Christopher WunderLee - Moore's Mythopoeia

The romanticism of her adopted mother’s death and his own actions did not escape poor Joseph. As he began his first year of secondary education, he mourned her death, but also couldn’t help anticipating what other extraordinary events would befall him in the coming years (being endowed with a Heraclitian perspective on things). The fact that nothing did, that was what ruined Joseph.

* * *

His conception that he would be ill prepared for education was completely false. Joseph was, in fact, due to the work of his dotting nurse of a mother, who had occupied so much idle time with books and imparted this practice onto her son (a Vallaian endeavor, admittedly), as well read as most of the professors at the college. He was allowed the unusual honor of skipping his first year’s studies and immediately entered into specialized courses.

It was in these classes that Joseph began to flourish, both as a student and a social animal. Years of isolation and access to only one other person for majority of his time, had made the young man pensive in overt ways and his silence amongst the loud and obnoxious majority of male students, who thought it becoming of young man to holler his ideas and force himself on other people, made him appear particularly appealing to many of the girls in attendance. He would listen to them, he would devote several hours of thought to their seemingly (although superficially) life-changing problems, and this enamored him to them to such a degree that he was not want of female companionship.

Most young men of Joseph’s age would have fallen into rather benign relationships with female confidantes, but Joseph had a rare gift for turning what appeared to be comforting caresses into arousing provocations that quickly made the girl forget her woes and focus on fulfilling the stirring need for gratification that had been slowly growing in her loins. This sensory foreplay of which he was naturally adept, was coupled with his poetic timbre, which could clandestinely change a few kind words of encouragement into a love ballad so romantic his prey often found themselves believing the young man was not after them sexually, but spiritually yearning for a union. They were obliging, in that they had not heard enough of these kinds of tricks yet in their adolescent forays into the tropics of desire, and accepted his words in their literal sense (not as they were intended). This also armored Joseph against accusations of mistreatment, for no one could conceive of his actions in any other light than that of friendship and honest sympathy, so perfect was his quiet demeanor.

Joseph had grown up in a hospital as well in the midst of a large pod of female nurses who were quite effusive with their conversations, which invariably always turned to sex and so, he was well versed in anatomy and feminine profundity. Women who had been attached to him during his college years had their negative opinions of him, but not one was based on his performance in bed.

When Joseph met his future wife, he did not fall in love with her at first sight, nor did he after several dates and several innocent fumblings in the dusty corners of libraries, dorm rooms, and park benches. In fact, Joseph, who was a successful bachelor, meaning he had sex on a regular basis, did not particularly like her. He had allowed her to initiate a relationship simply because he was of the opinion that one could not have too many mares in the stable, as they say, and her rather common appearance led him to accept the prejudices of her kind, or rather the urban legends of plain girls as nymphomaniacs. She was the polar opposite, a virgin at twenty, she was nothing special, most women her age had not given themselves to a man yet, and she followed stringently the social mores of the day, no sex prior to marriage.

They had met in a survey course on music appreciation, after they were thrust together by a befuddled professor who liked to have his students count-off and form groups. Joseph and Norma (his wife’s given name) were the only two who had been fives, and so they were forced to work together on explaining the difference between the popular waltz and the more technical one. They begrudgingly began their project with a meeting at her apartment, a few blocks from campus, but it was cut short by Norma after Joseph laid his hand on her naked knee, which she had unknowingly exposed.

Uninterested in waltzes or any other type of musical arrangement, Joseph had joined the class in order to fulfill a liberal arts requirement while his partner was a music major and took the course very seriously (having not yet been in secondary education long enough to realize its futility). Like many girls, Norma was free to follow her fancies, since her only real goal in college was to find a suitable fellow to support her for the rest of her life, as was the custom of the time, so she choose something that she thought would make herself more appealing to potential mates — music. She imagined herself singing a cappella in a large living room for relatives, a talent her husband could show off and pride himself on.

Norma was realistic, she knew she did not have the beauty to be a prime catch for one of the many wealthy gentleman, but she did not let this deter her, she would find other ways of being a trophy for her husband. Joseph was not on her radar, as it were, he was not well put together, the different colored eyes made her uncomfortable, since the blue one had fits of laziness and he never appeared to be looking at her when he actually was, he did not come from wealth or status, in fact he came from nowhere, a particularly frightening proposition for a standardized young woman of Norma’s age, and he had made a particularly offensive advance at her within five minutes of being alone with her. He was a tramp. She refused to fall into his traps, she would not tell him anything about herself, nor was she about to confess to him her difficulties or allow him anywhere near her so that he could concoct his wordy aphrodisiacs.

It wasn’t until Joseph had given up on Norma that she found out about his gifts. Joseph had taken another course for his liberal arts requirement, as well, painting, and had shown such a Da Vincian aptitude for it that the art department had officially requested the opportunity to study the virtuoso from the college’s vice president of student affairs.

Art was (and is) considered a past-time to assist tranquility, something executives, secretaries, scientists, and others practiced on Sundays to relax. It was not a profession, nor was it considered a viable option by the university for further study, so they offered two survey courses for those inclined and that was the extent of the flirtation with the arts. Joseph though had never placed brush to canvas before in his life and had achieved such a success that the product was like a portal into the universal subconscious. The figures were perfectly proportioned, the perspective was without flaws and had a geometrically significant position in consideration of the focal point, and the background was so carefully rendered one had to tell themselves it was only a picture so that they didn’t smell the bananas in the trees. While Joseph was receiving a considerable amount of praise, every piece he did was far greater than the first, which had appeared at the time to be the conceivable best (remarkably, however undiagnosed, Picassoian), Norma had also been told by one of Joseph’s previous conquests that he was one of only four people ever allowed to advance to the second year before ever stepping foot on campus.

For Norma this was symbolic of further success (Pygmalionian as it seems), and it did not hurt that her girlfriends related to her Joseph’s nocturnal abilities (although none of the them had actually given him the chance to prove the rumor, Norma’s crowd was quite different than Joseph’s). This caused a considerable problem though for Norma, she’d already rebuffed the young man and made it clear she wanted nothing to do with him. Without too many other prospects, once she’d lost the boy she’d spent a year entangling because his parents presented him with an expensively tasteless girl who came with her own money, she had little other recourse. Her last year in secondary education was the following one, and if she could not find a husband by that time, she was sure she would be a spinster for life (it did not occur to her that there were other single people older than twenty-two). So Norma decided Joseph was her future husband and with sheer will power, a remarkable feat considering Joseph’s enjoyment of hollow relationships and loveless fornication, she managed to convince him that she had only be toying with him before and wanted to begin a potentially sexual liaison. Joseph had accepted this as a devilish ploy becoming of girls like Norma, known for their inventiveness due to competition with more attractive females, and accepted the invitation. Norma was more creative than Joseph gave her credit for and quickly, within a few months of their first date, had maneuvered him into a monogamous relationship he was quite sure he had fought hard for. Her talents, much more than the obvious ones of Joseph, were so ingenious that she soon had him delivering to her an engagement ring and a solemn promise of future matrimony. Joseph, for his part, had been bamboozled voluntarily by what appeared to him to be his waning chances for random liaisons (orchestrated by her with simple rumors) and her continual promises for what their lives could be like (this ranged from her detailing a trip around the world for their honeymoon she had no intention of every embarking on, to detailed and erotically charged descriptions of the future, as though the two would always be young and always be discovering the other’s body). The couple was married two months after Joseph graduated and Norma did not have to attend school the following year.