The Marble Quilt

by David Leavitt

  “Do you read much?” John asks, sitting down next to him, handing him a glass of red wine.

  “I like to read.”

  “Who do you like?”

  Who, not what. What embarrasses Christopher now is that he can’t remember the names of any authors. It’s as if the question itself has expunged them from his brain.

  “Dennis Cooper,” he says after a moment, grateful at least to have successfully grasped at something. “I heard him at A Different Light, too.”

  “Anyone else?”

  “Those vampire books.”

  “Oh, Anne Rice? Yes, I like the early ones.”

  Slyly John throws an arm around the back of the sofa, behind Christopher’s neck. It may be the very immorality of what he’s doing—the fact that by inviting a client home he’s breached both the written and unwritten ethics of his profession—that excites him tonight, even more than the simple miracle of having convinced Christopher to come to his apartment. For he’s not used—has never been used—to attracting. Unlike Jack McMaster, for instance (and Roger, for that matter; and Bosie, for that matter), John was not good-looking as a boy. They had that ironic loveliness of the ephebe, that delicate beauty to which the imminence of manhood lends an erotic flush. For such a beauty there has always been, will always be, a market. John, on the other hand, was at twenty both geeky and spotty; all limbs; none of the parts seemed to fit.

  The irony (he sees it clearly tonight) is that while Roger aged wretchedly—Jack too—he has, as it were, grown into his body. At thirty-seven, he is a handsome man.

  Now, on the sofa, he puts down his wineglass; scoots closer to Christopher, who’s gazing rather vacantly at the disarranged books, the groaning shelves. “As you may have surmised,” he says, “I haven’t always been a social worker.”

  “No?”

  John shakes his head. “I used to be an English professor. Well, an assistant English professor. Jack—the fellow who gave the lecture—was my mentor. My teacher.”

  “Yeah?”

  “I wrote my dissertation on Oscar Wilde.”

  “Oh, I know about him,” says Christopher. “He was, like, the first faggot, right?”

  “More or less.”

  “And that guy Jack—that teacher of yours—when you were his student, did he fuck you?”

  The question rather takes John aback; it also arouses him.

  “Well, yes, actually,” he admits after a moment.

  “So that means that if he fucked you, and that poet he was talking about fucked him, and what’s his name—Oscar Wilde’s boyfriend—fucked the poet, then if you fuck me tonight it’ll be like I got fucked by the first faggot.”

  “I guess so,” John says, laughing.

  “Cool.”

  “You like the idea?”

  “I like the idea of your fucking me,” Christopher says, and looks John steadily in the eye. “Will you? I really need it.”

  John blushes. Suddenly Christopher is lunging at him, kissing him, kneading his erection.

  “But I haven’t got any condoms! I meant to buy some, only—”

  “It’s okay,” Christopher whispers urgently, “it’s O.K.—”

  “I could run out and—”

  “Feel in my back pocket.”

  John does. Slipping his hand inside, he paws Christopher’s buttock for a moment, then withdraws a single condom in its tidy plastic wrapper.

  “You think of everything.”

  “There’s lube in my backpack.”

  “That I’ve got in the bathroom.”

  “So where do you want to do it? Here? In the bedroom?”

  “Bedroom’s more comfortable.” And standing—how terrible and thrilling is this boy’s eagerness—Christopher takes John’s hand and yanks him to his feet.

  A Stroll on the Beach

  In his later years, Bosie makes it his habit, on sunny days, to take a morning walk along the sea. Bypassing all the rubbish in Brighton, the promenade and the tearooms and holiday camps, he heads south, to where the rocky beach is emptier. Taking off his shoes, he lets the cold water run over his feet, which churn up tiny whirlpools around them before collapsing into the dense, wet life of the rocks.

  It is 1944. Springtime. Though he doesn’t know it, in a little less than a year he will be dead. Yet he is not a dying man. Instead he is simply an old man, one of hundreds who stroll each morning along the promenade and the beach of this seaside town, this town of pensioners. Most of his neighbors know perfectly well who he is. “The one who ruined Wilde,” they say; or else, “The one Wilde ruined.” Such whispering and staring, even when overtly hostile, he accepts more placidly today than he might have in the past, letting it roll over his ego as gently as the water now rolling over his feet. For time has diminished the rage that once coruscated his eyes and corroded his hours. It’s not that anything has changed in the world; the change was in his soul. This is why he can regard this war—the second one—with so much more composure than he did its predecessor. Cynicism is an old man’s prerogative. You should have listened to me, he can say; the Hun must be squelched utterly, else he will re-emerge, time and again, with greater awfulness. Indeed, as of today only a single blemish clouds Bosie’s conscience, and that is the fact that the modern German’s loathing of the Jews has rendered the anti-Semitism of Bosie’s earlier poetry not only unfashionable but faintly scandalous. Without disclaiming the greatness of In Excelsis, Bosie cannot help but regret such lines as

  Your Few-kept politicians buy and sell

  In markets redolent of Jewish mud …

  Yet he was never one to shrink from unpopular positions.

  A few weeks earlier Olive, who had been ill for several years, finally died. This was both a sorrow and a relief for Bosie. True, they had not lived together for decades; still, with the coming of war their once acrimonious relations had at least resolved themselves into a state of cease-fire that did not disallow the possibility of friendship. Often they dined or took tea together—sometimes in Bosie’s modest ground-floor flat at St. Ann’s Court, more often at Olive’s much grander digs at Viceroy Lodge, which looked onto the sea. For Colonel Custance’s death had left Olive a rich woman—a fact that she sometimes lorded over her estranged husband, as for years he had lorded over her his self-proclaimed spiritual and poetic superiority. (No one admired Bosie’s poetry more than he did; by the same token, he admired no one else’s poetry—with the possible exception of Shakespeare’s—more than his own.)

  In Brighton, though, the tables were turned. Now it was Bosie who, as a consequence of his poverty, had to apply to Olive for money. She made him an allowance that she was not above occasionally threatening to suspend. No doubt the disparity in their circumstances—which, by keeping Bosie’s income low, she could be certain to maintain—pleased his wife. In her will she left to her husband an opal necklace (rather ironic, considering his dislike of opals), all the money in her bank account, and an allowance of £500 per annum. (All this, however, went into receivership, as Bosie had never discharged an earlier bankruptcy.) To their son, Raymond, she left her flat at Viceroy Lodge, which did not prevent Bosie from moving in almost instantly upon her death. For a few months he lived there quite happily, until Raymond, who had for many years been an inmate at St. Andrew’s Hospital, decided that he wanted to give “life outside” a try, and evicted his father. At the time Raymond was in his early forties—the same age that Bosie was when he took on Robbie Ross in court. In 1926 Raymond had been diagnosed as schizophrenic and admitted to an asylum for “electroconvulsive therapy and narcosis.” (Not incidentally, that same year he had fallen in love with a grocer’s daughter named Gladys Lacey, but his parents and grandparents had disapproved of the match, and kept him from marrying her.)

  Let us now say that the morning of which I am writing—the morning when Bosie takes a walk along the beach—is the same morning on which Raymond is scheduled to arrive in Hove and displace his father. It is still early; Raymond’s train won’t
pull in for hours. As Bosie strolls up and down the beach, I imagine that he is trying to suppress the rather petulant displeasure that Raymond’s decision to come to Hove has provoked in him. After all, as he well knows, his son’s release from the hospital where he has been living, on and off, for twenty years is—has to be looked at as—a good thing. It means that Raymond is getting well, with which Bosie has no argument. And yet must his getting well require turning his father onto the street? On the surface, at least, Raymond has been nothing but cordial to Bosie, has even vowed to give him an extra £300 per year as soon as Olive’s will has gone through probate. Even so, it does seem hard. (All right. Let’s just say it.) Bosie’s weeks at Viceroy Lodge, under the capable management of Olive’s maid Eileen, have been happy ones. There he has entertained, among others, his old friend Lord Tredegar and his wife, Olga, the former Princess Dolgorouki, as well as several members of the younger literary generation (by younger I mean those in their fifties), invited for elaborate teas featuring toast, scones, cream cakes, jam puffs, tarts, and other schoolboyish treats with which their middle-aged stomachs proved unable to cope. The juvenile character of these gatherings, though bewildering to Bosie’s guests (after all, he was now in his seventies), delighted the host, who still looks upon his childhood years as the best of his life. His old friend Wellington, for instance, he often thinks about these nights, as he thinks about Alfred, the schoolboy he seduced away from Robbie Ross, and the boy at Oxford who blackmailed him, and the rent boys with whom, sometimes in Oscar’s company and sometimes out of it, he was able to revive, for a moment, a lost dream of laddish camaraderie: tremendous friends. This is something he’s realized only lately: when he was a wicked young man, what he was really after wasn’t sex; it was those innocent attachments of boyhood to which sex—alas—only sometimes took him back. For though the route from childhood to manhood is a clear, straight path, to return, he has learned, one has to take back roads, stumble up rocky paths, try to make sense of deceptive and illegible signs. You rarely get where you want to be, and when you do, the magic place is never as you remembered.

  Of course, Raymond is the worst wrong turn of all. Where his son is concerned Bosie cannot, no matter how hard he tries, shirk off the unpleasant suspicion that if the boy has grown into an ill and fragile man, it is largely Bosie’s own fault. For Raymond was, in many ways, the most beloved of the many boys with whom he tried to recapture his lost adolescence. Even more than Wellington, he was Bosie’s tremendous friend, especially during the summer when Raymond was thirteen, and Bosie—enraged by what he saw as the iniquity of a court determined to favor the claims of his vindictive father-in-law—picked him up at his school and without telling anyone spirited him to Scotland, which was outside the Chancery Court’s jurisdiction. There he rented a house near the southern end of Loch Ness, and enrolled Raymond at the Benedictine Monastery and College of Fort Augustus. Every afternoon they went swimming, or fishing, or took exploratory gambols through forests in which generations of Douglases had roamed and hunted. For Bosie was Scottish, he was a Scottish laird, and Raymond—though half Custance—needed to be reminded that in his veins there ran also the blood of the dark grey man.

  His point may have been to persuade Raymond that the trip amounted to a Boys’ Adventure, something out of Robert Louis Stevenson, and not a traumatic kidnapping from which Raymond would never recover. Nor, apparently, did Bosie fail in this objective. Indeed, Raymond’s credulous acceptance of his father’s fantasy was the very thing that would do them both in.

  One day, after barely a term at his new school, Raymond went fishing in Loch Ness and never came back. Fearing that he had drowned, for almost a week, day and night, his father and the monks trawled the lake’s waters. Then, rather out of the blue, Bosie received a telegram from Olive informing him that Raymond was safely back at Weston, his grandfather’s estate. It seems that Colonel Custance, perhaps in collusion with George Lewis, had set up a secret means of communication with the boy, whom he had then enticed to embark on an even grander adventure than the one on which his father had taken him. It would work like this: Raymond, on the pretense of wanting to fish, would take a boat and row to the opposite side of Loch Ness. There a private detective would be waiting to carry him away in a car. All very thrilling, especially the car, which in 1915 must really have seemed, to an impressionable boy, the pièce de résistance, with its promise of speed and stealth and spy novel glamour. The detective drove Raymond across the border into England, where his mother and grandfather met him. Only once he was safely ensconced again did Olive inform Bosie of what had happened. Bosie, who had had to endure almost a week of tormented uncertainty, could not forgive her for what she had put him through. Nor could he forgive Raymond, of whom he washed his hands; he would never again have anything to do with his treacherous son, he vowed—forgetting, perhaps, that the treacherous son was at the time only thirteen years old.

  The tide is running out. Turning around, again like a child, Bosie walks backward, as if fitting his feet into his own footsteps, so as not to leave a trace of having made a return journey, so as to suggest that this morning he walked, and walked, and then simply disappeared.

  An instant later he notices that he’s not alone.

  He raises his eyebrows. Not far off, shoes in his hand, stands a soldier. An unfamiliar uniform … Canadian, perhaps? American? From where he hovers at the water’s edge, the soldier gazes out at the sea in a way that seems to Bosie both provocative and touchingly naive. For though he is old now, he was once beautiful, and so has some experience of the tactics to which nervous admirers resort in order to avoid being caught out in their curiosity.

  Stopping, for the moment, Bosie watches the soldier. What does he want? Is he here by chance? Very unlikely. The soldier’s presence amuses him, if for no other reason than that it is exemplary of something that has become, in recent years, so commonplace. He never expected to grow into a monument, a human equivalent of Trafalgar Square, or the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier. Yet this, as a consequence of Wilde’s ever increasing fame (Robbie did a good job, in the end), has turned out to be his fate. More and more young men come to Hove for one reason only: to seek him out; to gaze at him. On those rare occasions when they muster the courage to approach him, he is never less than perfectly polite. Instead he listens quietly, smiling, as they make their elegant speeches.

  If they’re good-looking, he invites them home for tea, and sometimes to bed.

  Now the soldier turns; approaches. Bosie straightens his back. He is, he knows, no longer attractive. Not that it isn’t possible for an old man to be beautiful. Toscanini, for instance, is a beautiful old man. In his case, age preserved the thick hair, the athletic arms and limbs. In Bosie’s, only the worst features seem to have emerged unscathed from the holocaust of time—the crooked mouth, the eyes with their startled rabbit’s look.

  Not that it matters. He has something else. In the end, Wilde gave Bosie more than he bargained for.

  I hate the man who builds his name

  On the ruins of another’s fame.

  “Mr. Douglas?”

  Yes, he is American. Otherwise he’d have called him Lord Alfred.

  “Yes?”

  “I hope I’m not bothering you. I—” Sheepishly the soldier puts down his shoes, takes off his hat. His beauty startles Bosie in that it is exactly the same sort of beauty he himself possessed once.

  “Yes?”

  “My name is Roger Hinton. Private Roger Hinton, of the United States Marine Corps. And I just wanted to say … I’m a poet, and a great admirer of your work. I’m here on leave. Especially In Excelsis … Such a marvelous poem!”

  Bosie allows his lips to turn up in a slight smile. What rot! he thinks. Later, when they’re at Olive’s flat, he’ll tease the boy, try to taunt him into admitting that he’s never even read In Excelsis. Not that it matters. Once it would have. Once he would have hoped that when young men stared at him in admiration, they’d be thinking, “Dou
glas at Wormswood Scrubs,” not “Wilde at Reading Gaol.”

  “So you’re a poet. How interesting. Do you write sonnets?”

  “I’ve written a few.”

  “Shakespearean, or—”

  “No, Petrarchan, like yours.”

  “What a charming coincidence, to meet a young sonneteer on the beach. And tell me, Mr. Hinson, will you be sojourning long in Hove?”

  “Hinton. Only forty-eight hours. As I said, I’m on leave.”

  “You must take tea with me. I’m afraid it will have to be today. This evening my son arrives. If that’s possible for you … I imagine your schedule—”

  “No, I’m utterly free.” (The utterly takes Bosie aback. Perhaps the soldier really is a poet.) “I don’t know anyone in Hove, or Brighton, for that matter. I’ve only come here to see you.”

  “How charming. And which way are you heading, if I might ask?”

  “Whichever way you are, Mr. Douglas.”

  “Please call me Bosie.”

  The young man blushes. “Bosie. And you must call me Roger.”

  “Very well, then. Roger.”

  Together they begin walking back, toward the promenade.

  Sabotage

  Middle of the night. While John snores in bed, Christopher, in his black T-shirt, switches on the light; fumbles in the bathroom with his back-pack. So far only once, but if he plays his cards right he’ll be able to get at least two more out of him before they part … After all, even though the guy’s old, he’s horny; has no trouble keeping it up, unlike some of those other sorry bastards. Opening the backpack (the fact that he is stoned—John gave him some good pot—makes the operation all the harder to perform), he extracts a fresh box of condoms, still sealed in plastic, which he tries (and fails) to tear open with his thumbnail. Finally he bites into the box; the plastic gives; little tooth marks puncture the cardboard. Tearing it open, he extracts the condoms, strung together like Christmas lights, divided by little lines of perforation. He rips until one comes loose. Dropping the others to the ground, he picks up the condom, holds it to the light. How innocent it looks, all rolled and thickened like his grandmother’s aproned stomach, not the sort of thing you would expect to be capable (if you didn’t already know) of smothering or saving a life! Yet there it is. The condom, his friend, his enemy … Anthony will die and Christopher will live. (Not if I can help it.) Anthony will die and Christopher will die. And now, from his backpack, he extracts a box of pins; takes one out; stabs the condom fleetly through its heart. Metal emerges out the other side. Withdrawing the pin, he holds the condom a second time to the light. Yes, there it is (though too tiny for any but a trained eye to recognize). That’s the beauty of it. He will slip it into the pocket of his T-shirt now, wake John, and compel him to further acts of lust; John will not resist. Then without even being aware of it he’ll do his duty to Christopher, the ironic duty of his profession, and never guess that the powdered sheath on which he is staking all the future bears beside its guarantee the harrowed and minute signature of the saboteur.