It was going to rain, but not yet. The sky was darkening with heavy clouds and the sun had nowhere to shine through.
You might have been killed, Ilia said, stopping on the sidewalk in front of the Dakota and facing Ted, visibly upset and angry.
It would not have mattered, Ted responded, smiling as if with a quiet wisdom.
Ilia looked at him.
Are you crazy? he said.
Let's keep walking, Ted suggested. I don't want to get caught in the rain.
Ilia did not move.
What were you thinking? he said.
There's always a risk when you meet someone you want, Ted said with suppressed impatience, as if it were something obvious, something that Ilia himself knew and was intentionally forgetting. He hoped that his answer would satisfy him and they could continue walking.
He was someone you wanted? Ilia said, impervious to Ted's impatience.
Yes, Ted said. He was. He was someone I wanted. You'll understand when you meet him, he said.
When I meet him? He pulled a knife on you!
The fact that he was holding a knife, Ted said, exasperated, and was trying to threaten me with it was secondary. Actually, he did not need the knife; just the way he looked was threatening.
As soon as the last words were out of his mouth, Ted regretted them. They gave Ilia the opportunity to start a new interrogatory thread instead of starting to walk again.
What do you mean? Ilia demanded. It was scary just to look at him?
He was beautiful, Ted said.
In the distance they could hear a rumble of thunder.
Beauty is always frightening, he continued. Beauty is threatening. Desire is threatening. Wanting somebody is threatening.
What are you talking about? Ilia said, impatiently.
It threatens to throw me off balance. I can't rest until I am wanted. I'm afraid I'll disappear if I'm not the object of desire. I wanted him to want me and to take me and make me his, Ted said. It was the same with Giovanni. It's the same with you.
Fat drops of rain started to fall and they began walking again, briskly.
It always looks like I am being overwhelmed, Ted said, and made to submit, but...
Are you saying that danger turns you on?
Have you ever really wondered why Giovanni rejected me? Ted asked.
The rain was getting heavier and they were getting soaked.
He was a sadist, Ilia speculated. He loved the hunt. Once he had achieved dominance, he lost interest. It's sick, but it's pretty common.
That's one way of seeing it, Ted agreed, as they stopped under an awning in front of one of the grand apartment houses that graced the street.
Once he had put everything he had into me, once he had breathed his life into me, what was left for him? He gave me everything. He transformed me. He made me over in the image I had not been able to shape for myself.
You make him sound like God.
Well, in a way he was. But in a way he was better than God. He made me what I wanted to be. He made it like there was no difference between what he wanted and what I wanted. Can you understand that?
Ilia said nothing and Ted continued.
I was using him all the time it looked like he was using me. What did I give him? Really! Compliance? To what? My own buried wishes! How satisfying could that be, in the long run, for him? I had nothing to give him. Give him back what he gave me? His own image of himself? He already had that. He didn't need me. Anyone would worship him. How could he not lose interest? He was disappointed. That's what hobbled me afterwards. I understood what a disappointment I was and I did not see how I could be anything else. When you come down to it, I am entirely empty.
You are being hard on yourself, Ilia said.
When you fuck me, what do I give you?
Before Ilia could respond, Ted answered for him.
Someone you can fill with yourself!
You give me great beauty to adore and the electricity of your receptivity, Ilia said countering him, touching his wet cheek. I fulfill myself through you. You complete the circuit.
Beauty to adore and receptivity, Ted repeated scornfully, but he himself, not Ilia, was the object of his scorn. I am only what you see, only that, nothing else, and one day, if that is all there is, it will not be enough. Any body can complete the circuit.
Ilia was frustrated that Ted did not understand.
You are going to see him again? Ilia asked and they began to walk again in the abating shower.
Philip? Yes, Ted said.
And you are not afraid? Ilia said.
I think that's part of the excitement.
Be careful, Ilia said.
But I'm not afraid of physical danger.
Then what are you afraid of?
An existential danger: The power that love can exert.
Ilia looked at him with tenderness and concern, suppressing an angry impulse to mock.
The pain I feel when I want to disappear inside someone else, Ted said, trying to explain himself.
Philip was waiting on the corner of 72nd Street at the entrance to the park when Ted arrived.
A young man, too heavy, with a downcast mien and a roll of fat that stretched his T-shirt at his gut was sitting on a nearby bench throwing hopeless glances at him.
I wondered if you'd really show up, Philip said.
Why wouldn't I?
Because you might not trust that I was not going to kill you, he laughed.
The unhappy young man on the bench could not hear what they were saying but understood in his heavy heart that he would never enter the sacred space they inhabited.
Ilia was waiting for them at Lincoln Center. He had been interviewed late that afternoon on the radio, during the intermission of a matinee performance of his new English translation for Boris Godunov. It was entering the repertory there.
In the just-falling dusk, he saw Philip for the first time. He was astonished at Philip's beauty.
What did you have in mind? he asked him as the three rode up in the elevator to his place on Columbus Avenue near the Planetarium.
It was a dare, Philip answered.
A dare? Ilia said as he turned the key and opened the door to his apartment.
A dare I made to myself.
What for?
To prove to myself that I could be in control.
In control of what?
Of anything. I was afraid I had lost my will.
It's a crazy way to prove anything.
I know that, Philip said.
But sometimes...risk... He shrugged unable to explain.
Ilia took his hand and looked him in the eye, searching for something deep within that would tell him more than words. Innocence was not enough. It was goodness that he looked for.
I wonder, he said, if you feel like you are in control now.
Hardly, Philip said.
Ilia opened a bottle of champagne in celebration of the first performance of his translation at Lincoln Center, and they shared a joint.
You are very beautiful, Ilia said, caressing the back of Philip's neck. Take off your clothes.
Everything?
Your shirt first.
Stand still, he said once Philip had complied. Let me look at you.
Caress his nipples, Ilia said to Ted. Take off your shirt, too.
Ted, who had been gazing at the young man in awe of his beauty, who might have killed him, did as Ilia ordered. He stood lean and muscular, graceful -- even more so because it was as if he were moving in a trance. He touched his index fingers to Philip's nipples and felt him shudder. That made him begin slowly to circle the tips of his fingers around the aureoles surrounding the tiny nibs. Without prompting, their gazes found each other and, like spiders, sent out gossamer lines that caught their eyes in the single web woven by their gaze. Their sight became a tunnel, an unending glance that reflected itself in the infinity of desire.
As their mutual immersion drew them together and they lost awareness of everything surrounding them, Ilia watched them intently, excited by their interplay. He began sketching in charcoal a series of drawings as they approached and found each other that were published two months later in Vanity Fair.
When Ted sat down across from him in a booth at the diner on Ninth Avenue, Ilia looked up from reading one of the stories Ted had given him about his time with Giovanni, one of those that he had submitted for publication and that had been returned to him.
Ilia took a sip of his coffee, but it had gotten tepid and was not very good anyhow.
You have several choices, he said, as far as I can see.
Ted looked at him without saying anything.
These are stories that take place inside a very closed world -- gay hook-ups, bust-ups, and longing, sometimes satisfied, sometimes frustrated. All your characters are gorgeous, handsome, toned, suntanned. Nobody has money problems or a problem finding or affording a place to live. Nobody is ugly or out of shape, or, at least, not for long. Anybody who is not perfect is transformed by someone else who is. Everyone is happily promiscuous, and when two guys make it together, the sex is over the top. And there are no women to speak of.
If you really want to write gay porn, I mean real jerk-off stuff, I'm not sure you're succeeding. I don't go in for porn much, so I'm not really competent to say. But from what you have shown me, I'd guess these aren't. They are too intellectual. I'm not sure I know what you are trying to do. Perhaps you're writing psychological allegories that try to use some of the conventions of erotic fiction to say something about identity, about its varieties and how identity is the result of interactions between people. You always seem to be writing about power and sometimes about love, usually about control and dependency, about domination and submission, never equality. It's as if when you are writing you get stuck somewhere in late adolescence and constantly repeat, relive, re-imagine the same thing without ever getting beyond it.
Ted looked forlorn. It was probably true.
Is it that bad? he said, laughing, trying to express his anxiety in gaiety and thereby avoid a lessening of himself in his own estimation.
I never said your stories were bad, Ilia smiled reproachfully.
Why do you listen to him? Frederick said, exasperated as they left the theater.
The evening was chilly.
Because he knows something.
He knows how to put people down.
Why would he do that? Ted asked with amazed emphasis.
Think for a minute.
I don't know, Ted said.
Because it puts him up.
I don't believe that, Ted answered. He does not need to.
Everybody needs to, Frederick said before he realized the implication.
You? Ted inquired.
Probably even me. Although I try to fight it.
He smiled and put his arm around Ted's shoulders and tried to draw him to his side, but Ted resisted.
I don't want to, he said.
That's a first, Frederick said.
He was right. It was.
Yes, Ted reflected. I never could say no.
So why do you have to start with me?
Perhaps it's because I would feel it was being disloyal to Ilia.
So you've become monogamous.
I would not say that, Ted laughed.
What then? Frederick demanded.
Before he could answer, however, Ted's cell phone began to vibrate in his pocket.
Excuse me, he said, taking it out and flipping it open.
After Ilia's drawings of Philip and Ted appeared in Vanity Fair, Philip was dismissed from his job as a flight attendant.
I thought they were indifferent to sexual orientation, Ted remarked when he told them.
They said it was not a matter of sexual orientation but of bringing attention to the company and reflecting poorly on their image. I won't be able to stay where I am now. Too expensive, and it was only a place to crash between flights, he added.
Ilia considered what it would be like to live with both of them. He made sure it was alright with Ted and suggested Philip move in with them. If it worked out the three of them could look for a bigger place.
At his insistence, Ted had stopped writing industrial propaganda. He spent his days struggling to be a real writer. It was a vocation, but it was not an income.
Philip had lost his job.
His own income, while it could be pretty, was free lance and not regular.
When Max Cantor called him from Maxson's a publisher of specialty books and wanted to put together a coffee-table size book using more of the kinds of drawings that had appeared in Vanity Fair, it was manna from heaven. Ilia told him he would think of some theme to give the drawings unity and purpose and came up with an opera calendar, with Ted and Philip pictured together in scenes from a dozen operas and one for each month. He proposed a book calendar.
It was more successful than they had imagined: goofy and absurdly alluring erotic camp with idealized drawings of two beautiful young men in scanty opera costumes, arguing, embracing, kissing, singing duets, sword fighting, chests bare, thighs exposed.
As he sketched them in their scenes, he led them to great intimacies with each other. They had to make emotional connections if his pictures were to have the vibrancy and the authenticity; finally, the humanity and the sexy energy that they had to have in order to work.
I'll be damned, Giovanni exclaimed slowly and in his heaviest southern drawl when he saw Ilia's pictures and recognized Ted.
[When you write, please put story name in subject slot. Thanks.]