This is the last chapter! An epilogue will follow, probably after the weekend. Thanks for reading up to this point.


Trinity

April-June 1967

At the start of the spring holiday Stanley found himself with three invitations. He was welcome to stay in Oxford, to go home and see his parents. They did not live far away from Magdalen itself, and the façade of their stunted little row house with its minuscule, manicured front garden and overgrown lawn in the back badly needing to be weeded was still, in Stanley's heart, his only real home. He thought of his mother's mediocre cooking and the pantry full of beer; the parade of children in the house as his sister came by with them nearly every morning; the little bed on which Stanley had come to many striking and unnerving realizations about himself as he grew from a boy to an adolescent and then, at long last, into whatever he was now. He felt more confident than ever, yet more vulnerable, too. He had written his father and mother a letter declaring his intention to do a fourth year, and that Garrison had offered him the chance to read for a master's. Randy Marsh had written back, I hope this will be the experience that cements your commitment to a responsible life. There had also been a promise to continue paying for Stanley's basic needs, beyond those which the university would cover. He would have liked to have seen his mother, but Stanley felt as though in some sense he had negotiated a contract between his parents and himself which was now sealed. He did not long to go back there.

Kyle had invited Stanley into the city, for a week if not the entire vacation. He had done this at the end of a drunken conversation in which Stanley had assured Kyle that he did not, in fact, believe Kyle was a bitch. Perhaps this had been influenced by the fact that, since Stanley had recently assisted Kyle with the delicate operation of (in Kyle's opinion) helping him avoid a conviction for gross indecency, and dying in Reading Gaol, they were now on the most intimate terms. Stanley adored Kyle and longed to see London again, but the sight of Kyle's mangled lip just made him afraid and unhappy. No number of furious glares at Eric had elicited any response, other than a sort of hefty shrug that said to Stanley, "He deserved it," which did not much help. But Stanley did not know what Kyle might possibly have done to deserve such a damaging blow and Kyle was not forthcoming on that point. Perhaps it was simply none of his business at all. Then there was the issue of Kyle's mother and father, who were pouring thousands into the now privately handled hunt for their missing son. Stanley might fantasize about secluding himself from the world to read and write to his heart's content, but the fact of the matter was that there was too much, too many people, whose loss Stanley could not bear. Kyle was foremost among those people.

And now Token was another. He had, in the most casual and off-hand way, asked Stanley to come down with him for a week to Llewych, his family estate. "I cannot invite you for the entire vacation, sadly," as Token would go with Craig and Clyde and some others to Monte Carlo for a stag weekend. They planned to meet up again, in London, when Token returned from this jaunt.

Craig planned to wed in a fit of extravagance in August, at the country estate of Annie, the duchess of Nommel to-be. Craig himself had become disengaged from lessons, barely scraping by, seemingly consumed by his new role as a peer. "It is difficult, being an aristocrat," he'd quipped at one recent tutorial. Taking this for a joke Stanley had laughed, and then received a talking-down from Craig that even Token later said was harsh. Butters had been horrified, telling Craig it wasn't nice to lash out at one's social inferiors; but then, that was the sort of thing Butters would say, as he continued to fancy himself a great equalizer, even as he spoke dreamily of how he longed to make elaborate roasts for Bradley for dinner. Around the time the term wound down, Bradley was offered a job in London as an underling assistant at a publisher of Christian liturgy. "I'm so proud of him!" Butters gushed. He then wept on the pavement as Bradley's bus pulled away, Butters' hair tied into two thin pleats and his bangs held back with a barrette he'd made out of a bit of old ribbon. It struck Stanley as a bit romantic and a lot silly, since Butters planned to go down and join him as soon as possible. Their last kiss must have been had in private, but at the station they embraced as only lovers could: soggy, soft voices, their bodies fitting together seamlessly, no disjunctions. Stanley wanted to hate them, and Bradley in particular, but it was so pure, he couldn't.

"Good riddance to the old bat," Kyle had said later. "She was never any fun at all." Then he excused himself and vanished for the evening. Stanley suspected the thing was back on with Eric, despite the fact that Kyle's lip was still double its natural size and marked with crude little holes where he'd pulled out the thread himself. "At least my nose distracts from it a bit," was Kyle's bitter observation on the subject. Suspecting Kyle of continuing his dreadful affair, Stanley took Token up on the offer to go for a week to Llewych.

The house was nothing Stanley had wanted it to be, a Blenheim Palace or a Castle Howard, the ideal Brideshead of his fantasies. Instead it turned out to be a dreary second- or perhaps even third-hand Jacobean, all boxy in the front and narrow in the wrong places. At least, Stanley figured, they'd have appointed it luxuriously on the inside, but the décor was curiously mismatched. Select rooms were furnished grandiosely; others were nearly barren. There was a general shabbiness to the place that felt, to Stanley, like a betrayal. Black House, in London, was a Georgian townhome on a gated square garden, the façade like cricket whites bleached and then dirtied and then bleached again, tasteful but used; distinguished. This house in the country sat upon the rolling green lands that wounded young men wept gently over in Somme trenches some 50 years prior. The fertile, undulating fields of elegiac England — and then the ugly, half-empty house, and Token's parents unaccounted for as Stanley was given a tour.

"It's a weird old place," Token explained, bringing Stanley out of a second-floor window and onto a bit of gabled roof that looked over the backyard. "This is the only good view." Below there was an even herb garden planted with boxwood right-angled borders, a neatly contained contrivance with a gravel path and a small reflecting pool in the middle, the water khaki-green and murky. Back in Token's room there was no trace he truly lived there, save for a dozen Pringle sweaters in the dresser. Wendy's parents' home in the country had been preserved like a museum, opened only selectively before the family retreated back to the city. Llewych Hall felt like a drab shooting club, the type Stanley had been exposed to in his youth by his uncle. This drably appointed sort of place was like the underfurnished and overarticulated relative of the kennels at which Stanley had been forced to house his dog when he'd been taken hunting as a boy. It gave Stanley a cold chill which he chalked up partly to the literal cold and partly to the memory of enduring suffering and loss. He did not want to associate these feelings with Token, whose skin was warmth personified, his geniality something Stanley was only slowly coming to accept. Stanley wondered if they would make it on this trip, or if Stanley's desires would have to be stowed away in the presence of this damp and unwelcoming house. The son of a common geologist, Stanley suffered the mediocrity of this place as Token pulled back curtains to expose heavy stone walls which began to sink over the centuries until they bowed slightly, as if the spine of a man who's labored in the mines for 40 years, the curve perceptible when mentioned, and yet subtle enough to be missed without a hint. That was the cause of the dilapidation at Llewych Hall; it was only slowly realized.

Though there was a formal dining room with an ebony table that sat 28, Stanley finally met Token's parents when they sat down to dinner at a small laminate dinette set in the shambling kitchen. "There are formal kitchens, of course," said Token's father, the earl. "But we prefer to eat simply, here." It was a dinner of cold pork sausages, dauphinois potatoes, canned green beans, and a trifle which Token's mother had picked up from a pastry shop in town. The earl produced a bottle of wine he had purchased in London on his way back from work.

"What do you do?" Stanley asked, to be polite.

"I work in the legal department at EMI, the record company." For a moment he waited for a gasp of recognition from Stanley. When it did not come, he said, "Most people are surprised to learn that I work there."

"Should I be surprised?" Stanley asked.

"I don't know," said the earl, "what does your father do?"

"He is the Class of 1899 Professor of sedimentology at Oxford University," said Stanley.

"Well, that's quite interesting!" said Token's mother, the countess. "I took a degree in chemistry in my youth, did you know?"

Stanley gazed at her blankly. He knew nothing of these people, it was now quite clear.

"So you are in the same course as Token," the countess continued.

"Well, yes," Token said, "that is precisely how we met. In the same sense that I am working on Conrad, Stanley is working on Waugh."

"So you knew James?" asked Token's father. "Such a spirited young man."

"Only briefly," said Stanley. "He was incredibly friendly."

"Yes, his parents are dear friends of ours."

"The most important thing you must learn from something like that," said Token's mother, "is to value each friend, and to really treasure them. You might imagine his death will be poetic, but perhaps it may be random. That is an important lesson to learn in one's youth."

"Do not presume to live as if there is opportunity ahead," said Token's father. "Every opportunity is now."

Token's fork scraped across his plate. "I didn't invite him here for a lecture, though."

"Does he have any girls?" the earl asked Stanley. "Token is so handsome. He should be seeing someone, don't you think?"

Without vomiting from nerves, Stanley carefully considered each word: "Well, he is very handsome, but he's also very studious. We've been working with one another on our theses. Who has time for girls?"

"Time is so crucial," said the earl. "You must cherish it. Token, have you taken him to the chapel?"

"Well, no, Dad, of course not."

"You might take him out there. Perhaps Mr. Marsh might like to see it."

Sighing, Token pushed his plate away and said, "Yes, that's an excellent idea. Thank you for the suggestion." He then quickly finished the end of his glass of wine.

Token showed Stanley to a guest bedroom which was well-appointed in the strictest sense but offered little real comfort. There was a single-bed with a worn-looking coverlet and a side table stacked with ancient books with peeling covers. Stanley examined their spines, poring over the details. They were books of poetry, metaphysical mostly, and Stanley had to halt himself from cracking one open and reading it until daybreak. The fact was poetry reminded him of Kyle, of how Kyle could fall into a book of poetry for hours and come to know every nuance of the text on both a surface and a deeper level. Stanley brushed his teeth and simply fell asleep thinking of Kyle and his fur coat, his pink lips, and his starchy-textured auburn hair. Perhaps it was the thought of Kyle that helped Stanley settle into rest in the overly drafty little room.


Token's parents were to host a cocktail party in the evening, and Token spent the day showing Stanley around the nearby town. It wasn't much, and Stanley had experienced his share of gracious English country life. Yet something about exploring the area was entertaining to Stanley, a slim copy of The Green Carnation in his back pocket. The town wasn't much, though being a Saturday there were the typical market stalls in the center, sleepy young things and astringent old women behind the counters of the stores along the high street. Token stopped to buy flowers for his mother, a gesture that Stanley found touching; when they sat down at a pub for lunch he pulled one early daffodil from the bunch and placed it on Stanley's knee.

"What's this for?" Stanley asked, rolling the stem between his fingers.

"I'm just glad you came down with me, that's all." Token was wearing a camel hair coat, not fashionable but timeless, cut in a blazer style over a purple polo. He did not fit into the town much at all, though Stanley understood that in some sense he must have been a local celebrity, the future squire. He approached everything — each market stall, each shopkeep, the bar at the pub — with an amiable detachment. Token seemed both common to this place and exceptional from it, his handsomeness almost too good for the weather-beaten people who lived here. A raucous shooting party came in, the men clad in crisp tracking gear and the ladies in Hermes headscarves and tight pants. Token seemed to know them, and he waved and raised a glass toward the group, which hollered back at him. "Local people," he said, resting his elbow on the table. "It comes with the territory."

In his battered old trench and worn plimsolls, Stanley felt neither handsome nor sophisticated. He pulled The Green Carnation from his pocket and plucked the flower from its lengthy stem.

"What's that for?" Token asked.

"Well, you can't very well have me walking around with a daffodil," said Stanley.

"Why not? I don't care. They needn't know where you got it."

"Well, this way I'll have it forever." Carefully, Stanley pressed it into the middle of the book and sealed its pages shut tightly around the daffodil's vital shape. There was an awkward gap in the book's edge and an obvious undulation in the cover, but Stanley felt pleased with his decision. He could further press it in something heavier later. "I love it, dear, thank you."

"Very good." Token gave a slight sigh, as if unimpressed. Whether with the day as it was unfolding or Stanley's improvised flower press, Stanley did not know.

At the end of their meal, when Token was finishing a pint of Guinness and Stanley was pushing mushy vinegar-soaked chips around his plate, the serving girl who brought the meals from the kitchen strode by their table, turned, and paused. She put a hand on her fleshy hip and said, "That party over there's paid your bill."

Token shrugged. "All right, darling. Cheers."

She stalled there a moment, her ironed bangs jutting out toward them. Then she made a pleasant face at Stanley, puckering her lips. "Come round here often, do you?" she asked.

"I'm afraid not," he said. "I'm just visiting."

"D'you like the cinema? In Like Flint just hit the theaters. There'll be a showing at 7 after I'm off for the evening."

Stanley felt immediately uncomfortable. "Sorry to say I have evening plans." He tried to smile at her but he just felt stupid. "Much obliged."

"Tell you what," said Token. From his pocket he produced a billfold, laying a 10-pound note on the table. "For the party over there. The next round's on me." He stood. "And keep the rest, of course."

She tucked the bill into her front pocket, patting it for safety. "Cheers, then."

"Yes, thanks." Token looked down. "Stanley?"

The topic of what had transpired was not broached until the walk back to the house later that afternoon. The air had grown a bit chilly, and the sky had become cloudless.

"What did you think," Token asked, "of the girl at the pub?"

"Well," said Stanley, "not too much. But then, I rarely think of girls anyway."

"You didn't think she was all right?"

"She was fine for a girl in a pub. That's all."

"You've no thoughts on girls whatsoever," said Token.

"Well, that was clumsily done," replied Stanley, "and to be honest, no, I've no thoughts on girls, though it did occur to me that that one in particular must do something for her hair. It's very 1962, isn't it, a bit Music Man-ish?"

"And you didn't notice her body?"

Stanley stopped walking and put his hands on his hips, raising an eyebrow. "And I suppose you did?"

"Well, yes," said Token. "She had a very nice one. You didn't notice? Dramatic hips." He made a curving gesture with his hands, outlining the memory of her shape.

"Why would I have noticed? She was our waitress. I made no particular study of her."

"Very well." Token sighed, putting his hands in his pockets. "Well, she liked you, so you could have had her."

"I didn't want her!" Stanley threw his hands up. "What's this about? Do you want her?" He heard his voice raising. "Go back and get her."

Token did not seem offended. Instead, he held out his arm for Stanley to take. As they were relatively secluded, nearby to a hedgerow, the gesture was accepted. They resumed their walk. "It's just that I wonder what exactly constitutes this lack of interest. What makes a person want one thing, and not the other?"

"I don't know, viscount." Stanley's voice had a distinct weariness in it; he sounded rather sexily hoarse. "No one does."

The remark hung between them for a moment, and Token opened his mouth as if he wished to comment. But then their forward progress revealed the manor house rising before them in the distance, and he bit his lip. The remark remained unprotested, for the time being.


When it was time to go down for the party, Stanley put on a pair of pressed twill slacks and a button-down with a dinner jacket. In the mirror Stanley studied his reflection, wondering if he should brush his hair or not. Certainly slicking it back was out of the question, but was it considered impolite to neglect to brush it? Stanley liked the way his hair fell about his face carelessly, and he felt it made him look masculine and confident, not minding what he looked like. Yet this was to be a nice party at the home of some kind aristocrats — feeling considerate, Stanley settled on a compromise, combing his hair into some semblance of order with his fingers. All things considered, he looked rather decent like this. One of the troubles of being homosexual was that one felt a certain sort of pressure to groom needlessly. Kyle would have been plucking his eyebrows in preparation, spritzing perfume behind his neck, and applying short strokes of concealer under his eyes and around his nostrils. That was if he was being low-key. In front of the mirror Stanley fidgeted for a moment — shouldn't he be doing something else? Wasn't there anything left to fix? But, no, this was it. He was dressed and he looked good. Stanley took a deep breath and shut out the light, walking up the hallway to Token's room. From downstairs he could hear clinking and chatting, the plucking of calm harp strings, and the soft tap of leather soles on hard carpet. Ostensibly Stanley was somehow late.

And when he knocked on Token's door, he was shocked to find Token in a tuxedo, with actual tails. It was a moment of great stress, given Stanley's terror that he had somehow missed this social cue, and the feeling of lust and attraction that began to form around how well and truly good Token looked in this formal attire. "Oh," he said, scratching briskly at his short hair. "Well, I see this won't do."

"I'm so sorry," Stanley said, and he was. "I didn't know — I feel so provincial."

"Oh, nonsense," said Token, and it was a relief to Stanley to hear lightness in his voice. "Berkshire is provincial, dear. Who wears a tux to a casual party in 1967? It's absurd." He yanked Stanley inside of his room.

"Really I feel stupid." Stanley sat on the bed, wondering if Token intended to lend him a suit.

"Oh, don't. You look so—" Token needed a moment to pick a word, apparently. "Handsome, really. Honestly. Let's see here." He began to slip out of his coat.

For just a moment the idea flashed in Stanley's mind that they would have sex, something they had not done on this jaunt at all. Token's cuffs were unlinked, his trousers re-hung, and Stanley saw that in Token's boxers there was a sturdy half-erection, primed for cautious growth. But then with a sigh Token began to dress again, this time in clothing that matched Stanley's more ideally.

"I won't have you feeling stupid. It won't look half as bad if we go down like this together."

"You don't have to change on account of me!"

"Nonsense," he repeated. "It will be fine, trust me."

There were some stares at the party, but trailing Token made it feel acceptable and glamorous. Stanley felt a bit famous, as if everyone was wondering who he was and what they could do for him. Token incessantly introduced him as "my Oxford friend," which both stung and was true, and Stanley made a sad, silly little game of drinking a cocktail which was on offer each time this was stated. It was a sort of premature summer-fruit squash cut with gin and a paper-thin slice of cucumber, served in an old, open-wide champagne glass. It wasn't quite strong enough, and soon Stanley abandoned his game and nibbled politely on Berkshire pork and stilton tarts, finger food that soaked the paper napkins on offer with velvety grease. If anything they seemed to have sat under a broiler for some time, the exposed edges of the pastry browned to brittleness.

In the sense that it was a cocktail party where proved to be a dearth of food; small plastic cups were stuffed with dollops of Eton mess, which Stanley felt should have been considered a sort of faux pas, as Token (and presumably his father, etc.) were Old Wykehamists. Perhaps Stanley was the only one at the party who had gone to regular old school and suffered through regular old home life in his adolescence. He wanted both to be admired and ignored, the subject of intrigue and then disinterest. Most of the conversations he fell into, with middle-aged women in short-sleeved long-hemmed beaded gowns, concerned safe topics of a generic nature: the weather had been good this week, all things considered, but soon it would turn; what did he think of the Queens Park Rangers? (he had no opinion); any thoughts on Manchester United? (no); any thoughts on the Gipsy Moth? Stanly did not know what that was. "You're quite uninformed, young man, aren't you?" asked a viscount's fat granddaughter, her introduction inclusive of her broken engagement to the ancient-blooded Earl Danborough, whose plane had gone down near Benelux.

"I suppose," said Stanley, cautiously finishing the end of his fourth drink. It seemed not to be affecting him; perhaps it was cut with water. "Mostly I don't care, darling," he drawled, turning up the effete edge to his voice.

"And quite underdressed to boot!" she added, a final stake in the heart. She then wobbled away, her rear sliding behind her like the bar car at the end of a commuter train, wider and somehow slower than the rest.

Stanley got another drink and found Token enmeshed in a chat with a fellow their own age, who introduced himself as Jason, Lord McHugh. He was balding already, and his tux made him look like something out of a BBC adaptation of the life of Gladstone. Stanley was certain he'd heard this all before. "Daddy was insistent I come down for this," he drawled. "Have to represent, you know. They're in Turks and Caicos. With the Snowdons, of course. This one is absolutely delicious, Black. Where'd you dig him up?"

There was something gay about the way he said this, a backhanded and bitchy ring to it, though nothing else about him was queer, besides the awkward fit of his tux. Stanley recoiled and said, "Magdalen," and stuck out his hand.

"Oh, never mind that." Jason took it, tentatively. "I'm up at Cambridge. Caius, actually."

"Stanley is a distinguished Waugh scholar," Token said evenly. "Be nice to him. This is all a bit of experiential archaeology for his thesis."

Stanley took a surreptitious gulp of his cocktail.

"Oh, is it?" Jason asked. "Well, that's genuine."

"Sorry," said Token. "He's a bit of a blowhard."

"Black can be a bit of a pill. So serious about things! Understandably, I suppose. Though great fun, at school. If you can believe it."

"How do you mean?" Stanley asked, casting an eye toward Token.

"Doesn't he know?"

"Not yet," said Token. "Though I suppose I'll take him out there this evening."

"Wouldn't that just be the scoop, for his report on this trip?"

"I am right here," said Stanley.

"He is writing an essay on Waugh, not an expose on the aristocracy."

"What's the difference," Stanley joked. He was now feeling upset and confused, the glass trembling in his hand.

As if to temper things, like he'd noticed, Jason turned his attention back to Token fully, and asked, "How's — well, I suppose it's Nommel now, isn't it." There was such concern in his tone that it somehow drowned out the element of a question.

"Well, he's fine," said Token. "Silently suffering. His way of doing things."

"Terribly tragedy," Jason blustered, "he was such a fine fellow."

"He was all right," said Token.

"For Craig, I mean," Jason said. "It's too young, you know." Now, finally, he sounded concerned and sincere.

"He'll get through it." There was sadness in Token's voice. "You know, he's got Annie now, and — it's his way."

"I cannot fathom marriage, could you?"

"I don't know," said Token, "though I'd also really hate to be rushed into it because my father died. I'd much prefer he lived forever."

"Then you'd never get your title, Black."

"The peerage is the responsibility, Jason. I much prefer my youth."

"You're the marrying type, though, Black. I can see it. Stability is your great interest. Everything else in ancillary."

"I don't know, really. I've not thought about myself enough to know." Turning to Stanley, he said, "This party's such a dud. You needn't stay, honestly."

"Well, where would I go?" Stanley asked.

"Anywhere you please." Token clapped his palms together and parted them, fingers splayed out. It was a weird theatrical gesture, as if he were breaking an actual spell. "I release you."

"I was here on my own accord, anyway." Stanley shrugged.

"There's a folly out there," said Token. "Shall we meet there in an hour?"

"Quite all right." Stanley put his drink down on the adjacent mantle. "Pleasure to have met you," he said to Jason. And to Token, "See you in an hour."


The folly was near to the house and ostentatiously large, larger than the follies he'd seen in the past, at Wendy's, but less innovative or inventive, and there appeared to be just the one. It was grand, a thankless colonnade, seemingly in commemoration of nothing. The sun was nearly done setting and Stanley still had The Green Carnation in his pocket, this time tucked into his jacket. He sat on the wet grass with his back to the monument, reading for as long as possible. The house was not so far off, he thought, though it seemed to recede into the background the darker it grew. By the time it was fully night Stanley had to fight the tightness in his eyes to force the words off the page, their meanings richer for the struggle.

When Token appeared his was without his jacket, a stricken look on his face.

"What's the matter?" Stanley asked. He took a hand and let Token hoist him, brushing off his pants.

"Your bum's all wet." Token said this in a proprietary way, as one might tell a hunting dog he'd blood on his teeth after savaging a rabbit. It was both demeaning and erotic to Stanley, as were a great many things about his very existence. Were they going to have sex? he wondered. He hoped. If not, why had he come here? To meet Jason, to be insulted by fat women, to turn down the possibility of a mucky tryst in the back room of a pub in some nowhere town?

"Well." Stanley cleared his throat. "I was sitting on the grass for rather a while."

"Let's climb up."

At the top of the folly Stanley tried to stare into the windows of the manor house, to glimpse the party inside. "I don't understand any of this," he said, reaching for Token's hand. In the dark he was unable to find it, and ended up standing with his arms crossed, all of his weight on his back leg. "This way of life," he clarified. "I simply don't comprehend it. I'm trying my dear, I am, but I simply cannot fathom it, any of it."

"Oh, Stanley." Token sighed, long and drawn-out. "There is nothing to come to understand about it. It is all just on the surface, don't you see? No greater meaning to it." He sounded so impossibly sad! Stanley longed to grab him, to comfort him. It was so easy with Kyle, their roles so clear and precise. Kyle would become upset and Stanley would console him, and that was the cycle of it, endlessly repeated. Token bore no access points. He would never say he was sad; he would never accept that sort of kindness. It felt to Stanley like an impermeable border. At that exact moment, looking down from this folly at the manor house Token grew up in, Stanley felt a renewed sense of purpose; he would somehow cross that border. The flush of realization filled him; beyond his dissatisfied lust, it occurred him that he cared for his person. Funny that it should come upon him on this folly, his arse all damp with spring rain.

Being early spring the ground was soaked; Stanley's loafers were flooded by the time they reached the chapel. "It's not ours," Token said, heavily. "Mum and Dad aren't religious. But it came with the place, or so I am told."

It was larger than Stanley imagined it, the scale and accomplishment of the Victorian construction out of sync with the rest of the estate. To Stanley's great surprise there was no key to the door; it simply pulled open when Token grasped the handle. The interior was too dark to make out any helpful detail, but then Token snapped on the light and a yellowish illumination filled the space, crackling and hissing like many of the outmoded electrical systems Stanley had encountered at Oxford, as if it had been installed begrudgingly.

"Well," said Token, in a somewhat resigned tone, "this is it."

The most compelling feature of the space were the tombs, dozens of them, marble effigies. "These aren't my people," Token said, stepping into the space. Perhaps on account of it being an Anglican worship space, Stanley felt a certain degree of apprehension concerning the chapel, with its cluster of deceased occupants. He marveled as how easily Token moved through the space, narrating its most peculiar aspects. "This is the fifth duke of Llewych and his wife Isabel of Saintonge, she was his second duchess ... I don't know what happened to the first. She had 17 of his children, four survived, all girls. So the duchy passed to his grand-nephew, the sixth duke — this was all before the revolution, you know, so the duke of Llewych was formally considered part of the French nobility..."

"Where did you learn all of this?"

Token paused at the feet of another dead duke, this one clad in full-armor with an open book below the spurs on his feet. Inscribed in it were the French words, which Stanley made out from his combined experience in Latin and friendship with fluent Wendy, My might is my god.

"I don't know," said Token, who threw the question off with a shrug. "Mum and Dad just sort of knew it."

"Where did they learn it?"

"From my deceased grandfather, I suspect."

"Well, what about—"

"I don't know, Stanley," said Token, wearily. He rested a hand on the knight's marble feet, reconfiguring his weight against the boxiness of the tomb sculpture. "It's family knowledge. This line died out and my great-grandfather bought the place, or maybe his great-grandfather. It's all a wash to me. I don't know. Does it appeal to your sense of appreciation for the antiquarian?"

"That's not me," said Stanley. "I'm strictly a modernist."

"Well," said Token, "aren't we all." He walked to the steps of the altar and took a seat beside the pulpit, head in his hands. "Come sit with me," he said.

Stanley did so, resting beside Token so their thighs were touching, and nothing else. It felt intimate, a tiny bit of solace in the otherwise technically empty chapel.

"That girl back at the pub," Token began a hitch in his voice betraying the tentative nature of what he was about to say. "Have you thought on her any further today?"

"No, of course I haven't," said Stanley. "Don't be stupid."

"It occurred to me at some point that perhaps she might play a larger role between us, her or someone like her."

Horror filled Stanley's consciousness, and yet he asked, "How do you mean?"

"I mean perhaps we could invite her—"

"Are you quite serious?" Stanley shouted. "No! Absolutely not!"

"I thought as much." Token sounded disappointed. Broken, somehow.

"Why ever?" Stanley managed to choke out. "How could you even ask me?"

"I don't know," said Token, "but it was stupid. Perhaps I just thought, well, you want certain things, and I do not want those things, and there are other things I want, and perhaps — perhaps, is it so stupid, to ask whether some third party might negotiate between our positions?"

"Um, literally? Yes, that's stupid! Token, I can't make it with a woman."

"Well, why couldn't you?" Token paused while Stanley gathered an answer. "I am not implying that you should or that you must, I am merely trying to understand—"

"I don't know!" said Stanley. "I don't want to, is that good enough? I don't even want to try! One mustn't just do something because he can, dear, I can't explain it!"

"Yes, of course that's good enough," said Token, "and you don't owe me any explanation. It's just that — well, I don't know. Perhaps I'd like to."

"So you're saying you haven't? Not ever? Or — have you? Have I left your bed and have you invited someone else into the void?" It was maddening to consider, though Stanley understood somehow that he had no right to be angry. He had no rights whatsoever.

"No, nothing like that! It's just — no one, ever? Not your friend Wendy? She's gorgeous."

"She propositioned me once," Stanley confessed, "but I turned her down."

"Are you not attracted to her?"

"No," Stanley seethed. "Not a bit."

"This is what I'm having a difficult time with," said Token. "The idea that perhaps I'll have to seal myself up, you know. To limit myself in one way. It feels unnatural to me. To limit myself. It's hard to fathom. Yet there is pressure — I am trying to be a good friend to you, Stanley, and I am failing."

"Why do you say that? No, you aren't."

There was a moment of compelling silence.

Then Token said: "On the wall you'll find a plaque with the visage of two young men. It's nothing fancy, and it's the only one. Go on. Take a gander."

Stanley rose up and began to search the walls for such a plaque. "All right…"

"Those are my brothers."

"You have brothers?" Stanley asked. He found what he was looking for, and hunched down to gain the best appreciation of it.

"Well, no, not strictly. You see, they both died before I was born. In the war, of course."

"Token!"

"Well, there you are. France, you know, somewhere like that."

Knowing he must say something, but not what precisely, Stanley tired with, "My uncle was in the war."

"Yes, I imagine he might've been."

"He survived, though." Studying the two profiles on the plaque, Stanley admired the craftsmanship, and the simplicity of the inscription: names, dates, and elegant Latin: memorabimus, memorabuntur.

Token stood up and walked toward Stanley, the scuff of his shoes on the marble floor slabs rhythmic and calming in some abstract way. Token put an arm around Stanley's back and rested his head on Stanley's shoulder. It was a frightening, unusual gesture, intimate and possessive. Stanley wrapped his own arm around Token's back, and they stood there clasped together for a moment, both of them staring up at the plaque.

"I know almost nothing about them, you know," Token said quietly. "Only that they died. Just like that, both gone. In the span of sixth months, my mother told me." Stanley could see that etched above them, but he said nothing as Token continued after a deep breath: "She sat me down one day, when I was just five, and told me. I have a distinct memory, actually, of this being something less than a revelation, as if it had been something I'd always known. And yet the look on her face — that was pain."

"And your father?" Stanley asked. The words came out dry and brittle.

"We've never really had a conversation about it," Token said. "I don't think they want to do as the plaque says, ironically. They were older, you know, in their early 40s. With two grown sons. Isn't my mother a wonderfully well-preserved 62 years? She doesn't look a day over 50."

Stanley found that to be roundly untrue, but he said nothing. He hated the idea of anyone criticizing his own mother, she of long-suffering endurance.

At this point Token broke away from Stanley's grasp, and rubbing his eyes, went to sit back down on the ground, near the altar. Stanley paused, wondering if he should follow. The heat of Token's embrace lingered around the muscles in his back; that would suffice, and Stanley kept his distance. "So they had you," he said, loud enough so that Token would hear.

"Of course they had me," he said, without bitterness in his tone; there was only resignation, and brutal honesty. "How does one put this, delicately? Stanley, there are remarkably few peers of, shall we say, African extraction. I'm sure they were aggrieved, and I believe the losses haunt them to this day. But I seem to owe my own existence to tragic happenstance, and the ensuing compulsion to correct course. I think my name is indicative—haven't you even wondered about that? 'Token' is hardly a usual name."

"I'd assumed it was some aristocratic affectation," said Stanley.

"It is in some abstract sense. It's like a little joke to the idea of tokenism, and meaningful in the sense that I'm considered literally a token on hope. It's sad to have to spell it out, but I feel this horrifying pressure to do my duty, as it were, to get married and start a family. Wouldn't it be a shame if this line should die out? Then this chapel would go on the market again, with some third family cramming their dead into its narrow aisles. Wouldn't that be a shame? So I'm curious, Stanley. What shall I do? Should I do what's right?"

"Well, I don't know." Stanley had the encroaching feeling that he was, in actual fact, being tested. "Token, I don't know."

"No, I am asking you, seriously," said Token. "What shall I do? Shall I embark on a life of homosexuality?"

"If that is what you want."

"It would be such an affront to my parents, even if they hardly knew at all. I am supposed to get married and have children — how could I not? How could I do that to them? I feel the weight of responsibility on me."

"Then do that," said Stanley, "if it's so important." His tone was laden with annoyance, perhaps a bit of disappointment. "You're putting this to me as if it's a quandary I might solve. I sympathize. To some extent I empathize, as it's not as if I don't feel the weight of my parents' disappointment. I assure you that they are very disappointed in me."

"How can you be so ambivalent about it?"

"I am not ambivalent," said Stanley. "Yet I feel like you are prompting me to participate in some ill-defined assessment by telling me something that is emotionally difficult and then proposing two solutions which are sharply juxtaposed, almost as if they are mutually exclusive and a decision to enact one must be chosen now. I feel awful about the situation, dear. But I couldn't dictate life steps for you. It must come from you, do you see?"

"I see that you're being resistant to taking an impassioned stance."

"Well, I don't believe in hiding. I don't believe in the closet. That is my foremost passion in relation to this conversation, and isn't that a point on which we disagree?"

"So you resent me for being in the closet?"

"I've literally never said that."

"But you don't feel like there's value in privileging one's family over one's self — what if one's family is one's self? What if that's the truth of one's nature? What if — what if you don't understand because there is nothing at stake in your family?"

"Token—"

"What if the so-called closet isn't a lie?" Token continued. "What if all choices are valid? What if a person could honestly choose either — what criterion is sufficient to inform that choice?"

There was a moment of pensive silence; Stanley and Token remained as quiet as the sepulcher that contained them.

Finally, in a weary tone, Stanley said, "I don't know."

"So you are saying you have nothing to tell me on the subject of why I shouldn't go out and get a wife."

Stanley cleared his throat. "Most people do have them."

"Most men, you mean."

"Yes," said Stanley. "I suppose that is what I mean."

On the walk back to the house it was much noisier out, between the rustling of the estate flora and fauna and the soft crunch of leather shoes against the gravel drive near the front of the crumbling façade. Sometimes their arms or hands might brush together, a total accident, but otherwise there was an unusual amount of reserve in the way in which they walked side-by-side. Stanley wondered if anyone suspected, and then he wondered why it should matter. It was not as if they'd done anything illicit in their time away. Something told Stanley they wouldn't transgress that evening at all.

"I am sorry," he said, gently, when they were closer to the house but just out of earshot. "I don't know much about grief."

"Neither do I," said Token. "I never knew them." He stopped, taking Stanley by the shoulder. "It was important to tell you, though. If you were in my social circle you would doubtless be aware, but you aren't, and so I felt — well, I wanted you to know. I felt you couldn't be denied that information if you wished to truly know me. So now you do, and that is everything."

"I know you're a high-quality person, though. I know you're diligent, and hard-working, and that you don't take Conrad too seriously."

"And that's all you think of me?"

"Well." Stanley felt the heat of embarrassment color his face. He crossed his arms. "I think other things, from time to time."

"Tell me sometime, then."

"Of course."

With a half-smile, Token reached for Stanley's other shoulder, squeezing it just once. He said nothing and walked up toward the front door.


After a late-March Easter, Stanley found himself in Garrison's office again, staring across a broad desk at the old man.

"Marsh," he said, but he didn't sound irritated, for once. "I trust you're getting on with your thesis on Waugh?"

"Oh, yes."

"Not finding him too vacuous?"

"Oh, no." Stanley kept his hands on his thighs, tensing them slightly.

"You seem nervous."

"Ah. Should I be?"

"No, not at all." Garrison stood up. "You should calm down." He strode to the window, which he pounded on until it slammed open. "It's nice out today, isn't it? Did you have a nice month off?"

"Oh. Ah, yes, I did." Stanley hoped Garrison wouldn't know he was lying. The truth was that Stanley was still reeling from week of his vacation in London, with Token one weekend and Kyle the next. It was a whirlwind, late evenings (as late as 11) drinking at pubs, and lazy afternoon strolls along the river, teas at Token's parents' house in the city, then they'd meet Wendy for a drink and window-shop in Knightsbridge. Wendy had taken Stanley down the Kings' Road, where he'd marveled at the mix of young women in high skirts and fussy old men in wool suits in the rain. Mid-week Stanley got in a taxi with his trunk and went up to Islington, where Kyle's family welcomed him with open arms, despite the air of continued mourning in the house.

"Eric's on some miserable jaunt to Rome with his mother and her boyfriend," Kyle informed Stanley, tugging him up the stairs by the arm. "Oh, the housekeeper will get your trunk, you know, why'd you bring such a big one? Anyway, so, I'm dreadfully lonely, Mommy and Daddy are still so torn up over things! It's no better than it was at Christmas. You're lucky you've spent some time with human beings. I'm dying to do a turn."

But as much as he wanted to, Stanley felt obliged to decline.

It had led to the most splendid row, with Kyle accusing Stanley of not finding him attractive. "Is it my lip?" he wailed. "Or is it someone else?"

Stanley was horrified. "I find you very attractive," he said, placid. "It's not your lip."

"Is it someone else?"

"Does Eric count as someone else?"

"No," Kyle said bitterly.

"Oh, you're so done with him, then?"

"Well, he's not here right now! He's not here when I need him."

"That's fine, then," said Stanley, "but if you haven't sworn him off, I remain reluctant to cross him."

"Why not?" Kyle moaned. "He deserves it! He deserves it for abandoning me."

"Abandoning you?" Stanley seethed. "Kyle, he split your bloody lip open! Literally, actually!"

"Maybe I deserved it," Kyle wept.

"Of course you bloody didn't! But I'm not going to make it with you to get back at some violent arsehole who socked you in the face. Or is it just that you're horny and I'm the only one around? Do you even know what you want?"

"I just want you to fuck me right now," Kyle cried, "that's all I want."

At another point, even a few months prior, Stanley might have said, "Well, let's have at it, then." He was hard-up to fuck something, anything beside his own hand. For a moment he felt actual anger toward Token, in the sense of, how dare he consider himself too noble, or whatever, to let Stanley have the sort of sex he wanted? But then Stanley thought back on his recent trip to Llewych, and decided with finality that he must commit to Token, yes, that was what he must do. Here was someone who was sad, who had a great many pressures on him; the very least Stanley could do would be to avoid contributing pressure of his own. In what sense sex with Kyle might contribute pressure, Stanley wasn't certain, but something about it was a little cease-and-desist order impressed upon his heart. Stanley knew nothing about how to carry on in a relationship, but he knew having sex with Kyle now would be in error.

It wasn't just that, though. It was too many things, the specter of Eric and his ownership of Kyle fore among them. Kyle then ordered Stanley out of his room, leaving Stanley to go downstairs himself. He found the key to the garden and sat there, in the back of the house, smoking on the steps. It was too early in spring for a full planting, but he felt comforted by the dark, cloistered feeling of that backyard, staring deep into it as if it physically continued on forever. That wasn't the case, but Stanley was terrified to go back inside to dig in his trunk for a book. There came a moment when he suspected Kyle might have come up to the back door to stare at Stanley through the glass, but Stanley did not turn around. He sat out there until well after nightfall, and when he went upstairs to bed, Kyle was asleep already. He did not feel at ease getting under the covers with Kyle there, lest there develop a misunderstanding between them about the sex they couldn't enjoy. So Stanley took a pillow from the bed — Kyle was sprawling in the middle of it, a pillow free between his open legs on top of the quilt — and slept on the floor.

They'd repeat this arrangement for the balance of Stanley's stay. Kyle remained bitter and hostile. "I haven't asked you to go because I need someone to accompany me to the opera, et cetera," he tossed off over breakfast.

"Well, that's generous."

"So don't you dare leave!" Kyle added.

Trapped there, Stanley escorted Kyle on the most repetitious and thankless of errands. They went to the kosher butcher and bought hens for Kyle's mother to roast for a future dinner; they went to the tailor to have Kyle's new trousers mended; they delivered a file of legal documents to a courier for Kyle's father. On Saturday they saw a dress-rehearsal matinee with Wendy, whose mother had a box. It was De Rosenkavalier. Kyle wept through it ("This is a comedy," Wendy hissed at him); afterward he pronounced it distasteful.

"Was it the sapphic bit?" Wendy asked.

"The whole German bit mostly," Kyle snapped.

"Sounds familiar," she said.

"I don't owe you any explanation," said Kyle. "You wouldn't understand."

"Oh, wouldn't I?" She shrugged at Stanley, as if they shared some bank of information that might make this retort relevant. But as Stanley just gave her a ceaseless inquiring look, she shrugged again and waved it away with an, "Oh, forget it!"

As they were nearish to the Ritz they stopped in for a drink at the Rivoli. Kyle was pointedly trying to be nasty, sucking his teeth and gesturing to the extent that she asked him to stop. "I appreciate that you are excited about De Rosenkavalier," she said, "but it's not appropriate for public."

They had never really been friends, and Stanley had always regretted it. Kyle was aggressive where Wendy was solicitous, and vice-versa. Perhaps if Stanley had a basic interest in mediation, it would have been feasible, but he was repelled by their squabbling and disinterested in inserting himself deeply enough to make up for their mutual ill-will. It was too bad, because they shared common interests: in French culture, in opera, in cultivating a personal aesthetic through meticulous self-design. It was interesting to Stanley how, on Wendy, these traits painted her as weakly aristocratic and benign, while the very same set of affectations made Kyle look like a vicious old queen. At least he hadn't worn makeup, Stanley figured, though while they fought, he fantasized about lipstick and blush smearing against his face and Kyle drunkenly kissing him. Stanley longed for that.

"Didn't you notice my lip?" Kyle asked. "You haven't said anything."

"Yes," she said, "precisely."

"I'm an old hag now. Who's going to want me like this?"

"You see, that's the question I ask myself," she replied, "more often than not."

"Oh, Wendy, heartface, don't worry. Someone will marry you for your money."

"I should say the same to you."

"Yes, well, unfortunately, I'm afraid I wouldn't even know what to do with that."

"The woman, you mean? Or the money? Because if it's the former, I assume you'd just belittle her into a corner after she treated you to the opera, isn't that right?"

"Calm down, my dear, it was only a dress rehearsal."

Tired of their cattiness, and profoundly disappointed in Wendy's insistence on feeding into Kyle's worst qualities, Stanley begged off and walked up to Soho Square, leaving Kyle to go home to bid farewell to the Sabbath, and Wendy for a trip to the Lansdowne for dinner with her parents. After putting Wendy in a cab and before parting, Kyle said to Stanley, "I'd love to go to the Bucky with you and have some excitement, but I'm afraid it might impede your chances. Also, I am sure Mommy and Daddy want to see me, so they can propose the same battery of questions concerning my face and how it became ruined, exactly."

"Oh, it is not ruined, and who said I was looking?"

Kyle did not address either sentiment. He merely shrugged and said, "If I don't get shagged soon I'll really begin to despair."

"Oh, please don't despair." Placing a hand on Kyle's shoulder Stanley gave him a chaste kiss on the cheek. "I'll be home this evening."

"Home? You mean my home," said Kyle. "As though we live together or something."

"I am using it very figuratively." Stanley blushed.

"Of course, of course. Fetch me a cab, my dear, won't you?" And Kyle stood back on the pavement in his burgundy trousers and boxy black fur-trimmed coat, scowling as though he thought he wasn't being watched. When Stanley held the cab door open, though, he got a quick look at Kyle's expression in the instant before it changed, softening, turning from disgusted to miserable. He said nothing as he got into the cab, and Stanley heard him quip, "Yes, hello, I'm headed up to Islington, you may take Upper Street—" and that was it.

Choosing not to go to the Bucky, Stanley sat in Soho Square with the newspaper, watching men of all types slip through the park on their ways to various ventures, past the Tudor-revival structure at the center of the garden. Once, two summers ago, Kyle had whispered in Stanley's ear that the little hut was a cottage, and that men did unspeakable things in there. Now Stanley got up and, though the sky was turning dark and the lamps had come on, he tried to gain access to the rumored facility inside. There was a door but it was well locked, and Stanley discerned no activity inside anyway. Disappointed, he filtered around Soho for a time, enjoying the queens who came out to be seen, their 1920s postures the clearest and most-shared trait that they all belonged to this secret little club. Like the Tudor hut one had to be alerted to the presence of a secret to begin to unlock its finer points, yet Stanley had found no way inside the structure, much as he had felt stupid trying to walk forward through his hips like that, holding a cigarette a foot ahead and gesturing with a bent pinky. In a bookstore soon to close for the evening an old man with a rather outdated wool hat followed him around the periodicals until Stanley paused and said, "May I help you?" The chap simpered and said no and disappeared. Back outside it had seemingly dropped five degrees, and Stanley crossed over the main road to stroll up through Fitzrovia en route to the Goodge Street station. Stepping off Tottenham Court Road and toward the ticket counter, his heart broke a little, missing the glimmer of the ancient stones in anachronistic gaslight after a misty, humid day.

If it were possible to be in love with a city and all of its people and the minerals in its buildings and the electricity that burned there through the night, Stanley figured, he might be in love with this place. Just a bit. But the very notion was overly romantic and consciously foolish. He silently chided himself for it as he swayed roughly on the balls of his feet as the train rolled northward. He said nothing about it to Kyle, and concealed that he had deliberately taken an inconvenient route home merely to gawk at men on the train.


Having come to the portion of his studies that most heavily concerned typing and retyping his last third-year manuscript, Stanley relished the chance to interface with his work on a critical level. Garrison had praised it and ripped it apart and praised it and ripped it apart so many times that it took real effort, and a full bottle of whisky, to be both honest about and proud of his analysis. It was good undergraduate work, or would be when it was finished, and he was proud of how good it was but honest that he was still, after all this, an undergraduate. "I am curious to see what you turn in, though, in the end," Garrison had said at the end of their last meeting. The truth was, part of Stanley's heart wasn't in this, and he was trying to discern where it might be. Token had already announced his intention to go down, and in some small measure Stanley wondered if he mightn't follow.

But then, Stanley had no illusions, not even small ones, that following Token to London might result in something productive, not in the sense that a traditional courtship might have yielded an engagement. Token intended to begin a law course at King's College, a second undergraduate degree; he swore he did not know what he would do with it, but had stated simply to Stanley one evening, "I mean to be productive." Meanwhile, he focused on finishing his work on Conrad, a draft of which Stanley had received to edit, tied with a red ribbon so the papers didn't go flying when a draft blew in. In relation to Craig, whose attentions to finishing the degree seemed to have petered out entirely in recent months, Token's determination was endearing and ennobling, to Stanley. He wanted to tell Kyle all about it, but that would have meant telling Kyle about the year-long secret relationship Stanley had tried, perhaps badly, to conceal. Then they might have had to be honest with each other, and Stanley would have had to confess that maybe the only thing keeping Stanley at Oxford for another year was Kyle.

Kyle had a bad habit of forcing his way into Stanley's evenings when Stanley himself intended only to work, and this evening was no exception. The rapping on the door was faint under the clack of the typewriter, but once Stanley paused for a drink of whisky he heard it. "Coming," he said, screwing the cap back on the bottle. He hadn't bothered with a glass.

What Stanley saw when he opened the door was shocking: Kyle's face was swelling, red as a piece of raw meat, eyes blackened and lip split open a second time. Stanley clutched at the collar of his polo and yanked Kyle in by the sleeve of his wide-necked jumper. It had been raining all night and it was raining harder now; having come over from his building Kyle's hair was frizzy and matted, a victim of the rain. And it was flecked, in parts, with blood. It took a moment of silent examination to see that it was coming from his nose, pouring from his nose, blood and snot and actual tears smeared everywhere.

Not knowing what to say, Stanley shut the door.

"Well," Kyle tried. It came out very wet and very unclear. "I think we've broken up."

Quietly, Stanley asked, "You and Eric?"

"Yeh," said Kyle, unable to get the whole word out. "I think m'lip's split agin."

"Are your teeth broken?"

Kyle shook his head. "I don'thin so."

"Jesus," Stanley whispered. He pulled Kyle into the bedroom, helping him down onto the bed. "I don't know what to do."

"Please think of something," Kyle tried to say.

Stanley fell onto the bed and tried to get a good look at Kyle's face. "Do you want a Panadol? Or some water?"

"I dunno."

It was only then that Stanley noticed Kyle was bare-legged, wearing only a pair of briefs and one soaked sock. "I'll, um — wait here."

Back into the small seating area, Stanley fell onto a seat and rubbed his face vigorously, trying to think. His mind was blank with fear, unable to come up with anything. He had to do something, he had to — would Token know what to do? No, surely not, Token did not deserve to become wrapped up in this. Stanley would kill Eric, he would absolutely slaughter him. He would — no, it wasn't productive to worry about it now. He paced back and forth, on the verge of some sort of anxiety episode, not sure what to do but knowing that poor Kyle was sitting on the bed, bleeding out of his nose and mouth, waiting for Stanley to introduce a solution that would make this go away.

He went back into the bedroom, the spooky red light of a lava lamp burning onto the wall against his dresser, the glint of the stained glass shade that hung over a mirror blinding if one caught it at the wrong angle. Stanley turned the lamp away and sat back down at the foot of his bed. He'd had sex here with Token for the first time, he thought inappropriately, Token had clumsily fucked him in the arse right here for the first time many months ago. Stanley grabbed Kyle's hand and Kyle pulled it against his chest. He was balancing against the wall.

"Kyle." It came out hoarse. "I'm going to call an ambulance."

"No," Kyle insisted. "Please fix it."

"I can't fix it, Kyle. I think your nose is broken."

"Just fix it, Stanley, please." It was coming out garbled. "I can't, I can't—"

"I think your nose is broken." Stanley was trying not to betray Kyle with alarm, but it was difficult not to let onto the immensity of this. "I cannot set your nose. It's still bleeding. If you keep bleeding you'll pass out."

"Just get a towel," said Kyle. "Please."

"I don't think—"

"Please, please." This was just begging.

"You can't just bleed to death on my bed!" Stanley snapped. He immediately regretted it. "All right, I'm sorry. But I have to call, all right? I'm not a fucking doctor, Kyle, I can't fix this!"

"Yes you can, Stanley, please, my parents, my — please, I can't, you can't—"

Stanley let Kyle roll his head into the clean, white shoulder of the polo while the phone rang. Kyle was actually crying now. Stanley hoped the operator on the other side of the line heard every sodden gasp of it.

"Well," Stanley said, hanging up the phone. "They are on their way."

"I don't want to go to prison," Kyle cried.

"No one's going to prison," said Stanley. Of course, it occurred to him even as he said it that someone should go to prison, and yet, ironically, that person almost certainly wouldn't. There was, of course, a relative likelihood that Kyle might go to prison if he fingered Eric as the cause of this, because then the whole thing would come out. But what was Stanley supposed to do? He couldn't leave Kyle bleeding on the bed. Stanley kept Kyle from reclining, though he professed to be tired; Kyle might have had a concussion, or he might swallow some blood. Any number of things could have happened, Stanley thought; any number of things might happen now that this had come to pass. It did occur to Stanley that Kyle's father was a lawyer, so perhaps that would be enough to mend any future legal scrapes. But then Stanley realized that he had a half-naked, bleeding boy in his arms, and that an ambulance was coming. Perhaps he should get Kyle a pair of trousers.

"It's going to be all right," he said, slipping off of the bed and stumbling toward his dresser. He found a pair of black slacks that would probably fit Kyle, and brought them over to the bed. "I know it doesn't seem like it now, but it will be."

"How d'you know?"

Of course, Stanley didn't know, but he gently lifted one of Kyle's feet so that he could roll a trouser leg up toward Kyle's knee. "I just assume Eric wouldn't want you in jail, especially seeing as a trial of any sort would expose all of his nasty business. It's very Wildean, isn't it, and as an English boy he surely must know that."

"He's German," said Kyle.

"I mean English language — studies," said Stanley. "And anyway — the other leg, darling, come on. Yes, that's it. Only so many bad things can happen to a person."

"This's awful," Kyle wept. "It hurts very badly."

"Shhh, that's it. Let me button these" — ironic, since all Stanley had ever wanted was to get Kyle's trousers off — "and there, see? It looks much less suspect now. How did this happen to you? What shall we tell them at A and E?"

"He pushed me into a doorframe."

"What if you fell down the stairs?" Stanley asked.

"Whatever." Kyle started crying: "My fucking face!"

"I know, darling, I know. Shhh." Stanley wished he had some ice, but he hadn't anything like that. Now Kyle's face was swollen like a boxer's, actually becoming much worse. There was blood on very nearly everything, including Stanley's hands and his white shirt, the bedspread and the wall. "Shall we find you some shoes? I know it's awfully déclassé, but you could borrow a pair of my plimsolls, if you like." Stanley had two pairs, neither of which he thought would fit Kyle; they would probably be a size or two large.

"If this is what happens," Kyle cried, "what's the point?"

Such an amorphous question, and yet Stanley looked down on the boy he loved, crying and bleeding and wet from the rain. Stanley had loved him for going on three years now. "Eric is — there aren't enough words for him. But when you find a good one, things should right themselves. It's worth waiting for. I don't know much, but I know that."

"And what then?" Kyle asked, wetly.

No matter how deeply he looked into his soul, Stanley had never been able to come up with an answer for that.

"Thought not." Kyle's head knocked into the wall and he cried for another five minutes. Then, the ambulance came.


In the end, this was what Stanley had learned at university: Life could be fun. And dangerous, and frightening, and terribly uncertain. In his squalid old bedroom in his parents' old row house, Stanley had always felt cosseted, restless, and empty. Then on some cloudy Oxford Saturday he'd stumbled into the cloister for a fag and met Kyle Broflovski. Stanley had liked boys; he had known boys at school; he had taken the time to fuck one or two of them, out of some sort of lascivious compulsion. But before meeting Kyle, Stanley had never had fun with a boy. Or really at all. He spent time with Kyle because he wanted to, because for three very long, heady years it had been all cigarettes on the roof at midnight and bottle after bottle of the palest cava, washing down mouthfuls of salmon salad on stale bread and, frankly, mouthfuls of come, of spit, of the taste of stale smoke after a night smoking on the rooftop. Mouthfuls of treacherous gossip, braggadocio, thinly veiled euphemisms and back-alley cants. Life was good; life was lovely.

Life was ending.

Stanley had sat with Kyle for as long as he could manage, the black-violet swell of his face increasingly unbearable. Yet Stanley forced himself to stay put, Kyle's still hand in his trembling grasp, cotton wool stuffed up his nose, stained with brown, dry blood. Here was the most adult moment of their lives, and it was no fun whatsoever.

Around dawn a mousy nurse came with a sedative and a glass of water; both were in paper cups on a cold metal tray. It clanked when she set it down near the bed, pulling back the partition that would keep them hidden from the rest of the emergency department. She must not have been old, the nurse, given her sunny disposition and unlined face, but she wore thick nude-colored stockings with black patent shoes, and she had the just-kempt look of someone biding her time. Stanley liked her.

She handed the paper cup to Kyle, saying, "There you go, love. Take this. You'll get some rest, then."

"I hope I never wake up," said Kyle.

She had no patience for that. "Don't be sour," she said, "it's only a broken nose."

"And a lip," Stanley added.

"Yes, I guess that's right." She handed Kyle the little paper cup with water, and after he had swallowed it, she put on a pair of latex gloves and looked at it, swollen and pierced where her colleague on the earlier shift had injected it with something — an analgesic or antibiotics, Stanley hadn't caught. He hadn't been allowed to sit with Kyle then. "You know what's curious about it," she said, "is that it looks like this has happened all before, and someone stitched it up already." She let go of Kyle's lip and peeled off the gloves. "You're a lucky boy, to have a friend to bring you in. You have to watch where you're going in the future, love, or you'll put out an eye."

"Yes," said Kyle, "I'll be more careful in the future."

"And what about you?" Stanley asked her.

"What about me? This is my last shift this week. Then I'm headed to St. Ives for a holiday weekend."

"That'll be lovely," said Stanley. "I've never been."

"Oh, we go every year," she said, "my old man and I." At this she made a conscious gesture, tipping her left hand toward him so he could catch a glimpse of her ring, lest he try to ask her out. She was picking up little bits of trash, and then began to readjust Kyle's bed so he could sleep, cranking it with great effort. Stanley never noticed these things, what women did or what they were wearing. "Where'd you get these old stitches?" she asked Kyle.

"Oh," he said, growing sleepy. "Why, are they horrible?"

"Well, they look like they came out badly, that's all. They didn't do it here, did they?"

"No," said Kyle, sounding as if in a daze, "not here."

"Just noticing," she said.

"Do you sew a lot of stitches?" Stanley asked.

"No." She laughed, briskly. "Came this close to being a surgeon!" She made a little gesture with his finger and thumb, the finger with the wedding band splayed out again. "Well, rest up. We'll take good care of your friend. We'll watch him until this evening and let him go, I imagine. Will you pick him up, or is there a parent, a girlfriend—?"

"Just me."

"Well, he's lucky he has a friend who'll look after him. Young men can be so reckless."

"Yes," said Stanley. "They can, I'm sure."

Kyle was soon out cold, his sleep peppered with the lull of low-grade snoring. Then Stanley became thirsty, and got a weak tea from the cafeteria. It tided him over just long enough that it was properly the next day, and his friendly nurse has disappeared, perhaps off to Cornwall. Now Stanley and hungry and exhausted, in multiple senses, and Kyle was asleep. He left a note:

Stepped out to preserve my sanity. Will return. — SM


Over a double-portion of pricey whisky Stanley dwelt for some time. He knew he should eat, especially as it was midday and he'd not eaten anything since dinner, but the thought of food was unbearable. The bloodstains on his trousers and shirt were oxidizing, turning a rusty brownish, hardening as they dried. Stanley was going to need new trousers, he knew; these were ruined. It was a good batch, the barkeep had promised him, when Stanley had ordered his drink; he could barely taste it.

"I knew I'd find you here."

It was impossible to believe that Eric had come, but here he was, looming over Stanley in his rower's whites, as if the previous night's actions meant nothing to him. Scowling, Stanley turned away.

"Sitting in the pub drowning your sorrows, not even half past noon. At first I thought you might come after me, but you don't have the bollocks for that. So I figured I'd come. Do you the favor."

Anger burned through Stanley so brightly that he became incapacitated, unable to even look at him.

"Ey, not going to take a swing at me?"

Stanley was quiet, staring deeply into the amber reflection that glanced up at him from his glass of whisky. "No. I'm not. What would it do?"

At this, Eric laughed. It wasn't a joyous laugh, but one of ironic relief. Stanley looked up to see Eric occupying the spot across from him, on the cushy velveteen banquette. It gasped a little moan as Eric sank into it, his broad chest and uniform brown hair with its center part betraying just how sick he looked. It reminded Stanley of the way he'd felt following his first lone tutorial, with Garrison, in that rainy October of 1964. Yet Eric merely set his beer down and, in contraction with his clear nerves, said, "Who cares what it would do? An actual man would thrash me. I know you'd like to."

"That wouldn't make me much better than you, would it?"

"Again, Marsh, there's your problem. Who cares?"

"Well," said Stanley, "I care."

"Don't tell me it's not what the Jew would want."

Now, that made Stanley angry. "Well, maybe that's my job, isn't it, as his best friend? To protect him from what he wants? Well, I've been trying, Eric. And it's impossible. He wants his own destruction, all right, you broke his fucking nose."

A slight change, but Stanley could have sworn he saw Eric turn one shade paler. "Oh, did I?"

"You know you did, you great big fat arse!"

"Ey! I'm not fat, I'm athletic."

"Oh, sod your athleticism," said Stanley. "Why do you think I want to fight you? I just want to be left alone for a bit."

"All right," said Eric, some amusement in his voice. "Have it your way, I guess." He took a step away, and while Stanley sighed in relief, Eric had spun around again before the last breath of wind had passed Stanley's lips. "You know what your problem is, Marsh?"

"Name just one. I can't set a broken nose?"

"No. Let's be honest, though, I must have done that Jewess a right favor. There was only room for improvement in that bloody great nose of hers. … No, Marsh, your problem is that you actually believe he didn't deserve it, that nothing your beloved Kyle would have done might have warranted my fist in his mouth."

"Fuck you!" Stanley seethed hopping to his feet.

Eric spread his arms. "Well, I'm perfectly open to that, if you insist."

"Get out of my sight."

"These clichés are disappointing. I expected better from a fledgling poetess. I just want you to know — he's not so innocent. That's why I came down here. I'm not looking for a fight. I just wanted to twist the knife. Kyle and me, we're even now. It's over."

"Nothing he did to you could ever be worthy of that! It's not even that nose that's the issue, Eric, isn't it, it's that he's got no recourse!"

"Well, why d'you assume he's the one who deserves recourse? How do you know I wasn't serving up my own recourse? It's very unfair of you to just assume."

"How could anything he did to you possibly equal that?" Stanley felt he might cry. "As if it were just the one thing, and not a series of things, a series of treatments—"

"Treatments, that's rich, as if you know what went on between us, as if he ever told you anything but the spiteful little Jew-lies he wore to needle away at you. Do you know what sort of barmy rubbish I had to read to make it to the end of this sodding course, Marsh? I had to read Icelandic sagas. I had to write an exam second year on the bloody talion. It was out of alignment and I reset it, that's all. Eye for an eye. Now we're equal."

"How could you ever possibly be equal?" Stanley gasped. "Are you listening to yourself? You're immense and he isn't. You're a rower and he isn't. You're never going to be convicted, and he might!"

"Well, I hadn't thought to go to Betty Bracelets," said Eric, "but the idea's not half-bad."

Stanley lunged forward and drew back his fist, seizing Eric by the collar of his shirt, shouting, "If you bloody well do—!"

A smile lit up Eric's face. "Well? Are you going to fucking do it?"

Stanley's grip on Eric's shirt loosened.

Eric stumbled away, sputtering, brushing at himself and picking at his clothing. But then, he straightened out, and plastered a silly look on his face. "Well," he said, "thought not."

"Get out."

"Fine!" Eric exclaimed. "That's fine!" He backed away slowly, and then he turned to scramble out.

"Moron," Stanley cried, sitting back down. "Bloody great fuck." He finished his whisky in one taxing mouthful.


At a difficult lunch on an early Tuesday afternoon, Kyle picked at his bacon-tomato sandwich with mayo and delivered a crushing blow to the promise of Stan's future happiness: he had decided to postpone his education indefinitely and go down at the end of the term.

"At the end of the term?" Stanley asked, teaspoon falling from his grip to clatter against the laminate tabletop. "But, darling, that is soon."

"Yes," said Kyle, "very soon." His nose was bandaged, the bruises obscured and fading around its peripheries. He had gotten it set over the weekend by a London surgeon, and Stanley both dreaded and longed to see what horror was hidden underneath its adhesive concealment. "I love Blake," he said slowly, as if Blake were some chap he'd gone home with just recently. "I would have given my whole life away to that man. But, what am I to do? I can't stay here, Stanley. It's too much for me to bear."

"Well, Eric is leaving, so you needn't leave on his account. Think of what you could do, for Blake and for yourself."

"You say that as if I owe everything to Blake and nothing to myself." Kyle's voice tightened. "I can't stay here. I can do a degree on William Blake at nearly any place in the country with a first in English. If that's what I want to do. I'm not so sure it is what I want to do, anymore. My father could get me a job, I believe. A good one. I've considered asking — that is, if I decide not to do the degree. In either case, I can't stay here."

Stanley's heart leapt at the reality of a time without Kyle. It pained him to think that Kyle, erudite and yet beautiful like a consuming fire, might not want to devote his life to a Romantic poet. Kyle, who moved like an image from Blake, his hair as if painted by some forgotten master's brush. Who else could make sense of such passions and ignominies, the very soul of art? "Well," Stanley said, his words dry. "I suppose you must do what is best."

"Yes, that's true. I must." It was a wry sort of agreement, and Kyle sealed it with a chaste kiss. He said, "Ow," pressing three fingers to the side of the pale, mummiform ridge that his nose had become. The grit of it still lingered on Stanley's cheek. "Well, I'm off to make sense of my exams, I suppose. Please telephone." Kyle took Stanley's expression quite seriously then: "It's not goodbye."

"Oh. Yes, I know. Of course not." Another cordial peck on the cheek, and they parted.

It felt strange to Stanley that Kyle should be going down. He had spent his whole life in Oxford unaware of Kyle's very existence, and now Stanley dragged himself back up toward Magdalen with the weight of Kyle's absence. He should have said something, berating himself. "Please stay," he might have said, "for I cannot do it without you." Instead, Stanley collapsed into bed, fully intending to read some of The Loved One. He awoke an hour later with the book splayed on his chest, rising and falling.

Stanley went to mass that evening at Christ Church. It was at such a choral performance that he had, years ago now, met the Lady Wendy Testaburger. Were some of these the same boys singing? Stanley let the performance cascade and ascend, relishing the ideal match between the cathedral architecture and the vocal arrangement. Wendy was going down, too. They all were. At least there was this, Stanley figured. There was this and there was the promise of rejoining Kyle in a year's time. There would be weekends at Llewych with Token, Stanley hoped, the fodder for comedies of manners and slim volumes on the juxtaposition of grandiosity with ruin from the outsider's perspective. As the concert receded and the audience applauded, Stanley had talked himself into optimism, somehow. He'd been so concerned with Kyle, of course, recently. Now his thoughts turned to Token. He considered going up to New College, to see if Token was in, but it was too near the end of term, his obligations already put off too often for Kyle's sake. Stanley headed home.

Coincidentally, it was walking back to Magdalen that he ran into, of all people, Craig Tucker.

"Marsh," he said, in that formidable monotone. "Where's your charge? I'd heard you were busy playing nursemaid."

"You heard about that?" Stanley asked. He crossed his arms in the road, feeling childish while Craig stood with his hands folded neatly together. They slid into the pockets of his out-of-season gray suit.

"Indirectly," said Craig. "Your friend Marjorine told Clyde."

"I didn't realize they still spoke."

"I believe they maintain a certain sort of correspondence." He shrugged. "One might call it speaking. I don't understand it, myself."

Stanley looked him up and down. Surely Craig had had sex with someone, if not Clyde. "When's the wedding?" he asked, trying to be both cordial and sharp.

"Oh, I don't think that's been decided yet," he said. "Since it's such a recent development, you know."

"That seems off. Token said he went with you to Monaco back at the break."

"Oh, you meant my wedding," said Craig. "I meant Black."

"Token's not getting married," said Stanley.

"Well." Craig seemed taken aback. He bristled. "I'm sorry, actually." Stanley could see his hands clench in his pockets. "He is, though."

"No—"

"Yes, to a co-ed," said Craig. "A Lady Wendy Testaburger. She's a—"

Stanley shouted, "Surely not!" He was surprised to hear it come out like that, his mind reeling.

"I am really very sure," said Craig. "Isn't she a friend of yours?"

"Well, yes, I did think so!"

"What's the matter with you?" Craig asked. "No. Please don't answer. You know it's nothing to do with you, of course. You must know that?"

"I really don't have time for this!" Something forced him to pause, to say, "Well, Craig—"

"Your grace."

"It was — well, I couldn't say it's been pleasant." Turning on his heels, Stanley fled back to college at top speed.


Curious enough, Stanley's first impulse was to call Kyle, to head straight to Kyle's rooms. Though they'd just seen each other at lunch, Stanley suddenly longed for Kyle's presence, for the camaraderie he might have offered. It was the sort of news one wished to spread around, to discuss first. But that would have been disastrous. Kyle didn't even know about Token. The impact — to let everything come spilling out now was ill-advised. No, he was going to have to consult the source. Perhaps Craig was mistaken; perhaps Token would clarify. Stanley needed some light, but not too much. He did something he rarely did and lit a candle.

Stanley tried the telephone, but it didn't ring twice before he slammed the handset into the receiver. He couldn't do this. He began pacing. His room was messy and crowded, but he had to walk the length of it, all five meters, before turning around and walking to the other side. Stanley trampled on papers and kicked a book out of the way. What was it? A leather-bound copy of Middlemarch. This entire thing was unbearable. Stanley wasn't certain if he should try again, or wait for Token to ring him. Craig had to have told him, be en route to telling him. Two could play at that game, Stanley figured. He snuffed out the wick of his languidly dripping candle between his thumb and forefinger; the moment when flame licked his fingers stung, but then the light was extinguished and there was no more feeling, just black soot on his skin. Grabbing his coat and keys, Stanley slammed the door shut and ran down to Broad Street.

"Hullo." Token opened the door calm and collected. "Here to discuss Conrad? Or something else? You're all flushed, dear."

"Something else!" Stanley gasped. "You're leaving me for my girlfriend?"

"What?" Token's mouth dropped open and he said, "God, no, nothing like that. Why, was there a miscommunication?" He pulled Stanley over the threshold, using his socked toes to nudge the door shut.

"So it's not true, then." Stanley continued his pacing in Token's room, careful this time not to step on any papers, although this was easier because Token was neat and most of his papers were in binders on the shelves.

"What's not true?" Token poured a glass of something. Stocky bottle — madeira? He offered it to Stanley.

"I'm not thirsty. You're not leaving me for Wendy?"

"No." Token tightened the cap on the madeira bottle and took a sip from the glass he'd poured. "Why would I do a thing like that?"

"Well, why would Craig say a thing like that?" Stanley asked. He felt calmer now, falling into an ancient, overstuffed armchair.

"Oh, Craig would be to blame for this. I thought I'd told him not to tell you," Token said, settling onto the ottoman, "that we'd talk about it later — I wanted to tell you."

"Tell me what? Jesus, Token, I can't take this, it's enough already—"

"That we've agreed to marry. Wendy and me."

Everything stopped, for a moment, the air going out of the room.

Then Stanley gasped, "What? Why?"

"But I'm not leaving you. Did he say that? It's wrong, we both agreed—"

"You what?"

"Stanley, calm down—"

"Calm down about what? You, you're — you're going to get married? To Wendy?"

"Yes." A look of realization settled on Token's face. "No one was supposed to tell you, you know, I wanted to tell you. Because obviously there has been a miscommunication. But you've been so absent lately, I haven't had a chance. This hardly means the end of you and me. I mean, it doesn't at all."

"But how couldn't it?"

"Because." Token took another sip of madeira. "Are you sure you don't want a glass."

"I'm not bloody thirsty!"

"I thought you'd understand…"

"Understand what?" Stanley asked. "That you've gone ahead and decided to marry, to become engaged to marry my friend, my friend to whom I introduced you—"

"You don't understand at all," Token said.

Stanley ignored him. "—and you expect me to continue to fuck you?"

"It's not like that." Token finished the drink and set his glass on the floor. "It's not like that, I promise."

"How isn't it like that? You want to be a married man, fucking a man on the side? How is it not like that? Which nuance am I failing to grasp? Any time, Viscount, any time you wish to elucidate for me—"

"I wish you wouldn't call me 'Viscount,' " Token mumbled.

"Well, I wish you wouldn't run off and get fucking married!" Stanley yelled.

"I'm sorry." Token sounded sincere. With his hands clasped and his eyes meeting Stanley's, he looked it. But there was something so discordant about how he looked, how he spoke, what he said — and his actions. "There's something I can't control. A role I was born into. I can't imagine you don't understand what that's like. And I love you, Stanley. But I can't build my life out of loving you, can I?" He clasped Stanley's hand, waiting for an answer.

Stanley drew his hand away, crossing his arms and sinking back into his chair. "D'you love her?" he mumbled, looking away.

Token thought for a moment. These words had to be perfect. He cleared his throat. He said, "Yes, well … I mean, no, not in the way I love you." He waited for a moment, for any sort of response. When none was forthcoming, Token continued: "It's a marriage of convenience, Stanley. That's all. I'd be lying if I told you it didn't mean anything. I'd be heartless if it didn't mean something. But it doesn't mean everything, do you know?

"No."

Now Token sat back, crossed his arms, and said, "I mean it, I love you. I'm in love with you and I've never been in love with anyone before. Doesn't that count for something? We don't have to stop … being together, not really. If you just say something—"

"There's nothing to say." Stanley uncrossed his arms, pushed himself out of the chair, and, standing over Token, straightened out his jacket. "Maybe I'm not the best man in Britain. I'm probably not even the best man in this bedsit. But I'm better than some married aristocrat's fucktoy, all right."

"I know. I know you are."

"Then thanks for nothing, Viscount. "


Nighttime was the worst for Stanley, with the cheers of celebratory grads down the hall, and in the cloister, and really everywhere in the college. He heard running on old stones, clicking typewriter keys, clinking glasses, the hissing of the gas torches, the brief moans of his neighbors' nightly triumphs. Stanley lingered in his sitting room in his old armchair, feet on the table, arms hugging his legs. He'd been through so many bottles of rye that he'd used them to line the tops of his bookshelves. He should be drunk by now, he figured, but his drink and his sadness had mingled so thoroughly that he no longer felt off, just gutted. He still had a pile of wailing old gospel albums Wendy'd lent him, and his first thought was to spin them out the window and let them shatter against the pavers of Magdalen College, then burn the covers in his fire. But it was too hot for fires, and then Stanley figured the best revenge was actually listening to them. He'd prove he was still integral to their relationship if it was the last thing he did, and even if he did it silently, unbeknownst to either of them.

Wendy called him once, and he wasn't even ashamed of how thick his voice was with tears, how he couldn't get a straight sentence out before his words broke down into heaving sobs. "I'm sorry, mon cher, I'm so sorry," was all she could say. "I didn't think it was going to hurt you like this!"

"How could you think it wouldn't hurt me?" Stanley asked her. "What sort of person do you think would want to share a boyfriend like that, what sort of person do you think I am that I would gladly continue to fuck someone's husband—"

"Because, Stanley, dearest, it's just a marriage of convenience. I didn't think it was something like stealing, I just thought we three could work something out together. Besides, you know, there's Kyle—"

"Leave Kyle out of it! Kyle's nothing to do with your convenient aristocrat marriage!"

"I thought he had," Wendy had said slowly. "Token thinks—"

"I don't care what Token thinks! He's a bloody prig and you're a traitorous cunt."

There had been silence. Then she'd said, "I deserve that."

"Oh, god." Stanley blew his nose right on the telephone, into his sleeve. He didn't care if she thought him vile. She was vile. They both were.

"I thought you'd like planning the wedding with me," she said, tentative. "You're — you're sad, dear, I know, but I don't think you quite understand it. I don't quite understand it myself but I have to do this, Stanley, we have to. We have to and I—"

Stanley took no satisfaction in the fact that she was crying too.

"It's just a bad situation all around!" she wept. "I'm sorry, Stanley, forgive me. You're the best, darling, the greatest, and I can't — I have to go, I'm sorry! I'll call, I promise, I have to go." That was when she had hung up the phone.

Stanley had spent every night since then on the floor of his room, listening to howling gospel dirges and drinking, drinking until he could not rise from the carpet. He left his windows open and when he went out for a sandwich, or to limp sadly to the off-license for supplies, every man on the street was Token to him, smiling broadly, apologetic.

One night there came a knock on the door, and Stanley just shouted, "It's unlocked," and he sat up, wiping the gunk from his eyes and the grime from his hands.

It was Kyle. "Christ!" he exclaimed when he shut the door behind him. "Leaving your door unlocked! Anyone could come in here and—"

"What? They might do something untoward to me? Rob me blind? Yes, my two pairs of plimsolls, my typewriter, and my novels. Wendy's fucking gospel albums and a bunch of empty liquor bottles. What a bounty." Stanley laughed at himself, foisting a bottle of sherry at Kyle, who hadn't even taken his jacket off. It was late May. Wasn't he warm?

"I'm worried about you," Kyle said, sitting down. He then took his jacket off, and put it neatly on the pouffe. His nose was still a bit swollen, bent right in the middle, puffy like a sausage roll that was burned on one side. The visual made Stanley grin, and Kyle hid his face with his hands.

"Your lip's healed nicely," Stanley said, getting off the floor and brushing the dust from his trousers.

"Don't make it about me," Kyle said. "I came to see you. Miss B says that old Clyde's told her that Token—"

" 'The right honorable the Viscount Black,' you must mean—"

"Butters tells me he's getting married!" Kyle sat down in the armchair, crossing his arms as if to emphasize the seriousness. "To Wendy Testaburger!"

"Yes." Stanley moved Kyle's coat to the bed and sat down on the pouffe. He wiped at his nose. "I know."

"And you've just—"

"Gone missing? Darling, I know, but don't worry — I've finished my thesis, it's all turned in. I'm just waiting for exams to start, I guess—" And then despite Stanley's attempt to be calm and serious, he sighed, and without a moment's pause he broke down into short sobs again, his face in his hands. He looked up only to see Kyle looking at him, pity and discomfort in the same detached frown. "I don't know which of them I'm supposed to hate more. I loved both of them, you know! And fuck, school's ending, I haven't got a clue, I've — everything is a mess. Kyle, darling, you don't know—"

"I know, Stanley. Shhh."

"No, you don't know, I haven't told you—"

"Haven't told me what?" Kyle inched closer,

"It doesn't matter."

"Of course it matters," said Kyle. "Generally, I miss you. But I hate seeing you like this. You know, I didn't come at first, because I thought it might be disturbing to me, in my current state, to see you like this." He sighed. "But now I need you to be all right again."

"Why?" Stanley asked. "You don't give a shit about me, either. No one does. Literally everything is shit, do you know that? I used to think we understood each other on some level, you know, that we felt each other's pain in some metaphysical dimension. When you were hurt, I was devastated. The only thing that made it better was the idea that I could prevent it from happening again, somehow. Or at least offer some solace, you know. But I'm hopeless. It's really just generally hopeless. I have been thinking quite a bit about a conversation we had earlier this year, in which I said nobody had ever loved me, and you said that was untrue. Well, here we are. No one's ever going to love me." Realizing that sounded too self-pitying to stomach, Stanley added, "It's illegal, for one thing."

Quietly, Kyle got up and went to Stanley's makeshift bar, studying the tops of the bottles. "Don't you have anything other than sherry?"

"Hard liquor," Stanley said. "I've developed a taste for it."

Kyle sat back down, exhaling a sigh. "Too butch. I need a girl's bevvy. Something that says, 'I am a bitch, boys. Mount me like a fucking bitch.' "

Stanley pushed the bottle back toward Kyle. "Then sherry it is."

After a long drink of sherry, Kyle wiped his lips. He leaned forward, becoming very quiet: "I hope, Stanley, that you live a life sufficiently long enough to have your heart broken dozens of times, thousands of times. I hope I'll be here to help you pick up the pieces. I trust you'd do the same. And I hope we never shatter at the same time, because if you're correct and we can feel each other's pain, well, that would be an unbearable amount of pain."

Stanley nodded. "I should have slugged Eric when I had the chance."

"I just don't want him to go to the police, that's all. Let this be the end of it. I am getting well out of here and away from him. So it's behind me, now."

"You are still headed back to London, I presume? And to a place of your own?"

"Well, yes. Just as soon as I could get a job."

"What if I came, too?"

"Well, that's preposterous," said Kyle. "Don't go down just for me."

"For both of us, really. I believe it's time I got out of here, too. There are men in London, Kyle. Other men, like we are."

"I'm aware. I showed you those men! Give me some credit."

"I give you all the credit, darling. It's just that I have come, after much thinking and some real hopelessness, to the conclusion that my life would be best lived away from here, and with you, and in a place where there exists more than one venue a man can walk into, in broad daylight, and find another man with whom to have sex. Or not even have sex! Just talk. Just exist. Shouldn't that be what we all want? To just exist?"

"It sounds like a very small desire, when you express it like that."

"I like academia," said Stanley, "but I'm done here, it's obvious."

"Well, that's jolly well," said Kyle, and it was clear that he did not consider Stanley's position to be serious.

But Stanley was serious. He knew what he had to do.


It had been some time since Stanley had been home. Since Christmas, probably. He had seen his parents for dinner recently; he had joined them at a place in town for his mother's birthday. Yet Stanley had been distracted, preoccupied with Token, and with Waugh, and with the ever-firming plan for his future. Stanley had seen the children once, taking Rhian to the Ashmolean to look at the Classical sculpture, steering her warily toward the pale white thighs of lovingly sculpted young men. But that had been some time ago, months now, and stepping into the old row house he'd grown up in, Stanley felt a surge of guilt over his recent absence. The feeling only intensified when his mother wrapped her arms around him and kissed both of his cheeks and began to paw at his hair, fretting that he needed it cut.

"I like my hair," he said quietly, though it was less that he liked it and more than he liked not minding it.

"You're such a handsome boy," she said, attempting to tuck in the T-shirt he let hang over his belt. "You needn't dress so slovenly."

"Why?" he asked. "I've nowhere else to go today."

"It's just strange, to see you growing up so adult, and yet so not. But 21 is still quite young, I suppose. Just, let me get a good look at you."

He allowed it, and sat on a chair in the parlor for a few minutes while she drank him in, chatting about Shelly's children and insisting, "Your father is impossible. He's been driving me batty lately. And he's really worried about you. Just impossible."

"I really hope not." Stanley meant it.

His father came home around the time dinner was served. They had a big fish pie, soggy cod and leftover bits of other whitefish buried in a tasteless, thin sauce, with burst peas and slim carrots, flecks of brownish dried herbs, and a blanket of mash at the top, browned in the oven. The thing came out in its casserole dish nearly undulating with heat. Stanley had known it wouldn't burst, but it still represented some vague threat as it steamed on a trivet centered on the kitchen table. When Stanley took his first bite he was overwhelmed with the luxury of dairy in the potatoes, with almost the smoothness of ice cream.

As he ate it, his mother leaned over and said, "You're too slight, you know. It's as if you never eat."

"I eat enough," said Stanley, "I mean, I'm not dead."

"That's really a very cynical thing to say."

"It's not cynical," said Stanley, though he didn't want to quibble with her over the definition. He grew up conscious of the fact that she was smart; she had a sort of innate, motherly knowledge that somehow colored their relations. She knew him, in some sense, in some way that took a real understanding of humanity; that much was clear. But like most women Stanley knew she hadn't been schooled properly, and though she read — perhaps had given him his love of writing — she sometimes let her general ignorance creep through. It was as if she had the powers of deduction and reason but lacked the information upon which she should rightly have set them.

Concurrently Stanley's father, the perpetually aggravated don, carried knowledge around with him like a burden but lacked any sort of sense. He ate hunched over, fork in one hand and can of Fuller's in the other, not shoveling the food into his mouth as one might expect but dissecting it to examine its layers, seeking to understand the delicate construction of a plate of rich and runny fish pie. If asked, Stanley might have described his father as a sort of savant; he knew only how to use the keen tools he'd already sharpened, and then he applied them broadly to the remainder of his life. It was sad, because Stanley became aware as he was eating a sort of craving for intimacy with this man in the same sense that Stanley's mother tried to coax out of their relationship. He wished his father might have known him, might have come to understand him over 21 years with the same incisive and inherent sensitivity his father had for the substance of the planet.

It was thinking of his father in this sense that led Stanley to his approach. After dinner they sat at the table, Sharon Marsh in the background, listening to the wireless at low volume as she scrubbed dishes.

"I think I'm in love." This was Stanley's first stab, uttered deadpan as he cracked open a beer.

"With who?" Randy was working on his third. "Man or woman?"

"A city," said Stanley. "London. I want to go to London."

"Jesus," he said. "And what about your fourth year?"

"Well, I can't do it, you know, if I'm going to move to London."

"So then, what now? What's the plan, Stanley?"

He sat there silently, wondering what he might say.

"The problem," Randy continued, "is that a person needs to do something, obviously, if he is going to survive. It's not — you wouldn't go with men for money, would you?"

"What!" This thought had actually never occurred to Stanley, and he felt a sudden burst of anger at that fact that his father had both raised it and dismissed it in an instant. "No, that's not even occurred to me. I don't have a plan. I just know it's where I need to go."

"But, your degree—"

"I'm going to take it at the end of this term."

"What about that fourth year?" his father asked.

"I can't do it," said Stanley.

"Any reason why not?"

"I just can't," he said. "You don't want to hear it, sir, just — I have something inside of me, I know it. But it will fester if I stay here."

"That's dramatic," said his father.

Stanley sat upright, the condensation on his beer can making an awful slick in his sweaty hands. "But it's true."

Randy finished the end of his third beer, and crushed the can in his grip as if it were nothing. It was nothing, Stanley saw, merely rubbish, and yet not so long ago it had been cold and potent and full. His mother came to whisk the empty can away, and his father prattled on: "I can't have you just running off like that. You're an adult and all but it's obvious you're not on the right track. You've got no money, and no job prospects—"

"I'll have a baccalaureate degree."

"—please don't interrupt me! — you'll have that degree but no job. And then what?"

"I had hoped," said Stanley, "I might get a flat with Kyle."

"Who?"

"My best friend."

"Oh, yes, right, the little ginger chap. He's not your lover, is he?"

"No, just a friend."

"And has he got money?"

"He hopes his father can get him a job."

"Who's his father, then?"

"Well." Stanley sat up, and laid it all out, especially the parts about Kyle's father's family's money, and Kyle's mother's seat in Parliament, and their stately house in north-central London. "I spent that summer there," he concluded, "and you told me you used to drink with Gerald Broflovski, when he was a teaching fellow one year. A long time ago."

Randy became quiet; his wife somehow sensed what this meant and delivered him another beer. Snapping it open, he seemed to regard the can with unusual interest. "That was a long time ago," he finally said. "You weren't born then. It was before the war."

"Well, now I'm friends with Kyle, and he is going back down to London, and I wish to go, too."

The wireless snapped off, Sharon came to sit with them at the table, bringing three small plates and three small forks, weightless as she set them on the table. "It's ridiculous to argue," she said. "He wants to start his life there."

"Sharon—"

"He's not a boy anymore," she said, as if Stanley weren't sitting there himself. "Nobody kept you from making decisions about your own life. You can't keep him here."

"But I can't just give him money to run away like some layabout, Sharon—"

"Then make a deal with him! He's a good boy, he'll do it. Just ask him. Would you do something for your father, Stanley, if he agreed to help you let a flat in London? And gave you some money to eat?"

"Hm," said Randy, as if he wished to show that the wheels were turning.

"Well, yes, of course I would!"

"Well, there you are. That wasn't difficult, Randy, was it?" She stood up and bent over, pressing a kiss to the top of Stanley's head. "I'll get the pudding."

When she had stepped away, to prepare Bird's Eye custard over the range, Randy turned to his son and cracked his knuckles. They were in the thick of it now, this negotiation. "I don't want any more of this nonsense with men. You've had some fun, but it's over now. Time to get serious. You could at least try, you know, with a woman."

"I'm afraid that's the one thing I can't do," said Stanley. "It would be like telling you to try it with a man, don't you see? I can't will myself to do it."

"And how do you know I've never tried it with a man? You don't know everything about me."

Now Stanley knew his father was a bit drunk, passed the low-level constancy of his usual imbibing. "What a patently ridiculous thing to say. Look, Dad, I can't do it."

"I'm sure you could," he said. "It's like anything else: playing a musical instrument, or reading a foreign language. It's simply a matter of practice and effort."

"It's not," said Stanley. "I can't will myself to — to physically perform like that. Don't you think I've tried? Don't you think if I felt it were possible to go with a girl, I'd go with one? I don't want to be like this! Nobody wants to be like this!"

"Then you'd be willing to try another approach?"

"I just want to live free from the pressure to radically change myself."

"Then it might be worth trying something." Stanley's father stood up, taking his beer with him. "I've something in the study. Wait here just a moment."

While he was gone, Stanley's mother came over with the pudding, a pale cake swimming in a thin, shimmering custard, speckled with currants. She set it down on the trivet formerly occupied by their fish pie. "Your father means well," she said, leaving again to grab a spoon. Yet she kept talking: "He can be impossible, I know, but he doesn't mean badly."

"I don't mean badly, either," said Stanley, "so how come I never get proper credit for not meaning badly?"

Here was the root of Stanley's troubles, the way he knew his mother was clever but unprepared: She did not even try to give him an answer. She came back to the table with a wooden spoon, sliding it into the steaming pudding. It smelled lightly of imitation vanilla, of the tang of orange and the chalk of powered milk. She kissed him on the head again, sweeping his fringe out of his eyes. "I wish you'd cut your hair," she said. "You're such a handsome, clever boy."

He said, "Thank you," but his attention was elsewhere. He felt too ill to eat his pudding by the time his father returned to the kitchen, slamming down a business card on thick, blanched white paper stock:

The Sidmouth Street Clinic

Treatment for Developmental Disorders and Indecency

"Make an appointment," said Randy, "and I shall underwrite your expenses."

"For how long?" Stanley asked.

"Until it's worked. Until you're cured."

"And if I can't be cured?"

"You will be," said Stanley's father. "It's only a matter of time."

"So, on a monthly basis, then? Until I'm cured?"

"Until then, yes."

Stanley looked to his mother. She had a sort of nervous look on her face, as if she knew this portended nothing good for any of them. But she mustered a conciliatory smile, grabbed one of the thin china plates, and plopped a serving of pudding onto it. Steam now billowed from the pile of pudding on the plate. She stuck a fork in it, too. "I think that's very fair," she said, "considering."

"I'll consider it later." Stanley took the plate with reservation. He did not have an appetite for sweets at the moment.


Both dread and relief followed this development. Stanley had a copy of the A to Z, two years old, and he immediately returned from his parents' to look up Sidmouth Street. Would it be tree-lined? Narrow? Paved with cobbles, full of Georgian rowhouses, rebuilt in stingy post-bombing brick, busy with traffic, choked with businesspeople stuffing down sandwiches at noon? An apprehension ate away at Stanley's consciousness that could only be countered by the excitement, genuine and full, of keeping Kyle within his grasp — if only for a short time. It was late when he returned home, too late to call anyone studying nervously for exams, but Stanley rang Kyle the next morning and made a date to see him at the pub in the afternoon.

"I'll be there," Kyle agreed, "though I shouldn't be drinking on all these pills—" for the pain in his nose, he meant.

"Is that something that's just occurred to you?"

"It's something my mother made me aware of when I spoke to her last night."

"As it happens, I spoke to mine last night, too," said Stanley, "and we'll discuss it this afternoon."

"Well, I'll be there," Kyle agreed. And he was, though he was late, grimacing at his naked wrist and swearing he would invest in a pocket watch, someday. "A beautiful Cartier one, with the face of a geisha on the front. One of those."

"Yes, one of those," Stanley agreed, though he really wasn't sure there were pocket watches decorated with the glittering visages of geishas.

They got a bottle of cheap sherry, their standard, and began to chat. They quickly worked their way through the sherry and spoke of nothing. Kyle was moaning about his reluctance to move back in with his parents while he sought work; Stanley immediately interceded with the news of his decision to come up to the capital and stay there, forever.

"Don't throw your career away on me, dear." Kyle whined, refilling his glass, then splashing the end of the bottle into Stanley's. "Though it's noble of you to offer to follow. No, Stanley, you should stay here. Keep to your path, or whatever. I'm going to be relatively miserable, you know. I'll be better off alone. "

"What career?" Stanley asked. He sipped the last of the sherry, pondering whether he should signal for another bottle. Would he have money to drink in London? Would he be allowed, whilst he complied with the program? Did even asking imply he intended to comply? "Look, I have no career aspirations. I just want to write. I had questions about how to write, precisely, and when Garrison offered me the fourth year, I thought, well, he might be a shrill old beast, but at least he's someone to discuss literature with, you know. I needn't confine my investigations to Waugh — I wondered if I should look at Forster."

"I'll bet Garrison hates Forster, too."

"Whether or not he does." A shrug, and a sip of sherry. It was dry on Stanley's lips, so he licked them. "I don't need to stay here to learn how to write. I just have to write. It's that simple. I had questions about life experience, of course, but I learned something recently. Life happens while one survives, you know. And I can survive just as well in London."

"Well, that's all well and good," said Kyle, "but survive on what, exactly? I'm not sure you'll be able to live with my parents indefinitely, and certainly not if Ike turns up — you know, assuming he's not dead."

"Oh, he's not dead. Don't even say that. Look at all the trouble the little bugger's caused you. He isn't done yet."

"Well…"

"Well, look." Stanley's tone became very quiet. He tried to be serious: "My father has agreed to finance my existence. And with that money we could let a flat, I suppose."

Taking some interest in this, Kyle raised an eyebrow and asked, "Oh?"

"Yes," said Stanley. "It's enough. That is the point. I told him I was going and he agreed to give me the money."

"How much money?" Kyle asked, his eyes wide. "Stanley, that's ridiculous!"

"Enough," said Stanley, "and in perpetuity."

"That's so ridiculous it's brilliant!"

"Yes, I'm quite pleased."

"For what purpose? Was he drunk? Why would he agree to such a thing?"

"Yes, of course he was drunk." For courage, Stanley finished the rest of his drink. He steeled himself: "Because I've agreed to pursue, er. Treatment."

"For what, though, dear? Asthma?"

Saying nothing, Stanley raised his eyebrows and made an outward gesture with both hands, curling his fingers inward. While Kyle stared at him with confusion, Stanley said, "You know, my little uranist problem. The inversion issue."

It took a moment for Kyle to react, then in shock he blurted, "What!"

"It's as I said." Now Stanley wished his glass weren't empty.

"Be serious!"

"I am serious."

"Don't joke — Stanley, what the bloody—"

"I am not joking, darling. I just go this little clinic in Sidmouth Street three times a week, and he'll finance my existence."

"But what sort of existence is that! And for the money? I'm aghast! I'm repelled! I'm — Stanley, please! You can't be serious."

"I already said I was serious, and only a fool would do it for the money," Stanley said.

"Then why are you doing it?" Kyle asked, after a moment.

"Because." Stanley's voice was very dry, like the sherry they'd been drinking.

"Do you think it's going to work?"

"No! No, I don't think it's going to work."

"Ah."

"I don't think it's going to work," Stanley continued, "and that's why I have to do it. Because I should like them to see it's something that cannot be reversed. My father is a man of science, so he'll understand — I mean, if it doesn't work."

"And what if it does?" Kyle asked, and Stanley heard the fear in his voice. "What if it does work, what if it cures you?"

"Well, on principle, I wouldn't want it to. But, it won't." The glass was slippery with condensation, and Stanley blotted at it with his paper bar napkin before lifting it to his lips. "You've nothing to fear. It's just a bit of electricity."

"Who said I was afraid of it working? Maybe I'd want it done myself."

"No, you wouldn't, darling. You're braver than I."

"Hardly!" Kyle seemed sincere.

Stanley was, too. "You are who you are," he said, "and I always admired that. I wanted to be that, too. But I can't be anymore, you know. I have to do this."

"You mustn't! Stanley, it can be very destructive! If you ended up as a vegetable — even as a different person—"

"The decision's made," said Stanley. He got up, his glass empty. "The conversation's over."

"It's over when I say it's over!"

"No, darling. Not this time!"

Kyle got up to follow Stanley toward the WC. "Look at me!" he demanded, pushing past tables and chairs. Some of the few drawn, neglected pensioners scattered around the pub barely reacted to this performance, and Kyle paid them no heed anyway. "Look at my face and tell me it's possible to just erase it because it's easier. If for a second I thought there was any other way I could be, any slight hope of escaping this, I wouldn't dare dream of persisting." He grabbed Stanley's shirt, yanking him into the toilets.

It was dark in there, with cracked green tile on the walls, and the only light one buzzing yellowed fixture just over the door. There was one stall in the corner, a sink, and a wall of three urinals. Stanley couldn't imagine pulling in this joint. It lacked the gritty vibrancy of a truly depressing cottage, the snap of energy that came with a steady crowd of cruisers, casting come-hither eyes across the badly lighted room. There was no refuge in disgrace here; this was a mere pub, and its patrons mere pensioners.

With a sigh, Stanley crossed his arms. The very thought that perhaps Kyle wanted to dissuade him from coming down to London was maddening. "I don't want to do it," he said. "But it's not something you'd understand, darling. I don't want to stay in Oxford for the rest of my life. I don't want to be here any longer. I've spent my entire life here and I don't want to die here. Could you try to see it that way? It's the money, and it's the chance to get away. And then it won't work, and I'll be done with it. And perhaps then they'll understand it won't work. Or I could write something about why it didn't work. But, I need to be in London. I have learned this about myself recently." He became quiet, uncrossing his arms: "And I need to be with you."

Kyle spat out a laugh. "Why would you need to be with me? I'm a sad old queen with a ruined face."

"You're a beautiful young man," said Stanley. His face became hot. "But that's not the point. The point is, darling, we need each other. I'll have a little money and you'll have your wits, and we'll struggle through it together, like that."

"Struggle through what?" Kyle asked.

"You know," said Stanley. "Adulthood. Since it's upon us now and all that. And without any wives or whatever we'll just have to, you know, struggle through it together, in companionable bachelorhood."

"Oh." Kyle sounded very disappointed. "Well, yes, I suppose it would make sense for us to struggle through it like that. Together. … We are going to need to find a flat."

"I'll come down the week after graduation," said Stanley, "and we'll find one." He stuck out his hand, as if to seal it.

"Oh, come now." Kyle did not take Stanley's hand. "Give us a kiss, at least, dear. I've never heard of two men shaking hands in a lavatory. It's much more fitting if you at least use your mouth."

Stanley blushed, furiously, feeling a heat fill him unlike anything he'd felt in some time. "All right," he said, taking Kyle's waist into his embrace.

It was brief and dry, and yet, it meant everything.


Term was winding down. Exams behind him, Stanley baked in the June sun, lying on the bank of the Cherwell. Rain was said to be coming in the late afternoon, but there was no hint of it in the blue sky streaked with plodding cotton clouds. Tree branches overhead and sunlight in his eyes, Stanley grappled with his decision: going down was so final. He would laze on near the river again the next day, and the day after next, and every day until he packed up his things at the end of the next week and left his time as a student of Magdalen behind him. There would be no more soaking in the daylight by the Cherwell, no more youth in which to glory. His time at university had, like the river, broken off and dwindled down into a little stream, disappearing into the anonymous and deafening roar of the unknown, its waters mingling with other, larger, better-defined rivers, flowing into the city and into the coursing vein of history, a mere tributary of something bigger and more infinite than Stanley himself had ever thought to be. As a boy he had laid alone in his bed, wishing to escape the confines of his family's small home, silently hoping he would one day slip into the knobby old walls of one of Oxford's fine colleges, processed into the rich legacy of its alumni, drawing strength from its potential until he had eclipsed what Oxford had given him and was ready for something else. On the bank of the river that day, Stanley knew it had come at last. He had grown too big for Magdalen. It could no longer contain him. He had to depart.

And so he did, brushing the yellow grass from the seat of his trousers and walking out of Magdalen to Garrison's office. He sat down in front of the old man, declining a drink and flashing a sad smile. "I have to go," he said. "I cannot stay here. It's a generous offer but I've decided to move to London."

Garrison's demeanor was unimpressed. "Marsh, you bloody dolt," he said. "Don't do that."

"I'm sorry, sir. I have to."

"Of course you don't! Don't be ridiculous."

"I really don't feel I have any choice. I'm not being ridiculous, sir, and I appreciate your vote of confidence in me—"

"Vote of confidence my arse," said Garrison. "This is about Broflovski. He's going down and you're following him."

"No! Well — it couldn't possibly be any one reason. But don't worry, sir. I will be fine. Eventually." He cringed at the way he sounded hoarse, as if he'd been crying. He hadn't cried in three days.

"It's no consideration of mine if you're fine. Of course you shall be fine. A good-looking boy from an upstanding family — just don't find yourself in trouble with Betty Bracelets and there won't be any concern. But what sort of life is that? And what good does it do me if all of my upstanding tutees go off and slum it in London?"

"I won't be slumming it, I hope. My father's going to give me an allowance."

"Awfully generous of him," Garrison sniped, "though I suppose anything's possible on a full professor's salary." He sighed, removing his glasses, rubbing his eyes. Then he put them back on and said, in an unusually soft voice, "Don't follow that boy to London."

"But I love him," said Stanley.

At this Garrison outright laughed, mean and short. "And what's that bloody worth, Marsh?"

"You don't even know, sir. Faustian stuff."

"He's not that good. Nanti the kosher homie, you know, he isn't much. Especially with that broken nose."

"You don't know him very well." Stanley stood, extending a hand. "Thank you, sir."

Garrison didn't take it. "I mean, he's smart, of course, but he's constantly chasing after a bit of rough, and that's not you, Marsh. It's never going to be you. Don't just throw out your potential on chasing some untenable dream. What happens if you seduce him, then? You move into a little flat, you stop having sex — and then some other little tart comes along and unseats the whole thing between you." There was evident pain in his voice, as if he referred to some distant yet still-open injury, an experience too raw on which to elaborate. "The thing you're throwing away your life to chase after is a lie. There's no permanence in that. All you have is yourself, and what you do with yourself now is the thing that matters. Writing is permanence. Kyle Broflovski is fleeting."

Stanley looked down at him. For all he knew his old don's words made crystal sense, there was something in Stanley, some bruised defiant will, that ached to assert itself over the best and most personal logic. "I'm going," he said. "It's done. I'm leaving."

"I see." Garrison stood, too, and finally took Stanley's hand. "You're an utter fool, boy."

"I know, sir."

"Stay out of the tearooms. Stick to the pubs."

"That's good advice," said Stanley, with every intention of following it. "Thank you."

"You'll be fine."

"I will," Stanley agreed. "I'm certain I will, in the end."

On the walk back to his rooms, Stanley thought deeply on the nature of what Garrison had said to him, and what he might have said to Kyle when Kyle had announced his departure. It was the sort of thing Kyle would probably not tell, at least, if he hadn't told it yet there was probably nothing flattering in it. Stanley considered those words, writing is permanence. "Well," he said aloud to himself, the warm spring air whisking his fringe in front of his eyes, "I can still write."

From the street in front of Magdalen some first-year called to him, "Hey, you! Who're you talking to?"

Glancing up at the boy, Stanley saw he was short, with bad acne, impossibly young. He had big hair, though, a great mess of it wiry and untamed, brown like the dirt in Stanley's parents' garden, and he was vacant-eyed. As Stanley passed he smelt the sweet sting of marijuana on the boy. It was likely in his robes, under his nails, in his hair. "Just myself," Stanley muttered to him.

"That's queer," was the reply. From his pocket this youth drew a cigarette and a lighter, lifting the former slowly to his lips, as if to be demonstrative.

Walking through the gate and around the cloister, it dawned on Stanley: it was over.

He would never be young again.


Again, thank you for reading this far! Let me know what you thought. An epilogue will be up within the next few days.