Close Too Close (22 page)
We drove into the gated, heavily guarded insides of a New Friends Colony block and the hush of the rich descended around us. I could hear the loud rustle of tree branches swaying a paean to solid property and wealth.
‘And here we are. This is my mother’s house or what I call our very own Liberace mansion.’
‘I can see that.’ I stood gawking at the Hussain horse that was eight inches away from your face as soon as you entered. Looking around, I saw it was true. There they were, the Queen Anne style sofas, Georgian cabinets piled with coffee-table books, gilded candelabras, Chinese screens, Wedgewood plates, sink in carpets and rococo mirrors pressing down upon you from everywhere. Walking in, I saw in one corner a sepia picture of his parents in a friendly pose with a very young Indira Gandhi in that cold, stunning look she had with sunglasses on.
The modern Indian masters followed us as we climbed up the staircase, the souzas, swaminathans and gujrals. Halting with a fumbling of keys on the second floor. ‘Who stays on the first?’ I asked. ‘Well, nobody currently. It was meant for my elder brother but he is no longer with us,’ he replied matter-of-factly.
The chill of the evening’s performance entered my heart again. On that landing on the second floor in that desolate staircase I felt I was entering a cursed territory. With someone who is the sole survivor, the seed and sustenance of one of the cursed clans of the young dead.
Inside his apartment I settled into a comfortable chaise lounge whereas Ivy League went to get some more beer. His own place, like everything else about the guy, was indifferently arranged. There was a large TV set hung up on the wall and some massive sound system surrounding it. There was the usual bric-a-brac, a college photograph with a girl in it. On the wall opposite me there hung a painting of two naked women. One was a light skinned, small-breasted, taut, muscular girl standing, her arm slung consolingly over the other, dark-skinned, sumptuous, sitting swathed in a white sheet. The white of the sheet seemed to sear through the painting like a flame. I drew my breath in and almost whistled. Was that what I thought it was?
‘Is that an Amrita Shergill?!’
‘Yeah yeah. My mom is related to the father’s side of her family. It’s been with us for ages.’
Here we go, the family tree answer. It was impossible to enter into a conversation with this guy and not have some part of the great network of family and connections being thrown at you. He came straight over and plunked the beer on the table and immediately started necking me. I picked up the beer while he was doing that and gulped some down. Till that final second there was a little voice in my head uncertain of where I was and what I was doing there. The suspense was finally over. Without being strict about definitions, an accredited heterosexual man had definitely picked me up and we were open for business.
Within minutes of shirtless groping and biting – and I must admit I was getting increasingly amazed at the expertise with which this guy manoeuvered his way – I found myself being led into the bedroom. We threw ourselves down into inebriated digging into each other’s bodies. I’ve mostly been drawn to the sleek, bony, barely-twenty type of guy, so his smooth mass of girth was a bit of a novelty for me. I hung on to the substance of his folds as he repeatedly worked his hands, mouth and tongue over me. The night’s drinking, the strangeness of the evening and this even stranger encounter had begun to hit my head. The steady base of reality was fast slipping as panic-stricken jolts of ecstasy took over. Soon, his body lost its intactness and became something fluid and piecemeal. It would once become a mouth, then the palm of the hand, the weight of the thigh, then the lobe of an ear, the blankness of the eyes, the fold at the back, a firm grip on the swell of the back, a smooth shape you could cup in your hands, a funny taste you could poke with your tongue. His body disappeared into little toy objects spiralling outwards.
He was evidently enjoying himself too, grunting and kneading his palms into my chest and arms. I would come together to a sense of myself in the way that he was enjoying me. Suddenly I felt more in control. I felt that I had been the one in control all along, I was the one who had seduced him all the way to his bedroom, I was the one who was going to tick this off my list of encounters; I had authored this script, directed the show and played the part. How I had seduced a straight man, the scion of a business empire, no-names-please, I would tell with a twinkle in the eye.
I felt the urge to take control and reached my hand down and started stroking him. He was studiously avoiding my raging erection, making all the efforts not to look down there. I got myself over him and started my own expert dance. I pinned his hands down and started working myself into his neck, chest, digging my nose in his armpits, all the while constantly trying to push myself into him. I felt so certain of what I was doing, almost blind in the efficacy of my instinct. So this was what they must mean when they say you become more yourself than who you really are.
His surrender was instantaneous, almost too instantaneous and I felt his legs open out for me. A little taken aback at the sudden success of my moves, I dithered. His eyes were still closed but he grabbed my back and pushed me in closer, wrapping his legs around me. I could feel the warm, hungry pulsation from between his legs reaching out towards me. There could be no clearer signal than this and I immediately started to prepare myself. I knew from experience that it’s in this awkward moment of putting on condom, grabbing your lube and the business delay necessary for the act, that all your efficiency and expertise counts. I saw that Jay had his eyes closed and was waiting in utter silence. His breathing was erratic and there were times when it seemed so shallow that he seemed not to be breathing at all. Like the devout at the moment of ushering in of the spirit, he was pure anticipation, totally still, as if any movement from him would dispel the image that had caught hold of in his mind. As soon as he felt me approach him, he pushed me into himself. I grabbed onto his shoulders, closed my eyes and began entering him with some care. I heard his voice quite a few pitches higher, almost like a girl’s now, clearly pleading, ‘Please don’t fuck me!’
I hesitated. I couldn’t understand. Did he want me to pull out? All my life I’ve picked up or been picked up from familiar places by guys who tell first, fuck later. Everybody knows their kink and every single act has been noted, measured and contracted from the decided anthropological categories of the sexual act. Everything has been rehearsed and
nothing
is ever left to chance or, god forbid, the heat of the moment. But right now I wasn’t sure who I was with or what exactly he wanted from me. I looked for some other signs. Again he held me and pushed me, this time completely into himself. A controlled scream followed, ‘Please don’t fuck me!’ I was all inside him now with hardly any effort from my own part. Yet he kept on making that ridiculous assertion. His eyes were closed but mine were wide open, looking at him slip into some role the exact meaning of which was known only to him. I couldn’t take my eyes off the incredible drama happening right under me. Like an acolyte following movements that were mysterious to him I kept looking, following with the mechanical effort expected of me.
I wanted to stare hard enough to enter into his mind. I tried to feel the shape and contour of the role that I was being cast into. What did he want from me? Who was I to him in this moment? An elder cousin, a dirty old uncle, a boarding school head captain, who was it who had given this very straight guy the first taste of his twisted pleasures. Where had it happened? At some summer camp, at the back of the lawns in the school ground, here in this very room with someone from the family left to look after him? And at what point had persecution become pleasure . . .? My mind wandered in confusion.
He kept on moaning at the shocking realisation of his own submission. ‘Oh you’re fucking me!’ followed by the pleading over and over not to, just not to fuck him. I have never been much interested in role-play but knew enough to know that this was not the straightforward script of masochism. What this guy needed was no, not a Dominator, because it didn’t seem he wanted to be obedient or submissive. In fact, he was very fierce, even devious in getting what he wanted. His secret fantasy was like an attic he could run away to when he wanted to hide from the sunlight. No, what he needed was somebody who would take his fantasy and make it his own. Maybe one day he might just pick up a person who would be able to do that for him.
I kept on staring at him. For the second time during this eventful evening I found that I’d slipped into my favourite role in an otherwise awkward existence. The role of the audience. And I was witnessing for the second time this evening, the absurd tale of death and desire, this time at quarters which couldn’t be more intimate. Inside the upstairs room of this family mansion where everything spoke of perpetuation and of carrying on, unfolded the sad-sweet tale of a poor-rich boy with the weight of clan, nay, race, loyalty on him, the younger son making way-out kinky sex in a house which still kept a floor for the dead one. And in this house, amidst all the objects that screamed of bad taste, was a painting of two girls loving each other that had somehow ended here for all the wrong reasons. A bit like this guy moaning under me – heir to the clan name, the sole survivor, the seed and sustenance caught in the blind grip of a secret, impossible pleasure.
It was time for me to close my eyes and retreat to myself. Since I did not have a place in his world or in its fantasies, it was time for me to surrender myself to my own senses. Surrender to the buzz in the ears, the rustle of the touch, the colours that flashed as I closed my eyes and to the warmth I could feel rising inside me. This was the only way, the abstract one of sensation, through which I could have any use for this guy here. And as I felt the warmth leaving his body and slipping first down my legs and then covering me all over, the life that he’d transmitted into me reached its point of final surrender. I gave myself up to the final breakdown of sound, sight, colour, feel and touch, and with some final thrusts both of us collapsed into a grunting, cold silence, each thankful for his separate desires.
In the morning, I woke in a state of panic, my mind running the whole gamut of embarrassing confrontations that I would have to go through on my way out of this crystal palace. I got my clothes on and nudged Jay on the shoulder, who woke up asking what time it was. I said it was six and that I had work.
Sure, sure. Wrapped in a bedsheet, he got up to show me the way out, but in his half-asleep state he seemed to be struck by something. All of a sudden he turned around, dived into his closet and returned with a tie.
He was handing it to me. A tie?!
‘No, you’re going for work. You should have one of these.’
‘No, no. I’m going to first go back to my place and then to work. And I don’t wear a tie to work.’
‘Keep it.’
I stared at his puffed up, groggy face. Does the drama never end for you?
I grabbed the tie and left. On my way out I did not bump into anyone except for the few servants who were getting about the day’s work. I squeezed my way out of the driveway lined with swanky cars. It was one of those bleak summer mornings where early brightness carries over the dead weight of the day before and drops it over the head of today. The heat was unremitting.
Several months later I saw Jay again in a crowded pub. There was a rock gig happening on the first level and there he was on the third level terrace, beer in one hand, chatting up someone who looked like a failed model not yet aware of his failure. Later, when I was sitting at the bar I saw the model come up to him and say, ‘Yeah we should definitely catch up.’ They were soon walking out.
I remembered the tie that was meant to seal this pact of anonymity between us. It’s still the most expensive tie I have.
H
ow can I start this story? I have tried many times, unsuccessfully, to write it. The problem is that it all took place a long time ago. Since then, the sharp lines of immediacy have been replaced by fuzziness.