Read Online The Marble Quilt by David Leavitt - Free Book Online Page B

asked me to do it. You wouldn’t have burdened me with—as if I don’t have trouble enough already.”
    â€œBut you didn’t have to agree.”
    â€œYou have more power than you realize. That’s why you’re dangerous. You act like you’re this innocent little thing, why me, why me, when all the time—”
    Christopher buries his face in his hands. “How did it come to this?” he asks. “We loved each other. Three weeks ago, a month ago, we would have sworn we were together forever.”
    â€œNot anymore.”
    â€œSo you’re saying you don’t love me?”
    â€œNo, I don’t, if that’s what you have to hear.” Anthony scratches the back of his head. “You know what? I feel like you’re trying to rope me back into a relationship with you. That this whole meeting, it’s all been a pretense. I wouldn’t be surprised to learn you hadn’t even had the fucking test.”
    â€œOh, no, I had it. And this morning I got the results.”
    â€œThe results you won’t tell me.”
    For a few hopeless seconds Christopher looks at the table. Then he lies. Why he lies, he’ll never, for the life of him (and it will be a long one), be sure.
    He says, “I’m positive.”
    All at once Anthony is on his feet, the table is toppling, cold mud-colored coffee streaming onto Christopher’s lap. He leaps away from it. “Goddamn you!” Anthony cries, and pushes at Christopher, who pushes back. Around them strangers stand and gawk and whisper. “Odors from the abyss,” one man says to another, while at the next table a woman gives her lover a look that is supposed to say,
Thank God for our more peaceable relations
. The lover, however, thinks,
We are closer than we believe. We are all closer to the edge than we believe
.
    The seizure has passed. Self-consciousness revives, and with it vanity, which causes Christopher to mop halfheartedly at his ruined shirt. In the interval fighting appears to have taken place—hitting too—for blood now drips from Anthony’s mouth.
    â€œAre you O.K.?” a waiter asks, handing him a wad of paper towels.
    â€œI’m O.K. Thanks. I’m O.K.”
    â€œAnthony, I’m sorry.”
    â€œStay away from me.”
    â€œIf you’d just let me—”
    â€œStay away from me. Don’t follow me,” says Anthony, hurrying out of the café. Of course Christopher follows. At that dangerous asterisk where Market Street intersects Noe and Twenty-third, the light is red. “Wait!” he calls. But Anthony doesn’t wait. Instead he hurls himself onto Market Street, threads his way through six lanes of traffic, alights on the other side. He will die and Christopher will live. He will die and Christopher will die … At last the light turns green. And Christopher, who loves life more than he is willing to admit, crosses cautiously, as his mother taught him; looks bothways, as his mother taught him. Then he steps up onto the curb. Glances down Noe. (No Anthony.) Glances down Market. (No Anthony.) Where has he gone?
    Only the pavement knows, and the pavement isn’t talking.
The Ruins of Another’s Fame
    In the spring of 1901, a few months after Oscar Wilde’s death in Paris, Bosie received a fan letter from a twenty-seven-year-old poetess named Olive Custance. Olive’s first book of verse,
Opals
, had been published the previous year by John Lane; she loved opals; her friends called her Opal. Bosie, on the other hand—perhaps because opals were thought to bring bad luck to those not born in October—insisted on calling her Olive.
    They entered almost immediately into a love affair. Olive, though lacking Bosie’s pedigree, was considered a great beauty, and came from money. As a poet she was dismal—worse even than Bosie, which was perhaps why they admired each other’s work. That spring, in Paris