The Undergraduates

by Steven Snell

  “Your actions are affecting other people here, Cynthia!”

  I step to avoid the girl and smile a sorry and she nods and I turn back to Cynthia. She takes my arm and walks and she continues pulling my arm out and I’m standing, half walking sideways pointing at something.

  “Come on slow poke, coffee awaits us.”

  I point with my chin. “Wait. Take a picture of that.”

  She lifts the camera to her eye.

  She takes a picture. Culture. A weedy park and buses passing by and couples’ hands hand-in-hand and bodies and posters and this city in her viewfinder contrasted to the images hosted in her mind of faraway places with hundreds of years of history of conquest and violence and community and fire and plague and these old historic cities contrasted to this place of large-format retail stores on this street and plastic econo-box suburban housing dumped onto the edge of it, on farmer’s fields and she lowers her camera and it hangs around her neck and she smiles. “Don’t you just love it?”

  We walk.

  Cynthia went to Italy after her degree. I took a break from mine. I didn’t know what my education was supposed to be so I stopped it. Cynthia went harder at it. She didn’t speak Italian, but her ease with French made acquiring another Romantic language between classes at museums and piazzas and verdant country-sides easy.

  She sent me letters and postcards from her communal apartment packed with long-term tourists in Siena. Her postcards written from her bed near Piazza del Duomo were some of the most obscure yet beautiful things I’d ever read.

  Good morning Gorgeous,

  How are you?! It’s morning here, a hot Italian morning. The sun is out and people are out too.

  I’m still in bed, but the covers are off. I’ve been lying here for a while letting the day unfold and thinking random thoughts. This is my first one:

  I think I’ve come to realize that one chooses one’s god by what playmate she builds sandcastles with. It’s not something we know, it’s something we’re told and learn. No child is a Catholic, a Muslim, a Scientologist. God is a process of discovery. But I built secular castles, and there were moats where I drowned the heathens!

  This is my second: I’m no longer a solid; I’m a mass wanting a soft caress only to slide off into a pool of slime and rotting fish. Not that I smell like a fish. I bathe my vagina regularly. I take very good care of her. When I stick my finger in her and taste myself it tastes right. I’d go down on me. My second favourite part of getting head is when I pull the guy up afterwards and he kisses me and I taste myself on his lips. I like licking his chin. There’s something sexy about cuming on a guy’s chin. Mmm, to get head right now…

  Okay – whew! – back to my second thought: If I asked, would you take my mind? I think you could take better care of it than me. I think you could pump life and feeling into it – maybe even give it words to say and things to write. I think it could be gorgeous like you. You’re the transcendent form floating out in the heavens transcribed by mortal hands onto frescos. There’re no facsimiles of you. Wait, there’re no facsimiles of us. Yes, us. It’s a team effort. We’re the thousand levels of turtle’s backs all the way down to the end of the universe

  It’s warm and dazzling here. :) I’m going to go make love in Piazza del Campo to a non-Italian man (sleeping with an Italian is like having sex with their moms at the same time. They’re so attached to them! Yikes!).

  Hope all’s well. Pictures to be attached in the next letter.

  Miss you. Love, C.

  XO

  She’d write me from the steps by Fontana Maggiore in Piazza IV Novembre in the centre of Perugia. She’d mention scarves coloured in the thousands wrapped around men enraptured in comfortable beauty. She’d write of taking pictures of women walking arm-in-arm on Corso Pietro Vannucci. She’d read Anaïs Nin overlooking The Arno river while drinking a four Euro cappuccino watching foreigners with maps searching for something famous to take a picture of – then back to the train station to take another picture of another famous monument in another famous town. She wrote me once to tell me of a novel that changed the way words fall on to the printed page. She was in Giardion di Boboli and fell in love with Herbert Aquin’s Next Episode. She wanted to have his children, she said. She said it’s something I had to discover. She wrote me saying that from the ferry to Isola del Elba there’s nothing more illuminating than the opening chapter of Cuba burning into the fire of Lac Leman. It’s sad he shot himself.

  She’d write until her hand cramped, it was noticeable in her penmanship. We once exchanged musings over email but that form of communication has no beauty. It no longer told stories of exotic places and extended emotions, just quick hellos and miss yous and goodbyes. It’s lost the art of intentional communications.

  I would tack her postcards to my wall beside my window along with others sent to me from faraway places. I began building an atlas constructed of rectangular images tacked up to form the countries they came from. Friends sent me parts of South America, Australia, Asia and many parts of Europe. Every time I walked past I would be reminded to meet more continents.

  She wrote me once to say that she’d be staying for a few weeks at a villa in Corsica. She had been swept away by someone. He was a Tenor from Denmark, spoke four languages and was gay. He told her singing was his occupation but painting was his passion. They met at Café del Rouge on Rue Germaine in Paris. She was taking a week away from Italy and drinking a glass of tabletop red wine reading Between Hell and Reason. The Tenor sat down beside her and said, “Words, it’s all I can think of, and I am condemned to them.” She put down her book and was hooked like an addiction. They spoke about their travels and books read and movies watched and places needed to be felt up close, finger tips close. Cynthia mentioned Isola del Elba and felt Napoleon should have stayed. But his ego took a hold of his heart and conquering was not out of his blood. The Tenor mentioned his villa in Corsica. Cynthia thought out loud about dying there for weeks. Taking a break from life. A long sleep. A deep cleanse. Emptying.

  Three days later she was smiling, driving with The Tenor to his villa in northern Corsica. She became the Tenor’s muse. He painted her. Cynthia would drink white wine, lie by his pool and he would abstract her nudity. He told her that he had once feared the female form but because of a few months during his late adolescence he had fallen in love with it. He’d only been with one girl back when he was fourteen. The girl, his one year older neighbour, was sitting in his room during a warm summer evening. He was painting the sun setting outside as if descending behind her left shoulder. He turned to reach for an acrylic to paint the sky and when he returned his gaze her breasts were exposed to him. He could have cupped each one in each hand. The size of a wild rose in full bloom. Her head was turned to look outside and he stared at her erect nipples. The paintings had been occurring irregularly for seven months and that evening she bared herself to give him something more. Once her nudity was exposed, every Thursday after school she would come by his house and undress for him. She told him how excited it made her. She enjoyed being his sea of discovery. Each week the portraits would get closer in on her body. And then one autumn Thursday he found where her vagina ceased to exist and her anus began.

  It was after he had turned back from rinsing his brush, returning to sweep through her right hip that he noticed a wetness and light reflecting off the top of her inner thigh. He looked at it. Studied it. It fascinated him. It was something he had not painted yet. The moisture. A reduction of what was occurring inside of her manifested onto her leg, and soon his canvas. It was the first time he understood the complexity of the human body and what he had not yet found. He was fourteen and discovered what it meant to have a soul. When you’re more than just your body and your words. When some immaterial part in you is triggered and appears on your external. When she opened her eyes, she noticed him staring at her vagina, not painting, just staring. She leaned forward and gestured to him. He moved towards her and she took his hand and placed it
between her legs. The heat and moisture against his palm, his other hand still holding the brush. He held his hand there becoming infatuated with the heat. Transfixed, his palm against her anus and his fingers pushing apart her labia and his brush as though painting the plaster ceiling. She looked deeper at him and for the first time, craved him. She unzipped his pants and took his flaccid cock in her hands. He looked at her. She held him. Then she leaned forward and took his penis in her mouth. Wetness back and forth over him. He felt her moisture and slowly grew erect. His breath became shallow as she slid over him with her tongue and lips. She pulled at him with her hands. Then she looked up at him. She turned around, bent over and slid his cock inside of her. She moaned quietly and within only a few rapid breaths, he pulled out shaking and splattered himself on the back of her leg. Regaining his balance, he watched his cum drip down the back of her knee and down her calf and he took his brush and brushed it up her leg and turned to his canvas and painted her a perfect form on that chair by the window with the afternoon’s sun crawling over her.

  He discovered then what art was to him. Every week after that late afternoon, he painted her more beautiful than ever before. She was no longer an object but of heat and sex and life. Of a warm mouth and a tight orifice. She never said it, but he knew that she was aware of his sexuality. But she liked his cock in her vagina and he liked the moisture she produced and her and him on his canvas.

  Cynthia told me she never shared a bed with the Tenor. The Tenor slept with men but he had never had a long-term relationship with one. He loved women. He found them more mysterious, more beautiful, more perfect. Fifty years later after those warm evenings with a girl one door down one year his elder in his two-story house on Wildersgade he still painted the female form. It was his escape from being a Tenor. He never publicly displayed his paintings. Many friends suggested gallery openings but then was not the time. The paintings are for when he is gone, to be remembered for something more complete than his voice.

  Cynthia wrote saying he gave her a sketch of her hair floating on the water. She was on her back on the deck, head back, hair out floating in the pool and one leg bent to the sky; her arms out as if nailed to a cross and the sketch drawing her shoulders and breasts and her memories of the sun revealing its warmth on her naked body.

  We’re walking arm-in-arm now. We’re smiling holding coffees and just finished taking pictures of a busker in a wedding dress riding a unicycle around a top hat while playing an accordion.

  Get into a scene late.

  Leave early.

  It ends when there’s no way to improve it.

  14.

  Alex sits as though he’s being interviewed, animating his thoughts with gestures. He shifts forward on his chair, back, his hands through his hair; he’s active, engaged. He took an acting class between semesters once but realized real life was a better stage for performing. “People already play someone they’re not in real life so why perform with actors?”

  I’m still wearing my work clothes. Alex is in jeans, green sneakers and a V-neck grey merino wool sweater. He looks down and scratches at something under his cast and continues transcribing the story he began when we saw each when I was walking home from the train. He was saying that we’re designed by our surroundings, that other than being human we’re “products of our environment. We’re basically naked apes with a few years of elective cultures under our belts.”

  He looks at me. He says, “I’m my state of financial affairs, my current clothing apparel, how comfortable my footwear is. I’m an upper-middle class consumer with upper-middle class consumer ethics. I’m a construct of my living – my life – arrangement.”

  Jacob passes us black coffees and Alex spills sugar into his and sugar into mine and we thank Jacob and sit down over by the window that faces out onto the street. I glance outside as I’m sitting down. The sun crests past a building of concrete and green glass, a few clouds reflected. Cars are parked on the street, others creep along in traffic. Street trees, mail boxes, signs, bicycles locked to posts, empty planters. People strolling. A dog barks. Ambient music in the café fills what’s not occupied by customers.

  Alex crosses his right knee over his left and leans against the armrest.

  “Do you remember Petrarch?”

  I raise my eyebrows. “Who?”

  “Did you not pay attention at all in school?”

  “Petrarch?”

  “The 14th century Italian. He believed in the individual rather than the community of church supremacy –”

  “A faint din resonates.” I sip my coffee.

  “He mashed the Greeks like fashion designers rework the past and claim it as current.”

  “A reworking of previous thought?” I ask.

  “Petrarch is essentially New York Fashion Week.”

  “As in his thoughts are mirrored in contemporary society.”

  “Is fashion a way to question authority?”

  “Perhaps.”

  “Perhaps?”

  “It depends on the fashion I’d think.”

  “Right. Runway fashion versus everyday consumer life fashion.”

  “I’d say, yes, runway fashion is a way to critique mainstream fashion.”

  “To critique society!” Alex adds. He takes a drink and continues, “The humanist movement occurred during the Renaissance, right when fundamental beliefs were being called into question. Like $700 designer jeans with holes in the knee taking a slash at their birth as factory-worker-wear.”

  “Yah, just like that,” I say with a laugh.

  “Jeans are kind of like church. Since its inception the church in every generation has had to deal with one of its misses on teaching the right way to believe and what to believe, be it geo-centrism, evolution, women’s rights, gay marriage, abortion, doctor assisted suicide. A new style of jeans comes out every season not just to add a new consumable to your life but also as a critique of those who aren’t buying the new. Different cuts, stitching, washes, the addition of rhinestones. They’re still just jeans, but a commentary on the individual wearer too.”

  “What better way to be an individual than with what you’re wearing.”

  “And to conform with everyone else being unique,” Alex says with a smile.

  He looks over his shoulder to the girl who just walked in. I follow Alex’s gaze.

  Alex says, “The plague was a great idea, though,” still looking at the girl.

  “The plague?”

  “Right, it occurred because people didn’t will happiness into their lives hard enough – you know, pray and you will have salvation. … She’s fit.”

  “She is.”

  Alex looks back to me. “Those who died in the plague weren’t tapped into the cosmic force of positive energy and happiness circulating in the ether waiting to be grasped to acquire fame and wealth and an overall feeling of self-worth and health.”

  “Riiight.” I begin to let go over the conversation and let Alex do what he does very well.

  “It must be frustrating when divine intervention only appears when someone says his prayers were answered, but not to rebuild limbs for war amputees.”

  We both take a drink.

  “The Black Death was an excellent application in social cleansing.”

  “Yes, that’s what you said …”

  “It’s far more powerful than best-selling spirituality books or dictatorship propaganda.”

  “You’re on the line of losing me.”

  “Bare with me. Uncontrollable death incites fear and undermines the value-belief systems established by religion. It spawned widespread social, as well as literal annihilation, and killed off a lot of the dirty poor. That’s why Petrarch started questioning the whole system of religion.”

  “To tear it down?”

  Alex shrugs, “Or at least challenge it by going back and understanding the Greek’s search for meaning and how those thoughts and prescriptions could be incorporated into understanding the horror that surrounded him.�
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  “Looking back to critique the now.”

  “Exactly. It’s like Marc Jacobs putting Nirvana’s plaid grunge look on the high-fashion runway.”

  We watch the girl push a lid onto her paper cup and look at her phone.

  Alex adds, “Fashion is a way to explain a general discomfort with current trends. It can look back to find meaning in contemporary society. Through rediscovery, the now can make better sense. … Amazing hips but she looks blue.” Alex pouts.

  “Or lost.”

  “Insecure.”

  I add, “Well, if you’re constantly being told how hot you are –”

  “She is hot.”

  We laugh.

  I ask, “Do you think she gets tired of hearing that?”

  “Maybe.”

  “Perhaps her self-esteem lowers when she doesn’t hear it enough.”

  Alex pushes his glasses up the bridge of his nose and looks at me. “Maybe. But the bored look is so boring.”

  “Indeed.”

  Alex sits back. “The rediscovery of ancient Greek and Roman texts, they were the beginning of a widespread movement, a cultural and intellectual movement towards secular concerns.” He pauses. “Who are we as selves within a group? What are you without being defined as a group member in the holy worship of God?”

  “When God gets removed what gives us meaning?”

  “Exactly.”

  “Love?” I as with a smile.

  Alex rolls his eyes.

  “What takes the place leftover by a dead God? When you’re no longer defined as a Christian, when you’ve wiped away Christ, what do you aim for?”

  “I have no clue. I have no idea what I am.”

  “That’s why people join clubs.” Alex takes another sip of his coffee, crosses his legs and continues, “It’s by our own constant desire to be defined, be stamped as something, some verb turned into a noun. You can’t be someone who does things. You are those things. You aren’t a person who runs. You’re a fucking runner. You don’t swim. You’re a fucking swimmer.”

  “I like that. So, that’s religion. It makes you something so you don’t have to worry about being anything else.”