fic | the first and the last

[sentito]

THE FIRST AND THE LAST




”Care for a walk, monsieur Perlman?” the King asks before all of court, caring very little that everyone is waiting with bated breath for them to leave, so the gossiping can begin, and even less for the fact that no man who holds his rank and position dear would ever decline such an invitation, made to his face. King Louis XV, le Bien-Aimé, known in private as Michel to those he chooses to let in on that little private joke, shows no regard for gossipers, or he’d be more careful with his shows of favor, besides he knows, like when you open a jewellery box only to reveal a jewellery box hidden within, that Elio would never want to say no to him anyway.

It's not an order, it’s an offer, but unrefusable.

And how Elio loves to be known. How he wants to put all his valuables on display for the other man, just line them up, here, take it all.

They leave the Hall of Mirrors together, the whispers and muttering beginning long before their footfalls have died out among the resonant walls.


~*~


Versailles is like a golden cage, filled to the brim with birds too blinded by the gilding to really mind their captivity. Elio doesn’t mind it either. What’s to dislike, besides the stench which is undoubtedly worse elsewhere? He likes the unrestricted access he’s enjoying to world class instruments, musicians, pupils from the nobility who understand music the same way others understand how to use any combination of limbs on their bodies. He’s among if not equals here and that’s the majority, consisting of Catholics, speaking, not him, then definitely among kindred spirits.

Very quickly and without any outward effort, he has gained the title, “the King’s Harpsichordist”, leading the concerts on the nights when the chamber orchestra plays in the ballroom, organizing musical events, inviting travelling opera singers and dancers to court, teaching the King’s son who is, however, extremely opposed to all attempts at being taught the intricate nature of the instrument, any instrument, anything that Elio touches, really.

Elio understands.

For all lack of outward merit, there are more secret efforts that have bound him so tightly to the King, and nothing in Versailles is more secret than a passive-aggressive suggestion or a faux-wondering comment, squeezed out through the ribs, like it has teeth. Biting.

“Isn’t the Jew a marrying age? Doesn’t his kind marry?”

“Why, is he seeing someone? One has to wonder, who could it be?”

King Louis’ son, also called Louis, though one day he’ll be known as le Beau, doesn’t wonder. Louis the Younger feels sure enough about his suspicions to hate Elio, like he has hated his father for more than a decade. And because his father loves music, because his father loves Elio who also loves music, Louis the Younger hates it and always plays with nothing short of a vengeance.

The lessons remain brief, tense and hostile, but a good excuse to walk with the King afterwards.


~*~


“Update me on the progress of my son,” Michel says, and although it’s verbalized as an order, as always he gives Elio the choice to remain silent, while at the same time sending him a wide, unabashed smile that makes silence redundant. So much is already being said, just like this.

Shrugging, his tight-fitting, embroidered jacket restricting him somewhat around the shoulders, the pale green fabric shiny and stiff, Elio shakes his head, not to mean no, but to imply a multitude of other things: do you really want to hear what I have to say? You know I never come bearing good news. Maybe he hated you a little less today than yesterday, but then you did this.

Then, he asked Elio to walk with him. Tomorrow’s music lesson will be a pain for all. Elio’s ears in particular.

But Michel doesn’t look away from him, only raising an eyebrow in anticipation, and Elio can’t turn down the King who invited him to court, just as much as he can’t turn down the man who wears him like a robe in the privacy of night.

The man for whom he’s both sceptre and throne.

“He greeted me by my name today,” Elio tells him. They don’t discuss the music, they both know le Beau takes no interest in the arts, not like his father and his father’s father before him. He is going to be a very different kind of king.

Michel has told him, he both fears and looks forward to when that time comes. It’s another of the King’s secrets that Elio carries, like his scent and his semen.

“How does he normally greet you?” Michel wants to know, frowning. Like he can’t even imagine, and maybe he can’t.

“Jew,” Elio tells him, looking straight ahead.


~*~


When he came to Versailles, of course he came because he had been summoned, no one arrives at court who isn’t wanted there, at least by someone, anyone with the power to make your stay happen. Elio had been called by the King himself, rare occurrence as that was, after having lived only a few years in Paris as a music teacher and occasional performer with the noble families that his father knew and who knew his father, owing this or that to his name.

His first audience was in the morning, all of court was present and he was led before the King by two guards, one on each side of him. They made him look tiny, he was pretty sure. With their lances and their hats.

He was wearing his finest, but still looked sloppy compared to all of Versailles’ powder-covered, silk-clad elite.

“Monsieur Elio Perlman,” the Grand Master of Ceremonies called out, a distasteful curl to his lip, “the --”

But before he could finish introducing Elio as Jew, which mattered more in these circles than it had ever mattered among the intellectuals with whom his own father had dined while Elio grew up, the King had opened his mouth and jovially proclaimed, “The Italian, yes! Are you familiar with the works of Scarlatti, surely you must be.”

Elio was intimately familiar with the works of Scarlatti. He held a lecture before all of court on his music, clinging to all his knowledge on the subject like a man clinging to a single lifeboat on a lonely and rough sea.

Although the waves hadn’t becalmed in the meantime, Elio survived the day, has survived every day since, under the cover of the nights. Softer. Gentler.


~*~


“He’ll stop with that nonsense,” Michel proclaims after a long moment of their simply walking side-by-side down the gravel-covered pathways of the Versailles gardens. “As soon as I get to him.”

Before them stretches out acres of grass and flower beds, water carefully reined in and pacified. Nature in perfect harmony, unlike the people living in it. Elio thinks, even when he leaves, he’ll never forget the sight of Versailles’ gardens, everything they symbolize, the order they create out of the chaos residing inside the sun-golden palace.

This is the only place where the birds living within the royal family’s gilded cage can even pretend to be free.

“Some people won’t just let themselves be gotten to,” Elio replies, then quickly adds, as they pass the Viscount the So-and-So and his daughter, “Your Majesty.”

Michel, the King, regards him out the corner of his eye and is quiet for a few long moments, weighing the same as time always will, when it is your sovereign dragging it out. Elio waits, patiently, hands behind his back as their feet draw parallel lines through the meticulously governed landscape. He has learned to appreciate Michel’s silences as much as his speeches, both verbose and subtly understated to an equal degree.

“The marriage canard?” he finally asks.

To which Elio answers, “There’s nothing to explain, really.”

Oliver isn’t easily ‘gotten to’, that’s all the detail needed; he removed himself across oceans to put distance between himself and Elio, everything they shared that summer. He left it behind, what could’ve been, and Elio doesn’t hold it against him. Could’ve been’s aren’t the sturdiest foundation to build anything on, after all.

Doesn’t he know it?

“Everything deserves explanation,” says Michel, waving one hand dismissively, as if swatting away an irritating fly. At least, Elio is relatively sure he isn’t the fly in this equation. This is the King under whose reign the sciences and the arts, the studies that explain the human outer world as well as the inner one, have flourished. Because the King thinks everything deserves an explanation. Elio smiles slightly, a curve at the corner of his mouth, saying, you’d think so, yes?

“Maybe, but not everything gets it,” Elio counters.

“Ah, checkmate,” Michel laughs, letting him have it. Like he’s letting Elio leave, although in every movement and touch between them these days, his body screams, stay, please stay. “I will talk to my son. It has been a few weeks of mutual disregard now. It’s time.”


~*~


To the world, King Louis XV is known as le Bien-Aimé, the Much-Beloved, to contrast the reign he’s had, suffering from misfortune in war and in love both. Everyone knows, though no one talks about it, one of those unofficial secrets that hang in the air, fill up any room in which they’re both present, that his wife doesn’t live on her own in the quarters where she has been installed. Just as everyone knows, but no one dares to mention how the Dauphin refuses to see him and keeps to his own quarters in the palace, their paths only cross when they carry out public relations.

They share a love for their country, naturally, but even their ambitions for it cannot find common ground. The current Louis and the next. He’ll either be the first king of his kind, my son, Michel once told Elio in the wee hours of the morning, or he will be the last.

Same as you, he’d whispered to Elio later, as they had welcomed the rising sun, totally wrapped up in each other, you’re either the first or you’ll be the last, I can’t tell which, but I fear the latter.

Elio hadn’t told him, not then, that sometimes the first and the last are the same thing.

Just hold me. Just kiss me.

“Just call me Michel,” the King had said on their fourth stroll through the gardens, when the guards were an extra couple of steps behind and there was not a noble in sight. Frowning, Elio had looked sideways up at him, though self-consciously averted his gaze when the King had met his eyes, with little to no shame. In his company, Elio found it easier to remember the boy he’d been once, swimming naked along the shore near his mother’s estate, unafraid of letting himself be seen by the stable boy, the visiting summer guests, Oliver. Easier to remember, maybe, but not easier to unearth, like old relics from the ground.

Some things required more digging. He half-asked, half-observed, “But that is not your name, Your Majesty.”

Michel chuckled. “No, but I wish it were. I have the name of a king, although I am only king because my father before me was king and so on, and so forth. Neither my father nor I wished to be king, he wanted to dance, I suppose I want that same kind of freedom, but that is life. We don’t always get what we want.” Drawing to a halt, dragging Elio along not by touch, still an arm’s length between them, but by his very presence, the authority of his movement or lack thereof, the King turned towards him, meeting his gaze with an open, yet unyielding expression on his face, the same way he had come to be known as a ruler.

Open. Unyielding. Buoyant, outwardly.

Behind it all, Elio thought. Sad.

So, he agreed to calling the King ‘Michel’ when they were in private and after some time, it became an intimate joke. Later still, it stopped being a joke and started being the name Elio called when the King pushed into him, front to front, with Elio’s legs wrapped around him.

In those moments, Michel wasn’t king, he was Elio’s lover, nothing more and nothing less.

Only in that capacity would Elio ever be able to leave him. You didn’t turn your back on King Louis XV, but – because he knew about firsts and lasts, middles and ends, as well as Elio did, they both understood the inevitability of their goodbye – Michel would ultimately allow him to go.


~*~


Elio had lived at Versailles for almost two years, when he heard from his father, of course, who else, since Oliver and he hadn’t spoken since he returned to America, that Oliver had married, had his first child, the second well underway and the entire family had relocated to New England now.

What it was about that letter that made him decide to embark on the voyage to rediscover the love of that summer, he wasn’t sure. Maybe it wasn’t the letter at all. Maybe it was the way Michel, the King who didn’t want to be king, sometimes told him, we are no richer than our regrets, Elio. Maybe it was the gilded bars of Versailles cage, they made him remember the freedom he had enjoyed in Italy, the vast expanses of land, the coastline, the waves.

Maybe, over in New England, Oliver was just as entrapped as Elio was, here, his cage just looked very different and was very far away. Other than that, it consisted of the same sleepless nights, the same recollections. The same forgetting yourself in food, drink, work, intercourse…

If nothing else, his father had taught him, probably taught them both, that some distances not only could be bridged, but were made to be. Some choices, changed. It is never too late, he could hear Samuel Perlman say in the present tense, to correct a mistake.

As it were, Elio wouldn’t ask Oliver for his life, Oliver had obviously chosen his, what ground to build it on. It wasn’t a blame game, you can’t hold people’s foundations against them. No, he would only ask for a night, a day, a fuck, maybe. He would only ask: again? He would only ask: because haven’t we always?


~*~


The voyage is at a stage of planning now, when there’s probably no going back. The King is sending a ship to New York with new supplies for the colonists and Elio has been secured a cabin on board, his harpsichord already stored away on the boat, these days he can only play the King’s own instrument, the instrument of his father before him. The two men who didn’t want to be king, but life, right? So much life, in one elegant frame of wood, sixty-one keys, the frail, vibrating pluck of the strings.

They take a right turn at the large fountain, walking quietly next to each other, both aware, Elio is only going to be here another week. Then, like Oliver before him, he’ll be gone. The first and the last.

“When you hear of my death, don’t come back,” Michel eventually says, and there's no grandeur or splendor to his voice. “Stick to life.”

“Any life?” Elio wants to know, mostly good-humouredly, if there’s any trace of regret in his voice, it’s hidden well. Because of Michel, the King, Louix XV, he is richer than that.

They are beyond regrets, with each other.

“The life I am about to give you,” the King replies, halts once more and dismisses the guards, though they only leave reluctantly. Versailles is safe, because the people is far removed, but even in Versailles… Well, people live here, too. However caged and clipped their wings. However blinded by their own gleam and shine.

Halting as well, Elio turns towards him slowly, expectantly, a little bit nervously, there’s that kind of anticipation in the air, of something that means more than the words themselves, more than the actions, even. He had once warned the King, he wasn’t good at beginnings. Well, he’s worse yet at endings.

You could've hoped the middle would last longer.

Michel holds up his hand and, in full view of Elio, removes his signet ring, the one with his monogram that he uses to sign his correspondences and treaties, reaching out to take Elio’s hand and placing it gently on his palm, closing his fingers around it. Like that, he holds him a moment, briefer perhaps than expected from the weight of it, the gesture, then he lets him go.

“This will open most doors for you in America,” the King says, with all the authority of his birthname, the initials on the ring, the favor of France’s monarch, “But the door you are leaving in the hopes of opening, I have no control over.”

That’s life, Elio thinks. He grasps the ring in a tight fist, pressing it to his chest, frills and ruffles almost obscuring the shape of his hand. Though, he can tell, it’s like a heart.

“It's not a matter of control, I just want to sit watch for a while,” he explains, because everything deserves an explanation, he's been told, also this. "Call it a vigil, if that makes more sense to you." Michel smiles, sadly rather than jovially, as most would expect of him, but not Elio, and begins walking again. Elio keeps up, he stays close, he isn’t gone yet.

“Then, this should keep you comfortable while you wait,” Michel replies. “Guard it well, it is the heart of my heart.”

Heart of my heart, Elio repeats, wordlessly, remembering another, similar phrase, said by himself to someone else, meaning the same thing. You’ll be gone, but you’ll be here, with me, always. This time, it is him pulling them to a halt, however presumptuous that may be, but the King of France lets him, seems to know already before Elio has looked around to make sure they’re alone, even before he has stepped up to him, that this is the first and the last goodbye they will get.

Like that, Michel bends his head, comes down from his heights, his royal pedestal, meets Elio’s lips halfway and they kiss for a long, breathless moment, open-mouthed and desperate.

From experience, Elio knows that is how it tastes, when you bid love farewell.