Mirrors of Narcissus (3 page)

I never let my eyes leave the face and body of my idol by as much as a fraction.

And then I heard the door to the men’s room open.

In no time at all, I’d folded up the picture into a tiny square and stuffed it behind the toilet paper dispenser. With my heart pounding, and my breath held, I waited to discover what the other was doing. He seemed to be standing before the sink. I heard the water being turned on, running for a while, then turned off. There was a silence, during which I could only assume that he was standing before the mirror looking at himself.

A minute passed. A long minute passed. And then he was gone, out the door.

For a while I just sat there trying to regain my calm.

I didn’t feel like continuing. My mood had been shattered. Leaving the picture where it was, I pulled my pants up and hurriedly left the stall. Perhaps another lonely gay student might find it there and be able to make use of it.

I made my way down the stairs to the first floor, and outside the library, to fresh air. Beside the shrubs which circled the building, I stood for a while, still a little shaken. I didn’t feel like heading back to the dorm.

I thought about the photo I’d left in the stall and wondered if it would be there again when I went back. I doubted it. Now that I realized I might never see it again, I regretted my hasty decision. Still, it would have been unsafe to have it on me. What were the chances that another gay student would come across it? Most likely a straight boy would pull it out, and in his disappointment, flush it down the toilet. I almost started to go back up and retrieve it, but the risk was too great.

I wondered how many others there were like me, lonely, unhappy, scared, having to resort to hasty, hidden pleasures for their only real satisfaction? I thought again of the “H. Golden” who liked to check out gay books.

About twenty feet away from me, tucked away among the shrubs which surrounded the library, was a little-used telephone booth. The hedge surrounding the library had been allowed to grow around it, making it almost invisible from the footpath. I decided on the spur of the moment to try calling “H. Golden” from here. There was no one about; I would have all the privacy I wanted.

From my wallet I pulled out the little slip of paper with his number on it and dialed.

“Hello?” The voice which answered the phone sounded much deeper and richer than I’d expected. My image of him modulated into that of an older man. I checked my impulse to hang up and managed to ask:

“Is this H. Golden?”

“Yes. Who is calling?”

“My name is Tim Glade,” I said, ready with a false name.

“I don’t recognize the name. Have we met?”

“No, never.”

“Are you a student?”

“Yeah.”

I’d called him half expecting him to hang up when he realized it was only a prank call, but he didn’t seem upset by my unsolicited intrusion. He even sounded a little worried for me. His straightforward questions disarmed me, and I found myself replying openly.

“How long have you been in school?” he asked.

“I’m a freshman.”

“Why are you calling me, Tim?”

I hesitated. In fact, I didn’t know myself exactly why I’d suddenly decided to call him. Could he understand that I only felt a deep-rooted desire to connect to someone, anyone, anywhere? Or did that sound too far-fetched?

There was a long pause during which I was sure he would hang up, but he remained on the line, listening intently, I was sure, at the other end. Finally I managed to ask:

“Are you gay?”

There was the slightest pause before he answered. “Yes. Are you?”

“I’m not sure,” I said.

“Do you want to talk about it?”

“I’m not sure.”

“You’re being very evasive. How did you get my number?”

“A friend.”

“Can you tell me his name?”

There was someone coming up the footpath. “Look, I’ll call you again, okay?”

“Sure. Maybe you can give me your number?”

“I’m not so sure about that. Bye, now.”

I stepped out of the booth just as a girl turned off the footpath. She was coming my way, and smiled as she recognized me.

“They told me I’d find you here,” she said. It was Christine, my girlfriend.

3

Christine lived in an apartment just off campus, in a picturesque, tree-shaded neighborhood of Victorian style homes with bay windows out front and terraces in the back. It was the sort of place which usually appeared in movies about college life. I was never very comfortable there, and infinitely preferred the messy disorder of my dorm. Christine couldn’t understand my preference.

We were in her room which she shared with a friend named Nancy. All during our walk here, she’d been dying to tell me something, and only now allowed herself to open up about it. Nancy was out and we had the place to ourselves.

“You won’t believe what happened to me today,” she said. She was carefully pouring hot water from the kettle into a tea strainer placed over a cup; her latest fad was experimenting with various exotic teas which she ordered from a specialty shop across the bay.

“What happened?” I said. “You seem a little upset.”

“I am.” She went on to tell me how her English professor had drawn her aside after class and whispered: “If you dress like that again for next class, I’ll give you an A on the midterm.” Christine wasn’t wearing a bra today, and the low neckline her blouse had apparently, when she was bent down taking notes at her desk, allowed the professor a generous glimpse of her breasts. She always sat in the first row quite close to the lectern.

“Damn,” I said. “That was pretty cheeky of him.”

“I think it’s disgusting, is what I think.” Yet her indignation could barely conceal the pleasure she got from reporting it. “I couldn’t believe it. This school has such high academic standards, too. He doesn’t have the least interest in my academic abilities. All I am for him is a pair of tits. And I’m not even well-endowed in that department, either.”

“So, are you going to do it?” I asked.

“Are you crazy? You’re suggesting I should take him up on it?”

“Sure.”

She looked at me, trying to judge how serious I was. As I imagined the professor peering surreptitiously down her blouse, getting excited by a mere glimpse of her breasts, I said: “If he finds you sexually attractive, why not give him a little pleasure? It costs you nothing. And you get an A out of it.”

“You’re serious, aren’t you?”

“Of course I am. If you know you have a sure A in English, you can spend that much more time studying for your other tests. If it were me, I know I’d do it.”

“I thought you’d be jealous. I mean, another man seeing my breasts.”

“I am jealous.”

In fact, the thought that other men found her attractive only excited me. Whenever we entered a room together, all the men’s eyes would be on her. I would secretly enjoy the way they stared at her, and the way their eyes traveled up and down her body.

Far from being upset by these attentions, I made efforts to encourage them. Though Christine would have preferred to wear sloppy T-shirts and jeans, it was I who constantly urged her to wear more provocative clothes: scanty short-shorts, tank tops, miniskirts, and low-cut camisoles. It was as if she were my doll and I was dressing her up to please the guys. And my pleasure in it was ignited by a process of reflection: the other boys’ excitement excited me. I imagined that all the male attention she drew to her stuck to the surface of her skin, so that when I caressed her, I was caressing those male glances.

For her part, she thought it was my jealousy which stimulated me, so she made efforts to fan that jealousy. She never missed a chance to report being stared at by boys, or being propositioned by them. She knew these tales only excited me by letting me know just how attractive she was to other guys. Perhaps she secretly sensed that if she didn’t have the power to attract them, I wouldn’t have been as drawn to her as I was.

She had the androgynous kind of beauty which I’ve found most attractive in women. Her body was lithe, long-limbed, and athletic-looking, and she walked with a slightly over-exuberant bounce which made her hair swing from side to side. At my request, she’d cut her hair short; her thick blond hair came straight down to her eyebrows, and was cut short all around, making it look as if she were wearing a shiny helmet. Her eyes were green with glints of gold in them, and were slightly slanted. This, combined with her high cheekbones, made her look quite exotic.

When Jonesy first saw her, he’d said jokingly: “Thank you, Attila the Hun.” Christine had a Polish background, and I suppose Jonesy was imagining the distant past when Mongol armies had swept into Poland, pillaging, plundering, and raping, leaving behind them those genetic traits which, when blended with the local Polish ones, had bequeathed this exotic look to Christine.

“I refuse to use sex as a weapon,” she was saying. When she pouted, the way her lips pushed together gave her a winsomely stubborn look.

I laughed. “Come on, Chrissie, I was only joking. But I guess I’ve learned why all the good-looking girls seem to get such good grades around here. Did you ever notice that?”

She nodded, suddenly turning serious. “You know, it’s true. The better looking you are, the more likely you’ll do well in school. But there’s a deeper reason for that.”

“Uh-oh. I think the psychologist in you is about to emerge.”

Unlike myself—who still couldn’t decide what my major would be—Christine had always known she wanted to major in psychology. She was constantly reading up on various psychological experiments, and whenever she launched into her explanation of one of them, her face became most animated.

“No, seriously,” she said. “I was just reading up on something dealing with that. Physical attractiveness has been shown to be a very important factor in the way we’re perceived by others—much more so than most people would think. There was a psychological experiment conducted on some kindergarten and elementary school teachers.” She paused, looking at me questioningly. “Are you interested in hearing this, or am I boring you?”

“No, go on. I wanna hear about it.”

“All right. Well, the teachers weren’t told the nature of the test they were undergoing though they knew they were being tested for something. They were shown a series of photographs of children and asked to rate them on an attractiveness scale, from one to ten.”

“That sounds like the guys in my dorm judging girls. Go on.”

“Anyway, these same photographs were then given to another group of teachers who were asked to study the photos and determine—just from first impressions—what they believed the personality of the child to be like. These results were then tallied against the results of the attractiveness test.”

“I can imagine the results. Probably the same thing that we all learned in junior high and high school—that attractive kids are more popular.”

“Exactly. The children who’d been rated low in attractiveness by the first group were almost invariably described as potential troublemakers, unsociable, unintelligent, or withdrawn. The attractive children, on the other hand, were judged to be more outgoing, friendly, intelligent, and creative. Mind you, all this was about children the teachers had never even met.”

“So what does all that prove? I could have told you that without an experiment.”

She became serious, a tiny wrinkle appearing between her eyebrows. “Well, the result seems to show that a teacher’s initial impression of a child will determine how he will act toward the child—whether he will give him encouragement, or ignore the child’s true potentials. Naturally, children who receive more attention and love will respond in ways which stimulate their intellectual and social growth—in other words, succeed in the ways by which society measures accomplishment. So from a very young age, the dice are loaded against unattractive children.”

“It’s not only teachers. We all judge people by their looks. Subconsciously and otherwise.”

“True. I have to admit that’s what first drew me to you, Guy.”

“Bingo.”

Christine was the first girl who’d ever been open about her sexual attraction towards me. Perhaps it was all the psychology she’d studied, but she had never been shy about expressing her erotic feelings. And she liked to enunciate clearly what it was about me, physically, that she liked. It was that which excited me most: I could see myself through her eyes, and become aroused by the image of myself I saw there.

For her, sexuality was the key to a person’s character. She was completely open about her own sexuality. We had long talks about our sexual awakenings, and (on my part, guardedly) about our love affairs in the past. I’d told her about the many girlfriends I’d had, but not about the thoughts that went through my head as I was making love with them, or what I had to do to excite myself. I hadn’t quite opened up with her to the point where I could confess that all the girls had merely been for decoration, to hide my true inclinations. And that in my mind I’d had to change many of them into boys before I could become sexually interested in them.

Christine, for her part, kept nothing back from me. That was how I knew I was the fourth boy she’d made love to. I knew all about my predecessors, Craig, David, Brian, and Julian. She knew I was curious about the boys in her past and didn’t try to hide anything. I wasn’t exactly the jealous type. I’d fantasized about being able to enter her body and watch through her eyes as she made love with other boys.

Because of her open attitude toward sex, people felt relaxed in her presence, and would confess things they wouldn’t have dreamed of revealing to other people. I’d even told her about my one homosexual experience in high school. My ability to confess this to her—and I felt able to, perhaps because she was a woman—was another bond between us.

She felt that all people were basically bisexual—a belief which I shared—and that we all had a sort of gauge within us, one side indicating heterosexuality, the other, homosexuality. With most people, the needle pointed closer to heterosexual, with varying degrees of distance from it. Nobody was completely hetero, or for that matter, homo. She felt that we all had urges both ways, which fluctuated with time and circumstances.

In junior high, she had had a crush on an older girl in school, even to the point of writing secret love letters. So she could understand homosexuality. I told her that my adolescence was also a confusing period of transition, though I stopped short of telling her that my most satisfying sexual experience had been with that one boy, and that my most vivid and erotic sexual fantasies were those involving men.

She wanted no secrets between us, so it was a torture for me not to be able to tell her everything. I longed to do away with this great secret which I carried, but I knew that this very secret was the bond which linked us so tightly together. And though she was the only person to whom I was ready to confess everything, that very confession would have destroyed what we had together. Her love would never be able to withstand that revelation. And I didn’t want to hurt her. I wanted to protect her for my own reasons: because I needed her love. My relationship with her had been the most fulfilling relationship of my life. So I had to keep up the pretense that I was what I seemed to be on the outside—just another heterosexual boy.

But I’d come very close to revealing myself. She knew I was excited by the way other men were attracted to her. And she knew I fantasized about other men making love to her…that I was hungry for details about the other boys in her life.

About clumsy Craig, her first boyfriend, in the eighth grade. He would come over to see her as she babysat for a neighbor. After the kids had gone to sleep, they would sit on the sofa watching TV and kissing, for hours, until she became frantic with desire. Craig would eventually slip his hand into her blouse, so eagerly, yet so awkwardly, that she wished she could take his hand and guide him.

In her sophomore year of high school she’d gone steady with David, who was not much better. He was a redhead, a hotshot tennis player and a Boy Scout. Christine practically had to seduce him, but she finally lost her virginity to him one night in a girlfriend’s bedroom.

Then there was the brief flirtation with Brian in her junior year. Christine lost her interest in him when she discovered that, despite his outward braggadocio, he suffered from premature ejaculation. Their lovemaking never got to the point of insertion.

The boy who changed it all was Julian, the bad boy in school. He was the one who first gave Christine the feeling that sex was not just a naughty prize to give away to a boy, to spite the grown-up world, or to prove your adulthood. Before she ever met him, she’d been fascinated by his reputation: since junior high, he’d been linked with the pregnancies of several girls. In high school there was talk that he’d slept with a student teacher from college. He exuded a confident virility, and it was this which excited Christine…and me.

“Was he that good looking?” I asked her.

“No, not really. He was tall and pale, with dark, curly hair and searching eyes. He wasn’t conventionally handsome. But there was something about him which the girls in my school found endlessly fascinating.”

“Did he have a good body?”

“Oh yes. Firmly muscled, slim hips….”

Of course Christine thought she was stoking my jealousy as a preliminary to our lovemaking. But for me, hearing about Julian enhanced our lovemaking, was a vital part of it. This was the only way I could get close to a boy—to see his nudity, to know how he kissed and caressed, the way he smelled, the way he made love.

“Did he have a big dick?”