The Marble Quilt Read Online Free PDF Page B

reasons to want to keep living. His abstracted mother, when she isn’t working, has her alcoholic boyfriend to deal with, while his father is too busy with a batch of new children to spare time for this unhappy child of an unhappy, unwise, early marriage. All Christopher has is Anthony, and for Anthony, he decides, he is willing to make any sacrifice.
    One evening they go out to dinner. A Mexican place. Chicken mole, enchiladas, greasy tortillas. Christopher makes a proposition to Anthony, who is horrified. “I couldn’t,” he cries, and Christopher takes his hand.
    â€œCalm down,” he says. “Hear me out.” And he states his case. He speaks gently, persuasively. He says that he would kill himself if Anthony died, so what does it matter? We all have to go sometime.
    Anthony is moved. “You love me that much?” he asks.
    â€œMore,” Christopher answers. At which point Anthony smiles. This love is the only good thing he’s ever known. A flower creeps through the cement of a blasted city, a blasted, postnuclear city: that is how it feels to him.
    They fix a date. Next Saturday, they decide, they will have sex. They will not use a condom. Discussing the details, Christopher finds himself becoming surprisingly aroused. Never in his life has anyone fucked him without a condom. In sex, as in all things, he has followed the rules to the letter. But now he suspects the rules to be a lie perpetrated by Dead White Males in order to suppress the freedom of gay people, who threaten patriarchy. Doesn’t he too deserve a taste of real abandon, release without restraint? He speaks nostalgically of “Stonewall,” even though he wasn’t yet born when it happened, even though “Stonewall” exists for him merely as grainy porn flicks, the actors mostly dead. Oh, how young he is! He sees the dead as a glorious fraternity into which he longs to be initiated. But he knows nothing of disease, much less of death.
    For the rest of that week Anthony and Christopher lead their lives as always. During the day they go to their jobs (one works at a video store, the other at a coffee bar), at night they walk together up and down Castro Street, or chat with their friends at the Midnight Sun, or watch MTV. By agreement, they do not have sex. They are saving up.
    Saturday arrives. Anthony is visibly panicked. “Are you sure you want to go through with this?” he asks Christopher over lunch—sprouts and avocado sandwiches at CaféFlore on Market Street.
    â€œSure as I’ve ever been about anything,” his friend answers, kissing him on the nose.
    That evening they cook a good dinner together: spaghetti with a sauce made from a recipe handed down by Anthony’s grandmother, who comes from Naples, and whose own mother was rumored to have been a witch. (Inspired by this heritage, he has dabbled in worship of “the Goddess.”) Then they have chocolate ice cream. Then they smoke some hash. Neither wants to lose his nerve.
    In the bedroom Anthony strips the spread off the futon, lights candles. Christopher has put Enya on the stereo; the songs bleed one into the other with a numbing sameness, like Gregorian chants. Altogether the atmosphere is early or even pre-Christian. The bedroom is a temple, the bed an altar. What is about to take place is ritual sacrifice, to which the pious victim offers himself up willingly. They watch each other undress. Because he knows it excites Christopher, Anthony has put on a jockstrap, letting his penis and balls out the right side. He is dark-haired, beefy, endomorphic. Whereas Christopher is taller, leaner. To be taken by a boy both smaller and stronger than himself excites Christopher inordinately. And now Anthony spreads him open on the bed, lifts his legs in the air. He takes the bottle of lubricant from the bedside table—but Christopher stops his hand.
    â€œUse spit,” he whispers.
    â€œOkay.” Anthony spits