The Everlasting Secret Family

by Frank Moorhouse

  They work their enthralment with so little.

  Maybe it is easier when you have so little to work with, I can’t remember, it is all fresh stuff then, and they can give it such detailed attention and zest.

  When older, we have much life material but have to walk the line between impressing and intimidating.

  Oh, I had been in his place. Sitting youthfully, hands dangling so lithe. No matter how sloppy or unkempt, the gleam of youth turned it all to adornment.

  Oh, I had known the feeling of mild, instinctively understood pleasure which comes from realising that the man is having difficulty taking his eyes from you. I saw that R realised there in the restaurant just how enthralled I was. Since that first day, his birthday, he had been swimming towards a calculation of his power over me.

  I had known it all, known the fondling in the way a man had looked and talked with me.

  I had known it without qualm at all, unconcerned that men were spending money on me. Buying me. And, later, as the hold over men became conscious, I began demanding gifts, without shame, and exercising all privileges, exploiting by subtle test and sexual instinct the furthest limits of indulgence and demand in the power-sex entente.

  I, those years before, after uncertainly submitting to his father, after being coaxed and cajoled into a way of living about which I hadn’t an inkling, had sensed after a while the beginnings of personal power, but it was power without program, exploited only in the most trivial material ways, and which resulted, later, in my being exposed to a reversal of power, when I had to accept the indignity and hurt of being kept by a man and ignored by him for long periods.

  I had known the time when, stripped, my body would not be in my consciousness at all, but very much in his. There was nothing then about my body for me to consider—apart from realising that naked I was sitting on my hands, like a child, and his suggestion that I not do that, and then being self-conscious about my hands, blushing, dying.

  In those days, I had to just undress and there it would be, the physical perfection, the shading of hair on my legs and buttocks, my breathing faster, my penis rising to erection—the boy homosexual.

  And my moment of self-truth. That strange day when, after a sports carnival at school, I had noticed his father with two other men. I had looked across and realised they were watching me. I had met his eyes and blushed. Whatever recognition had caused the blush passed too quickly across the mind to be caught or remembered. One of the men came across, crouched down where I was flopped, and talked to me, had known my name. I kept looking over his shoulder at the person who was to become my lover, my protector. He stayed at a distance impatiently. They seemed anyhow to know something about me, and the questioning seemed, looking back, merely a formality. It was as if they had looked into my heart or my psychology while I slept and already seen that I was ready to learn about myself. When, a week later, a note arrived excusing me from school I knew in a wild guess that it was he, it was the next step. The waiting car on that first day, as I straggled out with my things, was driven by a chauffeur. I was breathing dreadfully fast and, although my mind wouldn’t let me say it, I did know why we were going to the hotel and why I had to go to that room number and who would be there.

  He was not “good looking” but I cannot ever recall thinking in those terms. Maybe I already knew that there in the heat, the bodies, the conformity to ideals of beauty does not matter, that beauty is a matter for conversation and aesthetics not for sexuality. All bodies are charged with passion. I know that.

  But oh, it wasn’t long after the first certain detached submission of myself, with all its implicit self-pride, that I found my penis reared and ached to be touched by him and my anus went loose and pulsated ever so slightly at the thought of his penis. For a time sexual instinct told me to hide this need but there then came the time to reveal the dependency, to go down on my knees and beg for him to fuck me. The passing from detachment, to pretended detachment, and then to moaning submission.

  He wanted to shoot the rifle when we were on the property, after his father had gone back to the city for a conference. I said all right. We put up the targets and shot for three-target, five-shot aggregate. He shot better than I—122 to 116.

  I then loaded the rifle and looked at the trees. I saw a blue wren. I shot the wren out of the tree. Bright blue cap, black eyes, blue scarf, pert tail.

  He gave a small wince.

  There, you shoot one. I said to him, smiling.

  He was perturbed but felt it was probably weak to show it.

  “But why, why shoot them?” he said, as if there might be a reason.

  To show you can strike against nature without reason, by pure human will, just to show yourself that you can.

  He aimed and then lowered the rifle. “No, I can’t,” he said, unsettled by a feeling that perhaps this was something he should be able to do, yet obeying the call of gentleness.

  I smiled, put a hand on him, and said that it didn’t matter. But, I thought, it does matter as a test of personality, to see if that hardness had come yet, whether he could do the thing that had no “sense”. Which calls and instructions did his personality still obey? I took his face in my hand and kissed him as the sun set across the eucalyptus. Never mind, I said. It marked him off, I thought, marked him off from me. Gentle boy.

  When had I passed that point of hardness? Had his father forced me to? I remembered no single test.

  Then, as I was getting the ammunition into the shoulder bag, picking up the spent shells, he pointed the rifle at a magpie and shot it dead.

  Well, I said, you can do it. It was I who was now perturbed.

  He walked over, picked up the dead bird, looked at its limp neck, circle-eyes, and then dropped it.

  “I’ve never done that before.”

  Every bird has its mate, you know, somewhere up there in the trees, watching you.

  “Oh shut up.”

  It doesn’t prove anything—except that you can do the senseless thing, I said, trying to ease him, if he in fact needed his conscience eased. It doesn’t mean you’re cruel.

  “Shut up. Don’t talk about it!” he said, and pointed the rifle at me.

  Oh yes. He could do that some time if not now, or even maybe now. And the afternoon chilled more than its wintery self as I looked at his wilful face and the finger around the trigger of his rifle. Knowing that, being who he was, and at his age, he could get away with it. Oh yes. And I didn’t care.

  I told him, anyhow, not lo point firearms.

  He said he would if he wanted to, and anyhow the rules didn’t apply to him any more.

  Now I was sure he could pull the trigger. I didn’t care much for the knowledge as we walked back across the paddocks. I resented him for having so quickly equalised our situation. Instead of me regaining through him a lost, softer self, he was becoming me. Surpassing me. I could do without another me.

  There was an earlier condition, before sham indifference to sexual submission. There was the first excited curious pleasure when I did not know what was happening. He had passed from that. He had a long distance to go before he came to the fourth phase, the exquisite pleasures of the induction of a young person together with mellow appreciation of one’s state.

  Mellow appreciation—when did one reach that!

  I told him to wash his hands. I told him that birds are filthy with vermin. Even the beautiful ones.

  He asked about promiscuity. He had urgings towards “the crumbiest people”. He said that his father wanted him to go only with me. I wanted him, I said, to go only with me. Reluctantly and with an uncharacteristic allegiance to truth above self-interest, I told him about the instinctive requirement of the special reality in which he now lived, the need to be promiscuous while with me. To give himself to the streets. To dirty men, to men who smelled, to mean men, to the lowest, in streets, trains, lavatories. It was life’s compensation to them, the miserable, those denied so much of what life had. To be given, when they expected nothing
from life—nothing—to be given a superb young boy, a beautiful body for their pleasure in those passing moments of the night. For the boy who was to have everything in life the obligation of nature was for him to give himself to those lost in the night streets. It was, I told him, not only an age-old equation, obligation of office, but also one of the high pleasures of depravity. He would therefore have urgings, he the angel of a boy, to go with old men in suburban railway lavatories. I told him how, when I was his age, they’d tried to stop this happening, to break the age-old urgings and duties by some crude therapy, but they couldn’t tear out of me the sense that this was right. That it was part of the morality of our special condition.

  He nodded. But I do not think that he yet grasped the theology of it—only the earliest visceral urgings.

  I took the tarot pack there on the last evening of winter, in the room lit only by the yellow and blue of the open fire.

  The glow of the open fire lifted his face, lit it from the jaw as we sat on the floor.

  I took the pack and squared it, and then let it drop a few inches to the carpet. The pack divided perfectly.

  Take it, I said, take that card—it must be our card. The pack says so.

  He lifted it and turned it over. It was, of course, The

  Lovers.

  He looked over at me and smiled out at me, beamed there in the yellow and blue glow.

  Now for your card, I see you as a wand, I said. Perhaps The Page of Wands.

  I did a shuffle and had him take the top card. This is your card, I said, whatever it is, whatever the pack tells us.

  It was—The Page of Wands.

  “Hey!” he said, grinning, “that’s spooky.”

  Oh R, you are my wand. My page.

  And I the receptacle.

  I took the next card, saying that it would be my card. I am, I told him, his receptacle. I had him turn the card.

  It was the Page of Cups.

  I am the cup, the receptacle.

  I didn’t need to tell him the story of the cards.

  He shook his head. “I can read those cards,” he said.

  He looked at the Page of Cups and said, “He’s just a little older than the Page of Wands.”

  I took his hand, we are the lovers, you the wand and I the cup.

  His lips jumped across the inches between us, like a spark.

  We kissed, long and moist, we caressed, hands rushing to each other’s body under our clothes.

  Then, naked, sitting opposite each other, legs around each other, in the warmth of the fire, I told him that the cards forbade him to be anyone’s boy but mine. He nodded with tears in his eyes, and a lie in his heart. I leaned down on to him, took his penis in my mouth, as I had his father’s penis so many, many times, and found it, likewise, eager to give up to me. He filled my mouth. I had from it a sweeter sensation than from any other that had flowed into me. He moaned to the beat of my bursting heart.

  Later, over tea, I told him that I had salted the cards and done an overhand shuffle. Old conjurers’ tricks.

  “You didn’t!” he cried, affronted, hurt.

  No, of course I didn’t, I said to him quickly, touching him to reassure—frightened by how deeply cut he was by the idea of it. His tantalising gullibility. No, I said, not with the tarot pack, one must never do conjurers’ tricks with a tarot pack. The tarot pack tells it as it is, I said. It was just a bad joke on our love. I’m sorry.

  We kissed again, there across the table. “There will never be anyone else but you,” he said to me.

  I went to the bathroom and while I was there he called to me, “I knew it was a trick.” A voice trying, trying to be hard. “I knew you were tricking me.” Trying to learn the right lines. Trying to be like me.

  He was on his way.

  Table of Contents

  Contents

  PACIFIC CITY

  The Proprietor of Darkness

  The Etiquette of Deception

  The Crying Organ

  The Town Philosophers’ Banquet

  The Illegality of the Imagination

  The Science Club Meets

  THE DUTCH LETTERS

  The Hidden-Away Letters (1)

  The Hidden-Away Letters (2)

  Some Background to Dirk’s Letters

  IMOGENE CONTINUED

  Dance of the Chairs

  Yesterday Stone Age, Today Space Age

  Stockholm Syndrome?

  Writing Yourself a Proper Narrative

  Only the Interaction of Complex Things

  Only the Interaction of Confusing Things

  A Cat Called Teleosis

  Audition for Male Voice

  Epilogue

  Notes

  THE EVERLASTING SECRET FAMILY (An Erotic Memoir in Six Parts)

  I. The Bad Dog And the Angel Custodio

  II. The Letters

  III. The Little World Left Behind

  IV. A Map for the Child

  V. The Gift of a Son

  VI. The Wand and the Cup (and the Magician)