Lust Or No Harm Done (18 page)

Michael did, stiffly.

'I had a wonderful death. Don't you think? Still young on a motorcycle.'

Michael smiled at the pride. 'It is something of a prototype.'

'I hope that doesn't mean people imitate it!'

'No. But live fast, die young, James Dean, that kind of thing is around, but not really because of you.'

Lawrence 's head dipped in frustration. 'My entire life was spent trying to avoid power.'

His skinny body, the slightly awkward way it moved – oh, God, it reminded Michael of Phil. The pubes were shaved like an Arab's. Like a young boy just come into puberty. How many people does this man contain?

'Why avoid power?'

The grey eyes looked up, undeniable. 'Because I could have destroyed the world. I had it in me.'

From nowhere there was a yellow, rolled-up cigarette, lit and smelling of hashish. 'And because wisdom does not lie in power. You must have the potential for power, but use the power for different things. I wanted to be wise. I failed of course. I wanted to be a poet and a warrior and an historian.' The face closed slightly with tension. 'Do people still read my book?'

Michael did not have the heart to tell him that he had read only parts of it and thought it was horribly overwritten. 'It's everywhere. Though, to tell you the truth, most people see the movie.'

Lawrence closed his eyes and went very still. 'They made a film,' he said, as if in dread.

'I've got it on video; do you want to see it?'

'No!' said fiercely. Thank you,' said gently. 'It was kind of you to offer. I can imagine that the movie is very romantic. For those of us who understand English, the verb to romance means to lie.'

Hospitality, Michael thought, Arab hospitality. He had difficulty fighting his way to his knees. 'Would you like some tea?'

'Tea would be lovely, thank you,' said Lawrence and rewarded him with the most beautiful of smiles under the most doubtful of eyes.

Lawrence made Michael feel lonely. Michael asked him, 'Come and talk to me while I make it?'

Lawrence slid to his feet, as if gravity worked in reverse for him. He padded behind Michael into the kitchen.

Michael asked, 'Is tea all right? Are you hungry?'

'I try to be independent of food,' said Lawrence smiling, grasping his wrist again.

Michael was cursing his ignorance. It wasn't that he had only skimmed
The Seven Pillars of Wisdom.
He realized he knew nothing of the history. There must be a thousand questions that an educated person could ask Lawrence of Arabia. Michael had only one.

'Is it true that you had many Arab lovers?'

'No,' replied Lawrence. 'I had very few.'

'Is it true that your book is dedicated

'Yes.' Lawrence cut him off with a single, perfectly timed downward nod of the head. 'We all have a love of our life.'

Michael lowered his eyes and lapsed into a podgy English miserablism. 'I wish I did.'

'Tuh,' said Lawrence, a kind of chuckle, dismissive but affectionate. He leaned against the archway into the kitchen. He looked like a teenage girl, a bold Italian gamine, leaning against the village fountain. 'You may just have met him,' he said lightly, his eyes hooded, his smile teasing. He was naked, but clothed in something other. It was Michael who was embarrassed.

Michael clattered the teapot and cups onto a tray, and carried it rattling into the sitting room. They sat down on the carpet again, and Lawrence imperceptibly took over the serving of the tea.

Lawrence passed Michael a cup. It went out like a heartfelt gesture. 'What the Arabs taught me is that eloquence, even when overwrought or extravagant as some of their verse appears to be in translation, has a shape, an architecture that carries its own meaning.' Lawrence placed the teapot and sugar bowl on the carpet in a pattern as formed as a cuneiform wordsign from Nineveh. 'This shapeliness is mirrored in their calligraphy, in which the writing becomes a dance. The strange effect of all this is that in practice, and I mean the practice of love, their sexual cues are verbal. Ours are visual, related usually to looks. Theirs are veiled physically, but naked verbally. They say things such as, "Love exists to grow a new part of the soul, as my love for you has done. So even in Paradise, there will be part of my soul called Lawrence." '

'Someone said that to you?' asked Michael in wonder. Doh. Lawrence 's eyes were filmed over. His voice was slightly rougher when he said, 'You can sit closer to me, if that is your desire.'

Michael understood that this was an act of kindness, to understand and to do all of the work. Michael smiled at himself, to acknowledge that he was behind in the game. Feeling thick-arsed, Michael snailed himself in heaving stages six inches nearer to Lawrence.

'You have never suffered physically,' judged Lawrence.

Michael shook his head, no.

'I always made myself suffer physically, so that I would be enduring when I most needed to be. I would do without food or sleep or water. I would walk barefoot miles over rocks, so that I would disdain the physical.'

Michael was puzzling his way through the words. 'It's true. The worst I've had is a sprained ankle.'

The heat and the dust and starvation all burn away illusion. The body is an illusion.'

Michael was beginning to fall in love.

Lawrence looked at him, fiercely. 'I have never,' he said, 'allowed myself to achieve a sexual climax.'

Michael was beginning to fall out of love. Lawrence of Arabia was barking mad.

Then Lawrence of Arabia pulled Michael to him. The arms were still hot from sunlight. The wolf eyes blazed with a demand. They were insisting. They were insisting on something that was only somewhat like sex.

'Be my desert,' Lawrence demanded. 'Be my sunlight. Burn me.'

Michael looked at his watch. 'I have to keep you talking for twenty more minutes.'

'Is this a spiritual exercise?' Lawrence asked, hungry to be told that yes, it was a deliberate act of withholding, a reining in.

'No. No, it's a medical one.' Michael's Viagra hour was not over. He checked for any of the side effects: flushed cheeks, a slight sense of palpitation in the hands and heart.

'Is the condition chronic?'

'Ah. Yes, actually, it is.'

'Then you do know pain,' said Lawrence, his voice sinking several octaves lower. 'Are you in pain now?' The thought seemed to entice Lawrence. He began to stroke Michael's temples.

'I am beginning to get a mild headache.' That was a side effect too. Gosh, Viagra was fun. Michael couldn't wait for the splintered blue plates in his vision, either, especially the ones with zigzag flashing edges.

'Then I bind myself to that vow also,' announced Lawrence, and sat back.

Then he announced, 'To be really alive, you have to be prepared to die.'

Michael thought: if Viagra can work against this, it can work against anything.

They spent the next twenty minutes discussing pottery shards. Lawrence loved his subject, Ancient Near Eastern archaeology, and the excavation of Nineveh. 'It is a tonic against romance, to read the tablets. They are all contracts, the equivalent of shopping lists.' They finished the tea. Lawrence nodded and then turned and stretched himself out, face down on the carpet. He saw Michael's belt and asked to be struck with it. 'There is to be no indulgence,' he said. 'Use the end with the buckle. There should never be any shirking of the worst.'

Michael had never thought of sex as a trial of endurance. 'Um. Are you sure this is necessary?'

'It stops me becoming effeminate,' said Lawrence.

Oh no it doesn't, thought Michael.

The perfect buttocks wobbled. Without any fuss, no trumpets, or even any particular sensation, it was simply noticeable that Michael's penis was erect. His temples thumped with an increased flow of blood, and his thumbs felt curiously weak as they held the belt. Something was shivery and loose, not in his body, but in his mind.

Michael struck the buttocks, and they tensed. 'Is that enough?' he asked. Lawrence shook his head, no. 'Harder,' he said once. Michael struck again until the buttocks reddened and something like anger rose up in him.

Michael held down Lawrence 's tiny arms and pushed him down flat and mounted him, definitively. Lawrence had an ugly anus, lumpy and twisted shut several times, rolling over itself. Michael forced himself through the resistance of the sphincter. Lawrence did not react. The cock pumped as if all by itself, and Lawrence looked grim as if enduring something dreadful. Michael kept pumping and pumping, and the idea came to him: perhaps science had freed him after all, given him back to himself.

But he didn't come.

Finally, he just stopped.

'You withheld,' said Lawrence. 'So did I. ' He lay still as if broken. Michael slid back from him, and tried to coax him to roll over, to speak to him. Like a wounded child, Lawrence cast off Michael's hands.

'I have allowed you to violate the integrity of my body,' he said, and buried his face.

Michael felt like an unwanted guest at a wedding. He wanted to bring back the beauty of an hour before. 'Would you like some more tea?'

'I want some clean fresh air,' said Lawrence, angrily, to the carpet.

The hashish cigarette still smouldered on the fake wood tray. He's burnt my tray, Michael thought and then remembered. He can burn nothing; he's an Angel.

He's powerless. Michael looked at the unmoving body.

OK. He's from another age. All of this was inconceivably dirty and evil. Denial became all mixed up with the thing you desired. Denial made you able to ride in the desert with the Arabs. It made you tough. It meant that when you and they made love, you both understood each other's shame and guilt. They could respect and admire your shame and guilt as they admired your prowess. You are quintessential, Lawrence; you are genuinely warlike, as the English are. You are loyal and hard and self-sacrificing, and you regard militarism with its uniforms and flags and shouting and terrible music as irredeemably foolish.

You found yourself in Arabia, in particular circumstances. You found a kind of love, also in particular circumstances. It does not mean that you were not also noble.

Michael touched the small of the white back as if in benediction, and ordered Lawrence home, back to his desert and whoever it was had grown him as part of his soul.

I'm learning.

If you could sleep with anyone in the world, who would it be?

Sexually armed and dangerous, Michael now found there was no one with whom he wanted to have sex. This was, if nothing else, a serious failure of imagination.

There was a time when every afternoon's lecture presented Michael with students who seemed improbable miracles of health and beauty. Cosmopolitan London youths with V-shaped backs wore perfect white T-shirts. Their hips were slim, their crotches were full, their Scandinavian or Indic or West Indian complexions were unblemished, unlined, glowing. They had sat arrayed in front of him, legs wide, as if with the malicious intent of disturbing his calm.

Now Michael saw the imperfections that would distort their beauty with age, the gap teeth, the sunken eyes. For the first time ever, his students provided no sexual inspiration. In the mornings, the train seemed full of middle-aged men who needed exercise. Michael had to remind himself that some of them were, objectively, young and attractive. It was summer, the season of T-shirts and shorts and hairy knees. The beautiful naked legs had no effect on him.

Michael began to realize that he did not really like sex. He had only ever liked parts of sex, sudden jagged frozen moments. He would recycle them as images in memory or fantasy.

Often, the people in the fantasy did not matter. The core of the fantasy was the situation he himself was in.

These situations were not anything he would care to have written down. Just recently, one fantasy involved him being tied up in a Berlin dungeon. In another, he was pressed by a wall of waiting men in the urinals at Cairo train station. His potential partners in the fantasy might wear gelabiya or more Western dress. They could be Nile Delta plump or desert thin; young or old. Who they were did not matter.

In other fantasies, Michael imagined he was twelve years old in Carlsbad, waylaid on a beach and seduced into a weekend life in a male brothel. He imagined himself at twelve wearing the tight little trunks and dancing for men. He danced to T-Rex and put his finger on the cloth under which his sphincter lay. It made no difference if the customers were fat, black and middle-aged, or off-duty wrestlers still in costume, or fathers of childhood friends.

What made him come was the situation he was in and the different scenarios that could lead to. The dream was not of someone else, but of himself, changed.

Life had given him the wrong miracle.

Look, I said I kept fancying guys, but I don't. In fact, I think I don't really like most men. If anything, I am rather chaste. What I want is to be somewhere else, doing something I would never normally do. The fantasy actually is that I become someone different.

So that was what the miracle should have been. It should have changed me.

Michael looked at the escort ads in the gay press. The photographs were supposed to be genuine. They usually displayed the wares from the neck down: slim bodies with large cocks, muscular bodies with tiny ones. He could have any of them, just by asking. He didn't ask. Perhaps he was satiated.

Perhaps it was his computer course.

Seriously. The instructors had forgotten to set enough coursework to give final marks, so suddenly, week after week another report or essay or study was due. All weekend and most evenings, Michael read learned papers about Windows NT system design. Finals were coming as well, so he was having to memorize circuit diagrams. All of this was far from arousing.

Perhaps it was simply that he could have whomever he wanted.

When Michael and Philip used to go out together, the bars would seem to be full of delicious men served cold. When Michael went alone and sex was a serious possibility, the men all seemed to be ballet fans pretending to be motorcyclists, or over-coiffured skinny young queens, or bitter old ones, or flakes who believed in numerology, or fake rockabillies who talked only to each other, or men who lived with their mothers. Availability washed the bloom off the fruit.