"OK, here we go," Elliott said. He unzipped Quinn's jacket slightly and brought up the hood, smiling. "Now just look at me. That's right. Let me do all the work."
His was a compassionate eye, a soothing voice, a gentle presence. Greatness needn't announce itself, Quinn thought. It only had to be. Plus, Elliott made him feel like a collaborator in the process—ensuring he was comfortable, telling jokes, asking him for his ideas. And, shyly at first but then more confidently, Quinn offered them.
The studio—with windows along the top that let in the light while keeping out prying eyes—had been divided into various environments.
"Wow, would you look at this," Quinn said, entering a space that was a tropical set with rocks, plants and a waterfall. For a moment, he was back in Indonesia and then back in the black water. We die with the dying… Don't think, Quinnie, he told himself, just give yourself over to the experience.
Elliott didn't tell him what to do here. He just let him explore the rocks in nothing but ripped jeans that exposed a tuft of man-fur. Quinn stretched out on the rocks—on all fours at first, then on his back—or clung to them under the waterfall as he turned to look at the camera, damp tendrils caressing his powerful neck.
"Yes, you see, you've got it," Elliott said. "You're a natural."
Quinn climbed some of the rocks and rested his cheek against the stone wall. He ran his fingers through his hair, arching his back, his tawny chest muscles melding with the stones. He could feel the syncopated beat of his heart. What was he really doing here? Playing to an audience of one that wasn't Elliott but, he hoped, the one he loved and who loved him.
In a pale green room with a huge white bed and soft lighting, he tented his face with one arm and stretched out, a rumpled sheet covering his sex but otherwise leaving his body bare. It was a languid Venus pose, one that had belonged to women throughout art history save for that period in the early-nineteenth century when it was co-opted by Endymion, Cephalus, Rinaldo, and other fortunate—or, depending on your viewpoint, unfortunate—young men who found themselves captives of a witch or a goddess.
"I want you to think of, well, nothing," Elliott said, "absolutely nothing. Can you do that?"
How could he do that? Even thinking of not thinking was a thought. But Quinn tried to still his mind as he did sometimes in the meditative part of yoga—"tried" being the operative word. If he were thinking right now, he said to himself slyly, he would think that the camera lens was the moon to his Endymion, making love to him as he lay there. He was completely vulnerable, he thought, except that he was conscious, not oblivious like Endymion and nude not naked, the nudity being a kind of armor, a kind of performance. He was acting nude, acting vulnerable and unconscious of the camera's admiration and love's moony embrace.
The last room was black and blue, tough and tender with raunchy rock playing and dragon projections in the background. Quinn sported a robe in the Temps colors. "OK, let's just do this," he said, opening it with one sweep and dropping it on a black leather couch.
"Oh, my God," Christian said.
"Christian, are you going to be professional about this, or am I going to have to send you to the time-out corner?" Elliott admonished.
"I'm professional, I'm professional, but oh my God. I feel as if I should get down on my knees and worship, or maybe something else."
Quinn had to laugh. It was just a cock. No big deal. Well, actually it was a pretty big deal but no big deal, if you knew what he meant. And, anyway, he wouldn't be sharing it with the world, just a certain someone and him alone from hereon in.
He lay face down on the couch, the leather against his own hide—skin to skin—sending an erotic charge throughout his body. He could feel the foreskin retracting and his cock swelling, and he arched his back, reveling in the sensation. No one spoke. He stretched out, resting on his forearms, and, turning, peered out of the corners of his eyes, the mossy shadow of his underarm peeking at the camera, too.
Finally, Elliott spoke. "I want you to raise yourself up on your forearms, tilt your head down and look at me. Yes, that's it exactly, like an undulating snake, shedding its skin, being reborn."
When the shoot was over, Quinn, wrapped again in his robe, took Elliott aside. Elliott dismissed the others and led him back to the last set.
"OK, do whatever you want," Elliott said. "I'll follow you."
Quinn lay face down on the couch, eyes closed, stroking himself. He pulled back the foreskin gently—was there any better sensation in all the world than the rubbery, tingling, nervy feel of drawing back the hood with no lubricant, just skin on skin?—then traced the throbbing vein beneath the shaft. His face flushed. It was bad enough that he would be splashed all over the April body issue of New York Rumours—and that Christian was probably tweeting descriptions of his member right now. But if these photos ever got out, well, that would be the end of his career. Maybe that's what he wanted after all.
He turned over at last and arched his back and cock upward, looking directly, boldly at the camera, his face lush with lust, the moans escaping from his body, which jerked involuntarily. It was one thing to pose artfully nude, quite another to perform sex. This was, he almost hated to admit, a tremendous turn-on, and he gave himself over to it as he would his lover, had he been there.
"Yes, beautiful," Elliott said thickly as Quinn's rhythm quickened and he exploded over himself. "You're beautiful. And very brave I think."
He took Quinn's face in his hands and kissed him on the forehead and then on the lips.
"These, I take it, are for a certain someone, yes?"
"Yes," Quinn said, turning over with a smile on his face.
Elliott couldn't resist taking one more close-up of his face.
"I'm going to submit this last shot to Brenna," he said. "It's the cover, I think. The rest of these I'll make into a photo album for you after I take a month's worth of cold showers."
Quinn felt like a spy when they met a week later and Elliott delivered the finished "product."
"You have my word that no one has or will eversee these," Elliott said.
"Not even the famous Christian?" Quinn teased.
"Especially not the famous Christian."
Quinn shrugged. "I trust you, Elliott. And I tell you what? I’ll keep these images safe with the understanding that twenty-five years after your death and mine, they can be exhibited."
"You sure?"
"Hey, we'll both be dead. Who will care then, right?"
But Quinn did care very much when he shyly presented the leather-bound navy photo album—wrapped in a bright lime grosgrain ribbon—to Tam.
"Oh, you devil," Tam said. "I'm going to have to drink this in later and often."
He in turn presented Quinn with an envelope. "I have a surprise, too. Mine isn't as sexy—nothing could be—but I think it might also have a certain shock value."
Quinn opened the envelope to find two sets of first-class tickets with a complex itinerary that ended in two words—Jakarta and Bali.
Tam watched as Quinn fingered the tickets silently.
"It's time," Tam said, "for you to go home."
PART IV
Twenty-seven
Quinn and Tam boarded an Eagles Airlines Boeing 777 for Tokyo at Newark Liberty International Airport on a rainy and windswept April day. Quinn didn't know what they were doing—or, more specifically, what he was doing. He hadn't been on an international flight since the one carrying him and 261 passengers—including the late, loved, deeply lamented Aunt Lena—went down in the North Pacific when he was twelve. The way he got through the many domestic flights he and the Temps took was to remind himself that at least they wouldn't be flying over any oceans. Still, when he was invited to the Pro Bowl in Honolulu his rookie year, he had a hard time convincing himself that, technically at least, New York to Honolulu was a domestic flight. He was glad that the Super Bowl broadcasting gig, to which he had already committed himself, preempted his participation.
Now he was staring at
a screen that said, "New York to Tokyo—6,573 miles, 14 hours." He would be crossing the international dateline where it was already tomorrow. Already tomorrow, he thought, except that he was really flying back into yesterday.
Tam had bonded with the flight attendants in first class, who had recognized them—as had many they came into eye contact with—but were playing it cool. His people had put out a carefully worded press release explaining that as Quinn had been such a big supporter of his golf tournament, Tam was returning the favor by going on a "fact-finding" mission with him to Indonesia to see how the orphanage was progressing. "Fact-finding": Wasn't that what Congress called all those golf junkets to Puerto Rico? Quinn wondered whom they were kidding. But Tam was "F***ing Tam Tarquin," and if he said he was going on a fact-finding mission, then damn, he was going on a fact-finding mission. And if he, oops, let slip that it was just his luck that his sister Bev was smitten with his Super Bowl rival, well, who was anyone to question him?
Just what kind of game Tam was playing was anybody's guess, Quinn thought. All he knew for sure was that it was a dangerous one and that Tam was much better at it than he, whose mind was still back in New York, where reaction to his most recent photo shoot was crashing on the Jersey shore.
"These soft-porn photos—along with his post-Super Bowl press conference 'performance'—call into question what kind of team leader we have, what kind of mind he has," an indignant Smalley told The Wreck, INN and just about anyone who would listen to him. "And you have to think that his questionable judgment—his very stability—will be on the agenda come contract time."
Quinn wondered why someone like Vienne could get canned for adultery yet a bigoted sadist like Smalley held on to his job---probably because Smalley's transgressions, for the most part hidden from the press, were against his troops not his bosses.
Fortunately for Quinn, those bosses—Jimmy Jones Jefferson and Jeff Sylvan—couldn't have cared less about his provocative New York Rumours photo shoot. What they cared about was winning and anything else that put fannies in the seats. The Rumours issue was a hit. Brenna was a hit. And Quinn was a hit with everyone except the old school segment of the male population that doubted his manliness in offering himself as a sex object—which they viewed as a feminine occupation. What if they knew about the other photos, which Tam had hidden in plain sight on one of Quinn's bookshelves?
Quinn broke out into a cold sweat considering them now. What had he been thinking? Oh, that's right: He hadn't been thinking, for had he been, he would never have instigated the mother of all selfies. Fat good it did, too, because for all Tam's quiet licking of his lips as he incessantly perused them—often alone in the bathroom—he still hadn't touched him sexually. And yet he acted like a husband for all intents and purposes.
"You should try to eat something, my love," he whispered when the elaborately prepared Chilean sea bass arrived.
Quinn shook his head and pulled the airline blanket up near his face. He was living on Coca-Cola, crackers, vanilla ice cream and Dramamine until—twenty-two hours later, God willing—they landed in Jakarta. He marveled at how Tam could eat everything first class had to offer and delight in all the freebies. "Mom and the girls will get a kick out of these makeup samples," he said, looking at all the little bottles in the ultra-suede pouches. To Tam, it was all a lark. Quinn wished he could be as easygoing.
Or as beautiful as Tam was when he slept, his head like a sculpted marble bust, the sandy curls winding about an oval face that framed long lashes sheltering eyes the color of the sea, perfectly arched brows, a straight nose and a bow-shaped mouth. Quinn longed to kiss that mouth as Tam's sleeping form unconsciously—or maybe not so unconsciously—nestled near him. But they might as well have been the distance of the dark ocean they were crossing.
While Tam slept, Quinn read Travels With Epicurus; watched game film on his tablet until he was bleary-eyed; listened to the airline's classical and rock playlist—twice; saw a twelve-part BBC documentary on The Bible; walked the length of the plane—three times, pausing to greet well-wishers or sign autographs; freshened up; did his stretches and calisthenics; caught up on his emails; paid some bills; wrote in his journal; and, when all else failed, charted the plane's arc across the Pacific on the screen in front of him. The tiny plane sat on the top of the screen like a logo on letterhead stationery, hovering for what seemed an eternity off the Bering Strait between North America and Asia. Honestly, it was like watching paint dry, Quinn thought, or grass grow—or anyone play golf.
At one point, he forced himself to peek out the window at clouds over Alaska that looked like glaciers. Inside, the plane registered the outside temperature—minus 55 degrees. They were cruising at an altitude of some 35,000 feet in a glamorous sardine can, outside which they couldn't survive. How had he ever let Tam talk him into this?
"You should try to rest," a steward offered, as much for his own sake, Quinn thought, as for his.
"Is your friend all right?" he thought he heard another flight attendant say to Tam as sleep fought to claim him.
"Oh, yeah, he's just a nervous flyer," Tam said.
What was left unsaid was what the flight attendant might've known and Tam surely did: Quinn's fears were not irrational, particularly to those in the press who liked to psychoanalyze their subjects under the guise of faux sympathy. He had been Icarus, the boy who fell out of the sky. It was a tempting narrative that played out before, during, and after Super Bowl Week. Not only was he interviewed about it then but also on every significant anniversary of the event and every time a plane crashed, as if having been a victim made him an expert.
One thing he was an expert on was his own experience. Few had survived the crash, particularly as time went on, and each person's perspective was unique, though his was limited initially by Aunt Josie's insistence that he be kept from the details he himself did not remember.
"What you need to do is think of our dear, departed Lena as she was, not as she is in that watery metal grave," Aunt Josie told him, "and to live your life as she would've conducted hers."
"Yes'm," Quinn still found himself saying in his daily phone chats with her.
He had prepared her, along with Aunt Sarah, Uncle Artur and Patience, for his nude pictorial in the April issue of New York Rumours and was surprised by her equanimity.
"Well, as long as it's artistic," she said. "We wouldn't turn our noses up at a Michelangelo, now would we, Quinnie Day?"
But would we turn our noses up at our gay fiancé? That was the real question, Quinn thought.
All Aunt Sarah cared about was the laundry list of products she wanted from the Far East. Brenna, too, had an agenda:
"I want a field report from you on the orphanage for the July issue," she said. "And a gamelan, to be paid for by me right down to the last cent of postage and I won't take 'no' for an answer."
"Gee, what should we send Mal?" Tam asked maliciously over noodles at a Tokyo International Airport bar during their brief stopover. "How about a big stuffed Hello Kitty?"
Mal, Quinn thought miserably. Tam had to bring him up. Mal was still trying to fly under the radar outside the eye of Hurricane Vienne. Quinn could not take Tam or Brenna's pleasure in the affair's scandalous aftermath. What about Tiffany, their son, the Quakers, and their fans? Private acts, public consequences.
He would have to come to grips with Mal sooner or later, as well as the Temps and Sydney and Chandler, whom Tam had taken to texting.
"I heard from Syd. She'll be meeting us in Jakarta with Sumarti," Tam said, as if he and El Syd were old friends. It half-annoyed Quinn that his mother and Tam were already texting buddies.
"Well, I can't rely on you, can I?" Tam said as they went through yet another security screening as they boarded yet another Eagles Airlines flight, this one bound for Singapore (3,301 miles, six hours).
No, he could not, Quinn thought as they settled into another first-class cabin and adjusted their watches yet again. Quinn's entire correspondence with his moth
er had consisted of a text reading, "Arriving in Jakarta Holy Week. Staying at the Shang. Looking forward to seeing you and Chan before we head to the orphanage and then push off for a brief holiday in Bali."
Tam, on the other hand, had connected with her email, Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and LinkedIn accounts in what Quinn thought was a misguided attempt to ingratiate himself with a woman who would find fault with God. Still, Tam persevered in a relationship that he already thought of as son- and mother-in-law.
"Such a sweet text from Syd," Tam said, smiling as he settled into his seat for the flight to Singapore. "She says she won't hear of us staying at the Shang, though she and Chan will be taking us there for Easter Sunday brunch. Instead, we'll be staying with them at their place. Gee, I can't wait to see the house you grew up in."
And I can't wait for you to get a full picture of that scene, Quinn thought. He wondered if Syd and Chan would be so accommodating if they knew the real nature of his relationship with "Mr. America," as Sportin' Life's Ken Ransom had described Tam in a recent "kiss-ass profile"—Tam's words.
"Syd says there's going to be a party in our honor. Wow, we really rate," Tam added, turning to Quinn with a smile before drifting off—again.
No, you do, Quinn thought, drawing a blanket up—again. But no matter how many blankets he drew up to his chin, he remained vigilantly awake.
"This is your captain speaking," he heard over the public address system.
Oh, captain, my captain, Quinn thought—one with Walt Whitman—as he looked around at Tam and the other slackers snoring, tongues lolling. I await your instructions, Quinn added mentally.
"The South Pacific is notoriously turbulent so I'm going to keep the seat belt sign on for just a bit longer."
I've never taken mine off, Quinn told him silently.
The Penalty for Holding Page 19