Mirrors of Narcissus (11 page)

6

The ringing of the campanile bells woke me. I counted them off as the hours sounded: eight…nine…ten o’clock. My mind was still so full of what I’d seen last night that it took a while for the time to register. And the day: today was Wednesday. I was late for my chemistry lecture. In a sudden panic, I jumped out of bed realizing I’d never make it in time.

What was I to do? And then I relaxed. As if I’d suddenly remembered something from far back, the solution hit me: I would simply drop the course. Why not? I hated it anyway, it was the most boring class I took. Feeling as if a great load had been lifted off my shoulders, I lay back in bed. The decision to quit had come to me in an inspired flash, but I knew it had probably been building up in me for weeks.

From the very first lecture in that course, I’d felt lost, completely lost. With a sense of baffled amazement, I’d listened to the professor speaking in the most amazingly technical terms, and not a word of it had made any sense. It was as if he’d been speaking in a foreign language. Helplessly I’d taken notes but when I looked at them afterwards, they looked like they were written in code. I was beginning to wonder if college was the right place for me. Back in high school, the chem teacher had given me a B+; here, that grade didn’t mean a thing.

I yawned and stretched. At this hour, almost all the other guys in the dorm were in class; the whole place was quiet. For all I knew, I had the whole dorm to myself. It was a luxury.

I got up from bed and went into the bathroom. After urinating, I came out and sat down on Scott’s bed. It was neatly made and everything was in order. No doubt he’d tried to wake me this morning, and being unable to, had gone on to breakfast without me.

I liked to go over to his part of the room when he was out. We had each other’s permission to use or borrow anything without asking; only the locked top drawers of our desks were completely private. Being alone in his side of the room, surrounded by his belongings, I felt I was absorbing his essence in a way otherwise denied to me. Sometimes when I saw his things without him, I felt even closer to him than when we were actually together.

His wall was hung with reproductions of famous paintings and his bookshelf was crammed to overflowing with books—textbooks, paperbacks, library books. He was a voracious reader. We shared a love of books but I was always surprised at the wide range of his reading. He explored areas of literature which I found boring: the novels of Walter Scott, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Henry James. But he also read popular books, mysteries, science fiction, and spy novels.

We had begun lending each other the books which had moved us. It was an intimate exchange, I felt, because when a book touches you in some way, and you recommend it, you pass on a part of yourself. I read his personality in the books he liked, and in the passages he’d underlined. I, too, underlined the parts which I liked so that when I returned the book, he would see what had moved me. And we liked to write notes to each other in the margins, airing our comments about the writer’s views or style. Later we would discuss each other’s opinions.

Our tastes grew together, though I couldn’t say whose influence on the other was stronger. It was mutual in the best sense. I felt we were growing together toward a sensibility which was uniquely ours. (I didn’t dare tell him about the gays books I read, however.)

Often we would sit at our beds chatting half the night away, and I’d wish our meandering talk could go on forever. But he would yawn, glance at the clock, ruffle his hair and mention tomorrow’s classes. And I would pull up my covers and turn to the wall, my heart a mixture of yearning and regret.

I was in love with Scott—helplessly, hopelessly, endlessly in love with him. Every morning when I woke up, I felt unaccountably happy—and it only took a few moments to realize that the cause of my happiness was the fact that I knew Scott was sleeping in a bed just across the room from me. And I knew we would go to breakfast together where, over cups of coffee, I could stare to my heart’s content at his sleepy face.

In classes I found it hard to concentrate. My mind kept wandering to the last time I’d been with him, the words we’d said to each other. What color shirt was he wearing today? And later, we might meet sometime during the day, depending on our schedules. After classes, we would study together, then go out to eat dinner, often with Christine, her presence being a convenient cover-up for my almost unbridled joy at being with Scott. I felt so light-hearted when I was with him, and so let down when we couldn’t be together. The talks we had were usually nothing special, but I cherished them.

This feeling of happiness was something which simply inundated me, which colored my whole life from morning to night, changed the way I looked at the world. Now I loved the world, loved life. And my life was Scott. The sky looked so much bluer than it had ever been, the air tasted sweeter, everything was more vivid, alive with the intrinsic rapture of being. I smiled at strangers and they smiled back. I saw couples in love and knew I was of their number, though secretly. I felt lucky to be alive at the same time as Scott. Cruel fate could have had us born in different times, in different countries. But here we were, both miraculously in the same country, in the same state, on the same campus, and—most incredible of all—in the very same dorm, sharing the same room! Why was I so blessed? Did I deserve such luck?

This was a new experience for me. I’d never been in love—truly in love—with a boy before. I’d had crushes; all through junior high school and high school, I pined after handsome boys to whom I would never have dreamed of revealing my feelings, adoring them from a distance, half feeling sorry for my plight, half reveling in it, telling myself that if my dreams ever came true, the boy would disappoint me. That he couldn’t be the perfect boy I envisioned—that no one was perfect except for someone you create in your own mind. And I’d had intense sexual yearnings, and erotic fantasies, hundreds of them, about the boys in my school, about my teachers, about professional football players, beautiful actors, and even faceless strangers.

But what I felt for Scott was nothing like any of that. I knew he wasn’t perfect. I saw all his flaws, and I liked him because of his flaws rather than despite them. In many ways he wasn’t the boy of my dreams at all; what struck me about him wasn’t his physical beauty but his intellectual honesty. He had a high forehead which made me suspect he would bald young, but I didn’t care if he did go bald, as long as he remained the same Scott.

These feelings had crept upon me so stealthily that I hadn’t recognized them for the longest time. And the only thing I could do now was to keep it secret from him. He must never know. Otherwise, our friendship would be destroyed. For in my happiness I almost forgot the fact that it was impossible for me to ever have my love requited. For he wasn’t gay. I knew that. He was a normal, heterosexual boy.

I peered under the bed. There was a neat stack of girly magazines there, much more classy and tasteful than the raunchy stuff Jonesy had kept there. I flipped through one, noting the big-breasted beauties with their blow-dried hair and perfect, air-brushed skin, glowing and healthy-looking. When I’d first seen these magazines under Scott’s bed, I’d felt a little relieved, glad that he was “normal.” My pristine image of him needed to remain intact. I might have even been a little disappointed if I’d come across a copy of a muscle magazine.

I glanced into the wastepaper basket beside the night table. At the bottom there was a crumpled-up Kleenex like a pale green butterfly which had died there. The sight of it was a raw reminder that Scott, too, had to satisfy the itch of sexual desire.

Unlike most of the others in the dorm, he didn’t talk very much about girls. There were those who—even though I knew they weren’t getting laid—talked about “pussy” all the time, as if they were constantly getting it…and then there was Kruk, who obviously avoided a topic he was uncomfortable with. I knew Scott well enough now to realize he was a romantic heterosexual of the old-fashioned school.

Sometimes I would think of Christine’s belief in reincarnation and wish to become a girl in my next life so I could openly express my love for him. He would remain the same Scott, of course—nothing would ever change that. But I would be a beautiful young girl who could kiss him on the lips before the whole world….

But that wasn’t exactly what I wanted, either. I wanted to love him as a boy loves another boy. The forbidden nature of my love made it that much more precious, more sacred. What I felt for him was what only a boy could feel for another boy, and which could only be satisfied by masculine responses. Against all the censure of the world I wanted to cherish him.

On the other hand, if he were gay, my feelings for him might not have been so intense. There were plenty of obvious gays on campus but I’d never felt for them what I felt for Scott. They were just like me; and they attracted me in a purely sexual way—the kind of sex that might be satisfied in an anonymous encounter in Nightworld. It was because Scott was different from me that I adored him. He was what I longed to be, he was the ideal me.

So I was caught between two feelings; one part of me wished he was gay, but the other part wished just as fervently for the opposite. I desired him sexually, yet I also wanted him to remain pristinely heterosexual. That precarious balance was the equation of my love. If I satisfied my desire for him, I might also shatter my love by the same act.

It was torture, yet I loved my torture. Let it go on forever, just this side of unbearable. Oh, to be young and gay and in love.

I got up and went back into the bathroom. A hint of dampness hung in the air, from the shower he’d taken this morning. His bath towel was on the towel rack, alive with the odor of his sweat mingled with the aromas of his soap and after-shave. I held it up and plunged my nose into it, rooting for the essence of Scottness in its folds. All the articles of toiletry he used for his morning shower had the magical ability to preserve his essence like faithful messengers. Perhaps because we used different brands of everything, the smells his things left behind had a powerful way of evoking him for me.

The bathroom was alive with Scott.

Some mornings I could hear him from my bed urinating in here, and the hollow-sounding gurgle of his piss as it hit the water at the bottom of the toilet bowl was like a secret message from his dick.

In the shower stall, separate metal soap dishes were fixed in the tiled wall. On Scott’s light green cake of soap, I would sometimes find a single curly black pubic hair embedded there.

If I heard the shower on when I got back from class, I would come in here and pretend to be busy at the sink, just so I could see the flesh-colored shape of Scott beyond the translucent frosted-glass shower door. We conversed with each other, shouting over the sound of the jetting water. Sometimes I knocked on the shower door and opened it, stuck my head in. He would turn around to face me, the jets of warm water dashing off his back, into my face, the steam all but hiding him. The easy camaraderie of dormitory roommates did away with any sense of prudery.

When he came out of the shower, I always made sure I was looking at him straight in the face. He would be wiping himself off, toweling his hair dry, wrapping the towel around his middle, his chest and shoulders steaming, the air alive with the smell of his toothpaste, after-shave, and deodorant. But every time I had a chance to glimpse what I most wanted to see, a meddlesome hand “just happened” to be eclipsing the longed-for sight.

Beneath the bathroom sink was the covered wicker basket we used as a clothes hamper. Scott and I used to wash our clothes together down in the basement laundromat until we decided it was a waste of time for both of us to go. So we elected to share wash-day; once a week, one of us would take both of our loads down and wash them together.

This was my week to do the laundry and I wondered whether to use the unexpected gift of this free time this morning to do the chore.

I always enjoyed watching the promiscuous mix of his clothes with mine in the dryer, his briefs and T-shirts tumbling about in loving play with my own. And touching his most intimate things as I folded them up afterwards in our room was an act of love for me.

I lifted the top off the hamper basket; a musky smell came up to my nose. I knelt down and fished around in the pile of clothes. On top were some shirts and jeans, and beneath them were our underwear.

He wore size 30 briefs, the same size as me. But his taste in underwear was conservative—standard white cotton BVDs; he said he was too embarrassed to wear the slim bikini styles I preferred. Whenever I handled his briefs, I always looked closely for stains in them, because the faint after-image of urine or semen excited me. Even the traces of brown “skid marks,” far from disgusting me, only made him that much more lovable.

I picked up what I thought at first was a pair of briefs. When I realized what it was I almost had to catch at my breath.

It was a jock strap. Scott’s. I knew he took PE, but he’d always put his gym bag away in his bottom drawer, and I’d never seen his jock strap before.

My stomach felt queasy.

I replaced it in the hamper and tiptoed out to the hallway door and listened carefully. All was silent in the dorm. It was still too early for most of the guys to have come back from their morning classes. And anyone who didn’t have a class was probably sleeping in. Not even the sound of the TV in the lounge came to my ears. I locked the door and returned to the bathroom.