The Game of Ourselves
19 May [To Matthew]
Can't say how much I miss having you around. Sharing my exploits with you was nearly as exciting as the exploits themselves. But you would have to go off to graduate school. Ah, my dear, I know that you are going to make a great psychotherapist, considering the way you always got me to "open up."
I saw the most adorable boy in the supermarket this afternoon, and I left when he did, and followed him home. So I know where he lives, and I intend to see him again. And I will. You know me well enough to know that once I want something, I don't give up before I have it. And at first glance, I knew I definitely want him, and I definitely will have him. And when I say I will have him, I don't mean just for one night or one week; I mean for keeps.
Have you met anyone special? Or are you still as picky as always and waiting for something more than special. In that case, as I've always told you, you're gonna be waiting a long long time.
24 May [To Matthew]
I agree. It does feel funny writing letters instead of sending e-mails, but there is something about letter writing that feels more intimate and true. E-mails have become such a screen (ha!) for identities to hide behind. Writing an e-mail one is always on the verge of virtual falsifications. I know I am. Letter writing, on the other hand, keeps one – or me, at least -- in touch with the actuality of the real world.
Enough of that! I know you always reproach me for over-intellectualizing and theorizing. So I'll be concrete. I saw him again. Are you surprised? Yes, I was lurking. There's a little park, a city square, a few benches, a few trees, a small fountain, across the street from his house, a few houses over, and I've taken up the habit of sitting there with a book and reading. It's rather a pleasant pastime in itself. Of course, I don't get much reading done since my gaze is seldom fixed on the page.
The very first day I was there, I was lucky. After about half an hour, he stepped out the front door onto the stoop. He was an angel, framed in the doorway by the arch of the touching boughs, bending suspended from the trees that grow in the little gardens lying like margins on either side of the steps. A beautiful sylvan angel! O, for an evening of lovely abduction!
It's been unseasonably hot here these last few days, and everyone has been going around with as little to wear as possible. In too many cases this results in masses of unsightly humanity. How ill-cared for are most people's bodies, and with how little shame do they expose them. You can imagine then how delightful it was to see my little darling's – yes, I already call him my little darling when I think of him – how delightful it was to see my little darling's modest response to the heat. He is a slight boy, thin and lithe, not short; neither is he a string bean, as they say, but beautifully proportioned. His smooth chest, although it would outdo any number of chests that one sees these days flaunted -- naked, hairy, bulbous, fleshy, and sweating -- was covered by a loosely fitting cotton tank top of broad horizontal blue and white stripes, with red piping at the arm holes, around the shoulder bands, and across the neckline. The neckline was cut low enough to show his strong and straight clavicles and the top of his lovely chest, just down to his hardly-developed pectorals, but cut discretely enough that his nipples would not show unless he bent forward at the waist at least forty-five degrees. His lightly-tanned legs were bare to the thighs, and very shapely. He wore a pair of little beige cotton shorts and leather sandals with straps around his insteps, ankles, and big toes. His feet hardly touched the ground as he walked. I can guess you are enjoying a good laugh at my expense, as usual. I am a hopeless romantic!
He has a job – a summer job? -- as an ice-cream scooper in one of the upscale ice-cream parlors that have sprung up around here in the last few years. (The neighborhood is very different from how it was when you moved away – lots of well-to-do straight couples presuming to be bohemian.) It seemed like getting an ice cream cone was just the right thing to do on a hot day like this. I waited about ten minutes after he'd gone in, window-shopping the fancy kitchen supply store near-by, and then went into the shop.
"There are so many flavors to choose from," I said, looking at him in his starched yellow apron, rinsing an old-fashioned ice-cream scooper. "I don't know what to choose. Got any suggestions."
"Well," he said, almost laughing, "everybody makes fun of me, but I still like vanilla."
"Vanilla?" I said.
He blushed. "Not all the time. But it can be very cool."
"You sold me," I said. "Vanilla."
"How many scoops?"
"Two."
He smiled as he took a cone off the stack and scooped out a ball of vanilla and pressed it into the cone and then pressed another on top of that. You should see the shape of his wrist and the color of his slight blue veins. How my lips would delight in kissing that wrist and those veins. Instead I had to settle for the cone. But I let my fingers linger on his for just a moment too long as I took it from him. I gave him four-fifty.
"Hope you like it," he said. "You can come back tomorrow and try another flavor."
"Maybe I won't need to wait so long," I said, wondering if he was actually flirting.
He smiled as if he understood, but our connection was interrupted when several customers came in in a group.
"We close at ten," he said, without my asking.
25 May [To Matthew]
It won't surprise you that I walked over to the shop later that night, around ten. There was a last rush of customers, and there was an older woman working alongside Ned. That's his name. It says it on a little button pinned to the left side of his apron.
I stood discretely at the door, waiting for the crowd to thin. He saw me, and he shot me a smile that was equal parts dazzling and shy. I stepped outside. Despite the streetlights, LED displays, and neon, there was a strong moon visible in the sky, and I was gazing at it, lost in a reverie, when I felt his touch on my chest.
I brought my glance back to earth and saw him grinning.
"I hoped you'd come back. I saw you sitting in the square across the street this afternoon, and when you came into the shop, and, well..."
"Well, what?" I said teasing him.
"I figured..."
"What did you figure?" I said taking his hand.
He said nothing. He kissed me. Then he said, "I didn't figure anything. I knew."
"What did you know?" I said.
"I knew that I'd see you tonight."
27 May [From Matthew]
You always were a tease, Evans, and you still are. Just when it looks like I'm going to share that cupcake with you, you go dark. This is friendship? You'll have me thinking you did not get what you wanted. It's hard to believe that you've suddenly become modest.
1 June [To Matthew]
Maybe I have. Become modest. But don't worry about me on that score. I got what I wanted. Still, I have to admit to you that Ned's different from the others. I may have gotten caught in my own web. Perhaps if you were here, I would tell you how we spent that night, and the days and nights that followed. Then again, perhaps I would not. This was not an exploit. What was it? Something like a communion. Does that sound drippy? Perhaps. I can't help it. Adventure is noisy. Love – can you imagine? – love – I say the word with some trepidation – is quiet. It does not advertise. It understands its own delicacy and the need it has to protect itself from rumor and clamor. Believe me I would not even say this much to anyone but you.
4 June [From Matthew]
It must be true that one sure indication of growing up is growing out of one thing and into another. In this instance, it means finding a refinement of pleasures. My pleasure in vicarious experience, of being a fly on the wall, of imagining what you describe when I listened to your accounts of your lusts and conquests, must now yield to the finer, more mature, pleasure of taking pleasure in your deeper joy. Congratulations! But is it really love that you are talking about? Does it happen that quickly? Will it still be alive, this love, when you receive this letter? Attraction, infatuation, a storm of electricity – sure; but love?
9 June [To Matthew]
Love, Matthew, love. What a cynical bastard you've become. Is that what you're learning in psychology school? To be suspicious of everything? That's what I don't like about psychologists. Nothing is taken for what it is but is always seen as symptomatic of something else.
And he loves me. I can feel it. I can see it. Whatever I want him to do, he does. However I want him to be, that's the way he is. Isn't that love? And if I have that kind of power over him, how could I possibly live with myself if I did not love him? To exercise that kind of influence, power, whatever the word that makes you feel easier about the phenomenon, without framing it by love, that would be monstrous. Yes, I admit it, proudly: I feel an incredible sense of power over him. He feels it, too. He likes it. He wants it. He is dazzled by it. I know you won't believe me. So I'll have to give you some examples.
I've already mentioned the little square near the brownstone where he lives. The neighborhood kids hang out there till dusk, but soon after desert it. The whole street takes on a stillness that is hardly disturbed by pedestrian or vehicle traffic.
His head was resting on my shoulder, my arm around him, my lips softly kissing his feathery scalp. I felt his soft warm breathing, like the feel of the breathing of a bird you hold carefully in your palm. I ran my lips across the crown of his skull and he shuddered with pleasure.
"I love you," he said.
"How do you know that you love me?" I asked, teasing him.
"Because I would do anything for you. Whatever you wanted."
I kissed his brow, "And would you love me still if you knew that I did not love you," I asked, "if I told you that I was only using you for my own gratification?"
"Wouldn't that show that you did love me? How could you get pleasure out of using something that you did not love?" he answered with a smile.
I will admit to you, dearest Matthew, I was confounded by such a power of paradoxical reasoning, and I knew immediately that I had to be on my guard. And if that feeling is not an indication of being in love, I don't pretend to know what else is.
I said nothing in answer but only reached over with my free hand and took hold of his delicately blossoming branch beneath the foliage of his summer shorts and began to caress it, as you know I can, in a way that stilled his mind and inflamed his senses. His breaths became deeper and enriched with a cascade of tones that made an incomparable scale based upon which any number of nocturnes might have been constructed. They sounded in the cathedral of my heart with erotic reverberation, intoxicating the body of my lust. I scuffled his hair. He breathed my name, and I knew the flood of his love would surge. I tightened my fist around his desire. It throbbed. He gasped.
"Close your eyes," I said. He exhaled and obeyed.
What was I to do with him? He was mine. There was no doubt of that, neither for me, nor for him. But what was it that made that special. I felt like a musical illiterate who had been handed a Stradivarius.
"Open your eyes," I said quietly, on the verge of telling him to leave, of ending it without any explanation, of breaking his heart and (and mine, once the rush of destruction had subsided) leaving him one of those forever crippled by love.
You may wonder at me, Matthew. I wonder at myself. You have often called me a pervert, sometimes jesting, sometimes not really jesting, but of all the kinks you've observed in me, this impulse was probably the most perverse that ever overcame me: to prove our love, his and mine, by spurning it.
11 June [To Matthew]
I thought it was obvious that I didn't. I would have told you if I had, but my good sense and a certain residual amount of sanity kept me from breaking it off. So did Ned himself, without even knowing that he was saving us both – or perhaps he did. Perhaps he is as amazingly, wonderfully intuitive as he is...innocent. I'm beginning to realize that he is as unfathomable to me as I am to myself. Maybe that's the root of love. He seems so acquiescent...he is so acquiescent...and, really, at the same time, he is so directive. Can it be that he dominates by submitting? Does it follow from that that I submit by dominating? How happy it must make you to see me get so tangled up like this in this kind of suffocating ratiocination that you have so often warned me against.
Anyhow, dear Matthew, just when these demons of destruction were gnawing at my entrails, Ned stood up, stood in front of me, put both his arms around me, straddled me and started kissing me. That would have been enough in itself to loosen the demonic bite, but there was something else. He was kissing me with girlish ardor. What, you ask, reasonably, is girlish ardor? I can't say, but I knew when it was happening that that's what it was. I have never felt such delicate passion, such delicious softness in a kiss, such surrender, such tenderness and giving. My heart melted and I stiffened with ethereal love for him.
"You are a strange boy. If I did not know you, I would think you are a girl," I said, as he gazed at me with big, gleaming eyes.
He trembled. "When I'm with you, I wish I were a girl. I want to be a girl for you. Is that crazy?"
"No," I said, kissing the tip of his nose. "It is the most beautiful thing anyone has ever said to me."
15 June [To Matthew]
Yes, I am in pretty deep. Deeper than you want to allow, if I detect correctly an offhand cynicism in the tone of your last letter. No, I do not want your psychological interpretation of our behavior, your expert's *rendu compte *of what it is symptomatic of, or compensating for, or avoiding, or any thing else like that that robs the immediate of immediacy. Forgive me if my tone is harsh. You would understand if you only saw him, if you only saw how we are when we are with each other. This is something that has to be protected. Laugh if you want to, but he is someone who makes me feel to my very depths that I want to protect him. Is not that love? I tell you, I understand with my whole being that ubiquitous trope in medieval literature of leaving your heart left inside the beloved's body. It is more than a metaphor. We have exchanged hearts.
17 June [To Matthew]
You are right I am as bound to him as he is to me. I was not being fanciful when I wrote that we have exchanged hearts. It is exactly as you say: he is mine to command, but equally, I am his to command. And the uncanny thing is that we don't even have to utter the commands. Spontaneously, in each of us the knowledge of the other one's desire arises. Now why would we want to analyze that? Would it not be cutting open that famous golden-egg-laying goose?
As always, undoubtedly, you want an example, the more salacious the better, if I know you. All the degrees you earn, you'll still be a little bitch-in-heat at heart. That's ok. It's what makes you so...approachable.
19 June [From Matthew]
You bloody sadist. Do you take pleasure in frustrating me? You promise an example, and then...nothing. Am I supposed to guess? Ok, I'm a bitch-in-heat, and now I'm salivating. Are you satisfied?
25 June [To Matthew]
Delighted!
Without saying anything more about it, Ned and I began to slide into roles. It was not role-playing; we naturally began to assume the roles that seemed natural to us. He became feminine to me, and the more I felt his femininity, the more masculine I felt, and the more he felt the force of my masculinity the more feminine he became. It wasn't a matter of clothing or costume or dressing up. It wasn't something projected from the outside. It was something that emerged from within us and transformed us outwardly.