by Laura Argiri
“I’m seeing him as he is when he’s happy,” thought Simion. “This is what he’s like in his element, in an air he can breathe. The high noon and midsummer of his life.” He watched Doriskos sometimes, struck by the tranquilly listening look he had when he worked and how he would often stop and simply lay his palm on some surface like a midwife touching a heaving belly. After taking in whatever there was to be taken in, he’d then take up the pick and make another calculated tap. Alone with the block, Simion once laid his own hand on it; to him it felt like marble, that was all—he could not feel the presence within it. He accepted that Doriskos saw and, for all he knew, heard with fine, thin extensions of the normal senses and could see within the stone. He recalled the eyes of the cats who, as they and he crouched in John Ezra’s barn meditating, seemed to see what he couldn’t. “ ‘Lazarus, come forth,’ ” he thought, and shivered. He saw the shimmer of the miraculous behind the disorder of schedules and objects.
He dreamt again of a creature that was man and swan and horse at once. He knew it in the dark by the sound of its hooves, its exigent, feathery turnings.
In an essay written for a prize competition that term, Simion wrote:
The sciences are the avenue to an ultimate godlike knowledge of matter and motion. The arcana of art is to make the important things permanent. Science is on its way to being miraculous, and art already is. Some academics despise both. I see no reason for despising anything but incuriosity. Perhaps there is the root of all evil, indifference, inertia, the absence of forward motion that is not merely standing still but reverting and devolving, not merely not becoming but becoming less.
Simion’s ears became accustomed to the lack of silence in the hitherto-so-silent house and missed those noises during the two or three nights a week that he spent in Andy’s rooms.
He made no secret of those amorous nights from Doriskos; there was no need to say openly and crudely, “Well, if you won’t, there are those who will.” In the late nights were the truest flaws in their Book of Hours. Even the medieval chroniclers had been willing to draw their couples rightfully entwined under cover of darkness. Simion, however, would wake up at times, feeling Dori’s need like heat in the darkness. Yet if he turned toward him or in any way signaled his awareness, Dori would be up and into his dressing room; he wouldn’t accept Simion’s embrace until he no longer needed it. The statue seemed to have walled him up in his obdurate virginity again, claiming him for its own. Simion’s experiences with Andy had taught him to expect good and regular sensual satisfaction at an age when most adolescents only dream of consummation, and yet the true consummation was withheld. In Andy’s bed, he’d sometimes lie awake, unsatisfied in ways that managed to be both minor and crucial. How did you characterize something that was good but that was not completely what you wanted?
Simion wanted fire and thunder. He already knew that sex and art were extraordinarily interrelated, two faces of the same force. But he hadn’t the experience to realize that in this phase of his union with Doriskos, life and art were weaving themselves together, and that like all formative phases, this would involve imperfection and deprivation.
Once, in his frustration, he had cried out to Andy, “Hurt me!” It wasn’t a bid for actual pain, but for the wildness necessary to make this connection more than an elegant game, unlock his emotions, and leave him breathless. Remembering those few minutes of Doriskos’s delicate and unrelenting touch, Simion imagined what it must have been like for those ancient ecstatic cultists, those primitive Greek votaries of Dionysus—how, in the dark before the dawn after their riots and rompings, they must have lain sleeping on the ground. Never mind that the earth was cold and that they’d probably collapsed on it sticky with the intimate juices of strangers and the stag-blood of sacrifice—he could imagine how ink-black and obliterated their sleep of satiety must have been. If matters had progressed, he would have experienced that pure and personality-stripping pleasure, then that sacred sleep. Having missed that by inches, he kept trying for at least a thin taste of it. His bid for intensity was one of an ascending series of hints. But Andy just said, “This is me, not him.”
The summer already seemed a thing of nostalgia, pastel and far gone. The mornings now seemed merciless, whether Simion ate breakfast alone in the kitchen or Doriskos, half-awake, prepared it for him and sat opposite him drinking coffee. Of course, he was not neglected when he breakfasted alone; he would come down and find sandwiches of cold meat and cheese, fruit conserves, boiled eggs, and a pot of milk and sugar and cocoa ready to be heated up for hot chocolate, all laid out by Doriskos last thing before he collapsed for the night.
He would not have admitted to dissatisfaction. Dissatisfaction was not, in fact, what he was experiencing. He had the divided pleasure of living in the presence of a real mystery. What was really in the heart of that rock—the true shape of their lives, the secret of happiness? Nothing about the situation was simple—it was a tantalizing state of suspension, of art-in-progress and unconsummated life. Nothing could be assumed about the outcome of either. He was incompletely happy, as it were, which was not a resting state like simple misery. Not understanding this incompleteness as a natural condition, he was both unhappy and happy, and both to a fairly intense extent. His beautiful Book of Hours was empty, but also full.
XIII. The Voyage
“…aurochs and angels, the secret of durable pigments, prophetic sonnets, the refuge of art…” —Vladimir Nabokov, Lolita.
On Thursday the sixth of November, 1881, Simion woke up, as he habitually did, a little after five. Finding himself alone in the sleigh bed, he checked Dori’s bedroom, which had not been slept in last night. So, prepared to be extra-quiet, he went down to the kitchen, where he felt the last lingering heat from Dori’s fire. From the coals, he woke the fire for his morning, then prepared his chocolate pot and toast and sat on the hearth in the dawn darkness, contemplating the kitchen’s presiding divinities.
“Two white gods of self and identity and anarchy,” Simion thought, regarding the piece and the strangeness that had evolved around it. For a month or so, it had lingered in that nearly-finished phase that is probably more wearing on the nerves than any other phase of artistic evolution, and Doriskos had worked on it in a continuous state of determined exhaustion; each day’s contribution to its perfection was so small and delicate that no more gratifying day-to-day progress was visible. You had to study it from week to week to see what he’d been doing. Back in late September, Simion had taken a photograph of Dori to capture his image for that season: standing hollow-eyed in a shaft of autumn sun, looking hard at his outstretched hands for any tremor, which was his way of deciding whether he was too tired to work.
Now Dori was asleep on a thick feather mattress he’d installed in the room’s back corner, under a big utilitarian comforter he’d bought for it. The kitchen had also acquired extra gas jets for an abundance of bright unnatural light and oversized ballet-studio mirrors. Once the rock took on human form, there were even specially made shades—tough white canvas on the outside, black on the inside—that did not let out even a thin edge of light, much less an incriminating silhouette. The room was hermetic—intended to allow those within to see better than well, those outside not to see in at all. The God would go out into the world almost a virgin to men’s eyes.
Since the modeling phase of the statue had begun, Simion had often shared Doriskos’s spartan bed. He’d go to sleep early—it was useless for him to try to embrace Doriskos’s sleepless bohemian habits. Studying at the kitchen table in his dressing gown, interrupting his work twenty times an evening to take the robe off and let Doriskos lift him up into the air and contemplate him, he’d snicker gently to himself at what the town would think of life within this kitchen. He’d grown accustomed to being wakened from his sleep to shuck his nightclothes and assume the position again, his skin cringing from the air, his mind holding on to its darkness, not allowing itself to be wakened for long.
The light when
he wakened on the kitchen pallet was always a cavelight, he thought: a velvety accretion of shadows from which the statue rose in its white, defining purity. Simion would think of a very different room, a fitting place—a combined kitchen, studio, and everything else. A sprawling space up five flights of rickety steps over Paris or London, in the chill heights of some neighborhood desolate and dangerous enough to be uninquisitive and cheap. His imagination would furnish this studio with junk-shop furniture and half-finished canvases and paint the windows with the fiery, aqueous colors of sunset or dawn. That was really Dori’s kind of place, a setting in which he’d be far safer and far easier in his own skin than here—a year and a half of posing for an artist afforded an undiluted opportunity to contemplate that artist’s personality, and that was one conclusion of Simion’s contemplation. He thought about Stratton-Truro’s “rescue” of Doriskos and concluded that Dori, left to take his own form in the stews of Athens, would have managed to learn painting and sculpting much as he’d done in actual fact and risen to his proper level. And to a genius’s garret, the undiluted version of this strange kitchen. “His persnicketiness about right moments for going to bed, and cleaning, and being such a fusspot about being on time at the college, that’s probably because he’s been boxed in,” Simion thought in one of his cavelight reveries. “He’s had to live in a way he wasn’t meant to live. He always has. He’s tried to fit a too-tight space. That’s nine tenths of what’s been the matter with him. It’s tired him something fierce, worse by far than he manages to tire himself with the God.”
The sixth of November was not, though, a morning like all the rest. Simion took a cursory scan of the statue, as was habitual by now. He thought he noted a difference. In cautious quietness, he lit the lamp and tilted the shade to keep the light off Dori’s face and then took it over to the piece. He lit up his own laughing face, his hanging hair, his airborne body accurate in all its dimensions. He let his right hand travel down the marble belly of Dori’s image, the strong tensile lines of its thigh, thinking how familiar they had become with one another’s nakedness in all those evenings at work on this thing. Marble was like flesh in that it could actually seem to absorb light. Marble could suggest but not wholly capture the textural delights of a strong man’s body, the thickening of the hair from the navel downward to the dark nest; stone was too all-over silky. “Extraordinarily smooth,” he thought, missing some tiny irregularities he had come to know with his palms. Then he thought, “Why, he’s polished it. Does that mean he’s done?”
There was a note under the milk jug, and this note told him that his surmise was correct. “I think I’ve finished it. Up until four, exhausted, think I won’t meet my classes today, will you post them? Undying love. Do you like it?”
There, simple and momentous. Simion contemplated Dori’s sleep and recognized the end of one chapter of that Book of Hours. He made his chocolate and drank it, remembering a night when Dori had come upstairs and joined him in the sleigh bed and, seeing that Simion had come half-awake, greeted him with a kiss to the hand. Because his face is rough, Simion had thought drowsily, feeling the unshaven sharpness in his palm—feeling also a slow wrench of affection all the way through his body. He felt the same thing now—all the way through his nerves, the pleasantest of aches. It was like watching a century out, Simion thought—a natural end and the birth of something else. How slow it had seemed, and how evanescent it had been.
When Doriskos woke around three in the afternoon, he found by his pallet two celebratory items, Simion being a firm believer in gifts promptly given after large achievements. One was a new ice bucket full of watery ice around a bottle of very cold, very dry white wine. Also, in a gorgeous plain vase of heavy crystal, twenty-four coral roses. A gift of special import between Simion and Doriskos, these roses were neither tangerine nor red, but the perfect flaming pink of ambiguity, of winter sunset, of Baudelairean dawn. Simion had also left a note, this time anchored firmly under the vase: “I like it. Classes posted. Sleep in, have a beautiful sleep. Celebration upcoming.” Doriskos sat up on the feather tick and took the flowers to his lap as if they were a person, leaned his tired face to their cool lips and sweet breath. He noted that the cork had already been removed and replaced in the wine bottle so that he could get at the wine without using a corkscrew; he uncorked it and gave his thirst a long cold drink straight from the bottle. The fire was out, and the kitchen was deep in its familiar shadows, though he could see the sizzling blue edge of the sky around the shades. The statue, since it had been a statue, had never had natural light, even moonlight. It deserves the light, he thought sleepily. When he rose, he moved the edge of the west window’s shade to see that no one was within sight and then snapped the shade up. The finished statue, the light, and the wine were exactly what he wanted, all he wanted, in that moment. He sat with his masterwork in the light and drank his wine.
Back at Yale after Christmas of 1881 to take up where he’d left off, Peter did so all too literally. In his first random encounter with Doriskos, Peter said a civil hello to him and kept walking, as he would with any other man. Then he found himself ducking into Battell Chapel and in its cold and shadowed silence shedding acrid tears of pain—though he’d have preferred to cast himself in the dirty snow at Doriskos’s feet and cry all over his black Wellingtons.
Peter had bad days and tolerable ones, like someone with an insidious lethal illness not quite at its final stage. On the tolerable ones, he did not think too much about Doriskos’s new aplomb and his tightly shaded kitchen; on the bad ones, late at night, he crouched behind the snowbanks on the opposite side of Temple Street and watched number 113 for lights in the various windows, occasional lamplit faces.
Occasionally he was so miserable that he wondered if Fate were now busy paying him back the slow and sadistic way for the Affair of the Tracts—withholding any action until his tension became intolerable. Would it then hand him the poisoned cordial, the priceless gem that carried a curse? His Fate was a fata morgana, an evil fay disguised as a streetwalker but wearing his mother’s face. So compelling was her image that he actually took a little time off from his obsession to paint her, a picture that Doriskos, for once, would not have dismissed as trivial and tasteless if Peter had shown it to him. As matters devolved, however, his Fate had entirely different ideas.
During a brief season of sun and thaw, late in January, Peter was having one of his better days. He took the train into New York to buy art supplies. This errand he ordinarily enjoyed: It made him feel self-respecting and purposeful, as if he had a future. The light on the day of his shopping excursion was like spring light, brilliant and watery, the wind off the snowmelt bracing—it was good to feel interested in light and the faces of people in crowds.
He bought plenty of new oils and pastels and exquisite papers of different weights and textures, even a tub of white clay for the mock-up of a possible statue. Having lugged his burdens into a first-class carriage next to the dining car on the returning train, he opened a particularly luscious package of heavy matte stock and sketched in charcoal to beguile his time.
If he’d been the hero in one of his mother’s favorite operas, in a similar state of susceptibility, Fate would at this point have presented him with some pale and malignant temptress in heavy eye-makeup and a black veil. Being himself, and treated with appropriate contempt and shoddiness by his destiny, what he got was a corpulent viscount in a snit.
Peter was only mildly roused, at first, by the officious noise of the English tourist bullying the porter who dragged his bags in and settled them. The man had a highfalutin accent, truly snooty—remarkably like one that Peter knew well and did not wish to ponder. Peter’s eye, however, was not tempted to linger on this voyager; though well-dressed, now shrugging out of a rich long greatcoat of what looked like black cashmere, he was sixty or so and did not have looks to match his accent. He had a fierce case of windburn that had given him violently red cheeks, inflamed nostrils, and runny eyes. Where his face was not
red, it was leaden white; he had small podgy features, his narrow eyes were a weak and watery blue, and his thinning hair had matted down with sweat under his hat.
“Bloody old fool,” the newcomer said, as if to the doorway where the porter had stood waiting for his tip.
“It’s customary, here in America…” Peter murmured mildly.
“I already gave him half-a-crown,” said the Brit.
“Oh.” Whatever half-a-crown might be, it was not enough for hefting those three packed Pullman cases and that dandified hatbox, Peter thought, but he would not pursue the case. The train trip would give him two hours to draw, away from New Haven and all its dramatis personae, and he saw no reason to waste that gift time on this old crank. He drew a bowl of camellias that would have been a pale matte pink if he were doing an aquarelle, and a full-bodied but very graceful woman to contemplate them, a woman in a thin silk peignoir that would have also been a pale matte pink, a woman whose unseen nudity was clearly suggested. A thick gray-green Chinese rug yielded to the ball of her right foot; she had her left leg tucked under her. He let himself go fully into the scene, and placed a mirror behind her. “It’s March light,” he thought. “It’s clear and cool, and she has a small fire in her room, and the trees are blooming outside.” The thought sent up a rush of longing, like a breeze carrying a melancholy scent, for Belle Reve. For the same plantation he’d been aching to leave for the whole year that Araminta interned him there.