One for the Gods (The Peter & Charlie Trilogy) (24 page)

“You did. God knows what might’ve happened if we hadn’t been in public. But hell, kiddo, all that ended for me the day we said goodbye.”

“Peter? Still, you’re here. Won’t he think things?”

“Maybe. I admit I’m setting a bit of a precedent.”

“Tongues will wag. I can assure you of that. I’m not known here for my conversation.” Tony laughed and went to the table where the servant had left drinks and poured himself a glass of soda. “His Majesty will be furious. A rebuff to the king’s consort. I’ll have to spread the word that we spent an hour of bliss. Oh, Charlie. I’ve thought of you so much always. I’ve wanted you to know how your little hustler was making out. I can’t believe it’s really you. How about having a quiet dinner here? That party’s going to go on all night. I should stick around here long enough to tuck His Majesty in.”

Charlie accepted and Tony summoned a servant and gave orders.

“Are you off the booze?” Charlie inquired.

“I’m hitting thirty, sweetheart. Sacrifices must be made if I’m to go on living the good life. We mustn’t have any little sags or creases. His Majesty can’t throw me out. I’ve seen to that. But I must think of my idle hours. I don’t want to get used to hearing that word you just said.”

They dined in a small library off the living room, Tony having explained that the dining room was too big for intimacy. He told Charlie the story of his life in Europe, which was largely the story of being handed from one rich man to another on an ascending social scale, culminating in a king. They returned to the terrace for brandy. On the way, Tony showed him an array of silver-framed, signed photographs of familiar crowned heads. “It’s amazing to think that I’m related to them all by bed. Not bad, for a hustler.”

The memory of the tough, little street boy was difficult to keep in focus in the face of this smooth, stylish beauty, but Charlie was glad he had come. He had always made much of his distaste for the homosexual world but it had brought him Tony, their lives had touched, he had contributed largely to what Tony was now. It wasn’t a bad creation. He would be the butt of ugly jokes by right-thinking people, but if he were a woman, he would be deemed a success. He was a whore, but a whore in the accepted tradition of royal mistresses. Charlie couldn’t see that his being a man should make all that much difference. What was happening to his precious standards? In any case, none of this would have been of any interest to Peter. It was right and reasonable that they should expand their lives beyond the limits of their preoccupation with each other. He rose and took a turn around the terrace. “Are you planning to go back to the party?”

“Oh, I suppose I’ll pop in and see what new combinations have developed during the evening. His Majesty will be interested to hear. Besides, I want to meet Peter. Guy says he’s adorable and looks like you, except that he’s beautiful and you’re handsome. That’s the way he put it. I guess that’s why we girls go for you.”

“I haven’t been getting much sleep lately. I think I’ll skip it. Get somebody to introduce you to Peter. Tell him I’ve gone back to the hotel.” Let Peter have the whole evening on his own. It would be good for him, no matter what happened.

Tony rose and stood in front of him. Charlie put his hands on his shoulders and studied the exquisite mouth. Tony pulled him to him and lifted his head and their mouths met again and opened to each other. Tony’s body swayed against him and his hands roamed over his back. He pulled his mouth away breathlessly and dropped his forehead onto Charlie’s shoulder. Charlie ran his hand through his hair and held his head.

“Sure,” he said gently. “It could happen again, but it’s not going to. You don’t really mind, do you?”

Tony shook his head and lifted it and smiled up at him. “I’ll go back to the party and find a trick and the beast in me will be appeased. If I’m very lucky, it’ll be a little bit like you. Every now and then, it has been.”

Charlie looked at his mouth and ran a forefinger over it. “One of nature’s masterpieces. I hope I see it again. We’ll keep in touch, won’t we? We can send Christmas cards, at least. I’m really glad for you.”

They gave each other a little hug and smiled and broke apart. Charlie started down the steps.

“Charlie.” Charlie stopped and turned back. “I’ve always wanted to tell you. I really was in love with you for a little while. The only time I let that happen to me. But I had it. I’ll never forget it.”

“Take care, kiddo.” He went on down through the garden and out the gate. The policeman saluted as he left. He found the hotel without much difficulty and was surprised to learn that their room key had already been taken. He went up and found the light on and Peter lying in one of the beds with his back turned.

“You’re here already.” Charlie spoke quietly in case he was asleep.

Peter rolled over and lay on his back. There was a brief silence. “Why did you do it?” he asked in an expressionless voice.

“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 rhythm 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.