But Never Graze It

I'm reading The Salt Point, an early novel (1991) by Paul Russell. He's one of my favorite queer novelists, and I rank him so highly because he writes so awesomely about sex and desire. In this scene (which I loved when I read it the other night in bed) Anatole, a 25 year old gay man, is infatuated by 18 year old Leigh, of undetermined sexual orientation. He invites Leigh home, along with a couple of Anatole's friends, for a nightcap after an evening out at a straight nightclub. They get even drunker, and most everybody passes out. Then the others depart, leaving Leigh behind:

"I should leave too."

"No. It's late. You should stay here."

Leigh settles his head on the back of the sofa and starts to pass out again.

"Come on. I'll help you to bed."

He helps Leigh up. The boy's docile, lets himself be led by the hand down the hallway to the bedroom, the big double bed that used to belong to Anatole's grandmother. "We'll crash here," he says, as if it's an ordinary thing. He tries to be as unalarming as he can.

Leigh kicks off his loafers, slips his T-shirt over his head. His chest is smooth, nipples brown as pennies. A feathering of light hair under his arms. He unzips his jeans and slides them down, almost falling in his attempt to free himself of their embrace. His eyes are closed, he is dreaming this, dreaming these actions, this being. Anatole stands breathless, afraid to move. Then quickly, Leigh is beneath the sheets, his body surrendered, his mind sunk too deep for harm.

Anatole collapses into a chair and puts his head in his hands. Suddenly he wants to cry, the world is so huge and empty. He thinks of his childhood—how once he was a little boy who had a mother and a father. He feels completely alone, the way people who are about to die must feel alone. There's nothing to tell him what to do. There's nothing except this stillness here in the middle of this night that may never reach the other side of its journey through the desert, the mountain, wherever it is the dark night journeys.

.... [THE NEXT MORNING]

All morning he's felt the incredible fragility of physical objects. It's part of the dream he's moving in, both awful and strange—like being suddenly holy, touched by God's fire and so removed just a little from the mundane comforting things.

Waking up sometime in the stingy light of dawn, raising himself up on his elbow to gaze at the boy: not touching him. The way a cat's nose, quivering, will sniff right up to a surface but never graze it. Memorizing the details of his face—rim of eyelashes, sweep of nostrils, parted lips, various inessential blemishes in the impeccable skin. When he'd drunk his fill from the inexhaustible well of the boy's appearance, he got up and went into the bathroom, where, sitting on the toilet, he closed his eyes and re-created the boy's features and masturbated. Afterward, he felt completely empty, ashamed, scared. Making his way back to the bed he slid in beside Leigh carefully, sleeping for a couple more hours till daylight made it impossible to lie there anymore.