An Idol for Others (7 page)

They went back to David’s office and worked another couple of hours. Walter was able to make useful suggestions about various administrative details. Already he knew he could run the theater as well as David.

There was little time for personal relations, but Walter had a spare moment. He was more intrigued than attracted by her, if he could shatter her regal manner, that might change. The fact that she was a Washburn didn’t count against her. She had connections that might prove useful. If nothing else, he wanted to make enough of an impression on her so that they would go on seeing each other when they left in the fall. They never had time for a real conversation. He hoped for a free evening so that he could make a firm dinner invitation, but almost a week had passed before he caught her as she was leaving for the evening. He suggested walking her home. David could struggle along without him for half an hour.

She gave him a long, reflective look. Her mouth worked. “You look so ridiculously young. Rather overgrown, of course, but a perfect baby. It makes it difficult to take you seriously as a suitor.”

“Is that what I am?”

“Well, aren’t you? You’re paying quite a lot of attention to me. Did David tell you to?”

“David doesn’t want you to get bored. I think I’d probably bore you as a suitor.”

She uttered her abrupt laughter. “You’re really very clever.”

He had scored. He didn’t expect her to let him go to bed with her, and he wasn’t sure he wanted to if she did. She was too formidable for him to think of her easily in those terms. He wanted to meet her challenge, best her, establish his mastery. Nobody had ever made him feel like this. He didn’t see how he could do it without going to bed with her.

She moved majestically into step beside him. In repose, her features might have been too perfect and symmetrical to be interesting, but they were never in repose. Her eyes mocked and challenged, her mouth looked as if it were about to do something startling, the place where her chin and neck met invited a tender caress.

“I suppose you know all about me,” she said as they turned into the street toward the ocean. “Who are you? I don’t even know what your father does.”

“He’s a dentist,” he said.

She missed a step, caught off-guard. “A dentist!” She uttered a hoot of laughter that ended in a gurgle of delight. “How divine. To think I’m with a dentist’s son. I can’t wait to write my parents. They’ll probably want me to come home at once. Oh, dear, why couldn’t you be black too? Or Jewish maybe? They’d like that.”

Walter smiled at her, not minding in the least. His father existed only because everybody had to have one. “What’s yours?”

“Mine? Oh nothing. He runs things.”

“And what about you? Are you going to be an actress?”

She looked at him as if he’d lost his mind. “I
am
an actress. I don’t know whether I’ll go on being one. I’ll be quite rich someday. I might want to put money in the theater. Anyway, I like it here once the season gets started. I like theater people, and I adore the theater. You don’t want to be an actor, do you?”

“No, everything else. I want to have a theater of my own. When are you going to be rich? You might come in handy.”

“It won’t start for ten years. That’s when I get the first slice.”

“That’s too bad. I can’t wait that long.”

“You still have another year of college, haven’t you?”

“Yeah. It’s a bore.”

“I shouldn’t be wasting my time on you. I like people to be established, doing things.”

Just when they were getting to be friends, she hit him below the belt.

“Are you established?” he demanded.

“Of course. I had a part on Broadway this winter. It lasted only three nights, but that wasn’t my fault.”

“Do you live with your parents?”

“What difference does that make? It happens to be more convenient for me. They’re not there all the time. It’s the same as having my own place.”

“Sure, without the bother of having to work for your living. Then you’ll marry a rich guy and stop even pretending to be an actress. Why should I waste my time with you?”

Harsh laughter broke from her. “Oh, good–at least you don’t take me lying down. I told you I wanted you to be exciting. I’m beginning to think you might manage it. Your eyes help. In this light, you’re Pan. Is he the one with the tail? I hope not.”

“I never can keep those people straight. Dionysus is the one I’d like to be. He got the theater going. He didn’t have a tail.”

“Fancy a dentist’s son wanting to be god of the theater. That’s truly exciting.”

“Really? You don’t think it’s silly?”

“I think anybody who doesn’t want to be a god is silly.”

“That sounds like Washburn talk.”

“What do you know about it? I hate the Washburns.”

She said it with such passion that he was startled and thrilled by her. She had somehow entered into an alliance with him.
Attractive
was too weak a word for her. She was magnificent. He couldn’t imagine her letting herself be seduced, but he definitely wanted to try. He thought of Debby, pleading for love. He couldn’t see Clara playing that scene. He could imagine her taking him if it struck her fancy and promptly dismissing him. He chuckled. “We’ll have to have a referee if we see a lot of each other,” he said.

They walked a few more minutes until dunes and a glimpse of the darkening sea appeared before them. The sun had already set behind them. There was a big house at the end of the street, and behind it a two-floor garage with outdoor stairs leading to the upper floor.

“Do you want a drink?” she asked. “You do drink, don’t you?”

“Sure, but I don’t have time now. I’ve got to get back. Let me see where you live, and then I’ll run.”

She preceded him up the outside stairs, her narrow shoulders carried proudly. They were about to be alone and in private together. It was a step in the right direction. She ushered him into a living room with big windows overlooking the ocean, furnished casually with outdoor things.

“My palatial abode,” she announced. “I have some whisky. Do you want some?”

“I shouldn’t take the time.” He looked into her eyes and found no hint of the response he had learned to detect. He had to kiss her if only to prove that he wasn’t a child. He stepped to her and put his arms around her and touched her closed determined mouth with his tongue. She didn’t pull away but did nothing to encourage him. She was so tall and felt so slim and flat in his arms that it was like holding a boy. He had never held a more unresponsive body, but she was flesh and blood, and she excited him. He tightened his embrace and kissed an eye in a way he had found usually produced some reaction, but in this case it failed. He drew back.

She looked at him squarely. “Why do you keep your arms around me? You don’t want to neck, do you? I think kissing is absolutely hopeless. It either means nothing, or it should lead to a great deal more. Of course, you’re a raving beauty, so you’re probably used to everybody falling for you. It’ll take more than a stroll in the gloaming to make me fall for you.” Her laughter mocked herself.

He released her and moved away, still unexpectedly tingling with the feel of her. He wasn’t upset or embarrassed by her indifference. Girls liked to play hard to get. The sexual note had been struck, and she had become more than a Washburn. She was a desirable girl. He turned back to her. “I agree with you about kissing. I don’t kiss a girl unless I want a great deal more. I guess we’ve got that point clear.”

“I’ll keep it in mind. You’re really very sweet in spite of your devilish look. Your mouth feels lovely. I hate girls who tease. I won’t make any bones about it if I discover I want a great deal more.”

She spoke almost gently. Her voice was an instrument of attack, but it contained infinite modulations once the ear was attuned. He looked at her throat as she spoke–a lively throat, capable of emitting venom, or honey. He wanted to put his arms around her again, but she had closed the door on that for this evening. If she had given in a little, there was still a long way to go. She made it seem worth a determined campaign.

They went to the door together, and he held her hand while he said good night. Their eyes met and briefly he saw the kindling of sexual interest in hers, but he pulled away and left her. The first step in the campaign was to make her understand that she couldn’t make all the rules.

A few days later the actors arrived; the opening night went off smoothly, and the theater took over their lives even more completely than before. Everything they had been doing acquired an importance that lifted it above drudgery. There were rehearsals all day and performances at night. The apprentices demonstrated that Walter had welded them into a highly effective unit. The girls no longer acted as if they hoped for personal attention. There were no more suggestive undertones emanating from the boys–with one exception, Philip, who continued to eye him insistently. He countered by treating him more coldly than the others, to no avail. He felt Philip’s eyes on his whenever they were in each other’s proximity. He was a romantic-looking youth with a sweep of silvery blond hair, enormous eyes, an exquisitely modeled mouth, and a breathtaking long sculpted line of chin and neck. He had a willowy body all pared down to the bone except for the delectable curve of his behind. Thoughts of Harry came unwillingly to mind. Unlike the others, Philip never wore blue jeans but always dressed eccentrically in white, which was impractical for work but made him easy to locate. Not that he would have had to search for him if he had wanted to find him. Philip was always near, and his eyes were always on him with a persistence that began to nag at him.

He found occasion to mention Philip’s name to David and had to smile his way through an extravagant parody of David’s having uncovered an unnatural passion. He couldn’t resist mentioning him to Clara and heard him dismissed as “that silly little faggot.” He had never heard the word used that way, but he understood what it meant.

He saw the white figure passing one morning when he was getting out of the station wagon. He had just collected a batch of tickets from the printer, and he checked an impulse to avoid him. There was nothing to run away from. He could face the kid and make it clear that his attentions were unwanted. He waited and watched Philip alter his course to move to him as if he were a magnet. When he reached him, Walter allowed their eyes to meet and hold to administer a rebuff. He felt his eyes widen as they sank into depths of undisguised desire. His breath caught, and there was a hollowness in the pit of his stomach and a humming in his head. He struggled to the surface, feeling as if he would gladly drown in the great pools of Philip’s eyes, and turned away, his heart pounding. He managed to give instructions about the tickets and waited until the boy left before he could breathe again.

After that, there was no point in trying to hide it. Their eyes met constantly, either near or from afar, and held for long seconds in a contact as explicit as an act of love. They exchanged only the routine words necessary for work while their eyes dedicated themselves to each other. He cursed Harry. Without Harry’s initiation, he would not know what pleasure he was being offered, wouldn’t believe what his response implied. This was worse than Harry, because he knew now where temptation might lead him. His innocence with Harry had provided no basis for rational judgment until after it had happened.

When he looked at Philip, his ears echoed with a boyish shout and the rush of water. Abhorrent, disgusting–perhaps only pathetic–memories stirred wild passions in him that he was determined never to experience again. Feared he would never experience again? Hoped he would never experience again? Harry waiting for him at the locker-room door, looking damp still from the shower, his clothes a haphazard cover, as if they would fall off at a touch. He obviously hadn’t bothered to put on underpants. His cock was thrust, bold and naked, into the sheath of his trousers. He carried a jacket over his arm.

Somehow, Walter was in Harry’s car, sitting in a car that was carrying them away. He was leaving school with Harry. He was living in a dream. They hadn’t even left the school grounds when Harry reached across him and fiddled with the handle of the door and dropped his hand and drew it lingeringly across Walter’s lap and chuckled. “I guess we’re ready to compare, all right.”

That was the tone–easy, cheerful, straightforward. It made everything perfectly natural. He had felt as if his life depended on concealing his erection, but Harry had found it and apparently approved. In another moment, without his knowing how it had happened, Harry’s fly was open, and he was holding the hard column of flesh that lifted from it. He told himself that there must be limits to what was permitted, but in spite of himself, his fingers began to move along it. It was Harry, and he held it, the instrument of a god.

Intimacy. That was what made his heart beat so fast. He had attained intimacy with another human being. With Harry. With his god. He became aware of the pleasure he was giving him and began to handle the bold flesh more freely. As if it were his own.

Harry instructed him. “Put your arm around my shoulder. Yeah.” He unbuttoned his shirt down to the unbuttoned trousers and pushed clothing aside. He laughed. “I’d like to feel your hands all over me. Go ahead. Act as if I were a girl.”

It was a game. There was no need for restraint. He forced laughter but found that his hands had desires that weren’t merely playful. They roamed the worshiped body, learning for the first time the feel of physical beauty. He told himself a girl would feel better, but he didn’t believe it. He realized with horror that he wanted to have sex with a boy. He wanted them to be completely together. He couldn’t imagine Harry reciprocating, but at least he seemed to like what Walter was doing.

“Yeah. Go on, Walt,” he murmured. “Gee. I’ll bet you really know how to make love.” Harry turned, and their eyes met. Walter’s first instinct was to hide his head, but Harry’s eyes seemed to melt into his before he turned back to the road. Walter was left with his heart in his throat. Currents of passion that terrified him seemed suddenly to swirl around them. He became desperately aware of the difference in their ages. He knew Harry was almost two years older. He hoped he wasn’t getting into something that was over his depth. For an instant he had felt as if they were about to kiss. Of course that was beyond all permitted limits, but Harry’s look had been somehow girlish. Walter’s eyes swept over the powerful athlete’s body. Harry was the school hero. There was nothing peculiar or feminine about him. He ran his hand the length of his cock and began to stroke it rapidly. Perhaps it was best to get this over with. He had heard of guys’ jerking each other off. There was nothing very special about that.