The Marble Quilt by David Leavitt Page A

you, and that poet he was talking about fucked him, and what’s his name—Oscar Wilde’s boyfriend—fucked the poet, then if you fuck me tonight it’ll be like I got fucked by the first faggot.”
    â€œI guess so,” John says, laughing.
    â€œCool.”
    â€œYou like the idea?”
    â€œI like the idea of your fucking me,” Christopher says, and looks John steadily in theeye. “Will you? I really need it.”
    John blushes. Suddenly Christopher is lunging at him, kissing him, kneading his erection.
    â€œBut I haven’t got any condoms! I meant to buy some, only—”
    â€œIt’s okay,” Christopher whispers urgently, “it’s O.K.—”
    â€œI could run out and—”
    â€œFeel in my back pocket.”
    John does. Slipping his hand inside, he paws Christopher’s buttock for a moment, then withdraws a single condom in its tidy plastic wrapper.
    â€œYou think of everything.”
    â€œThere’s lube in my backpack.”
    â€œThat I’ve got in the bathroom.”
    â€œSo where do you want to do it? Here? In the bedroom?”
    â€œBedroom’s more comfortable.” And standing—how terrible and thrilling is this boy’s eagerness—Christopher takes John’s hand and yanks him to his feet.
A Stroll on the Beach
    In his later years, Bosie makes it his habit, on sunny days, to take a morning walk along the sea. Bypassing all the rubbish in Brighton, the promenade and the tearooms and holiday camps, he heads south, to where the rocky beach is emptier. Taking off his shoes, he lets the cold water run over his feet, which churn up tiny whirlpools around them before collapsing into the dense, wet life of the rocks.
    It is 1944. Springtime. Though he doesn’t know it, in a little less than a year he will be dead. Yet he is not a dying man. Instead he is simply an old man, one of hundreds whostroll each morning along the promenade and the beach of this seaside town, this town of pensioners. Most of his neighbors know perfectly well who he is. “The one who ruined Wilde,” they say; or else, “The one Wilde ruined.” Such whispering and staring, even when overtly hostile, he accepts more placidly today than he might have in the past, letting it roll over his ego as gently as the water now rolling over his feet. For time has diminished the rage that once coruscated his eyes and corroded his hours. It’s not that anything has changed in the world; the change was in his soul. This is why he can regard this war—the second one—with so much more composure than he did its predecessor. Cynicism is an old man’s prerogative.
You should have listened to me
, he can say;
the Hun must be squelched utterly, else he will re-emerge, time and again, with greater awfulness
. Indeed, as of today only a single blemish clouds Bosie’s conscience, and that is the fact that the modern German’s loathing of the Jews has rendered the anti-Semitism of Bosie’s earlier poetry not only unfashionable but faintly scandalous. Without disclaiming the greatness of
In Excelsis
, Bosie cannot help but regret such lines as
    Your Few-kept politicians buy and sell
    In markets redolent of Jewish mud …
    Yet he was never one to shrink from unpopular positions.
    A few weeks earlier Olive, who had been ill for several years, finally died. This was both a sorrow and a relief for Bosie. True, they had not lived together for decades; still, with the coming of war their once acrimonious relations had at least resolved themselves into a state of cease-fire that did not disallow the possibility of friendship. Often they dined or took tea together—sometimes in Bosie’s modest ground-floor flat at St. Ann’s Court, more often at Olive’s much grander digs at Viceroy Lodge, which looked onto thesea. For Colonel Custance’s death had left Olive a rich woman—a fact that she sometimes