The Peter & Charlie Trilogy

by Gordon Merrick

  “Good God, no. I’m just talking about being attracted sometimes.”

  “Well, things like that don’t happen to me. I don’t let them. That’s the way it’s always been. That’s what I’ve always believed in. If I found out you’d been sleeping around, it would be all over.”

  “You know I feel the same way.” Peter’s heart pounded up with alarm. Charlie spoke with such cold finality. He had to enter a plea for forgiveness in case this thing went any further. He added hesitantly, “Still, if something did happen with you and somebody else, I suppose I’d have to accept it somehow. I can’t imagine life without you.”

  “I can’t imagine life without you so long as you’re the person I’ve always thought you were. If things changed, the hell with it. I need you. You. Not somebody who gets into nasty little messes with hysterical kids. Just don’t forget it.”

  Peter could think of nothing to say. Although he was badly frightened, his mind was rapidly sorting out Charlie’s words, assessing the situation. The main thing was that Charlie still thought he hadn’t been to bed with Jean-Claude. How was he going to silence the boy? Charlie’s threat to beat him wasn’t idle talk; it was just the sort of thing he would do, rushing off to defend their honor. He felt the danger in Jean-Claude like a timebomb ticking away toward the blasting of their lives. He would certainly have to go to him in the morning. He knew he could demonstrate that he was of no use sexually to him any more. Would that be enough? If not, he would have to plead with Anne to intervene. She had some control over her brother.

  They completed what remained of the drive in silence. As soon as they reached the house, all lighted up as Peter had left it, Charlie got out of the car without a word and went straight in and mixed himself a drink in the living room, where bottles and ice had been left out by the cook-maid who was included in the rental. He was still seething. His hand shook as he lifted the glass to his lips. He took it out to the terrace and sat in a canvas chair. He was aware of Peter trailing along behind him. He approached and put his hand on the back of Charlie’s neck and stroked it.

  “I’m sorry. It was awful but we can forget it now. I suppose I could say it’s taught me a lesson, but this sort of thing happens so rarely that I don’t really need any lessons. Beautiful darling. It’s all right now, isn’t it? Please don’t make anything more of it.”

  “I don’t know. Maybe in the morning you can make it sound as if you were telling all of it. I don’t want to go over it all again now.”

  “Would you like me to stay and have a drink with you?”

  “Not particularly.”

  Peter lingered miserably. It was so awful. He was beginning to feel deeply ashamed, but he couldn’t see how any of it, except for tonight, could have been different. Last week, Jean-Claude really had represented a threat to everything he felt for Charlie. This morning before lunch had been proof that he had met the danger and overcome it. He couldn’t allow anything to go wrong now. Perhaps by morning Charlie would have worked it out in his mind and they would be secure and together again; he was completely shut off from him now. Peter touched the back of his head again, longingly. “Well then, I’ll go on up. Come up soon.”

  When he was gone, Charlie finished his drink in several long swallows and got up to get another. He went back to the terrace and sat, his throbbing head resting in one hand. Forget it, he counseled himself as the second drink began to calm him. If Peter had been lying, it could only be because he and Jean-Claude had been having an affair. This quite simply wasn’t possible. Oh, possible. Everything was possible if you set your mind to it. There had been Guy’s innuendoes about the trip back from Paris. Peter was out and about for hours during the day while he was at work. He and Jean-Claude had disappeared long enough this morning for anything to happen, which was one more reason why it was impossible. If anything were going on, Peter would take great care not to give him any grounds for suspicion. Still, he was going to make sure. He had no intention of living with doubt. He sprang up, tempted to go back to the party and confront Jean-Claude. And make another faggotty little scene? He went in and replenished his drink and returned to the terrace and sat. He would find out in the morning and if, as he was almost sure, Peter had been more or less telling the truth, he would give Jean-Claude a beating he wouldn’t forget. Christ, faggots. How he hated them.

  In the past, in periods when things weren’t going well between them and life had sometimes seemed unbrearable, he had spent hours picking meticulously over the past, assembling a case history, trying to understand why his life had taken this course. He had seized on every small milestone, arranged them in chronological order, learned the sequence by heart. Somewhere as it unfolded in his mind should lie the answer to why all his life was bound up with, all of himself was dependent on, another man, yet he had never found it.

  It had all started at school, of course. From the age of sixteen, his sex had begun to attract attention. For a long time, he didn’t know whether he was supposed to be proud or ashamed of it. It was simply commented on as one of the school’s phenomena. One year’s jokes and hints and glances became the next year’s acts. Somehow—it had had something to do with a boy who wanted to measure him—he was introduced to a secret circle that engaged in mutual masturbation. After the measuring boy, he was approached by another, who muttered something about “doing it” and led him down into the basement to a dusky, dusty room where athletic equipment was stored. There, they unfastened each other’s flies, liberated their by-now erect sexes and rapidly stroked each other to orgasm. That was all there was to it. Thereafter he was approached regularly and repeated the routine with a number of others. It was a day school in the suburbs of Philadelphia and the encounters always took place somewhere on the school grounds, never at home. It was a practice he associated with school and although it was secretive, he couldn’t think it was bad because all the others were doing it, all the ones he cared about, the athletes, the leaders, the good-looking boys.

  “You ought to do it with McClelland,” one of his regular partners said one day when they were buttoning their flies. “He’s almost as big as you are.”

  He had never paid much attention to anybody’s size except his own; he supposed he wasn’t really interested, but he was pleased to learn that Eddy McClelland was a member of the circle. He was captain of the football team, a school hero, not a particular friend, but one whose looks and style he admired. He dressed beautifully. He looked forward to Eddy’s approaching him, since that was the way it had always happened and it wouldn’t have occurred to him to make the first move. A large part of their last school year had passed when, at last, as they were leaving the locker room together, Eddy brushed a hand against his and led him across the grounds to the driveway where they parked their cars. Eddy went to his.

  “Get in,” he ordered. They drove a few blocks and parked on a residential street and there, seated side-by-side, they went through the familiar ritual. Charlie usually didn’t look while it was going on, but now he stole a glance at what he held in his hand. It staggered him, and the realization that he was bigger made him feel almost deformed.

  After that, he avoided doing it with any of the others. The first indication of a tendency to find a male mate? He didn’t know if Eddy felt the same way, but they constantly found occasions to be alone, sometimes several times a day, in daring and original places, out on the grounds hidden by shrubbery, in a deserted classroom, so he assumed that something special had been established between them. He didn’t know then that they had taken so long to get together because Eddy had never before made the advances.

  On their graduation night, after he had disentangled himself from his family, he hung about at Eddy’s side and Eddy seemed to expect him to be there. When the crowd had begun to disperse, Eddy nudged his hand in the way he had and they made their way quickly out of the gym, where the ceremonies had taken place. Outside, he directed their steps across the dark grounds toward the squash courts. There, to Charlie’s surp
rise, Eddy opened a door, which he seemed to know would be unlocked, and they entered. They were in some area behind the courts. Faint light entered from somewhere, but it was quite dark.

  “Take your clothes off,” Eddy murmured. “There’s a bench here to put them on.” His hand was on his arm to guide him, and then Charlie could feel him undressing at his side. Charlie did the same. When he had stripped, he could feel Eddy’s naked body moving in close to him, handling him, guiding him until somehow he was on his back on some sort of hard mat and Eddy was on top of him, naked in his arms. This bore no relationship to the simple ritual they had performed before. This was his whole body writhing against another in an act of intense intimacy and union. It was so unexpected and momentous that it passed in a daze. Afterward, he remembered his lips shaping a kiss against Eddy’s cheek in the convulsions of orgasm. He hoped Eddy hadn’t noticed it.

  Another milestone? Would none of the others with whom he had “done it” have dreamed of exchanging a kiss? Was he already responding to these childish games with some fixed, warped element in him that the others didn’t share? He had genuinely thought of the “games” as part of schoolboy life and had expected them to end with college. The last thing that would have entered his head was to seek an occasion for their continuation. In the first few weeks at Princeton, however, he had become increasingly aware of a youth he encountered regularly in the communal washrooms of the dormitory where he lived. He knew he was a class ahead of him and therefore didn’t speak, but he admired his aloof, sensual, artistocratic face and his fine, sleek body, which looked as if it had been formed by aristocratic exerciseriding, squash, swimming—well-muscled but unadapted to hard labor. He was sorry that the rigid social isolation of the freshmen made it impossible for him to know him, but he didn’t let himself think anything more than that.

  One morning, Charlie was in the shower and the young man, whose name he learned later was Hal, was standing only a dozen feet away drying himself. Charlie, as usual, was admiring the lovely flow of the lines of his body as he moved. He turned suddenly and their eyes met. Charlie started to glance away, but the intensity of the regard held him. The look traveled down through his body and hit his groin. Things began to happen that he had to conceal by turning his back, but not before he had seen Hal’s gaze drop to the troubled area, not before he had caught a glimpse, as the other lowered his towel, of what was obviously, boldly, in such a public place, the beginning of an erection. Charlie turned on a blast of cold water to calm himself and quickly finished his shower. When he turned back, Hal was gone. Obviously it hadn’t meant what he had thought it meant. After a moment’s disappointment, he decided that it was just as well. He had known that that sort of thing wouldn’t go on here. It was a thing of the past. It would be ridiculous, now that they were all grown men. He went back up to his two rooms, which, thanks to his family, he didn’t have to share with a roommate, thinking as he climbed to the top of the building that if this were prep school, he could have hoped for the young man to intercept him somewhere along the way. Why even think about it? He flung off his bathrobe in his bedroom and realized that he was still tingling with the shock of the look that had been exchanged. His sex stirred and he stroked it and felt it stiffen under his hand. He wondered if he should do himself to get it out of his system. There was a knock on the door. He snatched up a towel and crossed his study to answer it, knowing who it would be before he opened it. Hal stepped in without a word and threw off his robe and they were in each other’s arms, Hal’s mouth on his, his tongue running along his closed lips. It took him a second to realize what was expected of him and then he opened his mouth and they welcomed each other with their tongues. The slight roughness of their freshly shaved skin seemed a bit odd to Charlie but he forgot it in the unfamiliar thrill of kissing. His visitor backed him to the sofa and they fell onto it, grappling with each other, their legs thrashing, finding their satisfaction in the pressures of their bodies and in their eager, exploring hands.

  “Jesus,” Hal muttered when it was over. He sprang up and wiped himself with Charlie’s towel, his back slightly turned. “Are you going to be home this evening?”

  “Yes. Sure.”

  “Shall I come up about ten-thirty?”

  “Yeah, that’d be great.”

  He pulled on his robe and departed as silently as he had come, leaving Charlie in a trance of happiness. So it wasn’t all over. On the contrary, there were sophistications to be learned here; kissing added a whole new dimension of delight. That night, with the light on, frankly and abandonedly in bed for the first time, Hal introduced him to oral play. It had never occurred to him that anybody would want to take his sex in his mouth, but Hal did, and the sensation was electrifying. When it came his turn to reciprocate he did so without enthusiasm, dreading the ejaculation. What would it taste like? Since Hal had swallowed his, he supposed he would have to do the same. When the moment came, he managed it, but it gave him no pleasure.

  If he had any lingering doubts about whether to regard his prodigious sex as an asset, they were dispelled now. Hal came every night to worship it. He wanted it everywhere, in his mouth, against his cheeks, in his armpits, lying along his chest and nipples, between his thighs. He led Charlie through an elaborate ballet of shifting positions as he massaged his whole body with it. Charlie found it flattering and exciting, but embarrassing too, since he felt no similar obsessive passion for Hal’s, though it was very handsome in its way. Looking back, he found it amazing that he had been indifferent to so many things that later had given him such joy and ecstasy. Had he forced his body to find pleasure where it didn’t naturally exist for him? If he had refrained in time, would his sexual urges have been redirected? He and Hal had been meeting nightly for a week or more when he arrived carrying a tube of something. Once in bed, he reached for it and began to apply an oily substance to Charlie’s sex. Charlie assumed that this was an elaboration of his phallic worship; he wanted to see it glistening and have it move more voluptuously over his body.

  “I’ve taken care of myself,” Hal murmured inexplicably. They rarely spoke when they were in bed and never referred to their love-making before or after it. In a moment, he moved around and by the position he assumed and by his urgently guiding hands, he indicated that he wanted Charlie to enter him. Everything in Charlie recoiled from the act. He knew vaguely that it was possible (Something about Oscar Wilde? Words looked up in the dictionary?), but just the thought of soiling himself was almost enough to make him physically incapable of performing it. Hal’s desire communicated itself so strongly that he was almost forced to comply.

  As Charlie felt himself entering, a strange new sensation seized him. He slid deeper into him and he was gripped by a lust for possession. This beautiful body was his. Everything that Hal was, was his. He lunged into him and Hal cried out. His sex seemed to swell gigantically as it took possession. Hal’s acceptance of it, his hips lifting and working to have more, was a total submission to him. He drove into him and his penetration became huge and complete. He took him fiercely and Hal surrendered himself to him with cries of rapture. His orgasm was an immense planting of himself in the other. He shouted as he felt himself pounding into him, flooding him with himself. He collapsed onto him, spent and triumphant, having tasted finally the full joy of his sexuality. He had often wondered whether everything would have been different if, at that time, a girl had offered herself to him as totally and rapturously as Hal.

  The experience left him with a craving for more. He wanted to possess the whole world. Everybody he met became a potential bedmate, but he quickly began to discriminate as he never had at school, until Eddy McClelland, studying the texture of skin and hair, the shape of a hand, the curve of a mouth, the look of eyes and, of course, the drape of trousers at the crotch and what it seemed to offer. He never made a move to take what he wanted but somehow, perhaps because there was a circle here too into which Hal had dropped his name, his conquests multiplied. When he became active in the u
ndergraduate theater, the field widened, and his aspect of life became more overt. There were those who hinted at it quite openly. He received his first declaration of love, which stunned him and which he rejected as silly and exaggerated, but it unexpectedly set him to thinking about Eddy. The thoughts led to an exchange of letters between Princeton and New Haven and a meeting for a night in New York. The prospect was more exciting to him than he had had any reason to anticipate. He wondered if Eddy had been learning things, too. The thought of kissing him made him tremble inside.

  But Eddy didn’t kiss him so he didn’t attempt to kiss Eddy, and it quickly became apparent that they both had the same idea in mind. Because it was Eddy, he lay on his stomach and went through the motions, all muscles tensed, of trying to satisfy him but he had no intention of letting him succeed. The idea appalled and terrified him. (He had even got over that, although it hadn’t happened to him often: once with Peter and a few times when Tony introduced him to multiple coupling during Peter’s Army service.) The night with Eddy hadn’t been a success, but all through it words of love had hovered on his lips. It was inconceivable that he would say them unless Eddy spoke first, and they died forever when Eddy said as they were parting, “If we don’t look out, we’ll end up falling in love with each other.” He had laughed and Charlie had forced himself to join in.

  If he had had the courage to speak out, would the hopelessness of it have awakened him to the danger he was courting? Would it have made him realize that as long as the world forbade love between two men, the only chance of happiness lay in conforming? He had returned to college with a tormenting yearning and an even greater contempt for endearments so that he never went to bed a second time with those who used them, but he did learn to talk and laugh and joke while making love, which he found made it a much more rewarding experience. His silent coupling with Hal began to seem as incomplete as his abortive play with Eddy, although he continued to receive him regularly at night all through his freshman year.