by Paul Mendez
Nick is editor of Endymion—a small-circulation, preciously produced literary journal; has written several biographies—most famously of Rupert Brooke—and set up his own publishing house, The Endymion Press, to publish poets and short-fiction writers, all gay men, who he believes stand at the very top of the tree. Apart from their house in London, he and his husband Jean-Alain live in a detached, thatched-roof cottage painted a shade somewhere between tangerine and terracotta, with several stained-glass windows and a trained bougainvillea bursting richly with purple flowers. The tiny white blooms of a gypsophila pop stunningly against the muted orange. Owen pulls the BMW onto a grey slate driveway next to a grey-and-black three-door Range Rover Evoque, and Nick comes out to greet them in a white Polo Ralph Lauren shirt and black Birkenstocks, smiling coyly with his hands in his jeans pockets. He’s tall, dark blond, yoga-slim and austerely bronzed.
They get out of the car, and naturally, Nick embraces Owen first. Jesse notices the casual intimacy with which he looks Owen in his eyes, the unguarded freedom of his smile and the tightness of their hug, held so long they begin muttering and breathing together. Owen appears almost short in comparison. Nick marvels at their silver new-old car, and Owen jokes that Jesse’s to blame for getting him back on the road. Nick releases Owen and approaches Jesse as if in surprise, narrowing his smile and lowering the tone of his voice slightly as they kiss each other on the cheeks. He pats Jesse on the arm like an old chum before guiding him into the house, almost by the small of his back. They enter through the pale green door—under the distressed frame of which six-four Nick has to duck—into a long hallway of naked dark grey concrete hung with still-life oil paintings, and further into a huge extension scattered with sofas, plants, unique pieces of furniture, bunches of flowers and books. Jean-Alain, looking very brown and bursting out of a white deep V-neck T-shirt, minces in through the patio doors with a big schnauzer grin and a fistful of coriander.
“You remember Jesse, don’t you?” says Owen.
“Of course! Hi! Welcome to Suffolk!”
While many of the gay male couples Jesse knows could pass for brothers, Jean-Alain could hardly be more different from his husband. About forty, half-Lebanese but blue-eyed and white-passing, he is the most baroquely hairy person Jesse’s ever come across, with a thick, dark beard, almost Nietzschean moustache, thumb-thick eyebrows that meet in the middle and a carpeted chest, back-of-neck and forearms. They’ve met twice before, but it looks as if Jean-Alain’s been to the gym a few hundred times since then. Though less tall, he’s much thicker than Nick, and has the sort of glowering sexual presence that makes Jesse glad for his black privilege, in that he cannot be seen to blush. He cuddles and kisses Jesse and Owen muscularly, surprising Jesse by biting his lip. He apologises for the smell of the fish on the barbecue and swings his huge arse into the very high-tech-looking kitchen to finish preparing lunch.
If Owen and Nick are going to be holed up all weekend talking poetry, Jesse thinks, then he’ll be more than happy for Jean-Alain, an architect by trade, to give him a tour of the bedrooms.
People must have been much shorter in the sixteenth century, when this cottage was built, than they are now, and Jesse wonders whether Nick might not develop some sort of long-term osteopathic problem living here. The guests opt to put their bags up in their room straight away, and follow Nick through the house while he and Owen natter in that way best friends do when they haven’t seen each other for a while.
“So what did you listen to on the journey?”
“Mahler 3, Abbado, then 6, Bernstein. Jess was asleep but was woken up by the second hammer blow, quite entertainingly.”
“Only because you turned it up.”
“Ha-ha. Very stirring music for a bracing drive,” says Nick.
“It was perfectly relaxing. Isn’t it unbelievable how gold and brown everything is from the sun?” Owen says.
“It’s even more dramatic looking down through a plane window,” says Nick.
“Is this a Fantin-Latour? No, of course not,” Jesse interrupts, feeling ignored, to ask about a painting, halfway up the stairs, of brightly coloured and various flowers, immediately swallowing his silly mistake.
“No, no,” Nick laughs. They stop to contemplate it. “It’s a roughly contemporaneous copy of a work by an obscure seventeenth-century Flemish painter called Osias Beert. It doesn’t quite demonstrate the natural command Fantin-Latour had, sort of three centuries later.”
“Fantin-Latour didn’t feel the need to smash you over the head with the fact that these are beautiful luxury flowers, did he,” Owen says, turning to Jesse. “He often toned down colours and shapes and chose roses which were well past their best, such as you might find on someone’s grave.”
“They painted in very different times. Fin-de-siècle artists of all disciplines were pretty nihilistic. Just look at these bonny little spring butterflies,” says Nick.
“Paintings like this always remind me of that Henri Rousseau school of ‘I’ve never been to the tropics in my life but here’s live footage of an actual tiger bounding through the rainforest,’ ” says Owen. Nick laughs, showing all his perfect white teeth, and doesn’t look offended at all. “Pretty, though. Love the leopard-print vase.”
“Ha! Why have I never seen it like that?” says Nick. “No wonder poor Jean-Alain bought it. Overpaid horribly. Thanks for noticing it though, Jesse. I thought it might disappear, unlit, on the stairs, among all these other, authentic, exquisite, Dutch, Flemish and Spanish still lifes.”
They laugh and come up onto a landing papered in dark blue with a vine pattern, hung with oil portraits and decorated with antique furniture. There are temperature control panels at each doorway. Nick takes them into a pink bedroom facing the rear garden, with a four-poster bed and two walls stacked from floor to ceiling with serious-looking hardbacks. A bunch of fresh roses blooms fragrantly in a black-and-white jasper vase, depicting what seems to be a homoerotic Greek scene, on the walnut art deco dressing table in front of the window. The floor appears to be black leather. Nick suggestively opens the door to an antique rosewood wardrobe chiming with empty hangers.
“Drinks in the garden in fifteen minutes?” he says.
“Sounds good,” Jesse and Owen reply at once, and Nick leaves them to it.
“I always forget the way I end up feeling like I live in a complete shithole every time I come here,” says Owen, ripping off his clammy T-shirt and taking their toiletries into the en suite bathroom.
“Are those the original Scott Moncrieff translations of Proust?”
Jesse crosses the room to pluck out the first volume of Swann’s Way, blowing the dust off the top as Owen always does.
“It wouldn’t surprise me in the slightest,” Owen calls from the bathroom whilst washing his face and hands.
“Have you seen them before?”
By the smell, they haven’t been opened and read for some time. They belonged to Howard St. John, dated January 1923.
“We had those exact same full first editions at my college library,” says Owen, coming back out still topless and pushing back his hair.
“Who was Howard St. John?”
“Nick’s great-grandfather. Very eccentric and odd, reclusive man. Left London to escape the Great War, then when it ended, sent his wife and sons back while he stayed here alone to write until he died. Completed a couple of quite good novels, but wasn’t nearly productive enough to account for several decades of voluntary exile. His huge stacks of poetry though, discovered after his death, reveal him to have delighted in the company of young, hung, full-of-cum farm lads, some of whom he might even have had on this very bed,” he says, pushing Jesse down onto it.
* * *
—
They eat a delicious lunch of barbecued sea bream and fattoush salad, mostly listening to Nick and Owen bitch on about various of their Trinity contempo
raries while racing to the bottom of a 2015 Pfalz labelled if you are racist, a terrorist or just an asshole, don’t drink my sauvignon blanc, after which the poet and his editor, without a word, retire to their literary business in Nick’s study.
“There’s a market on this weekend, about a half-hour drive away,” Jean-Alain suggests to Jesse while they clean up in the ultra-modern, white-clean kitchen, like a set from a sci-fi film. “It’ll be mostly all shit but there’s a good organic store in the village I wouldn’t mind picking a few things up from for dinner. Do you collect anything?”
“Books? Records?”
“Then we could go there, if you want. On the way back we could stop off at the pond. Did you bring any swimwear?”
“I didn’t.”
“Ha-ha, you might not need any; the boring bastards here hardly use it. The pond, I mean. Just in case, I’ve probably got some old ones that don’t fit me any more from when I was a skinny bitch like you. You wanna see my wardrobe?”
Nick and Jean-Alain’s bedroom is also floored with black leather. The walls are rendered in polished light grey concrete with a hint of pink, so the room looks like a luxury version of a Genet prison cell, with roses cut from the garden on the mahogany chest, and in one corner, a giant chandelier of crystals draping down to the floor and pooling. That corner is also given to books. The light shining through the fragments of old stained glass casts coloured panels on the walls and the very large four-poster bed, which Jesse for a moment imagines himself being allowed to enter through its white lace curtains, like a groom handling the layered skirts of his new wife’s wedding dress. He imagines Jean-Alain ready and waiting within, naked and showing his arse, watching over his shoulder as he climbs in. Jean-Alain throws open the mirrored doors to a whole scene of leather, kilts, harnesses and the studs and straps of bondagewear.
“None of this fits any more,” he says, rifling through and picking out the odd skinny trouser leg, the odd leopard-print mankini. “Can you believe my husband and I almost never have sex, now? Well, we did last night, but…”
“Why do you have so little sex?” Jesse laughs.
“Babes. Marriage. Don’t. It will be the death of your sex life.” He is speaking at a volume, with the window open, as if Nick isn’t just the other side of the house having a quiet and serious work discussion. “You’re lucky to catch me here, I only do one weekend a month. This place?” He rolls his eyes. “Babes. You ever been to our house in London?”
“No, where is it again?”
“De Beauvoir. It’s on four floors. Dungeon in the basement all the builders fucked me in when they were finished. Amazing. I usually spend weekends alone there. Well, not alone, exactly.”
“So I guess you guys are in an open relationship?”
“Babes, 24/7/3-65! Aren’t you? I would die!”
“We talked about it at the beginning and said it would be fine. Are you on PrEP?”
“Of course, babes! I was first in the queue! So you both see other guys?”
“Well, I do.”
“And him?”
“I don’t actually know.” Jean-Alain must have seen that Jesse was lying when he said, “Or care.”
“How long have you guys been together now?”
“Coming up for four years.”
“Babes, wait until you’ve been together for twenty. Like, Nick won’t even fist me, for fuck’s sake. I’m like, you’re my husband, fist me now! And he’s like, do you mind, I’m reading this poem by Ezra Pound for like the one million eight hundred and ninety-six thousand four hundred and forty-fourth time go to sleep and I’m like, fuck Ezra Pound! Pound me! Anyway, it’s a gorgeous afternoon so let’s get the fuck out of here. I’ve got like fifteen thousand pairs of swimwear in here. Let’s see. No. Uh-uh. Ooh! Try these. Yay, perfect! Do you ever go to the men’s pond at the Heath? There’s a nudist beach in Suffolk but it’s a bit of a drive and I have to be back to cook dinner for that lazy bastard and his guests coming this evening—and for you and Owen obviously! Actually it’s a naturist beach so it’s full of elderly people and kids so, I don’t know if that floats your boat or not but I’ll pass thanks.”
* * *
—
The English countryside is beautiful. Everyone knows that. Suffolk is no different. The narrow lanes. The quietness, encroached on only by the soap opera wittering of tiny unseen bird families. The sense that people live a good life, eat well from their own land and are strong and healthy. The clean air the children spend their whole lives breathing. The colours and gradients of fields growing different crops. The cutesy little road signs. The proliferation of buildings more than three hundred years old. The castles and stately homes. The vast numbers of churches for such a lightly sprinkled populace. The wildflowers filling every crevice with colour. But it is also quite oppressive. It is hard to find another black face, any face of colour. A white person can go to Suffolk and blend in. A black person from the same place as that white person is assumed not to be local. If not a local, then an alien. If an alien, then someone not versed in local customs, a potential contaminant, someone to take umbrage with or else completely ignore.
From what Owen has told him, Jean-Alain’s father is a Lebanese doctor who fled the civil war in 1975 to work in France, where he met Jean-Alain’s mother, a fashion journalist. Jean-Alain and his sister went to international school in Paris, before he trained with the Architectural Association in London, while she studied languages at Columbia and now works for UNICEF. Their parents have retired in Greece. Jean-Alain is as foreign as most folk in Suffolk are used to.
Jesse has never found the countryside relaxing. It makes him anxious. He feels he has to explain his presence to everyone he meets. He has to smile at everyone extra broadly so that people smile back. He has to speak extra clearly and with cut-glass diction so that he doesn’t have to repeat himself. It’s not cum on, buzz but do you not also wish, dear Cuthbert, that the advertised 88 route might appear with marginally increased regularity on such brisk winter mornings? And still people look at him like he’s got three heads, and laugh.
“You okay, babes? You’re really quiet.”
Jean-Alain is swinging the Range Rover around corners like it’s a go-kart, playing the sort of unmentionably dull, overplayed, copycat early 2000s R&B that made Jesse lose interest in the genre for a decade.
“Yeah, I’m okay.”
“Tired? Babe, you’re on holiday. You should relax.”
“No, no, it’s cool.”
“What’s going on? Is everything okay with you and Owen?”
“Yeah, everything’s perfect.”
“Are you sure? You can tell me, babes. I know what it’s like, obviously, being a person of colour in a relationship with a white man. Especially like a proper upper-class, English white man. If we didn’t hate each other so comfortably I would’ve left him a long time ago. We wouldn’t be married, because I don’t for a minute believe he thinks of us as genuine equals. I’m a trained architect. I’m part of the furniture at Foster & Partners. My salary is more than he will make in ten years, not that he wouldn’t have greater earning potential than me if he pulled his fucking finger out. You know how an upper-class white man can just put on a suit and tie and walk into any bank and back out with a million pounds? You and I could never do that, even with the same or greater qualifications.
“If I left him, babes, I’d be fine. He’d make a million in a second, but would he be happy? Babes, no. His personal life would fall to pieces until he could find another boyfriend-stroke-servant to move in with him, cook his food and make it okay for him to go retire to his horrible, toxic, racist, complacent, inbred, white supremacist homosexual world of high poetry. His imprint is the ultimate white gay vanity project; he only publishes white gays he thinks are too good for Faber. I’m telling you, once white gay men have automated the world so that robots do absolutely ever
ything for them, found out how to make their own little white male babies and made it legal to fuck each other’s teenage sons à la ancient Greece, they won’t need anyone else. They’re gonna kill us all, babes. When the water runs out and the place is cooking because of the climate they’re gonna look round and be like, Who’s got all the money? Oh well, let’s just round up all the brown people, the women and non-white gays and push the fucking button. That’s why even in this whole post-post-postmodern age you’ve got the fucking KKK back, I mean, look at the thing they’re about to nominate! They make us fall in love with them and subjugate ourselves to their legend, but they will never allow us to share in that unless it suits them, unless it massages their salvation. We will always be something other, something inferior.”
“Wow, you really needed to say that,” Jesse says, agreeing with most of it but noticing the flaw in his argument that straight white men might have something to say about.
“I really fucking did!” He bangs the steering wheel, and laughs. “You know when you don’t realise what you think until you’ve said it?”
“But I genuinely don’t feel that way about Owen. I know exactly what you’re saying, not that I think someone like you could be trapped unless you wanted to be, but that’s not what I’m going through, because my boyfriend has that awareness. There’s nothing he can do about being white, but he knows he has to be absolutely aware of his privileges at all times. He knows he is part of a group that has to give up some of its privileges, and he knows that having the choice to be able to give up some of his privileges is also a privilege. I mean, he recently turned down the Head of Department job at his university and nominated someone else highly qualified who is a woman of colour, and she got the job, which was as much as he could’ve done for her, because he understands it’s about voices being heard in the right places. I know exactly where you’re coming from, though. I had this Tumblr account that I had to delete. I was following all these Black Lives Matter blogs, all these African-American black history blogs, and the stuff I was learning was the real truth. From top to bottom. How white people have turned everything to their favour. How they have written and rewritten and reedited history to put themselves in the place of God, using the Bible…”
