The Quirk (15 page)

Patrice approached, bringing drinks, and Rod studied him, testing his sight, taking in the trim body, the seductive mop of hair, the contradictory beauty of his funny face. Love overflowed and encompassed the boy. There was plenty for everybody.

“I’ll faint if you go on looking at me like that,” Patrice said breezily, making fun of himself.

“Really? Like what?”

“With love, I think. You do sometimes, tonight more that usual.”

“I love you, monkey. I really do. We’ve been together long enough for it to sound right now.” He put a hand on his shoulder and leaned over and brushed his mouth with his lips.

Patrice turned rigid, as if he had fallen into a trance, eyes closed, not visibly breathing. He slowly came back to life and opened his eyes. He glanced down with a sigh that was almost a shudder. “I haven’t spilled the drinks. How amazing.”

Rod gave his neck a squeeze and took a glass. They settled into their usual places in front of the fireplace. Alight with euphoria, Rod talked exuberantly to his favorite audience, defining for himself what he thought the afternoon had meant for the future.

As soon as he had said enough to make it clear that their living arrangement wasn’t threatened, Patrice was able to relax and enjoy it. He could face any eventuality except Rod’s leaving. He wouldn’t even mind if sex with him came to an end; he would prove to himself, to Gérard, that he was no longer a slave to his old appetites. He was ready to go back to the moment of their first meeting, when it had seemed unlikely that Rod could be had, and live for the platonic ideal of friendship. Virtue was the last quality he had expected to find in himself, but Rod would make him virtuous. He felt as dedicated as a monk, as pure as a priest, and he knew that a number of people would laugh like maniacs if they heard that
le petit
Valmer thought of himself in such a sanctified light.

“You say you’re in love with me, baby,” Rod said, fascinated by this vast and unknown subject. “What’s it like? I guess that’s what this is.”

Patrice laughed a trifle ruefully. “There’s too much to tell. Most of the time I feel like lying down at your feet and dying for you.”

“Yes, I guess that’s part of it, but please don’t. I thought it would be more–I don’t know. More exclusive maybe. I hated to let her go, and I’m dying to be with her again, but I love being with you. Everything’s so wonderful. I can even imagine wanting another girl if the right one walked in. What if you found a beautiful boy with a cock twice as big as mine. Wouldn’t you really be tempted?”

“No, never.” A wicked gleam came into his eyes. “Twice as big? That would be a most extraordinary sight. I might be tempted for a moment, but I would hate it for tempting me, and that would be the end.”

“I’m not sure that’s the way it should be. I’ve seen too many people killing each other and calling it love. My sister and her husband for instance. I want to keep it all alive and exciting, the way I’m feeling now. I’m counting on you. As long as you’re around, I don’t think I’ll lose my balance. The wonderful thing is that I don’t think she’s demanding in the possessive way some girls are. She understands that I’ve got to have some leeway.”

“You’re an important artist,
chéri.
You’re in love with your work. Maybe you’ll never fall in love the same way as most people.”

“I’m not so sure. I’d say the main thing is not to let it turn into one of those big all-consuming passions you read about. That’s what I’m apt to do. We mustn’t let it happen.”

Patrice was enchanted by Rod’s rationalizations–his efforts to have it all his own way–and uttered adoring laughter. His sometime lover was such a man. Looking into his fiercely poetic face, the extraordinary eyes bright with joy and the wonder of revelation, Patrice was wrung by gratitude for being allowed to share the simple wholesome birth of love between boy and girl; it purged him of the residue of guilt remaining from his participation, under Gérard’s guidance, in the sordid little intrigues of boy with boy. He prayed that he would never knowingly do anything to impinge on what was evidently a touchingly happy meeting and mating. Rod felt his selfless approbation; it confirmed all that he admired and valued in the boy. The evening was launched on a flood of mutual affection and good feeling.

Rod awoke the next morning with his usual erection, and habit turned him to the body at his side. Half-asleep, scarcely aware of what he was doing, and feeling himself prepared in the usual way, he took his boy automatically. As consciousness grew and he thought of Nicole, there seemed to be no conflict, and he didn’t see why he shouldn’t satisfy Patrice’s need. The sense of power that this male submission provided was outside ordinary human experience, unlike anything he would want with a girl, related somehow to the superhuman power he felt when he was working. Patrice’s happiness depended, not on sexual response, but on an act of creative imagination within himself and therefore deserved the best he could put into it.

When they were up and about, there was no need to make any reference to it. It fit into the complex of small automatic acts that made up daily life.

Alone, he set to work as usual but went out well before noon, finding that falling in love made it difficult to concentrate, and called his girl.

His heart leaped up at the sound of her voice. His words tumbled over each other in his rush to tell her how much he’d been thinking of her and that it was time to make their engagement official. “Definitely. With blares of trumpets and public proclamations. I’ve got to spend a whole day with you. When?

“But no, my dearest. Your time is too precious. You warned me how it must be. You must make a little money so that at least we’ll have a place to live.”

“Oh, God, darling. You’re right, except that I’ve been thinking about you so much that I’m not working well. What do I do about that?”

“You must start to think of me very tranquilly–I wait for you and love you–oh, yes, my dear, so very much. I–yesterday was–”

He heard the catch in her voice and found it difficult to speak himself. “God, yes. Everything. Are you really–I mean, I’m nuts about you.”

“Nuts?” She giggled. “Yes. Nuts. Is that right? We’re nuts.”

“Completely. When are we going to start having those evenings together?”

“Tomorrow?”

“Oh, fine. I was afraid you were going to say a week from next Tuesday.” They laughed a bit hysterically and got themselves under control and continued to converse in broken phrases, sudden pauses, incoherent murmurings. Being in love apparently didn’t make for eloquence; rapture could be contained in a monosyllable.

“It’s all settled,” he exclaimed, recovering the power of speech. “We’re going to spend the rest of our lives together.”

“That’s supposed to take a very great deal of time to decide. I think we must wait at least till tomorrow.”

They hung up, laughing, and he stood gazing at the telephone for some moments with a besotted smile. He would be able to work now–until the need to talk to her struck again.

Their first evening proved to be a confirmation of everything they thought they knew about each other, as sensationally satisfying as the first afternoon with an added peaceful sense of continuity. Her apartment, on the other hand, underlined the forces he would have to contend with. It was very small and very chic, every detail in exquisite taste, as he would have expected of her. There was no place for him to work even if his life had depended on it. She was definitely not a poor boy’s girl. He would have to turn her into one. He was determined to remove her from the world she frequented as thoroughly as he had cut himself off from his own past. He brushed aside her reference to grand friends and relatives and was uncommunicative when she tried to draw him out about his family and childhood. Would she love him more if she knew that his great-grandfather had owned a railroad, that there were family banks and family foundations, even a family zoo? There was enough to find out about who they
really
were.

She didn’t let him spend the night but insisted that he must go back to his hotel so that he would be ready for work first thing in the morning. He almost corrected her about the hotel but remembered his deception in time. Eventually he would tell her he had moved into the place where he’d been working. It was unimportant. Shortly after midnight he was back in bed with Patrice.

He and Nicole decided to make their first public appearance as a pair at the party to which Lola had invited him. Lola was at the head of his list of people to be eliminated, but under the circumstances he probably owed it to her to show up one more time. They made themselves conspicuous by their exclusive preoccupation with each other and provoked gleeful cackles from the old lady. Germaine treated them with brittle mockery; once, Rod caught a glitter of reproach in her eyes as she looked at him across the lighter he was holding to her cigarette. Had she marked him for her own?

The idea was more interesting than he would have expected because he’d discovered that she reminded him of his partner–a movie star, of all things–in his first full-fledged sexual experience. Marilyn Harvey had been a friend of his mother’s and a rarity–a “lady” who had had an enormous success in the theater and films. One summer weekend when he was 17, after an afternoon spent with a large house party around the pool, she had somehow cut him off from the others as they were going in to dress and had quickly dropped her ladylike manners.

“Do you have a girl, Rod dear? Are you madly in love?” she asked as they were mounting the great central staircase to the upper floors.

“No, I can’t be bothered with all that stuff,” he replied dismissively, covering his shyness.

“Oh, dear. What a pity for the girls. Are you a virgin by any chance?”

“Well, I–”

“I suspected as much. That really won’t do. You’re just at an age when the boys might get you. We wouldn’t want that, would we? You have the sort of looks that must drive them mad.”

“How do you mean?” The incident with the senior at Yale had taken place only a few months before, and he found it uncomfortable to even think about.

“Never mind. If you don’t know, so much the better. I suppose I seem frightfully old to you, but I dare say I could make you forget about that. Come along, darling.”

His rooms were on the third and topmost floor, and he glanced longingly up the staircase as she led him along the wide corridor to where she was staying. He was frightened out of his wits but didn’t see how he could run away from her. He couldn’t believe that she would really go ahead with what she seemed to have in mind. Nice people didn’t. He assumed that sex would happen in some undefined future, not here and now. Nevertheless, he was in her room behind a quickly locked door, his swimming trunks were gone, his cock was in her mouth with immediate and devastating results. He was so stunned that he hardly knew what was happening to him.”

“With a boy built like you,” she said complacently while he was still gasping for breath, “it takes a Marilyn Harvey to manage. I’m one of the best in the business, darling. We know now that I can make it hard for you, every splendid inch of it. That should eliminate any nervousness you might have felt.”

He slowly came to his senses to find that a naked woman was taking extraordinary liberties with his body. It didn’t take her long to prepare him once more, this time for orthodox copulation. He couldn’t believe that his body was capable of offering him such exquisite ecstasies. He spent the rest of the weekend in a delirium of sexual release. He waylaid her at every opportunity–morning, noon, and night–and found that she was always ready to meet him more than halfway.

When she had gone he decided that he had found his vocation in life. He was going to have every girl in the world. He became a menace at all the parties that summer, drawing girls into dark corners and trying enthusiastically to get them out of their clothes. He discovered to his regret that there weren’t many Marilyn Harvey’s around; perhaps girls had to reach a certain age before they learned how to enjoy themselves.

Cheerful memories of Marilyn revived when he looked at Germaine. Although he stuck close to Nicole’s side throughout Lola’s party, there were a few moments when he was able to engage in a mildly titillating flirtation with her. It was a late party, and for the first time he woke up in the morning in Nicole’s bed. He felt almost married to her until he had to put on his dinner jacket to go home.

When he got there he found a note from Patrice telling him that the water heater was out of order but that help was on its way. When the repairman admired his pictures, Rod was inspired to give him a small working sketch. He told Patrice about the incident but not Nicole. He had already discovered a practical streak in her that he was sure would be helpful in the future but that didn’t suit his current euphoric mood.

Despite his work and evenings spent mostly at home, he didn’t lose touch with his old Bohemian crowd from the rue de Buci. He frequently ran into Massiet or Pichet or Fargue in the streets around St.-Germain-des-Prés, and he always stopped for a beer and news of their latest projects. One day Massiet tried to interest him in an illustrating job for a deluxe edition of some classics that he’d been asked to parcel out to the best young painters he knew. Easy money. Rod immediately turned it down. It sounded too much like the old wage-slave days. If he ever again worked on order, he would be admitting defeat. He discussed it with Patrice that evening and received the approval he hoped for. His work was going too well for it to be interrupted. They mustn’t think about money. He didn’t tell Nicole. He didn’t want her to think that he was turning down chances to speed the marriage they both took for granted now as the inevitable conclusion to their carefully paced but passionate love affair.