The Peter & Charlie Trilogy

by Gordon Merrick

  “Do what?”

  “Kiss that boy. The rest of it.”

  “You saw that? Because I wanted to.”

  “He is a beauty. What else did you want to do?”

  “I wanted to talk to him.” Charlie started to undress slowly. “I was planning to go back and join you, but I changed my mind and came home. He was going to tell you.”

  “That’s all?”

  “All? I can talk to a guy, even a beauty, without going to bed with him, if that’s what you mean. Maybe you’re right. Maybe I’m not very curious about boys’ bodies, although it’s hardly pertinent in this case. I satisfied my curiosity about him a good many years ago. He was ready to relive the past. I refused.”

  “Oh, Christ. You kiss a guy passionately in front of a whole crowd of people and then go running off with him and I’m supposed to believe you just wanted a little chat.”

  “Oh? Does it matter what we believe about the things we tell each other? We know inside what we’ve done.”

  “I see. The Chinese water torture.” Peter’s voice grew more positive as he went on. “I cheated on you once. I never will again, no matter what happens. You know it matters for us to believe each other.”

  “I’ve thought a lot of things matter that maybe don’t. I’m finding out.”

  “Is it part of finding out to do whatever we want to do, regardless of the other’s feelings?”

  “What’s wrong with that? Isn’t that pretty much how it’s always been? Have you been suppressing all sorts of hidden desires out of consideration for me? Aside from the ones you’ve told me about, of course.”

  Peter’s intimations of danger had materialized with shocking rapidity. It wasn’t so much what Charlie was saying as his brutally detached manner that hurt, especially after the last few days when surely they had been drawing closer, their beings more intimately intertwined than ever before. Was he able to hold him in front of Martha simply because he felt removed, detached, no longer deeply stirred by him? He was frightened and lost. “Everything’s been so wonderful between us for the last week,” he asserted to reassure himself. “Why do you want to ruin it?”

  Charlie had taken off his clothes. Peter’s eyes ran over the athlete’s body as he went to the other bed and stretched out on it. “I’m tired of the kid-glove treatment. You’re mine. You gave yourself to somebody else. I won’t let that happen again.”

  “Is that why you hold me all the time?”

  “Perhaps. Mostly, I hold you because I like to. It’s finally occurred to me that there’s no reason on earth why I shouldn’t. I’m trying to find out if we can make everything work right for both of us. Come here.”

  “Why?”

  “Because I want you to.”

  “I’m not sure I want to.”

  “Oh, come on. Of course you do. It doesn’t matter. I’ll come there.” He rose and crossed to Peter’s bed and dropped down beside him and took him in his arms and kissed him. Peter’s mouth opened to his and their tongues met and played together.

  Charlie pulled his head back and looked him in the eye. “I just kissed Tony like that. Some of his saliva is probably still in my mouth. Now it’s in yours. Does that disgust you?”

  Peter’s eyes widened with shock. “Yes,” he breathed.

  “Didn’t you ever kiss Jean-Claude and let me kiss you afterward? People are great germ carriers. Didn’t you do things with your body and then offer it to me? Perhaps you let me kiss your cock after you’d been fucking him. Did you?”

  Peter tore himself from him and clawed his way upright to the edge of the bed and covered his face with his hands. His shoulders heaved and a strangled cry broke from him. “Go on,” he gasped. “Make me feel so foul and dirty that I’ll never be able to let you touch me again.”

  Charlie swung himself up beside him and grasped his wrists and pulled his hands away. “No. I still want you. That’s the thing that sometimes comes close to disgusting me. I thought I wouldn’t, remember, but there’s no question about that now. Let’s face ourselves, for Christ’s sake. You started something that isn’t going to end that quickly. Maybe it’ll never end. I thought of leaving you, not for long and mostly when I was angry, but seriously for a little while. I don’t want to leave you, goddamn it, but I don’t want to stay with you if it means going on hiding everything we really are. I kissed Tony because I wanted to, but Christ, the hypocrisy—all those faggots eyeing each other and waiting to pounce. Well, I pounced. I didn’t happen to want him, but that’s aside from the point. Maybe it’ll happen with somebody I do want. What’ll I do then? I don’t know, but I’m prepared to find out, just the way you did. I’m so goddamn sick of pretending. I’m sure you are too. I know you’ve always wished I wasn’t so fucking buttoned up. Well, here I am, unbuttoned. You can damn well take the consequences.”

  Peter sat slumped over, his eyes closed, waiting to recover from this sudden expulsion from his fool’s paradise. He had thought the wounds had healed, but Charlie had bared them, still raw and bleeding. He straightened and opened his eyes and looked levelly at Charlie. “I’m ready to face anything if we do it together.”

  “We can’t always do things together. That’s another thing. We’ve been suffocating. We’ve been living our great dream of love and all the time it turns out you’ve been fighting temptations. I don’t know what you should’ve done because there’s a lot I’m just beginning to understand, but there’s something wrong somewhere. We’ve survived so far because we’ve been young and goddamn beautiful and nuts about each other. Yes. Narcissus. But we’re not going to be young much longer and things are going to change. I don’t know how, but I’m certainly going to think about it. And do something about it, if it seems necessary. So I hold you in front of Martha and go off with Tony tonight. Straws in the wind. In case you’ve noticed I don’t hold you in front of Jack; it’s not because I’m shy. It’s just because he’d probably think he ought to make a crack, and I’d beat the shit out of him and that would be the end of the trip. I do know one thing, now that Jean-Claude is over the dam. I feel so much for you, it goes so deep, it’s so complete and a part of me that if we never went to bed together again, it wouldn’t change. It’s good to know, but it’s a problem because I don’t want it to block out everything else. We need air, baby. So. Do you want me to kiss you the way I really feel it?”

  Tears had welled up in Peter’s eyes. He took a long difficult breath and smiled. “God, you certainly put a guy through the wringer. I don’t know whether I’m in or out from one minute to the next. Yes, I always want you to kiss me. The rest can wait till later.”

  “Yes, later.” Charlie put his hand on Peter’s hair and drew him to him. Their mouths met and their teeth clashed in their hunger for each other. Their hands moved slowly over each other until they both were having trouble breathing. They drew apart.

  “Let me—” Peter whispered.

  “Yes. Go on. Quickly.” Charlie took a deep breath, his eyes melting into Peter’s. “I want to make love to you. God, what an expression. As if you manufactured it. I want to drown myself in you.”

  The next day, Cassandra crossed the bay to Naples to take on water and fresh food. Charlie and Peter found that it was like a homecoming being back on board. Charlie felt a sort of family feeling even for Jack. Martha wanted to know all about their evening ashore. They told her about the meeting with Guy and about the party, making it sound quite proper and suburban. They lay overnight in an ugly corner of the noisy port and left the next day for the Straits of Messina. It was another long run of over two hundred miles. Charlie welcomed the deliverance from land. He was in charge once more, with nothing more complicated to decide than whether to let out or take in the sails.

  They slipped back into the familiar rhythm of their days. The winds remained light; Greece still seemed a long way off. Charlie and Peter had brought copies of Homer and Herodotus and Thucydides and they began to find time to read. To Charlie, the Iliad was particularly adapted to the r
hythm of the sea. The voyage acquired a new poetic depth that gripped him when he was awake and beat in his ears when he slept.

  They were in well-traveled shipping lanes now so they had to learn a new skill of judging other boats’ courses and staying well clear of them. It wasn’t always easy, especially at night. With no landmarks to aid, speed was often tricky to estimate. One day, when Jack was blithely steering on a collision course with a large steamer, Charlie had almost to wrest the wheel away from him before he could convince him of his error.

  With Homer drumming in his ears and the responsibility for the boat resting ever more firmly in his hands, he found himself rarely sleeping more than a couple of hours at a time. The dawn hours just after his watch were definitely devoted to sleep, but he sometimes interrupted them, too, with a turn on deck. He went up early one morning only an hour or so after Jack had relieved him. The first thing he saw in the half-light before sunrise was the hulk of a freighter passing startlingly close across their stern. “Jesus,” he muttered and looked back at the wheel for Jack. He wasn’t there.

  He sprang out from the hatch and saw him. He had made himself a nest of clothing and blankets on the deck just aft of the seat and was sound asleep. Charlie went charging aft, roaring. “Goddamn son of a bitch! Wake up, you stupid bastard. Of all the fucking asinine—”

  Jack sat up dazedly. “What’s the matter? What seems to be the trouble?”

  “You’re asleep, that’s the trouble, you stupid shit.”

  “Now, take it easy.” Jack shook coverings off himself and slid down onto the seat behind the wheel. “I may have dozed off for a minute—”

  “Dozed off? You’ve made yourself a fucking bed. Christ Almighty! I sometimes think you want to sink your goddamn boat.”

  “What’s all the shouting about? There’s practically no wind. She can sail herself in—”

  “What about that?” Charlie shouted, pointing at the tanker. “She can sail herself right into that. Is that what you want?” Charlie saw that Jack had lashed the wheel. He tore the rope off and shook it in Jack’s face. “If anything’s tied up around here, it ought to be you.”

  “I saw that freighter an hour ago. He could see us. That’s what we have lights for. Do you think he’s going to try to ram us?”

  “It’s stupid idiocy to go to sleep on the wheel. You have four hours a day when you’re supposed to be good for something. If that’s too much for you, let me know. I’m running the goddamn boat, anyway.”

  “Because you want to. I like to see a man doing a job well that he likes doing. I wouldn’t want to depend on you for navigation.”

  “Oh, Christ. You head south, you head east, you head south again. Some navigation.”

  “Why are you such a bastard, Charlie?” Jack asked conversationally. “I know you’re really a good guy. Why are you such a bastard on the surface?”

  Charlie studied him briefly. The skull looked strong, as did the regular weathered features, but he saw a slack weakness around the mouth and despised him for it. Charlie turned from him and scanned the horizon. The sun was just about to do its spectacular run up the sky. He dropped onto one of the benches and stretched his legs out in front of him. “There’s a breeze coming in from the northeast. You’d better be ready to get the boom over. I’ll help you with the sheets. From now on, I’ll stay up here till sunup. You can take over then. Peter will be able to sleep a little later.”

  “I’d like you to answer my question. Why do you always want to act the bastard? What makes you think you can get away with it?”

  Charlie sized him up with a flick of his eyes. Sinewy. Tough-looking. He hadn’t yet come within that category of “older men” with whom Charlie would consider it unfair to fight.

  “The fact is that I can get away with it,” he said coolly.

  “What makes you want to? That’s the question that interests me. You know, sometimes you don’t seem quite human to me. At the beginning I actually thought you might make a pass at me. I could understand that. That would be human.”

  “What in hell are you talking about?” Charlie demanded. All his muscles stiffened, but he remained in his relaxed lounging position.

  “You seemed to like me when we met up in St. Tropez. I know about you, of course. I thought you might make a pass at me and I would’ve understood. I wouldn’t have minded. I don’t go for that sort of thing myself, but I understand. It’s a perfectly natural human thing that happens.”

  The fact that Jack might actually be trying, in his misguided way, to have a heart-to-heart talk was the only thing that kept Charlie from hitting him. “Whether or not I’m a cocksucker is my business,” he said evenly. “But I’ll tell you one thing. If I were, you’d be the last man on earth I’d come anywhere near.”

  “Really? I thought for guys like you, a cock was a cock. I have an idea Peter might be interested. We’re real buddies.”

  “You son of a bitch. Are you trying to suggest you want it? Are you making some sort of a pass?”

  “That would be putting it a bit strongly. After all, Marty is damn good at it. I don’t have to look for it. Still, a change every now and then never did anybody any harm.”

  “Christ! I ought to throw you overboard and get it over with,” Charlie said, barely keeping his voice under control and not allowing his body to stir. If he let himself go, he was afraid he would throw him overboard.

  “You see? You won’t let up, will you? I’m trying to tell you I understand. I thought we could be friends.”

  “You haven’t said one word so far that suggests you understand anything about me. And I’m not looking for friends.”

  “Suit yourself. But all this he-man stuff, running the boat and everything. You do it damn well. But don’t you think you’re over-compensating a bit? You’re going to knock yourself out.”

  Charlie’s hands were clenched into fists. His teeth ground together. Don’t do it, he warned himself. Fighting on a boat was too dangerous. He sprang up and came to rest against the hatch door. The release of movement left him trembling all over. He took several deep breaths until he was sure he could speak. He looked astern. “We’ll get the breeze in a couple of minutes,” he said. “You can handle the fucking sheets yourself.”

  He lay in his bunk, still trembling with rage. He could save their goddamn lives, but all that really mattered to Jack was that he was queer. He couldn’t resist rubbing his nose in it. He thought of Martha. He could have her anytime he wanted; he was sure of that now. He ought to goddamn well fuck her and tell Jack about it afterward. The shit. An incompetent drunk. All rolled up in his nest like a goddamn baby. He punched his pillow with his clenched fist. Would he be able to go on with the trip after this? Hell, yes. He would simply extend and consolidate his control until Jack was consigned exclusively to his charts. His thoughts returned to Martha. It had become increasingly obvious that she wanted him, though she remained so easy and open and undemanding that he still hadn’t had a moment of feeling crowded or hemmed-in by her. She was his faithful lieutenant, almost as dependable as Peter. She had none of the predatory quality he associated with women. She was the most attractive female he had been on such intimate terms with. Her body was beautiful, her face sweet and appealing, her eyes adoring. He had the impression that making love with her would be a soothing, opulent celebration of physical pleasure. Something to think about. He had never known such selfless love. It commanded attention, reminding him of what he had said to Peter about needing air. It would put Jack in his place; he would have nothing left but technical title to the boat.

  She was there, just a few feet away beyond the bulkhead. He was strongly tempted to go to her now. They would be as private as if they were locked in a hotel room. Jack couldn’t leave the deck. Peter was asleep. In any case, Peter wouldn’t mind. It had always been understood between them that Charlie might want a girl. He hadn’t so far, but it could happen. He imagined the welcome she would give him and tugged at the silken pouch he wore and adjusted the
sheet to cover himself and give his sex room to expand. It did so as he thought of how often he had caught her eyes looking at him there.

  Neither he nor Peter ever stripped for bed on board. They both always woke up with erections. Their brief underpants offered meager concealment. Their sheets often slipped off them. Martha came and went while they were sleeping; it was very likely that she had seen them both in all their glory. If so, it hadn’t satisfied her curiosity. Her eyes were always on him, sometimes searching out his own, more often on his mouth as he spoke or roaming his body and settling on his crotch. Yes, it could happen. He wished he thought Jack would really care.

  Shortly after noon, they sighted Stromboli. It was easily identifiable: a plume of black smoke rose into the sky above its high peak. Within an hour, the morning’s breeze had died entirely. They lay in a flat, leaden sea, the rigging creaking slightly, as motionless as if the boat had been set in cement.

  They lay thus the rest of the day, with Stromboli smoking in the distance off their starboard bow. One of the rare areas of agreement between Charlie and Jack concerned the dubious practice of swimming off the boat unless it was anchored, but it was stiflingly hot and they threw a ladder over the side and swam frequently, keeping within easy reach of the boat.

  They lay motionless all night. There was a faint glow in the sky where Stromboli was. By midmorning the next day, it seemed to all of them as if no breeze would ever stir again. They were fixed for all eternity in this flat seascape, the black hull set in an expanse of leaden sea with Stromboli daubed in on the horizon. Charlie rigged an awning over part of the cockpit with a spare jib. He waited till they were gathered for lunch before raising the question that was on all their minds.

  “How long are we willing to go on sitting here?” he asked.

  “We don’t seem to have much choice,” Jack said.

  “I think we should set a limit on it. Tonight. Tomorrow morning at the latest.” Charlie addressed Peter and Martha. He had adopted a policy of addressing Jack directly as little as possible.