The Rectum Is A Tomb 2/?
Title: The Rectum is a Tomb
Author:
sekrit_omg
Rating: R, this chapter
Pairings: S/K primarily; others
Summary: A 1980s British historical AU in which Stan meets a prostitute and sighs a lot.
Author's Note: a) Hollinghurst homage. b) imaginaaation gets all the props in the world for her amazing beta reading, especially considering I begged her to read a second draft of this for me immediately so I could post it last week, and then balled it. c) I'm not British. d) I am thinking this will be 10 chapters, but let's not hold me to that.
When we were in our second year, Kyle and I developed the idea that conflating nearly every queer we came across at school with feminine pronouns was not merely hilarious, but an ingenious sort of pseudo-ironic social commentary on our ever-expanding network of contacts, most of whom were sexual. Soon enough, everyone was a she.
We developed this even farther, sorting our acquaintances, friends, and lovers into full-on power groups within this insidious little nomenclature:
1. If we judged a lad effeminate, or he bottomed during sex, or we found him impractically risible in any sort of masculine role, it was ‘Miss’ for him, and if we were overly familiar with him he’d be reduced to ‘Miss’ and his first initial.
2. Sticklers, or ballsy-macho sportsmen, or those known to top, or anyone closeted, we dubbed ‘Madame,’ and again with the first initial.
I think, in the 1960s, sophomoric as we were - which is to say, incredibly - this felt very inventive and edgy for us. We thought it so cruel that the first time Garrison caught us doing it, he scoffed at us and told us we were rather unoriginal.
“It’s been done, boys,” I remember him saying, arms crossed. “Why don’t you stupid lads get over yourselves already?” He was never a very nice man, so it’s not as if we were shocked that he was cruel. We just missed our joke, and thinking of ourselves as original. “You might as well wear signet rings on your pinkies and paint your nails,” he added. “I mean, for crying out loud.”
We actually knew of one lad who did paint his nails, and one who wore a signet ring on his pinky. The former was Butters; the latter, Eric. I suppose they were our friends, but then again, so much of who your mates are depends on how you define the term, no? Is it about the quantity of time you spend with them, or the quality of that time? The nature of that time? The fact that you all went up and down together?
There was a time in my life when I hadn’t known Kyle, but that time seemed distant and empty in comparison. I did not think that there was a single chance in all of temporality that we might not have been close. With his exception, I was sure that the rest of these people I called ‘friends’ would not have been such if the circumstances had been different. You see, I did not really like Butters and Eric. We studied together at school, and had similar sexual proclivities, and lived in the same city now, and frequented the same clubs and pubs, bathhouses and gyms. We wandered the Soho streets and London parks together, cruising one another, forming visceral bonds with each other, although not so much lately. I think it is safe to say that my affection for them, such as it was, was based entirely on our having been queer together in the same course at school. Well, that, and the four of us had the same aversions.
Saturday nights began for us at Kyle’s flat. It was hardly convenient, but Kyle insisted we begin there at 8 on the dot for drinks and hors d’oeuvres. Tonight it was poached salmon and crème fraiche on blini, and individual pies. Unfortunately, they were shepherd’s pies, with ground lamb inside tossed together with cubed chunks of carrot and peas, topped by mash and served in heavy ceramic ramekins. To drink, he was chilling three bottles of cava and had lined up three crystal flutes. Kyle’s stemware always looked lovely on his gleaming black marble counters, light-catching and dear-looking at they were. He worked in an industry in which gorgeous things were handed to him all the time. The champagne flutes, I’m sure, were a gift from Baccarat or Lalique, a thanks for pitching their products to other ignorant nouveau-riche faggots who wanted to drink on Saturday nights before going out.
I have very little ability to characterize Kyle’s cooking. To be fair about it, I’m not sure it was cooking at all, but food preparation, as might be apparent when you consider the case of the salmon blini. I suppose he might have poached the fish himself, but it was far more likely that he went to Fortnum & Mason after work and bought everything served here. I could see him, in his fussy little way, fumbling into the lift with a bag of plastic containers, removing them one by one to the counter, dumping the contents into various pieces of china, or a cast-iron skillet. Kyle heated everything in a cast-iron skillet. This was one of several skills he picked up from his mother, and I don’t know if it was a particularly American trait to cook things in an iron skillet, but he loved grease; loved watching it congeal in an empty, cooling pan. I knew he would have bitten his thick lower lip while he prepared everything, wondering if he had enough ice for the cava.
The problem with this scenario was that pies in the oven reminded me of miserable lunchtimes at my mother’s house, my nieces and nephews tugging at her skirt while she hacked onions. “Be a dear, Stanley, and take them to the park, will you?” I can hear her asking in my mind. In the same irrelevant way that speaking to Wendy on the telephone reminded me of Kyle masturbating, Kyle serving pies reminded me of my family. Horrible. I don’t know if it was this or the fact that I’d eaten a bacon avocado sandwich after rather rough, dry sex with a faceless bloke in the sauna after my swim that afternoon, but I wasn’t so hungry at the moment.
On the other hand, Miss B was content to eat blini after blini. Kyle was the type to make 30 blini for three of us, and carefully recommend after setting down the silver platter that we each have 10. “Oh, I’m not so hungry,” I said genially at this calculation. “I think I’ll just have one.” This made Kyle raise his eyebrows, because he was very annoyed by the prospect that, as it now stood, there were 29 blini for two of them, which wasn’t going to come out to a fair division. So I conceded, “Well, all right. It won’t hurt me to eat two.”
“So, 14 for each of us,” Kyle said wistfully, edging a glass plate toward Butters. “I hope you’ll eat your share, ducks. They don’t keep well. And I’ve been meaning to watch my calories this week!”
“This is lovely, fellows,” Butters said. “I can’t imagine a nicer Saturday evening.”
“You haven’t got a very well-developed imagination then, have you?” I asked. “Because we do this every Saturday evening.”
“But there isn’t always blini,” Butters insisted.
“Well, so last week it was stilton and apple tarts” - which I knew Kyle had just bought wholesale from some pastry shop, but felt inclined to mention anyway, like this was all some great credit to his hostessing skills - “this week, blini. I mean, really, Butters, don’t be so impressed.”
Kyle proffered me a glass of cava. “I think I’d prefer it if you let him remain impressed.”
“Well, it’s lovely, all so lovely,” Butters complimented as I sipped my drink. Kyle handed him a drink as well, and he merely held it as he blathered rather inconsequentially about his horribly boring week. We’d last seen him the previous Saturday night, unsuccessfully flirting in the hallway that led to the backrooms at Camp with an impeccably dressed older fellow who looked about 40, maybe 50, wool-crepe suit in late June, which usually meant money, although more and more frequently these days it seemed to suggest ‘drug addict.’ That said, Butters was a rather responsible fellow who could take very good care of himself, and I am sure that he struck out with whomever he was attempting to get into the pants of, and took a bus back home to Southwark, where he worked in an antiquarian bookshop. He probably spent Sunday reading the papers and walking his bulldog, making sure to be home and in front of the telly in time for the nightly film on ITV. Perhaps he went to some local pub and had a Sunday dinner, or perhaps in an even sadder turn of events he made one himself. I could see him very carefully breaking up a frozen block of peas over a … cast iron skillet. Well, now I could only think of cast iron skillets, which was annoying, since I’m not altogether certain Butters had the upper-body strength to lift one.
The first thing we did was toast to our health, which was amusingly punctuated by Kyle sneezing into his sleeve, nearly avoiding a cava spillage on his cotton T-shirt. After wiping his lips, Kyle very casually asked Butters about the notable absence of Eric. “He’ll meet us at the club, you see,” Butters explained hastily. “He’s preoccupied.”
“With what?” Kyle asked nastily. “Cramming Jammie Dodgers into his craw?”
I laughed at this, despite the pedantic nature of the comment. Butters just sighed and rolled his eyes in a put-upon way, muttering something about it not being nice.
“Well, I made him a pie,” Kyle continued. “In fact, I thought I should have made him six pies. But I suppose he’s too important to show his face in my flat after last week.” Last week being when Eric had gotten into a screaming argument with Christophe about nationalized healthcare. “Oh, cripes. You lads don’t think it’s why Christophe left me, do you? Isn’t it possible Eric chased him off? I mean, it was only shortly thereafter-”
“Oh, no.” Butters was very quick in these situations. “I hardly think he was judging the company you keep, or anything. Seems to me he just wasn’t a very nice sort of bloke, was he? I mean, he’s nothing more than a petty thief, is he?”
“Who are we talking about here?” I asked, knowing perfectly well who it was we were discussing. “Eric, or Christophe?”
The stress of this conversation drove Kyle to eat Eric’s pie in addition to his own. He washed each bite down with cava, managing to finish about a bottle on his own. Everything Kyle did was fascinating to me after a few flutes of champagne. “It’s good he’s not here anyway,” he said after scraping the burnt mash from under the lip of the ramekin so he could eat it. “That man will only drink fermented bilge. And I think should have gone with a moscato.”
“It’s all just champagne, anyway,” I advised.
“It’s just so political, the geography of alcohol.” Kyle drank even more cava to facilitate his next thought: “Anyway, champagne is French, obviously, so I won’t be drinking that for quite some time.”
“You can’t just avoid everything French altogether,” Butters noted. “It’s a fairly prevalent culture, don’t you think?”
“Yes, with a fairly prevalent population of two-timing arseholes.”
Butters may have been correct, of course, but he did not know that Kyle’s determination was like an iron girder - impossible to bend. Kyle would turn up his nose at torchon de foie gras and destroy his LP of the Les Mis soundtrack, take his beloved picture book about Poiret off the coffee table and donate his Givenchy waistcoat to Oxfam; I’m sure they would be glad to get it. Butters did not have my perspective on these things. He could not have known how deeply Kyle was wounded or how his scars would never heal.
“Well, I am terribly sorry it all went to rubbish so soon,” Butters was saying, patting Kyle on the back timidly, the way Butters did all things.
“So am I.” Kyle rolled his champagne flute between his palms. “So am I.”
“I suppose you’re holding up all right, though.”
Kyle stopped fiddling with his glass and put it down. “My mother says I am ‘eating my feelings,’ whatever that is supposed to mean. The implication, I am sure, is that when I was with Christophe I was starving my feelings, maybe. I don’t know what that was, really. Perhaps it was some sick concentration camp trope, like a pantomime of la resistance, or something similar. The point, I believe, is that she really wishes I’d fatten up, and hates seeing me skinny. I hate seeing me skinny, too, although I hate seeing me plump as well. But above all else, I hate seeing myself dumped.” He put his head on the counter, nested in his arms. “Nobody loves me,” he whined. (His proletariat inflection had a very Eastern Seaboard wash on it; very many things he said sounded like whining, upset or not.)
I decided it was high time I spoke up. “Oh, it isn’t true,” I offered. I came around behind him and set my champagne flute on the counter so I could stroke his hair. “You are quite loved, darling. Think of your family.”
“They haven’t got a choice.”
“But think of all the poor souls who have no family, or whose family can’t be counted on.”
“It’s not what I mean.” Kyle shifted his weight, transferring the burden of his hunched body from his left leg to his right.
“Well, I love you.” From below, I felt him heave a sigh. “Butters loves you. Isn’t that right, Miss B?”
“ ’Course it is!” Butters cheered.
Kyle raised his head and wiped his eyes. “Thanks for the pity, lads.” One bottle of cava was left on the counter, about half-finished. He snatched it by its neck and looked at it squeamishly for a moment before clenching his other fist and declaring, “I’ve got to get dressed! We can’t have me going out dressed like some old slob, can we?”
“I think you look lovely,” Butters said kindly. He inched an empty ramekin away and picked up a blini.
Kyle looked to me, pursing his lips and tilting his head as if a toddler in deep thought. “Stanley?” he asked weakly, tugging on the hem of his shirt. “Thoughts?”
I shrugged, and crossed my arms. “Wear what you like,” I said amiably. “Everything suits you.” Except the dull, staid things he wore to work, I felt. Even if they were not particularly slack, his work trousers did not flatter his assets like a well-worn, well-loved pair of blue jeans, or the forest green corduroys he stomped around in every so often at school, which cleaved his behind in two perfectly symmetrical globes.
“Well, I’m off to change, then,” he said with a sigh. “There’s more cava in the pantry, if either of you must, but it’s hardly chilled, so I’d stick it in the freezer for 10 minutes before I put it on ice.”
~
Butters got a fourth bottle of cava out of the pantry, and I stuck it in the freezer. He was possibly one of the dullest faggots I’d ever met in my life, surpassed only by old Clyde in sheer capability to induce ennui in persons long-known and recently acquainted. Butters looked like a heterosexual nowadays, which perhaps contributed to his lack of activity in the bedroom. He was the only one of us at school to have gone up in a relationship, and gone down in a relationship. In fact, it was the same relationship. Butters did not like to discuss the details, but his father - a distant authoritarian figure who treated his son as if they were both ironic characters in Dickens instead of citizens of the modern era - had shipped him off to a correctional facility when he found his 12-year-old son pleasuring himself to dirty pictures of men, naturally. (On the rare occasion that Butters decided to tell the story, he made sure to include the part about how he’d found these pictures in the top drawer of his old man’s desk.)
While in rehabilitation, as he’d coyly refer to it, he fell passionately in love with a boy named Bradley, and six years later when I met him at the English course mixer three weeks into our academic careers, he had Bradley in tow, gushing about their long years of claims of devotion laid out in flowing blue-back fountain ink on onion-skin stationery. It was a bit too twee for my liking, and I never found Bradley particularly attractive, with his pile of straw-colored curls and revolting habit of chewing his nails down to bloody nubs. Once I wore a pair of white trousers to an end-of-term dinner, and in an attempt to be funny, which it was not, he left a trail of bloody streaks on the seat of my slacks when spanking my arse. I loathed him from there on out, having ruined my favorite pair of trousers twice, once by bloodying them and once by causing me to jump into Craig - whom I was regrettably standing next to - who happened to be holding an over-filled glass of cabernet. Butters and Bradley both apologized profusely, offering to bleach my trousers or send my trousers out to be laundered, or to purchase me a new pair of trousers. Sadly for them, the damage was done, and I had to wear something less flattering to my end-of-term date with a delicious first-year whom I’d first seen in a local run of West Side Story. Craig was livid, as the jolt had caused some wine to spill on his grandfather’s precious Saville Row suit (as if his damn grandfather didn’t own about 60 Saville Row suits). He was furious, and spent the remainder of the dinner hollering at me anyway, despite my attempt to explain that it was Bradley who was to blame. I really disliked Bradley from that day on, which was what made it quite awkward to get the call from Butters six years ago that Bradley had been strangled to death outside of their home while fighting off some hooligans. It was implied, but never directly revealed to me, that the crime was related to his sexual proclivities in some way.
Butters was miserable, of course, but he’d gotten over it. The perpetrators were never discovered, and the local law enforcement eventually wrote it off as ‘neighborhood violence.’ One might think that having come to Oxford in a relationship and having left in one, he’d never had sex with another man in his life, but that just wasn’t the case. We’d all had him, which was in fact the genesis of his nickname; his bowels, we boys found, were a joy to delve into, veritably as smooth as … well, you know. Thus Leopold Stotch became Butters. The moniker stuck, and to this day the only human being I’d ever heard call him by his Christian name was Bradley. At bars, at Camp, whilst cottaging, he could only bear to introduce himself as Butters. Indeed, back when his most compelling outlet had been female impersonation, the name ‘Butters Stotch’ suited the bill quite nicely. (He alternated this with the significantly less clever ‘Marjorine Faithfull.’)
After the death of his lover you’d expect him to begin having more sex, or at least sex with a greater variety of persons, but that also wasn’t the case. Butters was a rather chunky 36 now with a double chin and a hairline receding quicker than the ozone layer. He was quite friendly and yet so pathetically boring, which was what made sitting alone with him in Kyle’s flat particularly torturous. If the four of us had not been so cruelly blackballed together throughout school, I doubt I’d ever have spent time with him.
Thinking of questions to ask him was about as grueling as pretending to be interested in the mechanics of geological study, or the intimate details of one of my sister’s pregnancies. In the case of Butters and his bookshop, I did my best to play along as he spoke about the antique books market, but at a certain point it all became too much and my eyes began to glaze over in frustration. To appear interested, I had to make a few concentrated inquiries. “Well, there can’t be too many of those, can there?” I forced myself to ask about a first edition of The Hobbit.
“Oh, you’d be surprised what people hang onto, what they bring into the shop,” he reassured me.
“And why would someone want to get rid of a first-edition of anything?”
“Oh.” Butters coughed into his hands. “Excuse me. We haven’t all got the storage space you’ve got. Books are deceptively bulky.”
I had the feeling I was meant to be insulted by this. “I have a fair share of books, you know!” I replied. “I didn’t take an English course because I hardly read at all.”
“No,” Butters agreed. “But, as I said, you inhabit a great, big, cavernous space - a virtual library, for what it’s worth. I should only wish to hang onto all the books you’ve got. Then again, I don’t think you’ve got a first-edition Hobbit lying around.”
“No,” I agreed. “But what a dreary thing to have sitting around the flat, am I right?”
“Oh, no, it’s uniquely fascinating.” If there was anything I could believe about Butters, it was the sincerity of his words. I am certain, for example, that he did find first editions of Tolkien luxuriantly fascinating. “Did you know that the initial edition of The Hobbit’s all wrong?”
“No,” I confessed. “In what way is it wrong?”
“Well!” Butters was glowing, obviously looking to regale me with this story. “You know, of course, that an early moment in the novel is Bilbo’s encounter with Gollum, which results in Bilbo’s acquiring his adversary’s magic ring.”
“Of course,” I agreed. “That is, in essence, the point of the book.”
“Oh, but it isn’t! You see, at the composition of The Hobbit, Tolkien really hadn’t thought of a way to connect the tale to his greater mythology. He wouldn’t, of course, until his publisher asked for a sequel to The Hobbit, develop the larger idea that the ring was truly the Ring, capital R, and all that business with Sauron and so on. Of course, you know all about that, as you read it in The Lord of Rings.” In fact, not only had I read Lord of the Rings, but I had steadfastly hated it. (Tangentially: In our undergraduate days, it was not unusual to see Professor Tolkien wandering around town, popping into the pub or a library, or on his way to see an old colleague.)
“I’m sorry,” I said rudely, setting down my empty champagne flute. “I have no idea how we got onto this topic.”
“The point I am making,” Butters began, somewhat exasperated, “is that in the first edition of The Hobbit, the encounter with Gollum is different, as the one we are all so familiar with is actually a revision by Tolkien after he composed Lord of the Rings and decided that the ring was not merely a magical deus ex machina but the ultimate sentient evil wedding band.”
“Tremendous, Butters. Tremendous. Will you excuse me for a moment?”
“Of course,” he said, and I slipped out of the parlor and made my way to Kyle’s bedroom, which was down a hallway with a crimson runner and ornate crown molding. There were a few doors here, which led to a guest lavatory, a guest bedroom, an office, a washing room - Kyle had a very nice flat, which was easy to forget because he was so naturally at home in my flat, which I rather liked but wouldn’t venture so far as to call ‘nice.’ At best, perhaps, it was homey. I rather enjoyed it, in any case.
The streamlined fussiness of Kyle’s habitat seemed contradictory - very traditionally showy, and yet carefully set up that way. I suppose to fully understand, one might have to be familiar with Kyle’s thought process. He loved designating responsibilities to other people, yet he hated intruders. He loved entertaining, yet he would so much rather be entertained. He relied on me to escort him from one adventure to the next, if one could call these things adventures. After I’d ended things with Gary, and was feeling rather down about it, we’d gone to Thailand. In short, the trip was like this: Kyle was uncomfortable in the very muggy weather, and did not like noodles very much, at least not at every meal. I did not enjoy drinking sickeningly sweet things, so various alcohols mixed with various nectars didn’t really please me. We spent several days completely trashed on the narcotics we’d brought with us, having copious amounts of inebriated sex. After we ventured out of the hotel, we spent the second to last day seducing underage locals (in my case) or bored fellow tourists (Kyle’s) until we were so fucked out we could barely stand. We spent the last day sleeping, and I brought each of my sister’s children back an embroidered silk wallet, which cost me about half a quid apiece.
Continued here.
Author:
sekrit_omg
Rating: R, this chapter
Pairings: S/K primarily; others
Summary: A 1980s British historical AU in which Stan meets a prostitute and sighs a lot.
Author's Note: a) Hollinghurst homage. b) imaginaaation gets all the props in the world for her amazing beta reading, especially considering I begged her to read a second draft of this for me immediately so I could post it last week, and then balled it. c) I'm not British. d) I am thinking this will be 10 chapters, but let's not hold me to that.
When we were in our second year, Kyle and I developed the idea that conflating nearly every queer we came across at school with feminine pronouns was not merely hilarious, but an ingenious sort of pseudo-ironic social commentary on our ever-expanding network of contacts, most of whom were sexual. Soon enough, everyone was a she.
We developed this even farther, sorting our acquaintances, friends, and lovers into full-on power groups within this insidious little nomenclature:
1. If we judged a lad effeminate, or he bottomed during sex, or we found him impractically risible in any sort of masculine role, it was ‘Miss’ for him, and if we were overly familiar with him he’d be reduced to ‘Miss’ and his first initial.
2. Sticklers, or ballsy-macho sportsmen, or those known to top, or anyone closeted, we dubbed ‘Madame,’ and again with the first initial.
I think, in the 1960s, sophomoric as we were - which is to say, incredibly - this felt very inventive and edgy for us. We thought it so cruel that the first time Garrison caught us doing it, he scoffed at us and told us we were rather unoriginal.
“It’s been done, boys,” I remember him saying, arms crossed. “Why don’t you stupid lads get over yourselves already?” He was never a very nice man, so it’s not as if we were shocked that he was cruel. We just missed our joke, and thinking of ourselves as original. “You might as well wear signet rings on your pinkies and paint your nails,” he added. “I mean, for crying out loud.”
We actually knew of one lad who did paint his nails, and one who wore a signet ring on his pinky. The former was Butters; the latter, Eric. I suppose they were our friends, but then again, so much of who your mates are depends on how you define the term, no? Is it about the quantity of time you spend with them, or the quality of that time? The nature of that time? The fact that you all went up and down together?
There was a time in my life when I hadn’t known Kyle, but that time seemed distant and empty in comparison. I did not think that there was a single chance in all of temporality that we might not have been close. With his exception, I was sure that the rest of these people I called ‘friends’ would not have been such if the circumstances had been different. You see, I did not really like Butters and Eric. We studied together at school, and had similar sexual proclivities, and lived in the same city now, and frequented the same clubs and pubs, bathhouses and gyms. We wandered the Soho streets and London parks together, cruising one another, forming visceral bonds with each other, although not so much lately. I think it is safe to say that my affection for them, such as it was, was based entirely on our having been queer together in the same course at school. Well, that, and the four of us had the same aversions.
Saturday nights began for us at Kyle’s flat. It was hardly convenient, but Kyle insisted we begin there at 8 on the dot for drinks and hors d’oeuvres. Tonight it was poached salmon and crème fraiche on blini, and individual pies. Unfortunately, they were shepherd’s pies, with ground lamb inside tossed together with cubed chunks of carrot and peas, topped by mash and served in heavy ceramic ramekins. To drink, he was chilling three bottles of cava and had lined up three crystal flutes. Kyle’s stemware always looked lovely on his gleaming black marble counters, light-catching and dear-looking at they were. He worked in an industry in which gorgeous things were handed to him all the time. The champagne flutes, I’m sure, were a gift from Baccarat or Lalique, a thanks for pitching their products to other ignorant nouveau-riche faggots who wanted to drink on Saturday nights before going out.
I have very little ability to characterize Kyle’s cooking. To be fair about it, I’m not sure it was cooking at all, but food preparation, as might be apparent when you consider the case of the salmon blini. I suppose he might have poached the fish himself, but it was far more likely that he went to Fortnum & Mason after work and bought everything served here. I could see him, in his fussy little way, fumbling into the lift with a bag of plastic containers, removing them one by one to the counter, dumping the contents into various pieces of china, or a cast-iron skillet. Kyle heated everything in a cast-iron skillet. This was one of several skills he picked up from his mother, and I don’t know if it was a particularly American trait to cook things in an iron skillet, but he loved grease; loved watching it congeal in an empty, cooling pan. I knew he would have bitten his thick lower lip while he prepared everything, wondering if he had enough ice for the cava.
The problem with this scenario was that pies in the oven reminded me of miserable lunchtimes at my mother’s house, my nieces and nephews tugging at her skirt while she hacked onions. “Be a dear, Stanley, and take them to the park, will you?” I can hear her asking in my mind. In the same irrelevant way that speaking to Wendy on the telephone reminded me of Kyle masturbating, Kyle serving pies reminded me of my family. Horrible. I don’t know if it was this or the fact that I’d eaten a bacon avocado sandwich after rather rough, dry sex with a faceless bloke in the sauna after my swim that afternoon, but I wasn’t so hungry at the moment.
On the other hand, Miss B was content to eat blini after blini. Kyle was the type to make 30 blini for three of us, and carefully recommend after setting down the silver platter that we each have 10. “Oh, I’m not so hungry,” I said genially at this calculation. “I think I’ll just have one.” This made Kyle raise his eyebrows, because he was very annoyed by the prospect that, as it now stood, there were 29 blini for two of them, which wasn’t going to come out to a fair division. So I conceded, “Well, all right. It won’t hurt me to eat two.”
“So, 14 for each of us,” Kyle said wistfully, edging a glass plate toward Butters. “I hope you’ll eat your share, ducks. They don’t keep well. And I’ve been meaning to watch my calories this week!”
“This is lovely, fellows,” Butters said. “I can’t imagine a nicer Saturday evening.”
“You haven’t got a very well-developed imagination then, have you?” I asked. “Because we do this every Saturday evening.”
“But there isn’t always blini,” Butters insisted.
“Well, so last week it was stilton and apple tarts” - which I knew Kyle had just bought wholesale from some pastry shop, but felt inclined to mention anyway, like this was all some great credit to his hostessing skills - “this week, blini. I mean, really, Butters, don’t be so impressed.”
Kyle proffered me a glass of cava. “I think I’d prefer it if you let him remain impressed.”
“Well, it’s lovely, all so lovely,” Butters complimented as I sipped my drink. Kyle handed him a drink as well, and he merely held it as he blathered rather inconsequentially about his horribly boring week. We’d last seen him the previous Saturday night, unsuccessfully flirting in the hallway that led to the backrooms at Camp with an impeccably dressed older fellow who looked about 40, maybe 50, wool-crepe suit in late June, which usually meant money, although more and more frequently these days it seemed to suggest ‘drug addict.’ That said, Butters was a rather responsible fellow who could take very good care of himself, and I am sure that he struck out with whomever he was attempting to get into the pants of, and took a bus back home to Southwark, where he worked in an antiquarian bookshop. He probably spent Sunday reading the papers and walking his bulldog, making sure to be home and in front of the telly in time for the nightly film on ITV. Perhaps he went to some local pub and had a Sunday dinner, or perhaps in an even sadder turn of events he made one himself. I could see him very carefully breaking up a frozen block of peas over a … cast iron skillet. Well, now I could only think of cast iron skillets, which was annoying, since I’m not altogether certain Butters had the upper-body strength to lift one.
The first thing we did was toast to our health, which was amusingly punctuated by Kyle sneezing into his sleeve, nearly avoiding a cava spillage on his cotton T-shirt. After wiping his lips, Kyle very casually asked Butters about the notable absence of Eric. “He’ll meet us at the club, you see,” Butters explained hastily. “He’s preoccupied.”
“With what?” Kyle asked nastily. “Cramming Jammie Dodgers into his craw?”
I laughed at this, despite the pedantic nature of the comment. Butters just sighed and rolled his eyes in a put-upon way, muttering something about it not being nice.
“Well, I made him a pie,” Kyle continued. “In fact, I thought I should have made him six pies. But I suppose he’s too important to show his face in my flat after last week.” Last week being when Eric had gotten into a screaming argument with Christophe about nationalized healthcare. “Oh, cripes. You lads don’t think it’s why Christophe left me, do you? Isn’t it possible Eric chased him off? I mean, it was only shortly thereafter-”
“Oh, no.” Butters was very quick in these situations. “I hardly think he was judging the company you keep, or anything. Seems to me he just wasn’t a very nice sort of bloke, was he? I mean, he’s nothing more than a petty thief, is he?”
“Who are we talking about here?” I asked, knowing perfectly well who it was we were discussing. “Eric, or Christophe?”
The stress of this conversation drove Kyle to eat Eric’s pie in addition to his own. He washed each bite down with cava, managing to finish about a bottle on his own. Everything Kyle did was fascinating to me after a few flutes of champagne. “It’s good he’s not here anyway,” he said after scraping the burnt mash from under the lip of the ramekin so he could eat it. “That man will only drink fermented bilge. And I think should have gone with a moscato.”
“It’s all just champagne, anyway,” I advised.
“It’s just so political, the geography of alcohol.” Kyle drank even more cava to facilitate his next thought: “Anyway, champagne is French, obviously, so I won’t be drinking that for quite some time.”
“You can’t just avoid everything French altogether,” Butters noted. “It’s a fairly prevalent culture, don’t you think?”
“Yes, with a fairly prevalent population of two-timing arseholes.”
Butters may have been correct, of course, but he did not know that Kyle’s determination was like an iron girder - impossible to bend. Kyle would turn up his nose at torchon de foie gras and destroy his LP of the Les Mis soundtrack, take his beloved picture book about Poiret off the coffee table and donate his Givenchy waistcoat to Oxfam; I’m sure they would be glad to get it. Butters did not have my perspective on these things. He could not have known how deeply Kyle was wounded or how his scars would never heal.
“Well, I am terribly sorry it all went to rubbish so soon,” Butters was saying, patting Kyle on the back timidly, the way Butters did all things.
“So am I.” Kyle rolled his champagne flute between his palms. “So am I.”
“I suppose you’re holding up all right, though.”
Kyle stopped fiddling with his glass and put it down. “My mother says I am ‘eating my feelings,’ whatever that is supposed to mean. The implication, I am sure, is that when I was with Christophe I was starving my feelings, maybe. I don’t know what that was, really. Perhaps it was some sick concentration camp trope, like a pantomime of la resistance, or something similar. The point, I believe, is that she really wishes I’d fatten up, and hates seeing me skinny. I hate seeing me skinny, too, although I hate seeing me plump as well. But above all else, I hate seeing myself dumped.” He put his head on the counter, nested in his arms. “Nobody loves me,” he whined. (His proletariat inflection had a very Eastern Seaboard wash on it; very many things he said sounded like whining, upset or not.)
I decided it was high time I spoke up. “Oh, it isn’t true,” I offered. I came around behind him and set my champagne flute on the counter so I could stroke his hair. “You are quite loved, darling. Think of your family.”
“They haven’t got a choice.”
“But think of all the poor souls who have no family, or whose family can’t be counted on.”
“It’s not what I mean.” Kyle shifted his weight, transferring the burden of his hunched body from his left leg to his right.
“Well, I love you.” From below, I felt him heave a sigh. “Butters loves you. Isn’t that right, Miss B?”
“ ’Course it is!” Butters cheered.
Kyle raised his head and wiped his eyes. “Thanks for the pity, lads.” One bottle of cava was left on the counter, about half-finished. He snatched it by its neck and looked at it squeamishly for a moment before clenching his other fist and declaring, “I’ve got to get dressed! We can’t have me going out dressed like some old slob, can we?”
“I think you look lovely,” Butters said kindly. He inched an empty ramekin away and picked up a blini.
Kyle looked to me, pursing his lips and tilting his head as if a toddler in deep thought. “Stanley?” he asked weakly, tugging on the hem of his shirt. “Thoughts?”
I shrugged, and crossed my arms. “Wear what you like,” I said amiably. “Everything suits you.” Except the dull, staid things he wore to work, I felt. Even if they were not particularly slack, his work trousers did not flatter his assets like a well-worn, well-loved pair of blue jeans, or the forest green corduroys he stomped around in every so often at school, which cleaved his behind in two perfectly symmetrical globes.
“Well, I’m off to change, then,” he said with a sigh. “There’s more cava in the pantry, if either of you must, but it’s hardly chilled, so I’d stick it in the freezer for 10 minutes before I put it on ice.”
~
Butters got a fourth bottle of cava out of the pantry, and I stuck it in the freezer. He was possibly one of the dullest faggots I’d ever met in my life, surpassed only by old Clyde in sheer capability to induce ennui in persons long-known and recently acquainted. Butters looked like a heterosexual nowadays, which perhaps contributed to his lack of activity in the bedroom. He was the only one of us at school to have gone up in a relationship, and gone down in a relationship. In fact, it was the same relationship. Butters did not like to discuss the details, but his father - a distant authoritarian figure who treated his son as if they were both ironic characters in Dickens instead of citizens of the modern era - had shipped him off to a correctional facility when he found his 12-year-old son pleasuring himself to dirty pictures of men, naturally. (On the rare occasion that Butters decided to tell the story, he made sure to include the part about how he’d found these pictures in the top drawer of his old man’s desk.)
While in rehabilitation, as he’d coyly refer to it, he fell passionately in love with a boy named Bradley, and six years later when I met him at the English course mixer three weeks into our academic careers, he had Bradley in tow, gushing about their long years of claims of devotion laid out in flowing blue-back fountain ink on onion-skin stationery. It was a bit too twee for my liking, and I never found Bradley particularly attractive, with his pile of straw-colored curls and revolting habit of chewing his nails down to bloody nubs. Once I wore a pair of white trousers to an end-of-term dinner, and in an attempt to be funny, which it was not, he left a trail of bloody streaks on the seat of my slacks when spanking my arse. I loathed him from there on out, having ruined my favorite pair of trousers twice, once by bloodying them and once by causing me to jump into Craig - whom I was regrettably standing next to - who happened to be holding an over-filled glass of cabernet. Butters and Bradley both apologized profusely, offering to bleach my trousers or send my trousers out to be laundered, or to purchase me a new pair of trousers. Sadly for them, the damage was done, and I had to wear something less flattering to my end-of-term date with a delicious first-year whom I’d first seen in a local run of West Side Story. Craig was livid, as the jolt had caused some wine to spill on his grandfather’s precious Saville Row suit (as if his damn grandfather didn’t own about 60 Saville Row suits). He was furious, and spent the remainder of the dinner hollering at me anyway, despite my attempt to explain that it was Bradley who was to blame. I really disliked Bradley from that day on, which was what made it quite awkward to get the call from Butters six years ago that Bradley had been strangled to death outside of their home while fighting off some hooligans. It was implied, but never directly revealed to me, that the crime was related to his sexual proclivities in some way.
Butters was miserable, of course, but he’d gotten over it. The perpetrators were never discovered, and the local law enforcement eventually wrote it off as ‘neighborhood violence.’ One might think that having come to Oxford in a relationship and having left in one, he’d never had sex with another man in his life, but that just wasn’t the case. We’d all had him, which was in fact the genesis of his nickname; his bowels, we boys found, were a joy to delve into, veritably as smooth as … well, you know. Thus Leopold Stotch became Butters. The moniker stuck, and to this day the only human being I’d ever heard call him by his Christian name was Bradley. At bars, at Camp, whilst cottaging, he could only bear to introduce himself as Butters. Indeed, back when his most compelling outlet had been female impersonation, the name ‘Butters Stotch’ suited the bill quite nicely. (He alternated this with the significantly less clever ‘Marjorine Faithfull.’)
After the death of his lover you’d expect him to begin having more sex, or at least sex with a greater variety of persons, but that also wasn’t the case. Butters was a rather chunky 36 now with a double chin and a hairline receding quicker than the ozone layer. He was quite friendly and yet so pathetically boring, which was what made sitting alone with him in Kyle’s flat particularly torturous. If the four of us had not been so cruelly blackballed together throughout school, I doubt I’d ever have spent time with him.
Thinking of questions to ask him was about as grueling as pretending to be interested in the mechanics of geological study, or the intimate details of one of my sister’s pregnancies. In the case of Butters and his bookshop, I did my best to play along as he spoke about the antique books market, but at a certain point it all became too much and my eyes began to glaze over in frustration. To appear interested, I had to make a few concentrated inquiries. “Well, there can’t be too many of those, can there?” I forced myself to ask about a first edition of The Hobbit.
“Oh, you’d be surprised what people hang onto, what they bring into the shop,” he reassured me.
“And why would someone want to get rid of a first-edition of anything?”
“Oh.” Butters coughed into his hands. “Excuse me. We haven’t all got the storage space you’ve got. Books are deceptively bulky.”
I had the feeling I was meant to be insulted by this. “I have a fair share of books, you know!” I replied. “I didn’t take an English course because I hardly read at all.”
“No,” Butters agreed. “But, as I said, you inhabit a great, big, cavernous space - a virtual library, for what it’s worth. I should only wish to hang onto all the books you’ve got. Then again, I don’t think you’ve got a first-edition Hobbit lying around.”
“No,” I agreed. “But what a dreary thing to have sitting around the flat, am I right?”
“Oh, no, it’s uniquely fascinating.” If there was anything I could believe about Butters, it was the sincerity of his words. I am certain, for example, that he did find first editions of Tolkien luxuriantly fascinating. “Did you know that the initial edition of The Hobbit’s all wrong?”
“No,” I confessed. “In what way is it wrong?”
“Well!” Butters was glowing, obviously looking to regale me with this story. “You know, of course, that an early moment in the novel is Bilbo’s encounter with Gollum, which results in Bilbo’s acquiring his adversary’s magic ring.”
“Of course,” I agreed. “That is, in essence, the point of the book.”
“Oh, but it isn’t! You see, at the composition of The Hobbit, Tolkien really hadn’t thought of a way to connect the tale to his greater mythology. He wouldn’t, of course, until his publisher asked for a sequel to The Hobbit, develop the larger idea that the ring was truly the Ring, capital R, and all that business with Sauron and so on. Of course, you know all about that, as you read it in The Lord of Rings.” In fact, not only had I read Lord of the Rings, but I had steadfastly hated it. (Tangentially: In our undergraduate days, it was not unusual to see Professor Tolkien wandering around town, popping into the pub or a library, or on his way to see an old colleague.)
“I’m sorry,” I said rudely, setting down my empty champagne flute. “I have no idea how we got onto this topic.”
“The point I am making,” Butters began, somewhat exasperated, “is that in the first edition of The Hobbit, the encounter with Gollum is different, as the one we are all so familiar with is actually a revision by Tolkien after he composed Lord of the Rings and decided that the ring was not merely a magical deus ex machina but the ultimate sentient evil wedding band.”
“Tremendous, Butters. Tremendous. Will you excuse me for a moment?”
“Of course,” he said, and I slipped out of the parlor and made my way to Kyle’s bedroom, which was down a hallway with a crimson runner and ornate crown molding. There were a few doors here, which led to a guest lavatory, a guest bedroom, an office, a washing room - Kyle had a very nice flat, which was easy to forget because he was so naturally at home in my flat, which I rather liked but wouldn’t venture so far as to call ‘nice.’ At best, perhaps, it was homey. I rather enjoyed it, in any case.
The streamlined fussiness of Kyle’s habitat seemed contradictory - very traditionally showy, and yet carefully set up that way. I suppose to fully understand, one might have to be familiar with Kyle’s thought process. He loved designating responsibilities to other people, yet he hated intruders. He loved entertaining, yet he would so much rather be entertained. He relied on me to escort him from one adventure to the next, if one could call these things adventures. After I’d ended things with Gary, and was feeling rather down about it, we’d gone to Thailand. In short, the trip was like this: Kyle was uncomfortable in the very muggy weather, and did not like noodles very much, at least not at every meal. I did not enjoy drinking sickeningly sweet things, so various alcohols mixed with various nectars didn’t really please me. We spent several days completely trashed on the narcotics we’d brought with us, having copious amounts of inebriated sex. After we ventured out of the hotel, we spent the second to last day seducing underage locals (in my case) or bored fellow tourists (Kyle’s) until we were so fucked out we could barely stand. We spent the last day sleeping, and I brought each of my sister’s children back an embroidered silk wallet, which cost me about half a quid apiece.
Continued here.