The Marble Quilt (6 page)

Disgusted, he flees his hiding place and returns to the hotel. In the brocade and velvet sitting room, some outraged old ladies are deploring the scandalous behavior of a “certain woman” who has come to the hotel and seduced a boy nearly young enough to be her son. Gerald, his eyes in a book, listens avidly.

Eventually the old women get up to take a walk along the promenade. He doesn't
notice. By now he's lost himself in the book—Winckelmann—soothing prose about Greek things. What he tries not to think about, what he knows from his own tutors, is that Winckelmann was murdered in a Trieste hotel room by a Tuscan cook. A bad end, but he was a sodomite.

At around three Bosie strolls into the sitting room. “Hello, Gerald,” he says.

Gerald doesn't answer. Bosie takes the armchair opposite his. “Oh, Gerald, Gerald,” he says—and still Gerald doesn't answer. So Bosie picks up a magazine from the table between the chairs and starts flipping through it. “
The Women's World
,” he reads aloud, “edited by Oscar Wilde. Oh, look at this, an article by Mrs. Wilde! About
muffs
. Well, I doubt she ever would have got that published if she hadn't been married to the editor, do you think?”

“If you wouldn't mind, I'm trying to read.”

“What are you reading?”

“Winckelmann.”

“Ah, Winckelmann. But I suppose Pater isn't quite your thing, is he?”

“Too subjective,” Gerald says.

“Subjective!” Bosie puts down his magazine. “The trouble with you, Gerald, is that you're so …”

He quiets. Then: “She's very nice, your cousin.”

A deeper silence. Confidingly, Bosie leans across the little table that separates him from his tutor. “Gerald, may I tell you something?”

“What?”

“I think I'm in love.”

Gerald puts down his book. “Do you mean with my cousin?”

“Yes. With Laura.”

“That's nonsense. She's a grown woman. You're a boy.”

“Ah, but does age really matter, to the heart?”

“Your mother would not approve,” Gerald says. “I was supposed to take you on a tour so that you might learn something, not lounge around some boring hotel all day flirting with my damned cousin.” He sneezes. “No, this settles it. Tomorrow we leave.”

“We shall not leave,” says Bosie.

“I say we leave, and we shall leave.”

“And I say we shall not. Or you may. You may do what you like.”

“I would suggest your mother—”

“I would suggest there are some things I might tell my mother.”

Gerald stands. His face has gone pale. “What are you saying?” he asks stiffly.

Then Bosie laughs. He laughs and laughs. “Oh, come now, Gerald!” he says, stands himself, and pats his tutor manfully on the back. “Must you worry so? You always worry! Don't! If you'd let yourself, you could have a perfectly good time here. Why not let yourself?”

“This is not what your mother had in mind.”

“So what? Must she know?”

Gerald shakes his head. Excusing himself, he returns to his room. The bed assaults him: the knowledge of that stain. He must come up with a plan, he decides, and comes up with one. It is not a bad plan. Certainly it doesn't lack for courage.

“The doom room,” the counselor called his office; or “the fate gate”; or “the torture chamber.” Never to the faces of his clients, of course. To his clients it was “the consulting room,” and nothing else. Perhaps all of us use a different language in our heads than in the world; and certainly among his colleagues the counselor would never have admitted to amusing himself with such cynical word games. Still, so long as the brain's private monologue cannot be wiretapped, he will not be fired for his thoughts; he will not be fired for thinking of his office as “the torture chamber,” or for dividing his clients into the doomed (positive) and the saved (negative): terrible, archaic locutions that go against every principle of his training, which is in large part why he takes such malicious pleasure in their use.

At the moment the counselor is standing outside his office, by the water cooler. In his right hand he holds a fragile cone filled with purified water, in his left a piece of paper on which the future of a young man he has never met is spelled out. About five feet from him stands a door, behind which the young man sits, waiting, having no idea that the counselor, who is not in the least thirsty, has decided to drink another coneful of water instead of going in and ending the agony of his suspense. And why? Because he can. Nor will anyone (his colleagues, for instance) ever know that this little cruelty is intentional. That's the pleasure of the thing. He is palpating, caressing his own power. For a few minutes, the young man is his slave, and as in certain sadomasochistic sex rituals in which the counselor has also taken part, he's not going to be allowed relief until his master is good and ready.

After he finishes his third cup of water, the counselor checks his watch. Five minutes. Yes, he decides, probably he's kept the kid sweating long enough—to do so any longer
would be to cross the border into detectable sadism—and dashing his paper cone into a recycling bin, he opens the door and strolls casually inside. The young man, in his seat opposite the empty desk, flinches. No surprise. His terror is so visceral it can be smelled.

“Hello,” the counselor says, offering his hand, all smiles and affability and cool skin. “Christopher, right?”

“Right.”

“Good to meet you.”

The counselor sits down. How odd! He recognizes the boy. But where from? Christopher is brown-haired, handsome in a rough way, and according to the report the counselor spreads out before him, just twenty-two. But why does he look so familiar? Something about the eyes …

Then, quite suddenly and horribly, the counselor remembers: he and Christopher have had sex. Not slept together, just had sex, standing up, at a club a few blocks down Market Street. Maybe six months earlier. If he recalls correctly, he gave Christopher a blowjob.

The counselor coughs. Suddenly he is as sweaty as Christopher. Punishment, he thinks, punishment for having taken pleasure in making the boy wait … meanwhile he dreads actually looking at the report. (Oh, what cavalier arrogance, not to have checked, before entering, whether the news he has to dispatch was bad or good!) And now, he asks himself, what if the boy turns out to be positive? The result, for him personally, will be several very hairy days, as he awaits his own test results. Did he swallow? He can't remember if he swallowed. Probably not. Was there a lot of pre-cum? The counselor has bad gums, and therefore ought not to be in the business of giving blowjobs in the first place. Still, it's a habit of which, despite logic and remonstrance, he has failed, over the
years, to break himself. For though he would never suck off a man he knew to be HIV-positive, he feels no compunction in sucking off men (witness Christopher) whose names he hasn't even learned. Ignorance, in the end, really may be bliss, or at least a prerequisite for bliss, just as safety may be less a condition than a boundary, the exact location of which we can only guess at, measuring a little with science, a little with hunches. Why listen to statistics when common sense—which tells him what he wants to hear—is so much more congenial a guide?

“Well,” he says now, “let's cut to the chase, shall we?” And glancing down at the piece of paper in front of him, he prays very quickly. Blinks. “You've tested negative,” he says, before he himself can even absorb the fact of it.

“Sorry?” Christopher says.

“You've tested negative.”

“But that can't be.”

“Why not?”

“Because …” The boy leans closer. “Listen, are you sure you haven't mixed up my results with someone else's?”

“We triple-screen to avoid that.”

“But can't the results be wrong?”

“There are occasional false positives. Never false negatives.”

“But they have to be wrong.”

“Why?”

Christopher doesn't answer. Nor is the counselor—his own heartbeat decelerating with relief—in any mood to probe the matter further. Instead he goes into his negative
drill, hands a rather shell-shocked Christopher a copy of
The Gay Men's Guide to Safer Sex
, and shoos him out of the office.

Through the waiting room, Christopher stumbles. Like the counselor's office itself, the waiting room has been designed by a local architect who, after his lover's death, decided to devote himself to the science of creating spaces that “minimize panic, maximize tranquility.” This architect is now rich from a practice dedicated exclusively to clinics, testing centers, hospices—rooms in which bad news is given, painful treatments administered. Yet to all that yellow and blue carefulness, Christopher is oblivious, immune. How can he be negative? Before he left, Anthony fucked him six times without a condom. He shouldn't be negative. The news strikes him as a kind of curse.

Out on Market Street, in brisker air, he goes into a phone booth, drops in coins, punches buttons.

Two rings. “Hello?” Anthony says.

“Hi.”

A short silence. “Christopher, I told you not to call me. I don't want to talk to you.”

“I got the results.”

“And?”

“Come meet me and I'll tell you.”

“No. I just told you, I don't want—”

“Then I won't tell you.”

“Oh, man! You're crazy, you know that? I can't believe I ever got caught up in this shit …”

“Anthony, please.”

“How could I have been such an idiot—”

“You know what? The counselor was someone I tricked with.”

“I don't care. I don't give a fuck.”

“Anthony, if you'll just listen to me—all I want is to see you. Like old times. You owe me that.”

“Why? You scare me, you know that? You're dangerous.”

Christopher laughs. “For Christ's sake, man, I'd never hurt you. I love you.”

“You love me like a suicide loves pills.”

“But it's not about dying, it's about solidarity! That's the point, to prove—”

“It doesn't prove anything.”

“Why don't you understand? You understood before.”

“Before I was crazy too, a little bit.” On the other end of the line, Anthony beats his fingers against the phone. “Now I'm going to ask you just one more time. What happened?”

“If you'll meet me, I'll tell you.”

“That's blackmail.”

“But if it's the only way I'll get to see you, what choice do I have? I mean, Anthony, you're all that matters.”

“Is that supposed to make me feel better?”

“Yes. Why not?”

“You're the one who doesn't understand.”

“I understand more than you think. If you'd just agree to see me, to sit down with me, you'd realize that.”

Another silence. Then, “All right. Café Flore in fifteen minutes. But just to get the results, you hear me? Nothing else.”

“Thank you, Anthony. I can't wait—”

Anthony hangs up.

“Well, goodbye,” Christopher says to the dial tone. And hangs up himself.

That evening, with an assurance the brazenness of which will later stun him, Gerald puts his plan into action. To begin with, he decides to enlist the aid of the old women in the lounge who have been gossiping about Laura's misbehavior. To lure two or three of them into conversation after dinner, to express to them, “in strictest confidence,” his anxiety over his charge—not to mention his serious doubts as to the moral fiber of his cousin—turns out to be easy; after all, Gerald has spent most of his life in the company of old women. Unctuous and meek, he knows how to earn their allegiance. In many ways he is an old woman himself. A little confiding, a few whispered words of anxiety, and the entire female population of the hotel is set against Laura.

At around ten o'clock, he returns to his room, where he spends a gratifying half-hour with Winckelmann. Then he steps into the corridor, walks to Bosie's room, knocks at the door. As expected, no answer. Bracing himself, he heads down the hall, to the room his cousin occupies. Once again, with great deliberateness, he knocks at a door.

Loud barks from that ersatz lamb, the Bedlington terrier.

“Laura, this is Gerald,” he announces manfully. “I ask you to open the door.”

Again, only barks.

“I know that Bosie's there with you. Now please answer the door, else I shall have to
fetch the management.”

A sound of rustling. Then the door cracks, Laura's scowling face greets his. “What are you talking about? Are you mad? He's not here.”

“He is there, and I demand that you open the door.”

“You're mad! I'm alone, in bed.”

“Laura, for the last time … I do not wish this scene to become public. Need I remind you that Bosie is a minor? Send him out to me at once.”

The door closes in his face. The dog barks. A few seconds later, it opens again, and a teary-eyed Bosie emerges. Worse than that, a transvestite Bosie, dressed in one of Laura's gallooned nightdresses.

Some of Gerald's ladies, coming down the hall, stop in their tracks, stare in horror at the gauzy apparition.

“You shall come with me,” Gerald says. And yanking Bosie roughly by the arm, he drags the boy back to his own room; shuts the door behind them. “Now get out of those ridiculous clothes.”

Obediently Bosie pulls the nightdress over his head.

“You should not have done this, Gerald,” he says. “I call it most unfair.”

“Put this on,” Gerald says, thrusting a dressing gown at Bosie, trying not to notice his nakedness. For once, Bosie does as he is told.

“Tomorrow we leave,” Gerald goes on. “I expect to see you packed and ready in the lobby at seven. Nor would I like to hear that you have visited my cousin in the night.”