The God in Flight

by Laura Argiri

  “An artist, are you, sir?” asked the Brit, who had clambered up out of his seat and managed to wend his way to Peter’s side.

  “A student,” Peter said, hoping that would be less interesting. No such luck.

  “That’s quite good, you know. Where in America does a student learn such facility?”

  “Yale College.” No reply there. “It’s in New Haven, a nasty little city a couple of hours up the seaboard line.” The fellow lingered, his breath almost fanning Peter’s neck, peering at the sketch as if he found it of particular interest. “Please,” said Peter, with a gesture to the empty seat beside him—involuntary graciousness branded into him by the subject of his drawing.

  The Brit wheezed down into the plush seat, then ungloved and offered a damp right hand. “Thank you. I’m Viscount Stratton-Truro. I have a son who teaches at Yale.”

  “Indeed!” said Peter, noting that the man’s smell was faintly salty and unappealing, like cold and stale beef broth. He looked perfectly clean, yet had a dankness and miasma that would be disturbing even to the kind and broad-minded. “A member of the club? One of those perverts who interfere with little boys?” Peter thought, and kept drawing. Not one to take a delicate hint, Stratton-Truro continued his scrutiny of the evolving drawing and finally offered an audible conclusion.

  “Really,” commented Stratton-Truro, “that’s extraordinary.” Peter caught some vague familiarity in the way he said that word: ’strordinary. Doriskos, when presented with some drawing that Peter meant to shock him: Rilly, how ’strordinary!

  “It should be in pink chalk, that would be best, only I’ve started in charcoal. Maybe I’ll make a copy in pink chalk or pastel once I get back to college. You’re going to visit your son, then?”

  The old party nodded eagerly, as if his visit were some sort of honor—to him, not his professor son. “My son’s an artist also, a sculptor. He has just completed a marble piece which I am taking back to London for the Canova Prize competition. This is such an occasion for me! I haven’t seen him for so long.” Such a look of pitiful anticipation!

  It was at this juncture that Peter began to understand what had just walked into his net; he concealed his predatory elation. “How marvelous for you,” Peter told him. “But I don’t know a Professor Stratton-Truro at Yale.”

  “Oh, but that isn’t his name. He’s my adopted son. I considered giving him my name at one time, but my name’s a drab thing, and the one he was born with is a very jewel. He’s Greek by birth. I let him keep it. He’s Professor Klionarios.”

  Peter called upon all his resources of dissimulation and managed not to squeal with triumph. “Well, sir, this calls for congratulations,” he told the old party in the butteriest tone he could conjure. “There is a club car to our rear. Would you enjoy a drink?—I would. Come, be my guest.”

  In the three hours that this little journey took—the train stopped inexplicably for an hour at New Rochelle—Stratton-Truro had time to soak up a lot of third-rate claret and Peter to absorb a brainful of the kind of information you probably couldn’t buy for money or extract at stiletto-point from any human being with normal good sense and a feel for self-preservation. However, this conscience-racked and hysterically indiscreet buffoon spilled this information like honey. It started with the account of how he had purchased the infant Doriskos from some sort of artistic tart in Athens and concluded with his admitted unkindness over Doriskos’s exodus from Oxford, for which Stratton-Truro now almost tearfully castigated himself. Blubbery old nummy, Peter thought, with the kind of contempt he generally reserved for himself. The old lord was almost unhinged; he’d been raking himself over his lonely coals for so long that all this misery came out after a few drinks to lay itself in the lap of Peter, a total stranger. Who was not so strange as he thought. Peter, in fact, understood him all too well: that he knew, despite the accident of Doriskos’s birth, who really was the prince and who was the peon; and that he also knew that laying his own sticky paws on that rare creature had been no beneficence, but an act of criminal squalor. It interested him to think that he and Stratton-Truro both loved Doriskos with the same abnegation and cruelty—the same besmirching, dishonorable love.

  Even more compelling was the old lord’s pocketful of photographs, further evidence that Peter’s afflicted fascination with Doriskos’s looks was not unique. He wanted to show these to Peter, who wanted to see them.

  “Napoleon Sarony, sir,” said Stratton-Truro of one of these—apparently referring to the portraitist who had taken it. “Cost me dear, it did, but it’s worth it. Beautiful.” Stratton-Truro licked his lips.

  “Indeed,” Peter agreed. In most of the little prints, he recognized that impenetrable detachment, that non-expression that Doriskos had been practicing toward perfection from early days. A young captive, withholding everything from the lens and the viewer but his image. Something about those portraits made Peter remember the eyes of black servants indulging the caprices of whites, cool neutrality over hot, still depths of contempt. Then came the one that Stratton-Truro showed Peter only because he was too drunk to be careful: the leggy child at ten or twelve, standing amidst a coyly arranged cluster of hothouse plants, face closed like a book—naked. Stratton-Truro shuffled it to the back of the pack; Peter pretended he hadn’t noticed and poured them both another drink.

  “Your name, sir, your name,” slurred Stratton-Truro when the train pulled into the New Haven station. “My, but I’ve run on…and haven’t even ascertained…”

  “Christopher Petty,” Peter told him. “A pleasure to travel with you, milord. I must recover my painting things before I get off. I wish you a very pleasant stay in New Haven, sir.” Again, in his butter-and-cream voice. He made his way back to his original seat and deliberately spilled his things as an excuse to linger and wait so that Stratton-Truro’s waiting hosts would not see him. He peered out onto the platform and identified, within the crowd, a weary and solemn Doriskos with Simion by his side and Kiril in his wake. They saw their guest and came to help the staggering Stratton-Truro down the treacherous metal steps to the platform. A real frog between figurative princes, he wobbled there.

  In his long history of harming Doriskos, Stratton-Truro had never accomplished such a degree of harm so thoughtlessly, or so pleasurelessly, as he had upon that day, handing over nine tenths of the information he needed to this bold and experienced antagonist. Having bought Doriskos for the price of a ball gown, he’d now sold him for the trivial relief of babbling to a stranger in a train. Perhaps he only half-remembered it himself; he’d been pretty sopped. He was, of course, fawning and apologetic in his tone upon arrival and all throughout the rather long week he remained in New Haven arranging the statue’s passage, but not necessarily for the most recent reason—he had plenty to be apologetic for long before he ever stepped onto that train. Yet during his stay, Doriskos had to admit, he made himself very useful and took efficient care of every detail of the statue’s passage. This was the sort of chore in which Doriskos knew himself fairly inefficient at best; he knew how he’d have floundered, taking care of this peculiarly charged affair on his own. Then again, someone who’d managed to buy a baby like a pound of toffee and keep him captive until adulthood should be able to get a statue crated up and onto a boat to London.

  By way of further apology for the past, the old lord left Doriskos a very large bank draft when he finally departed—a bank draft so large that it made his last dank kiss almost tolerable.

  “What’s the matter?” Simion asked him, noting Dori’s peculiarly vacant expression as he saw Stratton-Truro onto the boat. He hadn’t seen that emptiness of eye in quite some time, had been delighted not to see it, and wasn’t elated to see it again.

  “What?”

  “That look, that zombie look.”

  “It has its uses. It kept his hands off me,” said Doriskos in the zombie voice that was the look’s aural counterpart. “Then and now.”

  “Well, he’s off now,” Simion responded wit
h aggressive cheer. “Do you really suppose we can trust him with—”

  “Oh, yes, absolutely,” said Dori, with a small ironic laugh. He waited until Stratton-Truro couldn’t see him, then took out his handkerchief and wiped the kiss off. Rather than thinking about the viscount, he was sensing the culmination of a sensation that had begun when the wood shell around the God first hid it from him and had grown stronger as it was inched down a ramp from the house—a sense of loss that had amplified with every step in the progress of severance. And as the steamer carrying the God struck off in the indigo winter waters, his connection with it dissolved, and he felt as if some part of his insides had been painlessly plucked out, leaving a taut vacancy worse than pain. He wondered if his mother had felt something analogous when his weight slid from her and the blood-rich bulk of the afterbirth broke from her insides and followed him out to the air—or when he disappeared for the last time from her sight. And how ironic that he and his mother both had confided their masterworks to this same man!

  Now his head felt both light and heavy. His throat ached with loss. “I’m not half tired,” he murmured, which meant he was very tired indeed.

  XIV. The Lead of Spite

  A couple of days after the departure of Stratton-Truro and The God in Flight, Doriskos surprised himself and Simion by turning up, after a faculty meeting, sick. In the midst of a mild malaise he thought was only ordinary exhaustion coupled with ordinary boredom, he had become aware of a sudden cresting heat in his head. When he put his fingers to his face, his own heat shocked him, and by the time the discussion wound to its close, he felt as if he were floating up near the ceiling. By eight that evening, he had a temperature of one hundred and two and a violently sore throat, the prodromes to a flourishing case of bronchitis. He found it hard to be concerned about that or much of anything but how thirsty he was, how tiresomely, simultaneously hot and cold he felt.

  “It’s almost to be expected,” said Karseth. “He hasn’t been sleeping properly for a year or more, and he’s been sleeping on that kitchen floor at that, and he’s worn out from having that elderly pervert in his house. Sickness can be a backhanded mercy at times—now he has his excuse to sleep for a couple of weeks and let his nerves untangle themselves.”

  “You don’t sound wildly concerned,” noted Simion, puzzled and vexed.

  “I’m not as wildly concerned as I’d be if it were you. He has a fantastically good constitution, and if we take normal care of him, he’ll throw this off. Rest and soup and juice and a cold cloth on his head, if he wants it. Don’t let his room get below sixty-five degrees, and see that he wears his nightshirt, and above all, don’t kiss him on the mouth and contract what he’s got.”

  What this lacked in urgency, it made up in accuracy. Despite Simion’s anxieties, Dori did not develop pneumonia—no, he was merely fairly miserable for a few days. Being normally so healthy and personally unused to the nastiness that the body was capable of, he was revolted by the green phlegm he coughed up; Simion concealed his amusement at his fastidious disgust. Between Simion, Kiril, Helmut, and Moses, he did not get the chance to hibernate as he would have chosen—what he wanted was to be naked between the smooth sheets, to sleep twenty hours a day, to drink cold water, and to have his head rubbed as he drifted off for the night. Instead he got willow-bark and chamomile teas, back rubs, orange juice, and various well-meant soups; he got doses that Simion, who was beginning to be seriously interested in medical science and already sported a good deal of its vocabulary, referred to as demulcents and carminatives. Still, as he would have done with far more minimal attention, Doriskos threw off the infection in about a week. And the evening after his temperature went down, he woke up clearheaded and hungry.

  Simion brought up a tray of food that Helmut had cooked for both of them, a pair of small steaks with carrots and buttered toast and bowls of consommé, and a bottle of chilled hard cider added at his own discretion. The food was precisely right—Simion’s meat was cooked to boot leather, but Doriskos’s was charred on the outside and pink in the middle, exactly as he liked it. Now Doriskos found himself delighted with the attention, as if the simple meal were some extraordinary present. It seemed the first pleasure he’d felt in months—finishing the God had been the end of pain, and sending it off had been the beginning of a long wait for the contest judgment, and neither could be called positive pleasure.

  It had been a very long time since he’d enjoyed the moment. As Simion had enjoyed the first meal that Doriskos ever served him, Doriskos enjoyed this one, the bloom of cooked salt and fat on his tongue, the tart alcohol cold down his throat. Also the sight of Simion taking pleasure in his meal, lifting his soup bowl and sipping from it as he liked to do when they were alone. When Simion finished, he settled himself next to Doriskos and held him companionably, not talking.

  “I wonder,” thought Dori, “if there really are any true and pure pleasures, beyond a few. Skin-to-skin touch…firelight…food…flowers…nakedness. Everything else has at least a little pain in it. Art has quite a lot, not just during, but after, when I have a sensation in my mind like the one I had in my jaw when two of my milk teeth fell out. When you make love, there’s the pain of revelation. You have to show yourself. But this, it’s pure.” He’d like to take his nightshirt off to make it even purer, he thought. He smiled and slipped from under Simion’s arm to get rid of the garment and then resume the loose embrace, his skin seeming suddenly awake to the pleasure of textures—the seamless sheet under him, the sleeve of Simion’s shirt against his shoulders, the rougher tweed of his waistcoat.

  I’m tired but also hungry now. I’m too weary to pounce on you as you want me to pounce, to take you as you’d like, but not too weary for you to take me. If I did exactly as I wish, thought Doriskos, I’d slide down and beckon you to take me, turn me on my face and ravish me with a kind of slow, insistent force. Catch my juice in your hand and know what you can do to me. I’m permeable in my fatigue—how keenly I’d feel everything! I think of the semi-divine pharaoh’s wedding night, or Osiris kneeling to Isis under the homage of every living star. I can see it in my mind’s eye, make myself explode by feeling it on my mind’s skin, though I can’t do it in the flesh. No reason that I can’t but that I can’t. Is there a reason beyond the usual reason for me to be afraid? If I weren’t, tonight I’d want you to ride me like that feathered horse of your dreams. Unhouse the mollusk, rend the rose, cause me the most delicious pain and shame. Not that I mean actual shame, actual pain. It’s that there aren’t even any words for that kind of exposure and possession, to be taken and ridden and freed. I want to cede control to the person I trust and feel as some shelled and carapaced thing of the sea would feel if it lay naked in your hand.

  Nothing made this impossible, except that it was. Some absolute barrier made it so, even though the God was finished. His body felt the poignant ache of possession denied, a cello note along the nerves. Still, he almost welcomed that fading ache, which wasn’t quite pain as hunger isn’t.

  Doriskos spent February and March of 1882 in complicated dread. He wondered whether he was so nervous about the prospect of winning or that of not winning, and finally realized: neither. It was that he’d finally be born: Whether his creation won the Canova Prize or not, it would show him to the world. He dreaded and longed for this birth and felt transfixed before its inevitability, one of these junctures in his life where he had no choice but courage. Meanwhile, due for such exposure, he put his minor nervousnesses behind him. His manner when he resumed his teaching combined his old genial carelessness and his new authority.

  He let his students embark upon their own projects and set up his easel and painted, saying that he craved the chance to manipulate color, the malleable mess of paint on canvas, after a year and a half in the company of white stone. Unlike any of the work he’d ever done in class, the picture was aggressively strange—a man rising into a night sky, flying, shedding the guise of a great swan-white and swan-feathered bird as he rose. The feath
ers floated down behind him, into vertiginous space. The sky was a drenching cyan, a blue that could almost quench a thirst through the eyes, a blue that rang like a bell. “Any fool with a little talent can paint things he sees with his eyes alone,” he told a student who questioned this turn away from the observable universe.

  Even his voice had altered. His public voice, the voice he used with all non-intimates, had always been quite lifelessly beautiful, managing somehow to be both modulated and flat—a voice accustomed to concealing his opinions. The people who knew it well would have been struck by his bright, live contempt when he said what any fool with a little talent can do. The small and offhand cruelties he’d once uttered in his gentle voice—cruelties that had once seemed dismissible—now took on a sharp life of their own. He did not suffer fools gladly, and those among his students began to fear him a little. As much as a man of such reticence could strut, he strutted. Andy and Simion took to leaving him a rose for every taloned salvo or mere well-timed cattiness reported back to them, and a rose in his lapel meant that he was feeling particularly incisive.

  Simion, for his part, did not need his boldness rewarded with roses. Noah Porter had begun to understand that his star student’s utterances were not those of an educated hick who didn’t know the right gods to bow to—Dr. Porter had grown familiar with Simion’s upstart emotions. That is, the anger of someone bitter against the limits on his life and in open war upon them. Dr. Porter had never quite forgotten the affair of Simeon Lincoln’s funeral, and he found much to object to in Simion’s use of his legacy. The previous autumn, while Doriskos was at his height of absorption with the God, Noah Porter had tried to have a conversation with Simion.