supplicium post mortem

When it comes to men, I don’t like facial hair. I detest tattoos. I dislike guys who slob around all the time. Maybe you will understand what I do like if I say that this picture excites me so much that it takes my breath away:

It is a beautiful photograph so redolent with masculinity that I feel I could resurrect an old-fashioned activity and swoon. You can smell the room, right? That gentlemen’s store smell.

When I was little, my father would take me with him on his Saturday morning errands: the dry cleaners, the tailor, the market, etc. We’d always stop at a certain men’s clothing store. It didn’t make bespoke suits, like the shop pictured above, but it did smell of men’s clothing. There was a long shoehorn I used to play with, a contraption that produced a flame for your cigarette or cigar, and some butterscotch hard candies. I don’t know what my father did at this shop every week; I think he just went to check stuff out and to talk to the men who ran it.

But the store in the picture: you wouldn’t go there merely to browse. In fact, the picture looks less like a store than like the corner of a man’s dressing room. I look at the dressing gown, the shirt, the jacket, and I think of the man who would wear them, how he would look in them, and how his body would look underneath them, when he took them off, or when I took them off him. I can smell his shaving foam: Taylor’s of Old Bond Street. I can see the jacket on him, or being taken off and hung over a study chair. I imagine his cuff links, being threaded through the cuffs, or unfastened to roll sleeves up to the elbow. I can feel the heat of his body through the dressing gown, his hardness when engaged in a kiss. The man who wears these clothes is a man who understands something essential about what it means to be masculine, and that something does not involve track suits or tattoos or vegetarianism or a lack of grooming, any more than it involves emotional illiteracy, sports obsession, extreme skepticism, or compulsive topping. I can’t find the words to describe the potent masculinity in this picture, but I am drawn to it inexorably, as the feminine has always been drawn to the masculine ever since opposites began to attract.

Yet, my kind of feminine does not possess a waspish waist, stiletto heels, makeup, or a flirty little personality. Mine rides a bike to church and there changes into stockings and a skirt knee-length or lower. Mine wears tomboy shorts in the garden, or gray flannel when summoned to a certain type of study. Mine can surrender to love while seeking surrender in return. It can work a Melita drill, cook pizza from scratch, scuba dive to 170 feet, make algebra lucid, or deal with children who suddenly start to cry. It isn’t a Victoria’s Secret catalog, but it craves this.

English flannel with Twist? Yes. Please.

She locked the back door and heard the murmur of the television from the den. No voices, though, giving her hope, however faint, that the children were asleep. She tossed her coat across the table and kicked off her clogs.

“Hey.” Her husband appeared in the dining room arch, back lit from the den.

“Are the kids—”

“In bed,” he interrupted. “Asleep.”

“Wow. Did you drug ‘em?”

“I thought you’d be back by eight thirty.” His voice acquired that edge. She could tell he wouldn’t be babysitting again anytime soon.

“The train was delayed. We got stuck in the tunnel.”

He palmed the dimmer, and the chandelier blared alight. She squinted.

“The website didn’t say anything,” he said stiffly.

She shrugged. “I’m shattered. You coming to bed?” She asked, knowing that he wouldn’t. She asked for form’s sake, to maintain the illusion of civility. As she slouched past him, his hand snatched her above the elbow. “Hey!”

“You were with him, weren’t you?”

“Who?”

“You know who.  Wasn’t enough, I suppose, to flirt with him in the deli every day. To have drinks with him last Thursday from five to seven PM.”

“What the hell?”

“Oh, I don’t need to spy on you. Do you think everyone in this town doesn’t know everything. Do you think they wouldn’t tell me?”

“And what did the jungle drums report about tonight, then?” She wrenched her arm free, but still he blocked her path.

“I’m your husband. You owe me the truth at least.”

Something in his eyes, something she’d never seen before made her heart ricochet in her chest.

“What do you want to hear?”

“Everything.” He imprisoned her wrists in his hands. She couldn’t remember the last time she’d felt his palms there.

“Do you want to hear how he took my hand?”

“How? The little punk.”

She met his gaze. He released her wrists. She took one of his hands flat between both of hers, and then brushed one protruding finger against her lip. He inhaled.

“Did you let him kiss you?”

Again, the look she’d never seen. Jealousy, but something more. “I kissed him.”

“You what?”

She ran her hands up his arms, over his t-shirt, and into the line of his disheveled hair. Then she pulled his face down and kissed him—lips, breath, tongue, teeth—as they hadn’t kissed in—

“What else did he do, the bastard?”

She moved his hand under her blouse. “This.” The other hand she led round to the back of her skirt. “And this.”

He pulled her close, stiff against her. “What else? I could kill him.”

Some time later they went up to bed, exhausted, sore, sated. She felt a pang of guilt, but fleeting. He wouldn’t have minded about the truth, a drink too many with her college roommate after the play; but the illusory lover not only proved incandescent, but it also guaranteed he’d babysit again soon, willingly.

---

What is Secret Saturday? This piece was a little different than my usual fare. I suppose you can decide whether the change was for the good or the bad! My wildcard, like Emma Jane’s, was tunnel.

Check out the other excellent writers joining in this week:

• Emma Jane – injecting a special verisimilitude to hers!

He slept like a rock or a man that’s dead, it seemed. Her stomach clenched, a passing fancy, and she stretched her arm across to see that he was still breathing. His chest did, in fact, move. He wasn’t to die yet, though when he did, he would look the same as that twilight on their bed.

The Pervy Hour had past. He lay naked, the duvet twisted at his feet. She still wore a shirt. The room cold now, she pulled the covers over them, as much against the air as against her own eyes. What had seemed a part of them now felt incongruous, like Adam and Eve felt towards each other after eating the knowledge.

Was it part of their fallen inheritance that she should always feel naked after? She had no Puritan admonition against making love with her husband, but always, after – either quickly or some time later – a self-consciousness would come over her, turning their acts into something faintly repellent. Before the arrival of the observing mind, the relentless panopticon, she could love him with her body, as she had promised at the altar; but, that Eden always fled, like a fawn, before the cold gaze of reason.

He jerked awake with a sharp intake of breath and turned to her, resting his head on her chest, curling a knee across her, his arm encircling her as if to keep her from rising, then or ever. Life had been long, so long for both of them, before they finally found each other.

“You were late,” he would tease, “as usual.”

They had been together before, in the distant past. “Last time,” he said, “I think I was the girl.” Or was the last time when they had both been boys? It was hard to remember precisely. Once, visiting the chapel of his Public School, she had been possessed of an eerie familiarity, as if she were recalling long ago, before her childhood, as if the memory resided just behind her eyeballs, if only she could see it there.

Later, once he actually was dead, she would discover that Anglican belief did not include reincarnation as such. “What do you make of it, then?” she would ask her theologian curate. “We both thought we remembered the same thing.”

The theologian would touch his index fingers to his lips and look at the ceiling, silent for a spell. “I think,” he would reply, “that it was a kind of spiritual gift, a blanket of Grace, perhaps.”

The blanket of Grace was large enough to cover the two of them that twilight, to extend the unspeaking respite. Holding him and being held by him was like being able finally to breathe, like stepping down into fresh, thick air after a lifetime at altitude. They exchanged no words, but the way he held her fingers said more than conversation. They were thinking the same thoughts, the same thought, as it sometimes seemed they would dream the same dream, not separately in their own heads, but tandem, one mind.

Twilight gave way to evening. Soon the dog would need dinner. Soon the phone would ring, and the traffic would resume outside the window. Soon they would resume ordinary living, side by side. For this moment, though, his arm still around her, his heart still pumping against her side, his cheek warm on her chest, duvet covering them, for this moment they lingered, ignorant of everything except each other. She breathed, sinking against him, no words, no self-regarding. The quiet was part of the meaning, part of the mind.

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What is Bookends?

Come read the other folks writing this week:

• Rafi – yay!
• Tom - yay!

It’s been a grueling week. First, a close colleague of M’s died suddenly and young, like M did. Same church, same requiem mass, even the same weather. So, last Friday I re-lived my husband’s funeral.

Then, my family came to town for my birthday. I love them. I’m hugely grateful for them and for the way they show up for me. But it all just made me want M and miss him even more. I have so many wonderful friends and kind, loving people in my life, yet I don’t feel any more attached to life than I did a year ago, for the most part.

The sermon on my birthday spoke of many things, but the one that struck me was the Rector’s exegesis on Take up your cross and follow me. Crucifixion is no longer a form of capital punishment, he declared. So what, he asked, is this cross? His answer: the cross is this mortal flesh, this mortal life. We are none of us getting out of this world alive, he said. And yet we are tasked with taking up this mortal life and living it, fully, faithfully, despite every attendant suffering. I want to do that. I want to be capable of doing that. I am always comforted and somehow excited—is that the word?—by the emphasis, at least at my church, that this life we are given is fundamentally and indispensably physical. We are not designed as ethereal, purely spiritual or purely mental beings. (Natty wrote a moving and theologically astute post about this a while back.) So on my forty-first birthday, I heard this instruction: take up your cross, your humanity, your mortality, your body, your sexuality, and your broken, empty, amputated heart, take it all up and follow me. I have ears to hear, at least.

In other news, my father was in a reminiscing mood, and for part of the weekend I was treated to stories of his wild 1950s boarding school days, when he would go with his roommate—Holden-Caulfield-like—down to Greenwich Village on the weekends, stay out all night hearing Beat poets and jazz singers, then repair back to the roommate’s family home in New England to sleep it off before returning to the dorm Sunday night. Needless to say, folks back in the industrial Midwest had no clue about his exploits, nor could they have understood them, probably.

Then today I hear from my brother that Dad had been reminiscing an entirely different chapter to my sister. This chapter plainly titillated and appalled the siblings, the gist of it being that my maternal grandmother apparently gave herself daily enemas for most of her adult life. The revelation that prim-and-proper grandma was perhaps a closet klismaphiliac caused quite a stir amongst my un-kinky sibs. I asked, bulb or bag? Bro didn’t really know the difference. They looked things up on the internet. I’m thinking, Yeah, I know that site but there are better ones I’d recommend…

And if that wasn’t enough, apparently grandma also gave enemas to her children (ahem, our mom) at times, and our late aunt was supposed to have done some paintings on the subject, including one of grandma self-administering. I’m thinking, Where the hell are these paintings?! but I say, That might be too much information, lucky they’re lost. Sis informs us that the DSM has Things To Say about giving children enemas. It can be a form of sexual abuse, she says. Anal violation. One track of my 8-track mind is thinking, Anal violation? Yes, please! Track 2 is thinking: What a big fucking deal social workers make of a simple home remedy. Track 3: Oh, bless grandma. That’s where I get it from. Track 4: You guys had better not look too far into the bathroom cupboards upstairs. Track 5: Maybe the DSM is right because it’s fucking hot. Track 6: Oh, but it can also be very calming, I can attest. Track 7: Have either of you ever had anything in your ass? Track 8: You really do not know me at all, do you?

My interest in That Thing was adult onset. It was not employed in our house, except once (not to me) on doctor’s orders. I had scarcely heard of it in those years when my mind was glomming onto spanking and then to English schoolboys getting the cane. I must have been corrupted when I found the internet; on second thought, I think it could have been Anne Rice’s Beauty series. I believe that series is also what introduced me to the idea of anal play generally. I’m glad she didn’t return to the church before she finished writing those. Not—NB!—that a return to the church should necessarily preclude writing such awesome erotica, but in her case, I think it probably would have.

I am dying to know more about my grandmother. How did she self-administer That Thing? Was it really every day? Why? Did she enjoy it? How much did she take? What started her out? Unfortunately, I think it would be way too embarrassing for me to ask either of my parents for elaboration. I do know from my grandmother’s diaries (which I possess) that she had a very sensitive digestion and often had trouble eating. If she was having That Thing daily, though, I’m not surprised. That can’t be good for you. I do wonder if there is a genetic component, though. I am positive that there is one for spanking. Anyway, amazing what you can hear if you listen when family are feeling loquacious.

I had poster’s remorse as soon as I clicked Publish last night. A murder of worries descended: in clearing up my nationality, have I become less appealing? Less mysterious? Less interesting? Or, more to the point, less authentic?

My father, a son of the industrial mid-west, has always been scathing about posers. You should hear him excoriate his cousin (my “aunt”), who raised her children in the UK and whom he accuses of being “a big phony” and “more British than the British.” By confessing my American upbringing, have I made it impossible for people to read my UK-set pieces without thinking, faker?

The subject for today’s exegesis (Quick! Click away!): How to regard being drawn to an alien thing that on some level you feel you are? In this case, let us speak of the English schoolboy. To persist with writing them would appear to be monstrously inauthentic. How dare an American girl pretend to know them? Yet, they have been with me more than half my life.

Cue timeline of my tgi imagination: Little House on the Prairie (which debuted when I was 5), followed by the Orphanage (after seeing Annie at age 9), eventually succeeded by the English boys’ school (zapped whilst watching Stalky & Co. at age 16). There were of course other influences, then and now, but the imagination has moved on little since eleventh grade.

Cue, perhaps, digression into the idle coveting of my brother’s willy, on the grounds that it would be so much less effort to wank with it. This was before Judy Blume or whoever informed me of erections. Before I blundered onto English schoolboys (perhaps not incidentally after achieving my driver’s license – “You’re becoming a tiger!” my driver’s ed teacher exclaimed with relief after weeks of me driving like an agoraphobic mouse), before that moment of gazing, slack-jawed at Robert Addie on A&E, I disliked boys as a category. Boys were bad, noisy, dirty, perverted, insensitive, got into big trouble deservedly, and made life a lot less nice when they were around. (Note: crushes, and boys with whom I was momentarily “going”, though not kissing, were excluded from this estimation.) Boys, in short, scared me, especially their sexuality, though I couldn’t have put my finger on that. I did know, in high school, that boys only wanted one thing, and on some level I thought that if I kissed a boy, that meant I was agreeing to sex. My junior year in college, on the eve of my first kiss, I asked my wild roommate if that was true. She said, Of course not! but I didn’t quite believe her. Later, having discovered a.s.s. but not yet M, I assumed that letting a man spank me was tantamount to saying, You may fuck me, or at least grope me. What a relief to learn that this need not be so. Of course, back then my mind labored to Discover the Rules, rather than to articulate my own boundaries. Sigh.

FYI for you, the first days I spent with M on his first visit to Gotham did involve kissing and a few other activities that would have shocked my teenage self (though not fucking); however, this did not mix with tgi. M and I may have made out on the futon, but Marky and Mr. Prior were scrupulously chaste. I got all those bruises with only 12 strokes of the cane through Calvin Klein boxer briefs and school trousers. RP only touched Casey to pull the tail of her shirt out of her trousers (a purely dramatic gesture, as it makes zero difference re. padding), and to shake her hand afterwards. I don’t think they were even on hugging terms then.

M did later introduce me to the workings of the male anatomy, and to a delight in dirty English schoolboys. His was an unrepressed, joyful sexuality. Sex was Fun and Nice, a Nice Thing. He loved his willy, and if other people wanted to look at it, it was no surprise to him. This, you might imagine, was alluring and foreign to my mind.

This mind – to insert yet more exegesis – had by age 26 become so thoroughly warped by the toxic combination of WASP prudery and Ivy League feminism that it had imprisoned me in a complacent academic aloofness guarded by sheer unconscious terror. (See Equity Day Off, the dialogue with Judy, ha ha). My party line was that I was All For Sex, any sex (so long as it was Safe); in all likelihood, I thought, I was even bisexual. Sex was No Big Deal; it was a choice, a creative expression of my most actualized personhood. I liked wanking, therefore I must want wild sex, like my friends and fellow peer-counselors in college. This particular peer counseling group was for sexual concerns. We did all-night shifts manning a phone line where people would call to ask about condoms, or to chat through the dilemma of having a crush on their roommate. We led them through being Straight, Gay, Bi, or Questioning. If I had gone to school a little later, the whole universe of Queer would have necessitated a longer training course, ha ha.

The point is I talked a good talk, but – gosh – I just couldn’t manage to get any guys to like me as anything other than a friend. Maybe you’re starting to get the picture. The narrator in Equity Day Off is a pretty accurate portrait, except that I never in college got anywhere near to admitting my real interests. My obsession with England was, at best, picturesque and Anglophile. My obsession with English schoolboys (being them, loving them) was too puzzling and unnerving to contemplate with my full mind. Hence Gender Politics, Feminist Theater, Cultural Discourse, blah fucking blah.

After spending a lot of time in England (biking, hiking, writing for a travel book), some of the attraction became clearer. There was a way that English people’s neuroses were like my own. I understood them instinctively in a way I didn’t understand Americans back home. It was like discovering a whole life I’d forgotten about through amnesia.

It would take a book, or more, to trace my love and hate affair with England (+ Scotland, Wales, Ireland). And the thing with being married is that to a certain extent you become merged with your spouse. Not just in sexual intercourse, or in name (actually I kept my surname), but in vocabulary, habit, and so many, many things. So, in ways intrinsic and extrinsic to that marriage, I have absorbed many things English, words being only part of it. Certain pronunciations, for instance, send shudders down my spine: our pronounced are rather than hour; wrath with a flat, twangy a vs. a deeper sound rhyming with Roth. Also, arse pronounced properly (soft r) turns me on like no tomorrow, whereas ass leaves me ice-cold. FYI for anyone attempting to talk dirty to me, ha ha.

All this exegesis and still, perhaps, I come off as an Anglophile fraud. Know that I am no Anglophile. I  detest the English on many grounds. I possess no twee, cultish fascination with tea and scones and things that are “so British.” Ugh.

What, then? Is it an attachment to the home of the English Vice? And overdose of strong literature at an impressionable age? The lingering effects of marriage? Or is it in some fashion the English schoolboy stowaway in me, recognizing scents of home when the sea winds blow that way?

—God…

—Quite.

—For something so bloody…

—I didn’t think it was.

—Painful, that was bloody terrific.

—It gets easier.

—It’s very wicked, isn’t it?

—Yes.

—Is it the wickedest thing you can do?

—Absolutely.

—And you made me do it.

—I did.

—I didn’t want to.

—No.

—And then you made me spunk.

—I did.

—Is that what happens to naughty boys?

—It is.

—What else happens to them?

—You know perfectly well.

—Do they get the cane?

—They do.

—Then do they get buggered?

—Good and hard.

—Is it very naughty?

—The naughtiest.

—Do it again.

—We ought to have some sleep, you know.

—I don’t see why.

—You’ll look like a raccoon at Chapel, for one.

—Do you suppose there’s something wrong with us?

—The game, you mean? It’s only pretend.

—But other people…?

—Damn other people. Other people do worse, and call it…

—What?

—Ordinary.

—I don’t want to be a pansy.

—You aren’t. We aren’t.

—What are we, then?

—Friends.

—Friends?

—And if two friends can’t be naughty together, what can they do?

—What if we’re caught?

—There’d be trouble.

—Would we be whacked?

—Oh, yes.

—Hard?

—Very hard.

—Before the whole school?

—And their mothers and sisters.

—Not that!

—Oh, yes. And then we’d be sent to Borstal, and you know what happens to boys there.

—Tell me.

—It’s late.

—We can sleep when we’re dead. Tell me…

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Those schoolboys have been at it again. They really aren’t safe for work. Make of them what you will, but I thought these were the same who appeared in “Dawn,” and they certainly attend the same school as those in last’s week’s “Cricket.” I simply cannot explain their rudeness except to say they appear to inhabit an era different from our own.

Microfantasy Monday is the brainchild of Sweltering Celt. The theme this week was sleep.

I feel despair, more than sometimes, at the prospect of ever finding a second husband. One thing that makes it seem even more hopeless is contemplating how non-overlapping certain aspects of my character are. This venn diagram shows what I mean (not to scale):

This doesn’t take into account the many other factors that make someone’s sensibility, humor, heart, intellect, habits, playfulness and imagination compatible with mine, let alone age, availability, location, etc. You can be friends with plenty of people who don’t share your politics, religion, and/or sexuality, but can you marry them? For me at least, I think there has to be a lot of overlap.

They lounged on the chapel roof together, smoking, as a grey light faded up around them. A gradual enchantment, he thought, nothing like the abrupt arrival of Faerie in the MacDonald he’d been reading. Dawn for them was not rosy-fingered, promising sun, but rather suffocating, extinguishing stars.

He pinched the cigarette but refrained from flicking it over the edge. Certain fellow prefects were going through a zealous phase; finding it would only encourage them. He wished such people could wear their power more lightly. His colleagues could never understand the lack of contradiction in delivering a sharp and deserved sixer to a daring-do fourth-former and then passing unofficial hours with him as he just had. Why did people so insist on categories and absolutes? He massaged his jaw. His fingers smelt of cheap tobacco and sex.

Billy (as byzantine nicknaming called him) lay along the leads, his eyes bloodshot but relaxed around the edges for a change. Nothing like a good buggering to dissolve the arrogance and tension.

“God,” Billy groaned, “I can’t bear the hols.”

Mention of the holidays seemed as brash and intrusive as the notion of Latin. How he would himself endure the long, sterile summer he didn’t know. On second thought, he did know – as he had the last four years, with longing. Longing for sensation, charge, the real McCoy. Longing for return of the enchantment now obliterated by the dawn, for the return of good things.

He traced Billy’s eyelid with a fingertip: thin, alive.

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What is Flash Fiction Friday?

Check out other stories from this week:

• vanimp
• PapaTomLA
• Rafi’s World

So, we were dragged (by TL) around the Met today. Guess she thought it would be improving or something. I can say that the newly re-opened American Wing is very nice. Other than that, I can try out the new gallery plugin and show you my pictures and notes, which go to show just how improving the afternoon was.

- You won’t ever call me Sunshine, or anything barfy like that, will you?

- Never.

- What will you call me?

- It rather depends, doesn’t it?

- What if I’m wearing this?

- Then, young lady, you can go straight across my knee.

- And what about this?

- I’d have to call you Miss then, wouldn’t I?

- It would be wise. And this?

- Ooh, mean babysitter – Miss?

- I think that would be Sir.

- In that skirt?

- She watches Battlestar Gallactica.

- Geek, then.

- Not to her face, unless you want some of this.

- Ah! Sir. Sir! Yes, sir!

- Better. What about when I’m wearing this?

- Only Aunt Amelia would wear that, and it’s always best to agree with her. Now this quite interests me, especially with these underneath.

- What would you call me then?

- Put it on and we’ll see.

- Well?

- Oh…you, boy, are the most impertinent fourth former it has ever been my misfortune to know. You can touch your toes for the cane right now.

- Right now?

- Right now.

- Ah!

- Hold still…right, now get those off. I’m going to have to fuck you.

- Isn’t buggery wicked?

- Very wicked. But you can’t expect me to resist, with a bottom like that, and such straight marks.

- Not that you’re modest.

- Quiet, boy.

- Come here, you. Here.

- Mmm…

- Slower…Here…What will you call me now?

- Darling.

- Don’t go away again. Promise. Promise.

- Oh, sweetheart, as long as I live. As long as I live.

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Microfantasy Monday is the brainchild of Sweltering Celt. The theme this week was sunlight. Unfortunately, I misread it as sunshine. Oops.