"Mirror Image"
by
Timothy Stillman
Jean and Martin(e?) came into our lives that winter of '71. Their skin was as pale as pink milk mixed with moon rays. They were dressed always in hippie attire--blue blue jeans that had bell bottoms that held hollow round their cartoonishly designed black heavy heeled and toed boots, all exaggerated in the flair of the style, the kind you found on those "Keep Truckin'" posters back then. Their hair was golden and flowed like a yellow sea to their shoulders. They wore large, too large for their slender waif bodies, outsized shirts always in plaid, changing only in color from one day to the next. They had silver chains around their little stalk necks. Their eyes were bluish green. Their hands were so small and their fingers were so long. They smelled like you would expect a dream to. They were tallish for their ragged body weight.
They looked identical. They had rabbity teeth and pale lips. They could say things to each other without completing sentences themselves. The act Mantan Moreland perfected in the old Charlie Chan movies, they took one step further. They were dreams. Their bodies were flinty looking. Their elbows. Their cheekbones rode high. There seemed crystal bones made up the structure of their faces. They were otherworldly. They were magic you don't look at too long because it gets caught up in things far too complicated.
They were always together. Always. In the same classes. Lived in the same dorm room. At the cafeteria or the pizzeria at the same time. Believed the same thing. Were as erotic together as they could be. As though they were children instead of college students. They were the snow and the coming of winter, and the pale roses that must of necessity fall before the weight of the end of the world and time. They walked to class together. Their arms around each other's shoulders. They wore huge greatcoats in the cold wind and bitter snow flurries. They were of one. They were a part of each other. They told everyone that they were: identical twins, boy and girl lovers since early grammar school, boyfriends since early grammar school, girlfriends also. Then they mixed the categories up and played with them as though with kid games in their hands and in their jeans seen on their slender legs. And the lack of a basket on Jean and on Martin(e?), for she or he pronounced it both ways at different times) at a time when boys needed those baskets to impress other boys and to impress girls.
The bulge. Hard or not. The length and the heft were everything. But not for Jean, whom we all assumed was a boy. But we didn't know for sure. We thought Martin was Martine and was a girl. But that was also in flux. They were mirrors of each other and mirrors of our dearest dreams. Windy and Peter. Windy and Michael and all the lost boys in one combination or another. They hugged each other a lot and sometimes when their friends were very down and deep in snow that said age is youth and this is no escape route, the number of years my body has in it, and the number in it that it has to go. We hungered for them. But they had only each other. And winter was coming on.
Their hands their eyebrows their lips their eyes we so longed to kiss for they seemed to have a canary cage in them that said we hold eternal youth, and though we were only a bit younger or older than they back then, still they seemed to know the rotation of the earth better than we did and they walked in it and with it in grace and style. We grew our hair longer for them, for the girl or the boy or the other combinations. We took to wearing those cartoon shoes with the high block heels ourselves because we were masquerading as them before we even knew it. They left us in their wake. Panting. They left our hearts sore. They left our imagination dry.
They were pain without the pain. They were the ease of springing up from the lettuce patch and hearts on the back pockets of their jeans and the American flag patch on the opposite pocket. How we watched them and wondered at them. And winter came. They had transferred to UTM that winter quarter. Their voices were of the North. They smoked pot and did occasional coke, but it was all caught up in those sleeves of their long shirts. Those arms that we never saw that cold season, but that we knew were warm to the touch and brocaded coverlet feeling more than perhaps flesh. They held each other side by side as they walked cross campus, and the snow was more beautiful for it. They snuggled into each other, into neck and shoulder. And they wouldn't tell us who they were other than the names perhaps phony names at that.
The snow and the gray wintry skies were the seas through which they drifted sure and certain, the way delicate hearts turn toward winter and laugh at it because they are delicate, because they are so mortal. Their hair was snow and yellow sun and thick and full of the ease of lay back, the ease of being what they were and their intense comfort at that. They were a caravan together. Sprites and forest fauns and things from childhood, old illusions that were toss aside because we were taught to, told to or else. And we were the dazzle that they didn't need, Jean and Martin(e?). They were the new jesters in their calm ways, in their serious demeanor that could turn around and slap each other with a frozen fish and we at the dining table on in the TV room at the Student Center would half fall on our asses we would laugh so hard.
They were coat hangers. Those sheer little shoulders on which we wished to hang everything, on which we wished to see them naked and making love, on which we wished to get the image right in our minds. Like movies then, when nudity was a common fact in every film almost, but the lovers with their private parts hidden in the soft candle glow and an arrangement of their arms and legs at just this pivotal point, raising up and hiding the valleys and the tender lips that wanted to touch breasts that were darkened by moody camera light and lips together and pretend was all we needed then. For it was all we ever had. And those cantilevered positions of legs and those camera angles that spread soft gauze on everything and everyone. This was Jean and his sister brother lover boyfriend girlfriend. That they should have been so close to us and we never to know. A thing like that could drive a person mad.
We dreamed of them. We were the snakes little and helpless and friendless that we put in their dorm room with our minds. We held in trust. We pushed our hands to our penises and our vaginas and we brought ourselves off in the steam heat of our dorm rooms. Singular. Or sometimes, lucky at love, together. And we imagined them as the collective Star Child, headed for Earth, headed for Earth to change everything, to change the sadness into glory, to change our waking hearts as we walked after Jean and Martin(e?) and their snow was ours and yet not. The trees were leafless and the sky was a cold bowl of gray and it seemed there was at times fuzz growing on it. And we huddled ourselves into our bodies and we made bets with ourselves and each other. And some of us tried to tell ludicrous stories of who they were and how they had sex.
But we didn't have the heart to go on, for it seemed wrong, and even though we knew they had sex (others in their dorm listened at the thin walls and heard them sometimes, so the listeners claimed, to be moaning and sighing and excited and laughing and climbing up the mountain and then spent glorious sun into night in each other's arms) and though these were only fill in conjectures, we assumed they did, because they told us, the mirror images, but never went into details. They were bloodless roses who needed winter. Without the cold snap, they could not have existed. We fully believed that then, and I fully believe it today.
There was something in them that was more than the huge clock watches on their infinitely slender wrists. There was something more than their long hair in which on occasion they would singularly or together put in a flower in honor of the admonition of what to do if you go to San Francisco. They loved The Beatles, and Black Sabbath, and The Who's Tommy. They read "The Strawberry Statement" and "The Greening of America" and they took all of those seriously, it became mock serious. And that was when, we thought, on looking back on it, that everything changed between them and us. University is a place of mind. Life there is so different. So tenuous you never know where you stand if you stand anywhere at all.
The Vietnam war was raging. There were a few fights on campus because of it. But mostly there were mirrors. There were mirrors in our rooms and mirrors in our minds, for we were changing, growing up, growing older. Though the mirror image couple were not changing, but there at the tail end of the hippie era, they were rushing back to those childlike times when weed protects ad much as it projects and it protects mostly from fear. And if Mooney hadn't died, and the mirror images and some of us had not been talked into going to his house to hold a wake or a seance, I never knew which, then we would still be bleeding over the mirror twins, over the mirror lovers.
Mooney was a teacher at the school. Claimed to have grown up with Harper Lee and Tennessee Williams. Was an English professor who wrote impossible to understand poetry and was a bore as a teacher, but had somehow in spite of his late middle years "groked" on to the counter culture movement, wore serapes to school, talked in a lingo that seemed truly ridiculous coming out of a face that looked far older even than it was. And that set the pattern of believing everything everyone throws at us. Or believing nothing. Mooney died of a heart attack. And his legions were in mourning. Some of us and the mirror twins were in that legion because Mooney had showed us how being old and a failure at everything could dovetail into being a champion of our own causes, which we didn't know till later, were lost ones. His house was willed to his closest students. A small place. Cluttered with books. An old house with tiny rooms and prints of classic paintings on the walls. His main disciples always had the record player going with Ravi Shankar sitar music. And candles of black lit everywhere. With black out shades on the windows of the living room with the lumpy couch and the ratty blue carpeting.
So we were there on Saturday afternoon, with the others who TRULY BELIEVED THEY COULD COMMUNICATE WITH THE DEAD. Which sadly enough in that belief, included the mirror twins. We hadn't meant to take our clothes off that afternoon as we listened to Shankar and then to chamber music holy and still and filled with death fugues every bar or two. We had been drinking some of Mooney's wine and were just a bit tipsy. There was supposed to be some grass but Mooney's stash was finally depleted and no one had brought more. It was like one of those movies I mentioned earlier they made back then before movie violence and special effects and heads springing open and blood blossoming became the thing. The movies then of people making love but with decorum, with chasteness, with arms and legs covering "the good stuff" and the lighting and camera fuzziness and angles doing the rest.
We talked about it later, some of us, and then we never talked about it again. How Doug and Jo and Randy were cramped together, cross legged, on the living room rug, and doing their chanting and their ooooommmmmms. And the rest of us were looking through the house, but eventually drifted to that living room. We were all crushed against each other in it eventually. The mirror twins had taken off their clothes. They had been lying one atop the other, which one it was impossible to say, as always impossible to distinguish one from the other, and some of us finally noticing this soul catching awesome and so hoped for thing had happened, and soon, all of us staring unashamedly at them, in the flickering candle light in the cold heatless room of the cold house once lived in by a man now quite cold and no longer self-profound. And there they were, brother and sister, boyfriend and boyfriend, all the combinations. The one on the bottom of the lumpy falling down sofa was kissing the lips of the one on top. Their bodies seemed gold and dark and flickering to our eyes and our minds depleting on the wine.
They did not grind into one another. They flowed cloud drifted into each other. But were even here, chaste. Even here, dignified. And though there were some stupes who went on and on later about seeing them hump like rabid frothing dogs, most of us, I at least, felt my heart breaking for them. Thin and thin and reactionary and readers of "Soul on Ice" (Power to the Brothers) and getting far back into the past, farther back than they had imagined. They might have been star children as the movie predicted. The glass face on top lying its cheek on the side of the identical glass face of the person on the bottom. We took off our own clothes, not for sexuality's sake; indeed, mostly unaware we were doing it, and yet there was this in our minds, I believe. To prove to them how reality looked. To prove to them that perfection is not a state that this world ever approves of. But of course they never looked at us. All themselves alone. For to us, the audience, we were in a totally sexless haze to each other. Aroused only by the couple making love in our eyes seemingly alone. And that was a very private, very hidden individualistic moment for all of us, I fully believe. We were like the cast of "Hair" in the nude scene. Unashamed. We are what we are.
And I think it was at that point, some of us tired of them. Some of us were angry at them. Because what can roses in winter otherwise do? And what good are they if they are not conjoined at the hip and the lip and the heart and can't let anybody else into their trapezoid parallelogram angular mathematical configurations. The shadows of them lay on them as much as the shadows of the room. And the rest of us sat there or stood there, naked, boys and girls, mostly straight, some gay, many not having clue one about themselves, just going along to make themselves fit if possible, and ready to turn on a dime at a moment's notice if the wave changes directions. We touched only because the room was so tiny. Some were in the doorway, not able to get in.
We watched the mirror make love to itself. We watched the slender boy hips in shadow and candle light move softly up and down. We watched the boy or girl on the bottom move as though she or he were a soft summer stream of pure silver up in the mountains somewhere of long ago, content with herself or himself. We watched them in tandem, in conjoining, and perhaps some of us thought of them as Ying and Yang. We weren't aware of ourselves or of anyone else there, but them. We watched as they made love. And it would forever after be the lovemaking we were not made for. That we could not accomplish no matter how hard we tried. We had seen the mirrors of our pasts, of our childhoods and teenage years and the memories, I think, of all the times we alone had made love to our mirrors, pretending to be not heavy or not too thin or not having a bulbous nose or not having stick out years or not being small or not being too hairy where we hated it the most. We remembered kissing our lips in the mirrors. But we could only kiss the glass and not our lips. We remembered angling ourselves in the mirrors, adjusting the lighting, and excited, and then over, and the loneliest feeling in the world.
We looked at them make love. And that usurped us forever. They took even that away from us. They were--perfect. The one on the bottom (how crude to describe it like this, they took our poetry as well, but how else to describe it, when we didn't know their names or even what sex they were or what their relation was?) put his or her legs around the sides of the one making love to him or her. And pulled his or her ankles round to the one on top's hips. And there was the remaking of the summer day in them. There was rose blush and the skies of childhood all china berry up there on a warm May afternoon when nothing will work but taking a kite to fly or riding a bike to the top of the world and laughing down on everyone and everything for the golden sun is on your side and no one can ever change that. But they can, yes, dear god they can.
We didn't feel wrong watching them. We knew they had no memory or knowledge we were there. We couldn't take our eyes off them. Their bodies looked so defenseless, so bony, so creamy in places. The both looked like girls. They both looked like boys. And when it was over, they held to each other and we felt a catch in our throats. We remembered everything about them. The dreams in their eyes. Their long hair blowing in the winter breeze. The books they loved, and the music. How they clung to each other and made friendship bracelets for each other of paper and tin. How they would watch a movie, lazing into the other, making the hard bones of each see so soft, so supple and light. How they took things seriously and made us too, after awhile, and then made us not. Made us go to a different path, a different direction. Because they owned that one, forever and a day. They took away our breath. They took away a lot of our life as well.
A few years after all of this, Herman Raucher wrote a novel called "There Should Have Been Castles." And that is how I will forever think of the mirror couple. The couple we came to dislike soon after that afternoon at Gooney Mooney's house. The couple we came to shun because they had shunned us all this time. Letting us in a bit at a time, then without a word or a shrug or a nuance, closing the door defiantly but courteously. But there should have been castles for them, all the same. I don't think I've ever spent a colder winter in my life that seemed so magical, so warm, so close to the heart, as I did that one. Of course we felt badly about shunning them, but they never noticed, it seemed. They had each other. That was enough. There was nothing to do to hurt them. We wanted to. But we only ended up hurting ourselves.
When they finished that afternoon, their ivory body movements, their understanding of what each wanted and giving it in full measure, the rhythm, the sexual urges, the needs right on the button, to counteract them, to overlay them, to soothe them, to satisfy them, then to draw away again, and thus the longing of one for the other, and pushing up and down, and drawing close again and holding on for dear life, their bodies bathed in perspiration sheen though it was so cold in here, when it was over, the rest of us robotically dressed. We didn't look at one another that whole time. Looking back, I wonder if any of it happened at all. We paid homage to the mirror twins. They did not pay us homage back. They were the sad movie with the sad music and the arms and legs placed just so, so we wouldn't know. But we did know. They after a time of their heart flutters slowing down, slowing down, eased with wit and cat like grace from each other, as the boy on top, and he was a boy, stood up and helped the boy on bottom up as well. They stood in front of us. They let us see. For a moment only, then they dressed.
The thing is, as the summer of their bodies put on the autumn of their clothes, we each saw them differently in the candle light, in the gloom of the black out curtains that someone should have opened and let the sunshine in, to see for sure, but that would have been like rape, and that we would never have done, had the idea even occurred to any of us. When some of us talked about it later, we discovered that we had all seen them differently. Some saw them as girl and girl, some as boy and girl, some as boy and boy, and some as star children come to save us from ourselves, from our mirrors. But Jean and Martin(e?) alone could walk away from their mirrors, as they walked away from the house that night, as we parted tightly to let them flow through us like ghosts with their high foreheads and their long thick hair and their teeth that made their mouths seem like a little perched high on a hill cathedral, and the hollows of their bodies, and the clothes that seemed as right on them, as erotic as their bare skin had been to us.
After a few months of us studiously ignoring them, and uselessly so, they were not seen again. No one knew what had happened to them. They were of their time and they were ahead of it. The gender bending would not hit America for a number of years from then. The confusion of it. The happiness of it. The bafflement and wonderment of it was still up ahead. I think sometimes that the mirror couple was just a mirror, each for the other. That mad old wish some people have to make love to themselves. Culled from those childhood years I believe of making love to mirrors because there was no other choice for most of us back then. Primping and angling the smile and the heft and sagacity of the eyes at our reflections. Stiffening the chin. Lowering the bottom lip, exposing the opened mouth to our images so we can see what we look like when we come, and it is not what it really is, but a romanticized dream of what is the reality. I turned to reality myself eventually. Most of us did. I like to think, in revenge, that Jean and Martin(e?) got tired of making love to their own selves, turned backwards, and broke up and destroyed each other's hearts forever more as they had destroyed at least mine.
I can't imagine them now. Not without those bell bottom blue blue jeans and those clocky boots with those blocky high heels and those plaid shirts, and those faces that seemed to have hollows in them, the sunken cheeks, the shelves that make the eyes below look a bit haunted. Their laughter and their seriousness. Their need for Betrand Russell and D.H. Lawrence. The sexuality that was on top of their skin all the time we were around them. The way their beauty made our hearts beat. The imagining of what it would be like to make love with both of them. But I assume time has taken then, as it has taken the rest of us from there and then.
I wish I could see them again, as they were, let them be still that now. How I made love to myself with their naked images in my eyes, images fading so quickly, no matter how hard I tried to hold onto them, like holding back the tide though. And snow at the window sill of my dorm room as I stood looking out it late night at the couples coming back from the show or a restaurant, there down in the sodium lights and the bone colored hard moon, staying in the cars for a time, kissing, before they had to get back for curfew. I wish that for all of us, every single last one of us there, whom I find a special place in my heart has been set aside without me really knowing it till recently, I wish there had been castles. I just wish.
And Rapunzel to let down their hair from the window of the cloister in the top of the tower, and I to climb up and free them from themselves. For a mirror world for an entire life is a terrible thing to contemplate. For the rest of us, that is. Because for us the image stays in its place and it ages and it is cynical and it is lost. But the sweetness of the mirrors I think Jean and Martin (e?) deftly lifted from us is totally different for the image climbs out of the mirror and says I'm here, and touches you, a whole different being from you, but of you as well, and says don't be lonely anymore, I'm here. It must be wonderful, such grand legerdemain.
THE END