Perfect Freedom (26 page)

“You good, Robbie,” Rico said when tension had drained out of his body. “No girl do it good like you. You got beautiful mouth.” He ruffled his hair and stroked his cheek and pulled away and turned to his clothes. “I go quick. I get clean sheets and towels. You come talk with me this afternoon. I fuck you later. Hokay?” He settled the jersey around his hips and was dressed. His dark curls were tumbled about boyishly on his forehead. He stepped back to Robbie and touched his cheek again and flashed him a dazzling smile. “You too beautiful, Robbie.” He left with a swaggering little roll in his gait.

Robbie dropped back on his bunk, tingling with ecstasy, and waited for his excitement to subside. He could taste Rico in his mouth. He had fed from his body. Life was too exciting to grasp all at once. They were together, within reach of each other all day and all night; he worshiped Rico's body and could feel Rico succumbing to his. He knew everything now, or almost everything. He still wanted to feel Rico's mouth on him but accepted the possibility that it was something Rico didn't like to do any more than he wanted to take somebody the way Rico took him. He had been wrong about some things but he knew that that would always horrify him.

His mind hovered and strayed around a puzzle. There was a difference in the things he and Rico wanted from each other. Were his desires girlish? He didn't feel girlish. Nobody had ever called him a sissy at school. If anything, his classmates were a bit frightened of him. Nobody was frightened of sissies. He would probably discover in time how it all fitted into a pattern of normal human experience.

At lunch, he felt his idyll threatened by land. He and Rico had been isolated together on an eternal sea. Now there was talk of the hotel in Athens where he would stay with his parents for several days, of people whose names the admiral had given them to look up, of the sights they would see. Robbie's sense of time was restored and he was stunned to realize that their physical intimacy had started barely twenty-four hours ago. It had seemed a lifetime. With the dawning of a new perspective, he was able to convince himself that the revelation of the last two days was the product of circumstances that could never be repeated. He had probably already had the best the experience Could offer him. He knew who he was. He loved Rico but he knew he couldn't hope to be with him forever. The dark unimaginable spectre of homosexuality had to be kept at bay.

Rico was reassuring. He spent the afternoon speculating about all the girls he would find in Greece. If he didn't have a girl soon, he maintained, he'd go crazy or fall in love with Robbie. This was accompanied by uproarious laughter. He patted Robbie's bare bottom when it was available during the sunbathing ritual and continued to say that it was as pretty as a girl's, but he didn't touch his cock again even when Robbie let him see that it was hard.

During the night Rico came to him and took him vigorously, but now that Robbie knew the wonder of being able to give himself to a man, he was beginning to feel lonely again. He really was a substitute for a girl and not a completely satisfactory one. Rico didn't want his kisses. Rico would keep him within the bounds of normalcy.

The next morning was filled with the adventure of arriving in a distant and legendary land. After the long days of open sea, there was a touch of the miraculous about seeing it rising on the horizon ahead of them. They were soon part of an island landscape with a great mountainous land mass taking shape beyond.

“Do you suppose it's really Greece?” Robbie wondered. He was sitting with his parents in the cockpit. Rico was busy performing obscure chores with lines and chains and anchors. “What if somebody's made a mistake? We could be almost anywhere.”

“I hope it's not still Italy,” Stuart said with a grin. “Wherever it is, it's pretty exciting. That was quite a sail. You've enjoyed it, haven't you?”

“Lord, yes. It's been marvelous.”

Stuart had never heard him speak with such simple enthusiasm. He was delighted with the boy. He had been a good sport all the way. He had shed his standoffish superior airs and become an inseparable friend of the cocky Italian kid. He had acquired a new alert manliness, in sharp contrast to the dreamy poetic quality that Stuart thought of as his dominant characteristic. The cruise had paid off in a way that he had hardly dared hope for. After the years of his own consuming preoccupations and the estrangement he had felt as Robbie became a mother's boy, he hoped that he and his son would recapture the closeness they had had before Robbie's illness.

The days in the sun had turned him stunningly handsome. Or at least Stuart could see that he would be handsome when his beauty matured. He leaned across to his son and slapped his knee. “I don't know about you, but I'm not going to wait much longer to celebrate. There's just enough ice left to chill a bottle of champagne. How about you, old girl?” He turned to Helene and his approval of Robbie spread out to embrace her; she was largely responsible for the way the boy was turning out. She was looking stunning too. After the bad years, things were beginning to go right again. He hadn't forgotten the morning of their departure, when she had responded to the world outside her home for the first time in years. It was a development he intended to encourage. There had even been a touch of eagerness in her lovemaking on board. Something about being at sea seemed to strengthen bonds between people. He felt as if she were awakening from a long sleep. As usual, she turned to Robbie for her cue.

“What about it, my beloved?” she asked. “Shall we let him get us drunk at eleven o'clock in the morning?”

“Why not? We don't sail to Greece every day of the week.”

She had expected him to refuse loftily. He didn't usually enter into his father's games. There was definitely a change in him.

They were where they expected to be, at the mouth of the Gulf of Corinth. When they had dropped sail and the anchor and tied up to a dusty stretch of cement, Rico put the gangplank over the stern and Angelino played host below to a procession of shabby-looking officials while the Coslings drank champagne and sweltered in the airless somnolent port. There was no town of any consequence in sight, only a few decrepit buildings. When the champagne was finished, Robbie stood.

“I'm going to set foot on Greek soil,” he announced. He teetered out to the end of the gangplank and stood on shore. “My God,” he called back. “It's either the champagne or the motion of the ocean. I can hardly stand up. Greece is rocking.” He returned to the relative stability of the boat. Greece. Athens. He was suddenly overwhelmed by a sense of where they were. He felt a vivid new immediacy and meaning in things he had read in classic Greek literature. It was full of heroic friendships in which passion could be implied. It was probably the champagne that was playing tricks on him. He felt oddly excited and languid and amorous all at the same time. His mind was filled with thoughts of somebody who would worship his body with the fervent abandon that he had been ready to offer Rico. He dreamed of eager lips on his, of a tongue darting into his mouth. If you knew the delights of kissing, why not enjoy them? He almost wished they hadn't shared that staggering moment so that he wouldn't know what he was being denied. If there was anything wrong with what they were doing, all of it was wrong, not just some of it. He couldn't repress the special element in him that craved more than Rico would give him. Who would he find to satisfy it? Probably nobody. He was dreaming of the impossible—of finding a complete passionate love with a boy without sinking into the unspeakable depravity of homosexuality. Greek love. He had heard it mentioned without knowing what it meant.

Ice was delivered to the end of the gangplank. Rico and Beppo came and went on purposeful errands. Angelino saw off the last of the officials and water was brought on board. They were ready to go to sea again.

They went through the Corinth Canal at dawn and they were all on deck to see it. When they emerged from the incredible ditch, Rico touched Robbie's shoulder and the younger boy dutifully went below and undressed. In a moment, Rico joined him and took him.

Robbie found the act growing more mechanical and perfunctory. For the first time it didn't even give him an orgasm, not that Rico noticed in the throes of his own satisfaction. Was it only novelty that had seemed to fill it with glory at first? He felt increasingly safe from any unnatural tendencies that might be lurking in him. He had dreamed of much more than sex with Rico. Perhaps his mother had been right in dismissing lust as beneath him.

Athens was a welcome release from Rico's constant presence. There was so much to see. The Coslings met people. They were introduced to the King at a party. There were discussions of the ancient world with cultivated new acquaintances during which Robbie could display the refinement and sensitivity that his mother valued so highly in him. They played up to each other in public, drawing each other out to display their best sides. Helene found that he was helping her recover the social gifts that had grown so rusty with disuse. Stuart observed them affectionately, fascinated by their resemblance to each other and delighted with their popularity.

One morning at the Acropolis, whose eerie magic had drawn Robbie back several times, a good-looking young American engaged him in conversation. Small things about the stranger began to make Robbie nervous—an insinuating look in his eye, slightly effeminate mannerisms of speech and gesture, a tendency to touch him unnecessarily. When he invited Robbie to come back to his hotel with him (“I think we might have rather a divine time together”), there was no further doubt about what he wanted. Robbie was indignant. How could anybody suppose that he was “like that”? (The French expression for homosexuality, c
omme ça
, was the first that occurred to him.) It made him feel dirty and cheapened the unique and beautiful things he had dreamed of with Rico. He brusquely left the young American and went back to the hotel and took a shower, studying his body for flaws that he hoped time would correct, and wondering whether he should have found out what sex was like with somebody who was
comme ça
.

Athens was beginning to make him wonder if the dread stigma attached to being
comme ça
might be a recent step in human evolution. It apparently hadn't existed in ancient Greece, and perhaps didn't even today. He saw young men holding hands in the street. Plato had advocated the sublimation of love onto a purely spiritual plane. The point that Robbie's teacher at school hadn't dwelt on was that the love Plato was talking about was love between men. If Plato had felt the need to make a case for sublimation, sex must have had something to do with it. The classic idealization of the male form in sculpture stirred him deeply.

The Aegean awaited them. If they went to all the places that everybody said they mustn't miss, they would have to stay a year. They set off rather aimlessly, planning to include the major sites of Santorini and Rhodes and Crete and Delos in their itinerary. A study of the charts with Angelino indicated that they could put into port every night at different islands along the way. Rico greeted Robbie with boisterous affection after their brief separation and told him all about his triumphs with girls. He wasn't going to need a substitute if he could go ashore every night.

An island called Poros had kept coming up in conversations as a pretty place within easy reach for their first day's sail so they put in there in late afternoon after having been amazed along the way by the dimensions of the ancient world. Salamis, the scene of a great naval battle, was just outside the port of Piraeus. Aegina, once an important power and a respected ally of Athens, was a small humpy island they passed during lunch. Sparta, the capital of a great nation that had overpowered Athens, lay across a few misty hills on the Peloponnesos. The heroic events of antiquity had been enacted on a very small stage. Stuart wished that the European war everybody spoke of as inevitable could be reduced to such a modest scale.

A crowd of children gathered on the quai as they tied up in what appeared to be an inland lake but was in fact a small pocket of sea formed by the island's proximity to the mainland. In front of them, a whitewashed village sprawled haphazardly against a hill. For a few moments they were soothed by the sense of total peace that descended on them when the lines were secure and the sails down and the engine was off. They became aware of the crowd making way for a simply dressed elderly woman of commanding presence and enormously distinguished looks who approached the end of the gangplank and came to a halt.

“Welcome. Have you come from far?” she called in a rich cultivated voice.

Stuart moved out along the deck to meet her. He was immediately intrigued and impressed by her; she was such a grand lady to emerge from a crowd of urchins. “We sailed from France,” he said across the gangplank. “We've just come from Athens today. Won't you come aboard?”

“How kind of you.” She showed no signs of age as she stepped nimbly down the gangplank. “I'm Mrs. Dianopoulou. We don't get many foreign yachts here. You're a major event in our placid lives.”

Stuart introduced himself and turned to include his family. “There aren't enough of us to make much of an event.”

“The three of you? How charming. You're such extraordinarily handsome people. I have a house here. You must come and let me give you a glass of
ouzo
. I have friends with me. You'll give us an excuse to make an evening of it. Our pleasures are simple but we can give you a taste of Greek island life. It has a certain enchantment.” Her beautiful eyes gazed through and beyond them as she chose her words carefully and enunciated them with great precision. Her presence made everything a major event.

It was the beginning of an evening of sharp but dreamlike impressions. A small sputtering motor launch transported them across the inland lake. They headed into the setting sun and were deposited at a rocky promontory and clambered up to a garden on various levels planted around a rambling old mansion. It appeared to be imbedded in trees. Mrs. Dianopoulou flitted gracefully through the foliage as she came to meet them. The terraced garden was bathed in golden light. They sat in garden furniture under a tree and were served
ouzo
. Others joined them. There was an English couple. There was a rather droopy young Englishman called Johnny Metcalfe who turned out to be a painter. He appropriated Robbie to discuss their work. A boy and a girl, both younger than Robbie, joined them. There was, most notably, Carl von Eschenstadt. The atmosphere of the gathering altered slightly with his arrival. He seemed to put them all on their mettle.