M.F.G. BOLTON | ||
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I have a secret male fantasy. Each night when I lie under these sheets, it makes me feel grubby, and sweaty, and sickly warm and I know I should not think it, but I do.
There is a bedroom here in my fantasy, and he is standing just inside the doorway. When I look at him, he smiles like the nice man he is and I smile back because I, too, am a nice man. We recognize each other in our niceness, and we smile. He is very beautiful. Very tall and beautiful, all careful hands and eyes. Naked in the room, I look at him where he stands. I like his eyes very much, so dark and bright and feathered by soft-formed brows. I like his eyes. And the chin is strong in that child's strength he has -- all his strength from the child; that delicate, washed, stroking skin straight from the playground after milk-time, straight from all our befores. When he smiles as he does, being a nice man, I know the teeth before they are bare and I can see his lips slide apart into two red cushions. I remember being beautiful before him but I don't think it lasted. I think it was swept away from me, not stolen but lost, and now he is the most beautiful; the loved one. There is something in his eyes -- the tiny golden flecks that make her believe he has cried them in, washed them there in his gentleness. When she watches those eyes he talks to her and I am not here. When I watch his eyes they laugh at me--oh, but nicely. We are nice men, he and I, but he is better. When he stands above her he's slender like the moon, beautifully slender and clean and I should love him, too, if she had not beaten me with him. He is lost in that vagueness we take to be magic, a vague kind of carelessness, a rich seam of apathy. He is terribly beautiful in his height and his pure strength and we adore his back. Such a wonderful back to stroke, or to scratch, or to grip in your fury -- such a wonderfully smooth back that dips through his thighs. I should kneel by his side and watch in my wonder and say is that better? Is that fuller? Is that how? Is that yes? Is that now? Is that now? Is that now? When you lie, as you do, next to him, I am brittle, and cracked, and terribly fault-ridden. He's not small next to you as I would be, as I am; and as you take him you choose his infinite, terrible beauty. There's a wrongness about me, an error somewhere, a riddling mistake, a flaw in my make-up that makes me the child and the sinner and the saint. I see the marvelous rinse of blue cigarette smoke rise from your lips that have never looked fuller, and you smile that smile I never have seen. On a train, in the dark, are
a couple of children playing games with numbers, with figures
they've learnt. The more they play, the darker it gets, and the
closer they rock to their quarrel. "You're making it easy, you're rubbish," she shouts, and though there is doubt in her voice, there's no laughter and no smile. And last of all, back in that room, is the beautiful man and you, and you do look fine with him by your side, with me by the doorway. And you laugh at a line that once made me smile: "You can never be too horrible to a boy." | ||
It's all there in my mind, all the players and myself, and it
makes my eyes bright just to think of it now. It is someone I
know with a magazine profile and the terrible swagger of triumph
who makes me do it -- who makes me scared I might like it, who
makes me think it is all my own doing.
