Failed Pass

I came to the party to see both the brothers.  Strangely it was not the one I was in love with who I hoped to hook up with before going home.  The one I loved was not an option, a guy a couple of years older than me who was strictly into girls.  But his brother, Dillon, was what we called open.  We had fooled around in the back of my car once, parked behind the high school, but it hadn’t ended great.  He’d been too drunk to concentrate and finally we straightened up the seats and I drove him back to his car across town.  I still thought about him a lot – the taste and feel and scent of him and perhaps most that things ended so incompletely.

 

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The party thinned until there were only a few straggling in the foyer, but still I hung back, pretending to read the spines of the books on the shelves in the library. Earlier in the night their mother had shown me this room, waving a dismissive hand at the volumes that climbed to the ceiling.

“But who has time anymore?” she’d asked in a breezy, rhetorical manner.  She smiled at me, “I guess when you’re young…”

Linda seemed more human to me in that moment, thought I still didn’t care for her. Earlier that night I’d heard her use the word ‘fag’ about her oldest son.

“I mean honestly, I don’t know why Linus is so sensitive about everything,” she told one of his friends, a girl named Terin who had big red lips and iddy-biddy bangs. “He’s such a fag sometimes.”

Terin and I had exchanged a glance.

I had glanced over at Linus, watching him shrug off the jab, and thinking wryly, ‘I wish.’

 

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He was slenderer than his brother, with a long bony nose and bright green eyes hidden under meticulously polished spectacles.  These weren’t eyeglasses as I knew them back then: the huge plastic frames that hid half the face.  These were small, clever, brass. They made him look bookish and vaguely historical, which was probably why he chose them. Maybe too why I romanticized him so much.

I used to study Linus like a painter does a muse, but when the muse doesn’t welcome the scrutiny, there are too many veils to peel away.  I wanted intimacy with him and when I was so young my hormones and naïveté conspired to convince me that was unattainable. Because the way I saw getting there was steeped in sex and sexuality.  I’d never had a solid friendship with a man and didn’t know how that was supposed to work.

Dillon spoke a language I understood more viscerally, a language not of words but of straight up sex.

 

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Even as the summer of my eighteenth year grew sweatier and more still, all the mild breezes of spring spent, even as I fell more in love with Linus, there were more chances to spend time with his brother.  We met with mutual friends at the tea house, bantering about topical things now forgotten, smoking too many cigarettes.  He had a hunger about him.  Despite the fact that he was handsome and athletic, Dillon seemed to always search your glance for admiration.  I sensed it about him and I was put off by it.  Perhaps I preferred the enigma that was his older brother.

Still I enjoyed watching Dillon for months before our singular hook up.  He had golden skin and dark golden curls. His legs were covered in golden hair and rippled with muscles he’d built playing soccer. His hands were broad and square and capable, his lips each full and quick with a reckless grin.

Then a friend of mine who went to military academy with him told me how he used to sleep with a boy that was their classmate.  I hadn’t seen this coming.  Dillon seemed unattainable until that morsel of gossip. Shortly after, he and I were the last ones to close down the teahouse – me lingering later than was my wont – and with only a slight pass, I opened the door to the fleeting encounter behind the high school.

It was sexy and yet not sexy all at once.  In later years I wished I’d made more of the night. We should have gotten out of the car and wandered down over the hill into the grass. There ought to have been night sky and the summer cacophony of cricket and cicada and swiftly running brook.

 

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When they invited me to the party, I was surprised to be asked.  I never really thought anyone liked me very much and was often taken aback to be included.  I didn’t know if it were Dillon or Linus who proposed my name.  I never found out, not that it came to matter.

It was odd to be there, wanting to be loved by one brother and to have sex with the other. Perhaps it wasn’t so much about want as realism and expediency. I knew I stood a chance with Dillon.  Linus thought of me as merely a new friend.

As the guests started to leave in groups, while I was hiding in the library, I heard Linus head out with his girlfriend.  Their mother even said good night, making a lot of noise about the clean up waiting until the morning.  There was one person left standing in the foyer with Dillon when I peered out from the library.  It was a girl he’d been talking to much of the night.  She had curves for days and hair like an angel in a Renaissance painting.

Dillon glanced my way and rather than be caught, I barreled out a little too quickly, pretending to only then discover how the house had emptied.  The girl with the beautiful hair said she needed to get home; she was going on a long road trip the next day.  Dillon gave her a kiss before closing the door. He peered through the sidelight until she drove away.

When he turned to study me, I dropped my gaze.  It occurred to me that we hadn’t really spoken much since the night in the car.  We’d never been alone together since then.  I wished I’d never come tonight, but a part of me longed for a chance to be with him again. There was a lonely craving in me that supplanted all better judgment.

“You not tired?” he asked.

“I thought we could hang out.”

He shrugged and I followed him into his bedroom down the hall. We sat on the bed and looked at an album cover together while he talked about things that happened at the party.  The scent of him made a kaleidoscope of butterflies circle in my stomach.  When I put a hand on his thigh, he stiffened.

“What are you doing?” he asked.

The butterflies dropped as if turned to stone by his tone.

“I thought we might…”

I faltered as he turned his brown eyes on me. Dillon always seemed to have laughing eyes, but tonight they were impenetrable, dense and cold like a pond in winter.  I felt myself grow smaller.

“We’re in my mother’s house,” he said.  “That was my girlfriend who just left.”

The funny thing is that I can’t remember how I responded. I didn’t say anything to him to change his mind.  Yet how he looked as I left or whether I stumbled out or was walked to the door are facts lost to time.  What I do remember is the light in his room.  There was only one lamp in a corner, casting long shadows over our suddenly sordid tableau.  Shadows trailed from his lashes and from his bed and from the soles of my feet to the top of my head.  Maybe he softened his rebuke with a smile. I honestly couldn’t say.

The drive back from their remote home on the river seemed interminable.  It was hard to believe I’d only passed these landmarks a few hours earlier.  The night had left me hanging open, exposed and restless.  With the windows down, I could feel the coldness of March on my skin and moving through my hair.  I should have turned on the radio and filled my bandwidth with raucous sound, but I made the trip home in silence, wondering what Dillon would tell his brother about my failed pass.

 

London and Other Old Loves

When he thinks of London, he remembers a girl with henna red hair and eyes like exotic oceans. Water he’s yet to dip his toes into.  They were best friends for a year and lovers for a scant few weeks.  That began in a rented room over Baker Street, where the window looked out on roofs for chimney sweep dancers. It surprised them both, that their laughter and wrestling sport would lead to urgent kisses, sliding hands and tongues, a shattering and quieting bliss.  He held her until she fell asleep, wondering what it meant.  Had he changed or been mistaken in himself all along?

Later he stood out on those roofs, listening to the noise of the city, feeling the humidity of the summer night.  He smoked back then and he remembers watching grey plumes drifting away from him into the shadows.  In his recollection, he didn’t want to turn and study her through the window.  He felt a mixture of anger and curiosity.  They had opened something between them that could not help but feel bold and mysterious.  Yet he was sure it only complicated everything.  The weeks to come would prove him right.

He walked to where the building ended over the street and sat on the dirty ledge.  He thought of home, the small nest of their town in Virginia, and he cried when his thoughts drifted to the boy he was sure he loved. In later years, this summer of youth would amuse him a little.  If the man he became could stand near the boy he was, watching him swiping at his tears and lighting another cigarette, he would be hard pressed not to turn away with a smile of both kindness and contempt.  Would he drop a hand onto the boy’s shoulder, give it a comforting squeeze?

His father used to do that, when he was alive, and that young man always squirmed away from the touch.  The young have no notion of how cruel they are, carving out their space, keeping their old keepers at arms length while they mine the world for gems they can only find on their own.  He hopes he would save the gesture. Perhaps he’d do the thing the boy hadn’t the courage to – after all, things would sort themselves out eventually – and instead he might turn and give the young woman his consideration.  Knowing where the years would take her, surely she needed the love more than his callow, slender, boyish self.

If he could go back as he was now, with just a hint of ache in his joints, a skiff of white wintering his dark hair, he might stand at the glass and think she was a bit of Venus in the shadows of that old room.  In sleep she would seem angelic, her claws tucked away.  For the year of their friendship, she was safe and never needed to use them.  Except perhaps a bit at the end – but those little cat scratches were all but forgotten.  He would trace his finger along the glass, the silhouette of her cheek against the pillow.

The Algebra Novel

Every morning in seventh grade math class, I opened my blue Trapper Keeper and sat the tip of my pencil to a fresh sheet of paper.  When the teacher began the class, I mentally checked out, returning to the novel I was writing in my head.

It was good stuff, too, all about two southern bell sisters trying to keep the plantation from falling apart.  These poor girls had a lot on their plate.  Between dodging deserters and remaking old ball gowns, it was pretty amazing they still had time to fall in love with sturdy bucks like tight-lipped, sun-bronzed Rafe Hyatt.  And don’t get me started on their older, wicked lady neighbor, the raven-haired Rebecca de Chastaine.  Pretending to be their friend even as she plotted to ensnare their lovers, make no mistake, she was nothing but trouble. With this heady stuff to tend to between 9:55 and 10:55 each school day, it is no wonder I had to repeat math in summer school that year.

Writing this novel in math class was the highlight of my day and what helped me not to miss quite as much school that year.  Never mind the occasional humiliation of being called on by our teacher, Mr. Shaylock, and having no clue where we were in class.  With his short sleeve button ups and messy 70s weatherman hair, he was a gentle nerd who barely maintained his class, so perhaps he didn’t mind the plump daydreamer doodling Marie Antoinette wigs on the margins of his notebook.  At least I wasn’t one of the trouble-makers, pinching girls’ asses through the cutouts in the orange plastic chairs. That man put up with a lot, but I doubt he went home and poured himself a Scotch on my account.

I was a committed craftsman back then, never missing a date on my inkless writing.  I got good at winding up a chapter an hour and I got excited on the bus each morning, deciding where I’d begin again.  I also did the hard research, checking out books on historic costume from the library and faithfully teaching myself to draw them.  I could tell the era of a redingote at a glance, and was not above sniffing in disapproval when a movie of the week placed a ball gown on Jane Seymour when clearly she would have worn a modest day dress.  Returning those much loved volumes of renderings to the library again and again that year, I’m sure the one clearly homosexual volunteer behind the desk was smirking knowingly under his handlebar mustache.  Yet all my work could not save me from my report cards. I blame it on the Reagan era that I wasn’t tested on the anatomy of pantaloons instead of converting fractions.  The arts must always suffer.

At that time my biggest writing influences were Gone With the Wind and my sister’s library of smutty historic novels.  I always saw the past through a misty red veil, never stopping to think about all the pots of shit-water under the beds.  Instead, I was taken with the clothes, see above, and by the time I got to middle-school I liked the sex scenes, too.  The women who wrote novels such as ‘Destiny’s Seduction’ or ‘Island Rapture’ were giants in their field. As with all great literature, I was taken with the power of even their simplest phrases.  Describe our hero’s thighs as both hot and strong and I was right there with him in the crashing waves, deflowered but defiant as over his gleaming shoulders my ancestral mansion was burned by pirates.  Oh, the places you will go in a really fine work of fiction.

By mid-year I was bold enough to tinker with the sexual foibles of my own characters.  I knew before I knew that I was not a fit for the hetero world of those novels. Neither a swarthy English hunk raised by Arabs nor a voluptuous preacher’s daughter sold into sex slavery on the high seas, I hewed my burgeoning sexuality to the wicked, older lady neighbor.  With her as my proxy, I could place myself in that world – and experience the catty thrill of being the only woman in the county still rich enough to nail my dress at the Christmas ball.  Dove grey silk with cherry red piping – don’t get me started.

Of course, I abhor violence and any form of chicanery, but through this towering beauty, Rebecca de Chastaine, I wielded a terrible power.  When we set our cap for the rugged Yankee captain the McClure sisters were hiding in their smoke house, it took only a snap of her fingers to have him brought to us.  Of course, the problem was that once she’d tied him down and laid out her plans for him in a flowery monologue, it was me who had to stand up with a boner when the bell rang.  Thank heaven for that Trapper Keeper.