slowly to the foamless weirs

He hasn’t slept well since the war — or earlier than that. He finds himself awake at odd hours, or simply not retiring to bed at all, hours spent with stinging eyes and manuscript pages spread out on the bedroom floor, determined to make something out of his jittery wakefulness. Stealing a few hours in a light liquor-facilitated stupor before jerking awake from a nightmare he can’t remember. Or lying awake with an aching leg and a throbbing headache, thinking of the party and Brandon’s hospitality and those books neatly bound up, the cassone with its lid weighted down — suffocating darkness, stale heat, weight, the impression of being enclosed on all sides. Or the gold letters embossed inside David Kentley’s hat, flaking and cold under his fingertips. He’d taken it home with him that same night, too mannered to remark on the evidence of a crime. He doesn’t need to undergo psychoanalysis to know what it all signifies — when he wakes in the night, he is wondering what he’d have seen if he’d looked.

Brandon comes back again in the fall, fresh and sleek as a housecat, and without Phillip. “Truly terrible,” he says, “how they never did find David.”

*

Rupert arrives on the same day as the piano-movers come and go. The offer is generous, and with Phillip gone — for good? — there’s no sense in wasting space. “There are two bedrooms,” Brandon says, “and I think you’ll find them both quite satisfactory.”

Phillip’s out, and Rupert’s in; out with the new, in with the old. He won’t be staying long, but Brandon is eager to be accommodating — there’s room for another bookshelf or two, if they don’t mind blocking out some of the natural light. There’s no clock on the wall in the living room, and the same emphatically modern paintings hanging on every vertical surface and a fine array of bachelor artifacts on every tabletop and shelf — the telephone sits tucked away against the far wall beneath a particularly ugly lamp, out of use.

Rupert turns the ashtray in his hands, casting a funny pool of light against the drinks cart. In his mind, he reconstructs a scene of hospitality, how it might have gone. But all the particulars have changed — the chairs are in different places, the chest has been carried away by movers. All the evidence has been cleared out, and scrubbed of fingerprints.

Brandon pours himself a drink and comes up behind him, slipping a neat white hand over Rupert’s shoulder; Rupert startles back against the cushions.

“You must be missing him terribly.” There’s no question about who.

“Not as much as his father is.”

Rupert lifts his chin, leaning back stiff with self-possession. Brandon’s fingertips drum against his collar with light familiarity.

“You must have come to our little party last summer hoping to see him again. I’m sorry it didn’t work out that way.”

A near miss. David coffined up in an Italian heirloom and no one else the wiser. Brandon gloating, Phillip terrified. Rupert wills his face into a mask of frostiness, but he can’t quite keep his mouth from twitching in an uneasy smile.

“You know, I hadn’t thought about David in a while until you’d brought him up.”

“It’s hard to forget such an odd little incident when it happens in your own home, you know.”

“If I didn’t know better, I’d say you were pleased at how it all turned out. Janet threw you over for Kenneth, and threw him over for David. Now David’s gone, and instead of hurrying back to you, she and Kenneth have made up. If it were me I think I’d find it galling.”

“It wasn’t like that. That’s one link too far removed to rattle me.”

“So David Kentley just happened to be the man of the hour?”

“You’re the one who wanted him so badly.”

“I beg your pardon.”

“You wanted him, and there wasn’t a soul at that school who didn’t know it. You always were weak for that kind of thing, chum, weren’t you.” He sounds like Janet then, self-consciously boyish. “Everyone trooped after David, but not like you. You wanted him, but you settled for me.”

“Brandon, think of what you’re saying.” But there’s no one else to hear them, no one’s due to come by any time soon. They’re alone with no witnesses and Rupert wants very badly not to be alone with Brandon now. He begins to rise from the window seat.

“Stop, stop. Don’t get up. Stay. Stay just as you are.”

Brandon lights a cigarette for him, shaking out the paper match. He’s fundamentally foolish, underneath the bogus erudition — a boy in a borrowed suit.

It’s shocking that no one else stepped up to the task of identifying him as a murderer — it seems so obvious, he’s so obviously wicked and so obviously weak, so distinctive. Janet must have seen it, Mr. Kentley must have smelled the cruelty on him and steered away. Mrs. Wilson could have seen it, for Christ’s sake. It should have been clear to anyone with eyes that something rotten had been done, over a girl or over a little stung pride, and the two young snobs had been the ones to do it. (Snobs isn’t the right word, really, for what they are.) The responsibility should never have been his — for knowing him too well, for having loved him once and regretting it.

Brandon lights his own cigarette next, looking at him out from under his eyelashes. His face is cruelly handsome; his neck is white and straight, bracketed by his collar.

Rupert grimaces. “Is this song and dance really necessary?”

“Sometimes I feel as if I’m missing something. Some minor part. You taught me I wasn’t alone, Rupert, did you know that? Six-odd centuries of Shaws and I’m the only black sheep. But I’m not alone.”

There’s a terrible feeling in his chest, a constricted closeness. Under better circumstances such a confession would qualify as touching — the old schoolmaster alone with his books as shades of his old pupils troop before his eyes to testify all the life-altering changes his instructions wrought in them. Rupert Cadell never particularly liked teaching, never thought of himself as much of a teacher, and if any slight part of him ever made Brandon Shaw seem like less of an aberration in his own eyes, he’d cut it out. He isn’t a teacher; he’s a thinker. He never led these boys by the hand to any conclusion; he posed questions and the courses practically taught themselves.

Brandon’s voice is hard and earnest, and so is his cruel mouth against the crook of Rupert’s neck.

There in front of those broad windows, where anyone could see — but the curtains are drawn and the skyline is dark, lit sporadically in red neon. With the ledge of the window against his shoulder and Brandon’s grip like an iron vise, forcing Rupert’s leg back — the old wound roars with pain and he must make a sound against Brandon’s mouth because it excites him, the pain and the inflicting of it. His erection is pressing against Rupert’s side and it seems like a terrible thing — sudden and terrible.

Rupert reaches out with a vague crawling hand, striving to touch.

If Brandon is a murderer, he’s an awfully careless one. Maybe that’s the joke in itself, winding up his dusty old housemaster with his careworn old nerves by pretending to have bumped off an innocent pal and then ta-da, David Kentley is alive and well and living in sin with a coat-check girl he likes better than Janet. It’s a farce, bathos straight to the bottom. It’s none of his business.

He reverts to some old pattern, some old weakness, some ill-healed break all ready to snap again along the same fault line. It’s strange to begin, to go about taking him in his hand or in his mouth, like he’s in a public toilet and they’ve only just met, like he’s a man of twenty-four again and foolishly in love with some thick-necked professor of languages who calls men like himself opportunists and calls men like Rupert swishes. Like they’re back at Somerville again, familiar territory braced and toughened by the passage of time.

Taking him in his hand and bringing him off as Brandon sweats and shivers — he leaves him with a rumpled coat and rucked-up undershirt. A band of his bare stomach is visible, a wet stripe.

When he draws back, Brandon leaves a hard blue mark on Rupert’s throat. Later on, Rupert can trace the borders of it in the bathroom mirror and shudder.

*

At the office, he telephones Phillip’s mother — over the line she has a hoarse, nervous voice, and she sounds heartened by Cadell’s concern even if what she has to say solidifies Rupert’s dread into a leaden certainty. She has only fond memories of this man who inquires after her son, and plenty to say about Brandon. He smokes a gold tray’s worth of cigarettes, and deliberates — contemplates drafting up a letter, some kind of confession, but his hands seem to seize up when he tries.

At the apartment, Brandon’s been waiting up for him. He might try and affect lanky casualness, but it’s unmistakable how he brightens, even in the funny neon half-light from the window. Rupert tosses down his hat. The room is too big and too empty now, and it fills up too easily with ambient light even after the sun’s gone down — removing Phillip’s things has hollowed it out somehow, and what’s left behind of Brandon’s belongings shows good taste but nothing resembling personality.

He must see it on his face, the moment he comes in out of the hallway.

“Lovely evening, isn’t it.” Brandon floats across the bare floor to meet him, barefoot in pyjamas. He is trying not to stammer. “They’ll be shipping out the rest of Phillip’s things in the morning. I’ve just been reading a really singular book —"

“So the two of you have really called it quits. I never thought I’d see the day.”

There’s a book all right, balanced on the arm of a chair, and a full ashtray — the book is only the prop, the pretense. From the binding, it’s one of Rupert’s.

Brandon’s face is tranquil, but his eyes are darting, his mouth moves too quick. “Well, Phillip was never cut out for city life. I think we can both agree on that. He’s liking it very much in Connecticut, back at the farm. Something about what it does for his nerves. Nobody bothers him there. You can write him a letter, if you don’t believe me.”

The pastoral scene: Phillip in Connecticut, living happily ever after on the family farm like a faithful dog in its last years. A diet of whisky and sheet music and all the chickens he can stand to strangle. No, Phillip may be residing in Connecticut but it’s hard to imagine that he’s living.

“That’ll be news to his mother. She says she hasn’t seen him in months. No letter, not even a telephone call. She thought he was still rooming here with you, in Manhattan. In fact, she was under the impression he was still attending classes.”

Brandon’s face doesn’t change, and his voice is as light as ever. “That’s Phillip for you — a heel to the end. I have reason to believe that’s why he’ll never marry.”

Rupert grabs his arm, just above the elbow, his thumb digging into the soft part. He can feel Brandon go rigid, but there’s no fear on his face, only an easy sort of titillation. His long slim body inclines itself toward Rupert, as if he’s angling for a kiss.

The two of them stand face to face. Rupert keeps his voice low. “What have you done to him?”

“I haven’t done anything.”

“You did away with David and then Phillip had a sudden attack of conscience. How did you do it?”

“I haven’t done anything worth being ashamed of.”

“What did you do to Phillip?”

Brandon’s face twists. For a moment, he is powerfully ugly. “He was weak, and he couldn’t hack it.”

“He was weak,” Rupert repeats, and Brandon’s mouth opens, a flutter of rapture at the recognition.

“Yes.”

“Do you think that gives you any right to do what you’ve done?”

His smile is luminous, scorching. “Don’t shout. You have to think about how all this would look — I can think of few things your reputation needs less than a falling-out between cocksuckers.”

Everything else would become doubtful, everything he’s ever done — the manuscripts he publishes, the men and women who write them, the schools he’s taught at. The association would stain them.

“That’s an ugly word, Brandon.” If not strictly inaccurate. He needs a drink fiercely; the back of his throat is prickling, constricting. “What would Janet think?”

“I didn’t do it for Janet. She’s a terrific girl, but I’ve had her already, and she’s not worth killing over. Surely you can see that.”

Rupert laughs a despairing laugh. “You were never a great lover of women to begin with. Janet’s a bright girl, don’t you think it’s possible she might notice?”

“Janet’s not like you and me. She doesn’t exist in our moral class — if you’d like to think of it that way. I could never really…”

He seems at a loss as to how to complete the sentence. Their moral class is constricted, shrunken down to a pinprick.

“She’ll never forget it.”

“I knew you had it, as soon as I saw your face. You knew. You’re the only one I can be honest with.”

They make it to the bedroom after that, shedding garments along the way — Brandon helpfully brings his foot down across Rupert’s instep to snag off his shoes. After that, Rupert lies awake and smokes, with his fingers on the fading blue mark.

*

They wouldn’t have dared, before. Rupert wouldn’t have — it had been enough of a relief to snag a moment, he hadn’t made any ambitious designs on the boy’s body beyond the completion of an act, he hadn’t trapped anyone. He’d made mistakes with Brandon, but they’d been clean mistakes.

They’re becoming a couple of libertines. Brandon isn’t a child any more, not by anybody’s reckoning — he hadn’t been a child when Rupert first came to teach, either, he’d been something else. Rupert no longer goes to parties or to the theater; Brandon’s gone all day but his primary occupation seems to be drinking in clubs, picking up the slack Phillip left behind. Mrs. Wilson’s visits come less frequently now. There’s nothing to distract them from each other.

There’s nothing to stop him from hauling his former pupil over the edge of the bed and delivering a punitive pummeling until the backs of Brandon’s thighs are marked out in red and blue — Brandon presses Rupert’s hands there, hard against the welted skin until the handprints show up white, the cruel marks of the cane are broken scarlet threads like the lines of a mathematical proposition. That’s one lesson in cruelty, and Brandon comes away from it marked but unwilted, alive with bright enthusiasm even if he winces when he sits. Nothing to stop him from being beaten — from awful scenes, from begging and pleading on all fours with his pupil still unrelenting. Those lessons might even be what Brandon prefers, and Rupert’s weakness only seems to thrill him. He can’t look Brandon in the face afterward, aching under his clothes. There’s no point in making conversation. Brandon’s opinions are insipid and unpleasant. Living with him is like owning a badly-behaved parrot. There isn’t a day that goes by without getting exuberantly clawed.

Rupert hates him, with a hard dull hate.

There’s nothing to stop him from cruel acts — certainly Brandon won’t. Brandon takes it in stride like a new sport with new rules. Every cruel thing Rupert has ever entertained the thought of, and yet has never done — annihilating, altering. He does things in the hope that any one of them will break him, that there’s limits still to Brandon’s depths and that one of the things he does to him will leave Brandon crying for him to stop, but every night when the two of them come together he’s more than up to the challenge. Brandon is trusting as a lamb, stumblingly eager and boundlessly curious.

His own depravity staggers him — there are things he’d never dreamed he’d do, and he’s done them now. There are other elements.

Brandon is pliant beneath him, Rupert rises up on his knees and the scar on his leg wrenches. Maybe Brandon can feel it, the grinding of his ruined knee as Rupert straddles him; he reaches out to clap a hand to his leg, reassuring or cruel.

Rupert can touch him too, with impunity. His fingertips graze the naked underside of Brandon’s throat, where the Adam’s apple stands out and the sweat of his exertion has settled into a tugging dampness.There is a length of rope in the bedside drawer — ordinary window sash cord, not long, and raveling out at the ends. It’s the simplest of all the devices that have entered into their conjunction, and if Brandon is watching him from under his eyelids, no recognition shows on his face.

Rupert calls him by name, and his face brightens. Brandon draws him down by the forearm, guiding him to his place, allowing himself to be encircled — like a wreath in white.

Rupert loops the cord around the broad part of his hand, and twists.

Brandon’s cock fills his left hand. Rupert fumbles attention out of it with his fingers and the pad of his thumb and Brandon makes such sounds — broken little wheezes that are terribly exciting even as they paint a uniquely unpleasant picture, what if. What if Rupert simply kept exerting force until the life left him — snuffing out the only witness to his own crime, too, and was this what David saw? What Brandon is seeing now — a man bearing down on him with an elbow planted in place for better angling, red-faced and ugly with exertion. He rocks against him slightly, grasping at the bedclothes.

It’s a terrible kind of power. Maybe it was easier for two men than one.

Brandon struggles beneath him, and it isn’t a picturesque struggle. One of his socks comes slumping down from the digging of his heel against the mattress — Rupert can feel the wool scrape against the backside of his calf, strangely pathetic. It wasn’t like this for David — too much trouble to move him, to deposit him where he’d ultimately be deposited, it’d have to be in front of those windows, in front of the skyline. Maybe it was more like this with Phillip — doing away with one’s lover while the two of you are in bed together, clearing the path for the next one to come along. Phillip, poisonous, helpless.

It would be easy like this — easier than it would have been for David. The rope gouges in deeper, carving a slash across Brandon’s mottled throat — Brandon chokes for breath beneath him and his hand gouges out to claw, opening raw tracks on the side of Rupert’s face. His grimace of deliberation furrows them open.

His own climax is like a string snapping somewhere out of sight — the cataclysmic pressure releasing without any intention behind it and almost without awareness, so focused is he on the slippery edge of Brandon’s consciousness. There’s a look on his face behind the horrible mask of altered color, something familiar in the jerky working of his mouth and the flaring of his nostrils, the wide-openness of his eyes — a dying man, not a man already dead. Rupert knows that look, but he doesn’t know what look it is. He could freeze him like this, lock him in this attitude forever — one last expression.

The look on Brandon’s face is fear. When he loosens his grip Brandon drops back gasping, the rope raveling away from his neck and the red imprint underneath standing out unambiguous.

Brandon claws his way back to the land of the living with deep rattling breaths and Rupert sinks back on his haunches for a long moment. The surge of feeling in his chest is like the squeeze of a fist — repulsion, fascination. He’s dimly aware of a wetness.

He hadn’t been breathing either, in the throes of it. He’d been too cowardly to breathe.

“My God,” Brandon finally says, in rapturous tones. His voice is cracked. Brandon rubs a hand along the red track where the rope had been — there’s a disarming trace of spittle on his cheek that keeps him from approaching dignity. He is red-cheeked and sputtering and very young. Their hips chafe together like chips of flint; the sensations have become painfully keen. Rupert’s disgust throbs inside him; the palm of his hand burns, the webbed part between his forefinger and thumb is already rising in a blister. A lock of his hair is falling limply into his eyes.

“What have you done to Phillip?” His own voice sounds absurd, asking the question in the state both of them are in. The sweat is drying on the back of his neck, in a cold prickle. Collapsing against the bed, the two of them in a tangle — he casts the rope aside like it’s going to burn him if he touches it a second longer. Evidence, fingerprints.

“He killed himself. You’ll have to believe me, why would I lie? Why would I lie now?'

Rupert clasps his face in his hands — Brandon’s eyes are shining, pupils darting back and forth past the queer brim of tears on his eyelids.

“I don’t think I do believe you.”

Brandon mouths against Rupert’s hand, and his breath is wet. “No, I don’t think you do.”