The Everlasting Secret Family

by Frank Moorhouse

You don’t try to present yourself any more. I mean with your clothing, your appearance. You don’t watch your weight. Does she really want you to dress like that? Obviously you don’t care a damn. Is it because you have a safe seat? Or does it give you a Plain Man image for the public? No frills. No foppery.

  “Mmmmm.”

  Mmmmm.

  “Fix that eyelash.”

  Does she really buy those underpants for you? They’re so cheap. Do you know what she’s doing? She’s killing you as a sensual being.

  “Don’t prattle.”

  Why don’t you take me on those trips? You have always promised. Are you frightened that I will kiss you behind the ear in public? I’m not like that now. I can converse. I read. Why don’t you let me meet people now?

  “You met President Johnson.”

  Yes, and he let his hand rest overlong on my shoulder. “And he wrote to you.”

  Don’t tease me. Yes, he wrote me a letter.

  “Maybe one day we will go to live in the Greek islands.” I don’t want to go to the Greek islands to live. I don’t want to go to the Greek islands. That’s not what I’m saying. There is another map—that is not the only “place to go”. I love this country. I’m more committed to this country than you, the professional patriot. I’m the one who cries at patriotic songs.

  “You are a silly boy.”

  I am not a “silly boy”. I am not a silly boy. I am your male love. A male lover who does not any longer know what is happening to him or where he is. I know I can’t leave you or do anything else with my life because of what I know about you and the rest. But nor do I want to. I want you. What are you now? Forty-seven? Overweight, balding. I want you to give our life emotional shape, size, status.

  “You are hysterical. You have overstepped.”

  Never have you thought to ask me if I was feeling well, whether I could have sex. You just come here and the next thing, without more than a grunt, you are panting, crying, holding me in desperation. But you grant me nothing.

  “The doctor will be here soon.”

  So the doctor will obliterate my mind, put me in a daze for weeks. Oh I know too what “soon” means. It means that I’m wasting time and you haven’t had your sex yet. All right then, I’ll lift up these skirts and petticoats, and you can gaze at her stockings, her suspenders, my legs—better shaped than hers, and just as hairless too. Have your sex. Imagine whatever it is that you want. It’s yours. You own it. There. I’ll hold up these skirts, pull down those feminine panties—take me.

  And bending over I let him take me. He stood there behind me, the skirt falling down over my head. My beloved. I am that too. I am too a surrogate, as well as a boy, yes I am that too. And he was right, I wanted to be overlapped with someone else’s identity—her identity. It was not only a humiliation but a victory. I could be her as well. As he entered up my body, dressed there in her clothes, I knew, it was revealed to me. I had lost another part of “myself” and I was filled with joy. He made me feel true. He made me right with the world again.

  I whimpered and tears came to my eyes.

  Oh yes, and yes give the child the mariner’s map. I hope it misleads him in the correct direction. I hope he realises that for some strange reason it is the wrong maps which are beautiful.

  “Here is the doctor.”

  He pulled out of me and, doing himself up, went to the door. He turned and said to me, “No don’t undress, stay that way.”

  They stood at the door together looking at me, still bending over, anus exposed. The skirts pulled up and the woman’s pants pulled down to expose my proffered self. The doctor made a gesture, a raised eyebrow, a request by gesture, and received the reply, “Sure, go ahead.” The doctor put down his bag, took off his coat, and came towards me undoing his fly.

  V.

  THE GIFT OF A SON

  It’s his birthday, isn’t it?

  “I thought you would remember.”

  He’s thirteen, isn’t he?

  “Yes.”

  We will give him a treat, and then bring him back here.

  “That’s correct.”

  I’ll make him something, his favourite dish.

  “I want everything done correctly.”

  Of course it will be done correctly. You said once that he was our child.

  “Did I?”

  And that now we would come together. The three of us.

  “In the long run it has very little to do with you. But I want this thing done correctly.”

  And he came. What is your favourite . . . is the school food just as . . . and which sport do . . . and when you leave?

  And I prepared him a treat.

  “I feel sort of good,” he said, giggling and lolling back on the meridienne after his treat.

  I went with his father to the other room.

  Out of sight of the boy he grabbed my wrist. “I want this done correctly.”

  It will be. And I looked at him, and I said, just as you did it to me when I was a boy.

  “I’m not interested in you.”

  I told him that I would pleasure the boy, and that the boy would thank me for it, for having taken him over the dreadful chasm.

  He was a divided person, savouring the situation and exercising his parental responsibility at the same time.

  I told him to wait, feeling my control, however slight, of this part of the situation.

  I left him and went to the boy. Now to open the gate.

  I was the medium for them both. It could only be me. This was my moment. My moment.

  The boy was lying back blissfully on the meridienne, a lazy smile on his face.

  I sat down with him, moving his body over a little, sitting against his thigh.

  Feel nice?

  “Yes . . . oh yes.”

  I’m going to make you feel nicer.

  “I know.”

  How do you know?

  “I just sort of know.”

  You want me to do it, don’t you?

  “Yes, I suppose so . . .”

  What am I doing to you? I asked him.

  “I don’t know, but . . .

  The drug was making him verbally lazy.

  He smiled up at me, saying do it, do it, his boyish lips mouthing the words.

  I took off his shoes and socks. I undid his belt.

  This will make you comfortable.

  He lifted his backside for me to take off his trousers. Has someone else done this to you? I had not considered that. Anxiety clutched my breathing.

  “I feel sort of weak but nice . . . I can hardly bother to move.”

  Has someone else done this to you? I tried to keep the urgency from my voice.

  “No . . . just at school.”

  What? What happened?

  I tried not to lose him by sounding like a school authority.

  “Just sort of played around. Nothing.”

  And with yourself?

  “No.”

  He smiled.

  Was he lying?

  But you know what I’m talking about and what I’m doing to you.

  “Sort of,” he smiled—teasingly?

  Was he already a lying virgin-pretender? A tease?

  I took off his trousers and cotton underpants. All with his name sewn in.

  And then his shirt.

  He was languidly co-operative.

  It’s good for this to be done to you.

  “Yes. I like you. I’m glad it’s you.”

  There was a genuineness in this. He was a virgin.

  I knew how he felt now, tingling with the wanting. The wanting of the touch which would dissolve him. I let his body lie there, untouched for those trembling seconds or more, with him looking up at me wanting—the wanting of the touch which, if it did not come, would drive him into a craze.

  His body was splendid, in the way that thirteen year olds are—an age where there can be no real defect. Physique just smoothes it away—the whole man was there, and the whole boy, and the female, all in
superimposition.

  The wispy hairs around his crutch were the only hairs on his body, apart from the light blond hair of childhood, so gracefully hermaphrodite.

  He took my hand then, could wait no longer, and took my hand and placed it on his penis, and gasped, quietly, with relief.

  I gave it a touch of acceptance as it erected, rigid quivering, and then I took my hand away.

  I bent down, pausing though, my mouth just above his penis. I looked at his face, his eyes closed, his breathing broken and reckless.

  He opened his eyes pleadingly.

  “Please.”

  Oh, yes, I knew that “please”. Behind that “please” lay the offer of anything he could give.

  I held his eyes, still not giving him the release he begged, receiving from him the begging gaze, seeing the fear that it might not happen which dances along with all totalisation.

  I closed my mouth around his penis and he murmured loudly, “Oh yes—yes.”

  My hand went under him.

  His whole body, his anus, opened like a flower, as I put my finger there, an eager yielding.

  “But . . .?” Again a question he had to ask did not complete and which contained no true concern, and which drifted away.

  He knows, I whispered.

  “I don’t care, really,” he smiled up, opening his eyes, conspiratorially, carelessly. “I like you. I like you touching me. I knew you would—it was in your eyes. I want you to do everything.”

  I know you do.

  “I like your finger in there.”

  Yes, he liked everything.

  He sat up, lifted my head from off his penis, taking the initiative, and, holding my head, he kissed me in that dreamily drugged way, his young saliva running to my mouth like juice from a crushed fruit.

  “You get undressed too,” he murmured.

  I did.

  We lay there on the day bed and then tumbled off, rolling about on the carpeted floor, embracing, our mouths locked in an endless kiss. I loved him in two ways, at least—as my child, and as an object of beauty—and he probably loved me two ways, at least—as an adult with whom nothing was forbidden and everything granted, his first adult of that kind, and he probably loved me as a simple instrument of his excitement. But I loved him another way, as the linkage, something I had not dreamed of until recently, when the dream had become a plan and I had realised that it was all part of a huge eternal program. But now it did not seem like a dream or plan, but presented itself as an inevitability. Oh yes. I sighed with the clear sudden realisation. It was an eternal inevitability.

  The drug peeled him of everything and he was a physical young animal of pure feeling. The drug had put back into his blood that which a lost society had taken out. He now knew no maths, no morals, no geography, no manners, no propriety. The ultimate state of being.

  I tried to slow him down but he could not wait, and I held his penis tightly as he poured himself out on me with great gasps and sighing, and I felt the outbursting too through the lining of his anus. Thirteen solid throbs of his penis, spilling and spilling.

  Opening my eyes I saw his father’s face from the other room. He was beyond parental apprehension now, he was the enthralled voyeur observing not only the erotic display but the loss of his own centrality in two lives—his repositioning in our lives and its endless dark possibilities. The exploding enlargement of his parenthood.

  The boy was crying with the relief which comes from the only liberation.

  “What happened to me?” he asked dreamily. “I’m all wet,” and then giggled. “Oh I think I must have fainted or something, oh I’ve never felt like this. This is, this is—heaven.”

  You’ve been relaxed with something. I put something in the drink, I said, as a birthday treat.

  Yes, he was right, I too felt like I had fainted. I had passed momentarily across to that special state of consciousness and back again. That orgasmic state, oblivion.

  “We’ll do it again? Can we do it again soon?”

  Yes. I’d like you to come to visit me again. Soon.

  He went to sleep in my arms. I disentangled myself, wiped him, and put a blanket over him, there on the lounge floor sleeping with a beatific smile.

  I could not but help consciously acquainting myself with the fact that I had a father and a son now as lovers. I couldn’t help enjoying the cheap novelty of it. But it pays to take whatever pleasures you can get your hands on, however trinkety. But there was another feeling less trinkety, a background feeling in my mind—I had a new security, a new place in the arrangement of things.

  His father came into the room.

  I told him that his son had loved every moment of it.

  “I saw that.”

  He poured himself a fresh drink.

  The cheap novelty of it disappeared and I was rivetted by a realisation of yet a third implication. I was joined to a line though history which went back to the first primitive tribal person who went my way, who took a virgin boy lover, and every boy who became a man and took, in due turn, a boy lover, through to Socrates. I had played a part now in the continuation of that chain. I had played my first part as a child in becoming a man’s lover. I had now played my second part. I now belonged fully in that historical line. It was a way of passing on and preserving the special reality, a way of giving new life, the birth for the boy of a new reality, a joining of him to a secret family, the other family. To belong to that chain is to belong to another life.

  I went to him, promising him by words and physically that I would not use the boy against him, and thanking him. That we all belonged together now.

  When the boy awoke he stretched and smiled directly at me, he looked as his father. His father told him to dress. He dressed slowly and I saw a beginning of haughtiness in the lazy way that he dressed there and the brazen acceptance of his father’s presence. He showed no hint of shame.

  He seemed, too, to have a consciousness of his relation to me and his father’s relation to me and this I supposed relieved him of fear of his father, maybe this was his dawning in that way too, yet another new power acceded to him that day. He did something which suggested that he had realised something about his power over us. His new self. He dressed before the bedroom full-length mirror where we could watch him, and he at the same time watched himself. He touched his body with his hands, oh that body, as though feeling himself as a body for the first time, and he did so admiringly. He held his own penis for a moment, bringing it to half erection, and then, smiling at us, he tucked it into his underpants. The other thing was the way he brushed his hair, using two hand brushes, showing a new care, and he then came over to us, kissed me on the cheek and whispered, “Thank you,” and then he kissed his father. His father looked down at his drink as he received that rare, that most preternatural kiss from lips that would never again kiss innocently.

  “We must go now,” his father said.

  There was now in the boy’s walk and movement a lascivious confidence and that also was in his kiss.

  Again at the door he took my hand and said, “This was the best birthday ever. May I arrange to see you again—soon?” And he leaned gently against me.

  Oh yes, we’ll do things together, oh yes.

  “Come on now,” his father said, looking at his watch, “I have a meeting.”

  It was his son’s birthday but I had received the gift.

  And now we were a family of a special kind with a long, long history.

  VI.

  THE WAND AND THE CUP

  (AND THE MAGICIAN)

  He is fourteen now, with some soft facial hair, perhaps he would be shaving were it not for the oestrogen which he chooses to take, has long, groomed hair of the fashion now passing, which his mother and sister praise and brush.

  “I dreamed of my mother, but she had no breasts.”

  You are your mother—with no breasts.

  “Yes, I have the female thing—my father shouts at me and makes me cry.”

  But he is ru
gged in the Australian private-school way, although at the window of his face a dandy—and sometimes a lady—appear now and then. He is not yet dressing true to himself. He is limited to school clothing and that boring denim of the weekend.

  He loves eating in good restaurants even now. He doesn’t, like some of the young, repudiate all these things because of some voluntary poverty principle or food fadism.

  “What is vol-au-vent?” he asked with a slightly reluctant innocence, but at least he asked. He risked his ignorance with me when the pressure is, at his age, always to pretend to knowledge. I smiled over at him, acknowledging the honour he paid me, the honour of being asked, of showing his ingenuousness.

  I do not touch him there in the restaurant for fear my hands, once having touched his breathing body, would singe, burn, melt, perhaps weld to him.

  I tell him what vol-au-vent is.

  “Yes, I do know, I’d forgotten.”

  I had so wanted someone like him in my life, so wanted to venture into my second part, and—whether by manipulating myself into liking him as a way to achieving that preternatural irony, or whether from spontaneous affection, or whether by being myself manipulated in other people’s plans—it had happened.

  Maybe I wanted him to break my heart and then, years hence, I could play with his heart and body when he found he needed me again and, returning to me in desperate dependency, would need that which he, now and for a couple of years, would use so lightly and thoughtlessly.

  I had travelled that route. My first man, his father, I had frustrated to anger and violence in the first years. Submitted with feigned indifference. Refused to show pleasure. Forced him to use pain and narcotics. And now he used me like a goldfish in a glass tank, taken out when he wanted to hold a twisting, pulsing life, but for the most time left to swim restlessly, to look out at him, screamingly, yet unattended. To yearn for his presence over his photograph in newspapers.

  I tried to introduce R, there in the restaurant, to the Sauternes experience—where the sweetness of the dessert makes the Sauternes taste dry. It didn’t happen. I don’t know why. The Sauternes not chilled enough?

  “Doesn’t taste dry,” he said, curious.

  How to impress someone so impressive. The young and beautiful are so impressive within the limit of their years.