The Line of Beauty - Alan Hollinghurst [114]
"If you tell one person you've told everybody," Wani said. "You might as well take a full-page ad in the Telegraph."
"Well, I know you're very important, of course . . ."
"You don't think we'd be at a party like this if people knew what we did, do you?"
"Mm. I don't see why not."
"You think you'd be hobnobbing with Dolly Kimbolton if she knew you were a pretty boy."
"She does know I'm a—that's such an absurd phrase!"
"You think so?"
"And anyway hobnobbing, as you call it, with Dolly Kimbolton is hardly an indispensable part of my life. I've never pretended not to be gay, it's you that's doing that, my dear. This is 1986. Things have changed."
"Yes. All the poofs are dropping like flies. Don't you think the mother and father of Antoine might worry a bit about that?"
"That's not really the point, is it?"
Wani made a little moue. "It's part of the point," he said. "You know I have to be incredibly careful. You know the situation . . . There!" He raised his hands as if he'd balanced something. "Now there's a line of beauty for you!" And he looked aside into the mirror, first at Nick and then at himself. "I think we have a pretty good time," he said, in a sudden weak appeal, but it was short of what Nick wanted.
Something happened when you looked in the mirror together. You asked it, as always, a question, and you asked each other something too; and the space, shadowy but glossy, the further room in which you found yourself, as if on a stage, vibrated with ironies and sentimental admissions. Or so it seemed to Nick. Now it was like a doorway into the past, into the moment he had thought "Oh good" when Ouradi first appeared, having missed the start of term, in the Anglo-Saxon class, and was called on to translate a bit of King Alfred, which he did very decently—Nick had fixed on him already and expected him, as a latecomer and a foreigner, to look for a friend in this group of raw eighteen-year-olds. But he had vanished again at once, into some other world not quite discernible through the evening mist on Worcester College lake. And the "Oh good," the "Yes!" of his arrival, the sight of his beautiful head and provoking little penis, were all Nick got, really, from Wani, in those Oxford years, when he himself was in disguise, behind books and beer glasses, "out" as an aesthete, a bit of a poet, "the man who likes Bruckner!" but fearful of himself. And now here he was with Wani, posing for this transient portrait, almost challenging him in the glass—and it was like the first week again: he was tensed for him to disappear.
He said, "Do you ever sleep with Martine?" It hurt him to ask, and his face stiffened jealously for the answer.
Wani looked round for his wallet. "What an extraordinary question."
"Well, you're quite an extraordinary person, darling," said Nick, thinking, with his horror of discord, that he'd been too abrupt, and pulling a hand through Wani's springy black curls.
"Here, have some of this and shut up," said Wani, and grabbed him between the legs as he came round the chair, like boys in a playground, and perhaps with the same eagerness and confusion. Nick didn't resist. He snorted up his line, and stepped away. Then Wani too, re-rolling the note, bent his head and was about to swoop when they both heard the dim cracks of footsteps, very close, already on the turn of the top stairs; and a voice, under the breath, indistinguishable. Wani twitched round and glared at the lock of the door, and Nick with his heart racing ran through the memory of turning the key. Wani snorted his line, up one nostril, pocketed the note and the wrapper and turned over the book, all in a second or two. "What are we doing?" he muttered.
Nick shook his head. "What are we doing . . . ? Just talking about the script . . ."
Wani gave an absurd sigh, as if it might just do. Nick had never seen him so anxious; and somehow he knew, as he held his gaze, that Wani would punish him