The Marble Quilt Page 3

  Yes, apparently, for Wellington readily agrees to the plan.

  The next morning a feverish Bosie climbs from his bed and peers out the window. Behind a yew hedge, Wellington is waiting for him. Already Harold has brought the ladder, leaving it, according to Bosie’s instructions, propped against the wall. Now he opens the window—the sash screeches loudly—and his friend clambers up and through. Dawn: a late summer breeze freshens the fetid atmosphere with the scent of grass. Wellington hasn’t combed his hair. He smells tired. Small clots of what is euphemistically called “sleep” harden in the corners of his eyes. “Hello,” Bosie says, then, taking his friend by the hand, leads him toward the bed, which is still warm and slightly moist, as beds tend to become when the ill sleep in them. He sits down before Wellington, guides Wellington’s fingers to his swollen salivary glands. He anticipates by a hundred years an age when swollen glands will spell terror for men of his kind. But at that time, in that place, most men who desired each other didn’t even think of themselves as a “kind.” Not yet. It would take a poem written by Bosie before their love would learn the name it dared not speak.

  “Come on,” Bosie says. “Let’s get in bed.”

  Wellington hardly has time to pull off his shoes.

  “We have to make sure the infection takes,” Bosie goes on, pulling the sheets over them.

  “How?”

  “Like this.” And holding Wellington’s face between his hot palms, Bosie kisses him. Wellington, who has never been kissed before, is at first surprised, resistant. But he likes the sensation, the silkiness of the sensation, and, giving in to it, allows Bosie’s tongue to open his lips. It is all for the purpose of being together, after all, of being boys together, tremendous friends. Bosie licks Wellington’s teeth, licks his tongue, the rough surface of his lips. Wellington returns, repeats each gesture. So much early sexuality is mimicry. Do to me what I do to you, we think the other’s tongue is telling us. Yet there are some things he would like to do to Bosie that he hopes Bosie wouldn’t like to do to him.

  “Do you think it’s taken yet?”

  “Perhaps. Still, we can’t be sure.”

  “Anything else we might try?”

  “Yes.” And sitting up, Bosie runs his small hot tongue down Wellington’s neck, onto his chest; he opens Wellington’s shirt and licks the halos of hair around his nipples. Lower down, an erection pokes Wellington’s trousers: no surprise. As for Bosie, his nightshirt has ridden up. He turns around, grinds his pinkish behind into Wellington’s groin. The heat shocks. Wellington can’t help but grind back. Sensation floods him, and he ejaculates, soaking the front of his pants.

  Church bells chime. It’s six-thirty in the morning. Shadows creep toward the bed. In the hallway, the housekeeper is upbraiding a chambermaid for the way she has folded some towels. Hearing them argue, Wellington and Bosie laugh.

  “She’ll be coming for us soon.”

  “Yes.”

  “Do you feel any swelling?”

  Wellington presses his fingers against his neck.

  “I think so. I think I do.”

  Under the bedclothes, he takes Bosie in his arms. They doze. Soon there’s a knock on the door, and the housekeeper steps briskly through. “Good morning,” she says, then stops in her tracks. “But what’s this?”

  The boys laugh, pull the sheet over their heads.

  “Oh dear,” the housekeeper says. “I’ll have to fetch Lady Queensberry.” And does.

  “Wellington!” Lady Queensberry cries, rushing in a few minutes later. “What on earth are you doing here?”

  “He’s come to get sick so we can spend our holiday together.”

  “Wellington, get out of that bed right now. What kind of nonsense is this?”

  “But, madame,” the housekeeper interjects, “if he’s already been infected …”

  Lady Queensberry rubs her temples. Of her four children, she loves Bosie best. She is also starting to have inklings that he will bring her the greatest torment.

  “I must consult with Lady Downshire,” she concludes, and, leaving the boys to play in the feverish sheets, goes to her dressing room to write that eminence a wearied, apologetic letter.

  But the infection doesn’t “take,” and Wellington returns to Easthampstead. Bosie recovers; the boys head off to their separate schools. Wellington, who should have become the third Viscount Combermere, dies in the Boer Wars. Bosie makes a career of ruin and infection.

  Wellington didn’t live to learn how narrowly he’d made it out alive.

  I base this account on Bosie’s own, in My Friendship with Oscar Wilde—one of several autobiographies he published later in his life in the hope that he might “set the record straight” concerning his disastrous love affair with Wilde. Here the incident takes up the better part of a paragraph. Bosie explains that he “adored” Wellington, and that he thought Wellington “adored” him. He says that when he came down with the mumps, Wellington climbed through the window, undressed, and got in bed with him. They stayed together half an hour. Then Wellington departed “‘as he had come, an undiscerned road,’ by the window.”

  The rest (in particular the arrival of the housekeeper) is speculation, invention, perhaps even impudence on my part, since what I want to show up is the irony that lies behind Bosie’s inclusion of this episode in a work intended specifically to repudiate charges that he was more than a coincidental homosexual. Indeed, Bosie seems to see the episode with Wellington as yet one more example of the ordinary, virile boyhood he enjoyed before he met Wilde, who corrupted him. No, he says, I am not the rapacious brat whose greed and rage brought down the genius giant. On the contrary, he was the devil, he seduced my greatness. At heart I was just a normal boy.

  Of Wellington, he remarks in conclusion, “I look forward to being a boy again with him in Paradise one day not very far off. (When you go to heaven you can be what you like, and I intend to be a child.)”

  The Infection Scene

  Precedent: in Philosophy in the Bedroom, the Marquis de Sade’s usual assortment of libertines are having a fine old time buggering and encunting and whipping one another, when Madame de Mistival barges into their playroom. She has come to demand restitution of her daughter Eugénie. The sudden arrival of this righteous interloper cannot, of course, be tolerated, and as punishment Madame de Mistival is raped, both anally and vaginally, the service rendered by a syphilitic valet.

  Sequel: San Francisco, the mid-1990s. Two young men—their names are Christopher and Anthony; one is twenty-two, the other nineteen—move in together. They are powerfully in love, each convinced that he has found, in the other, the great, the only true friend he will ever know, the friend without whom his life can have no purpose. They cherish the reading (Dennis Cooper at A Different Light) that brought them together, worship the author under whose dark influence their story began. This was three months ago. In the meantime, because their friends might disapprove of their moving in together after such a brief courtship, they’ve taken to saying they’ve been “partners” for more than a year. And why not? They feel as if they’ve known each other for decades. Three months seems too brief a term to contain such abundant happiness. Theirs is the rare, the distinguished thing.

  Oh, how they delight in each other! Before they met, neither had much hope for anything. But now a future in which peace and passion go hand in hand seems to be opening out in front of them. In the normal course of events their relations would become fractious, their passion would grow stale, they would cheat on each other, part, not speak for years, meet again, and wonder at their rancor and folly. But the normal course of events is not to be followed. Not in this case. There is an interloper present. Both of these boys come from difficult homes; Anthony, the younger of the two, from a disastrous one. When he was sixteen he ran away. An older man took him in, offering shelter and drugs in exchange for sex. The older man begged Anthony to let him fuck him without a condom. On several occasions Anthony, blitzed out on ecstasy, relente
d. Now he is seropositive. Christopher is not. One will live, the other will die. To Christopher, this condition is intolerable. He will not let his friend die alone. Anthony has no symptoms, nor has Christopher ever witnessed the ravages of the disease. Like many of his age, Christopher is so scorched by despair that for him the prospect of “dying together” takes on romantic connotations, seems pleasant and cozy, like sharing mumps. Anyway, his life so far has given him few other reasons to want to keep living. His abstracted mother, when she isn’t working, has her alcoholic boyfriend to deal with, while his father is too busy with a batch of new children to spare time for this unhappy child of an unhappy, unwise, early marriage. All Christopher has is Anthony, and for Anthony, he decides, he is willing to make any sacrifice.

  One evening they go out to dinner. A Mexican place. Chicken mole, enchiladas, greasy tortillas. Christopher makes a proposition to Anthony, who is horrified. “I couldn’t,” he cries, and Christopher takes his hand.

  “Calm down,” he says. “Hear me out.” And he states his case. He speaks gently, persuasively. He says that he would kill himself if Anthony died, so what does it matter? We all have to go sometime.

  Anthony is moved. “You love me that much?” he asks.

  “More,” Christopher answers. At which point Anthony smiles. This love is the only good thing he’s ever known. A flower creeps through the cement of a blasted city, a blasted, postnuclear city: that is how it feels to him.

  They fix a date. Next Saturday, they decide, they will have sex. They will not use a condom. Discussing the details, Christopher finds himself becoming surprisingly aroused. Never in his life has anyone fucked him without a condom. In sex, as in all things, he has followed the rules to the letter. But now he suspects the rules to be a lie perpetrated by Dead White Males in order to suppress the freedom of gay people, who threaten patriarchy. Doesn’t he too deserve a taste of real abandon, release without restraint? He speaks nostalgically of “Stonewall,” even though he wasn’t yet born when it happened, even though “Stonewall” exists for him merely as grainy porn flicks, the actors mostly dead. Oh, how young he is! He sees the dead as a glorious fraternity into which he longs to be initiated. But he knows nothing of disease, much less of death.

  For the rest of that week Anthony and Christopher lead their lives as always. During the day they go to their jobs (one works at a video store, the other at a coffee bar), at night they walk together up and down Castro Street, or chat with their friends at the Midnight Sun, or watch MTV. By agreement, they do not have sex. They are saving up.

  Saturday arrives. Anthony is visibly panicked. “Are you sure you want to go through with this?” he asks Christopher over lunch—sprouts and avocado sandwiches at Café Flore on Market Street.

  “Sure as I’ve ever been about anything,” his friend answers, kissing him on the nose.

  That evening they cook a good dinner together: spaghetti with a sauce made from a recipe handed down by Anthony’s grandmother, who comes from Naples, and whose own mother was rumored to have been a witch. (Inspired by this heritage, he has dabbled in worship of “the Goddess.”) Then they have chocolate ice cream. Then they smoke some hash. Neither wants to lose his nerve.

  In the bedroom Anthony strips the spread off the futon, lights candles. Christopher has put Enya on the stereo; the songs bleed one into the other with a numbing sameness, like Gregorian chants. Altogether the atmosphere is early or even pre-Christian. The bedroom is a temple, the bed an altar. What is about to take place is ritual sacrifice, to which the pious victim offers himself up willingly. They watch each other undress. Because he knows it excites Christopher, Anthony has put on a jockstrap, letting his penis and balls out the right side. He is dark-haired, beefy, endomorphic. Whereas Christopher is taller, leaner. To be taken by a boy both smaller and stronger than himself excites Christopher inordinately. And now Anthony spreads him open on the bed, lifts his legs in the air. He takes the bottle of lubricant from the bedside table—but Christopher stops his hand.

  “Use spit,” he whispers.

  “Okay.” Anthony spits into his palm. Another rule broken.

  They are doing it now. Anthony is amazed at how much better it feels this way. Without the latex barrier, flesh slides against flesh. For the first time he understands what it was that the older man who infected him had been after: this sensation. This.

  As for Christopher, in his stoned state he imagines that his friend is a god hovering over him. Anthony is Apollo laboring in the sky. His voice is distant thunder. Steadily Anthony fucks him, then without warning grits his teeth; deep inside Christopher feels warm wet pulses. He imagines low tide on the Pacific. Waves receding. In the remnant tide pools, hermit crabs with their cargo of dead shells, anemones suctioned to the rocks, spiny mouths that close around his touch.

  It’s done. Okay, he thinks. This is what I wanted. And he reaches to embrace Anthony.

  But Anthony pulls away. He pulls away, stumbles to the window, opens it. Leans out, not speaking.

  Christopher sits up in the bed. What’s wrong? he wants to ask—and doesn’t dare. He knows the answer.

  For some reason a strange memory assails Anthony. When he was a child, on the last day of every school year all the kids in his class wrote their names and addresses on cards that they attached to helium balloons. Their teacher then led them outside in a kind of procession, the balloons trailing behind, above her, a leashed bouquet, and when they were all assembled on the playground, she cut the strings. The balloons rose up, masses that separated, as the children, cheering the onslaught of summer, rushed out the open gates to parents, school buses. Only Anthony hesitated. He wanted to wait until he could no longer distinguish his own balloon from the others. He wanted to wait until every last one had disappeared into a dot on the horizon, and the sky was empty again, like a blank page.

  Few of the balloons ever made it more than a couple of miles. Instead, for weeks afterward, he’d keep finding shreds of them twisted around the branches of neighborhood trees when he went on bike rides.

  Outside the window tonight the moon is bright, not quite full. Rounder than a balloon. Pearl gray. Behind him Christopher puts his hand on Anthony’s shoulders.

  “Don’t worry,” he says. “It’s what I wanted. More than anything.” Kissing his neck.

  But Anthony, at the window, is too busy calculating to listen. Six weeks for seroconversion, then the blood test, then a few more days for the results. Oh, the wait! They will wait the way girls wait to see if they are pregnant.

  “Of course, it might not take.”

  Don’t let it take, Anthony prays to his great-grandmother’s Goddess.

  “So just to play it safe, we’ll do it every night.”

  Silence.

  “O.K.?”

  “O.K.”

  “To play it safe.”

  “Yes.”

  Anthony closes the window on the moon.

  A Hotel Flirtation

  1889. A big hotel on the Côte d’Azur. String quartets, a promenade, parasols. Also a busy network of back hallways in which servants and staff played out their own dramas. No bathrooms, though. In 1889 plumbing was rare, even in the most elegant French hotels. The rich, like the poor, used chamber pots.

  When the tutor arrived that afternoon—dragged hither at the behest of his difficult yet enchanting charge—he gave his room a minute and thorough once-over. First he stripped the sheets off the bed and examined the mattress, in the center of which was a largish pink stain. Then he noticed a perfect circle of carpet near the plant stand which, unlike the rest, had not been leached of color by the sun. He should leave well enough alone, he told himself, it was always better to leave well enough alone—yet even as he spoke these words to himself, he was lifting the plant stand to reveal the expected discolorations, stiff to the touch. What had produced them? Various unsavory possibilities sprang to his mind, so that he became nauseated and, putting the plant stand down again, opened both windows and loosened his c
ollar. He was bony, in his early twenties, with thin yellow hair and the sort of constitution doctors of that epoch described as “delicate.” From an early age the tutor’s mother had warned him not to exert himself too much. He worried excessively (and probably needlessly) about germs. He thought he could smell an evil smell.

  The tutor loathes hotels. The hotel is neither public nor private space but some uneasy blending of the two. To live comfortably in a hotel you have to maintain the delusion that the room you occupy is actually your own. And yet this privacy is fictive. The walls are thin. Yes, you carry a key in your pocket, but you also know that somewhere in every hotel, someone else carries a master key.

  Hundreds of people sleep on the hotel mattress before it is retired—sleep, or do worse than sleep. The John Bull sweats; the bride spots the sheets with blood; the French doctor does not wipe himself. Some guests have actually had the audacity to die in their beds. Though the tutor doesn’t know it, and old Belgian woman died in his bed last March. For six hours her body remained in the fetal lock of sleep, until a maid came in with morning coffee. Screams brought the concierge running. Yet once the corpse had been removed, the hotel manager didn’t bother to change the mattress. After all, who would have been the wiser?