Stephan Clark - Sweetness #9

“Fuck,” I said. “Fuck, fucking, fucks.”

I couldn’t explain it. My toothy smile and the heavy black frames of my glasses spoke of those years I’d spent in my mother’s England under its system of National Health, but I wasn’t entirely without my charms. In high school, I had been found sturdy enough to serve as a blocking tight end on more than one crucial third down. The very thing that had once made me so self-conscious, my flared feet, had blessed me with an almost preternatural balance on the gridiron. So what was it?

“You’re a square,” my roommate said the afternoon I returned from the bookstore. “Do you even know it’s not 1957 anymore?”

I turned over on the bunk beneath him, regretting that I had confessed my lustful passivity.

“Look at you.” He jumped down from the top bunk and sat on the edge of my mattress. “You’re a dinosaur.” He rubbed at my flat-top, a style I wore in honor of my dead father. “I’m rooming with Johnny Unitas!”

I sat up and swung my legs to the floor. I wore grey woolen slacks, a matching cardigan over a black short-sleeve mock turtle-neck, and a pair of zip-up Chelsea boots that I polished with the dedication of a soldier. I thought I looked good. Certainly decent. But my roommate was bell-bottomed and dimpled, a chemistry major with long hair and dubious educational motives.

“The world’s changing, man. Chicks want a cat who’s wild, someone who’ll talk about the revolution and our brother the Viet Cong. You dig?”

No, I did not dig. But for a few hours that night I did try. I went with him to one of the less reputable houses off-campus, a dingy place off Somerset where all the women walked braless and bouncing from one hushed and earnest conversation to the next. On three occasions I was offered a marijuana cigarette; each time I politely declined and bled into the next room, looking for a bottle of scotch. When I had made a full circle and returned to the front foyer, I saw my roommate at the base of the stairs, talking to a blonde who had a flower in her hair. She led him up the runner of red carpet into a bedroom, leaving me, as the door closed behind them, to move out onto the street coupled only with a feeling of loss.

I wasn’t like these people. I couldn’t conjure a sexual union with little more than the words “free love” and a harsh rebuke of Nixon. I was a member of the Silent Majority who feared the Domino Effect and supported the war in Vietnam. Perhaps most of all I preferred the breasts of my youth, the missiles of Marilyn Monroe and Jayne Mansfield that stood out in stark contrast to the careless and collapsed styles of my contemporaries.

Back in my room, I lay in bed chewing on buttons of licorice as bitter as death while staring up into the latticework of the empty bunk above mine.* My mind was a wintry soup, thick and bubbling. I questioned everything, even my career path. My ambitions had been set as far back as 1953, when sweet rationing had ended in England and Hitler was finally put to rest. Then a boy of only three or four years, I felt so unprepared for this unprecedented burst of flavor. It is my first memory, one that is so strong that it precedes any other by at least two years. In it, I am sitting on the living room rug in our riverside home in Wargrave, surrounded by the colorful curls of foil I’d torn from the many chocolates and hard candies that my father had brought back for me from London on the train. It is a celebration of scent: my father sits behind me smoking his pipe and reading the paper, as my mother hums along to the radio in the kitchen while doing the dishes, the perfume of our Sunday roast still hanging in the air.

Many years later, after we’d moved to the States and my parents had met their tragic end (a clock tower in Texas, a grad student with a rifle), I realized it wasn’t only Jesus who’d been given the power to bring back the dead. My father was the easiest to revive. He had been an import-export man who’d made his name in coconuts after the war; to get him to rise up before me, all I had to do was run a knife down the middle of a bag of coconut shavings and push my nose inside. Mother was more difficult. She was locked away in the smell of all those Christmas dinners and rhubarb crumble pies that no one else had come close to reproducing in the handful of years since her death. I had chased her memory into the lab, thinking I would one day stumble upon that elusive chemical combination that’d bring her back to me again.

But oh how foolish I’d been. As I lay in my dorm room in the dark, sucking on another button of black licorice, I was no closer to success than I had been when I’d signed up for my first chemistry class. I should’ve chosen a different direction, I realized. Should’ve tuned out, dropped on, whatever. Gotten laid, that’s what I should’ve done. Not stayed in the lab both night and day, my one eye pinched over the lens of a microscope. Sex. That’s what I wanted. To fuck from the front and the rear, the top and the bottom, on Fridays and Saturdays and high holy holidays as well. A fucking fuck — was it so much to ask for on an overpopulated planet? Wasn’t there one woman out there for me? Just one?

I turned over in the dark, fearing one’s sex-life was like poured concrete: something that once laid would forever be set. A virgin. I closed my eyes at the thought of it — I’ll die a virgin! — then wondered if perhaps I could still save myself by leaving this instant on a Greyhound bus. I could join an ashram out west and adopt an Indian name, and maybe find some barefooted girl who’d introduce me to more than just a strict dietary regime. Love. The physical and spiritual wonders of love. It was all out there, just waiting for me, but it was also a fleeting fantasy. I wasn’t the type to walk with dirt between his toes, so when I awoke the next morning, still hung-over with disappointment, the inertia of my old life had already recaptured me. Go west? I could barely get out of bed.

For the next month I lived a double life of sorts, working in the college lab mornings and afternoons, and then abandoning my rôle as scientist and going out in the evenings to a local café. I wore an authentic French beret that I’d bought from the back pages of The New Yorker, and I said over more than one cappuccino to anyone who’d listen, “It may work fine in practice, but it just doesn’t work in theory.” I’d always considered myself more of a Brit like my mother, but by leap-frogging my father’s New Jersey and playing up to the Gallic ancestry of my last name, I thought I could attract the type of woman who believed a Frenchman so talented in bed.

I looked for love as a statistician might, by exposing myself to more “events.” I prowled the library and browsed the stacks, being sure to always comment on the books being read across from me. On the quad, I suffered a flat nearly every day, if only so I could kneel down beside my ten-speed and wait for some pretty young thing to pass me by with a comment of concern or support. Beautiful girls were everywhere, but never with any greater frequency than in the language lab. Through its doors came young women dreaming in Romance languages, girls who wore knee-high socks and Sunday school shoes and sat down before a reel-to-reel to practice rolling their r’ s. I spent whole weekends in there, turning at the sight of every short skirt or hint of strong perfume. But still, no matter how many times I extended my headphones saying you have to hear this, my act was nothing more than a succès d’estime: not one girl accepted my offer to listen to a song by Edith Piaf.

There was only one logical conclusion to draw from all of this: I was homosexual. Of course I was. Those men who were had simply proven themselves unsuccessful with women. Scientific fact. They got together to form a lonely hearts club, and spent their days playing bridge and drinking too much sherry. The morning I accepted the truth of this—“Scientific Fact!” I said aloud — I threw off my covers, stabbed my legs into my pants, then stood before my roommate’s empty bed, slowly buttoning up my shirt while seething with an unexpressed rage. His latest conquest had kept him away through the night. I hated him — hated him so much I thought I should go to Residential Life and request a change of roommates. I wanted someone who used a wheelchair or an iron lung or at least limped noticeably. But it was wishful thinking, I knew. They’d never approve my transfer, so I messed up his sheets, then grabbed my coat and went out across the dewy campus to the dining hall.