I watch as the hulking figure begins to quake over the still body of my Giacinto. His breath comes out in wild spasms and meshes with the whooshing wind of the fan overhead. Dazed, I note that small flecks of my secret lover’s blood have speckled the soft-hued petals of the grounded hyacinth.
“My sweet wolfhound…” Giacinto is barely breathing. “Seems we’ve both been tracked down—ambushed, if you will.”
With the fight-or-flight instinct kicking in, I move back through a tangle of low flowering bushes. Stumbling over the rutted earth, I graze a spigot pipe sticking up in the ground, as my whole body lunges onto the footpath.
I can’t shake the heady scent of the hyacinth plant. From the corner of the greenhouse, I hear Zeffie’s unsteady voice stuttering into a cell phone. “I need an ambulance. Right now, someone hurry, please.”
My instinct is to flee, to find a place to howl and thrash about. But I’m completely winded and instead lean against a vine-covered trellis at the threshold of the conservatory’s front entrance. The sun overhead has scorched the potted plants lining the circumference of the bright patio, turning the thin tips of their petals a tobacco brown. I note how frail and delicate the veins of the leaves are; their exposed green, so delicate and vulnerable. I close my eyes but all I can see is the vague pink of Giacinto’s blood mixing with the palette of the hyacinth’s orange-purple petals.
I try to imagine the details of the conversation we had just moments ago: intimate, bare, sentences layering over one another like the soft pat of a shovel in a planting bed. Our words and gestures and intentions, like a scatter of seeds waiting for water and sun and the frail spark of germination.
What were the words he used? Hold me? Speak my name? Don’t let go?
My thoughts are jumbled.
This was just a clandestine affair—it wasn’t a real romance—it only existed within the boundaries of this greenhouse.
I try to make sense of the cacophony in my brain. How did Giacinto’s voice sound? How was it made distinct with all the blooms and beehives humming all around us? His phrasing was so gentle, sometimes barely audible, that we always needed to stand close; his voice always meshing with the wet air, the classical music station, the intermittent sunlight.
Perhaps I was in the grip of the Stendahl syndrome—that odd psychosomatic illness that produces confusion and dizzy hallucinations when individuals are exposed to too much beauty. Giacinto’s voice, his presence, his embraces had become for me a kind of sickness, a disease that produces intoxicating music in the brain. That was the only way to describe my infatuation with him, the way one would try and describe the sound of violin strings and mournful cellos—as if one could ever.
I was sick, of course I was, lovesick—lost in the exquisite, unworldly notes of Giacinto’s voice that braided around all these exotic plants and trees and this persistent tropical steam.
I steady myself against the trellis and note a stark white bloom placed at the exit to the greenhouse. I begin to recall vague details from a college course in Greek mythology that remind me that Hyacinthus was a divine hero who was deeply loved by Apollo. In the classic tale, Hyacinthus is struck by a wayward discus and dies. Apollo is so bereft that he creates a flower, the hyacinth, from the youth’s spilled blood.
I am not Apollo and I don’t have the power to disallow hell from claiming Giacinto—or rebirth him into a magical flowering plant. But I do have this strong desire, this urgent need, to rescue him—even if there is a jealous lover looming amid the spiders and geckos in the foliage.
I inhale deeply and turn around to face the path back into the conservatory, the trail that wends toward the thick mesh of leaves where Giacinto’s body was splayed. “So beauty has its own rules,” I tell myself. “It gives the seduced individual the ability to act on behalf of the seducer.”
I walk faster and begin to imagine bringing Giacinto back to a restored state of calm. I imagine visiting him in the hospital, bringing him potted orchids that he will explain are vulnerable to drafts. He will caress their petals and teach me exactly how much water to give them, how to tell if the soil is moist enough, how to place them just so at the windowsill.
“It is fated,” I say aloud to the wilting snapdragons.
I touch my forehead and wipe off the ring of sweat. The sun seems hotter, the graying glass enclosure more humid. I reach into my pocket for a handkerchief or a tissue, something to blot the unrelenting perspiration, but there is nothing except a half-melted hard candy heart from last week.
“I could have sworn I had swallowed every last one,” I say to myself, and I take it out and press the still hard surface between my fingers.
TELL ME, it mocks. But at the moment I am unable to form words. I cannot speak the incantation that will bring Giacinto back or call on the disdainful gods for mercy and redemption. Apollo was able to spare Hyacinthus from entering Hades. Is the strength of a budding romantic adventure enough to save Giacinto?
I inhale the heady scent of lilac and convince myself that when I turn the corner, just around the thicket of Japanese chestnut trees, Giacinto will be waiting for me, conscious and breathing, with enough spark and pulse and fire to heal.
I assure myself that when our eyes meet, somehow I will find the consoling words that will bring him back to me, so that alive and together we will reinvent the old parable, rewrite the outworn ending of the tragic Greek myth.
I take another step, put the last candy heart in my mouth and bite down hard.
BEAUTY, MATE
Barry Lowe
What was it that people saw in me that made them think Andrew and I would hit it off? He was gorgeous and the boy most likely to be pursued in a bar. He was intelligent, belonged to various gay political organizations and thought the older generation, of which I was a perfect example, had crippled the gay movement with our hedonism and our lack of political will.
He had flawless skin if you ignored the cluster of pimples around his chin—and it was easy to ignore those slight blemishes on an otherwise perfect complexion. His eyes were what you noticed most. Or was it his smile? His hair, the way it hung over his forehead and spiked at the crown?
And here he was screaming abuse at me in public along Oxford Street, Sydney’s gay Golden Mile.
“You’re so fucking tragic,” he screamed as a few guys passed by smirking, probably mentally calculating the difference in our ages (
It’s only twelve years
, I felt like screaming.
He’s twenty and I’m thirty-two
) and marking me down as a premature sugar daddy. “You don’t have an original thought in your fucking head. Everything you say is vomited up from opinion pieces in what passes for quality journalism in this city. It’s all shit! You’re shit!” And to emphasise his point he threw his arms out to encompass the street on which we were currently the top entertainment, “And all this is just commercial bullshit milking the gay proletariat’s dollar.”
A few people stopped to applaud and, if I hadn’t been on the receiving end, I might have applauded as well. But he had the wrong man. He hadn’t taken the time to find out who I was. I had marched in gay rights demos in which the police had beaten up protestors. I’d been outside homophobic companies and church dioceses when men had been fired for their sexual predilection. But, of course, Andrew didn’t know that. We’d only met half an hour earlier.
We’d taken an instant dislike to each other.
“Go home, granddad,” Andrew said, his energy finally draining out of him. “Your time is gone. Let us take over now.”
“It’s all yours and you’re welcome to it,” I bellowed back as I slunk away, leaving half a dozen predators hovering in hopes of picking over the remains of our short-lived friendship. Ah, the fickle nature of gay life—and the fickle transience of beauty.
I wasn’t ugly. I just wasn’t young and beautiful anymore.
Back home, I slammed the front door in frustration.
“You’re home early,” Nathan said and got up to give me a hug as comforting as only a long-term boyfriend can bestow.
“Opinionated little prick!” I spat it out and felt better for it.
“Didn’t go well then?”
“Thinks he knows everything! Has an opinion, no matter how half-assed it is, on anything I brought up. Oh, sure, there’s an inquiring mind in back of that pretty little head of his….”
“You didn’t say anything
about
his pretty little head, did you?”
“I might have.”
“And you didn’t make the mistake of telling him how young he is?”
“Um…well…”
“And just exactly how did you take it when people said the same things to you back when you were his age?” Nathan asked.
Nathan always did have a way of putting things in perspective.
It was two or three weeks later when Andrew and I met again. It wasn’t planned. Our house was always open for friendly drop-ins because we were so close to the center of the gay metropolis; to people passing on their way to parties, to the bars, on their way home. Nathan and I had just finished dinner with two close friends when another, Tony, and his entourage turned up at the door. And who should be among that entourage but Andrew. I smelled a rat and suspected Tony was attempting to precipitate another conflagration between the two of us, having heard the gory details from the bush telegraph that swept Oxford Street.
There was a buzz to the ad hoc gathering, about ten people in all, not least because of the buzz of exploitative interest in Andrew. He was instantly the focus of the crowd’s attention; everyone in the room was subtly and not so subtly attempting to impress him. There would be heartbreak tonight.
One of Andrew’s friends had staked a claim and was hovering possessively at his side, while others circled flirtatiously. I was never a fan of blood sports, so I left the room to replenish wines and make coffees and teas. Soon enough, I was chuckling as I heard voices raised and laughs shrieking more volubly than usual and people’s words tumbling over one another, all in an effort to dazzle Andrew. From my vantage point a room away it sounded shallow and futile.
“Can you do anything?”
The question took me by surprise, and I only realized when I looked up that the voices in the living room had subsided. That was because Andrew was in the kitchen speaking to me—quite civilly, as it turned out.
“What’s the problem?” I said.
“They all want to fuck me,” he said.
“My, aren’t we the modest one.” I couldn’t stop myself from a little payback.
“I should have known,” he said as he turned to walk away.
“I’m sorry,” I said, and I was. “I know they are. I could hear it from here.”
“Any solutions?”
“You’ll hurt a few people’s feelings,” I said.
“That’s okay, I seem to manage that anyway,” he smiled and that smile said it all.
I dragged him back into the living room and the noise level rose once again.
“Okay, everyone. Listen up,” I said in my most authoritarian tone. “Andrew’s a bit uncomfortable with all the attention, and while he’s flattered, the situation is awkward. So, how about I ask Andrew if he’s interested in each of you one at a time and those who get the nod can slug it out and the rest can just chill out. Okay?”
There was ready agreement. The fear of public humiliation was overridden by the hope of anointment.
Very carefully I went around the room, giving Andrew time to weigh his response about each eager man—which was always a warm but final
No
, even to my other half, Nathan, and, emphatically, to his overtly infatuated hanger-on.
When it was all over he’d turned down everyone,
“Now you can all relax and enjoy yourselves,” I told them.
I started back toward the kitchen to finish assembling the drinks, but Andrew interrupted. “You haven’t asked me about
everyone
,” he said, smiling.
“Who didn’t I ask you about?” I said.