by Olivia Myers
“I know! I know. But this—well you see, it’s kind of important. The kind of thing that I can’t really say over an email without it coming out lame and inconsiderate.”
“Nothing you say is lame or inconsiderate, honey. You’re a perfect John Keats in your art of conversation. A genius of the spoken word.”
“Mom, that was snide. But I’ll forgive you. And I’ll try to talk slower. I’m just so, so…happy! I can’t really control it!”
Jane held the receiver a fraction of an inch from her ear. Her daughter’s words were coming out half as squeals and half as shouts. What on earth could she be so excited about? Jane wondered, not without a trace of envy. Her daughter was succeeding in life. Twenty-five and working as a studio designer in Paris—in Montmartre of all places, the most fashionable and prestigious square in the city—Christine had done inconceivably well in her young life. Not to mention the fact that she was stunningly, absolutely gorgeous and had had a bevy of young men tailing her before she was a teenager. Christine had everything in life going precisely her way. And now, from the sounds of it, she was about to have even more.
“Well honey you’ve got to say it sooner or later—from the sounds of it it’s about to burst out of you.”
Christine giggled helplessly. That was another thing about her daughter: unlike the annoying, high-pitched giggles of the college girls Jane knew, her daughter had a cute giggle.
“Okay, okay, Mom—I will, I will—but, well, there’s no one in the room with you now, is there?”
“Only me, myself, and I. And we’re going to be running soon. Got another class to teach,” Jane lied, hoping to speed her daughter along.
“Okay. Let me take a deep breath first.”
“In…,” Jane counseled, “out—”
“I’m engaged!!”
Jane felt a buzzing in her ear from the squeal her daughter had made with the news. But wait—had she heard correctly?
“Honey,” she said, a little breathless, “did you say you were—”
“Engaged!” the news reverberated back, unmistakable. “Mom! You can’t believe how happy I am! How happy we are! It’s like—I don’t even know what it’s like! I don’t have your words to describe it. I don’t think anyone has the words to describe it! Maybe he has the words—he’s a literature professor too, Mom. Can you believe it? I think he even mentioned before that he’d taught at West Rourke. What a coincidence! But I’m not even surprised! Isn’t that amazing! The most incredible things in the world are happening, and it’s all completely natural for me! It’s like I’m floating. I’m completely in the clouds—I’m soaring.”
“Oh my God,” said Jane a little carelessly, but she corrected herself quickly. “Congratulations, honey! What a beautiful surprise! How—how unexpected!”
A thought, small and wicked, entered Jane’s head. “Honey,” she said, “tell me you’re not pregnant.”
“I’m not pregnant!” Christine said, indignant. “I’m just happy, so dearly, wonderfully happy!”
Jane was becoming exhausted with her daughter’s happiness and she decided to wrap things up. “Okay, honey, I’ve got to run. You’re going to tell me all about it later, okay? Congratulations again!”
She waited for her daughter’s response before powering the phone down. Then she put her head on her desk and burst into tears.
-- -- -- -- -- -- --
Twenty-five years. It was hard to believe it had happened twenty-five years ago. Jane was just seventeen, and Johnny eighteen. They’d been no more than kids, younger than Christine. Ignorant. Stupid. Madly, obsessively in love.
Johnny O’Darragh came from Ireland. A musician living in County Galway. He ran a music shop with his uncle and played the fiddle in two bands and the guitar in a third. But the summer that Jane knew him, he was driving a moving van in Toronto with his cousin. The job meant long hours, hard work, and menial wages, but Johnny had been pleased with it. He hadn’t had so much money all his life, he said. He felt like a king. An Irish king driving a moving van, strumming a guitar in the municipal gardens during the late hours of the night when his voice and the voices of the insects’ mingled.
It was the summer Jane found it impossible to sleep. The summer she arrived at the inevitable and frightening conclusion: that she was a remarkable human being, more committed to the pursuit of life and love than anyone else that she knew. Only the poets and the writers she’d read about could match her, and the comparisons between her heroes and herself filled her with a tingling, affirming energy that made wasting even a second of life seem like the gravest insult to the tremendous power that had been given her.
She introduced herself as Emily when she first met Johnny. Emily Eliot. A marriage between her two favorite poets at the time. Both of them incredibly, indescribably sad.
She recited poems from heart while he played his guitar. They invented songs together. They wrote together. Jane improvised songs on the spot and Johnny set them to music, and together they composed the world around them. The golden splash of the water in the fountain. The warm buzz of the insects that brought life to the still forms of the trees. The smooth, damp sweep of wind over the stone steps around the fountain where they played. The world belonged to them. The days belonged to work but the night was their domain, and in the deserted gardens, they owned the night.
They spoke and sang and watched the stars and gave them names. Jane called Johnny her Orpheus. “Orpheus who ventured into the Underworld to save Eurydice, who’d been taken from him by Pluto,” she whispered. “And then he lost her a second time, because he couldn’t keep himself from looking at her. But he couldn’t help it. He loved her too much. My Orpheus,” she said, smoothing back the long, brown bangs that partially covered his eyes. Green eyes, speckled with gold. She wondered if Eurydice had seen eyes like that before she fell back, back into the Underworld.
“The night is our Underworld,” whispered Johnny. “And Emily is my Eurydice.”
“And for as long as he was able after saving his love, Orpheus kept himself from looking at her. Close your eyes,” she whispered. The green and gold vanished beneath his eyelids.
Jane raised herself from his side and snuggled close to him. She looked at his still, breathing face and kissed him lightly on the lips. It was a soft, lingering, beautiful kiss. Her first.
Johnny opened his lips slightly and Jane opened the kiss more, sucking his delicate upper lip, slipping her tongue tentatively into his warm mouth. Johnny opened his mouth further and Jane inserted her tongue all the way, pressing it as deep as it could go. She closed her eyes and imagined that she was the kiss, entering into his warm mouth, and this thought gave her an intense pleasure. She felt herself go warm. Her whole body was warm.
Jane positioned herself on top of Johnny so she could give herself more fully to the kiss. She laid herself down on top of him and felt his manhood pressing against her through his jeans. It excited her to have him so close to her and she moaned deeply as they kissed. But she was so warm. She couldn’t believe how warm it had become. It was stifling, as if her skin was too much of a covering for her.
And, kissing Johnny, tasting the sweetness and the warmth of his lips, she felt how warm he had become as well. His flesh was scorching her, but she wanted to be closer to it. She wanted to live in the heat of his skin, to put herself into Johnny and dwell in him. Lifting her body from his, she took his shirt by both hands and gingerly but firmly slipped it off, revealing his firm, sturdy torso—finely chiseled from a summer spent lifting heavy materials from the truck. The sight of his bare chest filled her with a renewed, tingling excitement. She wanted to taste his skin. She wanted to taste his pale, finely sculpted body.
Jane kissed his cheeks and his chin, lightly fuzzed with the beginnings of a beard, and then she moved down and kissed his strong neck. She planted strong, wet kisses on his body, marking it as her possession. She kissed the moon-shaped birthmark on his shoulder and moved down, down. She wanted more. She wanted to tast
e him. She wanted him in her mouth.
Jane let her tongue glide down his body, wet and firm. She licked his body as she descended, drinking him in. She tasted the salt of his flesh and ran her tongue over his abdomen. Johnny opened his mouth and gave a slight, barely audible moan. “Don’t you dare open your eyes,” she whispered, resting her chin just below his belly button so that she could feel his member pressing up against her throat. “If you open your eyes, you lose me forever.”
Jane planted a garden of kisses just below the belly button. She wrapped her arms around his lower body and moved her tongue down until it was teasing the flesh beneath the elastic of his boxers. With one hand she undid the loop of his belt and unbuttoned the four studs that held his jeans. She was breathing faster, in incredible excitement, unsure of what exactly she was doing but knowing that whatever it was, it was supremely, utterly right.
She slipped his jeans down past his buttocks. The sight of his protruding penis, causing the elastic of his boxers to teepee, filled her with an insatiable and ravenous hunger, but she restrained herself. She dared not touch his boxers, letting all of the feeling go through her tongue. Teasingly close, the tongue ventured further and further beneath the elastic, running this way and that. She tasted the salt and sweat of his skin and felt herself go mad with desire.
With one hand she drew down his boxers and revealed at last his proudly erect penis. She took him in her mouth like a wanderer in a desert takes a drink of water. She was sure she had never desired anything so much as she desired to have as much of him in her mouth as she could withstand.
Johnny emitted a low, satisfied moan. The sound ricocheted through Jane’s being, filling her as his penis filled her mouth, with the full, complete satisfaction of her desire. Her lips surrounding his firm stalk, she closed her eyes and opened her mouth more, sliding herself down until she came nearly to his pubic hairs. Jane felt him pulsating, quivering and alive in the back of her throat. She slid herself back up and began drawing herself over his stalk and covering it with her warm, wet tongue. She took him in her mouth again and let herself sink down until he was again a firm bulge in the back of her throat.
Johnny gasped when Jane took him in her mouth a third time. “Emily,” he managed between gasps. His hands on her back suddenly flexed to his sides and transformed into white-knuckled fists. “Oh, dear God,” he gasped as she slid once more up his penis and planted a delicate kiss at its top.
Pushing back down on him again, Jane felt him quivering in her mouth. He was about to come. The idea thrilled her. She wanted to receive his seed. She wanted to taste all of him, not just his skin and his lips but his essence. She licked his penis and then closed her mouth and felt Johnny tremble. A warm, sticky fluid exploded in her mouth. She sucked furiously, drinking all of him in, not daring to spare a drop of his precious self.
“Dear God,” Johnny gasped. “My God, Emily.” She closed his jeans and positioned herself once more on his chest. “Open your eyes,” she commanded. “Orpheus. Look at me. You can’t lose me now.”
-- -- -- -- -- -- --
Jane remained in her office long after she had any students to see to, or any assignments to correct. She sat with a book of poems by William Yeats, though she found it difficult to read. Johnny was on her mind: Johnny and their fleeting, beautiful summer. Too soon it was over, she thought. And too soon all the joy had disappeared, like Keats’s nightingale.
Several more nights passed like the one she remembered, and then they’d had a beautiful consummation. A month later, Johnny had gone back to Ireland. No warning. Hardly a word spoken to her about it. He’d simply been there one day and was gone the next, and even now Jane didn’t know what had prompted him; he couldn’t have known by then that she was pregnant. She’d always thought he’d been scared by the idea of parenthood, and she resented him and distanced herself as much as she could from his memory, as though he were a deadly flame. Yet two months after his departure, the checks began arriving from Ireland. No return address—only the country and the county.
Jane gasped when she opened the first envelope. It was far more money than she’d needed at the time, far more, indeed, than was necessary for the first months of caring for the child. Where had he gotten the money? she wondered. Was there some kind of money cache he’d kept and never said anything about? Did he borrow it? The more Jane gave herself away to suppositions, the more sinister they became. Had he stolen the money? Was maybe this why he needed to get away so quickly from her? Was this why he hadn’t said anything to her before he left—because he wouldn’t want to involve her any further than he already had—wouldn’t want her to be implicated?
The checks came not once, but every month afterwards, with amounts that were always staggering and whose whereabouts, for Jane, continued to remain a mystery. There as so little she knew about the man she had given herself to—so little known of his character, that she had no grounds upon which to even build a guess about what prompted his generosity. Did he hope one day to come back and take care of his daughter? But then again, he didn’t even know that he had a daughter.
Jane resented Johnny—a shadow from across the ocean, sending monthly allowances to the child he didn’t know he had—but she was enchanted with his mystery, and she treasured the summer they’d spent. Nothing had spoiled this time in Jane’s life, and she wished to preserve the memory as it was and remained for her: unimpeachable, perfect. She had never married but she took Johnny’s name, and then gave it to her daughter. It would be the one thing Christine would have from her father, her true father, not the dark figure from across the ocean.
And now, Jane thought bitterly, the one thing she’d managed to save from her daughter’s true father was going to be lost. To a stranger. Someone like herself, it sounded from Christine’s description. That meant solitary.
A knock interrupted these thoughts. Jane looked up from the page she had been reading for the past half hour and noted at once the intruder in the doorway. Marcus Hobbs, a specialist in post-modern philosophy, entered the room. He was dressed in a grey suit and his shaved head gave off a gleam like a turtle’s shell.
“I’ve interrupted you,” he stated. “But you will thank me, my dear Jane, ere the day is done.”
Jane smiled weakly at his play on her name and its origin. Jane Eyre, the first novel Jane could remember reading. It had been her mother’s favorite book and the reason that Jane now enjoyed the same name. She didn’t, however, enjoy Marcus’s intrusion. He always talked for ages, intent on flaunting his intelligence. All he really flaunted was his lack of social grace.
“Marcus,” she responded gravely, “the only thing that could make me thankful for you being here is if you were to produce a stack of cleanly labeled, hundred dollar bills from that terrible coat, and then leave my office and never return.”
“Ah,” Marcus adjusted his glasses as though he were really about to give the idea some consideration, “that would be quite inconsistent with my character—which is to say, my non-character, if we are to regard with any seriousness the work our modern intellectuals, who have effectively done away with the incredible notion of ‘character’ and ‘personality:’ of the immovable, the permanent,” he said with some disgust. “So, to return to your hypothesis, it would be quite inconsistent with my choice of arbitrary-historical decisions that have comprised the present person you see today to offer you such a boon. But choices, being arbitrary, are only falsely consistent, so we are mistaken in hypothesizing a falsity of character, and you are wrong to have posited such a hypothesis.”
“Marcus,” said Jane levelly, “no amount of hypothesizing will keep you from getting a hardbound Complete Works of Shakespeare straight in the head unless you tell me what you want. Right this minute, you arrogant turtle,” she added.
“The English staff is seeing a colleague off,” Marcus said quickly. “We are having a bit of a celebration at my humble abode. Off the plane, I should say. He’s just returned from work in Paris.”
“My daughter lives in Paris,” Jane mumbled, then louder added: “Who’s the colleague?”
Marcus, having forgotten all about Jane’s threat, wagged a finger in her direction. “Now, now,” he said, “it’s meant to be a surprise. A surprise for all. I wouldn’t want to be the one who destroyed the fun for everyone else.”
“You can at least tell me if it’s someone I know,” said Jane, annoyed but curious.
“Anyone who’s been at the school for more than a decade will know him, but that is all I will say. Us turtles, we are a quiet, respectable lot.”
And a lot of good it’s done you, Jane thought. The man was wrinkled, ugly, three times divorced and with four children who didn’t speak to him. And yet the fact that he could still be so arrogant and so blind filled her with genuine amazement. And what did he have to show for his life of arrogant self-service? A position as a tenured doctor of philosophy. A moderate-sized apartment in which he could host two-dozen teachers all of whom hated his guts as much as Jane did.
“I don’t know, Marcus,” said Jane. “William Yeats is sailing to Byzantium. If I miss him on this trip out, I don’t know when I’ll see him again.”
“You are an absolute misanthrope, dear Jane. It makes me wonder why we don’t get along.”
“Because you’re a selfish, detestable, pretentious, wrinkled shit-bag of a waste of human flesh.”
“‘Anger is the lonely soul’s last resource,’” Marcus said airily. “That’s a quote from one of the McGregor’s creative writing students, which I thought an absolutely stupid bit of drivel until now. You’re lonely, Jane.”
Jane slumped in her chair. The copy of Yeats’s poems fell from her hand. “That’s like an executioner’s axe, coming from you, Marcus.”
“Come out tonight, Jane,” Marcus said, now tenderly. “Mingle. Talk. Recite poetry. Drink. You’ll have success if you end the night drunk.”
“Well, if those are the doctor’s orders...”