Mark Dunn - American Decameron

Cal was a teenage boy whom Cornell knew. Cal had a girlfriend named Kieran. Cornell knew the boy’s family from his long tenure as high school administrator (both of Cal’s parents were teachers) and he knew of the girl’s family (the father had a job with the town’s big restaurant equipment company, G.S. Blodgett). The boy was into old motorcycles and so was Cornell, and for a time he had thought of giving Cal his antique 1936 Harley Davidson 61EL — the one with the first “Knucklehead” OHV engine — which had been gathering dust in his garage.

Cornell shared aspects of his long life with the teenagers during their visits to a favorite city park. Kieran was especially interested in hearing how high schools had changed over the years, since she now felt that she wanted to be a teacher. With Cornell, the kids shared the empirical evidence of their young love — or rather lust, because Cal found it hard, even in a public park, to keep his hands off Kieran, who was plump-lipped and New England creamy-skinned and hungry for Cal’s every touch.

Cornell sometimes felt like a voyeur, even as the kids sat and talked to him, or when occasionally the three would enjoy a late lunch together. But he needn’t have; Kieran had, quite early on, designated Cornell guardian angel of Cal and Kieran’s love, and Cal was just fine with that. (“The man knows motorcycles. How could he possibly be a perv?”)

In time, Cal and Kieran came to learn that Cornell spent his Sunday afternoons with the Ludviks, several blocks from Cornell’s house on Cliff Street. In time, Cal and Kieran, acting on Cornell’s toss-away admission that he hardly ever kept his doors locked, began to spend a couple of hours every Sunday afternoon sneaking into the old man’s house through his wooded backyard so that they could have sex on the bed in his spare bedroom. Kieran usually brought a blanket in a backpack so that after their departure there would be no evidence that they had been using this otherwise rarely occupied room as a trysting place, or, as Cal sometimes referred to it when alone with his beloved, “the place we go to fuck each other’s brains out.”

Kieran loved this about her boyfriend: his sensitive, romantic nature.

One September Sunday, Cornell came home from the Ludviks’, sated on Cornish game hen and mushroom stuffing and a third, shamefully prodigal glass of Zinfandel, and discovered that his back door had been left ajar. Thinking that his home had been broken into, he moved cautiously from room to room, brandishing an old fireplace popcorn popper. Finding no burglar or prowler about, nor even evidence of there having ever been one on the premises, Cornell deducted with some relief that he had apparently left the door open on his last visit to his backyard, whenever that may have been.

It was not until later in the evening that Cornell, having wandered into the spare bedroom to look for a particular missing title from his collection of John le Carré first editions, noticed a certain sloppiness in the way that the bed had been made up. Rumples which bunched up the duvet in the vicinity of the pillows betrayed the bed-making hand of someone even more careless than himself. What’s more, when he pulled the duvet and underlying blanket away, there were moist spots upon the sheet. Unknown to Cornell, this was the only Sunday afternoon in their string of secret weekly home invasions that Kieran had been unable to bring along her blanket. The lusty teenagers had first considered copulating on the floor but had grown accustomed to the bounce and plushy give of the bed’s mattress. So they took their afternoon delight upon the bed without their protective full-sized blanket condom, and hoped that its only marginally observant octogenarian owner would have no cause to put two and two together and get four-nication.

But he did. In fact, given all his years of forensic experience as the chief investigator of campus infractions, a.k.a. high school principal, he figured it out fairly quickly. Had his eyes failed to glean the evidence, Cornell’s sense of smell, still keen at his advanced age, would have told the story, for the room smelled both rankly and fragrantly of the sweat and musk and love liquids of adolescent carnality.

Cornell became lightheaded. Suddenly, the wrong of it became excised from the equation. All that was left was the want and need for it. To be young again, to be young and lubricious and driven by hormonal impertinence to feral acts in strangers’ beds, and goddamn the consequences. For the first time in several weeks (the last during a rerun of Baywatch ) Cornell got an erection — one that did not go away for quite some time.

Through the early part of that week, Cornell found himself returning to the room and staring at the turned-down comforter and blanket. He sat in the armchair in the corner and pictured what went on in the room, from the first hungry kiss to the final bucking, writhing, toe-tingling orgasm. By the middle of the week, Cornell had talked himself out of saying anything to the young couple, even though he knew that he would see them inline skating at the park with other teenagers, or catch Cal playing Hacky Sack with his buddies while Kieran looked on adoringly.

However, by the end of the week, Cornell’s thoughts had begun to run to the more prurient and far more sinister. He would do this: He would send regrets to the Ludviks, though he would make sure that he could be seen walking in that direction (because he was certain that his house was being staked out, the two young sex addicts watching and waiting for the coast to clear). Then he would take a roundabout way home — the back way — a way not at all anticipated by Cal and Kieran. Finally, having given the kids sufficient time to invade his house, to place their ravenous naked bodies upon the bed in the spare room, he would enter and catch them — what was the phrase ? — fragrante delicto . He would not scold the young ones. He would not judge them or punish them for doing what nature and youth dictated. But he would explain that there was still a price to be paid for their youthful skullduggery, and the price was this: that they should continue with their lovemaking with him there, sitting in his armchair, observing quietly from across the room, servicing his own brittle, superannuated sexual needs, but intangibly, at safe distance, in promiscuous peep-show proximity. They would do this for Cornell, or he would report them, if not to the police, then to their parents. Someone would be told — someone they would not want told, for why else did they sneak around so? This would be the deal that he would offer them, and they would have no choice but to accept it.

They came for their clandestine assignation that day, and Cornell arrived twenty minutes later, just as he had planned, ready to ambush them and then to name his extortionary terms. As he crept quietly down the hall toward the spare bedroom, he could hear them in there, could hear the noises of bodily abandon, the groans and moans of unfettered youthful sensuosity. He stopped just to the side of the open door, waiting a moment, not looking inside — waiting another moment and then another — putting off that which in his imaginings had given him intense anticipatory pleasure.

He pictured his own young self in that bed with the first girl he had ever lain with. They had both been frightened, but then lost all of their inhibitions and threw themselves into the act. He thought of how it should feel if someone had stepped into the doorway and revealed himself to be their interloper. And an old man — a man whose life would in due time be drawing to an end. A man for whom the incandescent sexual fire that characterized his youth had long burned itself to embers. How would he have felt in the presence of such a pathetic old man? The thought now disgusted him.