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Originally published in 1994 and short-listed for the Booker Prize, The Folding Star was taken out of print two years later. Amidst a surge in demand for the author's work following the release of 2004's acclaimed The Line of Beauty, BloomsburyUSA re-released the novel last month.
Luc was asleep. I lay propped up beside him. Thinking of later days in our affair, unguessed afternoons of sex, drives beside long canals, his cock curving out of his fly in the car, high-summer lulls when we lay like soldiers under Flanders willows and poplars, shirts off, watching clouds drift in the canal, his crude, obsessive demands.
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I tiptoed out for a drink of water and came back gulping from the glass like a child. I thought he might have vanished, it seemed foolish to let him out of my sight; but there he was, a goldish blur. I half-stumbled on his clothes, and crouched to rifle them — but what did they matter when the boy himself was there? I found every fear answered and calmed by that luminous fact. He was lying in my bed, naked, sleeping — flat out. It was a triumph. Tears slipped down my face, I didn't really know why — it felt like gratitude, but also they were the tears that register some deep displacement, a bereavement sending up its sudden choking wave. It struck me I must be mourning everything that came before — it was the desolate undertow of success.
When we had started to kiss it was what I wanted, he was warm and strong, our cocks, lying opposite ways in our jeans, rubbed and jolted off each other, we were going to fuck, but for a long while I just held him there in a hard, shocked grip. His tongue pushed into my mouth but I blocked it with my own: I felt my tongue was the tip of some passionate organ that was rooted deep inside me, so densely coiled, so fiercely self-involved, so hardened to its own darkness and starvation that it reacted with a spasm of bewilderment to the free gift of what it craved. He lifted off my glasses and looked at me as if he found me drolly beautiful. I brushed and moulded his face and neck with incredulous fingers, kissed his eyelids, his long nose, the soft burden of his upper lip. He was squeezing my cock already and still I thought I would be mad to let this happen. I thought once I started I would stifle him, frighten him with my dreadful unconditional needs. He would break away with a sickened laugh.
I was reckoning without his own madness. Of course it wasn't just mischief, he wasn't trying to trap me: he wanted fun, experience, anything wild — either you did it with him or you didn't. Somewhere out there was the person he loved, a boy or girl, but for now he was making do; I felt I was getting the benefit of some stored-up passion intended for someone else, but brimming and spilling; and maybe he liked the switch of power in seducing an older man. It struck me it might even be a kink of his, that he'd done it before — there was the dream I'd had about him and Matt . . . I started pulling off his clothes in a turmoil of jealousy and pride.
Luc naked — apart from his white briefs. His hard cock had a vein in it so thick that it showed in contour through the stretched cotton. I turned him round in my hands, kissed the back of his neck, stood away from him a moment as I undid my cuffs, glancing down at his legs, where the summer tanlines still palely showed. I thought, I musn't say I love you, though they were the only words I had in my head. He
He was lying in my bed, naked, sleeping — flat out. It was a triumph.
looked back, swung slowly round, swallowing, wondering; there was a mastered shyness in his face, his movements had the seductive blur of drink, the sureness heightened by delay. He took my cock in his hand for a stroke or two, then hugged me again — I was kissing him adoringly, gasping a bit crazily as I worked at his mouth, confusing him; calming him too with my hands across his back, tranced arcs falling gently to his waistband — my fingers slid firmly under and he caught his breath as I furrowed through. He curled against me, then stated pushing at his pants to get them down.
Luc's cock — with that fat little rope of blue-grey vein that ran out along its broad back and then curved capriciously under, the tight foreskin, still with a tang of moisture under it — I kissed it and licked his blond-wisped balls just briefly, in acknowledgement, whilst his hands went softly through my hair. I stumbled him back a couple of times till he bumped the chair, he didn't quite know what was going on — he raised his foot on to the arm and I slid beneath and twisted round with my face in his arse. It was bolder and more beautiful than I expected, the flare of it as he leant forward to play clumsily with my cock. I stroked his pucker with a knuckle, longing to lick — I breathed on it, sort of whistled as if cooling something. It had a pretty, spoilt expression, a puzzled pout. I kissed all around it, decoyed my tongue all down his raised thigh, came back and tried it with a licked thumb. There was a kind of pride in him as well as me; he would take whatever I gave him. I felt for a second or two the strict obligations of the teacher's role, then doubted, as my thumb slipped in to the first, then the second knuckle, whilst he complained and jacked his cock fiercely in his hand, if he had anything left to learn.
I fucked him across the armchair, his feet over his shoulders; I had to see his face and read what I was doing in his winces and gasps, his violent blush as I forced my cock in, the quick confusion of welcome and repulsion. I'd used up all the lube Cherif had left in the jar, but I saw tears slide from the corners of his eyes, his upper lip curl back in a gesture like anguish or goaded aggression. His hand flickered up against my chest to stay me or slow me. I was mad with love; and only half-aware, as the rhythm of the fuck took hold, of a deaf desire to hurt him, to watch a punishment inflicted and pay
There was a mastered shyness in his face; his movements had the seductive blur of drink.
him back for what he'd done to me, the expense and humiliations of so many weeks. I saw the pleasure start up inside for him, as if he didn't expect it, his cock grew hard again in two seconds, his mouth slackened, but I made him flinch with steeper little thrusts.
I was up on the chair, fucking him like a squaddy doing push-ups, ten, twenty, fifty . . . I had a dim sense of protest, postponed as if he wasn't quite sure, he was folded in two, powerless, the breath was pushed out of him, there was just the slicked and rubbered pumping of my cock in his arse, his little stoppered farts. His chest, his face, were smeared with sweat, but it was mine; the water poured off me like a boxer, my soaked hair fell forward and stung my eyes.
And already it was about to end. I pushed myself back on to my feet, I came out of him for a moment and tugged him back by his haunches, his arsehole glittered and twitched and I thrust straight in, then held it gently, barely moving in the gulping shivery limbo just before the end. I had a high starlit sense of it as the best momentof my life. I stroked the inside of his thighs, stooped forward to lick and breathe the faint rubbery smell of his feet; took his cock out of his fist and worked it unyieldingly for him. I saw his balls clutch up, he said "No, No" and rode on to me as his thrown line of sperm soared into my face, my hair, and again, and then again. So I pushed over the edge myself — I made a grieving moan at the bitterness of it, craving the blessing of his gaze, though his eyes were oddly veiled, fluttering and colourless like some Orst temptress's.
Luc was perfectly friendly in bed, though he smiled more to reassure himself than to charm me. I was given the feeling that I'd slightly overstepped the mark. I was sweet to him, our heads together on the pillow, though I tried not to crowd him and torment him. I laid an arm carelessly over his warm stomach. I wanted to hold him, he was everything to me. His eyes were closed, but he would never sleep when his heart was speeding so.
"Are you all right, darling?"
"Mmm." Another slow smile, a pat on my protecting arm.
"It's a jolly good job you came into the bar this evening." A pause, in which he sighed and swallowed. "I mean, it's not as if you often do."
"No." It struck me that if I hadn't been there he could have ended up with someone else; perhaps on other nights he had — it made me feel sick.
"Had you ever been in the Cassette before?"
"We had a bet," he said, with a smirk. So it was just a dare, I thought there'd been a certain bravado to him . . .
His chest, his face, were smeared with sweat, but it was mine; the water poured off me like a boxer.
"About whether you'd be in there."
"Oh . . . " I couldn't tell if that made me a fool or a dangerous dark horse. "And who thought I would be?"
"They did. I thought you might be, but I didn't know. I said not. I thought I'd won, because I didn't see you in there, but then you came up to talk to us." Did it quite figure? I caught their cryptic exchange of looks again, saw the thread of mockery glint again in the story of the evening. Still, he had stayed for me, and I had triumphed. I had obliterated Patrick and Sibylle. "They think you've got a crunch on me," he said.
"And why would they think that?" I asked lightly and then wished I hadn't.
But he was too clever to answer, or too kind. He turned towards me, saw my confusion and kissed me on the cheek. Well — even if he was of their opinion, it clearly didn't trouble him. Even, I thought, if he's just using me, slumming it with me here, it's happiness, it's a fucking miracle. I ran my hand over him and between his legs. He was hard again, and so was I. I half-rolled on to him and he lounged round me like a cat, drawing up a leg, a heel that rubbed along my thigh and rested roughly and electrifyingly in the crack of my arse. I thought "scratch bottom" and smiled at him and to myself but I didn't explain; it felt both a comfort and a sadness to live so much more than him in the world of metaphors and puns. He gently pushed me off, saying "Not now", though he left an arm limply over me, our calves were crossed. I wondered if he felt the transgressive thrill of a man's hairy legs against his own. n°
Excerpted from The Folding Star by Alan Hollinghurst, published and reprinted with permission by BloomsburyUSA. Copyright 1994 by Alan Hollinghurst. All rights reserved.
