The Quirk (11 page)

Rod lifted his head slightly and spoke with his lips against Patrice’s ear. “
Tu es amoureux de moi, petit singe?
”

“
Follement.
”

“
Bon.
I can understand that, I guess.”

“Thank you for letting me tell you. You understand everything now. Oh
chéri,
it’s so big inside me.
Quand il s’agit de ta grande queue, il faut parler francais. Je ne veux pas dire des bêtises en anglais. Ta grosse bitte, énorme et tout-puissante. Quand elle est entrée dans mon corps, tout ce que j’étais cessait d’exister. Elle me possède, elle me joint à toi, elle me fait parti de toi. Sans toi, sans ta grosse bitte superbe qui me prend, je n’existerai plus.
I don’t know if it is the same for girls. They grow up knowing they will have a man, so it must be different. For me it is forbidden, but the feeling is there. I didn’t want it or ask for it. It is there, and it is forbidden, and so it grows and grows, with longing and without hope. Even with you there is no hope, but I don’t need hope now. I am transformed, complete by being a part of you, even if this never happens again.”

Rod was moved, if slightly daunted by the speech. The boy had offered him his life. To allow him to say such things would be an implicit acceptance of a commitment he couldn’t dream of making. “You know it can’t mean anything like that to me,” he said carefully.

“Of course,
chéri.
That is what I cannot hope. All I wish is to be your girl sometimes and give you pleasure.”

“Yeah. Well, that part of it seems to work all right. I’m sure it wouldn’t with any other boy.” He still couldn’t place it as desire as he knew it because he felt no urge to fondle or caress the body he was lying on. Was it a growing acceptance of the bizarre and unfamiliar? Once you made an initial act of rebellion, were there no limits to which you might go? A sexual rebellion hadn’t figured in his calculations, but if that was what this was, it was extraordinarily potent. Nobody had ever praised his cock so extravagantly. He knew that if he remained where he was, it would soon be ready to display its power again. He shifted slightly to withdraw.

“Keep it there for another minute,” Patrice exclaimed rapturously. “When you are so much inside me, you make me–Oh,
chéri,
I am so much yours that I could almost paint your beautiful pictures.”

“Maybe we better move the easel in here and see what happens.” Their bodies locked together in a brief spurt of laughter. “You want to be mine, monkey?”

“All of me. All yours.”

“You’re giving yourself to me. What will you take? Girls always take something.”

“I will take your big cock, and it will make me belong to you.”

“I won’t be yours.”

“Have any of your girls made you hers?”

“Not really, but it’ll happen someday, I suppose.”

“We don’t have to worry about that tonight. You fuck me sublimely. Better than the ones who like boys.”

“Have you had guys before who didn’t like boys?”

“Yes. A few. It happens sometimes if there’s no girl. That’s what I hoped with you.”

Rod was reassured; he slipped slowly from the boy. His boy?

He did as he’d been told and lay on his back with his eyes closed while Patrice left him and returned demurely robed and carrying a warm washcloth and washed him thoroughly and dried him. Japanese girls were said to provide all sorts of special services. Was he going to have to think of Patrice as a Japanese girl? He laughed to himself. When Patrice turned the light out and got into bed, he put a hand out. The boy found it and held it and moved close enough so that their bodies touched lightly here and there.

Not too close, Patrice warned himself. He must give Rod time to get used to having taken a boy as a lover. There was a great deal they both would have to get used to. He would have to get used to love-making ending like this, in silence, without an exchange of kisses and endearments. It wouldn’t be difficult. His body was filled with the feeling of the man he worshiped. It was far more than he had let himself expect. He had spoken openly of his passion. For tonight his spirit was at ease, and he was cradled in a cocoon of physical satisfaction. He pressed Rod’s hand and murmured a good night.

“Good night, monkey.” Rod closed his eyes and drifted toward sleep while his mind grappled with the impossible. He was shacked up with a fag in “gay Paree.” If he had intended to do over his life completely, he couldn’t have succeeded better.

It seemed like the moment for an appraisal of all that had gone before, but he found that when he tried to push his memory beyond the last five years, there wasn’t much more there than a blur of miscellaneous images–school, girls, playing fields, ski slopes, country clubs, tennis courts, grand hotels, seashore, dances–dominated by the growing realization that he was different from his contemporaries. He could find nothing in them that corresponded to his passion for recording the world he saw around him with pencil and paintbrush. Unwilling to condemn himself to being an outsider, he had tried to minimize his passion. He had talked about becoming an industrial designer, which could mean anything from coffeepots to space ships, and was quite acceptable to the world he had been born into. He remembered the liberating revelation of his first complete sexual experience and the excitement of bedding other girls thereafter. He remembered that for his 18th birthday his father had opened accounts in his name with a New York tailor, a London bootmaker, and a Roman shirtmaker. This had presumably been intended to mark his coming-of-age, but it hadn’t made him feel any different. It had amused him to send sketches of things he wanted to distant capitals.

He had been aware of being a member of an elite, but there had seemed to be such a great quantity of others who enjoyed the same privileges that it wasn’t until he set up on his own in New York that he grasped that it was an elite of a tiny minority. His apartment was provided by his family and was large and comfortable. The generous allowance he had been given when he went to college was continued after he graduated so that the paltry salary he earned as an apprentice designer was quite irrelevant to the way he lived. He had enjoyed himself enormously until the passion for paint had gradually become a troubling obsession and he had begun to understand the price he was expected to pay for his privileges. He had finally come to the conclusion that there wasn’t much point in being a rich boy unless he controlled the riches.

As a poor boy he was now apparently committed to living with a male lover. And why not? He began to see practical solutions to a number of problems in this unexpected situation. As far as money and comfort were concerned, it couldn’t be better. That was obvious; there were more surprising considerations. He had known he must be prepared for a solitary life from the moment Carol had dropped him. An artist was a loner, more or less by definition. Patrice could save him from loneliness. The hunger for girls might let up a bit. He could afford to wait now until he found one who might be important to him. He had known from his first sober moments with him that Patrice offered something special–feminine solicitude without female demands, more than friendship but none of the burdens or thrills of a love affair, total dedication that would still leave him free. Patrice had ended by offering all of himself, knowing there were strict limits to what he could expect in return. Rod was glad of the quirk in himself that made it possible to accept him. Or perhaps it wasn’t a quirk. He had discovered that he could accept sexual satisfaction where he found it. It made life much simpler.

He was suddenly aware, with a sudden rush of awareness, that he was grown up. He was an adult. He was a man. At 26 he no longer thought of himself as a boy. He tried to pin down and isolate the feeling, tried to define it, but there didn’t seem to be anything in particular to define. There was only a sort of general easing of tensions as if he had slipped easily into clothes that hitherto hadn’t set on him quite comfortably. For the last year he had been conscious of day-to-day shifts and changes in himself, but they hadn’t added up to anything recognizably conclusive. Now everything in him felt jelled, focused. Only the other day he had been awkward and self-conscious with Nicole. He didn’t think he would be now. He would make his play for her, and if it failed, try to forget her. Like a grown-up. He would see her and find out.

He wondered if the sense of power Patrice had aroused in him had brought about this real coming of age. Perhaps all men needed a homosexual experience in order to cast off the ambiguities of adolescence. He listened to Patrice’s deep breathing. Asleep. He extricated his hand from his grip and reached for the beguiling mop of hair and stroked it. A boy could have nice hair. So much for the terrors of being queer. His whole life had become an act of defiance. He wasn’t going to be stopped by conventional taboos. Patrice’s hair was soft, and it soothed him to stroke it. He slept.

Rod attacked his work after breakfast the next morning, reveling in the new living conditions. Patrice told him there was enough food in the kitchen for lunch and went out early even though it was Sunday, a day for household chores. He intended to stay out all day. He wasn’t going to let himself become an intrusive presence in the place. He felt more complete and confident of the future than he had believed possible. They would slowly find a home life together.

Rod returned that evening to his usual haunts. Jeannine was obviously beginning to feel neglected, but it had been time for them to drift apart. There would be others. He told nobody of his move. Yesterday, at a moment when Patrice had been otherwise occupied, he had arranged for the hotel to take care of his mail and telephone messages for a small fee.

When they had been sharing the place for a week, Patrice proposed an anniversary dinner. He spent a large part of the afternoon in the kitchen and lit a fire in the fireplace. They bathed and put on their dressing gowns, and Rod gorged himself, still marveling at Patrice’s cooking. They moved back to the fireplace and talked while Rod grew drowsy in the friendly glow of the fire. There was a sharp knock on the door.

Rod was so startled that he leaped up and pulled his dressing gown closer around him as if he had been caught in a criminal act. Patrice was immediately on his feet in from of him, his finger on his lips, their eyes questioning each other.

“Do you expect anyone,
chéri?
” Patrice whispered.

“Certainly not,” Rod replied, automatically adopting Patrice’s whisper.

The knock was repeated more forcefully. Patrice stepped closer and turned his head aside and reached for Rod’s arm, as if for support. Rod felt that Patrice was trembling and, shocked by it, yanked his arm away and gave him a push. Why should a knock on the door make anybody tremble? The knocking became more violent.

Rod charged across the room toward the door. Patrice flung himself in front of him, shaking his head, his eyes wild and pleading. The noise made whispers unnecessary. “Don’t open it,” he begged in an agony of terror.

Their slight scuffle pulled Rod’s robe open down the front so that he was nearly naked. He gathered it together and decided he didn’t want to confront a maniac in a flimsy dressing gown. He pushed Patrice aside again and made a dash for the corridor and ran back to the bedroom. He grabbed slacks and a sweater and pulled them on. What had he got himself into? Something to do with a sick queer world of demented perverts? He ran back along the corridor fastening up his slacks.

The knocking had become an insane tattoo that made the door rattle in its frame. There was no doubt in Rod’s mind now; whoever was doing it was mad. Patrice was slumped against the wall near the shuddering door with his face buried in his hands. Rod seized him and half carried him back to the living room and set him on his feet. More self-confident in clothes and determined to put an end to the madness, he started back for the door. The hammering suddenly stopped. It was followed by a man’s voice, cold and incisive and so accurately pitched that it reached them without sounding as if it had been raised.

“Very well. Enough of this,” the disembodied voice said in French, making Rod’s scalp crawl. “If you are there, and I’m quite sure you are, you’ll regret this. This place isn’t here for you to entertain your secret lovers. I think you’ll have much to regret. You’d best start by looking for another job. Are you sure the lease here is absolutely foolproof? I doubt it. We shall see.

There were footsteps and the creak of stairs and silence.

The two remained motionless for a long moment while Rod slowly relaxed. He turned back to his shattered young friend who stood as if he were hanging from the ceiling by a thread, swaying slightly, his head bowed. “What is all this?” Rod demanded in a normal voice that sounded strident after the profound, welcome silence. “Some sort of faggot hysteria? I’ve heard about it, but I certainly don’t want to be any part of it. Did you have somebody staying here before I moved in?”

Patrice pulled himself up and shook his head vaguely. “No,” he said in a faraway voice. He had had a week of peace and happiness, more than he would have dared hope for if he’d allowed himself to count carefully the consequences of what he was doing. Almost two weeks, if he went back to when he’d started watching for Rod everywhere and had resolved never to resume the life Gérard had made for him, regardless of what happened with the unknown American. He had known he wouldn’t be able to keep the secret for long if he embarked on what Gérard would assume was a silly little faggot affair. He had been prepared for questions, threats, reprisals; he had never dreamed of anything like this. Now that it had happened, now that he was recovering from it, he realized that he had nothing worse to fear, so that this was again a moment for hope. If he could gloss it over and put together the pieces, he might really be free. He had learned in a week that nothing Gérard could offer him, no extravagant pleasure he might dangle before him, could compare to the unpredictable joys he had found with the man he worshiped. He took a few steps toward the door in the corridor, listening, and turned back, determined to keep anguish out of his eyes, attempting a smile that he could feel was a disaster. “It’s nothing,
chéri.
Please. Sit down. I will tell you everything,” he said, intending to do nothing of the sort.