The God in Flight

by Laura Argiri

  When he’d finished the story of Aldergate and his forced exodus from Oxford, Simion got up and kissed him hard on the cheek and gave him a swift hard hug. “What dreadful people,” he said. Doriskos could feel him trembling slightly—was this perhaps too emotional, had it tired him? “Dreadful people,” he said again. (I’ll rock you the best I can.)

  “It’s over now,” said Doriskos, patting him. “It doesn’t matter to me anymore, though now it makes me feel rather sad because I might have managed the situation with Henry Aldergate better. I didn’t know then, but if I’d said, ‘Stop this nonsense immediately, young man!’ in Moses’s kind of tone, he would have, and his life and his education wouldn’t have been ruined…yet I wouldn’t have left unless I had to. And I certainly wouldn’t have come here, and we wouldn’t have come together. It was a horrible affair, but it doesn’t matter any more. Whereas if we’d lost each other after so many events ordered themselves to join our hands, that would have been not just horrible, but irremediable. We haven’t lost each other, though, and you aren’t scandalized at my idolatry…for I have been idolatrous, really—I worshiped you in my head, I made a cult of you, or at least of my idea of you—and the worst of it is that it kept me from knowing you once we were actually together. And now I realize that in some ways I don’t know you at all.”

  “But you do know me. At my worst,” said Simion, with a wary smile. “My celebrated temper. My longshoreman’s mouth. My love of lucre. My way of throwing unwanted victuals in moments of pique. What more could you ever know?”

  “The kinds of things I just told you,” said Doriskos, despite the resistance he heard in the boy’s tone. “We should know each other so that we build from strength this time, so that we’re a house on a rock to each other. You’ve never told me such things, I can’t think why—I’d take your history like a handful of the rarest thing on earth.” But he had a sinking, cold-water feeling already. He had been drinking in Simion’s hot affection, the indignation he felt from the light, cold hands, and now he felt Simion close up and flee inward as he himself was so often inclined to do. He anticipated the futility of persevering, yet he somehow couldn’t help himself.

  “I know you have a horrible father who writes sermons and draws Bible pictures, both very badly, and who owns a printing press to print them. I know what you like to read and the music you like, and the four or five things you enjoy eating. I know how fond you were of Simeon Lincoln. I know, as I imagine he must have known, that you’re something from the times both before and to come after this dreary, cowardly, prating phase of Christian decadence. That you’re a creature straight from the old light of paganism, and also of the world to come. But that’s all I know,” he said, a little abashed at his own childish final phrase.

  “What more do you want me to tell you?”

  “What I can’t tell by myself. Private facts.” Dori tried to think of unencroaching, unfrightening ones. “The room you slept in when you were small, what did it look like? What games did you invent for yourself? Did the people in that primitive place where you were born find you amazing?”

  “Yes, they did, but not in any way that agreed with them. Must I talk about this?”

  Doriskos knew by then that he would learn none of those private facts at present, yet he resisted the abashed no that tried to come to his lips and gave his question a last try. “I wish you would. I need you to,” said Doriskos. “I know it’s not comfortable, I did it. Will you try?”

  “No.” Unadorned, simple, and hopeless.

  “That’s all—just no?”

  “Right now I can’t. It’s unfair of me, but I just can’t do this.”

  “I don’t care if you’ve done some things you’re not proud of. Helmut says that we all have,” Doriskos said, unable to give it up.

  “It’s not what I’ve done, it’s what’s happened to me. There is absolutely nothing in my life up to when you met me that’s satisfactory,” said the boy. His tone was of icy anger, not at Doriskos but at the autobiography that was not satisfactory, as he put it. He wouldn’t look at Doriskos as he continued; it probably took all his force just to speak on. “It’s shameful, it’s sordid, it’s full of nothing but ugliness, and it would horrify you. You might manage to be horrified at it and not at me too, but maybe not. I couldn’t bear for you to include me in your horror. You have not even heard of such things, Dori. You’re a great big innocent in most ways, you’re a virgin in more ways than one. I don’t know whether you could take it. If you love me, you won’t pick at me.” He lifted his hand and slipped it into Doriskos’s hair, then stroked his cheek. Near though he was, he seemed to speak from a sorrowful distance. “Listen, I’m very sorry. I know what you want of me and why you want it. Does it help if I say that I wish I could tell you what you want to know?” he asked gently. “That I really want to? That it’s like being so feverish or sore that you can’t enjoy someone holding you, or being starved and feeling too sick for the food someone brings? That I promise, if ever I can talk about such things, that you’ll be the one I tell? That I want to tell you everything?”

  His teeth were chattering by then, and his shivering tended to underscore the truth of what he said. Doriskos got him a finger of cognac and held him tight until the shakes passed off, then tucked him in without delay. Doriskos considered how devastated he still looked, and what stern pride he had, and that fierce, defensive kiss on the cheek. Now, feeling like he’d lost a pint of blood, Doriskos sat by him in one of the apple-green chairs and watched him with affection beyond idolatry. The adolescent extremities of love, he’d learned, were the less rigorous aspects of it. Easy enough for the callow to say, I’d die for you or kill for you. Those were painful things, but things you could do in a minute, and they didn’t involve the patience that was the braver, harder part of love. You would think that the prospect of tolerating this secrecy for years would exhaust a man, especially a man in Doriskos’s fragile state, but no—he felt less fragile than he ever had, as if parts of him that had lived at war with each other had just formed an alliance. “I’m beyond that,” he thought. “Somehow I just got beyond it, as if I’d grown five inches in a night. I’ll wait for you, and I’ll take you on your terms.”

  He sat there for a while in the yellowing late light, then he grew purposeful. He thought of supper and went downstairs to see what Kiril had brought home from the farmers’ market. Later, while Simion napped, Doriskos was in his kitchen with the choice May vegetables, the asparagus and spinach that Simion loved, the milk and butter and heavy cream. He’d started the fire and put a chicken on the spit, the heat coming out against the evening chill and drying the shirt cuffs he’d gotten wet while washing the greens at the pump. For the first time in months, his mind and hands settled down to the task of making something. Soberly concentrated and at peace, he peeled potatoes and put them on to boil and waded out into the damp yard for flowers; darkfall would find him beating egg yolk into butter, drop by drop, for hollandaise sauce, an offering of practical art and practical love.

  And that was what the next couple of months called for; not in all his memorable life had Doriskos drawn or painted so little, or thought so little of it. He occupied himself with the issues of household calm, of rest and food. He made quantities of rich, bland foodstuffs: éclairs, potato mash with cheese, tapioca puddings, Bavaroises, soups thick with cream. He learned caution peculiar to his situation and companion: not, for instance, letting Simion catch sight of a piece of uncooked red meat, or a dribble of blood from a fresh-killed bird, or the yellow scum on a stock pot, lest such sights inspire some new capricious disgust. Doriskos recognized well enough these nerves as raw as the meat that Simion couldn’t look at and understood why he didn’t want to see people. He transmitted messages to the unnerved Andy Carpallon: “He asked me to give you his best and tell you that he isn’t up to visiting yet.” He said this at least half a dozen times, resisting his own pleasure at the spoilt young man’s distress.

  Doriskos was also S
imion’s intermediary with the college in the uncomfortable month before vacation started, for Simion was not up to taking his makeup exams or even suffering the questions of the prickly Noah Porter; supported by Moses, Doriskos made excuses for both Simion and himself.

  For his part, at present, Simion let himself be taken care of; he ate his meals and had leisurely conversations with both Moses and Helmut, read his French novels and poetry, and slept a great deal. Between all the food and all the sleep, his body filled out and the blue veins so close to his skin receded. His heart sounds normalized, but he was very easily tired and candid about it. Still, contemplating the upcoming summer, he decided that he wished to go back to Caroline for the vacation, and he wanted Moses and Helmut to come too. “It’s the absolute best place to rest, and swim, and eat like a cow, and get brown in the sun. It’ll do us all good, not least you,” Simion cajoled Moses. “Come, you won’t let me pay you for taking care of me, do come stay in my beach house. You have to spend the summer somewhere, you know, and it might as well not be here.”

  “I’ll have to be extremely satisfied with your progress before I let you go off to some isolated little island, or even before I agree to let you go and go with you. I must be entirely confident that you’re fit to travel before I consent,” said Moses. “I haven’t brought you out of your decline to let you endanger yourself for a vacation trip. We’ll see how you do. I say, you do look keen to go—what is it about this place?”

  “It’s mine,” said Simion. “You can take sunbaths and go swimming naked there if you like. The local Negroes don’t care.”

  “That’s tempting bait, but we’ll have to see how you do,” Karseth told him, grinning at the comical seriousness of those last remarks. It was agreed that they all would go if he found Simion well enough to travel by the end of term. If not, they would all stay at home. Simion cooperated wholeheartedly with his cure, and Moses finally gave thumbs-up to the plan for summer on the island.

  The first part of the trip, New Haven to Richmond, proved trying and tiring, but they traveled from Richmond to Savannah in a Pullman car, the first that Simion had ever been in. In the luxurious privacy of this mobile hotel suite, they lounged in their shirtsleeves and ate iced pineapple. Doriskos would remember Simion sprawling on one of its big brass beds when they were a few miles past Charleston and waxing poetic.

  “I’ll show you all around the places I know on the island,” he said. He described the place’s solitude, the tart tomatoes and sweet melons grown in its sandy earth, the heat blazing off the beach at noon, the blood-warm ocean. “You know, it sounds simple-minded to say it aloud, but now I own that place, a piece of the planet, a part of the ocean bed, maybe the sky above it. I find it remarkable that anything as frail as a human being can own something that’s eternal, that’s been there since the beginning of time. But all those acres on Caroline are mine—I can pick up a handful of that sand, and it’s mine like my heart is. When someone gives you something because he loves you, it seems more yours than if you’d bought it. It’s not as remarkable as having you, but it’s pretty remarkable. Oh, Dori, you’re going to love this!”

  And he was right. Doriskos did, settling down quickly after arrival to a routine of morning swims, long baked sleeps on the beach, afternoon swims, five-mile runs, and the pleasures of both solitude and company. He had also the pleasure of watching Simion improve in a way that was hard to pinpoint from day to day, but that was wonderfully apparent from week to week. A month and a half in the salt air made a difference that even a casual eye could have discerned.

  By July, Simion was ninety percent himself again: intent upon his boy-pleasures and saucy of tongue when in his more juvenile mode, earnestly executive in his adult one.

  Around that time, Doriskos had gotten his first installment of forwarded mail and was throwing most of it away. “I like month-old mail,” he decided. “It shows how far we are from the real world.” He filled a wastebasket with it. Simion was lying on his side on the floor, studying for the makeup tests he’d have to take in September. This activity was a sure sign of improvement, as was being able to lie on those bare boards.

  “You’ll see how near it really is if we don’t pay our bills on time,” said Simion, who possessed himself of the wastebasket and went methodically through it. “Also, I’m your secretary, and it’ll look strange if I don’t write the regrets for all the invitations you decline.” He rescued the bills, segregated the mail into separate piles of bills and letters, and then fished up from the depths of the wastebasket a ripped envelope of crested vellum with foreign stamps. Gravely, in his grown-up mode, he scrutinized the contents.

  “The Canova Prize Competition in Sculpture. Why’re you throwing this away? Where’d it come from, anyhow?”

  “Oh, that would be from my pater. His lordship doing his duty by me by nagging me.”

  “Well, you don’t need to throw it away just because he sent it. Perhaps he thinks you ought to enter.”

  “He thinks many things. And I deserve a prize for my skill in ignoring them all.”

  “That might be stupid of you in this case, don’t you think?” Simion asked with aggravating rationality. “Or is it that you don’t have enough time?”

  “You can see for yourself how much time I have right now—a gracious plenty. But I have no ideas. It’s a curious thing. I’m not at all unhappy, and I don’t even feel tired any more, but I’m asleep in the place that my ideas come from. I haven’t even been thinking of such things.”

  “The due date for entries for the 1882 competition isn’t until March of that year—that’s time enough to get an idea. You need to fill out this paper if you intend to compete,” said Simion. He looked deadly purposeful and ready to insist. Then he noticed the first prize of five hundred pounds and said reproachfully, “Dori, this is a lot of money! You just make something to send to these people, that’s all! This is what you ought to be doing right now,” he added.

  “I don’t have a decent idea in my head,” said Doriskos.

  “Where do you get decent ideas—or, better still, indecent ones?”

  Doriskos took pause, then said, “You remember my mural?”

  “Exquisitely,” replied Simion, who had learned some of Helmut’s strokes of sarcasm. “Do you? One might think you’d forgotten it entirely. From the way you tuck me in at night and kiss me on the forehead and put that glass of fresh water on the table by the bed, then go out on the beach.”

  “You aren’t well enough for—”

  “It’s not like running five miles! I’m plenty well enough!”

  “I’m not,” Doriskos thought, “and that’s the tone that comes before a clash of swords that no one here is well enough for.” He made an alternative offering, an intimate truth. “Those mural images came from a part of my mind that’s very primitive but very truthful,” he told Simion. “If I ask it what I really want, it tells me. It’s the part of me that’s wild and not afraid of anything, and when I grew up, it didn’t…it just learned to want carnal gratification along with all the rest. The most compelling artistic ideas come from that daemonic part of me. They get vastly refined along the way, but that’s where they come from, and that’s where they get their power. Art that’s academic and cerebral doesn’t get any strength from that primitive cauldron, and that’s why it isn’t interesting, I think. If you don’t have that cauldron somewhere in you, your mechanical talent never catches on fire and isn’t important, and you’ll produce lots of facile, dull work. I’ve had students who had almost as much mechanical talent as I have, but no daemonic soul. I felt dirty and primitive around them, but also superior,” he added ingenuously. “They didn’t have this ancient primitive lurking in their brains, but their work wasn’t interesting and wouldn’t ever be, they were weak in a way that I wasn’t. Images of significant power all, all come from that ancient primitive, and mine is silent right now.”

  Still, by courtesy of his efficient and very insistent secretary, the paper was filled ou
t, sealed, stamped, and sent out on the next day’s ferry.

  Doriskos beguiled his tired mind in several ways, none of which had to do with sculpting. He built a bond with Moses in those long barefoot runs; perhaps they learned to admire one another by admiring each other’s athletic prowess. When they first started running together, Doriskos had spent the first couple of miles in duress, his calf muscles screaming as he tried to keep up with Moses’s sprinter-pace; and Moses had found himself gasping in the last two miles, incapable of the endurance Doriskos had built as a distance runner. They had finally worked out an agreeable pace, emblematic of their accord and their pleasure in each other’s company. It was good to run until one’s body was eating the air like some sort of perfect and efficient machine, to get past the pain into the euphoria that was available for those willing to go beyond it, and finally to let the sea wash off the toxins his skin had squeezed out under the authoritative rays of the westering sun.

  Among the pleasures of the afternoons, he drew a series of casual portraits of Simion—mostly in chalks or pastels, willing himself to draw him as he was, not any mythologized version of him. One delightful sketch drawn with a piece of terra-cotta chalk: Simion with his head inclined but his glance turned up, his hair a little disordered, unparted by the wind; his expression a delicious mix of skepticism and mischief, just on the edge of a smile. Another: the boy in a union suit on a chilly night, barefoot, sitting cross-legged and addressing a meditative smile to himself alone. One for which he’d not posed at all: Doriskos drew him with his back to the viewer, looking back over his shoulder, his eyes wide in a mixture of wariness and fatigue and sorrow, his right hand up on his left shoulder in a shielding gesture. One of the few that Doriskos did not show him. It was how he’d looked at unguarded moments during the bad part of the winter, how he still looked in some of Doriskos’s bad dreams.