The Marble Quilt (8 page)

Custance was not the only person Bosie hated at this stage of his life. He also hated Mr. Asquith, the prime minister. He hated Asquith's wife, Margot, and Winston Churchill. He hated Robert Ross, Wilde's younger friend and literary executor, and he
hated Ross's solicitor, Sir George Lewis, son of the same Sir George Lewis who had been Wilde's great advocate, and who in 1892, at Wilde's behest, had extricated Bosie (then an Oxford undergraduate) from the intimidations of a blackmailer. The second Sir George (no coincidence, in Bosie's view) numbered
both
Colonel Custance and Robbie Ross among his clients.

Where did all this hate come from? Wilde seemed to think it was linked to Bosie's “terrible lack of imagination, the one really fatal defect of your character.” Hate, in Wilde's words to Bosie, “gnawed at your nature, as the lichen bites at the root of some sallow plant.”

Hate, then, as disease; infection.

Wilde's gravest error—some might say his fatal error—was that he chose Bosie instead of Robbie Ross to be his lover. In making such a decision, he allied himself decisively with risk, volatility, and passion (Bosie) instead of prudence, circumspection, and restraint (Robbie). For Robbie, unlike Bosie, was reliable. When he met Wilde, he was a young man of slight build and no great beauty, with a delicate mouth set rather low on his face, a weak chin, wide, wet eyes. Scholars generally concur that he was “the first boy Oscar ever had.” But then Bosie came along, and Robbie was demoted to the capacity of advisor and confidant, the friend into whose ears Oscar poured his passion when the affair was going well and his misery when it was going badly; none of which stopped him from supporting Oscar steadfastly throughout the years, even when it was both unpopular and unprofitable to do so. It was Robbie who took care of him after he got out of prison; Robbie who tried to dissuade him from reconciling with Bosie; Robbie who, in the
decade following Wilde's death, managed more or less single-handedly to bring his estate out of bankruptcy and get his work back into print.

How Bosie despised him! Years before, they had quarreled over a boy called Alfred, whom Robbie had seduced, and whom Bosie had then seduced away from him. Now the prey over which they fought was Wilde's corpse and, more specifically, the manuscript of Wilde's prison letter
De Profundis
, which Robbie had given to the British Museum and which Bosie would have liked to see burned. Increasingly he was becoming aware that Wilde's resurrection (of which Robbie was the chief architect) was going to necessitate his own depiction as the instigator of the great writer's downfall. This he could not bear, and so sometime around December 1, 1909, he begins to rail in print against the cult of Wilde, whom he calls a “filthy swine … the greatest force for evil that has appeared in Europe during the last 350 years.” Robbie, along the same lines, is “a filthy bugger and blackmailer … an unspeakable skunk.” As for Bosie himself, he is merely a “normal” husband and father who only wants the world to know that despite youthful wickedness, he has reformed: toward this end, he transforms
The Academy
into an organ of right-wing propaganda.

There is a touch of the Victorian spinster in Robbie, a disquieting mixture of quaintness, cowardice, and spite. On the surface he is the classic nineties aesthete, quietly flouting even the creed of nationalism that ushered in the Great War by painting the walls of his rooms on Half Moon Street a tone of weary gold: an evocation of France, of “abroad.” Nor does he lack for pugnacity: indeed, in his role as Wilde's literary executor he sued so many bookstores and publishers that in
Who's Who
he lists litigation as one of his hobbies. Like Bosie, he enjoys winning battles. By the teens he has grown into a
small, tidy, mustached man of middle age who wears a turquoise blue scarab ring and carries a jade cigarette holder. When he entertains friends at his flat—its decor “half Italian and half Oriental,” according to Siegfried Sassoon, and featuring a devotional panel of Saint Sebastian and Saint Fabian over the mantelpiece—he dons a black silk skullcap, serves Turkish delight, hands out boxes of Egyptian cigarettes. Yet
quietly
. This is the key to Robbie, the factor that distinguishes him from Bosie: the open warfare Wilde invited he makes certain always to avoid. When he takes the poet Wilfred Owen to dinner (and then home after dinner) he introduces him into a world of well-bred, refined homosexuals for whom Wilde's flamboyance is a quality at once to be admired and regretted, for though Wilde is their hero, his breaking of the rules—it cannot be denied—has made life more difficult for them. Much better to have one's say slyly, even anonymously, and without pointing any fingers.

Robbie's diligence, the earnestness with which he undertakes his labors on Wilde's behalf, suggests the degree to which he embodies that very work ethic against which Wilde, in his witty defenses of idleness, strove to rebel. For Wilde was bad: he fouled the sheets of decent hotels, went into debt, drank. Robbie, on the other hand, conducted all his affairs—even his amorous ones—with tact. Had Wilde chosen him instead of Bosie, he might have grown into an honored old man of letters, with his sons at his knee, his wife at his side, his “companion” quiet in the background. Instead of which Wilde chose Bosie—pouting, spendthrift, malicious Bosie—and died a bankrupt.

On December 1, 1908, the eighth anniversary of Wilde's death, a dinner was held in Robert Ross's honor at the Ritz Hotel in London. The purpose of this dinner was twofold:
first, to announce the publication of the final two volumes of Wilde's collected works (which Robbie had midwifed); second, to celebrate the emergence of the Wilde estate into solvency (which Robbie had negotiated). One hundred sixty people—among them Somerset Maugham, the Duchess of Sutherland, and Wilde's two sons, Cyril and Vyvyan—attended. Not Bosie, however. He declined his invitation, writing that in his view the dinner was “absurd.”

After Frank Harris and H. G. Wells, among others, had toasted Robbie, he himself stepped up to the dais, where he described all that he had had to undergo while resurrecting Wilde's reputation. Then—in ironic reference to himself—he quoted a fragment from an eighteenth-century poem:

I hate the man who builds his name

On the ruins of another's fame
.

He could just as easily have been talking about Bosie. Though probably he would have sued anyone who dared link this couplet with his career, nonetheless Bosie must have recognized the degree to which his fate was becoming yoked to that of his dead lover. For Wilde's resurgence threatened not merely his campaign against vice, but his very identity, his new idea of himself as a reformed libertine. More and more it must have been evident to him that his success would actually require Robbie's failure, and with it the preservation of Wilde's image as an unregenerate sodomite.

They are now more intimate, Bosie and Oscar, even than in the days when they scandalized London society by taking rent boys out to dinner at the Savoy. The object of the game is Robbie's ruin, which Bosie begins to seek aggressively. In letters, he threatens to horsewhip Robbie: “You have corrupted hundreds of boys and young men in
your life, and have gone on doing it right up to the present time.” His intention seems to be to goad Robbie into initiating an action against him, as once his own father, goaded by Bosie, goaded Wilde. Yet Robbie refuses to answer, even when Bosie writes to the prime minister demanding that Robbie be fired from his post as assessor of picture valuations to the Board of Trade (and promising to let off a stink if Mr. Asquith continues to receive “this horrible man” in his house). Later he sends another letter, “nailing” Robbie, to two judges, the recorder of London, the prime minister, the public prosecutor, Mr. Basil Thompson of Scotland Yard, the publisher John Lane, Sir George Lewis, and the master of St. Paul's School (as once he promised to mail his defense of homosexuality to every judge, lawyer, and legislator in England), and makes sure that Robbie is informed of the fact. Already T.W.H. Crosland, his coeditor at
The Academy
, has labeled Robbie's efforts to resuscitate “the maligned and greatly suffering Wilde” merely “one dirty Sodomite bestowing whitewash upon another.” Now he makes his point plain: “If these letters do not contain the truth about you, there can be little question that you would have taken a certain and obvious legal remedy.”

Matters come to a head for Bosie in the spring of 1913, with a spate of lawsuits. On April 18 he initiates a libel action against Arthur Ransome before the High Court. Then on April 24 Colonel Custance initiates a libel action against Bosie before a Magistrate's Court. (At that time, in that place, libel was a criminal, not a civil, offense.) Then in early May, Bosie has to go to the Chancery Court to argue with his father-in-law over the matter of Raymond's custody.

Colonel Custance's was the only lawsuit Bosie ever backed off from; it was also the
only lawsuit in which his outrage can be construed as being even remotely justified. After all, Custance really had written to Olive, “The moment he (Bosie) takes the boy away all payments to you cease.”

At the Chancery Court, Bosie was granted custody of his son for two fifths—and Colonel Custance for three fifths—of Raymond's vacation time; Bosie was told to pay the boy's tuition.

One evening a few weeks after his last conversation with Anthony, Christopher is standing near the magazine rack at A Different Light, thumbing through a copy of
The Advocate
. Every evening, now, he comes here, to this place where his great love was born, and waits patiently. For if he keeps faith, he believes, and if he shows his faith by returning here, piously, every night, then soon enough Anthony will feel its radiance, and come through the door. Perhaps he won't realize why he's coming through the door, perhaps he'll think he's here just to look at magazines, or buy a book, or hear a lecture. But Christopher will know.

If you saw Christopher today, you might not recognize him as the boy who was waiting at Café Flore a few weeks earlier. This is mostly because of his hair: last week he got a buzzcut. Tonight he's wearing a black T-shirt, combat boots, and a fatigue jacket, an outfit that worries some members of the bookstore staff, who fear he might be packing artillery in the bulging pockets of his pants. Not that they need be concerned: in fact, Christopher poses no danger to anyone but himself. If you looked inside the sleeve of his T-shirt you would find, on his right biceps, a healing tattoo (his first), an old-fashioned heart of the sort that sailors used to favor, except that instead of saying “Mother,” the
ribbon that bisects it says “Anthony.”

Anthony. No one else is allowed to see the tattoo. Even the men Christopher sometimes permits to pick him up and take him home are not permitted to take off his T-shirt, for if they did, then they would see it, and the spell would be broken; Anthony would never come to his senses; he would never come home. Yet if the tattoo remains secret—somehow Christopher knows this—then he
will
come, drawn as if by a talisman, if not tonight then tomorrow, if not tomorrow then next week. Nor will Christopher ever have to admit that he lied at Café Flore, for by then, if he plays his cards right, the lie will have come true. More and more, people are doing it, he's heard.
Bareback
, they call it.
No glove. Skin to skin
.

At the moment, next to where Christopher is browsing, there stands a bearded man with a beer gut, alternately glancing at the pictures in the latest issue of
Bound & Gagged
, giving Christopher the eye, and attending to the back of the store, where a lecture has started—nothing as exciting as that mobbed reading at which Christopher met Anthony (Dennis Cooper, the dark lord of American gay literature); no, this is just another Dead White Male, or nearly. At least eighty. At present he's standing before the lectern and two dozen folding chairs, of which two thirds are empty. On and on he drones, his coughy voice no match for the claque of strong-lunged young lesbians who have just started a conversation about Jodie Foster near the cash register. Their oblivious disregard offends one of the listeners, who turns, glowers, says, “Will you please be quiet, girls?” Christopher starts. It's the counselor! For a nanosecond their eyes meet; the counselor's lips contort. Then he returns his attention to the lecturer.

By now the bearded man has taken his copy of
Bound & Gagged
to the cash register
and is paying for it. Should he follow him? Christopher wonders. After all, older guys are more likely to have it; if he does enough of them, it'll be a sure thing … only this one looks like he might be psycho. He offers a last glance of entreaty, then leaves. Putting down
The Advocate
, Christopher listens for a moment to the speaker. He explains that he is here to eulogize a friend of his, a poet who died of AIDS sometime back in the dark ages. “The vivid influence of Cavafy,” the old man says about the poet, and points to a poster set up on an easel behind the lectern: two skinny boys with golden hair, posed before a severe arrangement of cactuses. “As Roger used to put it, if only for the sake of the forty-seven people in the world who still read poetry,” he goes on, and suddenly Christopher recognizes—the idea rather floors him—that
he
, the old man, is one of the boys in the poster. (The other must be the poet.) And what a mind-blowing idea that is! To grow, to grow old … (
Not if I can help it!
)

The audience, what little there is of it, is becoming restless. The old man's voice is monotonous and harsh. He is a bore. A fat, weary-looking youth gets up to leave. The bag lady who comes to all these readings, to sit alone in a corner chair amid her shreds of blanket, ceaselessly opening and closing the top of a plastic water bottle, starts humming to herself. Again the counselor turns, levels a glance at Christopher that makes him smile.