by C. P. Boyko
He clamped his eyes shut as if they were sponges that could be wrung out, then opened them wide and drank in great draughts of clean, sterilizing sunlight.
This was stupid. Dr. Pringle didn’t know what he was talking about. He was always going on about homosexuality; it was his idée fixe. Archie was taking the man too seriously. All his mother’s friends mocked their analysts. Archie, who had first been sent to Dr. Pringle when he was ten, understood that these sessions were in some way necessary and bettering, like piano lessons, chicken pox, or a visit to the dentist, and that their necessity and benefit were in some way inseparable from their unpleasantness. But if your dentist told you that your oral hygiene was deplorable, you did not take it to heart; after all, that was what he had to say. If Dr. Pringle hadn’t decided that all Archie’s problems stemmed from repressed homosexuality, he would have had to come up with some other reason for them.
“You idiot,” he muttered. A fat woman waiting at the corner for her signal scowled at him; blushing, he threw himself into the perpendicular crosswalk just as the light turned yellow.
It wasn’t fair: even a fat, ugly woman could make him feel stupid and inferior. That was the difference between boys and girls: only intelligent, handsome boys made him feel uneasy, while all girls, even stupid ones, even ugly ones, filled him with panic.
He crossed the street briskly, but refused to break into an undignified run. He was acutely aware, as always, of the waiting drivers’ eyes on him. Like an actor getting into character, he tried to see himself as he would have liked them to see him: rangy, insouciant, wise. When he reached the opposite sidewalk he slowed his pace to show them, by contrast, just how quickly he had been moving to get out of their way.
Still blushing, his mind lashed out again at the fat woman across the street. How could anyone let herself get so fat? Then his disgust gave way to a flare-up of vicious lust: How he’d like to fuck her, the fat pig. That would teach her to scowl at him. That would teach them all.
There were not many places one could go to be alone at Parcliffe. There was the corner of the library, behind the expired periodicals, where he worked on Freykynd. There was the derelict lavatory in the basement of the Masters’ House. (He knew it was derelict, unvisited even by Sawchins the custodian, because he had discovered in one of the toilets, lying lengthwise like a wedding band in a jewelry box, a massive crap whose progenitor had evidently been too proud (or perhaps too traumatized) to flush; and it was still there a week later, a little furry around the edges but instantly recognizable.) And then there was the Wood.
Generations of boys had trampled the bush into a vast, alluring warren of criss-crossing paths and passageways, crawl spaces and trenches and grottoes. But, down by the muddy creek, there was a grassy clearing which, because it gave no cover, because it left nothing to the imagination, was ignored by the younger boys who came here to play war. At one end of this clearing there was a little depression, bound on one side by the creek, on the other by the trunk of a tree, and concealed from view by the tall stalks of grass that tasted like licorice when chewed. It was here that Archie came to masturbate, or, sometimes, to think.
Somehow, the open air always felt cooler and fresher on his cock than on any other part of his body. Was this just an illusion of contrast, produced by the fact that this part of his body was so seldom exposed, and therefore felt nakeder when it was? Or was the skin of this organ more sensitive than the skin elsewhere? As he pondered the matter, the wrinkled little fleshy stub came to life, increasing in size by an implausible factor till it had reached a regal stature—standing there, indeed, proud and quivering with purpose, just like a queen.
He closed his eyes and mentally perused his cousin Patricia’s letters, lingering over the most-nearly-pornographic phrases: “I want to lick you up,” “We will touch each other all over,” “My hot lips yearn and ache,” “I want you to crush your sweetness into me.” As usual, he eked out these maddeningly vague words with phrases committed to memory from the scientific article on “intercourse” that Lyle had ripped out of the Encyclopedia last year: “Respiration becomes shallow and rapid … heartbeats are stronger and quicker … tendency to trembling, constriction of the throat, sneezing, emission of internal gas, are due to diffusion of the motor disturbance … dilation of the pupils, the expansion of the nostrils, the tendency to salivation and to movements of the tongue … movements of the tongue … erectile tissue charged with blood … perceptible to touch in an increased degree of spongy and elastic tension … face becomes red, and exactly the same phenomenon takes place in the genital organs … the erection of the male organ which fits it to enter the female parts … fluid which copiously bathes all parts of the vulva … onset of muscular action, which is largely involuntary … muscular action … under the influence of the stimulation furnished by the contact and friction of the vagina … involuntary rhythmic contractions …”
But soon even the biological facts were swamped by a surge of emotion, and his cousin’s individual features were washed away in a tide of abstraction: instead of one girl, he thought of girls in general; instead of one body, bodies in general; instead of one love, love. In a vision that seemed less like a dream for the future than some memory of former happiness, he saw himself on a dark desert highway, being embraced from behind by his soulmate, the beautiful genius who forgave him completely. He turned and crushed her in his arms, tore off her clothes with his teeth, carried her away, laid her down and lay down on top of her, and had her, took her, possessed her …
And yet it all remained dim and vague: she was resplendently nude but he could not quite see what she looked like; he himself was still clothed, or only half present, or half himself; and though she was soft and yielding she remained somehow pristine and inviolate, even in her subjugation.
As he made his way back through the Wood he was suddenly reminded of a similar spot he had once discovered on the edge of town outside Templeton. It too had been cross-hatched with pathways that twisted and curved out of sight in just the right way, revealing nothing of their direction or destination, enticing one irresistibly with the thrill of discovery. He prowled around in that wood like a wolf, like a panther, like the last man alive on the planet, surviving by his wits and strength alone. Then he encountered the other.
Well hiya.
Hi.
Hail fellow nature-lover well met and all that jazz I’m sure.
There was something furtive and smug about the man, as if he had expected to find someone like Archie in a place like this.
I was taking a shortcut, Archie explained. The words caught in his throat and betrayed a sudden, inexplicable guilt.
The man was blocking the path, and made no move to step aside. In a hurry? he asked, his voice rich with amusement and knowingness.
Bloody right, said Archie, and turned and fled.
At the time, his guilt and shame, so seemingly groundless, had bewildered and angered him. But now, at last, he understood their origin.
That wood had been on the same end of town as the public toilets.
Homosexual men often made dates with one another in public toilets (indeed, while standing at the urinals, if some of the books he’d read could be believed).
The man in the wood had been a homosexual. A homosexual had made a pass at him.
Surely, of all people on the planet, it was homosexuals who were most attuned to the telltale signs of homosexuality in others.
Did the man know something that Archie did not?
“Come in, come in, whoever you are,” sang a voice distinctly not Fishpool’s. Archie looked again at the number on the door, then pushed it manfully open, an explanation ready on his lips: Sorry, old cock, I thought these were C. S. Fishpool’s rooms …
But the words died before they were born. At the sight of the naked boy on the bed, apparently trying to twist himself into a pretzel, Archie fell speechless.
“Come on you bastard, close the door will you?”
Tho
ugh run together, the two parts of this sentence were uttered in such radically different tones—the first part growled, the second part tinkled—that they seemed to come from different personalities altogether. Archie shut the door.
The “bastard,” as a compulsive second glance revealed, was the boy’s leg: he was trying to get a look at the bottom of his foot. The second glance also revealed that the boy was not in fact fully naked, but wore a white towel around his waist which nevertheless, in his present posture, completely failed to conceal any part of his anatomy whatsoever.
“I think I’ve got another bastard of a wart,” said the boy, jumping from one end of his register to the other and back in the space of “bastard” alone. “Can you see the cunt?”
With simulated naturalness Archie kept his gaze averted, looking with roving absorption at every object and furnishing in the room. “I wouldn’t know what one looks like,” he said regretfully, so that the boy would not think that his wartlessness was for him a source of pride or superiority.
“Like a little prick of an asshole of a wart right on the bastard bottom of your asshole foot.”
Archie, like an amnesiac clutching at some inconsequential but precious memory, shouted, “I think I’ve probably got the wrong room.”
“Fishie’s in the bog; he’ll be out. I can feel him, the cunt. Just look. Here. Please.”
Archie turned his head far enough to see that the boy had fallen back on his elbows and extended his long pink leg, with all its toes wriggling, in Archie’s direction.
“It could very well be a wart.”
“No, but come on. It’s not contagious to look at. It won’t hurt you to look, will it?”
He thought of his session with Dr. Pringle. He looked at the boy’s foot.
It was easy, after all, not to stare down the leg at the exposed groin; he’d had plenty of practice in the locker room. Encouraged, he even grabbed the boy’s ankle to steady it. But the pink skin, which he’d expected to be warm and clammy, was as cool and dry as a corpse. He dropped it at the sound of Fishpool’s voice.
“Is Deivers going on about his ineffable bloody warts again?”
Archie felt a sinking panic, as if he had been dropped into a foreign city, as if this moment did not connect to any other moment of his life.
“It does look like a wart,” he said. “But one never knows.”
“I’ll cut it off,” wailed Deivers, rolling back and forth on the bed. “I’ll cut the whole damn cunt of a foot right off.”
“Oh poo,” said Fishpool. To Archie he said, “Let’s away.”
“Are we … Is he not …”
“No. Deivers isn’t literary.”
“The distinction between form and content,” one boy in an ascot was saying to another boy in socks and sandals, “is an insidious one. You cannot say what a poem says without saying it the way the poem says it.”
“In other words,” said another boy wearily, “form has content. No argument here. But can the inverse be said? Does content have form?”
“Ah—pétition principe. You are still treating them as distinct entities. Content cannot be extracted; meaning cannot be abstracted. A paraphrase is not the same as a poem. A synopsis is a lie.”
Archie nodded and grumbled his agreement. It was the only response he’d managed to muster since their arrival.
“But then,” someone else was saying, “as Lucretius so aptly put it, you will not feel death because you will not be. By the same token, you will not feel fame either.”
“Lucretius is overrated as a philosopher—underrated as a poet.”
“Ah!—but it is the desire of posthumous fame that inspires one to create great works of art in the here and now.”
“The here and now is overrated. No one lives there anymore.”
“Ah!—but!—the esteem of future generations, as Seneca so felicitously phrased it, is no more valuable than that of the present one!”
“Give it to us in Latin, Bowling.”
“One little known fact about Seneca is that he often spoke a lot of balls.”
“Often speaking a lot of balls is underrated.”
Archie laughed with the others, but this only made him feel more excluded, like a ghost excluded from the gaiety of those he haunts, which he can never hope to contribute to.
He saw now that Fishpool was speaking: “… On the other hand, you can’t rule it out entirely.”
Archie felt harpooned with awe and envy. To be the sort of person who always knew what to say, and at just the right moment! When he looked at Fishpool as an example of what he himself was not, Archie almost hated him.
“I need solitude for my writing,” someone was saying. “As Kafka said, not ‘like a hermit,’ but like a dead man.”
“Firbank was a hermit, wasn’t he?”
“That’s one word for what he was, yes.”
Archie glanced at Fishpool, but he seemed not to have heard. But a minute later he stood, and the other members of the Club fell silent.
It was time for the story.
“One summer, when I was thirteen, my parents got into their heads the notion that I was in need of a tutor. Nor was this notion completely unfounded, I must confess. I was not exactly, at that time, setting the world afire. The fact was that my interests had begun to migrate outside the academic realm. I was thirteen. Perhaps you know what I mean.
“Money, as always among the Fishpools, was scarce. My parents could not afford a ‘proper’ tutor, but had to cast their flimsy net among the teaching trainees at the local college. I gathered that only one candidate had, for the rate they could offer, presented herself to their scrutiny. I overheard my parents discussing this candidate’s qualifications one night. Wasn’t she too young? my mother worried. My father agreed, but the advanced state of my nescience left them no choice; in spite of their reservations, the girl was hired.
“As if deliberately to combat my parents’ fears, ‘Eileen,’ as I will call her, acted not like the seventeen-year-old girl that she was but a sexagenarian schoolmarm. She dressed like a matron and ruled like a martinet. Not a day went by without her finding some excuse to slap my hand with her ruler. The most common indictment was inattention. If the object of my alleged inattention was my schoolwork, I plead guilty; but emphatically not guilty, if the object was my tutor. Despite her formidable demeanor, there was no question but that she was the most exquisitely lovely creature I had ever laid eyes on. It was the most delicious torture to sit beside her day after day, pretending to grapple with algebraic functions or dangling participles while in fact grappling with the overwhelming urge to take into my arms and grapple with Eileen.
“Nor was she blind to my misery—I made sure of that. I called her cruel, vicious, uncaring, cold; she feigned to believe that I referred only to her pedagogy. I asked if she treated all men this way; she slapped my hands for my impertinence. I began to find these slaps strangely pleasurable. It was as if the ruler were an extension of her flesh. I became more impertinent, inciting her to more frequent thrashings, and trembled in anticipation when she reached for the instrument; at night in bed I caressed the smarting welts that blossomed on the backs of my hands. She understood what I was up to, but saw no way to relent without acknowledging the passion that underlay my impudence. She was committed to her course of action, as I was to mine. More than once I provoked her to the brink of tears. I was shameless; I was in love.
“Then my parents went away on holiday. My scholastic performance had not improved; as punishment, they left me at home, alone with my tutor, to study.
“By the second day we were both utterly frazzled. I refused even to pretend to work, and she, for her part, abandoned all attempt to control me. Even the ruler disappeared. Instead of liberating me, this rather intimidated me. Had I gone too far? I teased her; she made no reply. I jabbed my pencil at my books; she took no notice. We sat in agonized silence, heads hanging, frozen with fear—each frightened of what the other would do.
�
�When, after an eternity, I looked up, I perceived that she had been weeping. Quite thoughtlessly, I put my hand on hers. A spasm, as of malaria, shook her thin frame, and tears began to roll down her cheeks. She looked at me then, and I saw that her eyes, though moist, were not sad.
“‘Oh Clayton,’ she said, ‘we mustn’t …’”
Archie, who had been listening raptly, captivated as much by Fishpool’s eloquence and self-possession as by the tale itself, noticed that some of the boys in the circle were fidgeting. Now one of them stood and, moving with exaggerated delicacy, like an usher in an opera house, went to the door and locked it. Another withdrew something from beneath his chair.
Archie felt a stirring of panic: something was about to happen, and he wouldn’t know what to do.
“I told her that it was not wrong, that nothing that two people both wanted so badly could be wrong. She smiled at me then—and it was as though she had doffed all her schoolmarm’s sternness. She shook her head as if shaking off a dream. She had regained possession of herself, but no longer had to smother anything, or lock anything of herself away. She grasped my hand firmly and led me to the bed, saying, ‘But you must not forget that in this, as in all things, I remain your tutor.’”
Another boy withdrew something from under his chair, and another. Archie saw that they were readying their towels. He felt a flood of relief that spilled over into gratitude; though Fishpool had not told him what the towel was for, he had told him to bring one. Archie rummaged in his book bag for his.
“I applied myself to her instructions with a fervor that I had never shown in scholastic pursuits. And, as our passions mounted and intermingled like the smoke of two cigarettes climbing towards the ceiling, a strange inversion occurred. I, for one ineffable moment, became the tutor, and she the pupil. I taught her the calculus of pleasure, showed her how to bridge the split infinitive of joy. I clutched her like a pencil, spun her like a protractor, measured her every dimension with my ruler—repeatedly, patiently, pedagogically. She gasped; she understood; she saw the light.