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At just the moment he gave himself completely to Justin, other men suddenly started to want sex with him. He became a charged particle.
it would block out the roughly jealous appetite-killing sexual imaginings which the cottage seemed to force on him.
He treated him with the practical obtuseness of the healthy.
Robin watched him slip over a threshold, into the tapering perspectives of fatal illness, in which all but the mildest pleasures lay in the past.
Justin strolled and sprawled around the flat, naked or in his boxer shorts, he created a half-pleasant mood of lazy confinement.
Alex reached across to top up people’s water-glasses. ‘ave you got Justin to do any housework or things like that yet?’ he asked Robin. ’h no,’ said Robin hastily. ‘I sometimes wonder if he’d like to. He watches me doing housework with what seems to be genuine interest, but I think without any real confidence that he could ever learn to do it himself.’
wandered out through the open back door to have a pee under the remote supervision of the stars.
What was annoying was the slightly roguish joviality, the way Robin’s own vowels became ambiguous, half-rusticated, a sort of verbal slouch as if to disclaim their differences in age and class.
‘Do you know it, darling, it’s a gay restaurant. It’s called the Limp Ritz. It was the first restaurant in England to serve openly gay food.’
though what he was savouring was the longed-for surprise of being wanted.
He saw how long it was since he had shared such unselfconscious moments with another man, or even allowed himself to think in terms of his own happiness.
One or two of the places Alex listed had strong associations with Justin and with nights of memorable happiness or misery, and in either case seemed to offer the furtive prospect of an exorcism. Alex longed to reinhabit the disused wings of his life. He felt the tingle of benign power in having someone to pay for again.
Alex thought to himself, ‘This isn’t going to happen’, and at once offset the idea with a resolution that he would simply get what fun he could from it. The mechanism of disappointment in him was rapid and supple with use.
stopping to sniff the roses and wallflowers, as if he might be being spied on by his better conscience;
Terry gasped. ‘He likes that.’ He spoke of his penis as if it were some rare and lively rodent that he’d raised himself and could show to selected other boys with justifiable pride. ‘He’s thick at the bottom,’ he explained, ‘and he’s even thicker at the top. He’s got a big broad snout to him.’
Terry tugged up his zip and said, ‘I never tell nobody nothing’; which if you didn’t construe it too strictly was a reassurance.
George was a self-reliant bachelor unused to much genuine emotion, and wary of entanglement with a kid of twenty-one. He was moved by the poetry and artistry of things that he sold but had the low human expectations of a sexual predator.
Danny wondered for a second how he’d ever got on with George’s dreary sexual supremacism. ‘Sex is fine. He’s quite passionate.’ ‘You mean passion - but not genius. Technique? Technique can sometimes be mistaken for genius.’
‘Danny’s extremely bright and adaptable but he doesn’t really know anything. I mean, he’s seen one opera, by Handel, and he can’t remember which one. He seemed persuaded by each of the titles I suggested. He’s got a degree in something called cultural studies, which apparently doesn’t quite involve reading a book. I don’t know why I’m being so catty. And of course he’s terribly young. He does know all,about dance-music.’
Alex chose not to be tryingly truthful.
‘I don’t know what I’m turning into,’ Alex srid. ‘ “We know what we are but not what we may be”: Ophelia.’
In appearance the boys ranged from sexily interesting through very handsome to troublingly perfect.
On occasion they were merrily caustic.
What my English prof called “trowelling on the authenticating detail, Whitfield”.
‘I think the real excitement comes from embracing life as it is, not escaping from it into unsustainable fantasies.’ He was smiling, but Robin thought there was some kind of challenge in his unconversational tone, and said easily and courteously,
It was wonderful to be loved so much by somebody, and Danny jumped up with a surge of cheerful fondness for Alex and went round behind his chair and hugged him loosely from above.
Becky Sharp
And he heard himself coming vocally to attention to meet the challenge of Robin and sustain himself at the right pitch of pretended friendliness.
He sensed there were comparisons to be made between this journey to Dorset and the earlier two, but he left them luxuriously unexamined.
Danny said, ‘Well, you said he was a taker, not a giver.’ It was always interesting to see what he had remembered.
there wasn’t any talk about it, and Alex, who’d actually been feeling a bit Vaughan Williamsish, suppressed his disappointment.
what it might be like to float over a threshold into total acceptance by another man.
For the first time, it struck him as absurd to expect loyalty from someone he had met in a toilet.
Even so, afterwards, drifting sleepwards, he was glad to have Terry with him. His hands rubbed across the skin and joints and smooth transitions of a body that hadn’t yet dreamt of the changes Robin had studied earlier in the mirror. It was interesting - like an eerily privileged visit to his younger self, or to some aspect of it. But he wouldn’t want to make the journey often. How could all the ageing lovers of boys bear it, the distance growing longer and lonelier year by year? Robin liked the particulars of Terry, the very hairy calves and the smooth thighs, the marks of sweaty chafing
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like other addictive personalities he had a mystical respect for the total ban, as the only alternative to chaos.
bumf
He was fine, but suffered from the common syndrome of having grown in memory.
Justin knew he’d made another good choice. The boy was like a package holiday on legs.
But then Carlo stood back for a moment with a silly apologetic expression. ‘Only one second,’ he said. ‘I need to use your toilet.’ Justin gazed at him forgivingly. ‘Darling,’ he said, ‘I am my toilet.’
‘You don’t remember what I do, do you?’ said Ivor, clearly thrilled by his own insignificance.
into louder dance-music, with its threatening chemical eagerness.
It was extraordinary to have such power over someone to whom you longed only to submit.
Still, he couldn’t admit to having peeped, which might be considered a kind of cheating.
He dropped a little behind Alex, as he sometimes did, in the caressing grip of his own thoughts, and also with a sad but liberating recognition of something quite obvious: they had nothing in common. Their paths in life had joined for a moment, Danny had done a good deal for him, one way and another he’d got him sorted, and now it was natural and right that he should send him gently on his way. The process was so logical that he thought Alex himself, after the first upset of it, would be bound to see that it was right.
And Danny saw that being so much younger he must resist the temptation to be childish.
moue of uncertainty.
He thought how uncertain sex-magic was. It struck, and there was a tingle in the air around a man, and when you touched him it flowed round you too. Some people kept it for you for years, and when you saw them there was the same dependable shock, the shiver of rightness, the cool burn deep between the legs, the gentle thump on the chest, the private surrender of a smile. And with others it faded, like a torch left on, or with the quick disillusion that followed a hit of coke.
I have a beautiful Peruvian hanging in my bedroom.’
As he peed he looked sideways into the mirror, and saw how terribly beautiful he was: the image itself was reflected again off some hard vain surface deep in his eye, and he thought, with easy pity, how little Alex would want to lose him.
They had never had a row, merely separate hurts and irritations which they seduced each other out of.
