“Just checking to make sure you’re all right.”
It was Campbell. She could see him quite clearly as he approached the bed. He looked even more exquisite and fine-boned in the moonlight. He was wearing only cotton pyjama pants and his naked chest was as tawny, smooth and gleaming as the young satyr’s in di Cosimo’s painting. She felt her nipples harden and she involuntarily shuddered.
“Are you cold?” he asked. “You’re not still upset, are you? I’m sorry if the dope was a bit strong for you. Is that why you left?”
She nodded. As if her gesture implied a far more general consent, he came closer still, and sat on the edge of the futon and cupped her bare shoulder with his hand.
“Pretty lace,” he said and his hand moved to the creamy froth that covered her breasts. So quickly and deftly did he insert his hand inside her slip, she was utterly surprised and somewhat shocked. She took a deep, sharp, very audible breath.
“I can stop if you like,” he said calmly. “Just tell me.” As he spoke, he was already caressing her nipple in a circular motion with his palm. She had not thought it possible, but her nipples got even harder. Like two proud little towers, she thought. Just before he put his lips to her bared breast and began to nibble and gently suck, she had one last purely rational thought — that she was swollen with pride that this exceptionally handsome, graceful, intelligent and cultured young man had come to her bedside, willingly, to seek her out.
None of the erotic literature she had read prepared her for the intensity of the sensation she now experienced as he pulled the slip over her head and began to run his hands over her body, here, there, everywhere, even into hidden places she had imagined no man would want to touch. She was certain that if he stopped doing what he was doing to her, she would die. Then he did stop, but only long enough to stand up and drop his pyjamas.
Agnes was astonished, and a little frightened by the transformation, as he stood briefly in profile beside the bed. It was like looking at a mythical being, born with a magical thrusting horn. She wondered if it would hurt her; if indeed she wanted this to happen at all.
He got on the bed and knelt over her; and began stroking and nuzzling her body in a way that made her utter sharp little ecstatic cries. She tried very hard to keep quiet, thinking of the others in the house, and of the good-hearted Pinto above all, not wanting to disturb him. She was very close to climax when Campbell slid down the bed and pushed his hot tongue between her labia; then he licked her clitoris so cunningly she could no longer hold off the excruciating mounting wave of pleasure. She began contracting wildly on his finger which he had thrust deep inside her. Where did she go then? Out of her body certainly. Out and far above the naked form of Agnes Vane, who was quaking under a surfeit of incomparable sensations.
Was it Campbell’s lovemaking that triggered the vision? Or would she have seen what she did regardless of who brought her to her first engulfing climax? She felt the mist above the lake touch her lips and eyes, and the pale blue dawn light swathed her around. She was a creature compounded of clear light and air. She was close enough to the grey heron to make out the luxurious plumage on his neck. Then the miracle happened and she witnessed the impossible moment when the slain nymph revived and put out her arms to the young satyr who cried out in joy. As the great heron soared aloft, Agnes looked out of its eyes and felt her soul shake.
A kiss in the hollow of her neck brought her back to the Ark, with Campbell Korsakov kneeling over her, grinning.
“That was fun,” he said. “Now grab hold.” And he guided her hand, and showed her how, with a rapid firm pumping motion, she could make him orgasm. His exultant cry when he came sounded uncannily like the satyr’s in her vision when he saw the dead nymph revived. His semen, spurted across her belly and hips, felt warm and silky on her skin. It dried quickly to a crystalline sheen, which in the moonlight resembled a multitude of tiny stars.
“You have a beautiful body. Do you know that, Agnes? Beautiful.” He ran his fingertips lightly over her collarbone. “And you’ve got this kind of powerful quietness about you.” He kissed her lightly on the forehead; then he pulled her against him so that she lay with her head nestled on his shoulder, and her body pressed against his side. She told herself she would never be happier than at this moment. But already, the melancholy was seeping in. She was agonizingly aware that people called this wonderful thing that had just happened to her a “one-off.” It would never happen again because Campbell loved Kit. It had only happened at all because Kit had had to leave to look after the dreadful Horace.
She strove hard to banish these shadowy thoughts. If ever there was a time in her life for drawing all the savour from a moment, it was now. She moved her head a little so that she could drink in the astonishing beauty of his face. She concentrated on the warmth and strength of his body beside her, and let her mind touch in turn each of her new incomparable experiences: all the places he had touched her with his deft fingers; the next-to-unbearable arousal he’d brought her to with his lips and tongue. This flutter of thought raised various shapes in her mind. Now she could remember only a lofty window of ruby and ultramarine stained glass and a vast nest, made of woven rushes and bright fragments of silk, set extremely high in the same tree where earlier that evening she had glimpsed the figure of Piero di Cosimo. When the tree’s branches swayed in the wind, so too did the nest. Yet she knew it was solid and secure, its structure sustained by Campbell’s unconscious breath mingled with hers.
When she woke several hours later, he had gone. The sheet on his side of the bed was pulled taut. It looked as if he had even smoothed out the hollow in his pillow. She stretched out all ten fingers to feel on her belly the fine spangled remnants of his climax. Yes, it had really happened.
The chorus of early morning songbirds had already begun. She decided to leave once the light was fully up. An hour later, she let herself quietly out of the Ark’s front door, relieved that everyone else in the house was still asleep. She walked down the street with a brisk, light step, but carefully, as if she carried some fragile treasure.
From his upper window Pinto watched her go, the tears streaming down his face. He had often had cause to wrestle with, and neutralize, extremely acrimonious feelings toward the blithely oblivious Campbell. Camel had some wonderful qualities: he was a loyal friend and utterly committed to the movement. But he was still a spoiled rich kid, overindulged by his doting mother. He took his abundant good looks and charm for granted, and he was an inveterate womanizer. Pinto knew that Camel did not really care about Agnes. All he had wanted was to get laid.
Shortly Pinto would have to begin a gruelling process of mental purification. He could not afford to let this animosity toward Camel fester within him. He recognized this moral undertaking was going to be more difficult than any he had attempted before; even when he’d had to transcend his sick vengeful desire to beat to a pulp the boys who had murdered Mikos.
But now, for the briefest interlude possible, he would allow his feelings free range. He confronted his hatred for Campbell and saw how hard and sharp it was, like a pit inside a luscious fruit. He looked then at his love for Agnes and saw it was a wild bird, trembling inside his chest. He plucked it out of himself, painfully, and sent it flying away after her. Its cry was so plaintive it set his teeth on edge, and he struck at his heart, again and again, with his closed fist.
EIGHT
The Vulcan
“ONE-OFF” WAS A CRUDE PHRASE but it caught her situation with a mocking precision. As Agnes kept reminding herself, what had happened with Campbell was down to pure chance. If Horace hadn’t behaved so badly, Kit would have stayed. Then it would have been Kit in bed with Campbell. Extravagantly beautiful, long-limbed, peerless Kit.
They belonged together. Anyone could see that. Physically at least, Campbell and Kit inhabited another realm of being, and all Agnes could do was gaze at them in covert envy, or better yet, an ever-yielding acceptance. Although she was now more reconciled to the face she s
aw in the mirror, she knew no one would ever think her truly pretty. Despite this, she replayed obsessively the extraordinary moment when Campbell said: “You have a beautiful body.” She got hot every time and the ensuing sexual fantasies sent her reeling off into a humid, voluptuous picture-world dominated by his face and hands and by her body, in that edge-of-madness arousal on tangled sheets beneath the moon.
She would come back to herself with a little groan; look at the page in front of her and realize fifteen and more minutes had passed without her absorbing a word. This faltering attention had fateful implications. Poor grades on essays and exams would lose her her scholarship; and then, quite conceivably, she would lose her reason for living.
She summoned up the vision of the bare-legged figure sitting high in the tree, watching, like a tutelary spirit, over her and Pinto. It did not matter if her glimpse of Piero di Cosimo was a hallucination generated by strong pot. Her recollection of the figure’s calm presence and fluid, all-embracing attentiveness fed her in a way she could not doubt was truth.
It was to Piero she turned for an image to fasten her resolve to keep at a studious discipline. The painting was by no means his best, but its subject was most certainly to the point: a bug-eyed, buck-toothed, cartoon-like horse grinned foolishly and kicked up his legs in a rambunctious pose that showed off his tumescent genitalia. This was Lust, or how Piero chose to depict Lust, in all its willful, wasteful, shameless folly.
He was a purely allegorical horse, just as the figure of Chastity, with her erect bronze wings, small marmoreal breasts, smooth braided hair and cool regard, was a wonderfully imagined symbol of consummate restraint. Chastity’s hips were decently covered by a triangular swathe of crimson drapery. She held the horse by the merest gossamer thread of a rein, looped around his thick, muscular neck. Agnes thought the gossamer was most percipient. Her resolution to keep her thoughts chaste was just that evanescent and easily torn.
She next saw Campbell, accompanied by Kit, at the Wednesday Animal Ethics lecture. She took notes in a desultory fashion, but could not focus properly on what Professor Jonquil was saying. The topic was the altruistic behaviour of the great primates and other mammals, and she ought to have been noting his every word. But her eye kept returning to the backs of the two gleaming heads three rows in front of her: Campbell’s glossy raven hue and Kit’s breathtaking burnished red. That superb colour was just the last straw; as if the gods themselves were so besotted with Kit’s lovely features they could not stop giving and giving.
Agnes’s envy coiled as she saw Campbell’s fingers twine through the rippling red-glow mane. Those fingers had stroked her everywhere, even deep inside. Why did she so stupidly want it to happen again, so badly that even her teeth ached with desire? Why was she deluding herself? She knew the possibility of any repeat performance was ludicrous. Why would he choose her with her odd little face?
She was being ridiculous. Like Piero’s buck-toothed, grinning horse, his head empty of everything but carnal craving. What she was feeling was primitive and raw, and she must at all costs get it under control. She was beginning to understand the extreme iconography of eremites flagellating themselves in their desert hovels; even if the rein to subdue the lust was gossamer-thin, it was nevertheless a rein. She would hold firm. She would not be a naked body on a bed, legs splayed, tongue lolling from her mouth, as she begged for pleasure. This scenario was degrading and would be the ruin of her intellect, one of the few real assets she had.
She uncrossed her legs, sat erect, imagining the towering wings of Chastity at her back. She then refocused on Fergus Jonquil who was enthusiastically miming the death throes of an elephant matriarch who has sacrificed herself to roving hunters for the sake of the herd. He moved speedily to her burial, waving an invisible trunk, lifting one foot and then the other heavily as he mimicked her inconsolable relations in their ritual of grief. How would his performance strike a new student coming into the hall? Possibly as more than a little mad, or flagrantly uninhibited. There was definitely an unsavoury aspect to the professor’s histrionic demonstrations. Was it because he appeared to be enjoying himself a little too much, thus cheapening the very point he was trying to make? Or was that unfair? Perhaps Fergus Jonquil genuinely believed he took on the characters of the animals he imitated. She wondered briefly about the contents of his dreams and had an unwanted vision of him swaying in his lugubrious dance, dressed in the animal’s flayed skin.
This horrific picture jolted her. Where had it come from? Could she be projecting her own prickly angst about Campbell on to the innocent Fergus? The gruesome image of the weaving figure in his bloody elephant’s robe would not let her go and it spawned its own steely thought: that Fergus Jonquil’s claim to understand what animals felt and thought was vain and foolish, and perhaps dangerous, for himself and those he taught. This led her to the young woman who had been injured in the demonstration that ended in Fergus’s dismissal from his previous teaching position. No one at the Ark had said exactly how she was hurt. Had she recovered? Was she sitting somewhere now in a wheelchair, unable to walk or talk? Did Fergus ever think of her? Did he feel in any way responsible? Judging by his antics on the lecture stage, Agnes guessed not.
The air in the hall now seemed tainted. Her head ached. She felt dizzy. She wanted to leave but shrank from the idea of everyone’s eyes fixed on her as she made her awkward way past the students sitting to her right, and then down the stairs and out the heavy door of the lecture hall, with its disruptive clunk and swoosh.
How tense she felt. She clenched and unclenched her fists at her sides. She could not rid herself of the stupid idea some kind of miasma was polluting the room. At last, the lecture was over and she wrote down, with a disproportionate relief, the details of the readings required for the next class. She left quickly so that she would be spared any further witness of Campbell-doting-on-Kit and Kit-doting-on-Campbell. It was only when she was outside, taking in long draughts of tart autumn air, that she realized Pinto had not been at the lecture. She hoped he was not ill. As her mind touched on the idea of him — the gigantic man with the gentle face — she felt a great swell of gratitude. How would she have fared if he had not come after her when she’d left the Ark, distraught and buzzing with paranoia? She might have got horribly lost and ended up in a dangerous part of town, or begun raving in the street.
She recalled how sensitively he had calmed her needling anxiety; how, in his company, the bench facing the river had become a secure anchorage. She had an urge to go there now and see if she could find the tree where she’d had the vision of Piero di Cosimo perching. She was not so foolish as to think she might be granted such an apparition again. What she really wanted was to revisit that state of still clarity Pinto had helped her find. She needed to sort through and settle her thoughts — most particularly, how might she throw off the pathetic craving to be with Campbell again? She must try to exhume, as well, whatever nasty element in her own psyche had cast up the gruesome image of the well-meaning professor cavorting in an elephant’s newly flayed hide.
When she got to the little park that bordered the river, nothing was as she remembered. Night and the moon had made it seem larger, almost vast, and denser somehow. In that recollected scene, the crowns of the trees had looked round and full, although naturally she had not been able to see their burnished colours in the dark. In the last few days, strong winds had stripped the trees almost bare. The leaves, many already crisp and sere, lay heaped about her feet and in crested mounds against the iron legs of the bench. The overwhelming odour of decay stirred in her the old remembered dread of all the autumns of her high-school years. Those first few months back were always the worst. After the blessed respite of the summer, she’d had to relearn how to bear the sadistic onslaught: the crude, thrusting gestures; the wicked caricatures passed furtively beneath desks that showed her naked, with pendulous breasts and coarse hairs sprouting from her chin and buttocks. Freak. Monkey-Girl. She’d had to master again how not to fl
inch, how to keep her face impassive and her posture dignified, no matter how unexpected or vicious the strike.
She shut her eyes against these lacerating memories. She began to wonder if what drew her to Campbell was not so much physical and emotional desire as a childish need for acceptance. Through his touch, she had proof she was not utterly repulsive.
She shook herself; stamped both feet angrily. How she hated her tendency to run to self-pity, and even worse, self-loathing. She was not a freak. She most absolutely was not. But how complex it all was: this turbulent business of desire and love. For, yes, she was sure she did love him, and not just because he was so damned beautiful and looked so like Piero’s grieving satyr. She loved him because he was sensitive and intelligent and because he cared so passionately about the welfare of animals. She loved him because he was organizing the protest at the animal lab and that took courage. She loved him because he had come to her bedside and willingly and generously “made love to her.” She did not know how else to describe what he had done, so lavish and delicate and fluid were his attentions. Like an erotic choreography.
Choreography! This was the first time it had occurred to her that those clever caresses Campbell used were the result of long practice. How naïve she was. All along she has been hugging the delusion that what took place in the tiny moonlit bedroom in the Ark was as brilliantly spontaneous and unrepeatable as a work of art. Deflating as the cold truth was, it had the advantage of clarifying her position and wrenching her focus back to her work. To be a scholar delving into wonders must remain her prime passion.
It was Saturday morning. Agnes sat at her desk, head lowered over the same page of Burckhardt on which she had been focused for the past hour. Her essay on the character of the Renaissance ruler, what Burckhardt termed “a strange mixture of good and evil,” was due Tuesday. As yet, she had achieved nothing but the sketchiest of outlines. She had decided to tackle Sigismundo Malatesta, Lord of Rimini, rather than the more obvious choice of Lorenzo de Medici. According to Burckhardt, Malatesta combined “unscrupulousness, impiety, military skill and high culture.” She could have written pages on Malatesta’s “high culture” as easily as pouring water from a jug. She had seen photographs of the gracefully proportioned temple he had commissioned for his dead lover Ixotta, with its carvings of elegant goddesses, dolphins and elephants on its pediments and columns. It was an exquisite construction verging on the ethereal.
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