In Memory of Angel Clare by Christopher Bram Read Free Book Online Page A

nineteen, but it was three whole days since I got kissed in the vestibule and I was so horny I could feel it in my teeth. When you consider I went twenty-two years without getting kissed anywhere—Anyway, I thought he was too young to offer a cig to, my usual ice-breaker and the chief reason why I’m smoking now, so I offered him a cookie, or biscuit as we call them over here, of which I had a whole pack. Cookie led to talk which led to many cigs (he smoked after all) which led to more talk which led to—Nothing yet. But he’s staying with friends of his family in Venice and we’re rendevousing (sp?) tomorrow morning in San Marco Square, unless something more mature crosses my path in the meantime. Tad’s (Tod’s) English is quite good but I don’t know if it’s good enough for him to read between my lines. He certainly should’ve read it in my eyes…”
    Michael skimmed down to the bottom of the page, then on to the other side, wanting to see how it ended—the boy never showed up the next day—then jumped back to the sentences about the meeting on the train. Michael first met Clarence on a train.
    They ate a late dinner, just as they did in the city. Ben made his version of beef stroganoff, Danny made a salad, and they criticized each other’s method of preparation while Michael sat at the table and drank iced tea. They had offered him beer or wine, but Michael no longer trusted himself with alcohol: it brought his emotions too close to the surface. Music did that, too, but there was nothing classical in the boxes of records downstairs in the living room and the stereo below was playing safe, unfamiliar folk songs. The house had three floors staggered along the hillside with short flights of stairs between each level, an antique kind of split-level with low ceilings and no central hallway on the bedroom floor. To get to the guest room, you had to walk through Ben and Danny’s room, which was just five steps up from the kitchen. The cupboards in the kitchen had been painted with flowers by Ben’s sister, like watercolors in an old botany book, and there were hanging plants and potted ferns everywhere. When dinner was served, Ben and Danny immediately focused their attention on Michael again: Ben wanted to talk about the letters, Danny wanted to know what Michael was going to do now that he was back.
    “Have you thought about returning to school?” Danny asked.
    “What struck me most when I reread Clarence’s letters,” said Ben, “was his joy over discovering and exploring his gayness.”
    They often did that to you, forcing you to choose one of them. Michael chose Ben, because talking about a future without Clarence might seem disloyal to his friends, and because med school or any kind of school was no longer a possibility.
    “Clarence didn’t know he was gay in college?”
    “Eventually he did. But I don’t think Laird even noticed he had a body until he was twenty-one, he was so wrapped up in music, art, and movies. Our generation had a gift for sublimation, Michael.”
    “Except for you, you whore,” Danny muttered. “Who set up shop in the library tea room.”
    “It’s true,” Ben admitted with a certain pride. “I knew what I liked and couldn’t understand people like Clarence or Jack Arcalli who took forever in accepting they liked sex with guys. I was a good example to them.”
    When Michael tried to picture Ben and Jack at the University of Virginia with Clarence, and Laurie, who was there too, he pictured them as adults, only shorter, already knowing everything.
    “But once Laird knew, it took him forever to enjoy it. Well, not forever, but a couple of years, which seems like forever when you’re that age, and a trip to Europe. He had to go to Europe to be gay. Before then, he might do things but, God, was he depressed afterward.”
    Michael remembered his own mixed feelings after sex with the boy in Paris, but that was different. “He did things with you?” he finally