flawed heredity. He stood silent before me. The dim light from the lamp in the corner cast shadows beneath his cheekbones and in the caves of his eyes. He had disarranged his hair by running his fingers through it as he spoke, and it fell over his forehead. In that moment, I experienced a welter of emotions – compassion, confusion, and yes, desire. The thing I had discovered in myself a short time before had returned, with a vengeance. Something unthinkable until now was about to become real. I removed my spectacles, welcoming the blurring of vision. It was like camouflage, hiding me from myself as I entered an unexplored region.
He was now so near me that I caught again the faint scent of his narcissus perfume. Slowly, he raised his hand. His fingers brushed my cheek, the hair at my temple, the line of my jaw. His eyes were rapt, enormous, his lips slightly parted. He made as if to snatch his hand back, but I caught it in both of mine and held it to my heart. I heard a sweet, constant note, as though a harp string had been plucked, and reverberated in the silent room.
"Charles," he whispered, "I can feel your heart beating. So fast… You know what I am, don't you?"
"Yes," I said. "But it's all right, Herbert. I want this, I think. I want… you."
For the first time, I saw his beautiful face transformed by passion. He closed his eyes. "Kiss me, Charles."
So I did.
Always, in my dealings with him, he had been the leader. He had given the orders and I had followed them. Now he gave himself to me like a flower. His lips were warm, and tasted of whiskey.
After a long moment, he drew back. "Madness and degeneracy –can you feel it?"
"I don't know what degeneracy is supposed to feel like. As for madness, I suppose you could call it that, but whatever it is, I want to feel it. And so do you, I think."
He sighed. "Wanting has nothing to do with it."
In the darkness of my bedroom, without the acute details supplied by vision, everything became easier. I was fumbling with the buttons of his vest, when he murmured, "So you're not altogether reluctant to do this now? In our experimental days you always jibbed at undressing the subjects." He laughed. I felt his warm breath on my cheek, his fingers loosening my collar.
"You're not a subject, though," I said breathlessly.
"No? I suspect for you this is something in the nature of an experiment."
"Well, yes, in a way," I admitted. "So you must have patience."
I heard a smile in his voice as he replied. "Nine years, Charles. Isn't that patience enough?"
"But I don't know what to do," I said. "That's what I meant."
"Do whatever you like. Do whatever gives you pleasure. I don't think you could do anything to cause me harm."
I had reached the limits of choice. Swept along by a swiftly flowing river to the brink of a precipice, I had only a few moments left in which to change my mind. If I ended this now, it would be forever. This demanded nothing less than my complete surrender. I gave up. I gave in. I let myself be taken over the brink. As I fell and fell through the sun-shot iridescence of ecstasy, I no longer cared about what might happen. Whether I would be killed on the rocks below, or drowned in deep waters, or dissolved in air, was all one to me. There was only one thought in my mind: I am his. Now I am his forever.
Something woke me in the dusk of dawn, shattering my dream of a warm, salty sea near a country of flowers. He was a silhouette before the window, tying his necktie. Panicked lest he leave before I had pulled myself together, I seized my bathrobe and groped for the role of genial host.
"You're going now?"
He turned to me the face of one addressed on the street by a stranger.
"Yes. Don't bother showing me out."
The door opened and closed, and I heard his steps on the stairs.
Hurrying to a window that overlooked the street, I watched him walking swiftly along the sidewalk. He looked his ordinary, public self. No one who saw him could possibly have guessed, I thought, chilled by the speed of the transition.
If my affair with Alma had been a steadily flowing river, this one was a series of storms. Was it even an affair, or an aberration? Your nearly wordless departure that first time suggested the latter, but I did not ask you, because I thought it would be presumptuous, or merely disingenuous. Also because I could not be certain that you would tell me the truth. Always you reserved that for yourself alone.
So I found answers for myself. I found them when I lay awake alone, wondering where you were, what you were doing, and with whom. In my cynical moments I thought this was another of your experiments – after all, if you could by chemistry and force of will bring a corpse back to life, why not try, by that same will and with yourself as the instrument, to achieve a different kind of transformation? But in truth, I think your deliberate revelation to me of your secret was a truce with your sexual self, the culmination of a war that began long ago. I knew you feared betrayal more than anything, and in me you had found someone you could trust never to betray you. The death of Robert Leavitt had shown you that. So you decided to give into my keeping the troublesome demon that brought you pain and pleasure in equal parts. But not unreservedly. I realized that too late.
He grew elusive. Days went by, weeks went by, and I saw nothing of him. After the second week I went to his house, feeling apprehensive and foolish. Andre showed me up to his study with a formality that served only to intensify my awkwardness. He broke off his writing when I entered and greeted me amicably. For a few minutes we chatted of nothing in particular. Just as I was about to ask a few carefully formulated questions, the ubiquitous Andre reappeared, this time with offers of refreshment. I gave up, asked for coffee and prepared for more trivial talk until it arrived. But once the fellow had finally gone, his employer gave me a look of sardonic amusement and said, "All right, Charles, what's really on your mind? You look as though you have a bag of snakes with you."
I thought he knew very well what I wanted to say, but was not about to help me with it. I took a breath and said, "Well, Herbert, I've been thinking I must have done something to offend you the last time I saw you. It's been more than two weeks and – "
"Seventeen days, precisely." He smiled, and I, remembering the occasion all too easily, began to blush. "So what gives you the idea," he continued, "that you offended me?"
I shifted in my chair as my scalp prickled and my cheeks flamed. "Well, nothing, really. It's just that we're… Things are different now, so I thought – "
He stared at me hard, with eyes grown suddenly cold "No. Things aren't different."
"But they are! How can you ignore what happened… between us? Everything has changed."
"For you, perhaps." He smiled with compressed lips. "Look, Charles – for me, these entanglements are strictly peripheral. Don't expect anything. You'll see me when you see me. Feel free to seek other companions, if you want. Oh, and if you decide to get married, let me know, and I'll stand up with you, as your oldest friend. Now, drink up and go home. I have to finish this tonight."
So the rules for this would be the same as for our earlier collaboration and friendship. When he wanted my company, he would seek me out. Otherwise I was to leave him alone. I could take him on those terms, or not at all. They were the only terms he would offer.
To complicate things further, he was two different people in one body. One was cold, reticent and a little cruel, the other warm and loving. Remembering his long-ago lie about a deceased twin, I privately thought of them as twin brothers, Herbert and Francis.
"Herbert" preferred to talk, to perform, to generate fascination, and then to depart abruptly without explanation. He did not hesitate to lacerate intimate moments with cutting remarks. In an uncongenial mood, he could assume and wear remoteness better than anyone I have ever known. "Thank you for gracing the evening, Charles. I'm going up now. Forgive me, but would you mind showing yourself out? Good night." And he would drain his glass, set it down and turn away without a backward glance.
"Francis" was tentative, skittish and almost invisible,
except on the rare occasions when "Herbert" laid down some unknown burden and stood before me without his shield. Eventually, I discovered that his was a loving heart imprisoned in a cage of steel. In the darkness with him, I sensed the pain of his invisible wounds, before I knew their nature or cause. Inevitably, I sought, without understanding, to heal them.
He appeared on my doorstep late one evening, just as I, sleepy and irritable, had awakened from an accidental armchair nap. Giving no reason for his unexpected arrival, he paced around my sitting room, carrying on at length about Medical School business discussed at the meeting he had just left. The gist seemed to be that the "antediluvian fossils" among his colleagues were conspiring to persecute him in some bureaucratic way. Finally, I had enough. As he passed before me on yet another circuit of the room, I took a chance, grasped his arm and drew him toward me.
"Herbert," I said, "shut up." The startled look he gave me was sufficient reward for the annoyance I had endured. He looked at me with immense relief on his face.
"Charles," he sighed, "what would I do without you?"
I concluded this was a rhetorical question, and instead of replying, embraced him. All at once, there was no constraint between us. I led him into my bedroom and propelled him toward the bed. He yielded to me, laughing, his fair hair falling back against the