by Laura Argiri
“You aren’t, well, stranded. And now we aren’t either,” fumbled Karseth. “I mean, we’ve always had two pairs of paired chairs, and four of everything for the table. Two is balance, but four is better. I’m saying…perhaps that other pair of chairs is for you two. No man is an island, and to tell the perfect truth, a couple doesn’t make a very good island either. So, why don’t you…consider those two chairs your chairs.”
Doriskos smiled for what seemed the first time in months and extended his hand to Karseth.
“We accept.”
“I used to make a serious thing of running. I know you ran for Magdalen. Perhaps we might work up to some long runs,” Moses offered further.
“That would be excellent. Some hard exercise would help my nerves.”
Simion wished he knew the exact right thing to say. He caught their eyes and said, “You know, I’m sorry that I’ve given you such a fit, not eating. I’ll stop acting such an ass. In fact, if there are sandwiches and cakes for tea, I’ll eat some. In fact, whatever there is, I’ll eat some.”
“I thought it possible that you might,” said Helmut. “As luck would have it, there’s a chocolate sponge cake, and I think this is the moment for me to go and make tea and sandwiches. Thank God for such politic conventions as making tea. And you’d benefit by a few moments to yourselves while Moses helps me with the tea, wouldn’t you?”
“But I can’t boil water without burning it,” Moses twitted him.
“Do shut up, dear, and come along.”
“Let me get down a bit so we can look at each other. Well?” asked Simion. He gave a hesitant, sheepish little smile, a most unusual expression for him.
“Well…?”
“Do you forgive me? Before you say anything, you ought to know—everything you thought I did in New York, well, I did it. I was just as bad as anyone might want, even me. I kept a cigarette in my mouth for every waking moment, threw money around—”
“Simion, I don’t care how you spend money!”
“And got drunk as an owl in a hotel bar. And, the part you’ll care about, about spending time on my knees in front of Andy and on my belly, well, I did that too. The latter thing you ought to be just as happy about…in the practical sense that usually doesn’t matter to you…because the first time, it hurts like murder, and I know you well enough to know that you’d never enjoy hurting me like that. It hurt plenty, even after six mixed drinks and half a bottle of champagne. Anyhow, now you can make an informed decision. Do you forgive me?”
Doriskos felt his throat tighten up, as if his silence were some gelid physical thing that he choked on. “There’s nothing to forgive,” he managed to say. “Moses is quite right. You’re so young, I had no right to any expectations. Of fidelity. He said it was ridiculous of me.”
“What I did with Andy doesn’t really say anything about my feelings for you. It’s just that I’ve had so few chances to try things. I want all sorts of experiences—I don’t want to be a stupid provincial all my days. Outside of books, I’m really pretty ignorant. Frivolous things too, I want to do those, and they bore you…and, Dori, I don’t know whether this will make any sense, but I was so sad. And a few days of frivolous, trivial things made me feel better. If you lose someone you love, every deep and real and genuinely beautiful thing only reminds you of that person. And this was Mr. Lincoln’s town and his college, so it made me think of everything he should have had and didn’t. He should be here on the faculty with you, drinking sherry after the faculty meetings and hearing recitation and giving Peter and the other monkeys Hell, not dead in a box at thirty-six. Knowing that, there was hardly anything here that I could look at without pain. Perhaps especially you, because he wanted you for me. He said so.”
Doriskos wanted to ask him something. Oh, this is vile, he thought. But he asked. “You said you loved him. In other circumstances…would you have liked to be with him…as we are? Were?”
“And will be again, I hope. Yes,” said Simion levelly. “If I hadn’t got you, and if he’d been well enough, and if I’d been old enough, I would have been proud and honored for him to want me in that way. Does it matter?”
“No.”
“But it does about Andy. D’you want to ask me about Andy? I think you do.”
“What about Andy, then?”
“Andy and I are good friends. I never had a friend near my own age before, and I’d like to keep him, if you can stand him. He does silly things and amuses me. We don’t do anything that you’d care for except what we do in bed, and I’ll do that with you too with even the slightest encouragement,” Simion pointed out, trying a humoring smile.
“I’ve no business discouraging your friendships, of whatever kind,” said Doriskos, swallowing hard. “When you’re young, you need freedom and experiences. I didn’t have any freedom at your age, and the only experiences I had were my studies, and maybe that’s part of why I’m so stupid about everything human now. I don’t want to inflict that on you. So…I don’t pretend to like it, but I’ll have nothing to say about it…you have Andy. You amuse yourself with him however you see fit. You can tell him that I said that.”
“Very well, then,” said Simion. “And you aren’t in the least stupid. I think you’re as smart as I am, but in the opposite way. I’m…sorry for all my ugly talk along those lines. You do know it was just talk? It was just me, letting my temper free and exercising my forked tongue, which my father’s always said would send me to Hell. But being unlucky doesn’t mean being stupid, and maybe if we seriously join our forces, we can change our luck. Anyhow, I’ve told you the whole truth now. Do you forgive me? I guess I just need to hear that.”
“Yes,” said Doriskos, shivering like a docked horse. “Yes, I do.” His voice tried to lock up again. He forced it. “You know what I did. Do you forgive me?” He made himself look eye-to-eye with Simion. He had the sudden wish for some intense and attention-getting kind of physical pain to eclipse the pain in his mind.
“Yes,” said Simion. And the kindness of his tone hurt worse than anything possible at the moment. Doriskos sank down by the bed and hid his face before the inevitable sobs broke out.
Simion edged himself around. He was bone-tired by now, and changing positions entailed more effort the more tired he got. Moving himself around to sit on the side of the bed took as much effort as swinging himself up to sit on the high top of Gray’s stall had before all this. Silently, he invited Doriskos to let himself be held; shivering, weeping like a stricken child, Doriskos put his arms around Simion and hid his face in his chest. Simion leaned into his hair as if it were flowers, and Doriskos would have been comforted even in the extremity of his pain had he been able to see his expression. It could not have been more lit, more lovingly enthralled, more glad of him. “To feel things like that,” thought Simion, in reviving fascination with the thing that fascinated him most of all—the misted, violent-colored world inside that head and behind those eyes. “It must be quite something when you’re happy. It must even be good to be able to cry that way. It would break me apart, of course, but him it doesn’t. It must be a kind of freedom, like being able to eat well.”
“Shh,” he whispered to Doriskos. “If we were reversed in size, I’d take you in my lap and rock you like you’ve done me. I love that. I’ll rock you the best I can.”
XI. Heuresis
“Swan and horse, with the same wild otherness in his eye…” —S. Satterwhite.
The month of May brought the year’s first gentle weather and, finally, an end to peril. Moses had pronounced Simion out of acute danger by that point, and the four began to recover from the enormity they had undergone together. They felt as they might have if they had been wounded in the same battle and laved in each other’s blood. Their intimacy had been forged, and firmly, by the winter’s war. Now they tried out their gentler affinities. Simion followed Moses into his surgery and asked him questions about his profession and his life before he had a profession. Doriskos lingered with Helmut in the
kitchen, where they found themselves discoursing earnestly on boy-pleasing desserts; he followed him into the parlor and accompanied him in his practice sessions. The house finally seemed as full as it was meant to be.
By mid-May, however, Doriskos began to rediscover the need for his own undiluted company, a need that marked his progress back toward health. It had been good to wake up in the middle of the night and find himself in small rooms, almost in reach of other sleeping humans’ breath. Yet now he felt tired, wanted silence. He began to drift down the block to his own house in the afternoons, repairing damage and putting disorder right. Kiril had returned from New York unmarried and, like his master, in a state of healing unhappiness; he listened to Doriskos’s account of the season with gentle sympathy, assisted him when he required it, and left him alone the rest of the time.
When Moses pronounced Simion well enough to move back to his own domicile, Kiril packed the things that had gravitated up the block to Karseth and Kneitel’s, and Simion made a tentative tour through the rooms, amazed at his sudden privacy.
They had spent three months in a house replete with inanimate as well as human company—things, potted plants and glass bowls full of colored sands in patterned layers, framed photographs, indifferent watercolors bought in the secondhand shops of several European cities, antimacassars, dried flowers, comfortable rugs with no pretense of being artistic specimens. And despite all they had to hide, Helmut and Moses never locked any of their interior doors; Moses had locked his surgery cabinet while Simion’s mood was still undependable, that was all. By contrast, Doriskos had furnished a house piece by considered piece, with a pained fastidiousness that made his domain lovely to the eye but did not provide enough places to sit down. Simion’s time in Karseth and Kneitel’s domain had shown him something about Dori’s house: Beyond austerity, it had a sadness, a tentativeness, a quality of waiting and abeyance. In Helmut and Moses’s clutter was the archaeology of their bond, their new interests built over their old ones; Dori did not accrue things, but picked a few to allow in, at once perfectly expressive of his taste and inexpressive of his history. Simion thought, “Not that I actually want clutter, but we ought to do something to get all these stark, bare rooms human-looking. The kitchen and my room are the only ones that look inhabited. I want photographs of us. And no locked inside doors. I hate that. That one door that he locks gives the whole house a locked, tight feel. Hermetic. There’s something that needs to be fixed here,” he decided.
He’d been standing on the threshold of his room, which had been fixed. The room bore few signs of the abuse inflicted upon it—a new door, exactly like the old one but thankfully free of extra locks, and the discreet sanding of the cigarette burn on the headboard of the sleigh bed. During one of his afternoons alone in the house, Doriskos had located a piece of fine-grained sandpaper, cut it in pieces the size of a nickel, and delicately rubbed that black wheal off. He’d then lacquered the sanded spot, and all that was left was a faint pale scar in the wood, lighter than the scars on his bitten hand or those on the arm to which Simion had accorded the same treatment as his headboard. Simion considered the scar in the wood. “If I’d picked up a sprat of a boy off the street and he did something like that to a fancy bed of mine, I’d have thrashed him,” Simion thought, then shuddered—remembering that Doriskos had, although not over furniture. Yet this room had been given back to him, a private place to resume his life as he saw fit. All awaited his pleasure: The lamps’ wicks were trimmed, boxes of matches stood by, the cigarette box was full of Balkan Sobranies, a pound box of Guittard chocolates was on his desk, and on top of his bookcase was a vase of white daffs from the yard, arranged with ferns. Doriskos drifted up behind him and joined him in his contemplation.
“Dori, don’t you remember your responsibilities to this immature and self-destructive young hellion you’ve in effect made your child bride?” Simion asked this in his best imitation of Moses’s inflections. “That you’re to make him go to bed early, eat pounds of food, and above all refrain from drinking like a dipsomaniac and smoking like an engine?”
“Well, I was just about to say something on that theme. Between you and me, not for Moses to know, a secret. This is your house as well as mine, and you’re as free in it as I am. If I can get to New York and find a lawyer who doesn’t talk to the lawyers here, I’ll have your name put on the deed. You’re safe here, and you’re also free. I wish you didn’t like to smoke, but if you want to, well, you do as you like. The gods didn’t join our hands for me to oppress you. Though if your soul can bear an occasional little lie on the matter to keep Moses happy, that would be most helpful. Tell him…oh…”
With the smile of complicity: “That when I get snarky, you send me to my room until I can be a gentleman? I’ll complain very convincingly. It’s all right about the deed even if you don’t,” Simion told him, knowing that Doriskos would—he was making his own gesture of offered freedom. “Thanks for the assurance on the other point, and for the cigarettes and the candy. But I’ve had another secret on my mind for some time. I don’t think we ought to have secrets from one another.”
“I don’t have any bad secrets,” said Doriskos, who knew that wasn’t strictly true—he had secrets; however, they were hurtful mostly to himself.
“You don’t have to purposely have secrets, Dori. Concealment is as natural for you as indiscriminate revelation is for most people. But this I need to know. If I ask, will you tell?”
“Perhaps,” said Doriskos levelly, meeting his eyes.
“That was honest. Do you ever tell a lie?”
“Never effectively,” said Doriskos. He rather wondered what large thing there was left to ask.
“That room.”
“What room?” Oh, dear, Doriskos thought, knowing damn well what room.
“Ah, you can’t really lie but you’re the world champion of polite evasiveness. That room next to mine that’s always locked. Kiril says there isn’t anything in there, but I’d swear that I heard you in it last winter, in the deep hours of the night, and then as soon as I was well awake, there’d be no sound.”
“Unh, yes. That room.” Thinking of the queasy dread that those pictures might evoke—remembering the romping obsessiveness he’d let loose in there; the pure primitiveness and truth about his own wants that he’d put on those walls with the tempera—more than obscene, so completely private and revelatory, never really meant to be seen by anyone but himself. Wildness, torchlight, Dionysiac release, acres of blond flesh and hair, all the carnal congress of which he’d deprived himself or been deprived. He took a breath through his mouth and groped for something to say.
“You’ve arrived at point A. I shall proceed directly to point B,” said Simion. “I want to see what’s in it.”
“Suppose nothing’s in it?”
“If nothing’s in it, still, I want to lay eyes on that nothing. I need to, in order to feel safe in this house. You told me you wanted me to feel completely safe, well, I need this. Andy and I talked about it, and I had to agree—it would be damn peculiar to lock an empty room.”
“So kind of Andy to take an interest.”
“Well, he does care about my welfare in his frivolous fashion. Moreover, he’s right on this count. It’s an Edgar Poe sort of thing,” said Simion. “Dori, I want to see. I mean, you don’t have pickled dead babies in jars in there?”
“No,” said Doriskos with a gentle smile, “it’s true—I don’t have pickled dead babies in jars in there. Where d’you get these notions, Simion?”
“A Bluebeard joke that Andy made.”
“I see.”
“If it’s just naked pictures, I probably won’t mind them,” said Simion hopefully. “Come, Dori, we’re supposed to trust each other. Besides, I’ve seen some of Peter Geoffrey’s naked pictures, and I’m sure they’re dirtier than yours. Dori!…”
“There’s nothing!” Simion cried in disappointed relief when Doriskos opened the door. No instruments of necromancy—not even a chair. J
ust four walls in a mottled dark green. He stood there in the middle of the floor, peering around him.
Doriskos bit off the edge of a smile and with mild theatricality snapped up the window shades, letting in the chill light of the cold and lingering spring so that Simion might see. This entire transaction was proceeding too fast for him to be too frightened, or perhaps the events of the last four months had redefined fear and nervousness for him. He watched Simion pace around and take in the mural scene by scene—what would he say?
“Well?” That sober concentration didn’t look like fear, though he didn’t know precisely how to interpret it. He awaited further developments.
Finally Simion said, “Too bad you can’t sell things like this—it’s simply ripping.”
Simply ripping. Of all reactions, perhaps Doriskos had least expected that. He smiled, almost light-headed with relief. “You can sell them, but not here,” he remarked, amused at seeing the dollar marks come up in his loved one’s eyes.
“You’re a coy wretch, you know, to conceal something so delicious from me. Now tell me the story. Where does it begin?”
“The picture? It lets you tell yourself one. It begins wherever you want it to begin.”
“Tell me about how you painted this thing. Oh, this is too delicious!”
Doriskos felt his own sudden lack of resistance come up to meet Simion’s calm reception of his mural and decided to tell him what he wanted to know. He slid down to the bare floor and gestured to Simion to join him. Simion sat before him cross-legged, his thin hands clasped in nervous anticipation—his story-listening attitude. Doriskos told him how he’d come to start this mural. He went beyond the mural to the vision of his days after Eton. He told the story of his life as Stratton-Truro’s unsatisfactory curio, and the boy’s hands came out and lit gently upon his. Doriskos felt Simion’s palms chill as he told his tale. “I’m not as nervous as I might have been once, telling you these things,” he told Simion, “because I’ve come to believe more strongly than ever in this arcane bond between us. In some way I’ve always known you. The gods aren’t so dead that they couldn’t destine us for one another and send me your image to console me. Back then, I hoped; now I believe.”