Adam: A Sensuous Coming of Age Tale (21 page)

‘
Could you play something else – just a nightcap, you know?’ wheedled Michael. Gary laughingly said, no, of course he wouldn’t, and then changed his mind. There was a piece he was thinking of including in his next season of recitals once he started playing again in the autumn. They could hear him try it out, if they wanted, and tell him what they thought. He would have to play it from the score, though. Of course everyone said, yes, they wanted to hear it, and Adam was despatched upstairs to fetch what Gary called the ‘dots’.

The piece turned out to be Liszt’s shimmering transcription of Schubert’s Erl-king.
Gary explained the story for the benefit of those who didn’t know it before he began, quoting some of Goëthe’s text in Grman and English. Then as he played the story came to life. They heard the drumming hooves as the lone horseman gallops through the night, saw the rainswept landscape of fen and gnarled alder trees, heard the bewitching voice of the Erl-king himself as he tries to lure the rider’s boy away from his father with promises of music and banquets in an unseen other world. The Erl-king’s tone becomes more menacing.
Ich liebe dich, mich reizt deine schöne
Gestalt
(I love you, your beautiful form excites me)
und bist du nicht willig, so
brauche ich Gewalt
(and if you’re not willing, I’ll take you by force.) By the end, when the hoof-beats first race and then crash to a stop with the sinister spirit’s victory, child dead in father’s arms, Adam’s hair was prickling on the back of his neck. Looking at his friends he guessed they felt the same sensation. Nobody spoke for a moment and when Gary looked round for his plaudits none came. In the end he had had to break the spell he had himself woven by a laugh. Then they all talked about ghosts until it was decided by general agreement that it was bedtime. The three adults went first and the boys followed up the stairs a minute or two later, Adam going first. Halfway up, he jumped, startled, at the touch of a hand on his shoulder and was then very surprised to feel a gentle kiss on the back of his neck. This must be one of Michael’s jokes and Adam spun round to have a laugh with him. But Michael was nowhere to be seen. It was Sean whom he found himself facing, Sean who had kissed him. He had to repeat that thought to himself in order to believe it. Sean had kissed him.

Sean looked somehow changed, no longer his confident laid-back self.
There was a note of vulnerability in his voice as he said, ‘Can I sleep with you tonight? I mean, not just like last night, I mean …’ He couldn’t finish.

Adam knew what he meant.
Knew but could not take it in. Did Sean have any idea how Adam felt about him? How he dreamt about him and entertained him in his most private fantasies. How he would never have dared to ask Sean the question that Sean had just asked him because he knew it was a dream that would never come true. And now Sean, imagining that he exposed himself most painfully to a rebuff, was diffidently asking
him
. The mountain was begging to be allowed to come to Mohammed. The roasted chicken was pleading for permission to land in his mouth. He just stood and stared and Sean stared back looking more miserable by the second. Then Adam slowly enfolded Sean in his arms and said, ‘I’d like that very much, Sean,’ marvelling that he managed to get any words out at all, let alone make a coherent selection, while Michael emerged from the downstairs loo and started up the stairs below them.

ELEVEN

As
Jennifer drove the three boys over to Christophe’s barbecue the next morning under a sapphire sky Adam was still on an almost unimaginable high. His memory of last night was crystal clear and he ran the details over and over in his mind, partly to savour their sweetness repeatedly while they were still fresh, and partly in the way that he would memorise a piece of music so as to preserve it in his memory bank for ever.

Michael
had not been slow to sense the new state of things between Adam and Sean when he joined them on the stairs, and he had made his own way to bed with no more than a minimum of acerbic comment. Adam had a strong sense of action replay as he waited in bed for Sean to join him, though this time his eyes were wide open and focused on those new parts of Sean – the hard and furry parts – that he had not seen before. In bed together they had both been overcome with nerves. Adam could hear Sean’s teeth chattering just as he felt his own uncontrollable shivering, but somehow that shared reaction had helped to relax them as they lay tense, side by side like two guardsmen on some bizarre horizontal sentry duty.

Adam
was determined not to be the first one to make a move. Maybe Sean had had the same intention. But at last Sean did move. He put an arm over Adam’s chest. And Adam, with an involuntary gasp that cruelly made public his emotion, seized it, briefly kissed the back of it and then drew it down to where he most wanted it to be. Then with his own hand he began to explore Sean.

Sean
was nearly without hair on chest and stomach but his pubic fur was soft and thick as a fluffy animal. Adam automatically assumed, on the strength of his knowledge of Sylvain, that anyone older and bigger than he was would have a correspondingly longer dick and was slightly surprised to find that this was not always the case. Sean’s was thicker than his, especially around the base, but slightly shorter. Adam wasn’t quite sure whether he was reassured by this discovery or not. At any rate Sean had a comfortingly heavyweight pair of testicles, the size and feel of Satsuma oranges, to set it off.

If it had momentarily crossed
Adam’s mind that Sean would masterfully turn him over and fuck him noisily while the duvet slid to the floor and Michael looked on in awestruck silence, the idea vanished pretty quickly. Despite the hardness and size of his muscles Sean was surprisingly gentle in bed and, perhaps less surprisingly, relatively unadventurous. Perhaps he was inhibited by Michael’s presence in the next bed. Only the sudden wetness of his fingers alerted Adam to Sean’s rather quick ejaculation, but at least Sean was gentleman enough to make sure that Adam came too a few seconds later. Then for the rest of the night they had snuggled close together (though there was hardly much choice for Sean there) and Adam had the sublime experience for the first time in his life of waking in the morning with someone else’s arm around him – and of it being Sean’s.

The car crossed the bridge
– the frogs’ bridge, Adam now called it – at the head of the lake and began to nose along the eastern shore. Here Adam noticed the alder trees, now in full leaf, with their twisted branches, that grew by the water’s edge and he thought back to the spooky Erl-king whose beguiling voice had seemed so real in Gary’s playing last night. …
und bist du nicht willig, so brauche ich Gewalt.
It was just a fairy-tale, of course. You couldn’t really be spooked away from your parents and friends. Certainly not in the broad light of day. There was nothing at all sinister in the landscape they travelled through now.

Adam
found himself scanning the far side of the lake as the dam came into view, a thin line framing the edge of the water. Was there a lone figure cycling along the top of it in silhouette? Adam couldn’t be sure. For a moment his heart ached for Sylvain. He would explain to Sylvain about last night, he would have to. Sylvain would understand. No he wouldn’t. Why should Sylvain understand when he, Adam, didn’t understand himself? For comfort he reached out to Michael who was next to him in the back seat and laughingly tousled his hair.

It had been
Michael’s turn, earlier that morning, to leap into Adam’s bed as soon as Sean had – obligingly first again –) headed out to the bathroom. Adam had pleasured him with a mixture of feelings. Michael did not bother to pull the duvet over them so that their activity was very much in Sean’s face when he returned from the shower. Michael had actually grabbed at his hand and boldly suggested that he join in. ‘ I’d rather not,’ Sean had replied rather crisply and then pointedly ignored them while he got dressed. The atmosphere between Michael and Sean had been a little tense at breakfast, although they had enjoyed a novel treat in the form of golden honeycomb salvaged from the wreck of what Adam called ‘the beehive in the bedroom’. Adam had had the feeling that he alone was flying above the weather, flying without understanding the mechanism that had propelled him into the stratosphere. Yet somehow he had achieved it. He had slept with Sean.

They arrived at
Christophe’s house. The dogs barked as usual and overhead the kites banked and yawed in the jewelled air. All was the same as before and yet nothing was. …Although there was one change in the garden: the swimming pool excavations had been started but come to a halt as a result of some unforeseen difficulties with the subsoil; a massive unsightly mound of flint and clay filled a quarter of the garden but no-one, young as they all were, was ill-bred enough to notice.

Adam
would have liked to spend the whole time shoulder to shoulder with Sean, in a public parade of new-loverdom. Perhaps people would not ask them directly, but they would ask each other – Is that Adam’s boyfriend, then? Must be, I suppose. Didn’t know he was that way, but seeing the two of them together, like that… Mmm, quite a catch,
n’est-ce pas
?

This little daydream was punctured, however, by
Sean himself who wandered off with great self-assurance to talk to the girls at the party in a language of which he had mastered only a few words. Perhaps he needed to re-establish his heterosexual credentials for his own peace of mind.

Céline was there with her new man.
It was the first time Adam had seen him. Yes, he was handsome, no doubt about that, even if it was always relatively easy somehow to attribute good looks to the heir to a small industrial empire. But his looks were nothing, in Adam’s eyes, compared to those of either of the two men he loved: neither of the absent woodlander, Sylvain, nor his conquest of the previous night, Sean, who was wonderfully present, his fresh complexion glowing like a light among the bright female butterflies that quickly surrounded him.

Adam
had to make the best of it. He decided to feel flattered that the man he had been to bed with was the star turn among the girls. It vindicated his taste and enhanced the value of Sean’s desire to sleep with him. For not only Céline but all her girlfriends were flocking around the blond cricketer with his tongue-tied French and were emboldened by his beauty to try out their own shy English.

For a time
Adam lost sight of his other friend too. Michael seemed to hit it off well with Christophe and the two wandered away together, apparently finding much to say to each other, though in which language Adam could not tell. He found himself for a time in the company of Thierry who had taken on the role of
chef de barbecue
and was hovering over the red-hot embers and roasting-racks with impressively long pikes and tongs like a demon in a medieval depiction of the last judgement. ‘You haven’t spoken to my mother lately?’ Adam asked him.

‘
No, why?’

‘
Well that’s probably for the best. On the way here she was saying that if she saw you she’d give you a piece of her mind.’

Thierry looked puzzled.
‘ What am I supposed to have done to her?’

‘
Not to her, to me. And ‘supposed’ is the operative word. See my front teeth?’ He curled his upper lip like a dog.

‘
Mon Dieu
, how did you do that?’

‘
I told my parents you did it.’

Thierry’s eyes bulged.
A sausage burst with a hissing sound a tongs-length away. He took no notice. ‘You
what?
Why?’

‘
Because I couldn’t tell them what really happened. I had to tell them I was scrapping with someone. And you’re the biggest person I could think of. Verisimilitude,
tu comprends?
You will back me on this won’t you?’ And he dodged behind a group of people as Thierry seized a trident-sized toasting fork and lunged in his direction.

It was after the food and drink were finished and the party was beginning to wind down around mid-afternoon when
Adam finally caught up with Sean, though in fact it was Sean who had decided to come looking for Adam. He took Adam by surprise and plonked himself down on the grass next to him. Then he came to the point directly. ‘We shouldn’t have done that last night.’

‘
Oh,’ said Adam.

‘
You see,’ Sean went on, ‘I accept that you and Michael are gay, and you’re still my mates and it’s no problem. But I’m not. In spite of last night. That was a … an …’

‘
An aberration,’ supplied Adam. The word was fresh in his mind.

‘
Exactly. Not that I didn’t enjoy it. And I’m glad it was you.’ Sean took hold of Adam’s hand – it was only an inch away from his own – and gave it a squeeze. ‘But let’s forget it. Can we?’

‘
Sure,’ said Adam, trying to feel adult about it. ‘Let’s just forget it.’ But he kept hold of Sean’s hand, and Sean was too kind to withdraw it.

The jewelled day had faded like the dream it obviously was.
The Erl-king’s promised treasures disappeared in smoke. Sean had been the substance of Adam’s romantic fantasies for nearly half his life and of his sexual ones for nearly three years. Now the unattainable had been attained. He had shared a bed with Sean and they’d had sex. And it had been initiated by Sean, not forced on him by an over-eager Adam. Sean began it. Sean had actually asked him …. And now Sean said, ‘Let’s forget it.’