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The figure wore a black jacket with a white, almost fairy-wing-like collar—which Giovanni described as a doublet. He explained that the fabric was “probably velvet,” and pointed out its leafy patterns exposing color underneath. It was pockmarked with gold studs for buttons. The boy looked rich, expensive, and confident.
“He was twenty-one years old and, I like to think, very, very coy, but still transgressive. Effeminate. Beautiful.” The words “Quod me nutrit me detruit” were burnished on the wood beneath. Bron spoke the Latin aloud, butchering the pronunciation.
“It is said like this.” Giovanni repeated it back to him: “Quod me nutrit me detruit. It means, ‘That which nourishes me also destroys me.’ Brilliant, no?”
“Who is it?” he asked.
“It is you,” he said. “It is you, it is me, and it is nobody. Maybe it is Shakespeare. Who knows? But they say it is Christopher Marlowe.”
“The gay spy?”
“That’s one of his possibly identities. But he was also a great mind who made transgressive claims and met a violent end. He was brilliant, and so famous in his time, and yet now—who is he? You don’t know. But we all know Shakespeare. Why is that?”
Bron was ruffled by Giovanni’s riddles. Found them to be intense and scholarly. He was desperate for answers, and they made him feel stupid. He said the first thing that came to mind. “You think Marlowe is better than Shakespeare?”
“I think Shakespeare and his heteronormative mass appeal have had their time, don’t you? But Marlowe …” Giovanni paused.
Bron tried his best to keep up. “You think that Marlowe’s not as popular as Shakespeare because he loved men?”
“I hear a lot of people say, ‘We live in the twenty-first century,’ as if to say so demands and expects necessary tolerance in the world, but I’ve never understood what they mean by it. Twenty-first century—so what? We have always existed. Why now? History is afraid of Marlowe because of how he chose to live. Not just gay, but queer—I mean always against the norms. He lived boldly and passionately. Marlowe, he is something else entirely, fights the fight we all fight today as queer people. I am glad to share a college with him.”
I don’t understand any of this,Bron thought. “Why are you showing me this?”
“You wanted to know about me and Theo.”
“What does this painting have to do with you and …?”Darcy.
“Nothing and everything. Theo and I, we are the same, and yet we are not. But why all this intrigue from you? Theo, he is a mighty catch, but a repressed spirit. I suggest you don’t go falling for him—unless you already have?”
“I haven’t,” he said quickly.
“Hmm,” said Giovanni. “I’ll say I believe you. But there is something in your eyes that tells me otherwise. You have been hurt by something, by someone. I know it. I said the same thingto myself once—sometimes I still do—and I don’t know if even I believe it. Look at the painting again.”
He looked once more at the words inscribed there and tried to extrapolate their meaning.
Quod me nutrit me detruit.
“That which nourishes me also destroys me.”
Bron concluded that someone here must have been the wronged lover. Then Giovanni said, “It’s the things we cherish the most that can be our downfall.”
Outside it was a gray, frosty morning. Mr. Edwards had departed in the early hours, skipping breakfast for an appointment in town, and Ada, after announcing that she didn’t want to do any of her studies today, took to browsing the internet for information on aquatic sea life, reading out WikiNotes on each of her favorite sea critters. “Did you know that octopuses have three hearts—or is it octopi? And that the color of their blood is blue, like the royals? And that sharks don’t have any bones?” She pulled the skin of her arm upward, the elasticity creating a fleshy mountain peak. “I wish I didn’t have any bones.”
Bron pulled on his boots at the bottommost step of the foyer, listening with feigned interest to the recited list of facts. “That’s so interesting.” He zipped up his coat, eager to get out into the early morning dew.
“If you were a sea creature, I think you’d be a seahorse.”
“Why’s that?”
“Because male seahorses carry their babies. Did you know that? Would that make them nonbinary or gender fluid?”
“I don’t know,” he said, because he didn’t. “And what would you be?”
“A crab—no, actually, a tortoise. Wait, I’ve got it! A starfish,” she said. “And Daddy would be a dolphin.”
“And what about Darcy?”
“Hmm.” She thought for a moment. “A shark. No bones.”
