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Winter With a Ghost
By
Tim Stillman
Julian put his arms to me. I turned from him. He touched my shoulder. I wavered. He said, "You can't go on like this." I said "Why not? Where did someone write that law?" He said, "I can't change my name." I said, "You can't change anything." He touched my neck and tried to massage it. I pulled away from him. We were in bed. Naked. The covers pulled up over us this wintry morning. It was London. It was after the New Year. He was tall and thin and black haired. He wore his glasses. I had always found that so sexy when he was totally naked, with only glasses. That was another reason I turned from him.
"You get mixed up," he said, and got out of bed. He stood there, with his back to me, I could tell. He wanted his flanks to engender me out of my pout, my nightmare, but he called it a pout. I kept my back turned. I lay on my side. I was in love with him. Not the first Julian, but the second. Julian the Second. We made jokes about it. He would laugh. I would pretend to.
"Will you look at me? I'm freezing me knobs off here, trying to turn you on, for God's sake." There was a little laugh in his voice. I am an American. I have been here for five years, but I am still, for better or worse, an American. We lived in a little shivery coldwater flat. He did not work at the BFI. The previous Julian did. Julian the Second worked at a theatre as an usher, ticket taker, and butcher counter man, and now in management. I was going to college. I was trying to be a writer. I worked part time for the Times entertainment section. Where the previous Julian had worked some years before.
"You have got to take another job," Julian the Second told me often and endlessly, "You can't want to bump into him all the time." I said, "I have to lay the ghost. I have to try." Julian the Second said "Lay me, then. I am not a ghost." I heard him now making coffee in the little dinette, or what we would call a dinette in America, and I wished to go to him and hold to him and warm him so he could warm me. But I didn't trust him. Not just because of all the original Julians. There had been so many friends in my life who had gone away, and often as not, I never knew why. I always blamed myself. But probably it had nothing to do with me at all. It was lonelier that way, so I blamed myself anyway, to keep myself company.
"Do you want to see `The Dreamers' again?" He asked, as he came back to his side of the bed. I turned on my back and looked at him. He was so handsome naked. Nipples stiff. Cock uncut and partly hard, though I knew it was the cold making him so. "I don't think so. It makes me want all three of them," I said, reflecting on the movie, so erotic, so nostalgic, so filled with sexuality and nakedness; how often we watched the DVD of it, ran it slo mo, went some scenes step by step. "It makes me lonely. It's whole point is how wrong it all is."
"Till the end," he said. And he put on his clothes. I always loved to see him do that. I always loved to see him as he was, and what he was, was too close to Julian the first. He looked not unlike him, and I knew he would go away, Julian the second or Tommy the third, or Joel the 20th, whatever name, whatever number. It seemed as though I was fighting ghosts all my life. And I was jealous and that was wrong. Sometimes I didn't know what I was jealous about, really. I wished there were something I could say to him, really to him. He never knew if I was talking to him, seeing him, making love to him, or to the previous person who stole his name. And I knew it hurt him. And I sometimes thought I could get revenge on Julian the First by hurting Julian the Second, and I felt terribly about that, and went overboard in telling my lover of two years how beautiful he was.
He and I loved France and went to the bistros and cafes and strolled along the Parisian nights and bought sidewalk paintings for a song and looked at the bookstalls and ate croissants and it was all quite wonderful. We went there every weekend if we had the time and the chance. Here in London, we would go to the cinema. We would walk round the Circus. We would pose in odd positions in front of statues and stick out our tongues or waggle walk through museums and people would studiously avoid looking at us, or would laugh at us, or would be angry at our disrespect. Like in the movie. Like in our world where we had to be so careful.
He was fragile, my Julian. He had been born with a heart murmur, had had open-heart surgery as no more than still an infant. Had had a blue teddy bear that said, "I am loved" inside a red candy heart on its tummy(given him by the hospital staff) and would sleep with it next to himself, in his small bed at home and big bed at hospital. He told me the story of all of that, and I cried on his shoulder. I've never understood why horrible things happen, especially to children; it's a monstrous god working on these things if there is a god, good or bad. I kept picturing him brave, all that difficult childhood long. Kept in a warm, too warm, too claustrophobic family, always hovering over him, always seeing he was well, always seeing his temp was fine and he had no pains and his breathing was not labored. They actually made him sicker than he would have been. He was an only child. And that made him an adult before his time. I was his child now it seemed, for I had grown dependent on him and he said it was "all right, mate; I don't mind."
Well, of course he minded. And it was all so incongruous. Here was this decent nice guy, who gave blow jobs like nobody's business, I might add, and who made me feel warmer and more important than anyone in my life ever had, and who kept reassuring me that I did so much for him, and he thought me such a hot number and kind man, not that I had ever deserved it one bit, and I kept this Julian the Second ghost thing over his head. I didn't mean to. He had gone as far as trying to see if he could legally change his name, and it was possible, but the red tape he would have had to have gone through was astronomical, so that was out. I loved him. I loved Julian the First. He told me "keep Shakespeare in mind when it comes to the name business, a rose and all that," did Julian the Second who deserved some other bloke than me.
"Stop it," he said now. "The GD coffee's ready. Get up. Drink some. Get dressed. You've got class in an hour. I can sleep in till this afternoon, but I've gotta keep the books today, so haven't much time myself." He put his long warm pale hand on me, I thought of a human starfish in a lonely big black sea, touching me with kindness and care. I had met Julian the Second at the theatre where he works. I had known Julian the First because of a letter I had published in a horror magazine, which prompted a letter from the first Julian, thus beginning a trans-Atlantic friendship that ended up with us finally meeting each other. And that finally ended, shatteringly so, and turned me bitter and cold and lonesome. So with my Julian said hullo, one night as he met me in the Park, where we had both come to be less lonely, and had found each other. I turned away quickly, but he was not one to let that go unpunished--as he said later and we laughed about it.
He pulled at me to get up. I asked him if he would suck me off. He said, "Well, since you're so nice about it^Åno, I won't." I looked at him, somewhat startled. I had begun to take him for granted. This made me fearful. I had taken the previous Julian for granted, so I thought and re-thought everything I did with my Julian over and again, always making the wrong choices, because I had been fore-doomed to that. Julian the Second said, "Will you knock it off already with this distrust bit?" Did I do it? Would it have happened otherwise? Of course I did it. Whatever was I thinking?
Julian sat on the side of the bed. He was dressed, save for his coat for this wicked weather. He rubbed my arm. He told me, "Luv, you have got to get over this. You really must. He's not even in the country anymore." I asked him how he knew. "Because we have looked on the net, we have looked through phone books, we have looked all over the bleedin' landscape for him--we could hire Scotland Yard to find him, and they couldn't-- and he's not here." I asked where he was. "He could be in hell. Wouldn't you like that? Well, wouldn't you? He hurt you terribly."
"No. No I don't want that. Your heart hurt you terribly. Do you wish it in hell?" Julian put his hand to my chin. "No, boyo, that's a stupid analogy. What went wrong with my heart was not its fault. What went wrong with Julian was his fault. He walked away without a word. That's wrong. It would be wrong if he said good-bye without letting you say something, if he had just written you off, that's wrong too. But to walk away like he dropped off the face of the fuckin' planet, that's unforgivable. I see him in my eyes when I shave or dry my hair. I see him in your eyes when I make love to you. You're making him me. God. D'you have any bleedin' idea how it makes me feel? I am jealous of some jerk. Some jerk who just said, in that damned endless silence, oh futz off I've had enough, deal with it, dude^Å"
"Don't talk about him like that." I was angry now. I pulled off the bed covers. I said, "Suck me off." I cupped my cock in my hands and held it to him. He pushed away from me. "You're no tough guy. That's not you. And you're not rude. Get dressed, dammit."
So I did. As he brought me a steaming cuppa, which I sipped after, I had dressed. I sat at the little table by the fridge and he sat opposite me.
"I dream of killing him," Julian the Second said. And I said, "Stop it. I'm acting like a baby. You have to take care of your heart. You've been through so damned much and you're such a funny, kind, strong, resourceful man and I love you and I'm an infant, not able to shake this thing. It's nothing compared^Å" He stopped me. "I didn't buy you any books last week. How about this? How about we go shopping for books Saturday. I've saved up some, and I want to get you books to read and love and to think of me by." And oh how I loved him. Oh God, how I loved him. I got up and went round to his chair and knelt and held him and he held me with his arms too.
"I'm just a man, like you. I ask for no special treatment for my heart. It's fine. Hasn't given me any problems for years. You are my love, oh please believe that. I won't hurt you." I pulled away and stood up. I pulled him up to me and we embraced. I was taller by some inches. His coal black hair was long and curly. I kissed the crown of his head. He put his hands into my brown long straight hair and we kissed. Long and hard and tongues. I felt my erection and his as well. I had always trusted people. Even Julian the First. If I found him some day, and he was a friend again, no way that would happen, but say it did, what would I do? My Julian had asked me that once. I said I would tell Julian the First off and thus prove my love to My Julian. He didn't believe me. Neither did I.
I knelt to him now, not knowing the answer to the conundrum--was I meant to find the bastard and make a fool of myself once more, beg him back, and be so sick for more years, filled with all the wrong songs and all the wrong drugs and all the wrong psychiatric wind age? Would I take all that just to have the other Julian back? Would I say over and again, "my fault, my fault?" I would be insane to have done so. But still I wondered. And I know my lover Julian did as well. And I knew he was seeing someone else. I had the usual evidence. I had come home from university early while bunking a class. He was supposed to be at the cinema. I heard the voices, his and another's, and I heard the telltale sighs. I had walked away. Shattered. But happy that it was happening again.
They always ended. Always sadness. Except the first Julian, for reasons deep and strong and personal and no one else's business, that one person betrayed me, killingly and cuttingly. No one had ever betrayed me before, save Julian the First. I had never told this exactly to my Julian. Some things I keep private. Some hurts too embarrassing, too treasured, too sacred, to bring out and have someone else, or yourself for that matter, say, was that what the fuss was about? Okay, he was a lout, but you're making a putz eternal and infinitely more than he was. "Your fault, hell," Julian the Second said. "It was bloody well his." Would he say that if I had told him all of it? Would he have dismissed it as my making a mountain out of a grain of sand? So I worked the pearl deeper into myself and tried to make it count for all the pain I deserved. I did, didn't I, deserve it? Every time Julian the Second said that, I felt pain deep in my gut that said, oh yes you are, all that and a million times more, and it made me feel at home. As did Julian the Second' secret lover(s).
I felt happy he would ditch me soon. I was on familiar terrain. Ditched by another gay man, named Julian. Wonder how long this would make me temporarily impotent? I give it a year, on first guess, considering the past.
I did not like happiness. I did not trust it. I used the memories of hurt in order to make love to Julian the Second. I had at the beginning at least. Then I had started being happy with him. Hoping. Qualms though. But less and less. Till I knew for sure. Till I found out. The other times I had seen him with someone else. Who looked nothing like me and did not, I doubted, have my first name. If he had looked like me, had had my first name--it would have been perfect, I thought, if I had been parallel to the first Julian under my name to him--well, funhouse mirror times--but now that I knew I was expendable, how did I ever be fool enough to think that was not so this time as well?, idiot me. I knelt down and unzipped him.
I rolled the foreskin back, and put him hard in my mouth. He put his hands on my shoulders and sighed. I did it slowly and sensuously. I wondered if Julian the First's penis had looked and felt and tasted like this. I wish I had been given the chance to know. I felt him cum. My Julian. This was my way of saying good-bye to him.
As I stayed. As always. Till the bitter end. And pretended this time, like always, pretending.