The Marble Quilt Read Online Free PDF Page A

their love would learn the name it dared not speak.
    â€œCome on,” Bosie says. “Let’s get in bed.”
    Wellington hardly has time to pull off his shoes.
    â€œWe have to make sure the infection takes,” Bosie goes on, pulling the sheets over them.
    â€œHow?”
    â€œLike this.” And holding Wellington’s face between his hot palms, Bosie kisses him. Wellington, who has never been kissed before, is at first surprised, resistant. But he likes the sensation, the silkiness of the sensation, and, giving in to it, allows Bosie’s tongue to open his lips. It is all for the purpose of being together, after all, of being boys together,
tremendous friends
. Bosie licks Wellington’s teeth, licks his tongue, the rough surface of his lips. Wellington returns, repeats each gesture. So much early sexuality is mimicry.
Do to me what I do to you
, we think the other’s tongue is telling us. Yet there are some things he would like to do to Bosie that he hopes Bosie wouldn’t like to do to him.
    â€œDo you think it’s taken yet?”
    â€œPerhaps. Still, we can’t be sure.”
    â€œAnything else we might try?”
    â€œYes.” And sitting up, Bosie runs his small hot tongue down Wellington’s neck, onto his chest; he opens Wellington’s shirt and licks the halos of hair around his nipples. Lower down, an erection pokes Wellington’s trousers: no surprise. As for Bosie, hisnightshirt has ridden up. He turns around, grinds his pinkish behind into Wellington’s groin. The heat shocks. Wellington can’t help but grind back. Sensation floods him, and he ejaculates, soaking the front of his pants.
    Church bells chime. It’s six-thirty in the morning. Shadows creep toward the bed. In the hallway, the housekeeper is upbraiding a chambermaid for the way she has folded some towels. Hearing them argue, Wellington and Bosie laugh.
    â€œShe’ll be coming for us soon.”
    â€œYes.”
    â€œDo you feel any swelling?”
    Wellington presses his fingers against his neck.
    â€œI think so. I think I do.”
    Under the bedclothes, he takes Bosie in his arms. They doze. Soon there’s a knock on the door, and the housekeeper steps briskly through. “Good morning,” she says, then stops in her tracks. “But what’s this?”
    The boys laugh, pull the sheet over their heads.
    â€œOh dear,” the housekeeper says. “I’ll have to fetch Lady Queensberry.” And does.
    â€œWellington!” Lady Queensberry cries, rushing in a few minutes later. “What on earth are you doing here?”
    â€œHe’s come to get sick so we can spend our holiday together.”
    â€œWellington, get out of that bed right now. What kind of nonsense is this?”
    â€œBut, madame,” the housekeeper interjects, “if he’s already been infected …”
    Lady Queensberry rubs her temples. Of her four children, she loves Bosie best. She is also starting to have inklings that he will bring her the greatest torment.
    â€œI must consult with Lady Downshire,” she concludes, and, leaving the boys to play in the feverish sheets, goes to her dressing room to write that eminence a wearied, apologetic letter.
    But the infection doesn’t “take,” and Wellington returns to Easthampstead. Bosie recovers; the boys head off to their separate schools. Wellington, who should have become the third Viscount Combermere, dies in the Boer Wars. Bosie makes a career of ruin and infection.
    Wellington didn’t live to learn how narrowly he’d made it out alive.
    I base this account on Bosie’s own, in
My Friendship with Oscar Wilde
—one of several autobiographies he published later in his life in the hope that he might “set the record straight” concerning his disastrous love affair with Wilde. Here the incident takes up the better part of a paragraph. Bosie explains that he