One for the Gods (The Peter & Charlie Trilogy) (12 page)

“You like me like this?”

“You’re a beauty, especially with the hard-on. Let’s see how long you can keep it like that.”

“As long as I look at you. I want to see you hard again. It is incredible.”

“Well, you—”

There was a knock on the door of the adjacent room.
“C’est toi, chérie?”
Jean-Claude called.
“Entres.”

“Tu es seul?”
It was Anne’s voice.

“Mais non. Tu vas voir.”
He smiled at Charlie. “Come. I want her to see you.”

“Like this?” Charlie glanced at the ludicrously naked sex, unflaggingly erect.

“Of course. She will be thrilled. You mean me? She has seen me like this many times. I want to know how she likes me without hair. Come.”

Charlie had never been physically modest. All right, he thought. Let’s see what this will lead to. He let Jean-Claude put an arm around his shoulders and conduct him back to the bedroom. As they entered, they seemed to crowd the room with male nakedness in the presence of Anne’s slight, child’s figure wearing a straight floor-length dressing gown. She seemed unconcerned by it. Her devouring eyes clouded as they fixed on Charlie’s.

“Oh, no. Not you. This is wrong.” She shifted her eyes to her brother and took a quick breath of astonishment. “What have you done to yourself? You are obscene.
Mon pauvre
Jeannot, this is very bad.”

“You mean this?” Jean-Claude asked, passing his hand across his lower abdomen. “What’s wrong? He says I am a beautiful statue.”

“He’s wrong. Has he done this?” She turned back to Charlie, her eyes full of reproach. “I think you are not a friend to my brother. Why is Peter not here?”

“You don’t understand,” Jean-Claude interjected. He hugged Charlie to him. “Charlie is my lover.”

“This can’t be. You’re in love with Peter. You must not play with love.”

“This is not play. You’ve never seen anything like him. No one could resist him. I’ve never felt the way I feel with him.”

Anne’s eyes swept to Charlie and returned to her brother. “I think you will suffer very much for this.”

Out of the mouths of babes, Charlie thought.

“Suffer!” Jean-Claude exclaimed. “He is perhaps the biggest man in the world. It is glorious suffering.”

“Peter is big enough and very beautiful,” Anne proclaimed.

She knows that? Charlie thought. Had they all been at it together?

“You don’t know until you’ve seen Charlie,” Jean-Claude insisted. “I will make him hard for you.”

He felt Jean-Claude’s hands on him and knocked them away and took a step toward Anne. “Are you really interested?” he asked.

“If Jeannot wishes it. Big is not everything. He must understand that. But of course, I am curious. I’m interested in everything about men.” She spoke in her characteristically expressionless fashion.

“You’ve seen Peter like this?” Speaking directly to her, looking into her eyes, made him feel more keenly his nakedness and his sex was responding to it.

“Only at a distance. To me, he looked very big. But so does Jeannot. Perhaps to a girl all men look big. I wish they would be erect always. It’s so thrilling.”

“You’re making me that way much faster than Jeannot could.” He knew there was no outrage he could commit that they wouldn’t have anticipated and accepted in advance. Her eyes dropped lower and his sex rose more vigorously under her examination.

“It is very thrilling. May I touch it?”

“Of course.” The contact of her small hand made his body give a slight leap and his sex swelled closer to erection. She stroked it slowly and wonderingly, almost fearfully. Something about her stirred tenderness in him. She was so small and lost. Her maternal solicitude for Jean-Claude touched him. He put his hand out and touched one of the small round breasts he had admired before. He had forgotten how sweet and soft a girl could be. It brought him fully erect. She gripped his sex and looked up. He saw color flood her face.

“Why do you do that? You love boys.”

“It’s not always all that simple.” They looked into each other’s eyes. Perhaps he could add a refinement to his torture of her brother. “Why don’t we make love together?” he said.

“I’ve always dreamed of having one of Jeannot’s lovers. It would make me feel even more a part of him. When will you come see him again?”

“Why not now?”

“I must prepare for you. You look as if you could give me a baby very easily. Can you come back later?”

A baby? He felt an extra little pulsing ache in his sex as she fondled it. “Of course. I have some things to do. I want Jeannot to go with me, but he can bring me back.”

“You will be kind with him? He is very sensitive. He’s—his spirit is delicate.”

“I know what you mean.”

Jean-Claude moved in close beside them and put a hand with his sister’s on Charlie’s sex. “You see,
chérie
? Isn’t he incredible? Wait till you feel him inside you. You will be his, too. We will both be his.”

“I must go now,” Anne said. “If Charlie wanted you without hair, perhaps it is all right. You are both very thrilling. I will wait for you.” She turned and left them.

Jean-Claude clung to his sex and looked at him with longing. “Come. You are so hard now. You will have me again.”

Charlie pulled his hand away. “That was for Anne. Get dressed. We have to go.”

“Where are we going?”

“I want to take the car home. You bring yours. Then we’ll tell Peter what’s happened.”

“You’re going to tell him?”

“Of course. We’ll tell him together. He ought to know it’s all over as far as he’s concerned.”

“You’re going to leave him?”

Charlie’s breath caught and he clenched his jaws till the spasm passed. “Come on, damn it. Do you want me or Peter?”

“You, of course.”

“Well, then we’ll have to tell him.” He brushed past him and began to gather up his clothes. Anne had left him firmly aroused; he smoked a cigarette and waited for the feel of her hand on him to pass so that he could put on his shorts. He felt suddenly as disoriented as if he had survived a fit of madness. If everything that mattered in life was finished, why go on with this ugly little comedy? He pulled his clothes on. Jean-Claude had disappeared into the bathroom. He considered slipping away, but Jean-Claude’s submission drove him to devise some ultimate outrage. He wanted to rub Peter’s nose in the squalid mess he’d made of their lives. He called. The boy appeared in the bathroom door, fully dressed.

“Have you got your swimming things?” Charlie asked, letting his eyes slide past him. “I want to spend some time on the beach. You’ve got to get that bare patch sunburned like the rest of you.”

“We’ll go where everybody can see us together?”

“Of course.”

“Oh,
mon amour—”

“Let’s get the hell out of here. Come on.”

They went out into the hot day. Jean-Claude drove his car out of a shed at the side of the house and they set off, Charlie leading, back around the town and out through the vineyard to the rented villa. As he approached it, his heart began to beat so fast that he had trouble handling the car. He got out with difficulty and waited for Jean-Claude to join him and they went to the house together. Peter was waiting for them under the grapevine that covered part of the terrace.

“I see. I might have known it,” he said to Charlie, without looking at Jean-Claude. “I guess I did, when Yvonne said you’d gone to town. Well?”

“Oh, we’ve had our moment of truth. I planned to beat the hell out of Jeannot, but it turns out you’re the one who deserves the beating.”

“Is that what you’ve come for now?”

“No. Beating’s not much fun. I worked things out more interestingly. Tell him what happened, Jeannot.”

“This morning? Everything?”

“Of course. Just because he’s a sneak and a liar doesn’t mean we have to be.”

“He made love to me. It is the great experience of my life. We are all his now—you, me, even Anne.”

Peter hadn’t taken his eyes off Charlie. “You really have to make your points, don’t you?” he said. “It couldn’t be a quiet death, could it? You have to jump up and down on the corpse and cut it up into little pieces.”

“I suppose you’re referring to your sad little affair with Jeannot. Tell him how you feel about him now, Jeannot.”

“It’s very difficult. I think now I’ve been in love with Charlie all along from the beginning. I think I loved you because you are his. I—”

“Drop it, Jeannot,” Peter said without looking at him.

Charlie could see the hurt going back deep into his eyes. He could barely force himself to look at him; tears stung his eyes and his throat ached with them. “Well, that about covers it,” he said, grinding his voice out with difficulty. “If you two want a little farewell kiss, I’m going upstairs to get some things.”

He left them and returned in a few minutes carrying swimming trunks and a towel and a clean shirt and shorts for later. He found Peter standing beside the door with his hands in his pockets. Jean-Claude was on the other side of the terrace and sprang into place beside him, as if for protection.

“What’re you planning to do?” Peter asked in a dead voice.

“We’re going to spend the day together. And the night too, probably. What do you think, Jeannot?”

“Oh, yes,
mon amour.”

“If you go, you won’t find me here when you get back.” Peter said in the dead voice.

“That’s the risk we take, I guess. I probably would’ve said the same thing last week if you’d told me your plans for Nice. Come on, Jeannot.” Charlie took his arm and they left the terrace.

“Charlie,” Peter cried out.

The voice cut into his heart. He gripped Jean-Claude’s arm and speeded up. He dropped into the car and took a long difficult breath. “Let’s go out beyond Tahiti where we don’t have to wear anything,” he suggested with a harsh attempt at making it sound like something he wanted to do.

They lay out on the enormous sweep of beach, naked under the sun, with their swimming trunks tucked between their legs to protect their sexes. At a distance, they could see other naked figures, groups of men and girls, couples in various combinations. Charlie waited for the sun to anesthetize him. Everything hurt deep inside him. Seeing Peter had knocked all the props out from under him, shamed him, crippled him. It was finished, nothing could ever make it right again, but he hurt in the very roots of his being.

Life was over, but he was still alive. What was he going to with all the time that was left? He had already told himself and could go on telling himself that he should forgive Peter one transgression when he himself had committed so many, but reason didn’t prevail. Feelings weren’t subject to will; he couldn’t will himself to want Peter. The thought of Peter eagerly taking this big, deranged boy in his arms told him that he would never want him again. And how did he know that Jean-Claude was the first? It was the loss of trust that hurt the most, the discovery that the perfect truthfulness he had always believed in was an illusion. If he could manage an intrigue here, he could have done so over and over again in New York. The pain was real, stemming from an abnormal heartbeat and whatever organs pumped bile into the stomach, if that was what it was, but also from a blockage of the mind, a weight on his soul, so that he couldn’t think clearly and he hurt all over, a pervasive pain, dull but almost unbearable.

He shifted about on the sand so that he came into contact with Jean-Claude. He recoiled, although he scarcely registered whose body he had touched, and went on feeling, rather than thinking, about Peter. He had never reproached him in thought or word for anything he might have done when they were apart. Fastidious. Peter was much too fastidious to be capable of whoring, but when he had been on the town during Charlie’s ill-fated marriage he had made no bones about accepting expensive gifts from his lovers. He had done whatever he had done (Charlie had never known what) to have a very large sum of money settled on him by a rich benefactor. Charlie had met the benefactor and had known that Peter couldn’t have been involved with him physically for pleasure, so perhaps there had been a touch of whoring, but Peter had been on his own and Charlie had felt it was none of his business.

Charlie’s later exploration of the homosexual world, when he had still been successfully celibate, had been an attempt to bridge a gap in their shared experience. The bars he went to were bars he had heard Peter mention. When he found a new one, he wondered if Peter knew it. He observed the never-ending hunt for new partners; he repulsed the advances of many attractive young men. He gained his first insight into what Peter’s brief life away from him had been. Even if Peter’s part in the bad trouble with Hal had been less innocent than he had always believed, he would have understood. Loneliness wore down resistance. Solace was so readily at hand. All the more reason to set the highest standards and, at least when life was running its normal course, adhere to them. All the more reason why he could find no forgiveness in himself now.

When he had received Peter’s distraught telegram from California, he had immediately sent Milly away even though he had just arrived to spend the night. Milly had been sweet and understanding: he had already lectured Charlie on fidelity. “I’m glad it happened with me, but it shouldn’t have happened with anybody. I feel guilty for enjoying it so much.”