Alternatives

Alternatives

Was it possible?  After our busy day and now seated at the chess table, I looked at him askance, for among his many qualities was an uncanny perspicacity that so easily could have divined my enquiry.  Was it conceivable that someone so unquestionably male in every physical respect, evincing a quiet, resolute and authoritative control over his all-male team, as our project required, could  hide a proclivity that only I had now ventured to surmise.  Had that confident, masculine exterior, that superbly defined physical specimen that bespoke virility in every gesture, deceived us all?

The move of his rook beneath his long fingers surprised my king and inexorably sealed its fate.  I ruefully recalled the alternative move available to me as I upturned the piece and rested my hand upon it, amazed at missing his stratagem, failing to interpret the precise preceding moves which, made without hesitation, should have alerted me to his goal.  Well, he is a better player than I though I had been distracted by these intriguing thoughts of his psyche, thoughts which had for the first time been prompted that morning by seeing, quite inadvertently, his open folio on the bureau.

I had called for him on my way to breakfast just as he was summoned, as I thought, to the 'phone and, taking the call at the far window, he had beckoned me to enter his room.  The page would not have caught my attention were it not for the clearest black and white image that demanded to be seen, a superb photograph of a modern athlete in the pose, as I was able to recall, of John Flaxman's Cephalus in his 'Aurora and Cephalus' but shown without Aurora.  The full-frontal view of a perfectly developed nude male, while not lacking the relaxed firmness of Flaxman's model, suggested in clearer muscular definition an implied feral strength in repose, the effect being a subdued eroticism which, never intended in Flaxman's classical rendition, though muted was nevertheless insistent.  Our business had nothing to do with the finer arts; why should he have had the picture in his folio - but then, why not?

And so my thoughts as later I looked at the chessboard were not so much of my fallen king as of those moments in his room; his glance in my direction as I had lingered just a little too long over that photograph and my barely concealed embarrassment at intruding, as I thought, upon his privacy.

His nudge stirred me from my reverie over the chessboard and I apologised for my ostensible daydreaming.  I raised my eyes to his face and saw again what had not escaped my notice when he had stood at his bureau before we left his room that morning, his fingers upon the page; a glint in those expressive eyes that was both challenging and quizzical.  He had made no attempt to close his folio which, I thought, might have been his pressing concern.

Conscious of his arm upon my cuff as he proceeded to regroup the chess pieces I studied his profile. Perhaps the page left open was no act of carelessness; he had wanted me to see it and to gauge my interest.  Why?  Would it resonate with some subterranean propensity?  Were the ‘phone call and the signal to enter the room also contrived?  And now was the contemplative set of his features, the yield of his chiselled lips, the just discernible enquiry behind those eyes as he again looked at me a disclosure of what he had always so well concealed; the plea to an assumed kindred spirit?

But wait!  Like the upturned king beneath my finger was I not again a victim of wayward thoughts, misreading the signs? Were my friend's machinations to determine a leaning within me not to find correspondence with his own but simply to establish that such a bent existed in a member of his team.  Ah; his own strategy would then be surely flawed for then he would be misreading the signs.  Flaxman's nude, even with the sensual nuances, could for many be the object of natural investigation, a fact readily understood by him.  And, whatever his thoughts, would he resort to a puerile set-up that could only produce the circumstantial evidence of an interest in a photograph.

Of course, all of this is inferred!  There could be many reasons why he possessed the photograph outside the ambit of my convoluted thoughts which, like my game of chess, as in the game of life, are so often flawed in direction.
Anton