The Marble Quilt (7 page)

Bosie, subdued, watches with surprise and pleasure as Gerald moves toward the door.

Perhaps the scariest thing about Bosie, particularly in his middle years: his malignant, even obsessive litigiousness. And not merely where Wilde was concerned. For though the degree to which he singularly compelled Wilde to take legal action against his father is debatable, what is a matter of public record is that after Wilde's death, Bosie himself was involved in no fewer than ten libel actions. He himself brought libel actions against: the Reverend R. F. Horton, who had called a newspaper Bosie was editing,
The Academy
, “an organ of Catholic propaganda”; Wilde's first biographer, Arthur Ransome, after he described Bosie as a man “to whom Wilde felt that he owed some, at least, of the circumstances of his public disgrace”; the
Morning Post
, after it accused Bosie of anti-Semitism; and the
Evening News
, which in 1921 falsely reported his death and described the Douglas bloodline as showing “many marked signs of degeneracy.” (In rebuttal, Bosie argued that even though in his youth he might have exhibited “symptoms of wickedness,” he was by no means a degenerate: “I am a horseman,” he declared proudly, “a good shot, a manly man, able to hold my own with other people.”)

In addition, Bosie was himself sued for libel on three occasions: once by Wilde's friend Robert Ross, once by his father-in-law, Colonel Custance, and once—amazingly enough—by Winston Churchill, whom Bosie had accused publicly and repeatedly of entering into a Jewish-led conspiracy to lower the value of government stock. Churchill had no choice but to bring an action against Bosie, who lost and was jailed for six months at Wormwood Scrubs. (While in prison, as Wilde had written
De Profundis
, he wrote
In Excelsis
, a sonnet sequence containing anti-Semitic slurs of a more than usually repellent aspect.)

The case against the
Evening News
Bosie actually won, which is probably why he crows about it in his autobiography—yet what is curious is the moment when he chooses to crow about it. The reference comes just after Bosie's seduction by Gerald Armstrong's cousin. Like his rendering of the episode with Wellington, the account he gives here is brief—only a few paragraphs—and seems to be offered in order to challenge “the accusation which has been made against me of being what is called abnormal and degenerate from a sexual point of view. (By the way, the last time this accusation of being ‘degenerate' was made against me was by
The Evening News
in 1921, and it cost that enterprising journal £1000 in damages to me and a good many more thousands in costs.)”

Now that is an alarming parenthetical—alarming because its import seems to be, in essence, “Don't fuck with me”: a warning even to the reader himself, who has presumably put down money to purchase Bosie's book, that he would do well to avoid offending its author.

It is the only instance I can think of, either in literature or that species of writing that purports to be literature, in which a writer has overtly threatened his reader.

As for the details: what is striking to me about Bosie's account is the degree to which it undercuts his putative intention, which is to establish once and for all his heterosexual vitality. Thus when Gerald decides he has had enough and knocks at his cousin's bedroom door “demanding restitution of his ravished ewe-lamb,” the “ewe-lamb, reduced to tears and dressed in one of the lady's much-beribboned nightgowns,” is delivered to his keeper “to the accompaniment of loud barks from the lady's pet dog.” Hardly the
paragon of boyish swagger, that description. Also, no explanation is given of why Gerald has come to think of Bosie in the first place as
his
“ravished ewe-lamb.”

No, the transvestite frills in which the episode is dressed make it difficult to take seriously Bosie's pouting claim that had well enough been left alone, “my lady love would at any rate have kept me away from baser promiscuities”—presumably those committed in the company of Wilde. Indeed, one has to ask why, if Bosie's intention here is to prove his manliness, he chose to include the episode in his autobiography in the first place.

The only surprise was that in the end, Gerald did find it in himself to challenge Bosie; to wrest him from his cousin; to drag him from that hotel on the Côte d'Azur.

Courage. Perhaps it is not so surprising after all that timid Gerald grew up to be a war correspondent.

Where does it come from, this story? I'm still not certain. Probably it began with a newspaper article, something glimpsed three or four years back on the West Coast. According to this article, a San Francisco psychiatrist was noticing a dangerous trend among very young gay men: in essence, they were starting to abandon those very rules of “safer sex” that their elders had struggled so hard to instill and publicize. And this just at a moment when those rules were finally becoming second nature (and when as a consequence the rate of HIV infection was going down).

What had happened? No one seemed sure. Certainly that generalized anomie of which so many young people complained in the early 1990s could not be ignored as a contributing factor: ours is an age of suicide, and what is unprotected sex anyway but—to
borrow a phrase from Wilde—“a long, lovely suicide”?

As for the gay teenagers themselves, the ones interviewed spoke not only of despair, but of exclusion; solitude; loneliness. Think about it: when everyone you know is HIV-positive, when everywhere you look HIV-positive men and women are banding together to form not merely families but a society—to serve the needs of which whole industries have cropped up—how can you not feel that you have been left behind? Bear in mind that this condition was unique to a few urban centers, San Francisco chief among them: cities in which the HIV-positive had their own magazines, rites, habits and philosophies and language; to weary further an already wearied word, their own culture. More potently, with one another (or so felt several of the boys interviewed) the HIV-positive could flout the totemic restraints of “safer sex.” Infection threw them free from caution, and so they could throw caution to the wind, and with one another do what they wanted, as much as they wanted, while on the outskirts the seronegative watched meekly, enviously, nursing their fear.

It is hard for me—a child of a different (and perhaps more life-loving) age—to imagine a world where early death is the norm, and where therefore life itself may begin to seem like a death sentence.

I thought about this article for months after I read it. Then I read a biography of Bosie, and the present and past did their alchemy. Out of the flames Anthony and Christopher stepped forth, naked, almost fully formed.

As for the counselor, he is a character about whom, in my mind, an aureole of profound uncertainty hangs, perhaps because his private cowardices and hypocrisies reflect my own.

I leave him now, to follow Christopher down Market Street to the Café Flore, where at a sunny table Anthony awaits him. Passing these boys, and being told that one was HIV-negative and the other HIV-positive, you might very well confuse which was which, since Anthony looks flushed and vigorous, while Christopher is haggard, thin, his chin pimpled, his elbows scaly with psoriasis. Across from Anthony, who drinks an iced cappuccino, he sits down shyly. “You look great,” he says. “Did you get your hair cut?”

“Christopher, don't waste my time. Tell me.”

“How long has it been since you moved out?”

“I don't know—two weeks.”

“Two weeks and three days.” Christopher smiles. “So I hear you have a new lover.”

“Man, do we have to talk about this now? Can't you see I'm sweating this out? I have to know. I deserve to know.”

“Why?”

“Because if you're positive, I did it to you. And that's something, if I'm going to have to live with, I need to start coping with.”

“If I'm positive would you stay with me? Take care of me?”

“No.”

“That's blunt.”

“I have to be blunt. Like I said, you scare me.”

“Or I could sue you … like what's-his-name with Rock Hudson. Say you lied and told me you were negative.”

“As if I have any money for you to get.”

“Oh, I wouldn't do it for money.”

Anthony stands. “I don't have to listen to this,” he says. “I want to know, but not that much.”

“I'm sorry. Sit down. Please sit down. I'm speaking from grief, can't you see? I'm angry because I love you, because I grieve losing you, can't you see that?”

Anthony is silent. He sits down. Then he says, “If you loved me, you wouldn't have asked me to do it. You wouldn't have burdened me with—as if I don't have trouble enough already.”

“But you didn't have to agree.”

“You have more power than you realize. That's why you're dangerous. You act like you're this innocent little thing, why me, why me, when all the time—”

Christopher buries his face in his hands. “How did it come to this?” he asks. “We loved each other. Three weeks ago, a month ago, we would have sworn we were together forever.”

“Not anymore.”

“So you're saying you don't love me?”

“No, I don't, if that's what you have to hear.” Anthony scratches the back of his head. “You know what? I feel like you're trying to rope me back into a relationship with you. That this whole meeting, it's all been a pretense. I wouldn't be surprised to learn you hadn't even had the fucking test.”

“Oh, no, I had it. And this morning I got the results.”

“The results you won't tell me.”

For a few hopeless seconds Christopher looks at the table. Then he lies. Why he lies, he'll never, for the life of him (and it will be a long one), be sure.

He says, “I'm positive.”

All at once Anthony is on his feet, the table is toppling, cold mud-colored coffee streaming onto Christopher's lap. He leaps away from it. “Goddamn you!” Anthony cries, and pushes at Christopher, who pushes back. Around them strangers stand and gawk and whisper. “Odors from the abyss,” one man says to another, while at the next table a woman gives her lover a look that is supposed to say,
Thank God for our more peaceable relations
. The lover, however, thinks,
We are closer than we believe. We are all closer to the edge than we believe
.

The seizure has passed. Self-consciousness revives, and with it vanity, which causes Christopher to mop halfheartedly at his ruined shirt. In the interval fighting appears to have taken place—hitting too—for blood now drips from Anthony's mouth.

“Are you O.K.?” a waiter asks, handing him a wad of paper towels.

“I'm O.K. Thanks. I'm O.K.”

“Anthony, I'm sorry.”

“Stay away from me.”

“If you'd just let me—”

“Stay away from me. Don't follow me,” says Anthony, hurrying out of the café. Of course Christopher follows. At that dangerous asterisk where Market Street intersects Noe and Twenty-third, the light is red. “Wait!” he calls. But Anthony doesn't wait. Instead he hurls himself onto Market Street, threads his way through six lanes of traffic, alights on the other side. He will die and Christopher will live. He will die and Christopher will die … At last the light turns green. And Christopher, who loves life more than he is willing to admit, crosses cautiously, as his mother taught him; looks both
ways, as his mother taught him. Then he steps up onto the curb. Glances down Noe. (No Anthony.) Glances down Market. (No Anthony.) Where has he gone?

Only the pavement knows, and the pavement isn't talking.

In the spring of 1901, a few months after Oscar Wilde's death in Paris, Bosie received a fan letter from a twenty-seven-year-old poetess named Olive Custance. Olive's first book of verse,
Opals
, had been published the previous year by John Lane; she loved opals; her friends called her Opal. Bosie, on the other hand—perhaps because opals were thought to bring bad luck to those not born in October—insisted on calling her Olive.

They entered almost immediately into a love affair. Olive, though lacking Bosie's pedigree, was considered a great beauty, and came from money. As a poet she was dismal—worse even than Bosie, which was perhaps why they admired each other's work. That spring, in Paris with her mother, she had flirted with the famous lesbian Natalie Barney, going so far as to write Natalie a poem about how “Love walks with delicate feet afraid / 'Twixt maid and maid.” Besotted, Natalie proposed that she (Natalie) ought to marry Bosie, after which the three of them could live together in a ménage à trois. Olive demurred. Later, in a letter, Natalie made the same proposal to Bosie, who also demurred.

Like his love affair with Laura, Bosie's romance with Olive seems to have involved a certain amount of transvestitism, albeit in this case on Olive's part rather than his own. For instance, in a note to Olive written shortly before he embarked on a trip for America—where, he joked, he hoped to find a rich heiress to marry—Bosie suggests that she dress as a boy and accompany him. In letters, Olive refers to herself as Bosie's “little Page”: “Write to me soon and tell me that you love your little Page, and that one day you
will come back to ‘him,' my Prince, my Prince.” His princess Olive is not: “
She
will be very beautiful. But meanwhile love me a little please …”

On March 4, 1902, they marry; their son, Raymond, is born on November 17. The marriage does not go well, however, according to Bosie, because Olive loves only “the feminine part” of him: the “more manly” he became, the less attractive he was to his wife. To make matters worse, Bosie and his father-in-law, Colonel Custance, took an instant dislike to each other. An upright Christian gentleman, the Colonel—eager for an heir, and unhappy with the way that his daughter and son-in-law (flighty and irresponsible poets both) were raising his grandson—decided that it was his duty to wrest custody of Raymond from them, toward which end he duped Olive into signing away her inheritance so that she would fall into a position of financial dependence upon her parents. Enraged, Bosie barraged the Colonel with vituperative letters, and when the Colonel stopped opening them, with postcards and telegrams—the e-mail of his age. He called the Colonel “a despicable scoundrel and a thoroughly dishonest and dishonorable man,” and promised to send accusatory letters to his clubs, his bank, and the tenants of his estate. Later, after the Colonel threatened to cut her off without a penny if she did not hand Raymond over, Olive left Bosie for a time, and he added his wife's name to his list of enemies. “My father is angry all the time because I love Bosie still,” she wrote to Lady Queensberry. “But would it do Bosie any good if I am turned out to starve? I am helpless since I made those settlements … I only wish I had the courage to kill myself!”