He went to bed and was sleepless in a certain excitement.
“I SHAN’T CRITICIZE THIS, RANN,” Sharpe said, ruffling the sheets of closely written paper.
“I want you to criticize,” Rann said.
He was aware of Sharpe’s powerful charm, resisted it and then succumbed to it. It was a combination he felt helpless to resist, an aura of the spirit, a scintillating intelligence shining through the dark eyes, a physical presence of attraction. He felt a strange new longing to touch Sharpe’s hands, almost too perfectly shaped for a man’s hands, the skin fine grained and smooth like the skin on his face, the bone structure sculptured and delicate in spite of size.
Sharpe glanced at him over the pages and flushed as his eyes met the boy’s fascinated gaze. He put the papers on the small table beside his chair.
“What are you thinking, Rann?” he asked softly.
“I am thinking about you, sir,” Rann said. He spoke in a daze of feeling that he could not comprehend.
“What about me?” Sharpe asked in the same gentle voice.
“You aren’t like anyone I’ve ever known—and yet I don’t really know you.”
“No,” Sharpe said. “You don’t really know me.”
He rose and came to Rann. He put his right hand under Rann’s chin and tilted his face upward. Their eyes met in a long and silent gaze.
“I wonder,” Sharpe said slowly. “I wonder if we are going to be friends.”
“I hope so,” Rann said.
“Do you know what I mean?” Sharpe asked.
“Not quite,” Rann said.
“Have you ever had—a—friend?”
“I don’t know,” Rann said. “School friends maybe—”
“A girlfriend?”
“No.”
Sharpe let his hand drop abruptly. He walked over to the long French window closed against a light rain that was changing to drifting snowflakes. He stood looking out across the darkening campus, and Rann, watching him, saw his hands clench behind his back. He did not speak, half-afraid to break Sharpe’s silence. Then suddenly Sharpe turned and went back to his chair. His face was pale and set, his lips pressed together and his eyes averted from Rann. He took up the sheets he had laid on the table, and put them together.
“I don’t want to criticize this yet,” he said in his usual voice. “You have an excellent idea here—the relation between the creation of science and art—but you’ve dashed it off. I want you to take it back, think it through, and rewrite it. Yes, it’s already well done, but you can carry it much further—complete it. Then when you’ve finished the creative work, we’ll criticize it together, you and I. If it’s as good as I think it will be, we might even get it published in a magazine where I publish some of my own stuff.”
“Wouldn’t it help me to hear your preliminary criticism, sir?”
“No. There must be no criticism during the creative process—not even self-criticism, Rann. Creation and criticism are antithetical and cannot be carried on at the same time. Remember that. You’re a creator, Rann. Of that I now have no doubt. I envy you. Leave criticism to me. I’m a critic by nature, and a damn good teacher as a result.”
He smiled and handed the sheets back to Rann. Then he stood up.
“Your mother will be wondering where the hell you are. I am responsible for delivering you safely into her hands. It’s midnight. How the hours fly when one is—interested!”
He followed Rann to the door of the hall. There he paused, his hand on the knob. Still a few inches shorter, Rann, the boy, looked up and met the dark and tragic eyes of the man. Yes, tragic was the word. Sharpe’s eyes were filled with sadness, though his lips smiled as he looked down upon the young and wondering face. Suddenly leaning forward, he kissed Rann’s cheek.
“Good night—good night,” he said, his voice a whisper. “Good night, my dear!”
“DID HE LIKE YOUR THEME?” his mother asked. She did not usually wait for him to come home because she knew he did not like it. It made him uneasy, or at least less free if he thought of her sitting there by the fire in the living room, waiting for him. But tonight she was there.
“It’s only in rough form,” he said. “I have to do some more thinking on it.”
“What’s it about?” she asked.
“I can’t explain,” he said shortly, and then, in apology, “I’m tired—we had a real session.”
She rose. “You’d better go straight to bed. Good night, son.”
“Good night,” he said, and then, hesitating, he kissed her cheek as usual.
Each night he kissed her cheek with increasing reluctance, a childhood habit he wished he could break without hurting her. While his father lived, he had kissed them both, but now he wanted to be done with it. He went to his own room in confusion with himself. He did not want to kiss his mother, but he still felt on his own cheek the touch of the man’s lips—Donald Sharpe, his teacher and, he had taken for granted, his friend. The kiss remained there, at once repulsive and exciting. What did it mean? He knew that in some countries, in France, for example, men kissed men and it was merely a greeting. But this was not France. And he had never seen a man kiss a man. He, of course, was not yet fully a man, but he was fifteen, he was growing tall and he had to shave once in a while. He could not accept the kiss as casual. It was too unusual. He felt half-shy, half-pleased, but puzzled. Of course he knew things, his father had talked to him, but he had scarcely listened—he’d been interested at the moment in some project he had begun with turtles’ eggs. He had found the eggs one Sunday when he and his father had walked, as they usually did on Sundays, outside the town in the fields. It had been spring and they had stopped at a pond and he brought the eggs home and hatched them in the garage, three of them at least, but the turtles had died.
He bathed now as usual before he went to bed and, lying full-length in the lusciously hot water, he surveyed his changing body with a new interest that he could not understand. It was the same body he washed every night, but tonight he was different. He felt a new life in his body, a sensitivity, an awareness, not yet an emotion but an awareness. Did the kiss mean some sort of love? Could this be possible? A sign of friendship, perhaps? But did men kiss when they were friends? In college he had no friends, since he was always so much younger than the others.
However his mind wandered, it kept returning to Donald Sharpe. He saw himself sitting in that library facing the man he so admired. He saw Sharpe’s face, handsome in a delicate, vivid fashion; he heard the melodious voice, the rapid brilliant speech. Then he saw himself at the door and felt again not only on his cheek but throughout his whole body the touch of Sharpe’s lips. Alarmed, enticed, and half-ashamed, he got himself out of the tub abruptly and dried himself with quick, harsh rubbing of the big towel. In bed, his pajamas buttoned and the string fastened about his waist, he turned on the bedside light and took up the book he was reading, Prodigal Genius: The Life of Nikola Tesla, by John J. O’Neill. The powerful figure of Tesla absorbed him until he slept.