'Hey, come on. You'd make a cute dad.'
'Don't start that,' Paul said.
Adam began putting Paul's cotton shirts on hangers, careful to keep his back turned. He didn't want his disappointment to show. Paul was dead set against adoption, against that ultimate long-term commitment. And nobody could be as dead set as Paul.
'Sorry,' Adam said, his words muffled by the closet. 'I just thought, out here in the wilderness, away from our old life and all the pressures-'
'I said not to start.'
'You said we could talk about it when we got here.'
'But I didn't mean right away. I want to relax a little, and you're making me all tense.'
'Let's not fight. It's a bad way to start a vacation.'
'I need to work some, too. How can I get anything done if you're bugging me about that 'settling down' crap?' '
Adam sighed into the dark hollow of the closet. He finished putting away the clothes, then pretended to be interested in what was going on outside the window. Paul would have run getting some footage here. A nice, peaceful nature documentary for an uptight Boston boy.
They had a room on the third floor, smaller than the ones he'd seen while the maid was leading them upstairs. The window was set in a gable. The entire upper floor, including walls and angled ceilings, was covered with varnished tongue-in-groove boards. On the way up, Adam had asked the maid about a narrow ladder that led to a small trapdoor in the roof. She told them it went to the widow's walk and that guests weren't allowed up there. She said it with what Adam thought was nervousness and a dismissive haste. He wondered if, during some past retreat, a guest had suffered an accident there.
He turned from the window, ready to make peace. If he could get Paul talking about video, the spat would soon be forgotten. 'So, do you think you brought enough tape?'
'Got enough for eight hours. Too bad the budget didn't allow for me to get a Beta SP camera. I'm stuck with crappy digital.'
'Well, you're freelancing for public television. What do you expect, the budget for Titanic minus Leo Di- Caprio's dialogue coach?'
'Hey, I'd be happy with his hairstylist's budget. Documentary grants are at the bottom of the list for funding these days. Maybe I should go into 'Mysteries of the Unexplained Enigmas and Other Offbeat Occult Phenomena.' With all this talk about the manor being haunted, who knows?'
Adam smiled, counting a victory whenever Paul slipped into sarcastic humor. Paul wouldn't take any money from Adam to subsidize his videos, but otherwise he had no qualms about being a 'kept man.' Paul stretched out on one of the narrow beds and stared at the ceiling. Maybe he was visualizing the edit of some sequence.
'Tell you what,' Adam said. 'I'll see if I can arrange to be abducted by space aliens while you roll the camera.'
'I hear they do all kinds of bizarre sexual experiments.'
'Sounds better every minute.'
'Hey, what can they do that I can't do better?'
Adam crossed the room. Paul had that sleepy look again. 'Kiss me, you fool.'
Paul did. Adam felt eyes watching them. Strange.
'What?' Paul asked, his voice husky.
'Don't know,' Adam said. He looked around. No one could possibly see in the window from outside, and the door was locked. Besides the furniture, the only thing in the room was an oil painting, a smaller replica of the man's portrait that hung in the foyer.
I'm not going to be paranoid. It's okay to be gay, even in the rural South. It's OKAY to get back to nature. This love is as real as anything in this world.
He slid into bed beside Paul, wondering if the old geezer Korban would disapprove of two boys boffing under his roof. Who cared? Korban was dead, and Paul was very much alive.
October was a hunter, its prey the green beast of summer. The wind moved over the hills like a reluctant hawk; wings wide, talons low, hard eyes sweeping. Beneath its golden and frosty skin, the earth quaked in the wind of the hawk's passing. The morning held its gray breath. Each tender leaf and blade of grass trembled in fear.
Jefferson Spence looked down at the keys of the old manual Royal. 'Horse teeth,' the keys were called. George Washington had horse teeth, according to legend. Spence knew he was wasting time, finding any distraction to keep him from starting another sentence. He stared into the bobbing flame of the lantern on his desk.
He looked up at Ephram Korban's face on the wall. In this very room, twenty years before, Spence had written Seasons of Sleep, a masterpiece by all accounts, especially Spence's own. All his novels since had fallen short, but maybe the magic would return.
Words were magic. And maybe old Korban would let slip a secret or two, bestow some hidden wisdom gleaned from all those years on the wall.
'What,' Spence said to the portrait, his voice filling the room, 'are you trying to say?'
Bridget called from the bathroom in her soft Georgia drawl. 'What's that, honey?'
'To have and have not,' he said.
'What is it you don't have? I thought we packed everything.'
'Never mind, my sweet. A Hemingway allusion is best saved for a more appreciative audience.'
Spence had collected Bridget during a summer writing workshop at the University of Georgia. He had led the workshop during the day and spent his evenings cooling off in the bars of Athens. Most of the sophomore seminar students had joined him for the first few nights, but his passion for overindulgence and his brusque nature had caused the group to dwindle. By Thursday of the first week, only the faithful still orbited like bright satellites gravitating toward the black hole of Spence's incalculable mass.
Three of those were eligible in Spence's eyes: a bronze-skinned African goddess with oily curls; a hollow- cheeked blonde who had a devilish way of licking her lips and an unhealthy appetite for the works of Richard Brautigan; and the tender Bridget. As always, a couple of male students had also crowded his elbows and plied writing tips from him in exchange for drinks. Spence had little patience with writers. His best advice was to spend time in front of the keyboard instead of in front of bar mirrors. But, to Spence, women's minds were simpler and therefore uncluttered with literary pretensions.
He had selected Bridget precisely because she was the most innocent, and therefore would be the least corrupted of the three choices. With her fresh skin and clean hair, her simple and naive speech, her down-home manners and belle grace, she was everything that Spence wasn't. She was a lamb in a world of wolves. And Spence was pleased that he'd gotten the first bite.
He'd lured her to his hotel room that weekend with the promise of showing her his latest manuscript. 'Not even my agent has seen it,' he'd said, swimming in a haze of vodka. 'Consider yourself blessed, my sweet.'
She stayed the night, clumsily undressing as he watched. She shyly turned her back when she un-snapped her bra, and Spence smiled when she faced him with her arms covering her breasts. His was a smile of approval, but not for her physical qualities, as delightful as those were. He was pleased with himself for such a perfect conquest, such a decadent notch in his triggerless gun.
She hadn't complained or expressed surprise when he didn't attempt intercourse. A few women had actually ridiculed him, him, Jefferson Davis Spence, the next last great southern writer, just because he was impotent. But Bridget only lay meekly next to him while he stroked her as if she were a pet cat. Her warmth was comforting in the night. After a few weeks, she'd even stopped trembling beneath his touch.
That had been four months ago, and he figured she was probably good for at least another half a year. Then, as with all the others, the scales would fall from her eyes, the sexual frustration and the endless servitude would wear her down, until going back to college and getting a degree seemed a much better career choice than watching the great Jefferson Spence barrel headlong toward his first coronary. Then Spence would find himself alone, desperately alone, with nothing but himself and his thoughts, himself and words, himself and the monster he had crafted inside his own head.
He looked down at the paper that was scrolled into the Royal. Six years. Six years, and all he had to show for it was this paragraph that he'd rewritten three hundred times. It was the same paragraph with which he'd lured Bridget that first time, the one he didn't even dare show his agent or editor. He'd known the time had arrived to get
