The Nearly Complete Works, Volume 2

by Donald Harington

  Back at our penthouse after these long hikes, we would take turns using the sauna. Travis had enough difficulty accepting the sight of the sweat pouring from his own body without being required, or permitted, to watch it pouring from mine. Only after we’d showered and changed into fresh clothes would we see each other again.

  And then was the “empty” part of the late afternoon, before supper. “Would you like to have a television set for your room?” I asked him. “If you want to watch TV, just say so, and I’ll get you a big color screen.”

  He thought for a long moment before answering, “Naw, I reckon I’ve got along purty good without one this long, I don’t want to pick up a hankerin’ fer it.”

  So I would read and correct another chapter of Le Garçon Georges while he flipped through one of the several glossy magazines that arrived regularly in the mail. Sometimes Morris would saunter up to be stroked by Travis or myself, and for a time Morris liked to sit in Travis’s lap; but after the novelty of Travis wore off, Morris resumed his usual feline superciliousness.

  Then a young man from the Halfmoon’s kitchen would bring up supper; Travis would drape his arm with a fresh linen napkin, uncork the wine, serve the meal, and, as often as not, be invited to join me in the eating and drinking.

  II

  This routine was broken on the afternoon that Travis, instead of going with me on my daily hike, heeded my request to get himself a haircut. With my help and the drugstore’s chemicals, the last louse and nit had disappeared from his hair, which, I suggested, needed trimming; I was uncertain of my ability to do the job myself, so I sent him off to the barbershop. After my hike, I used the post-sauna empty time to start a special supper I’d planned to replace the hotel’s fare: mtsvadi, skewered lamb, the tastiest of all Georgian meats. Traditionally, the roasting of the meat over coals was always done by men, who were also responsible for preparing the fire and getting the coals just right, and throughout my exile from Svanetia I had been tortured by the memory of how much the very aroma of their activities had caused my mouth to water. My kitchen was equipped with a top-of-the-line Jenn-Aire, which had an elaborate grill with grill-rocks element, a suitable substitute for the requisite coals of hardwood and grapevine branches, and easily regulated to the correct temperature, but I had not yet had a good chance, or a good recipe, to try on it.

  When Travis came home from his haircut (and a shopping errand for me, to find some cherry tomatoes to skewer beside the lamb chunks), he found me hastily trying to impale the lamb chunks on a couple of shampuri, authentic but wicked daggers imported from Georgia by my friend Lennie Lewin of the Esoterica Gallery. Travis, first asking me what I was doing and being told, offered to do it for me. And while he was doing it, alternating skewering the cherry tomatoes he’d found, it occurred to me to see if I could teach him to do the Svanetian men’s work of actually supervising the grill and cooking the meat. Since he was so eager to learn the work of my kitchen, he took to the task with alacrity. But he sniffed and asked, “What-all kind of meat is this-a-here, anyhow?” and when I told him it was lamb he asked, “You mean a baby sheep?” Many people in the rural Bodarks, where pork or chicken are the common meats, have never sampled lamb, and this was Travis’s first encounter with it. But after his first wary bite of a chunk of it straight from the shampuri, he mmmed and declared, “Anybody who ain’t never et this stuff don’t have no idee what they’re missing.”

  Our mtsvadi was served with sliced cucumbers, a Svanetian shoti’s puri bread I’d baked and frozen some weeks earlier and now served thawed and hot, and a bottle of the best Gevrey-Chambertin that the local liquor store carried. Before the evening was over, my houseboy would be required to uncork a second bottle of it.

  Nor had he ever eaten by candlelight before. He had eaten by the light of kerosene lamps (“coal oil,” he called it) but tall, thin tapers were a new sight for him, and eight of them, in two silver candelabra, were sufficient light for us.

  Midway through the elegant, luscious meal Travis, having finished his reading of Georgie Boy, abruptly asked me if this food was the kind that Dzhordzha and his Princess used to talk wistfully about the possibility of having (Georgie Boy, pp. 187–191 et seq.), a possibility that never ever became a reality, and, thinking of it, I began to weep, more for joy at having finally realized the meal than for sadness over the fact that it was Travis, not Dzhordzha, who was sharing it with me.

  “Hey!” Travis said, solicitously. “What’s the matter? Did I say the wrong thing? Am I using the wrong fork? Did you spot another nit still in my hair?”

  I brushed away my tears. “No,” I said. “I was just remembering a time when I was young.”

  “You’re still young,” he observed, refilling the wineglasses for both of us. “I could blink my eyes and play like you wasn’t a bit older’n me.”

  “Blink your eyes,” I requested.

  And that was how we began the motif of the evening and night, which was not that I magically became twelve again but that both of us were without age, or, more accurately, that neither of us was bound to any actual years of life: neither was he older nor I younger, but each of us freed from time and from all the constraints of life except sex: He was clearly very male and I female and the two of us very attracted to each other, very curious about each other, very eager to seek the other’s hidden self. But neither of us knew anything about sex. Both of us wanted to find out, slowly and wonderingly and gently.

  I think it was then, that night, that I first realized the truth that would lead me to the answer I gave to the Paris Review interviewer (see below), who asked me bluntly, “Do you know why you are fixated upon twelve-year-old boys?”

  Oh, of course Travis and I were intoxicated, but I like to think it was not just the wine or the music that was playing (I asked him if he had any favorites. “I reckon my favorite number must be Hank Williams’s ‘I’m So Lonesome I Could Cry,’” he said, “but if you don’t have it, I guess Conway Twitty’s ‘How Far Can We Go’ orter suit me.” But I didn’t have either piece, so instead my Harman Kardon system played some soft things by Gershwin and Rodgers-Hart). When we stood up eventually to leave the table, to move from the formality of the dining room to the comfort of the multicushioned conversation pit, which Travis had quickly christened “the visit hole” although I’d had no visitors yet, it seemed to me that we were the same height, that he had grown, or I shrunk, or both of us, just as we had done with our ages, had transcended whatever measurement of size bound us to the earth. Admiring his neat, masculine haircut and running my fingers through it, I was aware of how long my own hair had grown—to below my shoulders, or, as we would discover very shortly, long enough if hanging in front to frame and caress my bare breasts. And he returned my gesture, running his fingers through my hair—the beginning of a nightlong game of follow-the-leader: anything I’d do to him, he’d do to me; whatever he chose or invented to do to me, I’d do to him.

  Before we lowered ourselves to the cushions of the pit, I put Morris out to roam the hotel, although Morris complained at this so much that I wondered if he knew what we were about to do and wanted to stay to watch. Then I flicked a wall switch that began the simultaneous dimming of all the “house lights” and the opening of the curtain on the great skylight that hovered above the pit, so that we were eventually illuminated only by starlight and some moonlight, scarcely enough to reveal us fully one to the other or to deprive us of our imaginations and our fancies: he could have been Islamber in that Svanetian tower, or Dzhordzha in the cell of the Serbsky, or Kenny in the Murphy bed, or all three of them interchangeable with Travis Coe, the backwoods faunlet, who had been dropped here by Anangka, or by angels, or, as I was to learn eventually, by Daniel Lyam Montross himself.

  I do not remember, at all, either of us undressing. I do not know what happened to our clothes. It was almost as if, having transcended age and height so easily, we transcended clothing with equal ease, finding ourselves bare beneath the stars in the cushiony pit
, our flesh oblivious to whatever chill of February was outside the place, our skins warm and soft and soon touching, his fingers reaching out to find how full my nipples had grown, my fingers discovering that already his groin’s heart had swollen to its fullest size, not man sized but as large as either he or I would ever want.

  Did we make any conversation in the conversation pit? Any talk in the visit hole? Possibly, but I don’t recall. It seems he expressed solicitude, or wonder, or a wish, or that he acknowledged a liking, or a request, or reverence, or that I spoke endearments and appreciations, but I think if we used many words at all we used the simple language of discovery, of searching and finding and knowing. Thus I became Travis, and he me.

  I blew softly and warmly into his ear, and he shivered with both the tickling and the delight of it, and he couldn’t wait until he had blown into my ear too.

  We used our hands, our eyes, our mouths and tongues more than our bodies, at least in the beginning and for a long time through the night. We even used our toes, which was an especially youthful and playful thing to do, my piggies (as he called them) burrowing into the nooks of his nates and neck and armpits, his piggies venturing as scouts into the places he’d later want to poke his little pole. When his biggest piggie brushed against my cheek I seized it between my lips and rolled my tongue around it, and he laughed with surprise and pleasure.

  We discovered, for the first time, both of us, a new and delicious sort of touching: of just the tips of our nipples, lightly and teasingly against each other’s, having a playful struggle to position our breasts to make the nipples touch, and then to rotate each nipple around the other. It was wonderful, but my nipples were so much larger than his that we realized this was the only disparity between ourselves, and we turned our attention instead to massaging each other’s chests with our hands and fingers and tongues.

  We played so long, without any actual contact of our sexual parts, that eventually he lost his erection. All this time I had been aching to take it into my mouth, but I had hesitated for fear he’d think it perverse or even evil of me.

  But while I was licking his stomach wetly, he observed, “You’re shore gittin me all wet, ye may as well tongue me all over.” And he requested, “Come on, lick me all over!” So I did, saving for last his wilted, drooping, shy penis, which I greatly slobbered upon, until it was not only drenched but resurrected. It was fully raised again, taut and proud, tougher than it had ever been and constantly quivering. I knew that it was near to exploding, and the noises he made told me that he knew it was. I assumed that he, like Kenny, had had some previous experience with self-induced orgasm, so it wouldn’t take him completely by surprise. I didn’t want to frighten him. I was tempted to bring him to fulfillment with my hand alone, but both my hands were busy elsewhere, one of them playing with his nipple, the other seeking to find the one entry to his lower body, and then finding it, and rubbing it with a forefinger that slowly but firmly entered it. He sucked in his breath noisily, and then, letting out his breath, let out also his semen, which splashed against my tonsils, as his body bucked and twisted and trembled. I kept my mouth upon his penis until both it and he were still and soft again.

  What is it about a boy that leaves him uninterested in sex as soon as he’s had his coming? Since all night long he had been duplicating my acts, my movements, my ventures, I hoped that he’d dare to return the deed I’d done for him. I waited a long while to see if he would do anything more, and when he didn’t, I said, “Now you ought to slobber all over me too.”

  He rolled over and nuzzled my neck with his mouth and gave my shoulder one or two licks, but then declared, “Boy, am I guv out! I could jist go right to sleep.”

  “Go right ahead,” I said, disappointed. And the way he snuggled into me, holding me, I thought he wanted to get himself comfortable for his snooze, and I resigned myself to simply holding him and perhaps trying to sleep myself.

  But sometime not much later in the night he began to wiggle and stir, and said, “You know what I’d keer to do? I’d care for us to go up and jump in that big swimmin hole in yore bathroom and take us a dip.” I told him to put lots of bubbles in it. While we waited the half hour for the tub to fill, we sat naked on the edge of the pool, having another glass of wine.

  Then we jumped into the deep tub and became a pair of dolphins and played a long time, and he was surprised to see how he could lift my body in the buoyancy of the water and hold me above him. He adjusted and changed the Jacuzzi whirlpools and he discovered that by standing waist deep in the pool and maneuvering his groin near the nozzle, he could give himself another erection with the jets of warm water. “Wow! I bet I could shoot off again like this!” he observed.

  And as I’ve said, I had discovered myself, some weeks earlier, that the Jacuzzi had the power to do something to me that no person could do. The beginning of the water orgasm had been so surprising and intense that I’d been leery of finishing it, but now, watching the Jacuzzi massage my Travis to the point of coming, I couldn’t resist moving to an adjacent nozzle and letting it gush between my legs.

  Travis became so absorbed in watching what the water was doing to me that he lost his concentration upon his own arousal. “You’re fixin to turn inside out,” he observed, and I, having never heard that expression before and wondering where he’d picked it up, was charmed by the accuracy of it, for indeed the water jet was manipulating me to the point of unbearable loss of control of my body.

  When I felt that I could contain myself no longer, that indeed I might turn inside out, I was moved to see if I could bring about something that had never happened to me before, an orgasm with a boy’s penis inside me. Quickly I turned him away from his water jet, as I turned from mine, and using the water to buoy my body I rose up and straddled my legs around his waist and impaled myself upon him.

  “Now this is more like it,” he said, as he hugged me to him, and I took it to mean that this was his first experience with intercourse, the real loss of his virginity.

  Oh, I was so close to the edge! My mind brought back to me all the hours I’d had with Islamber, Dzhordzha, Kenny, and Jason, hours of futile and senseless thrusting on their parts, on their parts, which had inevitably ejaculated but left me unreleased and consumed with fears of being frigid. Now dear Travis was not interested so much in thrusting as in bouncing the two of us up and down in the water, and around. We danced. We were both thrilled at how easily he supported my weight in the lightness of the water, with my legs tightly around his waist and his feet alone touching bottom, enough to make us move, to make us skip and spring and drift. The whirlpools seemed to sense our mounting ecstasy and increased their pressure, until the water all around us was boiling and roiling, and we were covered in bubbles. His two hands tightly gripped my buttocks as he bounced, and my two hands clasped his as if to hold on, but then he recalled a turnabout-is-fair-play that he had left unreturned, and he slipped one of his fingers into my rectum, and I slipped one of mine into his, and almost as if those were the two buttons waiting to be pushed, we came off together, simultaneously, neither of us hearing the other’s cries because we were too busy screaming ourselves.

  In the profoundest sexual passages of Georgie Boy there is nothing, nothing at all, comparable to the ecstasy of that moment.

  And yet, even in the throes of its excruciating intensity, something in my mind kept saying to me, “You’d better enjoy this, because you’ll never have it again.”

  There is a poignant line in our collateral text, Lolita, wherein Humbert, in one of his frequent asides or direct addresses to his imagined jurors, declares, “Sensitive gentlewomen of the jury, I was not even her first lover.”

  And then he begins the next chapter, “She told me the way she had been debauched.”

  III

  He told me the way he had been debauched. Not that night (when we were all finished with the Jacuzzi and climbed out of the tub, neither of us had energy enough to do more than stumble into my bedroom, pull back th
e down-filled satin comforter, and fall together into my queen-sized bed, where we were soon asleep in each other’s arms) but the next morning, when he reverted to his routine of preparing and serving my breakfast, after his trip down to get the flowers and paper and to flirt with Lurline (or to be flirted with by her), and then complied with my request to turn down the Beethoven quartet that would make conversation difficult, and to sit down beside my bed.

  Morris also sat, on the windowsill, pretending to keep an eye on the birds while actually observing Travis carefully.

  When I had finished my breakfast, I gave Travis a fond but shy glance and said, “So. How did you like all of that?” My curiosity matched that of a novelist awaiting his first review.

  “All of which?” he wanted to know.

  “Well, everything last night, but especially what we did in the Jacuzzi.”

  He nonchalantly remarked, “That sure beats a bed of straw all to smithereens.”

  “Oh?” I said, taken aback. “Which bed of straw? Have you done it on a bed of straw?”

  “Yeah, and it aint near as much fun,” he said.

  “With whom?” I asked. “You told me you’d never slept with a girl.”

  “Naw, I never slept with her. But we done it.”

  “Who was she?” I kept on. “Tell me.”

  Travis Coe asked for and received permission to get himself a cup of coffee, and while he was in the kitchen I prepared myself nervously for his confession, wondering at myself and asking myself if I would be able to tolerate the confession. My apprehension at my own intolerance grew steadily as he, during the drinking of his coffee, told me the story. The previous summer, his aunt had taken him on one of their frequent Sunday afternoon visits to a kinsman’s house, where, as was the custom of those country people (not unlike a Svanetian custom that was observed, however, on Saturday rather than Sunday afternoons), the grown-ups spent the whole afternoon, following a large feast of fried chicken and many desserts, socializing at leisure, the womenfolk gossiping busily in one part of the house while the men congregated on the porch or in the yard, and the children, of all ages, were left to their own devices…which devices were inventive enough to come up with some variation on the universally popular game of seeking.