The God in Flight

by Laura Argiri

  “He certainly doesn’t deserve to be upset, especially by you.”

  “No, forgive me—that’s your prerogative, isn’t it? So, the two of you, and me with my drawing board. You’ll take off your clothes for me. You’ll pose for me however I like. Without a stitch on, and with no noble noise about whether it’s decent or not. Every Thursday evening from, say, seven to ten. Or eleven, or twelve, or until my hand gets tired.”

  “And you’ll give us those postcards?” Simion asked him.

  “I didn’t say that. Let’s say that I will put them away for my private delectation.”

  “That’s not sufficient.”

  “Take it or leave it, my dear young fellow.”

  “We’ll take it,” said Andrew.

  “Andy!” Simion cried.

  Andrew gave him a look, and he subsided.

  “Agreed, then,” said Andy. “Seven, at your room. Send word if you find that the time won’t suit you after all. Send it to us at our rooms in Durfee.”

  “Oh, really? I can’t just leave word with Professor Klionarios’s valet?” And with this lilting taunt, Peter took leave of them.

  Thursday evening, contrary to all the old saws about the comeuppance for premeditated malice, was a scream.

  “I suppose you have something gross and silly in mind for us,” said Simion when he and Andy showed up at Peter’s room. “Riding boots with no clothes, or crinolines, or something else out of a brothel?”

  “Truly, I gave the riding boots some consideration,” purred Peter. “I thought of having you wear your hunt boots with your birthday suit and straddle a chair, and drawing you from the back. A compelling image. Or stretching you out on my chaise with a rose in your mouth.”

  Andrew gave a snort of laughter, rather incensing to Peter, who preferred the tight-mouthed anger and dread on Simion’s face.

  “What do you find so amusing, sir?”

  “Your little ideas about riding boots and chaises and roses. So very Storyville! Have you ever spent time there?”

  “Not I,” Peter replied sweetly. “Simion, really, you needn’t look as if you’re going to be shot. That’s not what I have in mind, not tonight at least. Just stand on that chair for me.”

  “That chair?” Simion asked, looking at it as if it were in itself some kind of obscene stage prop.

  “Stand on it.”

  With the beginnings of a sardonic grimace at the corners of his mouth, Simion stepped up on it and stood there with his thumbs hooked into his pockets. Peter waited until he gave in to a full-fledged grin, then snapped his fingers and pronounced, “Clothes!”

  “Clothes?”

  “Off, like a good model. You’re used to this situation, after all.”

  Feeling like Nero and Caligula at once, Peter luxuriated in this performance. He had never seen a face go so hard and cold as Simion’s while those clothes came off. The camel’s-hair jersey, the silk undershirt, the eternal riding boots, the socks, the breeches, and the final garment. Peter imagined him in the role of a very beautiful and freshly captured slave, a Celtic Druid on the Roman block.

  “He has the pride of Lucifer,” Peter thought. “Who else could take off his clothes for me as if he were spitting on me?”

  Alas, he was as fine in the flesh as he was in marble. He might have been hand-created by a god as gifted and persnickety as Doriskos. A god intent upon a mortal not only faunlike and perfect in his proportions, but fine in the little details of his beauty, in the turn of his slender ankles and the refinement of his feet, the scantiness and blondness of his body hair.

  “You have good definition, from all that riding, I suppose,” Peter shrugged. “But you could afford to look a bit more as if someone fed you occasionally.”

  “At least I don’t have a belly that reaches from here to Kansas.”

  “Touché. Actually I don’t either. One of the reasons I hate you is that you make me feel fat. You don’t have a belly at all, but what you do have is a mouth that a whole army could fall into, and in more ways than one. However! I didn’t invite you here to bicker, we agreed that you’d pose for me, didn’t we? Now touch yourself.”

  “What for?”

  “My amusement,” Peter snapped.

  “Oh, you mean…ugh, no! I won’t do that.”

  Peter took a couple of steps toward him, but Andrew placed himself swiftly between him and Simion: “Don’t touch him.”

  “You’re telling me what to do?”

  “You said that you wanted us to pose for you. We agreed. Anything more wasn’t part of the bargain. Now don’t put your hands on him unless you want even more trouble than I think you would relish. If you must paw and slobber on someone, let it be me.”

  Peter was pleased with both Andrew’s conciliatory attitude and the flash of revolted fear he’d seen in Simion’s eyes.

  “This could actually be very amusing if you’re nice,” said Andrew with a wink.

  “It had better be amusing, whether I’m nice or not. Now you do the same as your pretty little friend and take your clothes off.”

  “Practically everything,” Andrew said as he began unbuttoning his jacket, “is more amusing when you’re nice.”

  Peter felt momentarily tempted just to heap them against each other on his divan, a contrast in ivory and gold later to be painted in rich oils. Andrew had a permeating goldenness in his Creole coloration, a warmer and less stark darkness than Doriskos’s, and a sturdier slenderness than Simion’s. But Peter envisioned plenty of time for other pictures and pleasures and decided to keep to his original plan for tonight.

  “All right, Simion, you pretend you’re doing whatever you were supposed to be doing when you posed for the God—and you, Carpallon, you make like you’re holding him up in the air. I’m not being insistent and nasty and making you actually hold him up in the air, just let him stand on that chair while you assume the same attitude that our friend Klionarios did in his own work. Great works of art are for emulation, aren’t they, Simion, can we agree on that?—and, after all, by this time half of England has seen your bare tail. Well, I mean to emulate this great work of art that was hidden from me for so long, I’m going to draw my own God in Flight and enjoy the view that he enjoyed.”

  “This is ridiculous,” supplied Simion.

  “Not half so ridiculous as you’d look if you got expelled a few weeks before graduation. Imagine the charming Reverend Brimstone Tract’s reaction. Stretch your arms out like you did for the last year and a half or so, now. And smile!”

  Peter embellished that session with many further touches of his own, such as coming up close enough that Simion could feel his breath on the small of his back. He noted with mingled thrills of delight and pain that Simion’s pretty white skin crawled into gooseflesh at the touch of his mere breath. He drew for about two hours, forgetting to offer his models the common civility of a stretch break and a drink. In time, their arms developed a tremor and were surreptitiously lowered, then stretched back up at his glare. This felt good to him, so good that his mind went frisking off merrily into a dozen diversions for use in future drawing sessions. However, in the midst of these tasteful ruminations, Peter realized that his own arms were tired, that his head was pounding in long hangoverish strokes of pain. He showed them his work, which made them look like they’d just bitten into something spoiled, and sent them on their way with a jolly hint or two about his ideas for their next session.

  He thought he had them well and truly daunted. Getting them out of their clothes had been pleasant enough for him and unpleasant enough for them, but what he enjoyed more than their nakedness was the chance to establish the upper hand, to savor their subjection. For the moment, most gloriously sated, he lay on his bed, enjoying the prospect of handing Simion the damned cards after graduation, addressing to him the smile of complicity and tasting his accumulated shame. That would spoil the creature’s graduation if anything could. And he could, after all, get Araminta to send him some more cards. Even better, he could
join her in London and see the piece himself. The world seemed suddenly infused with possibilities.

  So he thought, with all the kindness of a spider, and lay there spinning out his scenarios, little obscene operas that no one but the three of them would know about, but that would endure as private horrors for two of the three. That was what he planned for them, not realizing that he had also spun a web for himself. But it later occurred to him that people might do their best thinking on some mental level far below the one of those pleasant and ugly meditations. Peter wanted to orchestrate something drastic; what happened after he made his bluff with those postcards was beyond his wildest dreams.

  Late the next Tuesday night, having had nearly a week to mature his ideas for their posing sessions, Peter was roused from his first sleep by a rap on his door.

  “This better be good, you!” he growled—startled to be answered in soft velvet tones: “Oh, it will be.” He opened the door to find Andrew Carpallon standing in the hall, a bottle of champagne in one hand.

  “Why, it’s Lord Byron. Have you got your dates and times confused, or what?”

  “You’re asleep at this hour?—well, sorry to wake you. I figured that if we’re to pose for you as a regular thing, perhaps you and I should be better acquainted. You seemed so nervous when we came over Thursday night. And we’ll all have a better time Thursday if we’re comfortable with one another, tu comprends ce que je veux dire? I’d like to get better acquainted. Will you share a bottle with me? Also, I’ve acquired some unique cigarettes. Not the sort of thing that Simion would enjoy, but I thought it possible that you might.”

  He admitted Andrew, his French champagne, and his Turkish cigarettes; he put on his best silk robe and partook. Peter had never had hashish, but he quickly added it to his list of favorite things, right up there with Fragonard, alcohol, ordinary tobacco, stiff male members, and Doriskos Klionarios. These cigarettes of Andrew’s made Peter feel better than any of the above ever had; they made him feel as if he had everything he wanted. Their gentle smoke lifted the choking cloud of his hostility and allowed him to think briefly that Andrew might be playing some genial game with him. Without noticing that Andrew wasn’t smoking much, he found himself getting undressed—without noticing, either, that Andrew had only taken off his tie and unbuttoned his cuffs. His room had become a golden subfusc, a beautiful blur—he wished he could see the lights of New York reflected on the river, what a Whistlerian gemscape they’d make in the lens of this opaline narcotic—and Andrew smelled of chrysanthemum and citron, of some dark garden—and Peter was happy, at least for the moment. The moment, to give it no more than its due, was short. He heard intrusive sounds, in the dimmed and abstract way that a very drugged person does. “Confusion?” his mind asked itself. “Noise?”

  And the forces he had set in motion arrived at his literal door. His room went black around him, then there was the snap of his window shade being jerked down, the flare of a lantern being lit. Something landed on top of him. When he tried to yell, Peter found that Andrew was sitting on him and had tied his hands with the cravat he’d been so languidly unloosing, then crammed his mouth with a pair of Topher’s discarded underdrawers. He whipped his head around to see three more uninvited guests—that all-too-authentic Charleston snob Francie Finch, his large friend Leander Hogan, and Simion, whose skull seemed particularly close to his skin in this witching light. He was wearing full riding dress and carrying, disturbingly, a riding crop.

  “Very well, shitheels, where are they? Francie’s going to unstuff that mouth of yours, and then you tell me where you put those postcards. Or, by all the gods, I’m going to use this thing on you more vigorously than I’d ever use it on a horse.”

  “Muuggf!” Peter spat. “They aren’t here! You think I’m some kind of numbskull? I put ’em where you can’t get ’em!” He had. Without apprising Topher of the fact, he’d put them in Topher’s Bible—possibly the safest and most undisturbed locale on campus—midway in the Book of Revelation. It had seemed very funny at the time.

  “Is that so?” asked Simion. Francie stuffed the dirty drawers back into Peter’s mouth, with an elaborate expression of flinching distaste for both him and them. “Do you know what we do with overfed liars with behinds the size of Texas?” Simion gave Peter a smart smack with the crop, according to promise, harder than he had ever used it on Gray. The stale fabric in his mouth muffled Peter’s yelp.

  “I bet you like that, maybe your mother does it to you on vacations. But not as hard as I will. Your mother probably just does it to the point of incestuous excitation, but I’m going to pretend that you’re my horse and you’ve just tried to nip my hand.” Whap! “I’m sicker of you than I ever believed one human could be of another. You set that cur dog Topher on me almost the minute I got here, and I believe you staged that three-way orgy in the common room for my special benefit, and then you threw that disgusting party to show off those foul tracts. As if John Ezra was somehow my fault, as if I’d picked him as my father as some special act of bad taste—about as likely as my picking you as my friend! And after all that, you’ve still had the monumental gall to pester Dori, and then blackmail us and draw filthy pictures of us!” Whap! “Want another? You can have as many as you like. I had an ulcer attack last night because of you, and I’m feeling very generous with this crop. You can benefit from my generosity until your backside looks like Waterloo after Wellington. Or you can tell me where you put those postcards when I take those dirty drawers out of your mouth for the last time of the evening.” He plucked the gag out and stood awaiting his answer.

  “You want ’em so much, you find ’em,” Peter said unwisely. As Simion began to stuff the gag back into his mouth, Peter decided to act the role assigned to him and bit him as hard as he could through the black leather of his riding glove.

  “Ow, you swine! Just try that again if you want me to skin you alive!”

  Andrew, betraying squeamish distaste in the set of his lips, caught Simion’s uplifted hand. “Simion, this is…” Andrew began. “This is perhaps excessive. Perhaps a better use of our time… Why don’t we just let Leander hold him down while we search his room?”

  Simion gave his reluctant consent. Even in his distracted state, Peter got a look into Simion’s eyes and saw that, for the moment at least, he was dangerous. “He’d really like to flay me,” Peter thought, with just the edge of some excitement too vile for scrutiny. If Simion worked him over seriously with that crop, the outrage would create a horrid intimacy between them like the one he’d tried to forge in his drawing sessions, an intimacy that neither would shake off.

  Leander sat his two hundred and twenty pounds down astraddle Peter’s bare back and in his laconic way said, “Stay still. Else I’ll sit on your head.” Andrew lit Peter’s other lamp, then he, Francie, and Simion began to go methodically through Peter’s things. First, they found the sketch he’d made last Thursday and ceremoniously burnt it.

  Then Francie found a ream of pencil sketches, any of which were worth a decade in jail—every fantasy Peter had ever had of trussing Doriskos up like one of Michelangelo’s slaves or spread-eagling him on the floor of an inquisitional dungeon, and worse. Peter could hear their divided reaction: titillated disgust on the parts of Andy and Francie, a sort of opportunistic wrath on Simion’s. They’d held their booty up for Leander’s delectation, and Leander jounced with shock, causing a crackling compression of Peter’s spine. “Quit that grunting!” big Leander growled. “You look like a hog, and you sound like one too. You ought to be in a pen like a hog, not in a proper college with decent fellows.”

  “But do you think—? Mightn’t it seem as if Professor Klionarios actually—”

  “Actually posed for him? No. These are pictures he made up from things inside his foul head. He doesn’t know what Dori looks like out of his clothes, I do.”

  “But what if—”

  “Pas devant le cochon, François. I just mean, well, you know how people’s feet aren’t the same, or
their navels…small scars and that kind of thing? This is a picture of Dori’s face on a body of the right proportions, but the details are wrong. That’s the sort of thing you can prove in court.”

  “Professor Klionarios would probably rather be shot than show a court his navel.”

  “If we do our work right here, it’ll never come to that,” said Simion.

  No cranny of Peter’s life was left unprobed; he was only lucky he’d never kept a journal. They found some bits of Araminta’s lingerie that Peter had made off with, and they were swift to intimate that he wore it. That wasn’t true; he merely draped it over his face when solitary and aflame—not that he thought this clarification would have helped his cause. And they found some nudes that Peter had made of his black manservant Thom at Belle Reve, and they tacked these delectable studies up on Peter’s walls.

  “Well, here’s a man of style and quality—nasty made-up naked pictures, ladies’ pantalets, and pictures of a big black buck hung like a gallows pole.”

  “But, evidently, truthful about the fact that he’s put those postcards elsewhere,” Andrew noted.

  “All this trouble for nothing,” said Francie.

  “Not necessarily,” said Simion, with a Sadean smile. “Peter there has had a lot of fun at my expense, and we really should have some at his before we leave.”

  “Do hurry,” said Leander. “I’m tired of sitting on him.”