Date: Sun, 11 Nov 2007 20:19:57 -0800 (PST)
From: Tim Stillman <novemberhourglass@yahoo.com>
Subject: Margin

In the margin of town, I sat quietly in Sandy's living room. It was
winter just started. There was nothing more than the small house, with
the aroma of her perfume, the smell of kitchen wax, a slight aroma of
mouse bait, the weak furniture, the sad sound of mournful winds gone by.
I was naked. At the age of 10, I had no experiences but my parents'
shouting at each other. I remember now as I write this, there seemed
blood in their words. Blood that shattered and screamed and cried. And I
had to escape. To Sandy.

Where there were especially silences. She came back to the living room,
with a tray of cocoa. She smiled at me. Softly. I don't think there was
anything in my childhood but hard edges except for her. She was small,
had a boyish body, tiny breasts, a round face that was dreamy, that was
the face of the only reality I had ever known, a page boy hair cut. The
face of something that was akin to love, I think now. I sat on the living
room couch. My penis was one and one half inches erect--I was so proud of
it--that she thought so much of it, and of me, and I loved her.

She sat beside me and put the tray holding the cups on the small rickety
brown table. I reached my arms to her and she held me. And I felt
non-ashamed. I felt--surprised that I could be held, not out of duty or
motherhood or father scowl, but for the real me, in this overly warm room
in the wrong part of town, that was where my life was. She nuzzled my
cheek and kissed me. I put my hand to her left breast and held it there,
as she was naked too. I loved especially her pubic hair because it proved
she was different than me. And the other mysterious curiosities down
there.

It proved that we were different territories, different lands, and we had
committed the impossible--we had found something in each other. I had
found a parent who loved me. She had found a child who could be loved and
wanted to be loved--most especially--by her. She was 25. I was all her
world, she said. The neighbor lady across the street. The shy girl, the
pretty as a pixie girl, whose beauty and warm body and warm heart made me
erect, made me strain to her. They say children can't really love.
Especially romantically.

This seems to me foolish--who else can love romantically, save for
children? Who haven't had the graininess of love exposed, who have not
yet mastered the art of using and being used or trying and failing again
and again. Children are the ultimate romanticists. They believe in it
fully, especially when one considers my parents and the nightmare world
they created for me accidentally, as though I was an anomaly and I must
somehow understand that. So Sandy and I held to each other.

So we sat there and drank cocoa and listened to music and felt each
other, that supremely delicious sexual tickle, that little moment of
childhood Sandy was trying to escape back into. The way the thing was not
awkward. A woman naked with a boy naked and they have had sex and they
have made love for two weeks now, as he lives for her, as she counts the
clock minutes till I am home from school and allowed to go to her house
for several hours every evening, the hours spared so mom and dad can
pretend they are human beings, then, the relief they must have felt, my
being away from them. And they safely ensconced in paying back eternally.

It was a quiet snow tonight, the house had many chinks in the walls and
the windows and door frames let in the cold, but the heat made the drafts
pleasant as I held her and she held me, cocoa warm in our stomachs, and
she said, Devon, and I pressed my mouth against her breasts and suckled
each one. She moaned as I did, and she said she loved me. Her voice was a
soft moment that a person should be allowed to hold, should be allowed to
know for sure was theirs. The passageway to tomorrow and the day after
that was a gradual ceding, a gradual running away come home every second
as I touched her breasts with my nipples as I tongued her tongue, as I
sat on her lap and felt her soft brown pubic hair under me. As she
stroked my penis and balls and made me her own.

As I told her I was all the things I could be, that I was comic books and
bike riding and Saturday morning TV, and Christmas holidays and birthday
cakes and books I could not read but which felt a heft in my lap and in
my hands that was a good comforting thing right there and then. And she
told me of herself, how she had been without a moment of happiness quite
like this, that she had never quite--assumed--adult hood. That it was all
a still box of paints that were cold and hollow and distant as they fell
out and onto the floor, stillborn.

We told these things to each other, silently, with our bodies, mine so
small, she so large in comparison, and we said the words a child says to
an adult, from the backbone, from the first rib to the third, heart and
turning heart, and seasons and the way her eyes glowed blue bright from
the Christmas tree lights. And the way mine looked at hers, always
daring, sometimes daring, to send her away, there and in the moment of
joy that comes from a small hand of a small child reaching out to the
hand of an adult; at that moment, I think, our fates were sealed.

As she put her warm tall fingers on my erection. And rubbed me. And
masturbated me. As I sighed and closed my eyes and came in her hand as
she knew just how to milk me. As her pussy did also. Leaning so into me.
Woman flesh, so different already from mine.

How she made that gulf of need inside me fulfilled in a small room and
small house in a sad poor part of a small town, as we knitted together.
And she sometimes would take my little pink boyhood in her mouth, as I
held to her head up and down. Sometimes, she told me about a boy from her
childhood, she never said, but I think it was her brother or someone very
close. How he had found her masturbating one summer day in her room, when
she was quite young, she never said how young, and he had made a great
deal of fun of her and then he had laid down with her....

At that point, she would never finish the story. She would be sad when
she said it and would apologize for her sadness. I think she wanted me to
be that brother or whoever it was. A certain longing. A certain creation
of not much of wonder or trying to be back in the past, for he had hurt
her in some fundamental way, but she wanted to be close to a small boy
and make love with him and hear him out and let him tell it the best way
he could. How two weeks ago, he had come here in desperation. His
parents. His jigsaw world. They had seen each other sometimes on the
sidewalks, his desperate motion away from home. Her tired already somehow
old trudging back to the old emptiness of ghosts. The first house he had
picked. At random really. So desperate and crying. And how Sandy had let
him in and bent down to him and let him cry on her most willing shoulder.

They knew and she took him in and she took off his clothes and hers and
they lay naked in bed the first hour he had been here. There was a
compactness to them. His small penis in her vagina felt--right.  She knew
how to contract her muscles on him and to make him feel marvelously good.
And he knew how to suckle her nipples and make her feel so sexy, a new
and intimate feeling for her, and for him. She was pale and puce. He was
pale and pink somehow, mixing these colors, these possessions of their
bodies and their rights to them and to each other madness and happiness
and that one giggle away from absolutely giving up the moment, to live in
each other's bodies and minds.

And in the humanity of what they were, weak boy gave weak woman and
himself certain courage. He would think of her till he could see her. He
would be constantly turned on, waiting and with her. There was a certain
tilt to his eyes that made him seem as if he were seeing the world a bit
off kilter. That made him seem to see a different slant to it than others
saw. He was just a small boy who had fallen in love with a certain
tallness that neither of them could obtain, and that would break them
apart in time, but here and now, it was far more than sufficient.

This night, he was allowed two hours of real-ness before he had to go
back home to the fake smiles and the fake voices, held under temper, held
under duress, and he would sleep in his insufficient bed and hear the
mice voices turn into the rabid voices and it was always the same.
Always. I find back there, Devon, being me, was always someone else. A
marionette tied to strings that played him, and run by me. Even with
Sandy, I pulled back, I never let the totally real me inside come out. I
was deeper in the world than I thought. I, he, needed this little massage
of passing more than the sexuality of it. How she let him touch her all
over and examine her closely, with his eyes and with his hands and his
mouth.

She tasted warm bread and soft and she loved to have him lying on her
body as she stroked his buttocks, as she held his penis between her hands
and his abdomen. To suggest. To feel her breasts under him and her mouth
kissing his face all over--as his feel dug into her legs, as the snow and
cold fell close to them and the wind howled mournfully as the clock held
up the calendar of how long they could be alive tonight and the next
night too.

Devon was to meet another friend of hers a month later, and Devon was to
be devastated. Her friend was his most hated enemy at school. Brian.
Brian of compact muscles and mouth that said words of hurt to Devon and
Brian was loved too by Sandy, the secret Sandy had unwittingly kept, that
said if the two boys were to meet, then there would be the three of them,
for Brian was lost too and more alone than Devon could imagine. They were
all three rudderless. They were caught in a world that made little sense,
that was hard and cold and unyielding for each of them. But Brian had
bloodied Devon's nose two months back, so when he saw him with her as
Devon came rushing as always forever more into her house, when he saw
them sitting clothed on the sofa, Devon almost died.

Devon felt that rush of train sets in his mind. Devon felt that terrible
failure that had nothing to do with him. And yet it was always his fault.
She would try to make friends out of them. Because Devon loved her,
because Brian used her (or did he?), they would try to make love to her
at the same time, but, finally,Devon could only turn away, as Brian
always took supreme spot with her, always lay with her and came in her as
Devon lay beside them, with his eyes tightly closed and his fists tightly
clenched as in make a wish.

And in that indictment of winter that had turned from magic snow white
and cold shivers and a naked woman to hold onto him from the back and
masturbate him in front of the glowing small Christmas tree, as she would
nuzzle his neck and hold her breasts to his shoulders, when gradually he
would put his mouth to her pussy and begin, he saw the ending of his
world.

All of it, as she meant to be lover to both, though who had been with her
first, Devon was always careful not to, never to, ask, all of it meant to
comfort and make their world a bit bigger, turned Devon away from her,
even when Brian tried to be nicer to him, there was one month from now
the beginning of the dissolution, as they lay naked three in bed, as
Devon say a certain grotesqueness in the whole thing, not sure if it had
always been this, or simply one boy and another and that meant soon and
sooner still one boy less. He had come to cuddle his boyhood with her. He
had come to tell her things he told no one else. He had come to tell her
his dreams big and huge. She had come to tell him her dreams small and
still with a bit of hope.

I see it now as a game.  Devised, not by persons, but by uncaring fate.

 I see three persons in that bed and each of them scrambling for love in
a place that no one else cared about, that would be only something
skimmed over in a next day attempt to find meaning in meaningless, and
perhaps that was the key-the transitory love of it-a woman needing to get
back to that boy who had laughed at her.

Who had hurt her. And had somehow made her feel guilty for herself being
hurt. The last thing I remember was the following February, during a too
warm hike in the temperature, melting snow and ice falling dripping down,
as I left that final time, when she was making a cake for my birthday,
Brian seeing me opening the front door, his face which seemed far less
mean to me now than it had ever been, his having made love to Sandy as I
watched, the need, the desperation, the vulnerability in him at those
times, the little boy of him when he came sometimes with tears, thus,
Brian coming to me as I was ready to leave without saying goodbye for
that would knife me in half, Brian saying, wait. As I looked at him and
did so, not being quite the jumpy rabbit I had been, before Sandy.

I looked at him, hard, refusing to weep, and felt immensely old. He had
come to depend on me to be with him and with her, it occurs now, because
he was afraid he could not do it on his own, because perhaps he knew he
was as transitory as was I. I felt like a gnome. I felt like I had been
on this planet since the first day of it. He smiled in fear a little.

Which made me momentarily feel better. I turned round and walked out the
door, closing it softly as though it did not know the happiness I felt
when I used to run to it and open it and find Sandy waiting, followed by
me in her arms as she spun me around till I was half dizzy. No doubt the
same thing she did to Brian and probably to the other Devons and Brians.
How suspiciously I eyed other boys in my school now. As I am sure so did
Brian.

I did not go back. I saw her occasionally outside her house and we
averted eyes. Perhaps Brian was replaced too by then. He and I avoided
each other as well. I saw a movie once, "Sweet November" in which Sandy
Dennis was dying, so to be remembered, she allowed one man, whose life
was bollixed and confused and confined to loneliness, to spend a month
with her, so she could help him. The man she allowed for November was
Anthony Newley, he of the cloistered heart and the smiling bravery and
bravado. She did this, because she was kind, but also because she wanted
to be remembered after she had died. Because not to be remembered was
then never to have existed at all.

I hated Sandy for a time. I wanted to throw rotten apples at her windows.
I wanted to let the air out of her car's tires. I wanted to hurt her,
really hurt her, but not half as much as I wanted to hurt Brian. Sandy
was not Sandy Dennis. But she was a moment of life when the poorness of
how we lived there, became a richness, became a moment of sheer alive
ness. I guess I would say she was selfish and she was seductive to young
boys, but her love for me was as genuine as a love from a broken person
to another already broken child can be, and that includes the broken
Brian as well. To see his thin worm pale body naked next to me as we each
suckled on her nipples as she masturbated her self as we got down there
and watched her closely doing this secretively woman thing, I think we
experienced what not many people ever do, not in a lifetime. Being.
Awareness.

My family moved to another town later the next year. I never saw her
again. After my parents decided the crutch of hatred was enough for them
and no more, they divorced. I lived with my mother and the strain was
then bearable between us. I remember Sandy to this day. And the first
time she said she loved me. As I said I loved her. And we both meant it.
I like to think, well, I maybe could have found her later on, but no one
gets to destroy my dream of Sandy, not even Sandy.

For, sometimes, that it all one has to go on, a dream. A memory. And
sometimes that is, perhaps, enough. Especially if it has to be.