Date: Tue, 21 Jul 2009 10:49:42 -0700 (PDT) From: Tim Stillman Subject: chapter two "Antonio and Bree" And, suddenly, as if by accident, Autumn returned and I was in University. I was in my dorm room all light and big windowed airy, sitting on my narrow bed and lost; for it was my lot to never forget my friends. I had had so few; the two love affairs did not count, for either him or me, or she or me. I read a great deal. Especially D.H. Lawrence, for it seemed he knew best of love and its chasing after; of hiding still inside and dying for that rainbow just up above us. If reach it some other century we could. I loved the charcoal painting of his words; they sent me into comfortable sadness of missing Antonio and Bree. My name seemed to be Barry. I seemed to be 18 now. I had deep dark eyes and my hair was longer; as I got up from my bed and went to the window, open, so Autumn could come inside, and now I looked at the season out there; the brown grass, the leaves of gold falling mightily off the dark tree branches; the wind kicking cool against my pale face. I touched my tongue to the cool and I put it back in and my mouth tasted of Autumn glazing. In a world of categorizing, I seemed not to fit. I had not forgotten one moment of Bree and Antonio and how I was allowed to hold their shadows over my arm as I watched them make love. It seemed as though I was bereft of my own, as if they had become child vampires, sucking out of me and the boy and the girl, separately, last year, I had tried to lose myself in, our souls, and making us from almost the start, uneasy with one another. I felt anger toward them and anger toward myself and they toward me almost from the very start. They were two years younger than I, and were so very eager to learn a sexual education from me. I smiled as I leaned against the left side of the window and looked at the campus as if a beginning beast just stirring to wakefulness. I was someone who had somehow grown into the how to variety--not only sexually--but in helping other students with their classroom studies; I was such a sham; and was ashamed of myself. Had I only been able to tell Bree's and Antonio's parents, but that would have been horrid and impossible and ridiculous, how their son and daughter had been so beautiful making love and letting me watch and touch and one time join in; if I could have done--something--to stop the future of them now their past--it was so helpless feeling--and in those aborted making love attempts later, and in my own solitary masturbation, I kept feeling like a thief, like I was the man fox who had stolen March away; like I was always spouting this philosophy and had no idea what it meant; as if I had betrayed myself by always looking "out there" when the answer should have been in my heart; oh I had enough friends since then; for I had acquired a seeming depth; easy to do---just betray your friends and then mourn them and yourself the rest of your life; and the rest of them in past yesterdays and tomorrows to come; hide inside and pretend you know what you could have done; be your own Autumn and winter too and take endless pictures of the sky with your very nerves and remember, remember.... And sometimes when masturbating, feeling so wonderfully happy, feeling one's self not alone in the world, anymore than anyone else is, and feeling Antonio sucking me, and Bree letting me suck her budding girl blooms, my hands on their child plump hips, and caught in amber that was the winter that almost happened; when I almost threw off phlegmatic me, and became--tender and giving as we ministered to each other; as we smiled and closed our eyes and enjoyed our being naked and discovering so very much; ideas and feelings and rushes of blood and examining each other and me watching them from mere inches away, and me hard and masturbating, and them examining my shaggy pubes and me examining their downy ones; so I turned from the window, and I looked at the wooden desk with my laptop on it; I could have found them; I could have found out what had happened; where they were now; I could if I were not a coward and an ageist; for I didn't want to see them now, as they had matured or for them to see me as I had; for I pictured myself as the prow of a ship going through choppy winter iced water and hard cold winds of danger; I, the foolish cavalier, I the one lured boy and lured girl, with my intemperate climate. Who thought, each in turn, by their climbing onto me and our sexual giggles and our removal of clothing, we could hide in each other, other than penis in mouth or vagina or arsehole, not ourselves, but little notes we had perhaps unconsciously made of our lives to this point--had Antonio and Bree and I done the same sort of thing?--for there in sex, there in love, we would say yes no matter how life and the days take us, we were here, and no one can shuffle the cards any other way; in dry cums or wet, in male or female, in kisses on bodies; in closing up shop at one end, in order to open up shop at the other; we were somehow always to be children, and somehow always to be safe; and I sat on my narrow bed in the third day of my being here in this strange scary place; and I did what I would do my whole life through--I remembered. I lay and stretched out myself with legs hanging over the soldered cheap bed's foot and I unbuttoned myself and had a shag and was in the throes of cumming on my jeans and hands when my roommate, Joseph, with a brace on his withered leg unannounced came barging in--well, it was his room too--he calling my name and walking past the desk partition separating the bed side of our room from each other--and then he stopped dead still, and I opened my eyes, still I was cumming a bit, and we stared at each other, so there was really nothing else but to continue till finished, while he marched quickly to his side of the room and sat on his equally squeaking bed; so I cleaned myself up and used the lav, buttoned myself and then went to his side of the room where he was blushing his baby chick looking face half to death as his hair was short and gold and stayed there unperplexed, as I sat beside him; as he moved rapidly away to the head of his bed and took his pillow, holding it over, not his face, as I had the distinct impression he wanted to do, but over instead his lap. "Well," I said, "I guess that was kind of awkward." He said nothing, wishing, I would imagine, he was ten again, and could hide in his single room with a kitten named Mittens or some such; instead, we sat there unmoving; as if we were playing Statues, till I started tapping my fingers on my knees and coughed. "I mean we all do it. We just have to arrange our times more strategically." I felt horribly guilty, as though he could mind read I was remembering a girl and a boy; and somewhere in there the girl and then the boy later; and though I had placed my childhood in full bloom and then in waning though still close memory, I had never felt silly as I did now; I had been the child/adult then the once child but not adult adult, even with Antonio and Bree; I had seen myself as a kid then; and they as experienced, though younger than me and in reality, not in my mind hall, far more children than I had been; and it seemed utterly unfair eyes were on me for what to do next, after Antonio and Bree, who knew quite nicely what to do next in love, in sexuality, but in most everything else, they had deferred to me; and now I felt like a foolish child, caught by an adult in this far younger looking face and far more childlike body, especially when compared to my older stronger looking one and classical chiseled face. I could not help that. It was my genes, and inside here, inside this little over heated room, in spite of Autumn coming in through the opened window, I felt that terrible overriding fear, for the first time, that he would tell. But tell what? And it was foolish to feel this way; still though that embroidery of the human mind that said he could see what I had been remembering as though a film projected on the wall, as in "Quartermass and the Pit," though it would be of me and Bree and Antonio instead of monstrous locusts from another planet, thus creating for us the image of the devil for endless times; I wanted to strike the bed with my fist; I wanted him to understand how he had made me feel like my friends when discovered by their mother, when Bree and Antonio had been fucking; and suddenly it hit me, for I had somehow never felt guilty about masturbation and sexuality; it had honestly never occurred to me; as I put my hands to my sides to push myself off Joseph's bed, to go to my desk and pick up my books for my two classes this afternoon, as he looked up at the pegboard ceiling, and I was lost in child and in adult, myself and him; his neck was very small and thin, and his shoulders were very shallow and narrow; he crossed his ankles and smiled at some secret thought; which made me angry; he somehow knew mine as if I were made of glass, but I was not to know his for he was opaque; when all my life, it had seemed to be the other way round. I could not make up to Antonio and Bree for my somehow failing to defend them, even though then, adult as I had felt, it was still the province of adults, and we were forced to let them do with us as they would, and if I had to remember and to grieve, for that I had no control over, and if I spread my anger to the boy and to the girl after the objects of my obsession had left great big crayon marks in my heart and soul; if I had to make up for all of that, then I might as well go on pretending I was a lecturer, I could use my voluminous reading to make me sound profound, though in truth, I always used others' ideas and words and images as springboards to my own, I like to think, individual ones, then I could pretend to still be an adult before my time, and---I got off Joseph's bed, looking at his brace outside his jeans, his brace he tried to hide somehow with his hands; perhaps he was ashamed of it and wished he could change it; as perhaps Antonio and Bree's parents wished soon after their children were taken away from them, they had been more mature about it; more philosophical about it; that they had somehow talked to them and their children to them--I had no idea, I just always imagined the silence deep that followed the outrage loud--I knew as soon as I left the room for classes, Joseph was going to masturbate, for any fool could see that; and if I could pretend to feel happiness for that, perhaps I would; I would not, nor did I want to, exorcise any ghosts in my mind; for they would hold me together in a consolation of sad joy which I needed in order to stay alive; so I got my books and stood at the door at the end of Joseph's bed, as he did an extra ordinary thing, I feel, for his shy self, he looked at me as though he were the last passenger on the Titanic as it had all but sunk, reconciled with always being like that; and I smiled at him; I genuinely smiled at him; for I had known embarrassment at his eyes and mind; I had known just a bit what horrors Antonio and Bree had and probably were still going through; never to live down; and, even if freed by now; even if living together in secrecy by now; and the destruction of their parents' lives caused by themselves; all of this supposition; everybody might be as happy and normal as hell; I deeply hoped so; I thought of all Joseph's embarrassment; for that was way too obvious; so I smiled at him; and very warmly and genuinely meant too; as he smiled back sort of at me. I said then, opening the door to the hallway, "See you later?" He turned his face away and managed an "ok," and suddenly as I had fallen it seemed by accident into an Autumn University, I thought there might have been another passenger on the Titanic that may not sink after all. I left, closing gently the door; perhaps it was time for me to listen and to learn and be a student in so many vast ways that books and false facades could not teach. I walked past the music noisy rooms and students walking up and down the halls; and I experienced something that felt suspiciously like happiness; and maybe Joseph could help me assuage the massive guilt I had had all my life, that I had been totally unaware of. Autumn looked to be a nice season.