The Marble Quilt (11 page)

Of course, Raymond is the worst wrong turn of all. Where his son is concerned Bosie cannot, no matter how hard he tries, shirk off the unpleasant suspicion that if the boy has grown into an ill and fragile man, it is largely Bosie's own fault. For Raymond was, in many ways, the most beloved of the many boys with whom he tried to recapture his lost adolescence. Even more than Wellington,
he
was Bosie's tremendous friend, especially during the summer when Raymond was thirteen, and Bosie—enraged by what he saw as the iniquity of a court determined to favor the claims of his vindictive father-in-law—picked him up at his school and without telling anyone spirited him to Scotland, which was outside the Chancery Court's jurisdiction. There he rented a house near the southern end of Loch Ness, and enrolled Raymond at the Benedictine Monastery and College of Fort Augustus. Every afternoon they went swimming, or fishing, or took exploratory gambols through forests in which generations of Douglases had roamed and hunted. For Bosie was Scottish, he was a Scottish laird, and Raymond—though half Custance—needed to be reminded that in his veins there ran also the blood of the dark grey man.

His point may have been to persuade Raymond that the trip amounted to a Boys' Adventure, something out of Robert Louis Stevenson, and not a traumatic kidnapping from which Raymond would never recover. Nor, apparently, did Bosie fail in this
objective. Indeed, Raymond's credulous acceptance of his father's fantasy was the very thing that would do them both in.

One day, after barely a term at his new school, Raymond went fishing in Loch Ness and never came back. Fearing that he had drowned, for almost a week, day and night, his father and the monks trawled the lake's waters. Then, rather out of the blue, Bosie received a telegram from Olive informing him that Raymond was safely back at Weston, his grandfather's estate. It seems that Colonel Custance, perhaps in collusion with George Lewis, had set up a secret means of communication with the boy, whom he had then enticed to embark on an even grander adventure than the one on which his father had taken him. It would work like this: Raymond, on the pretense of wanting to fish, would take a boat and row to the opposite side of Loch Ness. There a private detective would be waiting to carry him away in a car. All very thrilling, especially the car, which in 1915 must really have seemed, to an impressionable boy, the pièce de résistance, with its promise of speed and stealth and spy novel glamour. The detective drove Raymond across the border into England, where his mother and grandfather met him. Only once he was safely ensconced again did Olive inform Bosie of what had happened. Bosie, who had had to endure almost a week of tormented uncertainty, could not forgive her for what she had put him through. Nor could he forgive Raymond, of whom he washed his hands; he would never again have anything to do with his treacherous son, he vowed—forgetting, perhaps, that the treacherous son was at the time only thirteen years old.

The tide is running out. Turning around, again like a child, Bosie walks backward, as if fitting his feet into his own footsteps, so as not to leave a trace of having made a return journey, so as to suggest that this morning he walked, and walked, and then simply
disappeared.

An instant later he notices that he's not alone.

He raises his eyebrows. Not far off, shoes in his hand, stands a soldier. An unfamiliar uniform … Canadian, perhaps? American? From where he hovers at the water's edge, the soldier gazes out at the sea in a way that seems to Bosie both provocative and touchingly naive. For though he is old now, he was once beautiful, and so has some experience of the tactics to which nervous admirers resort in order to avoid being caught out in their curiosity.

Stopping, for the moment, Bosie watches the soldier. What does he want? Is he here by chance? Very unlikely. The soldier's presence amuses him, if for no other reason than that it is exemplary of something that has become, in recent years, so commonplace. He never expected to grow into a monument, a human equivalent of Trafalgar Square, or the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier. Yet this, as a consequence of Wilde's ever increasing fame (Robbie did a good job, in the end), has turned out to be his fate. More and more young men come to Hove for one reason only: to seek him out; to gaze at him. On those rare occasions when they muster the courage to approach him, he is never less than perfectly polite. Instead he listens quietly, smiling, as they make their elegant speeches.

If they're good-looking, he invites them home for tea, and sometimes to bed.

Now the soldier turns; approaches. Bosie straightens his back. He is, he knows, no longer attractive. Not that it isn't possible for an old man to be beautiful. Toscanini, for instance, is a beautiful old man. In his case, age preserved the thick hair, the athletic arms and limbs. In Bosie's, only the worst features seem to have emerged unscathed from the holocaust of time—the crooked mouth, the eyes with their startled rabbit's look.

Not that it matters. He has something else. In the end, Wilde gave Bosie more than he bargained for.

I hate the man who builds his name

On the ruins of another's fame
.

“Mr. Douglas?”

Yes, he
is
American. Otherwise he'd have called him Lord Alfred.

“Yes?”

“I hope I'm not bothering you. I—” Sheepishly the soldier puts down his shoes, takes off his hat. His beauty startles Bosie in that it is exactly the same sort of beauty he himself possessed once.

“Yes?”

“My name is Roger Hinton. Private Roger Hinton, of the United States Marine Corps. And I just wanted to say … I'm a poet, and a great admirer of your work. I'm here on leave. Especially
In Excelsis
… Such a marvelous poem!”

Bosie allows his lips to turn up in a slight smile. What rot! he thinks. Later, when they're at Olive's flat, he'll tease the boy, try to taunt him into admitting that he's never even read
In Excelsis
. Not that it matters. Once it would have. Once he would have hoped that when young men stared at him in admiration, they'd be thinking, “Douglas at Wormswood Scrubs,” not “Wilde at Reading Gaol.”

“So you're a poet. How interesting. Do you write sonnets?”

“I've written a few.”

“Shakespearean, or—”

“No, Petrarchan, like yours.”

“What a charming coincidence, to meet a young sonneteer on the beach. And tell me, Mr. Hinson, will you be sojourning long in Hove?”

“Hinton. Only forty-eight hours. As I said, I'm on leave.”

“You must take tea with me. I'm afraid it will have to be today. This evening my son arrives. If that's possible for you … I imagine your schedule—”

“No, I'm utterly free.” (The
utterly
takes Bosie aback. Perhaps the soldier really
is
a poet.) “I don't know anyone in Hove, or Brighton, for that matter. I've only come here to see you.”

“How charming. And which way are you heading, if I might ask?”

“Whichever way you are, Mr. Douglas.”

“Please call me Bosie.”

The young man blushes. “Bosie. And you must call me Roger.”

“Very well, then. Roger.”

Together they begin walking back, toward the promenade.

Middle of the night. While John snores in bed, Christopher, in his black T-shirt, switches on the light; fumbles in the bathroom with his back-pack. So far only once, but if he plays his cards right he'll be able to get at least two more out of him before they part … After all, even though the guy's old, he's horny; has no trouble keeping it up, unlike some of those other sorry bastards. Opening the backpack (the fact that he is stoned—John gave him some good pot—makes the operation all the harder to perform), he extracts a fresh box of condoms, still sealed in plastic, which he tries (and fails) to tear open with his thumbnail. Finally he bites into the box; the plastic gives; little tooth marks puncture the
cardboard. Tearing it open, he extracts the condoms, strung together like Christmas lights, divided by little lines of perforation. He rips until one comes loose. Dropping the others to the ground, he picks up the condom, holds it to the light. How innocent it looks, all rolled and thickened like his grandmother's aproned stomach, not the sort of thing you would expect to be capable (if you didn't already know) of smothering or saving a life! Yet there it is. The condom, his friend, his enemy … Anthony will die and Christopher will live. (
Not if I can help it
.) Anthony will die and Christopher will die. And now, from his backpack, he extracts a box of pins; takes one out; stabs the condom fleetly through its heart. Metal emerges out the other side. Withdrawing the pin, he holds the condom a second time to the light. Yes, there it is (though too tiny for any but a trained eye to recognize). That's the beauty of it. He will slip it into the pocket of his T-shirt now, wake John, and compel him to further acts of lust; John will not resist. Then without even being aware of it he'll do his duty to Christopher, the ironic duty of his profession, and never guess that the powdered sheath on which he is staking all the future bears beside its guarantee the harrowed and minute signature of the saboteur.

Bosie to Olive, from Loch Ness (1915): “Raymond is well and happy. He loves Scotland … He has given me the mumps and I have had it for the last 5 days.”

Maureen Borland,
Wilde's Devoted Friend: A Life of Robert Ross
, Oxford, 1990.

Lord Alfred Douglas,
Oscar Wilde and Myself
, London, 1914.
The Complete Poems of Lord Alfred Douglas
, London, 1928.
The Autobiography of Lord Alfred Douglas
,
London, 1929.
My Friendship with Oscar Wilde
, London, 1932.
Without Apology
, 1938.
Oscar Wilde, A Summing-Up
, 1938.

Richard Ellmann,
Oscar Wilde
, London, 1987.

Rupert Croft-Cooke,
Bosie: Lord Alfred Douglas, His Friends and Enemies
, New York, 1963.

Philip Hoare,
Wilde's Last Stand
, London, 1997.

H. Montgomery Hyde,
Lord Alfred Douglas
, London, 1984.

Douglas Murray,
Bosie: A Biography of Lord Alfred Douglas
, London, 2000.

The Marquess of Queensberry and Percy Colson,
Oscar Wilde and the Black Douglas
, London, 1949.

Timothy d'Arch Smith,
Love in Earnest
, London, 1970.

Josh and I are leaving each other. These last few weeks we've spent together, at “our” house, trying to see what, if anything, we could salvage from five sometimes good years. At first things went badly; then we started gardening. Josh has always been an avid gardener, while I couldn't tell a lily from a rose. How roughly my vacant acknowledgments of his work rubbed up against all the effort he put in, all those springs and summers of labor and delicacy! And did my not caring about the garden mean that I didn't care about him? After he left, naturally, the flowers turned to weeds.

The therapists in our heads told us that this was something we could do together, a way beyond talking (which meant, for us, fighting), like the trip my mother and father took to watch the sea elephants mate. Kneeling in the dirt, holding the querulous little buds in their nursery six-packs, there was another language for us to speak with each other, as virgin as the leafy basil plants we patted into the soil. Our old, gnarled, tortuous relations were rude and hideous weeds we ripped out by the roots.

I made up dramas as I planted, horticultural B movies in which I was the hero defending the valiant rose from the villainous weed. Or I was the valiant rose, and Josh the villainous weed, and the hero was someone I was hoping to meet someday. Or I was the villainous weed.

Digging, I came upon little plastic stakes from past seasons, buried deep, unbiodegraded, bearing photographs and descriptions of annuals Josh had planted in more innocent, if not happier, times, and which had long since passed into compost.

There is the top of a wedding cake in our freezer. It is frosted white, and covered with white, orange, and peach-colored frosting roses. It was left there by the young newlyweds who sublet the house when Josh and I, unable to decide who should stay and who should go, both went. Jenny and Brian are saving this wedding cake to eat on their first anniversary, which is apparently a tradition for good luck. When I came back, they moved into an apartment where the freezer was too small; the cake stayed behind.

There is a road, too. I don't like roads, the way they run through everywhere on the way to somewhere else. The road is where we lose dogs and children, the way we take when we leave each other.

This road, in my mind at least, is Route 80. Josh and I used to say that our lives and destinies were strung out along Route 80, which runs from New York, where we lived for years, through New Jersey, where he grew up, through the town where he went to school, and on to San Francisco, where I grew up. Even though our house is nowhere near Route 80—and perhaps this was the first mistake—it is Route 80 I imagine when I imagine the wedding cake, like a pie in the face, being thrown.

I was driving down the highway, this long and painfully lovely July day, when I saw the orange lilies bursting from their green sheaths. Until two weeks ago, when I finally asked and Josh told me, I wouldn't have noticed them, and I certainly wouldn't have known they were lilies. Now I know not only lily, but fuchsia, alyssum, nicotiana, dahlia, marigold. Basil needs sun, impatiens loves shade. At night I read tulip catalogues, color by color, easing gradually toward the blackest of them all, Queen of the Night.

All of this I have finally let Josh teach me—but (of course, of course) too late.

The lilies shut their petals, at dusk, over the road. And don't they become frosting
flowers, freezer annuals, with their sly, false promise of good luck? I can feel them smearing under the wheels, sugar and butter, a white streak like guano where a bridegroom is racing away from his bride.