by Laura Argiri
“Yes?”
“I’m yours for life,” said Karseth. “For whatever you need. Even if it’s trouble that finds you because of that mouth of yours. What you do, you do for reasons like my own. No need to say anything more. Go tell Helmut all’s well. I’m sure he’s ready to crawl down my neck because he thinks I’ve been scolding you. I want to compose myself now; sentimental emotion exhausts me. And another thing I learned from that mob was that I can run very fast, and now I feel like I’ve been running.”
He had been running, he and Doriskos, when Doriskos got his notification from the Canova committee in April. The two of them had just finished a long run and were slick with sweat under their jerseys and well splatted to the knees with spring mud, their noses chilled and sniffly from the sharp outside air. They stepped out of their cleated shoes on the stoop and went in, Moses making for his handkerchief and Doriskos for his mail. Kiril had propped the important-looking crested envelope on the foyer table, and Doriskos attacked it at once, with Karseth as his witness.
Having read it, he turned so sallowly pale that Karseth thought the God had not only failed to place in the contest, but elicited some special flourish in the form of nasty comments from the judges.
“No?” asked Moses.
“Yes,” whispered Doriskos. He handed the letter to Moses.
“You’ve won! Why d’you look like death? Here, sit down.” As Doriskos did so, Moses took a hectic look around and bawled, “Kiril! Kiril Theros!”
Kiril put his head in the door, looking quizzical.
“Your master has just gotten his notification that he’s won the Canova Prize, and he’s having one of his strange Klionarios-reactions to the news, looking about to faint. Get him a glass of water, if you will.”
“He’s only startled,” said Kiril. “It’s sudden.” He got the water, and Doriskos drank it all. Then he finally looked up and dared a smile.
A few minutes later, he was sitting with a glass of wine in hand, with Karseth massaging his neck and shoulders—“There’s no turning back from it now,” he announced suddenly, from the midst of his abstraction.
“There’s no reason to turn back. No reason to want to turn back,” said Moses.
“It’s not even among the available choices. The only road goes forward,” said Doriskos. When he threw off Aldergate and refused to be silent, when he decided to come to Yale, when he first opened his mouth to speak to Simion, and when he declared his love, he had stood at painful forks of possibility; that is, he had had the chance to balk or progress, to go forward into his future or stay in his pearly shell and implode. Not much of a choice, but a choice, and a surprising number of people exercised their option to balk at such moments. Skitty though he was, he’d gone forward. The Canova was unique in its stark consequence, though—that letter announced receptions for him in August, both at the prize presentation at the Albion and at the Slade School, which would propel him irrefutably into public life.
“But the money,” murmured Doriskos later, faintly relaxing in the warmth of Helmut’s kitchen fire. He and Moses were sprawled in their chintz chairs in the kitchen alcove, listening as if from afar to the elated chatter of Helmut and Simion at the table. Simion was grating peel for orange zest, Helmut beating what appeared to be cake batter.
“They’re going to give you five hundred pounds. That letter says so,” said Karseth, not seeing what the hurry was.
“A purse of five hundred sovereigns. But I have to collect it. I wish they’d just sent me a cheque. It’s not as if I wouldn’t go to their reception if they paid me now. I need funds.”
“What do you desperately need money for? You never worry about money. Even when you haven’t any. And while we’re on the topic, why haven’t you any lately?”
“Why haven’t I any money lately…well, there was the marble. Then the new tools, and the trusses under the kitchen floor, and the gas jets for more light. I used the pater’s bounty to pay up the debts I’d incurred for the past year and a half—”
“You didn’t say you’d spent yourself into debt!”
“No, I didn’t, I knew you’d howl. Well, it’s over now. It’s paid off, and I’m cleaned out. There was a smart sum in February, too, for Simion’s last session with the dentist. Those very modern crowns that look like the teeth his father let rot in Haliburton. There was also that New York stomach specialist who confirmed your diagnosis. And I’d had it in my mind to buy Simion a horse for a graduation present,” said Dori, sotto voce, after noting Simion’s complete absorption in chatter with Helmut. “A proper horse, an Arabian, one with racing possibilities. Maybe a promising foal for him to raise and train. Those animals cost a pack and a half, and I don’t have it. I can’t see, either, applying for a bank loan and telling the bank officer that I want the money to buy a racehorse for my twenty-year-old lover’s college graduation.”
“I can’t picture it either. Well, Simion’s done beautifully with Gray. He likes Gray.”
“Simion likes me, but that doesn’t mean I’m actually easy to deal with, and the same goes for Gray. Gray’s high-strung and hard to manage.”
“Don’t fret about racehorses. Above all, don’t put it into his head that you intended to buy him one, or he’ll think he ought to have one. I’m just as happy he doesn’t have another stinking beast to risk his neck on. Buy him a wedding ring,” whispered Karseth with a wicked smile. “That’s what he really wants. And it costs a fraction of what a racehorse costs.” Then, aloud: “Let me see that letter again so I can gloat over the charming things the prize committee has to say about you, since you yourself are not quite drunk enough for a full and vulgar enjoyment of the situation. Ah. ‘Direct line from Phidias…Praxiteles…and Myron.’ Well, it doesn’t seem so direct to me, many differences in fact, but I take their point.”
“What’s that taking shape over there, cake?”
“Those preparations would indicate orange-cake. Which, in this house, comes with piped white icing and a coronet of candied peel if my memory serves me correctly.”
“I don’t specially want a cake. Maybe a steak with caper sauce, seared on the outside and pink in the middle, with nice caramelized onions,” Doriskos suggested hopefully. He felt very tired and in need of real food; the thought of the mixed char and salt tastes of the meat brought water to his mouth. Meat and a wine as rich and heavy as blood. “And a bottle of heavy red Burgundy.”
“You can have that, only you won’t get away without a cake too,” grinned Karseth. “You know both Helmut’s and Simion’s feelings about cakes. It isn’t truly a success without a cake. That and champagne with one’s supper.”
“I could do with the champagne right now if it’s a nice dry one.”
“Kiril has been sent out for it. It’ll be a nice dry one. Naturally, he’ll also buy a sweet one, a near-relative of ginger beer, for Simion.”
Simion threw Moses a cheerfully obscene gesture with his right hand, his left being in the frosting bowl. “When I graduate, I want a nice sweet one, not a dry one that tastes like peroxide, and no contumely about it, please.”
“Boy dear! When you graduate, you shall have all the sweet champagne that imprudence will allow.”
“Pass me that, please,” said Doriskos, gesturing to the letter. He wanted it in his hand. He reread it and felt its vellum heft between his fingers, taking in its reality, its truth. It asked him for a recent photograph.
“One with clothes on, I presume,” he said, beginning to relish the situation despite the cheque that wasn’t in his hand.
To Peter’s hand, in May, came a flat parcel with an English postmark. It would prove one of the most momentous items he ever received, though it looked much like other parcels of tourist junk that Araminta posted him from abroad. It contained a letter from his mother, an exhibition catalogue from the Albion, and some foreign magazines.
In her urgency to experience ever more locales that did not in any way resemble Valdosta County, Araminta had taken her Italian to
London and dragged the bewildered but not displeased rascal through every available museum and gallery. Peter imagined he had coaxed her into the shops of the smart tailors and jewelers as well—not that he begrudged Piero these appropriate honoraria of the kept human pet. Peter envied his mother, in whose tone he sensed something as near to gushing, girlish, reborn as it could be from Araminta. Everyone but Peter seemed to be getting reborn. He made his way through a page or so of these cultural jaunts, then—
“Here is something which your old mother hopes will inspire you. Your Klionarios has made a sensation on these shores. I must admit, I always wondered if the man could do anything other than make album sketches; your talk has been much about him, and very little about his work. However, Piero and I made a pilgrimage to the Albion—not a momentous event for Piero, but certainly one for me. We got there for the Canova Prize judging—our timing could not have been better—and saw the piece pictured in the catalogue enclosed, which cannot fail to interest you. It is called The God in Flight, no doubt some reference to mythology. It’s even more beautiful than it seems in pictures, for photographs take the life out of marble, that milky light it seems to hold. How difficult it must have been to execute! And it has both the shine of the empyrean that I have seen in many of the old and wonderful works we have viewed on this tour and the special miracle of newness—it carries their light into our own century. I wonder how Mr. Klionarios managed to conjure this thing out of the stone in New England, which seems a grim place to me and cruel to the part of the human spirit engaged in such works as this. I got you out of New Haven in part because I thought the constraints of the place were addling you and might make you do something desperate. I understand that desperation. Our part of the world is merely indifferent to the artistic urges, at least as far as malekind is concerned, not actively punitive and hostile. I hope you are conducting yourself sensibly up there in those unkind latitudes.
“One feels privileged to look upon such a thing—it’s like being present when the world first knew Goya, or, more precisely, Canova. I have felt tormented by missing things—have I ever told you what a grief that’s been to me? I mightn’t have minded the life I lived up until now but for missing things. I never heard Malibran or Pasta sing, and now no one can sing like that anymore. I missed Debureau and LeMaitre and Rachel just as the rest of Valdosta did, only I was the only person there who knowingly suffered from the lack. I thought that no one could sculpt like this either, there might be people with ideas as good and daring, but it seemed there were none who could do the daunting physical feat of bringing something so ambitious out of stone. But it seems there is, and I haven’t missed it. I wonder what on earth that man is doing at Yale teaching tiresome boys to draw apples and casts of Socrates, and putting up with puppy crushes from young sillies such as yourself!
“Bear in mind that while you have indulged your puppy passion for this man and wasted your time in foolishness and worse among your peers, the object of your obsession has not been wasting his. He has my abject respect not only for his skill, but for a capacity for work and concentration that should inspire awe in all right-thinking artists. He is quite right to pay no heed to you, he has better uses for his energies than coddling a willful young wastrel with talent but no idea of how to use it. It is very exasperating for me to think about work and will sometimes. I was born with the artistic talent and the will to work—but of the female gender. The last has meant that I had to wait until now, when I am nearly forty, for the freedom to use those endowments. You were born male, and with my talent, but with no will to work and no sense of direction, and with these unaccountable perversities of yours. By this I do not mean your preferences, which do not seem more than mildly unnatural and not particularly important, but how idle you have been and the gift you have shown for unhappiness and for creating ever-renewing reasons for your own misery. I am hoping that your year at home afforded you time for reflection and resolution and that looking upon this masterpiece will strengthen your resolve and spur your efforts. Look upon this and think: For your time at Yale, you have a precise count of how many times he blinked his eyes and sneezed, and for his he has certain immortality. I am also enclosing the Revue des Deux Mondes and several other magazines with pieces on this, including clippings from the London Times. Perhaps this will inspire you.”
Peter read the letter to the end, willing himself to postpone Revelation. Then, in a rush, he tore through the catalogue, through the minor prizes, and finally laid eyes on these past eighteen months’ mystery. Heureka! as Archimedes said in his bath.
The generous catalogue provided not only luxuriously reproduced photos of the God, but a series of photo-postcards of it that could be snapped out and used at the purchaser’s discretion or indiscretion. Peter read the articles and sat and looked at the pictures. He was not drunk. He was stone-cold sober and full of electricity. He laid the postcards out before him like a game of solitaire. Profiles from each side, three-quarters, Simion full-face over Doriskos’s shoulder, Doriskos from the glorious rear. He felt as if his mind might explode, such was the strain of religious awe and filthy joyous vengeance fighting it out. He was divided between ille si fas est superare divos and I have you both by the balls. Very visible in both cases, too, along with everything else imaginable.
It was such an enormity that he couldn’t even smile at first, though later he’d dissolve in demented giggles. Inspire him?
“Oh, it will, Mother dear,” thought Peter. “It will. It already has, in fact.” However, not in the way she intended. He chuckled to think that even she didn’t know how despicable he was, or what a weapon she’d put into his hand.
Like an old sorceress seeking the power in a cache of dry roots and bones, Peter looked through the drawer in which he kept the souvenirs of this infatuation. To his various bits of garbage and laundry, he’d recently added a Yale Daily Voice article with an impertinent sketch of Simion in one of his theatrical getups, costumed as Elisabeth de Valois and smiling like Carmen. For contrast, there was another of him perched on the college fence in his riding clothes. These had the great charm of being part of an interview article, turned out by an initially hostile young journalist who had ended up charmed at what he called Simion’s “diffident good manners and array of fascinating hobbies.” (Yes, thought Peter: horseback riding, stirring up things in chemistry labs, wearing dresses in old plays, sucking people’s cocks, and earning his way through college as Klionarios’s catamite.) This drawer also held one of John Ezra’s tracts (“Godly Marriage”), the sole survivor of Doriskos’s raid after the tract party, with John Ezra’s address on the back.
Peter laid the postcards before him on his tabletop with select other bits of his arcana, then shifted the things around contemplatively, as if playing a card game he couldn’t lose. In his reverie, he tinted those white marble bodies in the hues of flesh. Then, from a cold distance he’d never have managed even a year ago, he considered it: how much pleasure, how much vengeance, he could extract from these pieces of incriminating glazed paperboard that were never meant for these shores, these hands.
The hands were on the table at the meeting of the enemy powers that Peter convened by letter a couple of days later, two pairs against one: Peter’s, the right wearing an emerald and holding one of his five trumps; Andrew’s, bare; and Simion’s, the right with a Yale class ring with an unbecoming heavy stone of lapis lazuli on its ring finger. His clenched left hand was bare. They met in one of the private supper rooms of the White Wave. For form’s sake, there were three glasses and a pitcher of cider on the table between them, but no one was drinking.
Peter had spent a goodly portion of the previous night sifting luxuriously through the possibilities, wallowing in dirt beyond his dreams. He’d considered in turn the pleasures of approaching Noah Porter, Reverend Satterwhite, Doriskos, and Simion. But he had found himself shying away from each idea involving a direct assault on Doriskos; as with his mother, he somehow couldn’t raise his hand directly against
the creature; aside from the question of love, that wasn’t what he wanted.
Among the possible scenarios, he had finally chosen the immaculate fleur du mal, the blackest and most venomous rose with the longest thorns. And then he’d written Simion and Andrew a letter, just like a blackmailer in a French novel, beginning, “I wish to discuss with you some personal matters of particular and urgent interest…”
“This is one of them,” Peter said sweetly, placing the postcard on the table.
“Is it the sole one you have?” asked Andrew in civil hostility. “Because if it is, I could simply scruff you and remove it from your keeping, and this little tempest can be resolved without our spending a penny or taking a single risk.”
“Just because I’m irrational in some things doesn’t mean I’m the fool you imagine,” Peter said. “There are in fact four more—I’m sure you know this, Simion, you must have your own copy of the catalogue by now—and they would be of great interest to the more prurient element in town, as well as the old clerical owls. Also, you don’t know what else I might have taken for my own personal use during my days as Professor Klionarios’s private student in that happy time before Simion arrived, when our beautiful Doriskos used to sketch naked little boys on the borders of his grocery lists—I didn’t find it hard to assemble a nice collection of thrown-away grocery lists. If you’re ornery with me, I might find interesting things to do with those, too.”
“Nothing’s beneath you, is it?” asked Simion.
“Yes—my tail. And the chair under it.”
“Let’s cut this short,” Andrew cut in. “What d’you want?”
“I contemplated that very subject last night. I considered, oh, all sorts of extravagant possibilities. But I’m a lover of beauty, after all, and I want…a little of what Simion does for him. Not what I wonder about, but what I know about for damn sure,” said Peter, again indicating the card. “I’d prefer him, but I’ll be glad to use the two of you rather than him. I have a tenderness for him you wouldn’t understand—I wouldn’t want to upset him. Not unless it becomes necessary, or exceedingly tempting. I’m sure you don’t want him upset, do you, Simion?”