Artemis, Apollo, Orion
by Pares
Sometimes, after Sunday dinner, when Henry has taken off his jacket and is ignoring cards and conversation for the lamentation of Helen or the righteous rage of Orestes, letting a Lucky Strike burn down, forgotten, between his thumb and first finger, she tries to picture him as a small boy propped up in bed, surrounded by crisp white sheets and frowning grimly at some huge book... and she can't. More than any of them, even Julian, Henry seems as marvelous as owl-eyed Athene: sprung full grown and fully armored, from her father's cloven skull. As far as Camilla is concerned, Henry was never a child. It's one of the things that she likes most about him.
For Camilla, her childhood is everywhere she goes. The too-quiet hallways of her Nana's house, croquet in the afternoons, the beech leaves falling on the vast front lawn-- everything is tied up in the close smell of Charles asleep in a shuttered room, seeing him bend his head over a book in the library, fidget with a button on his cuff.
Charles is currently snoring on the couch, his head in her lap, heavy and slightly damp. She lights another cigarette, and wonders how she can get to the phone without waking her brother. The phone is black, old fashioned-- it has a rotary dial and an almost comically heavy handset. It reminds her of Henry.
Camilla thinks about the earpiece, cool and soothing against her skin, Henry's nearly inaudible breath. He rarely speaks when she calls him, prefers to listen to the mundane accounts of her day: buying boneless chicken at the Food King, how her ink bottle needs refilling, how Judy Poovey still slits her eyes when she catches sight of her at The Brasserie.
When he does speak, his words are slow and thoughtful, as if he's chosen each one carefully and is arranging them before her like a row of small, polished stones. If she asks him to, he'll tell her little stories about Julian. The time Julian shook hands with President Nixon, and confided that the man had clammy palms. The brief visit to the Howard Hughes mansion, his rather poisonous dislike of Orwell, both the man and his books.
She likes these stories, because they are wholly unlike the life she leads herself, the life she shares with Charles, his head laid in her lap like a sun-hot melon.
When they were thirteen, he stopped teasing her. He took to pinning her against walls, pressing close and keeping strangely quiet when he should have been calling her Old Miss Wimpy. And when she wriggled away, her breath clotted in her throat, there was a strange buzzing excitement, making her lightheaded and not-quite-frightened.
She had noticed the strange hot lump pressing against her leg, but she hadn't really understood what it meant until the first time he'd kissed her. It was short and wet, his whole mouth against her closed lips, and then he drew away, looking confused and a little ashamed.
She could tell he was sorry, but something about the wetness on her lips and the weight of him all along her body decided her. She bucked a little against him, and he dropped his hands, eyes wide. He probably thought she was angry at him, and he waited warily for her to slap at his arms and shove him away. Although Charles was given to shouting when his temper was up, it was Camilla who would lash out when finally angered. He knew this about her, and years later she reflects that if she had done what he'd expected of her, things would have been very different between them.
Instead, she took his hand and squeezed it hard, pulling him close and stooping slightly to kiss him. That eighth grade year, Camilla, for the only time in their lives, was taller than Charles. Charles tasted like her, smelled like she did. Orange marmalade, Ivory soap. But he was shockingly, excitingly warm, and they clung together in the hallway until their Nana called them to set the table for supper.
It was Camilla who had taken her brother's hand under her sundress that summer, pressing it against her own bare belly. He had frozen, and then patted her the way you would a horse, and when his hand slipped lower, brushing the tops of her thighs, he snatched his hand away as though he'd been burned. When he'd brought his hand back, furtively, two poking fingers between her legs, they had stared at each other, and she knew her face was just as his, white around the eyes and scarlet eared, with flaring nostrils and red mouth.
*
Where Charles was first cautious and tender, most days now he seems to take her for granted.
"Hello, Milly," he might say, or more often, he'll say nothing, dipping his head to close his teeth against the point of her chin, casually rucking up her shirt or slipping his hand past the elastic of her pajamas, loose-waisted hand-me-downs that had once belonged to Charles himself. Perhaps because they smell so much alike, look so much the same, he feels she is an extension of himself, and he often handles her as she imagines he takes care of himself: with little preamble, and a curious efficiency. But there are times Camilla takes her turn in his bed. Charles, half-asleep and blinking at her, always welcomes her with generous, soft touches, so she gasps at his ear and clenches around his fingers. It's a bewildering care she never sees unless she seeks it out.
When he is awake (and sober) he sometimes gives her such grave looks that she has trouble meeting his eyes. She wonders: does he feel he only has the right to touch her with real affection when she comes to his bed? Does he feel (does she?) he's dishonoring her when he comes to her own?
If she could have asked anyone, it would not have been Charles, but Henry, who sometimes seemed a very oracle. Although he never seemed to pay attention to anything going on around him, he often had strangely insightful things to say.
She remembered asking his opinion of Richard Papen.
She had, at first, instinctively disliked Richard. He was too casual and too careful at once: his shirts had razor creases, but his jackets hung too large around him and needed to be cleaned. And he stared at her. In fact, she felt he paid entirely too much attention to what was going on around him; of course, she turned out to be wrong about that. (Henry sighing and pouring another finger of scotch: "I've done everything short of leaving a written confession nailed to his door. If he doesn't catch on shortly, I'll just have to take him aside myself.") Also, he was bad at euchre.
She and Charles had discussed Richard's refusal to return any of their invitations.
"Do you think he's sleeping with that Poovey girl?" she asked Henry. Charles and Francis, too, had turned their heads to learn his answer. Bunny had been on his Sunday walk.
Henry had actually given a soft little one-note laugh.
"I think," he said, after a pause, "that he hates his father."
Charles had shrugged, but Francis had a look of interest in his eyes; Camilla had immediately begun to hope Richard was gay. Francis deserved a boyfriend. Charles treated him shamefully.
*
She still remembered her first days at school, meeting Julian, sitting hip to hip with Charles, hoping she had not looked as nervous as she'd felt. When Julian had opened the door to their first class at the Lyceum, and Francis and Bunny had studied them with avid interest, Henry had not even looked up from his book.
She had asked him once about the students who had been in Julian's class before she and Charles had joined it. Henry had looked surprised.
"But who was here your Freshman year?"
Bunny, Francis.
"Yes, but before you?" He'd blinked at her. For Henry, there had been no students for Julian before him.
*
Henry had wanted her from the first. Although she could not have said how she'd known, she knew it was true. There was something cold and mechanical about Henry, and yet he'd never frightened her, as Charles had.
When they were sixteen and she'd been asked to the prom by Gilbert Hannover, she'd come home to a red-faced Charles, drunk on cooking sherry and hissing at her so as not to wake Nana: Did he fuck you, Milly? Did you let him? Did you want him to?
No, she'd said, no, and she let him apologize and press his face against her throat, push into her unprotected, against the wall that held up the stairs. For three anxious weeks she'd waited for her cycle to start, grimly convinced she was carrying her brother's child.
*
Henry, as she'd known he would, waited for her to make the first move. Charles and the others had gone out to dinner. She and Henry had been at her apartment, doing class reading and drinking gin and tonics. She had brought him a fresh one, and when he looked up at her, unfocused, as though he hardly recognized her, his hair falling over one eye like a blackbird's wing, she bent and kissed his wide, strong mouth.
He kept his head tilted exactly so, and that was how she knew to kiss him again. This time, he closed his hand, slowly, against the back of her neck. Then he let her go, glanced at his watch, and went back to his book as if nothing had happened.
Minutes later, Charles and Francis had come in, drunk and laughing, Richard trailing them, slightly more sober, having nominally been that evening's designated driver.
And nothing happened after that, until the night of the Bacchanal.
*
Camilla still remembers very little of it, although she was mute and sore for days after. There was the confused image of Charles with his arm across Francis' throat as they rutted against a twisted, barren tree, and a disorienting sense of leaving the ground, of Henry's harsh, panting breath.
There was nothing more until those long days after winter break. Charles crowding her in bed, reeking of cheap whiskey and crying in his sleep. Bunny stomping around, viciously unpredictable. Richard with that little crease of curiosity pinched between his feathery eyebrows. (Although she never really got over her initial dislike of him, Camilla had always found him irritatingly attractive. He had fine eyes, large and dark, with long lashes, and his hair looked very soft.)
In the days before they murdered Bunny, Charles had taken to spending nights with Francis, taking advantage of his deep pockets and his free hand with liquor. Also, she suspected, Francis' talent for fellatio.
That was the first night Henry had ever called to speak to her, alone.
It was also the only night she ever heard him even approach the sort of maudlin, alcoholic rumination that Francis, and especially Charles, were so prone to.
"Camilla, you know I have to do it, don't you?"
Charles had told her, in hushed tones, about Henry's plan to poison Bunny (and himself) with the little Death Cap mushrooms that huddled under Hampden trees every spring.
"I know."
There was a long silence, and she could hear the tinkle of ice and the solid sound of his glass being set on the end table beside his chair.
"I would rather not," he said finally. "Bunny has always had a certain flair for timing. God, if only he hadn't--"
"Stop it," she said firmly. "Stop it, Henry." She glanced at the clock. "Come get me. I don't have any money for a cab."
"Are you hungry?" He sounded confused, and for a moment she wavered about having him drive at all. "I don't have anything in. There's a diner--"
"Henry. Come and get me. It's past one. Charles won't be home tonight."
She heard him swallow, and she imagined he nodded, as though she could see him, before he hung up the phone without another word.
*
Henry's place was darker than her own apartment. No glow of an alarm clock on the dresser, no luminescent dial from a radio. He had electric lights, but she had never known him to use them, and when they got back to his place after a silent car ride, he lit the kerosene lantern in the black living room without switching on the overhead lamp. He stood there a moment before he held an arm out to indicate his bedroom, with all the formality of a headwaiter.
For a bad moment, she thought, Oh God. He's never slept with a girl.
But subsequent actions seemed to disprove that assumption.
Camilla herself had had few partners other than Charles; occasional hurried and unsatisfying couplings in the back seats of cars (notably with Gilbert Hannover), and once, when Charles had been away on a ski trip, a stolen night in a hotel with a boy named, oddly, Edmund.
When they got to the bedroom, the lantern guttered and died. She heard the soft, galvanized clang of it as Henry set it on a chest of drawers, but he made no move to refill the lamp, or light it again. He did not speak, or even kiss her. Instead, he took her coat, tugged her sweater over her head with all the solicitude of a parent with a young child. In the morning, she would find he'd draped her clothes, and his own, over a chair stacked with books about botany, Persia, The Medicis. He undressed them both, and she stood still, her eyes trying to adjust to the darkness.
She almost thought he would pick her up and carry her to the bed, much as he had carried her back from the lake the day she had cut her foot wading. Instead, he took her elbow and ushered her to the mattress, his hands urging her to sit down, lay back. She felt the bed list as he stretched out beside her, and flinched a little when his hand settled on her hip.
"Charles can't know," she said.
He made no reply, only stroked along her hip, her belly, palming one breast with an unfamiliar hand. Charles had cool hands, long fingers. In bed, he was fond of tucking them under her arm, between her knees: Warm me up, honey. Good girl. Henry's were large and warm as fever, rough at the tips from gardening and tracing the texts of dead languages.
When he finally kissed her, she was shaken. Although Charles kissed her like he owned her, Henry kissed like he belonged to her. It was courtly, worshipping, powerful. She had a sudden and unreasoning sense of reckless power, strongly reminiscent of the night of the Bacchanal, the moments right before she had lost her conscious mind entirely. Henry was hers; at her word, he would kill a man, kill himself.
Then Henry had spread her thighs and bent to touch her with his tongue. She tensed, and Henry kept her on the bed with one hand curved at her waist. For a moment, she felt trapped and panicky. Charles had only dabbled at this, and none of her other lovers had attempted it at all. She had witnessed Henry's formidable focus before; it was something else to be the subject of it. She was dazed, overstimulated, almost vibrating when he finally let her go. Distantly, she heard the crinkle of packaging. Charles, she thought, will kill me. Her brain sang her a line from Othello, even as Henry lifted her, pressed against her, sliding in-- "Even now, now, very now, an old black ram / Is tupping your white ewe.". She made a little wild sound and Henry shushed her, rocking into her, prodding his fingers past her lips so she could taste herself.
She bit at his fingers and snapped her hips; Henry ground to a halt with a sound she thought might have been a laugh. He leaned forward and slid his arm behind her back. He sat her up in his lap and she wrapped her legs around him. As Henry moved against her, a hand spread against her spine, one cupping her shoulder, she thought of Psyche's pleasured nights with invisible Eros. The only light in the room was a narrow slice of streetlamp stealing past Henry's lowered window shade. All she could see of Henry himself was an intermittent orange gleam in the whites of his open eyes.
*
Bunny's funeral is weeks past, and Charles had spent the night before in jail. Camilla is uneasy, full of a watery dread. Her brother moans her name in his sleep and shifts against her.
He's kept her under his thumb of late: at the funeral, he'd been convinced he'd seen her kiss Henry.
"Don't be an idiot," she'd said sharply. "He's sick, Charles. He can hardly stand up. I was only bringing him a glass of water."
He'd been unsatisfied, and there had been days of stony silence leading, she knew, to another bout of recrimination. This time, it ended with Charles shattering the mirror over the fireplace, crying, falling to his knees in apology, letting her take him to her bed.
It had worked, for a little while, and things had returned to what passed for normal between them.
Charles is still in his bathrobe, and a queasy whiff of whiskey and scrambled eggs clings to him above the scent of his shampoo, the smoke of her cigarette. Charles had kissed her in front of that awful Richard Papen. Too much, far too much, depends on Richard's silence, and now Charles seems on the verge of breaking, and a far greater threat.
For the first time, she wonders just how far Henry will really go. She knows from Charles that Henry had tried to hang suspicion on Richard. Francis looks on the verge of fainting whenever she sees him. Now that Charles is drunk nearly every waking hour of the day, how long before Henry takes it into his head to tamper with the brakes on Francis' Mustang the next time they drive into Hampden town?
And God save her if Charles, already suspicious, should find out about Henry.
The phone rings, loud as a gunshot and tuneless as cowbells, and she startles, almost dropping her cigarette.
END
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