Tail in the South Pacific

Brolin sighed, still gazing intently on the rippling muscles of the lithe, diminutive, yet perfectly formed houseboy, who was focused on catching their dinner. Jules knew what that sigh was about. He’d heard Brolin fucking the houseboy in the dark of the night in their thatch-covered sprawling hut. Jules had no illusions why Brolin had come this far from the American Midwest for his year’s sabbatical of writing. And, now, he also had no illusions about why Brolin had volunteered to bring him along and to mix his own writing with developing the young escapee of the Chicago tenements.

“It’s good . . . but?” Jules said, waving the pages of his latest attempt at a short story near enough to Brolin’s line of sight to break the man’s concentration on the fishing houseboy.

“It’s good. It’s very good . . . ,” Brolin answered again, absentmindedly.

“But what?” Jules persisted. Brolin was usually much more communicative than this. But Jules had been writing story after story for two months now in this Dutch colony paradise, and he still hadn’t won anything more than lukewarm comments from Brolin.

“But . . . we’ve discussed this before, Jules,” Brolin said as he gave his handsome, eighteen-year-old student his full, undivided attention now. “It’s good in a mechanical sense, but it has no passion.”

“No passion?” Jules asked. Brolin had put his hand, that hand with the long sensuous fingers, on Jules’s wrist and hadn’t taken it away. Jules shuddered at the touch, but not wanting Brolin to feel his trembling and misconstrue it, he let the words tumble out.

“What is this about no passion? I write adventure stories. I write of men struggling against the elements and eventually winning out over nature or the cruelties men force on other men, like war. War stories, like the one we just went through. Situations where people like my father struggle against impossible odds. I pour out everything inside me on these. But you say they have no passion?”