Let's begin tonight with a poem by C.P. Cavafy. The poem has been a favourite of mine for a long time, though in the last few years it's begun to mean more and more to me:
Body, remember not only how much you were loved,
not only the beds on which you lay,
but also those desires which for you
plainly glowed in the eyes,
and trembled in the voice -- and some
chance obstacle made them futile.
Now that all belongs to the past,
it is almost as if you had yielded
to those desires too -- remember,
how they glowed, in the eyes looking at you;
how they trembled in the voice, for you, remember, body.
I've been writing about stories lovely young companions from my past have told me--- tales of their adventures and encounters, accounts of their experiences and the things they learned. I do note that while these are all girls I've known, the stories are never about me. The stories are never about adventures and encounters I shared with them. If you're thinking that I'll ever write about those moments, those nights, then you're bound to be disappointed.
I won't be writing about any encounters and adventures of my own--- or at least I won't be writing about details. I was brought up to believe that a gentleman, even an aging roué, is bound to certain rules, and discretion is a key rule. I'll also note that as a straight male of a certain age ("pale, male, and stale") recounting my own adventures seems unpleasantly like bragging. Boasting about one's long-ago conquests--- let alone one's current bedmates ---has something both distasteful and sad about it. Well, I say that as a general proposition, but of course I'm applying that only to males, and to myself first of all. This is the age of the gender wars, after all. Male sexual desire is seen as always having a subtext of creepiness. So don't expect anything like details about my own life and adventures. Being male (and being of a certain age) means that any recounting of one's own adventures leaves you open to contempt and derision. I'll recount stories lovely girls in my life have told me about themselves; I won't talk about the details of my own encounters.
I wrote back at the end of 2018 about a lovely girl I'll call Liberty. Not her name, of course, but she did remind me a bit of a younger version--- a younger, strawberry-blonde version ---of a British actress/model named Liberty Ross. I wrote about her adventures in a kayak shop--- her first encounter with an older man. She'd told me the story while she and I kept company that summer and autumn. She was a delight, and her stories were brilliantly exciting. I do remember the first time she told me about the kayak shop adventure--- the two of us out at a rooftop bar, Liberty sitting cross-legged in skinny jeans, telling me about how she first discovered older men and grinning at my obvious fascination. She was a bartendrix girl, and she knew how to tell stories. She had that hippie girl earnestness, too--- her stories were always straightforward and detailed. Once at the bistro where she tended bar she wrote something on a notepad and pushed it across to me. NSNL, it said: No Shame No Limits. She pointed at me with the pen she was using. Remember that, she said. Live it.
I don't know where she is right now. She always did have a habit of vanishing suddenly. Back to New Mexico? Back to the Pacific Northwest? All I can do is wonder if she'll re-appear here downtown, or if one day I'll get a letter in violet ink, postmarked Santa Fe or Vancouver. Or Dharamsala, for that matter. She wrote me letters back in the day--- something of which I approved very much indeed. She wrote me about wicked things she'd done and told me to keep the letters safe and think about her years later. Sometimes, too, after she'd fallen asleep here, I'd sit up with my notebooks and try to set down the stories she'd told me. I wanted to keep them in my own archives, wanted to be able to remember her and the things that made her so amazingly alluring.
I'll be re-telling some of her stories here. Suitably redacted, of course. But always honest. Liberty wouldn't have had it any other way. We did share that, the belief that all our lives are made up of stories, that stories matter. So I will be telling stories about her life, about older men in her life and about girls she loved, too. There are stories about threesomes in sleeping bags and in her environmental science labs late at night. Stories about hotels in Vancouver and art galleries in Taos. I just have to find ways to tell them that would catch her voice.
It does occur to me that I'll be telling stories about Marsha, too. She did spend time in my bed when I was young, telling me about her own adventures. The two stories I've told about her have both been about cars. I just realized that. The Greek charmer in Thessaloniki had a classic MG, and she ended up being groped by a small town cop in a police cruiser. The stories I have in mind are mostly about cars, too. There was someone here who had a sports car, too--- a Triumph, I think. She always loved sports cars. The man here was older, too, maybe twenty-four when she was sixteen or seventeen. I remember that she was impressed by the Triumph and by the fact that he was a diver, an underwater welder on offshore platforms. There are stories she told that will be spun here as threads.
Her stories--- like Liberty's, like stories from my leggy blonde friend in New Zealand ---are worth recounting and preserving. My own stories, well...not so much. Liberty was in my bed and life for months. Marsha and I were off-and-on bedmates for much of my senior year, and we saw one another sometimes over our respective semester breaks. My stories with them, though...those tales aren't for me to tell. Their stories, though... Their stories are worth presenting.
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