by Hal Bodner
Corey had popped his head into the condo only briefly. It seemed the rift between him and his apartment superintendent was irreparable – mostly due to Corey’s inability to pay the rent but, in no small part also because Corey had steadfastly refused to allow the super to fuck him. Fortunately, the gorgeous reprobate had run into Charles Wannamaker when he’d stopped by the Shermer Gallery to bother Nadine with the sad and sordid story of his woes and to pester her for a cash loan. Charles had leaped at the opportunity to have a houseguest. Corey had grabbed only a couple of T-shirts and his gym bag, and borrowed a decent pair of Alex’s slacks – in case Charles insisted on taking him to a nice restaurant, he’d explained to Alex with a wink – and rushed out with the vague commitment to pick up the rest of his things “soon.”
While he fussed about arranging and rearranging his paints and brushes, in case he should be seized with the impulse to dive right in with the oils, Alex reflected that Corey could do a lot worse for himself than to hook up permanently with Wannamaker. In fact, knowing Corey, Alex was convinced he probably would end up doing a lot worse.
Charles was older, true, but he was a heck of a nice guy. Moreover, he was devoted to Corey and spoiled him shamelessly. Every time Corey was forced to bunk with Charles for a few days, he always left with a complete wardrobe of expensive clothing, most of which he would either forget about and leave at some trick’s apartment or return to the store when he needed the cash. Charles’s ability to make money hand over fist, when combined with Corey’s ability to spend it just as quickly, struck Alex as an ideal relationship. But Corey was a complete fool where matters of the heart – or the bedroom – were concerned. He simply couldn’t get past the fact that while Charles Wannamaker had a damned nice body honed by a membership at the city’s most exclusive private health club and assisted by a discreet surgeon or two, he was probably on the far side of sixty. Frankly, were he not already happily married to Tony and fairly wealthy as a result of his fame as an artist, Alex wouldn’t have crossed Charles off his own dance card so quickly.
As he continued setting up, he idly thought about what trying to make a life for himself with someone like Charles Wannamaker might be like and, without really noticing what he was doing, he began to compare it with his and Tony’s lives together. He’d probably end up doing even more traveling, and though Tony’s job got them some amazing deals on vacation packages, with Charles, it would be five-star hotels all the way. He wouldn’t have to work – not that he really needed to anyway. Painting was more of a compulsion than a necessity for survival. But he couldn’t picture the two of them sunning themselves together on the deck of a cruise ship without provoking snickers or smug smiles from passers-by who would naturally assume the May/December relationship was one of convenience. Nor could he imagine experiencing that flush of pride, that warm glow of rightness he felt whenever he and Tony were together, the sensation that he and his lover were a pair of living and breathing companion works of art, each different in so very many ways, yet as a whole entity, complementing each other so the sum was ever so much greater than the separate parts.
Charles would be doting, lavishing attention on him, surprising him with costly little trinkets, and no matter how much they might grow to love each other, he would be incapable of eagerly showing off his much younger partner to his dry and humorless investment banker buddies at tiresome dinner meetings or at get-togethers at the hoity-toity private men’s clubs where Charles’s family had held memberships for generations. There would be gifts of late-model cars and expensive jewelry, a house crammed full of antiques, maybe even the occasional practically priceless work of art should Charles be sensitive enough to the kind of thing that would truly make Alex happy. But eventually, and in spite of his own success, Alex would end up feeling cheap, like a kept boy, and he would come to resent it.
With Tony, on the other hand, there had always been a sense of the journey. They were like two intrepid explorers, standing shoulder to shoulder with identical goals and dreams held in their deepest hearts, ready to face life, to seize the wonders it had to offer with all the gusto they could summon, always together. One soul in two bodies, as Alex sometimes romantically liked to think of it, perfectly meshed and loving each other for all time.
But Tony was lost to him. At least for the present and, Alex feared in spite of Joey’s reassurances, possibly for the foreseeable future. Charles, on the other hand, was available and, should Alex show the slightest interest, very probably willing. And yet...
With a start of ashamed guilt, Alex realized the path his thoughts had been traveling down and angrily shook his head to banish them. Physical infidelity to Tony was one thing. They’d both “strayed” from time to time and, of course, Alex’s occasional sex with Corey was a tolerated dalliance. Thinking about an actual life with someone else, however casually, was unacceptable. Alex felt like he’d been on the brink of committing the worst sort of betrayal. Furious at himself, he turned his attention back to his work.
He’d picked Capricorn for several reasons. He’d long fancied doing something vaguely mythological and Alex’s painting, like the statue which inspired it, would feature the Goat as a hippocampus - a half-goat, half-fish creature. Second, there was an odd combination of sleekness and roughness to the sculpture. The impossibly long and curved scaly tail seemed almost to glisten with slick seawater; the dense hair at the groin and visible underneath the single raised arm and the sharply pointed beard provided a stark contrast which somehow meshed with the lean-muscled young man’s fishy attributes even though it gave the sense of verdant farmlands and open fields rather than of the depths of the uncharted seas. There was an elusive quality which Alex hadn’t quite digested yet, a notion of opposites combined into one which appealed to him. He hoped to explore it with spatula and brushes and, by that exploration, to eventually understand it and to absorb the feelings it evoked.
There was also the bizarre physicality of the creature. Attractive though it might be – almost breathtakingly so, Alex admitted – the thought of intimacy with such an odd being filled him with mild distress. He could imagine the sensation of his lower body wrapped up and slowly squeezed by the vaguely serpentine tail, his torso gashed where the cloven hooves which stood in the stead of Capricorn’s hands raking his tender flesh. And there was something in the face, in the expression, which made the artist uneasy – and it wasn’t just the tiny horns protruding from the forehead. It reminded him of wood block prints he’d seen on the pages of some rare books he’d used for research on one of the early paintings he’d done back in college.
The image had been of a giant devil, very probably intended to be Satan himself, a huge oppressive bare-chested figure with the legs and feet of a goat, glaring with evil intent and looming over the tortured bodies of his worshipful subjects. Gathered around his hooves were dozens of naked people, all in various stages of torment, plagued by the terrible violent lusts of the devil-creatures tiny demon minions, who capered wildly whilst roasting children on spits over blazing hot flames. In one corner of the picture, a greenish demon with a long spiky tongue performed cunnilingus on a bound woman whose breasts were partially ripped away by a cat-eyed monster wielding a pair of sharp pincers. In another tableau, a white-bearded man with a loincloth-clad body of impossibly youthful musculature was spread-eagled and chained to a revolving wheel while a group of tiny imps sliced into his agonized flesh with pointed knives and flogged him mercilessly with knotted flails.
The master himself stood center. In each hand he’d held several people, squeezing them in his black claws like ripe fruit, their eyes bulging in a way that would have been comical had not the artist seen fit to include the details of their mangled innards dripping from the demon’s fists.
By far, the part of the image which had made the greatest impression on a younger Alex had been the thing’s penis – and what it was doing with it. The organ was a scaled monstrosity rendered in shades of sickly orange-reds and nauseating yellows, a slen
der whip of a thing looking more like a snake’s tongue than a male organ, forked and split into two at the end. Impaled upon each barb, hellbound twins in torment, were a man and a woman, both young, both naked and both with exquisitely beautiful bodies. Anyone looking at the picture would immediately know that each of the victims had been penetrated through the ass, their expressions clearly showing the torture of the fire blossoming in their bowels as the vile monstrosity filled their insides with its molten spuge.
Alex felt no similar cruelty emanating from Capricorn. There was nothing evil or malicious about the sculpture, no hint of sadistic enjoyment. Rather, he sensed a kind of quiet and reassuring determination, a comforting notion that were a problem placed in Capricorn’s capable hands – or hooves, rather – it would be solved, that all troublesome obstacles would be overcome with a minimum of fuss and the result would be the comfort of protective safety. Above all, one could trust the Capricorn of the sculpture. The Goat had a noble sense of integrity and would never do a friend – or a lover – any ill.
As for this particular Zodiac man’s penis, it was anything but barbed. Straight and strong, it thrust nobly from the point where scales met hair, of normal girth if a trifle longish, and with a slight upturn at the tip. The head was plump, the sort of dick you could take into your mouth straight on and suck while still managing to tease the sensitive skin underneath with your tongue. Alex had sucked his fair share of those kinds of dicks many times before meeting Tony – though, he was forced to admit, none had been quite so perfectly in proportion with the body attached to it.
No, there was nothing ominous about Capricorn at all. There was nothing to fear. Nevertheless, looking at the marble statute, Alex could not completely shake the devil image of his past from his mind.
He quickly sketched the outlines of the piece, his pencil flashing across the canvas as if guided by someone else’s invisible hand. The slope of the Goat’s smooth back, drawn in three-quarter profile, merged seamlessly with the pylons of muscle of the tail, which strained against the scaly skin. Alex had chosen to depict him in mid-ocean, the torso emerging gloriously from the foamy sea from a point just below the navel where the first faint hints of fish scales could be seen. Most of the Piscean aspects of Capricorn were concealed by the frothy water, but slightly to one side, the last few feet of the tail burst free of the surface, proud and strong.
Eventually, once he started working with the oils, Alex wanted to capture a glistening quality as if the moonlight shining from above imparted an ethereal life energy to the tail, as if the nooks and crannies between each scale were inhabited by colonies of luminescent bacteria transported from an undersea cave, bathing the tail in their otherworldly light. The rivulets of water draining from the scales to reunite with the sea would be rendered in the trademark Restin detail, as would some of the furling wave caps.
For the most part, the scene was one of violent turmoil, with distant waves crashing against their neighbors in an abandoned display of primal energy, showing Nature’s inexorable might. A storm raged across the night sky and the stars were obscured by the distant glow of lightning bolts, never actually seen but for their reflection seeping through the roiling clouds. The roughness of the sea, the passionate wildness of the skies, the color choices of deep purples and sharp blues -- Alex hoped all would work toward making the viewer gasp at the raw power of the environment he had crafted. It was intended to be a terrifying scene, sparking awe and dumbstruck majesty, a fear of being taken captive by the savage frenzy of the open ocean, to be dragged down to the depths to leave nothing on the surface to show that anything had ever existed there.
For contrast and, hopefully, in resolution of the conflicting emotions he felt about his subject, Alex placed Capricorn at the center of the maelstrom, confident and commanding, an aura of peace and tranquility originating from him and sweeping slowly out across the turbulent waters, soothing their angst, rendering the boiling whitecaps into a smooth, glossy sheet of calm.
First with pencil, then impatiently as he warmed to the passion of his subject, with brushes hastily plunged into the globs of oil he crushed out onto his palette, Alex worked in a fever of creativity. With broad, fuzzy-edged strokes of the brush he created the impression of the Goat’s torso, lean and powerful. The tiny, taut buttons of nipples and the curly wisps of down on the chest and the thicker thatch of the armpits and upper part of the groin were merely suggested, as if Capricorn had burst forth from the depths of the ocean trailing hanks of seaweed attached to his body where mere mortals would have mundane hair. It was the beast’s navel which Alex felt compelled to render with exquisite precision. A knob of curled and knotted flesh, it would protrude from the planes of suggested muscle of the abdomen, drawing the viewer’s eye inevitably to its erotic beauty. He wanted those who saw this creation to feel their mouths grow moist at the prospect, however impossible, of tracing the curves of the belly button with their tongues, to throb with the desire to suckle at the hard nubbin while their hands moved across the barely perceptible ridges of Capricorn’s flexed stomach.
With increasing frenzy, he painted. Each daub of glistening paint added to the canvas matched a drop of sweat flung from Alex’s brow or trickling down his naked side when he moved to attack a new area of the canvas to try to ease the cramps in his arm and shoulder. His hands ached. He forced himself to keep them limber so he could wield the brushes deftly to create the painting’s finer details. Yet as the power of the piece infused his being, he found his movements growing wider and more forceful. He painted with his shoulders and back, with the muscles of his thighs and ass, as much as he did with the almost infinitesimal movements of his wrists and fingers. He reached forward and upward, feeling the play of muscle in his lats as he stretched to add the silvery highlights of the moon, to suggest the cavernous recesses of its craters with charcoal gray and cobalt blue, to coax the peaks of its mountains into being with the startlingly pure white of zinc, his shoulders tightening and his lower back almost in spasms before he was satisfied that the image on the canvas mirrored what he had seen in his mind.
When finished with the moon, he squatted, trying not to slip on the sweat-drenched marble floor where he stood, to focus his attention on the sea itself. His penis, rock hard, dangled like a club between his legs and his balls hung loosely in their sac, but Alex was used to this. It was the creative process, as well as the spectacular alien beauty of this subject, which turned him on.
He surprised himself by choosing pinks, peaches and other warm, fleshy tones as highlights for the vicious waters and discovered the wave caps and sprays cried out to his artist’s soul to be tinged with robin’s egg blue and mint greens. His brush brought the ocean to vibrant life, and yet it was dwarfed by the placid vitality of the creature, caught halfway between land and sea, that was the painting’s central focus.
On and on Alex worked, driven, so absorbed in creation he barely noticed when the handle of a brush snapped from the tension with which he held it. It was if each brush stroke, each slash of the palette knife, were predestined to be perfect at the first try. Often, Alex stressed over getting the glint of light just so or from the effort of making certain the perspective was exactly as he wanted it. But with this painting, in spite of the agonizing cramps and soreness of his muscles, there was a growing sense of fulfillment, a feeling of satisfied completion while he was still in the process of creating, something he had never experienced before until a work was done.
Hours passed. His mouth grew dry as the moisture leached from his body to accumulate in pools of his perspiration on the floor. His eyes blurred at times from the effort of his concentration and he blinked them repeatedly to restore his vision, unable to stop to even douse his head with cooling water or to slurp it up from the tap as the prospect of pausing even to walk the few yards to the kitchen to fetch a glass was virtually unthinkable.
By dawn, he was finished. He stepped back to peer at what he had wrought through burning, grit-filled eyes. Like most pa
inters, he often found himself overly critical of his work, but this time, he could see no flaws. The image in his mind had been faithfully summoned from the blank canvas just as he had seen it, as he had known it would be. It was, he admitted to himself, his first true masterpiece.
With that thought, exhaustion took hold and he slumped to the floor. The marble was still damp, but rather than being uncomfortable, the coolness eased his feverish flesh. He fought to keep his eyes open to prolong looking at the painting for just a few more seconds, but his overextended body had other ideas. His eyelids closed, as if weighted by sheets of heavy lead and, immediately, unconsciousness overtook him.
* * * *
That afternoon, when he awoke stiff and sore from his exertions and having slept on the cold floor, he would recall a whimsy which had seemed so real in the seconds before he passed out. It had only been for an instant, but just as his eyes closed, he imagined Capricorn was smiling fondly down at him – though he had drawn him with a more serene expression – and could have sworn he had seen the man’s tail twitch.
Even stranger, he recalled an impression emanating from the painting. There was a great sorrow, and it had to do with Tony. And yet, emerging through the grief, there was a reassurance. Though he would doubt it many times in the days to come, for those brief seconds Alex knew – he knew – whatever the future held in store for his lover, somehow and in some unexpected and unascertainable way, everything would work out the way it was supposed to.