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In slightly different circumstances, I don’t think I would have made it to Hampden until much later in the summer, maybe even the start of term. It wasn’t that I would have stayed by choice, but after the endless dreary battle of paperwork and last minute God-sends that had paved my way to college I expected a final summer captive in Plano, stuck in that dismal house paying off my dues one last time.

This fate, in the end, did not come to pass. A secretary somewhere put in overtime, or a postal worker came ahead of schedule, the result being that my paperwork was put in order earlier than I had expected, and this breakthrough emboldened me to leave as soon as I had pocketed my travel allowance, meager though it was. I could find some place to stay until term started, once I got to Hampden- I would work whatever job I had to. I only knew I refused to linger a minute longer than necessary at my parents’ house.

I traveled by bus across the country with a couple of hundred dollars to my name and a lone suitcase, the experience mind-bending. Until then I had never been east of Santa Fe, never north of Portland. Here I found myself crossing state lines by the dozen, and doing two-hour stopovers in the coach terminal of an airport in Illinois, the closest I had ever come to international travel.

My summer would have gone very differently had fate not placed me at that airport when it did. As it was, I was sitting by myself near the taxis watching the planes take off when a woman started fussily past me and our eyes happened to meet over her sunglasses. 

Despite our locking eyes, her hair was the first thing I noticed about her- red, and shockingly so. It was not the purpling bottle red I was accustomed to seeing on older women, but a natural flame-bright shade, something alluringly exotic, European even, an echo of Klimt.

She was striking, I acknowledged, following this thought. Pale-skinned and heart-faced like a doll, with hair pooling down her shoulders, something fragile but intense in her painted mouth and wavering brows. She could have passed for a woman in her thirties, though intuition told me she was at least a decade older, judging by the pulling of her skin and the covetous way she was eyeing me.

Intuition also told me she was wealthy. And she had stopped walking to eye me more closely, her large coffer set to rest by her side. 

Opportunism made my pulse accelerate. I had seen wealthy older women before and entertained the idea, not unseriously- imagined some youngish matron with a big house and nothing to do and a husband out of town in business all the time. Nice work if you could get it- good dinners, some pocket money, maybe even something really big, like a car.

Now here one was, and here I was with nothing to tie me anywhere, just a penniless summer stretching ahead and the chance to remake myself. 

I spoke before the moment could pass me by. “Excuse me, miss-“ (this politesse pleased her) “Do you need any help with that?”

“Oh, no,” the woman replied indulgently, waving a hand. “No, I’m only waiting for my car. They said it’d be here any minute. But I get so anxious waiting. You wouldn’t happen to have anything on hand, would you? Only to settle the nerves. I’m a horror when it comes to travel. You’d think after all this time-! But it’s my disposition, you see.”

I had nothing of the sort, so I shook my head. “Sorry. You travel a lot?”

She was patting her coat down now, extricating an old-fashioned cigarette and a silver lighter. “Only Europe. In the States I try not to go anywhere west of Vermont, but well- necessities. Do you smoke?”

“On occasion,” I nodded, though she did not offer me a cigarette, instead exhaling longly before looking at me with more focus.

“Are you travelling alone?”

“Yes. I’m starting college in the fall, so I’m moving out.”

“College,” she murmured, around a drag. “Very good. Are you clever? You look like a very clever young man.”

“I don’t know about that,” I demurred, which seemed to please her. 

“I can tell these things, you know. I’m very sensitive to others. It’s always been a burden. L’enfer c’est les autres, and so forth. But I can’t help it. I give too much of myself.”

“That sounds hard.”

“Oh, I don’t like to dwell on it,” came the reply, comfortably self-martyrizing; she inspected me again. “But you strike me as a kindred spirit. What’s your name?”

“Richard Papen,” I said, extending a hand to take hers. It was offered with coquettish grace, small and bony but impeccably manicured, and her sunglasses lowered a fraction on her nose as she surveyed me. “It’s a pleasure.”

“Aren’t you a darling thing? Call me Olivia, please.”

An understanding sort of look passed between us. She was not the type of woman to often be found alone, I was sure- I was lucking out in finding her between boyfriends or with her husband at home. I suppose she must have thought herself lucky too, stumbling upon me by chance. I have never had much trouble with women. 

“It’s nice not to be by myself even for a while,” I remarked, as I released her hand and strove to look less like we were conducting business. “I hope it’s not impolite to hope your car is a little late.”

“Do you know,” Olivia replied, in a philosophical tone, “I think it’s here now. Isn’t that typical?”

I glanced up; a chauffeured car, indeed, was slowing down near us. Before I could decide how to respond she had stepped delicately my way and taken my hand in hers, porcelain pale and clad in dainty rings. 

“You’d be welcome company, if you don’t have anywhere to be this afternoon. I so dread having to stay places alone. And Sebastian can take you wherever you need to go in the morning.”

I considered her. Had I been someplace where people knew me, I might have had more objections, but as it was I was free for the taking, and besides generally quite charmed by her, her nasal clipped accent and her out-of-place features. I wasn’t fooled by the propriety- it was apparent that in spite of her general aura of melancholy this was a woman used to getting what she wanted. The very instability I could sense in her still reeked of the comforts and confidence of the upper class- there had been plenty of broken birds in Plano, but their crises had led them to shooting up behind the gas station, not cavorting with young men and reading Freud. 

“If I wouldn’t be imposing…”

She smiled, a slash of impeccable Chanel Rouge. We climbed into the beautiful vintage Mercedes thick as thieves.

Conversation on the way to the hotel flowed easily between us, now that the game had been agreed upon. For the most part I asked her about herself, and she was happy to oblige, sharing grievances and histories aplenty. She was evidently cultured, and thought herself a creative soul, though she did little creating from what I could gather; she was from Boston, but 'French at heart', and quite recently married, though she and her husband (Chris, an actor in a soap, whom she described as “pure artistic genius”) had an understanding. She also had a son, not with Chris, about which she became briefly emotional when the topic emerged.

“It’s hard, with children, though you wouldn’t know. He’s at school all year, off with his little friends all summer, and so I barely know what sort of trouble he’s getting into, the naughty thing. And I have no authority over the child- I called him yesterday at his aunt’s house, and he still hasn’t been to see my doctor like I’ve been asking him for months- even though he’s always been so delicate, the precious boy. I suspect he gets his stubbornness from my father. I simply do not have the force to fight with him.”

I sent a mental prayer of thanks to any listening god for keeping me from meeting this impetuous little boarding-school tyke, attempting external sympathy for the mother’s sake. 

“I’m sure he appreciates all you do for him. It’s hard for boys to show these things.”

“Oh, he’s a darling, really,” Olivia sighed, tremulously. “I suppose I just miss having him nearby.”

She did not, apparently, miss him enough not to swiftly change subjects. I told her about my brief stint in college in California and my plans for fall, erasing the presence of my parents and of Plano entirely in this narrative. I didn’t mind playing the self-made man, but the tragic pauper was a step too far. 

For her part she recounted her latest hobbies, and the ‘exhaustion’ she had suffered from ‘since Venice’, which had motivated her travels- she was headed for rehab come fall, at the Betty Ford Centre, but in anticipation thereof she was headed first to a summer retreat somewhere in Canada, one of those semi-mystic immersion-type experiences that rich people like to throw money at. Despite my private skepticism I could sort of understand the appeal of handing the reins over to someone else, especially in so ritualistic a setting- I always suspected that had I stayed in California I myself might have ended up in a cult or at the very least practicing some weird dietary restriction.

The retreat, however, posed somewhat of a problem for my newfound summer plans, which I could not help but imply discreetly as we spoke. 

“It is such a pity,” Olivia said, running a proprietary hand up and down my arm as we stepped into the lobby of the grandest hotel I’d ever laid eyes upon, a uniformed valet about my age following with her luggage. “But I really can’t cancel my reservation- it’s already been paid for, and besides it’s not good for me, to go so long without rest, especially after a spring as hellish as this one has been.”

“It is a pity,” I repeated, honestly; my visions of a summer gig lounging in luxurious bedsheets were fading before my eyes. “I don’t think the rest of my holiday will measure up to today.”

“A young man like yourself? I’m sure you’ll be very busy,” Olivia tutted, turning plaintive on a dime. “In fact you’ll forget we ever met as soon as the next pretty girl turns your head.”

“I won’t be meeting anyone worth remembering,” I dismissed, shaking my head. “Until fall I have nothing planned but finding work.”

For an instant, the doll-like face froze undecided. “You mean to say you’re unoccupied all summer?”

“That’s right.”

“Well,” Olivia drew out, unexpectedly thoughtful then exaggeratedly conspiratorial. “Well. I suppose it’d be silly of me to ask- no, I will anyhow- if, by any chance, you might consider watching over the apartment?”

“Your apartment?”

“Oh, there wouldn’t be much to do, I’m afraid, but I would feel so much better with someone there,” Olivia pushed on, unperturbed in her wide-eyed act. “You hear all these stories of break-ins, and with the place stood empty so long- things are just things, but even so…  Of course the cleaner comes by every week, but you never know what might happen.“

“I would be happy to,” I interrupted, managing to sound a fraction less eager than I actually was. House-sitting! A place to live and a salary, all for the price of doing less than nothing in a doubtlessly beautiful Boston home. Here I’d pictured myself counting pennies and working night shifts.

“It’s beneath you, I’m sure, but if you’re looking for a little money it would be quite helpful,” Olivia said, self-effacing. “And it would be nice to have someone to come home to.”

I’m sure it would, I thought, wry. A month I’d have the place to myself, and then a week at least to traipse around Boston on her arm. “No, please, I’d be very obliged.”

“Then I’ll call our head of house tonight; she can arrange the particulars.”

It was thusly, clinking glasses with a tremendously classy cougar in a hotel restaurant, that I eluded whatever natural trajectory had awaited me that summer, and instead found myself headed out to Boston the next morning with nothing to my name but my battered school suitcase and a cheque for an obscene little allowance signed Olivia Abernathy. 

It took me the barest of efforts to adjust to my life in Boston. The initial shock, to be sure, was slow to wear off, but despite my raw-pinched arm I became at ease with my surroundings with valiant speed, I think because in some way I had spent so much of my life daydreaming of precisely such places. It felt right to be wandering the marble-floored entrance hall and the great wooden library; the guest room with its four-post bed felt more homely than my own room ever had. 

I felt in Boston that I was living in some dream. For the most part I was left entirely to my own devices; my job description was vague at best, and I felt little scruples exploiting this fact. The apartment, really more of a house, since it spread over several floors, had its share of staff- a gardener for the hidden back yard, cleaners who came in shifts, on occasion even a cook who came to check the kitchen stores- but they all seemed to expertly blend into the décor, and did not bother me except to inquire if I required anything, obviously used to Olivia’s paramours. As such, I was free to explore the house at my leisure- peruse the overwhelming collection of books, stare at the art pieces, cautiously rifle through the classic records. 

In these circumstances, I found myself at liberty to reinvent myself further. To the staff I was of little interest, but they knew nothing of me- I was a mysterious presence in the home, but not of their world. I could be this mystery at Hampden too- not John Richard jr. of Plano, but Richard of undisclosed origin, presumably well-bred but close-lipped on the subject. More important still, I had money in my pocket, though I did not know yet how to spend it.

Days bled into a week; it was eight days past my arrival when my new reality was perturbed in an entirely unexpected fashion. 

I had, for the start of my stay, been expecting any manner of complication. Someone would oust me from the apartment, doubtlessly- if not the staff, then some relative, Olivia’s parents disapproving of their daughter’s latest folly, or the vengeful husband returning early from shooting his scenes. But days had gone by with no sign of trouble, nor even anyone who seemed to care about my being there, and so I had stopped expecting any unfriendly guests by the time one finally came. 

This surprise arrival was, as you’d expect, wholly unannounced; it found me sat with my legs hanging in the pool, a newly started copy of Lolita in hand, my ears alerting suddenly to the noise coming from inside the house.

I had gotten used to the sounds of the place- the chimes of the grandfather clock, the unprompted creaking of old wooden staircases, the footfall and hoarse voice of the usual cleaning lady, the occasional flighty passage of the neighbors’ cat. Whatever this was did not resemble those familiar disturbances, and so I froze where I sat, straining to place the source.

A door slammed somewhere, close enough for me to recognize the sound, followed as it was by a clipped, purposeful rhythm: heeled shoes on wooden floors. Someone was inside, making their way through to the garden.

Faced with this realization, I found myself at a loss as to what to do. Olivia was to my knowledge still away, and I imagined she might have called out if it had been her, though the approaching footsteps could have been hers- certainly they were not stout Yulia’s. If not Olivia, then who? Perhaps a visiting friend or family member, with their own set of keys, negligently passing by- I imagined that wealthy people would be laissez-faire when it came to that sort of thing. More alarmingly, I could be dealing with an intruder, a real one: a burglar, armed maybe, unaware or uncaring of my presence in the home, come to rob the place and leave me face down in the pool.

It sounded sort of fantastical, but it wasn’t beyond the realm of possibility. In an abrupt movement I got to my feet, abandoning Lolita by the pool, and glanced around for something to brandish. I wound up seizing pool net, which felt to me an adept compromise- if some grand dame or the grand dame herself poked their head outside, I would seem innocuously at work, but if I saw some darkly clad marauder ransacking the silverware through the patio windows I could rush in and knock him out, or at least defend myself long enough to make a run for it.

The unwelcome guest had paused somewhere, but after a moment the footsteps resumed, and then a figure, silhouetted in the curtained shadows, had me slowly loosening my grip on the pool net even as I myself stood to attention. Before I ever saw him fully something in me had signaled plainly that this would be no burglar.

The newcomer stepped outside then, through the open door; his hair drew my eye before anything else, redder than red, tucked nonchalantly behind the ears of a boy about my age, though it seemed to me he might have stepped out of a picture two hundred years older. There was enough of his mother in his striking, aristocratic build and faraway gaze that I did not even briefly mistake him for some more distant relation, though I could not make sense of him as the son- in my head the boy had been thirteen at most.

For a second we stared at each other in silence, the both of us I think a little startled by the other. Then his gaze turned scornful, and he looked me over from top to toe in a way that made me stiffen even as I stood unmoving.

“Are you the new neanias?”

His accent was just like his mother’s, though his voice was lower and cooler, or at least seemed it then- later I would find him very much capable of reaching her shrill tones. In the moment I felt entirely wrong-footed, his clear belonging highlighting my lack thereof.

“Excuse me?”

This fumbled response seemed to satisfy him, as he raised his eyes heavenwards before returning dismissively to mine. “Don’t mind me. You seem very plausible.”

I could feel blood rising to my cheeks in humiliation; before he could turn on his heel I found myself rushing to defend myself from his semi-correct assumptions.

“Look, your mother hired me to watch the house while it stood empty. I wasn’t told you would be returning to Boston, or I would have-“

Here I stopped myself, unsure of what exactly I could have done to welcome my patron’s son home, but he had stopped to scoff to himself now, with the look of one used to his mother’s fancies.

“Yes, well. I had rather planned on being home undisturbed. Usually she keeps your sort close.”

His presumption was not inaccurate, but rankled nonetheless. I resented being reminded of the doubtless endless stream of others that had been employed on the same terms as I was.

“Listen,” the son continued, evidently sensing my discomfort and pressing the advantage. “I’m sure you’ve been an intensely fastidious caretaker, but I simply can’t have anyone around right now. I’ll pay you what you’re owed for the month, and you can head off home with a nice bit of spending money and your obligations fulfilled, all right? She’ll call you.”

But here I wavered, a jolt of panic at the thought of having to find accommodation silencing my tongue, and his tolerant look receded, mingled now with impatience.

“If you were hoping for long-term employment, I’m sorry to have to tell you that your position has very high turnover.”

“That’s not it,” I said, on instinct, kicking myself for it as soon as he met my eyes with suspicion and I was forced to elaborate. “I can’t go home. For one thing it’s in California.”

It was either that or admitting my parents wouldn’t take me back, and it had a sufficient impact, judging by the way my unwilling host’s eyes widened in abrupt disbelief.

“California? That’s new.”

“I’m leaving for college after the summer ends,” I pushed, with somewhat desperation-fueled persuasiveness. “But I don’t have anywhere to go before then. Just let me stay the month, at least- I’ll keep out of your way.”

He was wavering now, I could tell, and after a moment’s hesitation as I continued to stare at him earnestly he grimaced and waved a courtly hand my way, conceding defeat with an air of exhaustion.

“Oh, stay on, what difference does it make. Pretend I’m not even here, California.”

“It’s Richard,” I rectified, rapidly, before the nickname could stick. “Richard Papen.”

I earned a blink before he seemed to recall to be even slightly embarrassed by his lack of prior manners.

“Francis Abernathy. But I imagine you knew that.”

Then in a flash of the linen jacket draped over his shoulders he was off, and I was left poolside seeing my summer reshape itself drastically.

When I finally pushed back inside, one of the priceless bottles of wine was conspicuously missing from the dining room.

I saw little of Francis that day, and puzzled over how to adjust to his presence in the home for the better part of it, trying to anticipate the coming weeks.

My new housemate was young but from old money, which tended to make people act a certain way; furthermore, he was understandably not too pleased to find me living in his home. Upon racking my brains I also recalled he’d been off somewhere with his aunt or his friends or something, and this holiday seemed to have ended abruptly. 

All in all these circumstances seemed conducive to his souring the mood immensely, but I had few hopes of remedying the situation- it did not seem to me that there was much I could do to curry his favor. In truth I was rather struck by him for reasons I could not quite explain, and felt our differences very keenly. I did not want any further confrontation.

Having settled on keeping my head down and my mouth shut, I anxiously awaited Francis’ next move; considering the pilfered wine, I half expected a fit of hedonism in the foreseeable future, and crossed my fingers that I would not have to rescue him from overdosing on cocaine he’d sniffed off a stripper’s breasts or something similarly sordid. My employer would have burst into hysterics, and I didn’t recall med school ever teaching me how to treat an addict; all the dealers I’d known in high school had stuck to pot and alcohol.

To my surprise, when I saw him next, my host was perusing the library shelves, impeccably dressed in cream-colored summer linens; the sight startled me so much that I drew back from the door and absconded to the kitchen like a thief in the night. 

I had noticed, even during our brief exchange the day prior, how well he dressed, how storybook he seemed- now he struck me as some sort of Wilde-adjacent dandy, in faultlessly tailored trousers and billowing shirts. His shoes probably cost as much as my entire wardrobe. The whole picture was slightly surreal, even moreso than his mother- it inspired in me a deep curiosity, and I wished I had crossed his path somewhere I might have inquired after him, though I was somehow aware that I might have attracted the odd stare for it. Something about him felt somewhat illicit.

Despite my thoughts pulling in his direction all day, we didn’t speak at all until late that afternoon; I had busied myself half-assedly cleaning the pool, a task which I abandoned eagerly when the phone rang. I had no sooner crossed the threshold into the study when a cry halted my hand, and Francis came running down the stairs, motioning for me to stop.

“Don’t, don’t, it’s for me.”

“Sorry, I didn’t- “

But Francis was already on the line, eyebrows drown into a high line of expectation. “Hello?” An abrupt relaxation, his tone leisurely now. “Oh, hello. No, I didn’t forget you said that. Well, no, I was busy, if you must know. What? No. Could you imagine?”

He was laughing as I withdrew. I felt an entirely unreasonable pang of jealousy as I retrieved the pool net. 

We didn’t see each other again that day, though when I went up to my room for bed his door was open down the hall, and some classical piece I didn’t know was drifting down from it, accompanied by the rhythmic tapping of a foot against the floor. I lay awake for a good hour thinking of who I might have become if only my mother had been a wealthy depressive.

It wasn’t just the wealth. I had known rich assholes in California, in college or passing through the nearest big towns to Plano on their way to some kind of desert festival, but those had been an entirely different breed, and one I could more easily look down upon. The Abernathys, in all their understated superiority, struck me as a fair deal more aspirational- they had that air about them. 

When Yulia came by the next morning, we exchanged small talk in the kitchen, a sudden camaraderie between us now that the master of the house had made his return. 

“He is alone?” Yulia inquired, while she pulled on her cleaning gloves. I nodded and earned a nod in return. “Sometime when is just him he bring friends too. You are lucky is just him.”

“What, what are they like?”

“The same,” came the flat response. “But more mess.”

After I left her I found Francis in the library searching for a book once more, though this time I must have been less discreet in my observations because he turned my way with an absent frown before I could pass by the room. 

“Have you taken any of the books out of here?”

“I’ve been reading Lolita,” I admitted, tensing, but he only shook his head, disappointed.

“No, that’s not what I’m looking for. Damned Henry and his obscure requests.” He pursed his lips in concentration, then glanced my way again. “Did you say you were reading Lolita?”

“Yes,” I confirmed, then felt compelled to defend myself, cursing my choice of reading. “It’s not so much the taboo. I just haven’t had the chance to read much Russian literature, outside of Crime and Punishment.”

“It’s all very doom and gloom,” Francis opined, but he had not returned to the books, gazing at me curiously. ‘“You read?”

Somehow I did not take offence to the query. “Mostly classics. As in- the classical period.”

Francis appeared briefly stunned, brows shooting upwards. “That’s what I study.”

I was equally surprised, suddenly awkward. God only knew at what prestigious level he had studied the subject. “Oh. So do I. Or- I’m starting this fall.”

“Classics,” Francis repeated, staring at me the way one would at a dog walking on its hind legs. “That’s a novelty. You’re just starting?”

“I did a little at undergrad,” I shrugged, torn between the desire to change subject lest he impress his superior level upon me and the desire to talk of nothing else, having finally found anyone who cared for it. “I started off studying medicine.”

The look shifted, though the disbelief lingered. “And this is how you choose to spend your summer?”

“It seemed as good a plan as any,” I replied, which was hardly an answer. I didn’t want to confess to my familial circumstances on top of whatever assumptions he had made about the state of my finances. “I’ve never been to the East Coast.”

By the reflexive quirking of his brow, this much was obvious, but his expression remained one of mild interest. “I’m sure my mother was a warm welcome.” 

Then he added something I couldn’t place, though the language I could guess at, and I had to fight against a flush once more, gazing away.

“I never took Latin.”

“Just Greek then,” Francis surmised, with a barely hidden note of the mocking I’d expected, but perhaps in deference to my pathetic status in his household he continued: “It was just a saying. Hard to translate.”

I nodded, though I had the uneasy and perhaps paranoid sense that in fact he could have translated easily enough, and that furthermore the saying related to young men and older women. 

The phone rang before either of us could say anything further, and Francis snapped to attention with military rigor, cursing. “Good God, he’s relentless. I should cut the phone lines.”

He was out in the hallway in a flash; as I retired to my usual seat in the library I could hear him presumably resume his earlier conversation, in turn complaining and cajoling the mysterious Henry regarding the promised book. He did not come down from his room again after the call, or if he did I didn’t see him. For my part I made little progress on Lolita that afternoon.

I was intrigued by him, no sense in denying it. The odds of finding someone my age who shared my interests in Plano had been abysmal, and so even now I was quite taken by the idea of a kindred spirit in that regard, even if we lacked any other commonalities. He also seemed nothing like any other guy I knew, and though this might have been readily explained by his social sphere or something in the water I had a sense that there was more to it. 

I was vaguely aware that there was really no subtle way for me to sate my curiosity- asking after him struck me as difficult, considering my only sources were the staff, and I had felt already that Yulia found my questions distasteful somehow. Besides that my only option was befriending him, which struck me as fantastical- I had never been so aware of my defects of upbringing, and I was only even in his home as his mother’s summer diversion. Under different circumstances, perhaps I might’ve mustered the nerve to at least fake my way to a pretense of kinship, but here the hierarchy was too clear. Most likely I would have to make do with glimpses of my host and hope Hampden College, Vermont, offered a roster of classmates with less natural disdain for me.

I managed to get back into Lolita just as the night settled in, and then lost myself in its gruesomely florid prose until I fell asleep, wondering as I nodded off however the author had come to craft so impossibly delusional a narrator.

The next day saw Francis leaving the house in a slamming of doors sometime in the morning, by way of the beautiful motor I finally spotted through the window as he drove off into the city. The combined picture was just as movie-perfect as you might expect, something out of an old romance.

I had no idea if the departure was permanent, but I busied myself with random tasks out of a sudden sense of duty, maybe bolstered by my renewed isolation in the apartment. At several points I lingered outside of the master bedrooms, fighting temptation- Olivia’s I had been in, feeling it appropriate, though I’d done nothing more than look inside, but Francis’ I had barely glanced at since my first walkaround, and I now found myself sorely interested by its contents. 

Mail came; I set it aside but couldn’t resist the urge to skim the lone postcard amongst the pile, portraying an impressionist landscape on one side and on the other the delightfully loose cursive of someone who signed off with a heart and a ‘ta Camille’, the message jumping into French on every second sentence. From what I grasped the content was light-hearted; Camille, whoever she was, was droll in recounting some inside joke I felt instantly passionately jealous of, and sent love from ‘C’. The tone was familiar, even teasing, worsening my jealousy even as some small part of my brain was reassured. Something about Francis had made me wonder, but some girls went crazy for his sort.

I placed the postcard atop the letters and retreated to the library, day-dreaming a little unhappily of Camille, whoever she was, the idea of her entrancing. Doubtless they were legion, these friends of Francis’, cultured and confident, meeting in summer homes across the world and exchanging cheek kisses and priceless bottles of wine, floating above the petty dramas of my college peers. I could picture it all vividly, my imagination somewhat erroneously painting the great homes I’d never really seen, faceless strangers in beautiful clothes discussing in Latin while Francis and Camille held court, she as elegant as he, smiling coyly.

In truth when Francis reappeared he was highly malcontent, a pink tinge of exertion to his pale cheeks and a shifting sort of scowl on his face; he dispersed himself of his jacket by tossing it absently my way where I stood frozen in the hallway before vanishing up the stairs. I stared down at it in disbelief before eventually hanging it in the laundry; there was an expired parking ticket and a shredded cigarette label in one of the pockets. 

I hadn’t noticed him smoking, but I saw him in a cloud of smoke that evening when we crossed paths in the kitchen, which caught me off guard- I hadn’t seen him eat once in his stay, and had sort of begun to wonder if he had a private chef bringing him his meals without my knowing. Instead he stood then facing the fridge, a bowl of cherry tomatoes in one hand and a glass of gin in the other, smoke billowing around his head with artistic precision despite the blank look on his face.

“Oh. You’re still here.”

What the hell am I supposed to answer to that, I thought. “A postcard came for you earlier.”

This piqued his interest; I retrieved it from the table so he could take a look, watching him out of the corner of my eye for lack of anything better to do- he was still blocking the fridge. He was easy to read, I noticed, or at least expressive. By the end of it he was smiling, and he shook his head as he flipped the postcard so he could hold it alongside his gin, glancing my way.

“Any correspondence for you? À l’addresse du pensionnaire?”

I shook my head, resolutely maintaining the mystery. “No one knows where I am.”

“Illicit,” Francis replied, after a second, in such a way I felt somehow grateful we stood at opposite ends of the room. He seemed recovered from his bad mood, or at least he had registered my existence enough to cover it up. I wondered at the cause.

“Not at all.”

But Francis shook his head, cheekbones especially high in the shadowy lowlight of the kitchen, and took another drag from his cigarette. “So long as you hide your bodies well, you are welcome to them.”

I didn’t see him the next morning, although I knew he was there. Later I heard him vaguely on the phone, this time in his bedroom, and paused atop the stairs because I could guess at his interlocutor, who he was thanking for her missive. I didn’t eavesdrop long- it was hard to hear anything, anyways, and then there was the morality- but stayed long enough to hear a wry innuendo about unspectacular endings that made me suspect Francis’ ill temper the previous day related to things going poorly with a girl.

I fell back into Lolita with morbid interest, engrossed in the frenzied passions of Humbert Humbert, framed as they were by his rigorous exercises in solipsism. There was something compelling to the man’s perspective, his coinages and his transformative words, set against the dull realities of his world; Lolita, at the heart of it, remained otherworldly always, though I could not help but wonder what would become of her with age. It seemed to me evident that Humbert would kill her before the book’s end, immortalizing his darling; adult Lola would be banal, sans his passions to make her divine.

Engrossed in the fantastical twists and turns of Humbert’s evasions of justice, I lost some time watching Lolita age with a sense of foreboding. She had been struck now, several times over, losing her power with each blow; I knowingly awaited the killing stroke. In books murder always seems to lurk at every corner, apparently the first solution to any conundrum.

In the evening, the scent of food drew me into the kitchen, though I noted even as I approached that this was odd- there was no reason for the cook to be in, let alone cooking, unless she’d been called for.

Instead of the cook, I found Francis, incongruous, not dawdling but surrounded by pots and cutting boards, wearing an apron and brandishing a knife. The sight stopped me short, and Francis for his part gave me a sort of startled look, like he’d forgotten he had company.

He had half-tied his hair, stray strands falling in unruly fashion to frame his face, which unsettled me somehow, just as the idea of his cooking did. 

His expression turned inquisitive: “Are you eating?”

I wavered. “I could. But there’s no- “

“I should have remembered,” Francis interjected, pulling his mouth in childish displeasure. “Damn it. Anything you don’t eat?”

“I’m easy.”

“I’m sure. I’m making risotto. There’s probably enough for two, if that’s all right. I couldn’t find the right mushrooms.”

At a mild loss for what to say, I shook my head. I wasn’t even sure what went into a risotto. 

“That’d be great. Thank you.” Then, unable to resist asking: “I’m sure I could ask Yulia for the chef, if you wanted.”

Francis’ brow creased. “God, no. That woman caters to every fad imaginable. Don’t put yourself through that.” 

“I would help, but I’m not great in the kitchen. Is there anything-?”

“No, no, sit, I’m used to it,” Francis dismissed, and he seemed it, at ease. Sort of absently, he added: “I like cooking, besides.”

“Does your mother cook?”

A scoff. “It’s a miracle if she eats.” He softened. “It’s not exactly an indispensable skill, of course. I don’t know how I choose my hobbies.”

“There’s worse,” I said, sincerely; he glanced my way, and for a moment visibly preened at the compliment, which took me aback. He’d seemed too unflappable for it until then.

“There’s some use in it, I suppose. I try to host dinners every weekend, in college, though they’re a terrible hassle when Julian comes, since he hardly RSVPs until the last second. I’d resent it if only he weren’t such pleasant company.”

I’d not reacted, but he remembered himself anyways, glancing back at me. “Oh, sorry- our tutor, I mean. We’re close.”

“He’s lucky if that gets him dinners every week.”

This time I earned a grin, brief and satisfied; he shook his head. “If only you’d say so to the rest of them. Total ingrates.”

I would have drunk arsenic for the chance. Instead I ate risotto, tried not to radiate envy so hard I choked on it, and made small talk, though for small talk I’d never been so interested. Mostly we ended up talking about his family, though the subject of Olivia made me squirm- she’d had him young, and his grandparents had raised them “as brother and sister”, Francis claimed, waving a dismissive hand as he recounted his childhood in broad strokes. English nannies and private schools, summers in Switzerland, winters in France, “the usual, in short”. I was as taken by the idea as by the blasé tone. 

To lessen my feeling like so much of a squatter, I staunchly gave myself clean-up duty, though Francis stuck around drinking coffee, watching me somewhat unerringly. In retrospect I think he as much as I found it difficult to balance these brief conversations with our respective stations in the household, my status as a non-entity. 

When I was done cleaning up, I brushed myself down unnecessarily and looked at Francis, manners forcing a smile out of me- I had been, for the most part, stone-faced since his arrival, which I was entirely unconscious of at the time. 

“Thank you for dinner. It was going to be bread and cheese.”

“Thank you for the company,” Francis murmured, around the rim of his coffee. I retreated with a goodnight, though I didn’t especially feel like doing so- there was no real excuse to stay behind without being asked to do so.

The night saw me restless. The risotto had been delicious.

The next afternoon, I was sat in the kitchen eating cold soup and struggling with Plato when Francis emerged from his room and descended the stairs in one a flurry of action, pausing in the hall.

“Richard? I’m going to the shops. Would you like to come?”

Shops? I repeated, mentally, then thought: what did I care? I answered in the affirmative; Francis, clad in magnificent trousers and (delightfully) a pince-nez, guided me to his car (parked hapazardously, likely as a result of his snit the previous day) and set to starting it. 

Perhaps contrary to expectation, Francis was a meticulous driver, but more importantly he was a chatty one; we drove maybe half an hour, during which he told me in great detail about the sights of the city as we passed them. No mention was made of the more tourist-drawing points of interest, which felt natural: the focus was on so-and-so’s apartment, and this-and-that school, such-and-such’s gallery, a who’s who of connections and beautiful buildings. The whole affair was quite enchanting, such that I preemptively forgave him the grocery bags I foresaw in my future.

We stopped, however, on a high-end street, and Francis strode ahead into a menswear store, glancing disinterestedly at a Burberry we passed. I was suddenly intensely conscious of my ill-fitting shirt and faded slacks. Every understated jumper on the shelf would have cost my mother half her paycheck. 

“Sorry for dragging you along,” Francis said, conversationally, as I stumbled after him. “I just hate doing things by myself. I can’t stand being left alone with my thoughts. They’re bad enough in company.”

“That’s all right,” I managed, faintly. So I was being brought along to fill the silence- this I could understand better. I still couldn’t believe no mean-faced security guard had tackled me to the floor yet. 

“Ah, they have these in store,” Francis was saying now, wholly oblivious to my internal agonies. “What do you think will work through to spring, the green or the brown?”

“What?”

“It has to work year-round; I abhor seasonal fashion,” Francis muttered, seriously considering the two pullovers in front of him. “Making concessions for the weather is one thing, but going orange in fall and floral in spring is impossibly tacky.”

“The green then, maybe,” I said. Watching him hold it up in the mirror I had noticed for the first time that his eyes were green too.

Francis tilted his head this way and that indecisively, then sighed and beckoned a salesgirl. “I’ll take both. Charles can have the other if need be.”

“Charles?” 

“From college,” Francis elaborated, a little caught; until then I hadn’t bothered to ask after the names he interspersed across conversation. “Although he’s shorter than I am, and broader in the shoulders. You’re of a similar build, actually, only taller.”

Another one for the list. I resisted the urge to demand details about my doppelgänger or the mysteriously lovely Camille, staring respectfully at a pair of immaculate shoes. 

“Do you know,” Francis continued, thoughtfully, “I think this is about your cut.”

He was holding up a suit jacket; I gazed at him in confusion. Surely he wasn’t so oblivious or so cruel as to imply I had the means to consider the purchase. 

“I’m not really looking to build my wardrobe.”

His eyes lingered dubiously on the cut of my old shirt. “If you’re sure. It’d really be no expense, if you change your mind. The owner’s been tailoring for my grandfather for years.”

Now I stared anew. “You mean you- no, I couldn’t. You came here to get something for yourself.”

“I’ll be back sooner or later,” Francis dismissed, and now he turned briefly earnest, pushing the jacket into my hands with an intent look. “It’s nothing, honestly, I always find myself buying more than I wear, ask anyone. You might as well get something to wear for your troubles, since you’re here. You will, won’t you? I’ll ask them now. Excuse me? Do you have this in a lighter shade?”

Stunned, I allowed myself to be shepherded to the nearest mirror, where I was consequently handed a series of garments to model as a tailor murmured technical terms that Francis clicked his tongue at and salesgirls voiced their hearty approval. 

The whole montage had something of Pygmalion to it, with myself as an uncanny Eliza. Had I been there with his mother, or had Francis been closer to her age, the salesgirls might have gazed at me with more knowing spite. As it was, I think we came off as a charming pair of college chums, Francis my benevolent mentor in style, and the girl who had served us smiled at me with transparent interest as I stood staring at myself in the mirror. I could only imagine she would have been a fair deal less interested had she known the actual state of my personal finances.

The suits were all beautiful- the sort I’d lusted after watching people at the airport, dancing around the edges of my thoughts as I shook hands with a beautiful older woman on the curb outside. There was undeniable craft involved in their making, earning the price, and beyond that there was the matter of how they made me look- like a stranger, but one I was happy to hand the reins to.

In the mirror, I looked nothing like myself. I could read the desperation clear enough in my eyes, but it didn’t show in my face, and even less in the rest of me, stood coolly folding my cuffs like I’d been born to do so. This was a Richard Papen who might have come from anywhere, so long as he said so. Presented the right way this was a Richard Papen who might be going somewhere too.

“This one sits right,” Francis opined from behind me, tilting his head; unexpectedly he ran a hand down my back, making me start, but as I stared at the mirror his double only lifted his hand and hummed. “The material’s decent, too, for the price.”

I was on high alert, and so only nodded; Francis met my eyes, the picture of innocence, and nodded to the salesgirl to add the jacket to his purchases. Later I would recognize that the more scrupulous Francis appeared the more likely he was to have crossed you terribly; unfortunately, I was at that moment far too willing to play along to question his virtue. I confess I am easily bought if one knows what to buy me. 

I returned to the apartment that afternoon two jackets and two shirts richer, still the picture of startled gratitude, though uneasier than I had been performing in a similar role with Olivia. I don’t think the comparison helped.

When we got out of the car it was to find some member of staff I had not yet met waiting for us at the door, handing Francis a note and murmuring an aside to him that made Francis twitch disagreeably, nodding nonetheless. 

“All right. I’ll call.”

He vanished to the study, on yet another phone; when I passed by some time later, returning from a bracing dip in the pool, he was pacing the room restlessly, tethered by the cord as he made aborted attempts at placating or reassuring some interlocutor.

“It’s all right, really. I’m fine here. You take all the time you need. Oh, don’t say that, I don’t think that at all.”

Camille? I wondered, but moments later the hand that stilled in his hair was fluttering again and he was saying: “Really, maman, I insist I do not require any sessions. Yes, I know what he said about the migraines-”

A total mama’s boy, I concluded, amused, and slipped away. But how odd a relationship, with how little separated them- like brother and sister, Francis had called them, which was exaggerated for effect but carried a hint of truth to it. Something of the parental was lacking between them. And where was the father in all this? I could not imagine he had been a particularly present figure, and felt obscurely certain that this explained some aspects of Francis, though the thought was one my father would have shared, and I abandoned it rapidly in consequence.

There was something to it, though, more broadly, Francis and his mother. Not the awkwardly patronizing relationship I verged on with both- something more, a distinct stamp of the same personality, beneath even the trappings of status. Though was that status not integral to personality? Even so beneath the distant charm there was something else shared: pride, insecurity, some kind of shared nervous complex. But I was making assumptions now. And Francis had a distinct slant to him that his mother certainly did not, decidedly masculine- a temper, for one thing, though it had not been directed my way often since his irritated arrival.

He was a classicist, also. This I had not forgotten.

We spent the next week in and out of each other’s company. Francis seemed often distracted by his own secret preoccupations and endless phone calls, sometimes vanishing in the convertible for swathes of time and sometimes lounging by the pool lost in some massive tome, but consistently he found some time of the day to appear in my vicinity, and then we spoke for some time, about this and that. I always meant to ask him about some particular subject- his studies, for one- but our conversations meandered, and I didn’t know how to direct them without seeming too transparent. Already I found myself ill-at-ease with the aura of anticipation that had begun to dominate my days, a far cry from my initial visions of undisturbed leisure.

“And what is California like?” Francis would ask, over a glass of gin where ice clinked brightly, all curiosity, as if asking for reports of my mission to darkest Africa. 

“I don’t know,” I would answer, rubbing at my arm. “Well, different. People are a lot flashier as a rule, with everything. But it’s not real, really. Most of it doesn’t matter.”

“Do they really act that way, with the cars, and clothes, and hair, and everything?” Francis would pursue, morbidly interested, as I affected scientific objectivity. 

“Sure, some people. It’s- new money, you know.”

“And the accent,” Francis might add, with a shudder, then a belated look my way. “Yours isn’t so bad.”

A curioso, I thought, sometimes, on display. That’s what I am. I couldn’t have said why this bothered me more than the objectification I had happily consented to. 

Later in the week we spent the better part of a dinner discussing a book we’d both read, Francis in increments years ago and myself obsessively in my last year of high school. The conversation stretched long, alcohol loosening my lips and making Francis restless, pacing endlessly around the chair I sat in. In the morning Yulia smelt the smoke on my shirt and gave me a silent look that made me resent her immensely- the presumption that she had some great idea of our nascent companionship, or that her judgement of it should matter, irked me violently. I nonetheless hid the jackets and shirts we’d bought in my suitcase, out of her sight.

Almost in defiance of Yulia, I found Francis in the living room while she was dusting nearby and initiated conversation myself, something inane at first, asking about the apartment. Francis obliged, with the smooth verbiage of a tour guide, or a sommelier, reciting the building’s quirks and value. Somehow we wound up talking of his family, his grandparents in particular; Francis’ grandfather sounded like a real character. There was evident attachment beneath Francis’ light mockery, but also something like fear. 

“Of course we’re terribly lucky they’re so indulgent,” he shrugged at a certain point, resting his cheek against his palm. “There’s no shortage of families that would have thrown her out on the street for good when she came back bearing child.”

“Harsh,” I said, though I knew that kind of story well.

He raised a shoulder. “Discretion is everything. C’est la vie.”

He said this easily, but his gaze had gone faraway, and I wondered silently what Francis’ indiscretions might have been, or where such people even drew the line. It seemed to me their sort would have forgiven murder before embarrassment.

On the Friday, Francis was out; he returned in the late afternoon in a haze of smoke, hair ruffled by the biting breeze that had picked up. I think maybe he was in a bad mood that day, or else I was, but either circumstance led us to an actual argument once we ran into one another, initially over something petty like my forgetting to replace a book where I’d found it, though it deteriorated into sniping rather fast. Until then we had spoken either too casually or too briefly to argue; I found with some consternation that his sharp tongue was very proficient at raising my blood pressure. Usually I was good at keeping my grievances to myself unless I cared to let them show. 

Conscious of my position in the house, I withdrew into myself; Francis, sharing no such concern, was petulantly annoyed by my attempts at stonewalling him. 

“If you have something to say then say it. Don’t hold back on my account.”

Irritated and trying not to sound it: “That wouldn’t be appropriate.”

In disbelieving tones: “Oh, and you’re very concerned about what’s appropriate, are you?” 

Restrained, I managed to say: “I’m sorry about the book.”

“Don’t condescend me,” Francis scowled, color flaring in his cheeks. “You’re not sorry, and I wager you’d as soon have kept it for yourself.”

“You’re being-“ hysterical. “Unfair.”

“Oh, spare me. Playing genteel. Quis est haec-?”

He cut off his injurious comment, which in itself felt more insulting than it would have been spoken. I did not, as we both knew, understand Latin.

“How are you reading Pliny, anyhow?” came the follow-up, predictably. I raised a stiff shoulder.

“You have the dictionary. It just seemed like a good text to try and read.”

Francis stared at me. “So you’re assigning yourself homework.”

Humiliation was making my cheeks heat. “Look, if it’s off-limits I won’t touch it again.”

Francis’ head had cocked; now he straightened and gnawed at his cigarette, sharp lines relaxing. “Oh, never mind. Really you’re free to have a go at anything here. Forget I said anything. Have you eaten yet?”

It was my turn to stare, thrown by the abrupt end to our argument. Surely it wasn’t being so blithely swept under the rug. “I- no, not yet.”

“Good, good,” Francis murmured, and with a nervous sort of frown he turned on his heel. “I was thinking of chicken. Do you like chicken?”

All I could muster was a nod.

Over dinner, we spoke of Greek. Francis described himself as anything but a scholar, blasé voire disparaging of academic endeavor, but it was clear beneath the poor work ethic that he held a very real appreciation for his choice of studies, all aglow as he was with remembered fragments of class conversation. I envied him enormously- his very attitude towards his subject was totally alien to me, compelling and grating at once, since for me succeeding in college had always been a necessity. Beyond this, the discussions and debates he recalled with amused self-depreciation I had only ever dreamed of having, exercises in pure academia by those who had the leisure to carry them out.

I hid these feelings, naturally, but I circled them conversationally- mentioned, off-hand, that I had little luck drawing this kind of contemplation out of my previous classmates, and wondered aloud how he had come to find his group of amiable intellects.

“It takes all sorts,” Francis reassured, magnanimously. “Really, I’m sure you’ll find just as interested a little group wherever you go. Your Greek’s certainly good enough.”

“You don’t have to say that to make me feel better. From the sounds of it you’re all polyglot geniuses.”

“Oh, not at all. One of our friends is a complete imbecile- the shoddiest Greek you’ve ever heard, I tell you, it’s a miracle he even scrapes a pass. And anyways, languages- they’re far less impressive, when you’ve traveled. Just a by-product, really.”

“Even so. I don’t know anyone who speaks- what did you say, Sumerian?” Francis rolled his eyes; I grinned. “Or even good French, for that matter.”

“Ah oui?” Francis inquired, somehow surprised. “Sérieusement? I thought you’d learnt some at school.”

“Poorly.”

“Eh ben. That’s a shame. Everyone should know French, I think. It’d spare us all some of that Anglo-Saxon rigidity if more Americans spoke French.”

“Oh, yeah?” I inquired, amused by his philosophical snobbery. “What’s so rigid about us?”

“Qu’est que tu n’aimerais pas savoir,” Francis replied, swift, which even with my lack of French I could glean the meaning of: Wouldn’t you like to know?

I drank too much, and was tremendously hungover the next morning. Francis emerged into the land of the living around noon and draped himself over the back of my armchair, peering listlessly at Book II while I soldiered on. 

It was around this time that I found myself unable to quash the tentative idea that we were becoming friends.

Francis flitted in and out of the house for the next day or so, on obscure errands and then visiting his grandparents; he was friendly whenever we spoke, almost surprisingly so, his lord-of-the-manor affectation merging with a more particular sly directness. It was the exact sort of attitude shift I might have hoped for upon our first meeting, but there was still something in our interactions that lingered with me afterwards, a vague discomfort I could not explain and did not want to think about. 

To my misfortune, I did not end up with much of a say in the matter. Just past two weeks into his return to Boston, I awoke to thundering rain, and found Francis awake and burrowed into an armchair, lone extended leg swinging this way and that as the rest of him stayed fixedly concentrated on a letter he was reading that spanned several pages.

“Morning.”

His eyes shot up my way, startled, then relaxing. “Good morning.”

After a beat he lowered his letter. “What did you say your father did again?”

“Oil,” I managed, stiffly. I could not bring myself to expand upon this, though doubtless Francis could guess that I did not mean endless reserves of petrol in my name in some barren corner of California. 

“And I suppose he was quite insistent you follow in his footsteps.”

“For all the good that did.”

Francis quirked his brows, a what can you do sort of gesture, and folded his letter away. “I don’t know what is with fathers and this legacy ideal. Oh, the sons. Nevermind whether they’re suited to it at all. I don’t understand it.”

“You never met yours?” I inquired, cautiously curious. He didn’t seem offended, waving a dismissive hand. 

“No. My mother sung me one of his band’s songs, once. Dreadful stuff. You’d laugh.”

I was smiling now. “You remember any of it?”

“I’m trying,” Francis returned, screwing up his face in thought. “Oh, yes.”

He sat upright, made his eyes big, and in hushed theatrical tones recited:

Babe you’re the fire under my skin

Jezebel you wear it well

Pretty little thing with big big dreams

Baby be mine and I’m your man       

I could not help the horrified laugh that escaped me, both at the words and at the incongruity of their being spoken aloud by Francis, whose gentry-made drawl was far better suited to Shakespeare and his ilk.

“You’re not serious.”

“I wish I wasn’t,” Francis replied, self-pitying. “The follies of youth are one thing, but really.”

“I mean- there’s a certain artistic flair to it.”

“It’s inexcusable,” Francis countered, shaking his head indulgently. “Of all the men in the world to breed with. No wonder I’ve turned out this way.”

“You said he was the drummer, didn’t you?” I asked, now, daring to tease further. “Maybe the front man is to blame for the lyrics.”

“Tempting defense, but poor taste is my mother Achilles’ heel,” Francis said, mournfully, though the corner of his mouth raised then. “Present company excluded.”

I was stupidly pleased by this assessment, and pretended to look at the rain to hide it. 

“Actually, the song reminded me- last year this girl I was seeing took me to her slam poetry recital.”

Francis was all rapt attention. “No. You didn’t go-?”

“I went.”

We ate a late lunch, which devolved into an early supper, Francis liberal with the drinks during both. Through it all I felt oddly distant from the rest of the world, even moreso than I had up to that point- with the skies still storming dark outside, the kitchen was like an outpost or a shelter, far from neighbors or civilization, at odds with even the estival season. Somehow this felt fitting. The Abernathys had a distinctly autumnal feel to them, harkening to a bygone era, all fading heat and slowly consuming cool.

Francis himself encapsulated this atmosphere, though I was gaining the sense that the ice thawed rather quickly once he took you into his confidence. He had a quick temper, I had come to learn, and his hedonism ran deep- this liveliness I would not have anticipated on our first meeting, nor the soupçons of neuroses I’d gleaned through eavesdropping. I found him puzzling in his inconsistency.

At some point in the evening the thunder rolled back and left behind the idle rain and the setting sun, the both of us out of conversation and Francis sprawled across an armchair with his head lolling over one arm. He’d settled into one of his incredible positions, long legs hanging over the opposite arm of the chair from the knee down, and I gazed unseeingly at him as I mulled over this hot and cold attitude of his. In a sense he’d behaved that way towards me since our first meeting, but I could find no pattern to his heated attention nor his cool amusement. What was real and what was an act I had no inkling.

On prior occasions I had sometimes felt he might be wondering similarly what to make of me. Right then, as I lay sunken into my own armchair, I reminded myself that whatever image existed of me in his mind was doubtless an intensely unflattering one. It was hard to forget that I had stumbled into his home as his mother’s summer boy-toy. 

Upside down, Francis lit a cigarette, ember glowing bright in the dimly lit room, and as he exhaled his eyes flickered back my way. The smell of the smoke was balmy, playing with my alcohol-hazy senses to contribute to the general headiness of the room. 

“I assume you don’t have a girlfriend, considering your current employment.”

The question was unexpected, though the jibe was not; I shook my head, partly in an effort to dispel my tipsiness. “No. I haven’t really dated in a while.” 

In truth it was only quite recently that I had managed to extricate myself from a long, claustrophobic relationship with a girl in California who we will call Kathy and who I had at first taken for an intelligent, brooding malcontent like myself until I realized she was nothing more than a lowbrow pop-psychology Sylvia Plath, upon which I had begun the forceful but endless process of extricating myself from her weepy clutches. But this I did not want to get into, and reneging her cost me nothing.

It was awkward, but the opportunity to sate my curiosity was too good to pass up, so I pushed on: “And you?”

“What about me?” Francis returned, unnecessarily coy all of a sudden, his eyes on the ceiling. I risked presumption, maybe with a mite of Dutch courage.

“You have someone, don’t you?”

Now he made a sound in the back of his throat, admission plaintive in tone. Francis inebriated was sloppier with his disclosures.

“It’s complicated.”

“Everyone always says that.”

“Sometimes trite things are true,” Francis retorted, audibly a little piqued. “Why didn’t things work out with your last girlfriend?”

“We wanted different things,” I responded, feeling myself sway gently as I shrugged. “It wasn’t complicated.”

It hadn’t been- the process of the breakup had been difficult, not so the decision. Of course Kathy had cried waterfalls when I’d ended things for good, but to me she’d sounded covertly relieved, the tears just a social nicety. If I missed anything about her it was the drinks she mixed. The sex had been okay.

“So you weren’t in love with her,” Francis assessed, and pulled himself upright, swiveling into a sitting position with slightly unsteady grace. “When you’re in love it’s always complicated. You find yourself making things complicated in avoidance of simpler truths.”

“That sounds dramatic,” I said, fairly dryly. I had not really loved anyone myself, and though I had a Romantic soul I looked down on melodrama. Grand truths about romance did not tend to hit home.

Francis was unperturbed by my lack of response, clearly in an oratorial mood. “It is. It’s pathetic. Depraved. When you’re in love you act like an animal. There’s nothing you can do but grovel.”

My picture of the effervescent Camille was rapidly warping in my mind’s eye, but there had been that letter, too, all teasing affection. I felt my curiosity surge again.

“Surely when it’s mutual…”

“Where would the fun be in that?” Francis snorted, his world-weary affect somehow both irritating and compelling. I watched him for a moment, mulling this over- until then I wouldn’t have pegged him as the pining type. I wasn’t sure why. He seemed very suited to languishing, now that I was considering the idea.

“I’m sorry it’s been so terrible for you, then.”

Francis looked surprised by the comment, though I had meant nothing by it. 

“Oh- it’s nothing really. It’s fortifying, I hear. Rest assured I am not saving myself for true love.”

“Right,” I echoed, suddenly in want of my abandoned glass. The subject of sex felt taboo to broach, and not just because of his mother. “I guess that’s something.”

“Something less complicated,” Francis agreed. Through the slow-fading smoke his head was tilting as though listening to some whispering companion I could not hear.

I had found my glass; I finished my drink gratefully. Actually I’d gotten quite thirsty lying there thinking nonsense for however long we’d drifted into silence. The cool sharp bite of my gin was a welcome distraction from the cloudiness of the room.

I glanced back upwards, meaning to ask something about the portrait that hung above Francis’ head by the window- an austere-looking red-haired woman in Gilded Age dress- and found Francis eyeing me in a way that made my hackles rise, though I could not have quite said why. It was considering more than anything else, almost indulgent, and so not untoward in any meaningful way. Even so I felt myself shifting where I sat, and my gaze turned itself with intent towards the empty glass in my hands.

“I suppose, given your being here as you are,” Francis added, at length, “That I can safely assume you share my thinking on the subject.”

Sure, I might have said, if it had been someone else’s mother who had practically hired me as an escort. I don’t take sleeping around too seriously. What guy does? But I felt caged somehow, the blurry edges of the room disorienting now, my blood hot with drink, and with a looming sense of dread I remembered the look Yulia had given me days prior.

“Richard,” Francis said, lightly. “Don’t look so alarmed.”

My eyes shot back up. He had risen from the armchair, ostensibly to retrieve the gin bottle where it stood atop the coffee table, raising the rim to his mouth. In response my pulse began thudding erratically.

“Look,” I heard myself saying, aloud, and was relieved by how firm it sounded, though I had no idea where I was going with the sentence. “Look, I don’t want you to misunderstand…”

What was happening I had only faint and fatalistic ideas about, but I was at a loss as to how I might put an end to it without finding myself on the street within the hour. My screaming sense of self-preservation insisted the latter would be a small price to pay, when the alternative was… But I couldn't finish the thought.

“Oh, I understand,” Francis dismissed, blithely ignoring the opposition; too late I placed the look on his face as the sibling to the one Olivia Abernathy had given me upon our first meeting. This one will do. It was the same down to the way he held the bottle.

This one would not do, I thought, a humiliated sort of anger simmering in me, but I was awash with a vaguely paralyzing panic and rigor mortis had set in. All I managed was a sort of righteous stammer.

“Francis, I’m serious, I’m not- “

“Hush, it’s fun, I promise,” Francis murmured, inattentive, and I would have put an end to it then had he not sealed our mouths together and slid into my lap, the shock of it silencing me for good. He tasted of gin and smoke.

Things derailed at a breakneck pace.

My recollection of the episode in its totality is poor- my mind had disconnected wholly from the proceedings, my body left to go through the motions. All that I seem to recall is that there came a sort of natural lull in the action where we broke apart, at which point I found myself hazily certain that someone would barge in to call the whole thing off or scream obscenities at us at the very least. Neither event occurred; Francis pushed his hair out of his eyes and bit my neck.

It was that lack of interruptions that damned me- I myself, rattled as I was, could no more have put an end to the activities than I could have started us off.

When it was over, I absconded at breakneck speed, barely making my excuses- to-date I do not recall how I got myself out of the room and into my bed. Somehow I fell asleep as soon as my head touched the pillow.

Regrettably, I found Francis almost as soon as I stumbled out of bed in the morning, wandering the library barefoot and looking supremely well-rested. For my part, I had slept poorly and awoken to dismal recollections, and though I was determined to set the record straight it was with a slightly defeated sense of urgency. The fact that I had even allowed for things to go as far as they had somewhat unsurprisingly taken the wind out of my sails. 

Still, I had enough pride to stand up for myself. I wasn’t like Francis, whatever he was like. I had only ever slept with girls, through high school and college- a whole host of them, at that. My erstwhile friends had commented jealously on the ease with which girls gravitated to me, coy but always willing. It was just something I didn’t lend much thought to. Sex was meant to be easy and inoffensive. Spending the whole encounter in a sort of terror-stricken out-of-body daze was as clear a sign as any that I should not have let the situation unfold as it had.

Francis peered at me impassively when I halted in the doorframe, a flicker of anticipation in his gaze that made me control my expression into something eminently reasonable.

“Morning.”

“Sleep well?” 

I ignored the bait, drumming my fingers against the doorframe as I fixed him. “Listen, about last night- it shouldn’t have happened.”

Nary a blink, his gaze on the shelves. “No?”

“No. I’m not like- I’m not interested.”

“Ah,” Francis wondered, a succinct question, sliding his eyes my way. I set my jaw. 

“You had me at somewhat of a disadvantage.”

At this, Francis snorted; I think under different circumstances he would have taken offense at my rejection, but the facts of the matter gave him the upper hand. He was in his element, I was not, and for another thing cheated of divine intervention I had put up very ineffectual a fight against his advances. It gave him, I think, the confidence to remain unruffled rather than lick his wounds.

“But my mother you could have slept with?”

“That’s different,” I retorted, backfooted but intent on seeing the conversation through to a satisfactory end. “For one thing she’s a woman.”

Francis gazed defiantly my way, running an absent finger down the spine of his book all the while. “You know, Richard, if you didn’t want me to think you wanted to sleep with me perhaps you shouldn’t have slept with me.”

“I’m telling you that was a mistake.”

“You’re blushing,” Francis said, quietly smug. I could have beaten him unconscious against the bookcase. 

“I’m not interested,” I repeated instead, staunchly. He raised a shoulder.

“All right, so it comes and goes.” 

“How hard is it to accept no for an answer?”

Now his look was condescending. “You’re entitled to no. You’ve lost your claim to never.”

My fists had clenched so hard I was hurting myself; I forced my hands to relax despite the sick pit in my stomach. 

“Look,” Francis said, in knowing tones. “It’s already happened. It doesn’t really make a difference if it happens again, now. I doubt you were planning on bragging about what you did this summer anyhow.”

I stared mutely at the wall; Francis padded towards the door, and paused right next to me, heedless of the tension. He carried with him the faint smell of cigarettes and a tart sort of sweetness, nauseous recognition spiking through me. 

“I’m making gazpacho for lunch, if you can stand to share a kitchen.”

Left to stare at the library in silence, the sound of my rushing blood filled my ears. I could not place my feelings in the slightest.

It had happened, hadn’t it? I didn’t know how, but I had let it happen to me. I had been fairly drunk, yes, and taken by surprise, that was evident, but it had happened for somewhat too long and with too much participation on my part for that to be a credible justification. Nonetheless I wasn’t interested. My curiosity where Francis was concerned had been of a different order entirely- he had mistaken intrigued overtures of friendship for something else. Really he had been using me just as his mother would have.

But he was making us lunch, some corner of my brain interjected. Still, he was making us lunch.

My hesitation cost me- my train of thought veered off-track, to Francis in the kitchen, the close attention I hadn’t realized I’d paid to the movement of his hands. Then the rest. My stomach lurched. 

With a concerted effort, I pushed the wave of self-loathing back. No one knew me in Boston. No one knew about any of it, and no one ever would, save the parties already involved. If Francis saw fit to gossip, what would he say? That he’d had a summer fling with some West Coast pool-boy? No one in his circles was likely to run into me on the street. It was as safe as it could get, really, to do whatever I saw fit in my time under his roof.

Until the previous evening I’d been quite thrilled to garner the attention I had. In fact, during the previous evening- but this was not a productive line of thinking. My face was hot again. 

You’ve lost your claim to never. How obscurely dangerous this was- to have lost already some unnamable battle, the significance of which was intuitive but impossible to explain. In its shadow I now stood open to any attack, or any fit of folly.

I went to the kitchen. Francis, perched atop a countertop glancing at a cooking pot, assessed me openly.

It took a great deal of nerve to sit at my usual seat at the table, within arm’s reach of the stove, my leg bouncing before I forced it to still. Above all, I had decided, in a fit of emotion, I wanted us to stay friends, and to hell with the mess. 

Francis looked a little startled by my attitude, neither confrontational nor coy, but for a moment the look on his face was pleasantly surprised. He slid off the countertop and set to stirring the soup before it could linger.

“Do you think you prefer the Iliad or the Odyssey?” I asked, aloud; Francis’ lips pulled upwards as he glanced my way.

“I hope you have a good answer to that yourself. Otherwise asking is just spiteful.”

We ate our soup, and discussed Homer, and briefly argued over Francis’ refusal to pay the parking tickets I kept picking up in the mail. I washed the dishes and avoided thinking about the connotations. Francis smoked atop the countertop, watching me not watching him.

Weeks more of this, I thought. A different sort of man would have left the moment Francis had looked at me the wrong way. 

Something in me shifted impatiently. I placed the last plate back in its place and faced Francis squarely.

“Do you do this sort of thing often?”

There was a mean bite to it, but sincerity too. I think I expected Francis to say something scathing in return, Oh naturally, Richard, I love seducing my mother’s little boy-toys, but instead after a second’s wavering he just stared dark-eyed at the hand which held his cigarette.

“No.”

This was not what I had anticipated; differing replies tumbled over themselves and left me simply nodding slowly. 

“It’s just a bit of fun,” Francis said soberly, into the silence, raising his cigarette to his lips. “That’s all. You mustn’t take it so personally.”

I had a vague, unappealing sense that if we looked at one another something irreversible and damning would take place. Somehow it was easier to lean sideways and kiss him again, recklessly indifferent to the nauseous pounding in my chest.

Francis was sickeningly satisfied for the rest of the event, but he cooked me breakfast the next morning as though to smooth things over. I ate my crepe and did not dwell on the fact I felt like a whore.

What to say of the following weeks? I was walking a very fine line over a very high drop, if that can even be said- really both went hand in hand. I was having fun. I was living in hell. In a sense both were true.

What had my thought been at the start of the summer? Easy living, if you could get it, this sugar baby thing- good dinners, some pocket money, bigger things even. It did not escape my notice that I was fed and clothed in the lap of luxury, sometimes literally, in our current little arrangement. Really I was better off than I could have hoped, stumbling into the path of a benefactor who was quite happy to help me practice my Greek verbs or drive me around Boston when not otherwise preoccupied.

Of course, the fact said benefactor was a man also meant that I was embroiled in confused self-hatred, not least because I found it impossible to think of Francis in the transactional light that might have saved me from self-examination. 

It was beyond me to fit him into that role- we were the same age, and anyways he didn’t act as my knowing employer save in self-aware mockery of the situation, far too busy with his private performance to feign professional distance. He was too much of a real person to me- deeply charming or utterly embarrassing with no rhyme or reason to it, always composed in his seductions, never when his mother called. 

Some other time and place I might have had ways out of the suffocating togetherness. There in his mother’s home I did not. At times I secretly didn’t resent it- holding Francis’ rapt attention as I recounted some Plano story, trying not to laugh at his exaggerated whingeing when the rain threatened to ruin his car seats, his hands on me. Other times I did. I think the same was true to some extent of Francis.

On one occasion, in an unusual fit of drunken pique, Francis threw himself into the pool and sank like a stone, the splash gun-shot loud against the smothering silence of the manicured yard. It took me an instant to even register it, so abrupt was the movement, until the continued lack of sound brought me to myself and I dove fully clothed to grab hold of him myself, hauling him up by the shoulders. 

He was heavier than he looked; we broke the surface coughing before Francis batted at me and wrenched himself loose, choking through a glower.

“Get off me. You’re fired.”

My jaw dropped so heavily I almost perished via water intake. “I’m sorry?”

“I’m firing you,” Francis repeated, sulkily, and sank swiftly beneath the surface. He re-emerged before I could yell an obscenity and dive back in, kicking off to the side of the pool and pulling himself unsteadily up the stairs.

“You can’t be serious,” I burst out, still treading water and staring after him with cresting anger. “What’s the matter with you?”

“Don’t ask questions,” Francis groaned, stumbling out of the pool and collapsing in a heap onto a deck chair. “You’re meant to be leaving.”

I kicked off too, hoisting myself easily out of the water as I processed, an unsettled feeling in my stomach. “So it’s just that you want to get rid of me.”

Francis glanced upwards, mouth pulling, and seemed very much poised to agree that yes, all of his dramatics and manipulations across the summer had been part of a ploy to oust me once and for all. Only his gaze lingered on the state of me, as I stood dripping water like a drowned rat, and very visibly he sagged, falling back into a defeated sprawl.

“Oh, don’t start. Forget it. You’re not fired.”

“Then what the hell was that all about?” I demanded, sinking to my haunches next to his chair. Francis shook his hair out, groaned, and then shuffled back upwards, drops of water making his fine lashes cling wetly to his cheeks.

“Please don’t yell at me, my head hurts. Can we close the subject?”

“Not before you explain.”

“I said please don’t yell. If you must know this is all just quite overwhelming.”

I laughed in disbelief. “Is it?”

“I mean I don’t play house like this often,” Francis replied, jittery now. “It’s all a bit much. Don’t you think? I don’t know. I had different plans for the summer.”

He stopped, seeming at a loss, and there was something in his far-off gaze that went deeper and darker than anything I’d seen from Francis that summer, a hungry abyss.

“I think you should stop drinking whiskey,” I said, pushing the indignation down, and went to find a change of clothes.

Avoiding introspection did not come naturally to me, but I became quite proficient. It was easy, in a way, with so much to distract me. It was one fever dream of a summer, soon to be relegated to the annals of time, the sort of thing I would look back upon as funny in a few years’ time, a youthful folly. From a certain perspective it was just the sort of outlandish adventure I had hoped for in years past. 

It was funny, anyhow. Francis was funny. So was I, at times. There was an awareness of the absurd that underscored our cohabitation, pastiche that it was of a more worn cliché. 

“I really don’t think you’ll burn so fast.”

“Is now when you offer to apply my sunscreen? I’m all right in the shade, thank you.”

Slightly uncomfortable laughter on my part. “Jesus, no. Forget it.”

“You can clean the pool shirtless and I’ll watch, how’s that?”

“No, no, thanks.”

“You’re really not living up to expectations, Richard.”

“I’m branching out, I guess.”

Francis, affecting a pensive tone: “I don’t believe I’ve seen you do a single thing around the house all day.”

“My client’s very needy,” was my excuse, delivered levelly, although I had a harder time not smirking when Francis raised his sunglasses to wrinkle his nose my way.

“I miss when you did your ingenue act.”

On a roll now: “It costs extra now. Maybe dinner.”

“Only if you’re cleaning up. Diaírei kaì basíleue.”

“Pleasure doing business with you.”

“Don’t I know it.”

The tone caught me unawares; Francis laughed delightedly at my reddening face.

The situation went on as it had, a self-sustaining cycle, surreal and banal, its end unquestioned and yet unexamined. What did they matter, all those odd vignettes, in the end? Francis would vanish come fall, and I would go to college and strive to retain of these fantastical weeks only my improved grasp of Greek and my rudimentary Latin. 

Olivia Abernathy returned to Boston during the last week of August. 

Her arrival was not unforeseen. Some clinic had rung Francis, and so he had called his mother and paced the hallway receiver in hand occasionally rolling his eyes in my direction as they went over her travel plans. 

“If you don’t know what day then I can’t come pick you up at the airport, maman. Mais si, mais si, tu n’as pas a organiser tes transports à la dernière minute, surtout si- quoi? Mais- et tu l’as rencontré où? Comment ça? Non, laisse tomber, c’est bon. Je préviendrai Paul et il te commandera une voiture. Si, si, c’est réglé. Oui, je serai à la maison. Oui, maman. Non. Oui, je t’aime aussi. Oui.” An exhausted sigh. “Christ.”

“So when is she coming?”

“Who knows? Sometime this week. We’re sending a car.”

I was not looking forward to her return exactly. When we’d first struck our deal I’d imagined we’d spend the last few days together and then I’d be off to college, occasionally receiving a call to attend some kind of gala on her arm. My plans had understandably changed, so that I now meant to leave the morning after her arrival- staying long enough to be polite, but not so long as to enter some kind of incestuous commedia. A dinner and a drink sounded manageable, though much depended on the way Francis chose to play the interaction. 

He did not bring up the subject, however, so neither did I; the closest we came to addressing my imminent departure was his asking me if I wanted a garment bag for my suits so they didn’t get crumpled alongside the rest of my things.

The afternoon of Olivia’s actual return found us in the library once more, the windows open to allow for the sweet late summer breeze, Francis’ hair in a distracting state of disarray though the rest of him was firmly presentable. I was reading Aesop’s fables, or rather I had been before Francis got bored doing whatever he was doing and began peppering me with questions until I gave up trying to read in earnest and succumbed to thumbing through pages while making conversation.

“You were seven when you first studied Latin?”

“Only a little. If I recall it was mostly because I enjoyed being able to write things my mother couldn’t understand, though she was never really the type to try and read my journal or what have you.”

“You keep a journal?” This seemed hard to swallow- Francis lacked the rigor for routine self-examination.

“God, no. But I think I wrote letters then. Don’t ask me to who.”

“I don’t know that I’ve ever really written letters. Maybe to Santa when I was little.”

This made Francis grin. “I can’t imagine you ever believing in flying reindeer.”

“There was incentive to do it,” I justified, since it was that or bringing up my boundless capacity for self-delusion. “I was happy to bend to custom.”

“I suppose you are good at that,” Francis mused. “Sometimes it completely slips my mind that you’re not from here.”

Here did not mean Boston; I shrugged, sort of perversely pleased by the comment. “Xénos ṑn akoloúthei toîs epikhōríois nómois.”

“Boston is no Rome, but I take your point.”

“It must come naturally to you, as traveled as you are, adapting to places.”

“Rather the opposite, I think. I’m really quite incapable of change. I only seek out what’s familiar around me and cling to it resolutely.”

I thought of what I knew of Americans abroad and knitted my brow. “I bet you speak to the locals in their own language, though.”

An unfeigned look of confusion. “How else would I get by?”

“Well- what would you do if you went someplace you couldn’t speak the language?”

“Why should I ever do that?” Francis inquired, dumbfounded; I refrained from saying any of the many replies that crossed my mind.

“Never mind.”

Francis scowled with the air of one unjustly wronged; I bit my tongue and idly returned my attention to Aesop, whose shipwrecked protagonist was swearing life and limb to Athena if only she would save him from drowning. The dialogue tugged the smile back out of me.

“What’s funny?”

I raised the book. “Sỳn Athēnâi kaì kheîra kinei. Not much sympathy from the gods.”

Francis, who was Catholic in a sort of ancillary fashion and condoned blasphemy more easily than Protestantism, nodded wryly. “Along with Athena, move your own hands. You can’t fault her turn of a phrase.”

“Shame it’s so hard to slip into casual conversation.”

“Oh, I’ve been urged to move my hands before,” Francis replied, gleam in his eyes betraying his unruffled expression. I fought the urge to raise the book as a shield.

It was not very long afterwards that Olivia announced her arrival not by knocking but by dropping her suitcase loudly in the front hall, the sound followed by that of heels clicking breezily against the polished wood.

“Darling, are you home? It’s me!”

Francis slid out of his chair and into the hallway, waving in welcome as I lingered behind. “I’m here. How are you?”

“Oh, never mind that, let me see you first! Your hair’s getting so long. And you’re so pale, baby. Did Yulia iron your shirts properly? She has these moods sometimes, you can barely ask her to dust the shelves. It’s so good to have you home.” Air kisses were exchanged; Olivia spun to pat her dress down in the mirror before wrapping a hand around Francis’ arm. “Did you have fun in the country? How are your friends?”

“They send their love; the wine was well-received, by the way. Aren’t you tired? Yulia brought bœuf bourguignon.”

“In this weather? Hm. You know, your grandmother says she’s barely seen you while you were here. Were you with friends? Phoebe Everett said Gabriel hadn’t seen you all summer.”

“Weren’t you saying they cut you off from the world where you were?”

“Within reason, sweets. I’m allowed to ask after my son.”

Her voice had gained a tremulous edge; Francis’ expression went placating. “I wasn’t by myself, anyway. Richard was here.”

I stepped out the library as cued, watching Olivia’s bemused frown turn to an enchanting smile as recognition dawned. “And how have you found Boston, Richard?”

“Much improved now,” I answered, receiving a diverted laugh in response. 

“You’re certainly a treat to return to. Are you staying much longer?”

“I’m afraid not,” I said, with a regretful shake of my head. “I need to get to college before it starts, see if I can find a job for the semester.”

“Very responsible,” Olivia commended, somber in the acknowledging of my tragic pauper lifestyle before she turned wistful. “It is a shame we’ll see so little of one another. But then there are always holidays.”

Though I was reasonably embarrassed by the comment considering our silent audience, I found myself primarily perplexed by the suggestion. I had not judged her so infatuated by me that she would even facetiously still be interested by Christmas. 

“I’m not sure I’m worth the journey, but I certainly wouldn’t decline.”

“Oh, it’d be very easy to arrange, I’m sure,” Olivia smiled, encouragingly. “Hampden’s a very quick connection, really.”

I didn’t have the time to question when and why she had investigated the flight routes to my college; Francis’s eyebrows had shot heavenwards, and he stared at his mother in disbelief. 

“What’s Hampden got to do with anything?”

“It’s where you both go to college, chéri,” Olivia replied patiently, cocking a reproving brow, and then glanced backwards to the driver, who was hauling her baggage up the stairs. “God, those stairs. I swear someone will break their neck on them someday. People die from falls far more often than you’d think.”

Neither Francis nor I responded, too busy staring wildly at each other as his cigarette burnt to the quick.