Overthrow

by Caleb Crain

  * * *

  —

  When, in the artificial gloaming of Matthew’s room, an hour or so after midnight, Leif got up from Matthew’s futon, it was the sight of the boy’s pale shoulders, seen from behind as he loped away into the blue darkness, that brought home to Matthew his innocence.

  “Do you have to be up for anything?” Matthew asked, the alarm clock in his hand, when Leif returned.

  * * *

  —

  “Rich people have always been tacky, haven’t they,” Leif said, as he stalked ahead of Matthew into a room of eighteenth-century panels. Women with doll-like faces and all-too-human bodies were sitting in bowers and in swings, accompanied by men with complexions as sugary as theirs.

  Over breakfast, Matthew had taxed himself to come up with a parallel to Leif’s invitation to Occupy: a city sight that Leif ought to have seen but hadn’t. They were as a result visiting a mansion and art collection that had been left to the public by one of the point-oh-one percent a century ago.

  “It’s just ladies and their beaux,” said Matthew. “I don’t think they’re as tacky as a glitter skull.” A human skull sequined with diamonds had recently been auctioned as an artwork for a very high amount.

  “Are they whores?” Leif asked.

  “You know, it’s the French Enlightenment. Everyone looks like a whore, everyone talks like a philosopher.”

  “Can I tweet that?”

  “One night together, and you want to tweet me?”

  “Only the funny parts,” said Leif. He took out of a back pocket a pencil stub and a little red notebook the size and shape of a passport. “Don’t look.”

  “Why not?” Matthew made as if to look anyway. “That’s so cute.”

  Leif turned his back. “It’s private. There are other things in here besides the table talk of Matthew Fisher.”

  “Is it for your poetry?” Matthew asked in a more tactful voice.

  “If a line comes to me.”

  They had had their confessions. Matthew had admitted to graduate school, and Leif, to writing poetry, or, as he preferred to characterize it, “poetry.” He worked in a coffee shop by day to pay his rent, but he had published in a few journals. It was part of Matthew’s snobbishness as a scholar that he didn’t believe real poetry was still being written, but the disbelief wasn’t too serious, and he was willing to suspend it. They were having such a good day. And at least Leif wrote his poetry, which was more than Matthew could say for his scholarship. Today Matthew even felt willing to read the poetry, and he had said so, not too convincingly.

  “This is the room,” Matthew said, as they walked into what had been the millionaire’s parlor.

  Leif followed Matthew’s sight line. “Is this it?” he asked.

  Matthew had told Leif that his favorite painting in the world was in the museum. Faced with Leif’s question, the painting, when Matthew himself looked at it, seemed flat and, if not small, because it wasn’t small, then limited. Contained. Matthew hadn’t seen it in a while. It was just a painting. A saint in a rocky landscape. The rock, which might have been limestone, was green for some reason. Matthew had permitted himself to have a favorite painting because he didn’t know much about art, and he had chosen this one probably because it didn’t have anything to do with what he studied. There were no kings and no parliaments in it. It was early modern, but it was Italian. It looked as if it was set somewhere in Tuscany. There was a rabbit hidden behind the saint, watching—the rabbit was something Matthew could point out, if he had to find something to say—and small plants were painted against the pale jade rock so distinctly that one felt one ought to be able to recognize them and say their names. Matthew didn’t know the names. Nothing in the painting was the sort of thing that he was supposed to know or care about, and he was far enough along in grad school that for him his ignorance made for a feeling of liberty. In liking it he was being a bit of a tourist. And maybe, since he was taking pleasure and perhaps even a kind of pride in his ignorance, a philistine. Was it a good painting as a painting? He didn’t really know.

  He checked on Leif. Leif was still studying the work.

  The saint was alone. Was the solitude what Matthew liked about it? On the saint’s desk, just outside the cave where he slept, there was a book. The Bible, probably. Near it was a skull, the traditional reminder to pay attention. One had the impression that the moment before, the saint had been reading the Bible, in the sunlight. Maybe the implied scene of reading was what Matthew liked.

  “It’s beautiful,” Leif quietly said.

  Matthew knew that he had set himself up for the feeling he now had, but he was surprised by it anyway: a sense, in sharing an image of solitude, of no longer being alone.

  “It’s a green sunlight instead of a green shade,” Leif continued.

  “I think it’s the rocks that are green.”

  “But somehow the light is coming through that laurel.”

  “I didn’t know it was a laurel,” Matthew admitted.

  “Well, he was a poet.”

  “Who was?”

  “Francis. It is Francis, isn’t it?”

  Was the saint looking at the laurel? He seemed actually to be looking through it. The viny branches of the laurel, which held together like a gathered bouquet, were bending down toward the saint, responsive to him as nothing else in the painting was. The saint wasn’t alone, Matthew realized. He was seeing and feeling the sun, the way Matthew had felt it in the park yesterday. Its touch. Every other thing in the painting stood still in its place as if giving testimony of its independent being. Even the skull on the saint’s desk registered a distinct life.

  * * *

  —

  Not knowing exactly what it was was part of the charm. Not knowing what it was, not having to say, not having to justify oneself. To do something that no one had managed to define yet and to do it without permission—to represent the potential for that was what it was for, to a great extent, Matthew saw.

  It lay between them, though, something of an embarrassment. Matthew hung back for a while from asking about it, because he didn’t want to focus Leif’s attention on it any more than necessary. Left untouched, it might fall away like a crush gone stale. Matthew could hope, anyway.

  The trouble was that Matthew found it difficult to keep even his own mind away. There was something noble about exactly its silliness—about exactly the part that Matthew found most embarrassing. Moreover, to show no curiosity at all would have been, in this case, as awkward as the repeated turning away of a compliment, because Leif understood some of his attraction to Matthew in terms of it. Matthew had a share of it, Leif believed, and he kept repeating that he believed in Matthew’s share. Maybe Leif was too young to be able to understand attraction more simply; maybe this belief made it easier for him. It really was how he saw the world, at any rate, and it had the merit, even in Matthew’s eyes, of being distinctively Leif’s own way of seeing it. As such it called out to be answered by Matthew somehow. Met by him.

  If Matthew could see lower motives for their going to bed together, there was no need to be cruel about higher ones, even if they might be imaginary. That much was simple diplomacy. Not that diplomacy was going to be enough.

  Matthew found himself wanting to ask a question about it the afternoon of their third day together. They had put their boxers back on and were sitting up on the opened futon. Leif hadn’t volunteered his own apartment yet; roommates, was his excuse. The bare skin of their backs was clammy against the white paint of Matthew’s wall. They were playing a game where Matthew would pick up with his left hand a hand of Leif’s, drop it into his right, and then pick it up with his left again. It took a few iterations before Leif understood that he should let his hand fall freely. It would have been tactless of Matthew to ask what he most wanted to know, namely, how much Leif himself actually believed. For purposes that even Matt
hew was able to see, Leif didn’t need to believe everything. Instead, Matthew therefore asked when it had started.

  “Didn’t you ever play with a Ouija board when you were a kid?” Leif countered.

  “I didn’t believe it,” Matthew answered.

  “But it said something.”

  “It wouldn’t shut up. My friend was cheating.”

  “What if he wasn’t,” Leif suggested.

  “Then I should look him up right now on Facebook and apologize. It was a big fight, and we stopped speaking. Edward Rocket. I used to make fun of his name. Irvine, California. We were in second grade. It would have been 1987.”

  “I was born that year.”

  “Oh, fuck you,” said Matthew.

  “I was,” Leif insisted. “Were you scared?”

  “Well, dead people.”

  “It wasn’t dead people.”

  “Uh . . .”

  “It was my fetus, trying to reach you. Let me try something. Close your eyes.”

  Matthew closed them. Leif climbed astraddle him.

  “What are you doing?”

  “Keep them shut. Do you feel it?” Leif asked.

  “What are you doing?” Matthew asked again.

  “Do you feel it?” Leif repeated.

  “You’re holding something in front of my forehead.”

  “But how do you know?” Leif asked. “Your eyes are shut.”

  It was as if Matthew were feeling an indentation or a concentration of some kind in the air half an inch in front of his face. “X-rays,” Matthew said.

  “It’s your third eye,” Leif said, mock-significantly, as Matthew opened his two worldly ones again.

  “What are you talking about.”

  “That’s where your third eye is, you know. In the middle of your forehead. That’s the kind of game I played in second grade.”

  Leif stepped off him, knee by knee. Matthew felt that he ought to give Leif a confession in return. He thought of the mistake he sometimes made, at the front door of a building, of saying the greeting that another person was about to say to him. Hello, Matthew. Or Thank you, even when he was the one holding the door. It came, he thought, from a wish to meet the other person halfway that somehow overreached.

  Leif tried another way of explaining himself: “What if the thing you always hear—‘Oh, his wife says she sort of knew, all along’—is true? Of every feeling. Dislike. A crush. Mistrust.”

  Was Leif trying to say something about the two of them? But if he sensed Matthew’s reservations, he must also have sensed Matthew’s reluctance to talk about them.

  “If we never really fool anyone,” Leif said, “why not just say?”

  * * *

  —

  “I have these, by the way?” said Leif, before he left on their fourth morning. “I didn’t have time to wash them.”

  The two of them had had a long weekend, a movable one that hadn’t coincided with any weekend recorded in the calendar, as is possible when a poet-barista gets together with a grad student in his dissertation year, but now they had to return to their separate storylines, at least for a while. Leif had a double shift at the café coming up, and Matthew had reading to do, as a grad student always does.

  Leif was offering up a plastic grocery bag. Inside were a T-shirt, a pair of underwear, and a pair of socks that he had borrowed the morning after he first stayed over.

  “Why thank you,” said Matthew.

  “Is it pervy?”

  “Not on your part.”

  After Leif was gone, when Matthew was unwrapping the clothes to throw them into his hamper, he did wonder and he brought them to his nose. The only perversity was in his thought that if Leif were hit by a car while the two of them were apart there would be no other way to experience his presence one last time. The smell was of cotton that has been against skin. Like bread, but less than that. Like a drawer that one used to keep bread in.

  It occurred to Matthew that in his finicky wish to pin down the right metaphor, he was like a courtly lover refining his sonnet about the sweetness of his lady’s breath.

  Southeast of the park that was near Matthew’s apartment, a broad nineteenth-century avenue ran to the sea, and about a mile down it, there was a campus of the city’s system of colleges. Sometimes Matthew worked in its library when he needed a quiet place away from home and didn’t have the patience for the subway ride to his own university. He put a Samuel Daniel volume, his current notebook, and two pens into his shoulder bag, and he unlocked his bike from the basement.

  The elms and plane trees that raised their branches above the bike path were still losing the last of their leaves. Wind, or at any rate eddies from the cars rushing angrily past on the avenue, kept the cement of the path mostly clear, but leaves were lodged decoratively edgewise in the grass of its margin. Matthew had been hoping that he would be able to think about Leif while he biked—that he would be carried forward in his thoughts about him by the sensations of progress and perspective that came when one was moving quickly and unprotectedly—but the path wasn’t level, and he had to study the seams of its cement panels, which the freezings and thawings of previous years had shoved into each other and out of alignment, plate-tectonically. At the end of each block, too, the path dipped into and out of a crossroad, and he had to keep a lookout for spasms of territoriality and resentment by drivers. He held his thoughts off.

  In the library they came back to him. He sat in his usual carrel, a solitaire hidden from its peers by three rows of bookshelves that undergraduates no longer even went through the motions of consulting. He sat down in his customary, vaguely Danish-looking chair, took off his shoes, tucked his wind-chilled feet under him, and thought, What have I got myself into? He opened his book, and he opened his notebook, but they seemed to belong to a life he only faintly remembered. Did he really want a lover right now? How far had it gone? Was there already an expectation of fidelity? Did he want there to be? Was he proud of Leif, as a conquest?

  He could start there. He thought he might be proud of the conquest, but he had no one to show Leif off to. He couldn’t call his ex. There was no question that what was between them was over; they had never even attempted a nostalgic and fraternal session of sex by Skype. But they hadn’t, on the other hand, reached the point of telling each other about new dates, and Matthew didn’t think his ex was likely to want to hear that Matthew was dating a beautiful poet. A conjurer. A leader of men.

  Matthew remembered having kissed the boy a few hours ago. He had sucked on his tongue. Sucked at the pleasure that was at the root of the world. God! It was so enjoyable to think about the strangeness of the fact of a new lover. It was like the ache in muscles the day after one has gone for a run for the first time in a long time. He remembered suddenly that Leif had written down for him Elspeth’s address so that they could find each other there two nights from now. He took the slip out of his wallet. The paper was smooth and cream-colored; Leif had torn it from his little red poetry notebook. It wasn’t even Leif’s address; Matthew still didn’t know Leif’s address. But it was Leif’s handwriting. A loosened version of architects’ capitals. The strokes of the letters were as impersonal as spiders’ legs. Matthew thought he saw that the impersonality was one of Leif’s jokes, one of his masks. The paper had no aura other than a trace of the eel skin of Matthew’s own wallet.

  No sight line could fall on Matthew in the carrel where he was sitting, and experimentally he held the slip of paper over his book and notebook, as if his attention were a dog that could be trained by association and shifted. It didn’t shift; he put the slip of paper away. He stared at his book and at the notes he had made from it almost a week before—

  What, are they of so fatal a degree,

  That they cannot descend from that, and live?

  Unless they still be Kings can they not be?

  —
and after half an hour he became aware that the sunlight was hitting the wall beyond the blinders of his carrel at a steeper angle. The morning was losing its subtlety and turning into mere day, and he was still in the same chair. He was nearly invisible on his own campus, now that he wasn’t teaching and had lost his friends, and here in the city university’s library he existed only liminally, as a body, and not at all as a person. It felt slightly unreal to be so full of Leif and of sex with Leif in such a place. Glass, pinewood louvers, and muted carpeting. He had grown up in educational institutions built in the forward-looking architectural style of the 1970s, or knockoffs thereof. Maybe this carpet hadn’t been so muted when first installed. To still be sitting in a setting like this one past thirty, still technically a student . . . There were days when the academic way of life suited him, when, in fact, he took pride in his ability to accommodate himself to it. He went for weeks sometimes, for example, without reading the news, because what would the news be able to tell him about kingship in early modern Britain? He was setting himself outside the history of his own time in order to immerse himself in the history of Elizabeth I’s, or Richard II’s, or Charles I’s, depending on the chapter he was working on, and it was the ferocity of his asceticism—this is where pride came in—that would win him a professorship someday. Probably not this year, though, since no department had replied to any of his applications.

  There was a sort of historical jet lag in his topic, an inadvertent thematization of his own predicament. Sometimes he was almost guilty of trying to, say, explain Shakespeare by reference to the events of the Commonwealth, declared half a century later. But he saw the mistake and hoped that he would be credited with being too clever to make it unknowingly. He was careful to qualify his interpretations, and his advisers said not to worry. The more cynical one joked that anyway, in this job market, there was such a thing as too fine a specialization, chronologically speaking, and a little anachronism might be prudent.