by Laura Argiri
“Look,” said Andy, “I know that you don’t like to be…taken over or bossed. I think you may not realize how much the power is yours. Over him, over me, over anyone to whom you might grant a little of your love. I think that if you’d been born in Homeric times, someone would have fought a war over you. You’re beautiful in a way that even our thickheaded generation has got to recognize…and, aside from that, fascinating… I couldn’t say why, but, by God, whatever you are, it’s better than agreeable. I much prefer your way of being difficult to anybody else’s way of being delightful. There, does that satisfy you? I’ve had intimate friends before, who were nice and kind and reasonable…my God, how they bored me! You never do. I have this compulsion to make you happy…which is about as easy as waltzing with a raccoon, but I do. The first time I met you, I wanted to take my coat off and put it on you. People are going to go crazy over you once you’re launched in the world, and you’ll have your choice of giving them something to remember all their lives or pulling their ears and making them squeal. Think how much fun that’ll be. Either way. For both them and you. There’s no reason you shouldn’t make Klionarios do what you want, or why you ought to worry about him having tantrums…though I think a tantrum of his might be rather pathetic and amusing. I know this will be a hard thing to get through your head and might even take me several years, but what you do with any given person on a mattress has nothing to do with where the balance of power is. You could let someone tie you hand and foot and wrap your head in a burlap sack, and the power would be yours unless you chose to give it up. Do you understand any of this?”
“No, not a bit.” But Simion smiled. “I think it’s just your extravagant foolishness. But it’s sweet of you to try to persuade me of my human worth. It’s not your fault if I don’t believe it. What I could never explain to you is how alone I am, even in the most…frenzied acts of the flesh, and that I need…” He paused, with his scanning-the-horizon look, then seemed to come back, not realizing that in what he’d just said, there had been the submission. “Well, never mind. Your ever-ready font of blather makes me feel better, even though it isn’t so, and even though I should probably be challenging you to a duel. Maybe I feel so odd because I fell asleep so fast, maybe that makes me cross. I woke up all on edge.”
“You didn’t fall asleep fast, you passed out between one breath and the next, right in my chivalrous arms. I didn’t even have time to thank you. Thank you,” said Andrew.
Assuaged, Simion gave him a nod. It was much the same nod he’d give, instead of saying “You’re welcome,” when thanked for letting Andrew copy his math. “I think we ought to pack up and go home. I’m sure he was upset with my being gone during the weekend, and now that it’s Monday, he probably thinks I’ve been kidnapped and is hysterical. It could even give him a migraine, you know. He has them.”
“Well, we could wire him,” said Andrew. That being his submission. He figured it would make for a much nicer train trip home.
“Yes, let’s.”
Lulled as usual by the sound of train rails, Simion slept through almost all of their return trip. It being an old-fashioned train with compartments, he could safely curl up on the horsehair seat and put his head in Andrew’s lap. He did, quite unhesitatingly. Andrew, who liked to be used as human furniture in this way—it indicated unbroken physical trust in someone by no means free with it—was encouraged. He stroked Simion’s clean hair with one hand and then, as his breathing smoothed out, set the other hand on his shoulder. On the edge of sleep, Simion reached up and drew that hand down to hold it, then slept like an infant in its mother’s arms. Andrew kept vigil, for the moment entirely happy and thrilled with his successful risk. He only hated to wake Simion up as the train began to slow toward New Haven.
Because of the wire, they were collected at the train station—not by Kiril, but by Doriskos alone. He was awaiting them, not pacing or in any other fashion evidencing radical disquiet but leaning against a lamp post, hands in the pockets of a black cashmere greatcoat, standing too still.
“And did you have a lovely time, then?”
“First-rate. We put up at the Remington and had desserts on fire. It’s a splendid hotel, it has the biggest bathtubs. With gold-plated taps. And the towels come to your room hot when you ring for them. We saw Tannhäuser,” said Simion. “The ballet girls were in skin-colored tights.”
“And the tenor was simply ripping,” said Andrew. “He was in skin-colored tights too. Where’s your man?” Kiril’s absence was peculiar, especially when it came to some chore that involved harnessing and driving Gray.
“Off in some tavern chasing some poxed hussy, I fear,” said Doriskos. He smiled with bland complacency, too bland. He seemed too calm, too focused, for himself. That still, formal waiting posture…
“You’re not vexed because we…well, we didn’t really plan this, we just went?” hesitated Simion. “It was an idea that…just…came.”
“Yes, I know about these ideas that just come,” said Doriskos sweetly. Then, to Andrew: “Well, allow me to drive you back to your dormitory. I’m sure I’m obliged to you for planning an amusing lark for Simion. He has been so very sad and preoccupied, and it’s certain to have done him a world of good.” He opened the carriage door, as if he were Kiril; both boys got in and had the door smacked smartly closed behind them. They felt the vehicle settle forward slightly as Doriskos bounded up onto the box.
“I must say,” whispered Andrew, “that he’s behaving fantastically well.”
Simion murmured, “Oh, he’s a sweetheart. Just a big darling.”
“I’m going to call him Heathcliff. That’s his proper name, I think. I just realized, that’s who he looks like. Why on earth didn’t his British lord think to rechristen him that? So appropriate!”
“Just so you don’t take to calling me Cathy,” said Simion with another yawn. “If you ever do, I’ll bite you.” But he smiled, sweet and sleepy, and picked up Andrew’s hand to look at his new wristwatch. “This thing’s swank. I’d like one of these.”
“Tell Heathcliff.”
Pulled up at Durfee, Simion and Andrew exchanged a formal handshake, what Andrew called an “old-chap” gesture. Simion curled up on the cold cushions the rest of the way home, still half-asleep. He sleepwalked into the house alone, yawning, while Doriskos dealt with Gray and the carriage. He slid the wrapped runner under his bed to hide it until the right time, shook out the Chinese bathrobe from its folds of tissue to admire it. He was shaking out his bag to add his boiled shirts and a couple of changes of underlinen to the laundry when Doriskos came too soft-footedly upstairs. Simion turned to kiss him, hoping to be picked up so that he could wrap his legs around him at the waist and croon into his ear about how glad he was to be home—
IX.
“You little beast! Cinaedus! You infernal little whore!”
“Dori—”
“Haven’t you any damned decency? You not only run off to misbehave yourself, you haven’t the common politeness to leave a note—just to wire so I’ll collect you and that elegant skunk from the station!”
“Whatever are you talking about? I did leave you a note! Just how primitive do you think I am? Besides, I asked you long ago if it was all right if I wanted to go to New York, and you said yes!”
“I meant with me! And as for leaving a note, you did no such thing, but I’d wager I can guess what you have been doing. I guessed when I looked in your things to see what you took. Look at that!”—pointing superfluously to the small cringing pile of upended luggage on the bed. “Your evening clothes and your pretty little French dancing shoes, and my cologne water and pearl studs, you glad-fingered little devil, and a wad of money!”
“That’s my money!” Simion cut in.
“And your vanity and dead practicality, horrid and niggardly both of them, and a degree of opportunism previously unknown to science! You led me through that tragic-opera finale over those tracts—well, you don’t need your father and his tracts, you’ve g
ot low-life qualities of your very own to offer the world! I’d wager that you’ve spent half your weekend on your knees in front of that empty-headed Creole dandy, whose balls I’m going to kick all the way back to New Orleans at my earliest convenience, and the rest of it on your…on your…” Indignation failed for words; Doriskos fixed Simion with a blood-hot glare. “And, naturally, that Chinese whorehouse dressing gown, I ought to know such a thing was your heart’s desire! Vulgar gilt hotel rooms, groveling cabmen, things, money, that’s what you really like in life, isn’t it? And in comparison, immortal love is boring? If I really wanted to see you go off like a rocket on the Fourth of July, I should just shove a couple of thousand dollars down your throat or up your mercenary little arse! Right?”
“And there speaks the voice of love eternal and devotion defined,” Simion replied. “You love me so much that I can’t take a long weekend in a city two hours away by train? Your adoration is such that when I come back, with a present for you, no less, you yell like a drunken Greek peasant with nettles down his britches and make obscene threats? That’s a refined way to act,” said Simion, pushing back his fear. He’d never imagined Doriskos in a rage against him, much less considered what he would do. That stinging string of epithets had hurt more than anything he could ever remember having had said to him in all his life. And this was the thing he’d expected least in the world: violence from this gentle fey creature whom he thought of as the antithesis of violence and his protector against the wolfish world. “I didn’t know you’d mind about the cologne and the studs. I didn’t lose them, after all,” he faltered, to make time. He might have said, You’ve told me that you were mine, body and soul, and everything you owned, and you’re carrying on over perfume and cuff links? He didn’t say this, though. “Really, I was just feeling low…and tired…and I wanted to see the opera.”
“You’re a vile little liar.”
“I am not! I have the ticket stubs somewhere!” Simion picked up his evening-suit trousers and began scrabbling through the pockets, praying fervidly that he hadn’t thrown the stubs away. Doriskos reached out with sudden scary speed and snatched the trousers from him.
“Dori, this is ridiculous,” said Simion. He felt endangered now; anything he said or did now, anything, would be the wrong thing. “You’re scaring me. If you’d just compose yourself, perhaps we could talk reasonably. I did leave you a note. Perhaps it got moved or lost or thrown away. If you’ll just listen to me—”
“No, you listen to me,” said Doriskos, from the difficult vantage of a fingernail-hold on sanity. “My head feels as if the top of it will fly off any second. I haven’t eaten or slept since early Friday, and this is Monday. For seventy-two hours I’ve been so nervous I could have burnt this house down. As to this note about which you’re no doubt lying, why not wait around and ask? Why not ask me if you can go?”
Simion hung his head.
“Because that would have given me a chance to say no! Right? And keep you from running off with that scoundrel and wagging your cheap little tail for him, and opening your cheap little legs, and letting him have his way with you!” He’d taken a threatening step in Simion’s direction, but at this point he stopped and clenched both fists until his knuckles whitened, a gesture echoed by the hard-drawn clench of his lips. “If you…remember…the night of that wire. I’d waited most of my life for you! I never expected something like this of you.”
“Meaning what?”
“Carnal concupiscence…ugly frivolity. Acting the immoralist!”
“A long weekend in New York doesn’t make a person an immoralist, and you have some nerve to call me names! You don’t own me!” Simion said next, knowing it was the wrong thing even as it came out, but it did anyhow. “You’re a fine one for all this holy talk!” It seemed that this quarrel was already about a lot of things, including but by no means limited to things done in bed. That might be easier to discuss than the rest. “If there’s anything you don’t get, it’s because you haven’t asked for it! I have my faults, but I don’t withhold anything from you, and it’s mean of you to say I do! Did you want to take up where we left off before the wire came? Well, I wouldn’t have been in the mood for it, but I would have preferred it to this filthy tantrum! What is it you want? This?”
He lifted his hands and made the gesture for it, an ancient vulgarity he thought might shock Doriskos to his senses. Instead, Doriskos landed a crashing slap on his forearm and another, promptly, on his jaw. Simion went down, banging his elbow on his writing table, and ended up on his back, head against the baseboard. His fall seemed slow after the thunderclap impact, which had been made with all the considerable strength of Doriskos’s arm. It was the kind of blow that left you perfectly numb for a few seconds, long enough to think, my God, when I feel that, it’s going to REALLY HURT. It did. And then the situation graded entirely into madness.
“You vulgar baggage, you little guttersnipe. No wonder you can’t eat, with that garbage-mouth of yours. I’d like to know who else you let spend in it. Some fine day, you can give me the complete list. Let’s see if you’re as good as your word.”
Just as the pain was reaching for its crescendo in his jawbone and right ear, Simion had the breath knocked out of him again; Doriskos’s weight was on him, one hand leaning painfully on his hair. He heard his shirt rip as Doriskos reached under his sweater and grabbed a handful of it, and its buttons popped off; then one rip scattered his trousers buttons. Before his mind could, his body imagined what it was in for; it could imagine itself rent from the center out with a pain so great that it couldn’t yell or even breathe. It made the silent scream in his jawbone and ear perfectly inconsequential. He couldn’t kick, but he bit and scratched, his hands acting on their own. His front teeth nearly met in the skin of Doriskos’s wrist, the salt bloomed on his tongue.
And then it stopped. Doriskos, abruptly sobered by pain received as well as pain inflicted, went stock-still, the rage seeming to drain from him like the last sand from an hourglass. He remembered that moment of panic and outrage at Eton; he remembered when his teeth met on that finger bone, the copper bloom of another’s blood in his own mouth. And he rebecame himself, shocked, his wrist bloodied and four deep gouges on his neck. He went as white as such a dark person could go; he had suddenly a look of long sleeplessness, in the wake of that incandescent rage, as if he had rubbed charcoal under his eyes.
“Oh, I… Simion, I… I never meant… I…” He looked at his own blood, now welling briskly from the bite, then down at the boy whom he’d just slapped with all his strength not once, but twice. His look was of pure blank terror, nothing else. In just such pure blank terror, Doriskos had once bitten someone himself, so he knew it.
“Move, please,” Simion said in a calm and reasonable voice, a voice summoned up from long experience with dangerous madness. “Let me up from here, please.”
“I’m sorry! I am!”
“I’d just like to get up,” said Simion. He kept himself from touching his face, from looking at that bloody crescent on Doriskos’s hand. When Doriskos got up, moving like a sleepwalker, Simion forced himself to his feet. “I’d prefer to be alone now, I think,” he said. (I always prefer to be alone after I’ve been slapped silly and nearly raped. My God! You were going to do it, too. To tear my clothes off and force yourself into me. You meant to.) He managed to keep both fear and anger off his face as Doriskos backed out.
“I’m sorry… I’ve said I’m sorry… I am!”
The second he was out, Simion closed the door after him—closed it gently, avoiding the appearance of haste, as the spangle-clad animal trainer does when shut in with the tigers. (That’s all right, you be just as sorry as you please, once I have this door locked on you.) Then he slid the bolt home and sank to his knees. He felt himself starting to shake. He held his face in his hands and silently, within himself, moaned.
Simion was not one to lose the sequence of things, to drift from the world, but over the next ten days, he did. He wondered if so
me ghosts felt this way—those knocked violently out of the world, too fast and hard to know they were dead. Did they keep going through the motions? He did.
He had his own expertise in dealing with pain, but this seemed beyond it all. John Ezra had his few humble advantages, and one of them was his complete lack of credibility; abuse from him was just abuse, it didn’t reflect on its recipient any more than getting caught in violent weather. However, Doriskos with his double first from Oxford, his Prix de Rome, had told him he was vulgar. And called him a beast, a whore, a cinaedus, a devil, an immoralist, a baggage, and a guttersnipe—all within the same three minutes, and in an accent fit for a marquess. He had made indecent threats beyond John Ezra’s imaginative dexterity, as the stinging epithets were beyond his vocabulary—and had hit him just how and where John Ezra had liked to. (The side that Father clouted me on last? he thought. Yes.) The person who had promised to shield him from such beastliness had flung him back into it, no, into something worse. His sense of degradation and his shattered safety formed one cold and poisonous idea that went ricocheting endlessly around in him, gathering lethality in its unsleeping, undiminishing motion.
He woke up alone the next morning in his golden bedroom, between the sheets edged in Battenberg lace. The room had begun to feel not his again, but he stopped by Commonwealth Lock & Bolt at midday and took the locksmith back to the house, where he had a keyed lock installed on the door to back up the inner bolt that had always been there. He provisioned himself as he had for his dormitory room; he laid in apples, cheese, brandy, a tin of crackers, cigarettes, firewood, and water. The practicalities of estrangement, the practicalities of danger.
Through this double-locked door, he and Doriskos had a series of conversations.