The Rectum is a Tomb

by SekritOMG

It's summer in 1980s London, and Stan is blissfully unaware that after the rentboy comes the flood.

1. Chapter 1

1. This story is an AU homage to Alan Hollinghurst, written in his style.

2. Foodstamp has given me a lot of input on this story, and I really owe her public acknowledgment for that.

3. I am not British. If you are British and have some feedback, I welcome it.

4. It's just occurred to me that this is the first thing I've posted in the first-person. I swore I couldn't do it, but I didn't even realize I was until I was pretty far into this. It's all because of Hollinghurst.

I'm really pretty nervous about this, and I hope you enjoy it.

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The crowd at the Bucky was typically thin on weekday nights, and tonight was no exception. It was another dreary Monday evening, the end of a dreary Monday proper, during which I'd done the dreary thing I always seemed to be doing: writing. Here I was, at 37, no closer to the superstardom or celebrity I so readily deserved than I had been at 36 or 35 or even 21. In typical fashion, my date, as it were, was late again. But knowing him as I did I went right ahead and ordered a Scotch whisky from the waiter. The Duke of Buckingham was a somber pub with an all-homosexual clientele, although these days it seemed more and more tourists were stumbling in, unaware, clutching each other's arms and squealing, "Look, dear, it's an authentic British pub!" before ordering fish and chips or Yorkshire pudding, something like that. No, these tourists weren't even well-informed enough to be aware of let alone understand the concept of a pudding in this context. I suppose when they managed to seep in to trample on the decades-old salmon-colored carpet, they asked for bangers and mash with a wry little grin preceding a self-satisfied smile as if they too belonged somehow in a gay pub (not that they were aware it was meant to cater to a select group) eating pathetic mash made from half-fat milk and powder and sausages the fat black chef had picked up at the Tesco on his way to work in the afternoon. "Bangers, ha ha ha," they generally crowed, and I found it quite annoying, being as if I ever came to the Bucky it was to meet a dear old friend or two (albeit very rarely was I meeting two). Little did they know that on Saturday afternoons the large groups of queens who populated this space would have the same laugh over the same damn pun and rib each other over the irony of eating a slang-termed late brunch in order to cure themselves of the most dreadful hangovers, the likes of which I'm certain were procured in the lead-up to the previous night's banging.

I suppose I couldn't blame the tourists for coming in, for seeking refuge from our cobbled alleyways in here. It was purposefully hidden, such as it was, down St. Anne's Court, which was serendipitously wedged between Soho Square and the theater district. (Not that I had any use for milling around the West End these days, sad as it was that it seemed every third debut was for a splashy musical rehashing the work of some former great — or perhaps not — artist into trite fair for children and other easily bored tourists.) This was the exact sort of thing my mind began to reel over while I waited for Kyle to show up to our long-standing Monday night drink-and-meal, which began at the Bucky and regretably often ended at the Bucky. As noted their food was sad fare, but then again Kyle was quite stingy and considered the bill for virtually any fare worth eating to be outlandishly pricey. For my coin, why not simply spend a bit extra and not treat one's digestive track like he was a naïve American on holiday? Still, good prices on the whisky, which pleased me greatly, as many establishments had long since cottoned onto the fact that most of us queers were ready and willing and able to pay out the nose for a cocktail, provided it came with an umbrella or the night ended in some stranger's apartment.

It occurred to me that perhaps I should be irate that Kyle was, as he was wont to be, 10 minutes late. He'd never had the common sense of punctuality. "I believe I've forgotten my pocket watch again, dear," he would often joke when he turned up to find me well into my second or third cup. Of course, as he wisely pointed out, my system absorbed alcohol like a thirsty plant; it took longer than usual to become quite saturated. Still, while I was contemplating making a show and acting quite disappointed in him, it occurred to me that I would never be able to feign disappointment in Kyle. He never had any excuse except for his own self-importance, and yet I would continue to forgive him until he was late to my funeral.

Although he was often dreadfully tardy Kyle was never truant entirely, and on this Monday evening he managed to show his face a few minutes before I finished my second whisky. I was about to signal the waiter (a young chap with bulging thighs) to come bring me an anticipatory third, when who should appear but my date, soaked though he was from the ceaseless summer downpour.

Kyle did not look happy. Being that we had been so close for nearly 20 years — since the first term of university, as it happened — I knew how to read him like a book. His shoulders were slumped, his eyes were downcast, and his perfectly plump lower lip was pouted just so slightly. What signaled to me that something deeper had gone awry was his hair. Where he usually sported a silken growth of somewhat-redder-than-auburn curls, his hair had been quite recently sheared, so that it merely brushed the upper ridges of his ears. I should call this a fairly dramatic cut, being that Kyle's hair was one of his ongoing pet projects. He wasted ("Spent," I imagined he might correct me) hundreds of quid on this compelling feature of his, as it took nearly ten years and the talents of an especially well-practiced girl off Kensington High Street to force it into a presentable style. And here he was, looking visibly miserable, or rather more visibly miserable than I'd last seen him on Saturday night, perched on the thighs of that incomprehensible Frenchman, giggling like a naughty nun or something likewise ridiculous. More worrying was this appalling haircut.

"Darling," I said cordially, extending a gracious hand toward the chair on the other side of the table.

"It's Christophe," he moaned, not managing to seat himself. "He's left me."

"Darling!" I got up from my seat, and brought him to the banquette. "Here, here," I said encouragingly, foisting the ends of my drink at him. Kyle did not drink whisky though, so he rejected it, and slumped against my shoulder. "You must tell me everything. What did he say? What did he do?"

"Oh, you know how it is," he said dismissively, defeat pervading his words in a heartbreaking way. I did not know how it was; I had not had a relationship in three years, and I had ended the last one. Ironically, it was Kyle I was after; I had been hard-up for him since he invited me to spend the summer with his family after our first year. I couldn't pinpoint the moment when this steely lust had softened into full-blossomed pining, but even I had to admit that the sympathetic-mate act sometimes wore me down. "They feed you these clichés, you know, 'You're so much better than I' or 'We must remain close' or 'And while I was fucking him, I think I contracted the clap, so you may want to have that checked out, and by the by, I shan't be paying for it.' " Kyle heaved a deep sigh, and curled his hand into mine. "Why, Stanley? Why must I be doomed to live what little time on this green Earth I have left pining for an as-yet unmet phantasm of a man who won't leave me to die alone like the wretch I feel like?"

"So you're not quite over it yet," I tried to joke, dryly.

"I'm quite miserable," Kyle wailed, and then he buried his face in my armpit. I attempted to be loving and platonic, or to walk that line between loving and platonic that gay men often tread. Of course, I ended up stroking his dry, short hair, which I in turn found somewhat upsetting.

"Darling," I said softly. "Why ever did you destroy your lovely hair?"

Kyle raised his head, and gave a dramatic sniffle. "Oh, it's all Chris' fault, that rogue bastard," he seethed. "I don't know what possessed me, dear, I really don't, except that as I was eating a prawn mayo sandwich on my lunch break I happened to amble by a salon, and the sight of a shears reminded me of the way that wonderful terrible man would yank on my hair when we were…" He trailed off, and blushed. "Well," he said with a cough. "When I got back to the office I immediately called Evelyn" — Evelyn being his stylist —"and told her the dreadful news and asked if she'd squeeze me in. To my great luck, she had an opening. Of course, that was why I was late this evening. I hope you'll forgive me, Stanley, dear, but I just…" He trailed off again, and sighed. "They never stick around, do they?"

"Men can be so vile," I offered.

"And yet so lovely," he said dreamily. "Are you in the mood for a bite? I've been stuffing myself silly all day. I think I've been starving myself for Christophe for too long, but he's gone now, isn't he?"

"How did this break happen, exactly?" I asked.

"Hold on," he said gingerly, getting up. "I'll go order some mash and bangers at the bar. Care for a top-up?" he glanced down at my empty cup.

"Yes," I said wryly. "Thank you, darling."

"My pleasure." He departed.

XXX

After putting away three bangers, a pile of mash, a steak-and-ale pie, and half of a curry, Kyle leaned back in his seat and said, "Are you ready to hear my sad tale now?"

"Yes," I answered, wiping my hands on a napkin. I'd been eating some chips with gravy as a sign of solidarity, although I wasn't much enjoying it. "Please tell."

"Well, dear." Kyle removed his napkin from his lap. "There isn't much to tell, I'm afraid. He's been staying with me for about two months, as you know, and when I returned from our night out on Saturday, he was missing, as were my best steak knives."

"So he pilfered your silver." I was unimpressed.

"Oh, it's more than all that." I was always amazed at how quickly Kyle's misery could morph into indignation, or one of its emotional kin. "He was never anything but a hoodlum, of course; taking my knives was about the best I could hope for when it ended."

I nodded in mock-sympathy, when really I was glowing in triumph on the inside. Kyle had a tested affinity for these tall, dark, hardened, dirty, strong men. Vandals, sometimes, but often they were just ex-military, or even businessmen with a nasty turn. As I matched Kyle's height exactly (was an inch shorter, when he'd done his hair), and sported no bulk, only a sleek, cultured swimmer's build, I was hopelessly out of the running. Nevertheless, there was no reason I shouldn't inwardly gloat when, at the end of these affairs, I was still here, and they had only made off with the flatware.

"The worst part is," Kyle was saying, his half-ginger cheeks burning in quaint fury, "the next night I went to the pub across the street to drown my sorrows, and I saw him canoodling with an MP! Well, that's the last straw, really. And there I was, all ready to forgive him, at least temporarily, and let him back in for a farewell go."

I grimaced. "It's … probably for the best that you didn't. How did you know this new bloke was an MP?"

"Oh, that." Kyle stiffened whenever he was talking about politics. "Well, when you know one, dear, you know them all."

Kyle certainly knew one, or, as it happened, all of them. His mother, an estimable American woman, was a member of that club. Sheila'd come over from Brooklyn — or Boston, or some seaside district where they cultivated highly nasal accents — on a Rhodes. There she met the incorruptible Gerald Broflovski, esquire, who was lecturing or in residence at Merton or something while she procured a second A.B. Now, 40 years on, she was a British citizen, with a seat in the Commons and everything. Gerald was still a barrister, and still wonderfully well-informed in the field of social justice. He had the habit of talking down to me whenever I came by as if I were a child who needed these pressing issues sorted out by an adult. I think he was influenced by the other men his son brought around: scoundrels, tough blokes, the sorts of men who would gladly not only steal the silver, but slit another's throat with it. I found them welcoming, and yet tedious. Mrs. Broflovski was a tireless crusader, although with each campaign her oncoming arthritis forced her to concede that perhaps this would be her last. So Kyle knew virtually all of these MPs, on sight at least if not by name or virtue.

"This one," he seethed, "is a radical rat bastard by the name of Gregory. I don't know the family name; I don't even know his district, as it happens. All I know is he was romancing my ex-lover, braying at some private joke while Christophe ran his hands through his blond hair. He had the whitest teeth." Kyle stopped, and rubbed his chin. "This sort of thing always happens to me, you know. I think I shall die an old maid."

"Oh, no," I assured him. "Your mate must out there. Why, perhaps he's simply eluding you, having been under your nose this whole time."

"I should like to think so. But what about you, Stanley? Don't you ever wonder if perhaps you'll meet the one?"

I sighed, and took a final drink of my whisky before answering. "I'm sure," I said slowly, smacking my lips, "he is closer than all that."

"I hope so." Kyle raised his glass of shandy in salute. "Well, dear, here's to us. At least I have you, you know. It's better to have mates, perhaps, than the most satisfying sex of all."

"That's preposterous," I replied. "When was the last time you had very satisfying sex?"

Kyle thought for a moment. "To be quite honest about it? On the walk home from the bar, while I was cursing Christophe and Gregory and radical politics and everything they all stood for together, I came across old Clyde." Kyle smiled fondly, and set his drink down. "Well, you know, I was miserable, he was obviously trolling for something — or as it happens, someone. So, that was that."

The color drained from my face. "Oh," I said dismally. "How is old Clyde?"

Before continuing Kyle took a swig of his drink. "Allow me to tell you this: He is unpredictably well-hung. Would you never have imagined? He's such a dreary little civil servant. It was beyond my wildest dreams, not to say I'd been dreaming of old Clyde for any reason."

"No, me neither." I was quite on the verge of having an apoplectic fit, if not from this information itself, then from the attempt to keep myself from exploding.

"But it's like I've always said," Kyle continued. He was quite oblivious to my discomfort. "You can always have sex with your friends, but you can never make friends out of your lovers."

"Ah." I swallowed. "What time is it?"

Kyle glanced around. "Well, dear," he sighed. "I'd tell you, but I think I've forgotten my pocket watch."

I checked my wrist. "It's half-eight already," I said, silently shaking. "Where does the time go?"

"I don't know," Kyle said. He finished his shandy, and began to take another bite of his lukewarm curry before thinking better of it. "Can I go home with you?" he asked. "I'd … I'd rather not be alone tonight."

"Of course," I said warmly, my tremors calming somewhat. "You've just been heartbroken, darling, so let me settle the bill."

"But you've eaten so much less than I," Kyle stated. Then he shrugged, his thrifty nature rearing its head. "Well, I'll make it up another time, won't I?"

"Surely," I muttered, making a dash toward the bar.

XXX

When Kyle asked to come home with me, he meant to sleep with me — in the same bed. We'd had our trysts, most notably in college. They were infrequent, and usually under the sustained influence of any number of intoxicants. I don't think either of us could recall to what extent they were satisfying. That was just one of the aspects of this so-called gay life I was rather beginning to dislike. It was all well and good to fuck your best mate, and in the morning he would just roll over and bemoan his head pain and you'd laugh over a basket of financiers and pain au chocolat about how you couldn't remember anything about the whole thing except for how ridiculous it all must have been.

He had a perfectly respectable apartment in Notting Hill Gate, and of course by 'perfectly respectable' I do mean lovely, and ostentatious, and lavish. Kyle was in advertising. All these years, and I'd never quite gotten the hang of what it was that he did, except that it involved very long lunch breaks and socializing with a number of catty, gabby women he seemed to tire of long before they married and he had to attend some social function, possibly a wedding. "I do hate weddings," Kyle was fond of saying. "It's never my own, of course, and then it's always such trouble finding an appropriate hat." He was also irked by the fact that the invitations never came for Mr. Kyle Broflovski and Guest, which he cited as a critical injustice. I tried to support him in this regard, too, although I truly felt one of these boorish men, Christophe or whoever, would be horribly risible in a tuxedo.

I lived in a ramshackle mess of rooms over Hoxton Square. Kyle had serious reservations about taking the Underground to Old Street, thinking it unsafe. I found it no more unsafe than anyplace else, really, and the idea of finding a taxi preposterous. But Kyle was adamant, so I stood on the curb with my arm stuck out like a tourist or a fascist, holding my trench closed, as I was too lazy to secure the buttons. Perhaps if I had one reason to like what was happening around Soho, it was the ease of taxi procurement. I think most foreigners were unaware of how small central London was, really, or how easy it was to traverse the town by foot or even bus without resorting to cab. Still, there was something stately, grim, and romantic about paying a man to take you away, thinking not about where you were going or the ever-troubling problem of the meter.

I cannot overstate the frustration of being so intimate with a man I yearned for so intensely, and so persistently. Despite his inheritance of his mother's shapely features, Kyle fit well into most of my clothes, except the few things I hung onto that were tailored without a centimeter of error. (There is something deeply satisfying about turning up at a former lover's formal birthday luncheon dressed impeccably in something incorporating silk.) I lent Kyle a pair of striped pajamas, which he laughed at.

"I always imagine you asleep in the nude," he confided.

These little comments caught me off-guard whenever he casually dropped them into conversation.

"I make a point to go to bed like this so that in the unlikely case there's a fire or something, I won't have to evacuate in the nude."

"I suppose if you didn't live in such a hideously industrial wasteland it wouldn't be a problem."

"I hardly find it industrial," I managed to choke out with mock-outrage. "I mean, look, there's a wonderfully pleasant green out there." I strode over to one of the windows and knocked on it.

"Oh, yes." Kyle nodded along with his sarcastic assessment. "Sadly one can't see the green through your dust-clouded windows."

"Well, if you dislike it so, why not go back to your wonderful flat and have a cocktail by yourself and count your lavish blessings?"

"How rude!" Kyle's annoyance was false, but he played it well. "I suppose you should be lucky I'm here with you; after all, it's not like you'd be doing anything pivotal up here on your own, would you?"

"I have a story to finish," I told him. As a writer, I found it fairly simple to maintain a certain standard of living by filling in the gaps with short columns for whatever publication was in need; usually it was some trashy gossip rag, although I found that sadly, virtually every paper was quickly tilting toward that standard. This assignment happened to be a breezy roman a clef about the son of the executive officer of a major brewing company. I hadn't any clue where these editors get these outlandish ideas — like, say, the idea to publish gossip in a fictive voice with jabbing judgmental commentary laced throughout. Still, it was factual gossip, which I suppose was the nobler sort. Some months I soured on the scandal racket, and found myself disinterested in taking on these jobs. In those times, I found it easy enough to rely on my father for some income; wheedling usually worked on him, although even I could admit that as a youth, I never imaged my 37-year-old self as the type of man who routinely called upon his father to support me in my frivolous career as a dour aesthete who enjoyed drinking whisky on weeknights and champagne on the weekends, every weekend. Still, a man could be excused of such things, I think; there had to be some merit in enjoying oneself.

It was easy enough to wonder what my father would think of his only son spending another Monday night in his pajamas, drinking sherry with his old friend as they discussed escape routes out of the building.

"Of course," Kyle concluded, "if your sprinklers went off, these lovely cotton pajamas would be ruined."

"It's nothing laundering wouldn't fix," I told him.

Kyle wept a bit more over Christophe, and I did try to be supportive, but I had long since realized that Kyle loved performing his disappointment for me far more than he was able to take solace from my reassurance or even my schadenfreude. It was a little ritual for us. Being a lapsed Catholic of the highest degree, Kyle was the object of my devotion now, and going through these cycles with him was the closest I ever came to worship.

"Do you remember the night we met?" he asked, weepily, referring to himself and Christophe. Of course I did; it was another routine evening out, and he swaggered into the club sucking on the end of a cigarette like it was candy. He cruised Kyle rather thoroughly, choosing not to send him drinks at our table but to come over himself and simply pluck Kyle out of his seat and carry him toward the dance floor. I was sure the attraction was completely genuine, and yet it was obvious to me that a Frenchman — any Frenchman, no matter how toned his arms were — looking to cohabitate with a bloke he picked up in a club (literally!) was only in search of a temporary arrangement.

Still, I did not like to see him hurting, as much as I enjoyed seeing him hurt. As the night crept forward, I continued pouring him glasses of sherry, stroking what was left of his hair and offering reassurances. Finally, around midnight, he took my hand away from his ear and asked me, "Why did I cut my hair off? I must look like something of a lesbian now."

"You are certainly the most attractive lesbian I have ever met."

We giggled about this. Neither of us knew any lesbians, mind you; they were roughly mythological creatures to us, and yet we were all too certain we'd recoil at the sight of one. In this way, I suppose they were like the modern-day Chimera or something. Or perhaps there were a Hydratic concept, many-headed and too complex for us. Still, we toasted to our good fortune to have never identified one in the wild. After this, we realized we'd finished all of my sherry, although with the pacing, my tolerance, and Kyle's grand consumption, neither of us was really particularly drunk.

"So I won't be ill tomorrow, fancy that," Kyle mused. "Shall we?" I nodded, and took his arm, and let him lead me to my own bed, a wonderfully large-affair on a platform upstairs in the great tangle of lofted space of which my flat consisted. We curled up together, and Kyle summarized his latest muck-up of a fling: "Disastrous."

"At least you're having these trysts," I mused. "How must it feel, do you think, to go from one lurid park toilet to the next, settling to fuck men you meet in the gym showers?"

"Oh, are you complaining?" Kyle asked. "As I recall, after Gary, you were quite adamant you would never date again."

"Until I find the one," I told him.

"Well." Kyle reached over and turned out the bedside lamp. He rolled back toward me, and wrapped his arms around my torso. "Let us remember, Stanley dear, that we do have each other. Of course I expect you know by now that I would rather have you than any single piece of manhood in England."

"What about the Commonwealth?" I asked, secretly wondering why he only seemed to feel this way in the wake of his romantic follies.

"There, too." He kissed me, tenderly, on the lips, and tucked his head beside my shoulder. He closed his eyes and said, "Good night, dear."

"Good night, darling."

"Do wake me if you get up first."

Before too long I heard his soft snoring permeate my bedroom. With some difficulty I managed to fall asleep, dreaming of looming deadlines and men at oaken desks ordering me to have my cock cut off.

XXX

When I awoke in the morning, Kyle was gone. He was not in the habit of composing notes, but I knew well enough that he had probably called a taxi and gone back to his flat so he could shower and dress for work. Some weekend nights after parties if Kyle came home with me, he would still be there in the morning. For that matter, if I was sleeping over at his, I was generally awoken when he did, and given some breakfast before being hustled out. I wasn't sure that Kyle enjoyed his frivolous work, but if there was one thing his parents had instilled in him, it was an instinct to take business quite seriously. This made him, from 9 in the morning to 5 in the afternoon, something of a frenzied bore. He did, however, tend to a take an hour-long lunch break, which seemed to last for two hours. I sometimes met him, unless of course I was just rousing at noon, which was the case today.

His absence on these mid-mornings saddened me, but it was a very familiar sadness. In a very real way, I had been living with this absence since I'd met him. He was there, and he was not, like a phantom lover. In my youth it was very unsettling; now it was a well-worn melancholy; a perpetual longing. I think it must have been far more normal to me now than true contentment would have been. Or, perhaps it was the case that I was content, as I was not depressed, but I certainly wasn't … well, the correct word was probably 'exuberant.'

It was nearing 1 p.m., so I put a kettle on, and sat down at the wood-block table I kept near my kitchen. Or perhaps it was in my kitchen; I found the distinction very difficult to make, as my flat consisted of one very large space with several smaller catacomb-like rooms and a loft where I slept. Someday, the excavation of these annexes would prove profitable, I was certain, having spent years filling them with all varieties of inheritances from relatives deceased and living. My parents in particular liked to surprise me with a boot full of old rubbish, citing my ample storage space. "Perhaps this is valuable," my father would suggest, shoving faded faux-velvet boxes of broken bits of Bakelite jewelry into my spare rooms.

"No, it's not," I'd reply, "which is why you've been quite unable to foist it off on some unsuspecting antiquities dealer, and are therefore imposing it on me." At which point my father would whine and groan and launch into an overwrought tantrum about how if I expected him to continue distributing his wealth (such as it was) at any time prior to his extinguishment, I had better shut my mouth and let him use my living space as gratis storage. Usually it was not a long wait to discover that in fact my mother had gotten on him again about the lack of spare rooms in the dreary little row house I'd grown up in.

After rubbishy junk from my mother and father, I suppose the second largest source of clutter in my apartment was my collection of papers, all of which I'd managed to somehow jam into dusty towers of filing cabinets. As a writer — an occupation I loathed increasingly as the years went by — I was excessively paranoid about letting a single one of my papers get out of sight. In the two-odd decades since I'd gone down from Magdalen, I'd managed somehow by sheer luck or the skin of my teeth to publish two novels, both of which were fairly dense with flowery language. Neither was a critical or a commercial success, but the truth about publishing was that I had been generally fortunate enough to have been paid by advance — not millions of quid, but enough, so it hardly mattered to me whether or not anyone, professional or literary or commoner or uneducated, liked my books. My payment had come regardless of their ability to perform, not unlike the way some men were able to continue having sex. When I thought back on it, my so-called professional life seemed to mirror my personal life in that I hardly would call myself a wonderful lay, and yet I was never left wondering when my next paycheck (so to speak) would arrive; it just always did, because in some horrible way horny men are like book publishers: They are willing to take a chance on anything, or almost everything. Here I was, very nearly 40, and I deeply felt as if I'd squandered too many resources. I tried to console myself with the fact that it was hardly my responsibility to feel guilt over where and when other entities were liable to take liberties with their cash or their erections. It hardly mattered. When I was nearing 30, it really bothered me, but in the ensuing 10 years I suppose I'd mastered it. Nevertheless, I was horridly protective of my papers. Every draft of those two damn novels was stored in the cubby-like rooms off the larger space of the flat, which I'd purchased with my first advance more or less with the idea of keeping drawer after drawer of drafts safe from interlopers. What a fancy! I had been so naïve.

When my tea was done I put it next to me to steep and sat down at the typewriter, which was how I enjoyed writing. At some point in my life it had occurred to me that I was never going to be the next Waugh, so I may as well drop the act and just write on a word processor like a contemporary. But then, possibly drunk, I rebelled against my own common sense. I didn't care if what I handed in was riddled with errors, although if I was suspiciously and unusually concerned about impressing an editor I might whip out a red pen and correct my own work, as if I were something of an editor myself. I suppose the truth was that I had never been proud of what I was doing, and since it hardly made me happy I did not care if it was presentable or reasonable or even very good. The problem with all of this was that I didn't know what else I could do that I would be much better at, or what might make me any happier. Despite Kyle's nervous jokes about becoming his secretary, I would have been horrible at that. The only thing I had any interest in cataloguing was my own yellowing collection of novel leaves and rejected manuscripts. And that was only something of a pet project.

Around the time I was tapping out the last few lines of my assignment, the telephone rang. Determined to finish the damn story so that I could spend the rest of my week stalking pretty young things in the Kensington Gardens lavatory, I ignored it. I managed to commit another four words when the phone began crying out a second time. I had about four phones in the flat, one in the loft and the other three placed in sufficiently strategic positions so that I never had to walk far across the barren hardwood floors to get a call. I hit the space bar furiously, and went to the coffee table, for which I was using an old leather trunk with a lace table cloth over it. I also had a great interest in princess-style phones — of which I'd only managed to collect one over the years, a gift from Kyle for the holidays one year, in exchange for the outrageous oversized black rubber dildo I'd given him. Make a comment, if you like, but it was what he wanted, and I knew he got an awful lot of use out of it. It was one of those serendipitous gifts that managed to please both the gifter and the recipient, and I certainly had gotten my own share of use out of it, indirectly, imagining what Kyle must have looked like while making use of the overpriced dildo I'd bought him. Perhaps when I was still at school, thinking about my best mate impaling himself on a black cock of any variety, fake or real, would have made me extremely guilty and caused me to sulk. These days, it had rather a reverse effect, forcing me to become quite horny. I suppose the point of this anecdote was that when I spoke on the telephone Kyle had given me, I inevitably became hard. This gave phone sex a lurid, illicit third dimension of naughtiness, but even normal conversations became arousing because of it. I felt myself stiffening even before I picked up the phone and barked, "What?"

"Stanley," a female voice lilted. "There's no need to yell, mon cher, it is simply too early for yelling."

"Wendy," I sighed. I immediately felt wretched for snapping at her. "How's tricks?"

"Oh, you know, perfectly dreadful."

"By which you mean…"

She swallowed; I always heard when she swallowed over the telephone. I do not know how I could hear the viscous rivers of saliva in her mouth but I certainly could, and it was one of the few things I felt never merited mention to her, to whom I told almost every other thing about my life. Each thought and idea I had, no matter how wild or unsavory or brilliant, was filtered through Wendy.

"It's such a horrible day, isn't it?" she asked. It occurred to that I hadn't even looked outside today, although by her comment I noticed it was actually quite light out.

"No, dear, I'm afraid I don't know what you mean. It's very bright out, isn't it? Looks very warm."

"I don't mean the weather, you old fool, I mean the energy, or some like concept. Don't you just feel it's going to be a monstrous day?"

"Really I don't. How do you mean?"

When I questioned her, she always became somewhat irritable. "I can't describe it," she snapped. Then she returned to savory form: "I'd be remiss if I didn't ask you to tea today, Stanley. I hope you're not busy."

"I'm never busy, or rather, never too busy," I answered. "Why? Haven't you got anyone else to have tea with?"

"Not to be insulting, dearest, but I wish I did. You're always in such a moody way recently."

"I am not." She could have said the same thing about herself.

"Well, I've not seen you for so long now, it feels like. Why don't you come take tea with me, hmm? I'll serve those sandwiches you like." If there was ever a reason to go to Wendy's, it wasn't to sit in the seemingly endless cushions of her parlor couches; it was to consume coronation chicken sandwiches, have a cup of tea, and relish the fact that your life could never be as dismal as hers was. Likewise, I think she often silently thanked God or fortune that her life wasn't quite like mine. Nevertheless, aside from Kyle, she was certainly my dearest friend.

"I think I shall be able to make it. Shall we say 4?"

"Yes, yes, 4."

"Will Lady Stevens be in attendance?"

"No." She said this with firmness and in her voice, meant obviously to bolster me, as I had never been a great fan. "Bebe will not be there, I'm afraid. She's enjoying the Cote d'Azur this month."

Bebe was a woman who was well-equipped with intelligence of some variety, for it clearly took some talent to play her games, gossip-mongering and contact-acquisition. Still, she apparently was entirely uninformed on the matter of discerning which gentlemen were gay. I had no idea what Bebe was short for, and in complete honesty I should confess that I didn't want to know. Babette or something, probably; something overinflated and girlish. I did not like her, and I knew that Wendy's appreciation of her company completely accommodated my dislike. Still, she often made eyes at me; very clear eyes, at that; beckoning eyes; flirtatious eyes. I was always polite, although once at a tea she did get rather grabby after the other ladies had cleared out of the parlor. It was beyond my comprehension why she never simply did the computations and asked why her best friend had no children, or why she kept company with a confirmed bachelor, or why said bachelor was always the sole male (single or otherwise) at social functions in the private female sphere of Black House.

"What a shame," I lied. "I shall see you at 4, then."

"Good, good," Wendy concluded. "I shall look forward to it, dearest."

We hung up, and I took a moment to fondle my erection through my pants. It might have been a good time to abandon work on this project and go down to the lavatory at the coffee shop on Old Street and perhaps find a bloke whose company I could enjoy, but I thought it over and realized that I had only a couple of hours to finish the story, run it down to Fleet Street, and then jog back over to her place. In lieu of indulging myself in this way I decided to have a quick wank — a very quick one, truly, not one of these drawn-out luxuriant ones for which I'd draw a bath and bring in a porno mag or something and really enjoy the process. No, this would have to be efficient. I leaned back on the sofa and spread my legs and shut my eyes, instinctively running my palms over my thighs. After a brief delay I drew my cock out of my pants and really made quick work of the whole thing, coming into my hand so as not to waste any more time cleaning or laundering anything. If there was one thing I had learned the hard way, it was that semen was very difficult to get out of lace.

XXX

After dropping my draft, I hopped on the Underground. I'd taken the bus there, and tried to walk to Wendy's, but found myself tiring when I realized that I was near the Holborn stop anyway. I was at Bond Street very quickly, feeling quite wonderful about myself having completed some legitimate if unglamorous work, and having been cruised on the Tube not once but twice. Or, rather, I was cruised once as I made my way through the turnstile, by a man who clearly enjoyed watching me pass through it from behind, and once on the train itself, by a really old sort of gent without any hair who quite visibly had his hand stuck inside his trench coat. He kept winking and nodding at me and at one point, he whistled. If it had just been me and him on an empty car I might have been disgusted, but his attention was precarious and fleeting, caught between the attentions and conversations of a handful of other passengers. In the end, I felt it was a compliment, maybe a comment on my lingering youth. No grey was yet creeping into my sideburns, and I still managed to swim my laps every other day. I felt bad for men like these, for when they were in their prime or even just clinging to it, they were relegated to the toilets in gymnasiums and the back rooms of bars. I myself spent plenty of time screwing in overly moist environs, but I was hardly hiding anything.

After disembarking I hustled to my destination, wondering if perhaps it was too rude of me to have neglected to bring flowers or a tart of some kind. Thinking my homosexuality a sign of faultless manners, my mother and sister both often called me to inquire about things like hostess gifts and calling cards. Truthfully, I had never in my life picked up a book about etiquette, and I barely knew what I was doing half the time. I hardly felt I was making a remarkable transgression. Wendy, after all, was truly one of my closest friends, and I came for tea at least weekly.

I met Viscountess Black when she was still Lady Testaburger. She was the first noblewoman who found it necessary to speak to me for no apparently reason, out of inkling to kindle a friendship, in genuine warmth. I don't know why I felt particularly pressed to attend the choir concert that evening, but as a 19-year-old lad I think I felt that the rampant amount of gay sex I was having needed some serious absolution, and yet as a Catholic I was struggling to find a way to rectify what I thought to be my natural habits with what society expected of me. I hadn't been to Confession or gone with my parents to any formal functions or services since I was 15, when I woke up one Sunday morning after another night of scandalous nocturnal emissions hinging on my deep yet concealed lust for males. Regardless, here I was now. I was entirely unsure of whether I was looking for another outlet for my abandoned faith, or if the idea of a Wednesday night concert in the chapel appealed to me based on the combined merits of the young men singing, and the silken quality of their holy voices rising to a tumescent quality of song. All I knew was that I was developing a taste for religious and operatic music at the time, having bought an LP of La Traviata at a store in town, and lo and behold, the future viscountess sat down next to me, grabbed my forearm, and leaned in to whisper, "I thought buggers immolated in church."

If anyone else had done this to me, I would have been mortified, and stiffened — in body, that is — and gotten up when I overcame my pre-mortis rigor to hurry away as quickly as I could manage. But there was no judgment in Wendy's voice, just keen awareness. So I smiled, slyly, and said to her, leaning in subtly, "I sincerely hope you'll refrain from determining personal information about my character until at least allowing me to bend you over the altar, my dear."

"Single men," she continued, removing a missal from her pocketbook, "who come alone to church concertos on weekday nights instead of studying are almost always either future clergymen or buggers." She removed her hand from my arm. "And I find you significantly more attractive than a holy man, I'm sorry to say."

"Don't be sorry." I was all-out grinning now, pleased to be thought attractive by very nearly anyone, so vain was I at the time.

Afterwards, she introduced herself. "Must I call you Lady Testaburger?" I asked.

"No, you'll find me something of a forward-thinking daughter of a curiously liberal countess. You may call me by my Christian name; in fact, I do insist." She told me she was reading French, and asked me back to her rooms for the first of many teas. "I find buggery fascinating," she confessed. "Tell me, Stanley. Would you mind terribly if I inquired about your personal life?"

"I should only mind if you continued to use the term 'bugger.' It's so very Queensberry of you."

She blushed and apologized, and I did proceed to regale her with tales of my collegiate and current bedroom activities, not that I felt I had to keep them relegated to any sort of bedroom. At the outset her eyes widened, but after a few stories I considered rather shocking, because I'd been shocked by them myself as they were occurring, she eased into it, and I think I am not incorrect to surmise that she took a profound satisfaction from hearing about the romantic-sexual goings-on between two (or more, perhaps) attractive men. Let us say that girls were not a thing I was exposed to quite regularly up to this point in my life, and not because I preferred male company at all — England at this time, in my sphere, seemed to be quite gender-segregated, almost as if the social institution were fostering same-sex illicit relations and preferences. I had an older sister who may very well have been an older brother, as she was aggressive and whiffed out, I think, even before I had grasped onto it that there was something different about me, and readily took me to task for it. I socialized up until then with a majority of young boys, the sons of my father's colleagues and my mother's sewing circle members. I was entered into all-boys' school after all-boys' school until I landed at Oxford, not particularly eager to meet any women until this one had approached me in the most unlikely of places.

In the midst of our conversation that evening, she stopped me, and poured herself another cup of tea. "I hesitate to point this out, Stanley, because I think you are unaware of it, but I think it's all for the better if I do," she began. Setting the teapot down, she swallowed the first of many swallows. "It appears to me that even as you recount for me your various sexual exploits, the narrative always returns to this friend of yours."

This made me nervous, and I was not used to being made nervous by girls, or really at all anymore, so I said, "That's right, I guess."

"Is he your boyfriend?"

It was an odd, odd question for me. She was asking about Kyle, of course, whom I'd met almost immediately upon entering Magdalen. It was true that I spent about 80 percent of my time with him, and the bulk of my stories did end with either a comparison to some of his virtues or quirks, or his reaction to whatever trick I'd just turned, judgmental or not. Usually he was judgmental, and quick to write off any boy I'd had as unworthy of my time. And yet he wasn't my boyfriend, and later would commence carefully carrying on his own rather tumultuous affair, which I'd had something of a minimal hand in bringing about. It was as if the emotional role he filled was annoying Wendy, and having just made what I thought would be my second very good friend, I told her, "No, he is certainly not my boyfriend."

"Well, well." She sipped some tea. "Far be it from me to speak on the subject, but I should say you've got it bad for him."

"Well, so what if I do?" The truth was, I had it bad in some way for just about every good-looking boy I met. It didn't take a lot of wheedling to get me to admit, however, that I had it worst for Kyle. If only my first-year self had declined to summer with him, perhaps it might have ended in a fling or something.

"I don't know if there is any kind of direct correlation, but I feel the need to tell someone this," she began, before proceeding to tell me she'd just illegally had an abortion. "I think I actually wanted to have it, you know. But I knew, I knew somehow." She paused. "The bloke, you see. He was a lot of things, but he wasn't either of the important things. Namely, he wasn't titled, which is sort of sad. Isn't it? That I would break it off with a lad I rather liked for that? I just think it's so, so miserable. Maybe I shouldn't care. But, you know, my father. He hasn't got a son, you know. I don't know about his peerage; I know it shall die with him. But I'm sure he wants to at least see it stay with his genes. Some common bastard legacy wouldn't do, you know."

"That's horrible."

"I know, I know." She swallowed again.

"The second thing," I reminded her. "What's the other thing that he wasn't?"

She had been looking into her teacup, but she took this moment to draw her eyes away from it and focus them back on me. "Ah, that." She sat up straighter, seemingly recovered from her little pity party. "He wasn't straight, as they say."

I groaned. "You're meaning to tell me you just had the child of some homosexual commoner aborted."

"Well, yes," she said. "I told you I was fascinated by bug—" She caught herself. "Homosexuals."

"And yet you convinced one to have sex with you."

"I suppose so, yes."

"Does he know about this whole … mess?"

"Oh, heavens no."

It may seem unlikely, but I assure you that I didn't ask her who this man was, or where he had come from, or what happened to him. I had known Wendy now for very nearly two decades, and I was not lacking in acquaintances, but in Wendy I felt I had a friend to whom I could tell mostly anything, and she would want to hear it, and very rarely recoiled. She, however, had a handful of very close female friends, all of whom were either in possession of courtesy titles, through their fathers, or married to a peer or an heir or something. Very moneyed, very high, very all of it, really, and I didn't know any of them too well, although like I said, I attended tea and sometimes dinners with these ladies at least monthly, if not more frequently, depending, of course, on my schedule. At the outset it was bothersome that she seemed to view me as another girlfriend with a single crucial difference, but I knew, truly, that she cared for me, and valued my opinion. It was, in fact, I who had gotten her where she was now, and it was remarkable that up to this point she didn't feel the need to turn on me in hostility for condemning her to her current misery.

The crux of the issue was this: As the end of school neared, and the prospect of going down loomed, I was making it on a semi-regular basis with an incredibly handsome black man. I knew him, as I knew almost all of my group of friends at this point: We were reading for the same English degree under the tutorage of the same man. I don't think any of us liked to brag about being one of Garrison's boys, but the majority of us in the year sitting the exams intended to do nothing with the education we'd just gotten. I had my half-baked ideas about writing, and Kyle had almost instantly asked his father to find him a job with some contact of his, so long as it made a lot of money. But the well-heeled sons of lords and ladies would never in their wildest dreams require an education for any kind of practical reason, set as all of them were for life with endowments real or imagined.

Token was one of these lucky fellows who wasn't in need of much in life: gorgeous, utterly gorgeous, in a rather shamefully oriental way. I was most interested in his cock, of course, marveling at its naturalistic heft — it was almost how I imagined being transported to the feral Africa of my grandfather's colonial days must have been, having that monster stuck up in me like a spear. He was soft-spoken and self-confident, and a bit self-conscious, aware as he was of how awkward it was to be a member of an incredibly small segment of the population. If Kyle ever asked what it was we were getting up to in his rooms at nights, I merely demurred and told Kyle we were studying, and then as a sick joke I might make an offhand reference to Conrad or something, implying something a bit less innocent than simple reading, and perhaps Kyle got the message about the moist mess that was the jungle in those tomes, poisonous plants and rivers included.

Not to become too bungled up in Kyle's readings of these situations, I will cut to the point: Token was under pressure, lots of pressure, to bring home a noble bride from school, and as could only be expected by anyone who'd had the great fortune to become acquainted with his smooth, ripe masculinity, he had been failing in this task. His father was that rare breed of peer, a nobleman with a calling, and the elder Lord Black's business-like approach to these situations only served to stifle his son's efficacy. I could not imagine what it would be like to hide my own yearnings from anyone. At my worst, I simply chose not to speak about my sexuality, and hoped taking it off the table or deciding not to advertise it was good enough in the few situations where it might have a negative affect, such as at a social function engineered by my father, or a meeting about some of my nonliterary work. Token, on the other hand, was quite boldly hiding the entire thing from everyone, except the men he made mad, rushed love to, and the floundering, faithful wife he knew through me. Which was not to say Wendy'd never strayed; of course she had. But, as the years marched on, her general attraction to anyone seemed to cool, as it did with most women, and now her unyielding, impossible task was to give her husband an heir, and the earl a tangible reason not to fret over the future of his dynasty. So far, at this she was failing.

Our teas, particularly teas at which I was the only guest, went like this one did. A servant — I hardly paid attention to them, unless they turned out to be a particular boy I might like to fuck, and then that was the endpoint of my attention — led me to the parlor, where I was sat at a table set for tea, and forced to wait until the viscountess felt like joining me. Usually it did not take long, and tea was poured, and I was given my choice of very stout little tea sandwiches, which I would purse my lips over and point to on a silver, doily-laden tray, declaring, "That one!" and then moving onto the next and deciding, "That one!" again until I had enough tea sandwiches. The cook at Black House made a really delicious Coronation chicken, exactly the way I liked it — very smooth, spiced, no currants. I knew it was slightly racist of me to think so, seeing as it was another continent entirely, but the whole colonial thing reminded me of the viscount himself, the way he tasted exotic and filling at the same time. Wendy had some very, very good teas indeed — lapsangs and oolongs and things she just fixed together in her boredom. I felt bad that I was the one who got her stuck here: contemplating how to convince a man who had tried quite remarkably hard and failed to love her to give it another try, and then another try, until their congress made something of itself. The only thing that ever came of my congress was laundry bills, and I never wanted it to amount to anything else. The idea of being expected not just to perform but to perform terrified me.

"I think today is just a horrible day," she almost immediately after the sandwich-distributor had left us. Over the past couple of months, I'd noticed her beginning to take sugar, which she never had done in the past. "I mean." She licked some crystalline remnants of a sugar cube off her thumb. "Do you ever just think things have gotten as bad as they can possibly get?"

"I don't quite don't know what to say, dearest. I mean, it's sunny today, after all. I didn't think it ever would stop raining, but it did, didn't it, so this must be the start of something wonderful."

"What is being started, though, I wonder?" she asked me.

"Well, as it happens, Kyle's broken it off with that horrible Frenchman."

She rolled her eyes. "Ah, yes, I'm sure it's just a matter of time now until he comes around and asks you to marry him, isn't it?"

I flinched. "That's hardly a nice thing to say. I'm just telling you what's been going on with us lately."

"There is nothing ever going on with you two, Stanley. Getting drunk off sherry and making fun of other people's problems aside, I'm sure he loves you, but he's a miserable man who wants very badly to always be miserable, and he will have to be dragged out of his misery kicking and screaming, you see."

"I don't know that you can really assess Kyle like that," I said drearily, knowing quite well she was correct. "He's not your friend. You haven't sat up nights with him discussing his love life."

"No," she huffed. "I've been taking my temperature 60 times a day to try to predict when I am ovulating!"

This made me smile, as her prickly comments usually did, and I asked, mouth full of curried chicken, "Are you, now?"

"As it happens." She threw back her shoulders. "Can you tell? Do I look … rosier?"

"You look very fertile to me, Wends."

"Well, then maybe you can … say something to Lord Black, maybe, ask him to have a go at it."

"I concede to speak with Token about it," I conditioned, "if you soften your position on Kyle. He's everything to me, you know, simply everything."

She lowered her eyes to her teacup, just as she did when peeling back layers of self-protection to display her vulnerability all those years ago, confessing to a near-stranger about her recent termination. Then, she lifted them again, peering into me with the force of a desperate mother. "Am I nothing to you?" She managed to rasp this out fine enough, then she threw back her raven hair. "You've hardly been very fun lately, Stanley. Surely you must know that."

"It's not as if you've been a great party either!" I protested. "Look at us, sitting here eating sandwiches and whining."

"Fuck anyone new lately?" She asked this rather playfully, entirely because she knew I always answered.

"Oh, hardly. Just a lad from the club I took in the showers after a swim. Well, him, and that Asian bloke who hangs around with Craig" — I always made a point of sneering when I said 'Craig,' contracting my voice into a nasal tone of mockery — "you know, I think his name is Kevin."

"Don't know him," she confessed, now eagerly absorbed in fussing with her hair. "Hangs around with Craig, you say?"

"I don't know, for a rather high and mighty bloke, Craig keeps the spottiest company. I think I've seen him out with a real headcase lately, you know, some blond who I am very sure is coked up within and inch of his life."

"That boy." Wendy stiffened, sitting up straighter in recognition. "I don't know his name, but I know him, dear. He's been over with Craig before to have dinner with Token. I really think they just call him 'Tweek.' Ironically enough."

"Really!" I exclaimed. "How horrible! It's almost as if being called just 'Sodom' if one were gay or 'Fatty' if one were overweight."

"Well, Craig isn't very creative. He's really just something of a thug. I don't know how Token manages to stand him." I think Wendy knew as well as I did that how Token managed to stand Craig was that Craig brought his new boy over, and the three of them I'm sure took recreational drugs and copulated together. But no need to mention this to her; her day was obviously bad enough as it was.

One of many reasons Wendy and I got on so well was our ceaseless ability to perpetuate a conversation. Before either of us knew it, our talk had devolved into minutia and trivialities: I've eaten this, I've fancied that, so-and-so is quite a wanker, I think this new telly personality is a homo. You wouldn't think it from the grandiose room in which she took tea, but Token and Wendy owned a television, and she spent well enough time staring into the spangled void of the BBC, or rather, they both did. You may imagine they didn't, but Token and Wendy got on very well. Dare I say they were friends? Yes, I suppose they were. Even though their lives were on differing orbits, they still circled the same satellite, so to speak, living in the same home and (generally) sharing a bed. They breakfasted together and dined together and drank together, went out together, took holidays together. I suppose it was everything a marriage was meant to be, with the annoying exception of sexual attraction on the part of the husband. And yet, from time to the time they did have sex, particularly in what must have been their conceptual middle years, somewhere after their post-university wedding (which was covered quite extensively in the press) and prior to their respective fourth decades. Their union was half founded on the necessity of producing an heir, and half on the absurd idea of keeping up appearances. I believe it came down in many ways to Token's laziness. He could, after all, have periodically taken out a series of social- or class-climbing starlets and cast himself as a philanderer — but then, that would have involved careful calculation, or some kind of effort on his part, anyway, and certainly socialization with class-climbing starlets, and I somehow did not see Token as the type to enjoy that process. I suppose then, for him, 'married man' was a much better cover than the alternative.

I had lost track of the time, and how long I'd been gossip-mongering with Wendy. I told her a particularly long story about the boy I fucked at the club, to which she could only marvel, "It's swimming, dear; it always makes you so horny." I agreed, claiming it was the water sluicing between my thighs during laps that had an aphrodisiacal effect. "Of course, of course." She nodded along with my assessment, and I refrained from telling her that Kyle thought the same thing. Kyle was not a swimmer, not at all; he hated water, found it unnatural. Some questioning on the matter would easily reveal, I knew, that exposure to cleaning chemicals and the moisture of the post-swim steam and the air-drying effects of the locker room would force his hair to revert to its primitive state, gnarled and wild and uncontrollable. Certainly he would tolerate a sit in the hot tub, with his chin high above water, or at least covering nipples, where it was always easy enough to slip your hand into the crotch of a fellow next to you, provided he gave you a perverse nod when you tip-toed into the gurgling water. Perhaps, newly shorn and looking to be aroused past his melancholy, Kyle might take a swim with me? It was possible but improbable; Kyle preferred activities that barely exercised him, or did not cause him to sweat; I think working on his hair once a day was exhausting enough. I became mournful for a moment thinking of the loss of it, and I believe Wendy saw this in my eyes and she asked, "What are we moping about now?"

So I told her about Kyle's hair.

"Well." She grasped her teacup again. "I'll drink to that!"

This irked me. "His hair is really—"

She interrupted me. "Whatever you are going to say, Stanley, do not say it. This is a pyrrhic victory for me. It's been 20 years of listening to you go on about his damn head and whatever's growing on it. I'd think you were his barber."

"And it'll grow back," I concluded, grinned at her. "That's the beauty of it!"

"Yeah, okay." She shrugged, and lifted her eyes to some specter above my head. "Home so soon, dearest?"

She may have been talking to me in some dull metaphorical way, but very quickly I internalized a strong hand on my shoulder. Either Wendy had taken it up with some African lover whom she had a granted a set of keys, or the viscount had found his way, unexpectedly, to tea — he did not usually; he tended to spend his days away from the home in any manner of ways, brushing up on the policy he would so need when he took his seat later in life, or looking after business dealings, most of which sounded vague and unappreciable to me.

"Hello, Wendy." His voice contained some quirk of enthusiasm for her name — but, more for mine. "Hello, Stanley."

I rose — interpret freely. "Viscount," I said warmly, taking his hand. "What an unexpected delight."

"Yes, yes." Wendy pushed her chair back from the table, but did not get up. "Slow day out there?"

Token shrugged. "A bit, I suppose. But you told me you'd be having Stanley for tea, and I figured, why not come meet him?" He raised his eyebrows unenthusiastically. "It's been too long." I fought the temptation to say, curtly, "Well, no, dear, I definitely saw you out last Saturday, at Camp, and at the Bucky on Thursday, too." But this was not generally something I would say in front of one's wife.

He was wearing, as he always did, pitifully fitted trousers, so that it was entirely impossible to glean anything about the state of his arousal, or lack thereof, at the moment. I think that had been one of the appealing things about Token, as a boyfriend — I was never quite sure what he wanted, or when he wanted it. He had a very tight-lipped approach to everything, which perhaps was why he liked having someone to know his routines and be shocked when he broke them suited him just fine — excellently, in fact. I think he was in tune with my hasty downward glance, though, and he gave a curious, quick wink. For a moment, we gaped at each other, neither of us looking at the viscountess, trapped in sort of a staring game to see who would move a bit first, my mind racing with the idea that he'd come to see me; perhaps he wanted me to write something for him, but what could he possibly need written? No, that was ludicrous. I knew what he wanted. While we were performing this little formality, Wendy interrupted us.

"Pardon," she said stiffly, standing up as well. "I think you're trying to take my tea guest away from me, my lord."

"I'll be brief," Token assuaged her, rather ineffectively. I could see her nostrils flaring. She dropped her napkin on her seat, and tugged at the hem of her skirt.

Torn here between my friend and the opportunity to make up for my lost trip to the coffee shop earlier, I shook my head. I bit my lip. If it had been any other man's stifled beard, I don't believe I would have paused. "Well," I said, discreetly brushing away Token's hand as he tried to take me by the elbow. "I thought … I thought I was to speak with him." Her hands, hanging pathetically at her sides, clasped together tensely.

She swallowed, and fell back into her chair. "Don't be long."

"I shan't be." I blew her a kiss. "I never am."

She smiled at me wanly, and turned her head away.

XXX

Black House was like most stately, vaguely regal London residences of well-groomed lords and ladies: deceptively narrow on the outside, the slim façade of a townhouse, quite easily mistaken for smaller by American tourists who only ever saw these things on the New York streets — cases in which I found the proportions very immediate and revelatory; the length of the face of a house on those dirty little streets was the width of the interior, say. But the viscount and viscountess lived in a residence that opened up in many ways to a seemingly impossible breadth. The first two floors were very straightforward, very blatant, with large, showy chambers for reception, like the parlor overlooking the square in which Wendy usually held teas, and a formal dining room. Expectedly, the basement was for servants' quarters and the kitchen, and probably some storage. The house had been in the Williams family's possession since their receipt of the Viscount Black title, about a century back, possibly for service to the crown, or rather, probably for service to the crown, but I never asked, and never checked into it. Where people got their honors was an unfairly dubious premise to me, as I had and expected none. Nothing my father had that wasn't tangible enough to be shoved into my flat would expire with him, and they weren't things I wanted anyway: academic chairs, educational accomplishments, a CV swollen with publications and appointments. I suppose anyone assessing Randy Marsh based on these materials alone would see him as a distinguished geology scholar, and would never be fortunate to observe his wonderfully amusing-in-a-sick-way pathos, the drunken nights of fisticuffs at pubs, his somber disappointment in his only son, his baffling approval of his daughter's early departure from college to marry her art history lecturer. I saw the crown molding and ornate plasterwork lining the grand staircases of Black House, and sighed; I was fairly certain we were going up to Token's study, occupied by his father before him, and proceeding him, another three generations of noble heads of household. What was aggravating for him, I knew, was that the inheritance of this residence hinged on his ability to impregnate my friend. I shook it off noncommittally, resolving to speak with him about the matter before this meeting had concluded.

We reached the fifth floor, which featured a toilet, Token's study, and an adjoining library, cramming with some new and some very ancient books. I had thought he was taking me into his study, but he turned very suddenly at the top of the staircase instead of marching straight on into the office, bringing me into that book-full room with its built-in craftsmanship, supporting shelves and shelves of knowledge. There was a chair in the center of the room, with an ottoman, and I wondered about which far-back ancestor of Token's thought it was sufficient to put a single chair in here. Then again, I wasn't aware of any couples for whom reading was a particularly joint activity. It didn't matter. He crossed his arms, and leaned against a bookcase. "Well, my friend," he said in his clipped, warm tone. "You're looking well."

I rolled my eyes. "Oh, thanks. You too, I guess." I cleared my throat. "Did you … need something from me?" I cringed, inwardly. This was all so very awkward.

"Hmmm." He tugged me over by one of the button holes in my light blazer, which I didn't relish wearing in the warmer months but as I'd just come from handing in an assignment, I had been on my most professional alert. "She told me you were coming over for tea," he said wetly, wasting no time in undoing a couple of my shirt buttons. "I thought, what a lovely time to catch up."

"About that. I think we need to discuss something." Contradictorily, I wasted no time, opening the fly on his trousers as I spoke.

"What, pray tell, do we have to discuss?" After tugging the shirttails from my trousers, he began to unbuckle my belt.

"Wendy," I choked out, feeling his hand make contact — balls first, then cock. It was merely a brushing, as he slipped his hand out of my briefs nearly as soon as I'd mentioned Wendy's name, and cupped my chin with both hands, running a thumb against my jaw, both of us breathing very heavily, as one might only expect in this situation.

Following a very rough, very tense kiss, he spoke against my lips: "You know she knows, Stanley. We're hardly being illicit." His lips were on mine again, or rather, my bottom lip was between his, being sucked briefly, while I struggled to tug down his own knickers.

Extracting my lip from his jaw, I reminded him that I knew this, that it wasn't my gripe. He pushed me down by the shoulders, and I had to continue the rest of the conversation from underneath the outline of that streamlined, majestical stalk of his. Unlike other members, it was uniquely dark with indiscernible blushes of warm and cool contrasting colors, brought in by a really functional pump system, like the opposite of all colors at once. It was something I had always appreciated. I was hardly a particular size enthusiast, unlike multiple men I knew, who would very gladly get up off one cock and go sit down on another if the opportunity aroused itself, pun possibly intended. I would say this about Token's physical condition, and then resist from dwelling on it: I wouldn't allow myself to be penetrated by very many, but he was always on the short list of exceptions, so much I appreciated this tool. So I gave it a liberal licking, coating the thing with my own saliva, not really sure what kind of lubricant if any he had sitting around in the library of all places. I can't imagine anyone being bored by an extended description of this act, but Token was a fairly courteous type, proving that his breeding was good for something. He'd never forced me to take more than I could swallow, so to speak; he did not drill himself into my throat like any other party I was giving such allowances of dominance to would. As I worked on the head a great deal, I readily took note of the fluids gathering at the tip of his prick, the way the skin was curling back in anticipation. With a swift jerk to my own cock, about which I was feeling slightly neglected, he pulled me up by my armpits, so that I was leaning backward against the armchair.

"I know she forgives us," he said with compassion. I think I was intended to agree on this point, but the very truly throbbing head of his cock was circling around my entrance by this point, so I resigned myself to grunt a little affirmation, and almost hopped out of my trousers as I lifted my behind toward his crotch, finally feeling some weight off me as his wonderfully defined arms, the bulk of which I couldn't see at the moment but just knew was there, supported me from the top as I wrapped my legs around his torso. The effect was that my cock, which was doing nothing more than smearing anticipatory fluid all over his hard, dark abdominals, became trapped between us, which was something I rather enjoyed on the few occasions when I consented to allow myself to be buggered, to borrow an ironic term. I am quite sure that this was the exception ultimate between a man like myself and a man like Token: I was very allowing of deviations from the modus operandi, and he was not. I did not know him to have ever been fucked, or have his asshole penetrated in any sort of way. Even in the handful of lazy, excited months 15-odd years ago when we'd been in some formalized way together, he would not allow me near it. Fingers, lips, tongue, cock, nothing. Not even a jest about a carrot or something was acceptable. I think perhaps if he'd let himself get fucked by someone, even if it wasn't me, he might loosen up and see things a bit less rigidly. Even I could admit that a great deal of the enjoyment I took from fucking was the intimate knowledge of what it was to be fucked. Let's call it, say, a reverse appreciation.

He was a genial man, but a very stony, very silent lover, which was not to say that his attentions here were without any sort of passion, as that wasn't the case. He was quite loving about it, as I mentioned before, not interested in ripping or tearing or clawing at me. Certainly he didn't wish to hurt me, even if I was fairly tough and could take it. I did not generally perform penetration without lubrication, so he took his time, building his pace very slowly, working into me in steady, strong motions, not un-gentle. I spent this time slobbering on his neck, attempting to avoid wetting the pastel collar of his shirt, although I might not have bothered, considering my cock was slipping all over his belly under his shirt anyhow.

No matter how often I was fucked, which was to say not with any kind of regularity, I did not like to come with a man inside of me. This was one of those lessons I learned with the Token of our Oxford days; ejaculating mid-coitus left me softening and bored for the remainder of the act, wondering when he might get the idea that I was finished, and now it was becoming unenjoyable, or if not unenjoyable, simply frustrating, in an amusing sort of way. Typically, then, I used my hands to hold myself steady as best I could against the chair I was crushed up against instead of bringing myself off. So, when he finished, submerging himself into me for one last thrust — into my mouth as well, kissing me like he hadn't been kissing anyone for a while, which I imagined just couldn't be the case, if he was hanging around with Craig and all, never mind Wendy — we slipped down and he drew out of me. It was only at this moment that I realized he wasn't wearing a condom, and I reminded myself that maybe I should have asked. Back against the chair, he kissed me, supported me with one hand, and used the other to reach for my cock, which was by this point straining against my blazer painfully. I clenched my cheeks together, not really wanting his ejaculate to pour out and all over the extremely nice carpet. Wendy oversaw the cleaning staff, and I wasn't particularly interested in discussing it with her. But that just reminded me of Wendy again, so as soon as Token brought me off, as he was kissing around my jawline, I muttered, "You should be doing this with your lonely wife, dear," although I'm sure in my grogginess I slurred the 'dear.'

"Stanley." He sat back on his haunches, wiping his mouth. "Don't let's ruin a lovely mood."

"No, I'm serious." I hunched myself up enough to pull up my briefs and trousers, pleased that if I was going to leak, I could now do it somewhat guiltlessly. "It's not right," I grunted.

"Well." He stood up, and so did I, and he pulled up his pants before continuing. "I hardly see what's not right about it."

"Oh, don't you?" He shrugged. "You've got to give Wendy a child, my dear, and here you are wasting it on me."

He soured on this. "Don't tell me who I need to be giving children to," he scolded. "If you disagree so staunchly, why go along with it?"

"Well, screw it all! I'm no good at resisting seduction! And you know it."

"Not my problem." He shrugged again.

"No, don't you see? It is your problem! She's my friend, you know, I love her so. She needs a baby, obviously, and so do you, and time is running out … I feel. Why don't you gather your strength and give it another try?" I felt somewhat cad-like saying this with his semen trickling in the elastic leg-holes of my briefs, but at least I was back on-point now.

"If it's so damn easy, I think you should give her a damn baby." He backed up against one of the bookcases.

"I think it would be readily apparent that it wasn't yours based on the coloring, my lord," was the best I could muster.

"Well, it's not quite so simple," he tried to explain. I think his cheeks were flushing; I could feel the warmth of his guilt creeping around his countenance, whereas it had already settled in mine. "I can't…" He sighed. "I used to be able to, and I just can't anymore."

"Well." I wasn't very sure what to say to this. Here I always assumed he was capable of providing the necessary service, and it seemed I'd been mistaken. "Well, that's bollocks. There might be another way. Hadn't you better speak with a physician? The breeding of England is of interest to someone in the medical community, I should wager."

That made him angriest of all the things I'd said. "Why don't you just leave?" he asked. He continued on with great sarcasm: "Go have tea with your friend. I think I should just sit here and contemplate each failure I've committed."

"It doesn't have to—"

"We're done, Stanley, thank you," he concluded, pointing toward the door. "I'll do my work now, and keep your words under advisement."

"I think you should!" I finished lamely. "Thanks for the fuck, dearest. I might have enjoyed it with a bit of lubrication. That, or elbow grease." He made a nasty gesture at me, and I made sure to shut the door.

On the way out, Wendy glowered at me. "Have fun?" she asked bitterly.

"Well," I stammered, unsure of how to ease this. "You know…"

"Oh, I know," she agreed. Then she put her head in her hands. I do not think she got up from the table the entire time I was away. I thought briefly for a moment about sitting back down, but did not. Just when I was thinking of quietly slipping out, she spoke again. "How could I be angry at you?" She lifted her head from her hands, but kept her eyes shut rubbing her temples. "You haven't betrayed me." She laughed briefly, and sighed. "I suppose I haven't been betrayed at all, really. That would imply I've had expectations broken, which I haven't. But! How instantly depressing that this is how I expect it to be?"

"Dearest." I walked back over to the table, and knelt beside her. I put my head in her lap. "I wish I hadn't, you know. I certainly don't enjoy it with him, anymore. Which is not to imply we're doing it often, because I think that was really the first in quite some time."

Wendy stroked my mussed hair. "I think I have come to the conclusion, after all these years, that affluence breeds discontent which bleed idleness. Don't you think?"

"Maybe?" I raised my head. "I hope, for your sake, my dear, that you have some luck soon. I should hate to see you get on like this. Motherhood would become you, I feel."

"Thank you." We both stood up, and she brushed her skirt off. It was creased with lines that I'm sure had slowly formed over the hour or two she had sat at the table; I did not doubt it had been expertly pressed before tea. "I shall speak with him, I guess. It's just so … well, he's not bred for baring it all, anyway."

"Nor are you," I reminded her. "Nor am I."

"Well." She shrugged. "Let's do have tea again next week, dear."

"I'm sure we shall." I took one of her relatively soft, angular hands, and kissed her palm. "Until then, my lady."

Wendy swallowed. "Until then, Stanley."

XXX

I stopped for a drink at the Bucky on the way home. Was it on the way home, really? When one's time was all leisure, it seemed all things were on the way somewhere. In retrospect, it seemed that it had not really been on the way, but I'd started off walking, which was usually the case, and found myself in the neighborhood, so I went in for a drink. On my way out of the pub, two whiskies later, a group of three American women asked me if it was a pub I had just been in, or a bordello.

"A pub," I assured them. Then, in my best faux-American tone of mockery, I added, "Gonna have some bangers and mash?" The insult was lost on them, and they found this hilarious.

"Oh, he's just precious!" one of them exclaimed.

Another asked if she could snap my photograph. "Pardon?" I asked, not really able to gage the surreality of this request. While I was trying to form a sentence that rightly captured the sentiments of "What the devil are you on about?" and "No," she took it anyway.

"I think this'll be worth something eventually," the photographer remarked. Her earrings were shaped like parrots. "The way things are going we won't have any left after a couple of years."

"Yeah," another agreed.

"What are you talking about?" I asked, my recoil only halted for confusion.

The one with the parrot earrings looked at me, darkly, and said, "You be careful out there. There's a lot of icky stuff crawling around these days." Her companions nodded in agreement.

"Thank you, ladies." I sniffed. The summer air smelled like a mowed lawn and wet, heady dirt, the poisonous, trite perfume worn by the three middle-aged women crowding me, and cedar planks, for some reason. It was a very odd scent. Lately as I wandered around town I'd been detecting roses and ashes. But this was explainable, of course, because London was blooming, and this summer, the heat had proven its tendency to give way to fires. Perhaps Kyle was onto something, then, with his meditation (or obsession) on the escape routes from my flat.

XXX

I stopped at an off-license before returning home and, once there, began to drink in earnest. It had been a bit since I had been amazed by my ability to consume and consume and seemingly never feel the effects. In all honesty, I'd eaten a bit at tea, so those whiskies didn't go down on their own, and it was some time between departing the Bucky and arriving back at the flat, seeing as I first had to transfer at Bank, and then I'd stopped by the off-license. This was in addition to the tolerance issue. I knew I'd seen both my father and my uncle rather wasted on occasion, so I was sure it must be easier than not to become likewise inebriated. Surely they'd had to drink through a lot to get there. I suppose drinking for me was an activity, rather than means to a destination. I felt pretty poor at the moment, guilt over Wendy and fury at Token for being such a colossally lost cause. By my impending third cup I was royally annoyed and decided to eschew the glass entirely, so I slid it across the so-called coffee table with a sock-clad heel, and went straight into the bottle. Lest you think I was inclined to sit alone in my apartment drinking, please allow me to inform you that in fact I was sitting alone in my apartment drinking and reading Muriel Spark. I'd read these things over and over again, which felt rather wrong to me, but I enjoyed semi-contemporary work far more than the things I'd been nursed on, all that slop from Chaucer to Dickens, via Marlowe. Additionally, I steadfastly refused to read anything by an American, because it would only serve to remind me of the type I'd met back at the pub. At times I wondered if it wasn't the most fortunate blunder in British history to have ridden ourselves of that cursed little outpost of anti-intellectualism. But then, surely if they'd stuck with us, things would have turned out very differently; better for them, at least.

I hadn't realized I'd fallen asleep until I was being woken up. My stomach was sour, which I suppose was a given since I hadn't eaten since 5 and had since ingested an entire bottle plus two glasses of Glenfiddich. This, in combination with a ringing phone, got me groggily up, fumbling for the receiver, into which I barked, "What?" I was pretty irked, and then immediately humbled to learn that it was actually Kyle.

"I'm so sorry to wake you," he said immediately, recognizing my tiredness. "But I have a favor to ask."

"What's the time?" I asked. "Don't you tell me you haven't got a pocket watch, Kyle. I'm asleep."

He laughed nervously. "No, dear, there's a clock on the wall here. It's half-past 12."

"A clock on the wall where?" I asked, rubbing my eye as I woke up. My stomach wasn't settling.

"If you must know," he began. Then he interrupted himself to say, "Well, yes, I suppose you must know, due to what I'll ask you. Do you mind picking me up, dear? I'm at old, um…" He trailed off subconsciously. "Clyde's," he finished.

"Pardon?"

"I'm at Clyde's, dear, Clyde's house. I know it is so terribly inconvenient, and I feel quite horrible asking, and I really did not mean to wake you, and you know I would never ask except in a bit of a bind, but…"

"Oh, Clyde's." This was beginning to register. "And you need me to pick you up, why? It's not like I've got an automobile or anything. I'm going to have to come on the Tube."

He sighed. "Well, dear — I know it is so horribly terrible of me to have asked, but the thing is, the Underground's stopped running. It's past 12."

"Well." I was trying to think. Half of me wanted quite intensely to go save him, and yet the other half was feeling partly ill and cozy, although I should have put on pajamas before I fell asleep, or at least gotten in bed. Of course, that's what happens when one is sloppily drinking. Luckily I was still wearing trousers so rather than having to force my erected cock into confinement, it was already there, straining away, happy to be on the phone with Kyle at midnight even if I wasn't quite so thrilled. "Well," I finally managed. "Can't you simply stay there? Old Clyde must have a spare blanket."

"Ah, yes. Well, dear, you see, that's the thing. He's got the spare blanket, as he lives with his parents. I really have to leave, and it's so late and the Underground's over for the night, and I don't want to stand on the street wandering around looking for a cab. I might be brutalized or mugged or something."

"Well, where does our friend in question live?"

"Farringdon Road."

"And what, darling?"

"Rosebery, actually. It's somewhat on the way to King's Cross."

"Ah, all right. You just sit tight there, darling. I'm on my way."

"You are a lifesaver, Stanley!"

"Your life is hardly in danger, Kyle."

"Oh," he said noncommittally. "Anyway, I'll be looking out the window."

XXX

It was simple, really; I just took the bus. I got off at Clerkenwell and walked up the street. It was simple, really simple. My mind was on one track now; I had to get Kyle. He seemed grateful, and did not say goodnight to old Clyde. For that matter, old Clyde was absolutely nowhere. I was glad enough for this, because in truth speaking with old Clyde was on a short list of activities in which I disliked having to engage. We'd known him since school, as he'd been reading English with Garrison as well, so it had been a long time since we'd discovered he was about as boring as melba toast. He was our age, of course, but he readily earned the 'old' label by being about 50 in spirit if not in chronology when he went up. He was a laborious scholar, but rather dim and lacking any confidence. I imagine he'd earned his place as his father was also in the geology department, although what he researched or taught I had no idea, and it hardly mattered since the old man was retired now, I knew from my father. I know his family was a bit well off, owing their state of finance to the ownership of a shoe store, I think. Still, he was a bore, a whiney, awful bore. But, apparently, a bore with a gratuitously sized donger, which Kyle was gleefully telling me about, painting majestical linguistical descriptions of how vivid the purple of his swollen cockhead was the first time Kyle pushed his skin back. "Almost like the Wizard of Oz, you know," he was excitedly telling me. "All that fleshy dullness, and then all that outrageous violet! Like a blacklight being lit or something!"

"Fabulous." He was leaning on my shoulder, and I was leaning against the door in the backseat of a black taxi cab. We were on the way back to his flat, which I'd requested specifically, thinking the sight of Spark and an empty whisky bottle would just upset me upon returning to mine. "Tell me again why old Clyde was so unable to get you a cab?"

Kyle sniffled into my shoulder. He'd been so sniffly lately. I am pretty certain he was congested, however. "Well, he's asleep." I raised my eyebrows. "I know, dear. Well, no one's as considerate a lover as you. He has the most remarkable stamina, but as soon as he comes he just falls right to sleep. He's so unappealing when he sleeps, too. He sleeps with his mouth open and he snores like a lorry engine. Frankly, I can't stand it, and if I hadn't brought myself off while he was still drilling me it might have killed my erection."

"Indeed." Jealous as I was, this unflattering assessment of old Clyde was amusing enough. "You had no idea he lived with his parents."

"None!"

"One thinks that would have come up the first time you, um…" I just shrugged in conclusion to that thought.

"Yeah, well." Kyle rubbed his nose. "That was all in the bushes."

"Golly." I sighed. "The Mall is pretty at night, don't you think?"

"Mmmm." There was a moment of silence before Kyle decided to tell me, "You know, I spoke to Miss B this morning."

"Oh, okay." I waited for him to elaborate, but he didn't. "So, how is she?"

"She's fine, quite fine." This was all a ridiculous conversation to be having, considering I'd just seen Butters out last Saturday.

"Thinks we should go out on Saturday," Kyle kept nattering. He wasn't tired at all, which was awkward, because I was slightly intoxicated and somewhat tired and altogether a bit ill, too. Additionally, my calendar was always open on Saturday nights, at least since I'd sworn off any kind of formal courting. To think, just about every Saturday night we went out to Camp, and every week Butters was precarious about it, calling Kyle to ask if we were going to go, possibly afraid of missing out one week.

"She says Eric's got some thing to show us." It was amazing to me that Kyle was still going, and that he was telling me this now, when I was incredibly unlikely to remember any of it. "Some shocking thing, or something."

"Yeah," I agreed half-heartedly, staring out the window with my hand on Kyle's knee. "Sure he does. Totally shocking."

"Thank you for rescuing me, dear," was the last thing he said during the car ride. "I don't know why I keep doing this to myself."

"Of course, darling." I moved my hand up his leg and squeezed his thigh in reassurance.