Bodies and Souls

by Nancy Thayer

  And I will take their golden boy away.

  Johnny, you are my just desert. Your nipples are strawberries, your testicles are plums, and your penis is lovely, big, and firm; I bruise and crush it in the mouth of my pelvis until sweet white thick juice oozes out. You like me to eat you. Any boy as handsome as you are has had many women, but no one has had you with the skill I have. It’s fortunate for me that during this period of time when I need someone like you, you are engaged to Sarah Stafford. Your vocabulary, Johnny, is not as varied as mine, but you did amuse me once by telling me that making love with Sarah was like fucking a hole in a tree. That was a pretty artistic metaphor for you, Johnny, and apt, I imagine. I’ve only seen Sarah twice, but she is as upright and rigid as an ash tree; she’s hard and rooted and barky. Her limbs are muscular from playing field hockey and soccer. I can envision her passion as a rather athletic enthusiasm: she must huff and puff and thrust and bounce. She probably cheers when you come, or maybe she just pats you on the back, jock style, and says, “Well done.” I’m sure her attitude toward sex is healthy, clean, and sportsmanlike. And you’re such a pretty boy; she must think of you as a kind of trophy. Well, so do I.

  I’m sure you and Sarah have similar bedrooms in your homes: framed photos of you as children skiing or jumping horses on the wall, plaid bedspreads on your beds. You’ve had many women, but never one like me, whose house spreads rippling around us like a moat against the world. Weeks before, I had dismissed the housekeeper, and the gardener and housecleaning people came only twice a week, and never when you were around. We had my huge house all to ourselves, and we drifted through it naked, and as unseen as ghosts. My phone never rings, uninvited guests never arrive, and the mailbox is at the bottom of the long winding drive, so there is not even the delicate intrusion of a postman into our world. What freedom. It was a delicious pleasure for both of us suddenly to be able to roam up and down the three floors of Mitchell Howard’s mansion, through all the rooms, casually drawing the curtains against the outside world, leaving electric lights burning all day long. What did you finally tell your parents and Sarah? That you were off to spend a week with a friend on an island off the coast of Maine, and the friend had no telephone—some appropriate story. And your family and fiancée believed you, and you did spend that week on an island, after all. Our pleasure isle. I stocked the cupboards and refrigerator with every conceivable treat: thin-sliced rare roast beef, French mustards, scallions and melons, expensive champagnes, Godiva chocolates. It was the end of May, but still cool enough for fires, and we often fell asleep in front of the fireplace, into those deep, sated, dark sleeps caused by sensual exhaustion.

  Johnny, you are so young and inexperienced. At twenty-three, you had never stopped to consider how every aspect of your life was dominated by social concerns. From the clothes you wear to the books you read to the women you bed and brag about to friends, to the woman you planned to marry and live out your life with—it is all fiercely, relentlessly, subtly, insidiously controlled by the affluence and snobbish society into which you were born. Your mother pulls your strings with the authority of a puppeteer. I was the first choice you ever made on your own; well, your first major choice. You have been allowed for some time to choose the colors of the sweaters you buy, and which foreign country to go to for winter break—all the little illusions of freedom your mama fed you like bits of bread to keep you feeling like a real boy instead of Pinocchio. That sweet week we spent together in my house with no other human being terrified you. You had never been so alone, without reassurance from your peers. Who were you? Suddenly you were not the good Bennett boy who pleases his parents so, not the big popular jock, Londonton’s favorite son, not the fiancé of a social prize with a cardboard soul. No. You were just Johnny, alone with me. At first I know you missed it, wanted it—wanted to pull on your clothes and rush down the main street of Londonton so that all the shopkeepers could nod and smile and sell you something and thus restore your identity. But you were drugged with sex and could never quite manage to get out of bed. Then, in a rusty, amateurish fashion, you began to think. You talked aloud. You began to examine your life.

  Mostly you spoke about your mother. How horrified and heartbroken she would be if she knew what you were doing. How family-proud she is, how much she cares, how hard she works, how good she is. I listened and did not comment. You were on your way, and there was no need to rush you. I felt no guilt as I listened to you talk, because with each word it became more and more clear that you are not suffering from a social conscience. You do not want to be a dancer or an artist or a liberal politician or a Peace Corps volunteer; there is not that kind of tension of dissent. You are just, in your spoiled child’s way, unhappy with the necessary duties of your life. You do not want to marry Sarah. You do not mind going to work for your father, because one way of making a living is as good as another when money is not really the object. You like the idea of remaining in Londonton—that is, your imagination is not sufficient to cause you to think you could be happier anyplace else. You don’t even really mind the idea of getting married. Getting married is something everyone does, something you would have to do sooner or later, you’ve known that all your life. But marrying Sarah—well now, there’s the problem.

  You do not love Sarah, although that does not really matter, because you can’t always expect to love the woman you have to marry. You do not even particularly like Sarah. You find her shallow—and if you find her shallow, well, my God, Johnny, I think she must have a thimble for a soul. You find her rigid and bossy and silly and vexatious. You have little in common, you think, which comes down to the fact that she likes to ride and you like to sail, and you prefer casual get-togethers with friends and she prefers formal parties. In fact, the more you talked, the more you wondered why on earth you were engaged to this woman. You remembered how your mother’s face glowed with pleasure when you first said, a year ago, “I took Sarah Stafford home from the Dorans’ party last night.” You remembered that more than the initial meeting with Sarah. Although you cannot articulate it, you are beginning to see that courting Sarah was a way of wooing your mother. And not to marry Sarah now will be to disoblige your entire family, and the whole town, greatly. But to marry Sarah, to actually stand in front of God and your community and take her for your lifelong wife—you are frightened at the thought. You are confused. You do not love Sarah; you do not want to marry her.

  Your arrogance dazzles me. You think you suffer.

  What presumption. You have lived twenty-three years in a world as carefully constructed as one of those plastic shells which shield hyperallergic people from real air. You have had everything: money, beauty, loving parents, perfect health, unlimited possibilities, and yet you dare to think you suffer. I let you. I help you. I help you indulge in self-pity, in the luxurious sensation of thinking yourself misunderstood by your mother and the world at large; it’s an emotion you weren’t often aware of during your childhood, because no one ever let you lack for what you desired. Self-pity is a novelty for you, and so has a strong sensuous side to it; you become boyish and petulant and stare gloomily into the fire, absorbed in your thoughts, How gently, subtly, deftly have I nurtured your belief that you’ve been somehow wronged; it suited me to do so. I watched and waited while you snuggled down into your nest of self-indulgence, and oh, how self-absorbed you were then, wallowing in illusions of injustice. It thrilled me to see you there before me, your face and body sleek, handsome, strong, perfect, your spirit slack.

  You lack a sense of humor, which might have saved you.

  I had to be careful to step in before your mood of petulance turned into real nastiness. At that crucial moment, I would stop merely listening, holding your hand, stroking your hair, murmuring. “Poor Johnny,” I would actively interrupt your thoughts by kissing your mouth, or belly, or thighs. I would push you backward on the bed or floor, wherever we happened to be, and say, “Sssh, sssh,” as if you were still a little child. I would undo your shirt, if yo
u were wearing one, and slide my wet tongue along your belly. “Never mind, never mind,” I whispered, dragging my fingertips up your arms, down your back. Your body would relax, you would sigh, and your self-consciousness would slip away from you until you were helpless under my ministrations. I caressed you with expertise and pleasure; the same principle is involved in stroking cats or other handsome beasts. For great long periods of time you lay sighing and stretching under my hands as I acted upon your body with the gentle skillfulness of masseuse, geisha, nurse, and whore. You splayed yourself before me on the sheets and trusted me. Why should you not? Perhaps you felt your spirit had been aggrieved, but you knew only too well that your body could win only admiration and slavish love—every experience you had ever had with a woman proved this to you a thousandfold.

  Peter Taylor, you are a fool—we are all being fooled. The Life Force is stronger than the Death Force, and the force of life is every bit as despicably evil as the force of death—and I give you Johnny Bennett’s body as my proof. Against the knowledge of nihility, the black sacred space which we fear will encompass our lives and this earth, I present you with the physical being of Johnny Bennett. Look at his body. There is no reason for him to exist, yet here he is, and he is perfect. His back, arms, legs, and chest swell with muscles as hard and smooth as rocks, and the skin that covers him—his veins, heart, nerves, muscles, sacs of organs—flows flawlessly all in a piece. Who asked for this? No one. What earthly good does it do? None. In fact, he does evil, this spoiled would-be god; he breaks the hearts of women and does not care, he ignores the sad, disdains the poor, gives compassion to no one, and lusts constantly. How many women has he inadvertently impregnated and forgotten? How much of the world’s resources go to keep him in his pure cotton clothes, comfortable cars, healthy foods? What does he know, whom does he help, when does he cry for others? Nothing, no one, never—he should offend our sight. And yet look at him sitting ahead of me, skin and sinews and thick healthy hair, and every inch of him beautiful. What a trick. Don’t talk about the human spirit and its attainments until you can first prove that most of the women and men in this church wouldn’t give up a month of their lives to be physically loved for just a day by a human being with a body as beautiful as this boy’s. Just looking at him, feeling him, the strong, long, lean, hard, tender substance of him, brings awe, a wonder, a delirious ecstasy. This is the path to religion. If we can believe that such beauty exists, then surely we can believe in God! Life is sly, a cunning cheat. Life is all evil deception: for this boy has a beauty he does not deserve.

  Sarah Stafford, that piano-legged prig, will hate me all her life. She’ll never know that what she really should feel is overwhelming gratitude. For I am relieving her of Johnny, I am stealing him from her, I am taking him away—and her life will be the better for it. Of course, there will be difficulties because of the scandal. But the town has cast me, undeserving, into the role of villainess, so I’ll play my part to the hilt. Well, he suits my purpose very well. He will help me get my petty revenge on this petty town. And now that I’m leaving this place, where I was happy with Mitchell, he will provide me with—entertainment, if nothing else—as I throw myself back out into the void. He will keep me from becoming complacent and dull; for as long as I am with him, I’ll always be trying to figure out the puzzle of our lust. We do have something special when we are in bed together—but what does that mean?

  It was easy to convince him to run away with me. Of course I had to take care that there not be any worries; I had to supply a perfect plan. And I had to offer him assurances as complete and selfless as any mother’s: I said that I would be there for him as long as he wanted me, but that I would never try to tie him down.

  This Wednesday he will tell his parents and Sarah that he is driving to Boston to a stag party for a friend who is getting married. Instead he will drive to my house, and together we’ll drive to the airport, and literally fly away. It will be difficult to trace us, because the lawyers who are handling the affairs for this Londonton house operate out of Chicago, and I will pay them enough to protect my privacy.

  We’ll go to Las Vegas first, I think. Johnny’s never been there, and he’ll be entertained and distracted by the gambling, the nightclubs, the flashy lights and lives. We’ll have fun. We’ll act like children and indulge ourselves. We’ll go to Switzerland to visit friends in December, and a good month will pass in skiing and parties. After that, I don’t know. It doesn’t matter. Johnny might get tired or frightened and want to run back home. But my purpose will have been served by then. I won’t be surprised if he decides to stay with me for a good long time, because without this town and his parents to tell him what to do, to provide the center and boundaries of his life, he’ll be lost. He’ll begin to worry after a while about living off me financially, and so sooner or later we’ll go to Florida, where friends of mine can let Johnny play at selling houses and property—he’ll be good at that. We’ll turn him loose on the rich widows and he’ll make a fortune.

  It will all work out. It’s foolish to look too far into the future. Maybe we’ll just go to Mexico and lie in the sun. The night I fell asleep in Bermuda I had no plans or even hopes, and then Mitchell Howard entered my life and changed it forever. Now here I am. Who knows how these things happen? So why try to plan? I don’t expect anything much from Johnny—not marriage, love, trust, kindness, or even friendship. I will get from him all I want the day we leave this town together. My bags are packed, and soon I will strip this town away from me like a useless skin. Already I anticipate the shiver of freedom that will come when I feel free uncensured air once more.

  I sit in church, Johnny, and you know I’m watching you. When you came in with your parents today you gave me the slightest smile before glancing away; our little conspiracy makes you happy. It makes you feel powerful, independent, capable of an amazing variety of emotions; in your own mind you’ve become a psychological Renaissance man. Not only can you love your family, community, and friends, not only can you succeed in the proper world, you can also be wicked and adventurous. How proud you are of yourself.

  And I must say that treachery becomes you. I’ve never seen you look more handsome. Later today you will come to my house, having told your fiancée and parents that you’re going to drive around in the mountains for a few hours—you have implied that you are looking for a perfect spot on which to build a home. The moment you come in my door I will be there, wearing only a soft cotton caftan, and I will press my body against yours and cover your mouth with mine. You always take my ardor as sheer flattery, I can see you thinking: My God, she can’t wait to get her hands on me! And you puff up, pleased and cocksure. You enjoy the belief that you are irresistible—and, Johnny, you almost are. I’ve had many pretty men, but none quite so lovely as you. I like the height, the length of you, the insistent firmness of your flesh, the dumb optimism of your perfect health. A wholesome, faintly alcoholic, earthy smell reminiscent of hops emanates from your body and your breath; it is heady and seductive and masculine, like beer. Today, before you’ve taken three steps into my house, I will begin to unbutton your shirt. I will keep my mouth on yours while with both hands I unzip and unbutton your jeans. There is a thick rug on the front-hall floor and I’ll make love to you there, it will amuse you. Since we have not been together now for two days, you will be quick and eager. I will strip you naked, then slide my caftan from me in one smooth move. You will lie naked before me on the floor, oh sweet young silk-skinned boy, beautiful fool. My passion will be real. In all sincerity I will admire you, desire you, devour you. You will lie with me, helpless and willing, my sweet Johnny boy, and I will slither over your body like a snake, and coil about you till you come.

  Wilbur Wilson

  Wilbur Wilson had a pain in his chest, and more than anything else, this pain made him mad, because it distracted him from Peter Taylor’s sermon. At seventy years of age, Wilbur often indulged himself in the rather crabby certainty that one of the compensations of ol
d age was that he had heard it all before. He always looked forward to church, because Peter Taylor continually provided a challenge to that certainty; he reversed it: listening to the new minister, Wilbur thought that one of the pleasures of old age was hearing something new. Peter Taylor was full of surprises. He was unlike any pastor the First Congregational Church of Londonton had ever seen before. He was a liberal thinker who didn’t shrink from mixing political issues in with religious ones, and while Wilbur didn’t always agree with the man, he couldn’t help but admire his courage, and the way he had with words.

  Right now Peter was preaching a sermon broadly based on the old commandment “Love Thy Neighbor.” It hadn’t taken the minister but five minutes to get from that biblical behest onto one of his pet topics: the need for a nuclear arms freeze. On this particular point, Peter Taylor was eloquent and impassioned. He made a most handsome crusader there at the pulpit, with his dark robe, dark hair, and blazing blue eyes, and Wilbur thought it was a good thing that Peter was also intelligent and dignified, otherwise there would be a danger that he’d turn into a real rabble-rouser. He did hold the congregation’s attention.