We stayed there for some time, in our house in Boston. In the end, Marcellus refused to go back home to either California or to Texas. He told me, pressed against my warming body, pressed against my back, "I want this house."
I told him, "Yes and so you will have it, but first you must go home." His fingers dragged against my sternum and I could not keep my eyes from rolling back into my head.
"I'm squared away. I can buy new things," he told me, with a little disdain.
I had noticed, with some trepidation, how his eyes struggled to focus on small things. I wondered if anyone had ever bothered to test his vision. I wanted to take him to see the doctors that I knew, and those doctors were in Los Angeles. "Would you object to a short stay in Los Angeles?"
"In a hotel room? No thank you. Buy me an apartment there too if you want me to go."
Did I want to say, "We don't have the money to live quite that extravagantly?" That it had already been a hard battle to take money away from others so that he could have the house here in Boston? That our finances were a delicate dance and that in order to do as he asked I would have to carve deeply into our investment capitol? I had already one person who I was willing to do such things for. I was not certain in any capacity that our coffers could support two. "So please us both," I murmured.
For the first time, watching him pack up his little suitcase and busy himself in his room, I felt a little disdain. I thought, what will he do to us, if I cannot say no to him? If I worry over something like money, feel uneasiness, can I be so certain of him? Of myself? And over the afternoon, my disquiet deepened sufficiently enough to trouble me. After some time, I went away to my office, I'm afraid without saying good bye to him. I felt struck with the most extraordinary sadness, so suddenly struck with uncertainty, and could not think of a place to rest in that house. At my office, I sat in a chair and looked for Nicky, but he had gone elsewhere some few nights past, leaving me with, "Be wary. I love you and your nose, take care. I love you and your buttons, take care." What he went to do, I do not know.
I thought of myself, not for the first time, as a younger man and in love. Oh I had so been in love, those first few years. Oh how like this was not like that at all. You see that I did worship him, my Laurent, in those earlier times. Still, I felt great regard for his head, and well enough to attract me to him. Even, sometimes, lying beside him in bed I felt the deepest thrill of pleasure quite in tune with those early feelings. Surely, what I feel now, and felt then in Boston is tempered with that deeper love of belonging, and of origin, but I did feel that old thrill occasionally. I did feel a wish to be swept up by him and to be seen by him.
I told myself, he will creep into your life quite wrongly if you call him now, though I knew he waited to hear from me. There is no love like ours where the other party feels nothing. Of course I knew that he loved me even when he said that he didn't and that he couldn't. I thought of his little lips and tortured myself. I thought of his cologne, of its sugar, and tortured myself. I thought of him coming in and saying, "So let us relieve our body of our little sin, and put him by," and saying, "Yes," and him to whisper to me, "Dove."
I thought of Laurent's hands untucking my shirt, and of them upon my body, and how in my younger days his touch would draw from my lips earnest prayers to God, and how the touch of his own lips could make me forget Him or feel Him in me wholly. I trembled to think of it, there in Boston. I shivered for things as they had been.
But even then, so much had changed from our lives before. In France, we had lived as one body. In America, so often distance separated us. If living beside me, he would grow restless for the world, and feel as if I tethered him to a place. This I did not mean to do, but he had his own struggle. I could only be balm to homesickness, and he so often denied that he felt so in those years. I keenly ached for him. So quickly I had been swept into a romance that I could not be sure I truly wanted, but whose battles had been fought already, and won. To hear the boy say he loved me, it did not tremble me the same. I felt afraid of what I did not know. I sat by myself awhile, and sad.
How could I know that in the coming years, Laurent would put himself in a position of starvation again, and of vulnerability, but that Bell would never trust him. I see it clearly how it happened, that we both of us were looking for old love affairs. Bell was not a French naif or lusty in any way, though pretty and sincere. Bell had a vulnerability of spirit that appealed to Laurent, and which grew in Bell charm where really there was little there naturally. As Marcellus grew a little older, he grew a little quieter as well, and I came to appreciate that side of him, that as he did grow that little bit older, after Bell's death, there seemed in his eyes a stillness. Sometimes, when I am sad, I only need look in them to feel divine a little, and quiet myself.
With him, I have been vulnerable in ways I could not be with Laurent. Between L and I was always some propriety, and always history. With Marcellus, oh with Marcellus. To tell you it true, over these years together he has grown into a different man. And yet, in the year that his Bell died, he was still a boy. In 1983, he was only twenty.
That evening in Boston in 1980, before all of that, when I felt sad and thought of calling Laurent, I went back to Marcellus before the sun rose. I crept back in and sat reading under a dim light. It is a scene that has repeated many times, where though I knew he was awake, he did not come to see me. He is noisy on occasion, demanding, but when truly I must keep my own peace somehow he knows it. I sat reading, I believe Melville, and when finally he woke with the day, he went about his breakfast without acknowledging me.
I had been lost in thought. I had been thinking on my sins, and especially the violent ones. I had been reading the same page for an hour. I had been thinking that I had not been to confession in very long, and that if I were honest, I did not believe that I could be absolved by inwardness alone. I did not feel tortured, for I had been apart from God for some time, but it troubled me as it does sometimes.
I watched him cook his breakfast. He was wearing only an oversized white workshirt, and nothing else, which his long legs gave accent. Really he is very tall. He had left his hair unbrushed, and it was a blond chaos. Surely he had been sleeping fitfully. The sitting room flooded with the smell of butter for eggs and cheese toasting on bread, which made me feel nostalgic for nuns calling nuncheon. Only when Marcellus brought his breakfast tray into the sitting room, to turn on the television and partake of repast, did he look on me at all, and then only to flick his eyes up at me a moment. I wondered for what reason he were being so coy, not yet dreaming that he knew my mind.
While he watched television, I read. While he flipped through magazines, I read. When finally he turned to speak to me, sitting as he was on the floor at the coffee table, his legs crossed, I was ready. "Sometimes you speak to me very formally. Would you like me to try?" he asked. He did not seek my eyes.
"Oh good heavens, no," I said, sincerely.
"Where did you go last night? I looked for you," he said.
"I was only in my office."
"Don't think that I need you around all the time, but I missed you. We haven't been together all that long, if we are together at all."
"I think that we might be."
He's told me since that many thoughts were in his mind, like if I loved the man he thought of as his father, if I had gone to him, if I would. I am not good at thinking about the concerns of others, even those I care about. I know it. But in that moment, other of his concerns came to light then instead. "Do you drink blood?" he asked me. "Is that what you do?"
"Yes, my darling."
"Don't call me 'darling'. I don't like it. I'm not a 'darling'. How often do you do it?"
"Perhaps six or seven times per year," I told him.
"Do you murder people?" he asked.
"I used to. Sometimes it still happens," I said. I did not even think to lie. I am not ashamed.
"Sometimes?"
"Sometimes the body cannot take it, and it happens. Sometimes, there are uses for a corpse."
"Dasius, promise me that even though clearly you are psychotic, you will not be to me."
"Do you not want to deal in blood? Do you not think on it for yourself?"
"I do but I do not want much part in violence, not in the kind that I heard that night."
"You cannot be afraid. That does not do."
"Don't say platitudes to me. Don't you think I can tell the difference?" He was looking at me again, full in the eyes, his pink lips parted. His long pale eyelashes were stuck together from sleep. He had not washed his face. His breath had begun to run a little quick, a little heavy.
He was beginning to upset himself, and it froze me in my place. I did not know what to say. So often with him I do not know what to say. There are not those little phrases I know to speak. I did not know him. "I'm sorry. I am only trying to say the right thing."
He bit his lip and looked away, in a private emotion.
"Violence, it is not typical, Marcellus. Sometimes, there do not seem other ways to communicate. I do not know how to explain to you the language of blood, and of pain. I hope to spare it you. But I may only hope, as God has reign over me and of my soul, that I cannot know what will happen. I do not know."
"Are you so religious? I don't believe in God," he said, touching a tomato on his plate with his finger.
"I will share with you the Word if you wish, but if you will not, it does not trouble me a wit."
"I guess that I do not want to go to Los Angeles, and don't know why you're making me go," he said.
"I used to know a boy," I told him, and I don't know why. I waited for him to move up beside me, but he didn't, watching me from the floor. I uncrossed my legs and shook my head. "He could not have been more different from you, really. But he was tall like you, and blond. I thought him so innocent, so unlike myself. I thought that if he liked me, it would find me anchor, as I thought myself a tossed ship on warying ocean, and so lonely. But I thought, if it is blood for us, what can innocence hope to remain innocent? I thought it impossible."
Marcellus stirred his tomato with his finger, pensive.
"But out of my hands, he took to blood quite willingly, quite willingly. He took to violence quite willingly. And even now, he seems so innocent, and so soft. I wonder, how could both violence and quietude exist in such a person? His lustiness is a match only for his sweetness. Such do men become eternal, I suppose, and yet I do not know another like him."
"Why are you talking about other men to me," Marcellus demanded, in a tone I could not read. I looked to him for the meaning of it and he laughed theatrically.
He refused to go to bed with me. He said he felt hot. Beautiful boy, bronzed by warm sunlight, completely of fire.
I tried to think of what Nicky would say to me. I tried to think of what L would say to me. I waited until very late at night. I waited to call L.
"Ahoy," he said, on the other end, still at the hotel.
"How are the eyes? They are sitting right?"
He went quiet on that, and I heard him lick his finger to turn a page.
"They are sitting right?" I asked.
"They are never sitting right. They are never. You know that they are never. They are heavy in my skull. I feel them in my head," he said.
"But you command them."
"Come and see for yourself what I command," he said, and licked his finger again.
"Are you upset with me?"
"You think it is so easy to forget what has gone on between us? I am not so cold as you, remembering only what is convenient."
"But you should not keep a grudge."
"Dasius, think about what you are saying."
"You attacked me as well," I protested. "And the signs are all mended."
"You sound like a child. I am going to Europe. I was only waiting for you to call." His voice came to my ear as a vibrating purr.
"I do not know what I am doing. I am afraid," I told him, in a rush.
After a moment of silence, he sighed. He sighed out the breath he needed to speak with, and did not take another.
I thought of him there nude on the white sheets, of his hips, of his fingers holding the telephone. I thought of taking him apart, of putting him back together again just the same, just the right way. I thought of going to him on my knees and begging him to take me into his confidence, of apologizing for trying to cut him out of my life for the past forty years, out of my heart. I thought of telling him I would put away worldly things, of writing him a letter in order to sell him my soul. I thought to seal it with blood, and lay my body at his feet. In short, I thought of writing him the letter another lost boy had written, a century ago, and which had found itself in my hands instead of Laurent's. Nicky is not the only one who has memorized that letter, of Leis's, of Bacchus and Ampelos. I have it in my spirit, of violent love capable of disfigurement, and destruction, of a boy willing to throw his life away for just a taste of what he'd had briefly, a lifetime ago.
But I could not write it, and I did not or see hear of him again for three years, until I received a letter from that same boy so unexpected that it bound me to Laurent's unwilling side for the rest of his life.
Now I am writing. You see I am writing. I cannot stop writing. And more often than I can safely countenance, I so regret not writing Laurent that letter and giving up my worldly self, if it could only mean those three years back. The signs of struggle are all mended, his blood spilled by the blade that evening ten years ago now, all wiped away. Oh but the wound runs so deep I cannot breathe.