Date: Tue, 6 Jun 2006 19:44:33 -0500 From: Timothy Stillman Subject: bi/ m/f m/m a/y "Of Dorothy and Joel" "Of Dorothy and Joel" By Tim Stillman I still remember Dorothy and her son. I still feel lousy about it. And wistful, and sad too. It happened during the height of the Vietnam War, the time of radicalism and drugs and peace marches and hippies getting killed because of long hair or that they were just young or that they had American flags decaled on the back pockets of their jeans. Now, Christers are wearing entire suits and dresses with the pattern of the flag being them, not just on them. But this was a small town in the south, so when atrocities occurred in Nam and we saw them on the evening news, and though drugs had made their way here, though more to come later, and while hippies were wary of adults, mostly of the truck driving red neck variety, bigoted as that might be, things still could shock. Things like adultery. Which I was committing with Dorothy. She was the wife of my junior class English Lit teacher, and we were not in love; she was not in love with her husband and he, she said, had someone on the side, and true, he was home very little, it seemed, so I became a very incomplete, very awkward substitute husband for her and father for her son, Joel, who was 14. He was a bright kid. He took after his mother. The same thick gold hair, the blue-sky eyes, the delicate features, the glass fabric shine of her. They smiled often, and more than not, they smiled at me. They lived out in the country. Her husband, who we talked about only when necessary, was away in New York, trying to get a record deal for country music he wrote, badly, played, badly, and sang, unbearably badly. This was for an entire month, so I basically lived with them. Dorothy looked younger than she was and true to her hippie philosophy, wore a flag decal on the left back pocket of her jeans. She had fairly large breasts, always wore plaid work shirts, as did her son, even in summer, when it was hotter than hell. I was still a virgin when I met her. She had been costumer for the university theatre the past winter, when I had a small role in "The Lion in Winter." We men had to wear leggings for the roles and she would straighten them out on our legs every night before rehearsal and then every night before play time. And the guys were always going on about how they got hard ons when her warm hands smoothed the material on their legs and how their cocks were noticeably stiff at such times and could be patterned through the thin material that covered our groins. At least their cocks got stiff. Mine just got smaller. Fear, I guess, and sadness. That was a cold snowy winter, though the fine arts building, small little white clapboard building, not deserving of the grand name, was terribly hot, and we sweated for hours every night for two months getting the thing going and then the thing over with. Other guys would brag about how Dorothy's hands came too close to their crotches-knowingly, and how sometimes she smiled up at them then momentarily, and how she had laid one of them already and had her eyes on another. It made me angry. She was a sweet lady. Someone I had always wondered about even before I knew her. I had never thought of really having sex with someone, and when she invited me to her home, a rambling, somewhat run down farm, to have Friday dinner with her and her son, I agreed, not nervously, because I was someone people were nice to for a little while, and I knew how that went, and though I didn't like it, it was okay. Cronkite blasted Nixon on TV, while Dorothy and Joel and I ate homemade vegetable soup. We were silent as we ate. The TV was in the living room, we were in the kitchen at the table, and we listened to the body count, heard reporters, they actually had reporters in those days, in the killing fields of Southwest Asia, there in the carnage, and I would catch Dorothy looking at Joel as he ate contentedly in his 14 year old boy world, not a care in his sky, perfect student, great reader of books, who liked me enough to ask me to take walks with him round the country roads sometimes, just to talk, about writers and thoughts and movies and his world which was a soft and tender release of his hand from mine when he put it into mine and then I let it go, and walked with him, and felt so very tall to his smallness. She was wondering about her son, when she looked at him, and I knew, all the time, for we had been having an affair for some months now, gradually introduced, gradually she kissed me and gradually it felt good to actually have an erection around someone, especially this beautiful woman who did not wear make up and who was always ready to listen to college students' problems, in this case mine, and sometimes after we made love or before or sometimes she would wake me up to talk, or she accidentally woke me, for she was a woman of private thoughts, deep troubles I would never ever guess, weeping, silently, but I heard or sensed anyway. I would turn to her and in my stupid body that I still did not know how to handle especially since it said well now you're a man and since you are try this one out then, and I would hold her and she would hold me and lean upward. And she was worried about her kid. Worried this goddam war would last long enough to engulf him and it scared hell out of her. We were in the draft lottery by this point, and I was in the upper third, possible for service, but I made sure I had more than enough college credits and did well in most of them, but I had had too few credits my freshman year and had had to go for my military physical, before I cleared that hurdle of enough classes; the physical was the most degrading vile dehumanizing thing to that point in my life. Sometimes we just held each other silently, like we made love, with little noise, so Joel in the room next to ours would not hear. At least that was what she thought. But he told me on one of our night walks in the cold clear moon light on the country roads that he heard us, and he stuttered saying it, and Joel was not a boy to stutter, though he was shy in his bravery. I asked him, do I care what he thinks,? if he says go away, will I?, what he-thought-about it. He said his father drank and hoped the old man would never come home again. Then he touched fingers to my hand and then dropped his hand back to his side. I loved it when Dorothy massaged my penis. I loved it when she held it in her lovely mouth that was much the same shape and texture and color as Joel's. I loved seeing her take off her clothes. It was a soft kind of love. A gossamer kind of experience. The kind someone like me was never meant to have. I worried all the time about her husband finding out. This was always sickly at the back of my mind. And what Joel was hearing and whether or not this messed him up for life, and I know this was of Dorothy's concern also. We talked vaguely about it. But I loved her and she liked me and she let me learn how to make love. She let me see and feel how to have sex with a woman, to slide into her, to feel the comforting purse of her, the darkness in there, the muscles working on me, the way I pressed in and out, and learned from her tender breasts and the nipples I made hard that I could actually do such a thing. That I could actually be making love to a woman whose hands were on my sides, and whose legs were round mine, and to my eternal shame, though I refused to admit it for a time, till I could not help it, the fact of imagining Joel listening from his bed, imagining us, picturing us, made it more exciting, for I was imagining and picturing him doing so. I got to like farm life. I learned after getting spattered in the face over and again, to Joel and Dorothy laughing, by the cow, how to finally milk it, I learned to plant and in time harvest the few crops they grew under a limitless sky that was hope and love and forever smiling down on, can you picture it? me, of all people. And I loved the nights she and Joel and I sat on the crumbling a bit front porch steps, as I smoked my pipe, hating the taste and feel and burn of it, but I was in college, it was my duty, and we would talk about the peach marches and the flag burnings and the kids getting their heads caved in in Mayor Dailey's Chicago police riots. I would pretend that I liked a lot "Easy Rider" and I would say though "Medium Cool" and "Joe" were much better reflections of what was going. Then Joel mentioned seeing "Deliverance" and the Ned Beatty scene and we all three laughed and someone said man, those mountain men were pretty damn lonely and he would never ever live that scene down. And then one night, middle of the month, two weeks before her husband came home and I had to clear out and we had to make sure there was no evidence of me having been there at all, except to see Joel since we got along well, I was fucking Dorothy, I had learned fuck was a beautiful word here and now, it was not mean and beery and cruel and hurtful, but it was quite a key to a wonderland and as I was sucking her breasts, both of us naked, on top the covers, her left thigh rubbing my penis, Joel walked into the bedroom and turned on the light in the ceiling. We both froze, knew it was of course him, though neither of us dared look in his direction, then we rammed ourselves under the covers or tried to, and in doing so, I got tangled up in the covering and fell right on the floor on my butt. I covered my eyes with my hands. I curled into a comma. There was dead silence for a time. A long time it seemed. The crickets were all mighty loud. The farm smell that had been so sweet now seemed lurid, now seemed wrong and a special kind of dirty that leered toward the word "dangerous." I honestly think I thought he might kill me for this, that he had tamped his anger down at us for doing this for so long that he had a gun now and would kill me, and I had to protect Dorothy somehow, had to wrest the gun, what gun,? from him and all sorts of idiot thoughts, and promise him I would stay away forever more and tell his Dad if Joel wanted on promise that Dorothy would get a divorce and I would see that she and her son were safely away from Dad, who drank too much beer and did too many unspecified things that I never was really told about, then Joel walked out of the room, silently, like he did everything silently and in whispers and he closed the door softly. I was deeply ashamed. I looked up at Dorothy who was leaning on her side with the covers pulled up all the way to her chin and she was trembling. I knew I was supposed to comfort her, but I was trembling also and I was still really a boy and I felt the one needing the comfort. Funny to think about it now, this was all so shocking then, all the stuff happening now as I write this, and all of that seems so old fashioned and so Erskine Caldwell and "God's Little Acre" but her eyes said go. I didn't know if they meant forever. I thought yes, just for a while, but then, we can make this work, now that Dorothy can't pretend to herself that this is not affecting Joel, but now the thing was him, to find out what was up, and I dressed quickly, not looking at her, and stumbled on my shoes, then out the bedroom door to Joel's. I knocked lightly. No answer. I took a real big breath. Play it like theatre, I thought, that's the only way I can get through this and I was not ready to admit that this was my fear-not that Joel's and his mother's lives were to be messed up with this-but that mine was, so much for flower power and peace and love. It was then as it is now, too often, every man for himself. I opened Joel's door. The darkness was complete. The moon was hidden under clouds along with the stars. His window was a darker patch of black than his room. I heard him crying. I had never heard Joel cry. He had been this wondrous little flame of courage in such a world that was getting crueler than we could even have imagined back then, Evening News and all, for we knew no one in the war, well, I had had some high school friends go into the military, but I never knew what happened to them, acquaintances really, and I tried not to think about them, just hoped they didn't have to go to Nam and that they were okay and safe somewhere safe. We believed in that word back then. We were not to believe it for much longer. It would get worse and worse. I felt my way to Joel's bed. I stood there looking at the opened dark window with the little fan next to it blowing hot air around like that made it cooler, and I remembered the toy box by the window of Jeff Miller's room in the "Lassie" TV series and that great collie and how Jeff was my first imaginary friend and I dreamed of living with him in that melancholy farm with the soft music behind the words and the nice mom and the kind granddad, and I sat on the bed. As Joel pushed away from me. A slight boy. So he did it on purpose to let me know he was mad at me. So I felt it and a clock inside my heart broke open. I tried to say something, but he turned to me and he whispered, "I really didn't think you were." And in that abbreviated sentence like a shadow boy from a long time ago said it, or is that how I hear it now,? I bowed my head and I prayed God forgive me, for I still believed though not as strongly that God heard prayers and took pity on his children. I sat there for a long time. I don't know if Joel was crying. There was no sound. I thought he had gone to sleep. And I should leave. I should just do whatever it took to make it up to them if it took the rest of my goddam life. And then Joel took my hand and this time I didn't let the hand go. I felt him turn to me and I felt his arms suddenly around me. So thin, so powerless still those arms, but so tight and so warm and so desperate and so comforting and so needing comfort, and I put my arms round him too, reflexively, and we held and we rocked gently back and forth, and I felt him, in his briefs, and I felt him feeling himself, like we all do, males, I mean, I guess, when we're in danger; dead soldiers if left intact and if not even if possible always were found cupping their genitals. Not their faces or chests but their penises. I guess it's not the need to ensure further generations. It's instead the need and comfort of the part of us that needs the most and comforts the most and soothes the most and helps us sleep on especially lonely nights. The part of us that no matter how old we are never forgets we were once children and we slept that way in our lonely beds often times. And Joel put my hand to his briefs. I felt his small hard on. It was so stiff and so attention standing, that it made my fingers rub it through the briefs and then in a soft rush pull down his briefs and massage his penis, as he put his hand on mine that was masturbating him, so being a young boy he came quickly and his cum was sticky and he asked me if I would touch it with my tongue, the cum, just, on his abdomen, not his penis, he said again, whisper voiced, just-that. And I did. It tasted as did his abdomen warm and fragrant and boy and I cleaned him up in time with a warm cloth from the bathroom and then I knelt beside the bed and held his warm wet cock and balls in my left hand. And right before he went to sleep, comforted, I think in the dark he might have smiled even a little, he asked, "Do you love my mom more or me more?" I thought of his mom, as I had all this time, except for the breaking flash of thunder in my head that I was masturbating a boy who I discovered I had been loving all this time, and not really knowing it; not not admitting it; not knowing it. I thought of his mom listening to us, or the silence of us, or imagining what we were doing, whatever she would have imagined, and now the idea, did Dorothy and Joel love me? Did they want me love? And why? I had always thought, for I had had never had cause to think of it any other way, that I fell in love with people who liked me for a time and then got rid of me for good and never remembered me again.but this? And I said, truthfully, to Joel, "I've got to sort this out, Joel. Would you like to-for me-to-stay-maybe?" He held me again and kissed the left side of my cheek, just above my chin. And that was his answer. We slept that way the rest of the early morning, me, kneeling by his bed, my cheek resting on his abdomen, my hand cupping his balls, and how very much I wanted to see them and his penis and him naked in the light, and his hand held my other hand. I woke with a pain in my neck from having slept like that. Dorothy woke us, calling us to Saturday breakfast. Joel woke with a start. Not groggy. Not a deep sleeper. He looked at me as I woke to him and we both shouted out "Blueberry?" And Joel's mother shouted back, "What other kind is there?" And we were dressing as fast as we could. I was so hungry I forgot to look at Joel almost naked. And we were at the table. Coffee and milk and plates stacked high with home made blueberry pancakes and maple syrup. Dorothy had already milked the cow this morning, so we could get up later than she and have a relaxing feast. I guess that's the end of my story. Kind of the end of me too. It all got difficult after that. So very awkward. And though we were friends still for a long time, a too short time, after a few days, I packed and left back for my dorm room. I never made love with either of them again. It would have just felt wrong for both of them and for me, and the ending of them and me just fills me with inestimable sadness. I went back to my patented role of a jerk and a clown and someone who has to sell out a lot to keep friendships going for at least a little while, but I never forgot Joel and his mom and that farm and those mornings and nights. My first with her. My first with him. He a small dream of boy. She a lovely dream of woman. And when I think of them, and how those days were, and I hold tightly to them because I am of need, I still hear, laugh if you must, that haunting "Lassie" theme song and the late-god, how can he be dead,? and what's become of Dorothy and Joel?, I tremble even thinking of that-Tommy Rettig as Jeff Miller, running through the fields of his youth, calling Lassie, Lassie, and the beautiful collie always came to him and Jeff always knelt down and held his love true. I miss them. Joel. Dorothy. I miss me too. I wrote a story once, back in that dorm room. I called it "I've Been Gone Such An Awfully Long Time and I Miss Me Like Crazy.' I guess I meant, the me that was held and touched and needed and loved by Dorothy and Joel, when I got for a little while to be somebody, in a world of two giants, as I walked so tall beside Joel and a bit less tall next to his mom, as we took, together, some night walks down those country roads together. Me in the middle. Each holding hands with me. And one time a shower caught us far from their home and we started running. Still holding hands and we laughed and felt good and tipped our faces to the rain and let it fall on them and in our mouths, and it was all so very wonderful. Don't end. Please God. Don't end.