Editor’s note: In 1975, James McCourt debuted with his sparkling novel, Mawrdew Czgowchwz. Over three decades later came Now Voyagers, or more precisely: Now Voyagers: Some Divisions of the Saga of Mawrdew Czgowchwz, Oltrano, Authenticated by Persons Represented Therein, Book One: The Night Sea Journey. Almost two decades later and readers are still wondering, Where are the other books? Far from abandoning the project, McCourt has all but completed the next two in the series. The following excerpt was kindly provided by the author and comes from the third volume, Winter Journey. (You can read an interview with the author here.)

Two Boys and Love
(Another Time)

The date was January 7^th, 1957. The two were standing close together, the backs of their hands lightly touching, in the still hour of late afternoon, on the bank of the Housatanic. The more animated, Gabriel Wayfaring, had gone in search of flat stones and come back with eight, four each; they started in skimming across the lightly frozen-over river. After skimming three of his four stones, Gabriel Wayfaring spoke up.

“Cousin, dost thou know how many fathoms deep I am in love?”

Desmond Featherston-Haugh, having skimmed his last stone replied.

“No, I do not, being better acquainted with furlongs than fathoms. However, after four years, pretty well acquainted with the cascade of your libido and the plunge pool at its bottom. Moreover, in the first place I am not your cousin with whom I am given to understand you have rolled.”

“That’s one way to put it.”

“Well, illicit congress then – anyway a ripping yarn, how you fucked her spazzed in the – what is that grove you love down there in gorgeous Georgia?”

“The scuppernong – but you know what they say, incest is best, but the brother’s the test – and as you know, I passed it.”

“Oh, hey, I’m sorry, I whiffed it.”

“Don’t be – but I tell you, Feathers, I’m in love with a wonderful guy.”

“You are far beyond wonderful, and you do know what I feel for you.”

“I do at that – put another nickel in, in the nickelodeon, all you want is – or was – loving me and music, music, music.”

“Moron.”

And love is too young to know what conscience is Mm.   

Love is the unfamiliar name / Behind the hands that wove / The intolerable shirt of flame / That no human power can remove.

Poor Tom.

“That you are not some side piece adept at manual process whose hand I borrow to crank one out, nor am I that for you, we are buddies with benefits, a long standing tradition in the world of platonic friendship – we are not soiled boys, not two idiot gooners, breath ragged, lost in goonland.”

“Never – never stupid about – it. It was love at first sight – galactic – when all those years ago you struggled into that dorm room burdened with clobber.”

“And you jumped up off the bed to give me a hand, although I was not a ninety-eight-pound weakling.”

And the best was yet to come as they did embark on a four-year intimate relationship not covered by the words “classmate,” “roommate,” or “pal.”

Buddies with benefits – not to be judged, only to be narrated.

Can he use his butt for his pillow?

Hm.

“I don’t deserve you, Feathers, and you do know how much I do love you, and how – ”

“And how – and how high is the Housatanic on Silbury’s bank? How high do I get on cheap rot gut rye? Confucius says it takes more than one cold day to freeze the river over – turns up regularly in fortune cookies at the patchy Chinese joint in town – but tell me, I feel the need to know, I’ve wondered – is it June?”

“June?”

“In January – it’s January here, is it June where you are – in love? ”

“Oh, come on, Feathers, don’t be a prick, O.K.?”

“I – a prick? Me? Moi? Ich? Io, Yo? I’m struck down.”

“O. K., so you’re a linguist, a very cunning linguist – ”

“Hah-hah – wicked pun.”

“Also a prick.”

“Happy to say not true, pleased to contradict – pricks are things you only find on little boys so they can go pee-pee. and show their boy parts off to one another, and play strip poker down in the basement before Daddy and Mommy get home from work – and giggling.”

“Giggling is what girls do when boys persuade them to play doctor – boys jiggling their boy parts huff and puff, moan and groan, sometimes let out yelps.”

“You would know – what was the name of that golden grove?”

“The scuppernong – I think you like the sound of it.”

“I do, I do, it drips of lust – scuppernong.”

“It’s a kind of grape, a little sour.”

“Hmm – sour grapes – not your problem.”

“They’re good for constipation, also for nerves. Miss Evelyn – Momma – thrives on them. Strictly speaking the arbor’s not an arbor, it has no trees, only grape vines, but we call it the arbor – Miss Evelyn has always called it the arbor, so we do too.”

“And giggling is for girls – and huff-puff is for the things that English boys at Eton and Harrow and elsewhere in institutions throughout the – ”

“Septic Isle – you always like to say ‘the Septic Isle.’”

“Just so – the things that English boys do up and down the Septic Isle, the privileged little buggers of the upper class dig to do in their so well-furnished chambers – unlike ours in this chilly dump – diddle-diddle, lick the yummy areas, and not get caught on their merry English way to full-blown buggery.”

“You’ve been to London, but surely not involved in full-blown buggery.”

“No – not nearly. Day trips with the terrible Fanshaws, the British Museum, the Victoria and Albert, two boring matinees, boring plays, boring actors, you’re much better, tea at the Ritz, they love to talk with pointed concern about English depravity, things unfit for a young boy’s ears. Lots of tips, though.”

The Featherston-Haugh English cousins; they live in Wiltshire, call themselves Fanshaw, do indeed relish raking over lurid details.

Things unfit for a young boy’s ears. Lots of tips, however.

Such things according to undisputed consensus reporting, understood to be part and parcel of that what turn your English public school boys into full-blooded, lusty Tory Englishmen – and yet, when sent into the world, such full-blooded, lusty Tory limeys accustomed to such joys – with boys – must learn to practice great restraint – the wise constraints that make men free – free that is to grow and prosper, mature without reproach, turn into full-blown sadistic fuckers hot on the hunt for anything that stands, sits or crawls on all fours, slack-jawed, begging for it.

Anfractuosities abound – rough stuff – ouch.

You got it, got it in one – ouch and ouch.

It takes two to ouch twice.

Smart – and they can always get two Piccadilly corner boys priced right according to the asymmetric grammar of prostitution custom – cheers you up a good bargain – but most advisedly indoors in a warm room, firstly because of the climate – although in London on a foggy day, down under the arches…

But, say, if men are caught – often by plain-clothes coppers through entrapment – making unwise, baller moves, touching one another immodestly in gentlemen’s lavatories, for example, in facilities available in every station in the Underground, everywhere in the city’s many famous, lovely parks…

Such practices in public toilets above ground are known as cottaging if you don’t mind – cottaging – I mean, pull the other one, darling, it’s got bells on.

Sweet.

Such things are common knowledge, the penalties beyond severe, the consequences devastating – lives are ruined, reputations trashed – blackmail is rampant – cash on the line, tolls on the turnpike – suicides too, and it’s only in the higher echelons that things can be hushed up.

The way they are in Hollywood, where paranoia reigns, where you’ve either got to want it bad, and badly, or are terrified of losing it.    

It – no further definition.

“It? Hell, she has those.”

And so does he, it’s a land of opportunity.

Mm.

*

“Gaby, are you planning on going to Hollywood?”

“I don’t know – they’re talking about taking the show out there.”

“They say Hollywood can destroy people, that Hollywood will fuck you when nobody else will. That girl who jumped off the Hollywood sign.”

“Stella says acting is intellect, endurance, will, character, emotion and imagination, that is time for me to grow from other sources, but not from the glare and the glitter of Hollywood, there to live like a goldfish in a bowl, act the chump for the gossip columns, win an Oscar or two – and Oscar is a eunuch – start taking drugs – cocaine at first, then all the rest, and wind up taking lesser parts, your reputation sinking below sea level, tourists walking over your star on Hollywood Boulevard wondering ‘What happened? He used to be a big shot, he even got the Oscar, and for leading not supporting.’ You should hear her.”

“I’d much rather hear you.”

“The true actor marks his territory for all to see.”

“Like a dog pissing up against a tree.”

“‘He is never sidetracked by any futile trivia – he must unleash himself from all hindrances. Time is crucial – the duration of the scene, of a gaze – it can also be a moment of emptiness – and luckily dahling, you have one of those faces that is capable of expressing absolutely nothing.’”

“What?”

“‘So that you may feel this oblivion filling you up.’”

“Feeling you up?”

“Filling you up – it’s a paradox – you will be able to create moments of nerve-jangling disquiet.”

“‘Alluring looks and public aura may have a certain utility, but they can have nothing to do with the actor’s genius – of course, if he is unhappily ugly or deformed his choice of roles will be limited – but only limited to the classics and to experimental plays. He may have to work his way up from lofts, but if he perseveres, he will find a niche.’”

“Not your problem, you’re far from either ugly or deformed.”

“No, but Douglas is, on the inside, a mental and emotional hand grenade with the pin still in – every time he jerks off he’s threatening to pull it. You can’t say the poor sucker who plays him is trying to embrace the audience – or hawk product either.”

“If you quit the show, they’ll just have to kill him.”

“Or put him in a coma until they find a replacement – they have all kinds of things in their bag of tricks.”

“Gaby, you’d be as hard to replace as Brando or James Dean, God forbid you’d die.”

“You’re prejudiced. Stella talks a lot about Brando, but not about his work since On the Waterfront. The fact is he’s gone a little crazy, behaving like a rutting pit bull. So I don’t know. Stella also says, ‘You will either step forward into growth or step backward into safety.’ It troubles me.”

“Don’t think about it today, think about it tomorrow – after all, you are from Georgia, aren’t you, where tomorrow is another day.”

“In my experience of home, tomorrow is usually the same day – anyway,  things forbidden to my kind are also said to be a feature of the New York subway system as currently situated thereabouts therein, the pursuit of pleasure day and night, around the clock, even on the midnight shift.”

Subject to the same dangers as London ones – the police are said to be glad of the detail, sadistic glee and everything, threatening their captives with jail time on Rikers Island just to have them shit their pants – but usually they’re not even booked – but in a way, it’s all inevitable, given the provocation.

He loves the map of the system.

“Oh, that map of the subway system – how you do love that map.”

“I don’t know that I feel love for it, but I do like pointing it out to people – I pointed it out to him,

yesterday morning in the taxi.”

“Provocation…provocateur.”

“My vocation – all actors provoke…something – you might well call it a task appropriation.”

“I think what most actors provoke is annoyance – present company excluded.”

“Why thank you kindly.”

“No more than you merit – in that respect you have aced the assignment – now tell me something, did he provoke you back?”

“He didn’t, he was interested – he collects things people tell him, things he overhears.”

*

“You know something? Speaking of provocations, of every morning, noon and night and even during the midnight shift as we’ve lain in our beds whispering sweet brotherly nothings to each other, provocations ramifying every morning, noon and night for four whole years, summers excepted, and they wouldn’t have been, had you picked up the hints I dropped, yes, like lead balloons, to visit you and your fun girl cousin down there in the wilds of – ”

“North Georgia – no, I did not pick up any of your lead balloons, lying there like barbells I might have tripped over – not that I could not have, but out of the most tender consideration. You would sicken and maybe even die in the scuppernong arbor with the heat of the day what it is.”

“Also you are brandishing something mysterious, not visible to the naked eye. I wonder if those 3D glasses we got when we saw Kiss Me Kate affected you in some transforming way, when Kathryn Grayson’s big bazookas came right off the screen and she flung that silver goblet at Howard Keel, and it came whizzing out right over the audience’s heads, and women screamed and ducked and men chortled with nervous laughter.”

“Adult concept, her gorge pushed right in our faces – looked like we could stick our noses right into her cleavage.”

“Many would go into bliss states doing that.”

“Not I.”

“You wouldn’t, not even for fun?”

“No, you know that.”

“She has formidable knockers.”

“Bazookas – Cousin Diana Kaye says she has the biggest bust in Hollywood –size 44 D-cup. Is that bigger than that ticket seller’s dame’s down at the Silbery you customize – your lascivious Saturday matinee thrill you’ve got revving in the red zone?”

“Lucille? I wouldn’t know.”     

“I suppose not – you never come up for air.”   

“Embrace your attraction and inhale it – mm. She is a volcano in that ticket booth.”             

“Etna?”     

“Krakatoa – she keeps asking, ‘Does it schmeck?’ She’s of low German stock. I say, ‘Javohl, Lucille, it schmecks.’ She keeps asking and I keep answering, until, finally, yelp and squirt – ‘Mein Gott! Mein Gott! – yelp covered by sneeze if patron of the joint should be at the booth.”          

“Clever.”     

“Otherwise, fire engine, air raid siren, Invasion of the Body Snatchers.”           

 “Golly.”

“Poor Lucille is infertile – she suspects her husband brought something nasty back from one of his Shriner conventions – The Ancient Arabic Order of the Nobles of the Mystic Shrine. The ‘fun’ masons – my brother calls them the ‘moron masons,’ crazy white fuckers sporting red fezzes, riding camels rented from zoos and zipping around in tiny cars. She’s been to the gynecologist – he gave her penicillin and some other thing that made her sleep for a week. ”

“They say that’s why the Virgin Queen had to stay virginal – syphilis from Daddy.”

“Well, Lucille is Catholic – the moron Shrine husband is Methodist, so she says what the hell – anyway I don’t think I’m her only pastime.”

“I don’t suppose it will be easy to replace you, you evidently have cunnilingual talent.”

“As you know, I have never sucked cock – what is it you say in French for too bad?”          

“‘C’est dommage’ ‘merde,’ ‘helas’ and ‘La vie est triste.’”

Gabriel is proficient in French, Desmond in German.

Mm.

“Nice – C’est dommage, merde, helas, I’ve not sampled your supply.”

“You said ‘if only,’ I said ‘I never said if, I said when.’ ”

“Anyway, she has the biggest bust in Hollywood, 44 D-cup.”

“How nice for y’all up in the balcony.”

“Alas, no, the balcony misses the thrill, she thrusts out but not up.”

“Cheap seats – ‘You don’t get what you don’t pay for’– fortune in the gum machine.”

“Bubble gum – how’s your hot cousin – getting there?”                

“In that department, Diana Kaye is not distinguished.”  

“Perhaps anon – meanwhile, this with Lucille is Oedipal.”

“It’s called eating hair pie, right?”

“It is – of course you can get hair pie from Dad as well as from Mom – and from Dad it can be pie a la mode.”         

“Feathers, what a truly filthy mind you have.” 

“I suppose – allow me then to rinse it out by waxing thoughtful for a minute here – long, penetrating thoughts, no short takes on things – long, looping, curvilinear thoughts that think they’re on a merry-go-round, and keep circling and circling, reaching out, reaching – ”         

“– out for the brass ring and eventually getting it.”

“And for what? Another free ride.”

“Deep…penetrating.”

“And dangerous, smacks of existentialist thought, which next to being a pinko fellow traveler or a self-admitted homosexual is by way of being sophisticated, French and atheistic the greatest threat ever

promulgated to the bubble gum, trading card, take-me-out-to-the-ball-game-buy-me-some-peanuts-and-Cracker-Jacks American way of life – Oh, say can you see – see the USA in your Chevrolet.”

“Yankee Doodle dandy, born on the Fourth of July – you weren’t, I wasn’t. I was born on April Fool’s. He, however, was – born on the Fourth of July.”           

“Salient fact, I suppose.”   

“I don’t know why it gets to me, I just find it thrilling.”  

“Would you marry him?”     

“In a heartbeat, in the blink of an eye, in – ”    

“Reader, he would marry him, you heard him say it plain. If you have been faithful and followed him on his show like the rest of us up here at Cornhill Preparatory School for the elite corps of tomorrow’s leaders and half of New York and incalculable numbers across the plains and prairies all the way to the Golden Gate, where he creates many holy moly moments playing a menacing, myopic teenage sociopath – Should he marry him, the poet of the moment, the face as the saying goes like you would find on a bush, the heavenly voice of a herald angel?”

Well put.

Expertly so.

The poet of the moment soon enough proclaimed the glamor poet of his generation.

Will he be asked to sign a prenuptial agreement?

Narrative usurpation, hegemony compromised, allocation rendered – asymmetric – unable to reach conclusions – how best to counteract? What slap action take?

Kill – car accident, suicide, homicide.

Who?          

The husband.          

“So, how do I get a ticket to this show?”

“It’s already sold out on subscription, but I can get you a house seat – anyway, remember, in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, ‘kiss thy stones’ is code.” 

“Hot – well the whole thing sounds to me like more insanity right out of left field – I mean sucking stones? I think I better come down here with you just to stop you from swallowing and choking – with your idea of method make-believe you could turn blue and choke to death on air without real stones.”

“From skimming stones to sucking stones – I tell you, Feathers, these exercises are the one thing keeping me from cracking up with this Douglas shit.”

“Poor guy.”

“That and the money.”           

The money.

The money.

“Ah, the money – the smell of it, pure intoxication.”     

“Not pure – never pure – one is hooked, enslaved.”      

“The horror – the horror.”       

“It’s nightmarish.”        

“You must get help.”         

“Help costs the earth.”

“It pays to pay forward against the day – when you are doomed, doomed to fame – crazy people will want pieces of your clothing.”

“Oh.”

“Some may even try to get your underwear.”

It’s the attraction of the stars in those witchy eyes and the turbulent soul reflected in them.

A temperament taut like an archer’s bow with the arrow nocked and hovering on the edge of release.

The meaning of life.

As lived.

As time goes by.

As time goes bye-bye.          

“Then he must save me, take me away from it.”     

“All – it all – thing is, though, he’s doomed to it too.” 

“Yes, but he’s strong, I’m weak, weak around money, money is my goddam kryptonite.”            

“Getting and spending you lay waste to your powers.”

“You are so erudite.”

“Annoyingly – I annoy them, the others – shit, a high school boy who pulls the levers of smart, they are shocked and dismayed.”

“Well, they can just go straight to hell.

“I sometimes think I can’t be part of the world.”

“You’d better be, that’s all.”

*

Having skimmed his last stone, Gabriel turned, smiling.

“Six skims across the ice to his opponent’s five, he wins.” 

“He wins, he is wicked charming, fetching, he communes with stones – he absorbs the very nature of stones, he sucks the stones.”     

“Has been known to – sense memory, complex in the geometry of its moving parts, actor preparation, vital.”          

“He is a stone whisperer. Stones and rocks and no reckless excess of secret joy are the solemn truths of New England laid down by law in Puritan times – stones you skim across the water, stones with which you build stone walls, stones you throw at your fatal peril if you reside in a glass house, which everybody here in New England does – perforce. New glass houses, prefabricated,cheap, old glass houses with great, long windows and heavy drapes always kept drawn so stones may break the glass for spite, but what goes on behind closed drapes – gosh all get out, Gaby where did you get those eyes?”

“What? Would you ask that again – what you just asked?”

“Gosh all get out, Gaby, where did you get those eyes? It’s a song.”

“That’s an English alexandrine I haven’t heard one spoken – I think Tennyson uses them now and again.”

“That ear of yours.”

“Anyway, Miss Evelyn said they came in the post. ‘Momma,’ I said, ‘Sumpsie picks our mail up from the P. O.’ ‘Your ahyes came Special De-liv-reh.’ ‘Then why are they out of line?’ ‘Damaged in the handlin’ – we wuh furious.’ A rich man down home told me once I had asymmetric ahyes like strange sins capable of creating situations of escalating consequence – it’s the kind of crazy talk you hear all the time down home. I think the Civil War deranged people and it’s been passed on down.”

“What did you say?”

“I said I didn’t think anyone in the South would find any sin strange.”

“That is a strange thought for the aggrieved Puritan New Englander afraid tothink too deeply, as deep thought is the devil’s back door, as Hawthorne knew, and Melville found out mooning over him, that love was hell. The Southerner thinks deeply – Faulkner does while he drops a dime on something supposed.”

“I think Eudora Welty does – then there’s Flannery O’Connor.”

Flannery O’Connor – dogmatic Catholic frenzy…thought?

Those gimmicky conceptual sliding doors.

If that’s the real body of the Christ melting on the Catholic’s tongue, then once he swallows –According to the immutable laws of the very nature He, His Father, and the Hovering Dove called into play in the shaping work of creation itself – the animals and man, and on specific point the digestive system’s alimentary canal…well – we know, do we not, that due to the actions of the digestive juices, peristalsis of the gastrointestinal canal, and final evacuation – barring the painful jolt of constipation due to troubling acrimonious thoughts, not only are bread and wine transubstantiated into the body and –blood of J. Christ, but these two things, the body and the blood are transformed – into into – shit.

Desmond spoke, “Gaby, what’s the matter? All of a sudden you’re pale as a sheet.”

Gabriel said, “I have to sit down on this rock.”

Desmond helped his friend to sit.

“So?”

“I’ll be all right in a minute – sometimes my brain gets flooded with the ugliest, unseemly ideas.”

“Oh? Join the Club.”

“Mm.”

“The Friendly Association of Unseemly Thought – it’s enough to make you lose your faith.”

“I have no faith.”

“In God or man?”

“I have faith in him, and you…and Sumpsie and Stella – will that do?”        

“Well, there’s some would call it skimpy, I call it sufficient.”   

“Well, I’m a Southerner, I don’t know that I think deep thoughts.”

“The soul that thinks deep thoughts does not pause to acknowledge it’s thinking them.”

“Well, Hamlet does.”

“This is true – you could play Hamlet, Hamlet is a guy like you – you are a guy like Hamlet.”

“Stella is well known for saying, ‘ Dahling, Hamlet is not a guy like you.’”

“Well, dahling, you are, without doubt – it seems you’ve been so all along, as a guy, before you were an actor – a time there was – yes, that Gabriel, he feels all the feels, or nearly all, has the whole town talking, but for all that, and all the same he feels no vain ones.”

“Not none, not as many as Diana Kaye.”

“No member of the Cult of Expectations.”

“Not in respect of life itself – also, Stella says if you want to be a star, go to Hollywood and offer yourself to someone – your body, they don’t care about your soul – but if you want to be an actor who wants to learn how to feel and show respect for the things you do, to learn to work in ensembles –multiple parties at play in specific situations, then you may stay and find the actual moment and live it – do you understand me?”

“Normal – especially for Americans, but perhaps tempered by the Southern experience – surely Faulkner thought so.”

“Deeply.”

“He knew the drill as it were – curses fly on reeking wings. Here’s a thought, very Faulknerian – death is what unites us, life is what separates us.”

“Problematic.”

“Well, if you must know – and I think you must – I suspect your guy, your other wonderful guy shares one thing with you – us – and that would be blessings.”

“Hm.”

“I’m pretty sure he is gifted.”

“Hm – a heated rivalry.”

“Of a kind, yes.”

“Your gift – your gifted gift must make your Lucille happy, yes?”

“Actually, that doesn’t enter into it.”

“Pun?”

“If you like – also a fact, due to the position assumed. I get up and leave the scene somewhat satisfied but damp.”

“We’re always damp, but we don’t leave the scene – the bed – damp followed by stuck together.”

“You did say one time you were stuck on me like white on rice.”

“In the buddy huddle.”

“Gag with spoon – Sounds like a funny song – like ‘Wooly Bully.’”

*

“And when I’m with him I almost forget what I’m thinking.”

“You’re not thinking, you’re in a trance seeing the face of God.”

“Once again, Oh, cousin, doth know how many fathoms deep I am in love?”

“Big ask.In the first place I am not your cousin, she who – whom you fucked wantonly, and in the second place you haven’t fucked me – yet – yet I am a patient Boston Brahmin boy – patience itself sitting on a monument…like, say, Cleopatra’s needle, and rotating clockwise so as to see…”

“The world in every direction, like a panopticon, and all things in it about which patience need be such – but do please rotate on a cushion.”

“For you, Gaby, for you not to have to enter a dangerously worn and rough passage if and when the time comes. But as to the fathoms love, there is one sure way to discover its exact extent. Fill your pockets with heavy stones, and your handy Swiss pen knife too, hold a long, thick rope in your hand and jump into the Housatanic – you can’t miss it, it’s right there – and do take your shoes off – they’re very expensive, you got them at McCreedy and Schreiber – and as my grandfather Gideon says, ‘Look after your shoes and your shoes will look after you.’”

“Nice.”

“And when you touch bottom, take the Swiss pen knife out of your pocket and cut a notch in the rope – length to measure upon holder’s resurfacing and if you don’t get stuck in the mud and wind up lunch for the bottom feeders – I’ll be there – right here – to pull you up – unless you get stuck so deep in the mud, I can’t, and you drown – because love is as dangerous to fall into as any swiftly flowing river.”

“The Chattahootchie, not the Talullah. If I jump into the Housatanic, I’ll be engulfed – the entity Douglas is engulfed in the riptide of frustration.”

“That sounds like a publicity release.”

“It’s from the head writer’s notes to the peons who dialogue the shit storm in, forging the continuity. In the case at hand in real life, though, I suppose it would be poetic justice, I met him – or I should say tracked him down – by the swiftest flowing river in town.”

“Poetic justice, like every other kind of so-called justice, sucks – but they do say drowning is a lovely way to die, calm, peaceful, poetic, with your whole life passing before your eyes in seconds. Thing is though I would be honor-bound and crazy mad with love myself to jump in after you, and if we both drown, each remembering the other’s life, when they haul us out of the drink – remembering us as we were when we weren’t.”

“If and when, our maybe half-eaten corpses.”

“If and when our maybe half-eaten corpses, they’ll call it a double love suicide – and how wrong could they be?”

*

The last light had faded from the winter sky; they were back in their room, contemplating the situation. Desmond spoke.

“Well, here we are, home safe.”

“Boys’ night in.”

“For a change – hit the shower while I concoct some coffee.”

“But we always shower together, scrubbing each other’s backs.”

“It won’t take long, start without me – say on your parts.”

“I’ve only got one part – well, technically three parts in one set – and two of them have turned blue, driving me out of my mind here in the dirt.”

“I feel no less.”

“We are of one mind.”

“Ganz richtig, Schatz – Bruderliebe, Tag aus, Tag in. So, start in on your parts – gifted, stacked, wowza, whoopie, lock it in – but remember that love resembles the white killer shark that swims off Cape Cod, exemplifying the mysterious and ungovernable parts of our lives, and the white shark’s teeth will make short work of you, wowza-whoopie and all.Love may make the world spin in your head, but it isn’t the thing that makes the world go ‘round – look at history, look at now – you like song lyrics, fasten on ‘hearts full of passion, jealousy and hate’ – it’s jealousy and hate that make this terrible world go spinning ‘round, always has been, always will be.”

As time went by.

By and by.

“No call for butterfly tongue-tangos of a smooth, clinging consistency, no more displays of deep spiritual affinities behind the sycamore?”

“What sycamore – we haven’t even got a potted palm in here.”

“And whose fault is that? You wouldn’t let me have an aspidistra. All the same it’s a pretty thought.”

“He has no shame.”

“He is not a self-loathing homosexual, there are few such in the South they have other concerns, pressing ones, survival strategies.”

Touching Desmond, Hm? – A current passing between them – Mm. Gabriel said, “You’ll do well at Harvard, no question.”

“I’m not thinking about it, about how much I’ll miss this.”

“Us – we’ll always have us.”

“We will – there is a tunnel under circumstances, though it’s dark. I’ll go old school, make what might possibly be a random choice, one going by certain time-honored criteria, and begin courting choice picks among the nice Radcliffe girls, show pony virgins from good families, their inviolate parts nestled in soft hair, who wear single strands of genuine pearls over their expensive cashmere sweaters, and expensive camel hair and cashmere coats, who gather in sororities and dream of boys like me, and propose to one in our senior year, with ring, governing myself accordingly.”

“Deftly navigating the situation.”

“Most deftly – comporting myself with manly dignity – ”

“Swayve and blayze.”

“Can you doubt it? Embracing delayed satisfaction, but passionate and sincere until the madcap moment comes when I take her back to my lonely room, ply her with the finest Madeira to dispel that aura of conflict, until the dam breaks, she relents, and I fuck her stupid – stupid enough to fall for me.”

“A rake – and then?”

“And contrive to love her up within conventional limits, marry her when we both graduate with honors, in sickness and in health, forsaking all others.”

“So it says here in small print.”

“Kindly do not resort to worn cliches, it is frivolous and vexatious – unworthy of you. It is true I spike the football with lascivious tastes – Lucille ones, by definition – young wife chosen coming from a good family would ever even know about, much less consider ever satisfying, but some you win and some you lose in life. And raise children – who these days can be kept entertained by nannies and preschool. Will you be my best man, Gaby, and godfather of the first child?”

“Well, of course, Desmond, it will be an honor.”

“Desmond.”

“I am calling you Desmond from now on, as befits your station – and I must make a simple, sentimental request, don’t throw away the rear-view mirror.”

“Innuendo, huh. No, never, in a rear-view mirror things are closer than they appear. And what a gift – a best friend and best man, a man of the theater as handsome and as homosexual as Montgomery Clift and Tyrone Power put together – stuck together – be truly grateful and will of course always love you too.”

“And if you remember to say please and thank you, when appropriate express your gratitude, close cover before striking, let your purple scarves match your eyes, know you are loved or if you’re not, forget about it, love is a rebellious bird – of prey. Pray for those who have recourse to anybody – anybody else, do your best when they do their worst, illegitimani non carborundum, stay as sweet as you are, try new things, don’t please your folks too much. When you walk through a storm have enough sense to wear a nor’easter, wipe, do not blot. Kindly refrain from throwing your butts in their urinals, they don’t piss in your ashtrays, the last man standing is the professional, and last but not least, ladies are kindly requested not to leave their panties in the hall, nor gentlemen their skid mark boxer shorts.”

“You forgot don’t trip over anything while you maintain custody of the eyes to anneal the lust – a phrase that would mean nothing to anyone not from the South – and please remember, we were not defeated, we were overwhelmed, and as a consequence we are all trained to sneak peeks through keyholes and listen at closed doors to see and hear what each conversation entails –it’s how we come up with so many strange and wonderful stories that charm the world – cake time.”

“Reckless fool – go get into the shower, I’ll join you, otherwise the hot water will run out.”

“Unconventional relationship dynamic ahoy.”

“Then we’ll go in to dinner, we can face it, we’re hungry.”

“Luckily not for delectable delicatessen.”

*

Hours later, after a usual unappetizing dinner, they were lying together whispering in Desmond’s bed.

“You know what, Gaby, you are in a new story, and every story has a hero who wants something, and to get it he has to go on a journey. ”

“Somebody said, ‘Make journeys, attempt them, there’s nothing else’ but you know also what? Some stories have two heroes, Lancelot and Percival, for instance, before Lancelot fell for Guinevere, and sometimes there are two such as we are, and they don’t have to go anywhere, such as we don’t for the moment.”

“True – and you know what else also? You’re a big Beckett guy, so, full disclosure – there are these two bums on a road and they hardly move at all and they are wanting someone to show up and give them whatever it is they want –Beckett doesn’t tell us – but nothing happens – twice.”

“That’s not true, in the Second Act, the tree that was bare in the First Act has sprouted a single leaf.”

“Which is of course very empowering for the tree, who in the manner of all trees wanted a leaf – the thing is, where does it go on its journey?”

“The tree’s journey, every tree’s journey is an interior one.”

“Deep – but Gaby, the walls are thick in this novitiate, why are we whispering?”

“Pillow talk, always whispered.”

“‘Whisper His Sin.’”

“Never more than – it must never enter the squawk on the street, must never be offered to a stringer for the columns.”

“In return for a consideration. Well, then, allow me to whisper in your ear – you have had a sizeable impact on my life…also, you smell real nice.”

“It’s the shampoo, not the odor of sanctity.”

“Odor of Sanctity, a new perfume.”

“Just what the world needs, a new perfume – also it’s some time after midnight, whispering’s appropriate after midnight, loud talk is not.”

“I suppose if the walls have ears…”

“If the walls have ears, they’ve heard a lot, not just from us – just imagine, how many decades of intimate exchanges – ”

“I’d really rather not. There’s a tunnel in Central Park, a weird echo tunnel.”

“I told you about it, we were supposed to go but we never have.”

“We’ve never gotten around to it – you always got so interested in the seals.”

“The seals and the unseemly chimp Jimmy who jerks off in front of everybody – nasty – and he spits at people.”

“That word you use when you’re being Southern.”

“Unseemly.”

“Not nice – and if there’s one thing you are, it’s nice.”      

“Relentlessly, up front, and it’s gotten to be exhausting – Sumpsie always says street angel – but I’m no angel whatsoever, despite my angel name.”

“But you find something not so nice in you to play Douglas, don’t you – I mean that sex thing with the vacuum you told me about – very weird – but you only tried it once, right? You said imagining it done with the hose wasn’t enough, and you never told your Stella.”

“No, it was weird, but interesting, and we don’t have to be that specific in class – not to mention on television – but it did help – just the memory of having done it – plus the fear of having been caught at it, did help stick it in Douglas’s head – but it never comes to me otherwise.”

“Acting is a great big slice of strange.”

“And dangerous.”

“He doesn’t know he’s on television, like George Burns does.”

“That would be interesting, but the head writer doesn’t have that kind of imagination.”

“Bet it would sell more soap.”

“Detergent – it’s detergent now.”

“No more ninety-nine and nine-tenths pure – like you?”

“I am not pure, and you know it more than anybody.”

“Else – anybody else – but you can go to confession and get all pure again.”

“I haven’t been to confession in a long time – very.”

“So you’re more than only slightly soiled, maybe that’s how you become Douglas – but have you ever – with the vacuum cleaner? You can tell me, here in this place where so much has been talked of and explored in the realm of the senses.”

“You made the first move in the niche of the forbidden.”

“Only to stop you from panting every night in the dark, and drooling in the daytime, and of course to warm us both in this heatless icebox of a room.”

“I was surprised, you were het’rosexual.”

“Still am – basically, I care for no other male but thee.”

“I was surprised – shocked. This sort of thing happens all the time in the South, but from and with a Boston boy from a Mayflower family…”

“This is no time to be oik, Gaby, and this is no sort of anything but what it is, absolutely unique. You are unique, I am unique – we’re unique. Gnothi seauton – know thyself, and know and know the day, the date and the time – and that it’s always five o’clock somewhere.”

“That is so you – peak you in fact.”

“Bite me, let us clap cheeks, lose composure – and when you speak of this, and you will, please be kind.”

*

For such things are, according to undisputed consensus reporting, understood to be part and parcel of that what turn your English public school boys into full-blooded, lusty Tory Englishmen – and yet, when sent into the world, such full-blooded, lusty Tory limeys accustomed to such joys – with boys – must learn to practice great restraint – the wise constraints that make men free – free that is to grow and prosper, mature without reproach, turn into full-blown sadistic fuckers hot on the hunt for anything that stands, sits or crawls on all fours, slack-jawed, begging for it.

Anfractuosities abound – rough stuff – ouch.

You said it, Bo, you got that right, ouch and ouch.

It takes two to ouch twice.

Smart – and they can always get two Piccadilly corner boys priced right according to the asymmetric grammar of prostitution custom – cheers you up a good bargain – but most advisedly indoors in a warm room, firstly because of the climate – although in London on a foggy day, down under the arches…

But, say, if men are caught – often by plain clothes coppers through entrapment – making unwise, baller moves, touching one another immodestly in gentlemen’ s lavatories, for example, in facilities available in every station in the Underground, everywhere in the city’s many famous, lovely parks…

Such practices in public toilets above ground are known as cottaging if you don’t mind – cottaging – I mean, pull the other one, darling, it’s got bells on.

Sweet.

“What I would like is for my love for you and my love for him to be a double helix, or two entwined rose trees.”

“Think of the thorns, you bleed while we bloom in competition.”

“Thorns and roses, smiles and tears – I can’t be just me spinning two plates on sticks – it’s crazy enough spinning myself and Douglas.”

“Circus tricks are for the circus.”

“The contempt I have for him – Douglas – sometimes seeps into my brain – the contempt Douglas feels for the world, his explosive impulse shit,his homicidal loathing of both parents – the hack writers really let rip on that one – and how his psychical stance, his facial expressions and his whole demeanor becomes as if by itself into kind of Jekyll and Hyde thing – I read the book a few times when I was a kid, mostly for the language.”

“It shows.”

*

“We could have lain awake in the dark,” said the one, “alone in our separate beds, reaching out across the gap just to hold hands.”

“And supervised things with the free hand,” said the other, but the space between beds is too wide. I will admit I was the one who first crossed the great divide, so I suppose I fit the role of seducer – or sex pest. Ever since I first grabbed myself, I grab what I want – anyway, I find being together in one bed makes for a more satisfying means of communication, and satisfactory communication is of the vis viva in a relationship.”

“Well, the walls may have ears, but they don’t have eyes.”

“What was that other crazy thing – about eyes?”

“Custody of the eyes.”  

“Thready – anyway, I find what we do affirmative.”

“Bonding – what about what you do with Lucille?”

“I don’t expect ever to return to Silbury or ever see Lucille again, but if you go along with it, now that you say you’ve fallen in real love – ”

“This what’s between us is real love – horizontal, vertical, and bountiful.”

“Yes, and two loves have you – when comes the sonnet, the one about the rose tree and the plates? But the poet is the one to write the sonnet, isn’t he – but he only has one love, so no sonnet, at least not one about complexity or ambiguity – of whatever troublesome type.”

“As a matter of fact, I do believe he’s already working on a sonnet sequence.”

“You get quick action.”

“You weren’t listening at the reading, I overheard someone who knows him say so.”

“Well, Gaby, you ask me, he’s started over.”                      

“You still smell nice.”

Odor de fragrant boy.

Mm, and they use the same shampoo.

“You do too – but we do use the same shampoo.”

“Soap too – we do not however use the same toothbrush.”

*

“Anyway, I think we’re out of good subjects.”

“I suppose we could try sleeping.”

“As opposed to paper, scissors, fire, stone – why?”

“Possibly coaxing sublime dreams?”

“Sublime dreams tend to bring about depressing aftermaths.”

“OK, twenty questions?”

“Multiple choice?”      

“A lot of work – how many can you think of?”

“Not many, let me think. Who was last year’s hundred and first neediest case?”

“Who is public enemy number two?”

“Who killed Cock Robin?”

“Who was that masked man, anyway?”

“‘I,’ said the sparrow, ‘with my bow and arrow.’”

“No, the Lone Ranger.”

“He killed Cock Robin.”

“The Lone Ranger?”

“The sparrow – it’s a nursery rhyme.”

“Savage – but if you recite a nursery rhyme, and I go off to sleep, what will you do then, meditate?”

“I’ll think of something, or possibly very little – they say when you meditate, you should go for thinking a modicum of nothing.”

*

Gabriel said, “Cicero said if you have a garden and a library, that’s all you need.”

“He probably should have stayed in his garden reading scrolls and kept his head.”

“I think for anyone staying up late at night instead of going to sleep, it’s an unending debate between what he does and what he should be doing.”         

“I’m not on that debating team, I like what we’re doing, I think it means something to us both – getting our rocks off – Abspritzen, geile Wichsparty.”

“You’re a devout hedonist.”

“This is not the Realm of the Unsaid – and you?”

“I’m a suspicious hedonist – all Southerners are that.”

“And all New Englanders are Puritans, hedonists or not – ‘America, when will you be angelic? When will we take off our clothes?’”

“We already have, pay attention, look at us, naked, shivering, we must get into our pajamas.”

“Instead of their being the same dark green, maybe I should be wearing Yankee blue and you should be in Johnny Reb grey.”

“I should be in lavender –the lavender brigadier, and you have to overwhelm me.”

“I thought I’d did that already.”

“Checkmate.”

“Life with you, Gaby, is like one long make out on a whoopee cushion – although you are not a person of the uterus.”

“A what?”

“My grandfather Cuthbert used to call my grandmother Clemency a person of the uterus.”

“Your family is something.”

“My family – you wouldn’t want to be in it, which is why I can’t marry you.”

“You wouldn’t want to be in mine either.”

“I don’t know – Sumpsie sounds like a feature, your cousin too.”

“That they are, but you can’t marry either of them either.”

“Love, languor, longing, loss.”     

“Lean upon the everlasting arm – you’ll get over it in record time – that’s you – peak you.”

*

“Say we do face the truth, will the truth face us?”

“Or turn its back, focused on other matters.”

“Ah, philosophy in the still of the night – the world seems to tilt, word from the highest reaches of the heavens spills down.”

“You catch on quick.”

“And you smell nice, underneath the shampoo – what about counting something?”

“Sheep?”

“You know about farm boys and sheep.”

“Who’s a farm boy?”

“All right, let’s start.”

“As usual?”

“Why not, they’re sure to all be on the Classics final.”

“You first.”

“The three Graces.”    

“Euphrosyne, Aglaia, Thalia.”

“The three Fates.”

“Clotho, Lachesis, Atropos.”

“The four temperaments.”

“Sanguine, phlegmatic, choleric, melancholic.”

“The nine muses.”

“You know I can never get them all.”                       

“Never say never, it’s like in the shower, you start, I’ll come in and scrub your back.”

“All right…Thalia, comedy, Melpom-pom…”

“Melpomene – what for?”

“Tragedy.”

“Okay, good, an actor should know them, even pray to them.”

“Terpsichore, dancing, Euterpe, lyric poetry – Calliope, the epic – also of the merry-go-round in Central Park – how many more?”

“Four.”

“Nope.”

“Yup.”

“I mean, no, I don’t know the rest.”

“That means either an F or an incomplete – at the discretion of the instructor.”

“I’ll beg down on one knee for an incomplete.”

“That would mean summer school – or putting down the other knee – and whatnot.”

“Nix on the whatnot – all right then, the F – so fill me in.”

“That would be Clio, history, Polyhymnia, sacred music, Erato, love poetry – you should pray to her too.”

“Hah-hah.”

“Hah-hah – seriously – anyway, Ourania, astronomy.”

“Astronomy – I should have remembered her.”

“You should pray to her too if you want to be a star.”

“I am a star.”

“If you want to be a big star.”

“I might – all right, it’s my turn, the seven gifts of the Holy Ghost.”

“What?”

“The seven gifts of the Holy Ghost – you get them at Confirmation.”

“Gift-wrapped?”

“When the bishop slaps your face – weren’t you confirmed?”

“I must have been.”

“Wisdom, Understanding, Counsel, Fortitude, Knowledge, Piety, and Fear of the Lord.”

“I must have missed out – no bishop ever slapped me – nobody’s ever slapped me.”

“They know better – you’ve got Knowledge, Understanding, Fortitude, and Counsel anyway – bred in the bone, I imagine.”

“That’s a nice thing to say – you do say nice things.”

“You inspire me – there are also twelve fruits.”

“Apples, oranges, peaches, pears – ”

“Hush up your mouth – Sumpsie would say that. The twelve fruits of the Holy Spirit are charity, joy, peace, patience – ”

“So far, so good.”

“Do not presume – one of the thieves was damned.”

“Which one?”

“The one besides Dismas – he had no name.”

“He wasn’t baptized – nobody was baptized yet except Jesus, who was baptized in the river Jordan by John the Baptist.”

“Who lost his head.”

“That story is apocryphal.”

“Salome?”

“Apocryphal.”

“Rita Hayworth played her – I touched myself immodestly.”

“Nazimova played her first.”

“Who’s that?”

“Great actress, Russian, rumored at one time to be my aunt Thal’s lover – some morons called her ‘Nazzy-move-over.’”

“Cute.”

“Well, now I’ve lost count – but there’s mildness and benignity.”

“It’s benigg-ning to get boring – the seven hills of Rome.”

“Way too easy.”

“I’m being generous – you have to make up for the F.”

“Hm – the Quirinal, the Viminal, the Esquiline, the Capitoline, the Palatine, the Caelian, and the Aventine. I’d like to go to Rome and climb them sometime.”

“I’ve been up them all – made a point of it, although they’re not all that beautiful. The Viminal is the highest, the Palatine the most skeletal and depressing. I like the walk up the Via Qurinale best, past the quatro fontane and over to the Piazza Barbarini. The Caelian is the most beautiful with its great number of gardens, but the Aventine gives the best view of what was once the whole shebang.”

“You’ve done places, been things.”        

“Some – circumstances make the boy, not the boy the circumstances.”

“‘Minds have mountains’ remember?”

“Mullein – hard to forget – he teared up. ‘“Minds have mountains – Cliffs of fall. – Frightful, sheer – no man fathomed.’”

“Mullein teared up reading that – fathoms again.”

“Incorrect for measurement of land masses – but I didn’t want to intrude and correct.”

“More things to count?”

“Innumerable.”

“More Sevens?”

“Some – Hiroshima, for instance.”

“Hiroshima?”

“Seven planes – ‘Straight Flush,’ ‘Jailbird Three,’ ‘Full House,’ ‘Enola Gay,’ ‘The Great Artiste,’ ‘Necessary Evil,’ ‘Top Secret.’”

“I never heard any of that.”

“You mean before now.”

“How do you know?”

“My brother Elliot – he loves crap like that for talks around the campfire – and he’s regarded as the stable one, I’m the frisky sibling.”

“I love the frisky sibling – so, seven, huh?”

“Three for reconnaissance photography, one for weapon delivery – you’d think they were talking about Special Delivery from the gun shop – blast measurement instrumentation, strike observation, and photography. That was six, strike spare did not complete the mission – he might have felt relieved, or then again rejected, he’s never come forth like the pilot of the Enola Gay has, so we’ll probably never know.”

“Make an interesting monologue – maybe you could come up with some more things – those would keep us awake.”

“There are Aristotle’s eleven virtues, for instance.”

“Four more than the Holy Spirit.”

“Aristotle’s overall view is that virtue is one manner of elective habit consisting – of a middle ground relating to oneself introduced by reason, and so forth – more to the point, you have to work at it, nobody puts you into it with a slap in the face.”

“Like, ‘Thanks, I needed that.’ Miss Evelyn slapped my face once, the first time I sassed her, and then she started bawling her eyes out and begging my forgiveness, which was a worse thing. I’ve never sassed her since, and never have again called her Miss Evelyn – never called her anything, actually. You want to tell me what those eleven things are? In English – I don’t know any Greek words except iota – Miss Evelyn is always saying somebody or other hasn’t got one iota of consideration, and then Sumpsie will say back, ‘And there are times you haven’t got one bit of sense.’”

“They’re actually all similar to what the Holy Spirit supposedly dishes out – courage, temperance, generosity, truthfulness, friendliness, justice, magnanimity, righteousness, magnificence, ambition, and wit – you don’t just get them, although some are born courageous, generous, and friendly.”

“I wasn’t born any of those, and I never was ambitious.”

“No?”

“Sumpsie used to say I was born bone idle, too lazy even to get into the bathtub – she used to call me Smudge – Clay had all the ambition – Sumpsie, he had the gumption and the what’s to big himself up, and of course I worshiped him, body and soul. I’ll never get over him dead, not ever.”

“Phlegmatic – you play Douglas phlegmatic – or maybe just sullen.”

“Temperamental – there are other temperaments.”

“Three – sanguine, choleric, and melancholic.”

“I was colicky, and then melancholy – you’re sanguine.”

“There’s another Greek word you know – epitome.”

“I know that one – you are the epitome of frothed up sanguine.”

“Also probably hoi polloi.”  

“Always misunderstood.”

“What about you next?”

“Hm – how about the nine orders of angels?”

“To sing us to our rest? ‘Wer wenn ich schrie, horte mich denn aus der Engel Ordnungen? I don’t know.”

“Cherubim, Seraphim, Dominations, Powers, Virtues, Thrones, Principalities, Archangels, Angels.”

“Hm – well, Virtues might make me too good to be, Dominations and Powers would make me worse than I am – I like the sound of Thrones.”

“They mete out justice and keep tabs on the universal laws – okay for philosophy – but psychoanalysis?”

“It’s possible, in a strange way – you know what all these angel orders do?”

“I do – on account of Gabriel. You know what all the muses do, I know about angels.”

“What next?”

“Hm – let’s see – the Trinity.”

“I prefer the triumvirate.”

“We’ve done Rome – or you have.”

“The four suits of the tarot.”

“Easy, the sword for air, the wand for fire, the cup for water, the pentacle for earth.”

“You’re prone to the occult.”

“Only the good witches, only white magic.”

“I like hearts, spades, diamonds, and clubs better.”

“Di-a-monds.”

“In relation to lists such as the three conditions for mortal sins – serious matter, sufficient reflection and full consent of the will, the seven gifts and twelve fruits of the Holy Ghost, the nine choirs of angels, the nine muses, the seven hills of Rome, the four temperaments, the exact conditions of matter, form, cause and end, the nine planets, the Table of Elements, the moons of Mars, of Jupiter, the rings of Saturn, uncountable, the primes, likewise, the unnamed, unnumbered stars in the Milky Way, the rivers of the earth, the lakes, pond and puddles, every city, town, village, hamlet, crossroads, mountain, hill, valley glen and ditch, the hairs on any head and elsewhere.”

“Silky, blue black.”

“Prettier than Lucille’s, you said.”

*

“The strangely named months in the French Revolution – I remember you told me once.”

“You were amused, you wrote them down.”

“The dog ate them with my homework.”

“A likely story – in order, Vendemiaire, Brumaire, Frimaire, Nivose, Pluviose, Ventose, Germinal, Floreal, Prairial, Messidor, Thermidor, Fructidor. Zola wrote a novel called Germinal, and Sardou a play called Thermidor, after which lobster Thermidor is named.”

“Never had it – Lobster Newburg is big in Boston – so is crab Louis.”

“I’ve never had crabs – have you?”

“I would tell you.”

“I would hope so,”

“Hope springs eternal.”

“Spring will be a little late this year.”

“Better late than never.”

“‘Never. Anyway, I care about you – ‘If I didn’t care more than words can say, if I didn’t care, would I feel this way?’

“Your falsetto is sweet, but aren’t there four Ink Spots?”

“All right, one last, from Mullein, the order of adjective placement.”

“Opinion, size, age, shape, color, origin, material, purpose.”

“Use in a sentence.”

“Easy – Considered, impressive, young, any preference, ditto, he was emblematic of embryonic, muscle, flesh, and penetration.”

“Free association.”

“Hm…gross anatomy.”

“Hm – necrophilia.”

“Can you do better?”

“Let him who is without sin – ”                                

“Give in.”

*

“Yesterday, coming back on the train, I wondered about that – Dracula sinking sharp teeth into a victim – shock aftermath. When I got off at New Haven to change trains I walked up to the Yale campus, watched all the boys a few years older than us milling about, talking, sitting on benches in the cold open air, presumably discussing important things – I don’t know if Yale boys talk about shit or mock their professors like we do at Cornhole.”

“Too high-minded perhaps.”

“I thought, I don’t want any of this, all I want is him and the healing power of art.”

“Sweet.”

“I asked for the direction to the Drama School, the place I’ll never go to, found it, went in – there was a class going on in the main theater. I sat in the back row where it was dark, and watched. Some dumpy-looking woman with dubious red hair was giving two kids instructions, and then there was an improv. I couldn’t make out the sense – it seemed tense and they weren’t projecting, and it went on and on until one of the actors who had fallen off him chair onto the floor and curled up in a fetal position, sat up and howled like a wolf, stood, jumped down off the stage and ran up the aisle past me and out the door. I followed him out into the lobby and watched him heaving for breath. He saw me, looked startled, and for a minute I thought he might have recognized me – people do – but he was too wrapped up in the aftermath of whatever it was he’d been doing – experiencing up there on the stage – it’d had propulsive force.”

“As they say.”

“I went out and walked around awhile, went and had a cheeseburger in some place called the Duchess Diner, went back to the station and sat watching people come and go – not sitting around like the Yale boys in the cold open air discussing important things, not mocking anyone the way we do.”

“They most likely do when they’re settled down on the train.”

“In the club car it was hours before the next train up, and I sat there going over the whole thing in my mind – moving my lips like a crazy derelict.”

“Mulling over the improv performance.”

“It was a scream – he’s doomed – all actors are doomed, their sense of self is finally undermined.”

“Now you’re giving a performance, sounding like old Douglas gearing up for one of his tantrums – if we weren’t in this bed you’d be pacing up and down the room, smoking like a fiend, probably throwing the cigarette down on the floor – I don’t see you going on for self-harm, marinating in self-pity, burning yourself with the cigarette – curling into a fetal position and wailing away to such an extent so as to rouse the hallway, waking the prefect, earning ten demerits.”

“They say James Dean used to burn himself with lit cigarettes.”

“I would pick you up off the floor.”

“Not slap my face so I’d say, ‘Thanks, I needed that.’”

“Idiot – have I ever once slapped your face?”

“No – anyway I got in late, after midnight, you were asleep. I didn’t want to wake you.”

“That’s never stopped you before, but sometimes an earthquake wouldn’t waken me. ”

“I tossed and turned in bed, thinking about that actor – wondering. ”

“What it was all about – who was that masked man?”

“Then finally I went to sleep, deep sleep, and dreamed I went back home and uncovered secrets that were going to change the lives of everyone there – and I woke up before I could get to the conjure man – you’re yawning – I’m boring the ass off you.”

“Au contraire – I feel like that priest you didn’t go to, that Catholic of Episcopalian or Lutheran – and I absolve you. You should go to sleep now, not toss and turn, and dream sweet dreams, not dreams of running and screaming out of the theater.”

“I’ve never actually been up on stage in a real theater, or done an improv that would leave me a shattered wreck.”

“Douglas is a wreck, but he’s never shattered.”

“It’s time he was, time he was seen going to pieces, got himself missing. Life has been running for years to good reviews before him.”

“Those reviews have skyrocketed, Gaby, and you know it.”

“Troubled teenagers are in, but the stories play out – they’re fine for a couple of hours on stage, and better onscreen – James Dean, Sal Mineo, et cetera. The big screen, and you can see them over and over. On the tube they are a one long protracted agony, and nobody needs or wants to see them again – they age out, the way Douglas must. James Dean, dead, is forever young in East of Eden and Rebel Without a Cause.”

“So you want out.”

“Sometimes circumstances get in the way of love – right now I just want a ticket to Dreamland – if I go to sleep, will you do likewise?”

“When you’re asleep and I can hear you breathing, I’ll start in on the periodic table, it always does the trick – I never get beyond arsenic.”

“Desmond?”

“Hm?”

“Do you think there are more doors than wheels in the world, or more wheels than doors?”

“Doors.”

“Really?”

“Absolutely, it’s a given.”

Wisdom, Understanding, Knowledge, Piety, Fortitude, Counsel, and Fear of the Lord. The Quirinal, the Esquinal, the Viminal, the Capitoline, the Palatine, the Caelian, and the Aventine. Melpomene, Thalia, Euterpe, Terpsichore, Erato, Clio, Urania, Polyhymnia, and Calliope. Lachesis, Clotho, and Atropos. Faith. Hope and Charity. Vendemiare, Brumaine, Frimaire, Nivose, Ventose, Pluviose, Germinal, Floreal, Prairial, Messidor, Thermidor, Fructidor. Grave Matter, Sufficient Reflection, Full Consent of the Will. All entangled, tied together severally in knots, like any two or more feelings or desires felt at once.

He is astride his life, eyeing the fringes of his ways.

And now some closing remarks.

Please.

“And you know what they say, fast hands can also go slow – but you knew that. Sleep tight, and sweet dreams attend thee.”

“And when I dream I’ll dream of you. ‘When I want you in the night, when I want you to hold me tight, whenever I want you all I have to do is dream, dream, dream.’ ”

The Everly brothers, Don and Phil, nice boys.

Deeply and meaningfully talented, inspiration of a generation.

“You know, because we spoon, I might – ”

“I know – you might – you may, but you know that.”

Chaleur humaine.

Menschliche Warme.

“We are what we are.”

“We are.”

“We got this, Gaby, we do not need some time.”

That they do – and do not.

They are like-minded.

The story doesn’t end, it only stops, and then it starts again, another time.

At the same place?

At another.

Another time.

Another time.

James McCourt is a gay American-born writer and novelist who was raised in Jackson Heights, Queens. McCourt has been with his life partner, novelist Vincent Virga, since 1964 after they met at Yale University as graduate students in the Yale School of Drama. McCourt is the author of Mawrdew Czgowchwz (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1975), Time Remaining (Knopf, 1993), Delancey’s Way (Knopf, 2000), and Now Voyagers: The Night Sea Journey (Turtle Point Press, 2008), among other books. He has contributed to the Yale Review, The New Yorker, and the Paris Review. He lives in New York City.