Work Text:
Slats of waning sunlight fell across the desk as Edgar pushed the pile of memos to one side. He straightened them instinctively as he did so. In blurred type, on fickle, translucent onionskin, their ruthlessly aligned paragraphs made clear every subversive detail that had once been obscure. All the paperclips were placed just so, as if guarding against escape from the page.
The margins of the memos were filled with tidy comments written in blue fountain pen. Every one drew his attention to the finest of details, the most crucial of distinctions. Every one was a love letter from his faithful assistant, the man who for decades had been his alter ego. Clyde Tolson, Deputy Director of the FBI.
Underneath the memos was a thick file marked "Official and Confidential." Edgar took upon himself the responsibility for stemming the tide of filth that poured from the nation's pornographers. His personal files were filled with endless examples of what human depravity could create, all carefully catalogued and curated for posterity. Lurid colors, shameless display, all were burnished to gold that evening by the summer light. Dust motes slowly settled onto a photograph while Edgar attempted to decipher its meaning, the precise shade of its betrayal.
He didn't understand. He never had.
If he was honest with himself--and he rarely was--even the thought of the physical union of man and wife filled him with a prickling, creeping sense of distaste. What was rightfully reserved for procreation within the privacy of the marriage bed had been turned into something huge and monstrous, spilled wantonly over movie screens and the pages of magazines. Vice was everywhere, threatening the country's foundations. Few were able, as he was, to shake off its blandishments.
People said such scurrilous things about him and Clyde. His sense of duty would not have allowed him to ignore them even if he had wanted to. No whispers escaped his notice. No whispers had the slightest effect on him. He knew the truth, which was that no hint of impropriety clung to their friendship. To think otherwise was to betray a filthy mind.
It was not that Clyde was entirely immune from temptation. For all his goodness he could falter. At the revues his eyes would linger for a moment on one of the pretty young showgirls in her cocoon of feathers. Or at the racetrack on a handsome young man with his shirtsleeves rolled up, revealing forearms tan and bare to the California sun. The moment passed. It always did.
And Clyde returned to Edgar's side, burying the desires that would have made him a normal man alongside those that would have made him an outcast and a pariah. Neither would bring him any closer to Edgar.
Nothing could make them closer than they were already.
Every year they went on vacation. It was their one escape from the pressures that surrounded them, going out together to follow the races at Del Mar. They would stay in a bungalow at the Hotel del Charro, the same one every time. Two bedrooms, naturally, but Clyde preferred the springs in the master bed and they slept side by side as the night slowly cooled. Edgar's camera lay on the table by the bedside.
In the dewy early morning frogs croaked fondly to one another. Clyde was asleep in bed with his hand flung out into the hollow that Edgar had left upon rising. Black and white in the photographic print: that handsome form lost in the intimacy of sleep. It was worlds away from the tawdry and the profane.
Clyde, sleepy-eyed, in his bathrobe at the breakfast table. Clyde, shirtless, sunning himself by the pool and pretending not to notice the shadow of the photographer that fell across him. Clyde lounging serene and suntanned in the cool of a summer evening, the glass of his drink beaded with condensation.
Every photograph was tribute, a bounty tucked securely away between the pages of a book, fastened carefully into glued-down picture squares as if they had been butterflies pinned to the paper. Love caught on the wing.
As the years wore on Edgar and Clyde would sit together every so often, drinking Scotch with a photograph album open on their knees. Clyde's hand, lazy with drink, would trail along the stiff corners of the pages, his thumb straying into the black matte margins where Edgar and his camera resided unseen.
"I remember when you took that one," he would say.
Edgar would grunt appreciatively. After a decent interval he would turn the page.
Every once in a while, not too often, Clyde would ask one question.
"Why don't you let me photograph you, Eddie?"
Why not indeed? Edgar didn't mind being photographed. Usually he loved it. He stood proudly on the cover of Time and Newsweek, as close as he could come to the personification of all that was good in American law enforcement. Newspapermen were always taking snaps of him and Clyde together, stepping to their official car with their hats cocked in perfect unison, Clyde's courtly stoop making them as identical as they could possibly be. In his office there was a file of yellowing cuttings that documented their coming and goings, year in and year out, aging side by side.
And yet it was only from behind a lens that Edgar could see truly, open himself like a camera and let the sunlight flood in. A moment's dappled reflection could bind him to Clyde forever, fixed in the emulsions of the darkroom. What strange alchemy it was that could preserve the records of sin and love so easily. The distance between them was as thin as the wing of the butterfly, or as a leaf of onionskin.