Archive of Our Own ^beta

~*~

They find Florence in the yellow daylight, the thick of summer oozing into a midday heat with a clotted thickness around its edges. Ralph handles the baggage with all the civic aplomb of a tidy disembarkation, and Laurie stands away from the funny little car with its rickety luggage rack while he examines the sensation of standing apart—still new to him, after all this time spent alongside someone as efficient as Ralph Lanyon.

Travel is their common pleasure. I don’t suppose you ever learned exactly to remain in one place after all, Laurie had teased Ralph lightly once they’d booked the train tickets southward, running his fingertip along the edge of one. Did you?

That tends to happen, given the existential trauma of expulsion.

It is 1959, Laurie Odell has nearly forty years of living, and Ralph still holds himself like an admiral while dressed in mufti.

Laurie studied the maps closely before they left from the house that once belonged to Laurie’s mother—she pops by quite regularly, always charmed to find Ralph willing to oblige her gossip while Laurie pretends not to eavesdrop on their chatter as he putters about in the kitchen.

I’m so pleased you two have remained such good friends, she has told Laurie in confidence, taking a turn around the garden past the trees where a younger Laurie once hid out with that precious volume of his with R. R. Lanyon’s name written on the inside cover; He turned into such a fine man, didn’t he? I had always hoped he was exercising a good influence on you. And he keeps a house much tidier than you would alone, I think, darling—with no offense to your limitations, what with dusting, and bending and such. It’s hard work, you know; mothering you. I’ve enjoyed it very much myself.

The apartment they’ve secured for the summer sits three stories up over a small, square courtyard. Below the street-facing side of the building goes the Via dell’Alloro. The building is just over a ten minutes’s walk, with allowance made for the less vigorous rhythm of Laurie’s cane along cobblestone road, from a cathedral made of pink and green marble with a great dome looming above the city.

Laurie would quite like to see everything from the top of it.

Ralph helps haul the baggage up, speaking influent yet confident Italian with a rangy porter who thanks the both of them vibrantly at Laurie’s insistence he take a few extra coins back down the winding walkup stairs for the trouble.

Laurie stands aside while Ralph hunts the key from behind a statuette of a doughy Cupid, squinting out at them both with his blank, white eyes.

“Shall I make you a drink?” Ralph asks over his shoulder—he holds the door open for Laurie and peers around the foyer, sure as ever not to make a fuss over Laurie leaning obviously on the post—travel, despite being a pleasure, requires no small amount of effort in keeping his leg from complaining too loudly by the end of a long day.

“Will we need to fetch a bottle?”

Through the mirror fixed to the wall beside the door, Laurie watches Ralph smile vaguely to himself and pull the door shut behind the last of their trunks.

The apartment is very still and quiet. Through the windows left open by the housekeeper to let in the fresh June breeze, the soft mutter of the city caught in the mouth of noon not yet turned to evening wakes in the low fingers of daylight.

“It’s one of Sandy’s old friends who owns the place.” Ralph stops at Laurie’s shoulder and plucks at a stray thread, or a mote of dust. He gives an ironic smile. The lines playing at the corners of his eyes remain when his cheeks relax, worked in lovingly by Time; fatherly, bestowed with pride in a handsome creation.

The marvelous rightness of it vises Laurie’s chest. “Right. Suppose we won’t need to fetch a bottle all summer.”

~*~

Laurie wakes at an odd slice of early morning, partially for the sticky heat clinging to the air and partially for the alien sense of the hours becoming unfamiliar across the borders of faraway places.

He shuts himself away on the balcony so as not to wake Ralph with the smell and lights a cigarette. From here, ensconced at the far end of the courtyard view, Laurie can see back into the bedroom—Ralph remains asleep in one bed. The other is still carefully made up. They’ll fuss the sheets to some blithe disorder before heading out for the day, so as not to aggrieve the housekeeper.

From some other apartment despite the pale fragility of dawn still holding all else in a hush, the sound of an oboe floats out between the buildings.

Laurie smokes slowly and meditates on the tang of another place’s scents of living—of petrol, and brick, and the lightness of cypress trees sticking up between the rooftops like the proud ends of parapets.

When the balcony door creaks open again, Laurie’s stubbed out the cigarette and the oboe player has finished. Laurie turns to see Ralph still half-rumpled by sleep and smiles at him.

“Morning, Spuddy. Good sleep?”

“I’d like to see that church today,” Laurie says, indicating the vague direction of what the guidebook calls Santa Maria del Fiore. 

“The striped one?”

“Yes, the dome. There are stairs to the top, the friars used to use them. They let tourists go up.”

Ralph yawns and scrubs a hand down his cheek. He stands not quite in or out, as though braced in the open portal of a submarine’s innards. He has never been aware of the habit enough to break it, and Laurie is far too endeared by it to do something silly like point it out so Ralph can prune back the wilderness of the behavior.

The front lives in them as separately as it does in their togetherness. Laurie has, over time, found comfort in the lingering things too benign to be worried over—the way they flank each other’s shoulders without meaning to; Ralph’s hand up on Laurie’s back to steady him over uneven terrain; the swift readiness with which they can still find one another across a crowded room, as though able by a moment to move as one through the breach.

“Feeling up for it?” Ralph asks.

“There was someone playing an oboe just now, somewhere over there through a window.”

“Spud.”

“What?”

“It’s day one.”

“And?”

Don’t spend your reserves too soon, he moves to warn, Laurie sees it shiver in Ralph’s eyes, but he keeps his lips pressed shut and says nothing for a moment.

“An oboe,” he says simply, peering out in the direction Laurie had indicated.

“Yes. I believe it was Mozart.”

Ralph holds open the balcony door a hair wider—he wears only cotton shorts, and the sun-brown shape of him is still trim despite the subtle encroachment of softer lines and a mild invasion of silver amid the white-blond curls trailing down his chest. From the kitchen, the smell of coffee burbles in the percolator.

~*~

The friars must have been masochists.

Laurie has his cane in one hand, gripped in a sweaty fist, with the other pressed flat to balance him heavily against the wall of herringbone brickwork spiraling upward into the dome—and up, and up, and up.

He draws breath in even, steady huffs through his nose. More sweat prickles on his brow. Two (over-narrow, bleeding) steps behind him, at a respectable distance still close enough to catch Laurie if he were to stumble, Ralph ascends with silent and effortless ease.

“Did you expect to be saddled with a geriatric before you turned fifty?” Laurie teases under his breath when they pause to the side of the next landing, just low enough to go unheard by the other tourists huffing and chattering excitedly about having passed the halfway point; no sense in turning back now.

Ralph is peering through a narrow window, through which the endless red roof tiles of the city below flow out to the ghosts of the walls that once ran here amid the hills. A slim slice of daylight catches his profile just so, sending illumination through the soft lens of his left eye to set it briefly ablaze in a clash with the boyish wonder therein.

He puts a genial hand to Laurie’s shoulder and presses his thumb in gently, where Laurie had complained only briefly yesterday of a tightness that started up during their passage across the Channel.

I think my body is trying to feel it all again, Laurie murmured in the dark as they sat beside one another on their way to France for the first time together two years prior, unable to sleep, trying to be eager about the culture that apparently had come back to life in Paris but finding it hard to shake the old feeling of dread in their memories of the coast.

What is it they call it these days? Ralph had replied, tucking Laurie’s head down to rest on his shoulder. Exposure therapy?

“Oh, tosh. You’re still plenty spry,” Ralph says, not quite looking Laurie in the eye, which indicates as ever the keen innuendo swimming in the belly of his true intent.

Laurie bats Ralph’s shin companionably with the foot of his cane and turns back to the ascent.

When they reach the peak of the dome, a balmy breeze winnows past. Laurie, gripped by a sudden dropping in his gut, stands back against the wall of the lantern spire. He presses one palm flat to the stone as though to anchor himself to earth here at the crux of heaven.

He had climbed Tom Tower once, with Charles in their earlier days. He can remember a similar feeling from then, which he had written off at the time as a general nervous energy to be so alone so very high up with the object of one’s immediate intention.

Ralph, standing as comfortably at the edge of the railing as though it were the sea rollicking below them instead of a city, looks over at him and smiles like he once knew this feeling as well.

~*~

Laurie’s knee yammers loudly enough by two o’clock that he must return to the apartment or else claw his own leg off in the middle of the street. Ralph hails a cab for them from the corner by the bistro where they’d decamped to see if a seat and an afternoon espresso might help calm the twinging.

They cross paths with the housekeeper finishing up in the kitchen, who offers to bring Laurie an old dittany that, according to their piebald stumble of English and Italian, smoothed over with pantomime and exaggerated expressions, she swears will help with any pain of the bones and joints.

“Lovely woman,” Ralph says briskly once she’s left. He kneels to help Laurie remove the walking boot and has removed his gloves to do it—his less-dexterous hand is firm and cool under the leg of Laurie’s trousers. He flicks and tugs at the boot fastenings with familiar rote.

“You say that, exactly that way, every time my mother leaves,” Laurie says, leaning with a grateful unburdening into the armchair. It creaks softly beneath him.

The flooring of the apartment is earthen tile, the same red as the rooftops, with attractive carpets strewn about between the wicker and linen furniture. Ralph, kneeling easily on it, slides Laurie’s boot off and massages at his aching tendons.

“I don’t want to think about her just now,” Ralph says lightly, not quite looking at him, the amusement in every word as fragrant as whatever perfume the lovely woman had sprinkled across the laundry on the line outside the window.

Laurie sits forward, his leg still in Ralph’s hands, and touches his hair. Ralph tips his face gently into Laurie’s hand and catches the heel of it with a dry kiss made tender by its instinctiveness.

“I think tomorrow,” Laurie says, “fewer stairs.”

Ralph chuckles, the jet of air through his nose petting softly along the edge of Laurie’s fingers. He plucks at the clasp of Laurie’s sock garter where it has been pressed hard by the boot into his calf, freeing it to fall away.

“Whatever you’d like, Spuddy,” he murmurs. Ralph circles the pink grooves left in Laurie’s skin with his thumb. He keeps the two of them there for a little while longer.

~*~

The next day, Laurie picks a museum from the top of the must-see list in the guidebook.

He and Ralph wander the long halls, the rooms that once were clerical offices, peering steadily at each piece more marvelous than the last.

Laurie recognizes the fizzing energy of Ralph wanting to go on ahead—he waves a hand. “Go on then, quit waiting up for me.”

“Are you sure?”

“We’ll come ‘round to the same room at some point, I’m sure.”

“Here, take the map. Meet me here.” Ralph points at the center atrium of the ground floor. Laurie waves him off and sees him away with a fond look. The shape of him walking ahead is itself an art, his broad height so sure of itself passing through the fonts of daylight coming in through the windows.

Laurie slows to a bit more of a manageable pace on his own and ambles through the corridors. Busts of statesmen and portraits of gods and men alike watch him go with distant gazes, stares across the breadth of history itself that stick to Laurie’s very soul as he walks. It leaves in him the same sensation of slipping through the briar bush that would tug at his shirt and the soft skin along the insides of his arms whenever he took the shortcut to the stream by which he wiled away his summer holidays.

He peers at a slab of fresco on the wall, where a solemn-faced figure of God watches over a young man with golden hair held fast in dream-laden sleep.

Laurie stops. A very old memory finds him: Ralph, younger, lying asleep on the night of his mother’s wedding.

When next Laurie blinks, he finds emotion biting at the backs of his blurry eyes. He sniffs, swiping at his face, and turns to see Ralph enter by the far end of the hall.

Laurie collects himself as Ralph approaches. “Alright, Spud?”

“This one is lovely,” Laurie says, and moves right off into the next hallway.

It’s clear Ralph can tell he’s been having feelings. He hovers slightly nearer, as though he senses Laurie’s fresh fragility and wants to catch any shards of him that may shiver off before they can hit the floor.

Ralph watches him with quiet wonder, half-guilty with the obvious craving of wanting to see Laurie need him, so Laurie makes like his knee is bitching a little more intently than it really is and leans more fully into Ralph’s offered elbow.

~*~

They find a club two blocks north of the apartment, close enough for Laurie to trust his ability to get home without much fuss after indulging a bit. 

Ralph returns to the table he had gracefully requisitioned for them just off the busy end of the bar, with fresh pours in hand and a handsome couple at his elbow.

“I’ve found Americans,” he says, grinning with the ease of a few doubles already behind, and sets Laurie’s glass down before him.

They bring over two more chairs and introduce themselves, but Laurie isn’t paying enough attention and their names slide right from his mind—he nods and smiles his way through the how-do-you-do’s as they all get situated. The Americans are either quite rich, or very good at pretending to be rich, or simply run-of-the-mill Americans bringing the old glamour of intrepid victory around with them everywhere they step.

The woman is terribly pretty, with boyish dark hair and straight teeth and bold lipstick. Her husband is a dyed-in-the-wool beauty in a trim blue suit. He and Ralph have resumed a spirited chat about the Navy.

“Ralph said you’re at Oxford?” The woman asks Laurie, with all the ease of the name in her mouth as though they had known one another for years rather than having just met at an expat bar.

“Yes, I’ve been indulging in the questionable vice of teaching Classics.” Laurie sips off the top of his glass. “And pelting toward my first doctorate, as if I didn’t already have enough in hand.”

“Romans?”

“Greeks, actually. Mostly Euripides, the tragedy of Herakles and all that.”

At some point in the brief exchange, Ralph had turned to listen to him and brought the woman’s husband listening as well. The younger man smiles at Laurie, one cheek dimpling, and a schoolboy flutter works around in Laurie’s chest.

“You should see her do Medea,” he says.

The woman rolls her eyes fondly. “Stop.”

So they are actors. Laurie smiles. “I do love theater. What was it we saw last month, Ralph? In the city?”

Laurie watches the couple as they all converse and finds that he has been made an innocent thing in their eyes; whether for the cane balanced against the table or the way Ralph hovers with quiet possessiveness, he can’t quite tell.

But they are lovely to look at. Laurie wagers distantly with himself that she’s at least half of her a discerning lesbian, with very specific taste.

They each have another drink. Once her ice rattles fruitlessly, the wife looks at the watch face on her cocktail bracelet.

“Oh, hell.” She stands. “I hate to cut short, but we’re late.”

“Don’t let us keep you.” Laurie manages to rise for farewells on his own, subtly gripping the edge of the table.

The husband shakes both of their hands with a firm, earnest grip. His wife does the same.

“Lovely to meet you, gentlemen. Perhaps we’ll see you around the tourist traps?”

With both of them still standing, Laurie senses a strange energy about Ralph—like a dog at the point, who has lost a very keen scent he had every intention of following before it could quite make sense to him.

“I think I’m feeling a little more hale,” Laurie says. “Let’s take a walk. I want to see that piazza at night.”

Ralph collects their hats. “Are you sure?”

“If it gives out, I trust we’ll find a way to drag me back in one piece.” Laurie takes up his cane and sidles around the edge of the table, where he lets Ralph put on his hat for him.

They walk together, brisk and directionless, until Ralph stills him by the wrist on one of the bridges crossing over the river. “Hold here, Spuddy. Let yourself rest a moment.”

The Arno runs below them, where they stand only just apart in the dark between a pair of oxidized street lamps burning cloudy orange into the night. Laurie catches his breath and subtly stretches out his leg, leaning up against the low stone wall along the walkway. Ralph looks out over the water.

“What did you think of them?” he asks.

“Who, the couple?” Laurie takes a moment to consider it in earnest. “Unconventional.”

“How do you mean?”

“You must have seen the way he was looking at you.”

Ralph smiles. Laurie gives the rest a few more beats before he starts ahead again.

“Spud.”

“What is it?”

Ralph catches up to him, falling easily into step. “There. Speeding ahead like that, you’d think your kneecap was new again.”

Laurie loses the fight against a valiant half-smile. They walk in silence for several strides.

“I find it easier and easier to see them in a crowd,” Laurie says, still looking ahead of him.

“Who, the married ones?”

“Our sort. Married or not.”

“Well. It’s getting to be that it’s the thing to do, to be bold about it.”

Laurie sticks on that thought, with the shape of Ralph’s mouth firm and subtle around the words.

Neither of them says anything more as they pass along the edge of the piazza—it’s lovely at night. Someone has staged an opera performance on a makeshift stage, the art alive with its own transience in the footlights.

By the time they’re back at the door of the apartment, Laurie has milled the idea to a fine dust at the back of his mind.

“You think we’d have had the muster?” He asks softly, as Ralph slips the key into the deadbolt.

Ralph pauses. “For what?”

“Being bold. From the first, back when we started up.”

Pushing open the door, Ralph makes a dry little sound at the back of his mouth. “Have we not sought enough boldness, in all the world we’ve seen between the two of us?”

Laurie stands there on the doorstep and hesitates only briefly before he kisses Ralph on the mouth, there in the gap of night. Ralph stills under him.

“Well, Lanyon,” Laurie says softly against his cheek, “you chart a surer course than I could alone.”

And they are boys again in the prefect office, just two people in a room, with Laurie’s mouth alive in the wake of Ralph’s brief instruction after insisting it was all nothing but a myth—Now you see what I mean, Spud. It would never have done, would it?

Laurie’s heart surges fresh with the sweet sickness of that ancient discovery, sudden and hot as the heavy summer air still clinging around after nightfall.

“Come in then,” Ralph murmurs, “watch the step.” His hand, warm and sure of itself, presses to the clinging of Laurie’s shirt against the sweat along his spine.

~*~

It’s eucalyptus that scents the sheets, Laurie realizes with his face twisted amid the pillows.

Ralph has him on his back in a comfortable sprawl, with his leg held just so and each movement slowly deliberate so as not to jog him any one way too sharply. The room is dark, with light from the street below thrown upward and abstruse along the white plaster walls to dance with their shadows. Ralph tends to him the way he promised to always do a very long time ago, in the days very soon after Andrew when Laurie was still soft and raw.

Levering up by the middle, Laurie clings both arms around Ralph’s neck; blunt fingertips slipping, digging into the bow of his shoulders to post the soft rhythm of his motion.

“Call me darling,” he whispers at Ralph’s ear, “won’t you?”

And Ralph gasps for him, barely audibly but there—the night persists without, through their private and ecstatic recklessness of a single window left open to the city.

~*~

They wake beside one another.

“Do you think we’ll hear that oboist again?” Ralph asks, the fingers of his good hand playing along the nape of Laurie’s neck. He has in him the particular quality of melted muscle, slack and happy in his own body after having lived in its sensations so fully only hours ago.

“We may be able to hear it from here,” Laurie says softly, and listens.

It takes several minutes, but there; another tune, this one less familiar. They listen in silence for a few measures, staring up at the ceiling—although Ralph is certainly looking at him, with that itching in Laurie’s periphery.

“I don’t think I know this one,” Laurie admits.

“Do you still remember him sometimes?” Ralph asks, the non sequitur gentle and made to belong with careful self-consciousness.

Laurie shifts to nudge at his pillow with his shoulders. “Often.”

“I could tell, at the museum; I didn’t want to pry.”

Laurie reaches down between the two of them and takes Ralph’s free hand in his, the altered one. He means to say it had been the thought of Ralph, their first night together, which struck him: the moment he realized he could never let go of Ralph and mean it entirely, but “It isn’t prying,” he says instead. “You know the whole of it.”

Ralph hums genially. The rubble of sleep still sits in his chest, homey even here so far from usual routine. They remain in a brief silence underscored distantly by the melody on which Laurie still can’t quite put a finger.

“Sometimes I wish I could forget him,” Laurie murmurs.

“You don’t mean that.”

“…No. I don’t think I do.”

“You needn’t forget anyone, Spuddy. It’s good to remember, even the ones that go poorly.”

“Do you think we’ll ever go poorly?”

He doesn’t entirely mean to ask, but he can’t unsay it. Laurie turns his face to Ralph and finds him considering it dutifully, as though Laurie has only asked his opinion on one of the lively, turgid sculptures in the long halls of the museum yesterday.

“I think we’re each of us too much the other to go poorly,” Ralph says, with all the confidence of stating a simple fact of nature.

Laurie brings Ralph’s hand up to rest atop his naked heart and finally places the tune from Rigoletto on the air with its last statement.

Away over the rooftops, the oboist lets the final notes ring before taking the aching, hopeful Verdi excerpt again from its top. The morning outside is very warm, and full to the brim of its own potential.

~*~

Laertes:
Exchange forgiveness with me, noble Hamlet.
Mine and my father's death come not upon thee,
Nor thine on me!

— Shakespeare’s Hamlet, Act 5, Scene 2

//

Th:
So, the future. What’s next for H of H?

H of H:
Jump from a cliff. Stab myself in the liver. Burn this flesh away with fire and cleanse its infamy.

Th:
I had in mind Athens.

— Anne Carson, H of H Playbook