The Nearly Complete Works, Volume 2

by Donald Harington

  Tenny thought. “No, maybe the whole reason that all of the other things are there—bone and blood and breath—is to make the coming together of the male and female possible. Maybe the book’s trying to say that’s all we live for.”

  Colvin smiled. “I never thought of it that way, but I reckon ye may be right. I thought the book put it off so long in order to give us time to get used to the idee. You know there’s no way I could start off the first day of class talking about sex. I have to build up to it. I have to git to know ye first.”

  “Do ye know me now?”

  “I know ye now.” He reached up on the shelf and took down the lollipop box to show her that it was empty. “There aint no more, and I aint gonna git another box, and school’s over, anyhow. I reckon I’ve learnt near about all ye have to tell me.” Painful though the very thought of it was, Colvin was trying to work his way up toward saying good-bye. This was the last day of school, and she would be going home tomorrow, and it was quite possible he would never see her again. Even if her parents were not determined to get her married off, now that she was sixteen, she might not be coming back to Parthenon again, and, in any case, he had made up his mind not to return himself. But the closer he got to the moment of saying good-bye, the more he realized he wasn’t going to be able to do it. He was in love.

  “The last page in the textbook is about death,” she pointed out. “I’m still a-dying, and you haven’t cured me of that.”

  “We’re all a-dying, Tenny,” he said, surprised he’d been able to say her name correctly without messing up. “The textbook says, ‘While death is the natural end of life, it is not its aim—we should not live to die, but live prepared to die.’ You’ve been living to die, Tenny. I wush I could of stopped ye from doing that. I wush they was some way I could prove to ye what ye jist said: that maybe the whole expectation of us livin and havin bodies is not for dyin, let alone gittin sick, but the coming together of male and female.”

  “There is a way you could prove it to me,” she suggested, although she had to catch her breath three times to say this.

  And he knew what she meant, but he couldn’t do it here, not in his office, not on that lounge. Not even with the door locked. He wasn’t even sure he could do it if some magic enchantment could evacuate all the rest of the population of the campus and Parthenon too and leave him and Tenny the whole place all to themselves, with a big bed right in the middle of it, and it full dark with maybe just a nice moon to set the mood. Picturing such a scene in his mind’s eye, he recognized a certain familiarity about the setting: you only see places like that in dreams. Thinking of dreams, he had a sudden bright idea, and he asked her, “Do you ever dream, of a night?” Of course, she said; doesn’t everybody? “What do you dream about?” he asked. She reminded him how for example that whole week last fall she had a dream every single night of him, with all her clothes off, and him poking some instruments into every orifice of her body. It had nearly cost him her respect for him, because he had been totally unable to find anything wrong with her. “And was I really there in your dream as if you could reach out and touch me?” he wanted to know. It was more like him reaching out and doing all the touching, she said, but she sure could feel it, all over her body. “Well, then, Tenny, how about, tonight, let’s—” He tried to make his suggestion, but he couldn’t come right out with it. After all, she was a virgin, and he wasn’t sure he had any right to take her virginity away from her, even in a dream, not in this year that she was scheduled to become married. He postponed bluntly suggesting, “—Let’s me and you have a dream in which we lay down together…” by becoming gruffly pedantic and trying to explain to her certain matters which were not covered in the hygiene textbook, namely incubation, succubation, and masturbation. None of these were covered because all three of them were events in the mind’s eye, and the textbook didn’t even discuss the mind’s eye, a supreme part of the anatomy even though it was invisible, like the things it observed. All three words came from the Latin root, cubare, to lie down upon, same root that gives us concubine, meaning a woman who lies down with a man without being married to him. Incubatio refers to the man lying down with the woman, in her dream; succubatio refers to the woman lying down with the man, in his dream; and masturbatio refers to anybody lying down with themselves…

  Tenny yawned. She had to yawn, not because she was bored, but because she had understood very quickly what her lover was trying to suggest but wasn’t able to, and the suggestion had taken her breath away, and when your breath gets stolen, according to the textbook, yawning is an involuntary respiratory reflex that returns your breath to you. But when Colvin saw her yawning, he assumed he was boring her, so he tried again, “How about, tonight when we go to sleep, you in your bed and me in mine, and we start to have dreams, how about let’s—” Damn him, he still couldn’t come right out and say it, and Tenny was about to become asphyxiated despite yawning.

  So she used what little breath she had left to say, or ask, “I’ll be your concubine and succubate you?”

  “That’s the idee!” he said. “Except of course a concubine is a lady with a lot of experience, and it will be your first time, so I’ll have to be real careful and gentle with you.”

  She had no breath left, but she managed to utter, “I caint wait.”

  The really good thing about doing it this way, he explained to her, was that they were permitted to choose whatever location they wanted, just anywhere at all, and furnish it as they wished, and even decide what kind of fancy clothing they would be wearing when they took it off to get undressed. So they were able to kill the rest of the long afternoon by discussing and determining the ideal setting for their tryst, adjusting the temperature, getting the moonlight just right, selecting the bedcovers, starting a breeze to waft the curtained canopy of the huge four-poster, and even deciding which platters the Victrola would play throughout, a mixture of soft and slow numbers in the beginning, and faster things later on.

  They were all set. But one thing troubled Tenny, and she was brave enough to inquire about it. She reminded him that she was in only the second day of having a friend or flying the flag, whatever, and she was worried that might be messy, not a message from ’See. “I might could git blood all over ye,” she warned.

  He patted her hand. “My goodness, I’m a doctor, Tenny, and folks’ve been gittin blood all over me for years.”

  Trying to kill the rest of the day in her dormitory, she reflected that he hadn’t even given her a good-bye kiss, which might have left her with something to help endure the rest of the dying but everlasting day.

  Killing time in his barnyard and killing a rooster for Piney to cook for supper, he realized that he and Tenny had not agreed on a specific time to hop into their dreambed together.

  Time, though, is just something you kill in your waking hours. In dreams, time is indestructible, undying.

  But Tenny could not get to sleep. Away in the night, Zarky whispered, “You still awake, Ten?”

  Long after bedtime, Piney said, “You still awake, hon?” but Colvin lay there feeling like a kid on the night before Christmas.

  It must have been after midnight before Tenny and Colvin finally met, and joined hands and gazed together at the huge mahogany four-poster with a quilt in a Garden Butterfly pattern of velvet and linen broadcloth, and a canopy hung with long chiffon curtains a-wafting gently in the breeze to the tune of slow violins on the Victrola. Tenny was dressed in a royal purple silk nightgown that clung nicely to all the swells and buds of her young body. Colvin was dressed in a loose-fitting flouncy-sleeved white shirt such as swashbucklers wear to do their duels and adventures in. Can you see me? he asked her uncertainly, because the atmosphere was just a mite clabbered. Naw, I’m blind of one eye, and caint see out th’othern, she replied, but she was just teasing in response to his silly question, because of course she could see him, and he had never looked handsomer, even in her previous dreams. Well, he said, gesturing at the extravagant bed, do you w
ant to crawl in first, or you want me to, or both of us at the same instant, or what? She put her finger on his lips, saying, Oh hush, Colvin. Could you jist hold me real tight for a long time, first? So they just put their arms around each other, and mashed their fronts together, and squeezed. Neither of them had any further doubt that they were “real.” But just to be certain, she stroked the back of his neck with one of her hands, and he lay one of his hands alongside her cheek, and they spent a long moment assuring themselves that their hands were indeed touching live flesh that was warm, almost hot. Even that was not enough, so Tenny said, or asked, Do you think we could kiss, now? and she raised her lips and after an awkward few moments of readjusting their noses to keep them from bumping into each other, they succeeded in getting their mouths to mash together. He reflected upon how the anatomical juxtaposition of two orbicularis oris muscles in a state of contraction can be felt in the soles of the feet, the spine of the back, and in every corner of the brain. She had tried to kiss him on the mouth that very first evening of that first day they’d met, last October, but her aim had been off, and she’d missed, and she’d waited all year for this second chance. Now her aim was pretty good, except for the noses. Each of them was thinking, simultaneously, in the same words, “I wonder how long a kiss ought to last,” but neither of them did anything to remove their lips, and pretty soon Colvin realized that his corpora cavernosa were engorged with blood, while Tenny studied the sensation of a liquid seeping from her vulva that was certainly not blood but something else. I’d better take a look, she said, concerned, and stepped back, but Colvin misunderstood her, thinking she wanted to have her very first view of the male organ, and rather timidly he exposed himself to her view. It is possible that some things get exaggerated in dreams, and maybe the penis Tenny saw was larger than in “reality,” but whatever the case that sudden materialization before her sight of an object the textbook hadn’t even had the guts to illustrate distracted her entirely from her immediate objective, which was to determine the color and composition of whatever was smearing up her groin. Hold on a second, she told him, and nervous Colvin took that to mean she wanted him to handle his own part, so he got a good grip on it. But what she meant was that she needed a second to lift her own royal purple nightgown and run her hand up between her legs to find out what that substance was. She examined her fingers: it certainly wasn’t blood, it wasn’t even the least bit reddish. It was kind of like some clear ointment. Tenny had a quick mind, and if dreams exaggerate, then her mind was even quicker now, as she stared back and forth between her fingertips and his greatly distended penis, and realized the connection: what was coming out of her was an involuntary liniment intended to grease the passage of that big penis into her vagina. All year in hygiene she had studied the marvels of the involuntary system—heartbeat and breathing and glandular activity—the things that go without any effort on our part to keep them going, and now this struck her as the most marvelous involuntary doing of her whole body, and made her think again of ’See, as if ’See had returned once more to oversee the sweet ceremony of saying good-bye to virginity, and was bringing along the oil to do it with. This hard breathing she was doing was certainly as if ’See had resumed control of her lungs. Of course Colvin’s mind was just as quick as hers, if not quicker, and he understood what she was doing, and thinking, and therefore he did not even need to say, as he was tempted to, That there is jist the secretion of the greater vestibular glands of Bartholin. No need to bring that Danish physician into their bower, nor that British surgeon William Cowper, who named the glands that were producing a big drop of dew on the end of Colvin’s instrument. In just a little while, he might say something like, Let’s mix your Bartholin with my Cowper, but before they did that he wanted to make sure that Tenny understood two important things: the rupturing of the hymenal membrane, which would mingle one kind of new blood with the older blood of her menses, and her possession of a tubercle at the top of her vulvar groove which was homologous with the penis and ought to be respected as the seat of the woman’s pleasure just as the penis was the man’s. All the textbook had dared to say about it was to name it, clitoris, and to say it was very sensitive. Colvin wanted to be sure Tenny knew how to use it, because it wasn’t something a girl could wrap her fist around and jerk off.

  In dreams it scarcely matters, or is even known, whether one is right-side up or upside down, so without even being aware of it they were no longer vertical but horizontal, stretched out together upon the percale sheets of that fabulous bed, and Colvin took Tenny’s fingers in his own and guided them to the exploration of her vestibule, while he gave her a rather lengthy explanation of the structure and function of, as well as both the practical and pretty reasons for, the hymen and the clitoris. Tenny grew squirmy, not because she was embarrassed, nor because she was impatient, but because it was exciting her as she had never been aroused before, not the feel of her own fingers there but the thought that it was his fingers which were making her fingers feel. We all need to feel that others are making us feel. But I’m afraid there was one other reason for her squirming. All this time, the Victrola had somehow started a new platter; this was a good sixteen years before the first automatic changeable Victrola, but dreams don’t know that, and it was playing not just the violins getting faster but a bunch of clarinets and oboes and flutes getting faster and faster, urgent and immediate, and Tenny thought she was approaching a glimpse of that Other Place where people and birds and bugs don’t never have to eat nor breathe nor defecate. But she suddenly realized that here on the doorstep of Paradise she needed to go to the privy. They had not taken the trouble to furnish their dream with an outhouse, but there was a lush virgin forest all around their bower, and she could “use the bushes” just as well as she had back home on Brushy Mountain. ’Scuse me, she said, I’ll be right back. And she jumped out of that big four-poster and ran off into the forest, hoping she was not ruining the moment or the mood. Colvin sadly watched her go, and worried that his corpora cavernosa would release their blood and let his pecker droop and he might have an awful time getting it to rise again.

  Now I hate to mention it, but I myself have got to attend to one of nature’s subpoenas. Son, I’m going to have to ask you to excuse me while I summon the orderly to help me get out of this bed and into that potty-chair yonder. No, no, I don’t want you to help me; I’m such a goddamned cripple I have to be lifted and carried. The whole process is so complicated and cumbersome that I’d appreciate it if you’d just run along now and hold your curiosity until tomorrow, when I’ll be obliged to reveal the somewhat disturbing conclusion to that wonderful dream-tryst they were having.

  Damn it all, I’m almost eager to get myself to that Other Place where people don’t have to eat nor breathe nor

  Chapter seven

  I don’t mind telling you that yesterday after you left and I finished my interminable business, Mary C. and I got to talking about this matter of being able to take a roll in the hay in your dreams. Mary said she didn’t think it was possible. Well, you’ll recall when I was a graduate student in psychology at Clark, I did my whole damn thesis on dreams, and I must’ve read everything written on the subject, not just Freud, but Jung, Ferenczi, Brill, Abraham, all those fellers. Two things I learned pretty fast: one, all dreams are sexual, period. But two, there are very few dreams that are explicitly sexual. Dreams are filled with sexual symbols, but you hardly ever see a real pecker or a real twitchet in a dream, let alone such particulars as maidenheads or clits. I not only kept records of all my own dreams in those days but I went around talking to other graduate students, women as well as men, and getting them to tell me their dreams, and I almost never found a case of anybody actually getting their ashes hauled in a dream, and let me tell you this right now: I never once found a single case of any two people having the same dream at the same time, goddamn it!

  So what are we to make of this story? This is what me and Mary got into an argument about that lasted till bedtime last night,
and then she had the boldness to suggest to me that we give it a try, I mean, see if we couldn’t “get together” in our dreams. Hell, maybe I shouldn’t be saying it, but Mary and me haven’t “got together” in the world of “reality” for many and many a year. We don’t never even sleep together. I was already past seventy when I married her, and it wasn’t no May and December marriage neither, more like November and December. But anyhow, just as an experiment, we agreed last night to see if we couldn’t meet in our dreams. We tried our best, too. But the sad fact is, you don’t have no control whatever over what you’re going to dream. Among the involuntary systems of the human body, the dreaming system is the most involuntary of them all.

  That don’t mean the story of Colvin and Tenny is a bunch of hooey. Nor even a fairy tale. Any good story, in order to hold our interest and entertain us, must concern itself with things that never happened to us but which we believe could possibly happen to us. And I for one, even though I never met Mary nor anybody else in my dreams for the explicit purposes of unashamed and undisguised he’n-and-she’n, have the right to believe that what happened to Colvin could’ve happened to me!

  So if you and Mary want to sit there and laugh behind your hands while I try to tell this, go right ahead, that’s your privilege. If you don’t want to believe me, you might as well just turn off that hearing aid, goddamn it, and I’ll lay here and finish telling the story to myself, which is what I’ve been doing most of the time anyhow when you aren’t here or Mary Celestia has faded off into whatever celestial realm she prefers to inhabit.

  Anyway, excuse the interruption, and excuse my present dyspepsia. I hope you didn’t get too impatient, being sent away right smack in the middle of the first really good sex that we’ve had so far, before it even had a chance to “consummate” itself, as they say. Maybe yesterday I didn’t have the heart, nor the bowels, to reveal that this sex story didn’t have a climax, but an anticlimax.