Mike Allen - Clockwork Phoenix

I’m giving the impression that thoughts of sex were near the forefront of our minds all through those years, but that wasn’t the truth of it. Yes, those thoughts were always there; but they were only a sort of darkened backdrop at the rear of the brightly lit stage that was the life we shared together. Often, as we went through high school, I’d get teased by the other guys about it—not so much teased as incredulously interrogated. In the height of summer Jus, like all the other girls, would be wandering around wearing not very much—a brief halter and ultra-short pants that did little to hide the fact that she was young, and female, and lithe. How could I stand it, the boys would earnestly ask me, being near to such unconquered but surely conquerable tracts of exquisite femininity and yet never so much as succumbing to the temptation to indulge in a seemingly accidental grope? I didn’t tell them, of course, that Jus and I were relatively familiar with each other’s bodies, that sometimes we’d lounge around naked together if that was more comfortable, that physical exposure and nudity in themselves don’t matter because it’s the baring of selves to each other that’s what lovemaking’s all about. They were disbelieving enough already; that mental censor I spoke of earlier would have distorted the information so that what they’d have perceived was that Jus and I spent our time alone mindlessly fucking.

I can hear it now: “Well, you know, guys, sometimes we lie around without any clothes on and talk about string theory.”

Yeah. Right. You a faggot?

String theory wasn’t the only thing we discussed. Cosmology was just one of our passionate interests. Pinball was another. Classic mystery novels. Photography. Existentialist philosophy, until in the end we concluded that Sartre had his head in the clouds just as much as anyone else. Music—rock, classical, jazz, exotic. The Surrealist school—art in general, in fact, although we decided ninety per cent of the Abstractionists were just clones producing sub-Pollocks in a factory line somewhere. Microbiology. Menstruation—both in terms of its being one of life’s great tedia and in terms of its relation to the lunar cycle… and so we rambled on into biorhythms. Cryogenics. Black-and-white movies, preferably with Edward G. Robinson or Veronica Lake in them. Sunsets. Fantasy fiction, most of which we detested as being Harlequin Romance set in Tolkien Country but some of which we adored. Politics and the corruptibility of the human soul, those two topics being natural bedfellows. The situation in whichever part of the world the situation was in at the time. Sex and, in a world-weary way, its follies. Crossword puzzles. Quantum theory. The history of stupidity. Religion—we were rationalist, and abhorred the efforts of the bigots to impose their nonsense on not just the rest of us but their own children. Love, in all its forms. Tennis—we played, badly, but spectated avidly. How ghastly just about everything was that was shown on MTV, and how little we wanted to be rich and famous… although we both knew with an absolute certitude that one day we would be.

Rich and famous together , as Jusjohn.

As it is, John’s on his own and he’s a Deputy Chief Librarian in a small-town library.

Of course, we both went to the same college. Our families, who by this time were really just one large family, always assumed it, as did we. There was no question of being able to afford one of the major institutions, but Rembrandt University, while undistinguished, had a highly respectable reputation. It was actually a very good university with a top-notch literature faculty—we’d decided on literature rather than the sciences. The campus was large and in a superb setting; the nearby town of Ilchester was just the right size to accept but not overwhelm us college kids. We both joined a bad campus rock band called The Flaming Ghoulies that reformed every week or two until finally, after a full three months, to the silent but intense relief of everybody it split permanently amid a deluge of accusations and counteraccusations over who’d purloined the lead guitarist’s private half-gallon of rye. (In fact, the rest of us had shared it one hilarious night, but the details got confused.) Jus and I studied together; after the first semester we took an apartment together and our parents acted extremely cool about the whole thing because of course we were Jusjohn and would soon enough be married. They’d have been less cool if they’d known we weren’t sleeping with each other—at least, never in the usual euphemistic sense of the term.

Midway through that first semester I lost my virginity to a girl called, strangely enough, Tabitha; I can’t remember much about her except that her breasts were too big and the wrong shape, not being Jus’s, and that she knew more about Sean Connery than anyone else I’ve ever known, discussing his movie career with greater and greater intensity and louder and louder up to and through orgasm—a detail that had Jus, when first told about it, pummelling the floor in gleeful laughter. Over the space of a couple of months I must have slept with Tabitha a dozen times or more, because I could, until I discovered that she was extending the same privilege to several of the other guys, including a chemistry professor, and I began to worry about disease. Jus followed the liaison—it could hardly be called an affair—with fascination; it was the Jusjohn organism’s first experience of physically “going the whole way”, and thus obviously of potent interest to both of us. The Jusjohn organism might not have been so emotionally equable about it all if Tabitha had been more than an educational aid and receptacle, of course.

As I learned when Jus started dating and eventually sleeping with Martin.

This wasn’t a matter of double standards—the “it’s OK for the guy to screw around, but heaven help the girl who does the same” principle. Jus seriously liked Martin. She didn’t talk about their lovemaking when she came back to the apartment, to me, didn’t tell me everything they’d done. The two of them spent a lot more time talking or going around together—all the activities that I regarded as my prerogative, in other words—than they did grappling. And, worse, I could quite understand why she liked him. As I sat at home alone in our apartment nursing a bottle of whatever was on special offer that week at the liquor store I tried to find something— anything —about Martin that I could legitimately detest, and I always failed. I mean, I liked the guy as well.

Despite being liked by both parts of the Jusjohn being—“in their different ways,” as I fastidiously put it to Jus one time—Martin was a casualty of our first long vacation from Rembrandt. I spent much of that vacation reconciling myself to the notion that, although Jus was the other half of me, we didn’t own each other exclusively, that what she did with her body was irrelevant to the fact that we two were one, indivisible, our essences united, that even if she married this guy Martin he would always be an irrelevance in the light of… you can fill in all the other rationalizations yourself. Sometimes I voiced them to Jus; sometimes she agreed; sometimes she kept quiet.

It was almost an anticlimax to get back to college and discover that, during his weeks away from Jus, Martin had found “somebody else,” which “somebody else” he was going to marry.

When I first heard about it, Jus had to restrain me from stomping round to his place to bawl him out for his treachery.

She got over it quicker than I did, because Richard came along. He lasted nearly six months, until he suggested it could be more fun if he invited a friend to join in. (Jus wasn’t against the idea in principle, as she explained to me, but she was deeply offended by the presumption.) I had a nostalgic weekend with Tabitha—to hell with worries about infection—and then, later on, another; her field of expertise had shifted to Keanu Reeves, and I couldn’t help feeling she was on a potentially fatal slide. Who next? Adam Sandler?