The River in Winter

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The River in Winter Page 37

by Matt Dean


  What if?

  That night, as I lay in my bed, I imagined the three of us. Tigger and I side by side on our knees, Bobby our lord and master-.

  And then-. And then, somehow, Tigger disappeared, and Bobby disappeared, and it was Tory who stood over me. In the bed I arranged myself in the position I'd seen in Tigger's drawing, the drawing in which the bottom had been bound.

  On my belly, my legs spread, my hands clasped behind me, as if bound, I humped the mattress.

  In my mind's ear I heard Tory's voice. You want it? I think you need it pretty bad.

  Aloud, to the empty room, I said, "I do. I need it bad." And to the imaginary Tory I said, "Please-. Please, sir."

  * * *

  27 - Bondage and Discipline

  On Friday morning, Eliot called me at work. "I'm giving up my office space in the Midview," he told me. "I'm tired of burning up or freezing to death through every session."

  "Where will you go?"

  "There's a small addition at the back of my house. I've been working on it for a couple of years now, turning it into an office. It's finally ready."

  A couple of years? I thought. I said, "So I should meet you there tonight?"

  "Would you? I haven't moved the furniture yet, but I'm just not up to having heat rash today."

  * * *

  The new office had once been a lean-to porch, its length more than three-quarters the width of the house's backside. We surveyed it from the kitchen, through a narrow door. He'd painted the interior walls the same sesame color as the walls of his office in the Midview Center. The room smelled of paint and spackle. Except for a torch?re lamp and an aluminum ladder draped with a drop cloth, the room was empty.

  "You did all this yourself? I had no idea you were so handy," I said.

  "We all have our diversions." Smiling, he laid his hand on my shoulder. "Mine just happens to be drywall."

  Slender heaters lined the baseboards of three walls, but, as Eliot told me, he had not fired them up in some days. He closed away the room's chill. "We'll be more comfortable in the living room." He led the way.

  "It makes sense," I said, "having your office here. You have group here anyway, so why not see clients here?" Again I felt the shameful thrill of freedom-I would never have to go to group again. I could not help grinning. I hoped my smile was not too broad.

  "My thoughts exactly."

  We settled in front of the hearth, where a small fire crackled. Eliot took an armchair. I slouched in a corner of the sofa.

  "How goes it? On the phone you said you had good news."

  "I saw Tigger last night."

  Eliot grimaced. He slumped in his chair. "That's your good news?"

  "I-. I-. What?"

  "Tigger is lost. Entirely lost."

  "I-. I suppose he's somewhat lost, but-."

  "I could tell you things, but-. Well, no, I couldn't tell you anything. It was all said in confidence. Never mind. What happened?"

  I told him about Tigger and Bobby, about my victory over temptation. I described the sense I'd had that Bobby embodied the most attractive features of both Tory and Spike. For the first time in weeks, I invoked Spike's name.

  I hadn't meant to tell Eliot about what happened afterward, at home. But once the story was underway I got caught up in it. Without thinking, I said, "If only I hadn't-." I stopped myself, but it was already too late.

  Eliot raised his eyebrows. "If only you hadn't-?"

  "If only I hadn't gone back to it, in my head. Later, when I got home, I-. You know."

  "You were tempted, then, after all?"

  "Part of me-the old nature-regretted passing up an opportunity. But if I had it to do over again, I'd make the same choice. I still wouldn't do anything, but if I could go back-. I wouldn't think about it afterward, either. Or at least I wouldn't-. You know."

  He smiled. "We talked before about keeping a journal. How are you doing with that?"

  My face grew warm. The skin at my temples tightened. I cleared my throat. "I haven't been."

  I'd found a small spiral notebook in a drawer, and I'd ripped out the used pages. For days I'd carried the notebook in my breast pocket, but then I'd forgotten about it, and it had gone missing. I could not even picture where it might be. On the table beside my easy chair, maybe, or on a shelf of the bookcase. Perhaps, even, in a drawer of my desk at work.

  Eliot said, "It's well worth doing, Jonah. It's counter-intuitive, I know. You're thinking you'll just reinforce the thinking you want to stop."

  "That's not why I haven't done it."

  "We can start tonight, even without the journal. First, let's talk about how you fantasize."

  "How I-?" I said. "I'm not sure what you mean. I just-well, I just do."

  "Everyone fantasizes differently. Some are more visual, some more verbal."

  "When I see a man on the street, or when I go-when I used to go-to the beach, for example, I might picture us together. I might try to imagine him naked. But that's always brief, just a flash, a picture in my head. When I'm alone, I sometimes tell myself a story, or I'll imagine what we'd say to each other."

  "Give me an example."

  I blushed.

  Leaning forward suddenly, Eliot said, "That one. I want to hear that one. The one you just thought of, that made you blush."

  I told him, at last, in full, the fantasy I'd had about Tory. I told him how I'd lain on my belly, how I'd kept my hands behind my back as if they'd been bound there.

  Again I heard Tory's voice in my mind's ear. You need it pretty bad. It was, I realized, something Spike had said that first morning, so many months ago. Looks to me like you need it pretty bad. My cock stirred.

  "This can't be helping," I said. "I'm turning myself on."

  Eliot lifted his head. "Remember what I told you. It's counter-intuitive. At first you'll be aroused, but after we've done this enough, you'll find you make yourself sick. Go on. You're not having this fantasy. You're telling it."

  My throat had filled with cotton. I swallowed. "I told him-. Tory, in my fantasy-. I told him I'd do anything he wanted."

  "How far did you take it? Did you try to stop yourself?"

  "A hundred times. I kept hearing him, kept imagining his voice. Tory's voice. 'Take it, boy. That's it. I said you'd like the taste of it, didn't I, boy?'"

  It was not the kind of thing Tory would ever say, I was sure. Bobby had said it-you'll like the taste even better. It was not the kind of thing Tory would say. I felt queasy.

  "What else? What else did you imagine him doing to you?"

  I laid a hand on each knee. The fire, though small, had warmed the cotton of my trousers until it was almost painful to touch. Opening my eyes, I slipped off my shoes and tucked my legs under me. I said nothing. I couldn't say anything. It was too humiliating.

  For a long time Eliot was also silent. Then, "You masturbated."

  I nodded.

  "I'm glad we talked about this."

  "I was intending to talk about Tigger," I said. My voice was weak, reedy. "I was thinking I might be able to help him."

  "Tigger is lost," Eliot said, and he waved away the whole topic of Tigger.

  I stared into the fire. "Or I thought we might talk about this court case-this thing Tom's parents started. They think that-."

  "I'm absolutely sure that keeping a journal will help you with this. Jonah, please look at me." I did. "When this happens again, I want you to get to a place where you can sit and write for some time. Write down every thought, every desire, every bodily reaction. Analyze it. If something moves you particularly, write down why you think it affected you so much. Stay with it until it stops."

  "What if it doesn't stop?"

  Abruptly, with some alarm, it seemed, he looked into the fire. He squinted into it for a moment. Shaking off whatever he'd seen, or thought, or thought he'd seen, he said, "That's a possibility. The journal won't do the work for you. You do have to have some measure of willpower." He looked at me. He smiled. "Don'
t look so sad. You must have some willpower in you somewhere. Right? Everyone has some willpower, right?" He chuckled. "If not, we'd all weigh four hundred pounds and work twenty-minute days, right?"

  In spite of myself, I laughed with him. "That long? Twenty minutes?"

  * * *

  On the way home, my fantasy plagued me. Already it sickened me, just as Eliot had promised. Still, it would not let me be.

  NPR could not expunge Tory's voice, or rather the masterly caricature of Tory's voice that I had conjured. One of the pundits crooned in the same throaty way. Every pop station, it seemed, had devoted its play list to the quiet storm; every song preached the gospel of eternal arousal.

  As I entered the house I made straight for the easy chair. Without even removing my jacket, I sat.

  A pile of books and papers covered the table. I tossed everything aside that was not my journal-that is to say, everything.

  The notebook had not found its way to the bookcase. I searched for it to the point of pulling books off the shelf.

  Perhaps the bedroom, I thought, but no. It was neither on nor in the bedside table.

  In a shirt pocket? In the pocket of a shirt I'd dumped into the laundry hamper? Perhaps, but could it be worth the effort now?

  Returning to the living room, I at last shrugged off my jacket. Where it fell, I let it lie. It came to rest, as it happened, on a pile of dirty clothes beside the couch. I added my shirt and trousers to the pile. I hung my tie over the nearest doorknob.

  Back to the easy chair. From the debris I had just sent crashing to the floor, I chose the envelope of my latest bank statement. I smoothed it, laid across the back of Beethoven in London. I took up a ballpoint pen.

  Where to start? The date, the time, the place. "After session, in the car," I wrote. Should it be a narrative? A list? Right. This wasn't a term paper. No one was grading this exercise. Whatever form it would take, so be it. "After session, in the car, I had the now recurring fantasy about Tory."

  Now recurring? No, now-recurring. I squeezed in the hyphen.

  This was impossible. As long as I put pen to paper, I would worry more about spelling and grammar than about substance. I thrust away the envelope. It fluttered away, briefly came to rest on top of my jacket, and fell to the floor.

  I paced the room. I needed some alternative. What, then? Act out my fantasies for a video camera? Absurd. Draw tableaux of my fantasies, as Tigger had done? No, I couldn't draw.

  Perhaps, now that I thought of it, Tigger's drawings had been his journal. If Eliot had counseled me to keep a journal, then he had counseled Tigger to do the same. Maybe Tigger was, in some small way, still keeping the faith. Maybe he was not entirely lost.

  I went to my workroom. I cleared the card table and set a blank sheet of staff paper in the center of it. I took up a pencil.

  "March 19, 1992," I wrote.

  "On the way home from a session with Eliot, my fantasy about Tory recurred, or, in a sense, resumed," I wrote. "The bondage fantasy."

  I wrote and wrote, describing the fantasy in every detail. The shape and size of Tory, the hyperbolical version of him I had imagined. The tightness of his hands around my throat. The texture of the rope he used to bind me. The smack of straps and paddles on my skin. All of it.

  Somehow in spite of myself-in spite of the tightening of my belly, or perhaps because of it-my cock stiffened.

  "This is giving me an erection," I wrote, "and it's very difficult not to want to do something about it."

  Stop. Breathe.

  "I don't understand where this comes from," I said. "It's Tory in the fantasy. It's clearly Tory, and yet it's also Spike, and also Charlie." Yes, there was a hint of Charlie in the way I pictured Tory's shoulders and biceps-overgrown, puffed up with muscle. "And I guess it's also Bobby. I can't imagine Tory doing any of the things I've been thinking of."

  Something had changed. All at once, I realized, something had changed. My erection had flagged. I sat for a moment, trying once more to conjure the image of the bulked-up Tory standing over me, the feeling of Tory's big hands around my neck. Tory's, or Spike's, Charlie's, or anyone's.

  It had seemed so clear before. I had imagined it so clearly that I could feel it. Now I could not picture anything-could not feel a thing. It had all faded away.

  "Just as Eliot said," I wrote, "the fantasy has faded, just from dwelling on it. But now I seem to be trying to goad myself into having a different fantasy, almost as a test." I yawned. "It's not worth doing. Enough."

  Enough. I went to bed.

  I slept like a Jonah-shaped stone.

  * * *

  On Monday morning the sky was perfectly cloudless, uncannily blue. I began the day with a heart just as clear and clean. As I drove to work, I found myself humming.

  When I arrived at the office, Martin was already there. He poked his head around the wall of my cubicle. "Your enthusiasm is infectious," he said. "What's the occasion?"

  "Oh," I said, "just-you know-spring has sprung?"

  "I see," Martin said. "Don't get too excited. March is a capricious month." He cleared his throat. "I was thinking, we'd better procure the services of a new assistant. I'll write the posting."

  "A new-? What about Christa?"

  "She's on her honeymoon, and then she's going right into maternity leave."

  "She-? What? She never said-. Is she not coming back?"

  "I'm thinking someone temporary," Martin said. "I don't relish the idea of answering phones for weeks or months."

  "Excellent point. Let's write it together," I said.

  His forehead puckered, but he nodded and said, "In my office."

  Again I sat facing Ravi Shankar, my legal pad set out before me. The white board still bore the marks of our last briefing: "Harassment," and "PC," and "Stinson," and above it all, "Don't Panic." Martin wiped it all clean-as clean as he could. Scrubbing could not budge the outlines of some long-standing letters. He left Christa's "Don't Panic."

  "The successful candidate will," I said, pretending to write on my legal pad, "be able to clean any white board."

  "You laugh," Martin said, "but I think cleanliness and organization would be very good qualities to have."

  "We can say 'organization.' Let's not go so far as 'cleanliness.'"

  On the board, he wrote, "Organized."

  "Let's not skip over basics. Phones, typing, meeting minutes, proofreading, fact-checking, research. What else?"

  But by then Martin had just come to write "Minutes." "What came after meeting minutes?" I repeated the list, giving him more time for each word. "What else will she do?" he said.

  "Why she? Some legislative assistants are men. At one time they were all men."

  "This is not a dating opportunity for you, Jonah."

  I felt my mouth turn downward at the corners. I tasted bile at the back of my throat. "I don't do that anymore, Martin."

  Frowning, he capped his marker and set it in the trough at the bottom of the white board. He sat across from me at the table. "You don't do that anymore. What do you mean by that?"

  "Men, Martin. I don't see men anymore."

  "Did something happen? Do you have AIDS?"

  I blinked away the suggestion. "It's complicated."

  "In my experience, when someone claims a situation is complicated, he usually means he doesn't want to talk about it."

  "Fair enough. I don't want to talk about it."

  Stroking his beard, twisting together the hairs under his chin, he nodded. For a long, silent moment, he stared past my left shoulder. Abruptly slapping the arms of his chair, he rose. "Then let's get back to the matter at hand. What comes after meeting minutes?"

  Leaning forward, I brushed my fingertips along the edge of the table. There was a crack in the veneer, a sharp place where some ragged strips of wood had peeled away. I stroked the ruined place, letting the edges prick the pad of my index finger. "Research," I said. "Proofreading. Fact-checking."

  Martin wasn't writing. H
e stood, wagging his blue marker, staring at-or perhaps through-the board.

  "It's just ordinary administrative assistant stuff," I said. "Maybe we can copy another posting."

  In a rush Martin returned to the table. As he settled into a chair next to me, the marker still clattered in the trough at the bottom of the white board. "I know I haven't always been-or haven't seemed to be-supportive or accepting of your-well, your lifestyle, as they say." Clearing his throat, he pinched the skin below his Adam's apple. "But if that has anything to do with-."

  A laugh bubbled out of me. "I'd hardly go to the trouble of reinventing my entire personality to win your approval."

  Swallowing-with difficulty, it seemed-he nodded. He turned to the white board. "Ordinary administrative assistant stuff, then. Such as what?"

  "I'm sorry, Martin. I didn't mean that the way it sounded. I only meant that-. There's a lot more at stake than any one person's disapproval."

  "This is a religious thing, then."

  Lucky guess? Or was he more perceptive than I usually gave him credit for? "You could say that." I folded the top sheet of my legal pad in half, creased the fold, creased it again. "It's about time I believed in something, don't you think?"

  "This wouldn't be my first choice." He smiled. "Actually," he said, stroking his beard, "it was my first choice." He sighed. "So many of us in this country have Christianity thrust upon us as children."

  I shook my head. "That wasn't the case with me."

  He raised his eyebrows. "You never went to Sunday school as a child, not once? You got off scot-free. Why would you willingly-."

  "When I was very small, yes, I went to Sunday school."

  He clapped his hands. "I knew it." He pointed at me. "I knew you were smarter than that."

  My stomach tightened. "Smarter? I like to think I'm just now wising up."

  "You're answering to messages that were placed in your head when you were an infant. Listen to that still, small voice. Sit and listen. It's your voice."

  For a time he stared at the white board. Turning, he narrowed his eyes. "Would this have anything to do with Thorstensen's sudden change of heart concerning the OWT? Or rather, would his change of heart have anything to do with this?"

  I let the torn strip of veneer slip between the nail and the flesh of my thumb. I flinched in pain. "As a matter of fact-." I couldn't bring myself to say more.

 

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