Free The Brothers Boswell by Philip Baruth

James’s knowledge of Gentleman. Whatever else one might say of him, Gentleman is a quick study.
    James leans over to pat Gentleman amiably on the shoulder, then suddenly swivels to me. I say very little in most situations, little compared to what I think might be said. But with James in company, I speak less than little, who knows why. Now he wants my confirmation of his triumph. “What say you to that, John? Is she not slashingly bold?”
    I raise and lower my eyebrows, as though to say nothing more.
    But James is waiting, and Gentleman is looking at me with some amusement, so I go on. “What do I think? I think Mrs. Cowper wants you there beforehand to prove to you and herself that she is Lady Betty, and wants you there afterward to prove to you both that she is not. To send you home without so much as a kiss.”
    Gentleman signals to someone downstage that he’ll be there in a moment. He prepares to haul his long body upright. But before standing, he slits his eyes at me. “So you think it’ll come to nothing, then, young John.”
    “Not nothing. James will have what he really wants, she will have what she really wants. And Cibber’s creaky farce will seem full of the intrigue it normally lacks.”
    Gentleman claps his hands and hoots at that and begins to walk down the aisle, strides lengthening as he goes, but he turns back to point at me and call, “A deep one, your little brother, James.
Very
deep. Give me two minutes, Mr. Boswell, and then make your way backstage. The tiring rooms are yours.”
    James waves a hand by way of assent and then turns to me, and for a moment I think he’s going to say something critical or cutting, something that will spoil the day for me. But instead he gives a gentle bridegroom’s smile and says, “Look at me carefully, John. I will want you to tell me if I look at all different when I come back.” He looks off toward the spikes guarding the stage. “I expect I shall.”
    He brings his face a bit closer to mine for effect. And for an instant I do look: I look at his dark but mild eyes, the soft chin and the lips of a
putto
, all this thrown somehow into question by the wild, fleshy exclamation point of his nose. It is a cherub’s face with the mark of the goat dead center.
    No wonder the world’s doors either swing wide or slam shut as he approaches.

5
     
    I AM SITTING high in a gilded box, last in a short gilded row of such boxes along the left-hand wall of the theater. Beside me sits Gentleman. Ostensibly we have come to the box to make sure that the play carries well to this distance, but neither of us is very concerned with the trickery on the stage. Just below the gold lip of the box, my breeches are open, curling away from my linen like some dull fustian peel. Gentleman’s hand is lost inside that linen, the impecunious Irish fist pumping slowly up and down the length of me. I am confused by this, and I am in an ecstasy of a sort I cannot even begin to understand.
    Ah, now the mystery is solved.
This
was why all the rush, then, Johnny. This was why you couldn’t be late, not even a second. Not even a tittle.
    So what is this thing happening, then? Is it something real, or is it an acted, an imagined thing?
    Come, now—you know, Johnny, that it’s both. You know that.
    I T HAS HAPPENED the last two times I’ve come to the theater with James, and no doubt would have happened the first time had Gentleman been surer of his reception. It is a thing I am forever meaning to haul out of my memory and pore over and take apartand know, but never do somehow, a thing I’ve been meaning for almost a year to
do
something about.
    But it is too slippery to catch, because it exists only here in the Canongate, and only in the high or the far or the dark places of the theater. It exists only with James backstage, as now, or out for a short ale with one or another of the actors. It exists only when Gentleman and I are left alone.
    Which is to say it exists only when Gentleman