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was unthinkable to him that someone should possess an athletic skill and choose not to use it.
     
    I was at a loss to know what my next step should be in making Jeff Talbot need me. Let me say at once that never in my most fanciful dreams did I ever fantasize him wanting me. There is a crucial difference between being wanted and being needed. And of course there are many ways of being neededsome creative, some mere subservience. It would be misleading to claim I did not want him in a sexual way, but by recognizing the extent of this want, I knew from the beginning I would be able to keep it within bounds, to limit it to masturbation fantasies. By filling his needs, making him the perfect and desirable person he deserved to be, I could bring myself that most noble of all the gratifications, the creation of beauty for its own sake. And I resolved to be needed creatively. He would look up to me, respect me, and know the extent of my cleverness.
    For the realization of how surpassing beauty can be destructive hit me with sudden force. As long as Jack Foster had been a sexual object, had let himself be desired, he had been able to live with himself. And he had found many to worship his considerable sexuality. My beautiful mother had been only one of these. Now I could see that, when confronted with the impact of the full beauty of my father, Jack Foster had been undone. Had he remained with my father the love object he had so easily been with my mother, I do not think the tragedy would have followed. But by being untrue to himself as he saw himself, he murdered both my parents.

     
    4
     
    OPPORTUNITY KNOCKED SUDDENLY, UNEXPECTEDLY, and magnificently. Late one night, near eleven, I happened to glance out a window of my room (I was one of the few boys who lived alone) and saw Jeff Talbot walking oddly towards the building from the chapel, walking stiffly, not his usual graceful, easy carriage. Despite the darkness I could see in the muted moonlight the unnatural whiteness of his face, the catatonic stare of his eyes that saw nothing and everything. My heart pounded, not with concern for him, I am frank to admit, but with the recognition that the time had come at last.
    I slipped downstairs and intercepted him at the door. I said nothing. I took him by the arm and led him to my room. At the touch of my hand he began to cry silently. Still I said nothing until we were within my room, the door closed and locked. It was against the rules to have a lock on one's door, but not a word was said when I had hired a locksmith to put a bolt on my door, nor did I bother giving explanations. Had I asked permission, it would necessarily have been refused. Did I mention that the school's small but magnificent Norman chapel had been given by my grandmother some years before, in memory of my grandfather? Obscure Cornhill had been her choice because the mother of the headmaster had been with her at Miss Porter's School, one of the few girls she had not disliked. So no mention was ever made of my lock, nor did anyone ask for a key.
    Sit down, I told Jeff Talbot.
    It hurts, he whispered.
    Where?
    What they did.
    Show me.
    It is a measure of the trust he'd already placed in me from our brief encounter, and of his recognition of his need for me that, without hesitation, but stiffly, he pulled off his trousers and lay face-down on my bed. Even by the light of only my reading lamp I could see that his anus was raw and bleeding.
    Don't move, I told him. I got a washcloth, wet it in the basin my room possessedone of the few in that bleak, ascetic schooland with great tenderness and care applied it as a compress to His injured anus. I knew exactly what had been done to him, what human instruments had caused this damage. What surprised me, in my one-sided accumulation of sex information, was that such an act could cause injury. Though I did not, by choice, mingle freely with the other boys at Cornhill, still I heard frequent references to sodomy, always as a