Understand The Weapon

1932

They are quarreling without admitting it, on an afternoon with the sunshine slanting through the vines and the hot brick against their backs, Judd’s arms crossed tightly across his chest as he sweats into his shirt. They are in limbo, between the end of boyhood and the beginning of university, and it sits uneasily on the whole landscape. The sky is the wrong color, and the light has the wrong qualities.

It is a quarrel over Harcourt too, though he is nowhere to be found and he is never called by name, not once – his memory still hangs in the air between them, his soft animal loveliness and his dull charm. How anyone could feel a passionate attachment to such a stultifying specimen – it’s impossible to imagine being smitten with someone like Harcourt, all animal, all wooly softness.

If I wasn’t in love with James, I’d be in love with you. What a beastly thing to joke about.

“I feel sorry for chaps like Martineau, but I don’t feel in the least sorry for chaps like – like Oscar Wilde. His own class turned on him because he dared to embarrass it. It had scarcely anything to do with the offense itself.”

“Out of all your poses, Judd, this one is the filthiest. Wilde was a socialist too, you know.”

“Not a real socialist, anyway. His most radical pose was treating a person of his own class the way men of his class are accustomed to treat the poor.”

“Oh, is that all?”

“Our august grandfathers didn’t give a damn about a couple of renters, but lay one finger on a fellow with good breeding and you might as well have committed cannibalism. It’s a condition of the privileged classes, men are stuck going with men for some advantage or other and not out of feeling. Cross-class dalliances don’t dismantle the bourgeois system, they reinforce it. Even you can see that. You might lust after a working man, but you’d never listen to him argue his point, would you? It’s unequal by design.”

Guy laughs. “Well, there you go, you’ve got the whole range of desire stitched up. Buggering and arguing.”

“You’d never see a couple of — of bricklayers, or coal miners lining up to do it, not with one another. Money has poisoned it.”

“I don’t know about that, Judd, have you ever asked one? A coal miner, that is. Or a homosexual.” Guy is goading him now, but his cheeks take on a queer sort of color that he’s never seen him with before — it instantly makes him regret how carelessly he’d wrenched out those words, those spots of electric shame in Guy Bennett’s cheeks.

“In practice, at least,” Judd says, “you must admit that much is true. The – the stigma, at any rate, owes to the imbalance of power. It would never do for two men laboring in a, in a class awareness, to go home together at the end of the day like a man and wife with the same inequality between them. It would have to look radically different.”

“Dashed unfair to women, don’t you think? Where do they fit in this scheme of yours, in the state of pure Russian sexual freedom, or are the only pure and egalitarian relations the ones you’ll be having with your bolshy wife one day? Fully-dressed, in the dark, with a copy of Das Kapital lying between you like a naked sword.”

“I don’t intend to take a wife at all,” Judd says tartly, but it’s not the final word he intends it as. It doesn’t cut off that wretched line of fantasy but rather prolongs it. He can see it in Guy’s face as the momentary sting of embarrassment dissolves into an enormous annoyed exhalation.

“What rot.”

“It’s true. Marriage as we know it is a corrupt bourgeois institution, and it’s not in the least necessary for sex. It only breeds repression.”

“And children, too. I thought you were secretly staunch for productive congress — though those two don’t always go together, I suppose. You only think you won’t marry, Judd, we’ll make a bet on it, you and I. You’ll be attached to some woman by the time you’re twenty-five, and the girl won’t even be pretty. You had your little paramour, didn’t you?"

“Not any more," Judd says, feeling himself color slightly. “I’ve never wanted companionship. I don’t want children. Just because I’m not like you…” Tommy struggles to finish the thought. “That doesn’t mean I put some sacred premium on marriage.”

He will die young; he knows this. He will want the company of women, but he will die with nothing to offer them but principles.

“You’re so terribly dogmatic – you think you’ve made your own way, but you’re just like everyone else. You hate it because you can’t imagine it any other way. It’s another phase to pass through on your way to something more comfortable. Free love for you, but not for me, is that it?”

“That isn’t it at all. You’re mischaracterizing me because you’re angry. It’s no different for women than it is for men. To achieve what must be achieved–” – Tommy does not dare call it revolution, not to Guy’s face, for fear he will sputter with laughter and Tommy will forget his train of thought entirely – “without excessive violence, there must be an intensity, a fanaticism, with no other parallel to detract from it. There can be no competition with sex. Or love, if you call it that.”

“How much violence is excessive, I wonder?” Guy says and lights a cigarette with sulky ostentatiousness.

“There isn’t a place for ordinary love in a revolutionary life. Not the way you mean it, you know – if it brings someone into greater understanding, then it’s all right. Love should elevate Marxist consciousness, not suppress it. It should be an extraordinary love.”

“Love, but not sex. How Socratic of you.” Guy waves out the match. Judd reaches out to pinch the smoldering tip between his fingers, and the smart of it isn’t enough to make him sorry.

“You have your love, and I have mine.”

Bennett will have his fill of this Oscar Wilde business, he will martyr himself over a pair of lovely lips and lovely eyes, and then – he will come back to Tommy and they will walk again as they once did, they will talk late into the night by torch-light, they will be two again.

What he means is, eschew the love of lovely people like Harcourt, and love me. Turn away from things that are sunny and pleasant and full of life and love what is dull and plodding and serious — love me. But he will not know that for some time.

**

1936

“These buggers have stolen my camera,” Guy says with indignation. He tosses down his suitcase with a rattle as if he’s decided in the same instant to stay. “First thing when I disembarked.”

His slovenly figure fills the doorway, looking as if he’s freshly rolled out of bed; he has bitten nails and an unbuttoned suit-jacket with creases that look as if he’s slept in it. There is a packet of cigarettes in the front pocket of his shirt, and Judd cannot help staring at it as he strips out of his jacket. The red label shines through like a spot of blood.

“I heard an Englishman was making an ass of himself in the hotel lounge, and I came down to see. Didn’t know it would be you.”

“What luck,” Guy says.

He does not ask him if he’s gotten his letters. The prospect of that seems impossible, and Guy’s jaunty air certainly doesn’t suggest any urgent purpose. The democratic atmosphere in this city must exhilarate even a man like Guy; from their hotel on the Ramblas, there are hordes of people simply going about their business as though some great weight has been lifted from their shoulders, the weight of centuries.

“Tipping is no longer the practice here. It’s offensive to the dignity of man.”

“Should save on expenses, at least. I don’t know what I expected, coming here – lace mantillas, or something. Is it all right if I smoke?”

“I won’t stop you.” The window is open only a slit, to let in the air, but there’s the sound of some commotion down in the street – the sound of young men meeting, an exchange of slogans, an embrace. It sends a queer feeling of apprehension through him, like cold water. The whole city is going to war, and here it is as if he’s on holiday – jawing about useless things, perched on high with a cut-crystal water glass by his bedside like a diplomat.

Guy drops down on the bed without asking, lighting his cigarette with obvious relish.

“I thought you were going to sign up – to enlist, you know. What are you doing here?”

Judd settles in more gingerly. The urge to supplicate is almost too strong. What on earth can a man like Guy Bennett do for him in a place like Spain?

“That’s what’s the matter. I’ve been turned away – quite politely, but quite forcefully. I came as soon as I could, and now they tell me they’ll have to see my bona fides.”

“That’s not very proletarian. You’d think they’d take any able-bodied men they can get.”

“I don’t have the right papers or something, I don’t speak German. I went and got my Party card but they wanted something else, and I don’t know what, and I don’t have it. Lost– stolen– forgotten– it doesn’t matter. In their eyes, I might as well not exist. I’m rather suspect.”

Here he is only one foreigner out of many – come in a clique, broken off into a useless splinter faction while other university Communists slip by into their proper roles. There is something wrong with him in particular that makes him such a figure of uselessness – an extraneous man.

“So you want me to vouch for you?”

So, as if it goes unspoken. He’d have sacrificed his principles for Guy once, but he hadn’t had to, he hadn’t even had the chance in the end. Neither of them has forgotten that. For all the man’s bluster and posing, Judd has never doubted for a moment that Guy would do the same for him if the situation called for it. Does the situation call for it now? Will they ever again be at such a pass where something as foolish as the acceptance of a position in the tyranny of public schooling will feel like a sacrifice fit to shake heaven and earth?

Judd should never ask such a thing – not least of all because Guy never could do the same for him in this milieu. Guy is not on the inside of this great endeavor, and what could he sacrifice that could gain either of them the slightest bit of leverage in a war, the slightest bit of territory? This isn’t an old London firm where school-friends and letters of recommendation will establish Tommy among the right people. All the things he’s ever done for ideology’s sake are behind him on English soil and a decade’s worth of dedication has come to nothing. Nothing at all. He is useless. Guy loves him, but he is useless.

“I want you to help me,” Judd says. “You’re better equipped to travel than I am, and you know people. I won’t be a tourist, and if I wander around too long without an affiliation of my own they’ll shoot me.”

“That’s outrageous. There are other militias, surely, and you’re all brothers-in-arms.”

“Do you expect me to throw in with Anarchists? Trotskyists? The POUM is a ragged shambles, and there isn’t one of them who knows how to hold a gun. I don’t know what I’m going to do.”

“Find someplace that’ll take you, and explain. You’re an able-bodied man, and no one who spoke with you for half an hour could question your impeccable Marxist pedigree. Go forth and die, like Byron.”

“I’ll try,” Judd says, grimacing. His arms are crossed across his chest, convulsively, like a child. “You don’t need to tell me to do that.”

If Guy were with him, he’d fight alongside any party – with naked fascism bearing down on Europe, it is hard to see the good in fine distinctions, even with his conscience pricking like an electric socket. He cannot ask him that. He must be on his own in this. He cannot ask from Guy more than Guy is able to give.

“You can’t really die, you know. Or I’d rather if you didn’t. Britain would lose its finest gadfly in you.

“Don’t joke, I can’t stand joking any more. I’m angry, and I’m frightened. I want to shoot a fascist before I die.”

“You’ll get your chance.” Guy turns over, flicking his cigarette into the water glass on the bedside table and taking Judd’s sharp elbows in his hands.

Tommy lets him touch him like he used to, to press a hand to the back of his neck and to clasp him through his shirt – exhaustion has left every part of him aching like a plucked string and he could melt into the bluff familiarity of that touch, the intimacy of an embrace that is well-known to him here in this foreign place. Under the leathery haze of Knize Ten, Guy’s skin smells like crushed grass and cigarette packets, as he always has and always will, and if Judd only breathes him in he will be satisfied – those fingertips glancing over the fold of his ear or the furrow of where his arm and shoulder meet, or making soft motions through his hair. He’s like a child now, like some junior in hysterics crying for his mother.

Judd reaches out to clasp him by the thigh, and Guy makes a sweet helpless sound. He kisses him, with the full knowledge of that mistake on his lips – Guy catches him up in it and lifts his head in a manner that compels Tommy to follow. His mouth is incomparably sweet inside, he kisses as if he’s had much practice – practice coaxing sullen lips apart, bringing haughty schoolboys to yield under him, and all of Tommy’s bluntness cannot contradict such insistent subtleness.

They’ve known each other’s bodies in the way that boys do, at some distance and not without curiosity – self-abuse is no more a sin than it is a crime. But still, he has never kissed him – he has never lain back with Guy drawing close over him, he has never felt his pleasant weight settling into the mattress beneath them both, he has never braced Guy in his arms like a woman to feel him shift and breathe.

They could carry on like this forever if breathing itself weren’t a consideration – they break apart.

“This is ridiculous,” Judd says. “You must leave at once, or I’m going to do something really – stupid.”

“That’s what they all say,” Guy murmurs fondly. “Don’t be an ass, Judd.”

The excitement is something awful, after all the tension in the air and the jostling transit from Paris – it seems impossible for any part of his body to feel this way after such a profoundly enervating anxiety, but here he is with a distinct and inescapable erection, pressed between the two of them like a simple fact.

“Everyone gives in in the end, isn’t that what you said?”

Guy looks half-smug, half-stunned. “That’s right.”

Tommy undoes the buttons of Bennett’s shirt with sharp jerks as if the baring of his flat chest with its tight dark nipples will ease the crazy energy in the room – Guy has the body of a Greek athlete, not swollen with muscle but beautiful and lean. He wants to bite him, to savage him with his teeth by way of punishment.

Guy laughs and pushes him back, tugging his shirt up. This is love between men – an impulse, a wild and frantic wanting.

“Let me suck you,” Guy says. His hand is in his flies, past Judd’s unbuckled belt.

“Don’t call it that.”

“What should I call it?”

Guy lowers his head and mouths at Judd’s stomach in a way that makes his prick jump – at this rate, he’s going to shame himself terribly and Guy will laugh at him

There is no answering that. He takes the head of him in his mouth, while his hands encircle and press, and it sets Tommy’s heart to pounding. If they go on like this, they will go past the brink – past the point of sullen dissent, into a land only men like Guy know.

The groan that escapes Judd’s throat at the first touch of Guy’s tongue surprises both of them. This is indecent, Tommy thinks, before all thought is through and he is snared entirely by the splendor of that mouth, those wet lips.

He doesn’t know what in God’s name to do with his hands – whether to caress that splendid head of hair or leave off. He grasps him by the shoulders and Bennett makes a queer nuzzling gesture in response. Whatever he is doing, he is very very good at it; his mouth is grave and wet, a sort of pool of heat, and the pad of his tongue makes light easy strokes over the place just beneath the head of Judd’s prick.

Guy’s hand is at work on himself quite shamelessly, and his arousal speeds Tommy’s onward, there is something silly about the mirror-image nature of it and something exciting about the knowledge that Guy is enjoying himself.

This is Guy the man, sloppy and ardent, and this is love between men freely given. Kissing and caressing, tangled in a clinch – knee to shoulder, hand to heart, side by side on a real bed. At a loss, Tommy grips his hand, and Guy gives it an almighty squeeze.

Judd chokes and twists against the pillow, lost in his pleasure without the slightest idea how to give fair warning. Guy lifts his eyes to gaze at him, cool and clear, just as that final chaotic spasm racks him – Tommy will reflect on that afterward and be wholly bewildered, the glances of those great dark outrageous eyes.

Afterward, the two of them lie in a pile like kindling, in a heap of hard limbs and soft breath, Guy’s hand worrying at the nape of his neck like a spinster stroking a cat. Judd is utterly exhausted; all the action of the past weeks and months has fallen on him in one great heap.

“I’ve broken you down at last, and all that it’s taken is bullets flying overhead,” Guy says.

“Hardly overhead.”

“You will come back, when all this is done with, and find me.”

Judd squeezes his hand mutely, to say yes.

“And write me letters. Every chance you get, I’m like an eager mother that way.”

“I have a camera if you’d like it. More use to you than it will be to me, probably.”

“I didn’t mean to take the fight out of you. In fact, I’m sure I haven’t. In the morning we’ll go down again and see those beastly Germans, and get this matter straightened out once and for all.”

“If I’m not good enough for this, you must tell me. If I’m only lukewarm, I shouldn’t be here. I don’t feel lukewarm, but none of the really mediocre ones do, do they?”

“Nonsense. If you were only a milk-and-water Marxist you’d be back at Cambridge right now, not here. You’ll do brilliantly in a fight. You’ve been fighting all your life.”

They lie quietly for a while, side by side. Breath creeps back in, and the noise from the street.

“What’s that camera of yours?”

“An Ikonta, I think.”

“That would do beautifully. I think I’ll take you up on that offer”

**

He sends him off with the Zeiss and a few rolls of film and an admonition – don’t be silly, don’t make things up. Of course, he will make things up, he’s a journalist for some silly banal newspaper with its bourgeois affiliations worn proudly – but Judd has never expected constancy from him anyway. Bennett is as fickle as a sea-breeze. Guy writes him diligently, and his letters are startlingly indiscreet – the lines are littered with mentions of amiable and obliging lift-boys, charming Americans with permissive wives, Anarchist street-fighters who are at first exquisite and then abominable. Even the most careless eye could pick out the significance of these men. If this is his notion of journalistic candor, then the nation is lucky indeed that he’s become no diplomat. In Guy’s letters, his handwriting scrawls on a diagonal. Judd thinks that he may be drunk when he writes them,

He never speaks of their affair, of that night in Barcelona, of whatever exists between the two of them suspended on a silver thread – perhaps every reminder of Guy’s trysts abroad is meant to prick at Judd or to provoke some reckless confession of his own. Perhaps he is so guileless that the thought never occurs to him. And it is not that Judd has carried on monkishly since their school days. There have been girls in his little time at Cambridge, dark serious girls more committed to the Party than to courtship and marriage, and that would have suited him admirably if he’d only had the time. But there has always been Guy, too, like a magnetic force around which he cannot help but be oriented – like some unseen point in space. Always Guy, somewhere Tommy cannot seem to get rid of him.

Your only friend. This is how he signs his letters: your only friend, Guy.

His heart burns for him through the winter, through the whole rotten slog of it – it’s as though his heart will burst, as his feet ache and his teeth rattle from the shock of impact. Judd writes to him in the most circumspect manner possible; he cannot put his heart on the page, he cannot tell him a damned thing of use, but he writes long sober letters about advances and retreats, working men and women reclaiming their birthright as human beings under the dictates of no priest and no boss and no king. It is all one last desperate attempt to penetrate Guy’s indifference – o, but they say the tongues of dying men enforce attention like deep harmony, surely to speak of these things is to pierce any sensible heart.

If he can persuade him, if he can bring him around, then all is not lost – if one defeat steels combatants to a greater triumph, then it would be all right – Guy accepts his harangues patiently, like he always has. He responds.

The letters come while he is lying in a hospital bed racked with typhoid and some nurse offers him coffee – while he is sleeping on the ground black with lice and dirt – whether he is crouched in a frozen field dodging machine-gun fire or quartered in a fine hotel, they come. The jauntiness of Guy’s letters is a sustaining constant, like the shipping forecast or the bells on Sundays – constant as the sounds of shelling. Judd writes him back as sternly as he is able, dashing off venomous lines and all the while thinking I love you, I love you, you must know that I love you– words he will not write, the whole flurry of intelligence that must not be set down on the page.

He must look no further than the matter to hand, and what greater matter could there be – a great unity, a great rallying, a hard ugly fight for the only admirable end. This war may be the only good thing he’s ever done – it will extract the whole life from him, the unceasing grinding action of war. He cannot afford to waver.

One of Guy’s articles finds him at the front, the parting gift of a grave-hearted French Jew with her hair still in schoolgirl braids – she will go on to fight another war, but she leaves him with a few leaves of paper. It isn’t very good stuff, from the vantage point of one in the midst of things; it’s full of omissions, distortions, elaborations. But it is Bennett’s work to the hilt, and the girl watches him read it over and over until the lines are half-memorized and he has squeezed the last familiar phrase from them like the juice from a lemon. He reads the smudged newsprint with Guy Bennett’s kiss haunting his lips.

What has happened to him?

Guy will come and find him, Guy will come and fight beside him like a braver man. He will find him again, and they will walk again together through the thronged streets – they will walk in brotherhood and equality,

Guy is the living flame in his breast, the token he carries with him – Guy’s daftness, his idleness, his loping wit and his utterly pointless beauty. If Judd lives long enough he will see himself become a sort of relic – a premature actor, a figure of fun, an honest-to-God national treasure. Or he will die two months from now on a hot afternoon, with Guy’s letters in the breast pocket of his coat – he will die young and far from home.