The God in Flight

by Laura Argiri

  “Please don’t talk like that.”

  “You’d be justified if you beat me like a carpet now—”

  “It hurts me to hear you talk like that, and I need my composure now. Please!”

  “All right, but I’ve been an idiot, I jumped the gun like some stupid primitive…oh, my degree, my God, my degree, and my chance of getting into the medical school, and my whole life! And he’s mad at you too—he was mad because of the God, and what I did made him madder, and I deserve for you to be mad at me too, and I…I’m sorry.”

  “It seems to me, rather, that you were trying to clean up an ugly mess before I stepped in it, and to take care of me as you usually try to do. Tell me about those pictures you took away with you, are they frightful?”

  Simion gulped and half-laughed. “They’re horrific! And they’re of you, except a few of them are of his poor manservant, and you can see that the manservant isn’t his real interest. He dreams about trussing you up in ropes…he drew that quite a lot…in really painful positions. And about staking you flat to the floor in this entirely exposed fashion. You know what kind of eye he has…a dirty one, but a good one…so he’s got the proportions all right. But someone who really has seen you out of your clothes would know that he never has. He didn’t get your feet right, with the second toe the longest, and he gave you a perfect navel.” Simion hiccupped. “And, listen, Dori, he signed them! We have dirt of an epical quality on him. Even though I’d have to admit to the business with the riding crop before I could drag them out.”

  Doriskos sat silent for a few minutes, one hand in Simion’s hair while Simion shivered against him. “See here,” he finally said, “I can’t lie and say that I think we’re going to extricate ourselves simply and painlessly from this. It isn’t your fault—”

  “Oh, actually it is my fault, Dori, damn all! It’s a hundred and fifty percent and completely my fault! Say it if you want!”

  “…and even if it is, I’m yours and you’re mine and I’m behind you. And I won’t let anyone hurt you.”

  “But you can’t make them refrain from expelling me, if that’s what they want to do.”

  “No, but I won’t let them hurt you,” emphasized Doriskos, who knew that many of Simion’s oldest fears were alive and well along with this new panic about his diploma. “We have to decide our course of action. We’re going to have to decide how and what to tell Moses.”

  Simion raised his head. “You’re different,” he said. Meaning not shattered, and that he was rather amazed at the fact.

  “Yes,” Dori agreed, and helped him up. The truth was that for the past fortnight or so, he’d felt a cold hand on his life, a sense of helpless foreboding like the insidious first finger of a lethal illness. He’d felt curiously unable to be happy, despite all his happy prospects. Now he knew what that was all about.

  Once home, Simion brought out his artistic booty from Peter, and Doriskos examined it. “You know, I have never understood why my proclivities were denoted perversion. When you get down to the physicalities, lovemaking is the same for everyone. It’s a matter of twisting tongues and putting a peg in a hole, and wielding it well enough to give some pleasure—”

  “You don’t even do that,” Simion observed.

  “—or of accepting one and enjoying it. Just a matter of tastes and anatomical resources. A peg is a peg and a hole is a hole. Whereas this, this is perversion. It’s cruelty, it shows a person who inflicts degradation, a person who likes pain. That’s perversion,” mused Dori.

  “We found ladies’ drawers in his room,” smirked Simion, faintly cheered. “They were lavender silk and smelled like they’d been worn. We put them in his mouth.”

  “He probably liked it. Don’t you recall those comments about drinking my bath water and letting me beat him with a riding crop?”

  “He didn’t like it when I did. Of course, I gave him more than an amorous tickle, I smacked him one. Several, in fact.”

  Turning a page: “Christ on the cross! He must have spent every night since he got here on these, while I lay in here trying to sleep! I ought to have had a better lock on my door!”

  And right on this note of hysterical cheer, they heard a smart rap on that door. It was Van Rakle. He stood on the doorstep, his hands folded before him.

  “Dr. Porter requires your presence, Professor Klionarios.”

  “At what time?” asked Dori.

  “He will see you in his office at the earliest possibility. Now, if you will. He is waiting for you even as we speak.”

  “A rather vulgar reliance on the element of surprise,” smarted Simion.

  “Very well,” said Dori. “We’ll get our coats.”

  “Dr. Porter has already spoken with your secretary.”

  “We’ll both come,” Doriskos told him. Van Rakle wanted to drive them, but Dori insisted on taking their carriage. Simion untied Gray and bounded up on the box to drive; they followed Van Rakle and Porter’s landau.

  Back in that hellish antechamber, Simion resumed his place on the sofa; the office door closed behind Doriskos and remained closed. Evening came and night fell while he sat there.

  “…it’s nowhere forbidden to make a statue or to win an international prize for it,” persisted Doriskos with rare obduracy. All three of the postcards lay in the middle of the darkly lacquered table. Porter and a pair of divines from the theology school, Reverends Buckleigh and Calley, had initiated a conversation that had deteriorated on schedule into an interrogation.

  “Still,” said Reverend Buckleigh—an unsightly old party with a permanent sneer on his lip and the longest nose hair Doriskos had ever seen—“one might well question the motivations of a man who makes a statue of himself naked in company with a naked undergraduate.”

  “I got the idea for the statue from a picture of us in all our clothes,” Doriskos said.

  Buckleigh had obviously been waiting for a place to set his blade. “What would you say if I told you that I don’t believe anything so innocuous as that?”

  Porter: “You couldn’t perchance show us this picture? I’ve heard several cogent mentions of this picture.”

  “It’s scarcely fair to ask me to show things as if I were on trial, presenting evidence, but yes, I can show you this picture. I think I’ve got it in my pocket.” He rummaged in his jacket pocket for his wallet, which indeed contained a small print of Helmut’s photo. He laid it down beside the postcards. His and Simion’s decently trousered and shirted images joined their nude ones.

  “And what, may one ask, were you doing? You and young Mr. Satterwhite?”

  “Playing on the beach.”

  “What manner of man plays…in such an undignified fashion…with an undergraduate on a beach?” asked Porter.

  “I was on holiday, a thousand miles away, in Georgia, on a beach that the undergraduate in question owns. I’m not obligated to be dignified that far away from here, surely.”

  “Ah, yes,” said Calley. “The famous legacy that’s enabled little Satterwhite to carry on with such heathen abandon. What brought you to this beach that your young friend owns?”

  “An invitation to his summer house there.”

  With sweet bland interest: “To his summer house?”

  “A marvelous locale for painting,” Doriskos said, just as sweetly.

  “And did you take your clothes off anytime after the time this picture was taken?” asked Rev. Calley.

  “Many times,” said Doriskos. “To take a bath, you know. That picture was taken over a year and a half ago.”

  “You are supercilious, sir.”

  “No, I’m not. I’m just pointing out that I was on my own time, in a very private situation. A friend of ours took this photograph, which inspired me with the idea for my statue. I wanted to make an authentic Hellenistic statue, which meant joyous nakedness. I knew it was possible that my intent might be misunderstood.”

  “How perceptive of you,” said Calley. “One might also ask, however, what kind of man carr
ies a photograph of that kind in his pocket. And what kind of man cares so little about offending his colleagues—”

  “The picture inspired me with the greatest work I think I’ll ever do—why shouldn’t I carry it? Some men carry pictures taken on their wedding day. As for those cards, I do care about whether I offend people. I signed a release for them to be sold in England and on the Continent, but not here. I insisted on every legal protection possible to see that they weren’t sold or distributed in America. If one may ask, how did they in fact arrive here?”

  “Young Mr. Geoffrey says that his mother sent them to him,” said Porter. “Mrs. Geoffrey is touring England. She is interested in art. Young Mr. Geoffrey has brought us a great deal of injurious information concerning you.”

  “Injurious information? And from such an impeccable source. Perhaps I might be able to make a more effective response if you’d share this information with me. It’s hard to counter a lie that one hasn’t yet heard.”

  “Speaking of lies, it appears that you have also been less than truthful about your career at Oxford.”

  “Do tell me about it. I like to keep up with the dreadful lies I tell—and those told about me.”

  Reverend Calley smacked the tabletop before him and spat out, “He sounds exactly like that cheeky boy! That boy’s insolence is beyond all! And so is this man’s.”

  Buckleigh: “It appears that you left Oxford under a cloud.”

  “There was a situation. It wasn’t my fault that it happened. I managed it badly. I’d know how to manage it now,” said Doriskos. “Am I obliged to advertise every honest mistake I’ve ever made? I don’t see anyone else doing so.”

  “You didn’t tell me about it,” said Porter.

  “You didn’t ask me about it,” said Doriskos.

  “Could you at least make some effort at self-exoneration?”

  “I don’t perceive any need for self-exoneration. One of my students made physical advances to me. Very unwelcome advances which I repelled—loudly and undiplomatically, one might say. He and I both ended up leaving the university. If it were to happen now, I’d give him a stiff see-here-young-man lecture and warn him of the dangers of his behavior and see that I never got trapped alone in a room with him again. It was a matter of youth and stupidity on both sides.”

  “It’s not a matter of youth and stupidity now. Or at least not a matter of youth. Not two years after this experience you describe, Simion Satterwhite arrived at Yale. Before the end of his first year, he was living in your house. It is apparent to the stupidest man on earth that your relationship goes beyond that of employer and secretary,” said Porter, moving in for the kill.

  “You…behave…” choked Calley, “exactly like an old roué who’s espoused a delectable girl of thirteen. You treat this boy as if he were your wife, and he acts as if he were. The boy’s comporture and manner are all wrong. And now that young hellion has led a rag on another boy—”

  “In retaliation for a gross insult, not in pure idle aggression,” Doriskos cut in. “And the alleged victim is scarcely a boy of immaculate life.”

  “If I were you, I wouldn’t be making such judgments,” Porter said.

  “I know the boy in question quite well. Why don’t you get to the point?”

  The whole point of interrogations is not getting to the point, suspense being more painful than pain, and two hours of the ominous buzz of a wasp in the eaves worse than a single smack of a whip, which may even anger the victim into ongoing resistance. These three old men were having far too much fun to get to the point. Buckleigh gestured to Porter and whispered into his bristly ear. Porter looked brightly pleased for all his supposed duress.

  “Let us see how well you know young Mr. Satterwhite, Professor Klionarios. Go and get him for us and let us speak to him for minute or two, and wait outside until we send him out to you.”

  k

  “The point, young sir, is that if Professor Klionarios hopes to retain his position, there are conditions which must be met. The initial one is that you must move out of his house and not be seen so much as discussing the weather with him on the grounds of this institution. The second is that you must see that he writes immediately and declines the Canova Prize and ascertains that all publicity is suppressed, and that more photographs of this perverted abortion never reach these shores. Nor may he ever produce another piece subject to similar misinterpretation. Do you agree to these conditions?”

  “Why aren’t you asking him that question?” asked Simion, feeling his face go cold. “That’s a bid to bury half of his lifework alive. As to the rest, I don’t tell him what to do! And what makes you think he wants this job so much as all that?”

  “As you say. He may not want this job, as you so elegantly put it, so much. But I’m sure he doesn’t wish any police involvement with his affairs.”

  “You don’t have any proof of anything. You have a story from Peter Geoffrey. Any drunken gossip from some barfly at the White Wave is worth more. You have three postcards. That’s not proof of anything except that he made a statue and I posed for it, which is a long way from illegal. And why’re you asking me the question you should be asking him?”

  “You’ll answer it, sir, or you’ll contend with the police not tomorrow, but tonight,” Buckleigh persevered, going a dull red like the naked head of a turkey buzzard in his forehead and raddled jowls. Simion had actually startled one at its repast during one of his jaunts on Spruce Knob, and it had glared at him just so, as if imagining that he begrudged it a meal of fermenting woodchuck. He’d retreated posthaste, fearing its filthy talons; now he couldn’t afford summary retreat.

  “If I answer it, you won’t make me, as you so elegantly put it, contend with the police?”

  Buckleigh reached maximum engorgement at that: “How dare you cavil with me, you young bounder, you degenerate little wretch?”

  “Calm, calm, Mr. Buckleigh,” said Dr. Porter. “Yes, Simion, if you give us your answer now—”

  “No,” said Simion. “If I have to answer for him, no, I won’t leave my place in his house, I won’t decline the Canova Prize in his name, I won’t make him suppress his critical notices and the photographs of the piece, and I won’t promise in his name not to make anything similar.”

  “The legal authorities—” began Buckleigh.

  “—wouldn’t be involved, you said, sir, if I answered. I answered. No is just as much an answer as yes,” said Simion.

  Calley looked him over. “Are you sure that jurisprudence isn’t your true vocation of choice? You could set up shop in a handsome leather-lined office and defend poisoners and embezzlers and Irish politicians caught with their thumbs in the pie, and charge handsomely for your services, and buy more stocks. And racehorses. Have you ever considered a career as a lawyer?”

  “Or perhaps I might become a clergyman and collect sordid rumors from lazy degenerates and aspiring blackmailers, and get up my own little Protestant inquisition,” Simion suggested. This well-placed blow was felt as he intended—he saw Porter turn paste-white at his audacity.

  “Take your fast-talking, caviling self out of this room and tell Professor Klionarios to come in here, and wait outside until you’re called. And don’t try to recapitulate this conversation to him.”

  “They want you,” Simion said to Dori. “You’ll have to think on your feet—they’re not playing, they’re going for blood.” Once alone, he slumped onto the divan, feeling with his palm the heat of Doriskos’s body there. His throat was suddenly fever-dry. He sighted a dusty carafe on an end-table, but it was empty—not even an inch of stale water for the captives’ throats.

  “Well?” Porter asked blandly when Doriskos re-entered.

  “What does young Mr. Satterwhite tell you?” Calley amiably asked.

  “He says I’ll have to think on my feet.”

  “Very sharp of him,” said Porter. “No doubt you know all about young Mr. Satterwhite’s desire to attend the Sheffield School of Medicine over the next th
ree years. His ability to do so will depend upon your response.”

  “His grades already entitle him to a place there. It’s nothing to do with me.”

  “Ah, yes, entitlement. He has quite a handsome concept of personal entitlement, that young man. And I see that you have it on his behalf, as well. However, the acceptances have not yet been sent out, and if I am not quite sure that you will have nothing more to do with him nor he with you during his time at the Medical School, he won’t be getting his. I’ll repeat to you the conditions that I quoted to him—he must be out of your house posthaste, and you and he will not so much as speak to one another on the grounds of this institution or in this town over the three years that it will take him to earn his medical diploma. Nor will either of you do anything else anywhere else that will cast opprobrium on this institution. You, for your part, will decline the Canova Prize, have the publicity suppressed at your own expense, and have the goodness not to produce any other representations of naked undergraduates during your time here. If all these conditions are met, he will get his acceptance to the Medical School, however much I might wish that he’d continue his education elsewhere, and you will be safe from legal investigation unless you do something else to warrant it.”

  “I couldn’t presume to speak for him,” said Doriskos, feeling their damnation settle on him like a fine sharp dust. “I must consult with him.”

  “I give no permission—”

  “I’m going to ask him anyway. Excuse me,” said Dori. He stepped out and closed the door.

  In their sweaty lair behind that door, Porter and Buckleigh and Calley heard what was said on the other side of it.

  “You’re asking me? You go in there and tell them Hell no! Why d’you need to ask me anything? Do you think I’d barter your fame and your future for an acceptance to their medical school? They already gave me a chance, and I didn’t! You go in there and tell them to stick their offer in their gummy old ears and shove until it comes out the other side!”