I was at coffee this morning when I thought of someone from my past. I'll call her Ms. South Brooklyn--- the last place I recall her living. I haven't heard from her in a decade, and she must be in her mid-thirties now. She was once a fine writer, and she planned to finish a degree at Columbia and become a writer--- fiction, essays on culture and politics. I really have no clue as to what she's doing now. In some ways it's easiest to assume that she was abducted by aliens.
I'm not sure why I'm thinking of her today. It may be that I'm reading Susan Choi's new "Trust Exercise", and some of the scenes with precocious teens in an elite performing arts curriculum reminded me of Ms. South Brooklyn in her reminiscences of her own teen days. She told wonderful tales of her past, told them both to me and to readers of a 'zine she published long ago.
The heroine of "Trust Exercise" thinks at one point of the boy she's been obsessed with since freshman year in high school. His family is moneyed, and their house in upscale Atlanta has a detached carriage house. Ms. South Brooklyn told me once that she'd had a boy she was obsessed with in her mid-teens who'd lived in a well-off suburb (Silver Spring?) of DC in a reno'd mansion with a carriage house. Ms. South Brooklyn would go down by train from her father's house in Pennsylvania to her mother's place in Baltimore, and she'd make a point of breaking her return trip to dash out to Maryland and see the boy.
The boy himself means nothing, really. He used to be on the phone with Ms. South Brooklyn all night, having the long, complicated conversations bookish teens had in those days. They'd do phone sex, of course, but they'd also spin out plans for running off together to northern Italy or Tokyo. He means nothing to the story. What matters is the carriage house.
The boy refused to live under the same roof as his parents, and so he stayed in the carriage house. Ms. South Brooklyn would visit him there. I'll assume it was more-or-less clandestine, with the boy's parents (parent, maybe--- I think divorced parents are a given here) kept nominally in the dark. They'd sit and drink wine by candlelight and read one another's poetry and stories. They'd have sex on the sofa--- on the sofa far more often than in the boy's bed. She told me that she'd spend a day walking through the little carriage house topless in skinny jeans or tiny running shorts, that being topless like that made her feel far more daring than being naked or wrapped in a bedsheet or a post-shower towel. She recalled standing bare-breasted at the windows of the carriage house and looking out at the trees and the street and wondering if she'd have the nerve ever to go outside like that with a wineglass. I don't know if she ever did that. I know that in late high school she took up sleeping naked in order to feel more "European" or "sophisticated", but being topless always made her feel far more sexual than being naked.
In a better world, she'd have told me many more stories of her days of exploration and discovery. She'd have told me how many of the autobiographical stories in her 'zine were actually true. She became very political while at Columbia, and I suspect that her interests these last ten years have all been about social issues and socialist organizing than about erotica. That's why I'm noting her stories here. They were lovely things, and full of alluring images. Imagining her topless in just a pair of faded skinny jeans or cut-off short shorts, standing at a French window or walking in late-summer sunlight under trees in the carriage house garden--- that's lovely. She makes a lovely character for stories or films. And so I do want her stories archived here, archived against some kind of distant future.
Now I will note that she told me other amazing stories, too. She told me a couple of versions of something that happened just after high school. She was staying at her mother's and had discovered a hipster vinyl store and become a regular there. There was a boy who worked there who became the one who recommended most of the music (ambient, often Scandinavian, electronica)--- mid or late twenties, tall, lanky, with just a touch of a West Indian accent ---on whom she developed a major crush. She told me that once she made a point of planning an encounter with him.
She went into the store on a morning where heavy rains were keeping most people home specifically to seduce him--- thank him, she said. She told the story in more than one version, of course. The rain was a constant in both versions. Heavy rain, with her caught by it just enough to make her auburn hair messy and wet and for her white singlet to show under her summer blazer that she was bra-less. In one version, no one at all was on the street on in the store other than the boy she fancied, and she thanked him on her knees in an empty aisle and then sat on a work table with her jeans off and wrapped her legs round him while he took her. In the other version, the boy was there with a co-worker who smirked and waved the two of them into the little store office where she went down on him, although the boy was a bit too nervous to risk full-on sex. Two versions, and I'm not sure how much credence to give to either. Easy enough to see either version as a film in my head, and I'd like to hope that one of the versions was true.
For reasons that anyone can figure out here in the current political climate, erotica may be the last thing people think about. With the republic collapsing into authoritarianism and social advances being undone, tales of sexual adventure don't seem important at all. But it is hard to give up the thought that tales of discovery and pleasure and adventure do matter and that they're worth archiving for future dreams.
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