Contemporary Gay Romances (17 page)

He started to pronounce how munificent she herself was, how compassionate and unselfconscious, when she rose and arranged the jet glitter of her just-shut fan upon that same spot of forearm she’d yesterday alit upon. “Then we are in covenant! Every last word is to be included, collated, and only if required notated and explicated—that the Van Pryor legacy be fulfilled!”

She flowed toward the parlor door and he pursued her sweeping course to a second floor along dim connecting corridors of the ample dwelling, to another, yet more restricted stair, rising in two increasingly precipitous landings that at long last terminated at a door. She prized it open to a small, crammed room, redolent of ink and blotting paper, tumbled about from every side and possible angle with open-leaved books and bookmarked journals, page-creased periodicals, and yet more volumes amidst a veritable frenzy of unassorted papers. The single mullioned window allowed a compressed and thus all the more perplexingly mutiplex vista of differently colored, jumbled rooftops, accented only by chimneypots of diversifying size and configuration.

This was unquestionably the site, the very altar of the Van Pryor aptitude. Landsdowne could barely collect his breath.

“Here, then, young scribe and devotee,” she spoke with barely concealed vehemence, “shall be your new hearth and habitat! In this demesne shall your spirit guide Anthony Van Pryor’s grand literary scheme to its foreordained conclusion!”

3.

The presence, because despite the gossamer impossibility no other designation could possibly explain what else it might entail, had bided its time, allowing itself to pass unnoticed for more than a month, indeed for that very same duration that had passed as though in the midst of the grandest possible romance, that same period that Landsdowne had been sanctified to labor, beetle-like if not more quiet, ordinarily nocturnal, as he still must labor for his living by daylight, only now and then interrupted by a lower-floors menial asking if he’d care for tea and cake, the which he so often refused, and so colored scarlet in doing so, that the indomitable borough-bred lass now simply carried it aloft unbidden upon an overflowing tray, insistent it would “go to thems scurrying in the wainscoting” if he didn’t partake of it all.
She
came not at all, or if so, so seldom it was a marvel. Her approach would be signalized by an imperceptible distant fluttering as of poultry shivering off the remnants of a downpour, a nearly silent padded ascension, a shy tap on the ajar door, a murmur: dare she disturb?

Always he rose, paid reverence, osculated the beringed, dimpled fingers, averting whenever possible the overlarge, ever-moist, somewhat accusatory eyes, attempting to decipher within the tissue of civilities that drizzled through the laced intricacies of her omnipresent fan the content, should any be so bold as to represent itself, of her visit, her request. Never her remonstrance, though in fact certainly he’d sensed that too, hovering ambiguously at all times just beyond his grasp whenever she’d achieved one of her exceptional ascensions to the scene of his nocturnal communion.

No other word could presumably approach the sacerdotal, the hierophantic nature of what he so nightly labored upon than that which delimited the joining together of young acolyte and veteran host. All the more reason, then, to feel amidst the presence of those orphaned instruments of the trade, those excrescent volumes and sundry uncollected correspondent leave-takings of the master’s art not only the sense of a time now vanished forever, but somehow also of an ongathering, onmoving,
en point
, a virtually present tense.

More than once Landsdowne had attempted to summarize these impressions, restricted as they must be to the Van Pryor workroom, and though his handsome usual companion had donated his fullest, his most cognizant attentions, somehow, each time, Landsdowne realized he had, after all, not at all truly accomplished his end. With the unfortunately crystalline result that the indefatigable DeHaven was all the more conscious of what he designated his younger’s “extreme earnestness of intent.”

What method, if method could be discovered then, to describe the sensations—for literally sensations they must be admitted to be, and not as his publisher would have it, some finer perception beyond the compass of the customary—that Landsdowne had begun to experience with increased frequency within the blessed chamber, especially those moments not strictly restricted to actual transcription but to rumination? Most recently he’d been ambivalently dumbfounded and yet simultaneously gratified to apperceive a sort of riffling, feather-light, yet indisputable, amidst the hair above one temple as he bent to his work, a riffling all the more incomprehensible, as it was non-attributable to any minutiae of a draught or other perceptible material causation. A riffling all the more explicit in that no other portion of his person was affected, as though naught but a pair of incorporeal fingertips had, in passing, extended a vaguely fond salutation. The titillation had continued, had in fact endured minutes beyond the sensation itself, endured and confirmed itself into a tingling of the epidermis as it were, that once initiated, must consummate itself in every nerve-ending, down to his lower portion.

Undoubtedly it compensated, this latest sensation, since reimbursement of a more remunerative nature was apparently to be unforthcoming. And along with reparation, another emotion gradually established itself within Landsdowne’s breast: of unqualified approbation from, dare he consider it?
beyond
. Thus he labored on with incremented agreeableness, augmenting his tiny store of confidence that his selection had not been mere propinquity, nor the surety and ease of editorial manipulation, should such be required, but instead an authorization derived from the single, the only possibly authentic, origin.

4.

Indistinguishable was that evening, unextraordinary the circumstances, during which our young savant was to discern that all unawares he’d suddenly, lamentably discovered himself in a position most acutely felt and acutely deplorable. The literary-chronological mechanism upon which he’d long relied, which he’d for such a successful period plied, required that any uncollated paper, be it note, bill of sale, or missive, be paired to the naturally correspondent passage in the curiously irregular journal or record book Van Pryor had kept. Cognate thereby bred infallible. All the more inevitable therefore the communication Landsdowne now perused, unable to fully embrace its significance, except as it fit patchwork into the grander enigma of the diurnal events of this workroom’s predecessor. Yet, once puzzled into place, once the fit was declared not inappropriate, the greater meaning became—all too inescapable. That the authoress of the epistle to his master was instantly recognizable to our acolyte, whose own matrimonial partner he’d tirelessly if only mentally accompanied as each new volume floated into the lending libraries, produced perhaps the most peerless of concussions. That Van Pryor had then actually notated another fellow helpmeet’s initials into his ordinarily haphazard datebook with astonishing heedlessness, and later on compounded the egregiousness by commenting upon the encounter in his journal in a satisfied manner insouciantly approaching, well, it had to be admitted, approaching the vulgar, would thereafter be undeniable.

Ensuing passages, annotations, commentaries, in fact the entire ceaseless panoply amounted to several months’ duration, resulting in the irrefutable: unfamiliar to any but themselves, and now alas to
his
abashed gaze, the aberrant twosome had continued to sully their matrimonial sacraments and earlier commitments, with, at various times, an almost unrestricted liberty of action, month after month after month.

Crestfallen, Landsdowne could do nothing but abscond from if not the setting, then at least the substantiation of the activity. But while he’d decamped from the stage, the performance all the more perpetuated itself in his imagination, so that even an unaccustomed double measure of fortified wine failed to generate that lethean surcease he required to fall asleep. Before the obliquitous dawn he resolved to relinquish a task no longer to be held as honorable. Resolution led to somnolence; with his artlessness restored, he at last slept.

The unexpected interview caught
her
not completely unawares. She bestowed, entered, allowed his anxiety its stammering moments, his resolution its exclamation, but nonetheless she continued to remain unswervingly in place, plumped among her ebony crinolines, fixing upon him a liquid gaze admixed as much with compassion as with more professional objectivity. Allowing his timorous vehemence its fullest extent, she then acceded immediately to his resignation, wholeheartedly so, if, if, if—
if only
—she begged she might be allowed to partake of and thus
comprehend
the source of this remarkable, this so precipitous turnabout.

Seldom had Landsdowne encountered such difficulty. At last, he intimated his discoveries, his trepidation, the understandable apprehension—for her reputation alone. Before he was done, she contrived to interrupt, her fan an instrument of regard and interaction upon his sleeve, as, almost inaudibly she reminded him of their earlier intercourse upon the subject of “determination,” and how she’d understood them to have already abundantly agreed upon a course where any such selection would be utterly unnecessary. “You must present it
all
,” she once more repeated. “
All
as it is written. Every bountiful phrase. His readers demand all,” she once more gently insisted. “Poor we are merely his providential caretakers,” she reiterated.

Leaving her interlocutor at a temporary loss for further words. Was the personage then before him so extraordinarily charitable, so magnificent in her acceptance of the inadmissible? Without question he must now assume that his own recent detection must be a disclosure his hostess had somehow herself long before managed to arrive at herself, and further she had also managed to arrange it all to herself, processing the doubtless unwelcome information in a manner if not wholly acceptable than at the least bearable. It now came to Landsdowne, that without doubt his workroom’s predecessor had himself selected his life’s companion precisely for the possession of such a temperament, exactly such an ability at management, indeed for qualities beyond those at first glance apparent.

Grateful confusion led Landsdowne to bend his knee to her, but she soon elevated him to his feet, reminding him of their covenant and of the enormity of the task still left undone. He ascended to his exertions with a renewed stamina and sense of purpose, and once settled was again put in mind of that other, far less substantial Communicant, whose unquestioned presence consisted of a recapitulated riffling of his hair, as though overlooking in him the understandable, if surely not to be repeated, lapse of certitude.

5.

“But surely you can see how I’ve come around yet again?” Landsdowne moaned to his editorial contemporary, “From one bare credibility to another one, this time far more abominable.”

DeHaven had been accosted at his office at the moment of leave-taking for his midday meal, and his customary high spirits decided for him the necessity of his young champion accompanying him to a dining establishment of the most arcane tenor, focusing as it did, upon a cuisine altogether unfamiliar, mid-Asiatic, and sapid in the extreme.

“Explicate, dear fellow.” He attempted to calm his friend with a squeeze of the fleshier sector of one of his lower limbs. “For I’m afraid I’m somewhat at sea. Ah, and here is the tandoor dish I spoke of before with such tenderness!” he enthused as a be-turbanned attendant set down the savory vessel and uncovered it, releasing an amplitude of orientalia to ring their heads with its wreath of fragrances and to stimulate their gourmanderie.

“For days after, I’d persuaded myself she’d after all known all the while, the Widow Van Pryor that is, known perhaps with growing comprehension for months during the perpetration of the marital enormity and that she’d only
ultimately
forgiven, as who wouldn’t. But that she was now willing to release all despite, if not given, the otherwise faultless origin of her understandable agony. Naturally, she could but rise in my estimation, as I labored on to corral the aberrant missives and nearly licentious journal passages… But then, and only yesterday it occurred to me, as I was frequenting a railroad tea-shop attached to Euston Station, a dreary yet at times fascinating situation from which to encompass the London universe, only then, as I said, late last night, awaiting an Underground to return me to Roland Gardens, did another, far more sinister interpretation all unassisted arrive. What if, by publication of it
all
, she seeks nothing less than a practically public vengeance upon the great man, a vengeance all the more distressing in that she alone is able to give voice, while her potential disputant is utterly unable to defend himself? Thus my torment and thus the newly understood falseness of my present position.”

The carmine roast had been dissected, and unable not to resist, DeHaven had availed himself of the pleasures of the table. He ceased, however, now, elevating a fowl-filled fork aloft to declaim, “But my dear young marvel, it couldn’t be any clearer! Should she become, as you say you fear, so publicly intemperate herself, then you are yourself to take up the cudgels in defense of your master! Who better to be his champion than one already so privileged?”

Landsdowne could do little but utter phrases of astonishment to his companion, who managed to “tuck” back into his luncheon with the sharpest of appetites. “But surely you give me too much credit. You presume to begin with, that I
would
challenge her and defend him, when in fact, I’ve not arrived at any such certainty. Surely she was wronged. Surely the world ought to know her blessed silent endurance of it all, equally along with
his
seemingly Olympian utter disregard.”