by Greg Fields
CHAPTER XIV
Orpheus—they’ve gone on now, the good as well as the bad . . . They’ve done their little song and dance in your life . . . They are that way in you now, forever.
—Jean Anouilh, Eurydice
For Glynnis Mear, the cloying waters of the Raritan had been a Rubicon of sorts. As they splashed in her face and coursed over her slender form, the waters had awakened her from a drowsy malaise that had dominated her for longer than she had realized. She had been reinvigorated by the stark chill, and as she waded in to her knees, her thighs and beyond, she wanted more. She wanted the chill to shake her alive, to revitalize the placid blood at her heart that she recognized as stagnant. If it had been possible, she would have dived beneath the black waters altogether and never resurfaced.
The naked bodies of these men and women whom she only remotely knew stimulated her, too, and, slightly drunk but well enough in control to know precisely what she was about, she shed her clothes willingly to join them. Glynnis had never considered herself an exhibitionist: the only man who had ever seen the entirety of her splendid body was Conor. She felt no reluctance, though, perhaps because the shared stupor of those she was with provided a type of insulation. They would remember few details, she reasoned, and her body was likely to be indistinct from the others as leaves on a thick branch. She loved the raw sensation of the cold air and the colder water. She felt infinitely safe.
Glynnis had not ignored the frolicking nakedness around her. She regarded each body in turn, particularly, of course, the men’s. She looked at their wobbling penises, incongruous under the circumstances, remarkably asexual, and their white buttocks. With the exception of Dan Rosselli, each of the men was lean, their stomachs hard, their legs and shoulders defined by bone and sinew showing no puffiness or droop. The water made their skins glisten. Glynnis wanted to run her hands over them, to feel them as she might feel the hewn marble of a fine statue.
When Conor had turned inexplicably back to shore, Glynnis had continued down the river, spellbound. It did not matter that Conor was not there. He would have been an encumbrance, limiting her sensual indulgences with the regularity of his presence, the predictability of his responses. She was glad she was alone. She paddled past Dan Rosselli and his mate, a girl she did not know. Rosselli had her in his grasp below the water and she was laughing a throaty laugh. Glynnis called to them, “You two behave yourselves,” and Rosselli rolled his girl over and called back, “Always. I’m a very good boy. There’s plenty of my goodness for everyone,” and Glynnis laughingly responded, “Later, lover” before swimming on.
She felt as if she had pulled the curtain on an ancient bacchanalia where sensuality and sexuality, too long repressed, surrounded her and sucked her in. This was a celebration of the body in all its wondrous functions; she existed solely to be satisfied. The norms had been reversed, the forbidden glorified and the mundane forbidden. Conor, back on shore and bound to be sullen, could never understand. He locked himself inside his damned ideals. He would push his limits outward periodically an inch or two at a time but all the while remaining well within the prescriptions his tyrannical abstractions demanded. The next day he, no doubt, would reflect upon what happened tonight and conclude that they had all stepped too boldly over the line.
But who drew that line in the first place? On this glorious night Glynnis wanted no part of arbitrary constraints drafted by years of staid usage. Limit implied denial, and denial implied sacrifice, and sacrifice without reward was meaningless. Conor seemed drawn to sacrifice for its own sake—denial of the flesh beyond the normative indulgences, denial of the emotions beyond what was clearly definable, denial of the mind beyond what was unfathomable. Through it he supposed he would become more keenly honed, more devoted to what was already well prescribed, high and good. But to Glynnis this made little sense. Abandonment now seemed the proper pathway, shared pleasure with the consensus to eliminate any and all norms, any and all judgments. There would be far more to be gained through experience than through denial. She could see it clearly.
My rigid lover, bend. My Romantic idealist who views each day as a churning sea to be crossed in the small and fragile boat of your intentions, yield to me and dismiss your dreamy notions, if only for a night. Place yourself in my trust here in this world as it is, with its vanities and its tears. Do not deny what you are. You are human, and you ache, you tire, you lust just as the rest of us do. There are times when we are meat, not gods, and you, too, for I have felt your body on mine at night and heard your breath in my ear. I have felt the rising and falling of your Irish passion, frustrated by the ropes tied around it and, when released at last, spent joyously on my own small frame, poured endlessly into me. Do not deny what you are, my lover. You are a man of infinite longing perplexed by finite ability. You are a man of the highest ideals sullied by the soil of your own humanity. And, my lover, do not be too rigid in either your actions or your perceptions. For be assured, that, from this moment on, I shall not be. Perhaps you do not know me well at all. Perhaps I am only one of your Romantic Irish ideals, a sleek and graceful porpoise swimming just beyond your reach as you navigate the small and fragile boat of your intentions.
When they returned to the apartment that night, each carrying with them the lingering tarry scent of the dirty river, they did not make love, although Glynnis, aroused by the sensual carnival she had just left, practically begged Conor to please her. She tried all the seductive glances and grasps she knew, but Conor pleaded fatigue, a rising headache and the river smell that filled the room.
“It would be like making love to a dead fish, Glynnis.”
“I think I’m a bit more enjoyable than a dead fish,” she purred, sliding her hand inside his shorts. “I think I might be offended by that analogy,” then sucked his ear.
“Tomorrow, Glynnis, after we get a chance to shower and rejoin the ranks of humanity, okay? But not tonight, please. I’d only disappoint you.”
’You disappoint me now,’ she thought, ’as thoroughly as ever you could. And when, when, have you ever rejoined the ranks of humanity? You know nothing of being human. You may as well hope to sprout feathers and become an ostrich.’
“All right, then, we’ll sleep. But you owe me, Conor, and I mean to collect.”
And you owe yourself, too, if you’d ever see clear to realize it, not as a weakness but as an inescapable part of your very being.
***
Over the year, Lynda Hoelscher cultivated her own set of private jealousies regarding Glynnis Mear. Had she known what her subconscious was up to, she would most certainly have resisted it, outwardly at least. That, alas, was impossible, as impossible as it would have been to reverse the churning eddies of her confused and confusing past. The sad experiences of a youth thoroughly disabused of its naïve notions drew her perceptions of Glynnis toward an inescapable conclusion.
Both the concept of emotional involvement and the conviction that mankind was ultimately beneficent, or at the very least neutral, lay dead for Lynda Hoelscher, the Rosencrantz and Guildenstern of her psyche. They had not so much been lost at sea as they had been torpedoed by the unrelenting circumstances of her adolescence. Consequently Lynda saw all human activity, from helping an old lady cross the street to finding a cure for cancer, as motivated by self-interest. Man’s emotional reactions could never be entangled with anything other than the ego. All else was false posturing, ignorance, or, in the extreme, vile deceit.
That Glynnis had so obviously controverted this rule of nature through her involvement with Conor Finnegan sat in the bowels of Lynda Hoelscher’s subconscious like some indigestible piece of foul meat. It absorbed the smaller items around it and grew and bulged until it became a subliminally painful obstruction. Glynnis, with her faithful devotion; Glynnis, with the freshly revitalized glow she carried upon her return from weekends with her lover; Glynnis, with her phone calls and letters; Glynnis, with her naïve and sickeningly underdeveloped notions—it all lodged there, uncomfortab
le and misshapen, distending the limits of her very real affections. It was all too sweet, too pure, too clichéd to be real.
Lynda observed it all and, step by step, grew increasingly resentful of what appeared to be Glynnis’s uncommonly good fortune. Her relationship with Conor smacked of artificiality. It would blow up in her face someday. It had to. In the meantime, its purity offended Lynda’s hardened psyche. She would have been much happier and graphically more satisfied if something would come along to despoil that sweet Romantic purity.
So were the conclusions of her buried subconscious one Friday afternoon in late April when Glynnis asked her to call Conor to let him know that she would be finishing an art project for the remainder of the day and that he should not pick her up until three hours after the previously established time.
***
Conor Finnegan arrived at Glynnis’s dormitory after the usual ninety minutes of expressway and city street. He had long ago ceased to find the drive fascinating. The scenery and names that had been so laden with the intriguing history of the area, that odd sense of time, had become mundane, mere mileposts on a dutiful journey whose true reward lay not in transit but at the end where his lover waited for him.
Finnegan hopped up the stairs to Glynnis’s room after signing in at the desk. The building itself had always struck him as feminine, with its bleached white pillars in front and its stately brick. The interior was awash in light colors to create a brightness of environment that was no doubt meant to instill a brightness in spirit, however contrived and transitory. The broad waiting room contained solidly stuffed furniture that would not have lasted three weeks in Finnegan’s old dormitory before its soft innards were distributed from wall to wall. The white curtains, ever clean, let in huge swaths of sunlight late in the day as the angle of the sun’s descent set it flush against the west window, a giant, fiery voyeur whose pleasure was obvious. The stairway that Finnegan scaled in hops of two or three steps at a time was carpeted, and the carpeting remarkably showed little wear. Do they float up these stairs? he wondered. The building’s refined, immaculate condition never failed to make him aware of his actions, every step, every gesture, as if the intrusion of his sizeable man’s body into so delicate a world was a violation of the laws of nature. Too, he was afraid that a careless move or quick turn might pockmark a clean white wall or send a table lamp hurtling to a shattered oblivion.
Finnegan reached Glynnis’s room and knocked gently with the back of his hand. A muffled feminine voice bade him enter; he turned the knob and stepped in.
When he saw that the woman inside was not Glynnis, he stopped in his tracks and bit off the flippant greeting he was about to deliver. A tall blonde with rich green eyes sat on one of the beds, her back against the wall and her long legs stretched out toward the center of the room. She had been reading. Her hair hung over her shoulders and fell across her forehead in loose bangs. Finnegan stood thoroughly surprised, thoroughly transfixed by the green pockets that were her eyes and which knifed into him like razors.
“Do I have the wrong room?” he asked as he regrouped. His voice came out higher than he wanted. That was a trait he abhorred, this piping of his voice an octave or two up the scale when he was nervous. And this girl definitely made him nervous.
“You must be the mysterious Conor Finnegan,” said the young woman as she got up from the bed. Conor noted her thin, firm body. Her breasts were larger than Glynnis’s, and her stomach appeared flat and hard. She wore a gauzy white blouse that set off the rich tan tint of her skin. Her jeans clung tightly to her slender hips. Conor tried not to look too hard, but she exuded a sensuality that he found compelling.
“I’m Lynda Hoelscher. Glynnis must have mentioned me to you.”
“Oh, Jesus, yes,” said Finnegan, although in truth Glynnis had said very little about her roommate. “I’m sorry we haven’t had the chance to meet before this. It seems as if we should have, but I’ve always come down at the wrong time.”
“Glynnis will be a bit late. She’s finishing a project for one of her art classes that had to be in today, or so she said. I’ve been dispatched to keep you company until she gets back. Have a seat.”
“Lynda, you don’t have to do that. If you’ve got something else to do, please go ahead. I can amuse myself for a while.”
“But it would be so much more fun to amuse each other, no? And there’s nothing else I have to do. You’re my number one priority.”
“Well, then I’ll content myself with being flattered. You know, it does seem strange that we’ve never met. I feel like I’ve been missing a big part of Glynnis’s life.”
“Me too. She can be distant sometimes. She’ll tell you what she thinks is relevant and leave everything else aside. Not that she resents your knowing, but that she doesn’t think it’s important.”
“That’s true. I still haven’t met her family.”
“Her mother’s a great lady. Quiet and confident and strong. But isn’t meeting the family a terminal step? Doesn’t that signify something, or am I mistaken?” she asked with a teasing smile.
Finnegan smiled back. “Nothing is terminal at this point. I’m just curious. You can tell a great deal about someone by their roots. What are yours, Lynda? Where are you from?”
“There’s nothing Romantic or exotic about me, I’m afraid. Upstate New York. Loved and abandoned at an early age, a victim of a carnal bandit. Disillusioned and cynical, I headed south to this place where I’ve set about reconstructing things.”
“It sounds as if there’s a story there, and if what you say is true, then I’m sorry for it. But,” he smiled again, sensing that he was being played, “you’re being too glib to be serious, aren’t you?”
“As you like,” she smiled. “Glynnis, on the other hand, has told me volumes about you. She’s told me where you live, and who your friends are, and how you work for a senator. She told me what you look like and how you talk. Especially how you talk. You have a charming tongue, I hear. I’m interested to see all it can do.”
“It sounds as if Glynnis likes to exaggerate to her friends.”
“We’ll see. She was accurate about the physical description. I think I could have picked you out of a horde of thousands. You’re very striking.”
“Thank you, I think. Although ’striking’ can have a few different connotations.”
“Oh, it’s positive in your case. I judge you to be a rare human being, Conor Finnegan. I’d like to get to know you better. Would you like something to drink while we share stories? There’s a refrigerator down the hall that we all share. Beer, wine, and even some vodka, I think.”
“No, I don’t think so.”
“Come on. I’m going to have a glass of wine. It’s no fun to drink alone.”
“All right, then. A glass of wine would be great.”
“Good,” and Lynda bounced off the bed and down the hall. He watched her tight, slender figure hop out of the room. Her breasts pushed the front of her thin blouse forward in firm cones that tapered to rounded points, and Conor stole sly glances at them as Lynda left the room. In her absence Finnegan remained where he was, seated at Glynnis’s desk with his body twisted to face Lynda’s bed. He felt incredibly self-conscious, and awkward at being here. He was alone on strange turf now. The safest thing would be to hold his pose and fix his gaze on the abstract, garishly ugly poster that hung on the wall above Lynda’s bed.
She returned in a few minutes with two glasses in one hand and a huge bottle of chardonnay in the other. “I might want more than one,” she said. “So might you.”
The wine bypassed all of Conor’s digestive organs and made straight for his blood. It relaxed him almost instantly, in part because he now had a prop around which he could wrap his hands and which, in turn, defined the current situation. Two new friends getting acquainted over a drink, no longer a young man who happened unexpectedly upon a beautiful young woman alone in her room. Finnegan’s awkwardness, which Lynda did not perceive but which perched in the
visitor’s throat waiting to leap forth and direct any word that crept upward toward his mouth, diminished by degrees until it vanished altogether.
They talked for nearly an hour, Conor still in Glynnis’s chair, Lynda reclining on her bed. They spoke of Conor’s background, his work in Washington, what lay ahead, what he wanted to accomplish. Lynda was not willing to talk about herself, despite Conor’s prompting. He tried to lead the conversation back toward her, but she kept averting it.
“I prefer to remain mysterious to my young men. Besides, you know all that’s worth knowing. I’m here, I don’t particularly like it, but there’s nothing else I can do at the moment. I’m Glynnis’s roommate and I love her dearly. I’m probably not a ’good’ person in the traditional sense of the word, but then I really don’t care for tradition in any form. I’m cold-hearted, oversexed and not to be trusted except by the two or three people in this world to whom I’m close, Glynnis being one. She could trust me with her life, and I’m very protective of her. She needs me, although she doesn’t admit that to herself. There. Now let’s get on with you.”
“You make it too simple. And too gloomy. No one can summarize herself like that, in shorthand.”
“I just did, Conor, and that’s all I’m going to give you. Verbally, I mean. Now, tell me about this Italian friend of yours, the big one. He sounds adorable.”
And the conversation continued away from Lynda, who skillfully choreographed it to the end. Lynda stayed reclined, her ankles crossed, her head propped back against the wall. Her eyes remained fixed on Conor, green stones beneath her blonde bangs. They burrowed into him and settled somewhere near his ribs, burning a path fiery and straight. She was in control, there could be no doubt. Conor Finnegan was merely a passenger booked for the ride, or perhaps a mouse running between a cat’s paws.
Conor finished his second glass of wine. “More?” asked Lynda, and he smiled impishly in return. “I think I might. This is having a nice effect.” Conor stood and took a step toward the bed to hand Lynda his glass. He stood there next to her as she poured. She finished, filling the glass nearly to the rim, tucked the bottle between the wall and her pillow, then held the glass up to Conor.