Mirrors of Narcissus (12 page)

I pulled the jock strap out again and made my way back to my bed. There, I sat down and examined my find. I flipped the pouch inside out and held it up to get a better look. There was a barely-noticeable yellow stain in the very middle. I brought it up to my nose and caught the briny scent of urine…and of something else: a faint whiff of semen.

I felt faint. The image of the pouch firmly cupping Scott’s genitals came to me, and I felt my own dick stir. Feeling the keenest shame, I closed my eyes and licked at the cloth where Scott’s dick and balls had nestled.

The ignoble nature of what I was doing shamed me, yet I felt impelled to it. For this was a token of my love—a love for which I had assigned the purest motives. If Scott could see me now, what would he think? I knew all too well.

With a feeling of hopeless despair, I realized that this was as close to him as I could ever get. Unable to caress his flesh, I would caress that which had touched his flesh. This emissary of his body would have to do. Love was selfish, love was blind—and lust was an insane madman screaming for release. I wanted Scott’s body, I wanted it now.

With trembling, impatient fingers I undid my belt and fly, and kicked myself free from my jeans. Then I slid my briefs down to my ankles and flipped them away into the corner. My dick was up hard and straining, its flesh stretched taut to bursting point, the glans shiny and pulsing.

I lay back on my bed and brought the jock strap up to my dick. With pounding heart, I buried the head of my dick in the pouch, then wrapped the leg strap and waistband around the rest of my shaft.

I began pumping.

I thought of Scott naked atop his bed, masturbating to his girly magazines. It was a beautiful picture. I imagined him shooting off within seconds, with vigorous young spurts, all the way up to his chin, leaving sudden quivering drops of pure white pearls dotted all across his chest and belly.

A strap had come loose, and was playing rhythmically against my balls. Oh, how I wished I could be this jock strap, encasing Scott’s dick and balls so intimately, hugging his hips and buttocks in a firm clamp, feeling his body, hot and restless and hard, boy-clean and innocent, heterosexual. Not queer like me….

I was beyond all shame now. I didn’t care about anything, only about that hard rod of muscle I was stroking, into which the whole universe had become compressed, tight in my fist, and nothing else mattered, nothing. Not even if the whole world were to barge in now and see me.

For I was with Scott now, I was one with him. I was encased in his flesh and stroking his dick. I could feel his pleasure brimming up to the rim, to the very lip, where a single drop of lemon juice squeezed out and trickled slowly down the side, and I couldn’t hold back any longer, no longer, no more….

I jammed my shoulders back against the mattress and arched my back, made of my body a bow, as the tension drew taut—taut—taut—and then was suddenly, gloriously released as I shot an arrow straight up to heaven, up to the only heaven I knew.

*

Part Three: Mare Clausum

1

Erewhon, the disco just off campus on University Avenue, was the most popular place to go on Saturday nights. Christine and I liked to go dancing there occasionally, and tonight we had asked Scott to join us, along with a girl named Jill who lived in Christine’s apartment building.

Christine (and I, too) had been trying for a while to set up Scott with a girl. We knew he regularly received letters from a girl named Linda, but it was my impression that he didn’t care deeply about her. They seemed to be nothing more than friends, though they confided in each other about everything.

Even before tonight, Christine and I had introduced him to a number of girls, usually friends of hers, but nothing had come of them. His shyness was an inhibiting factor. Also, there were very few girls among them who could match him intellectually. Scott himself protested that our solicitous efforts were an embarrassment to him. But Christine reassured him that she thought of him as something like a brother, and wanted to see him romantically happy.

My own motives were a bit more complex. I, too, wanted to see him romantically fulfilled, but even more than that, I wanted him to be sexually active. Though he claimed that he didn’t feel deprived in any way, and that he was too busy with his studies to pay much attention to girls, I knew he was a healthy young boy with the normal sexual appetite of a 19-year-old male. To be the instrument of his sexual happiness, even indirectly, would give me the greatest pleasure.

Yet at the same time, another part of me wanted him to remain unattached. I was already jealous of whichever girl would eventually have her hold on him. Maybe that was why every time Christine consulted me about introducing someone to him as a possible girlfriend I always found something wrong with her. I was perfectly happy with the way things were, with the friendship among the three of us.

There was a large crowd of students outside the entrance to Erewhon, some waiting for friends, others (mostly high school girls) hoping for an escort to take them inside. We showed our student IDs at the door and got in at the student discount rate.

Twelve steps led us down into another world, a place very much like Venusberg. For Erewhon was decorated like the inside of a mysterious cave. A red light pulsating from just beyond some realistic-looking rocky crags gave a hellish atmosphere to the place. The music was loud and made my head feel stuffed up.

“Let’s find a table,” I yelled, above the sound of the music.

The dance floor was packed, as it usually was just after midterms and finals. A sexual ambience pervaded the whole place, inundated as it was by the nakedness of sexual desire. The beat of the music was sexual, and the bodies dancing to it all around us were writhing in passionate abandon. Boys in tight jeans were sweating from the exertion of thrusting their hips in a gyrating motion. Brushing against them on the dance floor as I led the way to an open table, I could feel that some of them wore no underwear. The girls they were dancing with seemed oblivious to the fact that their breasts were rubbing provocatively against me. There was a dizzying atmosphere of orgiastic promiscuity in here.

The tables on the far side of the crowded dance floor were all but obscured behind some pillars designed to look like stalactites and stalagmites. As soon as we found a table, a waiter dressed as a red demon came over to take our orders for drinks. When he went away to bring them, we headed back out to the dance floor and began dancing.

Whenever I danced, I felt a wonderful sense of freedom, as if I were being unleashed, a comet spinning through black space. The disco beat sent a primal message to my nerves; I felt I was back in the jungle again, back at my roots, in communication with the deepest part of my psyche. The rhythm sparked a genetic memory of my ancestors dancing wildly after a kill, or performing a ritual courtship dance. At times I felt I wasn’t dancing with Christine so much as with my ancient blood relatives.

Christine was quite a good dancer. For her, though, dancing was more of a practical physical exercise, a way to work off the accumulated stresses of study.

I looked beyond her to where Scott and Jill were. Scott looked like he was having a good time. He was dancing and laughing with Jill. I noticed her large breasts bouncing, bra-less, against her tight ribbed sweater.

Jill was one of those girls who had a reputation for being easy, and Christine had vehemently protested my choice of Scott’s partner. We’d almost had a fight about it earlier. She saw me looking over at Jill now.

“That girl’s a pig,” she said. “Her roommate tells me she sleeps with a different guy every week.”

“So? If unattached men can have multiple sex partners, why can’t women?”

“She isn’t for Scott. She’d eat him alive.”

“Maybe he’d enjoy that.”

“Guy.”

When I’d first set eyes on Jill this evening, I’d been a little disappointed that her looks hadn’t matched her reputation. I had been expecting a sleazy-looking tramp or a bewitching vamp, but the girl who’d met us at the dorm with Christine was of average looks, a trifle vapid-looking but otherwise nondescript. The skill of her make-up left something to be desired, and she used a little too much perfume. There was only one thing which gave a subtle hint of her promiscuity: her body seemed as if it didn’t belong to her. She gave the impression she was only borrowing it for the occasion, as she would wear someone else’s dress to create an enticing allure, a sexy gown designed for a woman much older than herself.

I caught Scott’s eye and we smiled at each other. At that moment, I felt as if I were dancing with him. He moved toward me, and for a while we danced facing each other, trying to talk over the loud music. I moved against him, and he leaned toward me, pressing his mouth against my ear, but I couldn’t hear a word he said.

When we got back to the table, I learned that he’d only been asking for directions to the men’s room. I got up. “I have to go, too.”

The restroom was in the far corner, hidden behind some hellish-looking “flames”—actually strands of orange, yellow and red vinyl being blown upwards by a small electric fan.

Inside the restroom, standing at adjacent urinals, I asked him, “What do you think of Jill?”

“She’s all right. A little bit on the wild side, though.”

I wondered if he’d heard the rumors about her. For me, Jill’s reputation wore itself around her like a cloak, wreathing her in an aura of magic, the magic of the many whispered stories about her. Such girls had always fascinated me; the knowledge that she’d been to bed with so many different boys gave her a semi-divine status in my eyes. I tried to envision all the male virility spent into her, all the boy-skin she’d touched. Some atavistic longing had made me go after such girls in high school. Maybe I’d felt a primal need to connect vicariously with all the boys they’d been with. I knew many boys—straight boys—who shared this subconscious longing to bond sexually with other males, but in a way which left their precious sense of masculinity intact. For them, too, the idea of possessing the girl a friend has once had, and passing her around in a ritual sharing, was a sexual stimulant.

I smiled at Scott. “I think she likes you, Scott. This is going to be your lucky night. I just know it.”

He looked uncertain.

“Don’t worry,” I assured him, misinterpreting his look, “she’s supposed to be…you know…friendly. You’re almost sure to score.”

For a moment I thought I saw a trapped look in his eyes and regretted my subterfuges. My man-to-man assurances seemed only to trouble him. For me, however, the thought that Scott would soon be having sex with Jill gave me a giddy sense of power…and a nervous feeling of anxiety. I felt like a playwright about to see his own work performed on stage for the first time.

We returned to the table where Jill was eagerly waiting to pull Scott back out onto the dance floor. Christine and I followed them. We danced the next several numbers, then returned together to the table, sweaty and tired. Scott and Jill seemed to be enjoying themselves thoroughly. We all sat listening to the music for a while, and talking.

I found myself ordering more and more beers by the pitcher. After a while, it must have seemed to outsiders that we were intent on getting drunk. Christine’s words were beginning to slur, and Jill’s laughter had turned loud and strident. Scott, too, looked quite drunk, drunker than I’d ever seen him. As I thought of the night ahead, my own intoxication became edged with panic; the scenario I’d sketched so blithely earlier was now fading away in places, leaving sinister blank spots.

“Let’s get back to the dorm before we get too drunk to walk,” I said.

Jill looked at me with, I thought, a flash of understanding. Had we somehow turned into secret accomplices?

Outside, I put my arm around Christine, and Scott and Jill were walking just behind us, locked arm in arm. My plan was for all of us to go back to the dorm where we would relax in our room. If the atmosphere and timing were right, I could make some excuse to walk Christine home, leaving Scott and Jill alone in the room. But if everybody seemed willing, I could just pull the partition closed, separating the two sides of the room, and both couples could make love right there in the same room. With luck, there might not even be a need for the partition. As I envisioned being able to see Scott and Jill naked in each other’s arms, I felt my steps begin to hurry. This would be a night to remember.

Back at the dorm, there seemed to be a party in progress in the lounge, but we sneaked past its door and headed straight for our room without looking in. Only after we’d closed our door behind us did we all burst out laughing.

Jill drunkenly pulled Scott to herself and began kissing him, clumsily guiding him down onto his sofa-bed as she did so. I suspected she was acting drunker than she really was. I looked at Christine; she gave me a wry smile. But when I signaled for her to come to me, she just shook her head.

“Well, you two lovebirds,” I said, “Chrissie wants me to see her to her room, so if you’ll excuse us….”

As I began guiding Christine toward the door, Scott’s passion seemed suddenly to cool. “Wait,” he said. “Not before having another drink.” The look of uncertainty on his face indicated he wasn’t so eager for us to separate just yet.

“Sure.” I walked over to the refrigerator where he quickly joined me. As I handed him a couple of cans, he whispered:

“Guy, please. Can we call it off?”

I stared at him. “What? Just when you’re about to get laid?”

“I—I think I’d prefer another night. The time’s not right.”

“It’s not?” And then the reason for his reluctance came to me. “Tell me something, Scott. Is this your first time?”

He looked at me ruefully. “Yeah.” He blushed and I knew he was telling the truth. Though I knew he was innocent, I’d never quite thought of him as a virgin, perhaps taking for granted that he’d slept at least once with his high school girlfriend.

“There’s nothing to be afraid of,” I said. “It’ll all come naturally.”

“Yeah, but—”

“You do like girls, don’t you?” I felt like a hypocrite for saying it, but a part of me was suddenly eager to hear his answer—perhaps I still had a faint hope that he was gay. And another part of me wondered if I hadn’t planned the whole evening with just this in mind—to prove one way or the other whether he was or not.

“Of course I like girls,” he said. “It’s not that, but—”

A sudden sense of shame came over me. Why should he have to go through with it just to satisfy a longing in me?

“All right,” I said, “I’ll make some kind of excuse.”

“Thanks.”

I went back to the girls. “Hey, listen. Scott says he feels a little sick from drinking too much.”

They looked toward him. Sheepishly, he said, “I guess I’m not much of a partyer.”

Jill looked a little disappointed. “Are you all right, Scott?”

“Yeah. But I think I should hit the sack.”

I said: “Chrissie, could you see Jill home? I think I’d better make Scott some hot coffee.”

“Sure.”

After the girls had gone, I filled the electric coffee-maker with water and plugged it in. As we sat waiting for the water to boil, I thought about the turn the evening had taken. Though I was disappointed that it hadn’t come off as I’d planned, I was happy to have gotten Scott’s confession of his virginity. Such a confession isn’t lightly given by any boy, and was another link bringing us closer together. I felt a new tenderness toward him.

“It’s all right, Scott. My first time was really scary for me, too.”

“It’s not that,” he said. He gave a nervous little laugh. “I’ve never talked about this with anybody because it’s a little embarrassing. I mean, it might sound so trivial to you, but for me it isn’t. You see, I’m not like other boys.”

I stared at him, my heart almost stopping. “Go on.”

“Guy, I have a confession to make. I’ve never undressed in front of a girl before. And the reason for that is…I’m ashamed of my own body.”

“Why?”

“I’m uncircumcised.”

I didn’t know what to say. My first impulse was to laugh at something so trifling, but the look on his face was serious. “Is there something wrong with being uncircumcised?” I asked.