The Quirk (17 page)

Patrice had to fight back laughter. He was so sweet and silly. “You know you wouldn’t,” he said firmly. “You know I wouldn’t let you. That’s why I say ‘we.’ Are those friends of yours so important that you would to without eating for three days so that they can drink?”

“They’re no worse than that queer black-market friend of yours.”

“We didn’t buy him a drink.”

“Goddammit. I’ll buy drinks for whomever I goddamn please,” Rod roared. “I, not you or we. Jesus, you’d suppose I was going to marry
you.
I’m getting a bit fed up with it.”

Patrice felt all the muscles of his face stiffening. He didn’t know whether he wanted to hit him or burst into tears. “Very well,” he said with a display of calm that surprised him. “I’m going away tomorrow. When I come back I can go somewhere else. I’ve told you that if you don’t want me around, this place is yours. Let Nicole come live with you. I probably should have insisted on it at the beginning.”

All the fight drained out of Rod. His shoulders sagged. He ran his hand through his hair and shook his head to clear it. “Come here, goddammit,” he growled.

Calling on all his reserves of will, Patrice stood his ground. “No, I want you to admit that I have the right to say ‘we.’”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Rod growled.

“I’m talking about important things. If it will help you to bring Nicole here, I will go and there will be no ‘we.’”

“You’re nuts. You’ll leave your own place to go live in a cheap room somewhere? Maybe you could get my old room at the hotel. Wouldn’t you love that? Jesus. All this sweetness and light. I’m getting sick of it.”

“There’s no sweetness and light when you do stupid things with our money.
Our
money. There. I’ve said it again. Anything that has to do with your work is ours as long as you’re living here.”

“That sounds like an ultimatum.”

“You know it’s not. I have a responsibility to you as a painter. If I didn’t know you were very good, I wouldn’t care. We can forget everything else. Just you as a painter. Painters are usually imbeciles about money. I see you’re no exception.”

“Thanks.” Irony seemed an easy way of putting Patrice in his place. He had the impression that they were talking in circles; this conversation might conceivably make sense with Nicole but with nobody else. He had known he was getting in deep with his boy, but there must be limits. Nobody had the right to claim a responsibility for his work. His work was his own. His mind drifted for an aimless moment and came up with a question. Hadn’t Patrice made it possible for him to work in a way he never could have at the hotel? He knew that he’d been in the wrong all evening; this added to the dull resentment that had replaced rage. “All right,” he said abruptly. “Let me tell you something. I accept ‘ours’ and ‘we’ only here, within your own walls. What I do outside is my own business. Is that understood?”

“I understand the words, but I don’t believe they mean anything.” He was amazed by himself. He was being downright foolhardy, but he was drawing on love. If he planned on living for love, it had to be tough enough to stand up to tests. “Inside and outside is all the same. What if I start serving champagne and caviar every night and ask you to pay your share? It would be my right, but you wouldn’t like it. When I go to my grandmother I always travel second class and she pays. Tomorrow I will go third and keep the difference. It will be very uncomfortable and will also be cheating her, but it gives us a little extra. It makes no sense if you throw away what I save. It is ours.”

“What’re you talking about? You sound as if you’re keeping me. How does what you save affect me?”

“It doesn’t Not at all,” Patrice said hastily. “I get mixed up when I’m always speaking English. I mean only if I save, you too should save. In case you need it.”

“I see. I hope that’s what you mean. You swore my being here wouldn’t cost anything. I don’t want your money.”

“Of course not. I’m talking about
your
money.”

“So it’s mine again,” Rod said with a small smile, his resentment fading. He loved the kid. There was no getting around that. “You’re a sneaky little devil. I hope you haven’t been cooking the books.”

“Cooking?” Patrice understood and seized on the first thought that came to mind to get away from the sensitive subject. “Who were those men?”

“Classmates at college. We were friends. God knows why. They’ve heard I’ve had a big success as a painter. To them success means money. How can I tell them I can’t afford a couple of whiskeys?”

“
Mon pauvre chéri.
Do you still think in that way?”

“Yes, when I’m drunk, I guess. I turn into an American drunk. Being poor is socially unacceptable. I’ve gotten over it, but when I’m drunk it catches up with me.”

“Now you help me to understand. Thank you.” He took a few paces toward Rod and felt the softening in him. Now that hostilities were ending, he wasn’t sorry for the angry words that had been exchanged. He had found a strength that Rod must have given him. For once he hadn’t behaved like a lovesick maiden. “Are you hungry?” he asked, scaling his voice down to normal. “Hadn’t I better make us an omelet?”

“It’ll save us a restaurant bill, but you were supposed to have a night off from the kitchen. I’ve fucked that up. I’m sorry.”

“I don’t need a night off. I make quite good omelets, and I love cooking for you. At least we can be comfortable. Why don’t you put on your dressing gown? Patrice turned away.

“In case it makes you feel any better,” Rod said to his back, acting on his suggestion by kicking off his shoes and tossing his jacket onto the chair, “I was furious with myself. Why should I show off for those assholes? They don’t know a painting from a comic strip. They’d be more impressed if I did illustrations for
Esquire.
You’re the first person who’s made me feel important. Really important As important as a bank manager or an insurance salesman. Maybe eventually I’ll be able to tell all my classmates to fuck off. I’m working on it.”

Patrice stopped on his way to the kitchen and turned back with a sudden sunny smile. “That’s good. They will all want to buy
you
drinks. I’m sorry I was angry, but it was for your sake. Also I don’t like being called a fairy when it’s meant to insult me.”

“The stupid bastard. I felt like socking him. You’re right to be angry. Are you drunk too?”

Patrice laughed. “I was. Walking home made me more sober.”

“I don’t think it had the same effect on me.” He had peeled off his socks and unbuttoned his shirt. “Come back here for a minute.”

Patrice obeyed. When he was standing in front of him, Rod looked carefully into the familiar devoted face. He put his hands out and placed them on Patrice’s shoulders, his chest, his hips, and dropped them to his sides. “It’s funny about people, why you get all tied up with one instead of another. You mean so damn much to me and–well, it’s unique. I mean, if you lose somebody you’re in love with, it’s likely you’ll fall in love again. But this is different. I’d never find another monkey. I wonder how it happened. Our peculiar little sex life?” He put his hands on Patrice’s waist and drew him closer and kissed his eyes and cheeks. He had so little beard that Rod felt only a slight abrasion of whiskers under the fresh skin. His body was inert against him. It took so little to make him happy. Life was too wonderful for silly little quarrels.

Daring an additional offer of tenderness, Rod kissed Patrice on the mouth and pulled back as if he had been burned. “My God,” he exclaimed. “Maybe I’m drunk, but your mouth is sexier than a girl’s. How amazing. I’ve never known that.” He leaned down to him again and parted his lips with his tongue. For an instant Patrice was galvanized into tense immobility. Then a cry was torn from him, and his mouth opened voraciously. He responded to the kiss with uninhibited longing. Rod’s love for the boy sent a sexual shock racing through his body. He was startled by it, startled by the thrill of the unerringly provocative hands that were stripping him, taking possession of him. A pattern was wrenched out of shape; Patrice hadn’t taken the initiative since the first morning.

The kiss was broken off with a stifled cry, and a mouth joined the hands in whipping up all his body’s erotic sensibilities. Rod stood naked before the boy, his feet parted, his head thrown back, his shoulders bunched, his hips thrust forward to offer his rigid flesh for adoration. At moments with Nicole, he was still slightly embarrassed by the gross blatant virility of his erection, but he knew it couldn’t be too big for Patrice. Looking down he felt he should curb an unfamiliar pride in it, shake off the heightened awareness of it that had begun with Patrice’s rapturous praise of it; everything in him seemed dwarfed by the bold male organ that demanded adoration.

“Jesus, baby,” he gasped as hungry lips drove him to the limits of his control. Some sixth sense seemed to link them so that he felt himself becoming what Patrice was in him–a god-hero in an almost innocently childlike vision of triumphant masculinity. All remnants of self-consciousness passed. He was a naked god accepting obeisance. Hands and tongue and lips worshiped the vision until Rod felt as if his body would crack in the blaze of passion it had aroused. His orgasm almost toppled him off his feet.

When the spasms had subsided Patrice rose and looked at him from eyes that were glazed with incredulous gratitude. “I’m sorry. I’ve wanted it so much,” he murmured.

Rod stood close to him and ran a hand through his hair. Having received a gift of unbridled selfless dedication, he was filled with tenderness and solicitude for his boy. “Don’t be sorry, baby.
I’m
sorry. You know that. I wish so much it could be the same for me.”

“You kissed me. That’s more than anything.” A sparkle came into his eyes. “I had to think of a way to thank you.” Patrice tore himself away and headed once more for the kitchen. It required a superhuman effort to lightly dismiss something that had so profoundly moved him, even though it had been edged with shame. For a moment he had almost allowed himself to believe that he could take him away from his girl. He knew that he couldn’t, and he knew that even if he could, he mustn’t. But he had felt Rod’s near-participation and been tempted to tear off his own clothes and achieve a total act of love. The quarrel had given him an exaggerated sense of his importance. He was glad he was going away; it would give him time to readjust to accepting passively whatever Rod was ready to offer him.

Rod missed his boy more than he had believed possible. Instead of enjoying having the place all to himself, as he had expected, he felt out of sorts and alien. He had gotten used to being taken care of. He missed Nicole too, but he was accustomed to that after the last month of once-a-week meetings. It was an entirely different feeling, not unlike having money in the bank; it felt good to have it there even if you weren’t spending it. His need for Patrice was immediate, and his absence was an upsetting as having a hand incapacitated. Rod welcomed him home with affectionate exuberance and made him very happy.

A few days later he called Nicole the day after her scheduled return.

“Oh, it’s you at last,” she exclaimed when she heard his voice. “You gave me such a fright, my darling. Did you get my message?”

“Message?. No. What message? Is anything wrong?”

“No, of course not, dearest. Not now. I came home a day early. To tell the truth, I was quite bored by my rich friends and wanted to see my poor one. When I called your hotel they said you weren’t living there anymore. I knew it was some silly mistake, but it made me feel so horribly cut off from you. If you hadn’t called, I was going to do something quite drastic like sit on your doorstep until you came home.”

“I’m sorry. There’s an idiot there who always gets everything wrong.” His first impulse had been to blurt out some semblance of the truth, updating his move to the last few days, but she had given him time to decide that it would sound too pat and contrived. He would tell her when he could leap up to it of his own accord rather than making it sound as if it had been forced out of him. “The main thing is you’re back. You came day before yesterday?”

“Yes. It seems ages. I’m quite desperate to see you, my darling.”

“Same here. Tonight?”

“Yes, please.”

“I’ll raise hell with the hotel. Damn them. We could’ve been together last night.”

“That’s what I had been longing for.”

“Were you, sweetheart? I’ll spend the night to make up for it. I have the right to get to work a little late tomorrow. I’m the only person in the world who worked all day Christmas.”

They exchanged additional endearments and grew repetitive without being aware of it, entranced by the sound of each other’s voices, and hung up reluctantly. Rod returned to work wondering why he clung to his small deception. If Nicole knew he had a friend he shared an apartment with, she might expect to be introduced to him, but he could think of ways of avoiding that. He couldn’t quite face the thought of getting through a social occasion with the two of them. It was a harmless secret that could become dangerous only if someone found out, but there was an element of danger in all that was unorthodox, and he had given up playing safe. Nothing he had observed or had been taught about human behavior had convinced him that there were infallible rules. He would invent his own. Nicole. Patrice. They were both necessary to him in very different ways.

With the coming of a new year (he had ushered it in quietly with Nicole), he and Patrice decided that 11 of the pictures were ready for their transatlantic voyage. A complicated procedure was required to clear them out of the country; a special branch of Customs had to be convinced that there wasn’t a Rembrandt secreted among them. Crating and shipping was expensive. Rod had the impression that his funds were suddenly melting away. It really didn’t matter. The spring show was no longer a distant goal but an immediate reality. Ten thousand dollars had been mentioned as a sum he might reasonably expect this time. The things he could do with $10,000! The shipment was practically a guarantee that payment would soon be made. A letter from the gallery arrived little more than a week after the pictures had gone, too soon for it to be an acknowledgment of their arrival. He read it with puzzled disbelief. It said nothing definite but hinted at a postponement of his show. Heavy commitments to more established painters. Hitting the market for abstract art while it was still hot. A possibility of showing a few of his new things in an important group show in order to boost his prices. Blah, blah, blah. He crumpled the letter in the grip of sudden panic and had to smooth it out carefully so that he could show it to Patrice. He was probably reading more into it than was intended. It simply raised some questions without answering them.