“No,” she said, “I don’t remember it.”
I went out of the party and on to the balcony of the house and wept.
I’m crying now.
“That’s all right. When you’re ready, we’ll analyse the dream.”
THE
EVERLASTING
SECRET
FAMILY
An Erotic Memoir in Six Parts
Prepared for publication by the author from letters, monologues, conversations, diaries and other sources.
Narrator’s note: This was originally to be published privately and circulated privately. I do not in any way wish to harm the conservative parties of this country. In so far as this memoir touches on political things (and caution delimited this severely) it does so simply as a fact of our lives. It may be suggested that the publication of this work is a ploy in a personal relationship—be that as it may, that also was not the energising motive behind my having this put down on paper. I recorded it out of joy and I dedicate it to him who gave me the highest sexual privilege.
I.
THE BAD DOG
AND THE ANGEL CUSTODIO
In that trance of black lust, like a dog, I fell entranced, fixed by the shabby immigrant of uncertain nationality who had caught my submissive, available eyes in the lane and flicked back a glance, knowing and commanding, stopping me, entranced and trembling.
He moves his head for me to follow and I do at a distance, like a dog, the wordless, animal knowingness of male gutter sex.
I follow him, he taking me I suppose at first to his room, but then it becomes clear that he is looking for any place, a doorway, a porch, an alley. We come to a church. He walks into a path at the side of the church and stands there.
I follow him, the submissive dog. He does not speak but simply unzips himself. I kneel before him, burrow in with my fingers and pull out the soft, erecting penis and take it into my mouth.
I am taken down, down into that self-contained black world where there is no other thing, feeling, or sound but a moist, hot penis and my yielding mouth. There is nothing in the world for that time but his penis moving towards its explosion and my mouth moving, shaping, and pulling and wanting it. The mouth that is saying without words, yes, come, use me, fill me. No outside world existing, no other reward, no other way of being.
Holding his balls, drawing out the sperm, he grunts, his only sound, a giving grunt and then the pulsing sperm, the completed link, the joining by the highest sensation and the most brawny of fluids, two strangers in a path beside a church.
He pulls himself away, he zips himself, and he steps around me, walking away. Not a word, no gesture, no sign.
That was right and how it should be. I was left by him on my knees, shivering with stimulation, coming out from under that black, sexual hood. The exertion and the enlivened nerves of my mouth and taste making me quietly gasp, panting there on my knees, weak from the perfection of that enactment. Our silent performance. In all its human basicness, complete. Corporeal recognition and fulfilment of need and role. The perfect rightness of it beyond morality. The weeping, honest animalism of it. I was weak with a ringing, singing gratification. I could have thanked God for permitting me to be, still, a human animal.
I stayed there for a minute as I returned to my identity, enjoying a recognition of where I’d just been and of where I was kneeling, of who I was, of my worldly connections, of my lover now waiting for me, of what I’d done—my smearing of that other life, a wilful disfigurement.
I got up, one hand against the church while my knees recovered, and then strolled back to our town house, our pied-a-terre, my penis moist in the silk of my underpants.
He was home waiting for me and I tried to be casual and not show the tired, remaining delight of my rutting.
“You look guilty,” he said.
I went and washed and showered and cleaned my teeth, sterilising myself back into our strict, shared world. Our hygienic arrangement.
“I suppose you’ve been prowling the lavatories again,” he said, although without menace.
He hadn’t alleged that for a year or so. He had once had one of his heavies follow me and then there’d been efforts to stop me from being promiscuous, including terrifying—but unsuccessful—“therapy” in some private hospital. When I was sixteen.
“No.” “Why all the redemptive washing, all that tired humming.”
“I just feel good.”
“Only one thing makes you feel good.”
“Leave me alone.”
“I have some news for you.”
“What?”
“I’m going to marry.”
I coloured. There in the lounge room I touched a Balinese carving for no reason, reaching out to it with a shaking hand, as if for balance. I stood there perilously hovering above his splintering statement.
“You can’t.” That was all I could say.
He had been escorting—courting?—I don’t know, this girl—woman—for a couple of years. I never thought, I had always seen it as a front for his political career, or an arrangement or something. I don’t know about these things. She was in the Country Party or her father was something in the Country Party. I assumed they didn’t do anything physically. I thought she was another sort of hostess.
“You can’t.”
He smiled.
In passing I realised that I knew nothing about weddings, engagements, the etiquette of it all, another world. This thought went through my reeling mind.
“What about me, us . . .” But as I said it, I knew there was no longer any leverage in “us”, or that I should not have tried to use it. Then I said, just as hopelessly, “What about all this?” indicating the apartment.
“I’m going to leave you here—in your abnormality.”
I had never heard him say anything which disowned our life, or anything so hypocritical. The clinical word “abnormality”. After the sexual life we’d had. After he’d inducted me into it. I was aghast.
“I’ve never been unfaithful to you—not since the therapy,” I said without relevance.
He smiled.
“I’ve only been with people you wanted me to go with.” “I know all there is to know about you.”
“It worked,” I said, desperately, “that treatment.”
“I move out of here tonight.”
“No!!”
He laughed. “I don’t want to catch anything—wherever you’ve been—whatever sewer.”
“You’d better have her checked too.”
He hit me with the back of his hand, with his ring, as if he had been waiting to do it for a lifetime. It seemed so timed, so pent up. It was not like the other beatings, it was not sexual.
His college ring had split my lip wide open.
Senselessly I remembered what was different, remembered his always saying that I wasn’t to be hit about the face in sexual play.
“I want,” he said deliberately, also as if rehearsed, “a clean life, a domestic life. I intend to father a child. You have no further part to play.”
“Betrayer,” I screamed.
He hit me again and again, his ring cut my face and I could taste now the blood in my mouth from my lip.
“Yes,” he said, not trembling, no loss of poise at all from having struck me or from the gigantic things he was saying, “I’ve arranged for someone to take my place, here. With you.”
He laughed to himself. I couldn’t take this second announcement in, let alone his private laughter.
By the time I’d gone weeping to the bathroom, dabbing my cut lip, my bleeding face, he was gone. He’d taken only his clothes and toiletries, in the Vuitton luggage. He took no objet d’art nor any of the other memorabilia of our shared life.
I was left, bereft. A frantic dog. I slid within seconds from clutching on to his presence, even though he was withdrawing it, clutching to those final moments of him being there in the room, slid to that extraordinary emotional sickness known bluntly as rejection. Unexperienced by me
until then.
But on top of that I was bereft of what they call “shared pathology”. That buttressed security which came from him telling me how I had been chosen to lead a very special life. How I had no ordinary destiny. That my relationship was with the great and powerful, in a special way, to serve and belong to the elite. To what reality did I belong now? I was too young now to handle it. I belonged through him. He was gone.
I cried at my cut face. I thought, for the first time in years, of my sisters, my parents, and my blood became melting snow.
I took what Valium I had and turned my blood and nerves into a stream of sluggish, chemically polluted snow. I was visited later that night by the doctor, who injected me with some other drug, and so I remained for weeks.
I did not go to the wedding. I remember staring at the invitation which arrived and sensing, even as drugged as I was, that this was not an invitation to something but the closure of something. I sent them nothing, if sending something is what you are supposed to do.
I saw him once, to get him to sign something about the apartment. I came on with a drugged blankness which passed as civility, while yearning for him to put his hands on me, and he, he was buttoned up in a lawyer’s suit and wore a minute lapel badge I hadn’t seen before. The sort of badge which is supposed to communicate only to those who also belong. Maybe it was the League of Married Homosexual Statesmen.
I had no strength of self for months after he left me. I found it unappealing to “play in the streets”. I worried with a drugged resignation about the “someone” who was to take his place. No further word had been spoken about this. Still the cheques continued to arrive from his office.
Much of my time was taken with unsatisfying drinking. Never having a true desire for any particular drink, always beginning drinking by saying to myself that, although I didn’t feel like it, if I drank I would feel like it. I made plans to run away. I tried to learn Spanish, became very “Spanish”. I suppose running away to another culture. I now felt, saw, and became perplexed by “normality”, those people in the shops. It seemed, as I shopped, to be so desirable to be like them now, the drab ones. After all those years of feeling privately superior. I wanted what I imagined he now had—the tidal routine of home-life, the idea of being woven into a rope of kinship and in-laws, and talkative, amusing children. In parkas.
That’s how it all looked to me.
Of course, with his sexual ambiguity, and because he was who he was, and because he was controlled by ambition and by pledges and oaths and deals, he had had to pass over to this new life and he did it so lightly, passed so lightly from our bizarre homosexuality, with its rituals and peculiar mechanics, with its lubricants and locker-room maleness. My memories of it ached around the place—warm, wet semen, groins, soft body hair, silk underwear, the other specially made garments. Even its terror.
To outsiders—“special associates”—it had been good cuisine (done by a catering service—not by me), privately projected movies, and those strange evenings, lasting through until dawn, where everyone knew their part, untold, unasked, where not only the music, the lighting, the clothing, the behaviour, was satanic but the air seemed different and one’s breathing was all changed.
And the quieter times, when I was the beautiful boy who shared this large apartment with him and was something of a mystery. A desirable young thing who obviously did what he was told. Who was directed to flirt with those important old men and sometimes more. But it had been a workable, shared . . . home . . . with its guest bathrooms and plenty of other space, the rambling courtyard.
I retched now, yearning for the odours of those days. I sweated in a fever of withdrawal, craving the pungency of a male intimacy.
All that remained, it seemed, was dirty laundry, unopened junk mail and a plaintive note from the cleaning person about “not her job to pick up after occupants”. I waited, for the key in the door which would tell me that the replacement, if that is the word, had arrived.
I thought I was sickening and had tests.
I was sickening, but the tests could not find the sickness. I was a sick dog with no master.
Then—suddenly, unbelievably, unexpectedly, without warning, as if in answer to a prayer, like the clouds parting, the end of a bad dream, the beginning of spring—the telephone rang.
The telephone. It lets anyone into our lives at any time, it can strike so wilfully. It can be the sword; it can be the soft wings of an angel custodio.
This time it was the soft, feathered wings of an angel custodio which folded around me.
I was just leaving. I was outside the door when I heard the ringing of the phone. I took my key out and let myself back in expecting that, as always, it would stop.
It didn’t. It was he.
The first call he’d made to me since he had left for the outer world.
He began with that desultory, false conversation—how are things? living it up? did you get those forms? And then he moved on to the shared lore of our life together, moved in that direction with a forced naturalness. How’s Zonky? (the cat) and so on. Embarrassing to relate. Yes, I kept thinking, I know, I know what this is all about—but why doesn’t he just come up and screw me instead of behaving like some ordinary lover. I was filled with another perplexity, this behaviour of his, as if he had to “win” me back. He kept on, about the cars in the garages of the town houses “wetting themselves”—a reference to a joke we’d had about the oil stains on the floors of the garages. I was embarrassed by his soppiness. Say it! Say it! But no, he had to sustain this false prelude.
He suggested he might drop around and, for the first time, said, “If it’s all right.”
If it’s all right.
Oh shit, I hated him like this.
As I listened, I tried on a new feeling though. Could it be the helmet of power? After all these subordinate years? I said, in my special cocksucking voice, as soon as I felt the power, “Only if you promise to fuck me until I cry.”
Was my voice right? Did I say it right?
He cleared his throat. “You know that’s what I meant,” and I think I detected some disconsolation. Oh, I wasn’t accustomed to this.
“What about, say—five minutes from now,” I said.
He managed to laugh and said no, it would have to be later, after a meeting.
The meetings.
Oh the time I’d spent waiting for meetings to finish. As a schoolboy dozing in his car.
But making me wait was a retaking of command.
“I’ll wait,” I said, “I want to be made to wait.”
I could have tried to make him come now and skip the meeting. That would have been a test of this power. But I didn’t dare. And I didn’t want to.
The conversation ended with me quivering and wet.
“Hah, though,” I said to myself, “nevertheless,” prancing to the mirror, sighing, throwing myself on the bed, “nevertheless, now who the dog and who the master?” He needed me.
I had the usual trouble that evening filling the time until he arrived. The dreaded jigsaw. And it is unfair to a book to use it to “fill time”, I always say. Concentration is always running ahead to the time of the appointment. When he arrived I did the girlish thing of saying, “Sit down, I won’t be a minute,” and then going off to the bathroom again. Or maybe these days girls don’t do that. Only hysterically dependent boy lovers.
And then to bed. I swear I have never seen so much semen. We were supposed to go out to a late dinner. But we just didn’t make it. He poured out his whole self all over me. Dear Jesus, I could kiss you for bringing him back.
I didn’t mention The Marriage. I felt that I shouldn’t make him assert loyalty one way or the other. Yet. So I gave him joy, unconditional joy—without emotional payment. That was my tactic.
I gave him joy and he came gushing over me in a flood. And I, not too badly either. That woman must have been scaring it back inside him. It certainly rushed to greet me.
We were awash.
As I lay there under him and he began to come, I couldn’t help but register the quantity of it to myself, and I swear I rolled my eyes in pleasure. He whimpered as he let it flow out. It was nice to hear someone as important as he whimper, and to feel his involuntary clutch.
Poor man.
That wife was doing him no good.
That, though, was my last and only playing about with the idea of being Master.
I wouldn’t have done it very well anyhow.
After pouring himself over me in that starved embrace, he got up with not one word of sexual gratitude, drank scotch, poked about the refrigerator and ate half a quiche.
He didn’t say much, but looked relaxed almost to the point of torpor. It was then I experienced the most diminishing gesture I know. The gesture which spelled out the new contract.
He looked at his watch.
But you must realise that, because he’d said nothing, and I’d asked no questions, and because he had obviously wanted to have me so badly, I had at this point a fantasy that he had come back to me. Come back to live with me. Maybe he had, by using the old intimacy, moving about in it the way it had been, using the language of our domesticity, maybe he had let me have this fantasy to, say, get my total participation. Or to be able to strike it down cruelly.
But. As soon as he looked at his watch I knew where I was. I knew that a dreadful new lock had closed on me.
The looking-at-the-watch gesture said, “I have demands on me above and beyond you.” The eating from the refrigerator said, “I have the run of the place again.” The way he sat in the armchair now and looked at me said, “I have reclaimed you, but in a different way.” The way he had used me, tortured me, in the bed said, “I am still this to you.”
The Everlasting Secret Family Page 16
