L.

[3.] Orphans. Whoresons.

"I do not understand your tone," little Dove says to me, on the phone. "I have only just left you. Not even a week ago."

"I know that you are working hard," I tell him, from my place in Paris. 

"L," he says, from his place in New York.

"Yes. Yes, yes," I say, quietly.

"Don't call me like this, with that tone in your voice."

"I only whisper," I say, whispering.

"Do not be like this, only to get what you want."

"To be frank, you leave me with nothing."

"You have that sweet thing in your voice. I do not like it," he says, because I have upset him. 

"Do not talk too much. Give it to me," I say.

"If you make me hang up on you, you will only be angry. And so stop this," he says. 

I imagine him in his office, in New York, to which I have often ridden the elevator in his tall building. He dresses so finely to go there that I must see him, and leave lipstick upon his white collar, and hear him protest it so nicely. How nervous I am in an elevator. How fearful I am to be at the mercy of an elevator. How I am driven, in elevators, to sometimes do such things as a libertine will do, in order not to feel so nervous. I put it in my voice, my true affection for him, my fear, so that I tremble. "Do not do it to me. Do not hang up."

"Good-bye now," he says, too briefly, so that I hear in his voice that temptation has him. 

He has something of value that I want. It is a phone number that he keeps on a little slip of paper. I know that I seek to do evil, but must he leave me in such disarray? 

"Please Dove, I do not feel confident. I shake. Please Dove, do Himself a little favor. I am beset by the devil and need only a little company to throw him off of me."

"Do you know the Devil?" he asks, affecting to be bored with me. "What is he like?"

  Nicky comes and goes. He has the scent of my blood on his breath, and it is like rot. If I had only a little company, he would hide himself.

"He is small and when he falls upon me he takes my voice away."

"Someone should. Good-bye now," Dasius says, and he hangs up.

In this manner, I shall truly catch a chill. 

***

He has maddening qualities. I cannot help but occupy emptied hours with thoughts upon his nature. Even from those first weeks, in 1497, he began to show himself to be a serious young man, ferociously conservative, church-minded, but with a pronounced tenderness and an anxiety to secure his situation.

Just as soon as his brother was well enough to travel, we made south for Paris. A chandler who I had known fleetingly, and who had grown quite old by then, offered me a temporary place down river. It was a basement flat in an area that often flooded in the fullness of summer, and it did not satisfy my purpose. I was able to trade it to a young itinerant lawyer for a place just outside le Marais, which was an old shop-space but suited us better. We were able therefore to make of it a two-room bedsit: a larger room where Dasius slept on sack-cloth, and a smaller one where his brother could be cared for. Into this smaller room we had got a bedstead of iron, and a mattress of fair quality. 

For my little St. Dasius, there was an ancient  desk and a fireplace that he sometimes got into, so that he could lay his cheek against its cool bricks. There was a basin for washing up, and even a well reasonably close for filling it. The same chandler gave me a mirror and a carpet, saying that these were reasonable things to set at my will, and cursing me for trading his flat and being able to live at least in the presence of luxury, for in le Marais, there was the presence of the aristocracy and therefore some good city ordinances regarding general filthiness. But it was not so nice anyway.