Mirrors of Narcissus (5 page)

“Can I see what you’ve done so far?” I asked. I was curious to see what I’d inspired, in the same way everyone wants to know how his photo came out.

“Sorry. I’d rather you didn’t see it just yet. You’ll have to wait until it’s done, okay?”

“When will that be?”

“Don’t know.” When he saw my reaction, his expression softened. “I’m sorry if I seem rude. But that’s just the way I am. I hate for someone to look at a work in progress. It’s a superstition I have. I don’t know if I can explain it.”

“That’s all right. I guess with your talent, you’re entitled to be a little eccentric.”

“Talent? What is this talent that everyone talks about? I hate to be singled out like some kind of freak. Everyone has some kind of talent.”

“Not me.”

He stared at me. “You do have a talent. Your beauty.”

“Beauty is a talent?”

“Of course it is. Beauty is a God-given talent. That sounds strange, I know. But believe me, I’ve given it a lot of thought. Beautiful people are that way by an act of will. They seem to radiate something from within, some sort of power which is the source of their attraction. I say this because I’ve seen many people who have all the attributes of physical beauty—the proper proportions of face and body, and so forth—but who don’t attract us. And on the other hand, there are others who might not have the natural material of a beautiful person, but who have this strange ability to draw our eyes. I’m not talking about charisma, either, or ‘personality.’ I’m talking about the true source of beauty, the magical talent for clothing oneself in physical desirability.”

“I think you’re making too much of all this.”

With a trembling hand, he took off his glasses and began polishing them with a handkerchief. Evidently excited by the topic, he continued on, stammering occasionally in his rush to elaborate. “Physical beauty is something we all want—if we don’t have it ourselves, we seek it in others. We want to possess it. And if we can’t possess it, we make it. I’ve always been fascinated by attractive people. Not being attractive myself, maybe I was jealous. I wanted to believe that it was impossible to touch them—that their surface beauty came between them and any sort of human contact. An unattractive person who is used to pining away for someone wants to believe that the burning desire he feels for his beloved is something which the beloved can never feel.”

He put on his glasses again and looked at me but I couldn’t see the expression on his face because the setting sun outside had lit the sky up in an orange glow and was reflected on the surface of his lenses. All I saw was a twin pair of orange ovals. I said nothing and he went on:

“Our society categorizes people by their looks. We pretend it isn’t so, but it’s true. Supposedly we are all created equal—we all have an equal chance to succeed. That’s all bullshit. In everything, whether it’s sports, business, or academics, the odds are stacked heavily in favor of those with good looks. Look at all the successful people, and nine times out of ten, except for geniuses, the successful ones are those who look good.

“In a society which prides itself on egalitarianism, desire for beauty is supposedly an unhealthy trait. But we are slaves to our instincts. It’s ingrained in us for survival. When we lived by the laws of the jungle, the best chance of surviving, and having offspring survive, was for the female to seek a strong male. A male with a strong, muscular body could fight off enemies. That is the very type we identify as sexually attractive. The weaker males also gathered around him for protection against worse dangers. Even today, leaders—whether in sports, business, or politics—tend to be attractive. We feel we can rely on them to keep the wolves at bay. When we see athletes on a playing field, we feel an atavistic longing within us. Deep within our genetic memory is the shared experience of relying on such rough brutes for protection.”

He paused and I shivered. I was struck by the incongruity of sitting almost nude listening to his spontaneous discourse, but couldn’t help but be strangely moved by his stumbling, stammering speech. He went on:

“Maybe that’s why I try to compensate by my art. If I wasn’t so unattractive, I might not paint at all. But the fact is, given a choice, I’d rather be an untalented but beautiful person than an unattractive genius. I think all artists feel the same way. Deep down, we all want to be desired and loved by those whom we love. We try to capture the beauty which we lack, which we want. I use my talent in revenge against a world which gives all its adoration to the beautiful people.”

As he said all this, there was no trace of bitterness; he was merely stating facts dryly, even a little tiredly.

“I don’t think you’re unattractive, Peter,” I said, awkwardly. “In fact, when you—”

He put his brush down and picked up a piece of paint-stained cloth. “I think we’ve had enough of a break. Let’s get back to work, shall we?”

“All right.”

I resumed my pose and heard him begin to mix paints again.

5

I posed for Peter three more times in the following week, after which he said he had enough to go on. At the last session he asked me rather diffidently if I would take off my briefs, which I did without any qualms. By then I had been longing for it to happen, and was somewhat disappointed at his seeming indifference to my finally becoming completely nude.

The next day, I decided to go to the library to find out more about Narcissus. I vaguely remembered reading something about him back in high school, but now I felt a need to learn all I could about my mythical alter-ego.

For me, there had always been something excitingly illicit about the Greek myths. I remembered my high school English teacher, Mr. Brown, telling us that many of the gods, including Zeus, were bisexual, with male lovers as well as female. In fact, the ancient Greeks—to the amazement of my classmates—seemed to have accepted sex between men as a normal activity. I wondered now if the story of Narcissus might not hold a secret waiting to be unlocked by me.

I found what I wanted in the classic literature section of the Spenser Library: an illustrated reference book which contained capsule histories of all the major gods and heroes.

Apparently Narcissus was a demi-god, whose father was the river god Cephisus and his mother a water nymph named Liriope. He was a beautiful youth; by the age of sixteen he was adored by both boys and girls. Almost everyone who saw him fell in love with him, but he himself seemed incapable of feeling a similar passion for anyone. Knowing nothing of the pain of love, he saw it as a weakness, a form of derangement which made people do ridiculous things. He mocked those whose hearts were broken by him.

One of the boys who had been spurned by him prayed to the gods in anger that Narcissus would suffer as so many others had for his sake—that he would fall in love with someone and never have it requited. The gods heard his prayer and answered it.

One day Narcissus became lost in a forest where no man or beast had ever ventured. In his wanderings, he came upon a hidden pool surrounded by tall grass and trees. To quench his thirst, he knelt down to take a drink, and as he did so, saw his own reflection for the first time in his life.

As he gazed upon the face of the most beautiful boy he’d ever seen, he experienced something he’d never known before. At first, he was happy just to gaze upon the other boy’s face, but before long, he desired more. He knew the other wanted the same. But though they stretched their arms out to each other, they could never touch. And when they tried to kiss, their frustrated passion dissolved into shimmering ripples.

Two lovers pining away for each other, from different worlds, so close yet so far, separated by the thinnest of barriers—the one separating reality from illusion, that division which generates the most desperate and powerful of all loves.

Obsessed by his twin, Narcissus lost all desire for food or sleep. His physical strength began to ebb away, his will to live sapped by his sorrow. Either because the gods were moved by his sorrow or by his beauty, they turned him into a flower forever peering down at its own reflection in the water, the flower which bears his name today, the flower I’d seen in the wine bottle at Peter’s studio.

This story had a strange appeal for me. Like Narcissus, I had always known that I was attractive, and been proud of the fact, even using my looks as a weapon to get certain things I wanted. But there was always a kind of guilt attached to my pride. I was made to feel that it was vulgar—especially for a boy—to flaunt his looks. The word “narcissism” invariably had a negative connotation. And because it was considered something like bad manners to feel that I was more attractive than the average boy, my self-love had to be hidden away in my deepest, most secret place. If someone should suddenly walk in when I was admiring myself in the mirror, I felt as if I’d been discovered in a shameful act.

All my life, I’d spent an inordinate amount of time in front of mirrors, though I tried to hide it from others. I would lose all sense of time as I examined my reflection, until my face had lost all its familiarity and become a stranger’s…like the feeling you have when you look at a word for a long time and eventually the word becomes unfamiliar and loses all meaning. In the mirror, the other boy’s beauty had somehow faded. I felt an almost obsessive need to find the tiniest little flaws that might detract from his looks, and to exaggerate them. I was happy to find tiny lines on my forehead, the beginnings of wrinkles, or veins in my eyes, a dark mole on my chest. I ended up feeling that I was ugly, and went into a depression. But this was only temporary, for I had a confident—even arrogant—faith in my own beauty.

Also like Narcissus, I seemed unable to feel true passion for anyone. What I felt for Christine wasn’t love, but something closer to friendship. When Peter had hinted that I seemed incapable of loving another, he’d unwittingly touched upon one of my deepest fears.

I’d always wanted an ideal soul-mate—someone who was exactly like me, and could understand everything I thought and felt. It was almost as if I pined after a twin brother I’d never had. I toyed with the thought that I might have been separated from him at birth, or perhaps he’d died at birth, and his grave was somewhere unknown to me.

I had a fantasy that each time I peered into a mirror, I was searching for him. The boy I saw trapped in the mirror was my long-lost twin brother, and the only place we could meet was at that thin glass border which separated my side—reality—from his side—fantasy. Narcissism might be the search for the long-lost mirror twin we all once had.

Perhaps that was why I was unable to love anyone else.

The illustration accompanying the legend of Narcissus showed a young boy kneeling beside the fateful pool. He looked a little too effeminate for my taste; I certainly wouldn’t have fallen in love with him.

I wondered how Peter would depict me. It excited me to think that for him, I was the present day Narcissus. I tried to imagine his feelings as he’d looked at my body. Perhaps for him, I was like that image in the water—so close yet so out of reach.

From his spontaneous confession about his adoration of beautiful people, I knew that he probably desired me sexually. His having me sit before him naked, obeying his every command, had been a sort of possession of me. In fact, I suspected that painting was, for him, a way to possess the boys he craved. If that was true, then the satisfaction he’d experienced had been mutual. For, as I’d posed for him, I’d felt that his will had conquered me in the fullest sense. I’d been made submissive before a burning, omnipotent gaze which laid bare my most secret needs. The way his all-seeing eyes had traveled over every inch of my body, leaving nowhere untouched, had been like being caressed by him in the most intimate way possible—with the eyes only, without a single touch. He probably knew that posing for him had satisfied something within me which could be satisfied in no other way.

I looked around at the other students in the library. After my heady meditation, they suddenly seemed so prosaic, busily occupied as they were in their tedious academic studies. It was about four o’clock in the afternoon, the time of day when the library was most crowded.

I caught a quick movement out of the corner of my eye and turned to look. A boy was hastily looking down at his book. Undoubtedly, he’d been staring at me. I didn’t recognize him. Perhaps he’d mistaken me for someone else. Anyway, this wasn’t the first time an unknown boy had stared at me.

I got up to return the book to the shelf, then headed to the restroom. I usually checked myself in the mirror after being stared at by someone, because sometimes I had the nagging feeling that I hadn’t looked my best.

I stood in front of the first sink, eyeing my reflection carefully, leaning in to check on the progress of a nascent pimple near the corner of my mouth. It was a barely noticeable swelling below the skin, but it bothered me. I thought of those disgusting boys back in high school who popped their pimples right in class, leaving bright red splotches of blood on their faces.

Giving my face a final inspection, I took my comb out of my back pocket and ran it through my hair. My eyes never left the mirror. The restroom mirror: modern-day descendant of Narcissus’s pool in the woods.

I walked over to a urinal and unzipped.

The door creaked open as someone entered the restroom. Staring straight at the wall in front of me, I noted out of the corner of my eye that it was the boy I’d caught earlier staring at me. For a second, I thought he might have followed me in here, but immediately dismissed the thought. I was always trying to find hidden motives for the least coincidence.

He placed his books on the shelf above the first sink and began examining the mirror. I knew from experience that it was possible to angle your gaze from there to spy on the boy standing at the first urinal…but I didn’t dare look up to confirm if he was doing it. After a moment he came over to the urinals and took the one to my immediate left. This in itself was a little strange, as most boys would have taken the one on the far left, leaving one empty between us for modesty’s sake. I became too tense to urinate.

Pretending to be done, I gave my dick a loose shake to signal I was done, and out of the corner of my eye saw him turn his head toward me. When I turned to look, our eyes met and locked. He was looking straight at me, and I immediately recognized the look. There was no mistaking it, though it usually came from an older man, not from someone my own age.

In answer to my questioning glance, he boldly shifted his gaze down to my dick, then brought his eyes up to meet mine again. Unable to meet his look, I lowered my eyes, only to find myself examining his dick. Without even the pretense of urinating, he was merely holding himself. As I watched, his dick began swelling out with no coaxing on his part. It gave a heavy dip before slowly rearing up; the fingers gripped it more tightly and encouraged it with a few slow strokes.

As I gazed at its steady rise, I felt the rude shock of cold porcelain. My own dick had gotten erect so fast I didn’t have time to think of stepping back from the urinal. And still I couldn’t pull my eyes away from his dick. There was a dream-like sense of unreality to the whole thing. A moment ago I had been sitting in the library; now I was displaying myself to a complete stranger.

Who was he? I couldn’t remember seeing him before. It was possible I’d passed him on the school grounds any number of times without paying the least attention. He had the looks one might see anywhere: sandy blond hair, pale blue eyes, light, colorless lashes, freckles. He was an anonymous student, unremarkable in every way, just another face in the crowd. Yet in this brief interval, I already had the impression that I’d known him from some period in my life far, far back.

Time was standing perilously still. I felt as if we were having a silent conversation; he wanted me to make a move but I didn’t want to. I was playing a game whose rules I didn’t know. I’d heard that this sort of thing happened sometimes, but had only half believed in it, never thinking it would happen to me.

I was afraid of continuing this dangerous game, yet at the same time didn’t want it to end.

I listened intently for sounds from outside, but all was quiet. Without looking away from my eyes, he reached for my dick and gripped it. Instinctively I reached down to cover his hand with my own. I felt myself being stroked, and found myself stroking along with him.

Though this was like something out of one of my sexual fantasies, in fact there was a mechanical, lifeless air to the whole thing which was far from erotic. Perhaps it was my tenseness, but all I could feel was a baffled amazement at the incongruity of its happening to me right now, right here in school.

His manner seemed so assured that I was certain he’d done this often before. How many others had there been? And how had he known I might not be averse to being approached? Did I have a look which gave me away—was there a certain something in my face or eyes which singled me out?

Suddenly a door slammed somewhere and we both froze—but it was far off, and after listening intently for a moment he resumed his movements.

I felt a strange calmness come over me, even the luxury of giving myself up to enjoyment. My hand dropped away from his; I let him have complete control. With his fingers he lightly stroked my balls, and then the tip of his thumb gently teased the underside of my glans, the part where it felt best. My dick gave several involuntary twitches.

I was beginning to lose my resistance…my mask was slowly melting….

And then the restroom door opened. Instantly he was standing at the far urinal with all the appearance of just zipping up. I, too, after the initial shock, found myself feigning the same. But the sound we’d heard had come from the women’s room next door, magnified by our hair-trigger alertness and the intense silence of our activity. In any case, a large wooden blind just within the entrance shielded the inner room from immediate view. I felt weak with relief.

But almost immediately after, the door swung open, this time the men’s room for sure. Just as someone walked in past the blind, my partner melted away, grabbing his books and slipping outside. We hadn’t once looked at each other since the first scare. Shocked back into strangers, we’d reverted to our former aloofness. Already the brief encounter seemed like a dream, fading away like a half-forgotten vision.

The boy who’d entered looked lost and confused, bustling around trying to find a dry place to put his books. When he found one, he proceeded to noisily wash his hands at the sink and dry them off with a paper towel.