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He made his way to his own room, falling down a couple of times. When he woke, sober and aghast, it was late the next afternoon and he expected to find the police waiting for him downstairs. But there was no one there but his father and his stepmother and the servants. Nobody acted as if anything unusual had happened. His father smiled, asked him how the dance had gone. His sister was out with friends. She didn’t return until di
That was all. That was the whole thing. When he was finished, Timothy looked up, drained, empty, gray-faced, a million and a half years old. “I can’t tell you how crappy I’ve always felt about doing something like that,” he said. “How much goddamned guilt I’ve had.”
“You feel better now?” I asked.
“No.”
I wasn’t surprised. I’ve never believed that opening your soul brings you surcease from sorrow. It just spreads the sorrow around some. What Timothy had told me was a dumb story, a sordid story, a downer, a bummer. A tale of the idle rich, mind-fucking each other in the usual fashion, worrying about virginity and propriety, creating little melodramatic operas starring themselves and their friends, with snobbishness and frustration spi
“All right,” he said. “I did what Frater Javier wanted me to do. Now I feel like a load of shit. How do you feel, Oliver?” He laughed. “And tomorrow it’s your turn.”
He went out.
Yes. Tomorrow it’s my turn.
chapter thirty-seven
Eli
Oliver said, “There was this day in early September when my friend Karl and I went hunting, just the two of us, chasing doves or partridges all morning through the scrubby woods north of town, catching nothing but dust. Then we came out of the trees and saw a lake before us, a pond, really, and we were hot and sweaty, for summer wasn’t entirely over yet. So we put down our guns and got out of our clothes and took a swim, and afterward we sat naked on a big flat rock, drying ourselves and hoping some birds would fly by, so we could pot them — pow — without even getting up. Karl was fifteen then and I was fourteen, and I was finally bigger than he was, because I had reached my full growth and passed him in the spring. Karl had seemed so mature and big a few years before, but now he looked thin and flimsy next to me. We didn’t speak for a long time, and then, just as I was thinking of suggesting that we get dressed and move along, Karl turned toward me with a peculiar look in his eyes, and I saw he was studying my body, my groin. And he said something about girls, how stupid girls are, what stupid noises they make while you’re “laying them, how tired he ,was of having to make love talk with them before they’d let him get into them, how bored he was with their dumb floppy tits, their makeup, their giggling, how much he hated buying them sodas and listening to their chatter, and so on. He said a lot of stuff along those lines. I laughed and said, Well, girls may have their flaws, but it’s the only game in town, isn’t it? And Karl said, No it isn’t.
“Now I was sure he was putting me on, and I told him, I never went much for fucking cows or sheep, Karl. Or maybe it’s ducks you’ve been going with lately. He shook his head. He looked a
“And as he was explaining this to me, speaking very fast, never once letting me get a word in edgewise, making everything sound almost rational and logical, he had his hand on me, putting it there in a very casual way, on my thigh, the way you might put your hand on somebody’s shoulder while you’re saying something to him, meaning nothing particular by it, and Karl was rubbing this hand up and down, up and down, still talking a streak, moving the hand closer and closer to my crotch all the time. And he was getting hard, Eli, and so was I, that’s what amazed me so much, so was I. I was getting hard. With an empty blue sky above us and not another human being within five miles. I was afraid to look down at myself, ashamed of what I knew was happening to me. That was a revelation to me, that another fellow could arouse me like that. Just this once, he said, just once, Oliver, and if you don’t like it I’ll never mention the subject to you again, but you mustn’t knock it till you’ve tried it, you hear? I didn’t know how to answer him and I didn’t know how to get his hand off me. And then the hand moved farther up, up to here, and even higher, and — look, Eli, I mean, I don’t want to get too graphic. If this is embarrassing you, just tell me and I’ll try to describe it in general terms — ”
“Say it however you need to say it, Oliver.”
“Reaching his hand up and up, until his hand was clasped tight around my — around my cock, Eli, he was holding my penis, holding me there just like a girl might, the two of us naked by that little lake where we’d just been swimming, at the edge of the woods, and his words pouring through my head, telling me how we could do it with each other, how men managed it. I know all about it, he said, I learned it from my brother-in-law. You know, he hates my sister, they’ve been married only three years and he can’t stand her, the way she smells, the way she files her nails all the time, everything about her, and one night he said, Let me show you some fun, Karl, and he was right, it was fun. So let me show you some fun, Oliver. And afterward you tell me who gave you a better time, me or Christa Henrichs, me or Judy Beecher.”