Cull-de-Sac

(With much affection for Tracy, friend of deep value, who, with eloquence and wisdom, inspired this story so much, she should be listed as the main writer; the good ideas used here are hers, the less than good ones are mine, as are all the flaws)

We lived in a cull-de-sac for this last day. Love had had its way with us and we were ending. We didn't look at each other as he packed, leaving me the house to storm around in, not playing the stoic any longer. That's the thing with by yourself—you can pretty much make a fool of yourself all the time you want and not have to be embarrassed or fear being asked to justify acting like a child.

We were each 23. And I saw Julian act like a child quite often. Not child like. But childish. As he saw me do the very same. There are non-plusses in friendships and the audacity we had had to try to make this a lifetime commitment after only one and one half years. He looked like a boy. Still. As did I. He was dark and I was darker. He had narrow cheekbones, as did I. He was whippet thin. I tried. He believed in himself to the nth degree while I believed in him to the nth degree as well.

We were still in university. We stayed in this tiny house. We were not necessary to each other. He told me that endlessly, saying it would end and then what will you do? You will sit round and blame me forever more and that way I will stay, he would tell me, after one fruitless furtive lovemaking sexmaking, had we ever made love?, ever?, session after another. He had always let me do what I wanted with him. He had been patient and tolerant. He had let me just fuck him all over the place even directly after he got home from an especially grueling day of classes. And he was always kind and always did as I suggested.

The thing was, he had not figured out that I had not figured out that this was all wrong. That this was a key to the whole damned thing. He suggested-nothing. He let the sex games be-my choosing. He said he loved me once a long time ago and would never say it again. I felt sorry for him and there the fatal web was woven and I panicked when he was not home at some certain time on the dot that he said he would be. He didn't mean to worry me, which was the thing of it, as he packed his luggage and I sat on the edge of the bed watching him. He never really meant to do anything to me. He was a cipher much as Murray Head was in "Sunday, Bloody Sunday." He would be whatever I wanted and not be whatever I did not want, and it would forever and a day chipmunk stroll round in my head that IT WAS ALL MY FAULT.

It had to be, you see, because he did nothing other than what pleased me, therefore he could get out of it with a clear conscience and nail me as a thrown apart doll that he had baby sat for and tried to put the stuffings back in—but only if the doll asked, and the doll did ask, until the controller of the doll, controlled ostensibly by the doll, had decided to come up with an actual personality, an actual thought in his beautiful long haired aquiline nose head, and say it really was time to end it and I flung him down on the bed and I kissed him hard as I could, and he didn't kiss back. Had he ever kissed back? In the beginning, he must have, I mean there had to be something in him that was more than me in a more desirable body looking back at me. But then was that the chariest bit of the whole mishmash?

Was he doing the whole thing, getting this little saltbox of a house, just because it was easiest? Was he really that great a lout? Was he really anything at all? Just a blackboard I could make my drawings on and see him virtually react to them like on a computer screen, us morphed into gods and gods and everything perfect, and sparkling white teeth and to kill for bodies as we danced under chandeliers in ball rooms decorated heavily and frothingly with ornaments and trees and frosted windows for Christmas that stayed in midnight lighting forever more as did we?

He moved in front of me to the chest to get some shirts and I put my hand to his crotch, his cock stayed flaccid in his jeans and he looked at me and I saw in there—not selfish me, not childish him, but something that scared the hell out of me, something that would have scared him also had he seen it. I pulled my hand back so it wouldn't be cut off. He went on with taking and packing. We didn't even go through the arguments of who should have what and all of that. It just didn't matter to him and it really didn't to me either. For me to miss him, he would have had to have been there once in the first place. Oh we shared laughter and sex was good until I realized that I provoked it and I made it and I undressed him and we went to bed for the exact time I wanted and he would cum at the right moment and we would hold each other and he would go to sleep and I would go into what I laughingly called the living room and watched telly the most of the night.

He was the substitute for me of my childhood friend who turned out not to have been much of a friend after all. He was the little girl I fell in love with when I was a little boy two years younger than she. He was Joel who broke my heart into shatters and over whom I would not get. And Julian—well I didn't love him really, anymore than a child loves a hobby horse or one of those horses that bucks up and down in malls, put a bit of change in and the child is happy for a quarter of a minute, then more change—that wooden and metal horse is quite unforgiving in time allotted and the price of admission. And that was all he was to me—a mechanical horse. A hobby I took up to whittle away the time. I guess I could tell him that now, were I to have the propensity for being mean, and truth to tell, I have been mean to him more than a few times, and he takes it because I'm a laugh and he likes to laugh at me and makes me feel ungrateful if I don't join in and a spoilsport to boot. Not that he does it maliciously, its just I am treated as unreal as I see him. But he is a superior unreal. I was always trying to stretch higher, reach further, to get to the top of him, the real Julian, the one other blokes see all the time, for with them, and he has always gone out, never with me, though I've no reason to think he is any more with them than he is with me—still there is that nagging doubt.

It is hot bloody summer and the air is not working. We have all the windows in the ruddy house open and its humid and we are both perspiring something fierce. He is done. The suitcases are packed and he puts them in the living room, two at a time, not to remind me he is much stronger than I am, but as the old joke goes, because he can. It has been like living with a cup of none-too-lucid lukewarm water—I wanted it to be big enough to swim in and give it waves and a sea scape and a moon to shine yellow down on and clouds and the night moving on toward daylight. And though he is beautiful in a Rodeo Yahoo kind of way, he was always pretend, for both of us. Oh don't get me wrong, he has an ego, and he can throw childish fits like I can, but beyond this and his intelligence, there are gaps in him that are very large and now I see them as quite scary.

I think a lot of people are in pretend relationships. One leads the other, odd though that a follower, like me, would be a leader for once in his life and that leading could be so damned awful.. It's a kind of a violence he has done me. I feel like I've been pummeled around. Like I've been living with a trained monkey or something. Not that he's not bright. He is very. He's in economics and has a grand math skill and background and probably will go onto The Royal Academy if he just wants to and he wants to. I don't even know if he's gay or not. We met on campus and we shared coffee and I fell in love and so quickly, me being me and him being him, he let me. I guess he was kind about it, for a long time really, though he was getting what he really needed, as they say, on the side, lifting a glass of port in one pub or another and going home with the fanciest nob of a guy. Well, I pictured that always. And when he had had enough of my selfishness, well, here it is-the going away. The thing that has happened all my life is happening again, just as I knew, just as horrible as I imagined, and knew.

I guess there is a sort of viciousness to some types of kindness. We don't think there is, but maybe this is how Julian is, wittingly or unwittingly, it makes no matter. They get their love from us, their way, even and especially when they don't want it, and it makes them more superior, the way bullies work it the opposite, but then maybe Julian is a kind of bully. I think he would let me have sex with him again now, right before he walks out the goddam door for good, which I've had millions of nightmares about, trying to relegate them to nothing more than that, proving I am a fool and always will be such. He will not remember me. He will go away. And I will be left to think to ponder to go half mad with wondering did I do it? Is it again my fault? Did I do it all over again? He didn't want me to think that. Probably is not even aware of it. If he were, could I begin to explain my convoluted contorted logic or illogic to him? God. I see corners where no one else is even aware they maybe should sometime on a shadowy night gain the potential to some millennia even exist?

He stands there. I smile. Wide stance. I think of the news and Larry Craig. I can't help but smile. His legs apart. His arms at his sides. His white shirt and jeans neat and pressed and sharp cornered by me. His socks and brown leather shoes. He is as tall as I. And I will be damned if I will sit here with this motherfucker looking down at me the last time he will ever see me. I could not take that memory jarring me for the rest of my life.

I stand up quickly. Before he can stop me. Before I know what I am doing. I am amazed at the fact I or someone like me not like me at all is bunching up his left fist, and is slamming it into Julian's lovely face, not so lovely now, and bleeding starting at his broken nose as he whoomps down on the old wood floor like a sack of cement.

I fall to my butt on bed. Holy God. I look at my fist. Did you do that? I ask and almost wait for a response. I look at him and his bloody face. I think, hey, Jules, I gave it back to you, just what you did to me and what my childhood friend did to me and what Joel did to me, only I did it the way it should have been done to the lot of you, except for Joel, because he alone is forever allowed. I stand up feeling really weird, weak legged, and I KO'd him in the last round. He is writhing on the floor, almost in a fetal position. I smile down at him. He is going to miss his damned train. No matter. There's another in an hour. And another after that. He's spent and will spend his whole life catching one train after another. Stupid prickhead.

He has his eyes closed. I stand tall above him. Till he opens his eyes, still in shock, I want to say something pithy, fuck you Charlie is not pithy, so instead I say, since this is my version of the whole ball of wax, "I fuckin' love you." You can't say silence. Or verbally express being cruelly kind as far as actions go, or lack of actions. So that is what I come up with. Then I leave the room and go out for a walk. I know it's not the best closing line in town, but I'm no writer and this is what I came up with. Ha. See? Doubtin' myself again already. We're all kids, mate, all of us.