Chapter 11E

We dropped by Martha's place, changed clothes, and then spent the rest of the afternoon on the Staten Island Ferry. Martha showed me what she called the "expected tourist attractions" -- the Statue of Liberty, Wall Street, City Hall. As dusk was underway we walked uptown toward Greenwich Village, where she took me to a hairdresser for a very expensive haircut. Gradually, Martha cheered up. Gradually, I became more sullen. The city was dark. We strolled through New York University and Washington Square Park as the night-time culture took over. Yet so many stores and shops remained open, with no sign of closing! We stopped in a couple of book emporiums on Broadway.

In the Strand Bookstore, I stopped to examine the title page of a volume from a pile of books on a small table against a wall.

Martha asked, "Wanna get anything?"

I pointed at one book on the table. "An out of print copy of 'Gregory the Great'," I said. "Brother Martin back home would give his eye teeth for this."

"Why don't you buy it and take it back home for him?"

"I'd want it for myself. Brother Martin lent me that book from the school library as a special project. He said he didn't want to waste my time in basic English, so he gave me extra credit for writing a report on this book. It's great. Whoever thought a biography of the first great Pope of the Church could be so good? Wouldn't it be great if I could--?" I stopped and sighed.

"If you could what, hon?"

"If... if I could absorb all this. Just stay here and go through every one of these things. There are books and ideas here that go back hundreds of years." I shook my head. "I'd never be able to do it all."

"Nobody can do it all."

"But I want to."

"Nobody can, hon."

"The problem is, I couldn't even get started. Why start with one, when there are thousands, tens of thousands, even hundreds of thousands, of books in here? I wouldn't finish Chapter One before I'd have to get on a plane back to Memphis."

She smirked. "So that's what you've been thinking about. I thought so."

I sighed again, and shoved my hands into my pockets. "Yeah."

"Come on," she said, "Let's go find dinner."

We had dinner at a small place in Greenwich Village and then took the bus home. At her place I lounged on the sofa. Martha plopped into the fluffy old easy chair beside her small fireplace, an unusable, thickly whitewashed relic of what her neighborhood used to be.

"What'll we do tonight? It's not even eight o'clock and I didn't make plans for tonight because I wanted you to have a night to call the shots. You know your way around the city a little now, so I thought you'd like to set it up yourself for a change."

"You plan real good, Miss Martha."

"That's not an answer. Just tell me what you want to do."

I yawned. "Oh, I dunno."

"Steven... I've been leading you around town for a week now. In fact, I've been leading you around all your life. I didn't bring you to New York to lead you on a leash. I brought you here to open you up. I brought you here to show you that the whole world isn't Memphis and you don't always get punished for saying and doing what you want."

I smiled gratefully, and shrugged.

"Oh, c'mon. Talk to me."

"What do you want me to say?"

She sighed impatiently. "It's not what I want you to say, it's what YOU want to say. It's what you want to do."

"I don't know what I want to do."

"You wanna just sit here and mope about going back to Memphis? You're not back in Memphis yet. You're still in Manhattan. With me. You're here. Now. Stop going over the past and stop worrying about the future. You see what that sort of thing did to me this afternoon at work. I said what I had to say about it, and then I moved on."

"Okay, well... First of all, I'm a little tired."

"All right. Sounds reasonable. I am too, actually."

I paused. She waited.

"Steven" she said quietly. "Talk to me. Wanna just talk? A nice, restful Friday evening, talking my head off would be very nice. I've got you to do a lot of things, but I still can't get you to talk without dragging everything out of you. I haven't forgotten who you are. I know you're still young and unsure. I know that New York is intimidating, and it was for me when I came here. But you still have feelings and ideas. I wish I could figure them all out on my own, but I can't."

I thought for a moment.

She waited.

I sat up straight. "Come one, let's take a shower."

She laughed. "That's what you want to do, take a shower?"

I walked to her and took her hand and gave a little tug. "Come on."

We showered together.

"How exciting," Martha said sarcastically as she soaped her hands.

"This is a prelude to what's next," I said mysteriously, swabbing my shoulders and arms.

"Hon, everything's a prelude to what's next, and this gives me a pretty good idea what it will probably be. But do you have to shower to talk?"

"You'll see," I said.

At the end of our shower I asked her to re-soap her hands and make the suds thick and slippery. "Now," I said, holding my cock, "Get me hard. Come on. Get me really hard."

She smiled at me quizzically as she worked on my cock. "Steven... what are you up to? This is how you start a conversation?"

"You'll see. Come on."

When I was fully erect I asked Martha, "Are you wet?"

She said, "Of course I am, what do you think?"

"Okay," I said, and I rinsed the soap away quickly and I turned off the shower spigots and then I led her by the hand out of the stall, across the living room, toward the bedroom.

"Steven, we're still wet from the shower."

"I don't care," I said, and I lifted her onto the bed, surprised at my own strength.

She looked at me wonderingly as I turned out the bedroom light and then stretched her out on her back and opened her legs and lay on her, and she looked at me with an incredulous smile. I looked down to aim my cock and then slowly entered her, sighing and enjoying the long slide inward. Her eyes widened and she whispered, "Oh, my. Steven. I have to thank Fiore for more than just my nineteen inch waist. Mm."

I slid in and out a few times. I muttered a little breathlessly, watching her hips adjust to my length, "I love your nineteen-inch waist. I love getting big and hard and going into you." When I felt thoroughly lubricated and comfortable I slid all the way in and held myself there and embraced her closely, one arm around her waist and the other around her neck, and hugged her and nestled my face against her neck. I lay motionless, my cock deep and snug and hard and wet inside her.

"Now," I said, "we can talk."

She laughed quietly, hugging me. "And I thought you said you weren't a good conversationalist." She kissed my cheek. "Well. Very sexy way to have a talk."

I kissed her neck. "Listen. I don't know how to tell you what I'm thinking because I'm -- I'm tired of thinking. I think myself to death, just like you say I do. Right now I'm feeling. I'm feeling you holding me. I'm feeling how good it is to walk in Central Park with you and go to a deli and eat matzo ball soup. I don't like to spend a lot of time talking about how I feel, I have to do something about it. I have to put my feelings to work. Every time I start analyzing and thinking, everything goes wrong. I just want to do something about my feelings, and I don't... I don't want to just look at books and look at movies and read plays. I want to do them. I want to make them real, I want to make them into something I can... touch and see, hear and taste."

I hugged her. "I don't want to just think about going back home, I want to go back home and do something. I don't want to look at New York and think about New York, I want to do New York. I don't want to think about being here, I want to be here. I don't want..." I paused, hearing myself go in all directions, and I took a breath and slowed down. I said with difficulty, "I don't want later, I want now. It won't do any good later. Sometimes... sometimes I think I've never done anything I wanted, and I want to do it all at once, everything at once. And I end up not doing anything."

I had to stop myself. I was on the verge of telling her I wanted her, Martha, and Martha Jane, now, always, and I wanted to be older now and successful now and out of Memphis now. But I couldn't go that far. I kissed her neck. I whispered, "Your neck feels good. And it feels so good with me in your -- inside you. I feel so --"

I stopped. I was suddenly overcome with the strangest, most nonsensical, most idiotic fear I'd known in years. I had a sudden, flashing vision of family, nuns, aunts, rules, frowns, gasps of horror. And mom. If I started talking, where was it going, except to go where it had always gone: nowhere? I didn't know how to say it, how to say anything in the right way without spending hours on it, reworking every word.

She hugged my face to hers and said softly, "Say it, hon. You almost said it, what you really mean. Go ahead. You can say what you mean to me. Don't be afraid to use the words. You started and then you stopped, you stopped and changed it. Don't be afraid of me, Steven. Not me. Inside me where?" She waited and then whispered, her lips near my ear, "Say it."

"... Inside your pussy."

"Yes."

"Your cunt."

"Yes."

"When I go inside your pussy, I put all of me in you. I put my body and my thoughts and my feelings, my past, my present, my future inside you..."

But I didn't say that all there was when I was inside her was her, just her, and I wanted nothing, nothing but her.

She whispered, "Baby." Inside her, she hugged me. "Maybe you should try to tell me one thing at a time. I know you've held yourself back for a long time. But you don't have to do everything at once, sweetheart. You can't."

We talked for several minutes, with Martha patiently holding and encouraging me. And again, Martha did most of the talking, drawing a thought, a sentence from me at a time. Now and then when I softened inside her she would squeeze me internally, or I would move inside her a little, until I was hard again.

I worked up enough courage to admit to her that I feared I'd never be able to do anything I really wanted, that I'd never be everything I wanted to be.

She said caringly, "I'm afraid too, hon. Everyone is."

I stopped talking and we fucked for a few minutes, slowly and lovingly, and it was one of the few times that I fucked Martha while not watching her; nestling my face into her neck while I moved, I listened to her breathing. When the pleasure mounted beyond more than lazy, affectionate probing, I would stop. She would ask a question or make a comment and I would start talking again.

She asked me what I wanted to do, who I wanted to be. I told her there were so many things I wanted to do, I didn't know where to s tart. She asked me to describe the person I yearned to be. I expended so much time and so many words trying to explain it that she asked me to give a name, the name of someone I knew who mirrored what I thought I wanted to be. I mentioned Gregory Peck.

She laughed aloud and said, "But, hon, don't you see? You were describing someone else, not yourself." She raised my head and looked at me, laughing, "Tell me about *you*. You inside. Forget what other people are!"

She wanted me to tell her what my plans were, precisely, when I returned home. I told her I'd keep working. She asked why I was so willing to sacrifice the things I really wanted by wearing myself out with a paper route. I told her I wanted a car, I wanted freedom to move around, I wanted the clothes, friends, and independence others had.

She said, "But having what others have isn't the same as being yourself, finding out who you really are." She said I should be in the theater, and I had better opportunities for a future in college if I spent more time in activities at Christian Brothers. I told her I didn't want to be in high school, I wanted to be in any other place. She was amused and somewhat awed by my willingness to risk everything I had for everything I didn't have. She said I should work with what was available. She told me I was trying too hard to be everyone but myself.

"I'd like to be," I said earnestly, "like you."

She laughed gently and said, "Like me?" and then she frowned and stroked my hair and said, "I don't want you to be like me. Steven, I -- There are things about me you don't know, failings I have that I don't reveal, not even to you or Ronnie. So I know, I know how you feel about areas where you fall short. But don't think I'm perfect. No one is perfect, they can't be. They won't ever be. And just because your folks want you to be someone else -- Hon, don't let them keep doing that to you. I'm so afraid you'll spend the rest of your life trying to please them, instead of being who you really are and could be. I want you to be you. I like what you're becoming. Ronnie likes you, too. She told me you have lunch with her and she's so fond of you, the way you are. And I don't want you to work yourself to death the way I did. Oh, sure, you have to work hard, but I gave up everything to get through Memphis State in three years instead of four, and kept weekend jobs on top of it. And you know what it got me? It got me worn out. Not quite twenty-four years old yet, and I'm all worn out and frustrated with work. It got me used to not taking my time, it got me to wanting everything and wanting it to be perfect. Take my word for it, the world isn't going to pay attention to you just because you work yourself to death to please them. If you're going to work that hard, work for something you want."

I said, "But you got out of Memphis."

"Yes. And so will you. But it was part work, part nerve, and part luck. I could just as well have been picked by another school, but it happened the way it did. The same way we just happened. And some things, Steven, don't happen. You can't make things happen, you can only make yourself available."

She stroked my hair again, and gave my shoulders a squeeze. "You seem so easygoing on the outside -- but you're very aggressive. And it's locked inside. And when you do that to yourself, it becomes fear. And anger. And self destruction. And you deprive others of the person you really are."

We got out of bed for a few minutes and had a snack. Then we embraced in bed again and Martha sucked me to an erection and I got inside her and we hugged and lay still for a while. She asked me about the one girl I'd been with in Memphis, and I hesitatingly told her about Karen. I didn't go into great detail. Martha said that disappointment was the norm when it came to intimacy. "Not everyone's a perfect partner," she said, "and some are lousy. It all depends on who you're with."