(E-novel (Copyright R. Laing © 2005)
As seen on Saatchi Gallery Saatchi Online

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'Yes there are two paths you can go by, but in the long run, there's still time to change the road you're on.'
From Stairway to Heaven, Led Zeppelin
 

Dedicated to Tom Corry
1972-2011.
You had many friends and you were the best friend to all of them.
 

CHAPTER 1

[A Man Has His Duty, And It Is Rebellion]

"And here's our batter!" stated the umpire.

Michael Carr, the guest batsman for the East Spirits, stepped up to the plate and flexed with the steely bat. It was almost the top of the exhibition game's fourth inning and there were two guys on bases - the first and the third. The East Spirits were behind the Rangers by a couple of home runs, and the high expectations of the crowd rested on his sculpted shoulders.

Tension, like the scent of Pacific Ocean, infused the air.

Michael looked up into the stands as a blonde guy, Jeff Brandt, settled into his seat beside an Italianate, well-built figure. Michael's grin was broad with undisguised admiration, and as the baseball fans scrutinized his posture and made animated commentary on his chances at taking the game, he coolly tapped the dust from the plate.

The Rangers' coach gave the pitcher the signal for the wind up.

Michael narrowed his deep cola-colored eyes.

"Take your shot!" the umpire commanded and the pitcher fired.

Michael swung fast and after a lightning crack the ball was sent into vast space, over the crowd and out of the ground. The stand erupted in hysteria.

"And the game is the East Spirits'!" the loud speakers rang out.

All the guys from Spirits team and the crowd rushed out as the last three players made it over the home base.

"You came," Michael enthused when Jeff got out onto the field. "I didn't know if you would. If we...?"

As the teams headed towards the locker rooms Michael stayed with Jeff. They had the instinctual sex and they spent hours just talking and connecting, enraptured just being with each other. That was the way it was and the way they wanted it forever.
 
 

- Or at least that was THE MOMENTARY FANTASY.
 
 

Alone, Jeff gave a hoarse sigh. He couldn't get Michael Carr out of his mind as he headed home. Walking between Italian style, sidewalk cafes, he wondered if Michael Carr had really looked up to him in the stand.

It was only a figment of my imagination, Jeff deliberated. Michael Carr is incarnate sexuality - An internationalist stud.

Jeff had been at the game with his best friend Tom, but feeling despondent he decided to make his own way afterwards.

Jeff needed to do some thinking.

Tom and Jeff had cheered for Michael Carr with the alibi of supporting Andrew, Jeff's brother in the East Spirits baseball team. It was the first time that Michael had played since he'd returned to Australia. His baseball career had taken off in America three years before. With virtually no prospects for a professional baseball career in Australia, he came to the U.S. and was spotted by selectors in Philadelphia. Andrew and Michael had been best friends for years and it was for this reason that Michael made a guest appearance on the field for the team during the exhibition game in Sydney. Tom's remarks on how lucky Jeff's brother, Andrew, was to be friends with a beautiful guy like Michael were still resounding in Jeff's head. "Do you know what team Michael is really batting for,, Jeff? Why don't you give Michael a line?"

Jeff had no comeback.

After Michael had taken the winning hit, Jeff and Tom had cascaded onto the ground to congratulate Andrew. Jeff didn't feel all that handsome or alluring in front of Michael. His hair was hung unevenly over his forehead and not having slept well the previous night, Jeff was shady under the eyes. Someone had commented that he looked like he needed a long trip that morning.

If Tom hadn't insisted that they go out onto the ground Jeff probably would have headed for the exit. He could see his brother, Andrew, any time. Being one of the retinue of admirers didn't seem to bother Tom like Jeff. If Jeff liked someone he wanted great, fantasist sex and something else too - but he had to be realistic. You can’t always get what you want, but fortunately you can’t always get what you don’t either. 

When Jeff had found himself drifting around Michael with a mass of teenage, twenty and thirty-something guys he hated it. He was no sports fan. He was a photographer and he prided himself on his artistic bent. He glanced at Michael once or twice detachedly.

Jeff was sure that Tom had cast a glance at a guy behind him and, turning to see who it was, Jeff stepped back - And then it happened.

Jeff tripped over the mobile bat caddy, and fell against Michael - then to the ground.

Jeff laid there, dazed for a moment. Jeff didn't doubt for a second that Tom had been looking at Michael. After all, Tom was buffed, square jawed . He had a kind of charisma that belied his very working class origins. Having always tried to be one of the proletariat he'd hardly even managed to make the amateur-letariat. The professional baseball player seemed especially handsome looking upwards. If there were any imperfections they all conspired to give him consummate sex appeal.

"Did you want something?" Michael gasped jokingly, assisting Jeff back to his feet. Michael's voice then became cool and professional: "Shedding some inhibitions?"

Andrew, Tom and the rest of the crowd were laughing hysterically. Jeff tried to laugh it off, then walked away and Tom followed to the parking area.

Michael had not played amateur baseball alongside Andrew since they were in high school. Even though Michael went professional and their career paths diverged, they'd stayed in contact. Michael had gone on to bankroll two gymnasiums: one in LA and another in Sydney. Andrew had became a trader for the Blenheim's International Stocks - He was definitively Capitalist: Happiness is not something that you can buy - It is whatever you can sell.  Ever since Jeff heard that Michael was back in town he was dying to see him exactly like he used to. Jeff and Andrew both lived in the Trussard building now, so it seemed even more immanent.

However, it seemed evident to Jeff that no matter how buffed he became, Michael Carr could never be interested in him beyond his association with Andrew. In the first place there was a serious probability that Michael was straight - or at least metrosexual. In the second, Jeff remembered how his confidence had collapsed when Michael looked at him after the game.

Jeff reflected on an incident that occurred just before Michael had left Australia. After a workout Jeff had accidentally walked in on him taking a shower at Andrew's. Michael stepped out right in front of him, fully naked. The view was exquisite. Michael simply wrapped himself in a towel and held out his hand. "It's all yours," he smiled, unperturbed, assuming that Jeff - scarcely breathing - had wanted to take a shower. Jeff, knowing that he was getting a major reaction to stand and deliver, declined. His sexual reflex might not be welcomed or even requited. Sports guys undressed and showered in front of each other all the time, it wasn't such a sexually charged thing for them; not like it was for Jeff.

The memory put a speculative glint in Jeff's eyes, that soon faltered.

For those whose life is hardest, their death is easiest.

He'd heard it from someone
- Why had that statement inexplicably returned to his mind? -

"Hey, Jeff! Need a lift?"

He turned: It was Andrew, his brother, leaning out of the window of his Porsche GT2. In the periphery of his vision Jeff registered Michael. When Jeff looked at him, Michael turned away as if he was checking something out in the rear-view mirror.

Andrew gestured at him to get into the car. "We're celebrating with the rest of the team at the Equator Nightclub tonight." He looked back to Michael. "He can come, OK?"

"Why not?" Michael agreed.

"You are going to, Jeff?" Andrew enthused.

Michael gazed at him in an attitude either of fascination or impatience. Jeff desperately wanted to say anything that made him sound alluring, but words abandoned him. Forget the boundaries, he reproved himself. A man has his duty - And it is rebellion.

"Gonna come?"

Jeff hesitated. "No thanks, Andrew. Tom and I made plans to go to the Beresford."

Michael, perplexed, turned to Andrew who whispered askance: "It's a gay bar." Noticing that Jeff had overheard him, Andrew's tone changed to one of affected open-mindedness. "That's cool. If he's made other plans."

"I arranged to meet Tom," Jeff improvised on anxiety. "Back at the apartment in thirty minutes. So I should hurry."

"Then get in the car and I'll take you."

"Thanks anyway Andrew, I'll get there before then."

"Alright, Jeff, exercise all you want to. I'll catch you later."

"Yeah..." Michael mused, in a subtle voice to Andrew. "Have you ever been to the Beresford?"

Andrew shook his blonde head vehemently as the Porsche pulled away from the kerb.

You blew it. Jeff kicked a Pepsi can into the gutter. Michael knows your gay, potentially assuming that you want him.

Just to take his mind off it Jeff crossed the street to the Pacific Royal Hotel. He gave a valet twenty-five dollars to drive him home.
 
 

 "Maybe we'll do that," Jeff said as he got out of the misappropriated BMW. "We'll catch up some time."

Jeff could see the Schindler's lift van outside his building so he headed straight for the stairs.
 
 

After eleven flights Jeff stumbled into his apartment. His metallic camera case lay open just beside the door where he had forgotten it that morning.

Jeff appraised his look in the bathroom mirror: Ecce Homo. He didn't have it, but he had something, he was sure.

The radio came on as Jeff moved his hand over the laser sensor: "C'mon, are you satisfied going nowhere this weekend? Call now and if you're the twenty-fourth caller you'll be on a plane to see the show everyone's raving about, Ricky Martin live in Monte Carlo. Call! Twenty-fourth! Now! MONTE CARLO! ELTON! JOHN!"

People told him all the time that he was attractive - and, ironically he had done more work in front of the camera than behind it since he'd taken up a contract with Christie & Carr Advertising. But semi-perfect skin, a chiseled body, and the unaffected tan didn't always equate to a perfect life.

Maybe it never did.

Jeff leaned forward and exhaled on the mirror. Sometimes, he wondered if he was only attracted to men who could never desire him. It was like he was in the clutches of some sexual death wish. Maybe that was just nature's cruel irony. Someday being a - nearly - handsome guy might make up for being so denied in a heterosexist world. He took a pair of dark glasses down from on top of the medicine cabinet as his concentration receded from his image. Why was the image everything in gay society? In gay bars where there is always the most obscene four-letter-word: Love. Maybe, the problem with the gay movement is not that gay men are different to straight men - the problem is that in too many respects they are not. 

Jeff mouthed the lyrics: "Looking for the right something. Looking for it in every night, every face?" pumping out of the radio.

Tom, Jeff's confidant, was adamant that Michael was gay and that was his single ray of light. Tom always believed: 'If you find him attractive then subconsciously maybe you sensed that he was available' and 'Opposites attract. Wrong attracts right, and right attracts no one'. Jeff didn't know how much substance there was to either conjecture. Maybe it was just the lip service that a friend pays to a naive infatuation. You can't be sure. Rarely do we speak truth - Even in truth. 

Outside of the one-night stand routine Jeff knew that he was out of his depth. But on the other hand being alone had its advantages. It had certainties and boundaries - relationships never had that.

But, 'You only have all these hang-ups so that you can get every ugly fucker in the industry to identify with you,' a photographer had once accused Jeff.

And maybe, on a subconscious level, he was right.

Jeff pulled out his pack of menthol cigarettes and placed one between his lips. He ignited the end with a pearl drop of flame and took a superficial drag. Smoke curled out of the side of his lips and rose in spiraling arcs to oblivion. He held the cigarette up for scrutiny and scowled. It hissed as he stabbed it out in the blue marble basin of the vanity.

Again he glanced at himself in the mirror through the ascending, silken remnants of the cigarette smoke.

"Jeff! Jeff! Jeff!" Baudouin shrieked in his supercamp voice and rapped on the bathroom door. "Are you decent - or at least dressed?"

Jeff flung back the door to see what the catastrophe was.

Baudouin stood there, his platinum wig askew and his face mask becoming more like cement every second. "I was lying up beside the pool and I fell asleep." As he spoke the mask cracked and started powdering the white carpet.

"Why do you do this to yourself?" Jeff admonished as Baudouin, the token drag queen, shoved past him.

"It's OK for you, you're only twenty-five, honeysugarbabe," Baudouin sassed, and feigned a limp-wristed slap. "I'm almost thirty-two. I don't mask for one day and I look like Joan Collins."

Baudouin turned taps to full pressure. Before he dipped his face to the faucet he saw the cigarette and rolled his eyes. He tossed it over his shoulder and Jeff dodged. Baudouin unbuttoned his bodice to reveal his pallid, sunken chest - he really put the diet into Dietrich - and madly splashed water over his face. "I have to perform tonight. Tonight!"

Jeff leant back on the door and lit another cigarette. Baudouin - 'Liberty Jean' - was keeping him a smoker, he was sure of it. He was one of Tom's acquaintances and while Baudouin's house was being redecorated Jeff said that he could stay with him. It had been there sixteen days and counting...

"I'm sorry to be doing this, Jeff. I promised that I would get ready for the Marlene Blue Angels show at the Albury but there ain't no time."

"Do you want anything?"

Baudouin pointed frenetically behind himself. "My sequined number - on the hanger on my wardrobe door. Would you be a darling?"

As Jeff headed towards the bedroom the doorbell rang.

"What timing!" Baudouin bitched. "I'll get it Jeff - It'll be Cindy Pastel or Vanessa Wagner wondering where the hell I am."

Baudouin's bedroom, the smallest room in the apartment, was already converted to a kitsch paradise. A 7-foot poster of Bette Davis reigned over, and behind, a bed covered with an assortment of faux furs - chinchilla, mink, fox - and ersatz skins like zebra and viper.

Jeff picked a postcard starring Bewitched Elizabeth Montgomery up off the floor and set it on the bed next to one depicting a Marilyn by make-up-artist : Warhol.

Baudouin always did his own make-up and it always looked like it was done by a great artist:

Jackson Pollock.

Jeff saw a bottle of liquid foundation among a disorderly plethora of cosmetics on a silver salver. He decided to try and conceal the too obvious rings beneath his eyes - as inconspicuously as cosmetically possible. Taking up the bottle in one hand and jerking down Baudouin's sequined Chanel in the other, he lost his balance and as he recovered both at once, the bottle of foundation spilt all over the palm of his hand and the back of the dress. He wiped back the foundation with his other hand but it only made the situation worse. Taking the sequined dress, Jeff made ready to retreat from Baudouin's psychosis, but he clearly heard the sound of Andrew's voice at the door: "Thanks, you'll let Jeff know?"

"Yeah," Baudouin replied with ersatz sweetness. "I'll tell him you've got them - not that Jeff'll notice - I bet that he's never played in his life."

Andrew laughed. "Catch you later. Baudouin is it?"

"That's right."

When he reappeared Baudouin reached majestically for the dress and Jeff maneuvered his hand to hide the foundation. "Actually, Jeff, just throw the dress over the back of the sofa and I'll pick it up in a sec."

"Was it only Andrew?"

Baudouin girlishly sighed. "Jeff, Jeff it was your brother..." He paused for effect, then surged hoarsely: "And a gooorgeous friend. Sugarhoney-BABE."

"What did they want?"

Baudouin hurried by him and tore into a pack of false eyelashes. "They've borrowed your golf clubs - I said it would be OK. It was wasn't it, Jeff? They were just there by the door."

"Yeah, sure," Jeff replied suppressing annoyance that Andrew hadn't asked for him expressly. Was Michael still with him? Didn't Michael want to set eyes on Jeff?

Looking out the open front door, Jeff saw Andrew stepping into one of the lifts with Michael.

"They'll be going up to the top of the building... to use the golf pad, right?" Baudouin called over the sound of an electric razor sweeping back and forward over his leg.

"They're not going to the Palace of Versailles," Jeff said, sounding unintentionally sarcastic.

The razor cut-out and Baudouin looked out from the bathroom checkily. "Touchy, touché. Is this about the doorman not letting you into the show free last night? I swear I told him you were coming. By the time you got there he'd let in forty people already who said that they were friends of the stars." Baudouin hurried out and began to slip into the dress. "He said it was like a friggin' zodiac conspiracy."

Jeff gave a chortle. He hadn't even gone to the club last night. He only said he did to save Baudouin's feelings. "It's nothing, Baudouin. It's just... It's nothing."

"Take a look."

Jeff turned to Baudouin with a look of pseudo-hyper-adulation. "Yeah..."

"'Yeah' like Sister Glamerica, or 'yeah' like a sequined tragedy?"

"You look just like Sharon Stone in Casino or a 21st century blonde, man-Venus."

Baudouin relished the proposition. "And, now, I've got twenty minutes to get to the club before The Bovine Miss M - AKA Ivana B. Britney -  enacts that threat."
 
 

When Jeff emerged from the lift, Andrew had already taken his third swing. Jeff watched from behind the glass doors beside the pool. They played on the open-air, miniature golf range high on the Sydney skyline.

When a guy who looked like Mel Gibson (The 21st-century's Ayatollah of celluloid Medievalism.) shuffled towards the door, Jeff pretended to be examining the surveillance camera. He then hurriedly pulled the diminutive comb from his pocket and brushed back the hair from over his forehead and stepped out of the door.

The musculature of Michael's upper torso was even more devastating than Jeff remembered from the game. He wiped back perspiration from his cheeks and brow.

Michael looked up with wind-swept hair flickering over his tanned face.

Jeff felt his throat constrict and his heart quake: the sexual tension was building. He tried to stifle it. After all, if he could make sex with a perfect stranger he'd met at an Oxford Street bar, why couldn't he talk to his brother's best friend?

"You made it back," Michael remarked, with a broad smile. "I didn't think you'd walk back this side of midnight."

"Come over here." Andrew summoned Jeff's gaze away from Michael. "Have you tried out the new turf? Lazzarelli set it out."

"I came up here yesterday," Jeff replied. It was at midnight after transient nightclubing.

"Didn't Tom show?" Andrew asked.

"Tom? Why?"

"You said you were meeting him."

"Yeah, I'll say things like that," Jeff muttered, thrown off axis. "I don't know what he's doing. You're getting some use out of Dad's old clubs? I've never used them since he gave them to me."

"In that case take some shots with us," Michael said. "Choose your handicap."

Jeff cast a glance at Andrew. "I don't know, I'll take this one in on the side-lines."

"What's the matter?" Andrew observed the reluctance in Jeff's gait. "Are you afraid of the competition?"

"You two look like you could play in the Australian Open."

"One of us anyway," Michael preened. "I didn't think that you played, Jeff. I only ever remember you playing tennis in high school. Didn't you have a talent for it?"

Jeff checked the question for sarcasm and felt relieved at finding none. Jeff and Michael's eyes met again, sending Jeff's heart into overdrive. "Not as good as you play baseball - I mean you play baseball like no one I've ever seen. You're-" Jeff broke off. Andrew was looking at him dubiously, knowing all the signs of when Jeff was ultra-awed by somebody.

"Yeah?" Michael raised his brow.

Jeff advanced his hand. "Did I congratulate you on winning the game today? That was a great effort."

"Thanks." Michael appreciated any compliment. "I got the impression that you were kind of excited after the game. I've got the bruises to prove it."

Andrew shook his head. "Was that guy - or whatever, down in your flat ever on Jerry Springer?"

Jeff didn't respond.

"If you could swing a bat like a tennis racket," Michael asserted, "you could easily get through the try-outs."

Andrew laughed. "Turn time back seven years and you might be right."

It suddenly occurred to Jeff how strangely exact to his fantasies Michael's face seemed to him. Out at the bars Jeff had subconsciously sought men with the same features and nuances of action as Michael. He was always disappointed and didn't realize why until now that he was getting a full frontal look at Michael again in the flesh.

Or maybe he was just overly idealizing Michael just because he had seen him naked.

Jeff suddenly realized he was staring at Michael.

Michael examined him with a blank expression. "Why don't you tee off first?" He held out his club.

"I haven't played for years."

Michael went down on one knee to collect the golf ball. Jeff avoided the admonitory look on Andrew's face as he took in the sight of Michael's gym-crafted shoulders.

"Take a shot, Jeff." Michael placed the ball down in front of him.

Jeff fired two fingers at Michael like a revolver. "You're some act to swallow - I mean follow, Michael." It sounded gauche and Jeff regretted the Freudian slip even before it had passed his lips.

Andrew slapped Michael's back. "I've got to have a drink. Do you want an OJ?"

"I'd love one."

Before Andrew disappeared down to his apartment two floors below, he called back: "How about you, Jeff? You always want one don't you?"

"Yeah, and like you don't need one?" Jeff replied wryly, putting his fingers back into revolver formation.

Jeff's mouth felt dry with nervousness. He was going to be left alone with Michael for the first time since the shower scene.

Michael's face gave all of the signs that he was about to say something, then he held back, turned and looked away at a couple of teenage girls giggling frenetically over an Ichikawa scuttling around in circles. Jeff stood looking at sunbursts shimmering over the harborside buildings towards Circular Quay. He felt Michael looking at him.

"Yeah?"

"So..." Michael intoned. They stood in silence with all the activity going on around them for several moments. "Why don't we play some gold - I mean golf?" said Michael, averting his eyes from Jeff's gleaming hair.

Jeff shrugged. "I haven't ever played with the clubs. Dad gave them to me, and Andrew was too proud to ask for them. Andrew is the sportsman - when he's not playing rooftop golf."

"Yeah, you're a... ?"

"I've been a model."

"A model what?" Michael grinned at his own quip. "I know. I saw you on HOMME Quarterly. It must be an international because I saw it on a poster at a Detroit newsstand. At first I thought it was Andrew. I guess you get that all the time."

"Yeah... But I'm a fashion photographer, professionally."

"Experienced?"

"Did you ever work at your father's company?" Jeff questioned.

"I got to meet a lot of photographers, but I've never met a guy who looked more like a fashion photographer than you."

Jeff didn't know how to take this. What did Michael mean? The stereotypical fag-photo-sycophant?

From nowhere Michael asked: "Are you still seeing that photographer - Anthony Marek?"

"You know him?" Jeff asked guardedly.

"Of him. He worked for C&C. I think you met him there."

Jeff was not sure if he was disappointed that Michael had actually known he was gay all along. He was dismissive: "No, that never went anywhere. I saw him at The Oxford a while ago - is he still at C&C?"

"Somewhere in Africa or India, I think..."

The conversation succumbed to silence. Jeff racked his mind for an allusive reply, but it eluded him. He selected a club. "Why don't I take that shot?"

"OK," Michael said. "I think I know the best vantage to take it."

They walked over to an empty corner of the roof where Michael removed the cap from the hole. "Jeff, stand fifteen feet back and hit it at the center of the head."

"The what?"

"The head of the club." Michael indicated the chromium plated projection at the bottom of it.

Jeff placed the ball on the ground and aimed it in the direction of the hole. He was blinded by the sun reflected on the iridescent windows of a building down the street. The ball headed towards the hole then made a dramatic curve in the direction of Michael, who crossed his arms over his broad chest.

Jeff held out the club resignedly. "See, I'm no good at this. I've never played."

Michael retrieved the ball and placed it again at Jeff's feet. "C'mon, take another shot."

The second time the ball was hit with such force that it soared over the parapet and down into the street.

Michael gave a gasp and frowned. "You really haven't played this have you," he drawled rhetorically.

You're not making a great impression are you? Jeff derided himself. Don't let him think that you're hopeless. "Only once. Golf is way too tedious."

Michael offered his palms in a supplicating gesture, making Jeff suspect that he had sounded unduly hostile. "Sure, that's OK," Michael consoled. "You can't expect to be a master on your first attempt. Don't be too hard on yourself." His voice was redolent with warmth that Jeff never expected from a masculine type. Michael put a hand lightly on Jeff's shoulder. "You know what you need?"

"What I need?"

Michael placed another ball on the putt, then stood behind Jeff placing his arm over Jeff's forearm to guide it. It was inspiring to say the least. "You need to get your swing right and you'll be doing OK." He repositioned Jeff's hands on the club. Tension filled his body, but Michael didn't seem to share his hesitation about this professional embrace.

With Michael's firm guidance he swung the club, sending the ball on a direct hit with the hole. It went in with a crisp pop.

"I did it!" Jeff stepped away from Michael. "Maybe I'm not the worst player in the world."

"Of course not - you could be - maybe - OK," Michael vaguely surmised. His eyes widened and his full lips smiled. "You could be a real player with practice."

Jeff walked over and withdrew the ball from the hole.

"You know," Michael said, "when your brother first started playing - in high - when he wasn't hardly hitting the ball he was losing it in the cypresses."

"And now he's losing it everywhere."

Michael didn't laugh. "You and your brother are very competitive with each other, aren't you?"

"In some ways," Jeff replied, wondering what Andrew had shocked him with. "We're both Leos and I guess that has something to do with it."

"And you're gay and he's straight."

Andrew appeared again, looking between them suspiciously. He handed each a glistening can. "Sorry, no orange juice."

Jeff felt frustrated, knowing what Andrew was thinking.

Michael edged back to Jeff's side again. Jeff feigned interest in the two helicopters fleeting across the horizon. Why did he take hands-on advice from Michael Carr? He wanted to escape, but something kept him exactly where he was.

"Do you want to try another round?" Michael urged.

"We can do this another time," Andrew refused. "I really have to get ready. I called Angie and I'll be collecting her in about an hour."

"They say that a woman always likes everything on time."

Andrew laughed slyly. "Angie's one hell of a frigid wait-er."

Walking away, Michael's superficial laugh faded as he caught the look on Jeff's face.

"Andrew gives the my to my-sogony," Jeff ad libbed.

Michael's apparent eagerness to get off the roof suggested to Jeff that he wanted to be away from him. Maybe Michael felt guilty at taking a close interest in his best friend's younger brother.

Or was it - by a total stretch of the imagination - rebounded sexual interest in Andrew?

A tide of disappointment imbued Jeff as they descended towards the eighteenth floor and Andrew's apartment.

As Michael and Andrew discussed the baseball victory Jeff felt like an outsider.

Jeff's moment in the light of Michael's interest was over. But did it mean anything in the first place?

Jeff reflected on situations with other seemingly straight men. He'd learned from experience that if you needed to ask for sex more than once it was never worth it ever. If he only asked and Michael refused, he'd get over this thing, he was sure. Michael probably gave golfing lessons and he was trying to hustle up business. A nervous gay was born every minute to get attracted to him.

"Do you want to join Angie and I for dinner?" Andrew asked Michael.

"Thanks And', but I've got to make tracks. There are some things I've got to get in order with the gym accounts. I'll see you later tonight."

The lift stopped at Andrew's apartment. "Then, I'll go down with you to your car." Andrew pressed the 11 and the G button on the lift panel, and they descended again.

They conversed about the next season's try-outs. Jeff feigned indifference as he watched the sequential illumination of the numbers above the door.

"Here's your floor," Andrew announced.

Michael semi-waved. "I'll see you later, Jeff."

Jeff turned in a perfunctory manner. "Yeah, later. Nice to see you Michael. Maybe I'll see you again before you jet away again."

"You will. I'm based in Sydney for the next six months."

Jeff watched the lift close dazedly, then instantly admonished himself for sounding so indifferent.

He turned around and luxuriated in the memory of Michael's golfing embrace.

And how well he had directed his body to make the perfect shot! He had genuinely had another chance to get to know Michael and maybe it wasn't an absolute crash.

He swept his hands back over his forehead and through his hair. On the heel of his hand he noticed a flesh toned substance. He tentatively moved his fingertips over his face.

"Damn!"

He hadn't washed Baudouin's liquid make-up off! He had accidentally wiped it over his face from the back of his hand and forgotten all about it.

No wonder that Michael had looked at him so intently. It was incredible that Andrew could have looked at him at all without bursting into laughter. With the bottom of his T-shirt he haphazardly wiped the make-up off.

He stumbled into the bathroom and cleaned up.

When he finished, he searched around the apartment.

"Baudouin?"

Jeff gave a sigh of relief. Maybe it was his lucky day.

There was no sign of the token drag queen, or his discolored token sequins.
 
 

CHAPTER 3

Jeff was on the phone with David (an ex object whose foremost foreplay was infidelity).

"Why didn't you turn up at the bar yesterday?" Jeff asked cursorily.

"David was silent for a moment then spoke hoarsely: "I went to the doctor... Jeff."

"And..."

"I told him that I had a psychosis."

"And?"

 "He told me I was crazy and sent me home. And-"

Suddenly, call waiting signal pierced through. Forced understanding and civility had strained the exchange and Jeff appreciated the distraction. "I'll get back to you, David, OK?"

"Hi, Jeff speaking."

"Jeff you won't believe who I've scored a date with tonight." It was Tom, breathless and bordering on mania. "He called me about five minutes ago."

"Why didn't you show earlier?" Jeff inquired solemnly.

"Didn't you get the message on your machine? You won't believe this, Jeff-"

"And you won't believe what Mic-"

"Guess who I'm going to the movies with," Tom insisted. "Guess!"

"Who can say?" Jeff replied dryly. "Brad Pitt? Matt Damon? Your mother?"

Sarcasm always passed Tom cruiser by. "Nathan Russell!" he boasted.

Tom's rapture seemed totally incommensurate to the name. Russell was the owner of the Paramount Club just off Oxford Street. Though universally considered a great progenitor of the gay scene in Sydney he was rumored to be a sleaze demigod.

"Why?" Jeff deadpanned.

"What do you mean, 'why'?"

"He's a known guy but doesn't he have a cellulite situation happening there?"

"What's your point?"

"Nothing... I just pictured his arrest for under age sex."

"You're so superficial, Jef,," Tom persisted. "The man is seriously loaded. And he likes me. He said that he fucking loved me... - Or loved fucking me - or something."

An invective tone came into Jeff's voice. "And there's no business like ho' business, right? You're not going back down that road again are you Tom? You can do better than being an escort."

Tom didn't conceal his offense. "Please... What do you think that involves?"

"You're good looking, so what's the deal, Madonis? Where did you get a name like that to advertise?"

"De-focus on that for a minute. I met Russell at the club last night, and he took me back to his house in Lavender Bay. Did you know he actually owns a Francis Bacon, Raymond Mars and an original, signed Herb Ritts: the one that was on the cover of Man?"

Jeff glanced up at the silver framed Francesco Scavullo image, and a diminutive Andres Serrano masterpiss (A gift from Tom.) on his wall. "How did you ever get to meet him? I heard that he's never at the club except after hours when heaven knows what goes on there." Christ, that sounded moralistic: Jeff reactively gritted his teeth.

"I went there asking for work and it just so happened that the barman asked me to come back before the club opened at nine. When I did, Nathan was there with a couple of the security guys and he sent them away."

"Yeah..."

"He asked me to take off my shirt."

"I see..."

"He liked what he saw-"

"Wait, Tom," Jeff interjected. "I've got someone on the other line. I'll just tell him I'll call him back."

"Could that be David?" Tom speculated.

Jeff switched the line, and disengaged the caller with a vapid: 'I'll call you tomorrow'.

Connecting back, Jeff heard the sound of clinking glasses on Tom's end of the line: "So there I was in front of the guy completely naked-"

"Naked..."

"You digress, Jeff - and then he said that he had a position available. Something of a more 'personal nature' at his home. At first I thought the guy was a first class pervert, but when we actually arrived at his home and he showed me to my own suite, I got to thinking that he was legit."

"You're moving in there?"

"Friday nights and weekends."

"Weekends?" Jeff grimaced. It just got seedier and seedier.

Tom detected the aversion in Jeff's voice. "It's a living. You do what you do to get by."

"And maybe a little hustling on the side? You said that wasted youth is the only lived youth."

"I don't know what I said," Tom protested. "This is P-E-R-S-O-N-A-L assistance."

The basis their friendship had always been Jeff's belief that beneath the hustler man ho veneer burned a good heart in Tom and this statement in no way compromised it. "How much is he paying you?" Jeff ventured.

"Southern Comfort." It sounded as if Tom had just requested it from a barman. If Tom heard Jeff's question he pretended that he didn't. "What was your news? David is back in Australia? The last I heard of him he going to do Canada - though, I doubted that it would be reciprocal."

Something occurred to Jeff. "Tom, are you doing cocaine, or angel dust again?"

"-So what was your news?"

Jeff took a deep breath. "Can you deal with hardcore jealousy? Michael Carr, gave me some very personal coaching on the roof."

Tom was not impressed. "Jealous? Not unless that's some kind of metaphor, right?"

"It could be a start."

"He lives on water, and turns the straight queer?  What happened? Did you kiss?"

"No, but we made contact."

"Everyone knows about him, Jeff: He's the "it" guy of Eastern Sydney."

"The ''it' guy'? You are so full of Americanisms."

"And America isn't any of our business or us theirs?"

"Self-pleasure is the business of America. Pleasuring America is the business of the world." Jeff fatalistically drawled. "I rev up and I'm a nervous wreck. There I was with him, his arms around me and I couldn't think of a single comeback. Nothing."

"I've always found talking to be an obstacle in situations with the potential lover. It means a lot more to do things with him. Scope out his interests."

"I think that he's a potential straight guy - more than a potential lover. We practiced golf."

"Right, but what about baseball?" Tom pondered. "Isn't that his main thing - and his gym business? Why don't you become a member? Get your season ticket into his profile."

"Yeah, but that's not my thing. I work-out in the building gymnasium, and baseball - that's Andrew's deal."

"Is there anything that you do that he'd relate to?"

"Who knows?"

Tom flicked his lighter and took a fast fag, fast drag. "We're talking about something serious here aren't we, Jeff?"

"I've thought about him for so long. Ever since high school, and that was over eight years ago."

"Yes, but just in case Jeff remember that holding a candle for someone is fine, but don't let it burn your arm off."

"This is the real thing."

"Isn't it always?"

"What?"

Tom guffawed indulgently. "Sorry Jeff, just barbing. I remember you obsessing about him. If you have the chance now then you should let him know how you feel."

Frustration stained Jeff's words. "How? It's not that easy."

"It's not for any guy. Everyone is afraid, but we owe it to ourselves, to discover ourselves with another guy - ASAP - whatever, wherever."

Jeff noticed that the door of his apartment was still wide open. Hadn't he closed it? He realized that it would be a wily exit out of a conversation that was beginning to make him anxious. "I've got something that I really have to do - the doors open, Tom, but I'm glad to hear about your... uh... arrangement with Russell."

Tom was somber. "Thank you."

"OK, Tom-"

"Jeff. Remember, there's a lot about Michael Carr that you don't know. Have some faith that maybe, soon things will be a lot clearer to you."

"Like?"

"If the worst happens you can always downlewd more porn... If you don't change your look... The white shirt, Klein denims and the V'ace jacket thing is too mid-'90's. Gianni is dead - Donatella's tat and her B-male models are riding his label into Hellas. R.I.P."

"Tom, I'll let you get back your sex and cocaine: Fornication and formication."

He hung up the phone and looked down with consternation. How'd Tom know what he was wearing then?

He turned and almost had his second collision for that day!

Andrew stumbled backward. "Was that Tom on the phone?" Andrew interrogated his brother. "I assume that it wasn't David."

"Do you always listen in on my phone conversations?" Jeff shot back, still reeling.

"Don't worry I only heard the last bit. I didn't hear anything about your thing for Michael."

Anxiety snatched at Jeff's stomach. Apparently Andrew had heard everything and was staking it out as humorous territory.

Andrew studied Jeff's defiant posture for an ominous moment before speaking. "So you're thinking of getting involved in baseball?"

"Maybe I'll like it." Jeff countered defensively. He fell back into the couch and picked up a magazine to flick through. "If you could give me some advice I would appreciate it."

"Of course. Don't let Tom anywhere near the guy's locker room."

"Andrew," Jeff seethed.

"Just joking, but wouldn't you be more interested in taking up golf?"

"You think that I'd make a baseballer?"Jeff inquired with machismo indifference.

"It's just that Michael thought that you had a vague talent for it."

"He said that?"

Andrew appeared quixotic. "Kind of... I asked if you were any good and he said that you had potential."

"Potential?"

"No, no he didn't say that exactly," he replied tentatively. "He said that you had significant potential - but don't read anything too deep in that, Jeff."

Jeff tried to act indifferent to Michael's endorsement but craved to know more. "Actually, Tom and I made no fixed plans for tonight."

"Yeah, I overheard that Tom is making a career move."

Jeff glared at the ceiling with foreboding. "Yeah..."

"Then I'll be gracious enough to ask you again to come to the Equator tonight."

"Can we take your car?"

Andrew brooded. "Actually, I was taking Angie to dinner before."

"That's OK..."

"But..." Andrew racked his mind for a suggestion. "Errr... You could..."
 
 

CHAPTER 4

In the Monde Girardon Restaurant Jeff tried to get Andrew talking about Michael, but his brother's central focus was his blonde girlfriend, Angie.

"It's too bad that Michael couldn't make it for dinner tonight," Angie finally said, her ashen green eyes sparkling. "If Michael thinks he can trust you, he's a real conversationalist. Couples don't make great company."

Jeff resisted the urge to be provocative and ask exactly why and if it had anything to do with a Who? "He's probably still taking fielding from fans," Jeff remarked, before taking a sip from his glass, savoring the opportunity to broach the subject.

"I doubt it," Angie demurred.

Jeff feigned a look of disinterest, checking the crowd reflected in the mirror panels on the walls.

"Nobody seems to see a lot of him these days - not off the field anyway." Andrew confided.

"He'd be at the gym wouldn't he?" Jeff asked.

"Sometimes. He's been distracted. Something happened a while ago, and I don't think that he fully recovered." Andrew looked askance at Jeff. "I think there's somebody involved in it somewhere."

"Somebody?" Jeff asked in what he hoped was a casual tone.

"Yeah," Andrew said, glancing conspiratorially at Angie. "Well, at least that's the impression that we get."

Restlessly, Jeff looked over at a quartet on the other side of glass atrium as they began to play a piece from Symphonie Fantastique by Berlioz. Water descended down the atrium and distorted Jeff's vision of the musicians.

Andrew picked up the menu. "Did they fix your MG yet, Ang'?"

"No. Taking it to that outfit was suicidal. I should have known."

"What has Michael said to you?" Jeff probed, viewing the menu.

Angie scrutinized her Lanvin red nail polish. "It's not what he says, but he's been very remote since he came back. He didn't even go to the Foxtel celebration."

"Yeah, but he never went to the sports industry parties," Andrew vied.

"He's cagey," Angie attested. "Too preoccupied."

"He's a sports celeb." Andrew adjusted his cuffs uneasily. "I know that his privacy means a lot more to him now than before - and that explains that. But what I don't understand are other things he does."

Jeff leaned forward. "Like what?"

"In his locker there is a picture of someone - like, a guy on the back of the door. I don't know what kind of... involvement they had, but I know that something happened whilst he was living in Los Angeles over the last two years. When he came back, I collected him from the airport and he had changed. Recently he told me that he thinks a lot about someone back in the U.S."

"That guy in the picture?"

Andrew was deadpan with concern. "Someone, but I guess that you never really knew him did you, Jeff?"

"I guess I didn't."

"I'm not saying that there was anything sexual about it," Andrew frowned. "But I know that no matter what happened it had a profound hangover."

"He never talks about him does he?" Angie reflected. "I asked him about the guy when I went to the gym last week, but he said that he was focusing on the, 'here and now'. Yesterday he told me that he 'learned more than he ever wanted to know about human nature in LA'."

Andrew set his napkin down on his lap. "That's the God knows..."

What appetite Jeff had soon vanished. He pictured a publicity shot of a macho team-player type guy from the Los Angeles Jets. Maybe, there was a debacle between them - maybe over a woman. Maybe a clash of egos.

-maybe anything-

It seemed pointless to pursue blind conjecture. But, Jeff reasoned, if it was controversial why didn't Andrew mention the man in the photograph? If he were famous surely Andrew would have recognized him.

The subject was only mentioned again when Andrew insisted: "What I said about Michael can't get out, OK, Jeff?"

"I understand."

"Because if this gets to the wrong people, I'll deny that I ever knew you."

Andrew was always circumspect in respect to his friends and the fact that Angie found the issue so engaging made him even more edgy.
 
 

* * *

 Jeff reflected on the words 'I'll deny that I ever knew you' as they left the restaurant. "Angie," he said climbing into the back seat of the Porsche. "You work in the pulp magazine industry. What's the Australian version of the National Enquirer?"

Angie giggled. Andrew was volatile.
 
 

* * *

At nine they arrived at the Equator to celebrate the baseball team's end of season.

Michael would be there and Jeff suspected that if he struck up a conversation he could lure his secret from him.

However, it soon became apparent that speaking with Michael was over-ambitious. He had arrived alone, but soon his entourage of wannabes and hangers-on clung on every available side. A quiet moment to converse with him was going to be damn impossible.

Jeff stayed in the company of Andrew as he spoke to his friend, Paul. The scar along his jaw line, the deep-set eyes and the broad forehead gave Paul's face a dangerous edge.

Jeff leant back onto a perfect, airbrushed copy of Michelangelo's The Creation of Adam on the wall and concealed Adam's crotch. Personally, Jeff had always preferred ancient statues to renaissance art. Michaelangelo’s David was great, but no equal to classical erections.

"Are you going to make it to the Capricornia Islands?" Andrew inquired. "Some of the guys have already pulled out."

Paul was appalled. "What? They can't even take the end of season trip?"

"We were lucky to get sixty percent of them last year on the Gold Coast."

"Career commitments, right?"

"And women," added Andrew, pointing out a bored couple in a corner table. "Sebastian's wife Raquel is up for cosmetic surgery next week."

Paul took gulp of beer from his glass. "That's unfortunate."

"Maybe not."

"But still the tickets can be canceled."

Andrew shook his head emphatically. "Not within seven days of the flight - It was a group booking."

"Is that right? That's a waste. That really is."

Jeff was roused. "Capricornia?" he questioned Andrew. "Are the guys taking their wives?"

Andrew gave a dubious chortle. "God, no! The end of season is for the guys only. It's a sports tradition like a beer after the game, and beating up your wife."

Jeff had not been out of the country since he was nineteen and he accompanied his father to Europe. Capricornia sounded as distant and exotic as Mars.

Paul caught the glitter in Jeff's eyes. He tapped Andrew on the arm good-humoredly. "Why don't you swing it so that a ticket is transferred to Jeff's name?"

"But he's not on the team."

"You know I am interested in getting involved with the baseball team in the next season," Jeff asserted. "Capricornia is an island, right?"

"A mass of islands." Paul apprised without hyperbole.

"We're staying on the far western island of Paradiso," Andrew explained. "It's about a three hour trip by air and sea east of the Fijian island of Viti Levu. The reservation is for just over a week at a resort called The Séraaz. It's got horses and a golf course, tennis - you know... A casino."

"A casino?"

"Does that sound alright to you, Jeff?" Paul solicited.

Imagery of hot summer nights in Capricornia - however, or wherever that actually was - flooded Jeff's mind. "Yeah! Whatever!" he shouted to make himself audible over a Pink song pumping out of the sound system. "When do we leave?"

"Friday!"

"Are you going to get into the saddle again?" Andrew asked.

The intelligence lights over the dance floor swept over Jeff. "Yeah."

"You can bring a friend along if you want - there are two tickets, remember!"

Across the room Jeff observed Michael and two semi-attractive guys walking past the bar. "I don't know who I'd ask."

"What about Tom?"

"Yeah." For a moment Jeff was thrown that Andrew - not exactly a Tom devotee - would suggest him. "Tom Firelli?"

"That's right!"

"Yeah - OK!" Jeff exclaimed edgily. "That's exactly what the guy needs." He imagined Tom's high when he revealed that he was carrying two tickets to paradise.

Andrew grinned, satisfied at his efforts. They had a frequently enjoyed each other's company when they were preadolescents and maybe he missed a certain amount of that fraternal interface.

As Jeff had almost navigated his was to the bar it suddenly occurred to him that Michael Carr could be one of the cancellations. He might be too preoccupied with the gym to go. He was one of the most career oriented men around. This took the shine off the proposition altogether. If he wasn't there how would he cope with the team? He had absolutely nothing in common with them, and in his absence who knows what entanglements might ensnare Michael. If I loose contact so soon after breaking the ice, Michael would forget I ever existed, he decided. It sounded like something that Tom would say but Jeff believed it to be true.

When Jeff returned with drinks to Andrew, Michael was on the seat that he'd vacated. Inconspicuously sidling up to him Jeff overheard Michael say something like:" It'll be great to be away from the gym for a few days. My accountant's handling all the details for an audit and there's nothing I can do."

Jeff, stunned, didn't know whether he should relish the moment or go out onto the dance floor to cut loose and get off on the anticipation.

A sequence of divine scenes reeled through his mind: Palm trees crowning sultry mountain peaks: Kissing during the unending hours of dusk under vaporous skies of amber and violet: Michael riding bareback and bare-chested across the shimmering platinum sands of a foreign coast.

However, his rapture was tempered with deep fear. He'd be seeing Michael every day for a week. Would he know how to act or what to say?

He hardly had the nerve to talk to him on the roof earlier that day. What would he say to him on the trip there, or on Paradiso?

Supposing the opportunities came along?

But then again, Jeff resigned himself, they probably wouldn't.

Suddenly a hand wrenched the vodka blitzed with orange from Jeff's grip. It was Andrew doing the prizing from his musing brother.

"Thanks, Jeff! Who do you think you will take?"

"Tom... Tom," Jeff came to. "He'd be available." Even if his club owner client had scheduled him for Saturday nights.

"He'd fit in alright," Andrew acknowledged with deadpan eyes. "He's funny. Is he still a screaming - ...?"

"He's no recluse-about-town!" Jeff retorted, trying not to think of Tom in physical pursuit of Michael.

And he had to try his luck with Michael. There was simply no substitute.

Not at that moment, anyway.
 
 

CHAPTER 5

Hurriedly, Jeff maneuvered his way outside the nightclub. He had to call Tom!

He cruised down the pavement: a silhouette against blaring neon lights. Traffic was heavy and he pressed his mobile phone close to his ear.

"Outrageous!" Tom swooned after Jeff told him. "A no expenses trip to the Capricornia Islands?" Jeff heard the phone drop and Tom calling to the guy he lived with: "Steve! I'm going to Capricornia next week. Capricornia!"

When Tom picked up the phone again he was still firing off on all cylinders. "What should I take?"

"You're all the ticket needs," Jeff replied.

"We're going to the Capricornia Islands!"

"Capricornia!" Jeff mirrored his excitement. "With Michael Carr."

"Michael too? I think I'm in your dream Jeff. Is Brad going?"

"Yeah."

"Ultra-luxxxe. I think I rented this DVD."

"...Andrew told me about a guy whose picture is stuck in Michael's locker at his gym. There was something between them in America - while he lived there."

"You mean... C'mon!"

"Seriously," Jeff contended. "I don't know what it was. No one does, and if they do nobody's talking."

Tom groaned. "But whatever, Jeff. He's history - and you're Andrew's brother. Whoever that guy is - or was - he's ten thousand miles away."

"I don't know... Circumstances sometimes conspire to divide people. And he was probably some really buffed guy. If I make a loser of myself approaching him, I'll never recover - and Andrew. It'd annihilate their friendship. And it's not like I want to marry the guy..."

"Jeff, Gays deserve all the rights that straights have: First, the dream of same sex marriage. Second, the reality of a no-sex marriage.."

Jeff chortled.

"We'll see what we can do to make it easier for you, Jeff."

Jeff stepped back as two bikers, tattooed with obscenities, rocked by. "Like what?"

"I don't know right now, but give me time - Oh'm'hell the time!" Tom erupted. "I almost forgot the movie. I've got to go - it's Saturday - the first night of my insatiable millionarie trip."

"And Rio de Habeiro, again," Jeff feared inaudibly.

"What?"

"Then don't hold out on him."

"I don't intend to. Jeff... Everything is going to be super - do gays still say that? -  at Capricornia. Don't worry. We'll find you an image that Michael Carr can't refuse."

"Yeah, and make him an offer he can't accept, but you better get going, Tom."

"Don't worry about a thing."

Jeff conceded his best wishes and hung up. His hand lingered on the End button before he closed the phone. An image that Michael Carr can't refuse?

He was reminded of a conversation that he'd had with Tom over three years ago, before Michael left for his epoch in Los Angeles. Tom had told Jeff that to get Michael interested he had to make it known that he was sexually available. Tom had insisted that when Michael passed them that they hold hands, and then Tom planted a random kiss on Jeff's lips.

What would've Michael thought? He'd completely forgotten about that. God knows how (It was probably repressed traumatic memory syndrome.). It was the one and only time that he and Tom had even vaguely sexually interacted. Afterwards Tom had been very professional about it, insisting that it would get Michael thinking about his chances of doing it - if he weren't absolutely straight. "It's great PR to give a guy a visual sampler of what's on offer."

Jeff had shaken his head in disbelief. "And you think he'd be impressed by an involvement with a self-acclaimed call guy? That's sure to put me on the top of his prospective list."

"Just trust me," Tom had assured.

If Michael saw him and Tom together now he might assume that they were sexually involved - or even worse - that Jeff did tricks on the side.

Don't be too idealistic, Jeff rebuked himself.

Michael could be way out of your league - Way out.
 
 

CHAPTER 6

Four days later Jeff and Tom were in the luxurious environs of Emporio Barbizon in downtown Sydney.

"Do you really think is the kind of thing that Michael would go for?" Jeff asked. He appraised himself in a gilded, full-length mirror; his hands moved down the front of a silk, macaw blue shirt with designer slits.

"Trust me, Jeff - it's very masculine. Sesso Latino." Tom spoke surreptitiously: "That's the kind of look I go for when I'm looking to score."

"The shove your hands down my jeans protocol?"

"Rock and roll, baby - Pimp up the volume."

Jeff regretted that he had asked Tom's advice on what to wear to the Capricornia Islands. They would be leaving in two days. However, he realized that getting the right look might take some experimentation. "This isn't the kind of look that I want," Jeff said removing the shirt to reveal the hard-wrought definition of his chest.

Tom selected another silk shirt from a mobile rack in transit.

Jeff refused it - pointing out a low collared shirt with flyaway cuffs on an exhibit stand.

"It's a little sedate." Tom disdained. He pointed out a mannequin beside it. "It's a flawless combination. The suit says: 'I've got très sleek' and the transparent shirt says: 'climb aboard!' It's classic."

Jeff's expression went vacant. "Classic? Why do you say things like that?"

"Why do straight men say love when they really mean sex? Why do straight women say sex when they really mean drunk..."

Jeff's, "No," was resolute. He pulled the low collared shirt with the flyaway cuffs on quickly. "Check out the fit."

"It goes with your eyes," the sales assistant lionized. "And it was made just for your shoulders... Peeerfect - are you wearing contacts?"

"Well... sometimes. Does it suit me?"

The assistant put one hand on her hip haughtily. "St Laurent, Dior, and Tom Ford couture suits any body."

"Go for something a little more wild," Tom demanded, selecting another pair of pants and a gold studded, red leather jacket and handing it to Jeff.

"It's Alexander McQueen," the assistant informed them. "Were you ever a model?"

Jeff smirked evasively, then closed the paneled, mirror-door of the changing room.

"I've know seen his face somewhere," the assistant hissed in Tom's direction.

Jeff emerged shining like only patent leather and lacquered snakeskin boots can. Aqua light flickered over him as another waif attendant adjusted the chandelier from the second floor.

"Now, there you are!" Tom applauded, when Jeff strutted forward out and did a 180-degree.

When Jeff saw himself in the mirror his eyes gaped. "What... I look like I've got everything but the whip, halter and handcuffs."

Tom spoke in a superlative tone. "If Michael could see you now."

"It'd be: 'back away, keep smiling'."

Tom rolled his eyes. "You flatter yourself."

"Do you like it?" ventured the assistant. "It does make a bold statement."

"I don't know - is it right for my age? Is it too young or...?"

"Really,"Tom carped. "Age is really nothing in this society. Afterall, you are only as old as you look."

Jeff frowned at the mirror. "Too... Over..."

"Jeff." Tom leered over his shoulder. "You really could lose some of those working class pretensions. And with all the bourgeois hang-ups about your body. You've got to put the man in the shop window. If you don't advertise the deal - you don't shift the merchandise."

Jeff glanced down at the protrusion of his crotch. "Yeah, but this is taking the boys to Kings Cross at midnight."

"Don't be so self-critical. A lot of guys would kill to have a package like that."

The sales assistant perused and Jeff pulled the bottom of the shirt over his crotch with modesty. "Getting with guys is so natural for you, Tom. You know how to work it."

Tom shook his head with a genial smile. "Do you know what your problem is, Jeff? You just don't give yourself credit. Life's a bitch and then you become one."

Jeff walked over to another rack loaded with leather and suede jackets. He looked at the large gold cage ornamenting the store between two Louis XIV chairs. His eyes drifted out into the street bustling with people, then over towards the quay.

"Dior, Armani, Givenchy, Klein, Morrissey, Julian Moore," the sales assistant indicated behind him. "We accept credit cards: Visa, American Express, Novus, Premier Platinum, Novus, Citibank, Optima, Eurocard - but no travelers' checks."

Jeff wished he were out on the promenade where he could collect his thoughts.

Tom was only being Tom: the eternal optimist. Jeff gave little credence to his compliments - that fountain of platitudes sprang eternal. It seemed to Jeff that Tom didn't possess the same standards of dignity.

Jesus Hooker Christ, Tom had worked as a 'money never has to ask twice' escort!

Tom may have looked like something out of Vogue Men, but Jeff was skeptical that Tom knew anything beyond the business of sex.

He couldn't take his advice seriously. Jeff wanted to find someone, but he wasn't desperate to advertise the fact. Besides, Tom was aiming for this to be the most expensive - maybe nonevent - fuck of his life.
 
 

After a sequence of stores along Sydney's designer row, Castlereagh Street, they went back to the Trussard building.

At Tom's insistence, they went up to the roof where only four days before Jeff had found such a personal rapport with Michael.

Tom's eyes progressed from the city high-rises to the synthetic golf green. Only a portion of it was still there. On the previous night it had rained and the janitor must have rolled it up to prevent water from collecting underneath. The sun was again burning through the sky.

"Where's Andrew?" asked Tom, cruising back into the pool enclosure.

"I saw his car heading towards the city this morning. He went to see Angie at She. He won't be seeing her for a week and maybe he's making it up to her."

"Lucky, Angie," Tom said as he walked over and dipped his foot into the chill blue of the pool. "It's too bad you haven't had the opportunity to ask if he's got anything more on Michael's Californian fling."

"Assuming that's what it was."

"Of course." Tom eased himself down onto the edge of the pool, light shimmering over his chest and face. "I'm looking forward to a close encounter with your almost-look-a-like."

"I thought you said that you thought Andrew was 'criminally straight' with a 'beige dress sense'," Jeff humored.

"I said that?" Tom feigned innocence, while scrutinizing the Centre Point Tower through the tinted glass. He turned and took in the incredulous look on Jeff's face. "Remember when I first met him. I said I was gay and he said: 'So you're a paedophile'. And I countered  him: 'I said 'gay' not 'Catholic priest'."

Jeff suddenly realized that Tom hadn't mentioned the weekend with Nathan Russell. Something seriously bad happened. "You don't have another infatuation/slash/death wish with Andrew, Tom?"

Tom's body slipped down into the obscurity of the effervescent water. He emerged from the froth in a bout of breathless laughter. "Infatuation isn't the right word. Let's just say that I've discovered that I like his style. He makes me laugh."

"He says the same thing about you."

"Yeah, yeah," Tom begrudged. "Maybe I could get to know him."

"I don't have a Ph.D. in the bloody obvious," Jeff gasped, "but you already know him - he's straight."

"You know, Jeff, sometimes it's your family who knows you least."

"If only," Jeff exhaled.

"Don't get me wrong, I'm not going to proposition him. I like him - neo-sexually. And since we'll be spending all that time with him on the Capricornian island, I'll have got used to the straight version of Jeff Brandt." Tom grinned diabolically. "Besides you'll be jumping Michael Carr - and what am I going to do if not Brad?"

Jeff plunged into to the pool and stroked his way to the other end to cool off.

"What are you taking to Capricornia?" Tom crooned. "Did you decide?"

"My blue D&G jacket and-"

"Slick, Jeff? Not ove-dressed. Less is more."

A fatigued look befell Jeff. "More or less..._

"Is there something wrong?" Tom asked, confused. "What?"

Jeff swam back over to the Tom and pulled himself up to sit on the edge. "It's just that - well, I have to get over the Michael, self-delusion thing. I wanna forget it. I'll find a new obsession."

"You don't need another one. What is it really? You couldn't easily detox he-tox from Michael Carr."

"You know - if he's straight he'll... I'll feel like zero. Their hate can be so absolute."

"Forget the hetero-spiel, Jeff. Homosexuality is one of the crowns of creation. The bizarre fact is that half the world believes in their own misrepresentations of God and the other is innately anti-gay."

"What have I got to offer him?"

"Didn't he put his arms around you out there?"

"Professional interest," Jeff discounted it. "I haven't seen him since. He hasn't even contacted Andrew."

"Maybe his business has been overwhelming - didn't you say he had an audit?"

"Yeah, I guess so, but he's seen Andrew every day since he came back to Australia - Why would he do an hiatus now?"

Tom considered it for a moment, then something hit him. "Didn't you speak with him at the Equator last Saturday night?"

Jeff inhaled on his cigarette belligerently. "I said, 'You're the biggest talent that The East Spirits had ever had' and he said, 'You're exaggerating'. I said, 'No way,' and apart from a comment about how easily I could step in on the field as a double for Andrew there was nothing. I didn't stand a chance there with all of his friends."

Tom pulled himself up onto an iridescent inflatable chair and reclined uneasily. "Do you know how many toxins you are inhaling there? Benzene, ammonia, hydrogen cyanide, acetone. Every time you inhale on a cigarette you're getting 4000 chemicals-"

 "And some people claim that you don't get value for money anymore..." Jeff shrugged decadently.

"Every 24/364 party groupie in the Western World would want Michael, but he goes home alone, right?"

Jeff was semi-energized. "Andrew was certain and he'd know."

Tom glared. "Are you sure?"

"Yeah."

Tom threw out his arms, ipso facto. "Then he's available."

A smile sparked on Jeff's lips. He blew a stream of smoke at the ceiling. "Maybe you're right, Tom. Maybe he is."

Possibly Michael did have a pretext for avoiding him - the Capricornia Islands were only two days away anyway.

What happened there would count far more than the home game.
 
 

Back in Jeff's apartment, Tom appraised the open case on his bed. The silken, inner cover was decorated with an Italian insignia.

"Formal clothes," Tom observed curtly. "A lot of shirts and chinos but where are your bathers and T-shirts? You said you were taking your bathers. He held up the top of a double breasted jacket disparagingly. "You know the square shouldered keep back or I'll knock you out isn't the sexiest way to get a man horizontal."

"And what do you suggest?" Jeff slouched across the bed, eschewing Tom as he went on a sartorial rampage in his walk-in wardrobe.

"Take these jeans - in case you go horse riding," Tom said, throwing them out.

"To prevent saddle rash?"

"Fuck no! They're so attractive."

"If you say so..."

Tom was exasperated. "How long have you been out of the closet?"

"Almost three years."

"Well, I've been out since I was sixteen - and I know about this. You want allure and you can have it," Tom patronized. "All you have to do is to bring out your real intentions in full view, and you can do that in one major way - your clothes."

"That's so formula."

"Look - I'll prove it - What do you think my secret is with guys?"

"Being over six feet tall, muscular and claiming to give great-"

"The first thing you do is deal with the superficials," Tom cut him off, taking the compliment with maximum impact. "What you wear says it all. There is a hierarchy of beauty in the gay world. On the club floor beauty trumps money and straight world status. The gay world inverts straight pretensions."

Jeff groaned and fell back on the bed.

"I'm not joking, Jeff. You've got to outfit your inner god."

"I'd rather be something more ordinary."

"They say it's better to be a god for a day than a lamb for a million years."

"There was never a gay god."

"The Candomblé devotees in Brazil worship a gay god called Logunede - who was 'the progeny of the two male gods, Ogun and Oxoss'. Ganymede - and there was Apollo and Hyacinthus."

"And Cézanne and Van Gogh conceived Picasso," Jeff intoned facetiously.

Tom was past it. "What were you wearing on the roof when he gave the golfing feel-up?"

"Just a shirt."

"Tight?"

Reluctantly Jeff admitted, "That's right."

"There you are."

"And half a bottle of ivory-bisque foundation."

Tom appeared suspicious. "Did that really happen?"

"How embarrassment! yes."

"Then forget everything I said. What you need is advise from Baudouin - The guy wants a demi-trans."

"I wasn't acting effeminate. I don't think."

Tom frowned as he took out two silk ties and placed them on the night stand. "Maybe he never noticed. My point to begin with was that you could get a guy to give you a second look by arousing his animal - gayminal - nature. You've got to available and attainable. It's all in how you project..."

Agonized, Jeff dragged his fingers back through his hair. "Not that spiel again. I am not going to totally redefine my life and ambitions based on what another man conceivably wants. I'm just going to take what I feel comfortable in - nothing else. But you're right about one thing. I won't take any of the suits."

"Right on..."

Jeff halted Tom's hand as he grasped into the case. "But I'm not compromising on the denim jacket and the white shirt."

"Steve said about the Pacific clubs-"

"What's Steve doing now?"

"He's become haute gáy - the theater and the opera. He says there's a gay hotel - in Fiji - on the island of Arakita Adi. His boyfriend had the penile extension surgery done. There were complications."

"What?"

"Steve noticed an abnormality about Jason - so he went to see his own doctor to talk about Jason's member. The doctor told him not to worry at the moment. They'd sit on it a little while and see if anything came up."

Jeff picked up a copy of the Sydney Q Times and threw it at Tom: Pages flew in all directions.

Tom stepped back on the bottom of his jeans and there was the sound of a jagged tear.

The doorbell rang, followed by the appearance of Andrew.

Catching sight of him, Andrew noted Tom's T-shirt with the words OVERQUALIFIED PORN STAR on it, then the tear at the bottom of his jeans. "A hard night, Tom?"

Tom concealed it at his side. "... If only."

"It's good to see your face again. I've heard a lot about you."

Tom put his hands behind his head and slouched back ebulliently. "I don't deny any of it."

Andrew watched Jeff removing the jackets and pants from his case. "It looks like you're going to let yourself go on this holiday, Jeff."

"What can I do for you?"

"I was thinking that I would go up onto the roof again and take a few shots on the golf green."

"Yeah?" Jeff asked.

Andrew gave a mischievous grin. "The clubs?"

"On one condition."

"Name it."

"That you take Tom up there with you and show him how to play."

Andrew threw a 'Yeah, right' look, before a fraudulent smile developed. "Are you up for it, Tom?"

"I'm up for it. I'll try anything once."

Andrew cast an insightful look at Jeff. "Yeah, I've heard."

"You!" Tom shot at Jeff. "I don't need a publicist."

"And it's all good and if it's all true you're a real athlete," Andrew amended. "We're going to go up there now if you want to come."

"You and Michael?" Jeff looked up abruptly.

"You got it."

"I'll go up with you now," Tom decided. On his way out he took a breath spray from the top of the chest of drawers and slipped it into the case. "In the mood to swing the money maker, Jeff?"

"Sure, sure, right - I'll be up in a while."

Self-critical as ever, Jeff checked his face in the mirror: No make-up.

Jeff flexed his muscles. Turning sideways he tried to ascertain how his muscles looked most conspicuous without it being obvious that he was flexing. He found his tightest shirt and most provocative denims. He sprayed himself over with Égoïste.

He was ready to make an impression on Michael Carr...

It was time Jeff Brandt asserted himself.
 
 

CHAPTER 7

"You made it up here right on schedule." Michael sounded so psyched that Jeff was momentarily disarmed.

"Hey. How are you?" Jeff responded.

"Looking good," Tom said, sending the blood to Jeff's face. "It's hot in the city today."

"Now you're here we can play," Michael decided.

Jeff's gait quickened as he moved to Tom's side directly opposite Michael.

"Are you in good form, Tom?" Michael asked.

"No one's ever asked for a refund after the money shot."

Michael ignored the sexual overtones and practiced his swing.

Jeff withdrew a 9-iron and held it over his shoulder as if he was about to swing it like a baseball bat.

"Wrong sport," Andrew disparaged.

"That's OK," Michael voiced. "We're pretty flexible here."

Jeff shot Tom a censorious glare as if to demand, 'Don't say it!'

Grudgingly, Tom didn't.

As Andrew prepared to take his first putt he cleared his throat noisily. "Are we playing single or doubles?"

"Isn't that tennis?" Tom whispered, loudly.

Jeff ignored him. Standing face to face with Michael was distraction overload.

Andrew tapped Tom on the arm with his club. "Tom and I could be one side and-"

"Me and Jeff," Michael interjected with what Jeff hoped was fervor.

Jeff tried not to appear too hyped about the deal.

"You do know how to play don't you, Tom?" Andrew narrowed his eyes at him. "Those two are gonna bite the dust, right?"

"I've never played before and now that I am, I'd rather be on the winning side." Tom glanced over at Michael keenly. "No offense, Andy."

"Then it looks like you and me then, Jeff." Andrew declared. "Brothers have to stick together when they get that attitude."

Jeff scowled at Tom, but stifled the urge to stake his claim on Michael.

As if he perceived Jeff's disappointment Michael smiled at him. "I'll catch you on the next round."

Jeff tried to subdue performance anxiety as Andrew prepared to take the first shot.

Andrew hit the ball and sent it on a sheer trajectory: It was a hole in one. He held up his stick in a victorious 'Take that!' stance.

The next shot was Michael's: He equaled his best friend's shot with euphoria. "You now, Jeff," Michael directed.

Jeff was attracting an audience. A virtual country club of tenants stood around watching on the sidelines. He was positive that he'd bomb - hydrogen style.

"Remember what I showed you," Michael said reassuringly. "Bring the club down in the single arc motion."

Jeff sent the ball on a direct course with the hole, but it fell short by a few inches.

"Yes, OK." Tom lauded, then Michael began to clap.

"So close and no cigar," Andrew overplayed the cliché.

This barb intensified Jeff's anxiety and made him even more determined to deliver the ball to the hole in the next shot.

And he did.

Andrew turned to Michael. "The first time Jeff tried on the a 250-foot-long driving range in Glebe he was fourteen. He lost the ball in a cypress."

Jeff stepped back and turned to avoid Michael's gaze. Tom was about to tee off.

Michael stalled Tom: "You've got very developed metatarsal muscles."

"What?" Tom said, raising his sunglasses to the top of his head.

"Here." Michael stroked Tom's shoulders contemplatively. "Do you do the bench press?"

"Push-ups," Tom replied with ersatz modesty. "I try to do a hundred reps a day."

Jeff fretted as Michael said nothing, his eyes appraising Tom's body.

Tom loosened up as if he was full of sensation. He brought back the club and hit the ball so forcibly that it flew over the parapet and down into the street.

"There's another lawsuit," Michael cringed.

"I'll go down and find it," Tom said with apologetic bravura.

"Don't worry, Tom," Andrew dissuaded. "I've got some more in my flat - you'll never find it."

"Yes, I will."

Andrew watched Tom pass wearily. "I'll go down to my flat and get the spares now."

Over at the parapet, a short while later, Jeff and Michael gazed down to the street hundreds of feet below. They stood on a low, slender bench. Michael was so close that Jeff could hear his breath over the rumble of traffic: Jeff perspired all over.

"This is one of the best views over the Blue Mountains," Michael said, grasping the top of the parapet and leaning towards Jeff.

"Beautiful," Jeff replied. "When I first moved into the building there was a great view down through those oaks - to the Beresford. That white building went up about six months ago."

"Still," Michael continued, "you still have the harbor. Do you see that inlet just beyond that island?"

"Yeah."

"There's my yacht below that purple grove of jacarandas. The one with the panther on the side, with the ring of gold stars around it."

"You own it?"

Michael laughed coolly. "Virtually - in twenty more installments. I was thinking of taking it to South America later this year."

"Who are you going with?"

"Jeff, there."

Jeff's body tensed.

Michael was pointing down to the street. There was Tom holding up an invisible prize and waving it as a bus hurtled by. Jeff returned his wave then looked at Michael.

Michael remained poised as though trying to determine something.

Say that he's the reason that you wanted to go to Paradiso, Jeff thought - take the risk! Say that you want to hear all about his life in America. Just do it! Say anything provocative...

Nothing came, but Jeff's look was worth a thousand guilty explanations.

Michael started back when Andrew called his name. "What's going on down there?"

Michael spoke: "Tom found the ball down in George Street."

Andrew shook his head and drummed his fingers on the side of the door. "He's persistent. Maybe too persistent."

Tom returned soon after and during the rest of the game Jeff felt sidelined. Michael's humor was played off against Tom's quick wit and they seemed perfectly at ease together. Jeff was burning up with jealousy. His shots got worse and worse. After Jeff had delivered his third ball to the far end of the roof, Andrew insisted that Jeff's next shot terminate the game.

Right on cue, Jeff sent the back careening through the door as a girl walked out and into the pool. Tom went in and snatched it out.

"Another notch on the Michael Carr epic," Andrew conceded defeat resentfully.

"Who knew you could have so much fun with two straights and six balls," Tom murmured, stepping up from behind Jeff.

"It's even sub-everything that you expected," Jeff responded shortly, checking to see that there was a confidential distance between them and Michael.

"Pissed off?" Tom asked.

"Just making conversation."

"Listen, I've got to run, Jeff. Keep working on Mr. Universe. Invite him to your flat."

"No."

"Yes," Tom pressed. "Go for it."

"I'll come down with you."

"Because?"

"Back in a minute." Jeff waved at Michael and Andrew.

"We'll be here," Andrew replied.

Tom appeared casual, but as soon as the lift doors closed he sharply turned on Jeff.

"What are you doing?" Tom reproached breathlessly. "This is your platinum opportunity to cut loose with Michael. Justify the X in our Generation."

"And Andrew."

There was an evil spark in Tom's eyes. "You know," he connived. "Sometime you could pretend that you were Andrew and-"

"No." Jeff held out his hands adamantly. "Don't... even say it."

"Why not? Or you could go to the gym - and check it out."

"What kind of maniac do you think I am?"

Tom held out his hands despairingly.

"Michael will know!" Jeff asserted.

"How?"

"We're not getting into platitudes."

"You could see the picture in his locker?"

Jeff paused indecisively. "I could ask whe- No. Forget it."

Tom slouched back in the lift as it eased to a stop. "Alright... Just keep leading each other on."

"I'll take things in my own time."

Tom sighed with disapproval. "That's fine. But just remember what they say old crime flicks, Jeff: Never pull your gun on a man unless you are prepared to use it."
 
 

* * *

Jeff resurfaced on the roof only minutes later.

"What happened to him?" he asked, viewing Michael sans Andrew.

"Angie called to say that she was across the road at the Hyatt. He went down just after you left."

There was an awkward silence.

Michael scratched the dark stubble on his hard chin. "We should go downstairs to do the uninvited guests thing in Andrew's apartment."

Jeff concurred.

Again in the lift, Jeff laughed faintly. "Michael," he ventured, pressing 11. "I've got some chilled Staminade downstairs... errr... Why don't you come down?"

Michael elected the eighteenth floor - Andrew's. "No thanks, Jeff."

Jeff looked at the ceiling, waiting for the kiss off.

"We can still just wait in Andrew's apartment," Michael said diffidently . "We can cool off and get a drink of water there."

"Sure... Alright."

"Tom and Andrew made good team up there didn't they?"

"Team?" Jeff laughed incredulously. "I don't think Andrew would ever think of himself on Tom's team."

"Don't they like one another?"

"They're relatively alright now, but when I first met Tom at nineteen, it was really intense. It offended Andrew's straightness to know someone so 'queer' as Tom."

Jeff put in the electronic code and they stepped out of the lift into Andrew's apartment. His deco was modernity on modernity, as if the plastic had just been removed from the furniture.

"Queer, hey? That's a God awful word."

"It just goes with the lifestyle." Jeff regretted. "At least for the last thousand years and especially after the Industrial Revolution when capitalist millionaires realized that gays didn't produce child fodder for their capitalist factories."

He went into the kitchen and returned with two glasses of water.

As he handed one to Michael their hands touch and it ignited an inexplicable longing in Jeff.

"Tom's a really nice guy," Michael said. "I knew someone like that in New York - in the East Village... He lived on... 16th... He was Big Apple to the core."

All of Jeff's conjectures on the appearance of the guy in the locker converged to make an Americanized version of Tom.

Could Michael be devious enough to be using him to get to Tom? Was that insane?

He looked up from his introspection to witness the anticipation in Michael's eyes. Jeff hadn't responded to his last statement.

One moment Jeff was certain that they were going to cross some boundary and there was the sensory illusion that they were gravitating towards each other but Michael appeared suddenly as if released from a trance, or experiencing a sudden spell of false conscience.

"Who was he?" Jeff asked, relieving the tension.

"Oh, no one important. I hardly remember his name."

Michael rose and placed his empty glass on a copy of Sports Illustrated on the coffee table. He went to the window frowning as if trying to recollect a face that escaped him.

"Another glass? Perrier? Aqua San Moritz? lemonade, espresso?"

"Actually, Jeff, I've got to go and see how things are at the gym. We've hired a new trainer and I should check how he's doing."

But we're so close to it now, Jeff thought, downcast. Give it another minute...

Jeff eyes engaged Michael's with a wordless dialogue.

"If you see Andrew can you say that I've gone there?"

Jeff dared a compliment: "I'd like to photograph you sometime. Maybe we could do some shots for a calendar. I'd find a publisher."

Michael smiled. "Maybe in Capricornia, hey?" He scrutinized Jeff's face with uncertainty. "You know I think there's something different about you today."

Yeah, no make-up, Jeff thought sardonically. "I think I got some sleep last night."

"That must be it," Michael replied doubtfully. "But even with that I always thought that you looked extremely different to your brother. More than just in a younger way."

"More than a year?"

"Yes," Michael nodded. "A helluva lot more." He paused purposefully. "You know, I'm really looking forward to escaping to the Capricornia Islands."
 
 

* * *

Jeff went with Michael down in the lift and to his SL Sportster.

He then watched after him until his car turned onto Deakin Street and out of sight.
 
 

* * *

Back in his own apartment, Jeff thought about the situation with Michael; looking for clues that he wanted him. There was chemistry there, but it seemed like the alchemy of poisoned euphoria. Michael had given some substance to provoke his desire, but not enough action to justify it.

He thought about Michael and Tom and the easy exchange between them enviously. He had suspected that Tom had liked Andrew for a long time but hadn't he been openly flirtatious with Michael? Was he giving Jeff pointers on technique or simply pursuing his own sexual agenda with a man whose homosexuality was a possibility?

Jeff picked up the gold Apollo statuette that his father had bought at auction during the '80s. It was from the estate of a dead actor who'd become prominent during the 1950s, won an Academy award, went Oscar wild, and fallen into '70's obscurity. He felt a sudden emptiness. There was no substitute for a man in the flesh. It was sheer intensity and irrespective to the obstacles he had to face, he had to take a chance.

Maybe Michael would too.
 
 

CHAPTER 8

"Flight 67, Sydney to Suva, will be departing from Gate 4 in five minutes. Passengers are advised to have all boarding passes ready for inspection."

It was a 2 p.m. flight from Kingsford Smith Airport.

Tom and Jeff waited anxiously in the departure lounge for the transit corridor to open onto the airplane.

"When the hell are we going to be on our way?" Tom complained. "It's been a ten minute delay already."

A cute, but deathly conservative man in a blue suit approached them with an insipid smile. "Gentleman, do you know Jesus?"

"Huh?" Tom asked peevishly.

"Jesus?"

"Well... Not personally. Do you mean the traditional Jesus, or the contemporary gay interpretation of Jesus?"

"I mean, do you have religion?"

"Yes, the religion of Tom."

"I'm certain that's not a religion."

"Of course it is. Do you want to to go down at the altar?"

The missionary man backed off and tried to shake the image out of his head.

In abject horror he checked the terminal for an easier mark.

Hating, not seeing, is believing. Religion was never "the opium" of the masses. It might delude, but it too rarely produces a tolerance.

Tom and Jeff had stayed out past three at a nightclub the night before. It was the third showing of Baudouin's new show, Blue Angels at the Albury and they'd promised that they'd be there. The performance kicked off at 2 a.m.

What a star.
 
 

* * *

Four hours into the flight it didn't surprise Jeff when he turned to find Tom's head fallen on his shoulder, asleep. He maneuvered it back onto his headrest before it fell on his shoulder again.

Jeff could never sleep on any journey via land or air; he was always too aflame with anxiety and/or excitement.

He glanced across from the middle section to see Michael dozing lightly in a window seat. Brad - 6' 5", jet-black hair and glacial blue eyes - sat on the aisle beside him.

Jeff took the last piece of chocolate from his bar and slipped it into his mouth. He fantasized that Michael could see him watching.

Unexpectedly, Brad returned his gaze.

Jeff looked away with affected spontaneity. He put on the headphones, tuned into the in-flight movie. Listening to the dialogue of the Catherine Zeta-Jones and Rupert Everett film he closed his eyes.

"You only have one life, so why waste it here, away from him?" Rupert demanded.

Jeff totally identified.
 
 

* * *

Towards the end of the flight Jeff began to feel tired. He felt down beside him to check for the metallic case holding his photographic equipment. He hadn't trusted it to the care of the luggage loaders. Nothing was going to mar this for him. He had the three greatest people in the world with him - what could go wrong?

Feeling satisfied he adjusted the seat as far back as it would go and relaxed.

He drifted into semi-consciousness and tripped through a glittering city. He wafted through its exquisite gay bars and stores that led onward to a stadium, and as he entered the great expanse the birds of subconscious light invoked the mantra of dreams and he was gone.
 
 

* * *

"Welcome to Fiji." A smooth hand stirred Jeff and an air hostess's face glimmered down at him.

"Yeah, we're here?" Jeff managed.

She nodded sweetly, but urgently. "Do you need help to put your seat in the upright position?"

"No, that's OK."

Jeff revived Tom. "We've got to get off the plane."

Bleary-eyed, Tom stretched himself like a nubile jaguar. "About time."

"It's only been five hours," Jeff stated.

"Only!" Tom complained.

Jeff spotted Michael collecting luggage from the overhead compartment. Tom looked at Jeff then at Michael with a wondering expression. "Did anything happen while I was asleep?" Tom asked, with a crackling laugh. "Anyone join the mile high club?"

Irritated, Jeff glared. "Jeez, what were you dreaming about?"

"Why?"

"It was all Andrew, Andrew, Andrew! Take me now, never or whenever!"

"No. You heard me say that?"

Jeff nodded with faux seriousness. "And everyone was watching. It was better than the onboard movie."

He pulled himself out the seat and followed Jeff. "Yeah, right. You are so full of escapist mantasy."

Jeff laughed unreservedly. "I suspected that's what you dreamt about."

Tom was indignant. "Do you think so?" He cast an explicit glance at Michael who'd just stepped out into the aisle.

"Thank you for flying Virgin," a hostess said, her voice in neutral, as Tom and Jeff stepped out of the plane moments later.

"I've had virgins who got me there faster than this," Tom responded.

The guys bustled out of the transit corridor into the airport lounge with Jeff and Tom behind.

"You know," Jeff said, "I was asleep for about twenty minutes and I had the most intense dream about what could happen."

"Can you dream in under half'n'hour?" Tom asked doubtfully.

"Then it was a revelatory vision. We were out on a yacht and I looked to the shore and Michael was riding a black palomino, bareback. He was with someone... a dark figure - I didn't recognize him. You were looking up at me and you were..." he faded out.

"What?"

"With me," Jeff lied. He had seen Tom beneath deep waters. "It meant zero. Forget it."

Approaching the carousel to collect their luggage, they both caught sight of Michael walking between Andrew and Brad. Jeff wondered if Michael had any idea that he'd just starred in his dream and expected Tom to come right out and ask. Jeff watched Tom pull off his case. It had large rainbow colored stickers on it with the wisdom like: "GAYS SHOULD BE SCENE AND NOT HEARD (...I DON'T THINK SO)".
 
 

* * *

They took a fleet of taxis to another airstrip fifteen minutes away. They would have to catch another flight to Isfaha, the nearest island to Paradiso. The plane had a far smaller cabin than the Virgin airliner and the odor of cigarettes. The wings of freedom were marked with the name Hermes Tri. Flying, they journeyed towards a lucid horizon and Jeff contented himself to hear the other guys' conversations and offer small talk about what they saw below.
 
 

* * *

It was at the border of dusk and night when they arrived.

The plane landed near the docks where a sea cruiser, The Pacific Ecstasy, awaited them.

In the men's rest room, Jeff maneuvered a particularly unwieldly shock of hair back from over his forehead.

"Doesn't it sound remarkable to you that you saw Michael riding with a dark stranger on the sand?" Tom frowned as he ignited a black cigarette.

"It doesn't mean anything," Jeff asserted, without looking from the incandescent mirror. "I should have kept it to myself."

"Every dream has its symbolism - psychologists say it, Jeff. It points to the... the subterranean... content... of the mind. Maybe Michael was riding double with your alter ego."

Jeff scoffed. "Thank you, pink Freud."

"Or it could mean that a dark presence divides you from him. It is Freudian, Jeff : like Oedipus."

"Eat a what?" Jeff checked the zipper on his jeans, then feigned hysteria. "Fides Christiana. You mean that he is in league with sin, death and the evil deuce, Satan, dear Liza?"

Tom was about to give up. "When you sleep you dream of Michael and when you're conscious you're sublimating your desire for him in an exaggerated concern with your physical appearance."

"You're the one concerned most about my look."

"Personally, I think he knows."

Jeff drew a blank. "What?"

"You're fevered for Michael Carr."

"Did you say anything at the airport in Sydney?"

Tom grinned. "Maybe, I implied that a great experience might await him when he least expects it."

"Tom..."

"Why shouldn't you have expectations about this trip?"

"Expectations?"

"Know what you expect and you'll be ready for the real deal - 'Around the world in eighty gays'."

"You don't have to make Michael uncomfortable around me," Jeff menaced, and resumed doing his hair in the mirror.

Tom exhaled loudly. "Don't be so paranoid. I made a suggestion - and if he wants to act on it - then that's his deal."

"Remind me not to tell you about my next infatuation."

An horizontally uninhibited, middle-aged man stepped into the rest room and shrank back. He looked between them suspiciously before disappearing into a cubicle.

Tom shuddered with revulsion, and whispered to Jeff: "Not in his John Wayne Gacy-est dreams."

Jeff cast him a questioning look.

"Well, never again for cash," Tom added with a faint determination.
 
 

* * *

 Soon after the Pacific Ecstasy departed into open sea they hit complete darkness.

After an hour Jeff was enthralled by a distant speck of light on the horizon. Jeff imagined that it might be like this crossing the Styx. He and Tom sat above the deck overlooking the cruiser's stern and gradually the faint specter of land asserted itself over the Plutonian waters. Jeff didn't know if the intoxicating scent of tropical flowers was real or just his imagination. It was easy to muse that they approached the blissful Isle of the Lotus Eaters with its sublime charm already subordinating their reason to the ways of a dream realm.
 
 

CHAPTER 9

The cruiser moored at an antiquated jetty that extended fifty feet offshore.

They were received by a horde of native men wearing sarongs. Frenetically, they unloaded the luggage in the hold.

A white suited man emerged from behind them. "Bienvenue a la Ile de Paradiso," he hailed.

It seemed strange to Jeff that a Rolls Royce limousine should be parked way ahead in front of The Séraaz's entrance on this remote, otherworldly island. From the ornate doorway a pair of men in their mid-forties appeared conversing in animated French. Stepping down the black marble stairs one of them looked at the new arrivals and offered a gesture: It was somewhere between a salute and 'come-on-down'. They climbed into the limousine, raised the windows and drove off.

When Jeff had arrived outside the lobby he paused to see the rear lights dissolve into the darkness.

"What's up?" Tom asked, when he caught up to him. "You look fazed. Are you jet lagged and/or fazed?"

"Didn't you see the car?"

"What car? I was talking to Brad. Why?"

"It was this limousine - blue-black, or black, I think." Jeff was about to point. "Forget it, it's gone."

Tom walked ahead then glanced back eagerly. "Coming in or are you waiting for the elusive long black one?"

Jeff looked up at the palms surrounding the resort hotel. They must have been nearly one hundred feet high. The hotel was a predominantly stone building with masonry that was obviously by European craftsmen. Jeff imagined that it would have a bamboo roof like many of the buildings on Isfaha but (From what he could make out above the floodlights.) it was resplendent in Spanish hacienda-amber tiles. In an instant all of Jeff's visions of a land of noble savages and basic instincts were obliterated. A brilliantly colored egalla bird was perched up there. It ruffled its feathers out, like the rainbow phoenix, like a spectral explosion.

"I wonder where they hide the cameras around here," Tom said when they walked into the lobby. "I feel like we just walked into a movie."

"You said exactly the same thing when we got on the plane."

They collected their room key from the clerk. She was an attractive English girl, with a clipped accent and immaculate make-up.

"This isn't what I expected," Jeff said to Tom as they got into the elevator. "For some reason I expected it to be a lot more exotic and Third World."

"Didn't Andrew tell you? Most people who come to Paradiso are Americans, Australians, Japanese or Europeans. This is a six star island."

"Then why am I crammed into a room with you?"

"That's the extra star."

Their room was on the third floor. Michael and Andrew appeared out of the second elevator moments after. Their room was right next door. Michael hauled a case in his hand and an Asics bag slung over his shoulder.

"Hi, strangers." Tom joked after he unlocked the door. He affected the posture of a licentious black ho'. "Don't you accidentally come stumblin' into this room after midnight none, y'hear, Andrew?"

Andrew gave Jeff a good-humored laugh then looked threateningly at Tom's back when Tom turned.

Tom hit the lights inside his and Jeff's room, produced a flacon of cologne and emitted it twice. The interior was all très Corbusier: negro leather, crystalline glass and luster chrome.

"It reminds me of the rooms we had when I was in the marines," Tom reminisced seeing the two beds side by side. He laid his case on the one closest to the door. "But we never had a balcony with views like this."

"I never knew you were in the marines."

"The worst two days of my life," Tom said reflectively. "The Vice Admiral called me into his office. He asked me if I was a homosexual and I asked, 'Why, is that a basis for court martial and execution? Do you ever shoot seamen on this couch? Am I going to get a dishonorable discharge?' But he was all admiral and no vice." Tom smirked as he pulled out a T-shirt with the words I THINK OF GUYS, THEREFORE I AM on it. "Cruisy, no?"

Jeff dropped the cases where he stood. "It's just promotion, promotion, promotion with you isn't it?"

"Damn straight."

Jeff swept back the French windows and sauntered out onto the balcony.

He leaned on the ornate balustrade and inhaled the balmy night.  He could hear the cruiser that they had come on depart with those leaving the island. Night birds moved as a flock of shadows above the opulent foliage of a far gulf. A gulf that wasn't taking all of the soul out of soldiers. 

Jeff reflected on an interesting look on Michael's face just before.

Interesting because it was definitely interested.
 
 

* * *

He continued to see that look in his mind's eye as they went to dinner in the restaurant downstairs. As a photographer he found it very stimulating. It was decorated like a Parisian salon of the 19th century, all néo-Rococo and elegance. Jeff had only made eye contact with Michael once again. But that time Michael's look was not interested but penetrating.

Beneath a single sheet in bed Jeff meditated on that look as he gazed out at what was once believed to be an unreachable moon. Maybe it wasn't as intense as it seemed at the time, but so what if it was self-delusion?If he wasn't in Michael's sights, who needed sanity?
 
 

* * *

In the middle of the night, everything was darkness loaded with sensation, Jeff perceived the male body against his. He didn't have to open his eyes to know that it was Michael. Everything seemed to be in proportion to where Jeff had wanted it. Jeff could feel Michael's inches against his and the fiery fluid of transmission. Michael's tongue moved over Jeff's lips and they kissed with fierce determination.

"If we're quiet, they can't know," Michael whispered heatedly.

"Why did we have to wait?" Jeff asked.

Michael began to kiss Jeff again, moving his body with Jeff's - ecstasy mounting. "You know this is not how we're fixing the game."

"What?"

"ffeJ, gnimoc uoy erA - Are you coming, Jeff?"

A sequence of rapturous throbs from his crotch jolted Jeff back to beautiful consciousness.

There was no Michael - just Tom.

Thank God that Tom was dead to the world.

Catching his breath, Jeff lifted the sheet and saw the fluid imprint on his boxers in the faint light.

He had to take a shower.

He stepped out into the hall and closed the door quietly. He heard no sound coming from Andrew and Michael's room.
 
 

CHAPTER 10

"Au revoir! Rentree!" someone called at the pier as a yacht departed the next morning.

Jeff, down at the beach, wandered through shallow waters and out onto the expanse of white sand.

Up the azure coast there stood a high peak, similar to Sugar Loaf Mountain in Rio de Janeiro. Through a line of majestic palms was the resort and beyond it rose dramatic mountainous terrain that seemed to recede into the atmosphere. Silktails danced over the top of the bamboo shoots and Eden palms that attended the bend of the beach ahead. Further up the coast, over the other side of an inlet, he perceived cavernous black rocks and the powerful waves being atomized against them.

He looked out to the horizon: There was the faint but verdant outline of a distant island.

Something could happen in Paradiso.

He could just feel it, but...
 
 

With some deft social engineering Jeff did get close to Michael at lunch. Right next to him.

Jeff asked when he would be "Camera ready to do some layout shots," but Michael appeared to have forgotten the proposition to do a calendar featuring The Jets' star hitter.

"What photographs?" Michael asked, straight faced.

Jeff let the subject slide and Michael initiated a conversation about an exhibition of Annie Liebovitz photographs he had seen in Seattle. Jeff was entirely unfamiliar with the show. He made a few generic remarks like, "She worked at Rolling Stone for a while I hear," and they had nowhere to go.

Lunch ended with Jeff feeling awkward and out of place. He'd expected Michael to talk about sports and it had taken him off guard when he revealed himself to be more than one-dimensional.

Jeff went to Andrew's room later that day on the pretext of speaking to him. Michael had gone down to the beach to practice his pitch. Jeff fingered through several American baseball magazines like Baseball U.S.A. and Diamond Run to get a handle on the game and who the locker room photograph might be of.

Who looked like Tom? Who?

He hoped that if he picked up the terms and the names of some the main celebrities he could speak knowledgeably to Michael later. But he found it difficult to memorize more than the major American teams like The New York Mets, The Philadelphia Phillies and the Kansas City Royals. Besides it was so artificial this compelled interest. You couldn't develop anything based on some mutual knowledge of a game. He handed the magazines back to Andrew. Even if he knew every detail of pitching, fielders, shortstops, batting and umpires it wouldn't fix him in Michael's life, or set them on an out of bounds trajectory.
 
 

In the evening Jeff and Tom played a hand of punot banco and two revolutions of the French roulette wheel in the Paradiso Casino, then indulged in the spa.

They drifted out to the informal garden - jardin anglais - and Jeff was left alone among the irises, water fountains and ornamental hedgerows when Tom decided to go to the Montenapoleone Bar.

"I want to have some time to think," Jeff had insisted. "You go and be the socialite male rental."

"If I wasn't carrying all this testosterone, you wouldn't talk to me like that."

Jeff was flippant. "But ch'are Tom - ch'are!"
 
 

Jeff was half-asleep in their room when Tom stumbled back after midnight reeking of bourbon and exhibitionism. He pulled off his shoes and dropped them noisily.

Jeff wiped the blear from his eyes and looked over at him. "What did you do?"

"That Michael," Tom slurred. "He's a lot of fun - we talked for the last hour. Jeff, you know, you really should get to know that guy..."
 
 

CHAPTER 11

At midday, Sunday, they all boarded a cruiser to go out to the natural reef formations six miles off the coast

With no sight of Michael, Jeff followed Tom's lead and ended up on the lower deck. He felt like a third wheel listening to Tom's double entendres as he conversed with Brad. They passed archaic fishermen's xebecs and Jeff viewed them casting their nets with rueful curiosity.

They didn't have great riches, but hey weren't altogerther destitute. Money can't buy you happiness, and poverty can't buy you anything. 

Out in deeper waters the presence of great, natural beauty meant Jeff couldn't stay en tedium forever. He selected a canapé as a server past carrying a golden platter and sipped from an exotic blue bottle of European mineral water. Everything wasn't totally zero stimulation.

Maybe the world didn't end with Michael Carr's disappearance.

Leaving Tom and Brad, Jeff decided that it was time to explore the upper deck.

Michael quickly lurched back from the steel steps when he saw Jeff. "Come up here," Michael urged emphatically. "You won't believe this. Take a look."

A feeling of awe stole over Jeff as he went to Michael. He witnessed a mystical interplay of light through shifting clouds. It was a symphony of rays, like a Leonardo da Vinci mystique-scape. It was as if it was an aperture by which the powers of eternity descended and ascended between heaven and Earth.

"I've never seen anything so beautiful before," Jeff said impulsively. "I didn't think that was possible."

"I saw something like this once in Ibiza," Michael recalled. He noted the diminished look on Jeff's face. "But, actually, I don't think it was this amazing."

For a time they didn't seem to get any closer to these otherworldly phenomena. The transmutations of light became more intricate for a moment.

And then they were gone.

Jeff became suddenly aware that he was touching Michael: their hands held onto the railing side by side and Michael didn't withdraw it until Jeff glanced down.

"You don't have your camera?" Michael asked.

"Hell," Jeff cursed. "That would have made a great stock image."

"Maybe you'll see something like it again before we leave," Michael vied solace.

"Yeah, maybe in the mountains."

Michael looked upward into eternal aqua of the sky. "Have you ever seen a sky so big? I haven't and I've been to the Sahara."

Jeff felt unsophisticated at Michael's worldliness and his tone lowered to a self-deprecating burr. "I haven't been out of the city for years. Last night I looked out from the balcony and realized that I had forgotten what stars look like."

"Yeah," Michael concurred. "I don't think I've ever been out of a city for more than six days in all my life." He paused, transfixed by the deep blue of Jeff's eyes. So tender, so... As if he was getting too so gay Michael looked away suddenly to an albatross careering past.

Jeff tried to be urbane. "There is so much of nature that you see out here that you just don't see in cities." Jeff looked around himself casually. "I wonder where the island went?"

Sean, a friend of Andrew and Michael, walked past them and took hold of the polished steel rail. He was a husky figure, unshaven and wearing a flannel shirt.

"Hi, Michael - Andrew," he said, not looking at them.

"I'm Jeff," Jeff corrected him.

"Right!" Sean said, turning slowly. He offered his hand. "Sorry but you look like... him, side-on. After looking at the sea for the last few hours it's sort of fucked up my eyes a bit."

Jeff shook it amiably, though he secretly resented the intrusion on his time with Michael.

"The captain is taking us back to the island," Sean said with relief. "We've been out for almost two hours, and the current is picking up."

Jeff looked over the waters, the wind disheveling his hair.

"I saw you two guys looking at the sky," Sean revealed.

Michael pointed upwards. "Didn't you see the equatorial lights?"

"You two are stoned, right?"

"Just riding the waves."

"I'm feeling a bit sea-sick myself," Sean continued, shifting about queasily.

"There are sleeping quarters downstairs, you know," Michael said, sounding concerned. "Maybe you should lie down."

"I'll be alright. I'll just go down to the view deck."

"Do you want to take a look?" Michael turned to Jeff.

Jeff shrugged, lackluster.

"Andrew is down in front on the lower deck," Michael embellished.

Jeff shrugged, lackluster.
 
 

For the next hour Andrew commanded Michael's total attention. All Andrew wanted to do was talk about major league football, the Masters' golf and his new damn Porsche with the, "Double chrome plated hub caps like Michael Schumacher's Ferrari Maranello 550."

All Jeff wanted to do was cast Andrew overboard.

The End.
 
 

That night Jeff and Tom followed the beach up to the base of the eastern cliffs and saw the QEII passing in the distance.

Afterwards they went to the queen discothèque.
 
 

CHAPTER 12

The deluge of white light through the French doors woke Jeff.

He put his feet out of the bed to the floor; they still hurt from standing the entire day before. Tossing back the tousled sheet he threw a glance at Tom, who rolled over and swept some of the sheet off himself with his leg.

In only his satin CK boxers Jeff languidly opened the curtained doors and stepped out onto the balcony. An atmospheric blue obscured the headland further up the coast. It struck Jeff as both romantic and mysterious (If those concepts were ever mutually exclusive.). His lids felt heavy and he considered going back to sleep for a while, but he knew he wouldn't be able to. He was too aroused by the prospect of another day in this fantasy oasis.

Jeff sat down on the only wicker chair on the balcony and lit the day's first - and he promised himself, only - cigarette. He observed a young Capricornian man carrying two large pannier baskets on either side of a shoulder poll. Jeff assumed that he was from the village bakery on the other side of the Island. It was just like something out of the pages of National Geographic. Reality, however, had a vibrancy that titillated the senses like no photograph could.

"Jeff did you open that door?" whined Tom, as he stirred, blinking the sun out of his eyes.

Michael went in and stood over him. "Time to shift it, mover and faker."

Tom's forearm shielded his eyes. "It's still night."

"The sun is way up."

"The dawn doesn't count. I don't crawl out of bed at dawn."

"I'll wait. What time do you get up?"

"When I went to bed at four I get up about... whenever."

Jeff plucked Tom's T-shirt from the floor and tossed it. It fell over his face. "You won't get any breakfast."

"I'm not hungry," Tom moaned, and cast the shirt off. "I am starving for unconsciousness."

"OK, but I'm ready to go down."

"Yes you do that and if you ask Michael nicely - maybe he'll unz-" Tom , to all appearances, fell back into the embrace of winged Somnus.

From his wardrobe Jeff produced a pair of jeans and buttoned up a black suede shirt, and stepped out of the room.

The hall was redolent with the scent of disinfectant and polishes: the aftermath of cleaners on the red-eye shift.

He turned a corner onto the hall lined with gilded mirrors that lead to the bathroom. Coming down the hall in the opposite direction was Michael. His dark hair gleamed, fresh from the shower. Jeff looked out the window to avoid Michael's gaze whilst trying to monitor Michael's expressions when he caught sight of him.

"Hi, Jeff," Michael said inscrutably.

"Morning" Jeff replied. "I didn't expect to see anyone else up this early."

Michael looked down at his black, silk dressing gown ruefully. "Neither did I. Not after last night."

Jeff laughed, nervously at the same time as Michael did. It was odd to him that Michael would be critical about his appearance. Jeff thought that was his lone prerogative. "I didn't hang around with the rest of the guys."

"Yeah, I noticed," Michael said.

"Is the water hot? I'm just about to take a shower."

"Yeah, 24 hours. You look like you've already taken one," Michael remarked, looking at Jeff's shirt. "Are you always so night first thing in the morning?"

"I guess that we are more alike than we realized." Jeff looked behind Michael to the open bathroom door. "I'd better get it over and done with before everyone gets up." He moved in its direction.

"Jeff," Michael halted him. His face had a captivating luminescence. "Are you going down to the dining room for breakfast after you finish in there?"

"Yeah, breakfast," Jeff said thoughtfully. "Straight after I think."

"We could walk down together." He put his hands in his pockets, pulling the top of the dressing gown open revealing his chest. "I only have to get dressed and we could go down together."

"Yeah..." Jeff said buoyantly. He deepened his voice: "That would be great."

"I'll be back in the room."

Michael turned and soon disappeared around the corner. Jeff lingered where he was, thinking about how he could most quickly get the shower over with. He forgot to lock the door, turned on the water and stripped down in a second.

He still had some froth of soap on him when he cut the shower and began toweling off. He looked at himself in the mirror. He brushed his teeth, then took a paper cup and gargled some of the mouthwash in the medicine cabinet. He screwed up the cup and tossed it into the bin and realized that he'd forgotten his comb. He began to shave and noticed how tired he looked. He consoled himself that is was just travel anxiety. Travel anxiety.
 
 

Exactly five minutes after speaking with Michael, Jeff tapped on his door. There was no sign of him - only Andrew. Jeff marveled that he would go all the way to the Capricornia Islands to watch the Australian Morning Show via satellite.

"Has Michael gone downstairs?" Jeff asked in a faded voice.

"No idea," Andrew exhaled, stretching. "He was just here twenty seconds ago. Maybe he went running on the beach."

"There you are Jeff, I just took some stuff to the laundry chute."

Jeff looked around to see Michael on a direct course for him.

"I'm starving," Michael surged. "I hope that you've got an appetite today."

"I think so."

"You don't want to lose that six-pack."

They took the stairs down instead of the elevator walking out of step.

The restaurant was aromatic with alluring culinary scents.

When the maître d'hôtel directed them to their reserved section, Jeff was so close to Michael again, that he felt himself beginning to sweat. He avoided Michael's eyes and concentrated on the chinking cutlery being laid by a native waiter. They sat in full sight of a pond out in the gardens. Matissean goldfish swam under the lotus blooms and Oriental moutan that wreathed the pavilion.

Jeff watched his orange juice being poured and the waiter looked at him in an attitude of mirth. "Ni sy yandra," he beamed good morning. "You are from Australia?"

"Yes," Jeff deadpanned, wondering what he had just said.

"Are you going to be here very long?"

"Yeah, we're here for a week - another five days, anyway."

The waiter held the juice bottle to his chest. "I like Australia - it is liber-eel."

Jeff shot a doubtful look in Michael's direction.

"It's not liberal because it's too Liberal, zeig heil!" Jeff said jokingly. "It can be like Alberta, Tennessee and Yorkshire on a continental scale sometimes. Ironically, Western Australia has the most enlightened gay laws in Australia."

"I've never heard of that place," the waiter said, transfixed by Jeff's words.

"The South West of the state with its wines and forests - around Manjimup -  is relatively OK. Sydney is-"

"The Gay Mardi Gras in Sydney is a lot of fun like the San Francisco Pride parade," asserted the waiter.

"Yeah," Jeff said, taken aback. "The Gras is one of my favorite times of year."

"After you finish your breakfast - why don't you go up to the estate?" The waiter pointed up the mountainous incline to an elegant, villa style mansion about three miles away. It seemed to have a façade of white marble with tall windows and statuary at the edges of the Palladian roof. An extraordinarily high stairway descended down to an avenue lined with Mojave and royal palms.

"Monsieur Vendomé saw you two days ago," the waiter informed them in a obsequious way. "Maybe you would like to meet-"

"Miteron!"

At the sound of his name, the waiter became flushed and began to scurry away. "Enjoy your breakfast," he said, making a petite bow before disappearing through the swinging silver doors of the kitchen backwards.

Jeff turned to Michael nonplussed. "I wonder why he'd suggest that?"

"The Mardi Gras?"

"No, going up there." Jeff scrutinized the distant villa. Behind it, he noted the vast tropical forest that receded into the celestial horizon.

"Maybe the owner of the island lives there."

"Someone owns this?" Jeff asked, incredulous.

"All of the Capricornia Islands are owned. When Capricornia declared itself a republic in the early '70s a lot of the old European families retained holdings on the smaller islands after the British gave them their independence. The doorman said about it yesterday. This island was bought by a French family almost two hundred years ago."

"Wow..." Jeff went into a state of reverie: "Your own island..."

"They have to contribute taxes to the nation and that's why they open them to the tourist trade."

Miteron appeared again as he brought out baskets of croissants. "You should go and see Monsieur Vendomé," he hurriedly completed the sentence he'd begun before he was summoned.

Jeff smiled in a genial, but noncommittal kind of way.

Michael finished his orange juice, then spoke. "The owner must hide out up there when the tourists come."

They both looked up as Andrew and Brad sat down beside them. Tom arrived not long after them. Michael's eyes lit up when Tom spoke: "See Jeff I am up now, alright?" Tom looked at Andrew, then focused on Michael. "How did you sleep on your second night on paradise - I mean - 'Paradiso'?"

"Great," Andrew replied, "but when Brad and I got up last night and went down to the beach to swim we got locked out."

"You're joking?" Michael gasped.

"No. We had to call the night watchman, and I lost my pants in the dark somewhere down there."

"Or someone or something took them," Michael said with facetious gravity.

A few moments before, Michael had been so subdued with Jeff. His excited conversation now suggested that he was in more exciting company. Jeff feigned joviality and thought hard on how to launch himself into the conversation. He was distracted by Tom's transparent laughter at everything Michael said. He contemplated Tom's motives and anticipated betrayal.

"Did you encounter any wild animals last night?" Michael brought Jeff back in.

Jeff glanced at Tom: "I sleep with one eye open."

"He was fit to be roped down," Tom retorted.

Jeff held out his hands with resignation. "But I wasn't into it so he just gave up."

"OOOK..." Michael drawled, looking in Tom's direction, with what first appeared to be surprise. His eyes softened, making him look adorably boyish.

Why is he looking at Tom? Jeff grudged. I made the joke. He tried to be indifferent. Just because a guy asks you to walk down with him - that doesn't mean anything. Michael didn't invite you here to the Capricornia Islands. It was an accident of circumstance.

Michael shot Jeff another one of his fleeting but penetrating looks. "What's everyone doing today?"

"Are you going to come with us to the estate over there?" Brad asked Andrew." He pointed to the distant mansion. "We're going riding."

Andrew squinted at it and half-sneered. "Is that where the horse stables are?"

"Yeah," Brad replied.

"I was thinking of doing the scuba diving. What about that?" Tom solicited in Jeff's direction.

"That's what I was thinking of doing," Andrew deadpanned, applying the napkin to his lips. "I saw a limousine, going up to the villa yesterday. It looks a little too, too..." He sought the precise word.

"Exclusive?" Jeff suggested.

"No..."

Brad's lip curled. "Hoity-toity?"

"That's the one."

"The waiter mentioned that we should go up there after breakfast," Jeff said authoritatively.

Michael dropped his cutlery on the plate. "So, are you up for that?" he asked Jeff.

"Yeah, I'd like to do that." Jeff nervously drained the last from his coffee and stood up.

"Then let's blow this resort restaurant," Michael suggested with inspiration.

Jeff paused. "That's if everyone who's going is ready?"

"Actually," Brad pondered, seeing a waiter delivering a martini two tables across. "I'll take the dive too."
 
 

CHAPTER 13

Michael and Jeff were driven up to the mansion by one of the hotel drivers.

They got out at the base of the portal stairway.

The waiter they'd seen earlier was closing the doors at the back of his Jeep Cherokee. "You I see, curiosity got the better of," he chortled, then picked up the crate of wine on the gold inlaid marble. "As you have heard I am Miteron."

They followed Miteron up the stairway and then watched him going into the sumptuous environs of the villa. "Monsieur Fontaigne. Allez!" Miteron shouted dramatically. "Les jeunes hommes de l'hôtel!"

Michael turned to Jeff who shrugged, bewildered.

A tall, sophisticated figure with incandescent green eyes acknowledged them. "Welcome - come in, come in Jeff and Michael. I am Francois du Fontaigne. Thank you Miteron. I'll see you again this evening I expect."

Miteron gave Francois du Fontaigne a half-salute and Jeff couldn't tell whether it was out of mockery or custom.

Although Francois seemed a very decent sort of man in his fitted suit of gray serge, Jeff suspected that he'd been watching them and wondered why.

Francois led them through the house, remarking on the historical significance of this Meissen vase and that Aubusson carpet, and Jeff was overwhelmed by its opulence. It was like a sumptuous cosmos enacted in the tromp-l'œil of a rococo fantasia. Brocaded damask drapes. Ormolu and water gilded furniture. Phenomenally intricate AAA-zircon replica chandeliers. The copies of ancient Greek and Roman statuary emerged like a profusion of ancien régime eroticism.

In his antiquated English Francois revealed: "I had seen you yesterday arriving back from the Reef Tour and wondered if you would be so kind as to exchange the resort accommodation to become guests in the villa?"

There was something decidedly Gothic in the way he said it and Jeff's first reaction was to accept, when all of his instincts demanded that they refuse.

"This is a beautiful oasis," Michael laughed, his eyes traveling over paintings in baroque frames and sculpted stucco on the ceiling. He placed his fingers on a pile of Elton John, Led Zeppelin, Marc Bolan, Bob Dylan, Amii Stewart, Edith Piaf and opera CDs. Jeff picked up the Pavarotti LP leaning on the damask beside them.

Francois grinned. “I never liked Pavarotti, but I wouldn’t say that I preferred the operatic hysterics of a great, bygone diva."

 "That would be callous,”a man's voice resounded from upstairs.

"Do you live here only during summer?" Jeff asked.

"I've lived here ever since I left Paris. I came and we couldn't bear to leave it - not for more than a weekend. Our resort is only available during the summer. People would like to come but a limited number of people could not finance the high standards which we attain."

"Right... I didn't expect so many people to be at the resort," Jeff said, eyes still roving.

Francois released his hands in a flamboyant gesture. "No? But you would not consider staying on the estate?"

"Here really? I thought you were joking," Jeff lied.

"If I called Miteron he'd collect your luggage from the resort right away."

Michael was thrown. "That's very kind, but we're actually comfortable with the rest of the guys down at the hotel."

Francois du Fontaigne pursed his faint lips dejectedly. "I apologize. I thought that Miteron might have said something to that effect."

"Paradiso seems to be a very inviting place," Michael observed.

"Yes."

"We were really interested in maybe going horseback riding?" Jeff asked opportunely.

"Can we see the stables?" Michael added.

"We were given the impression that you had some geldings that we could take up into the mountains," Jeff continued.

A diminished, thwarted look traversed Francois' face, but then he seemed to smile compliantly. "Yes, we have some divine horses." He clapped his hands twice. "Jacques we are going to the stables, can you come down?"

"Oui, Francois," a voice from upstairs resounded through the halls. Its owner glided down the semicircular stairway. He wore a red, felt jacket over black silk pants. He appeared to be about the same age as Francois, but with fair brown hair and inquisitive Nordic blue eyes. He looked like a forty-something Paul Newman.

"Salut! Salut!" he shook each of their hands.

"Jeff. Michael. This is... my... assistant - Jacques Revaul."

"You live here together?" Jeff questioned.

"Together. Do you want to go to the stables?" Francois replied.

Francois and Jacques led them out into a high walled sanctuary. The sound of running water was ubiquitous. Jeff noted two sculpted fountains and a natural stream that descended through glittering blackstone from the mountains.

"It must be a great pleasure to own such a beautiful home," Michael remarked.

"Fortunate guests, rather," Francois corrected with a modest laugh. "Arnaud Vendomé is the owner of the estate. Once he used to stay here during the European autumn and winter, but now simply winter. Now, he prefers 'multucultural Europe' - or, as he calls it: 'the decline and fall of the European empires'."

The scent of hay filled Jeff with nostalgia. He recalled the last time he had smelt it about two years ago before his father's property was sold.

"The last contact I had with Arnaud," Francois continued, "he'd been involved in a failed business deal with Donald Trump and Hugh Heffner. Heffner, apparently, still owed him a seven figure sum."

"Really? What were their names?"

The stables were already open and the large aisle down its length was concrete in stark contrast to the earthen floors on which the horses stood. As they passed each stall a horse walked towards them in an expectant manner.

Francois called the name, "Mischka!" and a light auburn horse extended its splendent head over the stall door. "Mischka has a wonderful spirit. She's a very personable horse. Please Jacques." He motioned at the stable hand. "Bring her out. Allow them to look."

Jacques unlocked the door and put a halter on the mare. The horse shook her head and neighed rashly before briskly stepping out of her enclosure. She stood with her tail flicking as they looked her over.

Jacques picked up a saddle. Mischka began to tap each of her front hoofs in sequence. Jacques laughed. "She thinks that she's going out."

Jeff noted the horse's phosphorescent silver eyes.

"Très exotique," Jacques raved.

The horse's ears flailed.

"Where is Marrakesh?" Francois asked, returning from an empty stall.

"I will get him in a moment." replied Jacques, removing a bucket full of hoof picks, combs and Ellery brushes. "He's..." he struggled for the English words. "Au soleil. Dehors pour une heure plus ou moins."

"Outside for a while?" Francois translated.

"Oui."

"What is this one called?" Jeff pointed to a stallion with a lustrous coat of café-au-lait.

Francois spoke with consummate pride. "London."

"And the others?"

"C'est Artemisia, c'est Rege, c'est Belladonna, Charger et Bijou," Jacques continued down the full extent of the stable.

After each, Jeff's eyes returned to the firm bodied London. It returned his gaze and flicked its mane to counter the discomfort of the heat.

At the end of the stable after all eleven horses had been introduced, Jeff went back approaching London's stall again. The horse advanced towards him sniffing at his hand and Jeff stroked the satin-like smoothness of its neck. "This really is a fabulous horse."

London advanced its head to Jeff's face.

"Who can go past an Arabian?" said Francois. "Beautiful forms, but always watch out, if you give it too much liberté. They are infamously temperamental."

"Does he ever jolt?"

"No not in memory," Francois deliberated. "But he prefers an experienced handler."

"Az we all do," Jacques muttered.

"Then, I think that London is the horse that I want - if that's OK with you Francois?"

"That is 'OK'."

Jacques took down a halter from another copper hook, and picked out a pair of chaps from the closet. He handed them to Jeff but as Jeff was about to put them on Jacques rebuffed him. "Stand straight, I only tighten the straps over your entrejambes - Jeans."

Jeff looked down at Jacques and noticed that Michael was gazing at his crotch. He looked at him and he averted his eyes immediately.

"What horse will you have Michael?" Francois asked.

Michael seemed apprehensive at the prospect of selecting a horse from such an immaculate field. He took a cowboy hat down from off the top of a polished cabinet between two of the stalls. He placed it on top of his head. "I'll take the black one there."

"Have you ever ridden before?" Francois inquired testily.

"Never."

"Then you'd better not take Charger. I'll bring Marrakesh in."

Jacques heaved a saddle over London's back and did up the cinch buckle underneath, then turned, ready to assist Jeff to mount.

"It's OK, Jacques I've done this before." Jeff placed his foot in the stirrup and ascended, in one clean motion.

Michael looked on, full of admiration. "I don't think that I'll ever be able to do that."

For the first time Jeff felt a sense of equality with Michael Carr. Unbelievably, he could do something Michael Carr couldn't. This was a significant development.

When Francois brought in Marrakesh, Jacques saddled him, but Michael refused the chaps. With trepidation he stepped up to the horse. With his brow furrowed, he made a motion with his foot towards the stirrup, but fell short.

Francois opted for a demonstration. "You place your heel over the tooth of the stirrup, take the handle on the saddle and swing your foot over like this. Press down on the pommel like this... Don't be petite, it'll take your weight." He took a step back. "Now you, Monsieur."

At first Michael's foot slipped in the stirrup, but Michael collected himself and shakily rose.

He lost his footing and crashed down.

Michael held up his hand arrestingly. "That's OK Francois, I'll get it."

Michael's tanned face took on a shade of red with the effort as he rose and settled into the saddle, jerkily reclaiming his balance.

Jacques hooked one guide rope to Marrakesh's halter and another one to London's. The tassels swung under Jacques' firm grasp as he led them out, remarking, "Aujourd'hui les chevaux sont dans la forme excellente."

After opening the set of arched, empire gates at the end of the enclosure Francois mounted his own horse, a white palomino called Bijou. He led them to the base of a trail leading up into the mountains.

"Francois, wait!" Jeff exclaimed. "There's another Jeep coming."

When it drew closer they could see Tom waving frenetically to delay them.

Whilst they waited for him to arrive Jeff explained to Francois who Tom was.

"Bon jour," Francois welcomed him.

"I changed my mind," Tom declared, alighting from the vehicle. "Is there another horse?"

"Vinaka, vinaka," Francois thanked the driver. "Please return to the hotel. I will call you later."

"I didn't think you could ride," Jeff said.

"jEFF, I can ride," Tom rebuffed. "I've seen a western movie or two."

Francois looked at Tom from behind and pouted airily.

Tom turned. "Is there another horse Mr. French? I'll take anything that's available."

"I dare say," Francois smirked at Jeff. He clapped sharply and Jacques appeared again. "Please, Jacques saddle Artemisia."

"Where do I get the outfit?" Tom remarked, with his eyes fixed on Jeff's chaps. "You look so, so... queer. Dead straight."

Jeff grinned slyly. "He's got a unique way with words doesn't he?"

"A well practiced tongue," Tom alleged, then looked at Jeff awaiting the snide retort.

He got nothing.
 
 

* * *

In equestrian threads, Tom was a cowboy in Gucci boots.

Francois and Jacques gave profuse assistance getting him on Artemisia, a chestnut Barbary.

"It isn't as easy as it looks," Tom admitted, when he was finally at full mast.

"Now we can at last depart," Francois announced, catching his breath.

He led the way towards the northern trail. At the fringes of the estate manicured lawns gave way to the majestic splendor of the tropical forest. They moved under a canopy of palms and Eden vines hearing the sounds of tropical birds taking to the wing. In the air were hung the scents of kava and opium. The sun was rising to its noon zenith and the heat swelled around them like some gentle inebriation.

"If you please we are going to ride through the forest," Francois called back.

Tom rode ahead abreast of Francois while Jeff and Michael trailed them in silence.

Jeff squinted up at the sun and then glanced checkily at Michael. The effect of the light momentarily blinded him and he couldn't discern the expression on Michael's face.

His gaze drifted over the voluminous foliage through the shaded regions beyond the path. He inhaled the sweet scent of distant mango and banana trees, growing in wild groves.

Ahead Francois laughed vigorously at something that Tom had said.

"How did you ever get to be such a great rider?" Michael asked, as his horse drew closer to Jeff. He glanced ahead at Tom and Francois. A gentle wind from the western shore lifted Michael's fringe and swept it back.

"When we were kids our Dad had a property in Orange," Jeff explained. "We had a few stud horses there, and we used to ride sometimes. For a first timer you're doing sans souci."

"Do you ever get used to this?"

"You will after a couple of times."

Unsteadily, Michael glared down at the horse, as it double stepped over a branch. "If I survive the first."

"If you can survive a professional sports career you'll make it."

The trail led out into a clearing, and they could see cliffs like honeycomb on the other side of the cavernous inlet. On the shimmering black rocks at the base of the cliff a noisy assembly of frigate birds touched down.

Jeff focussed on the backs of Tom and Francois; they were talking about the political tensions between the natives and Indian population on a distant island. Jeff hoped that Michael would strike up a conversation soon.

"I want you to see a panorama of the east side of Paradiso," Francois called back.

They quickly assumed a trotting pace as they began to ascend again into denser forest.

They fell into single file.

They journeyed through miles of luxuriant but capricious terrain. Jeff was riding behind all of them, and watched Tom's swaggering poise on the horse. He suddenly felt acutely conscious of how well proportioned Tom appeared, with those pronounced shoulders and thin waist.

Why didn't Jeff work out more? If he did, he'd have never felt that way. He wondered if Michael was noticing the facts of Tom's physique.

Jeff applied his heels to the horse's flank and picked up speed to pass Michael, then Tom.

"OK, if I canter with you for a while?" he asked Francois.

Observing the trail widening ahead he nodded at Jeff. "Of course but hold back the reigns. London was recently a race-horse and if he might get away with you."

"Is there far to go to the top?"

Francois pointed fleetingly at the palatial rock formations looming ahead. "That's the top. They call them the Stairway of the Gods."

"They?'"

Francois appeared wistful, then chortled. "The natives... Arnaud, Jacques and I."

"I see. The select few, huh?

"After the missionaries came the natives called it Idgarraj."

"What does it mean?"

"Angels' Lair."

Jeff reasoned that the peak was 400 hundred meters away at the most. Excited by the nearness and desiring to gain Michael's attention he pulled his feet back and outward, and let the reins loosen. He quickly sped ahead at a flying canter bordering on a gallop. After a short distance, London's pace was brisk but measured. He was in good form and he slid back with a comfortable bearing in the saddle.

As he arrived at the plateau of the mountain top, he slowed the horse to a cautious trot. Except for one or two tree ferns there was nothing before him. He paused and the sounds of the sea and the sea birds combined to give a sense of tranquillity.

The horse was static except for its tail, flaring out with agitation. Beads of sweat glistened around its jaw.

A breath-taking view of the coast and the eternal Pacific lay over the cliffs. He wanted the others to be there, to share it, but looking back down the trail there was no sign of them.

Ice trickled down his back as he speculated on what might have happened to the guys. Had they taken the wrong way?

Or did he?

He looked at the cliffs close by and it was similar to the one they'd seen before. Only a sea eagle was there...

He hoped that it wasn't too far from the earlier one. But how could it be? He was now on the other side of the island.

Everywhere behind him was surrounded by the tops of palm trees and lianas. He couldn't see anything inland.

He did a reversal on the horse and galloped back down to the place where he'd last seen the guys.

There was no one in sight.

A single heart beat shot through him like lightning. There was still no way he wanted to be abandoned there. The trails through these mountains were a labyrinth, and it was hot with no source of water for the horse. Jeff drew a deep breath trying to suppress panic. He assured himself that the island was no more than seven miles long at its furthest extent. The hotel or the estate couldn't be more than three or four miles away.

He stood and noticed for the first time that there were three trails ahead of him. He was sure that he'd taken the left one - or was it the middle? The foliage that surrounded each seemed remarkably similar.

"Jeff!"

He felt relieved as Michael approached.

Marrakesh suddenly reeled. "Woaw! Woooaw one time!" Michael implored, as he sought to recover his equilibrium. "We thought we lost you over the cliffs."

"Where's Francois and Tom?"

"Up there. Why did you take-off from us?"

Jeff didn't feel compelled to offer any apology.

"The guys have gone up the middle trail," Michael admonished him. "We assumed that you had too."

"How about that? I just wanted to feel some speed."

Michael bristled. "Are you always so insane?"

"The horse got away with me."

"Or you got away with the horse thinking you'd make a coup by getting there first."

"Maybe."

Michael squared him up irritably. "I thought that you were the level headed one - not Andrew."

"Another day, another fact of life."

"A smart ass just like your brother."

Jeff sauntered past him onto the right trail. "Do you wish that I was him right now?"

"No. I wish that he wasn't you right now," Michael fumed, under his breath as he picked up the pace and rode off towards the sky.

At the top of an even higher peak he saw Tom standing as Francois circled him on Bijou. "The secret is to keep your toes pointed outwards and you rock with the movements of the hind legs," Francois directed Tom. "Restrain the reigns behind the head and..." He broke off as he saw Michael draw near, with Jeff in his stead. "Jeff, I suspected that you'd gone back to the hotel."

"We couldn't find a single piece of you down there." Tom motioned over the cliff risibly.

Jeff searched for the pinnacle, from which he had come but couldn't find it. He looked with awe at the Stairway of the Gods just beyond where they stood. They stood like pilasters of rock surrounded by great gulfs of sea.

Jeff turned and saw the faint blue of the ocean back on the resort side of the island. Michael kept his critical eyes fixed on Jeff. Jeff threw a defensive glare back at him.

"At least I got the minutes to teach Tom some technique," Francois defused the situation.

Jeff alighted from his horse and gave the straps to Francois. He walked over to the edge.

Tom picked up a jagged piece of bloodstone and tossed it down into the crashing sea. "Imagine falling down there."

"Don't even say it," Michael said somberly.

"Maybe we should head back," Francois suggested. "Tom, are you alright?"

"It's getting easier and easier," Tom said unconvincingly. He contemplated remounting, then decided to simply walk the horse down the descending trail.

Francois grinned. "It's good you came with us Tom. You'll be doing the rodeo circuit soon."

"Don't you know it!"

"You won't be a white knuckle rider forever," Francois assured him.

Jeff laughed, but his mirth abated as Michael moved closer behind him. Jeff felt his intense gaze burning through him.

Did Michael think he was about to take-off and get lost again?

Michael waited as Tom seized the pommel between his hands and desperately straddled the horse. Jeff cast back a glance. It meant nothing when Tom and Michael rode abreast and made conversation, he decided. After all, they'd never ridden a horse before. They were just exchanging observations on the first experience. Nothing else.

They followed a different trail that headed downward towards the east. Overhead, shade was sparse and the horses began to kick up dust behind them. They crossed a small river in the valley over to an expanse of coconut palms. The road cut through an abandoned orchard.

Francois dropped back when Michael and Tom passed Jeff. "You lead the way Tom: Straight on. You're riding superbly."

"When you become accustomed to a horse's temperament, it's a lot of fun isn't it?" Francois asked sidelong to Jeff. He stroked Bijou's mane with the back of his fingers. "It's good for the horses to be out. They usually only leave the stables when Jacques or I take them out. Monsieur Vendomé doesn't ride them any longer. He has a stable in Provence."

Jeff looked at him speculatively. "I guess that you and Jacques are good friends?"

"Friends?" Francois' head fell back. "You're a lot more naïve than you look."

"I don't see..."

"We have been more than friends for almost twenty years."

"I assumed that perhaps you and Monsieur Vendomé-"

"Arnaud?" Francois was disarmed by the mere suggestion. "He doesn't just own Paradiso, he's an island unto himself. He is one of us but his family back in Paris were so Catholic He doesn’t even acknowledge the existence of lesbians. He finds lesbian sows to be dreadful bores...."

"Doesn't Jacques and you bother him?"

"Bother him. No! He needs to have couples around him. I expect that's why he asked you and Michael to stay in the mansion. It's..." He struggled for the word. "What is the English? - Vicarious?

Jeff frowned, seriously disturbed.

"Don't look so worried, Jeff. His interest was not something perverse. You are beautiful men so why shouldn't you stay in a beautiful villa?"

"You and Jacques must have been very happy here."

"We made a life exiled to Paradiso."

Jeff turned away, not wanting Francois to see the hankering in his eyes. "I'd stay here forever in that mansion too if I had the right... person."

"Would you?"

The trail was again surrounded by abundant, sultry wilderness.

"You came here with Monsieur Vendomé? I mean you and Jacques?"

A nostalgic glint came into Francois' eyes. "I didn't even know Jacques. I came here with a friend for a vacation. I met him at the Hotel Paradiso - as it was called then. One day Monsieur Vendomé invited us to stay in the mansion. It is ironic that you should mention it. You know, Jacques and I were thinking of returning to Europe..."

Jeff looked out over the sea dreamily. "It might have been nice to stay in the mansion."

"Yes, and it would have given me more room in the hotel," Tom interjected as he slowed his horse back to London's gait. "Then again, staying in a vast mansion, Jeff? I kind of got the impression that you didn't mind the close quarters."

Jeff stared censoriously. "Where did you get that?"

Tom shot a glance ahead at Michael and coughed back laughter. "I don't know - I just don't know."

The estate came into sight again. Tom galloped back to Michael. They began to talk about the first game that Michael played in America. The distant sound of Monsieur Vendomé's helicopter reminded him of it for some reason.

Jeff turned back to Francois. "They get along so well. I wonder if Michael had asked Andrew to suggest that Tom take the extra ticket?"

Francois appeared nonplussed and Jeff dished.

"Have they known each other for long?" Francois asked.

Jeff spoke in a confidential whisper. "That's what I don't get. Something's changed between Tom and Michael - I know that sounds paranoid."

"Michael said insulting things about Tom? I see..."

"Well, no... Not exactly," Jeff replied indecisively. "It was more about gestures... or..."

"Just after you disappeared ahead of us I spoke to Michael," Francois disclosed. "He said that he didn't know either of you too well." He raised his brow. "But he said that he'd like to."

"Who? Tom or me?"

Francois' features creased in thought. "I don't know. No, but what will you ever get if you don't persist? They say in France,  'À tout bonheur, malheur est bon'." [All misfortunes serve a useful purpose.]

"All's fair in love and war?" Jeff assumed.

"Something of that essence."

"But Tom's so cool with guys."

Francois gave one of those full subtly contemptuous laughs that come so easily to the French. "We never know ourselves as well as others do."

"You can't have unreal expectations when there is so much available out there. If I was Michael I'd want Tom."

"That is irony," Francois grimaced. "When we lost you Michael was stunned. Tom was precisely the last thing on his mind."

"He's only thinking of how my brother Andrew would react."

Francois sighed with resignation. "Nowadays, in a world where bad boys are going for cheap, and the good boys are going for anything - How can a man so handsome be so tainted with innocence?"

Jeff shirked the compliment with a 'That's insane' laugh and they rode back into the grounds of the estate in virtual silence.
 
 

* * *

They all applauded when Jeff cleared the rivulet in one vault on London.

After they dismounted in the riding circle, Francois quickly left them to welcome Monsieur Vendomé back. They were invited to meet Arnaud Vendomé but they politely declined. Jeff craved to be alone with Michael more than Beaujolais, oysters or Iranian caviar. His hedonism craved something more explicit than sublimation in the hauteur of foreign delicacies.

Jacques called the hotel and a native assistant called Asclepius came to gather them.

Maybe Michael harbored something for Tom, and maybe he didn't. For some reason, during the return trip to the resort, Jeff remembered what his mother used to say: 'What you never have, you never miss'.

But every time that he noticed Michael looking at Tom, he was missing it already.
 
 

CHAPTER 14

The guys were doing so many things during the fourth day that Jeff should have been enthralled by every moment. Jeff's last exchange with Michael seemed to have been forgiven and maybe forgotten.

In the clearing beyond the gardens, they played an impromptu game of baseball and Ritchies, the one black guy in the team, was filming them with a digital camera.

There was only one guy who wasn't revving it up for the camera and ironically it was Michael.

Jeff was getting along great with all of them, but the opportunities to get into Michael's space were transient. Maybe it'd be that way forever.
 
 

* * *

By mid-afternoon, Jeff and Tom were back in their room changing into their bathers, and putting towels, spare jeans and sunglasses into their beach bags.

Tom adjusted the frontage of his Speedos. "So is it paradise found : paradise lust?"

"I'm keeping the atheist faith," he deadpanned. "I wish I had some kind of religion or science."

"Religion and science. Science to evoke the answer to the mysteries - And a religion to invoke the mystery of the answers. Science is a form of the old religion - It has its god. It’s primum mobilum  is “chance” - What the pagan romans invoked as “Fortuna”."

Tom picked up a bottle of sunscreen and began to smear it over his face. He watched a man and woman down on the beach kissing and blithely embracing through the French doors. "I guess it's hard when it turns out to be a straight paradise - at least down here at the resort and not over there. I can't believe that you didn't see what was between Francois and his stable right hand man."

"I don't know, but it does look like a straights' paradise. I could write the postcard: Having great times, but wish you were queer."

"Yes, but... maybe not." Tom sat down on the bed and pulled on his sandals, and buckled them up. "When you brushed down the horses yesterday, Michael seemed impressed by the way you rode it bare-back into the stable- or at least I was."

"He seemed the same way when he rode beside you in the forest."

If the insinuation registered, Tom pretended that it didn't. "Yes, Jeff, Michael thought that you were a definitive vaquero at the stream; the way you got the horse to stand on its back legs. He thought you were really OK."

"It was nothing - the horse just panicked when the helicopter flew over. I just tensioned the reins."

Tom frowned at him dubiously. "OK ingénue."

* * *

They were following the signs along the road to V'Halla Beach. It was a touch overcast but searing none the less.

"Even if Michael did like me how'd he express it in front of the team?" Jeff reasoned. "The paradox of being gay is that when you really like someone sometimes you have to show it by staying away to protect them."

"Who cares what the team, hetero-SS think," Tom remonstrated. "The looks you get from the straight guys - being their nemesis - It's all sexual chess and having the absolute freedom of the queen."

"Why do I feel like a queen being made a pawn?"

"What kind of pervert can't desire another man? It's like living all your life without ever having tasted Beluga and Almas caviar - or Debauve & Gallais chocolates. Hetero-sex is subsistence, but homosexuality - that involves beautiful men - is the ultimate gauge of a state's'civilization'."

Ahead was a stretch of pristine white sand between two rocky formations. One was at the base of the cliffs, leading up to the high slender mountain that reminded Jeff of Sugar Loaf Mountain in Rio.

"Maybe, but the cruel irony is that most gay people are not genetically beautiful and that's why they don't see any point in coming out in a cruel gay world," Jeff cogitated.

"Maybe that is the reason, and maybe we need a militant gay lobby group like the Black Panthers. We could call it the Pink Panthers. Yes, but right now you can oblige Jeff for Jeff."

"That's easy for you to say. You don't have a brother whose bloody afraid that everyone's gonna think he's an ultra-fag."

Tom held out his arm with chagrin. "Everyone deserves a lover - Andrew has Angie - now it's time for you to get something for Jeff."

"Yeah..."

"Why not?"

Jeff looked at Tom impatiently. "I've looked available, so now what, Coco Gaybrielle?"

Andrew, Michael and several other tanned bodies awaited them further up the beach. Sean was attempting to ride his board over the hellfire surf.

Monsieur Vendomé could be seen about half a mile up the beach in a deck chair shaded by a boulevard umbrella. He was not diminutive and stout, as Jeff had imagined him, but an imposing height and slender. His Christian Dior suit and Oscar De La Renta diamanté cravat looked incongruous on the Pacific coast. The hair has to be fake, Jeff decided. No man of fifty-five could have such pristine black hair. His face had a plastic veneer. His face had all of the awry fascination of gilded child angels sitting on a black marble sarcophagus in a French basilica.

Jeff continued to look at him, then waved when Francois appeared from behind a grove of palms carrying a carafe of water or perhaps vodka.

As Tom and Jeff got closer, Michael began to run sideways into the cool, tumultuous water. Michael paused: "Hey! The last one in buys the rest of us drinks tonight."

"Find a gay bar here and I've bought 'em," Tom laughed as he threw himself into the water with full impact.

Jeff plunged in after. When Michael rushed in on his heels Jeff felt the smooth texture of his chest slide over his back. His hard-on accelerated from zero to three hundred miles per hour with a seven second differentiate.

With each throb he compelled himself out into deeper, blue water obscurity. He wanted Michael to see him in his board shorts but not like that. At least not there with all of the other guys around.

Towards the shore, Andrew and Michael had scored a volleyball and were contending it out of Tom's reach.

Confident that he was down, Jeff got out of the water and sat down on the beach with his board shorts clinging tightly. He toweled his hair and watched the other guys rampaging through the surf as each veered and dived for possession.

Francois caught Jeff's eye in the distance and as Jeff was about to go to him he felt the cold sting of the ball against his denuded abs.

"Get back in Jeff!" Andrew called.

Jeff, noting that Michael had seen the incident, glared fiercely at Andrew. "No, I think I'll just catch some rays - work on the tan."

"C'mon!"

Jeff glanced at an enormous inflatable ball up the coast, connected to the shore by a wire lead. Inside it people, with the bodies of summer, were running and moshing.

What the hell!

Jeff braced himself and staunchly crashed back into the water. It wasn't as cold as it was the first time around and it felt titillating as he dived under. Brushing the wet hair back from over his eyes he saw Michael. Jeff swam towards him on the pretext of seizing the ball. As he caught it off a wave he felt something move behind his calves.

He freaked with blind terror - Jaws flashbacks blitzing his mind.

He was dragged backwards by the undertow. Jeff body and Michael's were in collision for a moment before they were heaved on a tide of froth to the surface.

"You bastard," Jeff accused. "You dragged me under."

Michael smiled mischievously. "I swear it was accidental." He pointed under the water. "You... Don't you believe me?" He began laughing wildly before taking Jeff in his tight grip and nearly submerging him again. "What kind of guy do you think I am?"

Jeff slipped under the water and repelled him with ersatz fury before they ascended again gasping for air. Jeff pushed him away and retreated towards the shore: The tide in his board shorts was up again.

When he stepped onto dry sand Jeff looked out at Michael, but Michael evaded his eyes. Jeff snatched a magazine from out of his bag, and began to read - anything to conceal another faux pas hard-on.

When he felt a cold hand against his back he turned with a start. "I was only playing around," Michael assured. "I thought you were gone when that surfboard went under us. Were you drowning?"

"Hardly."

Michael's hand persisted on his back and Jeff felt the heat of his touch.

Dripping profusely, Andrew jogged out of the surf and frenetically dried himself beside Brad.

Jeff writhed, then shot to his feet. "Damn! - I've got sand all over my towel." He matador-flourished it.

Michael crossed his arms and regarded him with secret amusement.

When Jeff simmered down Michael put his hand back on his shoulder. It descended scrupulously as if savoring every undulation of flesh. "I'll get you that drink."

"What?"

"I was the last one in the water. You must be thirsty."

"Thirsty? I just inhaled half of the Pacific."

"I think I could use one - an O.J., I mean," Michael said. "...And some conversation... Have you been in the Kas Bar? A photographer like you would really like it."

"You think?" Jeff managed. "If Tom..." He looked searchingly around the beach and amid the waves. "Where's Tom?"

"Up there with Francois and Vendomé." Michael pointed them out. "He's under the umbrella on the other side of Francois."

Francois saw Jeff waving frenetically and leaned forward to converse with Tom.

Tom turned and motioned for them to come up the beach. "You won't get chocolate or truffle fungus down there! Jeff! Michael! C'mon!"

"Later!" Jeff called. "I'll see you tomorrow Francois to ride the horses!"

Francois smiled beneficently, and resumed his dialogue with Vendomé.

Michael observed Sean hounding Andrew out of the water, then back in again and a water fight ensued. "They won't be coming back to the resort right away. Are you, Jeff?"

Jeff looked down at his towel with frustration. Michael took one from his bag bearing the double headed eagle logo of the LA Jets and tossed it to him. "Use this."

Naturally, Jeff obliged.
 
 

In the Savannah Bar they sat on two armchairs lined with faux tiger skin. His board shorts were dry and their imprint through his jeans was gone. Michael sat dressed in only a bomber jacket, and his bathers. Outside the sun was dissolving into a golden fuchsia dusk.

They each sank a coke and talked about the horse riding the day before.

They both regretted that they hadn't journeyed up the beach to meet Monsieur Arnaud.

"Vendomé must have been born into wealth," Jeff remarked lucidly. "He's, what they would call in the U.S., rolling in green."

"Maybe like a viper in the grass."

"If Francois has remained here, I guess he can't be all bad."

"He must have his motives," Michael said. "God knows what they are."

The scent of the hibiscus gardens began to waft into the room as the windows were all opened.

Michael edged over towards him. "Do you think he asks all of the resorts guests to stay on the estate?"

Jeff felt nervy. "I don't know... Maybe just the ones he recognizes from satellite TV."

"Is there a Mr. Michael Carr here?" one the bartenders  - a Spanish woman - called.

"Over here," Michael responded.

"It's your manager on the telephone," the bartender said. "There's a phone through there in the lounge where you can take the call."

Michael smiled resignedly at Jeff. "It never ends," he said, then disappeared through the etched glass doors.
 
 

It was the last minutes of dusk when Michael got back to Jeff. Only a few minutes later, Tom and Andrew found them.

"They've lit the bonfire down on the beach," Andrew declared, as he fell back onto a zebra print couch. "There was the most gorgeous girl down there giving out drinks. Her top came off as she was handing me one. I thought I'd gone to pornographic heaven."

Jeff and Tom exchanged a blasé, en tedium look.

"People were cruising down to the ocean like it was a public highway," Tom included, bored.

"Maybe we should go down and take a look at this production," Michael suggested. "What do you say, Jeff?"

For a second Jeff actually thought he was serious.
 
 

CHAPTER 15

When they went down to the beach forty-five minutes later it was dark. Fire dancers, Galli musicians and a Hindu snake mesmerist were entertaining the resort's guests. Two yachts were anchored just off the coast. One of its masts was decorated with flickering lights and its voyagers were partying too.

Tom and Andrew sat in deck chairs opposite Michael and Jeff. Jeff looked between Andrew and Tom and the light of the bonfire flickered over their faces animated with conversation. Andrew was telling Tom about some hot, Italian blonde he had his eye on at the resort and Tom appeared strangely immersed. Sitting in the Savannah Bar was a thrill, but now being beside Michael in front of everyone felt like an ulterior affirmation.

Routinely, Capricornian men added firewood to the bonfire. With the sound of piano pouring out of the resort they handed around small dishes containing the local delicacy of tridacna clam blended with cassava. Afterwards they ate more traditional Western cuisine. Brandy, Cristal Champagne and tequila followed. As time went by an atmosphere of romance suffused the beach as love songs and party classics pumped out of a mobile sound system. Some straight couples began to dance close and laughingly on the sand. Beside Jeff and Michael three Brazilians paused to do a line of cocaine, they offered it to them: Michael refused.
 
 

When Andrew had gone inside and Tom was getting psyched to walk over a pit of hot coals, Michael and Jeff remained alone at the bonfire.

"Did you take any photographs of the acts?" Michael asked.

"I forgot. I never have the camera at the right moment. I don't have the instinct for predicting circumstances." Jeff smiled at Michael solicitously. "I can become too hesitant when I need to be direct. I become inhibited when I need to be head-on."

"Tell me about it," Michael laughed breathlessly. "Before every game - after the game - I feel exactly the same way. I just asked if you'd taken any pictures because I wanted to know what interests you. I just thought that maybe you were more pro-active about confronting the cons of the world than I would be."

Jeff stared in disbelief. "You are not serious?"

"No, I admire your self-assurance."

Jeff shook his head. "I think you've got the wrong Brandt. You're talking about Andrew, right?"

Michael looked away out into the endless ocean; the firelight flickering over his eyes. "What's the mystery of that fact, Jeff?"

"One of the world's most bankable sports stars said it."

Michael shrugged cool apathy. "I only wanted to make a name for myself and there's a price I've outlaid."

"If I said that you had perfect lips would you slap a sexual harassment suit on me?" Jeff laid it on the line.

Michael momentarily edged away and Jeff realized that Michael Carr was uncertain about what their boundaries were too.

"I think I really have the right guy here. Jeff, Andrew's gay brother, who seemed to know exactly what he was about when everyone else was chasing the dreams everyone else who had designs on and for you came up with." He meditated with his thumbnail between his teeth. "In high school you were different. You did your own thing - to hell with anyone else. I thought that was hell cool."

Jeff felt his mouth become dry and his mind was enervated with a strange sense of anticipation. He reached for a cigarette and used it as a distraction while he devised a reply. He dispelled the match into the fire and turned to Michael. "High school," he exhaled a rush of smoke. "I still think about it sometimes."

"Back when everyone knew you, and you weren't just a face in the crowd - or a magazine."

It didn't seem possible that this was the same Michael Carr, high school sports star, from all those years ago. How on Earth could he find a sexless, high school loser like him enviable? "It wasn't really that way," Jeff said, resisting the desire to admit how exiled he'd sensed his being.

Michael leaned down to pick up his bomber jacket and pulled it on over his T-shirt. "Life is all about risks. I used to feel for baseball in high school what you feel about your photography now. If I couldn't have what I really wanted then I had to have some kind of proxy gratification - like the fame that intoxicates a man with conceit," he confessed with lip-suave poignancy. "I was depressed and I didn't even try out for the U.S. selectors when they came to Sydney in high school, although I knew that I should - for my career. There was a satisfaction that I craved. I spent the last years of high school thinking about the alternatives and I realized that I had to do something about experiencing them, and I did..."

Jeff stared at him as if he was looking at some counterfeit personae. Not The Michael Carr. "What was the revelation?"

"I wanted to be like one flesh with another ma... I wanted sensation... Tom was talking about 'mensation'" Michael exposed his soul. "I just felt that a real man engages with other men - not with women. I feel inside that sometimes a man consolidates his masculinity ultimately with the masculinity of other men. A lot of the straight world don't understand the chemistry of sexuality. They want everything to be man and woman - dualism, like their politics - but ours is not man or woman, it is man and man - a unique concept of fated magnetism."

Michael looked over to Andrew who stood on a third floor balcony.

With one hand Andrew gestured and with the other he held a bottle of Gibson's Whiskey. Inside Tom was lip-synching a George Michael song - 'Let's go outside, you know you want to, but you can't say it' - with a taxidermy macaw microphone.

"Hey! Michael and Jeff! We're going for a walk along the beach up to the lagoon. Wanna come?"

Jeff looked at Michael, uninspired. "I'm tired Andrew - I think I'll crash soon."

"Alright. Hey Michael?"

"Sorry And'. I'll catch you when you get back, OK?"

"OK when we get back," Andrew drawled and swaggered back inside. "We're goin' up the beach."

"Maybe we should go with them," Jeff said. "I think we're the only sober ones on the island tonight."

"They know what they're doing."

"That's what I'm afraid of," Jeff replied distractedly.

As the last of the guests left the beach Jeff looked out and studied the reflection of the moon flickering over the waters. A straight couple swam out in the waves, and Jeff observed their silhouetted embrace.

Michael's subdued mood was gone when Jeff turned back to him. "You appear very self-assured with all of the stuff that goes on around you," Jeff extolled. "I assumed that if you keep giving yourself away to the public there'd be nothing left for you?"

"You can get used to anything, When I was in California someone - this'll sound outta field - put me in contact with myself... for the first time. Just seeing that someone sees life the same way as you do... That can be rare when you need it. And you do need it... I could have found that in Sydney before all along."

"What are you going to do when you get back to Sydney?"

"I think I'll manage the gym until the next season."

"And then it's California?"

Michael brushed the sand and ashes off his knees and got up. "Nothing is certain, right?"

Jeff sensed that Michael was putting up walls. He gave Jeff a guarded look as if he was a sports journalist questioning him about his on-field tactics after a game.

Damn this is frustrating. "Do you want to go in?" Jeff sighed too obviously. "It's only ten, you know, and..." He noted the finality in Michael's eyes.

"C'mon," Michael urged. "Why don't we walk back to our rooms? Even if the fire's not out."
 
 

"What?" Tom winced when the light flared on. He lay spread-eagled on Jeff's bed.

"Tom?" Jeff asked. "You didn't go to the lagoon?"

"You're on the straight posse," Tom rasped. "Hi?" He squinted fixedly. "Michael? You sly gun of a son, Jeff. You-..."

"Back in minute." Jeff fled back into the hall, embarrassed. "He's smashed."

"Huh!"

They could hear the pulsating music from the discothèque on the other side of the courtyard below. Would Michael go there with him?

 "Good in the garden of midnight and evil," Tom slurred. "Do you want to turn off the light, Jeff!"

Jeff did and then waited in the hall outside Michael and Andrew's room.

"How's it going?" Michael greeted two team guys - sporting his Team Face.

He and Jeff watched after them with a silence pending their disappearance.

"I guess, I'll see you tomorrow," Jeff said, turning with a sense of anticlimax.

Michael placed his hand on his thigh lightly but resolutely. "Jeff. Wait a minute. I'm not too tired and you've got nowhere to go. Come in." He motioned for him to step into his room, then closed the door and led Jeff out to the balcony.

There was a 'What do we do now?' silence.

"Look at that star." Michael pointed.

Jeff caught the last second of it - like a refugee from the light of the moon - without a breath.

Jeff was surrounded by the absolute presence of Michael.

Jeff walked back into the room and pulled the French doors closed behind him. "I'll have to..." Jeff's voice gave out seeing Michael's intense expression. His heart expanded in his chest and he felt the sensation of worldless vulnerability.

Michael's hands moved down his back. He closed his eyes and let his lips move in heated unison with Michael's.

Jeff tasted the salty masculinity of his skin as his lips moved away and brushed across Michael's chin. Their mouths united again and they kissed hard without inhibition. It was sublimely sweet, and as long as it lasted Jeff couldn't believe that there was anything or anyone else in the world but him and Michael. They held each other close and Jeff could feel the hard sexuality of Michael's crotch against his and Jeff wanted Michael in no way that he could express with words.

When Jeff loosened his hold, suddenly awkward and stunned, Michael stepped back. Jeff could hear his own heart beating; suddenly overwhelmed as if they had crossed a fatal border. Jeff fretted that Andrew could walk in on them at any moment.

Michael bit on his lip and placed his hand lightly on Jeff's' shoulder. "Maybe... I'll see you... I-"

"Michael," Jeff said hazily. "It's O.K." He stepped forward wanting desperately to reassure him.

Michael stepped away, balled his fist and began hitting it into the palm of his other hand nervously.

"Michael, it's cool... We can handle this."

Michael kissed him gently on the cheekbone then paused. "Maybe this isn't the right time to do this again."

Without another word he abandoned the room.

Jeff drifted out to the radiant light of the hall with the chagrin of sensual interruptus and watched as Michael walked past the elevators and down the stairs.

Nothing seemed real, not even the swelling volume of Tom's laughter when he went back into his own room.

"He kissed you," Tom exclaimed, pulling himself up on one arm. "And Oh Babe! What a kiss."

Jeff was nonplussed and excitedly Tom pointed at door connecting both of their two rooms. "It was way open."

At first Jeff was stunned, then he heaved a sigh and put his hands up against the glass doors and stared out over the dead expanse of the ocean.

"I'm sorry, Jeff, if you'd told me I would have gone for the walk on the beach or to the casino."

Jeff was remiss, taking stock of the situation. "It just happened - Almost out of nowhere." Jeff closed the door between their rooms.

"It's so cute, Jeff. And we've only been here four days."

"I can't even believe it," Jeff admitted, as he slipped out to the balcony to see if Michael was walking down to the beach. "And tonight we talked - I mean really talked. And it feels like we're strangers again." Jeff leaned back against the ornate railing, looking into the sky and a universe that was endless and so depthless. He unbuttoned his shirt to cool down.

"You know Jeff, I would have told you about the door if you and the baseballer went to third base."

"I know."

"Do you want to talk about it?"

"Sometime..."

Tom faked a maudlin yawn. "Then I'll get some rest Jeff."

"Nothing's what it seems sometimes..."

"What do you mean?"

"...I don't know," Jeff murmured.

Tom did a yawn sequel. "Uh-huh."

A question suddenly occurred to Jeff, and he stepped back inside. "Tom?"

"Yes?"

"When you were talking with Francois today. What did he say?"

Tom focused on the ceiling for a moment in thought. "We talked about the island. Arnaud was saying about maybe opening the resort during spring. Francois told me about his past."

"Like as a horse trainer?"

"Yes... You wouldn't think it to look at him now, but when he was... younger... he hustled, in Paris."

Jeff gaped with incredulity. "No way."

"For real. He told me."

"And he seems so... gay but in the straightest way."

"Yes, Jeff, but that was over twenty years ago."

"Francois hustled..."

"Don't give it any exposure, Jeff, OK?"

"Of course not."

Tom slumped back into the bed. "Nothing is ever what it seems," he repeated torpidly. "Always nothing..."

Jeff stepped out on the balcony and closed the door softly behind him.

He sat alone with the sound of a Celine Dion song drifting through the seminal darkness: 'I drove all night to get to you. I drove all night, crept in your room, woke you from your sleep, to make love to you. I drove all night, I drove all night. What in this world keeps us from tearing apart?' Jeff hoped that Michael might appear down in the garden, by the ocean, or the balcony next to his. His fascination sweetened with every second that Michael was out of sight. In the heat of the night, with thoughts of Michael burning him up, Jeff realized his own midnight sun.

But why, beyond the superficial reasons, had he pulled away from Michael? What made him feel so painfully vulnerable as a gay man?
 
 

CHAPTER 16

"None of the real thing with star-stud last night?" Tom remarked as he landed down on the bed beside Jeff.

"What day is it?" Jeff demanded, hurled into consciousness.

"Well, let me see," Tom mused, with thinned lips, thumbing through an imaginary teledex. "There's a twelve inch plastic heart out the front of the check in desk and complimentary heart shaped chocolates. Either they're starting a 'we grill 'em, you fill 'em' dating agency or it's Valentine's Day."

Jeff pulled himself up in bed. He looked down at the desolate terrain of his body.

"So," Tom remarked, getting up. "What's it like to be addicted to love on Valentine's Day?"

"I don't know," Jeff husked. "We're not in love." He stretched out in all directions and then slouched back against the chrome-finish headboard, trying to inhale the reality of the morning.

Tom looked up from a drawer of T-shirts. "Maybe. Maybe no."

"Wear the one with the picture of Pierce Brosnan on it," Jeff suggested to alter the subject. "People might mistake his face for yours. Gay gentlemen prefer Bonds."

Tom brandished his bleached teeth. "Why don't you haul your ass out of bed and put on your face, make-up boy?" He pulled on a T-shirt with the Mercedes symbols serried all over it, and tucked it into his jeans brusquely. "Not a captivating look," he criticized himself in the mirror.

"Maybe a belt?" Jeff suggested.

Tom looked between his image and Jeff's. "Jeff's inhibited eye for the queer guy? Hell, you look worn out."

"I only got about two hours sleep last night," Jeff said wretchedly. "Hardly any on the night before come to think of it. But I did - and I am not inhibited. I just think that your culture of furtive one-night stands does not equal gay liberation. Gay liberation is a redefinition of spiritual, economic, and political culture internationally. It represents a new hierarchy of meaning. It isn't a concept defined by any particular sexual act-"

"OK, Germaine Queer."

"And is not assuming any heteronomic names like 'queer' or 'dyke'. There should be a gay ethic that states that no matter what another gay or lesbian looks like, or if you want to have sex with them or not, they deserve your basic respect. 'Queer' is not respect."

"OK, Gay Guevara."

Jeff felt his stomach empty and craving. "I haven't hardly eaten since I came here to Paradiso. I've got to get something. I never starve like this."

Tom sucked in his chest painfully to do up his belt. "I know what you mean, Kate Moss, but you can get sustenance from many other things than food. When you've been starved for touch and you anticipate it, that can compensate a lot."

"Maybe you're right, but after last night I'm kind of nervous about seeing Michael again."

"Don't sweat it," Tom said combing back his dark hair with hair gel. "After last night everything's set up for the kill. In a manner of freaking."

"But he walked away last night."

Tom shrugged, but there was an adamant look on his face. "Yes. He's just hit the speed hump of his gay inhibitions - like you. He'll be way over it now."
 
 

When Jeff was dressed they proceeded to the restaurant. During the descent in the elevator Jeff's heart kicked into hyperdrive. Don't sweat it, everything is set up, he assured himself. He tried to equal the bound in Tom's step, but couldn't. If everything is perfect why am I on the brink of hysteria?

A waiter opened the glass doors of the restaurant and directly ahead he saw Michael glancing through a newspaper. He knew that one thing remained the same. Michael Carr was still Michael Carr, sports glamourboy, handsome and sacrosanct.

Michael flashed a cursory smile at Jeff as he unassumingly sat down at the table. "Sleep OK last night?" Michael asked rhetorically.

Jeff's throat felt dry and he coughed anxiously. "Michael," he nodded. "How are you?"

"Kind of tired but... Everything is OK."

Tom was gnawing on a piece of bread stick wrapped in watercress when Andrew and Michael's breakfasts arrived.

"How long did you two sit out by the bonfire last night?" Andrew solicited casually, without raising his eyes from the silverware.

"Not long after you left to go up the beach," Michael reacted guardedly. "I forgot to do my three miles yesterday morning so I did it late."

"At midnight?"

"That's right."

With his elbows on the table and his cutlery in the air Andrew was perplexed. "I thought I heard you come into the room at about three in the morning." He gave Michael a questioning stare. "Come to think of it I think I heard you murmur about something that got you really..." His gaze turned to Jeff ominously. "I don't know what that could've been - how 'bout you, Jeff?"

Jeff glared askance. "No I don't. I don't know what you think but you're seriously mistaken."

"Yeah, right," Andrew said, concealing a broad grin then spoke under his breath: "Michael's never missed a night of sleep in his career 'til last night."

"Andrew, how would you know that?" Michael asked dryly. "I'd appreciate it if we didn't get into that right now."

Jeff placed a napkin in his lap as his croissants and coffee were placed down on the table. "Thanks."

"You know," Tom reclined back in his chair, and sipped his mangosteen juice, "I'm actually feeling really relaxed here."

"That's what a holidays are for," Sean answered, sagely. "I hope when we take the yacht across to Orien Island the sea won't be too rough. It's only a 54-footer."

"What's there?" Jeff asked with relief.

"Andrew and I are going abseiling. They've got a course set up there."

"Sounds like fun."

Sean shot up both of his clenched fists. "Unbelievably stokes ya."

"What are you going to do, Jeff?" Andrew asked.

"I'll go with you."

Andrew shook his head. "Ain't gonna happen, Jeff - it was by booking only. We called about it when you were horse riding the other day."

"Then, we'll probably go out on a catamaran." He studied Tom with an offended frown. "If they aren't so exclusive?"

"Didn't Francois ask if we were available to take the horses out?" Tom said. He turned and looked at Andrew. "I think he's scheming for Jeff to take the horse around the shores of the island. Kind of like an overnight trip and he wants to be sure that he's totally confident with the horse before they do it."
 
 

* * *

Jeff waited for all of the guys to get up and leave. Michael was the last at the table, but as he hesitated Jeff stood.

Michael followed suit. Seeing none of the guys looking, he touched Jeff's wrist. "Going over to the mansion to see Francois today?"

"I probably will."

"When?" Michael questioned with ardor of attitude.

"When...?"

"If I get a vehicle we can drive over together - with Tom. Or without him."

"I expected you to go abseiling?"

Michael's features contracted. "Nah, who wants to throw themselves off some rocks in the middle of nowhere?"

"I was thinking," Tom suddenly manifested between them. "Last night, when I cooled my feet, after the firewalking, I went up the beach."

"Alone?" Jeff asked evenly.

"No, and I found this little inlet and I'm sure that I saw two peacocks there at the base of a tree. Apparently, there are ten routes, but they all led to to the same destination and..." Tom looked between Michael and Jeff doubtfully. "You wouldn't be interested, I assume."

"A peacock sanctuary?" Jeff said vaguely.

Michael was easy. "Why don't we check it out?"

"Wow, cool," Tom effused. "I'll tell you where it is..." Tom stopped, seeing that Jeff wasn't enthusiastic.

"If we don't want to go over the mansion?" Jeff asked Michael.

"Of course we can," Michael said, reminded. "We'll see the peacocks tomorrow, maybe. What time do you want to go over there?"

"What time suits you?"

Michael tapped his Rolex. "Say in two hours."

"Sure," Jeff agreed.

"OK, I'll come and find you after I practice my pitch with Brad, Ritchies and Paul."
 
 

* * *

In the sauna, Jeff's smile glittered like a fist full of diamonds.

"It's really happening with you two," Tom lauded him.

"Our first date. I can't believe this after last night."

"I know, I'm dying to know what he'll do when he gets you alone again."

"Yeah?"

Tom sneered lewdly. "You didn't expect me to go with you two to the peacocks did you?"

"I didn't think that you had anywhere else to be."

"I've made plans," Tom said, fanning himself with a copy of Man.

A reservation gripped Jeff.

Tom stared. "What is it?"

Jeff took a deep inhalation of steam. "I'm afraid of what could happen. I think that's what went wrong last night."

"I can't understand you sometimes. You've got experience with guy-sex, right?"

"Yes, but with Michael, I'm scared that I'll blow it. If it's anything worthwhile."

"Are we talking inches? Michael could be a hard habit to take."

"What?" Jeff huffed with derision. "No, I mean - not just that - us - if he actually wants to know me - post-knowing me. I don't want to scare him off and if we don't have any commitment then I don't know if I want to go through with the sex. And after last night I don't think that we'd even get that far."

Tom scrutinized him with chill bewilderment. "How can you know?"

"I just don't want to be a latest experiment."

"Come on. Do you actually believe that?"

"What are the alternatives?"

Tom smiled distantly: Where did a male escort begin?
 
 

* * *

Having showered and dried off, Jeff was led by Tom out into the garden. They set themselves on the edge of the baroque water fountain. The center was exulted with figures of mythical testosterone in platinum Carrara marble.

Tom looked him right in the eye. "Why are you afraid to give Michael the opportunity of expressing himself with his body if he finds it hard with words?"

"I don't know."

"What's the worst that could happen?"

Jeff stroked his hand through the water airily. "I can just see it. We're making out and then he freaks about what he's doing again and that'll be the worst."

"'He freaks...?' Believe me, that is not the worst thing that can happen. I know from experience. Besides if he initiated sex, why...? As I recall it was you who pulled away from Michael last night. It's all about your gayttitude, Jeff."

Jeff thought for a difficult spell. "I could maybe say something about seeing each other back in Sydney - or say something stupid-"

"-like I love you..." Tom warbled, and fisted Jeff's leg lightly. "How come you're so neophyte? Your brother never is."

"He's straight in a straight world - he's got a different angle on life. He doesn't have to be so circumspect about every assumption he makes."

"Nor do you - not around civilized people. Didn't Michael kiss you last night?"

"Before he went like a bat out of..."

"Jissum Christ," Tom threw his hands into the air. "What does he have to do for you?"

Jeff shrugged.

"Michelangelo said that virgins stay looking young longer. You're not a reborn virgin again are you?"

"Sometimes I don't know if what I want is really what I want," Jeff murmured.

Tom looked at him over the top of his mirror sunglasses pointedly. "Are you a virgin?"

"I've only been with one-night stands." Jeff was indignant. "I've gone to clubs and the guys that I've had sex with were so horny and they did all the work to come onto me. They came and they went. It was a flesh-on-flesh drive-by. I didn't know what I wanted, but I got it and I rationalized it by thinking that it was all research for a gay novel that I would some day write. Or to get men to pose for my photographs or art. Art would give the experiences some kind of meaning."

"Meaning from art? Art  is perfectly useless - That is its charisma - like Allah, Christ, Buddha, Krishna, Capitalism or Communism."

"I don't know what I want, but I want it everything..."

"Yes?" Tom urged.

A flock of seagulls settled at the edge of the other side of the fountain.

"When you want someone to... I don't know - relate to, it's different," Jeff continued. "I want, but he's Michael Carr. It's so pretentious." Jeff closed his eyes and tried to see clearly through the obscurity of his thoughts. "He could have any guy and I'd be taking the risk that he would."

"Hold up," Tom frowned. "What's that got to do with anything? A guy is a guy, Jeff. If Michael likes you, give him you now."

"Now?" Jeff repeated dubiously. "It's always the eternal now: then now: then now in the gay culture."

"Believe it or not, I've got a theory that if at least seventy percent of a guy's needs are supplied he'll stick around."

"Then why haven't you found l'uomo Adonis?"

Tom groaned self-deprecatingly. "I'm working on it. It's like Oscar Wilde said: 'Love is the privilege of the rich, not the profession of the poor'. Our profession, and illusory concession, is sex."

"Michael and I have absolutely nothing in common - he's got money and he's probably been with a thousand guys. Gay people know that even if there was no straight oppression the gay life would still be fraught with dangers and pain. There is competition to get a beautiful lover and that produces antagonism. If you have a nice man that gets extreme jealousy. Gay men can easily develop a homophobe complex and begin to indiscriminately treat other gay people with disrespect because they are self-hating, not because of straights, but because they've always been rejected by the gays they want. There is no binding element that keeps men together, whereas straights have the factor of children. Clinical depression is endemic to the so-called 'gay' community. Michael and I is just fuel for depression."

"-Like sand through the hourglass, so are the gays of our lives," Tom intoned acridly. "Did it feel that way when it happened last night?"

"No. It was faultless," Jeff said pensively. "I felt divided about it. It was a shot in the dark - then he was gone."

Tom shot to his feet, glared and clenched his jaw decisively. "Forget words. We've gotta boost your confidence. We've got to get you psyched."

"I don't ne-"

"We're going back to the room."
 
 

 * * *

Inspired, Tom foraged through inner lining of his own suitcase. "Have you got any protection, Jeff?"

"No, I didn't think that I'd need it."

"You surrendered before you even got on the plane didn't you?" He produced a three-pack and threw it to him. "Put 'em in your back pocket. Maybe you can take out your cigarettes and they'll - unexpectedly - fall out."

"I'll take them - but that's too cheap. Not after last night."

Tom made a face. "Condoms are cheap and that's why they save lives. Any guy who wouldn't want you or him to wear a condom is a risk factor. I've heard of risk actors who pretended to put it on, then they take it off before they... You've seen the movie. That's just bastardry - but, I don't think that Michael is like that. What are you going to wear?"

"Riding pants, and a black T-shirt."

He opened Jeff's wardrobe and shuffled through the interior draws.

Jeff got up and looked over Tom's shoulder cynically. Couldn't Jeff have any privacy?

"If you wear something too glam, he could really think you're trying too hard, too prissy. Wear something not ordinary but something that says, 'I know where I want'. It's got to suggest that you're something that he could have serial sex with."

"What about your patent leather boots?" Jeff stooped to pick them up.

"Yes!"

"But they don't look very cool."

Tom stared at Jeff. "Cool is not what you want - you want approachable, not untouchable in the pages of a stud mag. I know!" He furiously snatched at a pair of jeans with knee slits and a diaphanous black shirt made of rayon, in his own closet. He handed them to Jeff and was disappointed when Jeff didn't change into them instantly.

"You think I should wear your clothes?" Jeff asked distantly.

"Why not? You're about as tall as I am. - Not as buffed, but-"

"I don't know about the shirt."

"You always claimed to like my wardrobe."

"On you - sure, but I don't want to be something too contrived. No, not this transparent, podium-Barbie muscle shirt deal."

"It's a preview to the main event, Jeff," Tom inveigled. "Can't you just give it a try?"

"I don't see how-"

Tom slotted a heart shaped cherry liqueur in his mouth to silence him. "But you will. You said you felt divided didn't you? Don't you think there is some way to get you together?"

Jeff held up the shirt in front of him and acquiesced. "Do you mind if I dress alone?"

Tom headed for the door. "I'll go downstairs to get the obligatory chewing gum."

Jeff watched him walk out with a questioning look on his face. Hesitantly, he pulled the leather pants on, then the shirt.

He selected Tom's Gucci belt from the wardrobe and did it up as tightly as it would go. He pulled it off, deciding that it was too glitzy for an afternoon horse ride and pulled one with a large gold, square, faux Bulgari buckle.
 
 

* * *

Tom knocked and came into the room, almost knocking the bouquet of lilies by the door over.

"How do I look?" Jeff demanded.

"Persona none greater." Tom clapped with a congratulatory whoop and pointed. "Go. Did you take a look?"

Jeff had only dared a vague side-glance in passing. "I went out on the balcony for a cigarette." Jeff explained as positioned himself in front of the floor-to-ceiling mirror. He didn't know whether to laugh or gasp when he saw himself. It had an implicit wrongness and that's what made it so thrilling - at least at first sight.

"How do you feel about it?" Tom asked, like an haute couturier at his first sale to Athina Roussel.

"I look fine," he admitted. "I feel..."

"Sexy, erotic, debonair?"

"Dreamily," Jeff deadpanned: It was what Tom wanted to hear. "At least I look different to what I looked last night, and you know that Baudouin says: 'No naked, man deserves a new outfit, but every new outfit deserves a naked man'."

"Wild! That's the gayttitude." Tom leered at Jeff. "But there's one thing - the belt. That's got to go."

Tom went to the wardrobe and removed a studded belt and two wristbands in the same patent black, metallic style. "Try these on."

"This really isn't my thing..." Jeff protested but put them on anyway. "And I am getting accessories like a biker because?"

"It's dangerous chic."

"Is that hip?"

"Way hip."

Jeff saw himself: It didn't look too excruciating.

Tom grinned. "You could turn me into a one-man-man looking like that."

Jeff glared with simulated horror.

"For a one-nighter that is." Tom retaliated.

Jeff looked away from the mirror, self-possessed but cagey.

From behind, Tom placed both of his hands firmly on Jeff's shoulders and passionately cast his eyes upward. "With this new look you're fit to stun."

"Fit to be f-"

"Want me to fix that?" Tom asked, pointing at Jeff's hair.
 
 

* * *

Jeff sat in front of the mirror on a black leather and chrome chair. Standing behind him, Tom coiffured with a can of hairspray poised in one hand and a salon comb in the other.

"So, do you work around here, honey?" Tom emulated Baudouin's voice. "You're gonna love this coiffure. So hot you're infernal, sugarhoneybabe."

Jeff marveled at how different he appeared with his fringe set obliquely over his forehead. "It looks like something on a hairstylist's wall," he gasped.

"You're a model aren't you? You've already got the look that a lot of people want."

"Yeah, but am I Michael's Carr's type?"

Tom met his eyes in the mirror and humored, "You're anybody's type now, babe."

"We're changing my appearance, but I don't think I can say things to turn Michael on. I know he'll look at me and I'll start talking about terrorist politics and everything else."

"Force it," Tom commanded. "Use gay will. You've made yourself appeal to the camera, and you've had a rapport with photographers in the past. If you can do it for them, you can for Michael."

"Yeah but that was professional," Jeff remonstrated, wringing his hands. "I knew what to say. How do I start with Michael? Wait for him to call directions?"

"Just think of Michael just another gay man offering friendly Q&A: Queer and Available.."

"Or maybe you should be totally honest and say something like: 'Michael I find you incredibly hot and I want us to have the hardest session you have ever had'."

"Yeah, right."

"Jeff, you know Michael - just say what he wants to hear. Don't talk about yourself - don't withdraw. Ask him about the phenomenon of Michael Carr. Make him see that you want to know about him - Gay guys want that."

Jeff stroked his new shining hair and got up. He glanced back at himself in the mirror and adjusted the fit of his jeans.

"But, Jeff, don't go on about his looks. You don't want him to feel simply pornamental."

"Maybe you do know about this."

Tom put his fists on his hips in an authoritative stance. "You pick some things up after being out for ten years."

"Yeah, so they say at the Oxford pink clinic."

"You-..."

Jeff's nervousness had abated a bit after speaking with Tom. Almost assured of his own powers of persuasion, he felt set for anything. On the balcony he looked out over the beach to catch a glimpse of Michael as he dived into the oncoming surf, vanishing within the whorling, frothing conflagration of emerald waters.

When he emerged he shook the spray out of his hair and clutched Andrew. It occurred to Jeff that Michael held Andrew too closely and for too long.
 
 

* * *

For lunch, Jeff and Tom didn't go down to the restaurant, they called for a pizza to be delivered to their room.

He didn't take much notice as Tom pledged undying desire for Brad's carnal dimensions.

He was preoccupied recalling some great come-on lines from '90's movies as his determination began to subside.

Tom noted the deflated look on Jeff's face. "You look like a designer fantasy, Jeff."

Jeff wasn't convinced. "Why is everything labels and names with you?"

Tom smiled shrewdly. "It's like a great philosopher once said: 'We are living in a material world... And I am a material girl'."

"Why do gays identify with straight people - women mostly -  who really have nothing do with the gay agenda? It is instinct for men to adorn themselves but not in our culture - Baudouin has to validate it by dressing as a bisexual female type - even if she had a male German name for a surname. You can't break the bizarre paradigm. You have to put up a front - like a stereotyped Venus guy trap."

Tom's voice became Gothically serious:  "Baudouin's paradigm is lately Marlene Dietrich - and she was a woman who turned her back on her own nation's Nazi culture and every gay and lesbian has the right to turn their backs on their heterosexist culture. Dietrich was glamour and iconic of easy sex. Madonna is her arch-pastiche. Dietrich was the originalgood time had by all - forget Joan Crawford."

"Yeah, but Baudouin said that Dietrich died in virtual poverty, equally exiled from Hollywood and Berlin."

"Like there's a difference? Arnie, the storm terminator, is the Governor of California - a man who actually stated that he admired Hitler. It's Herrenvolk Mark II USA. Look, see what you've done Jeff? You've got me all gay liberationist." Tom glanced down at his own iridescent shirt. "Or is that Liberace-ist?"

"But Hitler was not the only homophobe. What gets me is these gays who are totally non-racist as if there is any justification for it. Many of the most seriously homophobic cultures are not white. Many African and Asian nations are extremely homophobic. Nazis come in every color. Look what the Chinese Communists, Zimbabwean blacks, and Islamic Saudis have done to undermine the right of gays to be gay, often times by killing them. Just read some of the venom that many of the Southern black religious leaders have had for gay marriage. Of all people they should know better than a religion that states: 'Servants [i.e. slaves in Roman times] be obedient unto your masters'."

"Obviously they don't," Tom said resignedly.

"'All people are created equal' is a Franco/American theory like 'justice and liberty for all'. They are not biblical concepts. 'Those who live by the sword will die by the sword' however, is one that the black ministers should remember. I just wonder what it would be like to have for a day a world where gays had it their way. I mean how perfect it could be to have the whole world defined by the natural-god given gay perspective."

"Gaynarchy. The issue with the gay community is its mortality. We are only young for what we for a time and then we are simply beyond the gay iconography." Tom looked into vacant space. "I've encountered straight people that I hate. I've encountered gay and lesbian people that I abhor. There are too many different concepts of paradise in this world and the next for there ever to be an ultimate paradise... Just transient encounters with absolutes." He slipped out of his reverie after a few moments. "But let's deal with the serious transgender questions: Are you going to wear the Hugo Boss cologne or the Chanel Number 5?"
 
 

* * *

With the knock on the door Tom mouthed "Go for it," at Jeff.

"Hi," Jeff said as he opened the door and hurriedly stepped out into the hall in case Tom's advocacy registered with Michael.

"Hi, Jeff. Has it only been two hours?" Michael remarked.

Tom was silence incarnate.

"Yeah, you made it," Jeff commended slowly.

Michael stood and looked at him in an expressionless, non-committal way. He smiled. "You really do look so different to your brother."

"About last night, I-"

"I was going to say that I never thought that one brother could get all the..." Michael said, deliberately eluding the proposition.

"Sports talent like Andrew?" Jeff offered, neutralizing a potentially awkward situation with Tom watching them.

Michael's eyes descended from Jeff's shirt to his boots. "Yeah," he said vacantly.

Force yourself, he remembered Tom's advice. Use gay will. "A slick new look, yeah?"

Michael glimpsed Tom slouching in the doorway. "Yeah," he repeated warily. He put his hand behind Jeff's back coaxingly. "You know, we should go." As if it were an afterthought, Michael threw back: "Are you going to come, Tom?"

"No." Tom straightened up in the doorway. "I think I might catch-up on the in-resort porn."

Michael and Jeff exchanged a 'What else would slapper Tom be doing?' look.

After exiting the lobby Michael gestured toward the car that awaited Jeff and he.

And what a car!

A gleaming Aston Martin V12 Vanquish.

"It's the only Avis rental the hotel had," Michael explained laconically.

Jeff couldn't take his eyes off the car.

Michael couldn't take his eyes off Jeff's new threads: The look was hate couture.
 
 

CHAPTER 17

"Do you like Jefferson Starship?" Michael asked, before triggering the CD player. The car was ascending up from the Séraaz's ravine.

"I think I saw him in Sydney two years ago," Jeff lied to appear sensually agreeable. "I've got the same disc."

"I just found this one in the car. It must be Francois'."

Jeff thought again. "Yeah... Well, actually I think I didn't see him - It was someone else. Carole Pope, or someone. Not Pope Benedict - of course - not the godfather of the Church."

"Do you go to many concerts?"

"Sometimes. I guess that you wouldn't - being a known face."

"I'm not that famous to music audiences," Michael said, looking sidelong at Jeff with unease.

They drove along the palm lined avenue that led to the mansion. Kind of like Hollywood Boulevard in Los Angeles, Jeff wondered. He started to speculate on Michael's underground past again.

On the trip across the lush ravine and up the mount to the chateau they spoke about Michael's baseball career, his gym and anything else that involved his existence. When Michael asked Jeff anything about himself, he immediately directed the conversation back to Michael. He kept remembering Tom's words: 'Show that you're interested in him - Gay guys want that'.

They drove through the front entrance of the estate and Michael parked the car down the driveway a short distance from the stairs. "Would you like to walk through the gardens?"

"Yeah, it's beautiful here." Jeff took a breath of self-assurance.

Michael touched Jeff's hand and spoke tentatively: "Is this OK?"

Jeff tried to take an inconspicuous deep breath as a shot of anxiety hit him.

He got out of the car and followed Michael.

They talked about Las Vegas at first, and Michael plucked a hibiscus blossom and looked as if he was about to hand it to Jeff, but didn't. "I could be in the league for fifty years and I don't think that I could afford an island like this... I'd actually want something forever, forever."

"Could you live out of the media glare?" Jeff asked doubtfully.

"I think so. I've made money from the game. The competition is pretty stressful and my Dad wants me to work in the company. You know, I want to be for a while. I want to deal with the gyms - develop that."

"You know, every time I watched you on cable with Andrew you always seemed so focused. I think it was in Chicago and you were playing against the Houston Oreos-"

Michael cracked up. "Houston Astros."

"Yeah, Astros. You were fielding off second base. You took a catch and you caught out John... Something. You were so modest in the interview afterwards saying that it was the out fielder's shot up the line."

Michael paused reflectively. "Yeah, Yankee Stadium."

"New York, huh? Was that before the World Trade Center disaster?"

"No - it was the end of an icon. I guess that faith moves mountains and capitalist icons too."

"But you're an icon aren't you? You made yourself one in your sport."

"It's only history." Michael shied modestly. "Self-flattery leads to complacency and you can't be complacent about anything in life - not if you're prepared to work for something that's important. Or at least that's what they say and I wish that I could really believe."

Jeff felt exhilarated at this easy exchange. Maybe he didn't look as strange as he felt in Tom's clothes. "Are you determined to get back?"

"No. Just to find something reality," Michael said ambiguously.

They were silent for a minute.

Jeff caught a glimpse of Francois in a third-story window.

"Do you want to go up?" Michael suggested lucidly.

"Right away?" Jeff wanted to remain in that heady moment among the fantasia scent of Oriental irises and Givenchy Gentleman cologne.

He was silent and Michael took advantage of it to reach and touch his hand again. They passed the RR limousine at the bottom of the stairway.

Halfway up Jeff regarded the large bronze statue of Perseus holding the decapitated head of Medusa. Water falling from a fountain above swiftly rippled down its patinated surface to a square basin.

The large oak and brass doors were open and they entered. "Francois?" Jeff called. "We're here! We're queer - but not in the pejorative sense."

"I will be down in a minute," echoed Francois' voice from the third floor. "Monsieur Vendomé is in Europe - Please pour yourselves a drink. I will be down in a moment."

Michael followed Jeff to a neo-classical style settee in the front room. It was definitively Old School - no modern art. ['Once contemporary artists had portrayed what could not be said, now they portray what can not be seen' Francois had remarked to Jeff during the horse ride.]

Michael placed his hand on Jeff's knee and felt the shiny texture of his jeans, then the red tufted surface of the seat. He looked at Jeff's studded wristbands critically and connected his own hands. "It's quiet here isn't it?" Michael looked at the collection of hand-techniqued, gilded porcelain along the wall. "I don't think I've ever been anywhere as silent as this. Definitely not in LA or Sydney."

"They say it's good for the soul," Jeff remarked.

"That's not the only thing."

Michael stood and picked up a small photograph in a silver frame. It was of an adolescent Francois carrying a guitar and wearing a bonbonne uniform. It appeared to have been taken during the 1960s on the Rive Gauche, Paris. "Is there anything we should talk about, Jeff?"

"Talk about?" Jeff asked with a jolt of self-consciousness. "I couldn't be more satisfied. You know Michael, I came here because of you and if there is nothing else I'll always be grateful that you respected me enough to spend time with me."

"You make it sound as if I'm doing you some great charity." Michael replaced the picture, perturbed. "Before, when I came to your room, I got the sense that there could be something wrong."

"Wrong?"

Michael looked upwards. "Francois! Do you mind if we go out to wait beside the pool?"

There was the sound of something falling like a rock crystal chandelier. "Of course not. By all means. Jacques and I are dealing with a hanging fixture - we are getting it off."

He followed Michael out through the main, cavernous hallway of the mansion.

When they emerged into the white daylight Jeff blinked at the marble copies of famous Grecian idols surrounding a pool on the scale of Roman imperial vanitas.

"You know, Michael, you seem so comfortable in a wealthy environment like this."

"Really?" Michael said irritably. "My family didn't always have its capital. I've always identified with people who didn't have a lot of money."

"But you're known by the right, A-list people. And it's like they say: It's not who you know or what you know, but who knows you."

Michael looked vaguely embarrassed. "Do you think that about me?"

"That's your lifestyle, from what I can see."

"Jeff," Michael leaned over him tentatively. "About what happened last night, I walked out, but I've thought about it and maybe I was wrong. But, now - if we can't handle it then..."

"What about last night? I'd expected us to get off, maybe. That's cool sometimes you get it sometimes you don't." Jeff shrugged like an inveterate sex addict. "So what about it?"

"'So what about it?'" Michael repeated, his voice overcast with pique.

"What about it?" Jeff said, popping some gum in his mouth and chewing, blasé. "It happened and it doesn't matter to me who saw it or knows about it."

Michael glared with alarm. "What do you mean by that exactly?"

"You're not hung up about that are you?"

A dangerous accent came to Michael's speech. "I didn't want to get into anything we'd possibly regret but-"

"That's right," Jeff resonated his tone of voice. "I felt exactly the same way. No regrets."

Michael got up and walked to the other end of the pool.

Jeff walked back towards the door of the mansion full of conflicting feelings. It all felt too intense.

"I don't know what happened last night or what we were doing," Michael stated, off axis.

"Yeah," Jeff deadpanned, accentuating the the drama factor. "I could see that."

"I don't feel like going out with the horse," Michael said as Francois appeared.

"But Jacques has already got the stallion out of the stable in the enclosure." Francois looked at Jeff who chewed on. "Maybe if we just practice mounting and dismounting."

Michael held up his hands willfully. "No, I really think I'd prefer to go abseiling this afternoon."

"If you want to leave..." Jeff said, walking up behind Michael. Their hands almost touched, but not to unite.

"Maybe tomorrow," Michael said to Francois. "I'm finding the heat hard to take today."

Michael's false smile dissolved when he perused Jeff. "If you want to go horse riding, I'm sure that Francois could drive you back to the hotel."

"Is that alright, Francois?" Jeff defiantly asked the French horseman.

"I'll be going over later tonight. You could have dinner here, Jacques will be arriving back soon and we'd like the company."

"Then, Jeff, maybe I'll see you at the resort or whatever," Michael said, walking back into mansion.

"See you some time," Jeff countered superficially. Now he'd really fucked it up.

Francois was visibly disappointed as Jeff stared bitterly after Michael. "Screen your words before you say them, Jeff. Beautiful words are the only incense to the gods." 

In stark contrast to how they arrived, Michael was departing alone and it couldn't have been worse.

After Jeff and Francois led London and Bijou out of the stable, Jeff mounted and paused to observe Michael careening down towards the ravine and the hotel.

"You will see him again on the right terms," Francois consoled Jeff. "You are only learning to predict each other now."

"We'll never happen."

"In time," Francois insisted. "Desire is the omega-point of all time. But before we go riding why don't you come inside for something to drink? I have a Hasselblad camera that you might like to click with."

Noting Jeff's hesitation, Francois lit a cigarette, watching the car fading into the next scene. "Then again, Jeff, some people don’t care if by smoking they die of cancer. As they say in Latin: Sic erit - So be it."

CHAPTER 18

Jeff returned to the hotel late the next evening. Tom was sitting in a rattan chair out on the verandah reading a copy of (Not Just) Blue. "Welcome back," he said, raising a cocktail glass ebulliently. "I hope you exercised your French resistance."

Jeff ignored him icily and headed straight up to their room.

"What went down?" Tom burst in after him. "I saw Michael yesterday before he went out over Orien Island for the abseiling and he did exactly what you just did to me."

"What can you do?" Jeff replied.

"You two really pissed each other off, didn't you?"

"I can't relate to him - and you're not going to analyze it."

Tom appeared lost for words and Jeff felt unduly callous. His restrained his anger. After all, Tom hadn't made him do anything against his will. "I don't think we were ever meant to become involved."

"It can't be that bad."

"It was a fuckin' disaster," Jeff said in a measured tone.

Tom stifled his laughter. "A 'fuckin'' disaster?"

Jeff glared. "I'm serious, Tom."

"But, you looked great. He's just a bastard with a stunning face."

"I didn't feel comfortable wearing those clothes."

"And he didn't want you?"

Jeff felt venomous. "Not in that act."

"And you gave him the spiel?"

"Yeah, and Michael saw right through it. The last time I saw him he looked at me as if I was determined to sabotage him."

Tom stood akimbo, ready to shoot from the lip. "At least you've made it to second base with him. He knows that you want to impress him."

"Did I?" Jeff lit a cigarette out on the balcony.

"Then forget he ever existed," Tom decreed.

"That's the first thing that you've got right today," Jeff said with equivocal heroism.

"Yeah, yeah."

Jeff felt suddenly frustrated by everything and everyone, but he subdued it. No one was worth that - he realized that fact consciously.

When Tom went down to dinner that night, Jeff complained that he had a bastard of a headache and he'd call in room service. He suspected that the situation between Michael and himself was too volatile.

Jeff had to back off.
 
 

CHAPTER 19

Jeff waited until Tom was nowhere in sight before he emerged from his bed the next morning. He consulted his  watch on the night stand and premeditated staying in the room for another half-hour to deftly avoid the inevitable vis-à-vis with Michael and he did.

He slipped down the hall later and locked the bathroom door and turned on the water.

Sinking back into the hot tub he tried his best to give a dolce vita sigh. Red throated lorikeets fluttered outside the window amongst the frangipani.

He must have stayed in there for about forty minutes, before he pulled himself out and toweled down.

He felt a certain satisfaction pulling on his own comfortable jeans and polyester T-shirt. He walked barefoot in the hall back to his room. He got there and saw Tom's clothes - the ones that he'd worn the day before - still hanging over the back of a chair where Tom had abandoned them.

Just forget it ever happened. Jeff closed his eyes. There's nothing worth reliving.

He walked into the hall hoping that the restaurant would still have table service. He was dying for a coffee expresso. Maybe Tom would be down there and he'd clear the air between them after the semi-altercation on the day preceding. Tom hadn't returned until two in the morning last night. When he did Jeff had pretended that he was asleep.

As he passed the Luxe Délice Lounge, he overheard Andrew's conversation with Sean:

"And we needed a model to advertise the stock brokerage online," Andrew was saying. "And we could have had someone from one of the top agencies in Sydney, but Eric was ambitious for the girl on the Esquire cover."

"Who was she, Naomi, Karen, Nadja?" Sean guessed optimistically.

"No way. This chick had as much charisma as Elle's got cellulite."

"Right..."

"She was some anorexic Melbourne piece with a habit. She was booked to come over to Sydney last week. We got a call one day before, saying: 'Veronica suffered a fatal heroine overdose last night - we apologize for all inconvenience'."

Jeff observed them with his arms crossed. The 7-foot digital screen behind them attracted his gaze. A couple on the screen walked along a decayed Orleans boulevard, immersed in blonde light.

Andrew leaned over the billiard table with his cue, preparing to deliver a red ball into the top right pocket. He took the shot and looked up to Jeff benignly. "Good afternoon, Jeff - or is it good evening?"

"I caught up on some lost sleep last night."

"I guessed that."

Andrew pointed out a corner of the table to Sean. "The black in that pocket." He turned back to Jeff. "When you didn't come down to breakfast, Tom said you'd stayed at the 'faux chateau' last night."

Balls clicked and dispersed over the table and Andrew growled when he saw that he'd missed the shot big time.

"Speak of the devil."

"I'm going over out on the cruiser again," Tom said, sauntering past in the hall." Are you up for some scuba diving?"

"I'd have to learn how to use the equipment first," Jeff replied.

"OK, Jeff, but they say there's whales down there the size of Cessnas."

Jeff grimaced. "Now, I really want to submerge to Atlantis."

"This island was on the spice trade route hundreds of years ago, Jeff, and there could be some serious doubloon treasure - maybe some spice like cumin vanilla or a stick o' Afrocane cinnamon - down there."

"The eternal optimist."

"Is that sarcasm? Now, that's truly out of character for Jeff Brandt."

"Just making conversation."

Tom looked him over. "Maybe I should catch you later."

"No neuroses about yesterday?" Jeff asked apologetically. "You know I didn't mean it. I didn't say anything to you last night when you came in."

"No hard feelings," Tom assured him. "Besides I had my own agenda last night." He winked mysteriously at Jeff.

Tom accosted Brad in the elevator. Tom flashed a lurid smile. The doors closed.

"He's having a good time," Andrew looked up from the table again. "Are you still down, Jeff?"

Jeff resented Andrew bringing up the issue in front of Sean and he tried to simulate high spirits. "I will survive," he joked vacuously. "I'm just on my way down to get something at the restaurant." His tone became persuasive: "Wanna come? Will you?"

"I will after I finish here," Andrew said, and glancing up he noted something in Jeff's expression that motivated empathy.

Just as Jeff stepped out of the elevator into the lobby Andrew caught up. "I looked in to see you still asleep this morning. I didn't see you yesterday, so I thought that you'd relocated to the manson - mansion, I mean mansion."

They walked into the rarefied milieu of the restaurant.

"I've been doing some thinking," Jeff euphemized.

"What was it like staying up there with those two?"

"Francois and Jacques?"

"Are those their names? Bloody Francos."

Jeff ignored the remark. "We had a ball. After about a seven course meal and truffles we talked. Francois told me about the Loire Valley, and the industrial town of Le Mans. His mother was a spy behind Nazi lines - for the Russians."

Andrew fixed his eyes on Jeff as if speculating on what the real issue with Jeff was. "Michael turned up unexpectedly the other day to go abseiling. He didn't say anything about what happened over there at Palazzo Paradiso."

"Yeah..."

"I assumed that something had gone wrong when you went horse riding and I was afraid that there was some kind of hostility between you. Like some kind of cross-purposes."

"I didn't put the hard word on him. Is that what you're thinking?"

Andrew was all innocence as the maitre d'hôtel gestured for them to take a window table.

They sat facing one another and Andrew handed Jeff a menu. "I know you wouldn't do that - not unless it was reciprocal. I know you better than anyone." He shook out some salt and playfully cast some salt over his shoulder. "Don't forget that."

Jeff remembered when they had arrived so few days before and marveled at how things had progressed and devolved so quickly.

"Can I give you some advice?" Andrew said.

Jeff decided on a hamburger, but failed to glance up. "Go for it."

"Michael asked where you were. That's the reason why I looked in on you at about nine."

"He did? Michael?"

"When I saw Tom last night he just said something about you getting 'thrown from a horse'?"

What a bizarre metaphor.

Jeff ordered and sat looking towards the kitchen making vapid commentary on how they could make the table service faster.

"You know Jeff, there's not much difference between me and you. Whether it's a guy or a girl you never can be sure. It's hard when you want someone and you can't read all of the signs."

Jeff admonished himself for opening the door onto his romantic life by involving a friend of Andrew's even if he was beyond cute. "They could turn the air conditioner up in this sauna couldn't they?"

"I liked girls before Angie," Andrew persisted with a laugh. "At the time they were the most important thing in the world. But it's sexually lethal when you're hung up on that someone when maybe you're not actually compatible. Even if there are signs that they want you."

"Like Denise?"

"No, other girls - but not Denise - I never gave up on her and it caused me a lot of hurt waiting."

Jeff rapped his fingers on the table to the beat of the Olivia Newton-John song playing: 'And destiny will arrive to bring all of your dreams alive for you. You have to believe we are magic, nothing can stand in our way...'

"I thought Denise was the only one but then it just didn't happen," continued Andrew.

"And you never saw the signs?"

"I was waiting for the right time. Just because two people want each other doesn't mean that they should."

Jeff looked at the chandelier. "And Denise moved to London didn't she? and-"

"What I'm saying, Jeff-"

"What?" Jeff interjected. Where was Andrew going with this? "There's nothing to talk about - not on the lethal front. Not now..."

They looked up as the waiter delivered.

Andrew, taking a complimentary sliver of avocado off Jeff's plate as he stood up. He ate it and licked the tips of his fingers. "We'll be back home in three days - and then it's back to Sydney. Why don't you just make the most of it here while you can?"

"Yeah, I realize that."

"I'll see you later."

"Andrew," Jeff stalled him in a conciliatory tone. "Has Michael said anything about me - Like about what happened over at the villa?"

"I don't know how Michael feels about anything off the field or outside the gym. He's an island."

"Just like Paradiso."

"Michael is nobody's property."
 
 

Jeff felt between heaven and hell after speaking with Andrew.

It was a relief to know that he had an insider in Michael's life as a confidant. However, it depressed Jeff to think that Andrew associated his feelings for Michael with one of the cheap flings in his own past. How could Michael ever be just a memory to him in the future? It seemed absolutely implausible.
 
 

CHAPTER 20

Jeff intersected Brad as he headed from the beach to the resort. "You aren't with Tom? Where's he gone?"

Brad pointed towards V'Halla Beach. "They went up to see some 'peacocks'. It's good to see that you're getting out, Jeff. Everyone was beginning to think that you'd deserted us. Wouldn't you feel guilty for that?"

"Thanks. Things are starting to climax up now," Jeff replied, not actually meaning it.

Jeff took a short cut out of the boundaries of the resort.

Ahead, wild hyacinth, palm bushes and mango trees infused the air with all the fragrances of summer. They did nothing to lift Jeff's mood. Nothing really mattered, not the sovereign sun and especially not the aching in his chest. He was beginning to feel that having a desire didn't necessarily predetermine its fulfillment during life.

Ever.

Jeff hiked through the straining sand. Seeing an outcrop of palms obstructing the beach, he headed into the water to cool his feet.

He wandered through the shallows for about ten minutes until he saw the inlet ahead.

Eventually the noise of the ocean segued into the sound of Tom's laughter.

Surreptitious, Jeff stalked up towards them. A startled, bleu de roi peacock fled into the undergrowth and Jeff reeled to catch his breath.

She stepped closer and closer and when he got near to them he concealed himself behind a cluster of Eden palms.

Tom stood with Michael's arm over his shoulder. They were in avid conversation. Jeff watched as Tom shook his head and overly reacted to something Michael propositioned.

They're definitely on intimate terms, Jeff decided jealously. I should have known.

Michael was looking at Tom and definitely liking what he saw. In his hand Michael held a palm branch that he appeared to be fanning them both with. They'd forgotten about the peacocks. They seemed far too excited by their new alliance.

Tom's hand dropping down Michael's back and he spoke low and personal.

Suddenly the wind blew a leaf of an Eden palm in front of Jeff's eyes.

Jeff looked back towards the ocean; the pit of his chest was leaden with indignation. He'd seen enough. It seemed exactly what it appeared to be. Why Tom would have wanted him to look and dress as Jeff had two days before began to make sense.

Jeff moved away with stealth. If for nothing else the way Tom and Michael looked at each other was sufficiently condemnable.

He was too hurt to summon genuine anger - feeling like the ultima thule of ultimate fools. He looked around for anyone else, but they were perfectly alone.

When he made it back to the sand he headed towards the resort.

When he approached its gates he veered into a darkened grove of palms, seething. How could Tom be so two-faced? He knew Tom was easy with guys, but how could he horn in on Michael like that? What of Tom's talk about being on fire for Brad?

Maybe a gay man had no friends when it came to the pursuit of sex.

He felt as isolated as the verdant island on the horizon. Miles of pristine white sand beneath shallow water between the beach and the island made Jeff want to escape to it. He had always had the consolation of Tom's friendship in the bad times. This kiss of betrayal had a sting of deepest evil. But though Jeff tried to hate him, he couldn't - not as absolutely as...

He'd heard it from someone:

There is no freedom without violence. Ultimately absolute violence is absolute freedom.

He'd heard is from someone
- Why was that statement playing in his mind? -

He willfully restrained his breathing to measured gasps. Who could blame Michael for being attracted to Tom?

What was the alternative?

Andrew's sex-inert brother?

An attraction to Tom could never complicate Michael's friendship with Andrew like one for Jeff would.

Jeff heard the sound of footsteps crushing dried foliage behind him.

Hell, get yourself together! Jeff was fraught with self-recrimination. He quickly arranged his hair and drew a labored breath.

Francois was as startled as Jeff when he spotted him.

"Jeff, I was just collecting some of the dry, fall away leaves for the hearth. Are you alright?"

Visibly downcast, Jeff forced geniality. "Just catching some sun."

Francois continued picking up branches from the ground like a medieval peasant. "Jacques has London out on the running circle up at the villa," he said benevolently. "He'll be brushing him down about now and, if you like, you could practice again."

Jeff began to walk away to conceal the dark emotions overcoming him. "Yeah..." he said distantly. "I was just taking some time to..."

"To be?" Francois didn't impel the issue and after handing his haul of dead foliage to the driver they got into the limousine. Pulling out the ubiquitous bar, Francois looked fixedly out of the window, blindly handing Jeff a box of Kleenexes.

"No thanks. My hay fever is clearing up."

"All part of the service." Francois smiled.

"I seem pretty stupid, don't I?"

"No, on the contrary you seem to be perfectly who you are, and that's never naive. It's a fool who doesn't acknowledge the vagaries of one's mortal coil."

Jeff gave a maudlin laugh: Sometimes Francois' English sounded so 19th century. "Things have just taken a dive," he admitted.

Francois gestured to the chauffeur who was watching in the rear-view mirror.

They drove off in silence.
 
 

* * *

On arrival Jacques was, as anticipated, grooming London. With his tail sweeping side-to-side grandly the horse looked at Jeff.

Jacques went into the mansion to take a call and Jeff stroked his hand back across London's head and down through his mane.

"At least I know what you are," Jeff lamented. "Even if I don't know where anyone else is."

The horse neighed impatiently and shook out its mane.

Seeing Francois coming out, Jeff took to the saddle with a clean, sharp ascent. He turned the horse around, resisting the urge to glimpse back at the distant resort.

"Do you feel ready to escape across the coast?" Francois asked, as he mounted Rege.

"As I'll ever be..."
 
 

CHAPTER 21

Jeff declined Francois' invitation to remain at the villa that night, preferring to return to The Séraaz.

Right alongside Francois Jeff rode over the sand to the small island just off the coast of Paradiso that he had seen. It was only accessible at low tide and the sense of adventure had partially taken Jeff's mind off the day's revelations.

"I liked Michael but I'm not sure if it is only for his physique," Jeff had disclosed with the crystalline-aqua only partially obscuring the horses' hooves.

"When I was young, Jeff, I'd take many atractive men home but it never bought me any real pleasure."

"Because you wanted something deeper?"

"No," Francois replied, laconically. "Because they wouldn't have sex with me."

"...You now feel that you missed out on really living?"

"What would I have gained by gaining only transient bodies? Some only have to lose their hearts once to a man who only desires their body and they are spiritually razed. They are down on monogamy and everything else good and upright."

Jeff stifled laughter. Francois was remiss.
 
 

* * *

Jeff made it back just in time to endure dinner. His cool indifference was annihilated when he saw Tom and Michael sitting at the same table by the window between two potted palms.

What a shocker.

They glanced up as Jeff jerked back a chair and sat, abruptly at Andrew and Sean's table.

Tom smiled and Michael nodded. The bloody nerve, Jeff seethed. Head games now?

Michael tried to catch his eye, but Jeff refused to dignify their presence with a response.

"Garçon, waiter!" Tom called. "Could we get a carafe of water?"

It wasn't until Andrew went to collect something from the buffet that Tom took the chair beside Jeff. "Hi, where did you go to?" he asked.

"What's it to you?" Jeff barbed.

"Errr... Just interested... Are you still uptight about what happened yesterday at the villa with Michael?"

Jeff dropped his cutlery on the plate. "Is there some reason why you think I should be?"

Tom edged back, seared by Jeff's tone. "You're not conceding defeat are you?"

Jeff didn't reply.

"I looked for you this afternoon," Tom claimed, "and I couldn't get a lift over to the mansion until late so I gave up. Where did Francois take you?"

"Around."

"Tomorrow I want to go over to the stable aga-"

Jeff cut him off with a glare. "You're a real homo player aren't you?"

"Excuse me?"

"You know what I'm talking about."

"What?"

"Forget it," Jeff said getting up. "You've made you're point - You win."

"Where are you doing for dinner?" Tom called after him, seemingly confused. "What's wrong with staying here?"

Jeff paused to contemplate a reply before returning shortly and scrutinizing Tom with chagrin. "I don't want to talk about it."

"Why are you so angry at me? I tried to get over to Francois'."

Jeff continued to stare at him.

"Keep it to yourself then," Tom shot with indignation. "I don't care, just don't take it out on me."

Jeff stood, his disdain poised. He collected some seafood and salad from the buffet, then went out onto the balcony and sat at the only empty table. He ate angrily, wanting to get out of there ASAP. He could still hear the sound of Michael and Tom conversing and he burned with anger that they accepted his leaving so rapidly. He heard his name mentioned, but couldn't make out what it was in connection to.

"Waiter!" Jeff called as a pretext to looking over at their table. "I've lost my carafe of water. Maybe someone has Prostituted It! from me?"

Michael had his back to Jeff, with Tom facing him. Tom glanced at Jeff, laughed purposefully then looked at Michael.

Andrew sat with them and concealed Tom's face. He tried to make out Michael's reactions to what was being said but couldn't from behind.

He's gonna make a big spectacle out of succeeding with Michael, Jeff realized ironically. Give them another few minutes and they'll probably be heading for Michael's room.

Jeff looked down at his plate and pushed it away.

"Hi," Jeff said to Andrew, as he walked past the table: Explicitly overlooking Michael and Tom.

Tom watched him leave and slowly got up. "Guys," he said. "I'll be back in a while - there's something I've got to deal with."

"What is happening with you guys?" Andrew glared at Tom.

"I think that I'm going to find out." Tom pouted, then navigated his way out to the lobby.

Jeff was already down the stairs in front of the hotel and taking up an incensed pace when Tom careened out of the front door. "Jeff!"

Jeff continued on. He unsuccessfully attempted to light a cigarette as he head into the tempest emanating from the sea and ditched the lighter. The frenzied rustling of palm leaves and the crashing sea were the only things that could be heard as he walked along the dim beach. He had to squint to prevent the airborne sand from blowing into his eyes.

"Jeff. Stop for a second!"

Jeff cast an accusatory glare back at Tom. His hustler deceiver looked ridiculous struggling through the sand in boots.

Tom was a stranger now. How could he have asked Tom to Paradiso? To Paradiso lost?

With no more light on the beach, Jeff walked up the stone stairway out onto the illuminated jetty. There was a dense mist on each side created by the waves crashed against its foundations.

Tom's step quickened and hearing them Jeff knew that a confrontation was unavoidable. When he got to the end Jeff stood with a determined bearing. He'd be civilized.

But his mindset wouldn't be altered.

Tom stopped a respectful distance away from him, disheveled and breathing heavily. He clanged his ringed hand against a metallic mooring pole, gasping: "What's wrong with you, for Christsakes? So what if things aren't working out with Michael do you have to turn psychotic on me? What have I done?"

"Like you don't know. You don't miss a chance do you?"

"What?"

"You don't know..." Jeff laughed scornfully.

"Just what do you mean by that?"

"What about pretender? That's your trip."

Tom gaped incredulously. "I give up - you're gone this time."

"Man! - Why don't you give it up, Tom? You know exactly what I'm talking about. I saw your tryst with Michael at the inlet. A 'peacock inlet' - yeah, right."

Tom threw his hands into the air tersely. "Big bloody deal. We saw some bloody water - Hellfire!"

"Do you think I'm blind, Tom," Jeff retorted. "I know that something's going on. If you wanted him then why didn't you just say?"

Tom slouched back against the pole, his face in harsh contrasts underneath the downward light. "I don't want him." He shook his head. "I never wanted him. He'd never want me. You admitted yourself that you haven't slept lately," Tom attested. "You were hellucinating."

Jeff was imperious to any line of reason. "How could you abuse my trust like that?"

"I swear that if you saw anything Jeff it was deceptive." Tom was more hurt than angry. "I wouldn't do that to you even in my worst dreams. If I had wanted him, I would have told you - You know that I speak my mind."

Jeff wiped the moisture from off his forehead. A single yacht veered between waves out in the sea. Lights in its bow illuminated the fierce, jade ocean around its hull.

Tom's tone became sincere and assuaging. "Aren't you going to let me even explain what happened this afternoon?"

Jeff looked into empty space and shrugged. He was angry and he had the will to be.

"Why does it have to be so hard to know you?" Tom groaned. "It's like Jeff versus the world. I used to think that you were naive, but you just don't trust anyone."

Jeff wanted to blame, but he wanted even more desperately to hear something forgivable. He cast his eyes downward into the distopian waters.

"Jeff - You're my friend and you know I wouldn't do anything to shaft your ambitions with Michael."

"...You haven't."

"All that happened was that after lunch I wanted to talk to him alone - Don't get me wrong. I couldn't find you, and I wanted to get Michael's perspective on yesterday. I did it for the right reasons. That's why we were alone. He consoled me about Brad and I did the same about you for him." Tom caught his breath and looked pleadingly at Jeff who hadn't stirred for some moments. "If there is something you want to say - don't hold back."

Jeff gave a low, cautious laugh. "You had to condole him about me?"

"He asked my advice on what he was doing wrong."

"What did you say?"

"You seemed as enigmatic to me as Michael."

Jeff's expression lightened up a touch; he kicked absently at a loose railing. "Well... Maybe I didn't see that much," he admitted.

"You don't have to explain, Jeff. I should have told you. It's not always in our nature to trust another fag. We're conditioned to distrust the homosexual even in ourselves."

Mist glistened on Jeff's face. "Sorry, Tom. I do have faith in you but just not a lot in myself. I was only trying to make sense of things."

"Does this mean I'm forgiven for what I never did?" Tom crooned, a glimmer of light in his eyes.

"I really must have looked like I was losing it, saying what I did," Jeff replied desolately. "You've got a rep and that can make it difficult being your friend sometimes."

"Don't say it - I'm flattered that everyone actually believes I get all the guys I say I do. Why don't we go back in: Have a drink?"

It was a relief to be back in the heated lobby. The check in woman watched the two tousled figures with her overly mascaraed, violet eyes.

"I never knew whether you wanted to make me feel inadequate," Jeff confessed in an amiable way. "Like when we lived together and you'd bring home guys from the club, I felt so envious. I just wondered how you got so popular, and..."

Tom held up his hand poignantly. "Don't say that Jeff. You're acting like you never had the opportunity - when you did. You had a lot of the best looking guys interested. It's never easy for me."

"Really?"

"Besides, Jeff, you came from money. You didn't come from the west side of the Sydney like I did."

"And so what?" Jeff said in an apologetic tone as they stepped into the elevator.

Tom gave a wan smile. "You can never forget where you come from. I grew up hearing every Westie anti-gay thing there is. I wanted to grow up and be something different." The elevator doors closed. "I grew up to become exactly what they said: Tom Firelli, the male prostitute, or the dole addict, satisfying every prejudice that they ever had."

They stood, neither of them knowing what to say for several seconds.

"But forget it..." Tom smiled reassuringly. "Guess what happened today? Do you want to know something else?"

"Yeah." Jeff steeled himself.

"I..." Tom took a deep breathe. "I did something really wild."

Jeff leaned forward with bated breath.

"While you were with Francois, I went into the sauna with Brad... And..."

"You did?"

"I did... Brad didn't." Tom was struck by a sudden introversion.

"Come on Tom. Give it up! Full disclosure."

"I failed badly. I kind of realized that the advice I gave you about Michael wasn't right, and... That I was significantly responsible for what happened between you."

"But hasn't it always worked for you?"

"Maybe for a one-night stand, but when it's someone you want for more, then it's too superficial. I couldn't experience and know Brad. I tried street technique, but available looks and one-liners fail with genuine guys."

Jeff's eyes glittered. "Did Michael say anything else about me?"

Tom raised one brow at him pointedly. "I've been waiting all day to tell you." He paused for dramatic effect.

"And..."

"In fact..." Tom's eyes widened. "He wants you. He said you were cute as hell."

"He said that?"

"Yes and more - he's out like a whore on Bastille Day."

Elation snatched Jeff's senses; he tried to believe it. "Did he say that he wanted us to get together here?"

Tom rolled his eyes teasingly. "He was making no designs on you - not definitely, but I got the impression that he's waiting for the perfect cue."

"If I'd acted out the way I felt it'd have been easier."

"I think that you're right."

"You think he's waiting for me to make the move?" Jeff said heatedly. "Do you think I should?"

Tom was floored. "You're asking me? I think you should just act natural and relax. Accept everything as it happens and don't question it - not right away. Say whatever comes to your mind, and whatever you do, dress for your state of mind."

"But when are we going to get the chance to be together? We're leaving in three days."

"Aren't you riding with Francois around the island tomorrow? I hear it takes hours riding steady on a horse."

"We're making it an overnight trip."

"Now that's beautiful," Tom intoned mindfully. "Ask Michael and maybe Francois might give you some time with each other. Francois would have seen it a million times already anyway."

"Very inventive, but would Michael go?" Jeff inquired faithlessly.

"Oh... yes... I've got a feeling he would," Tom responded with a lusty chortle. "But, I do have an ulterior motive. He's scheduled to go with Brad on the cruiser over to Orien Island again, so if he cancels then..."

"Cool strategy," Jeff shook his head overwhelmed. "You take every shot don't you."

"What other option does Tom Firelli have stuck here?"

Jeff smiled resignedly and shook his head. Jeff's fist anointed Tom's shoulder in allied mode. They fell into step, laughing as they entered the Montenapoleone Bar.

What other option did any of them have?
 
 

* * *

Jeff and Tom hustled their way into the discotheque among a straight crowd. When a familiar song came on Tom insisted that they dance and to the amusement of the crowd they did. Two gays dancing, facing one another and striking dance poses from Top 40 video clips was a novel occurrence.

Michael made a brief appearance, but he seemed preoccupied and didn't see Jeff wave. Jeff suspected that he was going upstairs to the casino bar.

Jeff got off the dance floor and asked for a bottle of water from the barman. He took a long swig, then thought about how he'd put his concept to Michael. What to say?

Maybe: 'Come away with me handsome stranger into the setting sun to explore the rays of the night, and the opium of the flesh'.

Maybe not.

That was Baudouin's opening line in Marlene Blue Angels. Jeff knew he'd have to play it by sensual instinct.

He decided that he would tell Tom that he was leaving. He maneuvered his way back to the floor and saw that Brad had already taken his place with Tom; they were seriously funking out. Brad pumped his arms and thrust his crotch like Gaymageddon in blue jeans.

Jeff tried to catch Tom's eye but it was a wasted effort.

Tom was way too down with it.
 
 

CHAPTER 22

Upstairs, Jeff asked for a "Mercury Fire" at the casino bar. The barman expertly mixed it with whiskey, Cointreau, cola and tonic and slid it across.

Jeff faked a relaxed walk as if he were looking for somewhere to sit or a game to take a chance on. A group of Japanese VIPs were making a Buddha awful racket as a man scored a straight 21 blackjack. Behind Michael the brilliant gold, red and blue sequences of light from the slot machines and baccarat lured Jeff's gaze.

Michael recovered his glitz-testosterone composure when their eyes met.

"Jeff." Michael gestured: 'Come over'.

"Michael... I."

There was a perfectly timed pause.

"Sorry, I," they apologized in stereo.

"You go," Michael insisted.

Jeff's face abounded with guilt. "Sometimes I make mistakes."

Michael grinned. "I think we both managed to do that. It was a stupid misunderstanding."

"I assumed-"

"Yeah I know. After the bonfire I was unnerved that the door was open and Tom was watching us kiss."

"I didn't know and Tom didn't care - He likes to watch."

"I've been blackmailed before and..." Michael's voice faded out as he appraised the look on Jeff's face. "I know that you could never do anything like that," Michael said regretfully.

"Then you want to spend some more time with me?" Jeff ventured.

Michael's smile expanded. "We could give it another try - getting to know each other and hanging out again."

"I'd understand if you had other plans." Jeff began earnestly. "But, Michael... I was going to ride around the island. It's an overnight trip and I was thinking that you seemed OK in the saddle. Assured actually."

Jeff sat next to him and looked at the blackjack table with boding: Hell, Jeff, he's going to refuse.

"I was going out over to Orien Island tomorrow..." Michael said.

"It's 'visual ecstasy' over on the south side of Paradiso... here," Jeff mused trying to sound unassuming. "Francois swears it."

Michael took a sip of the cherry liquid in his glass. "If you're there it will be. You know, I've already been to Orien and I'm sure the guys would understand - Andrew at least."

"You'll come?"

"Well, if it is 'ecstasy'."

"I'll call Francois!"

"Ask him to find me another horse than the uncontrollable Marrakesh. I seriously think that that horse was trying to kill me."