Red, White & Royal Blue
Page 25
“Yes, Alex, the day we met, nothing gets past you, does it?” Henry says, reaching to steal the pillow back. “‘What about you,’ he says, as if he doesn’t know—”
“Shut your mouth,” Alex says, grinning like an idiot, and he stops fighting Henry for the pillow and instead straddles him and kisses him into the mattress. He pulls the blankets up and they disappear into the pile, a laughing mess of mouths and hands, until Henry rolls onto his phone and his ass presses the button on the voicemail.
“Diaz, you insane, hopeless romantic little shit,” says the voice of the President of the United States, muffled in the bed. “It had better be forever. Be safe.”
* * *
Sneaking out of the palace without security at two in the morning was, surprisingly, Henry’s idea. He pulled hoodies and hats out for both of them—the incognito uniform of the internationally recognizable—and Bea staged a noisy exit from the opposite end of the palace while they sprinted through the gardens. Now they’re on the deserted, wet pavement of South Kensington, flanked by tall, red brick buildings and a sign for—
“Stop, are you kidding me?” Alex says. “Prince Consort Road? Oh my God, take a picture of me with the sign.”
“Not there yet!” Henry says over his shoulder. He gives Alex’s arm another pull to keep him running. “Keep moving, you wastrel.”
They cross to another street and duck into an alcove between two pillars while Henry fishes a keyring with dozens of keys out of his hoodie. “Funny thing about being a prince—people will give you keys to just about anything if you ask nicely.”
Alex gawks, watching Henry feel around the edge of a seemingly plain wall. “All this time, I thought I was the Ferris Bueller of this relationship.”
“What, did you think I was Sloane?” Henry says, pushing the panel open a crack and yanking Alex into a wide, dark plaza.
The grounds are sloping, white tiles carrying the sounds of their feet as they run. Sturdy Victorian bricks tower into the night, framing the courtyard, and Alex thinks, Oh. The Victoria and Albert Museum. Henry has a key to the V&A.
There’s a stout old security guard waiting at the doors.
“Can’t thank you enough, Gavin,” Henry says, and Alex notices the thick wad of cash Henry slips into their handshake.
“Renaissance City tonight, yeah?” Gavin says.
“If you would be so kind,” Henry tells him.
And they’re off again, hustling through rooms of Chinese art and French sculptures. Henry moves fluidly from room to room, past a black stone sculpture of a seated Buddha and John the Baptist nude and in bronze, without a single false step.
“You do this a lot?”
Henry laughs. “It’s, ah, sort of my little secret. When I was young, my mum and dad would take us early in the morning, before opening. They wanted us to have a sense of the arts, I suppose, but mostly history.” He slows and points to a massive piece, a wooden tiger mauling a man dressed as a European soldier, the sign declaring: TIPU’S TIGER. “Mum would take us to look at this one and whisper to me, ‘See how the tiger is eating him up? That’s because my great-great-great-great grandad stole this from India. I think we should give it back, but your gran says no.’”
Alex watches Henry’s face in quarter profile, the slight pain that moves under his skin, but he shakes it off quickly and takes Alex’s hand back up. They’re running again.
“Now, I like to come at night,” he says. “A few of the higher-up security guards know me. Sometimes I think I keep coming because, no matter how many places I’ve been or people I’ve met or books I read, this place is proof I’ll never learn it all. It’s like Westminster: You can look at every individual carving or pane of stained glass and know there’s this wealth of stories there, that everything was put in a specific place for a reason. Everything has a meaning, an intention. There are pieces in here—The Great Bed of Ware, it’s mentioned in Twelfth Night, Epicoene, Don Juan, and it’s here. Everything is a story, never finished. Isn’t it incredible? And the archives, God, I could spend hours in the archives, they—mmph.”
He’s cut off mid-sentence because Alex has stopped in the middle of the corridor and yanked him backward into a kiss.
“Hello,” Henry says when they break apart. “What was that for?”
“I just, like.” Alex shrugs. “Really love you.”
The corridor dumps them out into a cavernous atrium, rooms sprawling out in each direction. Only some of the overhead lighting has been left on, and Alex can see an enormous chandelier looming high in the rotunda, tendrils and bubbles of glass in blues and greens and yellows. Behind it, there’s an elaborate iron choir screen standing broad and gorgeous on the landing above.
“This is it,” Henry says, pulling Alex by the hand to the left, where light spills out of an immense archway. “I called ahead to Gavin to make sure they left a light on. It’s my favorite room.”
Alex has personally helped with exhibitions at the Smithsonian and sleeps in a room once occupied by Ulysses S. Grant’s father-in-law, but he still loses his breath when Henry pulls him through the marble pillars.
In the half light, the room is alive. The vaulted roof seems to stretch up forever into the inky London sky, and beneath it the room is arranged like a city square somewhere in Florence, climbing columns and towering altars and archways. Deep basins of fountains are planted in the floor between statues on heavy pedestals, and effigies lie behind black doorways with the Resurrection carved into their slate. Dominating the entire back wall is a colossal, Gothic choir screen carved from marble and adorned with ornate statues of saints, black and gold and imposing, holy.
When Henry speaks again, it’s soft, as if he’s trying not to break the spell.
“In here, at night, it’s almost like walking through a real piazza,” Henry says. “But there’s nobody else around to touch you or gawk at you or try to steal a photo of you. You can just be.”
Alex looks over to find Henry’s expression careful, waiting, and he realizes this is the same as when Alex took Henry to the lake house—the most sacred place he has.
He squeezes Henry’s hand and says, “Tell me everything.”
Henry does, leading him around to each piece in turn. There’s a life-size sculpture of Zephyr, the Greek god of the west wind brought to life by Francavilla, a crown on his head and one foot on a cloud. Narcissus on his knees, mesmerized by his own reflection in the pool, once thought to be Michelangelo’s lost Cupid but actually carved by Cioli—“Do you see here, where they had to repair his knuckles with stucco?”—Pluto stealing Proserpina away to the underworld, and Jason with his golden fleece.
They wind up back at the first statue, Samson Slaying a Philistine, the one that knocked the wind out of Alex when they walked in. He’s never seen anything like it—the smooth muscles, the indentations of flesh, the breathing, bleeding life of it, all carved by Giambologna out of marble. If he could touch it, he swears the skin would be warm.
“It’s a bit ironic, you know,” Henry says, gazing up at it. “Me, the cursed gay heir, standing here in Victoria’s museum, considering how much she loved those sodomy laws.” He smirks. “Actually … you remember how I told you about the gay king, James I?”
“The one with the dumb jock boyfriend?”
“Yes, that one. Well, his most beloved favorite was a man named George Villiers. ‘The handsomest-bodied man in all of England,’ they called him. James was completely besotted. Everyone knew. This French poet, de Viau, wrote a poem about it.” He clears his throat and starts to recite: “‘One man fucks Monsieur le Grand, another fucks the Comte de Tonnerre, and it is well known that the King of England, fucks the Duke of Buckingham.’” Alex must be staring, because he adds, “Well, it rhymes in French. Anyway. Did you know the reason the King James translation of the Bible exists is because the Church of England was so displeased with James for flaunting his relationship with Villiers that he had the translation commissioned to appease them?”
“You’re kidding.”
“He stood in front of the Privy Council and said, ‘Christ had John, and I have George.’”
“Jesus.”
“Precisely.” Henry’s still looking up at the statue, but Alex can’t stop looking at him and the sly smile on his face, lost in his own thoughts. “And James’s son, Charles I, is the reason we have dear Samson. It’s the only Giambologna that ever left Florence. He was a gift to Charles from the King of Spain, and Charles gave it, this massive, absolutely priceless masterpiece of a sculpture, to Villiers. And a few centuries later, here he is. One of the most beautiful pieces we own, and we didn’t even steal it. We only needed Villiers and his trolloping ways with the queer monarchs. To me, if there were a registry of national gay landmarks in Britain, Samson would be on it.”
Henry’s beaming like a proud parent, like Samson is his, and Alex is hit with a wave of pride in kind.
He takes his phone out and lines up a shot, Henry standing there all soft and rumpled and smiling next to one of the most exquisite works of art in the world.
“What are you doing?”
“I’m taking a picture of a national gay landmark,” Alex tells him. “And also a statue.”
Henry laughs indulgently, and Alex closes the space between them, takes Henry’s baseball cap off and stands on his toes to kiss the ridge of his brow.
“It’s funny,” Henry says. “I always thought of the whole thing as the most unforgivable thing about me, but you act like it’s one of the best.”
“Oh, yeah,” Alex says. “The top list of reasons to love you goes brain, then dick, then imminent status as a revolutionary gay icon.”
“You are quite literally Queen Victoria’s worst nightmare.”
“And that’s why you love me.”
“My God, you’re right. All this time, I was just after the bloke who’d most infuriate my homophobic forebears.”
“Ah, and we can’t forget they were also racist.”
“Certainly not.” Henry nods seriously. “Next time we shall visit some of the George III pieces and see if they burst into flame.”
Through the marble choir screen at the back of the room is a second, deeper chamber, this one filled with church relics. Past stained glass and statues of saints, at the very end of the room, is an entire high altar chapel removed from its church. The sign explains its original setting was the apse of the convent church of Santa Chiara in Florence in the fifteenth century, and it’s stunning, set deep into an alcove to create a real chapel, with statues of Santa Chiara and Saint Francis of Assisi.
“When I was younger,” Henry says, “I had this very elaborate idea of taking somebody I loved here and standing inside the chapel, that he’d love it as much as I did, and we’d slow dance right in front of the Blessed Mother. Just a … daft pubescent fantasy.”
Henry hesitates, before finally sliding his phone out of his pocket. He presses a few buttons and extends a hand to Alex, and, quietly, “Your Song” starts to play from the tiny speaker.
Alex exhales a laugh. “Aren’t you gonna ask if I know how to waltz?”
“No waltzing,” Henry says. “Never cared for it.”
Alex takes his hand, and Henry turns to face the chapel like a nervous postulant, his cheeks hollowed out in the low light, before pulling Alex into it.
When they kiss, Alex can hear a half-remembered old proverb from catechism, mixed up between translations of the book: “Come, hijo mío, de la miel, porque es buena, and the honeycomb, sweet to thy taste.” He wonders what Santa Chiara would think of them, a lost David and Jonathan, turning slowly on the spot.
He brings Henry’s hand to his mouth and kisses the little knob of his knuckle, the skin over the blue vein there, bloodlines, pulses, the old blood kept in perpetuity within these walls, and he thinks, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, amen.
* * *
Henry charters a private plane to get him back home, and Alex is dreading the dressing-down he’s going to get the minute he’s stateside, but he’s trying not to think about it. At the airstrip, the wind whipping his hair across his forehead, Henry fishes inside his jacket for something.
“Listen,” he says, pulling a curled fist out of his pocket. He takes one of Alex’s hands and turns it to press something small and heavy into his palm. “I want you to know, I’m sure. A thousand percent.”
He removes his hand and there, sitting in the center of Alex’s callused palm, is the signet ring.
“What?” Alex’s eyes flash up to search Henry’s face and find him smiling softly. “I can’t—”
“Keep it,” Henry tells him. “I’m sick of wearing it.”
It’s a private airstrip, but it’s still risky, so he folds Henry in a hug and whispers fiercely, “I completely fucking love you.”
At cruising altitude, he takes the chain off his neck and slides the ring on next to the old house key. They clink together gently as he tucks them both under his shirt, two homes side by side.
ELEVEN
Hometown stuff
* * *
A
to Henry
H,
Have been home for three hours. Already miss you. This is some bullshit.
Hey, have I told you lately that you’re brave? I still remember what you said to that little girl in the hospital about Luke Skywalker: “He’s proof that it doesn’t matter where you come from or who your family is.” Sweetheart, you’re proof too.
(By the way, in this relationship, I am absolutely the Han and you are absolutely the Leia. Don’t try to argue because you’ll be wrong.)
I was also thinking about Texas again, which I guess I do a lot when I’m stressed about election stuff. There’s so much stuff I haven’t shown you yet. We haven’t even done Austin! I wanna take you to Franklin Barbecue. You have to wait in line for hours, but that’s part of the experience. I really wanna see a member of the royal family wait in line for hours to eat cow parts.
Have you thought any more about what you said before I left? About coming out to your family? Obviously, you’re not obligated. You just seemed kind of hopeful when you talked about it.
I’ll be over here, still quarantined in the White House (at least Mom didn’t kill me for London), rooting for you.
Love you.
xoxoxoxoxo
A
P.S. Vita Sackville-West to Virginia Woolf—1927:
With me it is quite stark: I miss you even more than I could have believed; and I was prepared to miss you a good deal.
Re: Hometown stuff
* * *
Henry
to A
Alex,
It is, indeed, bullshit. It’s all I can do not to pack a bag and be gone forever. Perhaps I could live in your room like a recluse. You could have food sent up for me, and I’ll be lurking in disguise in a shadowy corner when you answer the door. It’ll all be very dreadfully Jane Eyre.
The Mail will write mad speculations about where I’ve gone, if I’ve offed myself or vanished to St. Kilda, but only you and I will know that I’m just sprawled in your bed, reading books and feeding myself profiteroles and making love to you endlessly until we both expire in a haze of chocolate sauce. It’s how I’d want to go.
I’m afraid, though, I’m stuck here. Gran keeps asking Mum when I’m going to enlist, and did I know Philip had already served a year by the time he was my age. I do need to figure out what I’m going to do, because I’m certainly closing in on the end of what’s an acceptable amount of time for a gap year. Please do keep me in your—what is it American politicians say?—thoughts and prayers.
Austin sounds brilliant. Maybe in a few months, after things settle down a bit? I could take a long weekend. Can we visit your mum’s house? Your room? Do you still have your lacrosse trophies? Tel
l me you still have posters up. Let me guess: Han Solo, Barack Obama, and … Ruth Bader Ginsburg.
(I’ll agree with your assessment that you’re the Han to my Leia in that you are, without doubt, a scruffy-looking nerf herder who would pilot us into an asteroid field. I happen to like nice men.)
I have thought more about coming out to my family, which is part of why I’m staying here for now. Bea has offered to be there when I tell Philip if I want, so I think I will. Again, thoughts and prayers.
I love you terribly, and I want you back here soon. I need your help picking a new bed for my room; I’ve decided to get rid of that gold monstrosity.
Yours,
Henry
P.S. From Radclyffe Hall to Evguenia Souline, 1934:
Darling—I wonder if you realize how much I am counting on your coming to England, how much it means to me—it means all the world, and indeed my body shall be all, all yours, as yours will be all, all mine, beloved.… And nothing will matter but just we two, we two longing loves at last come together.
Re: Hometown stuff
* * *
A
to Henry
H,
Shit. Do you think you’re going to enlist? I haven’t done any research on it yet. I’m gonna ask Zahra to have one of our people put together a binder on it. What would that mean? Would you have to be gone a lot? Would it be dangerous??? Or is it just like, wear the uniform and sit at a desk? How did we not talk about this when I was there?????
Sorry. I’m panicking. I somehow forgot this was a thing looming on the horizon. I’m there for whatever you decide you want to do, just, like, let me know if I need to start practicing gazing wistfully out the window, waiting for my love to return from the war.
It drives me nuts sometimes that you don’t get to have more say in your life. When I picture you happy, I see you with your own apartment somewhere outside of the palace and a desk where you can write anthologies of queer history. And I’m there, using up your shampoo and making you come to the grocery store with me and waking up in the same damn time zone with you every morning.