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Richard Papen is a delightful mystery for all of them. The wonder of this lanky Californian specimen does not miss any of the Greek class. Roiling whorls of coffee-brown hair curl across the nape of his neck. He has a warm brown glance, roving and flickering across all of them. He is a puzzle, and the Greek class is hungry, hungry, hungry for puzzles to piece together and break into bits. They are desperate for a cause to stand around and rip apart, and Richard Papen is a delicious distraction.
Well-seen on campus, Richard is familiar but unrecognizable. Francis hears from campus rumor that Richard has asked about him. It thrills Francis, who starts to move in the same repetitive circular paths, delighted when Richard side-steps into crevasses and creases of walls and hallways. Francis brushes by him on walkways, muffling a laugh when the sudden warmth makes Richard pull his hand away, sucking in a shocked breath. Francis flexes and caresses the hand that touched Richard's for two days. It aches with a phantom sensation he cannot place. When he asks "cubitum eamus?" before class and Richard turns those dark, dark eyes to him in confusion and a little thready unease, Francis can't even feel stung by his answer. He whistles as he walks into class. He propositions Richard often, and delights in Richard’s faltering gaze and persistent refusals. Francis sees his fists flex and unfurl as if he is imagining something, and wonders what is coloring that mind of his. Francis starts asking him just to see Richard’s face flush a warm, ripe-cherry red. He sees Richard care for them all, even as they each scorn him, leave him out, bite and bicker about his odd quirks. When Bunny, madly, viciously, attacks Richard, poor, innocent Richard, Francis feels himself burn with an acrid fury. How could he target Richard, proud, upright, silver-tongued Richard? They see Richard warily lie about his father’s oil wells, his private school, his not-Hermes tie. Francis feels an urgent, dizzying desire to clothe him in rich, expensive silks and suits, till he looks as noble as he actually is. He wants to brush Richard’s marble-column neck with his hand, almost as if by accident, as he wraps a tie around it. Francis wants to pin cuff links on his sleeves and feel Richard’s warm breath huff on Francis’ cheek.
Camilla sees his gaze lingering on her. Californian born, he is burned brown and lovely. She likes how he follows her quietly, like she wouldn’t even notice unless she tried to pay attention. She follows the curve of his nose, Indian? or Latino in origin. That proud, Roman nose, that pushy, upright pride that prevents his gaze from lingering when she returns it. When she sees that dignified Roman profile in class, she is oddly flushed with delight. How far, she wonders, does his pride stretch? What would it take to break that cold, marble exterior? She sees him hang onto her every word in class as she recites Greek, Latin, polished English. She sees him mouth along. She wants to know how his eyes crinkle when he is crying. She wonders what he would look like kiss-blushed and wide-eyed with glossy, limpid tears. She wonders how their class will ruin him. She knows all their ugly, jeering Achilles’ heels, the rifts and bitter, hideous truths roiling between them. She knows what her brother says when he wants to be cruel. She knows how Bunny detests her brain, and ridicules her as his fingers drip in lush red sauce made from her own damn kitchen. It amuses her to think of how brutal Richard's awakening will be (it drives her a little insane). How will stoic, steady Richard react? That melancholy, frigid lover of ferocious beauty - how will its ugly underbelly repulse him? She wonders - with a bitter pang - if he will abandon them. She wonders - with a keen sort of longing- if he will instead choose to stay.
Charles laughs delightedly as he welcomes him for dinner. Funny Richard, with his odd eyes and lanky figure and quiet solitude. He wants to eat him alive. He wants to keep everyone else from having him. He wants to set them loose on him. Charles sees Richard pale as the meal goes on, looking sick to his stomach as Bunny laves his tongue over a lambchop’s burgundy marbled grain. Charles offers him wine, roasted vegetables. He eyes Richard’s wavering gaze and trembling fingers, and grins at him, clasping his shoulder kindly. He offers him a cold glass of water, cajoles him with a soft murmur. Richard, that righteous martyr, doesn’t say a word. Charles is desperate to crack him open and peel his thoughts and desires from his chest. Instead, he thanks him for coming, and tells him to come back every Sunday. Every time Richard reappears at the door with a book to share or a bunch of flowers for the dingy vase on the side table, Charles thinks of how much he wants to hear Richard break apart. He wonders how the lithe, long-limbed boy takes all their hideous urges and follies and finds a way to glaze it over with porcelain-blue wonder and luxury. Charles is innately jealous of the fantasy Richard gets to hold. Charles is jealous of everyone who Richard idolizes into god-figures. Charles wants to be more than Camilla’s twin and Francis’ something. He does, though, delight in knowing that none of the others can touch him like Charles (and sometimes Bunny) can. He swings an arm around Richard’s shoulder, mouths little jokes against the shell of his ear, and presses mindless kisses to his jaw as he hugs him goodbye. No one else can step down from their pedestals, so Charles delights in getting to taunt them from below (one lazy arm wrapped around Richard’s waist).
Bunny is bright, all-American, in the way of propaganda from the 1940s, wartime hero, legend and muse and fan-favorite. He is still envious of Richard, who is Californian but long-suffering, in the way of an old French poet or soldier. It strikes him every time they fantasize about his French title and secret troves of filthy aristocratic money. Bunny wants to show him how lousy American new money is. He fingers the green striped suit that runs languid and lush over Richard's shoulders, and bites out how it’s sloppy for the summer here, how only navy works in these circles, didn’t you know? Bunny watches Richard bite the inside of his cheek, a divot appearing like a cherubic dimple in his cheek. Bunny wants to run his tongue over it. Bunny wants Richard to stay. He is a little sick of the others. When he leaves without paying the bill, begging clemency, his wallet burning in his pocket, he watches Richard’s pulse beat a melody in his neck. He watches the rugged nose and sharp cheeks flush red-red-red. Even Henry’s bitter scowl when he comes to pay the tab cannot rub away that image from his head, Richard’s flush, how Bunny wants to touch it. He knows it will rub off carmine on his fingers. Richard doesn’t belong with them. Richard knows this. Bunny knows this. He will let Richard pretend. (He ignores how the green suit jacket made his curls shine redder, made his eyes into chips of amber.) Something about Richard feels like he can reach out and touch it. Bruise it. Bunny has an uncomfortable reverie when he realizes he likes watching Richard squirm. Later, after the venomous truth of the deer-farmer-deer comes to light, Bunny takes a sharp-edged pleasure in carving Richard up. He knows Richard doesn’t know. He knows the others haven’t filled him in on their filthy revelries. But he likes being the one to twist the knife, likes watching the others squirm and tighten in indignation at Richard being faultlessly slandered, likes watching Richard fumble to explain himself. (Richard is too proud to share that he is one foot outside of their world. Bunny just feels his heart skip in his chest every time he moves cool, lovely Richard to stutters and mumbles.) He sees his chocolate eyes flicker as he tries to explain the next lie, the next false luxury, and Bunny knows that none of the others could possibly know Richard the way he does. No one else could know what cracks lay behind that glossy veneer of their shared American Dreams.
Henry has spent many ugly hours, tinged with insomnia and fury, thinking about Richard Papen. His history, his name, odd French titles and the broken slope of his shoulders. There is no money where he comes from, that is certain. Nor does he want to talk about his humble origins. But there is something so sharply noble about him, about the proud, rigid set to his spine. Nothing, though, no hours of fantasy, no long nights of musing, could have prepared him to hear Richard’s voice. That low, warm timbre sent chills down Henry's spine, curling and lashing like lightning. After he hears him in class, Henry cannot help but think - ridiculously - for but a moment - that he is actually some sort of lost European aristocrat. His lovely voice curls and splays around Greek vowels and consonants, and Henry soon takes to wondering what he would look like sprayed in wild blood, red from the hunt's exertion and wine and too much sticky-flushed-languid skin. Henry lays awake for three nights, haunted by the image of Richard bent over the farmer-deer-farmer, his hands coated in coagulated blood up to his wrists, so thick it shines black and poisonous under slivers of moonlight. It startles something so ferociously primal inside Henry that he wants to vomit. When he slides into a fitful sleep and wakes, half-dazed, he sees that cold, clear vision imprinted into the backs of his eyelids. In class, during breaks, in the warmth of apartment dinners, Henry watches Richard's intelligent eyes flick and rove over them, tracking, noting, analyzing the webs between them. After Bunny’s wretched whinging after Christmas, something in him craves for Henry’s quiet lies and patent honesty, unspoken but clear all the same. He returns to a warehouse attic and sees it empty. He waits till he hears footsteps, a grin curling his lip into a jibe when he sees Richard crumple, tacky, viscous blood shining on his forehead, the boy’s eyes glazed and sightless. As Henry carts him to a hospital, his own heart pounding a feverish rhythm, he wonders how long Richard would have pushed himself. He sees snowflakes melting and dampening the coat sleeves Richard wore. Absurdly, unimaginably, he sees ice freezing part of Richard’s hair solid. He wants to clothe him so warmly that Richard never feels cold again. He wonders how this silent man is capable of such an acutely Roman arrogance in his condition that he would drive himself to death over it. A placid Cato the younger, stabbing himself in the stomach with a sword, not killing himself enough, only just enough for it to pull him apart at the seams. Henry knows, somehow, blindly, that Richard Papen is going to be their Dionysus. Grape-vine woven, directing these maenads, even as they blindly, madly wreck things till bloody ruin. So he takes his Dionysus home. He clothes him, and makes him sleep in his own bed. He cooks him simple meals, and reads quietly in evenings with him. And he decides. He decides he must tell him. He wonders if he can pin his plan on Richard. He wonders if he even wants to incriminate Richard as fodder anymore. (Something ugly and domestic and fiercely possessive urges very clearly “no”.) He watches Richard stumble through the realization, and the murder, and the consequent plans regarding Bunny. Richard stays quiet. He stays keen. He blearily works through algebra problems unassumingly, just in case Henry does decide to set the police hounds on Richard’s tail. Just in case. But some part of Henry looks at Richard, sleepy-eyed and heavy-limbed, working on mushroom potency and human weight proportionate to administered dosages and decides that he does not have the spine, really, to foist this on the boy he still dreams about, covered in moonlight and crimson smears.
(Henry does not die. Bunny does. Camilla leaves them all behind. They get letters from her often, but only Henry knows where she is. He refuses to tell, even Charles, and soon, they stop asking. Francis lives clothed in lush luxury, dreaming of brown, brown eyes, and eventually meets someone normal. Someone kind. Someone who holds him at night when he rocks. And the ugly pit in his stomach is replaced. Charles keeps drinking. He sleeps and wakes to the phantom sensation of dim blares of search sirens and FBI interrogations. Slowly, he works on forgetting. Slowly, even those memories fade away. He wakes up to clear mornings and no sirens or sisters or red-haired lovers in his dreams. Richard stays in Henry’s house. Richard is too proud to ask Henry for what he wants. Henry, cold as he is, has no such qualms about asking for what he wants. Richard gives it, freely. Henry has learned that Richard can't stoop to begging, but will concede enough ground if Henry grovels. Henry is - oddly - very good at groveling. Henry finds he doesn't quite mind groveling if it awards him Richard's rare smiles, hidden behind his brown palms.)