Mirrors of Narcissus (2 page)

“Is there anyone you suspect?”

“No. But I’m pretty sure it’s someone on our floor.” He looked uneasy. “I’ve talked to some of the others. They’re missing things, too.”

I didn’t have any valuables in my room, only my bank checkbook and some loose bills. I didn’t want to believe that one of the guys could be a thief. I wanted it to be all in Kruk’s imagination. Who could it be? The dorm supervisor had a master key, or duplicate keys, but he was a trustworthy person. The faces of all our dorm mates went through my mind.

Suddenly I felt as if I, too, might be under suspicion.

“All right. Thanks for the warning. I’ll be on the lookout for anyone suspicious.”

“You do that, Guy.”

2

There were three libraries at our school, but the one I liked best was the oldest and least used, all the way at the other end of the campus. The Spenser Undergraduate Library was built during the 1930s in a classical style, and exemplified everything I found charming about my university.

My route to the library took me on a bicycle path which meandered across the entire campus, first, alongside the stream which crossed the grounds from east to west, then over a small bridge and through some trees which grew thickly on the westernmost part of the campus. Many of the buildings here dated from the end of World War Two and had been used to house scientists doing wartime research at the school. I liked the dilapidated quality of the area. It had a romantic feeling of historical antiquity.

Yet all of this was slated to go some day. The school was planning to rebuild this section into a model housing/recreation area. Housing had always been a problem with the school, and was a high priority in the current restructuring program. Indeed, my own dorm was destined to be torn down as soon as more substantial funds were forthcoming. The building itself had been quickly built—a prefabricated, slapdash affair put together temporarily to ease the housing crunch caused by ever-increasing enrollments.

I felt a little sad at all the changes taking place. Though I’d only been in school for a few months, I’d already grown attached to the ambience of the old college town.

I stepped in through the main entrance of the library. The floors were all carpeted, and there was a heavy hush throughout the building. On the first floor, the innumerable study carrels and tables were filled with students busily taking notes. This entire floor was set aside for the reference books, bound periodicals, and texts which the instructors had put on reserve for their students to use. The upper two floors contained open book stacks through which we were free to wander, browsing if we chose.

I went up the stairs to the third floor.

There were fewer people on the upper floors, as most of the space was taken up by seemingly endless rows of bookshelves. The hush up here was inviting. I always felt as if I were stepping into a secret wood.

For me, reading had always been bound up with sexual discovery. I’d learned the facts of life through a sex education book for youths in my junior high school library. And when I made the wonderful discovery that there were books which dealt with homosexuality, some of them containing explicit descriptions of sex acts, I became an avid explorer of the public library stacks.

It had started in the main library of my hometown, where I accidentally discovered
Naked Lunch
. I was initially attracted by its bizarre title. Its dust jacket informed me that it was an underground classic. When I opened it at random, I found myself reading a description of two young boys on a riverbank masturbating each other. With a sense of unreality, I read on, about two other young boys, naked, sucking each other off, then fucking each other in the ass. I couldn’t believe how explicit the prose was. It was the first time I’d read sex scenes which reproduced all those fantasies which I’d thought I was the only one in the world to have, the things I’d daydreamed about in the privacy of my own mind, feeling that if anyone else were to view them I’d be burned at the stake.

Not having the courage to check it out and take it home, I’d devoured it in the library during a couple of days in the summer before my last year of high school. Because most of my reading pleasure was focused on the sex scenes in novels, the act of reading itself had acquired a sexual cast for me. Indeed it was a sexual act.

Since coming to college and discovering the Spenser Library, I’d been on the lookout for any more books dealing with homosexuality. I seemed to have a built-in radar for zeroing in on them. Something in a title would alert me, and I would pull the book out and scan the dust jacket. If the blurbs contained words like “forbidden love,” “illicit passions,” “underground,” “secret,” “daring,” “previously banned,” “taboo subject,” or “unexpurgated,” I knew I was on the right track.

There were so few other people using this section of the library that it felt like my own personal library. In the quiet, little-used stacks I could roam at my ease. In the evenings I would choose one of the many comfortable leather armchairs located in hidden nooks and crannies of the labyrinthine aisles. With a small table and reading lamp beside me, I devoured books whose titles—
The Immoralist
,
Confessions of a Mask
,
Our Lady of the Flowers
,
The City and the Pillar
,
Cities of the Night
–gave no idea of the inflammatory material contained within them. I would never have dared to check them out and read them back at the dorm, but it was enough for me to have this secret retreat.

My excitement at reading these books was only eclipsed by the thought that I knew there were others in school besides me who liked them. Unlike the other libraries on campus, which had computerized their check-out systems, this library still used the old system. Anyone who wanted to borrow a book had to write his name and telephone number on an old-fashioned check-out card.

Whenever I discovered a gay book, I always scanned the list of people who’d checked it out, hoping to find someone I knew. One of the names which I frequently encountered was an “H. Golden,” who always seemed to be there before me. I wondered who he could be. It was obvious we shared the same interest, and I began to expect to find his name on the card whenever I opened a book which dealt with a gay theme. In fact, if his clear, distinctive signature jumped out at me, I would feel as if I’d received his recommendation, his stamp of approval.

Over the months, I had built up my own picture of him. From the sound of his name I imagined a golden young boy, athletic and blond and beautiful, who agonized over the fact that he was all alone with his secret, just as I was. I dreamed of meeting him.

I’d copied his telephone number from a check-out card and had been keeping it in my wallet with the half-formed intention of giving him a ring sometime. I had no idea what I wanted to say to him. All I knew was that he was probably gay—and the fact that I knew the name of at least one gay out there gave me a sense of security: I was not alone.

I located the copy of
The City and the Pillar
by Gore Vidal which I had been reading for the past several days, and sat down in my usual armchair. But for some reason I couldn’t lose myself in the story. I kept thinking about what Kruk had told me earlier.

There was a thief in the dorm. I imagined him—whoever he was—sneaking into other boys’ rooms stealthily opening drawers, pocketing valuables, brazenly assuming ownership of a friend’s possession, touching, caressing his property. In a manner which I couldn’t quite understand, there was something provocatively sexual about the thought. For me, anything secretive immediately assumed an erotic aspect. Perhaps because the nature of my own sexual needs had forced me to keep them secret from others, secrecy itself had become part of the landscape of my desire.

I shut the book and put it away, then headed for what was probably the least frequented part of the library, the section containing books on health and fitness. There was a particular book I was after, and I only hoped it hadn’t been checked out. To my relief, I found it in its usual place on the top shelf, in a corner set aside for oversized books.

It was the autobiography of a Swedish bodybuilder whom I’d idolized as a boy. He had been the one who’d sparked my interest in training my body. In high school I’d bought several of his books on weightlifting and had religiously followed the regimen he’d set down—the bench presses, snatches, and jerks with which he had developed his own body. Every day I’d drunk the “stamina drink” he’d recommended—bananas, milk, and honey whipped up into a protein-filled milkshake. To my delight, I’d watched my body fill out and harden with muscles, but it had never approached the ideal masculine form which he represented for me.

He was my god.

I began flipping through the book.

Sectioned among the pages of text were plates of the most exquisite photographs. He had the body of a classical Greek statue. Unlike many professional weight lifters, his muscles didn’t bulge to unsightly proportions, nor did he wax and oil his skin till it gleamed like metal. And it wasn’t overly tanned, as was the skin of most bodybuilders in muscle magazines. His skin had a completely natural tone, though he did depilate most of his body hair.

All his muscles—from his shoulders and chest, to his thighs and calves—were perfectly proportioned. And because he was tall enough, the large muscles didn’t make him look too top-heavy, as often happened with shorter men.

In a skimpy black bikini, he flexed on a beach, the sea breeze ruffling his hair slightly, bits of sand clinging to his chest and belly. The clean curves of his pectorals made his chest look like the twin shields of a refined, flawless body armor, and the tight abdominal muscles below them were a firm, compact plate on which I spotted tiny hairs glinting in the sunlight. His shoulders were so fully muscled that the line from his neck to shoulder was a steep slope.

His face, with its classical Nordic lines—a steep brow, high cheekbones, a firm jawline, and full, sensuous lips—was the face of a warrior-hero, a marauding Viking sacking villages, leaving them in smoking ruins, spear in hand, his long, flowing, golden hair streaming behind him, his blue eyes glinting without the slightest trace of mercy, his lips curled back in disdainful superiority.

I wondered how many other boys had stood here flipping through this book. It looked well-thumbed. And I doubted if all those who gazed at the pictures were gay, either. But surely these pictures would be enough to turn a straight boy queer.

I looked around again, and listened. For all I knew, I was the only person on the entire floor. The ripping sound could barely be heard as I excised a page from the book. Folding it once, I slipped it into the pages of another book I was carrying.

The men’s room was located at the far corner near the elevator. The restrooms in this library were quite spacious and well-ventilated. Inside, there were three stalls enclosed within wooden partitions painted a dark green, with a six- or eight-inch gap between their lower end and the floor. A quick glance assured me that none of the stalls was occupied.

I selected the one farthest from the door, entered, shut the door behind me.

I lowered the seat and sat down on it, then opened the book on my lap, pulled out the stolen page and unfolded it. Holding it out before me, I gazed at it with a greedy hunger I would never have dared to reveal out there.

It was my favorite picture. He was standing in front of some gym equipment flexing his biceps which bulged sexily, riveting my attention by their sheer bulk. He was wearing a skimpy sleeveless runner’s shirt which was stretched so tightly over his expanded chest that I could easily see his nipples under them, well-defined, round as quarters, and a healthy pink in color. Tiny wisps of underarm hair peeped out from under his armpit.

I felt a tremor run through me.

With my free hand I undid my jeans and, lifting my hips slightly, hooked my thumbs under the elastic waistband of my undershorts and pulled down, until my jeans were down to my knees. As my penis was freed, it flipped up and slapped solidly against my belly, pungent with the sexy aroma of semen.

The glans was so swollen that it was purplish, and gave off a slight glow, as if lit up from within like a dark bulb. Its moistness made it look like some kind of ripe fruit, a juicy plum ready to burst from its skin. The solid brown shaft supporting it was enwrapped with pulsing veins, throbbing to the beat of my excitement.

Normally, I didn’t like to masturbate in my dorm. It wasn’t that I didn’t have the privacy there—I could easily do it in bed at night, or in the shower, as I knew the others did. But somehow, I felt more comfortable doing it in here where I was an anonymous student.

And I wasn’t the only one who availed himself of the privacy afforded by the stall. There was evidence all around me that others were attracted to the same purpose. Crude drawings of naked women showing their genitals covered the walls (which were regularly painted over by the maintenance staff.) Sometimes I would find, tucked away behind the toilet paper dispenser, a folded-up page from a men’s magazine displaying a picture of a naked woman with her legs spread magnanimously open.

Such evidence of universal lust gave me a sense of camaraderie with those other boys. As I pictured them sitting on this very same toilet seat, stroking themselves for all they were worth, one ear cocked for the sound of anyone coming in, I felt my own excitement augmented. It was as if I’d joined them, was one of their company, and doing it in rhythm with them.

I concentrated upon the picture. I felt like a humble worshipper offering my devotions to a god who didn’t deign to look upon me, who exacted the most humiliating postures of abasement for the supreme privilege of looking upon him. Here in this toilet stall, my shrine dedicated to him, I was figuratively upon my knees, prostrated before him—and he merely smiled blandly, as if it were all his due…. I was his most worshipful servant.

My slow, elaborate caresses gradually became intensely focused upon their goal, and the rhythm accelerated into the steady, familiar beat of the final sprint. There was a slight slapping sound as the heel of my hand hit repeatedly against my groin, but the restroom was empty and I didn’t worry.