Read In Memory of Angel Clare for Free Online Page A

sympathetic over what he thought he was going to hear. Instead, Michael read him a poem he had written, a thin complaint without meter about how he hated his father for being fat and working-class and obsessed with status. He wanted to know where to send it for publication. It was as though he didn’t know the man in the next room was dying.
    He knew now. Or acted like he did. And Michael’s family had broken off from him, although Michael seemed more pleased than hurt by that. But Jack was furious with Michael for having been so oblivious when Clarence was dying, only to carry on now as if he were the only person on earth who remembered Clarence. Jack had known Clarence almost twenty years; Michael had known him only three. Jack tried to forgive and understand, but it was difficult when he was alone.

3
    C ONTINUING THIS BLOW-BY-BLOW (SO to speak) account of a tramp abroad, Vienna was all window-shopping, until I sat on a bench one night outside the Ratshaus—imagine building a house for rats—looking at my map when a big, kind, cleanshaven, shorthaired, thirty-ish Austrian kindly asked if I was lost and sat down beside me to tell me I should visit some of Vienna’s many churches. He pointed to them on the map in my lap, poking at the map until I began to notice—smart boy—how many churches were located in the vicinity of my penis. When I did not scurry off, he offered to give me a personal tour of the nearby university, which was closed for the night, if I was curious about Hapsburg architecture. He showed me a dark baroque courtyard where he groped me, a darker neoclassical vestibule where he kissed me, and a well-lit contemporary toilet where the rest is silence. So I’ve finally done it in a toilet, which was anticlimactic, so to speak, after the Englishman who carried his own roll of toilet paper in the Trocadero. Cut to: a smoky coffeehouse later that evening where an old man whose English was even worse than mine asked me if I was “a Christ.” He meant Christian of course but he was so sincere and I so polite that it was almost like chasing away the postcoitals talking with Jack in the caf after a night of forgetting the unrequiteds for Larry Breaststroke in a horny visit to you. (Please don’t show this letter or the other to Jack! We don’t want to spoil his innocence and I rather he not even know I was gay until he knows he is. And he is. I know it.)
    Michael was wondering if he should go to Vienna after all, when he looked up from the letter and remembered he sat outside a house near Norwich, Connecticut. But he really felt as though he were still in Europe, still unmoored in the world and just passing through. His brief stop by the apartment yesterday had not been enough to make him feel he was home.
    He had never been to this place and it was as foreign as a corner of Europe. Michael sat in a redwood chair on a shelf of lawn terraced a few feet above a country road, the lawn going back just a few feet before it ended against a rocky hillside scabbed with lichen and topped by scrub pine. Below, in the orchard on the other side of the road, checkers of shadow played over the long grass and collapsed stone wall. The long shelf of lawn was in the sun, but Michael kept to the shade of a tree at the far end, sweating in his white dress shirt and gray slacks. The house itself stood at the other end of the shelf, built into the hillside and looking very red, restored, and quaint. Ben and Danny were house- and dog-sitting for Ben’s sister and brother-in-law. Michael had arrived by train the previous evening and only now was getting to his real purpose in being here.
    He riffled through the folder of letters in his lap—a motley assortment of different kinds of paper, all covered with the same perfect handwriting—and looked again at the sawtoothed sheet of notebook paper in his hand. Clarence’s letters weren’t what he expected. He wasn’t sure what he had expected during his lonely week after Paris,