Educating Simon

by Robin Reardon

  Luther took the lead, and that was just fine with me. He stood, held a hand out, and led me to his bedroom. He undressed me slowly, and I just let him, wondering—and worrying a little, though I’m sure I could have stopped him at any time—about what he had in mind.

  He stood back and admired me, his eyes falling on my erection. “And the carpet matches the drapes.”

  I had no idea what that meant, but I didn’t really care. I reached a hand behind his neck and brought our faces together, kissing him before and after I lifted his T-shirt over his head. This felt like such a brazen act to me, but I’m sure it was appropriate in the circumstances. He removed his own jeans, nothing on underneath them, and pulled me onto the bed.

  He positioned me gently but deliberately so that when he was settled, we were in what I guess is the famous sixty-nine formation, each of us able to grab the other’s dick. I did with my hand what I hoped would feel good to him, imitating what he was doing to me—which felt out of this world—trying to avoid pulling any of the rich, dark hairs that were everywhere. And then everything changed. He’d taken me into his mouth.

  Oh, my God. Oh, my God. I stopped breathing. I stopped moving. My mouth opened wide, soundlessly, and stayed that way until I came, and I nearly screamed as I shot everything against the back of his throat. He swallowed but stayed on me, his mouth now very gently caressing me. I nearly fainted onto the bed and let him go on. Finally he released me, sliding gently off the end of my dick and kissing the tip of it as he let it flop onto my thigh.

  And then I realised he was still hard, still in need. I roused myself ; could I do for him what he’d just done for me? I half sat up as he lay back, his beautiful, thick penis pointing to the ceiling. It curled a little to one side, which I found rather charming. There was an odd moment when I felt a certain reluctance to take it into my mouth, but I soldiered on and did my very, very best to give him the pleasure he’d given me. Within seconds I realised there was going to be a breathing issue, but it took me only one more second to figure out how to work around that problem by lifting my soft palate and breathing out as I took him in.

  When he came, his shouting grunt took me by surprise, and I swallowed without having any time to think about whether I even wanted to do that. There was musk, a hint of salt, and a note of chlorine. I had to stop myself from laughing; it was a cum tasting, like fine wine. I released him as he’d done for me, and even as he lay there panting he pulled me onto his chest.

  When he could speak, he said, “Oh, Red. You’re a quick study.”

  “Always have been. But how do you know I haven’t been doing this all my life?”

  He chuckled. “Oh, a wild guess. I don’t want you to misunderstand. You were great. Really, really great. But in my experience, people who’ve had a lot of sex have moves of their own. They don’t tend to imitate someone else’s actions. That would be mine, of course, in this case. And that’s what you did. But you did it so well!”

  Well, I guess that wasn’t a bad review.

  We kissed, and caressed, and kissed some more until I grew hard again. He pulled a small towel out from somewhere I didn’t see and turned me onto my stomach, the towel under my crotch. When he pried my ass cheeks apart with his fingers I had to say, “Wait.”

  “Not to worry. I promise.” The next sensation was such an unexpected ecstasy that I cried out. He ignored me and kept using his tongue in a way I never knew anyone would ever do. Within a few minutes I had come all over that towel. Immediately, he flipped me over again and kissed me, hard and deep. I could barely breathe.

  I must have dozed for half an hour or so before I felt him get off the bed. I watched him leave the room, naked, and return with the chocolates. We lounged on the sweat-soaked sheets, tasting some of each other in the dark chocolate truffles.

  “Champagne truffles,” he said at one point.

  I grinned and bit into another one.

  There were still a couple of truffles left when he sighed and said that he had something else he needed to do today. I glanced at my watch, which was the only thing I had on: a few minutes before one. Luther didn’t have a champagne stopper, so I made him promise to finish the last of the wine today. He said that would not be a problem.

  Fifteen minutes later we were standing just inside his open front door, wrapped in each other’s arms, kissing deeply, when I heard someone gasp.

  I pulled away, my empty champagne cooler dangling by its strap from my arm, and saw a young woman at the bottom of the steps that led to Luther’s door. She was around his age, a true blonde, blue eyes, and pink lipstick around the wide open mouth. The look on her face was one of horror.

  All three of us were frozen like that for maybe four seconds, before Luther said, “Stephanie. You’re a little early.”

  I pulled away from him. “What’s going on?”

  Stephanie said, “Yes, Luther, what’s going on? What the fuck is going on?”

  It dawned on me suddenly that Luther had arranged two dates for himself today. Me for breakfast, and Stephanie for—what, afternoon delight?

  I stared at him, not quite knowing how I felt. “You said you were bisexual. You didn’t say you were—I’m at a loss for words.”

  Stephanie was not at a loss. “You bastard!”

  “Now, wait just a minute,” Luther protested. “It shouldn’t come as any surprise to either of you that there might be a little cross-pollination going on.”

  Stephanie was shrieking now. “Cross-pollination? Is that what you call this?”

  It seemed unlikely that anything good was going to come of this encounter. I said, “He’s all yours, Stephanie.” I walked past her and out towards the street.

  “Simon!”

  I ignored him. I didn’t have any idea what had just happened, and I wasn’t sure I wanted to. It was lucky I wasn’t struck by a car as I crossed Comm Ave towards the BC campus, which was the wrong way to go, anyway, if I was headed home. I wandered sightlessly down a paved road that led into the campus and had to step to the right to avoid a large group of students coming the other way. And I found myself staring at a labyrinth.

  A few years ago, my dad and mum and I had gone to France. We’d stayed in Paris, but one day we took a trip to Chartres Cathedral. Dad had particularly wanted to walk the labyrinth on the floor of that historic building. But when we got there, there were chairs set up all over the nave where the labyrinth was, and he couldn’t walk it. We sat in the chairs, and I asked him why labyrinths were important to him.

  “Lots of people confuse the labyrinth with the maze,” he opened. “They’re completely different. A maze deliberately sets out to confound you. There are dead ends, irregular trails that feed back on themselves, all kinds of ploys to make you lose your way. A labyrinth is exactly the opposite. And the number of circuits, and the patterns they form, are significant in both Sufi and Christian traditions, so it spans East and West.”

  He got up and moved to a spot outside the labyrinth. “You enter here. And you follow the path, which in this style of labyrinth is extremely complex. Unless you’re very, very familiar with the shape, it’s impossible to anticipate when you’re going to be sent in one direction or another, or when you’ll be led halfway around the outside of the circle. But if you keep going, you’ll eventually walk over every single spot, and you’ll end up in the centre. The way out is the reverse.”

  As he’d spoken, I’d tried to follow the path with my eyes. The chairs made it challenging, but I quickly realised that even without them there I couldn’t have predicted the twists and turns.

  “It’s like life, Simon. Unless you’re looking at the pattern from overhead, you can’t quite know where it’s going to lead you. But if you have faith, if you put your trust in the big picture and keep putting one foot in front of the other, you’ll get to where you need to be.”

  As I stood there on the BC campus, staring at this labyrinth shaped just like the one in Chartres, I was surprised that this description was still th
ere in my brain. I hadn’t thought about it since Dad had said it, but there it was. And it seemed as though he had just told me the same thing everyone else had been telling me for months. Put one foot in front of the other. Shift weight. Repeat.

  I stepped towards the large open space and read the information that told me that the labyrinth was dedicated to the twenty-two BC alumni who had died in the attacks on September eleventh. There was no one walking it, and no one on any of the benches around the outside of it. I had the entire thing to myself. I tossed my champagne cooler on the ground, put one foot in front of the other, and moved forwards.

  Somehow I knew it should be a slow walk. There should be contemplation of some kind, something to think through on the way to the six-petalled rose shape in the centre. I kept my eyes on the stone segments that made up the path at my feet and let my mind wander.

  Of course, it went first to Luther, to what had happened, before and after Stephanie had arrived. Before? That was easy. Luther had been gentle, sensitive to my inexperience, and he’d made sure I enjoyed it thoroughly. It had been all about sex, but it had not been all about fucking. He’d pleasured me, and he’d taught me how to pleasure him. I could be pretty sure that almost certainly, every time Luther and I got together—if that happened again—there would be sex. And I had to expect that before long it would go beyond what had happened today to something much more invasive. Maybe it wasn’t the end of the world that the sex today had been special only to me. But wouldn’t I want that next important step to matter to both me and my partner?

  Stephanie. What had she expected? It seemed obvious that she’d been invited for a specific time. Which means there had been something specific planned. Did he have more chocolates hidden away? And would he have offered her the remains of my champagne? Was he going to take her out someplace? Before or after they had sex? And would that act happen on the same sheets?

  As for my own feelings . . . He’d told me he was bisexual, and he’d made it clear that no one should expect anything resembling love or commitment, and I had been in agreement with that. So why was I feeling so—I don’t know, betrayed?

  At the centre of the labyrinth, hands in my jacket pockets, I stood still and took a few slow, deep breaths. I turned slowly around, looking first at the tall, leafless trees along one side of the space and then at the stone building on the opposite side. I tried to remember anything my father had said about the centre of the shape and what it meant. The only other thing I could recall was that the outer ring, the eleventh circuit, is supposed to represent the first exhalation of the universe, of God, of The One, when he/she/it sees itself as both object and subject. I was going to have to give this some thought; I couldn’t wrap my mind around it at the moment, despite the fact that the labyrinth was designed to foster exactly this kind of thinking.

  And then a word flew into my mind. Invalidated. I felt as though my own time with Luther, my own experience, my own specialness—even if it wasn’t supposed to last in any significant way for us as a couple—had been invalidated. Luther’s scheduling multiple partners for sex on the same day denied the importance of two individuals merging, becoming one. We’re not just animals, and sex to us should have more than mere physical implications. I’m not talking about commitment, here, but sex the way I want it should blur the lines that separate two people, even for just a few moments. And there’s something sacred about that, nothing to do with religion or scripture or some old man in the sky watching over us. Maybe it’s the reversing of that duality, that subject-object split that happened in the universe’s first exhalation. It’s God breathing in again.

  I shook myself; this was way, way too esoteric for me. I took another deep breath, released my own exhalation, and walked back through the shape. My thoughts bounced around randomly on the reverse journey; I was mostly trying to imagine what my next conversation with Luther—if any—would be like. I ran through a number of scenarios, none of which led to anything satisfactory unless I allowed myself the luxury of telling him all those spiritual thoughts that had come to me in the rose centre. And that seemed both unlikely and ill-advised, even if he is studying philosophy.

  I sat on one of the benches under the trees, feeling decidedly chilled and not really caring, when I decided to pull out my phone and turn it on again. And there was a voice message from Luther, from twenty minutes ago, probably when I was halfway into the labyrinth.

  “Call me.” That’s all. Not “I’m sorry that happened” or “I hope you’re not upset.”

  I put the phone into my pocket and sat back. Remembering that when Michael had changed his mind about coming to my rooftop for antipasto, I’d been very careful to give him the impression that it didn’t matter to me either way. I could take that approach with Luther. But it had been dishonest then, to Michael, and it would be dishonest now. And whatever else I could accuse Luther of, dishonesty was not on the list.

  I could ignore his message completely; that would be one way to let him know I didn’t like being treated that way. But the fact was that I didn’t like him treating Stephanie that way, either. I tried to put myself in her place. What if she’d been with him since eleven, and I’d shown up early for my date at half one, and the two of them had been standing there kissing?

  Bisexuality notwithstanding, commitment-bound or not, I would have turned around and left.

  I pulled my phone out and called him.

  “Simon. Thanks for calling. Will you let me explain?”

  “There’s not much need to explain, really. It’s pretty obvious what happened. The only thing I don’t know, and I’m not sure it matters to me, is what your relationship is like with her. All I can know is how it makes me feel.”

  I paused, and he waited a few seconds before asking, “And how is that?”

  “Invalidated.”

  “Simon, I never promised—”

  “No. That’s true. And I never expected. I wasn’t looking for you to declare undying love, or any love at all. I wasn’t hoping you’d dream about me for days and have to hold yourself back from begging to see me again. That’s not what this was about, and I accepted that.”

  “Then . . . why invalidated?”

  “I think you knew this was my first time. That alone made it incredibly special to me, whomever it was with. Now, if Stephanie hadn’t shown up early, I’d never have known about your second date. But the fact that you were cramming two liaisons into one day cuts the importance of each of them at least in half. I can’t help wondering how you thought you’d have time to shower, let alone change the sheets.”

  “We were going out.”

  “And then?”

  “Then we were going over to her place. Her sheets.”

  I nodded, though of course he couldn’t know that. “You had it all figured out, then. Well, I’ve figured out a few things, too. I really enjoyed this morning. Thanks for that. But I don’t think I want to do this again. I appreciate your honesty; I just don’t like your style.”

  I rang off, half expecting he’d ring me back, but after three minutes of staring at my phone I put it back into my pocket. Then I took it out again and looked up the location of the nearest T stop.

  And I think that’s all I want to write for now.

  Boston, Sunday, 18 November

  I talked with Ned about Luther as soon as I could get him to myself, which turned out to be last Tuesday afternoon. I sat at the island and he listened as he worked, occasionally asking a clarifying question but nothing else. I told him about the sex (with very little detail), about the labyrinth walk, and I stopped after describing that last phone conversation. He finished up something he was working on and wiped his hands on a towel.

  “Do you remember what I told you about him?”

  “I do. And you were right.”

  “Tell me about that epiphany again. The one in the labyrinth, about sex being the remerging of the two dualities God had divided into in the beginning of the universe.”

  “Is that ho
w I put it?”

  “Not quite; but isn’t that what you meant?”

  I shrugged. “I guess so, yes. But I wouldn’t read too much into it. The ramblings of a wounded ego.”

  “No. That’s not it at all. You’re on to something important. Have you ever heard the song called “Hallelujah” by Leonard Cohen? Made famous by a number of singers, most especially Jeff Buckley?” I shook my head, and he stumbled through a few lyrics that didn’t seem to gel. “Oh, hell, just go to YouTube and search for it. I think it will resonate with you.”

  I toyed with a few crumbs I’d dropped as I’d devoured a piece of Mum’s gingerbread.

  “You okay, kid?”

  I lifted a shoulder. “Yeah.” I grinned at him. “At least I’m not a virgin anymore.”

  “Oh, honey, you have no idea. But—all in good time. Now, git; I need a moment alone with some burnt sugar. It wants all my attention or it turns vicious.”

  Upstairs I did search YouTube, and I found the Jeff Buckley video, and I did listen to it. And then I listened to it again. And then I opened another tab and searched for the lyrics so I could follow along.

  If it weren’t for one particular verse, I’m not sure I would have understood what Ned had been talking about. I replayed it several times, dragging the little circle back over the progress bar. Remember when I moved in you, and the holy dove was moving too, and every breath we drew was Hallelujah.

  I’m not fooling myself that what I had with Luther—that what I would ever have had with Luther—would even approach this. But I think I did the right thing, turning my back on a relationship that was deliberately set up to be the exact opposite, to be full of dead ends, to confound the hallelujah deliberately. I want love to be a labyrinth, not a maze. And I think sex, for me, has to at least point in that direction.