Once Before Sunset

David Deutsch

Description

You can always start again, and stories can always be retold to make new meanings. In Once Before Sunset, Will Belicor wanders through small-town New Hampshire, Princeton, and Amsterdam like a medieval knight errant, reworking old narrative traditions to re-assess his aristocratic New England upbringing and his increasing desire for other men. As medieval knights sought religious ecstasy through encounters with hermits, locked-up lovers, and foreign lands, Will turns to exiled intellectuals, feverish crushes, and the city of Amsterdam to establish his own moral guidelines.

Sujets

• LGBTQ+
• Ámsterdam
• Gay
• Fiction
• Amsterdam

Informations

• Publié par: Madville Publishing
• Date de parution: 18 mars 2021
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781948692571
• Langue: English

Extrait

O NCE B EFORE S UNSET
O NCE B EFORE S UNSET
David Deutsch

Lake Dallas, Texas
Copyright © 2021 by David Deutsch All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America
FIRST EDITION
ONCE BEFORE SUNSET is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, businesses, companies, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
Requests for permission to reprint material from this work should be sent to:
Permissions Madville Publishing P.O. Box 358 Lake Dallas, TX 75065
Author Photograph: Kirk Walter Cover Design: Jacqueline Davis Cover Art: “Tehura” (2012) by Doron Langberg
ISBN: 978-1-948692-56-4 paperback; 978-1-948692-57-1 ebook Library of Congress Control Number: 2020941261
For Kirk and Bella
“Bele amie, si est de nus: Ne vus sanz mei, ne jeo sanz vus.”
—Marie de France
Princeton, 2001 (Et in acedia ego)
Table of Contents
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-One
Epilogue
About the Author
Chapter One
The idea to travel had come to me, fittingly, if lazily, last New Year’s Eve. Home for Christmas during my freshman year at Princeton, the holidays had proven awful. My father had reminded me, ad-nauseam—“ let me remind you once more ,” a finger shaking with a sauve savagery, “that you are the fourth generation of our family to attend that self-same institution ,” notable for me because our parents had not-so-secretly doubted that I would get in—anyway, I had been home, from there, and it had been awful.
The wills of patriarchs are too often parodically prolonged but that Christmas ours had come crashing down. As with any old New England family’s, it had done so quietly and with a minimum of disturbance to anyone, save myself. As the oldest son of the oldest son of a still older New England family, it had spent its remaining force on reminding me of my “responsibilities” and recalling them with all of the power of home. Our childhood and our adolescence, but praise me not our present, had, like most of our predecessors’, been spent in the smallness of Carlton, New Hampshire, a town filled with large clapboard houses and all the extravagance of an early American inanity.
As a child, of course, a family history is hard to contemplate. Fortunately, we had extensive help from our father who, having shown-up his brothers by being born first, is the chairman of our family business, Belicor Publishing. Belicor is a not entirely unimportant publishing concern. It is one of the oldest and largest privately held firms of its sort in the States. Its family forerunner printed pamphlets or broadsheets for either independent-minded revolutionaries or royalists, depending on who has drunk too much Christmas punch. Regardless of its original intentions, the firm is a family one and our father, a sixty-year-old silver-haired well-groomed-but-portly control freak, insisted on taking Christmas to remind me that I am to succeed him as its chief executive: nominally of the literary arm but more imperatively of the division that controls our family profits, most of which are no longer embedded in books per se , but in high-end literary accoutrements : bookends, pens, gold bookmarks, and other such stuff.
Our mother had just left for New York to follow up her own publishing success. She had contracted elsewhere, since romance novels, my father had insisted, unironically, were not part of Belicor’s portfolio. She’d gotten her own back a bit when her book hit shelves. Our father had expected, as Sean translated him, for it to sell like cockrings at an abstinence rally but she had done well. Actually, when I had read it, I had liked it.
She’d called it An Unanticipated Affair and instead of her heroine, Waltroud, being beautiful, busty, and well-put together, she starts off weepy, fat, and flustered. Too attentive to everyone around her, Waltroud causes so little conflict that her coworkers, her family, and her few selfish friends all ignore her. Isolated and alone she loses herself in cheap paperbacks and cries herself to sleep. Then one evening, someone’s paunch interrupts her on her bus ride home. Its owner has read what she’s reading and is interested, he says, in what she thinks of it. Soon they are having dinner together every week. Her life gets better and better until it gets worse, then it evens out and it ends up not so unpleasantly. The set-up is really ingenious and once you get past Waltroud’s exasperating dependence on cinnamon buns and her brown paper bagging of everything, her story is worth reading, even if I’m the only one in our family that glanced past the first five pages.
Our lives though, my mother’s and mine, have always been more adventurous. This is what, after all, caused the New England uproar when she’d finally taken off to New York. She’d needed, she said, to find “inspiration” for her next novel. After she’s done, everyone said, though they never said with what, she’ll come back. Of course it’s not as though she’d need to: an unmarried uncle, who had invested well, I think, in the eighties, had left her a substantial legacy. This is good because our father would never give her one red cent. He would claim—I know him, he would—that every last penny was “wrapped up in the business.” Once, and only once, I had alluded that a public separation might pique an interest in her work, boosting her already respectable sales among the Kroger crowd. She had wondered briefly, with a metallic sweetness, how some stranger’s separation could possibly affect her book. All of which goes to show that she still really is one of us. Silence … it’s the perfect panacea. This is all but our family motto.
To tell the truth, I am glad that she went to New York. She is much closer to Princeton. All I have to do now is jump on a train and in an hour or so we can be having dinner, usually at some flashy restaurant that has just been “discovered” by her new agent, AJ. As of yet, of course, this has only happened twice, as they are busy trying to pitch the movie rights to Waltroud. Really, I think she wants to protect me from the vulgarity surrounding scrounging for VIP tables and talking to illiterate go-betweens and movie producers at tacky clubs. Anyway we have several outings planned for the spring. Shows, exhibitions, cultural stuff that you just can’t get back in Carlton, and that she would want to do with me.
I can’t imagine Sean and her going around in New York. And Donny, well … of the three of us, I’m the only one she takes to shows. The other two take no interest. Despite Sean’s alleged brilliance, he really has an anemic intelligence. He thinks he’s smart because his whole life he has gotten good grades and sports awards, neither being too hard to “ Achieve at St. Ann’s Academy! ” an unearned school motto if ever there was one, and one which only shows how poorly GPA actually attests to ability. Last month he turned eighteen but he’s still totally without sense. One night, for instance, not three months ago, he passed me a note just before dinner, behind the back of our father, asking if I liked “ cock aegne.” Then he snickered all throughout the meal. Our father hates private jokes, almost as much as he hates drugs and bad French.
Some people, though, shine despite their innate insipidity and Sean is worse than all St. Ann’s acolytes put together. He combines inanity and effortless arrogance to be not what in any sane world he should be, a nonentity, but an “over-achiever,” and recently he has just gotten worse, particularly since he found out that Princeton not only did not wait-list him —the year I had applied, there had been a record number of applicants and staggering few last year; the statistics are in the alumni newsletter—but offered him an early acceptance. People still haven’t stopped congratulating the little matriculant. No matter, my philistine frère, one day incompetence will out.
Then there is Donny. Poor Donny, Donald, our youngest brother. He’s not so much annoying as he is just sickly. He has never had the chance to worry about grades or school or any ordinary childhood hang-ups. Really, I feel sorry for him. He’s a good kid and he always tries to smile, which must be difficult when half the time he has tubes down his throat. When even his own family waits until just before Christmas to buy him his presents.
The rest of our family, even the competing cousins, our uncles’ kids, we see only on holidays, so they’re pretty unimportant. Though, it was one of them who told me, struggling in her overlong Christmas Eve evening gown, that she was going to East Asia with friends for spring break and made me realize that travel, of course, was the perfect way to get out of the next family get-together.
This hadn’t, though, proved as easy as I’d thought, so I’d abandoned the plan. Until, with next Christmas break rearing its horny head once more, some kids in my eating club started planning a ski trip to Aspen and gave me the perfect excuse for why I couldn’t come home.
Luckily, I was able to avoid being asked, directly, to go on the trip myself. This was tricky because it quickly became the inane topic of conversation for the semester, where to ski, where to eat, where to drink, the answer to the latter being, of course, “everywhere.”
So, I let drop halfway through last term that I had plans to travel over break with kids from Carlton. This was a deft response on my part, since the wide-ranging social status of small New Hampshire towns and the restraints of an almost hereditary snobbery prevented anyone from asking too many questions. By this poi