—Dark background’s going too, Hugo mused. It wants to be white.
Mariana, her breasts loose under a rich blue pullover, was zipping herself into snug coral shorts when big Tom, tossing his floppy hair out of his eyes, shifted from foot to foot. He crossed his hands on his behind, nudging a lampshade with his elbow. He then cupped them over his crotch, seeing instantly that, expand or contract, he was equally awkward. He tried sliding his fingers into his pockets, hitting the lampshade again, and settled for knuckling his nose and scratching a convenient itch on his thigh. Shown the painting, he stared at it.
—That, Hugo said, was the dopey kid who was a day student, the one who floated around on lysergic acid and managed the ultimate trendy distance by killing himself with an overdose of God knows what. I tried getting his head out of his ass. I failed.
—No, Mariana said. He failed you.
—Anyway, Hugo said, I’m going to repaint.
—Tom hates coffee, Mariana said brightly. Every time he’s been here, he has suffered and squirmed. Beer, milk, fizz water, which?
—Beer, Tom said, his voice rasping at his audacity.
—Head turned slightly, Hugo said, so that you’re looking at me out of the side of your eyes. Right elbow on the chair arm. Everything else the same, except that your body is much harder and better muscled than the Rider’s. I have all sorts of changes to make. Take off your pants.
This sloshed Tom’s beer.
—Leave your briefs on. They’re nicely stinted and stressed.
The balloon, Hugo could see through the skylight, was just outside. He had learned on a walk with Mariana that she could not see Buckeye, Quark, and Tumble. They had come and stood gravely interested while they sat under the oak, Mariana’s head in Hugo’s lap.
—Burnt sienna, Hugo said, raw sienna, titanium white.
Franklin made a great show of finding the tubes and laying them on the little table that served as a palette.
Buckeye was on the skylight, peering in. Short khaki pants, gray white and ochre striped soccer jersey, and not till he came into the room, in less time than an eyeblink, could you see his dinky blue cap.
—Calabash! he said to Hugo, straked gourd pumpkin vine!
—If I had some paper and pencil and an envelope and a stamp, Franklin said, I could write Augustus a letter.
—And, Mariana said, if you could spell and write so that anybody but God could read it.
—Put in your letter, Hugo said, that while we visited I saw what I needed to see. Say that the casting out of demons is the hub on which everything else turns. He’ll know what I mean. The self is the demon. Demon out, daimon in.
—O wow! Franklin said. Start spelling.
Hugo painted. Tom, with only his good nature to get him through this ordeal, took courage from the fact that it was his good looks that got him into this, and thought of seducing Franklin without breaking Lemuel’s heart, share him perhaps, and Mariana, and even Hugo, and the green-eyed sailor with silver eyelashes at the recruiting station, the one with the sleepy friendly smile and crammed trews.
Mariana spelled, Franklin wrote and erased and wrote again. Hugo painted.
Tumble was at the skylight, Quark looking over his shoulder.
—Why do you keep looking up? Mariana asked idly.
—The light, Hugo said. It’s what I paint by.
Buckeye was inspecting Tom, closely, with doggish curiosity. His eyes met Hugo’s. Under all’s a fire so fine it is and isn’t in and out of time, a pulse of is, a pulse of isn’t.
—But, Buckeye mouthed inaudibly, with a shrug of his boney shoulders and a crinkle of dimples in his smile, that isn’t worth knowing, is it? Over all’s the nothing that’s something because of the curving tides of the is and the isn’t. No matter that, either.
He stood behind Tom and put his arms around his neck and rested his chin in Tom’s hair.
Quark read Franklin’s letter. Tumble sniffed Mariana.
—What matters, Buckeye said, is that there are so many who don’t know their right hand from their left.
THE BICYCLE RIDER
I
They could see through the grime of the barnloft windows, Anders and Kim, how far the field of sunflowers they’d walked across stretched down to where the sawgrass begins back of the beach, sunflowers higher than their heads, bitter green and dusty to smell. They could see yellow finches working the panniers, butterflies dipping and fluttering, the glitter and lilac blue of the sea where they’d been horsing around on the sand. They’d filed along the narrow path like Mohawks, Kim brown lean and naked except for the skimpy neat pouch, cinched by string around his hips and down the cleft of his butt, in which his sprouting peter and spongy scrotum made a snippy jut, Anders behind him, a head taller and with a livider tan, his bathing slip a pellucid Danish blue. Jellyfish bit me once, Kim said, his hair like maize silk flopping in a spin as he smiled over his shoulder, and did it ever sting but I didn’t cry, brave me, and once I cut my toe on a shell, and got sunburned once real pitiful. Glowed in the dark. They were pals in a Greek goatherd-and-shepherd poem, idyllisk. Boldly sneaky, Anders, but with Kim you didn’t sneak very far. His blue eyes saw all.
2
Macadam road through pines, early morning, a red fox slinking through grass bent with dew, rabbit into bramble. Happiness is a sensual totality of being, Hugo Tvemunding, assistant classics master at NFS Grundtvig, wrote in his journal after his run. Le bonheur was the better word. Lyksalighed had northern sharpnesses of light and dark. Luck has nothing to do with happiness, which comes from rhythms, order, clarity. A card from Papa in the mail, and Der Eisbrecher. Greek torso, Apollo, third century. I do hope, dear Hugo, that you’re getting this hurt of the unfortunate young man you call the Bicycle Rider behind you. Hurts that cry out to Heaven do not go unheard. The hollyhocks are more beautiful than ever. Come see them, why don’t you?
3
Pastor Tvemunding, who was reading H.G. Wells’s The Passionate Friends in his garden time about with a detective Penguin by Michael Gilbert, after leafing through the Church Times, said to his cat Bobine Pellicule, Well, old girl, the letter from Hugo (yes, he’s coming to scritch you under the chin) with its question about an aorist in the gospel of Markus made you yawn, though you found the bit about latching onto a young lady of great interest, jo? We remember others, do we not? Do we not, indeed.
4
I didn’t think, Kim said, you’d even notice that I exist, much less make friends. The barn had a grand smell of oats cows chickenfeed old wood and time. They could hear only their steps up the steep ladder to the loft, the nattering of finches in the sunflowers, the white noise of wind and sea. Chinks of blue, Kim’s eyes, after he’d said that the yellow light paced along the smooth wide floor in rectangles was beautiful and that the silence was sweet and the barn snug and private. O jo! Anders said, cozy secret bright, stepping from window to window. Our place, all our own. Kim turned on a heel, stomped, and took off his cache-sexe, hanging it around his neck. His penis cantered out over a round and compact scrotum, its longish foreskin pursed at the tip. He scrunched his eyes, feeling naughty and in love. Anders, mouth dry, swallowing hard, shoved down his bathing slip, snapped it inside out, and hung it on a peg. Earlybird sharp, eyes rounding, Kim whistled to admire Ander’s lifting penis nudging its glans free. Ih du store! Skin yours back, Anders said. It’s a thumper for twelve. You think? Kim asked.
5
This golden flower of Peru, or sunflower, being of many sorts, both higher and lower, with one stalk, without branches, or with many branches, with a black or with a white seed, yet not differing in form of flowers or leaves one from another, but in size only, rises up at the first like a pompion with two leaves, and after two, or four, more leaves are come forth, it rises up into a tall stalk, bearing leaves at several distances on all sides, one above another to the very top, being sometimes seven, eight, or ten foot high with leaves which standing out from the stalk are very large, broad bel
ow and pointed at the end, round hard rough, of a sad green, and bending downwards: at the top of the stalk stands one great large and broad flower bowing down its head to the sun, and breaking forth from a great head made of scaly green leaves like a great single marigold having a border of many long yellow leaves, set about a great round yellow thrum in the middle, which are very like short heads of flowers, under every one of which is a seed larger than any seed of the thistles, yet somewhat like, and lesser and rounder than any gourd seed, set in so close and curious a manner that when the seed is taken out, the head with its hollow cells seems very like a honeycomb.
6
Rutger, he said, and Rutger he was. Anders invented for his bunched brown curls an adoring mommy, pederast of a barber, and Narcissus complex. We’re stuck with each other, Johannes Calvin having laid it on us in his pep talk that getting along with your roommate is character itself. You don’t look pukey. Rutger here, and you’re? Anders. He wore American jeans, perfect fit, an English plaid cotton shirt, rotten sneakers, germless white wool socks, a French undershirt with skinny straps, and a smidgin of briefs, Horn style micro, with the little triple-flame trademark on the left below the spandex waistband. Out of these he flopped an outsized dick. Lucky you, said Anders. It serves, said Rutger, and stays in tone by coming without let or cease, spurt spout splat. Scrounging in a canvas bag of silver scissors, combs, shampoo, nail clippers, dental floss, toothbrush, orange sticks, he located a green tube of Panalog from which he squeezed gunk that he smeared on his glans. Vaginitis, he explained. From his girl Meg, the second time the sweet slut had given it to him. You’ve never caught it? An infection that itches like fire and parches the foreskin. He was going to get laid around four, and give it back to Meg, and she back to him. Crazy.
7
Nu vel, Anders said, we’d got into our sammenslynget when, with sandpipers nittering and pecking and the edge of the sea was sliding the plies of its border back and forth, and that’s all the universe was doing in our part of it, except that the sky was being bright summer blue over our heads, and I sweetened my gaze at you and wriggled my toes, you said, you little rascal, Keep looking at me like that and my peter will stand bolt upright and whimper, and I kept looking at you like that, and here’s your peter, herre Jemini! rose-petal pink, standing bolt upright. So why are you blushing? Robin-eggs in gelatin, Kim’s balls to Ander’s feel. For answer Kim curled his fingers around Ander’s rigid haft, squeezing gently, tentatively. It’s beautiful, he said. So’s yours, Anders said. Do you come yet? I think so, Kim said. I’m not nearly as brave as I want you to think I am. Why do you like me? Because, Anders said, there’s a poem by Rimbaud that begins Aussitôt que l’idée du Déluge se fut rassise, un lièvre s’arrêta dans les sainfoins et les clochettes mouvantes, et dit sa prière a l’arc-en-ciel à travers la toile de l’araignée. And the dove came back with an olive branch in its foot.
8
Here, said Mariana, I’ve brought you a rose. And I’ve brought you a weed, Franklin said. Thought it was a flower, but Sissy says it’s a weed. Girls are like that, Hugo said, hard to please and never satisfied. Hejsa! I’ll put them together in the one vase here, to show that I like them both.
9
Franklin standing under Hugo’s metre-square photograph of Emile-Antoine Bourdelle’s Héraklès archer (1910) in a thin silver frame was like all the children in the world in museums, their innocence and alert attention virginal before a Mondriaan, a broken Hera, a case of paleolithic axes, a Cubist harmony. A convincing Greek, Hugo said, the cunning of Odysseus, or of a mountain lion, in that muzzle. I think he looks like a possum, Franklin said. What’s he shooting? Monsters, said Hugo. All terrible things.
10
A glass jar of acorns. A nautilus shell. Shale slab with a fossil gingko leaf. A Greek coin from Metaponton in Sicily. A snail shell. Greek text of Marcus, dictionary, coffee cup, running shorts drying on a hanger hooked to the skylight latch. Boy Scout Handbook, with markers. Mariana, said Franklin, says she likes this place better than any she’s ever been in, and I do too. Sure glad we met you on the beach.
11
The greatest of these beautiful thistles has at the first many large and long leaves lying on the ground, very much cut in and divided in many places, even to the middle rib, set with small sharp (but not very strong) thorns or prickles at every corner of the edges, green on the upper side, and whitish underneath: from the middle of these leaves rises up a round stiff stalk, three foot and a half high, set without order with suchlike leaves, bearing at the top of every branch a round hard great head consisting of a number of sharp bearded husks, compact or set close together, of a bluish green color, out of every one of which husks start small whitish blue flowers, with white threads in the middle of them, and rising above them, so that the heads when they are in full flower make a fine show, much delighting those who look at them: after the flowers are past, a seed grows in every one, or the most part of the bearded husks, which still hold their roundness until, being ripe, it opens of itself, and the husks easily fall away one from another, having in them a long white kernel: the root is great and long, blackish on the outside, and dies every year after it has borne seed.
12
Kim, home, strayed into his father’s study. Before Henricus Hondio’s Nova Totius Terrarum Orbis Geographics ac Hydrographica Tabula, he smiled at the lion and ox reclined by a pumpkin in the border. Gerardus Mercator Flander. Grapes peaches cucumbers. Like Papa to have so narrow neat and black a frame. Then he stared at the engraving of Holberg to the left of the map and reset the nudge of his penis in his pants. The view through the French windows was a Bonnard. He read all the dull mail on the desk while fitching his crotch with meditative fingerings. At the harpsichord he played a gavotte by Bach, to keep from thinking of Anders just then. Midnote a repeat he froze, swivelled around, and turned a cartwheel. The view through the French windows was Bonnard because of the greens and mauves, the rusty pink of the brick wall. Anders, talking or strolling, liked to roll the ball of his thumb against his dick through his pants, and laugh like a dog about it, no sound, only a happy look and slitty eyes. Kim slid his pants down and off. Whether anybody was home he didn’t know. His briefs caught on his shoe and had to be hopped free. He yawned grandly, and stretched. He finished the gavotte at the harpsichord, did another cartwheel, and sauntered upstairs, britchesless. On the bed he allowed himself to think about Anders, happily, wondering if he were wicked, silly, or simply lucky.
13
How, Mariana said, did you talk a horse out of it? And with accessories to match. I thought only sailors were so gifted. I haven’t blushed since I was ten, Hugo said. Are you always so uninhibited, and so generous? Born so, Mariana beamed. Judging character at a glance is my best talent. They were sitting on the free beach, friends of half an hour, Mariana combing her black hair dry, keeping a lookout for Franklin in the shallows. He’d picked up spadger friends and they were idiotically scooping water into each other’s faces, squealing, stomping, kicking. Mariana, naked, was on her knees undressing Franklin when Hugo strolled up on the momentum of an impulse he dared not let flag. Hi! he said, Hugo, scoutmaster, schoolteacher, adept at small fry and making friends with beautiful strangers. What do you teach, Mariana asked, weight lifting? She hauled Franklin’s jersey over his head, unpantsed and debriefed him, and combed his hair with her fingers. Little brother Franklin, she said. Our day at the beach. Mariana Landarbejder. Work in a kindergarten, with brats. So I get to sunbathe with one. Maybe he’ll drown. Hi, brat, Hugo said. Isn’t it exciting to have so sweet and good-looking a big sister? Hugo undressed, making a neat stack of his clothes beside Mariana’s. You’re gorgeous, she said as they trotted into the waves. You’re beautiful, he replied. Life can be very simple, Hugo said after their swim. I have a room over the old stables at the school where I teach, wonder fully private, which you’re going to like. And I won’t ever know if I do or not if I don’t come and see, will I?
14
> Papa? Kim in stubby blue pants all but occulted by a jersey with the collar flicked up cockily in back, fists at thighs, head down. Yes, dear Kim? You’re as brown as an Etruscan and as fetching as Ganymede. Who’s that? Charming chap your age in Greek legend filched by Zeus to do God knows what with. Speaking of which, scamp, an hysterical mother, dash it, called to say that you’ve been exciting the school with jabber about sex. Something she said you said about the rights of children to it in great heaps and doses as a revolution against stuffy middleclass oppression. O my yes, and the red flag down the village road followed by troops of naked youngsters. All of this, and more. My ear was ringing, rather, before she finished. All I ask, Kim my boy, is that you take the persuasions and fiercely guarded decencies of others into consideration. Eh, what? Don’t look so damnably glum. I’m only talking reason. And you’re not listening. Papa, Kim said, looking up bravely, I’m in love with my friend Anders. We want to sleep together. We’ve got to. Every night, I mean. In his bed in the dorm, or in my bed. Anders Hammel. He’s fifteen. There are other boys here who love each other. They’re just like anybody else. Anders is not a sissy or anything. Mama won’t even notice.
15
Rhinopithecus, a permanent inhabitant of the cold high forests of Moupin, has a very thick fur, like the Macacus. Aeluropus, the most remarkable mammal discovered by Père David and kin to the singular panda (Aelurus fulgens) of Nepal, is as large as a bear, the body wholly white, with the feet, ears, and tip of the tail black. It inhabits the highest forests, and is therefore a true Palaearctic animal, as most likely is the Aelurus. Nyctereutes, a curious racoon-like dog, ranges from Canton to North China, the Amoor and Japan. Hydropotes and Lophotragus are small hornless deer confined to North China. A few additional forms occur in Japan: Urotrichus, a peculiar mole, which is also found in Northwest America; Enhydra, the sea otter of California; and the dormouse (Myoxus). Pallas’s sandgrouse (Syrrhaptes paradoxus), whose native country seems to be the high plains of Northern Asia, but which often abounds near Pekin, astonished European ornithologists in 1863 by appearing in considerable numbers in Central and Western Europe, in every part of Great Britain, and even in Ireland.
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