How We Touch 4
Out of Touch
The Brantley Grange School was known throughout Charleston for its self-proclaimed exclusivity and for its boast that it offered the best academic opportunities for young men set on gaining admission to prestigious colleges and a powerful future. It was, in fact, a mediocre place -- with pretensions that forced upon its pupils armloads of homework and a continuous barrage of testing. It fostered a culture of competitive, driven, glossy young men who either succumbed to the need for psychological medication or developed an intense and presumptuous indifference to anything but their own predominance. The school could only posit its reputation for quality because of the precipitous decline in the public schools that had followed desegregation and that was continually enhanced by budget cuts at both state and federal levels.
It was an expensive school -- that was part of its rhetoric -- but well within the means of Chrissie's parents, who thought it would provide a useful balance to the unorthodoxy of their home, without defeating it. Chrissie, they thought ought to see what he ought not be. Julian was there on scholarship. Young Mr. Brantley, the school's music director, looking for a boy soprano, had heard him sing the Pie Jesu from Faure's Requiem at the First Church in Mount Pleasant and wanted him for the lead boy in the school's choir. At fifteen his voice had not yet changed. When he spoke to a stranger on the telephone, for example, the person on the other end might call him "Miss." When he sang, his voice had an uninflected purity, a pure, unforced countertenor unburdened either by rubato or vibrato or by ornamentation of any sort.
Going back to school Monday, after the erotic weekend of love that had brought an irrefutable revelation to them of an interlocked, magnetic destiny, Chrissie and Julian were wary. Their plan to leave for New York City in just a few weeks, moreover, made putting on their kaki chinos, white socks, brown and white saddle shoes, dress shirt, blue and white striped tie and blue blazer, with gold buttons and the school's emblem – a golden bull dog! – prominently overlaid upon the breast pocket, seem even more absurd than usual. They knew, furthermore, that they would, no matter how hard they tried to conceal it – and they did not want to conceal it; lovers delight in the openness of their love – they knew that their alliance would surround them like a radiant aura, like a halo hallowed by holy desire. Determined in their nonchalance, nevertheless, despite the derision that always greeted either one of them – what would it be like when they walked in together? -- they entered the students' lounge. As usual, coffee and morning rolls were set out for the boys, and clusters of uniformed sophomores gathered around the buffet, reaching to take breakfast. There was little of the subdued raucousness that usually accompanied this early convocation. The boys were looking at their cellphones and handing them around. When Chrissie and Julian entered a hush fell on the room. And then, a cacophonous, shrill, "Good morning, girls!" in sing-song unison as the boys in the room formed a menacing circle around them.
"We want to offer our congratulations," Trey Jordan said. "We got you an engagement present," Bob Willie added, slapping a folded newspaper against his palm. "Will you be June brides?" Robbie Bigelow asked, taking a campy pose. "We don't want you to forget to invite us to the wedding," Larry Burly said, picking up a knife from the breakfast buffet, examining it, and then buttering a roll. "And to the hotel room so we can see how you do it," Ken Rivers said, with a sneer.
"What is going on in here?" Miss Whitiker, the science teacher said, entering the room just then.
"Nothing," they said one after another, "nothing Miss Whitiker. Good morning, ma'am."
"Well break it up," she said, summoning her disapproval, but not very convincingly. She frequently forced herself to stop daydreaming about one or another of them as she drove to work or prepared her dinner.
They backed off, but Burly said through his teeth, "Later."
Later, in Introduction to Latin, the photograph that had been the focus of that morning's attention was being downloaded from one cell phone to another. Old Mr. Bromberg, the Latin teacher, sensed the intensity of some distraction keeping the class from giving him their attention as he struggled to pull out of them the translation of a poem by Catullus. At his wit's end, he demanded to see a phone. Trey Jordan happily showed him his. The boys broke out in giggles. Mr. Bromberg looked at the picture of Chrissie and Julian, in their sequin dresses holding hands in the moonlight in front of Chrissie's house. He looked up from the phone and turned to Chrissie and Julian. They were sitting in the back of the room, the only ones not laughing. "Is this a picture of the two of you in drag?" he asked. The entire class broke out in gales of laughter. This boring balding man with a neat fringe of white hair and a prim mustache just used an expression they never expected to come out of his mouth. They were thrown into fits of merriment just by the idea that he even knew what drag was.
"All right, class; stop it," he scolded. "Christopher, Julian, I think you both ought to take your books and wait for me till the end of the period in Mr. Haldane's office. Spindly, stiff, unfriendly, Mr. Haldane was the headmaster. He was not in his office when they got there. Miss Ransom, his secretary sternly told them to wait in the hallway outside.
"Why are we here?" Julian said when Bromberg arrived with Haldane.
"It is only normal that such behavior would provoke this kind of response in boys who are struggling with growth spurts and the demands of puberty," Bromberg explained to Haldane. "It is not something we ought to permit. It does not reflect well on the school."
Julian and Chrissie realized that they were being inculpated for their classmates' behavior and not viewed as the injured parties. Fortunately, they did not feel injured, nor did they wish to be perceived that way. They felt strong.
"Are you blaming us for the way they are behaving?" Chrissie asked with scorn.
"I would not say that your behavior was not provocative. Don't you think you ought to have the good sense to know that such displays – to put it at best -- have consequences?" Bromberg chided.
"You mean being bullied?"
"I mean," Haldane interrupted, "that you will not be invited to spend your junior year at Brantley Grange. You will get credit for this year, and we wish you all the best for your future, whatever you choose to make of it."
Chrissie and Julian sat facing the headmaster, smiling at him with wry contempt. He was discomfited but could not say why except to attribute it to having to deal with the disrespect and insolence of these shameless boys.
"I think that all that needs to be said has been said. Good day, gentlemen." He slavered over the word "gentlemen" with disgusted irony, and added, "Clean out your lockers." He then called the campus security guard, and said, when he arrived, "Mr. Moses will see you to the gate."
"Let's have coffee in the loft," Laura said, as the four of them, Laura, Rod, Chrissie, and her sweet friend Julia, got up from the table after a light dinner. The girls were laughing as they narrated the events of that morning in school. Rod and Laura always dressed for dinner, and Chrissie told Julia it was expected of them, too. So when they got home, Chrissie ran a warm bath in the king size tub, filled it with bubble bath and they both shucked off their horrid Brantley Grange uniforms and the frilly yellow panties they wore secretly underneath on the days that they did not have to change for gym, and stepped into the tub. They held each other close, slipped soapy across each other, kissed, and brought each other to joy.
For dinner, Chrissie wore a silver mini skirt, blue tinted stocking, black ankle strap heels and a plum colored scoop neck sleeveless fitted jersey made of crushed velvet. Her lips and eyelids were daubed with the same shade; her neck and wrists were bare. A faint smell of bubble bath surrounded her like a nimbus. She wore no jewelry.
Julia wore open toed patent leather heels, a long, plum-colored, sheath skirt with a side slit to mid thigh that showed the flower garland garter circling her paisley stockings underneath every time her skirt parted. Like Chrissie, she wore a scoop neck crushed velvet sleeveless fitted jersey, but hers was pink, as was her lipstick, nail polish, and eye shadow. She, too, wore no jewelry and was surrounded by a nimbus of delicately perfumed air.
"Foolish, foolish boys," Laura said, shaking her head in pity and looking Chrissie and Julia up and down. She was in awe of their budding beauty. "How out of touch they are with what really matters! They don't know," she added, "that out of touch comes what really matters."
The actual Laura was even more gorgeous than avatar Laura. She was beautiful; she was voluptuous: Voluptuous, a word that Julian adored – the sound of it! and when you pronounce it, your lips and tongue make the same movements they make when you perform cunnilingus.
But it was Rod who turned Julia to jelly, just by looking at her. She was afraid to look at him. He saw how she trembled, and understood her feminine response down to its core. He was tall and his skull was clean-shaven and perfect. His eyes burned with a crystalline brilliance that made it almost impossible to assign them a color. He wore no shirt upon his chest but his skin became him like a garment. His muscles were ropey rather than bulked. A pair of amber-colored silk trousers hung loosely from his hips, fastened by a circular silver clasp. His feet were bare.
"You are an extraordinarily beautiful girl, Julia, and more than that you are extraordinarily delicate. You are all tenderness and vulnerability." He put his arm around her and steadied her against the dizziness his very existence provoked in her. "And you are endowed with a great capacity for receptiveness. It is a great strength. You can receive, and you have much to give, and a great need to give." Saying this he turned her fully towards him and kissed her on the mouth. It was a passionate, lover's kiss, not a paternal kiss. She responded unhesitatingly, yielding to him with her entire being.
"Do not be afraid of surrender. I am always in you, protecting you," he said, holding her where her legs parted. His finger filled her insides. His gaze entered hers and she was awed by the adoration she felt. She dropped to her knees in a trance and unbuttoned his fly. She clasped his muscular calves and took him inside her and worshipped him. His strength overwhelmed her. He was a storm inside her. She lay, as if struck by lightening, at his feet in a swoon, afterwards. She became conscious again in Laura's arms. Laura raised and caressed her and spoke to her gently.
Chrissie came and took Julian in her arms. "My darling," she said, caressing her in happy frenzy. Laura took them both in her embrace. "You will always be inseparable parts of each other," she said. Rod lifted his champagne glass and toasted "to Chrissie, Julia, New York." They touched glasses and drank.