The Line of Beauty - Alan Hollinghurst [137]
He lay in the dark, as the smell of the burning mosquito coil spread through the room. The night was very still, the doors didn't quite reach the floor, and he could hear Wani moving about in his room across the landing. He wanted to be with him, as he had been, more or less, for the past ten days, in the thoughtless luxury of top-class hotels; but he felt the relief of being alone as well: the usual relief of a guest who has closed his door, and a deeper thing, the forgotten solitude which measures and verifies the strength of an affair, and which, being temporary, is a kind of pleasure. He heard Wani switch off his lamp, and his own darkness deepened a fraction, without the faint spill of his light under the door. He wondered if they were sharing this sense of ghostly proximity, if Wani was lying with his eyes open, thinking of him, listening for him, masturbating perhaps as Nick half consciously was—not even that, just a boyish solace and reflex of being alone, the blind friendship of the hand . . . Or had he plumped his pillow, tussled his head and shoulder into it with a sigh, drawn up his legs in the defensive position which made Nick want to curl in behind him and shelter him? It would be easy to go to him now, they both had wide beds, but he could hear already the echo of the door latches in the long corridor like triggers to Wani's sense of danger.
When he woke an hour later out of a Venice dream he stared in a sort of panic at the grey square of the window and the unrecognized mass of the chest of drawers. Then it came back to him, like going upstairs, the shocks and connections of the past twenty-four hours. He felt horribly hot, and kicked off the sheet and drank the dimly visible glass of water. In the dream Wani was drowning: he stood on the canal-side, knees bent in a tense crouch, looking back over his shoulder with an undecided but accusing expression, then fell in with a dead splash.
It had been very hot all the trip, the hottest Nick had ever known; in Venice, for all its dazzlements, they had moved in a heatwave stink of decay; in Munich, in the glaring avenues, the temperature reached a hundred and four. The heat put a strain on them which they didn't acknowledge to each other. They went to the Asamkirche, which had Nick beaming and sighing with delight; Wani strolled about with an air of provisional goodwill, as if waiting for an explanation. Nick longed to share the beauty with him, to communicate with him through it, but Wani, out of shyness or pride, was lightly mocking of what Nick said. You could really only tell Wani one useful thing at a time—too much information was an affront to his self-esteem. Nick stayed on in the church, and the loneliness heightened his pleasure and his pride in his own responsiveness. At the Nymphenburg Palace, among surging coachloads, the pleasure was harder won, but he felt he took in these marvels of the rococo by right—they might have been make-believe for rich people when they were built, but now they were more than that, they were celebrations in and of themselves.
On their first afternoon there Nick went into a gay shop called Follow Me—something Wani did at last with a deprecating snigger. Surrounded by harnesses and startlingly juvenile pornography they bought the Spartacus gay guide to the world and a siege supply of rubbers, which Wani affected to have nothing to do with: he handled the book lightly, as if assessing its threat, the thick sleek india-paper weight of the thing, some heretical bible. They took a taxi to the English Garden, and had walked only a short distance under the trees when they realized that the people ahead of them were naked. There were families having picnics in their unembarrassable German way, and old men with peeling crowns standing by themselves like forgotten games masters, and then a zone that was mainly young men, sitting and sprawling in an air of casual tension as palpable as the dust and insects in the slanting sunlight. A wonderful cold