Happy Families_ Stories - Carlos Fuentes [78]
He put on a funereal air and stood up. “I know. You want me to leave. You don’t want me to foul your sweet little love nest. Fine, my dear fags. I won’t beg. You think you’ve conquered me. Fine. We’ll see.” He made a ridiculous pirouette, sometimes lifting off the ground despite his large bodily mass, revealed in that act as a balloon filled only with self-satisfaction. “Fine. I’ll go. But my box of surprises isn’t empty yet. Wait a little. A bee stings harder the longer he retains the venom.”
Guy’s unusual spiritual distance during the days that followed was understood by José Luis as uneasiness rather than irritation due to the scenes provoked by Curly. Still, in his more intelligent moments, José Luis decided to treat what seemed serious as if it were frivolous, what seemed profound as if it were superficial. He didn’t change his behavior, the rhythm of his daily actions, the usual chatter of lives that were too intimate and too old not to understand that the times of the most level normalcy did not exclude but underscored the moments filled with physical love as well as intelligent discourse between two human beings.
José Luis, somewhat pensive, asked silent questions of Guy. What is our relationship made of? Desire and jealousy? Or innocence and disdain? Will you always love me in the natural way you have until now? Or are you going to make me feel that you’re indulging me? Isn’t indulgence the most deceptive form of tolerance?
(“We’ve never tolerated each other, you and I. We wouldn’t have lived together for so long if we only tolerated each other.”)
His glance happened to fall on a photograph taken when they were young. Guy and José Luis side by side, smiling but serious, not embracing, displaying the seriousness of their relationship because it wasn’t demonstrative, it was discreet. It was enough for him to see himself in his twenties, when the relationship was already an irreversible fact, to know that he and Guy always knew how to survive the bad times, and this conviction deflected the irritations found in every shared, intense, prolonged life. They put off explosions of bad temper. They exiled misunderstandings. They banished tedium and indifference. Precisely because all of that was found in the relationship, not because it was missing.
Perhaps the inevitable was treated by the couple not as something not talked about—hypocrisy—but as something just the opposite—imagination. Bad humor saved by an opportune joke. Misunderstandings elevated to the level of vain possibility. Tedium deflected by a reference to the movies, to literature, to art, to everything that, being theirs, should have been everybody’s.
This was the difference. Now it would seem that the roles they had once shared were turning into monologues. José Luis resisted being the actor of jealousy opposite the protagonist of desire in Guy’s distant glance. He was afraid that jealousy would turn into scorn as Guy’s desire disguised itself, ridiculously, as innocence.
The fact is that José Luis, knowing Guy so intimately, could distinguish the temperatures of desire in his lover. What disturbed him was that, after a few days, he could not identify the object of that desire. Because he, José Luis, was not the object or the subject of Guy’s familiar palpitations.
José Luis was in his office at nightfall when Curly phoned to invite him to supper in his penthouse near here, opposite Diana the Huntress. José Luis tried to confirm what the now not very trustworthy Curly had said, but Guy was no longer in the gallery. And he hadn’t returned home. José Luis changed and went to Curly’s supper alone.
“Welcome to the Pink Pantheon,” Curly said with a smile to José Luis. “And remember my slogan: sex copuli, sex dei . . .”
With his forelock tilted like the Tower of Pisa, Curly was wearing his host’s attire. A plush velvet jacket, white ascot, Scottish plaid trousers, and black slippers, one with the image of the sun, the other the moon. He wore no socks.
“Ah,” he said with a sigh. “What can I offer you? You have to drink to put up with me,