On the Plains of Troy, Vying with Gods
"At that moment, with that confrontation," he said, "all our attempts at interpretation prove to be insubstantial. Interpretation is revealed for the bloodless thing it is. The only valid response to the poem, the only response that can make the experience of the poem the experience of poetry is your experience of the encounter as the overwhelming visceral illumination it is."
A lock of his dusky golden hair fell over his forehead. Without thinking or missing a beat and with the hand that did not have a copy of "The Iliad" open in it, he brushed it back, only to have to do it again after it defiantly bounced back.
"Apollo does not signify anything allegorical or metaphorical. This is 12th century Greece, B.C.," he continued. "He's one of the Gods. Gods were not allegorical or metaphorical. They were actual, relentless and terrifying, terrifying in a thrilling way, in the way that indomitable power is. When Diomedes hurls himself against Apollo in the ecstatic fury of his battle fever, hot from his victory over Aeneas, Apollo thunders a warning to him.
"If you want to make meanings here, go ahead," he admonished the class. "But all this scene really is, what is at the root of this story's power," he explained, "is the encounter of a magnificent and furiously raging mortal striving with and then deferring to an ineffable and aroused God. There is an explosion of power so intense that it recoils back on itself. It becomes an implosion.
"That encounter is nothing else but itself, and it is existentially terrifying. It brings together the forces of anger and eroticism, joined in a kinetic confrontation between a man and a God."
Edgar Robinson could not have held his audience better had he been a great star of the theater. His class was charged with drama and charisma. Students sat on the window sills and radiators. They crouched on the floor in the corners of the classroom, notebooks thrown open, but hardly anyone took notes. Everyone was listening.
No one called him Edgar. Everyone called him Eddie. He called himself Eric. It was his middle name, but nobody even knew that. It was his mother's name with the 'a' trimmed off in recognition of his masculinity.
He was not married. He was courtly and flirtatious with women. At the semi-annual holiday parties he danced with nearly the entire female complement of the faculty and the administration with courtliness and gallantry. But he was always out of reach, impervious to any grasp. He was open, affable, unavailable, and irresistible. He was tenured and published.
Chris sat in the first row in Eric's class. He was awed by him. He had adopted his teacher's staccato speaking style. He dressed like him, too. Like him, Chris wore a well-fitting ribbed cotton turtle neck under an autumnally-brown tweed jacket and a pair of tight-fitting jeans. And he wore a long leather coat.
It was the leather coat that did the work and took Chris where he never thought he could go.
"I like your coat," Eric said walking beside him down the granite steps outside Bluehouse Library into the early and perhaps deceptive springtime. Perhaps deceptive because snow was known to come yet again, even after such sweetness, before winter could be confidently forgotten.
Chris blushed. He giggled, and shrugged.
"It looks good on you, too," Eric added.
Before Chris could figure out what exactly Eric was saying, Eric said, "But the two of us walking together like this, we might be mistaken for a pair of upper-mid-level Nazi bureaucrats. My rooms are over there." He was pointing to the upper floors of an old Victorian mansion across the street and down the block. "Can I interest you in a pot of tea?"
"Really?" Chris stuttered, but Eric cut him short.
"Really," he said with a happy grin at the boy's sense of being honored.
"Why do you dress like me?" Eric said, carelessly, as he hung Chris's coat in the closet beside his.
Chris again blushed.
"Please don't be embarrassed," Eric said. "I am flattered."
"Because I admire you and I want to model myself on you," Chris gulped, figuring bravado with its attendant ambiguity was the best defense.
But he was to be outdone by his master at the game.
"Have you thought about what it would be like to have me inside you?" Eric said.
The question would have seemed weird, shockingly odd, even incomprehensible, had not Chris so often imagined slowly stripping seductively and watching Eric watch him doing it, had he not felt his rectal muscles clenching and loosening as he imagined Eric inside him.
"Yes," Chris said shyly.
"I thought so," Eric said, smiling. "I'm glad. So have I."
He reached out and brought the boy to him and pressed him to himself. He kissed him.
"I could see it in your face that I'd gotten to you. I like that kind of devotion."
"Thank you," Chris said.
"Thank you," Eric returned the compliment with a surprising tender sincerity, unbuckling Chris's belt, pulling his turtle neck out of his jeans, and lifting it. "You do it," he said.
Eric watched Chris pull the shirt over his head and then removed his own, enjoying that Chris was now watching him.
"It will feel like I'm making love to myself," he said, following the contours of Chris's naked chest with spidery finger-tips and touching his lips to Chris's and then backing away.
"You like to work out," Eric said, gently taking hold of Chris's firm nipples.
"It turns me on," Chris said with a shiver. "Do you work out?" he said looking at Eric's smooth, well-wrought torso.
"It turns me on," Eric said.
Daylight was gone. They lay together in Eric's bed, slowly dancing to ecstasy.
"Tell me how you feel," Eric said, looking at Chris looking up at him.
"I feel like I'm worshipping you," Chris said.
Slowly they wound themselves together.
"You don't have a television?" Chris said, returning to the kitchen with his empty coffee mug, looking for a refill.
"No, I don't have a television," Eric said smiling, looking at Chris' well-wrought figure, nearly naked except for his black bikini underwear. With his cup extended as Eric tilted the pot and poured some coffee out into it he seemed posed to be an old Greek or Roman marble of a beautiful young man. Michelangelo would have appreciated him.
"But you do have a laptop," Chris continued.
"I could not live without it," Eric said.
"I'd like to hear you say that about me," Chris said.
"With or without changing the pronoun?" Eric said.
"That's yours to determine," Chris said.
"We'd better get dressed," Eric said.
"What happens now?" Chris said as he looked at himself in the mirror and brushed his hair.
"What do you mean?" Eric said.
"Are we?" Chris said but shifted from words to gestures, shuttling his right hand back and forth through the charged and empty air.
"Are we what?" Eric asked.
"I don't know, Chris said, hesitating. "Do you want to see me again?"
"I'm going to see you in exactly one hour and fifty-three minutes from now and talk to you about Diomedes' third encounter with a God when he would have slain Ares, if Gods could be slain," Eric said and took a swallow of coffee.
Chris frowned. Eric was teasing him.
"I mean this way, like this?"
"Like this, too," Eric said.
"You're making fun of me."
"Do you want to see me again?" Eric returned his question.
"In exactly an hour and fifty-three minutes from now every Tuesday, Wednesday, and Friday until May," Chris answered.
"I mean this way," Eric grinned and took the boy in his arms and kissed him.
"This way, too."
"You're copying me again."
"I mean it," Chris said, caressing Eric's bicep. "But I don't really feel like it's up to me."
"Who is it up to then?"
"You."
"What I say goes?"
"What you say goes."
"Get dressed. I'll see you in class. Come to my office after your last class, which is over...when?"
"At three."
"Be there at three."
"Yes, Sir," Chris said.
"Go, now," Eric said.
Chris returned dressed. Eric took him to the door. Naked he stood there and took the clothed boy in his arms and pressed his lips to him. He filled him with his breath. Chris collapsed in surrender against his chest.
"Go," Eric said. Standing behind it, he held the door open. Chris went out into the morning light-hearted and confident.
"What are you going to do this summer?" Eric said, his hand on Chris's shoulder as they passed under the marble arch and sauntered through the alley formed by the facing lines of newly blossoming apple trees.
"I was thinking of going west to pick grapes," Chris said.
"That's not a very good idea," Eric said.
"No?" Chris responded surprised.
"No," Eric repeated. "A better idea is to spend the summer with me in Greece."
"Are you serious?"
"I'm doing a seminar in Athens the last two-week in June. Then I'm free for the rest of the summer. Our trip would be paid by the university. I always stipulate a traveling companion. I don't like to be alone."
"Poor baby," Chris said with an appealing pout.
"Then you'll come with me," Eric said in triumph.
"At your beck and call," Chris said with a graceful swooping bow, "your devoted warrior and acolyte."
The Aegean Sea breaks its waves on a sable sandy shore. Marvelous rocky caves and arches tower above it on the beach. Great rock walls, too, are submerged within the depths of the water. Only their crowns and peaks break the surface forming alleys and mazes of blue water for swimmers to negotiate like the narrow streets of antique villages.
As worthy of the gaze as these rocks and caves or the resonant horizon filled with an immense emptiness of blue that brings the gaze to it and fastens it there -- were the two masculine figures standing in the wet sand by the edge of the water gazing at the declining sun that was turning the blue sky purple.
Their lithely muscled, supple, sun-brazed bodies glittered with perfection. Their scant black bathing suits showed that perfection.
Swimming, they broke their strokes against the strong Aegean, the hard-breasted, blue-chested Aegean.They embraced its shining waters. They returned happily winded to the beach. Clasped in each other's grasp, body pulsed on body as breathing, dancing, settled to a steady joy.
"I'm sorry we have to go back to Athens tomorrow," Chris said, "even though I like Athens."
"You like picking up dope at dusk on Sophocles Street," Eric said kissing him.
"It was good grass," Chris grinned and became aroused thinking of how powerfully Eric had taken possession of him. Neither of them had ever felt it like that before. Now it had become the way it was with them always. They lived for each other.
"You could stay here forever."
"I could."
Tired from the sea and the sun, they lay stretched out in their bed only covered by a sheet. They turned and embraced. They kissed as if they were dreaming. Chris looked up at Eric dazed. They fell asleep still joined.
They woke and began to dance inside their glow, rushing together into a bright gold pneumatic landscape. They faced each other like ancient warriors. Their skin was like breast plates. The way they touched each other was like the hurling of lances.
They subsided into each other's arms. They slept again. They woke again.
The moon was full. It shone thru the window. The window opened on to a terrace. The terrace gave out onto the vast and black Aegean. It was nearly two o'clock.
The night sky beckoned. They kissed and smiled. They pulled on white shorts and white tank-tops, slid into sandals, and walked facing traffic – but there was hardly any – along the side of the road. It wound around the mountain following what had been a dirt path only, before automobiles.
Now, Eric had his arm round Chris's waist. Chris walked snuggled against Eric, his cheek pressed to Eric's.
They stopped. They kissed. They looked at the moon. They embraced. They flared at the touch of their muscular flesh.
They arrived in Athens in the heat of the day and took a cab to their hotel and fell asleep. When they awoke, they walked in the falling light to the coffee shop Eric knew at the foot of the Acropolis and drank frothy iced coffees.
The snows of January hemmed them in, but in the farmhouse Eric owned a short drive from the college, they burned wood in the stove and in the several fireplaces.
Eric lay with his head in Chris's lap, drew in upon the joint that pointed upwards from his lips and passed it up to Chris. Chris took it with his left. With his right he continued to caress Eric's forehead, followed the outlines of his eyebrows with his fingers, and gently ruffled the curtains under his closed eyelids with the gentle sweep of his fingertips.
"This has been so wonderful. Thank you," Chris said.
"Thank you," Eric said. Lifting his arm, he took Chris round the neck and drew him down to him. He pressed his lips lightly to his, then more intensely, until they were lost, swirling within each other's swirl.
"Are you surprised?" Eric asked him.
"About us?" Chris said.
"Uh-huh."
"I can't believe it, but it feels exactly like what ought to be. No one batted an eyelid when they found out. I imagine there are quite a few women on the campus who feel deflated, though," Chris said
"I'll still dance with them at Christmas and Easter."
Next morning, Eric received an e-mail from his publisher that his edition/translation of Simone Weil's "The Iliad or The Poem of Force" was being published.
His celebrity was just what the campus needed in January to give the place some life.
There was a champagne reception for him the evening a television crew from New York came to shoot scenes of his daily life as a teacher. But the press were less interested in Eric's thoughts on "The Iliad" than on his open and apparently accepted relationship with Chris. Questions quickly turned from classical antiquity to contemporary issues.
"The strange thing about the passage of proposition eight," Eric said, and it was broadcast nationally on television and posted in varying chunks on YouTube, "and I'm sure it is an unintended consequence, is that it has regularized and familiarized homosexual relationships of whatever sort and dimension far more than the failure of its passage would have. Consequently it will soon be rescinded and marriages between gay people will become routine. As momentarily disheartening as proposition eight is, it may be the signal of the beginning of the end of wide-spread individual prejudice and legalized bigotry."
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