The God in Flight

by Laura Argiri

  Peter felt a twinge of guilt along with the stitch in his side; he imagined what Doriskos would do if he knew everything there was to know on that last subject. Worse than his secret drawings were the images he dared not draw, those that flickered behind his closed eyes at night: a ghost-Doriskos he’d violated at every orifice, a pleasure-slave with no emotions but pain and whimpering ecstasy. Untouchable, warily fastidious as Doriskos was in actuality, in the sump of his bed, Peter made him beg and made him bleed. Moreover, Peter had just finished a summer of work as a commercial artist, making illustrations to advertise men’s clothes and furnishings for a department store in Atlanta. In that capacity, he had compounded his iniquities against Doriskos’s image: He’d purloined it to advertise that emporium’s flashy factory-made suits, spatted boots, and various other gentlemen’s accoutrements; he’d made that tinted phantom his minion during the days as well as the nights.

  “This is bad for you,” said Doriskos, really quite gently. “I’ve been thinking about this ever since my…decision to stop your private lessons. I’ve been resolved to take this step for some time. For reasons you appreciate as much as I do. You take my meaning.” Peter did. “You need to go away from here. You show the strain, you drink too much and do the gods know what else in private, and on your bad days, you look as if you were already thirty years old. It’s also bad for me. I have a very large project I must finish by a certain date, and I simply cannot stand the nervous strain of having you in this class this term. In any case, you’re going to have to leave New Haven, so you need to start getting used to the idea now.”

  “Why would I have to leave? I plan to stay—start on my M.A. degree—”

  “You know quite well that with your grades, there’s no chance that Yale would take you back for a second round. Unless you had my recommendation saying that you’re the next Michelangelo or Millais, and I will not under any circumstances write you a letter of recommendation to Yale.” As Peter’s slack mouth fell open a little farther, he continued, “You need to leave Yale and get your mind off all the things it plays over so obsessively. I won’t write you a recommendation to Yale, but I will write you one to Harvard or Cornell or Charlottesville or the Sorbonne or any other place you’d care to go and finish your education, or to any individual artist you might wish to study under. Any, that is, except one located wherever Simion decides to go to complete his studies. I won’t have you within a hundred miles of him if I can help it. He shan’t have to worry about a reprise of that vile tract party if I can do anything about it,” said Doriskos, swallowing hard, then pausing.

  “But he’s perfectly foul to me,” remonstrated Peter.

  “You began it. Simion isn’t interested in bickering, and it’s likely he’d barely know your name if you hadn’t started in on him almost first thing his first term. This is trouble of your own making, like most of your troubles. ‘Cet animal est très méchant: Quand on l’attaque, il se défend!’ ” he quoted, trying two things that would achieve no result: reason and a smile. “Anyhow, as to that recommendation—I will write it in the highest terms and do my best to stack the cards in your favor. My word is going to be worth something within the next couple of years. But I won’t do anything for you if you don’t refrain from creating difficulties for me and…mine.”

  “What makes you think you know anything at all about me?” huffed Peter. “Perhaps I’ll just go to the dean and tell him all these peculiar things you’ve said to me in private, that almost amount to a bribe, and—”

  “But you won’t, and I do know things about you,” said Doriskos gently. “I’m no stranger to the kind of obsessive temperament you have, and far from insensitive. I know quite a lot and am disturbed by all of it.”

  “What do you know?” sneered Peter.

  Doriskos shrugged. “Nothing specific and factual beyond your cruel dealings with Simion and what’s passed between us.”

  “But it’s not fair!” Peter importuned in that desperate tone that brought Doriskos near to feeling sorry for him. “Why do you everlastingly turn your nose up at me as if I smelled?”

  Doriskos made a long pause and looked at and then through Peter, then settled his attention firmly upon him. “I think there’s something very dangerous in you,” he finally said—Peter thought his tone was rather like that of a doctor breaking the news of a fatal illness. “Beneath the ordinary human meanness, and the ways you’re pathetic, and your desire to please. A karkinos. Heat and darkness. And for some reason you mistake for love, I bring this thing in you to the fore. I feel as if I were downwind of a forest fire when you’re near. I don’t know what to do about such a deep illness except remove the patient—you—from the aggravating factor. Me. And that I mean to do.”

  “You’re different,” Peter said. The moment was so dreadful that he didn’t bother flinching at what had been said. A vast understatement, different—Klionarios seemed to have brought his superfine instincts into some new calm and control and had read the message of his natural revulsion and aversion to Peter most accurately. “What’s made you like this?”

  “I have something to do,” said Doriskos. Then: “Get on, now, and sign up with Hangstram. His studio course fills up fast, I’m told. Go, now.” Not meanly—even amiably, though not smiling. He went back into his classroom, attentive heads turning toward his return, and closed the door.

  Carrying that last memorial picture of Doriskos’s Athenaeum studio—assiduous clean-scrubbed boys all drawing away, mellow heat, the drowsy golden smells of September, the green-gold light, a bowl of apples and pears on Doriskos’s table and a bee circling them, hoping for a last suck of honey—Peter went. He felt utterly empty-handed: by no means relieved of his obsession, but unequivocally relieved of his hopes.

  Doriskos, as he’d said, did indeed have something to do. By Christmas, Peter had gathered enough information to know that Doriskos’s project was a statue. And it was a big one if the rumors of Klionarios having his kitchen door enlarged to accommodate the marble block he’d ordered were true. Doriskos, for his part, was pleasant, preoccupied, and much more authoritative with his students than had been his wont. Not that Peter had any but fleeting contacts with him, but his fleeting contacts informed him that there had been some decisive consolidation in his idol. Formerly a natty dresser, Doriskos had taken to wearing old black trousers and big heavy black jerseys and Wellingtons to class. Along with his vagueness and fussiness, he’d also shed his what-will-people-think worries, and Peter often saw him and Simion eating their lunch together on the cold autumn grass, and had read what he could from their laughter.

  Peter had sustained his obsession a long time, and for most of the time he’d had it, he’d known it was hopeless. It was hopeless, and it was very, very strong. Giving it up, even for a new start and happy possibilities, would be giving it up. That would be a defeat. As the term wore on, he began to feel painfully pulled in two directions. Sometimes his passion tasted as stale as unbrushed teeth, and he’d think, “My God, here’s this creature whom I wouldn’t have given a second look if he resembled any of my other teachers, this haughty Greco-British snob and his house pet, a white-trash guttersnipe from the West Virginia hills, whom I wouldn’t have given a second look either but for his face and his goddamned mouth. This doesn’t mean anything, it’s only a tiresome habit like smoking, and not half so much fun.” And then he would catch sight of Doriskos doing nothing in particular but being Doriskos, crouching down to riffle through the gutter for the brightest and most patterned leaves or to touch the live green velvet of the moss in the sidewalk cracks—and wish with tears in his eyes for the slightest real contact with him. He would rather have been spat upon than so thoroughly ignored: It was the ultimate insult. He would see the pair of them together, either in the classroom or at the stables or having one of their indiscreet picnics, often with the other ephebes of Andy Carpallon’s circle stopping to pay them court. Together they were as lovely as the dazzle of sun on black water, and there would be b
etween them this look of passion and complicity, and Peter would feel as if his heart were made of salt and that salt were on fire.

  I’ll hurt you both, he found himself thinking on one occasion. He’d failed his last midterm and was celebrating his failure with a vile combination of stout and champagne that seemed to feed and foment his rage rather than soothing any part of him. Before I leave this earth, I’ll hurt you in some way that’ll matter to you. Then he thought, “I sound like the bass or the baritone in one of those silly dago operas that Mother goes to Charleston to see. I can’t do anything without looking like a fool, perhaps because I am one. Well, so be it, and whatever else I am!”

  Still, that was the phrase that floated to the surface: I’ll hurt you both, hurt you both, hurt you both.

  In truth, he was losing what minimal control of himself that he’d ever had. He had never known time to crawl by in such married tedium and pain. Unhappiness fattened him like bacon, and made his skin break out to boot. By the time of the Christmas vacation, Peter was soft and paunchy, raddled with drink and misery, and his grades had spiraled downward from the mediocre to the pathetic.

  Gorgeous medieval Books of Hours depict the unfolding pleasures of the day on gilt-rimmed, illuminated parchment, and equally lavish little booklets of that time illustrate the Seven Deadly Sins—always, rightly, capital and capitalized. Peter had seen some of both types of books. He’d envied the medieval chroniclers for their sense of order, the seemliness of their pleasures, the clean-cut clarity with which they saw Sin. Perhaps human psychology had used to be a simpler thing than it was now. In his own experience, lust and sloth and greed and covetousness and their dozens of cousins mingled like the sharp spices of a complicated curry, each a part of all, at once poisoning life and giving it what savor it had. Being allergic to the tight order he admired, he couldn’t have illustrated a Book of Hours, and he would have needed about seven hundred pages to cover all his Deadly Sins. However, he could have written and illustrated a Book of Chaos, a Book of Betrayal.

  1881 was the Year of Betrayal for Peter. Doriskos, then his mother, both slid their swords into him. Until their conversation that September, Peter had kept himself convinced that he had some connection as strong as an umbilicus to his prey and idol, and that someday Doriskos would acknowledge it and admit that his scorn had been feigning. Well, he’d been thoroughly disabused of this idea; Doriskos had looked at him as he might through a magnifying lens at the germs of some revolting disease.

  With Araminta, on the other hand, Peter had always known his utter lack of power and influence. He neither fooled her for two minutes running nor put himself successfully in the way of her intentions, ever. She loved her son with a love that was full of genial contempt, and this love had never for a moment gotten in the way of her doing exactly what she wanted, when she wanted to do it. She and her wants had a force-of-nature inevitability, like geologic time. She also had an inhuman patience and self-control—or they seemed inhuman to Peter, who found himself implacably at the mercy of his own greeds and ruttings. He realized it now: For years, the woman had been incubating her intentions in near silence, painting her little landscapes and directing her harvests, letting her outrageous desires take shape—and no doubt had known for years what she would do if the roll of the dice and her father’s will favored her. In September, about the time that Doriskos looked into Peter’s eyes and analyzed his character, Araminta had returned home from a first tour of Italy; in October, old Ravenall Tattnall died and left his daughter most of what he’d owned, which turned out to be a great deal indeed.

  Peter arrived at Belle Reve late on December 22, after a major spree in Savannah the night before—involving a heavy venison supper, a couple of bottles of champagne, a knowledgeable quadroon boy whose sexual skills were worth their price, and a couple of hours at the gambling tables that were not. The heat when he got out of the train at the Valdosta depot made him feel sick in his head and stomach. The smell of swamp and late roses, long after roses should be dead, now combined in a sort of intercrural warmth—sickening, sensual, sickening…foul, exquisite, foul. His mother had long since gone to sleep, and he collapsed in his childhood room. He woke at the crack of noon in hungover horror, hearing her slippers on the stairs.

  When she opened his door after the usual muted knock, he was amazed. She looked fantastically well. The Italian sun had paled her hair nearly flaxen and brought the clear rose to her complexion. She had also lost every one of the twenty-odd pounds that might not have mattered on a taller woman, but had made her looked aged and laden. She made him remember why he had always thought her a beautiful woman. But there was some new exuberance about her, utterly unfamiliar to Peter. Even with the misery expanding around his brain, he was shocked. She put down a tray of cinnamon toast and coffee on the table by his bed, ignoring the decimated bottle of brandy there, and kissed the top of his greasy yellow head.

  He stated one plain fact obvious enough to be relied upon: “You look well.”

  “I am, thank you,” she said, smiling and repressing another kind of smile.

  “I guess the air in Italy did you good.”

  “The air was fine,” said Araminta, looking as if she were remembering more than air. Peter looked her over well again. That purring-cat satisfaction, that limberness of step! He remembered Topher telling him, far too loudly, that he “looked like a widow who’d just gotten pumped after a ten-year dry spell.” According to her postcards, Araminta had slaked her artistic hungers in Italy by drawing everything that would stand still. Perhaps that was not all she had slaked.

  “Mother!” he accused. “You’ve got a lover over there. In Italy. I’d just wager you have.” His own voice grated his ears; he had meant to sound pretend-indignant, but he sounded genuinely shrill and alarmed.

  “Why not? I’m free.”

  Or at least cheap, Peter would have liked to say, though it wasn’t true and he didn’t dare. Instead, he said, “Why don’t you rush to contradict me?”

  “I have no especial wish to, and it wouldn’t be accurate,” said Araminta with a shrug. “Why should I? After all, we know what you do.”

  “Not all of it,” thought Peter, with an internal smirk he dared not show on the surface. She really was refusing to contradict him, dangling the filthy truth before him like a piece of stinking meat.

  “Who is he?”

  “Are you in the mood for a fanciful story? Very well, he’s a gondolier who rowed me under the Bridge of Sighs. He’s a paintmaker who made me the most beautiful egg tempera you’ve ever seen. He sings with a strolling band of singers. Pick whichever one you prefer.”

  “Who is he!”

  “I’m not going to tell you until you are calm,” replied Araminta, very calmly indeed. “I came back to settle affairs here. As I told you, since Daddy died, we have money. Significant money, that is, of the kind we had before the War. That wretched old Scrooge squirreled it away in a bank in London and lied about it, then out of the blue left it all to me. Eighty thousand dollars in gold—it almost makes me not hope quite so strongly that they’re cooking him in Hell this minute. I came to Belle Reve to hire someone to look after the darkies and the rice, or, better yet, if I can find some imbecile who has an appetite for boredom and heartbreak and wants to buy it, I’ll sell the lot. And you can return to Venice with me straightway.”

  “I don’t want to go to Venice! I don’t even want to move from this bed! Mother, have you gone perfectly mad?”

  “I’ve no such thing. I’m in an advantageous position, and I’m going to exploit it. I’m a widow with a large fortune, and I’m going to act accordingly. I’m not going to spend my life in the swamps worrying about rice and darkies and hurricanes in the autumn. I’ve lived a life that was hateful to me, and now that’s over. I’m going to have what I want. We’re going to have a lovely house on a canal in Venice, with a little enclosed garden behind it. It’s just a few streets from the Doge’s Palace.”

  “I don’t want to
live in Italy, in Venice or anywhere else!” yelped Peter, beyond indignation.

  “Why ever not? Practically every other artist your age would be ecstatic at such a chance.”

  “I’m not finished at Yale!”

  “Who gives a fig whether you graduate from Yale? You’re doing badly there. Dr. Porter has written to let me know.”

  “Well, maybe I want to finish regardless! So I made a bad start this year—the way I’ve been treated, with you sending me to Atlanta and making me draw advertisement pictures while you went gallivanting about in Italy with strange men, it’s scarcely strange if I’ve been despondent and fallen down in my studies.”

  “Go out to the swamp and tell that to the alligators, maybe they’ll believe it,” said Araminta. “I’ve already started the business of buying the house,” she intoned, in plainly waning patience. “It’s the one I want, and I will buy it!” Peter noted the more familiar edge of his mother’s personality and felt on higher ground, despite her stubbornness. “You’ll go with me if you even have bat-brains, unless, of course, you’d like to manage Belle Reve yourself. I’ll be more than happy if I never see another grain of rice or leaf of tobacco, another mule, another Charlestonian, or another damned darkie in all my life. I have better things to do with my mortal life than sit in an attic on the edge of the tropics, copy carpet designs onto jewel boxes, and hand out good money and cough syrup to lazy free darkies that smell like polecats.”

  “Yes, very evidently you do. Have you granted your, ahem, favors to this gondolier or paintmaker or bootblack or whatever kind of Italian blackguard he is?”