Issue 11 - May 2006

Shadows and Music by Renee Manley

The last view Henry had of his mistress was of her reclining languidly on the divan and carefully draping herself over the plump cushions, her bodice hanging open. She held their squalling baby in one arm, her free hand slowly fumbling for her corset (also undone with Henry’s help). Just as the door was being shut behind him, Henry caught a glimpse of a pale breast being freed from its stiff confines and the baby being lifted up and positioned against a rosy nipple. Roxana raised her eyes to watch him escape, a little smirk curling her lip as she displayed herself, perhaps even ensuring that this teasing glimpse of her breast would be the very last thing her lover would enjoy before he shut himself away to spend time with his visitor.

Henry snorted quietly when he closed the door with a firm click. He knew Roxana’s methods, perhaps for far too long. He’d grown hardened against her manipulations though he’d also depended on her brazen displays of their “romance” for his shelter; too well he understood and accepted his complicity in the whole thing. Henry was never an innocent, and he always looked on his behavior with a degree of loathing and mortification, given his reasons. He had too much at stake should the world discover the truth about him. Having a mistress who willingly abandoned her husband for him, sacrificing her good name in the bargain, and with whom he’d sired a poor bastard, was expected of Henry among the more jaded fashionable circles. He was a popular musician, after all—a peer and a rival of Liszt and Chopin—an artist both worshipped and reviled for his nonconformity, eagerly sought after and slandered for his genius. A scandalous attachment to a fallen woman was far preferable to a crime against nature, and that was simply that. After all, even jaded circles had their limits.

Shutting the door between them served a dual purpose, both physically and symbolically, and Henry welcomed that brief interlude of complete independence from his self-made prison and his conscience. His music room, though tiny, was his refuge, and Roxana understood well enough to respect its sacrosanctity.

Henry sighed as he patted the doorknob as though reminding it to make good its purpose and so keep the room safe against the threat of violators. Then he turned around and smiled wryly at the figure that sat at the piano and was gingerly running gloved hands over the keys.

“My piano has withstood my playing, Sebastian,” Henry said. “I daresay it’s immune to your touch.”

Sebastian glanced up with a sheepish little smile. “This instrument’s sacred to me.”

“Of course. But there’s certainly no need for the gloves at least.”

The young man looked down and laughed quietly. “I suppose not.” He was about to pull them off when he paused, struck by a thought, and then relaxed visibly with his hands resting on his lap as he waited. “Go on then.”

Henry laughed in return as he walked over to stand behind him. “You know my mind.”

“Only because I can feel you ogling my hands when my back’s turned.”

“It’s very magnanimous of you to allow me a perverse indulgence then.”

Henry grasped Sebastian’s wrist and took over the task of shedding the glove with careful tugs that exposed, inch by inch, the pale skin and long fingers of a musical prodigy. His adoration of Sebastian’s hands was a “secret” that always “exposed” itself during moments such as this, when privacy and Sebastian’s half-reluctant, half-solicitous encouragement emboldened him. Setting the glove aside, he slid his hand from his friend’s wrist to the palm, Henry’s fingers practically devouring every bit of flesh they touched, terminating their brief exploration at Sebastian’s fingertips with a gentle, reverential brush before their release, and Henry turned his attention to the other gloved hand. He would, if he could, take a finger or two between his lips in a show of adulation, but he knew his limits.

“I could have done it myself, you know. I’m not on my deathbed yet.”

“I do know, but I prefer to spoil my guests.” Henry pressed a kiss against Sebastian’s temple. “And how have you been doing?” he asked, dropping his voice to a near whisper at the remembrance of Roxana’s presence a mere closed door away.

“The same, I’m afraid.” As though in answer, Sebastian’s body suddenly shuddered under a burst of dry, light coughing. After the brief attack, he turned to look at Henry, shamefaced and even more deeply flushed, and shrugged weakly.

“You can’t let that stop you.”

“I never did.”

“No, of course not.” The irony was never lost on him. Henry smiled faintly and nodded at the keyboard. “Your music—how goes it?”

“I’ve gone too soft,” Sebastian simply said, his voice falling.

“I don’t follow you.”

He fell silent and began to play. The music that was coaxed out of the piano was muted, lyrical, pensive, yearning—an echo of Sebastian’s nature and the limits forced on his youth and talent by his unstable health. Henry moved to stand beside the instrument and leaned against it as he watched and listened, his attention now wholly wrapped around the sight of Sebastian at the piano. He sensed familiar slumbering passion in his friend’s features—the pale, wan complexion, the heavy-lidded eyes, the full mouth that always parted in slack invitation when Sebastian played. The smooth, high forehead was a study in marble-like placidity, but Henry always visualized that same broad feature furrowed deeply in a moment of intense feeling. Even the fall of loose brown curls grazing the top Sebastian’s forehead looked almost unnaturally soft and airy, as though it would dissolve at a mere touch, but Henry understood it to be no more than an unwanted physical reminder—one of several—of his friend’s fragile health.

Sebastian was refinement to the extreme like his quiet, timid music—melodic, restrained, everything perfectly set, nothing out of order.

Henry sensed the muted bubbling of long-suppressed energy in the music he was hearing. It was always there; it was what defined Sebastian’s compositions. They were like verses of a consumptive poetic genius—filled with all the inexhaustible color, the beauty, the sensuality that was otherwise denied Sebastian through various physical means. He’d likened his friend to Keats not too long ago and received a round of astonished and incredulous laughter in return.

“You’ve just insulted one of the greatest literary minds with your comparison,” Sebastian had said before his self-deprecation vanished in a fit of hoarse coughing that nearly brought tears to his eyes. It took some time for Henry to forgive him his dismissal; it might be hyperbolic, but the lover’s praise was always sincere.

Dropping his gaze further, Henry watched a pair of pale, thin hands flitter across the keyboard—no less lyrical and graceful in touch than the music they were forming, no less gentle and restrained than their owner. Reflexively, he rubbed one of his hands against his leg as though to remind himself of his own strength, currently lying quiescent in fingers of slightly greater bulk and darker flesh tones—certainly far more suited to his preference for energy and flamboyance in his music but still easily adaptable to the gentler handling of a sickly genius’s rapidly dwindling body.

“Henry!”

He blinked; the music had already ceased. Sebastian was watching him in some surprise, which quickly softened into amusement.

“Excuse me. I was just thinking.”

“Yes, I can see that. Have you any advice?”

“You wish to sound like me, you mean.”

Sebastian shrugged vaguely. “I don’t wish to sound dead at least for this piece.” He stopped abruptly there, but Henry believed that he knew what was supposed to come after. I want more if only this once. It might very well be my last composition. Sebastian had all but said so with every visit he made, a partially finished piece of music safely tucked inside a weathered portfolio for his friend’s listening pleasure. For the past few months, none of his newer pieces was completed; as strength waned, he resigned himself to offerings of truncated inspiration and hid them away, thinking nothing more of them.

This time, however, Henry was proven wrong. Sebastian spoke again, hesitantly yet clearly.

“I’ve been thinking—perhaps a glimpse of death would liberate me.” He fixed tired, gray eyes on Henry. “I want to try it at least once.”

“What—death?”

“Come now. Help me.”

“Don’t be absurd!”

Sebastian beckoned to him. “Think of this as one of those experiments we used to try once upon a time.”

It was always difficult arguing with Sebastian. It was impossible finding leverage when every word he said seemed edged with bitter resignation though he’d always been dismissive of his manner in communicating. Henry was still fumbling his way through a web of muddled thoughts when he abandoned his spot to take his place once again behind Sebastian, vaguely even aware of his friend’s warmth against his chest as he pressed close. He reached around Sebastian’s shoulders and covered the young man’s eyes with his hands, feeling the light tickling of eyelashes against his fingers as well as something familiar stirring in his gut.

“Keep your eyes closed then,” he ordered firmly, “and play your piece.”

Sebastian sat in silence for a few seconds, momentarily unable to move, but he soon raised his hands and positioned them, instinct guiding them over discolored keys. Henry’s own continued to tingle with every reflexive brush of Sebastian’s lashes against them, his slowly dampening palm catching the deepening warmth of flushed skin.

Sightless artistry presently engaged the keyboard, and music was once again drawn out of the depths of the polished wood. All were hesitation and whispers at first, but as confidence grew in spite of the darkness, sounds solidified in form, and they gradually rent the air in the music room with their awakening intensity and their newly-discovered voice. This composition was relatively short, and it was repeated several times over like a perpetual web, with each new turn being more emphatic than its predecessor. It was, moreover, the first completed piece of music Sebastian had written in a long time.

Henry listened in growing wonder at the force that seemed to be escaping Sebastian’s deeply suppressed spirit. The escalating violence of fingers (so long used to more genteel sounds) flying across ivory fascinated him, and he stared, mesmerized, at the emerging force that moved the fragile-looking digits. He half-expected them to shatter into crystal shards from their own velocity, but they held together, and his wonder deepened. Music that was at first better suited to the more refined tastes of the court reshaped itself into an auditory tempest, and the air was soon swirling in a storm of notes, and Henry almost felt as though he was being lifted off his feet.

“Here is passion. Here is fire,” he breathed.

His eyelids drooped instinctively as the music continued its rage, and he was lost in the confusion, feeling himself caught in the tempest, arpeggios shredding his clothes till he floated naked and stung on all sides by the voices of gods till he wished to be torn to pieces by it all. Time seemed to stretch and contract, lose its form altogether, and it faded gradually. As it tended to happen when he and Sebastian were alone and tenuously clinging to what little security could be afforded against Roxana and the rest of the world, Henry’s mind rose and ebbed with the piano, his long-denied needs finding expression if only in pictures.

How many times in the past had he done this, playing a vivid scene over and over again without being granted the reprieve of physical pleasure? He’d always wanted to make love to Sebastian right there—in that room, against the piano—because that was all they had. Sebastian’s loathing of his physical condition had all but obliterated what little opportunity was allowed them, hiding guiltily behind a weathered door and the shadows of an old keyboard in spite of Henry’s reassurances. That he loved Henry back was certain, but it was never enough. The chasm gouged by his self-hate was too wide a span. He refused to be rescued, having been ill for too long to bend his mind in the direction of recovery and hope. Mental images were all Henry had; they were all he was allowed. He sometimes indulged himself with them when alone, playing his compositions and using their energy to stir his imagination and find cold solace in their artificial world. Their termination always led to a desperate fumbling for his trousers and several quick strokes of his cock as he bent over the keyboard, sobbing away his isolation, his release masked by the lengthening shadows of the room.

Piano music now took familiar visual form, and Henry pictured himself pressing Sebastian against the piano, barely even mindful of the discomfort the instrument’s frame might be causing against his friend’s back. They were kissing deeply, Henry’s tongue hot and slick against Sebastian’s, sounds of pleasure drowning in each other’s throats. He was shifting his weight and was sliding his hands down Sebastian’s front to fumble for the young man’s trousers, and his friend, liberated from the constraints of disease and weakness, never stopped him.

In the swirling mist of a constantly reshaping sonata, Henry was pressing his lips against his friend’s cheek, shivering at the feel of Sebastian’s cock in his hold. A hand long used to cold ivory moved up and down the rapidly thickening shaft, fingers absorbing the sensation of hot flesh stretched tautly, the slight curve as it jutted from a nest of dark curls, the sensitivity of the flared head made slick by the small bead of moisture that had formed at the tip.

Notes crammed within measures found expression in the way Sebastian was throwing his head back as Henry dragged his tongue down his friend’s throat, settling on the pulsing hollow between the collarbones, which had just been exposed by a diligent effort at undoing Sebastian’s neck-cloth and shirt. Henry felt a prodigy’s gifted hands tangle themselves in his hair, and with swiftly thinning control, he fumbled blindly with his own trousers to release his erection. Then he was pulling Sebastian’s hips against his—groin to groin, cock to cock. He shuddered from the contact and began to move his hips, rhythmically grinding himself against Sebastian, who responded just as eagerly, his self-loathing now forgotten.

Frenzied legatos transformed themselves into two men firmly locked in each others’ arms, forcing pleasure out of their straining bodies as they pressed and moved, erections rubbing against each other, Sebastian’s naked backside periodically pressing the keyboard and drawing slight, discordant sounds from the agitated ivories. The novelty, the intensity of outlawed physical pleasure was maddening, and Henry surrendered himself to imagined heights to which they soared, claiming Sebastian’s mouth once again in a forceful kiss just as their movements grew more and more desperate and demanding.

In the final measures, with music being hushed into a conclusion that was more of a whisper than an emphatic surge of sounds, the heat that had collected and throbbed in Henry’s groin finally burst and swept outward in a biting wave, rippling swiftly through his body. He shuddered and muffled his groans against Sebastian’s slack mouth, his body stiffening as ropes of semen spurted out and mingled with his friend’s release. The weightless sinking that followed echoed the last string of notes in pianissimo, and time finally righted itself, reality coaxed back to his awareness.

It was all Henry could do to imagine how such a moment would be, battering his senses from all sides with the sights and sounds of Sebastian in the throes of pleasure, the smell and the taste of his friend as Sebastian abandoned himself to his needs completely, the feeling of a male lover’s sweat-dampened skin against Henry’s hands. How simple all these seemed, yet how elusive they remained.

Henry’s emergence from his near-delirium didn’t come from the calm that presently fell on the music room. He wasn’t even aware that Sebastian had ceased playing. Instead, he was drawn out of his trance by the feel of hands against his, of fingers gently tugging at his own as Sebastian sought to free himself from his hold.

“Enough,” his friend said, and the darkness melted. Henry opened his eyes and stared in bewildered wonder at the face that was now tilted up to meet his gaze with eyes that had deepened in hue. He realized that his head was bent down, his long hair hanging in a fine curtain around Sebastian’s upturned face, dark tips lightly tickling the young man’s sunken cheeks. Their faces were very close—their breaths mingling—and if he wished it, Henry could easily have stolen an awkward, upside-down kiss from his friend. But before he could move away, he felt a bony hand take hold of one of his, gently guiding it downward and pressing it against the hardness between Sebastian’s thighs. No other word was exchanged; no other sound followed but those of clothing being undone and deep, ragged breathing that crumbled into a series of helpless gasps. Then Henry was holding Sebastian’s sagging weight against himself with one arm, his semen-coated free hand trembling as it carefully tucked Sebastian’s softening cock inside his trousers and struggled to push buttons back into their respective holes. Henry himself had orgasmed in his trousers but was only peripherally aware of the discomfort caused by soiled undergarments.

“There now,” he said unsteadily. “It only takes a little encouragement for you to find your fire.”

Sebastian laughed as he sat up on the bench and tidied his clothes, even taking Henry’s hand and wiping it with his handkerchief. “I suppose you mean to say that there’s hope for me still.” The floor beneath him was spotted with semen.

“I’ve always believed that,” Henry replied quickly and with conviction, but Sebastian merely grinned and shook his head as he carefully folded his soiled handkerchief and tucked it back inside a pocket.

“Ah, Henry—always the incurable romantic.”

“It’s a miserable disease, I know.”

For the first time, Sebastian had nothing to say to that. Henry suddenly felt stifled and moved away, reflexively seeking any open space in the small, confined area, and there he planted himself—a forlorn little spot between the piano and the door, marked by weathered floorboards that lightly groaned under his weight. He knew better than to further provoke a man who never wished to be rescued—even if Sebastian’s salvation were safely restricted to the small, protected space of a music room, the frequency solely dependent on the regularity of his visits. What had just happened, he knew, would never be repeated, and he was right. Disease would complete its triumph in a mere two months’ time, a week short of his friend’s twenty-third birthday.

Sebastian cleared his throat as he retrieved his gloves. He carefully pulled them back on and walked toward the windows.

“It’s a little too cold in here,” he declared, coughing a little. “May I close them?”

Henry nodded vaguely. “Yes. Of course.”

Outside the door came the barely muffled sounds of a baby wailing and of Roxana calling out for a servant with a string of curses.

Sebastian reached out for the shutters, and the cacophonous montage of merchants’ chatter and laughter, of rumbling carriages and horses’ hoofbeats, dissolved into a hollow silence. He took his place at the piano once again and began to play gentle, restrained music. It was the same piece he’d brought to life a few moments ago—only now stripped down to its original form, perhaps as it was meant to be played all along, just like his other creations. Glancing at Henry and smiling, he noted, “Fire doesn’t suit me. I suppose I can always turn this into a pastorale, don’t you agree?”

“It’s best to keep things as they were, yes,” Henry replied and then excused himself for a change of clothes.

Renee Manley was born in the Philippines and moved to San Francisco in her teens. She writes largely historical and gothic gay fiction with an occasional dollop of folklore. "The Glass Minstrel," an original fairy tale, was just published by Torquere Press in their Taste Test: Once Upon a Time anthology. "Heroes," a surrealist satire on folktales, was acquired by SoMa Literary Review for an upcoming issue. She's now married and still lives in the Bay Area.
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This story has been beautifully illustrated by Pira. See the gallery for the full sized picture.

"Shutting the door between them served a dual purpose, both physically and symbolically, and Henry welcomed that brief interlude of complete independence from his self-made prison and his conscience."