"Love Affair"
by
Timothy Stillman
His name was Frederick. He was 19, and home for winter break from university, UT-Martin. The middle of his freshman year and he was furtive. In the year 2,001, almost into the new year, he was furtive and tall and furled all at the same time. He had kept his secret in his face for a long time. His eyes were sad, but the rest of him was successful. He had been a star at most of the sports in high school, and he was sure he would succeed in them in university as well. He was smart, creative. But or because of these things, train whistles late on wintry nights or sultry summer ones made him limitlessly sad. Which was the country inside him. He was a success in his parents' eyes, in his friends' eyes, but in other ways he had given up, long before now. He wanted to be in love, but it frightened him so much.
He lived in a small ranch house on a flavor of maple tree street in a small town. The neighborhood was quiet and secluded, off the beaten path. His mom and dad did not quarrel, got along quite well actually. He had no brothers or sisters. He had a square chin and blue eyes that could break a person in two, he thought, if they only saw them in him like he saw them in his mirror when he shaved in the morning, and dried and brushed his long coal colored hair, the only times he looked in the mirror at his face. His face betrayed him. It said letter jackets could be his and girls on his arms any time he said. But he was a dreamer and these were not his dreams. The only thing he was in love with was what was in the outside storage room of the house on the corner, two houses down from his. An old house with creaky porch swing and windows that had shutters on them for winter, though actually left there year round, which blew in the wind which sent them caticornered, for they were not securely fastened.
When Frederick was in early high school, he had some other friends, younger or older, in the other neighborhoods--for his own was, save for him, a middle aged one or old one, which made for quiet nights for study or watching TV or reading, but he grew up in a sort of bell jar of solitude in it, knew the leaf dance down the street of autumn, knew how the cold stars sounded in the first winter sky of the season--one of those friends, all boys, had discovered a cache in the outside store room of the old house on the corner, the house that seemed mottled with paint black and winter eaves that seemed disconnected and hanging on at wrong angles, a house of spots that were really caused by the summer leaves or the winter absence of them of the heavy oak and maple trees in the deep and large front yard, that cast shadows blown and wavering even it seemed in hot summer sunny days.
How the cache, the find, the loot of Davy Jones' veritable locker, was found, he didn't remember. Just that the store room door was always unlocked, beaten and battered by a great many seasons, the door did not even close all the way, and was ragged at the edges of it, painted perhaps once white, but now only a scab looking color. And in this store room, one boy with rising joy, with sap spinning inside him had found heart's desire--stacks of old and not so old "Playboy" magazines, which even to boys at the end of the 20th century, in this small town at least, was a discovery of inestimable magnitude. To look at pictures forbidden, in that room, that narrow cobwebbed room that was crowded with an old floor model fan once silver now rusted, an old bike tire, deflated, leaning in another corner next to a pile of ancient books from book clubs, cheap cardboard covers to begin with, now filled with mildew and rot and crumbling at the touch, the floor filled with rain rue, and snow leavings, and the seasons as they turned on that concrete flooring and came in the not totally closed door, spinning time and life and the world in and out. Leaving footprints of the seasons.
The "Playboys" were in pretty bad shape as well. Beaten. Torn. Plagued by the years. Though eventually one of the boys found underneath a broken lamp a series of other "Playboys," in leather binders with the name of the magazine and the head of the famous rabbit embossed in gold leaf on each front. Those magazines were in pretty good shape. Frederick told the boys the binders made the magazines seem dignified, and must have cost money, so his parents, impossible to believe though it was, may have bought them and maybe the magazines for him. Must have allowed him to read them and not sneak around doing it. The issues were all from the sixties. Frederick said that would have been Martin's teenage years, judging from what Martin looked like now. The others accepted that because he was always right, they believed him, they didn't like him, but they believed him. Frederick had seen the man of this narrow old house on his evening walks and had occasionally caught up with him and walked beside him, making the shy man shyer. Making him not say hello to the equally as silent Frederick who most uncharacteristically walked companionably with the man for a distance.
But the man did not look at him, but looked straight ahead, and Frederick knew that every cell in the man's body, his thin one and his hawkish face, was screaming--no, please no! So eventually Frederick, when it seemed the man would break down like a stove pipe and begin to weep rainy winter pain, would veer off from him and feel good about the whole thing. Because Frederick, though successful at everything, though he had lots of friends, had no one who liked him even moderately. Because the boy who was meek and small and shy and gray of soul and skittery of heart was in the presence of others bold and brash and ornery and too sure of himself. He did not do this on purpose. He knew it was not himself. But he seemed to be on this train track whenever anyone was around. And he had no idea what he would do about it. The man who owned this place where it seemed always night, Frederick knew, was not of the night at all, but the boy knew, the man was also given no choice. Too afraid to try. The both of them. But it went deeper as well.
They acted as they were meant to act. And they were dying from being so successful at it. So when the other kids were in the storage shed, fanning the magazines to the centerfolds and the layouts, they were giggling quietly, storming in their crotches strongly, punching each other's arms gently, shouting at the pain in shadow shudders, and grabbing each other and whispering fates of Miss October and Miss January, imagining humping them, forgetting as Frederick did not, that these photos were decades old, that the women in them had grown of age that had done the same things it did to everyone. Frederick though was not a purveyor of such pictures when he was with his friend who were not his friends. He would turn at an angle to the others as their hot sweaty hands reached out for the magazines and held the pictures to their lips and kissed them, or held them to their crotches of their jeans and kissed them.
The name of the man who owned this house and seemed to live there by himself was Martin Heran. That at least was on his mailbox. He was a corner not turned, a page that had not been read, or imagined on. He was a man who wished to be a boy again because he had never been a child. Frederick hated himself for tormenting the man, who had in his absence, somehow become the boy's mentor in ways so difficult to explain, if impossible, by walking with him some of those dark leafy nights or cold black ice heart star nights. He also knew that though the boys tried to be as quiet as they could when they were essentially house breaking, for that was what it was, Martin knew they were back there. Though he never came to see. Never made a sound in the house. No TV. No radio. No CD player. But the house knew. The house had Martin's nerve endings grafted to it, for Frederick felt them. And he hated the boys for what they did.
He hated it that they tromped in that room and they dug through the magazines, and left them in an even more disorderly pile, and that they took the magazines from their leather bindings and tossed them all round the place when they were through giggling and laughing at them and saying their girl friends were better, and Frederick almost wept when he was with them there. But only when he was with them there. Not when he was playing baseball in the spring or summer sun in a nearby field, or basketball on the high school basketball courts, or tennis on Saturdays sometimes on the sun glare tennis court next to the town's municipal swimming pool where the water was blue and childhood shouts and screams and laughs seemed so very happy. Here, though, in this storage room, by himself at night, for a while frightened he would be confronted, asked what he was doing here, but gradually getting over that fear, and how soon, he felt as though he was in church.
It became a holy shrine. Not for the pictures of the women. There was a dim light in the room he turned on at night, as he lost himself in the almost dark there, reading, actually READING, as he knew Martin had, the magazines, the stories, the articles, the interviews. He learned of Bradbury this way, and Beaumont, and Matheson, and Wilson, and Silverstein, and Shepherd, and Donleavy, and Fleming, whose novel excerpts of James Bond seemed far more interesting than the old movies that had been made of these ones. But it was not the feel or the quaint look of the magazines, or the way they seemed so clubby and old and nostalgic for a time he did not remember. It was that Martin had read them, had treasured them, but, one moan horrible dejected day, in a fit of anger or disdain or putting away where the past should be, Frederick made worlds within worlds for people he knew and people he did not know, it was just the way of him, that day, Martin had thrown them away, in the only way he could, because the man had tired of imagining the excited eyes of boys, as he and they had been then, from Martin's own boyhood, looking over the magic mountain of flesh and exploring their own without disdain and with such feckless fun, such random salvations they would give themselves without thinking about it twice, as Martin explored it all alone, alone.
So in this winter night when Frederick padded soft as a mountain cougar down to Martin's house, and opened the door to the only place he had ever felt comfortable in, and sat on the floor of cold, even cold in summer, concrete, angular, stiletto sharp knees up at his chest, his thin arms resting on them, he of course, for old's time sake, masturbated. Not thinking of the man in the house, but the boy who used to live there, for the house was so old, Frederick had no trouble taking another tangent and imagining that Martin had grown up here, though he never knew, because his family had only moved to this neighborhood when Frederick was 12 or so, and Martin was one to whom strong fences made good neighbors.
Martin was not considered a kook or a weirdo or a spy from some hinterlands by anyone, even the boys who were down on everyone all the time. He was a part of the neighborhood, with his sweaters and their anachronistic soft padded elbows, and his trips to town, always on foot, there was no car ever at his house, for his Saturday morning haircuts. Trips to town that Frederick knew he had made since a boy. Trips to a barber shop Martin had seen from a short height to a taller and taller one until he had burst out of childhood and teenage hood altogether and then young man, and then the nights got trapped in the soul and it was impossible to keep shaking them out of his sleeves every morning for Martin was no magician.
So Frederick masturbated long and luxuriously and curled within himself. He was safe in the room because he knew the other boys avoided the house like the Overlook Hotel at night. It simply was too haunted for no particular reason, save that when the train whistle blew lonely nights out of itself, as the train passed and chugged and roared and shoved itself through the town and then out into a world these boys had not yet laid eyes on, when the neighborhood, this one and the ones around it the other boys came from, was so silent, that a bird landing on a high phone wire could be cause for decibel calibration from a seismic earthquake detecting device, even when these rare sounds happened, none of them made it to Martin's house. Not even the sweaty straining sound of summer and its sun and its heady growing green grass, the sound of boyhood in passing, that boys feel in their bones like life itself a season in them giggling for all it was worth, even these silent shushes made non-sound at the Martin place, seemed to interdict it with the opposite of silence which is nothing literally at all. And nothing at all is pretty terrifying. It seemed the other boys couldn't breathe there at night, in the store room. They tried it once or twice for some jittery minutes but then never again.
So Frederick came here. He knew he would never see Martin. He had no idea how the man had looked as a child. Frederick knew just that this was a different dimension of loneliness the man walked in. This was something that even Frederick didn't understand, a pain that could be held and weighed and cut and borrowed and never given back. And that enticed him because it was like, in this atmosphere, in the dim slim white bulb and the moon shining in the back yard bone still, as he looked through one particular magazine, and realized, with his finger tips, touching the pictures, knowing how it was, and how it always is, sexual release needed so in those years, not even sexual, just the relief, and pretending that it was the photos in the magazines that got Martin off in those days, until, and this was the answer searched for, the ditching of these once obviously prized possessions--degraded from the binders to the loose issues scattered around. Martin just couldn't take the sounds of the nights any more, not even those of the lonely trains, to touch his ears, did Martin. He wanted to case himself up in this little place and not be hurt or touched and made hopeful or made to dream again--not one more single time. For it hurt too much. And that made Martin want it all that much more.
Because Frederick knew, then as a boy, and now as a college student, in the store room which he had been away from for a full three months, a room not visited he knew by anyone in all that time, that he was dreaming not of the past, perhaps, and he was aware of it more this particular night when he thought he had grown up enough to put it together, but instead thinking of his own future, of when he couldn't pretend anymore. When he couldn't pretend that throwing a baseball curve strong and brave into the hollow of the summer sun, when he couldn't pretend caring a damn about dunking a basketball in a hot sweaty gym, winning the game, and the screams of the fans like rockets blasting apart his most unwilling ears.
When it all, in short--stopped. And yet, he would not. Cold came in the door, as always partly opened, blistered by the heat, stung by the cold, bowed even more than last summer, the last time Frederick would be here, he in his heavy coat and thickest jeans and shirt and boots, sitting in his place, he had come to think of it as that, handled this one "Playboy" gently, delicately, for he hated disturbing or breaking or harming a book or magazine-- newspapers were different, he didn't care about them because they were mostly lies anyway, leavened with stupid like should be a crime letters to the editor, that must regardless of the newspaper, all come in written in crayon on paper sacks, idiocy that made him grind his teeth to all but powder and want to spit-- but these magazines and the book club books, many of which he had looked through by now, some of which he had read cover to cover, keeping them together as well as he could, but the spines and the glue were pretty much gone, all of it was--priceless.
And Frederick knew the man in the house was sleeping or reading but never dreaming. So Frederick dreamed for him. And this night, he having, once more, unzipped his jeans and pulled out his penis, and found it of course hard, he could make it so with just the merest thought, impossible to believe it would not always be that way, but what was the difference?, he thought, his thoughts and the house that was the thought of Martin writ large merging as usual, for their combined penis would never be shared, either of theirs. So Frederick made Saturday happen sometime in a mist of sixties, with a hot day and no air conditioner and a cold Coke standing near by, and he and Martin back here in this very storage room, whacking away--no, he would not have. He would have had a ritual, as did Frederick. Profound boy dignity.
Where did of the boys leave off and the other one begin? Frederick wondered. Who influenced the present or the past or future? But Martin would probably back then have locked the store room door, it could have performed that service back then, and he would have taken out a "Playboy" and he would have pulled down his jeans--did boys really and honestly wear jeans back then?, Frederick was of his time, though he thought not of it as well, still he knew the years he knew and could only imagine fractures of ones he did not.
So next to Martin, did Frederick masturbate. Both boys looking at their hard cocks. Both proud of them. Both stroking the heads and the shafts and measuring their cocks with each other. Hot and sweaty and time off every now and then for a drink of that icy cold Coke. Which one or the other placed on his own penis, temples, these hard ons, beginning pubic hair, light or dark, smooth or crinkly, or that of the other boy's who would shiver and reach down and hold his throbbing balls. And they would laugh silently. They would respect what they were doing. A pleasure, not a job or a task, but a way of worshipping each other, a way of silently getting inside the thin limbs, the soft eyes behind the thick glasses, the shy smiles as one boy put his arm around the shoulder of the other, and that other boy returned the favor. As they stroked and as they spread their legs and felt the power in them, felt the powder smell of their balls as though they had just dusted them with momma's bath powder on a Saturday night after a bath before bed and then church tomorrow. And because Frederick was a young man now, he brought another secret to this place this night, and that was a classmate he was hopelessly in love with. That other freshman's name was Michael, and Frederick brought his dream over to see Martin's ghost, because he wanted them to like each other. It was so important to Frederick that they did.
As Frederick stroked himself there, as he brought his hard penis closer to the top of his hands that melded their warmth in it and bathed it as though it was a baby of the future to come that was to change everything and everyone, in the winter dark night, as he imagined it coppery warm Saturday morning, and he and Martin faced each other, had their legs intertwined, and they were teaching each other how to grasp the other's cock, and get the most out of it, make it feel the very best. They never cursed or made jokes or hurt each other or made the other feel badly. They were respectful and there was the need to see, not who could come first, but who could cuddle best, who would lean over first, who would be brave this time?, and lean their head against the other boy's chest, and the legs moving together, one boy holding the other close and kissing him sweet on his mouth and trading tongue licks, all of it without total nudity. But without furtiveness as well. For Martin, the boy knew always expressed furtiveness, as did Frederick, even here, if only for a little bit. They would hold their chests close and their hands roaming in their shirts, comforting shoulders and backbones and shoulder blades and spines, warming each other, and they would feel the other's heart beat at the same time, in synch, and that would be the lonely train whistle going on into the night time hours as morning sneaked in once more, the whistle, off in the distance, the sound Martin did not want to hear and that therefore did not come here.
Cowboys and buddies and friends and forever too. As Frederick pulled on the hood of his cock, pulled it hard, straining the skin, as he looked at Miss October of 1967, because he knew or thought he knew this was Martin's so difficult to explain favorite, and he felt the house strain with him, felt his balls tighten and he imagined a cock ring in the head of his penis or in his balls and how cool that would look, for Frederick still was a boy of his time, as he rolled his fingers around his shaft, as he pulled and shoved and handled himself with a bit of cruelty and then with such love that he only felt at a time like this. Laving it. Twisting it gently. Rubbing the base of the shaft, the center of it, hard, stoking it like a train about to whistle out lonely farms and mountains and hills in a blue screed of long sky distance.
As he made his cock so warm and buttery seeming, and looked down and saw the boy next to him mimicking him, going for pleasure that Martin had never gone for before, for it had been sin, and to get it over with quickly was the thing, and Frederick forgot himself altogether and reached over and concentrated on his image of Martin's now college age body, and he slowly ladled sexual longing into the boy, he moved the heart of that boy invisible beside him, he denied him and smiled at him sweetly, mischievously, and then let the string of desire rush through that other penis, and then slowly and slowly, and pushing up on the balls and down on the base, he made Martin's college penis come, though of course it was really Frederick's own, as Frederick leaned over, almost without thinking, his cum staining the floor and the magazine--he had always made sure this did not happen--with Kleenex--when he was here alone, when the other boys came here with him at other times--now, there was not the necessity, for he knew Martin would never come near this room every again. The other boys had long forgotten, probably. But this time, Frederick leaned over in creamy bliss into, not Martin's chest, with the red cowboy shirt pulled up around his tits, but onto his imagining of Michael's chest. And with the warm gold circling in his stomach, with his penis jumping and his fingers pushing the last sperm out of it, he knew, and it shocked him cold. And pulled his penis up short. The desire. The golden happiness was cut as if with scissors.
It made the room even colder than it was, and that was plenty cold, Frederick huddled in his coat and heavy clothes, now like a scarecrow come apart at the seams, on a high tension wire fallen. He was doing to Martin what he swore, without knowing it, he would never do, one dream betrayed, no, added to, another, Michael, no, betrayed, there was no added to. The time here could continue, in this room, but the image of Martin would be edged out, until there was only Michael, and oh god, and he put his dick and balls back inside his jeans, and got some of his pubic hair caught as he zipped up fast. He had not meant to hurt Martin. He hadn't, and if he could do it to someone, then someone could do it to him, and he scrambled up, but these were only fantasies, fancies, they meant nothing, he could feel as he felt, he could not stay a boy with a boy who had not been one for so long, it was cruel to expect--but there was this fear in his stomach that seemed to have flipped over--and he tossed the magazine down, did not put it back in the case he had gotten it from, even though he had known it had been Martin's favorite, though Frederick didn't know the how of any of it, didn't know the how of anything concerning this place and the things he had done here. He wanted Michael. He wanted someone real. He wanted someone to really hold him. I'm sorry I'm sorry he silently wept. And he ran out of the door, leaving it wide open, and loped as hard as he could to his own house.
And in the night winter bed, covered heavily with quilts, he lay in his dark room and he heard the 12:05 train crossing town, and the lonely whistle, but a whistle accompanied by new sounds--in Frederick, the urge, the compelling need to tell Michael hello at the very least, and see his love's eyes close and sweet and gray as mental abracadabra turned from magic to flesh and blood and here and now--in Frederick the lonely sound, the loneliest sound he had ever heard, that far away lovelorn whistle of the night shouting remember remember. But then as he turned on his side and felt the tears come, as they had always come, when he heard the train, from little boy on, he heard another sound. Long and very far away and very faint, but so frightened, so gibbering, that it got into Frederick's bones and made his flesh crawl. He sat up in bed, his heart beating fast and fearful. It was a sound that kept apace with the train whistle, though it was far lower, far fainter, but the opposite at the same time.
Then he knew and he lay back down hard and turned on his stomach and put the pillow over his head and tried to shut out the sound. Because Martin had maybe begun to believe for a single second or half second. Because Martin had perhaps begun to just some millennium here or now start to figure out what love the boy and now man Frederick had had for the boy Martin, and then Michael, even unreal Michael, had come along, and shattered, had made Martin vulnerable again--for just a moment--but a moment that was rent and torn asunder and made wide as the sun and the moon thrown into each other was wide, a trust, a touch, a whisper, just a hint of all of that, and that had been enough for Martin to fall hard into all those tons of pain he had forgotten, or tried to, and new pain as well--for Frederick knew without doubt that this very moment, the train whistle was being heard by Martin for the first time in decades, a sound he had banished so long ago, and which would now rattle away in the man's head forever more.
And Martin screamed. Soft. Invisible. Whispery. Shatteringly. And it was Frederick who had done it, gotten it all balled up, for he was as selfish as everybody else, just as self justifying as everybody else, everything he hated in others, he now saw in himself, what he swore he would never do, as though any of this was real, but it was all so horribly real, far worse than real, and he beat his fists on the pillow over his ears, but he could still hear Martin's wracking cries, with every thing in him, and he said over and again, I'm sorry, I didn't mean it, I'm sorry. And the pleas took him to morning. As did the train whistles, the both of them. Martin and Frederick. Formerly, conjoined twins separated into ragged hunks of meat by a cleaver. As well as did the scream, silent, like a grasshopper who had, first time ever, looked up at a sky he hadn't known was there, and had just begun to learn what he had missed, for just a moment, from Martin, the monstrous longing of it unbearable to Frederick's ears. But the next morning, and all the mornings to come, would never stop any of these sounds.
Welcome to madness.