The 1st Deadly Sin

3

He pulled that brass plunger, standing at her teak door, grasping the bundle of long-stemmed roses, blood-colored, and feeling as idiotic and ineffectual as any wooer come to call upon his lady-love with posies, vague hope, a vapid smile. “Good-afternoon, Valenter.”

“Good-afternoon, thir. Do come in.”

He was inside, the door closed behind him, when the tall, pale houseman spoke in tones Daniel was certain were a burlesque, a spoof of sadness. That long face fell, the muddy eyes seemed about to leak, the voice was suited for a funeral chapel.

“Mither Blank, I am thorry to report Mith Montfort hath gone.”

“Gone? Gone where?”

“Called away unexthpectedly. She athked me to prethent her regreth.”

“Oh shit.”

“Yeth thir.”

“When will she be back? Today?”

“I do not know, thir. But I thuthpect it may be a few dayth.”

“Shit,” Blank repeated. He thrust the flowers at Valenter. “Put these in some water, will you? Maybe they’ll last long enough for her to see them.”

“Of courth, thir. Mather Tony ith in the thtudy and would like you to join him, thir.”

“What? Oh. All right.”

It was a Saturday noon. He had imagined a leisurely lunch, perhaps some shopping, a visit to the Mortons’ Erotica, which was always crowded and entertaining on a Saturday afternoon.

And then, perhaps, a movie, a dinner, and then…Well, anything. Things went best, he decided, when they weren’t too rigidly programmed.

The boy languished on the tufted couch-a beauty!

“Dan!” he cried, holding out a hand.

But Blank would not cross the room to touch that languid palm. He sat in the winged armchair and regarded the youth with what he believed was amused irony. The roses had cost twenty dollars.

“About Celia,” Tony said, looking down at his fingernails. “She wanted me to make her apologies.”

“Valenter already has.”

“Valenter? Oh pooh! Have a drink.”

And suddenly, Valenter was there, leaning forward slightly from the waist.

“No, thank you,” Blank said. “It’s a little early for me.”

“Oh come,” Tony said. “Vodka martini on the rocks with a twist of lemon. Right?”

Daniel considered a moment. “Right,” he smiled.

“What will your son have?” the waiter asked, and they both laughed.

“My son?” Blank said. He looked to Tony. “What will my son have?”

They were in a French restaurant, not bad and not good. They didn’t care.

Tony ordered oysters and frogs’ legs, a salad doused with a cheese dressing. Blank had a small steak and endives with oil and vinegar. They smiled at each other. Tony reached forward to touch his hand. “Thank you,” he said humbly.

Daniel had two glasses of a thick burgundy, and Tony had something called a “Shirley Temple.” The boy’s knee was against his. He didn’t object, wanting to follow this plot to its denouement.

“Do you drink coffee?” he asked. They flirted.

“How is school?” he asked, and Tony made a gesture, infinitely weary.

They were strolling then, hands brushing occasionally, up Madison Avenue, and stopped to smile at a display of men’s clothing in a boutique.

“Oh,” Tony said.

Daniel Blank glanced at him. The lad was in sunlight, brazen. He gleamed, a gorgeous being.

“Let’s look,” Blank said. They went inside.

“Ooh, thank you,” Tony said later, giving him a dazzling smile. “You spent so much money on me.”

“Didn’t I though?”

“Are you rich, Dan?”

“No, I’m not rich. But not hurting.”

“Do you think the pink pullover was right for me?”

“Oh yes. Your coloring.”

“I would have loved those fishnet briefs, but I knew even the small size would be too large for me. Celia buys all my underwear in a women’s lingerie shop.”

“Does she?”

They sat on a park bench unaccountably planted in the middle of a small meadow. Tony fingered the lobe of Dan’s left ear; they watched an old black man stolidly fly a kite. “Do you like me?” Tony asked.

Daniel Blank would not give himself time to fear, but twisted around and kissed the boy’s soft lips.

“Of course I like you.”

Tony held his hand and made quiet circles on the palm with a forefinger.

“You’ve changed, Dan.”

“Have I?”

“Oh yes. When you first started seeing Celia, you were so tight, so locked up inside yourself. Now I feel you’re breaking out. You smile more. Sometimes you laugh. You never did that before. You wouldn’t have kissed me three months ago, would you?”

“No, I wouldn’t have, Tony, perhaps we should get back. Valenter is probably-”

“Valenter,” Tony said in a tone of great disgust. “Pooh! Just because he-” Then he stopped.

But Valenter was nowhere about, and Tony used his own key to let them in. Daniel’s roses were arranged in a Chinese vase on the foyer table. And in addition to the roses’ sweet musk, he caught another odor: Celia’s perfume, a thin, smoky scent, Oriental. He thought it odd he had not smelled it in this hallway at noon.

And the scent was there in the upstairs room to which Tony led him by the hand, resolute and humming.

He had vowed not only to perceive but to experience, to strip himself bare and plunge to the hot heart of life. The killing of Frank Lombard had been a cataclysm that left him riven, just as an earthquake leaves the tight, solid earth split, stretched open to the blue sky.

Now, alone and naked with this beautiful, rosy lad, the emotions he sought came more quickly, easily, and fear of his own feelings was already turning to curiosity and hunger. He sought new corners of himself, great sweetness and great tenderness, a need to sacrifice and a want to love. Whatever his life had lacked to now, he resolved to find, supply, to fill himself up with things hot and scented, all the emotions and sentiments which might illume life and show its mystery and purpose.

The boy’s body was all warm fabric: velvet eyelids, silken buttocks, the insides of his thighs a sheeny satin. Slowly, with a deliberate thoughtfulness, Daniel Blank put mouth and tongue to those cloths, all with the fragrance of youth, sweet and moving. To use youth, to pleasure it and take pleasure from it, seemed to him now as important as murder, another act of conscious will to spread himself wide to sentient life.

The infant moved moaning beneath his caresses, and that incandescent flesh heated him and brought him erect. When he entered into Tony, penetrating his rectum, the boy cried out with pain and delight. Dimly, far off, Blank thought he heard a single tinkle of feminine laughter, and smelled again her scent clinging to the soiled mattress.

Later, when he held the lad in his arms and kissed his tears away-new wine, those tears-he thought it possible, probable even, that they were manipulating him, for what reason he could not imagine. But it was of no importance. Because whatever the reason, it must certainly be a selfish one.

Suddenly he knew; her slick words, her lectures on ritual, her love of ceremony and apotheosis of evil-all had the stench of egotism; there was no other explanation. She sought, somehow, to set herself apart. Apart and above. She wanted to conquer the world and, perhaps, had enlisted him in her mandarin scheme.

But, enlisted or not, she had unlocked him, and would find he was moving beyond her. Whatever her selfish motive, he would complete his own task: not to conquer life, but to become one with it, to hug it close, to feel it and love it and, finally, to know its beautiful enigma. Not as AMROK II might know it, but in his heart and gut and gonads, to become a secret sharer, one with the universe.