Mirrors of Narcissus (4 page)

“About average, I guess.”

“But he sure knew how to use it, huh?”

“Oh, yes. But not nearly as good as you. You’re the best ever.”

“Oh?”

“And you’re the best looking guy I’ve ever been with.”

“What is it about me you like?”

“Your butt, for one. I love your butt.”

“Girls usually tell me that.” Her hands were on my buttocks, caressing them. “What else?”

“Your chest.” She pulled off my shirt. “I love your chest, and your shoulders. You worked out today, didn’t you?”

“Oh yes.”

She felt the hardness of my muscles with the palms of both hands. Seeing the desire in her eyes as she looked at my body excited me. I could see myself reflected in her pupils. There was a lascivious hunger in them. Her lips were slightly parted and I saw her tongue flicker inside. Even in the darkness her eyes glowed greedily when I slipped off my briefs. Feeling her lust, I became aroused. It was her desire for a boy’s body that pierced me now. She made no effort to hide it or disguise it. I could feel it so keenly that my head swam. Maybe this was the nearest I would ever come to making love with another boy. Only Christine had been able to do this to me. And she would do anything for me, to stretch her erotic boundaries in an almost reckless fashion. Only with her had I not had to resort to my imagination. My excitement was what I might have felt if I were naked on a bed together with another boy.

Her slender, boyish figure, and the androgynous, classical beauty of her face easily enhanced the illusion. When her hair was brushed straight back, as it was now, the exquisite shape of her head and the perfection of her ears made her seem like the beautiful young prince of childhood fairy tales.

I reached up and gathered her hair in a bunch behind her head. “Now you look like a boy.”

“Meaning you wish I had bigger tits.”

“No way. I love you just the way you are.”

I lay on my back and she sat atop me straddling my thighs, the better to stroke my erection. From the way she was sitting, it looked as if my up-thrusting penis were hers, completing the illusion that she was a boy.

“You look like a young kid beating off,” I said.

“Oh?” She smiled naughtily, immediately sensing what I wanted. Without hesitation, she began stroking my dick with smooth, practiced motions of the wrist, parting her lips and running her tongue over them. Then she opened her mouth slightly let out a soft moan. It was a beautiful performance.

“Is this how you do it?” she asked.

“Oh yes. You do it so well.”

Looking at the expression on her face, it was difficult to believe she wasn’t feeling exactly what I was feeling. Yes, of course she’d seen a boy’s pleasure at firsthand. I thought of her masturbating her boyfriends by hand. I was now looking at Julian’s face….

She refined the illusion by peering around furtively as she stroked, like a boy in his bedroom fearful of being caught at it. I thought of myself earlier in the library restroom.

“Oh yes….”

She closed her eyes and began sighing, moaning, grimacing, a little exaggeratedly at first, but then more and more realistically. A strange and wonderful boy-girl had been created before my eyes, and I could feel each nuance of his pleasure as he masturbated himself, for he and I were one, stroking and being stroked, boy on boy.

The illusion was perfect.

“Come on, baby….” She had gripped her shaft and was giving herself up to a straight pumping action, jerking it up and down in a frenzied pace which made the glans bob crazily. Her hair had come loose and now flopped rhythmically against her cheekbones to the beat of the creaking of the bed beneath us. The heel of her hand made a slight slapping sound as it hit repeatedly against her groin.

She glanced at me wickedly. She knew I liked what I saw.

And my excitement in turn ignited hers. She became lost in her performance, excited by it, exploring the perverse corners of her own soul. As she sensed the onset of my pleasure, she really seemed to forget for a moment that she was a girl. Suddenly she threw her head back and her thighs gripped me tighter and her lips made a tight O as she shot her warm semen all over my chest.

I was in heaven….

4

Peter Cockle lived north of the campus among the hills overlooking the city. I’d spoken with him over the phone and had taken him for just another art student. But after I’d learned more about him from Christine, I began to feel a little nervous about meeting him. Apparently he was already something of a campus celebrity, being one of the most talented artists in school. There were those who called him a genius. The art professors treated him a little deferentially, creating a certain amount of envy among the other art students.

It was Christine who had introduced me to modeling. She’d started to model herself under the work-study program offered by the school, which gave students part-time employment around campus. These jobs barely paid minimum wages, but were convenient and easy. The fine arts department was looking for models for the art students, and the pay was reasonable; Christine had applied and immediately been accepted.

I used to watch her sometimes as she sat for the students, wishing she could be posing in the nude. School regulations prohibited nude modeling during class periods ever since some student’s mother had complained about it, but students or groups of students could make private arrangements with a model for extracurricular sessions, even using the art room after school hours. Christine herself refused such offers, but when I told her I would be willing, she recommended them to me. She had told me it was easy work and, knowing I could use the money, urged me to try it, too. I’d never modeled before so I agreed initially out of curiosity. Since then, I’d posed privately on a number of occasions, almost always in the nude.

Peter Cockle had apparently seen me posing for someone else, and had contacted me over the phone. He wondered if I would be willing to model privately for him. I’d agreed, then gone to Christine to find out more about him. What she told me made me curious to meet him, especially as he was apparently widely rumored to be gay.

When he came to the door in answer to my ring, he was wiping his glasses.

“I’m so glad you could come, Guy,” he said, extending a thin white hand. I shook it—it was limp, and a little damp. “Come on in.”

He was a pale, intense aesthete, the stereotypical artist. Thick lenses magnified his eyes, which had a stark, questioning look. His hair was thin and wispy, already going bald. He wore a black turtle neck sweater under a pair of faded workman’s overalls. He was barefoot.

He was obviously the type who became so absorbed in his painting that he forgot to eat. If it weren’t for his careless way of dressing, and the complete lack of interest he took in his grooming, he could have passed for a business ed major—a future bank manager or advertising executive.

His apartment was cramped and smelled of oil paints and turpentine. Canvases filled every room, most with their faces turned to the wall. Their backs, wooden-framed, looked naked, and were covered with titles scribbled in pencil. Rows of them leaned out from the wall into the middle of the room, and we had to maneuver carefully past them to get to the workroom.

Peter apparently did all his painting in this small, well-lighted space with a paint-spattered workbench in the middle. Pinned to the walls everywhere in kaleidoscopic disarray were newspaper clippings, photos torn out of magazines, comic strips, and Polaroid shots of street scenes. There was a camera on a tripod beside the bathroom door. The floor was littered with cans, bottles, and various knick-knacks obviously picked up at antique stores and junkyards. Amid all the clutter was a strange wooden contraption which looked like a tiny replica of the Wright brothers’ first airplane. Propped inside it was a small mirror, angled so that the viewer’s eye stared back at him. Next to it was a book checked out from the library turned face down, a collection of African art.

“Sit down,” he said. “I’ll get you something to drink before we get started.”

It was difficult to find a place to sit among the jumble of things scattered haphazardly all over the place. I sat down in a low-slung canvas director’s chair.

He opened a portable refrigerator under the workbench—I caught a glimpse of rows of paints and camera film inside—and pulled out a can of Coke. Picking up a glass from a small table, he blew the dust off it and handed it to me with the drink.

“I can’t pay you very much,” he said. “But I’ll do the best I can.” He named a price and I nodded; it was well over what I usually got.

“What kind of work are you doing now?” I asked.

“Believe it or not, a series of illustrations dealing with themes from Greek mythology. Look.”

He picked out one of the canvasses leaning against the wall and turned it around so I could see. It was a painting of a boy half-undressed, in a secluded grove peering through some bushes at a bathing woman—a goddess, presumably.

“No one does this sort of thing nowadays,” he said, “though it used to be the standard practice for artists. But that’s exactly why I want to do it. For one thing, I like the challenge of painting naturalistically. Everyone thinks that all I can paint are those abstracts which the professors are making such a fuss over. I want to prove to them that I can do other things—that I have mastered the traditional techniques. Just when they think they have me pegged, blam, I turn around and do something completely unexpected.”

I was barely listening to him, so mesmerized was I by the painting. I remembered looking at pictures very much like this in my mother’s art books back home when I was a boy, but this was somehow different. Though its theme was just as traditional, there was something very modern about the way it had been done.

The whole scene glowed with life, emanated a sense of reality, almost a super-reality, which riveted my attention. I’d never seen such minuteness, such painstaking attention to detail before. No photograph could ever be this realistic. It was as if Peter had actually gone back into a mythological time and had been there to record the moment. I was astonished. This painting transcended realism—gloriously. It lived, breathed.

I was especially struck by the beauty of the boy’s face, and the attention Peter had paid to the delineation of his muscles, and wondered who the model was. Just the way the boy’s arm angled back to expose a tiny wisp of underarm hair made me ache with longing. I felt a hollow hurt in the depths of my chest.

“Am I gonna look like that?”

“Something very similar,” he said. “You’re going to be my model for Narcissus. You know who he is, don’t you?”

“Isn’t that where the word narcissist comes from?” When speaking with highly intelligent people, I sometimes found myself almost unconsciously acting less intelligent than I was, as if adopting a pose of simple-mindedness.

“Exactly. Narcissus was a beautiful young man who fell in love with his own image—and got turned into a flower for it.” He pointed to a flower in a wine bottle amid the clutter on the floor. “That’s Narcissus today, a lovely but somewhat over-refined flower.”

“Why did you pick me?”

“You fit my image of him perfectly. There’s something about you which makes you just right for what I wanted—something in your eyes, maybe. You seem so deep within yourself—as if you were gazing into a deep pool. And there’s also something about you which makes me feel that you’ve never been in love with anyone—that you might be incapable of loving as others love.”

“Oh?”

“Please don’t be offended,” he added quickly, blushing hard. “I don’t mean it to sound insulting. It’s just that that detached quality was exactly what I had in mind for my Narcissus.”

“Well, I really don’t know what you’re talking about. As a matter of fact, I have been in love. Several times, in fact.”

“Me and my big mouth. Please ignore what I just said. Sometimes I don’t know what I’m saying. I guess I got so carried away with planning my work that I’m still lost in it.”

“I understand.” But in my heart I felt he’d touched on a truth inside me. I did have a secret fear that I could never love anyone in the manner he mentioned—the normal way all people fell in love and lived happy, fulfilled lives. I could only have crushes on people I could never have. Unrequited love suited me, and had been all I ever experienced. Perhaps it had been too easy for me to possess any girl I desired, for I seemed to lose all my desire the moment I possessed her. But the boys I got crushes on stayed in my heart for that very reason: because I could never have them, they remained unattainable dream ideals whose reality never intruded upon my immaculate images of them.

“I like to play jazz records as I paint. I hope you don’t mind. It helps me concentrate.”

“No problem.”

He went over to the record player and picked out an album from a pile of them on the bench, put it on. Then, as he spread a rather thick rug on the floor before the window, he mumbled something I couldn’t catch.

“What’s that?” I asked.

He cleared his throat. “You don’t mind modeling in the nude, do you?”

“No, of course not.” I felt a prickling along the back of my neck. Thinking of the rumors about his sexual inclinations, I tried to repress the thrill which surged through me.

“Would you be willing to pose fully nude?”

“Of course. I suppose when you’re dealing with ancient Greek myths, it comes with the territory.”

“Sometime in the future I might ask you to. But for today, all I need is the shirt off.”

“All right.” As I pulled off my T-shirt I felt relief and disappointment in equal measure. It would have been nice to savor the heady danger involved in being watched by a gay man. But at the same time I was relieved of my worry that I might let my own excitement show. In any case, this painting of Narcissus might not require full nudity; perhaps the lower half of my body would be covered by a piece of cloth. “Shall I take my jeans off?”

“Please.” He turned his back and began fussing with the palette and some tubes of paint. His eyes avoided mine as he set up the easel. He was trying hard to act nonchalant, but I could see his Adam’s apple bob up and down each time he swallowed.

I pulled off my jeans and put them on the stool on top of my T-shirt. I was down to my white cotton briefs. In a way, it was even sexier to be in briefs rather than fully nude. “Do you paint many nudes?”

“Some.”

“Mostly male or female?”

“Both.” He pushed his glasses back up onto the bridge of his nose. “Well, shall we get started?”

“Sure.”

He glanced at me and came over. “Please kneel down on the rug.” Guiding me with his hands, he had me sit gazing slightly downward at the bare floor, adjusting me slightly every few minutes until he had the pose he wanted. Then he began doing a rough pencil sketch of me directly onto the canvas.

The room was a little cool. I felt a tiny tension in my nipples and along the surface of my skin. The idea that Peter might make a pass at me was at the root of the tension I felt, even though he seemed so otherworldly, as if sex were, for him, secondary to painting. I imagined his glances at my body as tiny caresses, brushing feather-like here and there, occasionally rasping roughly as if a finger were rubbing an unshaven cheek. I was praying that I wouldn’t get aroused. But I needn’t have worried. As soon as he began painting, he was lost in his work, and I began losing my own self-consciousness.

He dove into his work with a voracious appetite, animated by a hidden power which seemed to have taken over his conscious self. I could tell he was in another time and place. His unblinking gaze went up to me then back to the canvas, communicating some message from eye to brain to hand. His face had no expression at all; I felt he was seeing right through me, at something which wasn’t of this world, and I was a little frightened by it.

For him I was nothing more than a problem in lines, colors, shades. I had been reduced to the reflection of lights on the surface of my skin. For all he cared, I might have been a desk, an apple, a sunset.

But I was used to this by now. Modeling hadn’t been as easy as I’d thought it would be at first. Standing still for thirty minutes at a time, sometimes in an uncomfortable pose, knowing I was being closely scrutinized, mentally stripped down to the bare lines and planes of my physical existence—all of this was sometimes quite unsettling. During a posing session, every inch of me was public property; I was merely a life-sized doll to be analyzed for the angles of my bones, the shade of light against my skin.

And sitting so still before a classroom full of students was often a test of endurance, almost a Zen-like discipline. I thought of it as a Spartan training to achieve mental detachment. Indeed, the way I concentrated on my breathing, the sensations on the surface of my skin, the play of light in the air—all this was a sort of meditation. At such times, I was not the usual me but another, more abstract being. My mind went blank and I thought of nothing, only occasionally brought back to reality by the tiny sounds made by hatching pencils, rubbed erasers, dropped paintbrushes.

Still, the ferocity with which Peter was attacking the canvas could very well be seen as a sublimation of his sexual desire for me. His intense, bug-eyed expression and the sweat popping out on his forehead only added to the bizarre illusion.

I wondered if he found me sexually attractive. The most satisfying thing about being a model, of course, was the sheer joy of just being looked at. I’d always been self conscious of my looks, perhaps too much so, for I’d known from an early age that I was attractive, and this knowledge carried with it a burden as well as joy. Whenever I walked down the street, I always secretly counted the number of heads I’d turned, the number of people who’d stared at me. And if no one or almost no one looked in admiration, I began to worry if my looks were going. By modeling for artists, I knew I was being looked at by people who knew and cared about how beautiful my body was. It was a way of reassuring myself that I was desirable.