Yes. It was the gaping hole of death that I saw. The way death leaves staring, unwanted spaces in our lives. It is a penalty. It places people out of consultation or touch. They continue in your head but that is not enough, is, in fact, a reminder of the penalty.
I hadn’t had much experience with death. It was a new insecurity, this realisation that the protective circle of people around us will go, one by one. And death itself, the experience of dying, must be a bad experience too, the whole self resists it, avoids it, we must sense something about the passing through to that other state.
You seemed to want the kiss. I was hungering for it. It’s odd that our physical life should have gone on for years without kissing. Or maybe you kissed me when I was a boy at school, during those early days. But then the kissing must have ceased, until that night, the night of P’s death. I kissed you and I wanted to do it always and not to stop.
But it was a members’ party or whatever, and there were key people at the party. So it had to stop. But to your credit you did not shy. I was conscious immediately afterwards that I should not have. Although there was one person especially at the party I would have been glad to have see us. To cancel at last that shy curiosity. Of course I would have loved, too, to have declared us to them all. But there was to be no coming out for you. You knew it was the wrong historical time.
But I would have liked them to have all known and I would have liked to have declared those too who were part of our private circle from the Camden scene. It wasn’t as if they were prejudiced or that they didn’t know such things occurred even in their own ranks, but they did not want their category ruffled. They wanted no meddling with the well-secured boundaries of behaviour, expectation and conversation. As young A so nicely put it, no one in that crowd will accept his homosexuality when he declares it, not even his own father, they will simply say he’s into “liberated chic” or that he’s being deliberately “sensational”.
But I suppose, at least, they have categories and that’s one way of keeping things endurable. I prefer that in a way. I heard someone say the other day they don’t believe in “homosexuality” or “heterosexuality”, only in “sexuality”. They want to deny the categories. Establish a broad, false harmony. They don’t accept that there just might be natural hostilities, incompatibilities, inherent enmities in the human condition, in the sexual roles, in their many devious forms. They are the sort of people who hate categories because they do not wish to be excluded from anything that’s going. They fear exclusion as a form of rejection, I suppose.
Yes, P taught me this. Yes, P taught me lots of things. Yes, yes, and you too, you taught me too.
I felt the bristles of your growth that night and they belonged so much with the sensation. Were part of the imprint of it.
Maybe also it was my try at breaking the dumbness about us which had overtaken you after those voluble first years. Those words you wrote in letters about “my role” and “my reality”. Before there were so many books, so many new sexual experts. As you have said, the lessons and the knowledge hadn’t been lost to the tribe, it was in the hands of those who deserved to possess the lessons and the knowledge. But then you lapsed into dumbness, a refusal to express, or connect, except physically. Was this a lesson?
But why did I think that kissing would break this dumbness? After all, kissing is another, but different, way of using the mouth, and precludes talking. Was your dumbness a way of avoiding verbal treason against your marriage? But you must have faced the disparity of your behaviour at the marriage ceremony.
You are hardly as true as steel and as straight as an arrow. You and your talk about political candour. I remember hearing you on some ABC program and getting the giggles. I suppose you say that once again it illustrates the indigestible fact—that truth is divisible. That being frank in one place and not in another is everyday human conduct. That people can be corrupt in one area of behaviour and not in another.
Yes, I know, you taught me all this a long time ago.
Did you know about P? P, nicotine-stained, decayed teeth, shingles, dirty ears. He desired me too, and I let him have me. I was very young and unsure. I knew I was supposed to go only with people you told me to go with. Maybe I knew P was not one of those. I suppose it was partly because he was famous (more famous than you at that time). I remember also him saying in a leering way that he was a “behaviourist’’ and believed that he could have anything from anyone by offering the appropriate threat, or the appropriate and sufficient inducement, or the appropriate verbal formula. I remember being immobilised by revulsion when he made it clear that he wanted me. Mesmerised by it. And then actually going into his arms, saying no at the same time that I began to undress, going naked and shivering into his arms, giving him my young body. It was in a judge’s chambers and I remember some files and I remember thinking that I was being “defiled”. And it was true. I felt defiled. And it became a delicious feeling.
You have made me feel abused, ravaged, and many other things. But it needed a sick, ugly and brutal old man to give me the sense of being lovingly defiled. I was young, in fettle and P was so debilitated. He knew what he wanted to do with me. Everyone you sent to me seemed to have some strange thing they wanted me to do to them, or they wanted to do to me. Their own act. Straps, pain, what-have-you. It sometimes took me days to recover and I had to go on with school as well. P had no trouble with erection, as sick as he was.
You probably fucked me later that night. Oh I forget where you were. Probably some Important Meeting. Or “in with the PM”. Those hours that I spent dozing in your car after school while you were addressing something. All the pool drivers knew me.
You probably fucked me that night on his sperm. A fantasy you know I love, the thought of which you cannot abide. Especially the idea of P’s probably infected sperm. He tried on other occasions. I said no—because of us. There, isn’t that unbelievable fidelity? I was scared about saying no because he did have power in the land. Didn’t he? I mean, I didn’t know what would happen to me with people like him if I said no. I prayed that you could protect me. But the rotten thing was that I liked talking to him, and he taught me so much, and I hated to say no to him. I would relieve him but I wouldn’t do the things he wanted. My head was full of chilling stories told to me by those boys at Camden. Probably just to scare me. I kept the act with P quite separate from our reality. I mean in my mind. Oh for all his intellect, public standing, public “integrity”, he tried to blackmail me one way or another into doing things with him again. I had to say no, too, because I knew that there were only so many times that a young body could do what he wanted me to do.
How sentimental I am really deep down. Or was. But there—now the two things have joined—P now belongs to the same memory group as our “reality”, see, confession can do things to the pre-existing reality—P belongs now with our shared reality, tied with the same blue memory ribbon. Maybe you would prefer not to have had the gift of that confession?
But you were supposed to know everything. You had me followed at other times. Or was I above suspicion then? Too naive and young to be capable of deception? Or did you know, did you engineer it?
I think that when I kissed you that night of his death, I kissed P too, kissed the corpse with its rotting teeth goodbye.
It was only once with P, or twice or so.
My need for solace the night of his death was so crying a need because of the space he left in my life, not as lover but as tutor. We left the party and you had me and used me so hastily, rushing off then to meet the curfew of your marriage and you left a second space in my grasping, sad, needful consciousness, you left me doubly deserted and assailed—by death and by marriage.
After you came pumping into me and then within minutes pulled on your trousers, leaving me panting on the bed in a mess, I went looking for something more, for something that would complete the solace I sought. It was far too late. But whisky and lust—neither can tell the time.
Maybe I was
trying to crowd bodies into the space left by P’s death.
I found no one in the lavatories of the city and that was strange because there had on every other night, no matter what time, been someone hunting in the lavatories. But not on the night of P’s death—as if by ordinance, they had been cleared.
Finally I had to telephone a woman I knew (you don’t know her—and you won’t) and ask her if I could come over to her place to stay for the night. She was fond and wanting to please and knew about me and felt therefore no threat from me. What I think she liked was someone unheterosexual to hold on to in the night, and she liked gossip about people in high places (I never told her serious gossip).
We would caress for the comfort of it and then I would go down to her anus. The absolute self-abasement of it, and the unlocked relief that self-abasement gives. By showing another person that you will do those things which the culture abhors, to behave with another person in a way that is repugnant to cultural conditioning, its hygiene, and to self-image. Bringing together those two parts of the body—mouth and anus—which are by nature so closely related in function and yet in our culture severed, separated. The organ that sings in oratorio and the organ that cannot be politely heard. By kneeling before this common woman in this act of submission, lying with my face in her anus, I lost all identity—the body who went to concerts, pottery on Thursdays, who knew so many people—those things all fell away and I went spinning, falling outside culture and outside sex into that other world. Most of all, I lost homosexual identity.
Lying there on the bed she would lift her dress, smile at me, pull down her pants, turn her arse to me and open her legs. For all I know, she probably smoked while I died there. I would put my tongue there, bury myself in her buttocks, buying myself in the smell of earth, body function and waste that had no gender.
On rare occasions, including this night, she would cause her anus to give, stimulate it to release, and I would convulse, shuddering, smeared, and die as a person and find myself, alive in another state.
It was there, in the arse of this woman who meant nothing to me, that I found release that night.
I went home and back to bed, falling asleep with sperm and excreta odours about me. I again woke, hours after, and P’s death was a day or so back. I woke and tasted the night.
I was able to go calmly about, sending an expensive gift to the woman, doing the other things that make my day. All this after a night of being enveloped, smudged and stained, and hurt by sexuality. I found solace in the overpowering infliction of it upon my consciousness. I had kissed your mouth and so kissed the corpse goodbye, and I still had your sperm dribbling from my anus. And I had knelt before this woman and buried myself in the excrement of her anus.
I felt an exaggerated aliveness. I had no hangover, and I had things to do. I showered, had a glass of milk, a mango, and stepped out into the world.
A friend had died and gone and I said to myself, a friend has died and gone. And I read the papers flicking through to the obituaries of P, “. . . a key figure in the extra-parliamentary life of the fifties . . . significant contribution to the constitutional history of this country . . .”, while at the same time I enjoyed the sore aliveness of my arse. My mind trailed in and out of the news of the day, and back and over the sensations of the night. It gave me a sharp, sunny affirmation that I was living and doing, and that I could go down the dark tunnels of sexuality with or without you, and I could forget for a while that P was dead and you were married.
IV.
A MAP FOR THE CHILD
This is a map for the child. I think the map is probably educationally disreputable.
“He likes those things. Brontosauruses.’’
Not one word to show he understands our emotional complicity in the child. No registration of what the giving of the map to the child means.
It shows the boundaries of the world, false boundaries, it’s even wrong for its time, it’s an imaginative reconstruction of an old map, it is art, not navigation.
“It is unlikely that he will use it for navigation.”
Yet once, just once, but obviously from premeditation, you touched me, while we were walking the child between us, you had had it left with you unexpectedly, you touched me and said, “The first child is ours—I think of him, I think of him as belonging to The Family.”
Take the map.
Take my heart, my blood, my sensory system—you’ve owned them,, depraved them—give them to the child as well.
“Now stop that.”
I have never complained about that—about what you did with my body. It’s my placing, my status, in your life that I can’t accept, now.
You have never asked me to do this, to wear her clothes. Is this a way of humiliating her and me at the same time? I don’t mind that you lie back there, that you wait for me to undress you and to stimulate you, which is all too easy. But now that I have understood my role, and come to be good at it, you change everything. You want me to put on her things. It was never like this before.
“No.”
Was I gathering an identity, is that it? Do you wish to take that away? I’d rather be called a “predilection”, as you once did. I know that after all these years you say that you are not homosexual, that that is not what it is all about, you say. You live not only against yourself but against the temper of the times. You should be in the Gay Cause. Here look—on the map—it says, “The Course of the Great Wind Currents.”
“Fix that eyelash.”
I suppose you would simply repeat that politics and power have always been intuitive arts for those few special people who are able to use the mechanisms of power, whatever they may be, in whatever system, at whatever historical time. The trick, you would say, is always to belong to the pre-eminent elite. Did I get it right?
Don’t be angry with me. But use me for what I am. A male. I give you my young body. I give you imaginative love. But not this.
“Yes.”
Oh God, her clothing fits me. We must be the same size, even this corselet.
“I want you to welcome this.”
But you took me as a child—a boy—because I was male. But I can’t argue against you. But I could draw another map for the child, of strange routes “outside the walled cities and cultivated lands”. Where you took me.
I was an innocent boy when you so skilfully turned me into a moaning, weeping, naked boy on a hotel room floor.
“Innocent?”
All right, there is no such thing as innocence, but I was uninitiated. How did you find me? Why did you come that day to the school?
You just smile. All right, so on that day on the floor of a hotel I was given the truth about myself and I embraced it. But how did you choose me? Who were those men who pointed me out?
I wanted her to die in hospital. I would have lived with you and we could have raised the children together. Yes, I knew she had been ill. Oh the savage, regal fantasies of the subjugated.
Even hustlers get their important lovers to make commitments.
“Where do you get this nonsense?’’
I sometimes hate the bizarreness of my life. Did you know that? You have made the bizarre my normality, but sometimes I try to imagine the other life. I sometimes crave in-laws, outings, and lawns. Isn’t that real life? Instead I stand here in her slip and her stockings.
“Mmmmm.”
But no, I complain about the way things have changed. Me standing here dressed like this. But not only that. We were different at those lunches. I was once the sexy boy and always needed, to be fondled and so on, by your important friends, able to sit about without talking and then tell you everything that was said in your absence. It’s not like that any more.
But you’re not getting joy any other way, I can tell. You’re not getting it from her—I can tell that. I’m the only one who can give it to you.
“The makeup is good.”
The map makes a good joke. “Trade route,” it says, that’s what my life has been.
And the map says, “Parts Yet Undiscovered.”
We’ll see. Is something still to come?
“Turn around, twirl around.”
What will you tell her, for instance, about the map? That you found it in the street? That you got it from a wandering cartographer? Or that it was I who sent it as a weird present for the child. Dangerous for navigation. Does she know about me? Did she select the clothing, the underwear for me to wear?
“You’re hypertense.”
I’m hysterical.
“You need the doctor.”
No. Listen to me. Please. No, listen to me. Please come away from the telephone.
“Perhaps you need to be sent away for a time.”
No. I hate it up there.
“Put on the gown now.”
I have my own friends you know. People you don’t know. You claim to know everything I do and everyone I see. But you don’t. I have people here. I have to put your photograph in the drawer for fear that some stickybeak will seize it and say, “Why, you never told us . . .” or “Is he really . . .?”
“Turn around. I’ll do the zip.”
You are frightened that the words you might say would turn into silken ropes and bind your hands and tie you to my bed. You know that the feelings which move inside you, if once articulated, would become contracts which you’d be forced to honour.
“Now put on the shoes.”
The Everlasting Secret Family Page 18
