Alan Hollinghurst - The Line of Beauty

"If you tell one person you've told everybody," Wani said. "You might as well take a full-page ad in the Telegraph."

"Well, I know you're very important, of course…"

"You don't think we'd be at a party like this if people knew what we did, do you?"

"Mm. I don't see why not."

"You think you'd be hobnobbing with Dolly Kimbolton if she knew you were a pretty boy."

"She does know I'm a-that's such an absurd phrase!"

"You think so?"

"And anyway hobnobbing, as you call it, with Dolly Kimbolton is hardly an indispensable part of my life. I've never pretended not to be gay, it's you that's doing that, my dear. This is 1986. Things have changed."

"Yes. All the poofs are dropping like flies. Don't you think the mother and father of Antoine might worry a bit about that?"

"That's not really the point, is it?"

Wani made a little moue. "It's part of the point," he said. "You know I have to be incredibly careful. You know the situation… There!" He raised his hands as if he'd balanced something. "Now there's a line of beauty for you!" And he looked aside into the mirror, first at Nick and then at himself. "I think we have a pretty good time," he said, in a sudden weak appeal, but it was short of what Nick wanted.

Something happened when you looked in the mirror together. You asked it, as always, a question, and you asked each other something too; and the space, shadowy but glossy, the further room in which you found yourself, as if on a stage, vibrated with ironies and sentimental admissions. Or so it seemed to Nick. Now it was like a doorway into the past, into the moment he had thought "Oh good" when Ouradi first appeared, having missed the start of term, in the Anglo-Saxon class, and was called on to translate a bit of King Alfred, which he did very decently-Nick had fixed on him already and expected him, as a latecomer and a foreigner, to look for a friend in this group of raw eighteen-year-olds. But he had vanished again at once, into some other world not quite discernible through the evening mist on Worcester College lake. And the "Oh good," the "Yes!" of his arrival, the sight of his beautiful head and provoking little penis, were all Nick got, really, from Wani, in those Oxford years, when he himself was in disguise, behind books and beer glasses, "out" as an aesthete, a bit of a poet, "the man who likes Bruckner!" but fearful of himself. And now here he was with Wani, posing for this transient portrait, almost challenging him in the glass-and it was like the first week again: he was tensed for him to disappear.

He said, "Do you ever sleep with Martine?" It hurt him to ask, and his face stiffened jealously for the answer.

Wani looked round for his wallet. "What an extraordinary question."

"Well, you're quite an extraordinary person, darling," said Nick, thinking, with his horror of discord, that he'd been too abrupt, and pulling a hand through Wani's springy black curls.

"Here, have some of this and shut up," said Wani, and grabbed him between the legs as he came round the chair, like boys in a playground, and perhaps with the same eagerness and confusion. Nick didn't resist. He snorted up his line, and stepped away. Then Wani too, re-rolling the note, bent his head and was about to swoop when they both heard the dim cracks of footsteps, very close, already on the turn of the top stairs; and a voice, under the breath, indistinguishable. Wani twitched round and glared at the lock of the door, and Nick with his heart racing ran through the memory of turning the key. Wani snorted his line, up one nostril, pocketed the note and the wrapper and turned over the book, all in a second or two. "What are we doing?" he muttered.

Nick shook his head. "What are we doing…? Just talking about the script…"

Wani gave an absurd sigh, as if it might just do. Nick had never seen him so anxious; and somehow he knew, as he held his gaze, that Wani would punish him for having observed this moment of panic. It wasn't the drugs so much as the hint of a guilty intimacy. And now that it was done it was surely the locking of the door that was suspicious. "No, just ten minutes, baby," the same voice said, Nick smiled and closed his eyes, it was Jasper's phoney drawl, the familiar floorboard outside the bathroom creaked, a dress brushed the wall, and they heard the door of Catherine's room close, and almost at once the rattle of the key. Nick and Wani nodded slowly and smiles of relief and amusement and anticipation moved in sequence across their faces.

For Wani the first hit of coke was always an erotic rush, and for Nick too. They had kissed the first time they did coke together, their first kiss, Wani's mouth sour with wine, his tongue darting, his eyes timidly closed. Each time after that was a re-enactment of a thrilling beginning. Anything seemed possible-the world was not only doable, conquerable, but lovable: it showed its weaknesses and you knew it would submit to you. You saw your own charm reflected in its eyes. Nick stood and kissed Wani in the middle of the room-two or three heavenly minutes that had been waiting to happen, a glowing collision, a secret rift in the end of the day. They stood there, in their suits, Wani's lightweight Italian "grey," black really, like one of his father's suits but made to hint and flow, Nick, in the needle-fine pinstripe Wani had bought him, like one of the keen young professionals of the age, the banker, the dealer, the estate agent even…

Funny how sound travelled in an old house-through blocked-off chimney spaces, along joists. A rhythm almost inaudible to the cautious couple or unsuspecting soloist who made it was relayed as a workmanlike thump through the ceiling below or, as in this case, a busy squeak in the room next door. Stroking Wani's penis through his open fly, kissing his neck so that his skin stood up in shivers, Nick laughed but he was embarrassed too, almost shocked to hear them at it (which he never had before) and at it so promptly and so fast. No wasteful foreplay there-it made him wonder if Catherine was liking it, if Jasper wasn't being a brute with her, when surely she needed such careful handling. He felt Wani's grip tighten on his shoulder, pressing him down, and he went down on one knee, looking up at him sternly, and then on both knees and pulled his cock into his mouth. Wani wasn't big but he was very pretty, and his hard-ons, at least until the coke piled on too deep, were boyishly steep and rigid.

Nick worked on him easily and steadily, his own dick still buttoned away in a hard diagonal, something else waiting to happen, and the squeak of the telltale floorboard coming in rapid runs, like a manic mouse, and then with impressive intermittence; Nick almost went with it, but it was a distraction too, like the voices on the stair, a kind of brake or warning. They must have moved the bed, or they were fucking on the floor perhaps. He pictured them, Catherine vaguely and anxiously, Jasper much more vividly.

Wani's hands stroked and clutched at Nick's hair, tugged on it unpleasantly hard. "They're really going at it," he murmured. "The little sluts… " Nick glanced up and saw him smiling, in his erotic trance, not at him directly but at the two of them in the mirror; and also (Nick knew) staring through the mirror, and the wardrobe itself, into the room beyond, which he had never seen and which was just as readily the motel bedroom of some seedy flick. "They're really going at it-the little sluts"-Nick heard how he loved saying it again, whispering it, and grunted as Wani's little thrusts against his face fell into the accelerating rhythm of the kids next door. He felt awkward, pulled in to service a fantasy he couldn't quite share-he tried again, he'd jerked off a few times about Jasper already, but Catherine was his sister, and on lithium, and, well… a girl. He heard her voice now, quick staccato wails… and Wani's breathing, slipping away from him just at the moment he had him. And then another idea came to him, a second resort, a silent, comical revenge on Wani while he brought him off-it was Ronnie he'd invited in, to solace him for his woman trouble, to give him ten minutes of real care, man to man. It took a little adjustment, of course, a little further twist on make-believe, since the Ronnie he'd imagined was twice the size of Wani-at least. But as Wani pulled out and Nick squeezed his eyes tight shut, it could almost have been Ronnie in front of him, instead of the man he loved.