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I'd known as soon as Hettie mentioned her sister's failing marriage that I'd hold my tongue about my nights for the duration of the trip to the Syracuse airport. This year, here, my secrets were safe. Next year?
To Joe Cicero sexuality between men was homosexuality, with which, to say the least, he was uncomfortable. Were either of his boys to be homosexual, he had said a month ago, he'd feel that he had failed as a father. Another night he'd said he wouldn't get into a hot tub naked if there were another man in the tub. "What if our legs touched?" he said. This was the man to whom I'd been imagining talking of and even showing my sexual feeling? Him and his wife? The timing, mm, would be delicate. Angus was neither jealous nor homophobic. I believed he trusted me and Hettie, and I thought he might actually be both interested in my newfound feeling and surprised but not discomfited that I thought it might be enhanced were he and Hettie with me. He was habitually silent about his feelings, though, and I imagined him waiting too long to speak of any misgivings I, or she responding to me, might stir. I thought both Dee and Hettie would be interested and sympathetic.
I imagined Joe talking to Angus of our friendship's rupture and demise: "He was making love to my wife and I didn't like it. He was way out of line. I like the guy, maybe I even love him, but I can't ever trust him again. I don't want Dee to see him, and if she does see him I don't want her to talk to him. I think you should be damn mad too. If Hettie falls in love with him it'll be your own fault for letting it happen. What? Was he always thinking about us sexually; working on us? It's too weird; it gives me the creeps."
Troubles, though, were not what I imagined as I lay feeling; rather, I imagined openings to love that were denied by all common sense except the common sense that knows love possible. I didn't lust for either man as I lusted for each of the women (nor did I lust for either woman in the usual sense). But when, one night, I imagined Joe kissing my hard penis, I came. I imagined him in love with me like a teen-ager; I imagined him confident as he had never been and believing in himself as he never had; I felt his brown eyes looking into mine all soft with love.
I didn't want a lover or think one of my friends likely to fall in love with me. My fantasies were simple. Love is simple. But we fall in love as we do, not as we intend, and I had imagined not just Joe but also Angus or Hettie or Dee in love with me. I had imagined Hettie teaching Angus and me to please each other and watching me try with my mouth to make him hard, all three of us laughing at my clumsiness. Were I and either woman to fall in love, I'd thought, the husband would very possibly find himself excluded, the new heterosexual truth having replaced the old. Either of the men falling in love with me seemed less likely and, too, less likely to be catastrophic, more likely to be comic than tragic. If I alone were to fall in love, well, I would suffer and accept the consequences I'd provoked. I feared being fallen in love with more than falling in love--didn't think it likelier, just prefer misery to culpability.
____
I fantasized a world without AIDS where there were Twelves and Ones. Oning was the romantic tradition of in-love and monogamy, two as one against the world; Twelving was a system of nonexclusive sexual relationships that complemented Oning. To tell the truth was not enough between Ones. Ones required mutual desire. Truth was everything to Twelves. One-fidelity as I imagined it included up to two twelvings a year with each Twelve. Twelves might yearly ask and be asked to make love and, asked, might say yes or no without explanation or with explanation deferred. To demand an immediate explanation, to insist upon a yes or a why, breached Twelving etiquette and violated unconditional trust.
____
Hettie helped me and then Angus to another line as we cruised south, then did another one herself. I smiled at how relieved I was I hadn't brought up my summer sex life. And kept smiling, thinking how much trouble I was probably in.
Because I wouldn't stay silent in Tucson much as, unsgurded, even sgurded and in my chair, not genitally opened, I thought silence best. I had, over the summer, come to accept that what I felt necessary and proper in bed and under the influence, I thought unnecessary and better undone most of the rest of the time, but (my smile broadened) I also knew that my reticent self had no way to dissociate himself from the man who was going to speak. If I did no sgurd I might keep silent about my fantasies and what seemed possible. But I intended to sgurd, and if whomever I sgurded with put me to bed, as would often happen, I doubted I would, again and again, not speak. Most of those to whom I spoke, I assumed, would not want to stay with me as I felt. Some--which?--would.
In the nearly ten years between my being hurt and Lee becoming my lover I had never asked a woman to sleep with me. After Lee had come into my bed I had learned to ask, and I had had a number of lovers; Lee seemed even to encourage my love-making to other women, and the openness of our relationship seemed simple and natural. I sometimes hurt when she made love to another man, but I did so silently; I thought it better, especially given her age, that I give her the room I did. We loved. I'd been silent before Lee because I'd thought my sexual hunger (starvation!) obvious, and that to express it in words would put whomever I approached to the trouble of making explicit what had been implicit: I don't want to be sexual with you. My timidity was poignant, though it did not seem poignant to me. Lee had lifted the spell. I did not enjoy being rejected, but I found I greatly preferred being rejected to concealing my desire behind a veil of wordlessness. I thrived.
Would I speak when I returned to Jamesville next year? My unspoken fantasy wouldn’t come fresh forever, but, spoken, it would lead to what? I hoped not merely mischief. I would be with Jane tonight as, three weeks ago, she had asked me to be. I'd speak to her tonight? I knew that coke made her feel asexual. Though often an aphrodisiac when first come upon, the drug rarely continues so, and none of the women in Tucson with whom I was intimate still used it as a physical-love drug.
I shook my head. I didn't want to want what I wanted, me lying naked on my back in bed, legs spread, my left hand holding my hard-on, saying, "See me feel, feel me feel, tell me that you want for me to feel." I wanted it, and I seemed bound to ask for it. Safely out of Jamesville silent, speeding south with Hettie and Angus through early autumn reds and yellows and greens, violets and whites and browns, I thought: Stephen and Sid.
____
I'd known Stephen about a dozen years. Nine years ago I'd officiated at his marriage, the only marriage I have ever performed. After sgurding for hours one night three years ago, him sitting on the floor with his back against my bedroom wall and me in bed, I asked him whether he'd like to make love.
"I didn't know you did that," he answered, meaning make love with men.
"I don't," I said; "at least hardly have. I've never known why I don't lust for men the way I do for women. If you come to bed, I won't even know what to do, but I figured we'd figure something out."
He hadn't come to bed and I had known a measure of relief at his choice. When I'd then asked if he'd object to my touching myself as we talked, he'd said no, and I had made and kept my penis hard off and on until, some time after dawn, he left. I had touched myself another night in similar circumstances with a waitress from a restaurant I frequented, and also done it more than once—twice, I thought--with Jane and Seth. But though my essentially unsatisfying sex with myself had gotten me through those nights, I'd asked none of those with me if I might give myself over to feeling all I might--nor had I suspected how much that might be.
Within months of separating from Carol the year after that night, Stephen had coupled with Sid, an old friend of his and hers. Sid was slow-talking, independent-minded, careful of herself, and leery of Stephen's assuming he knew what she was feeling. She liked to sip Bushmill's and so did he, but the three of us had never done any serious drinking together. As the turn-off to the airport came in sight I laughed aloud, thinking that sooner or later Stephen, Sid, and I would spend a long night drinking and doing lines and that, even if I were to remain silent about my feeling and my fantasies to everyone else, I'd speak to them--however much, thinking of it now, I hoped I wouldn't. (I didn't.) Now, I preferred my silence. Then would have to take care of itself. I smiled wider still and laughed.
"What's funny?" Hettie asked.
"I was wishing myself good luck this winter," I said.
She'd miss me, I thought, hoping she was looking forward to kissing me good-by at the airport as much as I was looking forward to kissing her.
"Will you need it?" she said.
"Yes," I said. "Always."
_____
To go to the next part of LOVE NOTE click here.
To go to the THE HEALING & LOVE NOTE DISCUSSION FORUM click here. I want to hear almost anything you are willing to say, including whether you have had similar or contradictory experiences. Criticism of my behavior and beliefs is also solicited and will be (more or less!) welcome.
Edited by Coach, 10 March 2006 - 06:24 PM.
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