1

Eric sat naked in his rented garden. Flies buzzed and boomed in the brilliant heat, and a yellow bee circled his head. Eric remained very still, then reached for the cigarettes beside him and lit one, hoping that the smoke would drive the bee away. Yves’ tiny black-and-white kitten stalked the garden as though it were Africa, crouching beneath the mimosas like a panther and leaping into the air.

The house and the garden overlooked the sea. Far down the slope, beyond the sand of the beach, in the thunderous blue of the Mediterranean, Yves’ head went under, reappeared, went under again. He vanished entirely. Eric stood up, looking out over the sea, almost poised to run. Yves liked to hold his breath under water for as long as possible, a test of endurance which Eric found pointless and, in Yves’ case, frightening. Then Yves’ head appeared again, and his arm flashed. And, even from this distance, Eric could see that Yves was laughing—he had known that Eric would be watching from the garden. Yves began swimming toward the beach. Eric sat down. The kitten rushed over and rubbed itself against his legs.

It was the end of May. They had been in this house for more than two months. Tomorrow they were leaving. Not for a long time, perhaps never again, would Eric sit in a garden watching Yves in the water. They would take the train for Paris in the morning and, after two days there, Yves would put Eric on the boat for New York. Eric was to get settled there and then Yves was to join him.

Now that it had all been decided and there could be no turning back, Eric felt a sour and savage apprehension. He watched as Yves stepped out of the water. His brown hair was bleaching from the sun and glowed about his head; his long, wiry body was as brown as bread. He bent down to lift off the scarlet bikini. Then he pulled on an old pair of blue jeans which he had expropriated from Eric. They were somewhat too short for him, but no matter—Yves was not very fond of Americans, but he liked their clothes. He stalked up the slope, toward the house, the red cloth of the bikini dangling from one hand.

Yves had never mentioned going to America and had never given Eric any reason to suppose that he nourished such a desire. The desire arrived, or was, in any case, stated, only when the possibility arose: for Eric had slowly graduated from near-starvation to dubbing French films to bit roles in some of the American films produced abroad. One of these bits had led to television work in England; and then a New York director had offered him one of the principal supporting parts in a Broadway play.

This offer had presented Eric with the enormous question he had spent three years avoiding. To accept it was to bring his European sojourn to an end; not to accept it was to transform his sojourn into exile. He and Yves had been together for more than two years and, from the time of their meeting, his home had been with Yves. More precisely and literally, it was Yves who had come to live with him, but each was, for the other, the dwelling place that each had despaired of finding.

Eric did not want to be separated from Yves. But when he told Yves that, for this reason, he had decided to reject the offer, Yves looked at him shrewdly, and sighed. “Then you should have rejected it right away, or you should never have told me about it at all. You are being sentimental—you are maybe being, even, a little cowardly, no? You will never make a carrière here in France, you know that as well as I. You will just grow old and discontented and you will make me a terrible life and then I will leave you. But you can become a great star, I think, if you play this part. Wouldn’t you like that?”

He paused, smiling, and Eric shrugged, then blushed. Yves laughed.

“How silly you are!” Then, “I, too, have dreams that I have never spoken of to you,” he said. He was still smiling, but there was an expression in his eyes which Eric had come to know. It was the look of a seasoned and able adventurer, trying to decide between pouncing on his prey and luring his prey into a trap. Such decisions are necessarily swift and so it was also the look of someone who was already irresistibly in motion toward whatever it was he wanted; who would certainly have it. This expression always frightened Eric a little. It seemed not to belong in Yves’ twenty-one-year-old face, to have no relation to his open, childlike grin, his puppylike playfulness, the adolescent ardor with which he embraced, then rejected, people, doctrines, theories. This expression made his face extremely bitter, profoundly cruel, ageless; the nature, the ferocity, of his intelligence was then all in his eyes; the extraordinary austerity of his high forehead prefigured his maturity and decay.

He touched Eric lightly on the elbow, as a very young child might do.

“I have no wish to stay here,” he said, “in this wretched mausoleum of a country. Let us go to New York. I will make my future there. There is no future here, for a boy like me.”

The word future caused in Eric a small trembling, a small recoil.

“You’ll hate America,” he said, with vehemence. Yves looked at him in surprise. “What kind of future are you dreaming of?”

“I am sure that there is something I can do there,” Yves said, stubbornly. “I can find my way. Do you really think that I want to be protected by you forever?” And he considered Eric for a moment as though they were enemies or strangers.

“I didn’t know you minded being—protected—by me.”

“Ne te fâche pas. I do not mind it; if I minded it, I would be gone.” He smiled and said, gently, reasonably, “But it cannot go on forever, I also am a man.”

“What cannot go on forever?” But he knew what Yves meant and he knew that what Yves said was true.

“Why,” said Yves, “my youth. It cannot last forever.” Then he grinned. “I have always been sure that you would be returning to your country one day. It might as well be now, while you are still fond of me, and I can seduce you into taking me along.”

“You’re a great little old seducer,” said Eric, “and that’s the truth.”

“Ah,” said Yves, wickedly, “with you it was easy.” Then he looked at Eric gravely. “So it is decided.” It was not a question. “I suppose that I must go and visit my whore of a mother and tell her that she will never see me any more.”

And his face darkened and his large mouth grew bitter. His mother had been a bistro waitress when the Germans came to Paris. Yves had then been five years old and his father had vanished so long before that Yves could scarcely remember him. But he remembered watching his mother with the Germans.

“She was really a putain. I remember many times sitting in the café, watching her. She did not know I was watching—anyway, old people think that children never see anything. The bar was very long, and it curved. I would always be sitting behind it, at the far end, around the curve. There was a mirror above me and I could see them in the mirror. And I could see them in the zinc of the bar. I remember their uniforms and the shine on their leather boots. They were always extremely correct—not like the Americans who came later. She would always be laughing, and she moved very fast. Someone’s hand was always on her—in her bosom, up her leg. There was always another one at our house, the whole German army, coming all the time. How horrible a people.”

And then, as though to give his mother a possible, reluctant justice:

“Later, she says that she do it for me, that we would not have eaten otherwise. But I do not believe that. I think she liked that. I think she was always a whore. She always managed everything that way. When the Americans came, she found a very pretty officer. He was very nice to me, I must say—he had a son of his own in the States that he had only seen one time, and he pretended that I was his son, though I was much older than his son would have been. He made me wish that I had a father, one father, especially”—he grinned—“an American father, who liked to buy you things and take you on his shoulder everywhere. I was sorry when he went away. I am sure that it was he who kept her from getting her head shaved, as she deserved. She told all kinds of lies about her work in the Resistance. Quelle horreur! that whole time, it was not very pretty. Many women had their heads shaved, sometimes for nothing, you know? just because they were pretty or someone was jealous or they had refused to sleep with someone. But not my mother. Nous, nous étions tranquille avec nôtre petit officier and our beefsteak and our chocolate candy.”

Then, with a laugh:

“Now, she owns that bistro where she used to work. You see what kind of woman she is? I never go there.”

This was not entirely true. He had run away from his mother at fifteen. Or, more accurately, they had established a peculiar truce, to the effect that he would make no trouble for her—that is, he would stay out of the hands of the law; and she would make no trouble for him—that is, she would not use his minority status as a means of having him controlled by the law. So Yves had lived by his wits in the streets of Paris, as a semi-tapette, and as a rat d’hôtel, until he and Eric had met. And during all this time, at great intervals, he visited his mother—when he was drunk or unbearably hungry or unbearably sad; or, rather, perhaps, he visited the bistro, which was different now. The long, curving counter had been replaced by a long, straight one. Neon swirled on the ceiling and above the mirrors. There were small, plastic-topped tables, in bright colors, and bright, plastic chairs instead of the wooden tables and chairs Yves remembered. There was a juke box now where the soldiers had clumsily manipulated the metal football players of the baby-foot; there were Coca-Cola signs, and Coca-Cola. The wooden floor had been covered with black plastic. Only the WC remained the same, a hole in the floor with foot-rests next to it, and torn newspaper hanging from a string. Yves went to the bistro blindly, looking for something he had lost, but it was not there any longer.

He sat in the old, vanished corner and watched his mother. The hair which had been brown was now of a chemical and improbably orange vitality. The figure which had been light was beginning to thicken and spread and sag. But her laugh remained, and she still seemed, in a kind of violent and joyless helplessness, to be seeking and fleeing the hands of men.

Eventually, she would come to his end of the bar.

“Je t’offre quelque chose, M’sieu?” With a bright, forced, wistful smile.

“Un cognac, Madame.” With a wry grin, and the sketch of a sardonic bow. When she was halfway down the bar, he yelled. “Un double!”

“Ah! Bien sûr, M’sieu.”

She brought him his drink and a small drink for herself, and watched him. They touched glasses.

“A la vôtre, Madame.”

“A la vôtre, M’sieu.”

But sometimes he said:

“A nos amours.”

And she repeated dryly:

“A nos amours!”

They drank in silence for a few seconds. Then she smiled.

“You look very well. You have become very handsome. I’m proud of you.”

“Why should you be proud of me? I am just a good-for-nothing, it is just as well that I am good-looking, that’s how I live.” And he watched her. “Tu comprends, hein?”

“If you talk that way, I want to know nothing, nothing, of your life!”

“Why not? It is just like yours, when you were young. Or maybe even now, how can I tell?”

She sipped her cognac and raised her chin. “Why don’t you come back? You can see for yourself how well the bar does, it would be a good situation for you. Et puis—–”

“Et puis quoi?”

“I am no longer very, very young, it would be un soulagement if my son and I could be friends.”

And Yves laughed. “You need friends? Go dig up some of those that you buried in order to get this bar. Friends! Je veut vivre, moi!”

“Ah, you are ungrateful.” Sometimes, when she said this, she dabbed at her eyes with a handkerchief.

“Don’t bother me any more, you know what I think of you, go back to your clients.” And the last word was thrown at his mother, like a curse; sometimes, if he were drunk enough, there were tears in his eyes.

He would let his mother get halfway down the bar before he shouted.

“Merci, pour le cognac, Madame!”

And she turned, with a slight bow, saying,

“De rien, M’sieu.”

Eric had been there with him once, and had rather liked Yves’ mother, but they had never gone back. And they had scarcely ever spoken of it. There was something hidden in it which Yves did not want to see.

Now, Yves leapt over the low stone wall and entered the garden, grinning.

“You should have come in the water with me, it was wonderful. It would do wonders for your figure; do you know how fat you are getting?”

He flicked at Eric’s belly with his bikini and fell on the ground beside him. The kitten approached cautiously, sniffing Yves’ foot as though it were investigating some prehistoric monstrosity, and Yves grabbed it, holding it against his shoulder, and stroking it. The kitten closed its eyes and began to purr.

“You see how she loves me? It is a pity to leave her here, let us take her with us to New York.”

“Getting you into America is going to be hassle enough, baby, let’s not rock the boat. Besides, New York is full of alley cats. And alleys.” He said this with his eyes closed, drinking in the sun and the odors of the garden and the dark, salty odors of Yves. The children from the nearby house were still on the beach; he could hear their voices.

“You have no sympathy for animals. She will suffer terribly when we go away.”

“She’ll recover. Cats are much stronger than people.”

He kept his eyes closed. He felt Yves turn to look down at him.

“Why are you so troubled about going to New York?”

“New York’s a very troubling place.”

“I am not afraid of trouble.” He touched Eric lightly on the chest and Eric opened his eyes. He stared up into Yves’ grave, brown, affectionate face. “But you are. You are afraid of trouble in New York. Why?”

“I’m not afraid, Yves. But I have had a lot of trouble there.”

“We have had much trouble here, too,” said Yves, with his abrupt and always rather shocking gravity, “and we have always come out of it and now we are better than ever, I think, no?”

“Yes,” said Eric, slowly, and watched Yves’ face.

“Well, then, what use is there to worry?” He pushed Eric’s hair back from his forehead. “Your head is hot. You have been in the sun too long.”

Eric grabbed his hand. The kitten leapt away. “Jesus. I’m going to miss you.”

“It is for so short a time. You will be busy, I will be in New York before you know we have been apart.” He grinned and put his chin on Eric’s chest. “Tell me about New York. You have many friends there? Many famous friends?”

Eric laughed. “Not many famous friends, no. I don’t know if I have any friends there now, I’ve been away so long.”

“Who were your friends when you left?” He grinned again and rubbed his cheek against Eric’s. “Boys like me?”

“There are no boys like you. Thank God.”

“You mean not so pretty as I? Or not so warm?”

He put his hands on Yves’ salty, sandy shoulders. He heard the children’s voices from the sea and the buzzing and booming in the garden. “No. Not so impossible.”

“Naturally, now that you are about to leave, you find me impossible. And from what point of view?”

He drew Yves closer. “From every point of view.”

“C’est dommage. Moi, je t’aime bien.”

These words were whispered against his ear, and they lay still for a few moments. Eric wanted to ask, Is that true? but he knew that it was true. Perhaps he did not know what it meant, but, there, Yves could not help him. Only time might help, time which surrendered all secrets but only on the inexorable condition, as far as he could tell, that the secret could no longer be used.

He put his lips to Yves’ shoulder and tasted the Mediterranean salt. He thought of his friends—what friends? He was not sure that he had ever really been friends with Vivaldo or Richard or Cass; and Rufus was dead. He was not certain who, long, long after the event, had sent him the news—he had the feeling that it had to be Cass. It could scarcely have been Vivaldo, who was made too uneasy by what he knew of Eric’s relation to Rufus—knew without being willing to admit that he knew; and it would certainly not have been Richard. No one, in any case, had written very often; he had not really wanted to know what was happening among the people he had fled; and he felt that they had always protected themselves against any knowledge of what was happening in him. No, Rufus had been his only friend among them. Rufus had made him suffer, but Rufus had dared to know him. And when Eric’s pain had faded, and Rufus was far away, Eric remembered only the joy that they had sometimes shared, and the timbre of Rufus’ voice, his half-beat, loping, cocky walk, his smile, the way he held a cigarette, the way he threw back his head when he laughed. And there was something in Yves which reminded him of Rufus—something in his trusting smile and his brave, tough vulnerability.

It was a Thursday when the news came. It was pouring down rain, all of Paris was wavering and gray. He had no money at all that day, was waiting for a check which was mysteriously entangled in one of the bureaucratic webs of the French cinema industry. He and Yves had just divided the last of their cigarettes and Yves had gone off to try and borrow money from an Egyptian banker who had once been fond of him. Eric had then lived on the Rue de la Montagne Ste. Geneviève, and he labored up this hill, in the flood, bareheaded, with water dripping down his nose and eyelashes and behind his ears and down his back and soaking through his trench-coat pocket, where he had unwisely placed the cigarettes. He could practically feel them disintegrating in the moist, unclean darkness of his pocket, not at all protected by his slippery hand. He was in a kind of numb despair and intended simply to get home and take off his clothes and stay in bed until help came; help would probably be Yves, with the money for sandwiches; it would be just enough help to enable them to get through yet another ghastly day.

He traversed the great courtyard and started up the steps of his building; and behind him, near the porte-cochère, the bell of the concierge’s loge sounded, and she called his name.

He went back, hoping that she was not going to ask him about his rent. She stood in her door, with a letter in her hand.

“This just came,” she said. “I thought it might be important.”

“Thank you,” he said.

She, too, hoped that it might be the money he was waiting for, but she closed her door behind her. It was nearly suppertime and she was cooking; in fact, the entire street seemed to be cooking, and his legs threatened to give way beneath him.

He did not look carefully at the outside of the envelope because his mind was entirely occupied by the recalcitrant check, and he was not expecting a check from America, which was where the letter came from; and he crumpled it up, unread, in his trench-coat pocket and crossed the courtyard and went upstairs to his room. There, he put the letter on the table, dried himself, and undressed and got under the covers. Then he lay the cigarettes out to dry, lit the driest one, and looked at the letter again. It seemed a very ordinary letter, until the paragraph beginning We were all very fond of him, and I know that you were, too—yes, it must have been Cass who wrote. Rufus was dead, and by his own hand. Rufus was dead.

Boys like me? Yves had teased. How could he tell the boy who lay beside him now anything about Rufus? It had taken him a long while to realize that one of the reasons Yves had so stirred his heart, stirred it in a way he had almost forgotten it could be stirred, was because he reminded him, somehow, somewhere, of Rufus. And it had taken him almost until this very moment, on the eve of his departure, to begin to recognize that part of Rufus’ great power over him had to do with the past which Eric had buried in some deep, dark place; was connected with himself, in Alabama, when I wasn’t nothing but a child; with the cold white people and the warm, black people, warm at least for him, and as necessary as the sun which bathed the bodies of himself and his lover now. Lying in this garden now, so warm, covered, and apprehensive, he saw them on the angular, blazing streets of his childhood, and in the shuttered houses, and in the fields. They laughed differently from other people, so it had seemed to him, and moved with more beauty and violence, and they smelled like good things in the oven.

But had he ever loved Rufus? Or had it simply been rage and nostalgia and guilt? and shame? Was it the body of Rufus to which he had clung, or the bodies of dark men, seen briefly, somewhere, in a garden or a clearing, long ago, sweat running down their chocolate chests and shoulders, their voices ringing out, the white of their jock-straps beautiful against their skin, one with his head tilted back before a dipper—and the water splashing, sparkling, singing down!—one with his arm raised, laying an axe to the base of a tree? Certainly he had never succeeded in making Rufus believe he loved him. Perhaps Rufus had looked into his eyes and seen those dark men Eric saw, and hated him for it.

He lay very still, feeling Yves’ unmoving, trusting weight, feeling the sun.

“Yves—–?”

“Oui, mon chou?”

“Let’s go inside. I think, maybe, I’d like to take a shower and have a drink. I’m beginning to feel sticky.”

“Ah, les américains avec leur drinks! I will surely become an alcoholic in New York.” But he raised his head and kissed Eric swiftly on the tip of his nose and stood up.

He stood between Eric and the sun; his hair very bright, his face in shadow. He looked down at Eric and grinned.

“Alors tu es toujours prêt, toi, d’après ce que je vois.”

Eric laughed. “Et toi, salaud?”

“Mais moi, je suis français, mon cher, je suis pas puritain, fort heureusement. T’aura du te rendre compte d’ailleurs.” He pulled Eric to his feet and slapped him on the buttocks with the red bikini. “Viens. Take your shower. I think we have almost nothing left to drink, I will bicycle down to the village. What shall I get?”

“Some whiskey?”

“Naturally, since that is the most expensive. Are we eating in or out?”

They started into the house, with their arms around each other.

“Try to get Madame Belet to come and cook something for us.”

“What do you want to eat?”

“I don’t care. Whatever you want.”

The house was long and low, built of stone, and very cool and dark after the heat and brightness of the kitchen. The kitten had followed them in and now murmured insistently at their feet.

“Perhaps I will feed her before I go. It will only take a minute.”

“She can’t be hungry yet, she eats all the time,” said Eric. But Yves had already begun preparing the kitten’s food.

They had entered through the kitchen and Eric walked through it and through the dining salon, into their bedroom, and threw himself down on the bed. The bedroom also had an entrance on the garden. The mimosas pressed against the window, and beyond these were two or three orange trees, holding hard, small oranges, like Christmas balls. There were olive trees in the garden, too, but they had been long untended; it was not worth anyone’s while to pick the olives.

The script of the new play was on the plain wooden table which, along with the fireplace in the dining room, had persuaded them to rent the house; on the table, too, were a few books, Yves’ copies of Blaise Cendrars and Jean Genet and Marcel Proust, Eric’s copies of An Actor Prepares and The Wings of the Dove and Native Son. Yves’ sketch pad was on the the floor. So were his tennis shoes and his socks and his underwear, all of these embracing Eric’s sport shirts and sandals and bathing trunks—less explicit and more somber than Yves’ bikini, these last, as Eric himself was less explicit and more sombre.

Yves clattered into the bedroom.

“Are you going to take that shower or not?”

“Yes. Right away.”

“Well, start. I am leaving now, I will be back in a moment.”

“I know your moments. Try not to get too drunk with the natives.” He grinned and stood up.

Yves picked up a pair of socks from the floor, put them on, and put on his tennis shoes, and a faded blue pullover. “Ah. Celui-là, je te jure.” He took a comb from his pocket and pulled it through his hair, with the result that it stood up more wildly than ever.

“I’ll put you on your bicycle.”

They walked past the mimosas. “Hurry back,” said Eric; smiling, staring at Yves.

Yves picked up his bicycle. “I will be back before you are dry.” He rolled the bicycle through the gate and onto the road. Eric stood in the garden, watching him. The light was still very bright but, in the mysterious way of southern light, was gathering itself together and would soon be gone. Already, the sea looked darker.

Once past the gate, Yves did not look back. Eric turned into the house.

He stepped into the shower, which was off the bedroom. He fumbled with the knobs, and the water came crashing over him, first too cold, but he forced himself to take it, then too hot; he fumbled with the knobs until the water became more bearable. He soaped himself, wondering if he were really getting fat. His belly seemed firm enough, but he had always had a tendency to be chunky and square; it was just as well that he would soon, in New York, be going again to the gym. And the thought of the gym, while the water fell down over him, he was alone with his body and the water, caused many painful and buried things to stir in him. Now that his flight was so rigorously approaching its end, a light appeared, a backward light, throwing his terrors into relief.

And what were these terrors? They were buried beneath the impossible language of the time, lived underground where nearly all of the time’s true feeling spitefully and incessantly fermented. Precisely, therefore, to the extent that they were inexpressible, were these terrors mighty; precisely because they lived in the dark were their shapes obscene. And because the taste for obscenity is universal and the appetite for reality rare and hard to cultivate, he had nearly perished in the basement of his private life. Or, more precisely, his fantasies.

These fantasies began as fantasies of love and soured imperceptibly into fantasies of violence and humiliation. When he was little he had been very much alone, for his mother was a civic leader, always busy with clubs and banquets and speeches and proposals and manifestoes, aloft forever on a sea of flowered hats; and his father, rather submerged by this glittering and resounding tide, made his home in the bank and on the golf course, in hunting lodges, and at poker tables. There seemed to be very little between his father and his mother, very little, that is, beyond habit and courtesy and coercion; and perhaps each had loved him, but this was never real to him, since they so clearly did not love each other. He had loved the cook, a black woman named Grace, who fed him and spanked him and scolded and coddled him, and dried the tears which scarcely anyone else in the household ever saw. But, even more than he had loved Grace, he had loved her husband, Henry.

Henry was younger, or seemed younger, than his wife. He was a trial to Grace, and probably to them all, because he drank too much. He was the handyman and one of his duties was the care of the furnace. Eric still remembered the look and the smell of the glaring furnace room, the red shadows from the furnace playing along the walls, and the sticky-sweet smell of Henry’s breath. They had spent many hours together there, Eric on a box at Henry’s knee, Henry with his hand on Eric’s neck or shoulder. His voice fell over Eric like waves of safety. He was full of stories. He told the story of how he had met Grace, and how he had seduced her, and how (as he supposed) he had persuaded her to marry him; told stories of preachers and gamblers in his part of town—they seemed, in his part of town, to have much in common, and, often, to be the same people—how he had outwitted this one and that one, and how, once, he had managed to escape being put on the chain gang. (And he had explained to Eric what a chain gang was.) Once, Eric had walked into the furnace room where Henry sat alone; when he spoke, Henry did not answer; and when he approached him, putting his hand on Henry’s knee, the man’s tears scalded the back of his hand. Eric no longer remembered the cause of Henry’s tears, but he would never forget the wonder with which he then touched Henry’s face, or what the shaking of Henry’s body had caused him to feel. He had thrown himself into Henry’s arms, almost sobbing himself, and yet somehow wise enough to hold his own tears back. He was filled with an unutterably painful rage against whatever it was that had hurt Henry. It was the first time he had felt a man’s arms around him, the first time he had felt the chest and belly of a man; he had been ten or eleven years old. He had been terribly frightened, obscurely and profoundly frightened, but he had not, as the years were to prove, been frightened enough. He knew that what he felt was somehow wrong, and must be kept a secret; but he thought that it was wrong because Henry was a grown man, and colored, and he was a little boy, and white.

Henry and Grace were eventually banished, due to some lapse or offense on Henry’s part. Since Eric’s parents had never approved of those sessions in the furnace room, Eric always suspected this as the reason for Henry’s banishment, which made his opposition to his parents more bitter than ever. In any case, he lived his life far from them, at school by day and before his mirror by night, dressed up in his mother’s old clothes or in whatever colorful scraps he had been able to collect, posturing and, in a whisper, declaiming. He knew that this was wrong, too, though he could not have said why. But by this time he knew that everything he did was wrong in the eyes of his parents, and in the eyes of the world, and that, therefore, everything must be lived in secret.

The trouble with a secret life is that it is very frequently a secret from the person who lives it and not at all a secret for the people he encounters. He encounters, because he must encounter, those people who see his secrecy before they see anything else, and who drag these secrets out of him; sometimes with the intention of using them against him, sometimes with more benevolent intent; but, whatever the intent, the moment is awful and the accumulating revelation is an unspeakable anguish. The aim of the dreamer, after all, is merely to go on dreaming and not to be molested by the world. His dreams are his protection against the world. But the aims of life are antithetical to those of the dreamer, and the teeth of the world are sharp. How could Eric have known that his fantasies, however unreadable they were for him, were inscribed in every one of his gestures, were betrayed in every inflection of his voice, and lived in his eyes with all the brilliance and beauty and terror of desire? He had always been a heavy, healthy boy, had played like other children, and fought as they did, made friends and enemies and secret pacts and grandiose plans. And yet none of his playmates, after all, had ever sat with Henry in the furnace room, or ever kissed Henry on his salty face. They did not, weighed down with discarded hats, gowns, bags, sashes, earrings, capes, and necklaces, turn themselves into make-believe characters after everyone in their house was asleep. Nor could they possibly, at their most extended, have conceived of the people he, in the privacy of night, became: his mother’s friends, or his mother—his mother as he conceived her to have been when she was young, his mother’s friends as his mother was now; the heroines and heroes of the novels he read, and the movies he saw; or people he simply put together out of his fantasies and the available rags. No doubt, at school, the boy with whom he was wrestling failed to feel the curious stabs of terror and pleasure that Eric felt, as they grappled with each other, as one boy pinned the other to the ground; and if Eric saw the girls at all, he saw mainly their clothes and their hair; they were not, for him, as were the boys, creatures in a hierarchy, to be adored or feared or despised. None of them looked on each other as he looked on all of them. His dreams were different—subtly and cruelly and criminally different: this was not known yet, but it was felt. He was menaced in a way that they were not, and it was perhaps this sense, and the instinct which compels people to move away from the doomed, which accounted for the invincible distance, increasing with the years, which stretched between himself and his contemporaries.

And, of course, in Eric’s case, in Alabama, his increasing isolation and strangeness was held, even by himself, to be due to the extreme unpopularity of his racial attitudes—or, rather, as far as the world in which he moved was concerned, the lack of any responsible attitudes at all. The town in which Eric lived was celebrated and well-to-do, but it was not very big; as far as Eric was concerned, the South was not very big, certainly, as it turned out, not big enough for him; and he was the only son of very prominent people. So it was not long before his appearance anywhere caused heads to shake, lips to purse, tongues to stiffen or else, violently, venomously, to curl around his name. Which was also, however, his father’s name, and Eric, therefore, encountered, very often and very soon, the hideous obsequiousness of people who depised him but who did not dare to say so. They had long ago given up saying anything which they really felt, had given it up so long ago that they were now incapable of feeling anything which was not felt by a mob.

Now, Eric stepped out of the shower, rubbing his body with the enormous, rough, white towel Yves had placed in the bathroom for him. Yves did not like showers, he preferred long, scalding baths, with newspapers, cigarettes, and whiskey on a chair next to the bathtub, and with Eric nearby to talk to, to shampoo his hair, and to scrub his back. The thought of the Oriental opulence which overtook Yves each time he bathed caused Eric to smile. He smiled, but he was troubled, too. And as he put on his bathrobe, his body tingled less from the effect of the towel and the toilet water than from his image, abruptly overwhelming, of Yves leaning back in the bathtub, whistling, the washrag in his hand, a peaceful, abstracted look on his face and his sex gleaming and bobbing in the soapy water like a limp, cylindrical fish; and from his memory, to which his image was somehow the gateway, of that moment, nearly fifteen years ago, when the blow had inexorably fallen and his shame and his battle and his exile had begun. He walked into the dining room and poured himself a drink. Then the bottle was empty and he dropped it in the waste basket. He lit a cigarette and sat down in a chair near the window, overlooking the sea. The sun was sinking and the sea was on fire.

The sun had been sinking on that far-off day, a Sunday, a hot day. The church bells had ceased and the silence of the South hung heavy over that town. The trees along the walks gave no shade. The white houses, with their blank front doors, their blackly shadowed porches, seemed to be in battle with the sun, laboring and shuddering beneath the merciless light. Occasionally, passing a porch, one might discern in its depths a still, shadowed, faceless figure. The interminable pickaninnies were playing in the invincible dirt—where Eric was walking that day, on a back road, near the edge of town, with a colored boy. His name was LeRoy, he was seventeen, a year older than Eric, and he worked as a porter in the courthouse. He was tall and very black, and taciturn; Eric always wondered what he was thinking. They had been friends for a long time, from the time of Henry’s banishment. But now their friendship, their effort to continue an impossible connection, was beginning to be a burden for them both. It would have been simpler—perhaps—if LeRoy had worked for Eric’s family. Then all would have been permitted, would have been covered by the assumption of Eric’s responsibility for his colored boy. But, as things were, it was suspect, it was indecent, that a white boy, especially of Eric’s class and difficult reputation, should “run,” as Eric incontestably did, after one of his inferiors. Eric had no choice but to run, to insist—LeRoy could certainly not come visiting him.

And yet there was something absolutely humiliating in his position; he felt it very sharply and sadly, and he knew that LeRoy felt it, too. Eric did not know, or perhaps he did not want to know, that he made LeRoy’s life more difficult and increased the danger in which LeRoy walked—for LeRoy was considered “bad,” as lacking, that is, in respect for white people. Eric did not know, though of course LeRoy did, what was already being suggested about him all over town. Eric had not guessed, though LeRoy knew only too well, that the Negroes did not like him, either. They suspected the motives of his friendliness. They looked for the base one and naturally they found it.

So, shortly before, when Eric had appeared in the road, his hands in his pockets, a hoarse, tuneless whistle issuing from his lips, LeRoy had jumped off his porch and come to meet him, striding toward Eric as though he were an enemy. There was a snicker from LeRoy’s porch, quickly muffled; a screen door slammed; every eye on the street was on them.

Eric stammered, “I just dropped by to see what you were doing.”

LeRoy spat in the dusty road. “Ain’t doing nothing. Ain’t you got nothing to do?”

“You want to take a walk?” Eric asked.

For a moment it really seemed that LeRoy was going to refuse, for his scowl deepened. Then a faint smile touched his lips. “Okay. But I can’t walk far. I got to get back.”

They began to walk. “I want to get out of this town,” Eric said, suddenly.

“You and me both,” said LeRoy.

“Maybe we can go North together,” Eric said, after a moment, “where do you think’s best? New York? or Chicago? or maybe San Francisco?” He had wanted to say Hollywood, because he had a dim notion of trying to become a movie star. But he could not really imagine LeRoy as a movie star, and he did not want to seem to want anything LeRoy could not have.

“I can’t be thinking about leaving. I got my Ma and all them kids to worry about.” He looked at Eric and laughed, but it was not an entirely pleasant laugh. “Ain’t everybody’s old man runs a bank, you know.” He picked up a pebble and threw it at a tree.

“Hell, my old man don’t give me no money. He certainly won’t give me any money to go North. He wants me to stay right here.”

“He going to die one day, Eric, he going to have to leave it to somebody, now who you think it’s going to be? Me?” And he laughed again.

“Well, I’m not going to hang around here the rest of my life, waiting for my papa to die. That’s certainly not much to look forward to.”

And he tried to laugh, to match his tone to LeRoy’s. But he did not really understand LeRoy’s tone. What was wrong between them today? For it was no longer merely the world—there was something unspoken between them, something unspeakable, undone, and hideously desired. And yet, on that far-off, burning day, though this knowledge clamored in him and fell all around him, like the sun, and everything in him was aching and yearning for the act, he could not, to save his soul, have named it. It had yet to reach the threshold of his imagination; and it had no name, no name for him anyway, though for other people, so he had heard, it had dreadful names. It had only a shape and the shape was LeRoy and LeRoy contained the mystery which had him by the throat.

And he put his arm around LeRoy’s shoulder and rubbed the top of his head against LeRoy’s chin.

“Well, you got it to look forward to, whether you like it or not,” LeRoy said. He put one hand on Eric’s neck. “But I guess you know what I got to look forward to.” And Eric felt that he wished to say more, but did not know how. They walked on a few seconds in silence and LeRoy’s opportunity came. A cream-colored roadster, bearing six young people, three white boys and three white girls, came up the road in a violent swirl and wake of dust. Eric and LeRoy did not have time to move apart, and a great laugh came from the car, and the driver beat out a mocking version of the wedding march on his horn—then kept his entire palm on it as the car shot down the road, away. All of the people in the car were people with whom Eric had grown up.

He felt his face flame and he and LeRoy moved away from each other; and LeRoy looked at him with a curiously noncommittal pity.

“Now that’s what you supposed to be doing,” he said—he said it very gently, looking at Eric, licking his lower lip—“and that’s where you supposed to be. You ain’t supposed to be walking around this damn country road with no nigger.”

“I don’t give a damn about those people,” Eric said—but he knew that he was lying and he knew that LeRoy knew it, too—“those people don’t mean a thing to me.”

LeRoy looked more pitying than ever, and also looked exasperated. The road now was empty, not a creature moved on it; it was yellow-red and brown and trees leaned over it, with fire falling through the leaves; and the road now began to drop beneath them, toward the railroad tracks and the warehouse. This was the town’s dividing line and they always turned off the road at this point, into a clump of trees and a rise which overlooked a stream. LeRoy now turned Eric into this haven. His touch was different today; insistent, gentle, ferocious, and resigned.

“Besides,” said Eric, helplessly, “you’re not a nigger, not for me, you’re LeRoy, you’re my friend, and I love you.” The words took his breath away and tears came to his eyes and they paused in the fiery shadow of a tree. LeRoy leaned against the tree, staring at Eric, with a terrible expression on his black face. The expression on LeRoy’s face frightened him, but he labored upward against his fear, and brought out, “I don’t know why people can’t do what they want to do; what harm are we doing to anybody?”

LeRoy laughed. He reached out and pulled Eric against him, under the shadow of the leaves. “Poor little rich boy,” he said, “tell me what you want to do.” Eric stared at him. Nothing could have moved him out of LeRoy’s arms, away from his smell, and the terrible, new touch of his body; and yet, in the same way that he knew that everything he had ever wanted or done was wrong, he knew that this was wrong, and he felt himself falling. Falling where? He clung to LeRoy, whose arms tightened around him. “Poor boy,” LeRoy murmured again, “poor boy.” Eric buried his face in LeRoy’s neck and LeRoy’s body shook a little—the chest and belly of a man!—and then he pushed Eric away and guided him toward the stream and they sat down beside it.

“I guess you know, now,” LeRoy said, after a long silence, while Eric trailed his hand in the water, “what they saying about us in this town. I don’t care but it can get us in a lot of trouble and you got to stop coming to see me, Eric.”

He had not known what they were saying, or he had been unable to allow himself to know; but he knew now. He said, staring into the water, and with a totally mysterious abandon, “Well, if we’ve got the name, we might as well have the game is how I see it. I don’t give a shit about those people, let them all go to hell; what have they got to do with you and me?”

LeRoy looked briefly over at Eric and smiled. “You a nice boy, Eric, but you don’t know the score. Your Daddy owns half the folks in this town, ain’t but so much they can do to you. But what they can do to me—–!” And he spread his hands wide.

“I won’t let anything happen to you.”

LeRoy laughed. “You better get out of this town. Declare, they going to lynch you before they get around to me.” He laughed again and rubbed his hand in Eric’s bright red hair.

Eric grabbed his hand. They looked at each other, and a total, a dreadful silence fell. “Boy,” LeRoy said, weakly. And then, after a moment, “You really out for trouble, ain’t you?” And then nothing was said. They lay together beside the stream.

That day. That day. Had he known where that day would lead him would he have writhed as he did, in such an anguished joy, beneath the great weight of his first lover? But if he had known, or been capable of caring, where such a day might lead him, it could never have been his necessity to bring about such a day. He was frightened and in pain and the boy who held him so relentlessly was suddenly a stranger; and yet this stranger worked in Eric an eternal, a healing transformation. Many years were to pass before he could begin to accept what he, that day, in those arms, with the stream whispering in his ear, discovered; and yet that day was the beginning of his life as a man. What had always been hidden was to him, that day, revealed and it did not matter that, fifteen years later, he sat in an armchair, overlooking a foreign sea, still struggling to find the grace which would allow him to bear that revelation. For the meaning of revelation is that what is revealed is true, and must be borne.

But how to bear it? He rose from his seat and paced restlessly into the garden. The kitten lay curled on the stone doorstep, in the last of the sun, asleep. Then he heard Yves’ bicycle bell and, shortly, Yves’ head appeared above the low stone wall. He passed, looking straight ahead, and then Eric heard him in the kitchen, bumping into things and opening and closing the icebox door.

Then Yves stood beside him.

“Madame Belet will be here in a few moments. She is cooking for us a chicken. And I have bought some whiskey and some cigarettes.” Then he looked at Eric and frowned. “You are mad to be standing here in your bathrobe. The sun is down and it is getting cold. Come in and get dressed, I will make us both a drink.”

“What would I do without you?”

“I wonder.” Eric followed him into the house. “I also bought some champagne,” Yves said, suddenly, and he turned to face Eric with a small, shy smile, “to celebrate our last night here.” Then he walked into the kitchen. “Get dressed,” he called, “Madame Belet will be here soon.”

Eric stepped into the bedroom and began putting on his clothes. “Are we going out after dinner?”

“Perhaps. That depends. If we are not too drunk on champagne.”

“I’d just as soon stay in, I think.”

“Oh, perhaps we must have just one last look at our little seaside town.”

“We have to get packed, you know, and clean up this house a little, and try to get some sleep.”

“Madame Belet will clean it for us. Anyway, we would never be able to get it done. We can sleep on the train. And we do not have so very much to pack.”

Eric heard him washing the glasses. Then he began to whistle a tune which sounded like a free improvisation on Bach. Eric combed his hair, which was too long. He decided that he would get it cut very short before he went back to the States.

Eventually, they sat, as they had sat so many evenings, before the window which overlooked the sea. Yves sat on the hassock, the back of his head resting on Eric’s knee.

“I will be very sad to leave here,” Yves said, suddenly. “I have never been happier than I have been in this house.”

Eric stroked Yves’ hair and said nothing. He watched the lights that played on the still, black sea, from the sky and the shore.

“I have been very happy, too,” he said at last. And then: “I wonder if we will ever be so happy again.”

“Yes, why not? But that is not so important—anyway, no matter how happy I may become, and I am sure that I shall have great moments yet, this house will always stay with me. I found out something here.”

“And what was that?”

Yves turned his head and looked up at Eric. “I was afraid that I would just remain a street boy forever, that I was no better than my mother.” He turned away, toward the window again. “But, somehow, down here in this house with you, I finally realized that that is not so. I have not to be a whore just because I come from whores. I am better than that.” He stopped. “I learned that from you. That is really strange, for, you know? in the beginning I thought you thought of me like that. I thought that you were just another sordid American, looking for a pretty, degenerate boy.”

“But you are not pretty,” Eric said, and sipped his whiskey. “Au fait, tu es plutôt moche.”

“Oh. Ça va.”

“Your nose turns up.” He stroked the tip of Yves’ nose. “And your mouth’s too big”—Yves laughed—“and your forehead’s too high and soon you won’t have any hair.” He stroked Yves’ forehead, stroked his hair. “And those ears, baby! you look like an elephant or a flying machine.”

“You are the first person who ever say that I am ugly. Perhaps that is why I am intrigued.” He laughed.

“Well. Your eyes are not too bad.”

“Tu parle. J’ai du chien, moi.”

“Well, yes, baby, now that you mention it, I’m afraid you’ve got a point.”

They were silent for a moment.

“I have been with so many horrible people,” Yves said, gravely, “so soon, and for so long. Really, it is a wonder that I am not completely sauvage.” He sipped his whiskey. Eric could not see his face, but he could imagine the expression it held: hard and baffled and terribly young, with the cruelty that comes from pain and fear. “First, my mother and all those soldiers, ils étaient mes oncles, tous,” and he laughed, “and then all those awful, slimy men, I no longer know how many.” He was silent again. “I lay in the bed, sometimes we never got to bed, and let them grunt and slobber. Some of them were really fantastic, no whore has ever told the truth about who comes to her, I am sure of that, they would chop off her head before they would dare to hear it. But it is happening, it is happening all the time.” He leaned up, hugging his knees, staring at the sea. “Then I would take their money; if they made difficulties I could scare them because I was mineur. Anyway, it was very easy to scare them. Most of those people are cowards.” Then he said, in a low voice, “I never thought that I would be happy to have a man touch me and hold me. I never thought that I would be able, truly, to make love with a man. Or with anyone.”

“Why,” Eric asked at last, “didn’t you use women instead of men, as you despised the men so much?”

Yves was silent. Then, “I don’t know. D’abord, I took what there was—or allowed what there was to take me,” and he looked at Eric and grinned. He sipped his whiskey and stood up. “It is simpler with men, it is usually shorter, the money is easier. Women are much more cunning than men, especially those women who would go after a boy like me, and even more unattractive, really.” He laughed. “It is much harder work, and it is not so sure.” His face dropped again into its incongruous, austere melancholy. “You do not meet many women in the places I have been; you do not meet many human persons at all. They are all dead. Dead.” He stopped, his lips pursed, his eyes glittering in the light that fell though the window. “There were many whores in my mother’s place, but—well, yes, there have been a few women, but I couldn’t stand them, either.” He moved to the window and stood there with his back to Eric. “I do not like l’elégance des femmes. Every time I see a woman wearing her fur coats and her jewels and her gowns, I want to tear all that off her and drag her someplace, to a pissoir, and make her smell the smell of many men, the piss of many men, and make her know that that is what she is for, she is no better than that, she does not fool me with all those shining rags, which, anyway, she only got by blackmailing some stupid man.”

Eric laughed, but he was frightened. “Comme tu es feroce!” He watched Yves turn from the window and slowly pace the room—long and lean, like a stalking cat, and in the heavy shadows. And he saw that Yves’ body was changing, was losing the adolescent, poverty-stricken harshness. He was becoming a man.

And he watched that sullen, wiry body. He watched his face. The dome of his forehead seemed more remarkable than ever, and more pure, and his mouth seemed, at once, more cruel and more defenseless. This nakedness was the proof of Yves’ love and trust, and it was also the proof of Yves’ force. Yves, one day, would no longer need Eric as he needed Eric now.

Now, Yves tilted back his head and finished his drink and turned to Eric with a smile.

“You are drinking very slowly tonight. What is the matter?”

“I’m getting old.” But he laughed and finished his drink and handed his glass to Yves.

And, as Yves walked away from him, as he heard him in the kitchen, as he looked out over the yellow, winking lights along the shore, something opened in him, an unspeakable despair swept over him. Madame Belet had arrived and he heard Yves and the old peasant woman in the kitchen. Their voices were muted.

On the day that Yves no longer needed him, Eric would drop back into chaos. He remembered that army of lonely men who had used him, who had wrestled with him, caressed him, and submitted to him, in a darkness deeper than the darkest night. It was not merely his body they had used, but something else; his infirmity had made him the receptacle of an anguish which he could scarcely believe was in the world. This anguish rendered him helpless, though it also lent him his weird, doomed grace and power, and it baffled him and set the dimensions of his trap. Perhaps he had sometimes dreamed of walking out of the drama in which he was entangled and playing some other role. But all the exits were barred—were barred by avid men; the role he played was necessary, and not only to himself.

And he thought of these men, that ignorant army. They were husbands, they were fathers, gangsters, football players, rovers; and they were everywhere. Or they were, in any case, in all of the places he had been assured they could not be found and the need they brought to him was one they scarcely knew they had, which they spent their lives denying, which overtook and drugged them, making their limbs as heavy as those of sleepers or drowning bathers, and which could only be satisfied in the shameful, the punishing dark, and quickly, with flight and aversion as the issue of the act. They fled, with the infection lanced but with the root of the infection still in them. Days or weeks or months might pass—or even years—before, once again, furtively, in an empty locker room, on an empty stairway or a roof, in the shadow of a wall in the park, in a parked car, or in the furnished room of an absent friend, they surrendered to the hands, to the stroking and fondling and kissing of the despised and anonymous sex. And yet the need did not seem to be predominantly physical. It could not be said that they were attracted to men. They did not make love, they were passive, they were acted on. The need seemed, indeed, to be precisely this passivity, this gift of illicit pleasure, this adoration. They came, this army, not out of joy but out of poverty, and in the most tremendous ignorance. Something had been frozen in them, the root of their affections had been frozen, so that they could no longer accept affection, though it was from this lack that they were perishing. The dark submission was the shadow of love—if only someone, somewhere, loved them enough to caress them this way, in the light, with joy! But then they could no longer be passive.

Chaos. For the great difference between these men and himself was also the terms of their connection. He saw their vulnerability and they saw his. But they did not love him for this. They used him. He did not love them, either, though he dreamed of it. And the encounter took place, at last, between two dreamers, neither of whom could wake the other, except for the bitterest and briefest of seconds. Then sleep descended again, the search continued, chaos came again.

And there was more to it than that. When the liaison so casually begun survived the first encounters, when a kind of shy affection began to force itself up through the frozen ground, and shame abated, chaos more than ever ruled. For shame had not so much abated as found a partner. Affection had appeared, but through a fissure, a crevice, in the person, through which, behind affection, came all the winds of fear. For the act of love is a confession. One lies about the body but the body does not lie about itself; it cannot lie about the force which drives it. And Eric had discovered, inevitably, the truth about many men, who then wished to drive Eric and the truth together out of the world.

And where was honor in all this chaos? He watched the winking lights and listened to Yves and Madame Belet in the kitchen. Honor. He knew that he had no honor which the world could recognize. His life, passions, trials, loves, were, at worst, filth, and, at best, disease in the eyes of the world, and crimes in the eyes of his countrymen. There were no standards for him except those he could make for himself. There were no standards for him because he could not accept the definitions, the hideously mechanical jargon of the age. He saw no one around him worth his envy, did not believe in the vast, gray sleep which was called security, did not believe in the cures, panaceas, and slogans which afflicted the world he knew; and this meant that he had to create his standards and make up his definitions as he went along. It was up to him to find out who he was, and it was his necessity to do this, so far as the witchdoctors of the time were concerned, alone.

“Mais, bien sûr,” he heard Yves saying to Madame Belet, “je suis tout à fait à votre avis.” Madame Belet was very fond of Yves and gave him the benefit, entirely unsolicited, of her seventy-two years’ experience each time she was able to corner him. He could see Yves now, in the kitchen, holding the two drinks in his hand, edging toward the door, a pale, polite, and lonely smile on his face—for he had great respect for old people—waiting for the pause in Madame Belet’s flow which would allow him to escape.

Madame Belet was fond of Eric, too, but he had the feeling that this was mainly because she recognized him as Yves’ somewhat unlikely benefactor. If Eric had been French, she would have despised him. But France did not, Dieu merci! produce such conundrums as Eric, and he was not to be judged by the civilized standards which obtained in her own country.

“And what time are you leaving?” she asked.

“Oh, surely not before noon, Madame.”

She laughed and Yves laughed. There was something bawdy in their laughter and he could not avoid the feeling, though he suppressed it at once, that they were laughing in league, against him. “I hope you will like America,” said Madame Belet.

“I will become very rich there,” said Yves, “and when I come back, I will take you on a pilgrimage to Rome.”

For Madame Belet was devout and had never been to Rome, and it was her great hope to see the Holy City before she died.

“Ah. You will never come back.”

“I will come back,” Yves said. But his voice was full of doubt. And Eric realized, for the first time, that Yves was afraid.

“People who go to America,” said Madame Belet, “never come back.”

“Au contraire,” said Yves, “they are coming back all the time.”

Coming back to what? Eric asked himself. Madame Belet laughed again. Then their voices dropped. Yves came back into the room. He handed Eric his drink and sat again on the hassock, with his head on Eric’s knee.

“I thought I would never get away,” he murmured.

“I was thinking of going in to rescue you.” He leaned down and kissed Yves on the neck.

Yves put one hand on Eric’s cheek and closed his eyes. They were still. A pulse beat in Yves’ neck. He turned and he and Eric kissed each other on the mouth. They pulled slightly away. Yves’ eyes were very black and bright in the unlit, leaping room. They stared into each other’s eyes for a long time, and kissed again. Then Eric sighed and leaned back and Yves rested once more against him.

Eric wondered what Yves was thinking. Yves’ eyes had carried him back to that moment, nearly two years before, when, in a darkened hotel room, in the town of Chartres, he and Yves had first become lovers. Yves had visited the cathedral once, years before, and he had wanted Eric to see it. And this gesture, this desire to share with Eric something he had loved, marked the end of a testing period, signaled Yves’ turning out of that dark distrust with which he was accustomed to regard the world and with which he had held Eric at bay. They had known each other for more than three months and had seen each other every day, but they had never touched.

And Eric had waited, attentive and utterly chaste. The change in him was like the change in a spendthrift when his attention is captured by something worth more than all his gold, worth more than all the baubles he has ever purchased; then, instead of scattering, he begins to assess and hoard and gather up; all that he has becomes valuable because all that he has may prove to be an unacceptable sacrifice. So Eric waited, praying that this violated urchin would learn to love and trust him. And he knew that the only way he could hope to bring this about was to cease violating himself: if he did not love himself, then Yves would never be able to love him, either.

So he did what he alone could do, purified, as well as he could, his house, and opened his doors; established a precarious order in the heart of his chaos; and waited for his guest.

Yves shifted and sat up and lit a cigarette, then lit one for Eric. “I am beginning to be quite hungry.”

“So am I. But we’ll be eating soon.” The kitten wandered in and leapt into Eric’s lap. He stroked it with one hand. “Do you remember how we met?”

“I will never forget it. I owe a great deal to Beethoven.”

Eric smiled. “And to the wonders of modern science.”

He had been walking along the Rue des St. Pères on a spring evening, and his thoughts had not been pretty. Paris seemed, and had seemed for a long time, the loneliest city under heaven. And whoever prolongs his sojourn in that city—who tries, that is, to make a home there—is doomed to discover that there is no one to be blamed for whatever happens to him. Contrary to its legend, Paris does not offer many distractions; or, those distractions that it offers are like French pastry, vivid and insubstantial, sweet on the tongue and sour in the belly. Then the discontented wanderer is thrown back on himself—if his life is to become bearable, only he can make it so. And, on that spring evening, walking up the long, dark, murmuring street toward the Boulevard, Eric was in despair. He knew that he had a life to make, but he did not seem to have the tools.

Then, as he neared the Boulevard, he heard music. At first, he thought it came from the houses, but then he realized that it was coming from the shadows across the street, where there were no houses. He stood still and listened; to Beethoven’s “Emperor” Concerto, which was moving away from him. Then, out of the shadows, ahead of him, and on the other side of the street, he saw the long, lean figure of a boy. He stood on the corner, waiting for the lights to change, and Eric saw that he was carrying a small portable radio, holding it with both hands. Eric walked to the corner, the lights changed, the boy crossed the street, and Eric followed. Down the long, dark street, the boy on one side and he on the other, and with the violence of the music, which was like the violence in his heart, filling the soft, spring air.

They reached the corner of the Rue de Rennes. The concerto was approaching its end. To the right, far from them, squatted the bulk of the Gare Montparnasse; to the left, and somewhat nearer, were the cafés and the Boulevard, and the clean, gray spire of St. Germain-des-Près.

The boy hesitated on the corner; looked over, briefly, and his eyes met Eric’s. He turned in the direction of St. Germain-des-Près. Eric crossed the street. Tum-ta-tum, tum-ta-tum, tum-ta-tum, tum-ta-tum! went the music.

“Hello,” Eric said. “I’m afraid I’ve got to hear the end of that concerto.”

Yves turned and Eric was immediately struck by his eyes. In the candor with which they regarded him, they were like the eyes of a child; and yet there was also something in that scrutiny which was not childish at all. Eric felt his heart pound once, hard, against his chest. Then Yves smiled.

“It is almost ended,” he said.

“I know.” They walked in silence, listening to the end of the concerto. When it ended, Yves clicked the radio off.

“Will you have a drink with me?” Eric asked. He said, quickly, “I’m all by myself, I’ve got no one to talk to—and—and you don’t run into people playing Beethoven every day.”

“That is true,” said Yves, with a smile. “You have a funny accent, where are you from?”

“America.”

“I thought it must be America. But which section you are from?”

“The South. Alabama.”

“Oh,” said Yves, and looked at him with interest, “then you are raciste.”

“Why, no,” said Eric, feeling rather stunned, “we are not all like that.”

“Oh,” said Yves, majestically, “I read your newspapers. And I have many African friends and I have noticed that Americans do not like that.”

“Well,” said Eric, “that’s not my problem. I left Alabama as fast as I could and if I ever go back there, they’ll probably kill me.”

“Have you been here long?”

“About a year.”

“And you still know no one?”

“It’s hard to make friends with the French.”

“Well. It is only that we are more réservé than you.”

“I’ll say you are.” They stopped before the Royal St. Germain. “Shall we have a drink here?”

“It does not matter.” Yves looked over the tables, which were full; looked through the glass walls into the bar, which was crowded, mostly with young males. “But it is terribly crowded.”

“Let’s go someplace else.”

They walked to the corner and crossed the street. All of the cafés were full. They crossed the street again, and passed the Brasserie Lipp. Eric had been watching Yves with more intensity than he realized; as they passed the brasserie, it suddenly flashed through him that Yves was hungry. He did not know how he knew it, for Yves said nothing, did not pause or sigh; and yet Eric could not have been more certain that the boy was faint with hunger had he abruptly collapsed on the sidewalk.

“Look,” Eric said, “I’ve got an idea. I’m starving, I haven’t eaten any supper. Come on over to Les Halles with me and let’s get something to eat. And by the time we get back, it won’t be so crowded over here.” Yves looked at him, his head tilted in a kind of wary, waiting surprise.

“It is so far,” he murmured. And he stared at Eric with a bright, suspicious bafflement; as though he were thinking, I am willing to play all games, my friend, but what are the rules of this one? and what are the penalties?

“I’ll bring you back.” He grinned and grabbed Yves’ arm and started for the taxi stand. “Come on, be my guest, you’ll be doing me a favor. What’s your name?”

“Je m’appel Yves.”

“My name is Eric.”

He had often thought since that, had it not been for that sudden apprehension before the brasserie, he and Yves would never have met again. Their first meal together had given them time, so to speak, to circle around one another. Eric did most of the talking; the burden of proof was on him. And Yves became less wary and less tight. Eric chattered on, delighted by Yves’ changing face, waiting for his smile, waiting for his laugh. He wanted Yves to know that he was not trying to strike with him the common, brutal bargain; was not buying him a dinner in order to throw him into bed. And by and by this unspoken declaration caused Yves to nod gravely, as though he were turning it over in his mind. There also appeared in his face a certain fear. It was this fear which Eric sometimes despaired of conquering, in Yves, or in himself. It was the fear of making a total commitment, a vow: it was the fear of being loved.

That day in Chartres they had passed through town and watched women kneeling at the edge of the water, pounding clothes against a flat, wooden board. Yves had watched them for a long time. They had wandered up and down the old crooked streets, in the hot sun; Eric remembered a lizard darting across a wall; and everywhere the cathedral pursued them. It is impossible to be in that town and not be in the shadow of those great towers; impossible to find oneself on those plains and not be troubled by that cruel and elegant, dogmatic and pagan presence. The town was full of tourists, with their cameras, their three-quarter coats, bright flowered dresses and shirts, their children, college insignia, Panama hats, sharp, nasal cries, and automobiles crawling like monstrous gleaming bugs over the laming, cobblestoned streets. Tourist buses, from Holland, from Denmark, from Germany, stood in the square before the cathedral. Tow-haired boys and girls, earnest, carrying knapsacks, wearing khaki-colored shorts, with heavy buttocks and thighs, wandered dully through the town. American soldiers, some in uniform, some in civilian clothes, leaned over bridges, entered bistros in strident, uneasy, smiling packs, circled displays of colored post cards, and picked up meretricious mementos, of a sacred character. All of the beauty of the town, all the energy of the plains, and all the power and dignity of the people seemed to have been sucked out of them by the cathedral. It was as though the cathedral demanded, and received, a perpetual, living sacrifice. It towered over the town, more like an affliction than a blessing, and made everything seem, by comparison with itself, wretched and makeshift indeed. The houses in which the people lived did not suggest shelter, or safety. The great shadow which lay over them revealed them as mere doomed bits of wood and mineral, set down in the path of a hurricane which, presently, would blow them into eternity. And this shadow lay heavy on the people, too. They seemed stunted and misshapen; the only color in their faces suggested too much bad wine and too little sun; even the children seemed to have been hatched in a cellar. It was a town like some towns in the American South, frozen in its history as Lot’s wife was trapped in salt, and doomed, therefore, as its history, that overwhelming, omnipresent gift of God, could not be questioned, to be the property of the gray, unquestioning mediocre.

Sometime in the course of the afternoon, though they had only come down from Paris for the day, they decided to spend the night. It was Yves’ suggestion, made when they returned to the cathedral and stood on the steps, looking at the saints and martyrs trapped in stone. Yves had been unusually silent all day. And Eric knew him well enough by now not to push him, not to prod, even not to worry. He knew that Yves’ silences meant that he was fighting some curious war of his own, was coming to some decision of his own; presently, later today, tomorrow, next week, Yves would abruptly retrace, in speech, the steps he was taking in silence now. And, oddly enough, for it seems not to be the way we live now, for Eric, merely hearing Yves’ footfalls at his side, feeling Yves beside him, and watching that changing face, was joy enough—or almost joy enough.

They found a hotel which overlooked a stream and took a double room. Their windows overlooked the water; the towers of the cathedral loomed to the right of them, far away. When they took the room, the sun was setting and great streaks of fire and dull gold were splashed across the still, blue sky.

There were trees just outside the window, bending into the water; and there were a few tables and chairs, but they were empty; there did not seem to be many people in the hotel.

Yves seated himself in the large window and lit a cigarette, looking down at the tables and chairs. Eric stood next to him, his hand on Yves’ shoulder.

“Shall we have a drink down there, old buddy?”

“My God, no; we shall be eaten up by bugs. Let’s go and find a bistro.”

“Okay.”

He moved away. Yves stood up. They stared at each other.

“I imagine that we must come back early,” Yves said, “there is surely nothing to do in this town.” Then he grinned, mischievously. “Ça va?”

“It was your idea to come here,” Eric said.

“Yes.” He turned to the window again. “It is peaceful, yes? And we can be gentle with each other, we can have a moment together.” He threw his cigarette out of the window. When he turned to Eric again, his eyes were clouded, and his mouth was very vulnerable. After a moment he said, softly, “Let us go.”

But it was very nearly a question. And, now, both of them were frightened. For some reason, the towers seemed closer than they had been; and, suddenly, the two large beds, placed close together, seemed the only objects in the room. Eric felt his heart shake and his blood begin to race and then to thicken. He felt that Yves was waiting for him to move, that everything was in his hands; and he could do nothing.

Then it lifted, the red, dangerous shadow, the moment passed, they smiled at each other. Yves walked to the door and opened it. They descended again into the sleepy, the beautiful town.

For it was not quite the same town it had been a few hours before. In that second in the room, something had melted between them, a gap between them had closed; and now the irresistible current was tugging at them, dragging them slowly, and absolutely surely, to the fulfillment of that promise.

And for this reason they hesitated, they dawdled, they deliciously put it off. They chose to eat in an unadorned bistro because it was empty—empty when they walked in, anyway, though it was taken over after they had been there for a while, by half a dozen drunk and musical French soldiers. The noise they made might have been unbearable at any other time, but, now, it operated as a kind of protective wall between themselves and the world. It gave them something to laugh at—and they needed to laugh; the distraction the soldiers afforded the other people who had entered the bistro allowed them, briefly, to clasp hands; and this small preamble to terror steadied their hearts and minds.

And then they walked through the town, in which not even a cat seemed to be moving; and everywhere they walked, the cathedral was watching them. They crossed a bridge and watched the moon in the water. Their footfalls rang on the cobblestones. The walls of the houses were all black, they walked through great patches of blackness between one far-off street light to another. But the cathedral was lighted.

The trees and the tables and chairs and the water were lit by the moon. Yves locked their door behind them and Eric walked to the window and looked at the sky, at the mighty towers. He heard the murmur of the water and then Yves called his name. He turned. Yves stood on the other side of the room, between the two beds, naked.

“Which bed do you think is better?” he asked.

And he sounded genuinely perplexed, as though it were a difficult decision.

“Whichever you prefer,” Eric said, gravely.

Yves pulled back the covers of the bed nearest the window and placed himself between the sheets. He pulled the covers up to his chin and lay on his back, watching Eric. His eyes were dark and enormous in the dark room. A faint smile touched his lips.

And this look, this moment, entered into Eric, to remain with him forever. There was a terrifying innocence in Yves’ face, a beautiful yielding: in some marvelous way, for Yves, this moment in this bed obliterated, cast into the sea of forgetfulness, all the sordid beds and squalid grappling which had led him here. He was turning to the lover who would not betray him, to his first lover. Eric crossed the room and sat down on the bed and began to undress. Again, he heard the murmur of the stream.

“Will you give me a cigarette?” Yves asked. He had a new voice, newly troubled, and when Eric looked at him he saw for the first time how the face of a lover becomes a stranger’s face.

“Bien sûr.” He lit two cigarettes and gave one to Yves. They watched each other in the fantastic, tiny glow—and smiled, almost like conspirators.

Then Eric asked, “Yves, do you love me?”

“Yes,” said Yves.

“That’s good,” said Eric, “because I’m crazy about you. I love you.”

Then, in the violent moonlight, naked, he slowly pulled the covers away from Yves. They watched each other and he stared at Yves’ body for a long time before Yves lifted up his arms, with that same sad, cryptic smile, and kissed him. Eric felt beneath his fingers Yves’ slowly stirring, stiffening sex. This sex dominated the long landscape of his life as the cathedral towers dominated the plains.

Now, Yves, as though he were also remembering that day and night, turned his head and looked at Eric with a wondering, speculative, and triumphant smile. And at that moment, Madame Belet entered, with a sound of knives and forks and plates, and switched on the lights. Yves’ face changed, the sea vanished. Yves rose from the hassock, blinking a little. Madame Belet put the utensils on the table, carefully, and marched out again, returning immediately with a bottle of wine, and a corkscrew. She placed these on the table. Yves went to the table and began opening the wine.

“She thinks you are going to abandon me,” said Yves. He poured a tiny bit of wine into his own glass, then poured for Eric. He looked at Eric, quickly, and added more wine to the first glass, and set the bottle down.

“Abandon you?” Eric laughed. Yves looked relieved and a little ashamed. “You mean—she thinks I’m running away from you?”

“She thinks that perhaps you do not really intend to bring me to New York. She says that Americans are very different—when—in their own country.”

“Well, how the hell does she know?” He was suddenly angry. “And it’s none of her fucking business, anyway.” Madame Belet entered, and he glared at her. Imperturbably, she placed on the table a platter containing les crudités, and a basket full of bread. She re-entered the kitchen, Eric staring malevolently at her straight, chauvinistic back. “If there’s one thing I can’t stand, it’s malicious old ladies.”

They sat down. “She does not really mean any harm,” Yves said. “She thought that she was speaking for my good.”

“She thinks it’s good for you to distrust me—just when I’m about to get on a boat? Doesn’t she think we have enough to worry about?”

“Oh, well. People do not take the relations between boys seriously, you know that. We will never know many people who believe we love each other. They do not believe there can be tears between men. They think we are only playing a game and that we do it to shock them.”

Eric was silent, chewing on the raw vegetables which seemed to have no taste. He took a swallow of wine, but it did not help. His belly tightened and his forehead began to be damp. “I know. And it’s going to be worse in New York.”

“Oh. well,” said Yves, with an odd and moving note of finality in his voice, “as long as you do not abandon me, I will not be afraid.”

Eric smiled—at the tone, at the statement; but he felt his forehead flush hotter, and a strange fear closed his throat. “Is that a promise?” he asked. He asked it lightly, but his voice sounded stifled; and Yves, who had lowered his head to his plate, looked up. They watched each other. Eric stared into Yves’ dark eyes, terribly aware of Yves’ forehead, which gleamed like a skull; and, at the same time, with the most immense desire, he watched Yves’ curving, parted lips. His teeth gleamed. Eric had felt those teeth on his tongue and on his cheek, and those lips had made him moan and tremble many times. And the short length of the table seemed to tremble between them.

“Why don’t we pay Madame Belet now?” Eric asked, “and let her go home?”

Yves rose and walked into the kitchen. Eric munched again on the raw, garlic-flavored vegetables, thinking, This is our last night here. Our last night. Again, he heard their voices in the kitchen, Madame Belet seeming to protest, then agreeing to come in the morning. He finished the last of his wine. Then the kitchen door closed and Yves returned.

“I think, perhaps, she is a little angry,” Yves said, smiling, “but she is gone. She will come again in the morning, especially to say good-bye to you. I think that is because she wants to make certain that you know how much she dislikes you.” He did not sit down again, but stood at his end of the table, his hands on his hips. “She says the chicken is ready, we should not let it get cold.” He laughed, and Eric laughed. “I told her it does not matter with chicken, if it is cold or hot, I like it either way.” They both laughed again. Then, abruptly, silence fell between them.

Eric rose and crossed to Yves, and they stood for a moment like two wrestlers, watching each other with a kind of physical calculation, smiling and pale. Yves always seemed, a moment before the act, tentative and tremulous; not like a girl—like a boy: and this strangely innocent waiting, this virile helplessness, always engendered in Eric a positive storm of tenderness. Everything in him, from his heights and depths, his mysterious, hidden source, came rushing together, like a great flood barely channeled in a narrow mountain stream. And it chilled him like that—like icy water; and roared in him like that, and with the menace of things scarcely understood, barely to be controlled; and he shook with the violence with which he flowed toward Yves. It was this violence which made him gentle, for it frightened him. And now he touched Yves lightly and wonderingly on the cheek. Yves’ smile faded, he watched Eric, they moved into each other’s arms.

There were the wine bottle and the glasses on the table, their plates, the platter, the bread; Yves had left a cigarette burning in an ashtray on the table, it was nearly nothing but ash now, long and gray; and the kitchen light was on. “You say you don’t care about the chicken?” Eric whispered, laughing. Yves laughed, giving off a whiff of garlic, of peppery sweat. Their arms locked around each other, then they drew apart, and, holding hands, stumbled into the bedroom, into the great haven of their bed. Perhaps it had never before seemed so much like a haven, so much their own, now that the terrible floodwaters of time were about to overtake it. And perhaps they had never before so belonged to each other, had never before given or taken so much from each other, as they did now, burning and sobbing on the crying bed.

They labored together slowly, violently, a long time: both feared the end. Both feared the morning, when the moon and stars would be gone, when this room would be harsh and sorrowful with sunlight, and this bed would be dismantled, waiting for other flesh. Love is expensive, Yves had once said, with his curiously dry wonder. One must put furniture around it, or it goes. Now, for a while, there would be no furniture—how long would this night have to last them? What would the morning bring? the imminent morning, behind which were hidden so many mornings, so many nights.

And they moaned. Soon, Yves whispered, sounding insistent, like a child, and with a terrible regret. Soon. Eric’s hands and mouth opened and closed on his lover’s body, their bodies strained yet closer together, and Yves’ body shook and he called Eric’s name as no one had ever called this name before. Eric. Eric. Eric. The sound of his breath filled Eric, heavier than the far-off pounding of the sea.

Then they were silent, breathing hard. The sound of the sea returned. They were aware of the light in the living room, the light left burning in the kitchen. But they did not move. They remained still in one another’s arms, in their slowly chilling bed. Soon, one of them, it would be Yves, would move, would light two cigarettes. They would lie in bed, smoking, talking and giggling. Then they would shower: what a mess we are! Yves would cry, laughing a laugh of triumph. Then they would dress, they would probably eat, they would probably go out. And soon the night would end. But, for the moment, they were simply exhausted and at peace with one another and loath to leave the only haven either of them had ever found.

And, in fact, they did not move again that night, smoked no cigarettes, ate no chicken, did no talking, drank no champagne. They fell asleep as they were, cradled, spoon-fashion, against each other, lulled by the pounding of the sea. Eric woke once, when the kitten crawled into bed, trying to place itself around Yves’ neck. But he forced it to the foot of the bed. He turned around, leaning on one elbow, watching Yves’ sleeping face. He thought of getting up and turning off all the lights; he felt a little hungry. But nothing seemed important enough to take him out of bed, to take him away from Yves, even for a moment. He lay down again, closing his eyes, and listening to Yves’ breathing. He fell asleep, thinking, Life is very different in New York, and he woke up with this thought, just as the sun was beginning to rise. Yves was awake and was watching him. Eric thought, Maybe he’ll hate New York. And then, maybe he’ll hate me, too. Yves looked frightened and determined. They were silent. Yves suddenly pulled Eric into his arms as though he were angry, or as though he were lost. By and by they were at peace again, and then they lay there in silence, blue cigarette smoke circling around them in the sunny air, the kitten purring in the sunlight at their feet. Then the sound of Madame Belet in the kitchen told Eric it was time to make tracks.