Excerpted from Seven Sweet Things

This is how we get ready to come today: like teenage boys, like perverts, jerking each other off, fists oiled with spit and ID Glide. You nibbling on the tips of my nipples, me with my tongue up your backside. We are acrobats. Sometimes I think my joints will snap, that I’ll rip my tongue from my mouth if I keep lapping at you the way I do. Sometimes I think you’ll gnaw off the tips of my tits, your hunger like a memory too terrifying to articulate. And when you do, when we do get to the point where you’ve had my blood on your lips, tasted that wheat-grain of flesh between your teeth, got over the shock of having my nerve-ends in your mouth, will you then be faithful to me?

“Okay,” I say. Now.”

And your cum falls like holy water, like kind words and promises. Mine, I let go of reluctantly, a surprise when it lands any further than the edge of my pubic hair. In the year before we met, my shooting had dwindled to a dribble, and like other changes to my body — the grey hairs on my chest, the bald patch like a yarmulke on my head — I sensed my internal desolation making itself known on my flesh. The realisation had been slow and complete: I would no longer be hitting the wall behind my head. There’d be no more: Ow, that was my eye. No more: Fuck, you shoot big loads. No more pornographic expressions of wonder about anything. Now you have changed all this; your beauty and your love have got me firing again. What a relief to discover that not everything about the body is irreversible.

“You’re my spark,” I say.

“Come closer,” you say, curling against the side of my body.

These are honeymoon days, November in the year of the dragon. At moments like this I could ask you to marry me. And what a fine view it would be from the steps of Hackney Town Hall. For you, my love, I’d wear a suit; to make you mine, I’d collude in the moulds of hetero-patriarchy; I’d spend my last pennies to stand face to face with you, and with this ring I thee. But that fear of disappointment keeps me from asking about the images inside your head. Could they ever be as perfect as mine?

Your breathing is slow and deep, your cheek on your hand on my shoulder, to keep the hairs on my chest from tickling your nose. I draw cum trails on your smooth skin, like a slug crossing slate, my finger sliding up over your hip and towards your ribcage. The ease with which it travels; how accommodating the surface of your body is. My other hand nestles between your legs, against your soft cock, in the moist warmth of sweat and cum and lubrication.

“I want to draw you,” I say.

“Draw me?” you say. “I didn’t know you painted.”

“I don’t,” I say.

“You’re being secretive again,” you say, lying back, your hands on your stomach, frowning. “What else can you do that you haven’t told me?”

“With words,” I say, sitting cross-legged beside you. “I want to put you into words.”

To capture: The curves of your chest muscles; the way the shadow falls across the cleft between your pecs; the folds of skin on your tummy like tight pleats as you bend to take off your trousers just after you arrive; the delicate hairs in your armpit; the pencil marks of those around your arsehole; your baby’s, lint-free belly-button; your lips that carry memories of an ancestor who might have been black, like your cock and your nipples, brown-purple, several shades darker than your skin.

I want to imagine you before muscles covered you body. To put into words the parts that have remained unchanged by all those hours on the rugby field, in the swimming pool, at the gym. Hours spent on hiding the essence, growing fruit around the pip. Ripening flesh to be eaten. These are some of the parts that cannot be changed: the feet, the cock, the balls, the arsehole, the spine, the nipples, the hair; all the rest is --

“Do you think armour and amour come from the same root?” I say, making casual conversation as I copy your body onto the page.

“Have you finished yet?” you say. “I don’t like you looking at me like this.”

“Love as a suit of armour,” I say.

“Whatever,” you say. “Are you done now?”

“Do you want to go for a walk?” I say, as if I’m about to put down my notebook.

“We can have tea and cake in the park,” you say, your head is on my thigh.

“Maybe I’ve got some cake here,” I say, kissing your forehead, your eyes rolling back to meet mine. I am a Buddhist monk with a treasure in my lap. My bowl of rice. I can let go of my pen now and feast.

“Maybe I’ve got some cake here,” I say.Last Saturday, after lunch at the Kurdish Restaurant on Kingsland Road, we lay on the sofa, me propped up against the arm-rest, your back against my front, and I read to you from Joseph and the Old Man — the story of two lovers who write books in the same room in a house on the beach, each looking out at the sea from a different window — until you fell asleep, your snores as invaluable as a secret. Now I keep trying to ease you back into sleep with words or lovemaking.

“You know there’s always cake here,” I say.

“I didn’t want to sound greedy.”

“If you don’t ask,” I say. “You’ll never get anything.”

“What kind of cake?” you say, as you lift your arms over your head to flick my nipples with your fingertips.

“I think I might be falling in love with you,” I say.

It’s true: Jumping off the edge of the chasm doesn’t kill you.

“Can we go now?” you say.

I put four squares of lemon and poppyseed cake and two white serviettes in a paper bag, which I carry like a Gucci purse, along with my imaginary French poodle, a brother to Gertrude’s Basket, prancing along Church Street on our way to Clissold Park. I make eye-contact, I smile, I say hello to strangers. God, am I happy. The government should be paying us to be in love. We’re good for the neighbourhood. We lift the morale to heights heretofore unknown. The smells of our lovemaking trail behind us like maypole ribbons. And I know you’re enjoying yourself; I know you are, just in a much more reserved fashion.

“Stop it,” you say. “I’m not going to hold your hand.”

“This is Hackney,” I say, and I ruffle your hair, and pinch your cheek. “We’re in the majority.”

“Yeah, right,” you say. “In your head.”

I tell you that I’m always bumping into people I know, that I used to work in The Cooler, where half the neighbourhood buys its salamis and olives and ciabatta bread. I warn you that I know half the people around here. Though by the time we get to the park — having browsed in the shoe shop, looked at the menu in the window of Barracuda, stopped off at the library to renew my books — we still haven’t bumped into anyone. We will, though, at some point.

At the café in the park in the old Manor House we stand in line for tea. Behind us, a mother clutches a four-foot tall Winnie the Pooh doll; her daughter holds onto Pooh’s paw. The girl has decided: She’s not having ice-cream, she wants a drink.

“Is that orange juice or Ribena, Georgina?” her mother says.

While we wait, you look out the door at the men playing chess on the grass. When we’re out in the world you stare at other men, allowing yourself the joys you abstain from when you’re with her. When we’re out in the world you become a great big bloody pouf, and I am a narrow-minded, envy-riddled middle-aged man, possessive of the beauty I have stolen. You see, you are my one and only; to you, I am one of many.

I will make my questions ring effortless.

“What’s out there?” I say.

“Just people,” you say. “I love looking at people. They fascinate me.”

“Yes,” I say.

It is autumn and the leaves are changing colour; soon they will start to fall, even the slightest breeze will pluck them from their branches. It is one of those crisp blue days that make the world feel pure, that make being here a dream of escape. We walk to the pond with our styrofoam cups, and our paper bag of lemon and poppyseed squares, and in some strange way I realise that my life has changed. I have yielded, in my own staccato fashion, to the joy of connectedness. A group of teenage boys are doing chin-ups on the branch of a birch tree; further down two youngsters are kicking a soccer ball into a line of horse-chestnut trees, watching the pods fall to the ground and split open, then collecting the conkers from the path.

“I feel beautiful when I’m with you,” I say.

“You are beautiful,” you say.

I have tutored you well. Tell me nice things, I said to you soon after we met; I’ve an entire childhood to make up for.

“Are you okay today?” you say.

“Am I being too much?” I say.

“I can handle anything,” you say.

“Even ‘I love you’?” I say.

“Those are strong words,” you say. “Don’t say them if you don’t mean them.”

“I won’t,” I say.

“Still,” you say. “It’s a nice thing to say.”

Past the yew tree and the One O’clock Club, where the lawn is lush green, mothers and fathers standing with toddlers in their arms, clinging, reassuring themselves they can handle being at home alone with their babies. How difficult it must be for a mother to keep holding her baby when she’s on her own. A black squirrel crosses our path, one of the last to survive from the dozens the council brought in from Japan last year.

There are ducks and coots; there are bulrushes on the banks and algae floating on the water’s surface; there is a father and a son watching a labrador circling the inside of the fence that skirts the pond. Last winter I was here with a man who taught me the names of birds, though the only one that stuck was coot, because of the way its head moved, as if coot were a verb, the word for what it did. All that effort to swim without webbed feet. The pond was frozen then, and we’d looked for a stone to throw onto the ice to check how thick it was. I remember the ducks walking across the water, their turquoise-green heads catching the light like velvet, cobalt blue on their tails, and then, as we stood at the fence holding hands, how they’d lifted themselves off the solid pond to fly upright for a while, then land back on their feet, webbed and bright orange. We couldn’t find a stone anywhere.

“There used to be a shelter here,” I tell you as we sit on a bench near the water. “I got a blowjob here one afternoon when it was raining.”

“I love London when it’s raining,” you say. “Did you know the guy?”

“Not for long,” I say.

“Did you fuck him?” you say, taking your slice of cake from the bag.

“After the blowjob,” I say.

“You fucked him out here in the open?”

“In the shelter,” I say. “With a curtain of rain around us.”

“What happened to the shelter?” you say, preparing for your second mouthful.

“It burnt down,” I say. “I think the dog’s trying to get out.”

“Mm,” you say, your hand on your lips. Your delicate gestures; the way you lift the tips of your fingers to your mouth as if every crumb were the harbinger of an outpouring. As if your pleasure might brim over and spill down the sides of your face.

“The dog’s stuck,” you say.

“He can’t get back onto this side of the fence,” I say.

“How did he get in, then?” you say.

“They’re not doing anything to help him,” I say.

The labrador walks along the inside of the fence. The son follows him, expecting to find a way out.

“Did I ever tell you my goldfish story?” you say.

“You did,” I say.

“Did you know the exact same thing happened to Jeffrey Dahmer,” you say. “He gave his teacher a goldfish bowl with a goldfish in it and she gave it to his worst enemy, some little boy who put the bowl in his living room window for everyone to see.”

“I wonder how the teacher felt when she heard what little Jeffrey was up to,” I say.

“I wonder why I didn’t turn out to be a monster,” you say.

“Because your mother held you,” I say.

“I know she did,” you say, as if you’d never considered another truth.

“The dog’s struggling,” I say. “Maybe we should lift it out.”

“It’s wet and dirty,” you say. “And I’m wearing cream trousers.”

“I’ll do it, then,” I say.

But I don’t, because you’re stronger than me, and you climb over the fence and talk softly to the dog, reassuring him that you’re not going to hurt him, that you’re there to help him, and I’m a) envious not to be saving the dog, and b) saddened that you, sweet man, are not mine to keep.

“My hero,” I say.

“I know,” you say.

And the dog runs off as if it has somewhere to go, like a child running across a field knowing its father is close behind. Then he turns and sees he’s on his own, no-one following him, so he skips around on the spot, playfully, as if unaffected by this lack of destination or master, and we look away, you and I, diverting our gaze so as not to embarrass the dog, and to make sure he doesn’t come running back to us.

“My hands stink of dog fur,” you say. “You’ll have to feed me now.”

And while I hand-feed you, a plane crashes on the runway in Paris, an earthquake reduces Izmit to rubble, and York is up to its waist in water. A man I know, a friend of a neighbour, is beaten up on Hackney Downs, and while one of his assailants kicks him in the ribs, the others circle him, their fists in their armpits, their elbows beating the sides of their bodies as if they were wings, singing cock-a-doodle-doo. The time is 4pm on a crisp cold bright November day. Any minute now Jack Straw will force the Lords to pass the Bill. Legal pubescent pricks are about to be loosed upon the world.

“When do you get back?” you say.

“On Friday,” I say. “It’ll be less than a whole week.”

“What’s there to do in Yorkshire anyway?” you say.

“Think,” I say.

“You think too much,” you say. “This cake is excellent.”

“Open wide,” I say, which is when I see them, out of the corner of my eye. The girls; they’re always on time.

“Hey, love-birds.”

“Hey,” I say, getting up to hug them.

Ruth and Melissa in the park.

“This,” I say. “Is Martin.”

Everyone shakes hands, you in particular, like a visiting dignitary. You’ve heard me mention them; they, on the other hand, know everything there is to know about you: your girlfriend, my obsession with you, every single one of our positions. They have seen my cry when I thought the shock of good things would kill me.

“What are you doing out?” I say. “Did you finish your essay?”

So we walk around the park, and Melissa tells you about The Story of O; Ruth and I a few feet in front of you, her hand inside my elbow, wondering if you’ve picked up that everything is premeditated, a ploy to bring you out into the open of my world.

“I feel bad,” I say.

“You’ll get over it,” Ruth says.

“I’m going to have to tell him,” I say.

“What’s this honesty fetish of yours?” Ruth says. “You’re in love, for fuck’s sake, not on Oprah. It’s not his job to listen to your confessions.”

“Did I tell you...?”

“Have you been eating cake again?” she says, her finger-tips on the side of my mouth.

“Lemon and poppyseed,” I say.

“And?” she says, unhooking her hand from my elbow.

“And I’ll bring you some next time,” I say.

“Some?” she says. “I want you to make me those cheesecakie thingies.”

“I promise,” I say. “I will. When I get back from Yorkshire.”

It’s getting dark and they’re ringing the closing-time bell. You catch up with us to say you’d better be off; you want to be home in time for dinner, it’s your turn to cook. So we walk with you to the gate. You head up Green Lanes, and the three of us walk back through the park towards Church Street, turning only once to wave, but by then you are out of sight.

 

More Information about Seven Sweet Things at:
http://www.sevensweetthings.com

 

©2003 Shaun Levin - Contributor's Bio