1990, Ann Arbor, Michigan

By Scott Corlett

It burned. This was the first surprise. Until that day, I was accustomed only to soft, creamy flesh framing the mouths upon which my lips landed. That day, in my dormitory room, your mouth was surrounded by a short-bristle mat, which rubbed and scraped my face like a housepainter taking a wire brush to old siding, readying the wood for a new, shiny coat of color.

The day was one of those vernal glories that visit Midwestern towns with the same economy that the careful parents in these cities — not wanting to spoil a child and thereby making their words, when they do come, absolute — dispense praise. The sky was clear; the greens of the grasses and trees, afraid that winter might be playing a trick, were still tentative and light; while the air was warm and seductive, like the caress of a lover’s fingers on an inner arm, a touch made so softly that only the fingerprints’ highest ridges contact quivering skin.

From the quad outside, through the open window, came somersaulting breezes and the burble of sunning, chatting friends and ball-tossing boys. As I lay on my back and felt you press down on me with the force that gravity demands, I opened my eyes and saw heavenly bodies swirling overhead. The constellations and planets and moons, which some past resident had stuck to the ceiling, dimly fluoresced in the late-afternoon shadows, all eccentrically orbiting and flying ever outward from a central sun that was haloed by your fine, brown hair.

Less a surprise than a pleasant confirmation of all that I’d imagined, your body was lean and unyielding. By now, we’d shed our clothes, and, in earnest, I explored your topology — the hills of muscles, the berms of sinew, ribs like waves of sand in the desert, every subsurface formation suddenly resolved by my touch as if a radar had been remodulated and the heretofore fuzzy was now crystal clear. On you, everything lived so near the surface, raw, jagged, and hard — you were a young mountain range compared to the gently rolling, geologically mature features of the flesh that I’d known before that day.

Our bodies ground like stones milling wheat. My hand was on you; yours was on me. Lost under the spinning stars, sanding smooth each other’s faces, we both assumed that the wetness, moans, and shudders were our own, and therefore neither of our hands stopped moving.

After a moment of the sublime agony that comes with the attempt to wring more life after the small death, neither of us could stand the neural overload and we begged the other to stop. These cries, only half-heeded, turned to laughter as we realized that the seeping warmth was not a single stream, but a gathering confluence. This knowledge quickly transformed from mirth to a silent understanding, confirmed only in a glancing brush of lips: the pleasure of bodies — which, before this day, had been mine and then theirs or theirs and then mine or mine and theirs at once, but, in all cases, identifiable, divisible, and separable — could be one and indistinguishable.

While pleasure is shared and lives freely in the realms of the body and of the mind, anguish is a centralized tyrant that rules from the brain and is always felt alone. The weather had turned hot, humid, and lazy by the time that I learned this lesson in the same small room, under the same greenish stars, at the same narrow window through which, only weeks prior, breezes had passed to dance to with us.

I watched you grow smaller as you walked across the quad, and, from a dark staging area in my head — where he lay in wait with his lieutenants: fear, envy, and greed — anguish seized absolute power. In irrational, despotic fashion, to erase all that existed before him and therefore threatened his legitimacy, the new dictator ordered a purge back to the earliest moments of the universe.

First, every atom of my body collapsed into an impossibly dense concretion. Then, as you passed into the shadow of the ivy-webbed stone arch that led to the street, this pinpoint of matter exploded and shot out fragments of elemental sadness, lust, and love. Then, the salty drops and strings of mucous, whose visits in such abundance I’d not known since childhood, flowed unstoppable, as if the membranes of every cell in my body had been punctured by the cosmic burst of emotion and could no longer hold back the liquids that life requires. Long after you had disappeared, I remained at the window.

While parting may not always be such sweet sorrow, waiting for word from a lover is like the exquisite, hyperbolic torture of ever approaching but never quite reaching orgasm. For 10 days after you left for your hot, dusty Mediterranean home, you were traveling and, in those last years before the widespread availability of mobile communications, were unreachable. This double-fistful of sunrises and sunsets — divided between hours light and dark, sad and sadder, hot and hotter — were longer than the sum of the 19 years of my life then to date.

On each of these days, en route to the street-side mailbox, in a rush toward release, I plowed through the muggy afternoon air as if I’d left the house without a coat on a subzero January morning. Then, for the first nine days, I walked slowly back up the driveway with the frustrated languor stipulated by summer weather, heavy disappointments, and a lover with a slowing hand. But, on the 10th day, as I slid your first letter beneath my sweaty shirt so that something you’d touched would be next to my skin, in brief defiance of Euclidean edict, the hyperbole finally reached infinity.

If waiting is a masochist’s game, then reunion is for the sadist. In the fall, to the small college town that anchors the intellectual life of a mitten-shaped state, we returned browner, leaner, and each with enough letters and postcards to fill a couple of shoeboxes. In our first days back together, we devoured each other with regard to neither the pain nor the pleasure of the other: you were thirsty from the months spent in your blast furnace of a country, where even the air burned to a beige ash that dusted all the land, and I was hungry from the weeks passed in the wet incubator of America’s middle, where I’d lacked an essential nutrient, as if in a controlled biological experiment.

Despite the primal nature of this copulative feeding frenzy, our pleasure remained without demarcation: the eater, eaten; the drinker, drunk; all one, all same. Only when fall laid down its yellow, brown, and red carpet on the quad were we quenched and sated, and our fucking again became lovemaking.

Take the clothes of an old lover from your closet when they become an unspoken affront to a new partner. That December, after our faces had long been scraped free of their old layers of paint and your final departure from the little, cookie-cutter house that I shared, you left behind two pieces of wear: an orange, shapeless T-shirt and a waist-length, synthetic raincoat, gray and steel blue in deference to its assigned task.

The T-shirt, which you said had been your father’s, took care of itself. Although this piece of cotton, whose fibers were imbued with a mélange of your cologne and bodily odor, suffered many, many nights in my bed before it found first respite in a washing machine, wear and laundering eventually turned its orange fabric into a leprotic web.

The raincoat, made of some hydrocarbon excretion and called upon far less frequently, was a different story. After many years, one day, like any other, really, I opened the coat closet and saw the jacket whose origins I’d never mentioned and whose blue and gray suddenly seemed a betrayal to my then love. Maybe now, after a journey through the charitable organization to which the parka went that very afternoon, your raincoat has been left at the home of someone else’s love.

Perhaps, readers, this last lesson is not one that you’d hoped to hear. Maybe you’d wanted a helpful word on how first love endures or how to keep first love fresh after a near score of years. Alas, neither of these topics is in my repertoire.

At least, you then ask, was his December departure the end? In my notes, at the bottom of the page, there are some scribbles about trains, lifelines, postal misdeliveries, and something that I believe reads, though with my script, I cannot be sure, “Grand Central’s starry ceiling bookends nicely with dorm room’s fluorescing bodies.” All that I’ll say is that Euclid was right. Some lines do always approach, but never reach infinity.

Scott Corlett lives in San Francisco and is a freelance journalist. His writing regularly appears in a variety of publications, including Gaywheels.com, OutinAmerica.om, GayWired.com, Automobilemag.com, and OutWord. He is working on his second novel while searching for the perfect publisher for his first book, The Real Estate Agent.

Posted by Elizabeth Armstrong Moore on Monday, April 2nd, 2007 | Email This Post

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