A Visit to Priapus and Other Stories (10 page)

Then some summer ladies wandered from the inn down through the grove with sudden piping voices, which made him blush and draw away from me. This gave me a welcome insight into his state of mind. For there had been nothing overtly improper in the relative positions of our recumbent persons there in the redolent and tickling grass where presently the ladies also would lie and gossip and giggle; but evidently his thoughts were amorous, his conscience bad. I took his embarrassment as a good excuse to bestir myself and get him started toward Clamariscassett. For this self-conscious and inactive felicity of mine would soon wear itself out, if it had not already done so.

When we reached Clamariscassett he introduced me to his family, friendly but not cheerful folk, evidently of modest fortune, somewhat shiftless. Then he asked me to criticize half a dozen more paintings. While I was thus occupied, thus embarrassed, the family terrier bit my ankle, but it did not hurt. Jaris, with money solicited from rich neighbors and vacationers, had built a little information bureau on the main street, which he and his sister administered; and I had to admire this next. The moral support and occasional friendliness of Maine celebrities such as Messieurs Colcord and Coffin, Madams Carrol and Chase, have been useful and gratifying to him, he explained; and now he is planning a small public park in a vacant lot on the waterfront; and we also inspected this lot. Then he marched me a good way up the Clamariscassett River to view its mysterious vast banks of oyster shells: residue of century-long banquets of a prehistoric people. All this tired me: I felt less and less equal to the opportunity that the night was to afford.

Jaris suggested that we sleep at his parents, although his mother would disapprove—the discomfort, not the immorality, he hastily explained; for we should have to share a single bed. I intensely agreed with her. His father needed the car early in the morning, but he offered to drive us to an inn at Pemaquid Point and to fetch us back next day at noon. Evidently it did not occur to these good people that I could be expected to spend the night at the inn alone, which complacence puzzled and amused me.

It was a new building, most absurdly planned and unattractively furnished. There were two double beds in the room over the kitchen assigned to us. The proprietress complained about this fact a little; she had hoped to rent it to two couples; the morals, that is the
moeurs,
of Americans, how odd! To reach the bathroom we had to go downstairs into the kitchen, and through the sitting-rooms, and back upstairs from the front hall. While I went on that expedition, then while I unpacked—as indeed all the day whenever I turned my back a moment—Jaris engaged a cook or a maid or another guest in the warmest conversation. This great sociability, I thought, must underlie his several semi-philanthropies, raising of funds, giving of information, etc.; and went well with other traits of his odd character: a sort of vacuity, and a sort of insincerity. It was evident also that he had confidence in his ability to obscure the issue of his homosexual -ity. A tireless indiscriminate friendliness no doubt is one good way; for these natives of Maine appear to be not fussily moral, but passionately neighborly, touchily democratic …

Then in my black waxed silk, exotic rather than erotic attire, I lay down on one of the double beds and waited for him. From the remote bathroom, and I know not what further conversation on the way there and back, he came at last and lay beside me. Still I could not think whether to like or dislike his eyes, so light-colored, so old-looking, and decidedly aslant, enclosed in numerous little intense wrinkles pointing out and pointing up. Suddenly I knew what I thought: they were half-animal eyes, metamorphosed eyes; the deadness in them was the legendary pathos of the satyr. His strong, thin, and slightly chapped mouth also pointed up. Most modern men smile downward; he smiled in Etruscan style. We gossiped some more; then he took me in his arms.

After a good many vigorous hugs and rough kisses, I observed that he was worrying about my response to them, that is, my lack of response. What was he doing that displeased me, or was it that I lacked temperament, or what? In fact the day had affected me as if it had been interminable, and I was waiting to forget my fatigue. Also our dinner had been of the grossest meat and potatoes and pie, and I was still aware of my digestion. Of course I was embarrassed to speak of these unromantic impediments. Instead I remarked that his Palm-Beach-cloth suit was uncomfortable, scratchy. He promptly removed it.

His hair was only warmly, rustily blond; but his flesh had the rather weak and precious texture, the hothouse pallor, that as a rule goes with red hair. This, in contrast with his sunburned face, made him appear very naked with his clothes off. The muscles of his back were admirable; the backbone in a deep indentation from the nape of his neck to his compact buttocks. He carried himself with a slight stoop, but his chest was round and stout enough to make up for it. The form and carriage of a young day-laborer … Having undressed in the opposite corner of the room with his back to me, briskly, methodically, he turned around and faced me with the strangest expression—somewhat joyously exhibiting himself, yet somewhat ashamed, and perhaps resentful of my interest, my amusement— and came to bed; and the seemingly interminable night’s work or play began.

His sexual organ, the symbol of this silly pilgrimage, and also the cause of my severe self-consciousness and unromantic sense of humor, really was a fantastic object. No matter what infantile prejudice you might be swayed by, or pagan superstition, or pornographic habit of mind, you could not call it beautiful; it was just a desperate thickness, a useless length of vague awkward muscle. An unusual amount of foreskin covered it, protruded from the end of it, thickly pursed like a rose. In the other dimension also, around the somewhat flattened shaft, the skin was very coarse and copious. Neither in length nor breadth did it increase in the usual ratio, nor did it grow quite rigid, at least not until it had almost reached the point of its difficult orgasm. And at that point, as I presently found to my dis-comfiture, it was apt to fail suddenly, droop suddenly, lie useless half way down his thigh. But still in dull and futile flexibility it had a look of pompous, ominous erection. It was a thing which to a happy person of normal spirit would be a matter of indifference, an absurdity; which on the other hand, to a very sensual man or woman who happened to have a faulty understanding of his way of life, might be a cause of, or a pretext for, desperate bad habit and disappointment. And now here was I, certainly unhappy, and dangerously sensual, but no fool, and not afraid—here was I in bed with Priapus! A thing to frighten maidens with, and to frighten pillagers out of an orchard; a thing to be wreathed with roses, then forgotten …

The mind of poor Priapus in bed seemed to me no less exceptional and troubling than this classic bludgeon. You might have expected him to take pride in it as a kind of wonder of nature; or you might have expected him to hate or pity himself on account of it, or to have a horror of being desired for that and no other reason—expectations far too simple. Upon my referring to it he only conventionally and complacently demurred, as if that were a customary flattery, due tribute, and entirely agreeable. But when I paid attention to it more directly than by word of mouth, active attention, then its size and strength would suddenly decline: the flesh itself ashamed. You might think that such a thing, in its hour of exercise, must cast some spell upon the one of whom it is so disproportionate a part, upon his entire temperament, even his opinion and his emotion. It was not so. Never for an instant did my Hawthorn cease to be self-possessed, critical, and equivocally self-critical, and with the oddest air of begrudging, of calculatory cunning. A man of the purely mental type, pretending to be erotic … It absurdly occurred to me that he might be a man quite deficient physically to whom some wondrous physician, or compassionately interfering friend, or capricious deity, had simply attached this living, but rather spasmodically living, dildo.

And what a strange type: a mentality as busy as a bee, and forever blushing or turning pale; feeling devilish or feeling pure; and in an instant beginning to be sad or angry, but the next instant overcome by fond satisfaction, and self-satisfaction! All night long, throughout my own easy enjoyment and my laborious effort to please him, my falling asleep irresistibly and his waking me, and the rise and fall of that practically hopeless phallus, all night long he was evidently thinking, thinking, in that inconsistent way of his. Thinking, thinking: explaining himself a little, at least to himself; justifying himself a little, or trying to decide how to go about justifying himself if he should have to; and resenting little things I did or things I said, but losing track of his resentment at once, all absorbed in some sort of theory of love, or policy of being my lover, or dubious general scheme of loveableness. While the light bulb without a shade over the bed was on, I could not help seeing all this, kaleidoscopic in his face: all this disorderly rationalization, moralizing, this cold and interminable changing of his mind. I tried not to care; I looked away from his face, and my naturally erotic eyes were indeed otherwise fabulously occupied. I shut them; I turned off the light. But in the dark I could feel the same incongruity in the various emphasis of his fingertips, straining of his thighs, stiffening of his neck—an intellectual straining and stiffening.

I said to myself that he must so admire intellect that he encouraged himself to think as much as possible, no matter what; it was like being in bed with a kind of German philosopher. And probably his intelligence has never quite sufficed to put in order and clarify even for himself the incessant ejaculation of these pseudo-ideas. Certainly his speech never sufficed for an instant to convey to me anything that I could be quite sure of, or entirely respect. Every now and then he whispered something, but never a whole sentence: a word or two, then a silence, then a soft stammer, with a shrug, with a little grimace. Every now and then whatever I did obviously shocked him. But he was ashamed of himself for being shocked. So then almost instantly he would make up for it by an added word or two in explicit praise of my unembarrassed eroticism. Twice in the night he said that he hoped to be influenced by me and become like me in that respect. Evidently he assumed that this intimacy of ours, so rashly and improperly improvised—what for?—was to go on indefinitely like a marriage made in heaven …

Naturally at times I grew as inappropriately thoughtful as he. I simply wearied of lying in the dark, vainly clasping insensitive pseudo-Priapus; I despaired of ever understanding that petty morality, or ever discovering just what would undo and overcome that giant concupiscence. Therefore I would turn on the light again, and by some calculated caress keep him from speaking. Then I would see a sort of apathy, an expression of boredom and disinclination, gradually accumulate in his face, tight-mouthed, dead-eyed. Oh, that eye of his, retrospective even upon the present object, like the eye of a sea gull! If he noticed my observation of him, instantly he would respond with his little Etruscan grin, lips up, eyes up; and the impression that made was of entire insincerity, I think he must have sensed it; for he would kiss me with a fiercer approximation of appetite, or give me a special series of rapid and muscular hugs.

It was bound to be difficult, having to do with a physique such as that: a thing rather symbolic of sex in the abstract than apt to do the actual work of intercourse in any way that I know of. At a glance I could guess how long it would take, how lethargically, callously, it would function: which did not dismay me. What dismayed me little by little was to learn that it was very sensitive as well, more troubled than troublesome—like the sex of some shy wild animal, in incalculable kind of rut one minute, and a strange state of arbitrary chastity the next minute; or like the sex of a great will-o-the-wisp, shrinking away in the darkness. The abnormality, the practical or mechanical trouble, was bad enough; but it was the inability to concentrate, the subnormality of emotional temperature, which made it impossible. No matter, I said to myself; no doubt love or even lust would find a way in time; practice makes perfect …

But a certain uncomfortableness of spirit, obscurity of point of view, is likely to keep one from falling in love, and virtually discourage even the lesser or lower forms of desirous imagining; the spirit is prevented from going to work with any ardor to solve the problems of the body. In the case of male in love with male, this is serious, because homosexuality is somewhat a psychic anomaly, not exactly equipped with mechanism of flesh. At least at the start of such a relationship one must fumble and feel one’s way amid a dozen improvised, approximative, substitutive practices. From start to finish many men find this a terrible disadvantage, a continuous punishment: the worry of what to do and what not to do, and why not and what next and what else; and the dread of the other’s modesty or immodesty or other inexpressible sentiment; and the chill of sense of responsibility, the grievous anxiety of perhaps failing to do for the other what he needs to have done, even amid the fever and rejoicing of one’s own success, at the last minute. In bed with such a fellow as my poor Priapus you would have to be phenomenally unkind or perverse not to suffer from this.

That fantastic plaything might have meant nothing to me at all; it was in fact almost good for nothing; it would have seemed only a fearful, comical, mythological, theoretical thing—unless I had been able to command myself to care about it extremely, unless I had deliberately yielded to a kind of drunkenness of caring: wild exercise of the sense of touch, and spurring on of every other nerve from head to foot around it, and intentional blindness to all else, and conscious fetishism, and so on. I may say that I was quite successful in the management of myself in this respect. With a great store of sexual energy saved up in melancholy and inaction, I did care; I was drunken. But the more successful my excitement, naturally the more difficult it was to control myself, to bide my time, to keep from spending. I could continue with enthusiasm and without crisis for one hour, let us say, not for two; or perhaps for two hours, but not three. And whenever I made any special impatient effort to bring him to the point of felicity, or to keep my own pleasure going, or to distract my attention lest it go too far, then I would encounter suddenly the embarrassment of his mind, the defeatism of his flesh; then I would have to begin all over again. All night long in this way it was a little like nightmare: fighting an infinitude, or running infinitely nowhere. He reminded me of the old man of the sea, Proteus, becoming this and that and the other thing as one wrestled with him. I reminded myself of Tantalus in hell, thirsting to death up to his neck in fresh water, starving to death under a ripe fruit-tree … And whenever my mastery of myself foiled, the nightmare ended for the time being, that is to say whenever I succeeded in spending—there he was still, in his stubborn capricious pretentious condition, pretending that he was going to spend presently, and wildly enthusiastic about me, so he said: optimistic as a madman, energetic as a day-laborer.