An Idol for Others (9 page)

David remained behind the wheel. He seemed to be bursting with inner glee. He rolled his eyes and tossed his head. “I gave this lad a lift. He wanted to see you, and I thought you’d have time for him. I let the poor actors out of their cages. The rehearsal call is for 3. You’ll have to take it. I’m off. I’ll be driving all over the countryside till this evening. Try to have fun without me.”

Walter and Philip stood transfixed, their eyes summoning each other. “Was it all right to come?” Philip asked finally. “I asked David where you were, and he insisted on bringing me out.”

“Sure. Fine. Come in.” His voice sounded casual. He hoped it would stay that way. If they could talk together casually, perhaps they would be able to look at each other without making it an invitation to bed. They went into the stillness of the living room. Walter felt suddenly as if it were pressing in on them, pressing them to each other, forcing an embrace. He moved hastily to the desk, heart and mind racing. “Look, I still have a bit of work to do,” he said, staring at the accounts without seeing them. “Why don’t you go down to the pool? There’s some trunks in the shower room. Get some sun. I’ll be down in no time.” He went to the screen door that opened onto the lawn and stepped out and held it open for Philip without looking at him. He kept space between them and pointed down at the clump of trees. “It’s right down there. You don’t have to worry about meeting people. Nobody else uses it.”

“You won’t be long?”

“No, 15 minutes at the most.” His eyes dropped to the coveted bottom as Philip turned and started across the lawn. He forced himself back into the house. He breathed deeply and ran his fingers through his hair. At least he had gotten him out. He had room to think coherently. He was in a rage with David for playing this trick on him. He was probably laughing his head off, wondering if he would succumb. He hadn’t yet. He had created difficulties for himself and forced a postponement. If Philip put on the trunks, he would be able to look at all of him and dispel the mystery of his body.

He was in no state for dealing with accounts. He ran upstairs and stripped and went to the bathroom and hitched a towel around himself. He looked down and saw that he jutted out conspicuously under it. He rearranged it so that the folds hung down the middle and concealed him more effectively. He found himself staring at David’s suntan oil. If–no, but Philip was so fair that he should probably have some. He took it and went slowly downstairs. Should be revise the script and start over from the beginning? Should he get dressed and go call Philip back and talk to him sensibly in the living room? With the bed waiting just above? No. They couldn’t go on like this indefinitely. The opportunity had been offered him to resolve the issue. Being outdoors was a safeguard. He would see him naked and trust in the satisfaction of his eyes, even touch him and know that he couldn’t really want a boy.

He went out and crossed the lawn and descended the slope to the pool. Philip was nowhere in sight. A yew hedge enclosed a small area at the side of the bathhouse. He went stealthily to the break in it and found him. He was lying on his stomach on a towel, his head cradled on his arms, the enticing behind encased in brief trunks. He sprang forward silently and pulled off the towel. When he reached him, he held it in front of him and dropped down on it and flung an arm across the slight shoulders. “Alone at last,” he said melodramatically, taking refuge in a joke.

Philip’s head jerked up, his great eyes wide as if he had been asleep. “You scared me.”

Walter realized he’d gone too far. The sudden intimacy committed him. Its effect was immediate. He had to shift to make room for what had happened beneath him. He wouldn’t be able to get up until the boy left. “You scare me all the time,” he said, his eyes on the mouth only a few inches from his, on the delicate nose, on the fine arch of the brows. “You’re more beautiful than a host of angels.”

Philip craned his neck slightly and darted his eyes down over him. “You’re naked,” he murmured, as if dazed with wonder.

“Sure, we don’t have to bother with clothes down here.” He kept his hand motionless on the shoulder, still able to hope that his excitement might subside when he got used to having the boy close and almost naked beside him.

“Can’t anybody see us?”

“Not here, you picked the perfect place.”

Philip eased over so that he was propped on one elbow. The movement dislodged Walter’s hand but somehow created no more space between them. They still touched all the length of them. Walter slid his hand down to the narrow waist, establishing the right to hold him without turning it into a sexual advance.

“I’m pretty smart,” Philip said.

“That depends. Are you sure we’re both thinking the same thing?”

“After the way we’ve been looking at each other? I don’t know why you’ve waited so long.”

“Waited? Anyway, why should it be up to me?”

“It is, of course. You’re god around here.”

“All the more reason to wait, whatever it is you think I’m wailing for. What did you want to talk to me about?”

“This.”

“I see.” Philip obviously wasn’t going to let him evade it with meaningless words. “Aren’t you a bit young to know what you’re doing?”

“Older than you, I found out. Old enough to know I’m in love with you. Well, everybody is. You can take your pick, boys or girls. You look at me as if you’re in love with me, but I don’t want to get my hopes up. We’re going to make love, aren’t we?”

“Are we?” Walter was amazed at the ease and tranquillity with which people announced they were in love. Harry. Debby. Anyway, guys couldn’t fall in love with each other. He was sure of that much. Doubting that Philip knew what he was talking about, he tried to tell him what he felt. “I want to look at your face until I know everything about it. I want to know what you feel like. I suppose that’s sort of making love.” There was an appeal in Philip’s face, perhaps in male faces generally, that he had never found in a girl’s–a poetry, a mysterious vulnerability. Even Harry, who was hardly poetic, had had a guileless, happy sweetness in his face that approached poetry and was uniquely male. Girls were so down-to-earth and knowing. He allowed his hand to move back along the top of the trunks. Philip’s eyes closed, and he let himself go so that his head dropped against Walter’s shoulder. He made a small sound like a sob. Walter thought of Clara and wondered if she would ever be capable of such sweet, moving surrender. Philip’s hand worked its way down between them along his side. Walter felt his body giving way to its touch, lifting to allow it to find what it was seeking. He clamped his stomach to the ground.

“Please. Take me somewhere we can …” Philip’s urgent murmur broke off. His mouth was open on Walter’s skin.

“I don’t know what …” He too found it difficult to finish a sentence. “You scare me. You make me feel that if I … if we let it happen, I’d never be able to let you go.”

“That’s all right with me.”

Soft lips moved against him thrillingly. He had all that he had imagined he wanted. He held him. He felt his lips against him. He had praised his beauty. If he wasn’t what he was determined not to be, desire should be assuaged. He wished the trunks would vanish but forbade himself to remove them. He made a further effort at control. He found that he was still clutching the bottle of oil. “Here,” he said breathlessly, forcing another postponement. “I brought you some suntan stuff. You’re getting pink. Let me put some on you.” He moved Philip’s head so that he was lying out flat and poured oil on his shoulders and began to stroke it slowly into him. Philip’s hand crept along Walter’s side still trying to work its way under him. Walter had to keep his muscles taut to prevent it from reaching its goal.

He watched the movement of his own hand as he caressed shoulders and back and learned the feel of the slight body. Philip’s profile was turned to him, the eyes closed, the pale hair in touching disarray, his lips slightly parted as he uttered his small sounds. His beauty was angelic in its fragile purity. Walter felt a great wrench in his chest, and his throat tightened. Was he fighting his true nature? He wanted all that Philip offered him.

His hand moved down the small of the back. Philip tucked his thumbs under the top of the trunks and lifted his hips and pushed. The gentle curve of buttocks was uncovered. “If you’re naked, I don’t see why I shouldn’t be,” he said. “Put that stuff all over me, it feels so good–your hand making love to me.”

Walter seized the trunks and pulled them down to the knees and up over the jack-knifed legs and tossed them away. He forgot control at the sight of the slender body now completely naked and exposed to his will. He spilled more oil into his hand and ran it down between the buttocks. Philip’s muscles worked as Harry’s had. He moved his fingers caressingly into him and slipped his other arm under Philip’s head and drew him closer so that their bodies turned and closed to each other.

Philip cried out as their mouths met, teeth clashed. Another cry was strangled in his throat as his hand closed on its goal. Walter blindly reached for more oil and drew back from the hand that was stroking him and spread it on himself. He relinquished the hungry mouth. Philip dropped his head and flattened himself against the ground, trembling from head to foot and making little whimpering sounds.

Walter took him, slowly until he was in full possession of him, and then with joyful abandon as he rushed headlong back into the realm of forbidden pleasure. He brought Philip to a sobbing climax and collapsed onto him in the triumph of orgasm. He waited long enough so that he could slip from him easily and gave him a little hug. “I’m going to take a shower.”

He stood under the bathhouse shower and hoped Philip wouldn’t join him immediately. There was so much to absorb and bring into focus. Did he know himself now beyond any shadow of doubt? If he was one of the damned, he would have to come to terms with it somehow. Was it possible, after all, to fall in love with a boy? Harry had insisted that it was, but they had been schoolboys. The things he did now became part of real life and the future. If he gave in to it, he would have to abandon his campaign to win Clara. He would have to renounce his ambitions; he couldn’t be in the public eye with the risk of discovery hanging over him. He would be an outcast. For love?

Harry had insisted that they were in love and in the next breath had told him about another boy he had his eye on.

“There’s a kid in the class below us–have you noticed him?–Callaghan, a cute blond with a terrific body. Hey. How about it? We could bring him home and have some fun, all three of us.”

Walter was shocked and made him promise not to have anything to do with the boy. He would never forget the afternoon he had come out of the school building just in time to see Harry driving away with Callaghan’s golden head at his side. He didn’t know how he had got home. He had wept. He had torn his hair. He had ripped a pillowcase to shreds. He had smashed the watch Harry had given him and resolved never to wear one again. As he recovered, he had felt steel entering his soul and had welcomed it as a sign of growing up. Never again would he allow himself to become so deeply attached to another human being, especially male. Men together couldn’t know anything about being in love. The fireworks of the physical side of it could be stupendous but were bound to be short-lived. Was he going to forget the lesson of the most crucial experience of his life and allow himself to be deflected from the course he had set for himself?

Philip appeared in the bathhouse door and approached the shower. Walter’s eyes roamed over the willowy body from the shapely feet to the appropriately slim and delicate sex, up to the celestial head, and felt no resistance to him but a surge of pride in his possession of him. He held his arms out to him and watched his pace quicken until he had pressed himself to Walter’s dripping body. Their eyes met with acknowledgment of what had happened.

“God, Walter,” he murmured, again in a daze of wonder. “I knew it had to happen, but it’s hard to believe it really has. I’ve been waiting and wondering when you’d let it.”

Walter drew him closer and took his mouth in his. He handled him gently. He turned him and soaped his back and his delicious behind. He felt almost paternal toward him. “We better get back to the house while our luck holds. That was pretty crazy.”

“I’ll say. I wouldn’t have cared if the whole town had been peering over the hedge. It was heaven.”

Walter ran his hands over him, extending his possession of him while he rinsed away soap. His hair was so pale that the down on his arms and legs was almost invisible. He turned off the water and put his arms around him as they crossed to the towels. He saw with pride that his handling of the slight body had begun to arouse it again. Power. Power to give pleasure. Power to bind another being to him. Had he a lust for conquest, regardless of gender, a craving for deep total connection with those who stirred his imagination? It was probably related to the drive he felt in the theater as he molded his actors into an expression of himself and exulted as the audience swayed to his will. Sexual drive. Creative drive. If it were all mixed up together, he wasn’t simply a pervert but needed both sexes to express himself fully.

They dried themselves, standing close to each other, their eyes meeting and moving on to learn each other’s bodies and returning with messages of delight and discovery.

Philip put his hand on Walter’s cock again. “I want to look at it the next time it’s hard. It’s beginning, isn’t it?”

“It’s been beginning ever since you came in here. You don’t suppose it’s like that all the time, do you? It’s a bit soon for it to go any further.”

“I’ve got so much less that it happens in no time. Especially when I’m with you.”

“So I notice. I like that Come on. Wrap a towel around yourself. You can carry your clothes.”

They trotted up the lawn and reentered the living room. Walter put a hand on Philip’s shoulder and looked into his eyes with proprietary tenderness. They were strangers, yet in an hour Philip had become precious to him. He was prepared to admire everything he did, find ways to please him. It wasn’t just sex, but the craving to get behind people’s facades and learn what they really were. The quickest way to total intimacy he had found was in the meeting of bodies. Was there another way he would discover? He didn’t want to make love to him again until he could make love to the person called Philip, not just his body, but the fact of having known his body made the person called Philip accessible. “How about eating something and getting that out of the way?” he suggested. “I have till 2:30. What about you? Are you supposed to be doing anything?”