Perfect Freedom (49 page)

He went to work with an exhilarating new freedom of concentration. Nothing could distract him. He was the luckiest boy in the world. He was in love and he had declared his love and hadn't been punished. His beloved lay only yards away, sprawled out in their shared bed as he had left him, in the full flower of his morning vigor. It added a new dimension to his work. For the first time, he was working not only with his mind and senses but with an overflowing heart. He didn't know how love could affect painting but it was bound to show somehow.

It showed when the two were together in public. Toni grew more lavish with his physical endearments, apparently to remind Robbie that if he needed a man in his life, he was it. Toni straightened Robbie's hair, adjusted his clothes when a collar needed smoothing or a jacket wasn't settled properly on his shoulders. He held his hand when he wanted to draw him aside for a private word and put an arm around him when they were standing together talking to others. Robbie quickly relaxed into easy reciprocation. Toni was so conspicuously engaged in his heterosexual pursuits that nobody thought it was anything more than charming. The rumor had spread that they were long-lost brothers and people found it natural that they should want to establish a warm contact with each other. Toni had been right about one thing: Robbie stopped getting an erection every time they touched.

Helene, glowing with pleasure at seeing them so sweetly happy together, was at the same time troubled by a new awareness of Robbie as a sexual presence. Intuition told her that they couldn't be so free with each other in public without carrying it further in private. They were bound to kiss and caress and fondle each other. She was profoundly shocked when she caught herself wishing that she could see them naked in bed together. She didn't find it surprising that Robbie, with his sensitivity and refined instincts, should form an emotional attachment with a boy rather than a girl. There was a vast difference between that and the ghastly world that was apparently on display where Toni performed.

Robbie and Toni's lovemaking remained on the level of the night of their first shared orgasms although there were moments when Robbie still hoped that it might go further. He discovered that Toni responded sensually to water; he always got an erection when they swam naked together and it was easy to arouse him in the shower. Toni maintained that they looked ridiculous that way whereas to Robbie the dancer's graceful priapic body was the epitome of beauty but they agreed that it felt awfully good and they didn't always carry it to the usual conclusion. Just having erections together was an exquisitely tormenting thrill for Robbie, so he exercised restraint for Toni's sake. Toni admitted that his mouth was marvelous but he was waiting for him to get over wanting to demonstrate its capacity to give pleasure.

“You see?” he said one day when they were naked in the kitchenette sipping cold wine before dressing for dinner. “You don't get a hard on anymore just because I'm around. I told you that's the way it would be.”

“Maybe you were right,” Robbie said, suppressing a giggle. He loved him so and he was so silly. He was tempted to put a hand on him anywhere and let him see what happened. “Does, it mean there's a girl looming on the horizon?”

“Don't laugh. She'll be along any day now.”

Robbie was grateful that he hadn't volunteered to pick one out for him. He never stopped being grateful to him for one thing or another. He was grateful to him for his life. Toni had even learned how to ease the pain of the nightly separations that often stretched into the early hours of the morning; he promised that if he found him asleep when he came home late, he would wake him with a kiss, not the usual quick peck they frequently exchanged but a real long deep kiss of the kind that could give Robbie an orgasm. After the first night it happened Robbie almost hoped that he'd be late all the time. He was able to go to sleep with a smile on his lips looking forward to the ecstasy of waking up with Toni's open mouth on his, of his dangerous-looking hands moving with infinite gentleness over his body, touching the places where it thrilled him most, culminating in a feathery caress of his erection that always made him come instantly into the towel Toni had waiting for him. These moments always followed hours of great sexual activity for Toni, so Robbie expected his ecstasy to be solitary, but Toni's tenderness and solicitude made his heart almost burst with love.

The Coslings decided to give their first large-scale party on Bastille Day, the fourteenth of July, a decision reached by what had become known as the Committee of Four now that Hilliard and his girl were gone. It developed into a party to celebrate Toni's first film engagement. The day before (the thirteenth, henceforth his lucky day) he heard from his agent that the contract had finally been drawn up and awaited only Toni's signature.

“You're very proud of him, aren't you, dearest?” Helene said when Robbie went rushing down to the main house with the news before Toni had finished his breakfast.

“God, yes. Aren't you?” He and his mother had always been demonstrative but he realized that he'd drawn back from her in the last few months while he'd been finding more passionate embraces. He threw his arms around her and hugged her and remembered the comfort he'd always found in her bosom.

“Of course,” she said with brief uncertain laughter. She was startled by the change she felt in his body. A rich eroticism seemed to emanate from his pores. The way he held her (even her!) crackled with sensual electricity. He had undergone some profound emotional experience that had altered him completely. It wasn't difficult to guess its source. She put her hands on his chest to assure herself that this was the child who had been with her always. “It's a big day for all of us but you're his special friend. You're probably even more pleased for him than he is for himself.”

“Maybe. He doesn't take himself very seriously. That's one of the amazing things about him.” He wondered if she knew that he was in love. They had always been so close that it wouldn't surprise him. He'd like her to know if she didn't have to know that sex was involved in it. Love flooded him and overflowed to include the world. He hugged her again and kissed her. “You see what it means? He can quit at the end of the month. He'll be with us for the rest of the summer without having to go off every evening.”

“I think he may still want to go off in the evening, dearest,” Helene said with an indulgent little smile.

“Oh sure. That.” Robbie laughed. “But not
every
evening.”

His skin had a lovely texture. She stroked his chest lightly and in spite of herself the image recurred of him lying naked with Toni in bed. What a beautiful sight it would be. She must stop thinking about it. He was radiantly happy. She didn't want to know more. She slipped out of his unnerving embrace. “You must tell him that the party is now officially for him.”

“That's sweet. He'll be pleased.” He moved to her side and put an arm around her waist as she started across the terrace. She was carrying a pair of garden shears. Toni was right; it was good to touch and hold people, to feel close to them and show that you loved them. “Isn't it funny? We're going to have a movie star in the family.”

“It's very exciting, dearest. I must say, your father can still astonish me. Who else would have picked out a son in a bar?”

“Do you think he really is my brother?”

“Of course not, but it's an intriguing idea. I keep thinking what fun it would've been for you if we'd found him sooner. Do you remember how we used to choose the flowers for our funny little house? Felix will be furious with me but I'm going to gather a bouquet.”

“Okay. I'll go tell Toni about the party.”

That evening, he helped Toni go through his cosmetic routine of tinting and curling his hair, shaving his armpits, trimming his pubic hair. “There,” Toni said when they were finished. “That's the last time I'll do that. I may be looking a bit shaggy by the end of the month but the hell with it.”

The simple marble pedestal Robbie had designed had arrived a few days earlier and the statue was mounted on it, presiding serenely over the steps down to the cove. Stuart had hired a boat for the party and had it filled with fireworks. When the glittering company had assembled, when a flood of drink and an avalanche of Boldoni's inspired culinary creations had been consumed, a spectacular pyrotechnical display took place at the mouth of the cove, accompanied by gasps and cheers. Stuart was afraid that he might've overdone it—anything that followed risked being an anticlimax—but the big hit of the evening was a surprise even to him.

People swarmed over the terraces and down around the beach house. Stuart was about to say something to the heir apparent when the clear tinkling notes of a mechanical piano came from the direction of the house, bearing a message of absurd heartbreaking gaiety. After a frozen moment, Stuart muttered some excuse to His Highness and strode toward the house. Near the elaborate buffet stood a screen which Stuart had supposed served some function in connection with the meal. From behind it, the music swelled. He hurried over to it and peered behind. There was the old piano, Boldoni leaning on the crank in his chef's cap and long white apron. Tears burned in back of Stuart's eyes and his throat tightened.

“I bought it back while you were away,” Boldoni explained. “I remembered you used to like it.” Stuart put out his hand and squeezed his well-fleshed shoulder.

“Old friend,” he said, not looking at him. His eyes were fixed on ghosts, on Helene, tense and racked with love for him; on Odette, all laughter and innocent sensuality; on wide-eyed funny little Robbie, just turning into a person. He retained the smell and feel of those evenings under the moon on the dusty vine-covered terrace with the scrubbed boisterous men from the quai and their hearty women—so many memories came tumbling out of the battered clattering old box. Was it only eight years ago? Stuart looked at Boldoni with a wistful smile.

“It was a wonderful idea. I'm glad we've got it,” he said.

To the guests, ignorant of the piano's origin, it was a bit of deliberate originality.

“How too divinely clever,” exclaimed some and, “Isn't it mad,” said others. Everybody began to dance. The small band Stuart had hired proved superfluous. Everybody clamored for more of the spirited old tunes churned out by the piano.

People danced, people swam, people continued to eat and drink. Helene was courted by a dozen men and thought it the best party she had ever been to. She found the strains of the mechanical piano infinitely more charming in this gorgeous setting than among the noisy crowd at Boldoni's. The party didn't even begin to break up until dawn. By then, the fireworks had been forgotten but the piano went clattering gaily on.

It was a world of parties, yachting parties, beach parties, cocktail parties, dinner parties. If there'd been any theater, there doubtless would have been after-theater parties. They were dancing on the edge of a volcano. A cliché, but Stuart felt it strongly. There were scare headlines every other day but people discussed Hitler's troop movements as if they were moves in a chess game, interesting but of no consequence to everyday living. After Czechoslovakia and Austria, would Poland be next? The “inevitable” war was taking so long to get started that he understood the tendency to dance. His memory of the other war, his war, was that it had burst upon the world like a bolt from the blue. Everybody was suddenly fighting for survival. Now, there had been so much time to prepare that it seemed reasonable to believe that all the necessary precautions had been taken. France had its impregnable Maginot Line. England had the Channel. The States didn't even enter into it. Hitler might want a war but how was he going to fight it? That was the general consensus of opinion. Stuart, who had come only slowly to believe in war's inevitability, now felt its imminence in his bones. Perhaps it was wishful thinking. He had an uneasy conviction that the evil embodied in Hitler, if unchecked, would end by being more devastating than any war. It wasn't a popular view. There were plenty of pro-Nazis around. The volcano.

The Coslings were invited everywhere but as they settled in they became more selective. Robbie and Toni ruled out lunch parties, the latter because lunch came too soon after his late breakfast. Stuart and Helene were acquiring a small circle of real friends, including Jane Cumberleigh, the admiral's fourth wife, and Hilda and Alex, the Middle European princelings, but Stuart still had a sense of living through an interlude in his life, much as he had during the cruise. He told himself regularly that he must cut down on his drinking but it didn't seem particularly important. They would while away the summer, but then what? It was difficult to come to grips with the future with the threat of war hanging over them. The Committee of Four spoke often of Paris and it was more or less understood that they would have a reunion there during Robbie's Christmas holiday and look around for an apartment.

Stuart observed, with amused detachment, that Helene was enjoying the attentions of attractive men more than she ever had in the past. There were plenty of attractive women who acted as if they wouldn't mind some attention from him but he felt no inclination for flirtations. Was that side of life permanently closed for him? He thought so. The years of devotion to hard work had killed his taste for sexual distractions. He was much more interested in the part he could play in Robbie and Toni's futures. Toni was a major addition to their life. Stuart was well pleased with himself on that score.

In many subtle ways, Helene made a point of treating Toni and Robbie as a couple. The more she watched them, the more she preferred that Toni absorb the shock of Robbie's nascent sexuality than some silly susceptible girl.

Robbie became quickly aware that Helene arranged their days so that he and Toni would always be together. It bound him to her more powerfully than anything in the past. She knew, or suspected, and was offering him her blessing. He showered her with endearments as generously as Toni did him.