The following, lengthy story, although it can stand alone, is a continuation of the first one I posted, "Divine Neglect," (/nifty/gay/adult-youth/divine-neglect) which was itself slightly revised and recently posted in gay/beginnings under the title, "As Flies to Wanton Boys." It may help, but it is not necessary to read one or the other version. The author-- park517@aol.com -- welcomes comments and dedicates the story to Matt, the first reader to respond to "Divine Neglect" a decade ago.
[DISCLAIMER: The following completely fictional story, the sole copyright for which belongs to the author and translator, contains explicit depictions of sexual intercourse between men and should not, therefore, be read by anyone under the legal age of consent in whatever jurisdiction or by anyone offended by homoerotic and/or pornographic material. It is forbidden to post the text electronically or disseminate it in any manner without permission of the copyright holder.]
Doctor of the Heart Chapter 1
"Clumsy! You've probably dialed the wrong number. If you haven't, leave a message. We'll see what happens." Sirens whined. Cymbals clashed.
"Tommy!" I yelled into the tiny mouthpiece. "Tommy, pick up. Please. It's Yves. You have to be there. I need you. Desperately. Tommy, I beg you."
"On your knees?" He WAS there.
"Yes, my love, on my knees. Tommy, can you come right away? I've met this incredible man."
"Doesn't sound as if you need me."
"Well, I haven't really met him. He knocked me down. Coming out of Paragraphe. And now he's at the Second Cup next door and he's playing chess, and you know I don't play chess."
"I know, cheri. One of our many irreconcilable differences. If he's playing chess, though, he's not alone. Are you going to be timekeeper?"
"He is alone. He's playing by himself. With a book. Tommy, he's beautiful. I think he's foreign. And he has the saddest eyes. Please hurry."
"Where are you?"
"Right by the Roddick Gates. You'll come? I love you. You're my best friend."
"I have a little weakness for gorgeous chess players. What if I want him myself?"
"I saw him first. Please hurry."
"On my way. Not to panic."
I snapped the cell 'phone shut and began to fidget. Tommy's flat was a six-minute walk up Mont Royal, but I knew Tommy. He'd amble. He jogged to keep fit, but wearing street clothes, he'd sooner fart at the Symphony than appear to be in a hurry on a public thoroughfare. "Unseemly haste," he told me, "is a sure sign of a deranged mind. Or a robbery in progress. Either way, stay away."
Tommy always took his time. Even when, as teenage virgins, we first started making love, he never seemed to be in a hurry. "Make it last, Yves," he'd tell me when my thrusts got urgent. "Slow down, mon amour. This is a bed, not a racetrack."
That was easy for him to say. He had studied yoga. Once, when I was on my knees and doing a good job I thought, he didn't come and didn't come. I finally realized he was meditating. My jaw was aching, and he was off in some kind of trance. So I bit him. Not hard, just sharply. We had a fight and didn't speak for at least three hours. But I loved him desperately and I needed him all the time. I still need him. He's super sane, and I'm a nut case. Or a hopeless romantic. And I get into situations that only Tommy can sort out.
"Me voila, your faithful servant." He gave me a hug and a peck on the cheek.
"Oh, Tommy," I yelped. "I'm so glad you're here. You have to help me."
"My mission in life. Remember the charming young men from Middlebury?"
"You never let me forget. One of them had a great butt. I don't get upset when somebody cute gropes me."
"But he did. Ethan. That was his name. Autre gens, autres moeurs. It took a lot of talking to get them to believe you're just spastic."
"Well, I am. That's how I got knocked down by this hunk. He had his nose buried in a book, and I had my eye on a pair of tight cut-offs going up College. He was really nice about it. Helped me up. Apologized. And I couldn't say a word. Tommy, you won't believe how incredibly devastating he is."
"Probably not. I always have trouble believing the incredible."
"Don't tease. You know what I mean."
"I do. I just keep hoping that before I die I will persuade you to speak precisely. Words are fragile. If you toss them around, they'll break. And then chaos."
"Yes, professor. Tommy, don't preach. Not now." I took his arm. "Come on, you are going to talk to him about chess, and I will bring your latte, and you will introduce us, and I will make him fall for me."
We crossed the street and went into the cafe. Tommy pretended to be looking for a free table and then said something to my solo chess player, and he said something back, and Tommy leaned down and moved a piece on the board, and my black-maned Adonis thought briefly and moved another piece. By the time I got to the table, they were seated across from one another so deep in the game that Tommy didn't reach for his coffee, much less present me to his opponent. I sat down anyway. And I waited. And waited. Neither one of them even glanced at me.
This was not in my plan. I am not good at being excluded or ignored. I'm a first-born, and we are used to the spotlight. I like getting attention, and I usually do. Blonds may not have more fun, but I bet we pick up more stares. Not, though, from my mystery man. Since he wouldn't even look my way, I could inspect him, absorb him, commit him to memory.
I had been right about the eyes. They were big and dark brown and curtained by some persistent grief. His black hair curled a little over his enchanting ears and along his neck, and I couldn't decide whether he needed a haircut or just my fingers fiddling in those glossy swirls. He certainly needed a better wardrobe. His definitely retro blue-and-green-striped shirt was button-down and frayed at the collar and throat where a clump of black hair peeked out. His checked trousers, gray with brown lines, were unspeakably new, and his shoes, miles away at the end of legs long enough to wrap around my waist almost twice, were clunky boxes in a ghastly shade of gray somewhere between mouse and unpolished silver.
But I was willing to forgive his clothes. The rest of him was so inviting: the perfect nose, the thick eyebrows, the full, firm lips he was gnawing into a blush the color of a pomegranate seed, shoulders by Atlas, the fleck of dried shaving cream under his right ear that I craved to transfer to my fingertip. The only thing really wrong with him was that he was playing chess with Tommy, not flirting with me or letting me flirt with him. And I had to sit there, congealed like Lot's wife, pretending not to care if their game ever finished.
At last it did. Achilles (or maybe Hercules; he was too powerful and dark to be Adonis.) tipped over his king and put out his hand to Tommy. "You were in the right," he said. "That Kasparov variation on the King's Indian is unrespondable."
"Nothing is unanswerable," replied my oldest friend in the world. "If you wait to castle till after the tenth move, you at least keep some options open. Would you like me to show you?" He started to rearrange the chessmen as I shot him a look of fury.
"Tommy," I blurted, "your coffee's getting cold."
"That's all right," he answered. "This is really interesting." Then he caught himself. He remembered his mission in life.
"Never mind. Another time," he said. He put his hand across the board. "Hello, I'm Thomas Shields. Thank you for the game."
"No. I must to thank you." What was the indefinable accent, clipping his sexy, resonant baritone? "I'm Dmitri. Dmitri Njegos." It sounded like Nyeh-gohsh. "I do not play enough to give you a difficulty, but I have some free time now, and so I am again at study."
"Njegos?" Tommy's voice rose at least half an octave in excitement. "Are you related to the poet? Petar? 'Discovery of the Microcosm'?"
Dmitri, surprised, sat up very straight. "He was our prince-bishop, but early in the last century. I can not believe you know of him and even of the poem."
"I read it in French. There must be an English translation, but I don't know it. It's a very great poem. Marvelously romantic. Is he an ancestor?"
"Yes. Not very direct. After the bishops decided it was to be permitted to marry, the family grew itself by much. Montenegro is full of Njegoses."
My turn, at last. "Montenegro?" I chimed in. "Near Monte Carlo?"
"Don't be an ass, Yves." Tommy was irritated. "Montenegro is on the Adriatic, part of what's left of Yugoslavia, along with Serbia. Do you ever read a newspaper?" He turned to Dmitri. "You're a long way from home. Are you a refugee?"
Dmitri, turned and looked at me closely for the first time. He smiled. "You are the chap I was so rude to by the bookstore. I am so sorry. I hope I did not do you harm."
I melted. "No harm. I'm Yves Sinclair. It's true. I don't read the papers, and I'm sorry for not knowing where Montenegro is. Has it always been in Yugoslavia?"
Dmitri chuckled. "No. Only about 80 years, and maybe not for much longer. Excuse me, but Eve, I thought, was a name of girls."
"It's Yves." I spelled it. "French. Supposedly I was conceived while my parents were watching an Yves Montand film. If I'd been a girl, I would have been Yvette."
"Now," Tommy butted in, "that's the first time I've heard that story. I thought you were named for your mother's father. How come your parents weren't arrested for making babies in a cinema?"
"They were at home." I tried gagging him with my eyes. "The movie was on tape. I can't even imagine my parents holding hands in public." I turned to Dmitri. "Are you a refugee?"
"No. Well, in a way perhaps. I am a student of medical school. But I am running away from home. I do not choose to be there for a while, maybe not ever again."
"I'm so sorry." I caught myself before I took his hand to pat it. Not everyone likes to be touched or groped. "I can't imagine not being able to go home."
That was a conversation stopper. Tommy's father, after all, had come to Canada to avoid the Vietnam draft. His parents disowned him. Tommy's grandfather had been something like the third or fourth black man to become a general in the American army. He died three years ago without speaking to his only son or meeting his only grandson.
"Yves is imagination-impaired," Tommy said acerbically. "Are you going to be starting at McGill, Dmitri?"
"No. Third-year. For the second time." He grimaced. "I got summoned out from the classroom last spring and sent to Kosovo. Now I must to repeat the whole year."
"Why at McGill?" I asked. "Do you have relatives here? Friends?"
"No. No one. In Kosovo, after the fighting, I worked with a Canadian team of detectives inspecting for war crimes evidence. One of them was very..." He hesitated. "Very kind. And his father is at the medical school and found some money for my tuition and some expenses." He hesitated again. "I have ... had a friend in Toronto, but we are no longer the kind of friends we were before."
The hurt behind his eyes seemed to be opening like an infected wound. Suddenly, he didn't look powerful at all, just grieving and alone. I still didn't dare take his hand, but I did put mine on his forearm, and he didn't recoil.
"Well, now you have two friends in Montreal. Tommy and me. We'll show you the sights. Brush up your chess game. Take you to supper tonight. Where are you staying?"
"At the College Francais right now, but I have found a room just two blocks north of the metro Verdun. I go there Sunday, the first of the month. I can take the Metro to school or, they say, there is a bus. The 107. And I like to walk."
"That's a terrible area," I asserted. "Almost a slum. You can't live there. Can he, Tommy?"
"Oh, it's not that bad." I kicked at him under the table. Tommy can be awfully literal. "But there are much nicer neighborhoods," he recovered. "More convenient to the university."
"And much bigger in cost," Dmitri shrugged. "I have looked around. I cannot afford nice or convenient. I got no pay from the Army, and I think not that I ever will. Do you know any rich women alone? I would not mind being a kept man."
"A kept man?" Tommy snorted. "I haven't heard that expression since Leslie Howard's last film. Where did you learn English, Dmitri?"
"In a monastery. An Orthodox monastery in Leeds. I went to the university there for a year and I stayed with monks. It was without a charge because I was a Njegos." He laughed. "Some of the times being a bishop's great-great-great-grandnephew is of benefit. What do you call a kept man here?"
"Lucky," said Tommy.
"An escort or a gigolo or, if there's no sex, a walker," I amended. "But I think it would be hard to study medicine and keep a lonely woman happy at the same time." I looked at Dmitri and began to throttle back my passion. "Of course, I don't know you. Maybe you could handle it."
It was his turn to put a hand on my arm. "I was not serious, Yves," he said. "But I do need to earn money."
"I think all the monasteries here are Catholic. Orthodox isn't the same as Franciscan, is it?" I said stupidly. I was trying to buy time for what I really wanted to suggest. "I know! If you're willing to hire out to a woman, you wouldn't mind being an artist's model, would you? My school is always looking for people who will pose."
"With no clothing?" he asked.
"Nude, yes. But just for the figure studies. And the studio is quite warm." I stopped and then plunged on. "I've done it. Lots of the students have. It's a little embarrassing at first, but it's such hard work, holding a pose, that you really have to concentrate just on that."
Tommy gave me an odd look. "Another first in the revised adventures of Yves," he sniffed. "You really stripped off in front of Madeleine and Roy and the gang? It must have been an epic moment in art history."
I blushed. "Well, actually, they gave me a thing to wear, a posing strap, it's called. But I would have done the Full Monty if they'd needed it."
"Full Monty?" Dmitri was puzzled.
"A film," Tommy answered. "Men in England with no jobs who become strippers. It was quite funny and affecting until near the end. The Full Monty is when they show all their stuff."
"I do not think I could do that," Dmitri weighed the idea. "And I think the school will find some work for me, laboratory assistant or something, after classes start. They may even let me to move into a residence. I can manage in Verdun," he gestured toward the southeast, "until then."
"Wait a minute," Tommy said. "You think you can make do in September? So the problem is just for about a month." He turned to me. "What about Elaine's room?"
I love Tommy. As usual, he read my mind -- id, ego, libido and the part that saw Dmitri slipping out of his posing strap and pulling me into his arms. "Why didn't I think of that?" I slapped my forehead. "Tommaso, you are a genius."
"And you, as I said, are imagination-impaired." He gave me a quick wink.
"Dmitri," I put my hand back on his arm. "That would be perfect. My roommate is away. You could have her space. Free. Until classes begin. And by then, who knows?" By then, I could bring in a king-sized bed. I could get him into decent clothes. And out of them. I could bring him breakfast in bed. I could breakfast on him in bed. My head spun. I am not imagination-impaired in matters of the heart.
"I could not impose on you that way," my imagined lover said. "You do not know me at all. I might be a thief or a murderer."
"Or a candlestick-maker." He looked puzzled. "From a nursery rhyme. I know that you picked me up off the sidewalk just a little while ago with such courtesy and caring that I was hoping I might run into you again so you could knock me down a second time." Tommy snickered. Bastard. "And now I know that you have a poet in the family, I can't believe you would harm anyone."
"Not on purpose." There was some unhappiness behind those words. "But what about your girlfriend? She may not like coming home to find that a stranger has been in her bed."
"Elaine?" My turn to snicker. "She's a roommate, not a girlfriend. Not even much of a friend. She's in Rwanda or Nepal or someplace digging latrines and distributing female condoms for the greater glory of the Anglican Archdiocese. With any luck, she'll come down with beri-beri and be sent to take the waters in... wherever you take the waters."
"Casablanca," Tommy said deadpan.
Dmitri laughed for the first time, a real, warm, happy laugh. "I remember that film," he said. '"I was misinformed.' What a great wittiness!" He looked at Tommy. "Who was Leslie Howard and what was her last film?"
"His. 'The Forty-ninth Parallel.' Forgettable. Leslie Howard was a fine, aristocratic British actor, who was really a Hungarian Jew. Very good-looking. Blond, elegant. A little like Yves."
I tried to look modest and elegant at the same time. "Tommy is doing his doctorate on pre-war cinema," I said. I felt I had to explain his omniscience. "And he writes the most wonderful criticism. Except that he doesn't respect any director since Welles."
"That's not true. Early Visconti. Antonioni. Tarkovsky. And George Cukor." He reflected. "Also Kubrick. I try to keep an open mind."
Dmitri looked at both of us. "You two are very good friends. Am I right?" We nodded. "But are you ever agreeing about anything?"
"Yes," Tommy answered. "Not often, but it happens. And we agree you should move into Elaine's room. You need a free place, and Yves needs a minder. I'm planning to take early retirement."
"I'm his Anchises." I wanted to see if Dmitri knew Virgil, the classics. He smiled. Of course, he did. "He's my St. Christopher. We have been friends since we were put at the same desk in first grade. Shields and Sinclair. An alphabetical inevitability.
"Dmitri, please come. I would be honored to have a chess-playing medical student poet-by-inheritance under my roof. At least, come and look at the place."
"I should not to impose on you like that. Besides, what is a minder?"
"A kept man." Sometimes Tommy can be impossible.
"Don't listen to him, Dmitri," I said. "A minder is someone who looks out for someone else, usually for an old person. I need one because I can be scatter-brained. It's part of the artistic temperament. But I pick up my dirty clothes and I always replace the toilet paper when it runs out. And you wouldn't be an imposition. You would be company. Please say yes."
"All right, I will come to look. How can I to refuse such hospitality?" A huge smile, and I melted again. "But I may not be a very good minder. That is the word? I do not have much experience." He stood up and put out his hand to me. "Yves, there is just one condition."
"Anything."
"You have to call me, Mitya. That's little for Dmitri."
Tommy's eyes had widened when Dmitri got to his feet. "Short for Dmitri," he said. "Not little. And you're not short. You're a giant. How tall are you?"
"About 188 centimeters. In inches, I don't know."
"Over six three." Tommy's internal abacus moved like lightning. "But we're metric in Canada. You'll fit right in. It's the yahoos to the south who can only think in inches."
"Yahoos?"
"Yanks. Americans. They come here to drink and molest women and small animals. They have large voices and small, one-track minds."
"Tommy," I said sharply. "Not now, please. Mitya," I stood, still holding his hand. "I'll give you a chance to back out. Let's go to my place. It's in the Plateau, not far. And if you don't like it, all you have to do is say so." I shook his hand and released it.
He did like it. He liked the completely open downstairs space where the only divider between my work bench and the kitchen is a long seat I designed with an adjustable back so that guests can face either the stove or my small kiln. He liked Elaine's Spartan bedroom and said he didn't mind sleeping with his feet hanging out in space. And he said he liked my sculptures.
"Yves," he asked. "Why are Tommy's eyes shut in that beautiful bust?"
"Because he sees through the back of his head," I explained.
"You are not making joking, are you?"
"No. He really does."
"I do not know how you did it," Dmitri said, "but instead of being blind, you have made him completely understanding. It is a wonderful carving."
I looked at Tommy. He closed his eyes and smiled. "Mitya," I said, "that is just what I wanted to do. You are almost the first person except Tommy to see what I saw."
He complimented me on some of the other pieces, but he didn't get or didn't like my parody of Brancusi, the extended middle finger emerging from the stylized arm and fist. "It's called 'Bird in Fight,'" I said. "Do you know the sculpture called 'Bird in Flight? It's so famous it's a cliche.''
"No. I am sorry."
"I'll show you a picture. But not now. Mitya, will you move in? Please. Not just to save money but to give me pleasure. I would like to know you better. So would Tommy. But you wouldn't have to hang with us when you didn't want to. I promise."
"Hang with you? Like in a cowboy film? Whatever it means, I am sure I would enjoy to hang with you and I would be truly thankful to live with you until Elaine comes back. I did not imagine Canada would make me feel so welcome so fast."
"Actually," Tommy said, "Canadians are really party animals. We just pretend to be withdrawn and reserved so that people will fear and respect us. Which they wouldn't otherwise. Right, Yves?"
"There are Canadians, and there are Canadians," I said. "Mitya just knocked down the right kind. And it was my lucky day."
"And mine," Dmitri shook my hand. There was no electricity, just affability. This was going to be hard work.