The God in Flight

by Laura Argiri

  Peter strained to hear their muted conclave. He managed to catch something about fresh air, and Francie saying that it was a mite dangerous but a hoot of an idea, and too bad they couldn’t carry it out in broad daylight and take a photograph.

  Then the party began in good earnest—“You gave Topher the idea of pinning me out the window, now let’s see how you enjoy the experience personally,” said Simion, who never seemed to forget anything. The four interlopers jerked Peter off the bed and stuck him, nightshirtless, halfway out his window, with the additional flourish of substituting Araminta’s mauve silk drawers for Topher’s yellowed cotton ones in his mouth.

  Then, wincing behind the lingerie, Peter felt something very much like someone writing on his buttocks. And all Peter could do was wish he’d had beans for supper.

  “Just remember,” said Simion, wanting the word after the last word, “you may have five postcards of a controversial work of art, but I’m going to take home with me half a ream of genuine-to-God criminal filth. And such is your amour propre that you signed all this stuff. All these crazy dreams, these sonatas for right hand about poor ethereal Dori, with Peter Tattnall Geoffrey at the lower right corner. Anybody who’s ever talked to Dori for five minutes knows he hasn’t posed for them, that it was your diseased imagination at work. Just keep that in mind if you start thinking about more posing sessions, or about making any other form of grief for us. You keep away from us—you keep away from him. Meanwhile, we’ve fixed you up so that you’ll be open for business when someone finds you.” As a parting shot, they poured his liquor, all eighteen bottles of it, out on his little Persian rugs.

  And they left him there, his mouth full of musky mauve silk and his room reeking with the rising fumes of cordials and red whiskey. From the lawn, all of them waved up cheerily to him, and Simion brandished his cache of Peter’s obscene drawings as if it were all some jolly joke. It was a very cold night for May, and Peter could only writhe unsuccessfully, freezing from the waist up—and from the waist down as well.

  Nor were Simion & Friends the only ones who derived amusement from this tableau. When Topher came lurching home at three in the morning and saw the light from Peter’s open door, he found it very natural to go in. No doubt ol’ Pete would do what Topher had been unable to persuade the girl at the Mershaw Mews to do earlier that evening. Topher laughed until half the corridor was in there laughing with him. From their exclamations, Peter learned what had been written on him—with Barton’s Indelible Black Ink.

  3 Cents, enter here! With an arrow in case any poor befuddled fool had difficulties figuring this out. On his left side: Discounts for athletes! And on the right: Satisfaction guaranteed! Proprietor T. Holloway. As a concluding grace note, they left upon the windowsill a coffee mug for compensation and a jar of cold cream taken from Peter’s night table.

  “Haw, haw,” laughed Topher. “I bet you’ll have to think again about getting all snooty and telling me that you won’t have so much time for me, like you did this afternoon,” he said, once he and Peter were left to the pleasure of one another’s company. “And lookit that nigger! You and your dear mamma take turns with that gorilla? He looks like he’s got plenty to spare.”

  “You filthy fool, I was freezing out there!” Peter shuddered and burrowed into his robe. “And why’d you want to make all this noise and get that crowd in here? After this, why would I have any time at all for you?”

  “’Cause no one else is going to have time for you, except for folks with three cents to spend…once they see the writing on the…well, not on the wall,” elaborated kind Topher, and, with his usual shining sympathy, he laughed some more.

  Peter, for his part, wept a little when he was alone, tears that were soon transformed into hysterical laughter that had his next-door neighbor kicking the wall—“For Chrissakes, shaddup! You’ve had your fun for the night! Put a damn lid on it!” Then he knelt on his bed amidst the rising reek of his liquor stash, in some white arctic of the heart. The rage of Medea, the rage of Clytemnestra, rose in him and chilled his veins with purpose. With nothing else left, he re-embraced his obsession for worse, for sickness, for poorer. He said a hot prayer to the Furies, who did not concern themselves with fairness or rationality or the worth of the creative. Like Topher, they found that ruining things was easier than making them, and more fun. They heard. In the dark before the dawn, they whispered coldly into his ears and told him that if he had the daring to exploit it, to act with the boldness that those four had used against him, he could turn all that had been done to him this night against his enemy. That they might have done him the biggest possible backhanded favor: that his best-laid plans had been better than he’d intended. He calmed himself somewhat and began re-examining the possibilities. Informing John Ezra and watching him cut Simion up into stewing steak; informing Doriskos and watching him commit hara-kiri; informing the Yale Daily Voice and watching the news spread like cholera…informing Noah Porter and hearing the university’s Protestant puritan thunder roll.

  The Ace of Spades in this pack of possibilities was acting by the book. Peter was sure that after the enormities he himself had committed, the last thing Simion expected was for him to march himself down to Dr. Porter’s office and report the indignities performed upon his person. To reveal was also to confess. He’d have to admit actions sufficient to get himself thrown out of Yale several times over. However, Simion cared about being thrown out of Yale, and Peter didn’t, perhaps to an extent Simion was constitutionally incapable of appreciating. You cut off anyone else’s balls; you cut off Simion’s diploma.

  Peter didn’t bother with his tutor or any other intermediary. He went straight to the top and gave Porter three of the postcards and the rest of the information he possessed about Simion and Doriskos’s unorthodox partnership. He kept the catalogue and the fourth card for himself and made some explanatory notes on the back of the fifth card, which provided the best view of Simion. Then he put a stamp on it and mailed it to Reverend John Ezra Satterwhite at the address on that last tract he’d saved.

  When the summons came, Simion was taking an hour exam in graphical statics at the Sheff. After a whispered conversation with Professor Williamson, Noah Porter’s secretary, Mr. Van Rakle, came and tapped Simion on the shoulder and said, “When you finish with this test, Mr. Satterwhite, you must come for an immediate conference with Dr. Porter.”

  “All right,” said Simion, wary but not panicked. His nervousness rose a few notches when Van Rakle did not leave, merely nodded and then took a chair at the front of the classroom. His summons to those previous lectures in the guise of friendly teas had arrived with no particular urgency via U.S. mail. He gave the secretary a questioning look.

  “I shall await you, sir, and drive you to your appointment when you finish.” Not the sir, one might note, of respect. Simion hurried, considering the all but unbelievable prospect that Peter had summoned the shreds and shards of his self-respect to invoke an administrative remedy.

  “If Peter’s gone and done it,” thought Simion, “this is going to be gloves off.” Even this longish wait in the dark parlor outside Porter’s study might be a scare tactic intended to raise his level of tension to the intolerable before the discussion even began. If so, it was a bit of psychology he was determined to resist. “If he puts my back against the wall, I’ll just tell the truth,” he thought. “I wish I had those drawings. If things get ugly, I suppose I can always insist that they let me go get them.” His stomach started its familiar seasick swoon. “Serves Dr. Porter right if he makes me throw up on his rug,” he told himself. Then the door of Porter’s inner sanctum opened; Leander and Francie, violently red of face, came out. Peter had thrown down his cards.

  “Oh, Simion—”

  “Did you—”

  “We denied everything, but he doesn’t believe us,” Francie mouthed. “He’s really incensed.”

  “Gentlemen, this way,” said Van Rakle in antarctic tones, indicating the exit.

 
“He’s also angry with me about the Heathcliffs,” said Francie, in distraught tones—this was also true. “Mainly for wearing my sister’s pink skirt in Psyche Zenobia, though I don’t know where he thinks I’d get skirts if not—”

  “Dr. Porter will call you again if he wants you, sirs,” said Van Rakle, all but pushing them out the street door. A minute later, this same door admitted and closed behind Andy.

  “They must know—”

  “Dummy up, Simion,” said Andrew. Hearing movement from within Porter’s office, he switched into French. “La solidarité, souviens-toi! Nous n’en savons rien, ni toi, ni moi. Ce qu’il faut absoluement, c’est que nous raccontons la même histoire.” (Remember, keep a united front! We don’t know anything, you don’t know, I don’t know. The important thing is that we tell the same story.) And Porter, unsmiling, opened his door.

  The boys’ initial feints and denials after Porter’s opening remarks got them nowhere. Moreover, he seemed to have all the time in the world and every intention of wearing them down. He had an ominous air of preconviction.

  “Once again,” asked Porter, “you wouldn’t know anything about a sign with these words upon it?” As he had before, he indicated a piece of paper upon which was penned, “3 Cents, enter here! Discounts for athletes! Satisfaction guaranteed! Proprietor T. Holloway.”

  “Enter what, sir?” asked Andy. “I don’t understand. Perhaps Topher might.”

  “Yes, he might. Topher Holloway is a hooligan of the first order,” Simion allowed.

  “The person who did this is certainly a hooligan,” Porter remarked in a tone of chill disdain. “It isn’t the act of a gentleman of breeding and refinement, for a certainty. Not the sort of thing we like to see here at Yale.”

  “No, I shouldn’t think you would, sir.”

  “No doubt you, Mr. Satterwhite, with your aspirations, find such actions inexplicable.” Porter extended the bait.

  Simion declined it: “Perhaps Topher Holloway would be able to explicate them for you. Or somebody else of the hooligan persuasion. Topher isn’t the only one at this college.”

  Porter leaned his cheek into his hand and surveyed them both. “No, apparently he is not. Where were you on the night of May ninth, Mr. Satterwhite?”

  “The ninth? Was that Tuesday?” Simion asked, with the best feigned uncertainty he could produce. “Ah…I was in my room in Durfee. I was studying for my exam in graphical statics.”

  “And you, Mr. Carpallon?”

  “Tuesday? Simion and I were together. I was memorizing the libretto of Lohengrin in German. I grew up knowing it in French.”

  Both of these statements, in the narrowest sense, were true; that was what they’d been doing up until the time of the rag. Rather prominently and noticeably doing—with the curtains open and all the lights blazing.

  “Very good, Mr. Carpallon. Please wait in the parlor now. Close the door behind you.”

  “Even if you don’t know anything about what we have been discussing,” said Porter, “I’d imagine that you know something about this.” He withdrew one of the postcards from the desk drawer where he’d sequestered them under lock and key since they came to his hand, and laid the card upon the table.

  “Would you care to comment on this?”

  Simion forced his voice up his throat. “That,” he managed to say, “is The God in Flight.”

  “I don’t know how to talk myself out of a mess like this,” he was thinking helplessly, as the interrogation wore on. The skin between his shoulder blades was cold and hot with nervous sweat; he wished he could take his coat off. He wished Andy were still here. He almost wished he hadn’t ragged Peter.

  “Dr. Porter, I know that someone who’s never sculpted or been involved with an artist might not understand this at first, but sculpting is work…and a very businesslike proceeding. It’s true that I posed for this, without my clothes, but a model is, well, a model. A body of the right shape and size. A tool. There’s nothing frivolous or lubricious about it. I simply sat at the kitchen table doing my homework, wearing my bathrobe, and when he wanted me to, I took it off and posed for him. He already has me in the house to write letters, why should he go out of his way to pay another boy to pose? Also, it might be hard to find one with the right looks and an understanding of the nature of the work.”

  “And did he do the same work in his bathrobe and take it off?”

  “No.” Which was perfectly true. Dori had pretty much finished the figure of himself before proceeding to Simion’s. “Actually,” Simion added, “it might please you to know that the inspiration for this piece was a photograph. Taken of us in all our clothes when we were playing on the beach one day.”

  “Well, why didn’t he make a statue of you in all your clothes?”

  “It’s supposed to be like a classical statue, and Greeks in a classical statue wouldn’t have been playing on the beach in clothes.”

  “So you, a clergyman’s son, took off yours as a matter of course so that your employer could make an imitation of a classical statue, and this minute you’re in effect standing up in your bare skin on exhibit in England?”

  “In the premier museum in London. The Albion’s thought to be even finer than the National Gallery. Sir John Ruskin wrote and said that he loved the piece. Ruskin is a very famous critic.”

  “I know who Ruskin is.”

  “Of course, sir.”

  “I am not happy with you at all,” said Porter. “When you arrived here, I thought we had the raw material of a gentleman as well as that of a scientist. I thought it meet to treat you with leniency in the aftermath of your illness, also to let you take some of your electives at the Sheff, and I have several times regretted my kindness. You’ve gone out of your way to be vulgar and disruptive, beginning with your decision to throw over the religion of your childhood—”

  “We have religious freedom in this country.”

  “I seem to recall discussing the Constitution with you before; I see no need to discuss it again at present time. As I was saying, you advertised your decision to become a heathen, you started running with Carpallon and his bad set, you linger round the racing stables as if contemplating a career as a groom. You air your inflammatory views at every opportunity. You’ve maintained this disturbing friendship with Professor Klionarios, and you cap all that with this statue. It is your constitutional right to do all these things, but not necessarily at Yale. This artistic statue could create a scandal of nightmarish proportions right in itself, and this affair of 3 Cents, et cetera—well, suffice it to say that if I find that you and Carpallon have manhandled Peter Geoffrey on little or no provocation, or indeed on any provocation, you’ll be free to exercise all your constitutional rights in the world beyond Yale.”

  “But, sir, you’ll be rid of me in June regardless.”

  “I shall be rid of you earlier than that if I see fit,” Porter responded. “Now, a very good morning to you, and close the door as you go out.”

  Simion turned, as if unfrightened, and closed the door. Then, when the full value of this statement had weighed down upon him, he turned back and opened that door again. “You wouldn’t do that to me. I’ve paid for my degree! I’ve bled for it!”

  “I said, close the door,” said Porter. Simion kept his face stiff over the panic that was rising in him, the spill of chaos in his head, and headed out. His brain felt as his hand would feel if someone had slammed a door on it.

  With a death-grip on outward calm, Simion waited outside the door of the studio where Dori was proctoring a test for Professor Hangstram until time was called. Then, nerves shattering in a horrid rush of contrition and panic, he wanted to scream at the students to hurry up and turn their stuff in. When finally he was alone with Doriskos, he whispered, “Something horrible’s happened. We have to go someplace safe. I have to tell you about this. Dori, I’ve never been so stupid in my life, or so sorry about anything, and you’re going to be furious with me.”

  “No, I won’t. I just hav
e to drop these things by Sven’s flat, then we’ll go home,” said Doriskos.

  “Not home,” Simion quavered. “Some place where no one’ll interrupt us.”

  Doriskos got the carriage, delivered Sven Hangstram’s exams, and complied. He drove them out to Spee’s Pond, deserted in this busy season on this bright but chilly afternoon.

  “Dear heart, I’ve never had much of a tolerance for suspense, so could you please—”

  “Something frightful just happened…”

  “I heard that part.”

  “Dr. Porter called me in—he’s seriously angry…”

  Doriskos tried to shift him gently back toward the beginning of the story, which Simion in his state found elusive; he began to be scared because of Simion’s panicky irrationality. Even on the point of death, he had not been in such a state of stammering incoherence.

  Finally Simion got the sequence right: Peter’s getting hold of the postcards, and his beastly and wholly successful blackmail; Simion and Andrew’s counter-aggression, which proved insufficiently persuasive; Porter’s knowledge of the affair and disapprobation of the statue; and his final draconian blow. Hearing this, Doriskos turned progressively more sallow, but in no way manifested the hot anger that Simion expected.

  Still, by the time Simion had told all he knew, he was fighting tears, and when Doriskos took him by the shoulders, he did cry, and for a while he couldn’t make himself stop. He was too desperate to worry, even, about being here under the open sky gasping in Dori’s embrace.

  “Do try to stop,” said Dori, finally. “We’ve a great deal to think about here, before we even go to Moses with this.”

  “He’ll yell at us,” gulped Simion. “Aren’t you going to yell at me? Oh, God, I deserve to be hit this time—”