The God in Flight

by Laura Argiri

  Doriskos had one secret pleasure, dangerous and all the dearer for it. Late at night, when the others in the little house slept, he’d go out and plunge into that bath-warm ocean and swim out until he could barely see the shore. He loved feeling himself carried on that deep black water, loved feeling its ponderous gentle heft underneath his body—a dangerous beast that was indulging him. In the moment before he turned back for shore, he’d feel a small welcome disturbance in the place where his ideas came from, the deep well of his daemonic brain.

  Then, at long last, the gentle push of interested Destiny.

  One morning early in August, Doriskos and Simion boarded the ferry and spent the day in Savannah looking for a birthday present for Moses. They ended up with their idea of a highly scientific and modern item, a camera and the paraphernalia and chemicals to develop the pictures. It was the most expensive available, intended for professional use.

  Over the next few weeks, they took an appropriate number of tourist photos suitable for framing and parlor-decoration. However, they found that the camera could be more than a simple recording instrument. It saw and caught the truly evanescent things: Moses caught one charming picture of Simion, who had plunked himself down in the wicker laundry basket and was having a riotous tug of war with Helmut over the last piece of wet laundry. Another, taken by Doriskos: Simion lounging in the shallow old bathtub, quite decent, nothing distinct but head and shoulders and knees.

  Doriskos had not expected Simion to be interested in Moses’s camera, the model is not expected to play photographer—but he was. Simion first took a number of surprisingly good pictures of Doriskos, mastering light and angles with a celerity Doriskos hadn’t expected. Then he asked him to take his clothes off and took some more. Doriskos didn’t mind; it would afford him a chance almost to see himself through his loved one’s eyes, to see what Simion saw in him. And Simion was evidently pleased with his pliancy, his photogenic submission. The pictures were shockingly good, especially one of him dripping with seawater, half-reclined on the sand, his face tilted up hungrily toward the sun, eyes closed; the water dripped off his hair in molten droplets. Their fierce brilliance hit the eye even in monotone. Another was taken from the back, with an evident appreciation for the solid sculptural lines of his legs. One showed him sitting cross-legged in the cavelight of the evening, the dark at his back and fully merged with his hair, a brandy glass in his hand and shadow lining the baby fold in his stomach. Perhaps strangest of all, he took one of Doriskos outside, caught after one of his long runs with Moses on the beach, his hair raked back by the wind. He looked like a savage, but also particularly like himself, Doriskos thought. Simion apparently liked this one too; it was the only one upon which he’d written more than location and date. On the back he’d written: “Swan and horse, with the same wild otherness in his eye.” Doriskos first wondered where that came from, then realized that it was no translated scrap of classical poetry, but a sort of dream-image: how Simion thought of him. What Simion wanted from him. He wished he were that wild mythical beast, or that he could summon it from its labyrinth within him; he didn’t want to be a disappointment. It was as if that camera saw the part of him that he himself could not summon out to the free air.

  Doriskos’s history had made him an expert and an authority on waiting, and now he found himself waiting some more, flinching under Simion’s impatience with their stalled intimacy. Doriskos gathered himself to bring up the matter with Helmut. The Right Moment had been spoiled and had not come again, and Doriskos had learned the disastrousness of forcing one’s hand in any large issue.

  “And in this, you’re quite right,” Helmut replied. “I think you need to wait until you’re settled in at home, and until the need’s so great that it takes you and carries you,” said Helmut. “When it feels right to you. If you let him cajole you into something before you’re ready and he’s ready, it’ll be hideous. On the other hand, when you’ve got the inclination and proper privacy—”

  “I’m afraid it’ll be hideous anyway,” said Doriskos. “I can’t do anything perfectly unless it’s painting or sculpting, and I don’t even do those things these days. I would have been fine if that wire about Lincoln’s death hadn’t come when it came, but I…can’t do just anything at just any moment, and it’s all the worse because that damnable Andy Carpallon will be here for the last week of our stay, and Andy doesn’t have this trouble about Right Moments, I’m sure—”

  “We’ve told you before that what Simion does in the dunes after dark with Andy is unimportant.”

  “It’s not, though. In my heart, it’s not unimportant. And the more frightened I get, the higher the likelihood gets of my making a disgusting mess of things when I try. With someone you love as I do Simion, it ought to be like mermen dancing in water, or like flight, or like lifting an armload of flowers. But I fear I can’t make it that way. And I’d wager that Carpallon has the finesse of an old roué along with the strength of a young roebuck, and that he’ll stage the Song of Solomon out in those dunes—”

  “You talk as if it were a race, or a picture, or ballet. Physical love isn’t choreography, and Simion doesn’t want perfection, he wants you. You’re a luckier man than you realize, Doriskos. There aren’t many people of either sex who could get beyond the distraction of your comeliness and love you for your essence, but Simion does. He wants to eat and drink your personality like the Host—he’ll enjoy your lovemaking because it’s yours. You mustn’t let him inveigle you into acting when you’re still frightened, but on the other hand you mustn’t deprive him and yourself of the joy that you can have because you fear some slip of the hand or tongue. Anyway, you have to look behind the surface of things and little inconveniences, at the poetic truth. And when you do that, it is like leaping in water or holding someone against the sky. Not odd at all that you should use that image. I have faith that you’ll find the experience worthwhile in the fullness of time. Lovemaking is the consolation for living in the body just as art is the consolation for living in the world.”

  “Who said that?” asked Doriskos.

  “I did,” said Helmut, with the smile that Doriskos had tried many times to get down on paper without entire success. The smile had elements of mischief, meditation, and carnal wisdom—it was much more complicated, Doriskos had to admit, than any of Simion’s expressions. He could not help smiling back. “Come,” said Helmut, “and I’ll show you something that makes me think that all will be well in that way. Last week I was playing with Moses’s black box—everyone else does, so I thought I’d have a try. I got this out of pure dumb luck—anyhow, it’s beautiful.”

  “Lovemaking is the consolation for living in the body just as art is the consolation for living in the world,” Doriskos wrote inside the cover of his sketchbook.

  “There,” said Helmut, putting down the photograph. “You didn’t see me take this. I thought it was all right—you both still had your clothes on. I thought…we both thought it was quite wonderful.”

  It was a picture of the first game that the beach had inspired in Simion and Doriskos, a game that remained their favorite beach game. A couple of hours after their arrival, on a day of lovely warm wind and sun, Doriskos had picked Simion up off the sand of this beach and whirled him around like a little child, then held him up against the sky. Helmut had caught that pose; Doriskos held Simion up by the waist as if he’d seized him from the air. The picture was far too beautiful to be called well-composed; no one got a photograph like that except by rapturous chance and the smile of the visual fates. Doriskos stood dumb over it, too amazed to smile.

  “Now, that’s not only beautiful—and I take no credit, because you two are—but that shows something that’s wonderful and ecstatic and unique. That, by God, is Love. And that’s a picture of two people who’ll be able to make love that the angels will envy them, eventually if not right now this minute. You can see it there. And it’s so strong that it’s not just an indication, it’s a certain promise.”

  �
��No wonder Moses loves you enough to kill for you,” said Doriskos. “You look like an angel, and act like one as well. If Simion is the god of my life, you’re the angel of my destiny, and if there’s any good news to know, you know it.” Almost without hesitation, he bent and ceremoniously, chastely kissed Helmut over the right cheekbone. Helmut closed his hand on the photograph and smiled.

  The vacation, with its mysteries and languors, lasted until the tenth of September. Doriskos did not mind Andrew’s presence as much as he anticipated. The last week of their stay was crowded and excessively social, though, and by the time they were ready to leave, he was worn out and longing for home and privacy before the new term. Their last night there was almost a cliché—a thunderous cerise sunset and a long glass-clinking dinner, during which Moses let Simion have wine; Simion got dizzily merry after long abstinence. They built a fire on the beach and had a last swim in the ocean.

  On the ferry, leaving, Doriskos stood at the rail and watched the sea purl back; today it was like a true tropical ocean—clearer, gentler, more blue than its real self. He half-regretted that the summer had been such a gentle one and that he had been unable to witness one of those mighty storms this region was famous for—tornadoes, waterspouts, hurricanes, a sea in magnificent convulsions rising up like an angry hand. He savored the sight of Simion and Andrew, white-clad and looking out to sea, white-gold and brown-gold hair raked back by the wind.

  In his pocket, Doriskos had Helmut’s picture and a handful of Simion’s hair, surreptitiously gathered that morning after he had trimmed it back to collar length for their re-entry into civilization. Doriskos intended to tie it up in a silk bag and keep it to call up this summer’s image.

  A conversation between himself and Simion, a few days back:

  “But do you respect it, do you find it worthwhile, useful, what I do? Or, let’s be accurate, what I’m supposed to be doing, when I do anything of any account? You know art never cured anyone of anything.”

  “It isn’t supposed to cure anyone of anything, Dori. It’s medicine that’s supposed to cure people of things, and it usually can’t—why should I expect that of pictures? Of course I respect what you do. It’s the truest way that anyone can represent the really important things, like ecstasy, or communicate any inner experience. I saw a daguerreotype of an urn painted with a dance to Dionysus when I was only twelve, and I realized that. You need a talented ear to hear the same thing in music or poetry, and not everybody has that—but practically everybody has eyes,” said Simion with a shrug. “It can’t be anything but useful if it’s the only real way we have of making things permanent. The camera won’t replace it, either. A camera has only mechanical sight. You, you’re capable of accuracy both ways.”

  “Both ways?”

  “Seeing and representing. Accuracy beyond a camera’s, because you know what images mean. You’re the accurate instrument.”

  If he knew anything at all, Doriskos knew that Simion’s standards of accuracy were brutally high. If you measured up to them, you generally had little to fear from anyone in the accuracy department.

  “You see,” Simion had said next, “I know what you’re capable of, even though you haven’t done it yet.”

  So perhaps it was not so sudden as it seemed, perhaps he had been reassured in certain precise and crucial ways that he required, and perhaps there had been a long if inobvious laying of stick on stick and flint on flint for the flame. Nevertheless, it seemed as sudden as lightning from the clear blue sky above would have been. As he watched the island recede, lightning indeed struck, but from within. He did not need to take out the picture and look at it, for he already knew what he saw: the two of them in marble, him holding Simion up as he did in their game on the beach. It was an image that contained every nuance of their feelings for one another with such strength, such lyrical clarity, that anyone with eyes could see it. This and this alone could contain their immortality, and his own—even if he made it and never another thing. The God in Flight, he thought. The messenger from the realer world, seized out of the air.

  He wrote: So that was how it began, the crown of my youth. I felt a shock from my forehead to my fingertips, as if I were the water from whose fathomless depths that image surfaced. It was like the kind of dream that, once caught in conscious memory, seems strangely familiar—and you realize that you have dreamt it hundreds of times, that it is as familiar to you as your feet. So many times during that summer, you’d demand it: “Fly me, Dori!” And I loved catching you up and whirling you about, feeling my strength under you, then taking you by the waist and lifting you up as high against the sky as I could. It gave me a thin taste of how beautiful the sensual pleasures should be but rarely are—as if I knew what it was like to lift someone up and find him light as an azalea bough, as if I knew how to make love as gracefully as some merman dancer in water, buoyed in the gracious element. Perhaps the daydreams of a particularly maladroit young man whose sensual desperation precluded all finesse, but on the other hand a visionary idea, a hope like an aurora borealis.

  I knew the difficulties I was courting. This was not a subject for a free-standing marble, but for a frieze, for a painting, for something that would not break. And yet that was what I wanted: a precisely life-sized marble statue. The need for calculating the size of the block and whether I could get it into the house and if I’d need to have the floor reinforced and how long it might take to get the block once I knew all the above occurred to me within a few seconds of my shock while I stood there saying nothing, but I had not begun to worry. I want to say I had just been born, only that would not be quite accurate. To be accurate, I’d have to say that I had just emerged from a dead element in which I’d been drowning all my life into one where I could breathe, in the high and rich and rarefied air of passion and art. Saying that I was relieved and grateful is inadequate. My feelings of reprieve and release were beyond all such formal words and even now underlie my affection for Helmut, who had handed me that photograph and said the Right Thing to me. And indeed I’d sensed earlier that he understood ecstasy—from his singing, a line from one of those German songs, the cry of someone running across a field of flowers to jump into a lover’s arms. One afternoon during the awful depth of that winter, he sang it to me, and I noticed that with one live corner of my submerged mind, as you see something from the corner of your eye in passing.

  When I work on a marble piece, I capture more than matter and motion—I can actually close my fingers on time, the slipperiest element of all. There is no better way to catch time than in the slow change of creation, bringing features out of mute rock. I love the physical work of it too. Sculpting is a process you can feel in your muscles and in your nerves, and it goes forward in a way you can see each day. And when I work and can see each day’s progress, even time lost to my blank or black moods, to sickness, or to unhappiness seems redeemed, for I realize that the piece took shape within my brain and my bones while I appeared inert to myself and others. This is one of the mysterious things about me, and one that makes me worth the space I take up and the food and firewood that keep me alive. A part of my mind, the mystic beast in its labyrinth, keeps laboring in its concealment and silence. I am never as idle as I seem. I am ready and have been found worthy when the angel descends and the stone speaks, and I have a voice to say such things. What I hear with my eyes and say with my hands, that is. While my head still thought of nothing, my hands dreamt. In the bones of my fingers, I conceived The God in Flight.

  XII. The Very Rich Book of Hours

  “No, Mr. Geoffrey, nothing would induce me to change my decision,” said Doriskos on the first day of the new term. Peter had gone to turn his course card in and been told by the clerk that he would not be able to take Professor Klionarios’s studio course again. He had raced back to the Athenaeum, up the stairs to the studio, a stitch in his side from speed and indignation.

  “How could you do this to me!” cried Peter. The wail of the indignant lover—he was too unhinged to
restrain it.

  Doriskos raised his left hand, a stern and alarmed gesture for silence, as Peter’s yawp roused his class from their still-life studies. He motioned Peter outside and shut the door.

  “I said, how could you do this to me! It’s my last year!” he couldn’t help yelping. “It’s the last time I’ll have the chance—”

  “Sit down and try to listen to me,” said Doriskos in the kindest and most reasonable tone he could muster. Peter kept standing and leveled a blazing stare at him, then finally backed into the window seat. Doriskos had always been unpredictable, his personality not set in stone like those of most adults; rather, he was like some flower that blooms blue or red or purple as it chooses. Now he’d found a brand-new way of being unpredictable, this sudden and altogether unforeseeable firmness, and Peter didn’t care for it. Doriskos took a deep breath. “Very well. You’ve taken this course three times. I think you’ve learned everything you can learn from it or me. Architecture is the only area where you’ve got anything approaching a technical weakness, you’re set to graduate this year, so you should work on your architectural drawing now. My idea was for you to do some architectural drawing under Hangstram at the Fine Arts School this term. You don’t need another term of drawing apples and pears and casts and…me.”