Uncle Carl

"My name is Nario. You are Mr. Armstead?"

"Yes. I was expecting my uncle."

"He could not come. I am his boy."

Yes, I'll just bet you are, I thought. But then he clarified, if not enough to make a difference to me.

"I am his houseboy. Welcome to Naples, Mr. Armstead."

"Call me Harry, Please. Is it far from here to Positano?"

"No, not too far. The worst part will be getting through the airport traffic. Then it is a very pleasant ride, a scenic ride down the Amalfi coast. Your uncle has picked a very beautiful spot to live in."

And a very beautiful houseboy, I thought. But then I knew he would. Some things never change. I certainly didn't think Uncle Carl would change for anyone. He always expected the world to change for him. Not in this respect, of course—him being here in Italy rather than back in England with the rest of the family—well, most of the rest of the family. That's what I had been sent here to do. I had come to try to get Gordon to come home.

Nario was certainly a cute little trick. Small and deeply tanned—the olive Mediterranean complexion. Curly black hair, a beautiful androgynous face, with a winsome smile. His mincing steps as he preceded me to the baggage claim gave him away. Just like my uncle liked them. Didn't do a thing for me, though. Better here than in England, of course. We'd been well through that. But this was one of the reasons why I was here. I was charged to tell Carl he could come home now—if he had given up the ways that had gotten him exiled. Seeing who he'd hired as a houseboy, though, made me think that part of my mission was a lost cause.

I wondered if Nario too was some important person's favorite son—someone who could dismember Carl at will if he found out what was happening to his precious child. Not that Carl picked them underage, mind you. He just went for the danger of a powerful backlash.

I was on edge and disgruntled. I hadn't told anyone the whole of why I was here. I had only told Uncle Carl that the family wanted me to talk to him—and then only through telegrams. He had said that my plane would be met. He didn't say he wasn't meeting it, though.

As we left the airport, I briefly had the fearful thought that Uncle Carl wasn't even at his exile villa in Positano. He flitted all over the world. He was the portrait photographer of choice for the rich, famous, royal, and, when he needed the money, the want-to-bes. He could go anywhere but England. And, if our circle of friends could be trusted to have their collective ears to the ground, he was even wanted back in England. Despite everything. In fact, I wouldn't be surprised to find that the well-heeled in London had greased the skids to just make his trouble go away so that he could return.

And return he could, my family had decided. And it was one of the two legs of the mission I'd been sent here to accomplish. But whereas I hadn't defined these to Carl, I also hadn't told my family all of the reasons I was willing to be the messenger.

If they knew what I knew—indeed, all that Uncle Carl knew—they wouldn't have sent me. Not in a million years.

The drive in the Fiat down the coast of Italy from Naples did quite a bit to assuage my nervousness and pique. And when we crossed the mountains surrounding the seaside town of Positano, west along the rugged coast from Salerno, and descended into the semicircle of old dwellings holding onto the mountainside for dear life, I was completely captivated.

I could understand why Uncle Carl had chosen this escape hatch. And I could understand why he might not want to leave here to return to England.

The Fiat wound its way down a few levels through narrow streets and hair-pin curves until we came to a white stuccoed villa wedged between two ochre ones. It appeared to be mainly only one story, with a large, fully windowed room at one side on the top, opening out onto an open veranda, with a bougainvillea-covered loggia as a buffer between the room and the open air.

This would be a perfect art studio for painting, I thought. And then the dread hit me that perhaps it was. There was a semicircular drive tucked into the narrow stretch of front courtyard between the front of the villa and the cobblestoned road. The courtyard was ringed by a high stuccoed wall, with just an opening at one end into the vehicle turnaround, an identical one at the other end for the vehicle exit, and an iron-gated pedestrian entrance between.

Nario pulled into the turnabout and moved all the way around so that the nose of the car almost spilled out onto the roadway again.

Uncle Carl was at the door, beaming at me and rubbing his hands. He'd hardly aged in the four years since I'd last seen him. Still looking disingenuously benign and almost grandfatherly—he was my father's older brother. A happy smile on his face. He may have put on a bit of weight, but he always had been the stalwart, solid-body type. I knew that he was deceptively strong and that most of what looked like the beginnings of fat was actually muscle. I trusted that he still took his long morning walks and had a weight room tucked around the villa somewhere. Although where it might be was a mystery to me. The villa didn't look very large.

When he ushered me into the main room, however, while Nario struggled getting my luggage out of the boot of the car and carrying it in, I begin to learn that the exterior presentation of the villa was deceiving.

We were on only one of five floors of the villa, he told me, as I walked straight to the large windows at the back of the room and marveled at the panoramic sight down the slope of the town, to the harbor below, and out into the Golfo di Salerno. This view alone was worth the trip.

This floor was largely one room, with a square section in the front corner for the kitchen. On the town side of that room was the dining L. To my right was a spiral staircase leading up and down. The room was richly appointed with old English furniture and oriental rugs purloined from the family estates in England. In contrast to this, however, was the artwork covering the three walls not covered with glass and overlooking the harbor.

All of the celebrities Uncle Carl had photographed over the years—indeed, was still photographing—and the blown up art photos on his walls were of meltingly beautiful and androgynous youths—in the nude. The photographs were provocative and just this side of pornographic—an edge that I had known Uncle Carl to cross but, in this, at least, he had shown a bit of discretion in his life. I was to find that on the next level down, Carl's photographic studio, and the one below it, housing four bedrooms and two baths, he had not held back on the photographs.

I was to be shocked—although I told myself that I shouldn't be—to see that he still displayed some photographs I remembered well. Ones the authorities must have found quite damning when they had come for Uncle Carl in his wing of Armstead Rest just outside Cambridge. How Carl was able to get the sons and daughters of some of the richer and more powerful to pose for him like this was beyond me. But, then, who was I to question his powers and his sense of danger?

The floor at the bottom of the house contained a laundry, a dark room, storage, a well-stocked wine cellar, and Nario's small bedroom and bath. Both this level and the bedroom level had no view, being blocked by the back wall of the villa immediately down the steep slope from Carl's villa

"You didn't show me the roof," I said to Carl as we sat out on the full-width balcony between the house and the harbor view on the living-room level—which made the floors below it deeper than the two upper levels. Nario had served us drinks and disappeared, after Carl told him he'd be down in the studio shortly.

"That's Edward's domain," Carl said. "I rarely go up there, and he rarely comes down in my studio."

"You still meet in the bedroom?"

"Yes, we're still together."

"I thought Edward was in prison," I said. "He didn't have the connections you do."

"He was for a while, but I made your father get him out. Edward shouldn't fare worse than I did just because I came from position and money and he didn't. Now, if you can take care of yourself for a while—"

"Where is Edward, Uncle Carl? For that matter, where is Gordon? I came to try to convince him to come back to England. The family is worried. Nationals are coming up. He needs to prepare for them."

"Gordon is of age. He can make his own decisions where he goes."

"Only barely. And mentally he's still a child. You know that. His entire life is figure skating. If he can't go to nationals or doesn't do well there, it will crush him. You know that. And I know he's of age. That's why I'm not asking you to return him. I want to talk to him."

"He's in Milan. Edward has taken him there."

"You . . . let . . . Edward take Gordon anywhere?" I was close to hyperventilating. Gordon was my younger brother. He was a vision on ice, but he didn't have a clue what to do with himself.

"I'm sure the family knew what Gordon was doing here. On his nineteenth birthday, he made a beeline for Italy." Carl raised his hand, staving off what he knew would be a scathing reply from me. It was all tied up with what had sent Carl scurrying for an Italian exile. The scandals had involved our family as much as anyone else's. "Gordon has been keeping up with his practice," Carl said. "He's skating at the Milan Skating Club. That's where Edward took him. There are only four facilities good enough for his preparation. They are all in the Milan region. He and Edward should be back tomorrow. I cabled that you were coming. I surmised that it was to take Gordon back to England. Both he and I know the nationals are looming."

"Seeing that Gordon makes the nationals in London is only one of my family missions, Carl. The other one involves you directly."

"Me?"

"Yes. Father believes it's safe for you to come home now. The two young men . . . their families have emigrated to Australia. They are no longer a problem."

"Good lord, how much did that cost Adrian? That MP was quite the news hound at the time. And to have left his future in politics—"

"He is ambitious enough to stake his future in Australia. You made sure that his family name would always be linked to a sordid scandal if he'd remained in London."

"Well, I must say, your father must love his older brother dearly to arrange for me to come home. It's quite a noble gesture after he robbed me of the barony and—"

"We could hardly have the head of household guiding the family from prison, Uncle. You fucked your own way out of the barony, I do believe."

Carl laughed. "What a bald—and appropriate—way to refer to it, Nephew. You always were good with your tongue."

I winced. "Well, the family can tolerate your return. And England seems to be clamoring for it. I do believe even the queen is ready to sit for you."

"Return? Why in heaven's name would I return? Look around. Why would I leave this paradise and go back to an ungrateful England?"

"You didn't leave much room for England to be grateful. And, yes, now that I'm here, I can see why you'd want to stay. Nario is quite a pretty little trick. Some Italian count's son, I assume?"

"He's Sicilian?"

"Sicily. You mean Mafia? And his family doesn't know he's here?"

Carl just smiled.

"So, you haven't changed," I said. I swept my arm toward the room behind us. "And he seems to be staring at us from various places on three walls in your living room. This, I suppose is what his uncles will see when they come in, guns blazing."

"You should see the ones in the bedroom," Carl said with a little cackle of self-congratulation. "In fact, Nario is waiting for me now. Downstairs in my studio. If you are interested, by all means come downstairs and watch me work. If not, I see you have brought a book. Stay up here and read. There is no finer backdrop for reading on a balcony to be found anywhere in the world. Oh, mercy me. Why should I want to leave Positano?"

With a bit of effort that provided me the first evidence of the passage of four years in my uncle's later middle age, Carl hoisted himself from his chair and descended the spiral staircase. I gave reading a chance to grip me, but it was no use. I had to know if Carl had changed at all. I rose from the chair and quietly descended the staircase and went to the beaded curtain that separated the landing of the floor below from Carl's huge photography studio.

Carl was finishing up positioning the lights so that they shone on Nario, naked, and sitting provocatively in an antique, red velvet-upholstered slipper chair on a damask-draped platform.

I dug my nails into the palm of my hands and shivered as I saw Carl disrobe, pick up a camera, and move around the chair, taking photos of Nario from various positions. Nario knew how to pose, and he had a beautiful, if diminutive, body. The gazes he gave for the camera under long, fluttering eyelashes were sensual while still having an edge of youthful innocence. How old was Nario, I wondered? Was Carl pushing his usual modus operandi and skating on thin ice even here in Italy?

I decided, with bitter remembrances, that this really was Carl's problem. And Edward's as well. I presumed that Nario was old enough to know what he was doing—and that he knew enough not to be bragging on the streets of Sicily about what he was doing.

I watched Carl's dangling cock become less dangly and more upright as he moved around Nario. I should have moved away from the beaded curtain when, as I knew would be the case, I saw Carl moving in on Nario. I wanted to look away, but I couldn't, as Carl put the camera down, moved Nario to where his chest lay on the top of the back of the slipper chair, with his arms swaying down toward the floor on the other side, nudged Nario's thighs in a wider stance, and began to fuck him slowly and languidly from behind. Carl had picked up the camera again and directed Nario to turn his head to him, and Carl took close-ups of Nario's face as he was being fucked.

Carl was long and thick and Nario was small—just as Carl liked them—and Nario's expressions were an emotional mix of pain and passion and longing.

Carl had amazing stamina for a man his age. Nario was clearly exhausted before Carl was done with him. After ejaculation, Carl turned Nario around in the chair so that he was slumped in a sitting position, with his legs splayed wide and his arms artfully arranged in a seemingly natural askew position behind his head, one arm behind his neck, showing his hairless armpit and pulling his pecs tight and the other arm draped behind the back of the chair.

Nario's facial expression in post-total fuck was priceless, although Carl was sure to put a big price tag on it. These were Carl's most infamous studies in the art underground—the photos that brought him the most money—the splayed out body of a completely fucked young man, showing facial expressions of mixed satisfaction, violation, and exhaustion—and evoking the reaction of "Isn't that?" Carl reveled in the viewer's revelation of what young celebrity or well-connected youth that was. There was never a question of what had happened to the subject of these photographs right before they were taken.

"You can return to your reading now, Harry," Carl called out to me when he had taken the photographs he wanted to take. "I'm finished now. As you can see, I haven't changed, and I have no reason to leave this paradise—or the beauties they provide me."

Carl wasn't finished with Nario. I knew he wouldn't be if he had remained true to form. Going down on his knees between Nario's thighs in the chair, recharged, and a new postcoital pose in mind, Carl grasped Nario's legs and lifted and spread them, and thrust his cock inside Nario's rolled up buttocks again. Nario moaned and clasped his hands around Carl's neck. Carl kissed him on the mouth. I turned and left as Nario began to burble in Italian.

I went to the room where Nario had taken my luggage, one floor down. It was on the front of the house and only had a couple of half windows opening to the side. The view was of an ochre stuccoed wall of the adjacent villa, not more than eight feet away. There were other curtained areas around the walls in the shape of windows, giving an illusion that the room would be airy if they were open. I pulled aside one of the curtains and then another, and then I quickly closed both, my stomach threatening to give dry heaves. The photographs were some of the very explicit nudes Carl photographed—none of them of a single subject. I recognized the model for most of them, and I was shocked in the recognition. I fled the room and went back to the balcony two flights up and forced myself to read from my book.

Dinner was late, with just the two of us, Carl and me, at the table and Nario buzzing around us, giving full service, but not giving any hint at the full service he'd given earlier in the day. The food was gourmet. I heard activity in the kitchen, so I surmised there was a cook out there. She was humming, so I surmised that she lived out. I had never known Carl to allow a woman to spend a night under his roof. The wine also was first rate. And there were at least three bottles of it served and emptied before I voiced my weariness from short flights and interminable waits in lounges and passenger check-in lines between London and Naples, and declared my intent to go to bed and read a bit before going to sleep.

I did not mention the photographs in my room. I believed that more than once Carl was on the edge of bringing them up. I could tell by that mischievous little smile he had. But he said nothing. There was more silence than discussion, but what discussion there was was of the art world. I had started life in an art auction house. I was surprised to find that Carl was well versed in what was being sold and for how much.

"For Edward's sake," he said. "Someday he will be discovered."

Not likely, I thought. But I didn't say as much. Edward's art was insipid. That had always surprised me because I had found Edward to be intense and forceful. I would have expected broad, telling strokes in oil from him, rather than the washed-out watercolors of sailboats. Of course there was Edward's private collection. His rendering of the same theme that drove Carl's life—the search for the perfect depiction of the face of a handsome young man right after being fucked by the artist. That art of Edward's was, technically, excellent. And it sold well. But it wasn't going to be sold in the reputable, high stakes auction houses, and it wasn't going to make his public reputation.

Both Carl and Edward had overextended themselves in those months in England before the authorities got on to them. Both moaned of having found the perfect subject and rendered their individual modes of art perfectly—but only with one youth, the son of a duke. In search of regaining this, they had been sloppy in their techniques of developing subjects, and it had caught up with them.

I had trouble sleeping, and part of that was because of my curiosity of what Edward was up to, painting wise. I eventually realized I wasn't going to be able to sleep until I satisfied that question. I quietly got out of bed and padded up the two flights to Edward's studio at the top of the house.

He had never been a neat person in his studio. Chaos reigned here and it took me a few minutes to focus on what was where. I wanted to see canvases, not the sheets of rice paper he liked to use for his water colors. There were plenty of the latter around. The harbor below was the subject of many of those, and Positano obviously had been a good influence on his work. Many of these were vibrant and the strokes bold and sure. Several, I thought were good enough for the auction houses. I didn't know if I would say anything about that, though. I found Edward foreboding and overwhelming. The distance between us these last four years had been perfectly fine with me.