I won't bore you with the details of my school life except to say that I attended a different private school than when I was younger, and that it was in upstate New York and secular. To my surprise, once I adjusted I found myself happy there, and of great interest to some of the other boys, who found me strange, tall, and cagey. At fifteen, I was ready to rebel and found other boys a great and divine distraction, and I am not embarrassed to tell you that at school I worshiped my body for two years in New York more than any book, and that it amused Laurent greatly, who visited me most weekends to take me out for tea in New York City.

He took me to a fine tailor and kitted me out for school and for our excursions, spending money as if it were just paper. I spent time in what he called his "New York garret" with much scorn, which was actually a brilliant suite of rooms at the Waldorf-Astoria overlooking Central Park. He loved to shit on America, and make Europe look glamorous by comparison. If I admired his fine things in New York, he would make little spitting sounds and laugh as if I were simple-minded. He would kiss me behind the ear and say, "After school, we will go to Paris." He would take me to bed fully clothed in black tie and kiss my neck, and mutter things at me, and play with my buttons until it made me angry and want to push him away so that I could shower. Between us, things never went beyond flirtation and petting. It would have been too strange.

As often I would find him sitting by the window dressed in white, looking out, and he seemed much older to me then, and I would remember what it had been like to seem him as a child, and know that he was not of this world. More than once I came upon him and seeing me he welled with tears and covered his face, and couldn't speak to me, and only once he told me that it was because when he looked at me he thought of himself at my age and living, and that he felt both sorry for that boy and envied him. "I want you to understand that if I abuse you I don't mean it. I am only thinking of myself," he told me, and covered his ears and screamed when I tried to protest until I promised him I wouldn't say another word. Sometimes he would let me hold him while he wept, and stroke his hair, and as often he would want me to go out and leave him alone. He wrote me blank checks. I still have many of them. 

Compared with Laurent, lovers at school were very simple to deal with, and often a relief. One weekend, in the spring of my junior year, Laurent picked me up and said, "Drive. You can drive, can't you?" I said, "Yes," and he never drove again. So I got to drive a white Jaguar sk120 all over, and I have never felt cooler than I did pulling off school grounds every Friday afternoon with the top down and sunglasses on. I believe that our family is still very rich but never as much as we were in those years directly after the war.

So I was in the Waldorf in the spring of 1959 waiting for Laurent to finish cutting his hair when the phone rang. It was an old crank phone, with the receiver in its perch, white and gold filigree. I said, "Laurent should I pick it up or do you want it?"

He made a sound in reply that can only be described as a yowl of annoyance, and so I picked up the receiver and said, "Hallo?"

"Oh dear, oh who is this?"

"Jackie. Who is this?"

A shuffling commenced which sounded like the renegotiation of clothing, and there came on the line another voice, smooth and velvety and British, that said, "What is the meaning of this? Where is our Laurent?"

"He's in the other room styling his hair. Who is this?"

"My name is Porter. We've come for the weekend and it's a long way, and will you not go and tell the little prick to come and pick up the phone? He is awfully rude in letting a boy pick up the phone. What are you, one of his prostitutes?"

I hung it up very rapidly, and said, "Laurent?" 

"What?"

I went into the washroom and he was powdering his nose with a puff. He had cut his hair to just below his ears, and it looked an organized mess of platinum curls. He had tied a black silk ribbon around his throat to hide his Adam's apple, and wore only a white slip. There was a large sable fur by his arm, and I petted it. He clearly intended to take me for cocktails, and had dressed the part of my lady. 

"There's a man named Porter here, and someone else. I think they mean to come up. What should I do?"

"Tell them I'll be to the phone in a minute. It won't do for tonight. I want to go out. I won't see them, no I won't."

"I hung it up," I said.

Without any warning, he attacked me his powder puff, making me laugh, powdering my neck and saying, "You rascal, rude boy, very rude," and pinning me easily against the sink. He said, "Look what I've done to your neck," and made to blow the loose powder away.

"Please God, don't blow it," I said, which made him smile like a devil. 

"Make you uncomfortable? Good. Porter? Don't know him. Must be an assumed name. We'll go down to the lobby and find them. They'll know me if they want to see me, and if they don't know me, we'll assume it's not as important as cocktails."

"Ca marche," I said, that works, and he took me by the cheeks for speaking French and kissed me between the eyes.

He wanted to go down the stairs, so I followed him, and even in his heels he was faster than me, so that I trailed at about half a flight of distance. "Hurry up," he called back to me, "are you not in the prime of life? I've seen your body." 

"Would you quit it?" I said, wary of mixed company, and at the bottom of the stairs lost track of him in the crowded lobby, it being a weekend and therefore likely that the ballroom would be active. I looked for him but couldn't find him, and felt I would give up and go back to the room before I felt arms around me from behind that I thought were his.

"Is that you, Jackie from the phone?" I heard. "I smell him on you. I smell him on your neck. I still remember his smell, but it has been many years. Is that you?"

"It's me," I said, stiff and afraid of the arms too tight around my waist, and tightening so that I couldn't take breath.

"Are you a good boy or a rude one? Do you like to die? How does it feel? Do you like it? Does he drink your blood? Do you like his money and his fine hotel?"

"Please," I whispered, certain that my ribs would crack.

"Rude boys like pain, don't they? Don't they?" whispered the voice in my ear. 

I wanted to tell him that I was not, and that I didn't, but couldn't speak, eyes going black spots from the pain and the inability to breathe, his fist on my diaphragm, in shock of his strength, of my coming death, and his lips at my throat, and suddenly he let go of me, which made me double over against the wall and gasp, and when I turned there he was, with orange hair and a white open collared shirt, looking at me severely. He had a red mouth and a straight brow, large eyes and high cheek bones, a long neck. I could not help but cry about the shock and the pain, wiping my eyes with the back of my hand, which didn't seem to move him, but I didn't know what to say.

"Porter. Is that what you call yourself?" Laurent said, finding us, not seeing the state of me. "So you are alive. That's fine. Calling my boy a prostitute, that's lovely. Well shall I call a cat a cat? A faun a faun?"

Porter moved only his head at that, like an owl, a fine movement which struck me as inhuman and unsettled my stomach. 

"Where are you hiding my master?" and seeing me, finally, "Oh this is a most unwelcome meeting, most unwelcome."

"He's in the car. He didn't want to be among these people. It smells like bodies here."

"May I remind you whose blood kept you alive, Nataniellus, and will you not be rude to me."

"I would have that blood and keep you as a slave. My own, for you have grown well."

I fled then, because I felt too afraid to stay, into the street and the evening. It hurt to breathe with bruised ribs, and I thought, who can I ask to protect me? Because I had never in my life felt so unsettled and so unsafe, but I had run directly into the jaws of the beast, because I found myself at the Met, which I felt a comfort because of how often I had visited it, and had been followed.

So all the while I tried to lose myself in the statue halls and calm down, I was not losing my follower, who loved to follow me, and look at the things I was looking at a minute after I finished looking at them. I stayed there two hours before I knew there was someone there, watching me, and when I looked he looked off in all directions, and back at me to smile as if to say, "No it was not me who was looking, it was you, and how dare you!" For another hour I wandered, looking back sometimes, until I was looking for him, and waiting for him to come into view before wandering off again, to look, to wander, to search, to wander more. 

And then in the hall of Egypt, I waited a little longer, sitting by the water, and outside it was dark against the great glass walls. I didn't look when I heard him come, and didn't look when he sat beside me, at the jewel-tone of his eyes, or his long black hair tied in a chignon loop on the back of his neck, or at the black silk he wore which set off the marble paleness of his skin. I didn't look at him, though he made the hairs on the backs of my arms stand up when he leaned in to smell me, smelling the smell that had given me away to the other at the Waldorf. I looked out the window at the trees and kept my gaze fixed. 

"And who are you?" he asked me, voice a little deep, a little husky, "for I am curious." He took my arm in his and put his hand on my hand. "Talk to me. I am tired from my journey."

"My name is Jackie. Dasius is putting me through school. I'm from down south," I told him, ribs painful.

"Oo, oo," he cooed, perhaps at the wavering of pain in my voice. His hair felt soft against my neck, where he had rested his head. "Who are you to my little bird? A lover? A friend?"

"Only a friend," I said, because I thought it the most true. I didn't know to be afraid. I wouldn't know what he was until far later. I had no way of knowing who he was.

"It is good to have a friend. Will you be mine, too?" he asked. "I would like a friend."

"Will you come with me and look at the brontosaurus skeleton?" I asked him, because I didn't know what to say.

"Oh I will for certain," he said, speaking slowly, pleased. "Please tell me, what is it, a brontosaurus?"

And so I made a friend named Leechtin, who wanted to know about the entire world. We wandered as long as we could, and I showed him everything I knew about. As the museum closed, I showed him even how to use the pay telephone just outside, and he would not let go of my arm to do it. 

"Show me how to do it," he said, an accent haunting his words I couldn't place. "Oh, it's easy, isn't it?" He called Laurent at the Waldorf and said, "No Jackie will walk me there. Won't he? He will. Oh do not be so angry, little bird. It is not an important matter. Is he upset? He isn't. See he isn't. We will be there shortly, oh we will."

I did not realize for a long time that whenever he was around me, Leechtin would imitate the way I spoke so smoothly that I never noticed anything was amiss. It is one of the reasons that others think him dishonest, think him planning, serpentine. But I have never met anyone so open, and so curious, so ready to laugh and to be interested. But perhaps I have been too lucky in my life, to be in the right place at the right time, to make a good first impression on those who are vulnerable to it. 

When we arrived back at the hotel, the one with orange hair was sitting on the bed, and Laurent was on the phone, which he hung up at the sight of me. I made to approach Laurent once the door was shut, but found Leechtin's hard arm in the way, so that I stumbled back a bit off balance. I expected Laurent to come, to push the arm back, and take hold of me, but he didn't move at all, which frightened me anew.

"I will say this only," Leechtin said, and the hush made it impossible for me to make noise by breathing, because then I knew him to be very important, to quiet Laurent in that way. "This has been kept from me, and I am not pleased by it. I am not pleased by it at all."

Laurent opened his mouth but Leechtin cut him off.

"Quiescite. Do not cross me," Leechtin said, pointing at the open mouth. "You have both of you behaved like children, the more embarrassing that this young man has been the better. He has said not one word against you all evening. I have had much pleasure by him these hours, and he is very well-raised. So that is suitable, and he will do nicely. I think that I shall have him away, and that is how it will be. And now what say you?"

The one on the bed said nothing, studying Leechtin's face with unblinking eyes. I found myself unable to look at him, because he seemed unnatural and it made my viscera crawl.

"He must finish school. He must be educated," Laurent whispered.

"No, dove. It does not matter at all."

"He does not belong to me. I am begging you. He must be returned."

"So he will but now he belongs to me."

And it was true. I never went back to school at all, and flew to California that Monday. No one ever asked me what I wanted.