The Blue Star by Robert Ferro

Author:Robert Ferro [Ferro, Robert]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Fiction, Gay Men, New York, Florence
Publisher: ReQueered Tales
Published: 1985-02-15T00:00:00+00:00

ON MONDAY MORNING I called Lorenzo at the shop and we met for lunch. Over the weekend his skin had been darkened by the sun, the deeper honey color serving to lighten his eyes further, as if something – an inner shade of gray – had been removed, allowing me to see deeper into him, or so it seemed. He looked at me as a woman would in a new hat, expecting comment and approval but not directly asking for it.

“You look wonderful,” I said, happy and comfortable giving praise. I felt great sympathy suddenly for la moglie, whose picture – of an attractive but usual sort of woman – I had seen the first night. She must think of herself as the invisible lady, if also the quite envied. I saw now why she was not jealous. To be jealous of such a phenomenon was pointless and could end only in confusion. It was, finally, a question of self-possession and free will. Perhaps she had come to see that in Lorenzo admiration was not looked for, but simply missed when it didn’t come – if it didn’t come. Or perhaps she took pleasure, as did I, in the public association of herself with this treasure, as if she were wearing a sable coat or a fabulous jewel. For after looking at Lorenzo, people would look at me, then again at him with the thought of themselves in my place.

How arbitrary, it suddenly seemed, that I should be sitting there with him, and not someone else, anyone at all. In my mind perhaps I felt qualified to be there – qualified by the years I had spent loving him; but what about in his mind? Why should it be me?

Perhaps with him, too, it was simply a question of having known me before the world threw itself at his feet. Perhaps he saw me, because of this, as an exception, as he must see la moglie as an exception – she because he had arbitrarily chosen her, and then because she had borne him two sons; myself because of the connection and recollection of that single episode of his youth, and mine, which fifteen years later was still inexplicably and ineradicably important to us both. While from me must come immediate surrender to him whenever our lives should intersect, for if Lorenzo needed and deserved admiration, I needed to give these things; like a believer denied the ecstasy of faith, I had too long been deprived the object of my love, the idol of my praise, the vessel into which I would, if allowed, pour myself completely. If only, I thought, the connection on his side could be as strong. I wondered how I might induce this same obsession in him, that he might in the end need me as I needed him.

After lunch we retired to the hotel in Via Faenza to make love time and again, each event as if the last. We took from and gave to

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