Work Text:
In 1831, Arthur Schopenhauer fell in love with a girl named Flora Weiss. At a boat party in Germany he made his advance by offering her a bunch of grapes. Flora’s diary records the event as follows: “I didn’t want the grapes because old Schopenhauer had touched them, so I let them slide, quite gently, into the water.” Schopenhauer was forty-three; Flora, seventeen.
*
It is a summer day and the air is crumpled with heat.
The summer enlivens Will, and so he looks forward to its advent all year. For him, summer means long days and light, and fly-fishing shirtless, knee deep in the river’s shallows... meandering aimlessly with the dogs, where they are allowed to be carefree and happy, and he can simply enjoy their pleasure in being so alive.
In the dying days of spring he had half-hoped that the summer would bring some measurable change in Hannibal, if only because he felt so grateful for the lengthening days. Perhaps he had hoped that Hannibal would retreat, go perversely dormant, take a reverse-hibernation. After all he had seemed so much a creature of the cold days, with his sleek three-piece suits and his beautiful woolen overcoats, the dark richnesses of his mind.
But no, no such luck for Will Graham.
In fact the man in question looks as cool and urbane as ever, even now. He bends to the oar in time with Will and they pull together, their silences easy with the summer warmth, their rhythm slow and measured and perfect. In his largesse Hannibal has had Lake Roland closed for his boat party; there are no tourists to be seen. The ripples catch the light and the boats’ contrails criss and cross; conversation’s low, decorous murmur carries over the water.
He has hemmed us in with money and power, thinks Will, and is almost resigned now to Hannibal, almost pleased to be here. He is part of Hannibal’s little flock, gathered colorfully on the summer lake, resplendent in their summer plumage. Alana is a bird of paradise, and the season has made her colours more verdant, given Will’s own shirt an intensity of whiteness that is almost defiant. The leaves are green and translucent with youth – if Will shades his eyes he fancies he can see the yellow veins within their chartreuse.
Alana lies back against the cushions in the boat – where on earth does the man find such luxuries, she wonders, for the cushions are actual cushions, covered in soft cotton, not the hard rubber things that typically accompany rowboats, and she has no doubt that Hannibal does not care if they get a little grubby or if the river water gets to them. Hannibal always seems to be beyond such trivialities…
She fans herself a little. Everything seems hypersaturated today, she thinks: Will’s eyes are so sharply blue and yet the clear winter grey seems to be behind them still; and there’s Hannibal’s hair, perfectly tow-coloured in the sun, like young flax rope or hemp… Rowing home to haven in sunny Palestine, with a cargo of ivory, apes and peacocks, sandalwood, cedarwood, sweet white wine, she whispers in her thoughts, content to watch them, arms straining in tandem against the weight and water.
Will feels her eyes on him and Hannibal and is taken by the unfamiliar urge to raise his eyes to meet hers, though he keeps them lowered still. Around them the various boats go a-glemmering past, all meandering according to the whims of their rowers. But soon it will be two, the perfect hour for a late lunch. Each boat will gravitate to the left bank, and there they will unpack the food hampers, all the courtesies from their gracious host.
The boat holds Hannibal and Will and Alana, and there is also a beautiful harpist from the Philharmonic who is making polite, quiet, tasteful conversation with Jack, just as Hannibal and Will and Alana make meaning by silence, wrapped in each other, for each other.
Will wants to grit his teeth, suddenly. He wants to grind and roll the anger and confusion around in his mouth, savour its taste, spit it out; it will be all bruised flesh and peach stones, he thinks faintly, and presses his lips firmly together as he contemplates the strong column of Hannibal’s neck.
*
They are stilled now, and on the edge of the lake beneath a cluster of birches. Hannibal, presiding, lays out the tablecloth, with its pristine white and red checks; Alana begins to unpack the hamper with her deft, graceful, beautiful fingers. She does have charming hands, Hannibal thinks. Later he will reach out and kiss her fingertips, because he knows that they have touched himself and Will both –
“Immaculate as always, Doctor Lecter,” Will says, gesturing at the items Alana is pulling from the basket. He does have a voice perfectly suited to him, Hannibal thinks passionately, and he notices that today, at least, Will is not wearing that terrible cologne. It is just as well. The hours they are to spend on the lake are too hot for scent; already Will’s shirt clings faintly to his skin in patches.
“To begin, watermelon carpaccio with prosciutto,” Hannibal begins, and he enjoys this part almost as much as the hunting for the food itself, all their rapt, upturned faces waiting for his word. His voice carries across to them. He is a prophet, a soothsayer, a giver of virtues. “Then a salad, with grilled heart, served with chilled endives,” he continues, and savours the words, the percussion of the plosive and the open yawn, the discreet long vowel and the neat, voluptuous consonant at the end.
There are two mouthfuls of liver pâté each, individually sealed into indulgently tiny glass pots with a golden-yellow layer of clarified butter. The cucumber sandwiches he had sliced just that morning, and after that he had taken the fresh cold prawns and butterflied them open with a slender knife, arranging them just so, scattering a brief eulogy of parsley on top of their sweet bodies. And then Pimms and lemonade and elderflower cordial, and the soft sighs and delighted hums of people eating with pleasure.
“This is your pleasure, then,” Will says sotto voce. How terribly effortless it all looked when Hannibal did it, he reflects. This too is Hannibal’s design, the effortless disposal of evidence down people’s willing throats...
Will rolls up his sleeves and immediately feels the heat beat down on exposed flesh. Even Alana is fanning herself with her straw hat, her dark curls gleaming in the sunshine. The slow beat of Hannibal’s heart is blue-red and cool and never speeds up, like the cold cuts of heart on the salad. The animal must have been relaxed when it died, Will thinks, because there is no toughness to the muscle, only a delicious, melting tenderness that makes Will wonder about caresses. The kind of caresses that only Hannibal is qualified to give, the man in his duck’s-egg blue shirt, and now (perhaps soon) Will himself, who is learning intimacy through the tutelage of his master.
He shuts his eyes briefly, the better to see the red heat shine through his eyelids, leaving a glowing afterburst of light. He should never have come, and he would not have, ordinarily. But Hannibal is wise to his ways; it was Alana who had delivered the invite, trotting up to him with Hannibal’s overture so neatly clutched in her warm hand. It was all one with Will’s attraction to the lovely and confusing Dr. Bloom, who remained so strangely blind to the man she spoke to and laughed at now, even as she regarded the two of them together with increasingly wary eyes, unsure of what was happening in the space between them.
“Have you eaten, Will?” Hannibal inquires, turning briefly from Alana. She cocks her head and obligingly twists her body slightly, and just like that Will is included in their little twosome as though he has always, always been between them.
Nonplussed he accepts a slender silver fork from Alana. The lustre of its tines are mercury in the sun, and Will bends obediently to the salad that she hands him from the picnic basket. The first bite of the heart in his mouth turns him into the oracle at Delphi – gives him a glimpse of someone hooked, strung up through the roof of his mouth like a young, unwary fish –
He eats, and chews, and swallows peaceably. Hannibal looks delighted.
*
Jack has been surreptitiously feeding bits of his food – the meat bits, specifically – to the swans. Hannibal quite enjoys those graceful, violent creatures, who snap up the bits that Jack feeds them with all eagerness. Hannibal wonders if Jack realises that he’s noticed. He thinks perhaps not, and then he thinks, well, perhaps. But he knows that for another season yet, it will not matter. Jack thinks he knows but Jack is too canny yet, and there is no harm. He genuinely likes Jack Crawford. He has enough mind to constitute an enemy, and not enough to be the nemesis that Hannibal has found in Will.
The talk has drifted, for a while, as have their boats, bobbing. Hannibal and Alana are speaking desultorily of a colleague they have known and Jack is speaking to the people in the boat right next to theirs. Will and the beautiful harpist are talking, a little stiltedly, about their respective loves of fly-fishing and music, both of them shy but sincere in listening to each other, him speaking to her knee and she to his.
At a natural pause in their conversation Hannibal takes up a bunch of grapes and asks Will if he will have one, holding them out like an offering. Perhaps thus were virgins led to dragons, Hannibal muses, eyes on Will as he considers the heavy spray of fruit. Their ripe, smooth skins are still cool from the shelter of the basket.
It feels as if every single thing they do together is weighted, now. Will’s desire for his death and his complicity in Hannibal’s desires for him complicate even this simple gesture.
They are all different colours tied together with clever twine and the delicate knots that men use to hang each other, a small enough cluster that it fits in the curl of Hannibal’s palm. Triumph, with its almost-bronze shades and thin skin, is entwined sweetly with the rich blue of Coronation and the grass-green of Blanc du Bois, and the artificial bouquet is studded through with the tiny violet pearls of Black Corinth.
Will takes it and their hands have a brief, delicate encounter. Alana turns appraisingly to them for a moment, her eyes darting from him to Hannibal and back, trying to divine what has happened although by then they have parted, quite naturally, no startlement or surprise to give themselves away.
Will meets Hannibal’s eyes, as he so often does in these dark days. He is a dog that Hannibal is feeding. Not for the first time he feels that perhaps Hannibal is not so much taming him to heel as coaxing the wolf out from the domesticated animal, an alpha to a lesser pack creature.
If he could, he would put his head in Hannibal’s lap.
Instead he indulges this strange whim of the dog days by settling for Alana’s, inching closer in the boat and telegraphing his movements to her, gesturing at the cushion in her lap, asking her, “May I…?”
Alana looks delighted. Will holds a red grape up to her mouth. Her lips take it from his fingers, and he lies still as Hannibal strokes the dark curls of her hair.
*
They make a pretty picture, certainly, un tableau vivant, perhaps Dionysus and a nymph and a satyr, perhaps some Roman queen and her men, perhaps Hero and Leander with Marlowe who created them both.
They make an intriguing picture, un scandale à la cour. Other people see it and they note it to themselves with a touch of “Oh my,” a little whisper of genteel scandal sanctified by Hannibal’s decorum, Alana’s beauty, Will’s indifference.
Jack looks at them and his gaze is inscrutable, as befits him. There is only the slight furrow of his brow to indicate the contemplative bent of his mind as he takes a prawn and absentmindedly puts it in his mouth, following it with a gulp of Pimms which he barely tastes. Bella languishes in her last days and here he is at Hannibal’s mise en scene of summer pleasure. He is not here to enjoy himself though he must seem as though he is. He is here to watch, and to be wary.
Eyes drift across the three in the bow of their boat, but it’s his eye that Will catches.
Jack shifts his weight, careful not to rock the boat – he often surprises people who think that he should move with less grace, cumbersome with weight, who instead find that Jack moves like a bear, with startling speed and balance. He settles next to the three of them, and begins to speak to Alana and Hannibal, engaging both of them and drawing the eye.
When Jack looks back to Will, his hands are empty, and the cluster of grapes gone.
*
It is already evening when Alana offers to drive Will home, but the blue light lasts a long time in the summer. She shucks her wedges and drives barefoot, the skin of her sole confidential and strange against the pedals.
Unto her heart is brought a strange pang, as she glances sideways at Will’s beautiful profile, his face turned sternly to the front, the light transforming everything into soft-focus, into longing.
She had thought she knew him, but she is starting to realise that previously she knew his vulnerabilities, and now she is starting to witness his strengths. He has tried to kill before, Alana says to herself, attempted murder¸ she tries the phrase out in her mind. And yet here she is and here she still feels safe beside him, the way she feels around Hannibal. She envisions him with a hand around her throat and in her mind’s eye what replays is the way Hannibal touches her sometimes, when they lie together. They drive in comfortable silence, the radio a low, formless murmur.
From the corner of her eye she catches movement, and when she turns briefly to look, she realises that Will has a bunch of grapes from earlier. “Where’d that come from?” she asks lightly. There were no leftovers, she thinks – there hardly ever is, at Hannibal’s feasts.
Will shrugs. “I slipped it into my pocket,” he says, and plucks a grape off the little posy. “Thought I’d save it for later.”
He eats it and for a moment the car is filled the soft wet sounds of chewing and the sweet juices of the grape. Then he seems to notice her again, for he offers, “Would you like to have one?”
His voice is slightly more formal than usual, it seems, the phrasing more deliberate. It’s not Will as she’s known him, and in that moment she hears Hannibal’s voice running through his, veins through his lungs.
“It’s alright,” she hears herself say, “I’ll pass.”
Will shrugs, and pops them back into his jacket pocket. “I’ll eat them later, then,” he says.
She smiles at him. “You do that.”