Page 5 of Gifted & Talented

5

As far as orgies went, it was a success, or maybe a failure. Largely because Arthur had only had eyes for his lovers, and though he had twice as many of those as the average person, it still seemed antithetical to the principles of an orgy to limit himself to the usual fare.

“Darling, you’ve been away from us for ages,” said Philippa, tutting a little in the matronly way she seemed to affect only when she was feeling sexiest. “I hate it when you’re gone so long.”

She had her hands on his chest, Yves’s hands traveling Arthur’s hips, guiding him gradually up the stairs. They seemed to be shedding what few garments remained as they went, or at least Yves seemed to be. He’d long since done away with his mask, which made sense, as Yves became very sensual when he was aroused. Every moment called for a slow, pliant kiss, which Arthur quite liked, as it felt unhurried and primordially luxurious, as if true wealth could only be meaningfully defined by this kind of excess of time.

Arthur’s shirt had already been unbuttoned, but now he felt his arms lock behind his back, Philippa’s attempts to fully disrobe him providing a not-unwelcome service of restraint. “I’ve been very foolish indeed,” he said, adopting the British musicality of diction that was so temptingly in reach whenever he was cross-faded and two orgasms in. “I suddenly can’t think what could have possibly been more important.”

Philippa smiled radiantly at him then, or a smile that was not very radiant on a normal woman—it was a little too smug, something Arthur only noticed when Philippa was around the many others who did not understand her—but on Philippa was as good as spraying him with molten gold. “You should give up your silly little game of politics. Don’t you ever get bored with it, all the infighting and do-gooding?”

Arguably there was very little do-gooding. Ask the internet. “Where else would I keep up with the latest trends in dinner conversation?”

Philippa laughed, tossing her arms around his neck and clinging to him like a sexy little koala. Yves, too, laughed, his tongue busying itself somewhere below the waistband of Arthur’s trousers.

Arthur realized belatedly that he had forgotten to take off the tiny American flag pin that Gillian had bought him when he’d won his first election. “All the important ones have one,” she’d said matter-of-factly, “and now you do, too.” It had felt to him as solemn as a proposal, like sliding a ring onto the finger of his beloved, but he knew Gillian lacked that kind of sentimentality. To her, all of it—symbolic jewelry, patriotism itself—was a tactic. He himself was a tactic of sorts, though for what he had never actually understood.

The pin tumbled to the floor, lost in the floorboards, in the shuffle to the bedroom. It was abandoned in the God-given pursuit of happiness, among other things.

Occasionally when Arthur Wren had been very small and very sad, he had heard a voice calling to him, speaking as what seemed to Arthur (who was admittedly very imaginative and had not actually read the book) to be a ghost of Christmas future, a message from someone important whom he had yet to meet. He couldn’t have said whether the voice was masculine or feminine, only that it seemed to him very kind and very intimate, gentle in a way but also steadfast and unfailing, and most often what the voice said to him was I love you, as if he were confusingly reliving the memory of a quiet moment between paramours that had not yet occurred. It had faded into the recesses of his memory as he got older, but not really. He no longer heard the voice anymore, not actively, and he couldn’t have described the tone or timbre, but he retained the memory of hearing it, and the way it made him feel to know he was destined for something that lovely. That kind.

He looked for it in his lovers from time to time in moments of desperation, but life has a way of minimizing the efficacy of imaginary voices that make loneliness gentler to bear. (All conditions are ultimately survivable, which is to say that despite grief, despite loss, Arthur did eventually grow up.) How could Arthur still be so riddled with holes, like a colander of a person? As a man, or whatever he was, Arthur collected all the affection he could hold and was still somehow left with nothing, only the imaginary weight of three overused words.

But then again there were moments, glimmers even, when the voice and its implications seemed not only very real, but powerfully, presciently his, as if he had always had it in him to see the future. It made him a believer in a blueprint, which was in its way a form of relaxation, stress relief. Because it meant that no matter how badly he fucked up, there was a cosmic path he could never actually stray from, and therefore this moment was meant to be his, and so was this, and so was this. He’d felt it long ago with Lou, and again when he’d first run for office, and he felt it with painful severity now.

“I love you,” said Arthur to Yves, one hand on the structured cheekbones for which so many would gladly shed their knickers. “I love you,” Arthur said also to Philippa, imagining himself a handfasting ceremony wherein he bound his life to theirs. He pictured this moment as one of matrimony, almost. As if the voice was somewhere in this room with him now, and maybe if he thought about it hard enough, it had always been his voice. Maybe this was the moment he’d so long remembered as a child—only he hadn’t known it would happen this way, falling into the king-sized bed while reaching for the halos around both his lovers’ heads.

By then the drugs were coursing fully through his system, alive in his veins, the bedroom’s recessed lighting twinkling in and out like the sultriness of candle flame. His magic, or whatever it was (it seemed very silly to call it magic, grown men did not have magic, just as grown men did not imagine bodiless voices professing love to them, sometimes in the anthropomorphized form of the company his father had built, as if Wrenfare were a sexy cartoon fox), was skitteringly potent. Arthur himself was just a series of sparks by then, cascading onto the linen sheets below like stardust. He felt the faintest tug of reality, the buzz of his phone with all the loathing its apps and their denizens had for him, and was surprised to find he still had arms and legs, a pocket. He ignored it, felt Yves digging it out, wonderful Yves, clever Yves, excising the tumor like a surgeon, saving Arthur’s life with his wonderful, clever, lifesaving hands. Arthur could have kissed him. I love you, I love you! It was never meant to be a quiet moment, then. It had always been this moment, this Arthur, reassuring his child-self not with the high of drugs or the lure of sex but with something else, the feeling of existing wholly in the right moment, the opportune place at the opportune time, which Arthur never seemed to find.

Why had he not chased this feeling, chosen this life? The monotony of municipal chambers, snippy headlines, angry tags. The lives Arthur wanted devotedly to fix but never could, probably never would. The irony of it! Of loving this deeply and yet being this powerless; nothing but stars and emptiness after all.

His vision was hazy, filled with the deep purple of Philippa’s robes. Philippa, darling Philippa. He twirled a finger in her curls, imagining a world where he woke up to her each morning, alive as she was now with unfiltered love. Not just the little slivers he was allowed to have, but every morning. Oh god, the luxuries of such a life! The downstairs television ran the gamut of Arthur’s emotions, skimming through every channel of barking dogs and tears of joy.

Imagine it: Philippa fresh out of the shower, Philippa’s perfume on the dresser, brewing a fresh pot of herbal tea for Philippa, because cheesecake gave Philippa the shits. And Yves! Darling Yves, like the silver lining to Philippa’s cloud. Imagine the nights spent with Yves’s long toes in his lap, stroking Yves’s silken mahogany waves, Yves as some sort of symbol of luxury, always reclined like a cat on a velvet chaise lounge even in Arthur’s most domestic fantasies. Arthur kissed him, then kissed Philippa. Oh, he loved them. He loved them, he wanted them, he longed for a life like this!

He leaned over to bury his lips in Yves’s neck. “I want all of it,” he murmured, his mouth muffled by skin slicked with salt and the particular flavor of Arthur’s magic, which was a bit like grape Tylenol, and had technically been used under these conditions as a sort of advanced vibrator, that proverbial electric touch.

“I want all of it,” Arthur said again when Philippa’s breathy moan sounded in his ear, like the call of a siren from afar. Her hands were elsewhere, on Yves. “I want all of it, everything, the baby—”

“Is that your phone?” said Philippa, and Arthur didn’t know, his trousers were gone, everything was euphoria, would only be euphoria from now until forever, it was euphoria eternal, euphoria evermore. He turned to kiss Yves, who was no longer within reach, and Arthur felt confusingly marooned. Everything seemed to shrink a little. The bed, which had seemed so large and uncontainable just breaths ago now seemed too small, his fingertips and toes already bursting from its edges.

He didn’t quite realize what was happening until Gillian’s voice was already in his ear, tinny and far away, like an astronaut in deep and distant space.

“Arthur,” said his wife’s voice. Yes, you heard me correctly. “Art, are you there?”

“Yes.” He struggled to sit up, holding the phone to his ear and squinting at Philippa, who was tracing delicate filigrees of nothing on his thigh.

“I’m very sorry to have to spoil your trip, but your father is dead.” Arthur heard the faint sound of static in his head, like the connection was bad, the blueprint was failing. “I’ve emailed you your flight itinerary; it leaves in three hours. I’ll take care of everything at the office and send a car to SFO if I can’t be there myself. Do give Yves and Philippa my love.”

I love you, said the voice in Arthur’s head, which in reality could have been any voice but was always supposed to be his father’s. I love you. Like the tumble of the flag pin to the floor, the neatness of an ending, gone as it had never been before.

And with it, the phone fell from Arthur’s hand.