His Coy Mistress

1979

Had we but world enough and time,

This coyness, lady, were no crime.

We would sit down, and think which way

To walk, and pass our long love’s day.

The Professor recites from memory, his voice sheer vibration against my naked rib cage, a husky purr in my ear. I’m curled on his lap, my skinny legs hooked over the edge of his favorite easy chair, head against his chest, hands linked around his neck. There’s a smile on my face; I enjoy when he reads to me.

“Marvell’s admonishment, of course, forms a rebuke to his lady love who, he believes, is allowing precious time—and perhaps youth and beauty—to slip away with every moment of inaction. He can feel, as he says later in the poem, Time’s winged chariot hurrying near, and urges her to reconsider her stance of remaining at arms length when she could be engaging in, well, shall we say, love-making of a more fleshly sort. What?” he asks, drawing in his chin so that he might look down at me. His white beard prickles at my forehead. “What’s so funny?”

It’s true that I’ve begun to chuckle—not something I often do with clients. When someone pays for my time, it’s usually because they have an agenda; they’re more absorbed in having me act out and reinforce their desired scenarios. My interior monologue is not supposed to interrupt. The Professor is different, though. He calls the shots, but since I know he revels in my delight, I’ve no qualms in showing it. Sleepily, I respond, “Which of us is supposed to be the coy mistress and which the poet?”

He harrumphs, as if the answer is obvious. “In my silver-haired role as the elder, I…”

“Look,” I interrupt. “I’m the one who’s naked.” I gesture to my pale body, lying across him, then tug at the outermost layer of his clothing. It’s in the mid-forties outside, but here in his den, The Professor has his wood-burning stove blazing at a high enough temperature that in nothing more than my birthday suit, I’m roasting. Yet as always, he’s still wearing a nubbly sweater vest, a plaid dress shirt, and though he’s been retired for several years, a necktie. His only concession to the informality of our situation is a pair of house slippers instead of shoes. “I’m ready to go.” I guide his hand to the half-stiffness between my legs. “You’re the coy one.”

“I?”

“Thou!”

I’ve flustered him. I’ve always thought he resembles Professor Plum from my edition of Clue, his body a stack of rotund globes decorated like a snowman with spectacles and a white fringe around his bald dome. When he huffs and puffs his reddened cheeks, I half-expect him to accuse me of murdering Mr. Boddy with my lead pipe. “Coy!” I almost fly off his lap as he sits up straight in the armchair. Beneath that gray mustache, though, his lips quiver with amusement. His knees spread, revealing the tent in his woolen slacks.

Now that I’m on my feet, my buttocks broiling from the heat of the wood stove behind, I strike a pose. My hands drape across my pale-skinned nakedness as if I’m a Botticelli maiden, nude but preserving her virtue; I draw up a thigh to half-obscure my dangling erection. A Mona Lisa smile on my face, I look half-away from the man and slowly turn, so that he can admire every inch of my body.

“Oh, Kip,” he whispers, using the name by which clients know me.

Slowly, I revolve on the ball of my foot with the cruel deliberation of someone who understands the power of his beauty.

It’s not a sensation I often feel. School’s a constant reminder that I’m tallest, gangliest, and whitest of the students, a gawky anomaly loping through the hallways with books in hand and head hung low. There I’m an outsider, unsightly and a waste of space. At home, I’m told that good grades and accomplishments are more worthy than looks. The lectures feel like my parents settling for some sort of sad consolation prize.

Here though, as I model before the man and see the white planes of my slender body reflected in his lenses, I can view myself through the eyes of a man who shells out several twenty-dollar bills for my unclothed presence. To him, I glow. I am the naked youth who delights in flaunting his charms. I am poetry made luminous. His infatuation is more powerful than any narcotic.

“Come,” he at last whispers, beckoning.

The urgency in his voice stiffens my cock. Up and down, it dowses the den carpet as I pad back to him. The Professor receives me with soft hands on my skin. His face dives into the crook of my neck, where he inhales deeply of my soapy scent. With the utmost gentleness, he settles me once more across his lap, my head nestled against his scratchy sweater.

From the table adjacent, he pulls a familiar volume. “Let’s assay something much more modern, shall we?” I nod. He opens to the bookmark we left the last time I visited, and he begins reading to me from Tristram Shandy.

My path from scrappy, self-taught hustler to selective rent boy hasn’t been without a few bumps along the way. When I’d first begun accepting my procurer’s business cards, scrawled across the back with an address to visit, I’d arrive at the appointed time ready to get the action started. Tempus was fugiting, after all, and I had some diem to carpe, or at least an unstated curfew to mind. Very quickly, though, I learn the difference between a twenty-buck trick ready to go by the riverside, and the needs of men accommodating a higher price for my time.

Few of them are paying strictly for sex, I come to understand; they have an agenda beyond beckoning me into the bushes for ten minutes of pleasure. Most of my clients are nervous and even unsure of their desires. If they’d been adventurous spirits, they’d be getting laid for free at the parks or tearooms or by cruising The Block for a young man on the prowl. However, these men don’t court risk.

Out in the wild, they’d have the advantage of choice. Absent that, I swiftly intuit that it’s my job to discover what my clients want. Winnowing out that vision and then becoming the fantasy is something I have to learn on the job, without training. All my life, though, I've cultivated invisibility to avoid bullying. It's made me malleable. Abandoning my own inclinations for someone else costs me no ego.

So for one man I become the submissive. I whimper and plead to increase his excitement. For another, I transform into reluctant and uneducated trade, degrading himself for the cold, hard cash. For some, I’m the young boyfriend with stars in his eyes, to others, the disinterested cocotte barking orders. None of these roles bother me. Losing my identity in the desires of another feels like sliding into a tub of warm water for a while, then emerging some time later to wipe down and dry off to return home drowsy, sated, and a little wealthier.

The freaks—well, of course there are a handful of freaks. I’m never coerced into enduring situations that make me uncomfortable; I reserve the right to say no. I rarely have to. The men with unusual fetishes by and large don’t bother me. To the older, wrinkled, bald man with a mummification fixation, who coincidentally looks uncannily like a hairless Sphynx cat, I’m the perfect subject; I lie still, arms at my sides, as I allow him to roll my naked body to and fro while he wraps me from collarbone to ankles in dozens of Ace bandages. Once confined, however loosely, I keep silent while he sniffs and licks my feet for an hour or more, masturbating all the while. Sure, the bandages are weird, but I feel swaddled and oddly safe, and there’s pleasure in the warmth of his mouth on my toes and his wet tongue on my soles.

There’s another fellow, from Richmond’s stodgy West End, who takes me to the unfinished basement of his expensive, gated home to dress me in cheap t-shirts and denim. He then sits me upon a webbed patio chair. While I watch, he’ll strip his portly body naked, lie on the dirty concrete, and stroke himself furiously while I do what he loves best: tear cap after gunpowder cap from a roll of red paper, tuck it beneath the domed, blunt head of a cap dart, and throw it between his thighs so that on impact, it explodes with a loud retort. He keeps a bucket of darts specifically for this purpose, but once I exhaust them, I’ll have to scoop them up, toss the spent cap papers onto the floor, and start all over again.

Eventually, when the air is acrid with gunpowder smoke and my ears ring from the firecracker pops, the man will heave his body upright and climax, spilling his seed atop the mess of dust and blackened, used caps. I’m never sure exactly what excites my patron about the scenario. Is it the scent? The mild danger of explosives so close to his testicles? Or am I a mere mannequin he’s posing in a recreation of some childhood trauma—an older brother or a bully who titillated, even as he frightened? I’ll never know, but in those chilly hours in the man’s basement, I sit in the costume my client prefers and perfect my aim until I can nail my imaginary bullseye, time after time.

But for the majority of my clients, I discover—half or more—I’m there for conversation. I strip down to my birthday suit, climb into bed or cuddle up on a sofa, and listen to men talk about their lives. Old men recall to me their youths and past loves; I hear stories of how and where men used to find each other in the decades before I was born. Some men chat about their work while I feign interest. A small handful fritter away their time complaining of being unloved, unrecognized, under-appreciated.

I may have entered the business assuming men were paying for my body. I learn that attention is what they truly need. And I, with my eagerness to erase myself in their lustful regard, am more than happy to form the flawless mirror to reflect their desire.

“Choose something,” urges The Professor. I’m still naked, padding over the braided carpet to the bookcases that line his den. Much like in my own home, books occupy every room here. If a case to hold them can be made to fit, he’s done so. We always end our encounters thusly: he reads aloud to me with a book in one hand and my semi-erect cock and balls in the other, then I’m urged to pick a volume to take home. I don’t really require encouragement to read—I'm already one of those boys who loves books. Neither do I really need The Professor’s library; my mom has collected British novels all her life, and I possess a library card. He enjoys the intimacy of sharing, though, and maybe the responsibility of broadening my mind.

Secretly, I also wonder if it’s a way of ensuring I’ll come back, to return what he’s lent.

Already I’ve read his copy of Forster’s Maurice, only recently published despite being written decades before. He’s opened my eyes to Woolf, both with Orlando and To the Lighthouse. I’ve checked out Gulliver’s Travels and finished Nicholas Nickleby, after he’d begun reading it during our meetings. On my own, I’ve previously read the Brontës and Austen. My eyes dance along the spines, scanning title after title, as I try to make my selection.

“The contemplation of beauty,” whispers The Professor in my ear, as his soft hands caress my backside, “causes the soul to grow wings. Plato.” I feel his breath on the back of my neck.

I chuckle because he’s a bit of a pompous ass, both for quoting and naming Plato, but it’s hard to fault the sentiment. Besides, I like the shivers he tickles forth with his fingertips. The bookcase rocks slightly as I press my hands against it and arch my back, presenting the man my butt to do with as he likes.

But touching is all he’ll ever do. Touching and looking, and sighing at those parts of me he finds delightful. “How you tease, my coy mistress.”

“It’s not me who’s teasing,” I say, returning to my feet. I’ve chosen Uncle Silas to take home, mostly because Harriet Vane enjoys Le Fanu in Dorothy Sayers’ mysteries.

“Coy,” he rebuts, laughing to himself as he nods with approval at the title. “Let’s get you dressed.”

At fifteen, I’m already taller than The Professor by a good six inches. When he turns away, I spy something new and unexpected: a knot protrudes behind his ear, speckled and ugly. A crusty scab decorates the top. It’s roughly the size of a deviled egg half, seemingly slipped beneath the fringe of white hair ringing his scalp. Though I want to recoil, my heart beats faster as I reach out. I’d not noticed the injury when I’d been lying on his lap. “What—?”

The Professor flinches at my touch, then spins around. “Interesting fellow, Le Fanu. Not widely appreciated these days, of course, but the man really was a pioneer in the genre of…”

“James,” I say, speaking his name. It’s not a liberty I often take. Kids my age don’t address adults without an honorific like mister or doctor. Sexual intimacy cannot completely break down that taboo. Not even with my clients. I shut my mouth, though, when his shuttered lids lift to reveal something I recognize: a fear of being judged.

I’ve always known that I’m not the only trick The Professor pays for his time. I satisfy some side of him that needs to look at a naked youth and allow his hands freely to wander; I’m there to strip and model and allow him to indulge his avuncular instincts. He has a darker side, though, that needs debasement. My vice, he calls it. In the most delicate of terms, The Professor has let me know before that he also pays trade—rougher, more traditionally macho men, particularly those that give off an aura of danger—to rough him up and penetrate him in a way he craves. I know the welt is a souvenir of one of those visits.

It’s not the first. My vice is something in which he indulges infrequently, but it nearly always leaves a mark. I’ve seen other bruises before, especially around his neck and wrists. Once, the remnants of a black eye. It’s not right. It’s dangerous. Seeing that welt and the violence it implies makes me want to run in the opposite direction.

Yet I need to fix this. I cannot look at affliction without wanting to soothe what is swollen, to mend what’s broken, to smooth the ragged edges and sweep away the debris. “Why don’t you let me…instead of…” Already I know the idea’s as stupid as I am inarticulate. “If you need…that…I could try to do it.”

“Kip.”

“I know how!” In theory, anyway. When he looks away, turning his head so I can’t see the lump, I grow more insistent. If only he’d asked. If only he hadn’t wasted his time with a thug. I would have tried. “You wouldn’t even have to pay me. It would be, you know. Safer. I don’t like when you…”

“Kip.” All the usual good humor in The Professor’s voice has vanished.

“But…”

His head jerks to the side. Waits. Then snaps to the other. It’s the simplest and sharpest no I could have received. “Kindly say nothing more of my vice.” The words burn with frost.

The head-shaking had been a rebuke. This is a slap to the face. I shut my mouth and say nothing more. I’ve overstepped.

It only takes a simple change in tone to remind me of what should have been uppermost in my mind: The Professor and I are not equals. My likes and dislikes don't matter. I’m not in his home as a friend. I’ve forgotten that during the hour or two I'm with the man, I’m ornamental. Nothing more. I’m only as essential as the blown glass paperweight sitting on the man’s roll-top desk, and just as easily replaced. He’d sooner seek wisdom from one of the miniature plaster busts of the Great English Poets adorning his bookcases, than from me.

My dumb idea would never have worked. Accustomed though I am at transforming into what my clients need, there are limits. I can never been the streetwise thug with hair on his burly chest, not the greasy garage worker, not the mustached leather man from the Village People. I’m what men call chicken, the flip side to that coin. Safer isn’t what he wants. As much as I might wish, I can’t fulfill that fantasy of hypermasculinity that brings out the sexual submissive in him.

He can tell I’m deflated. “Don’t worry about an old fool like me.” His spirit artificially light, he takes my fingertips in his grasp and cajoles me back to the chair. “Let me watch you dress, before you go,” he pleads, sitting. I allow him to remove his book from my clutch, as with the gentlest of touches he propels me to the room’s center. “Slowly,” he adds.

He’s forgiven me, but in future I’ll take care not to cross that line again. I fish my t-shirt from the floor where earlier I’d flung it. It’s inside-out, so I wrangle it back into shape.

“Underwear first,” he orders.

I have little choice but to obey. Instead of dropping the tee, I drape it over my shoulder and retrieve my briefs. I slide one leg through a hole, then another, slowly, focusing on his appreciative gaze. Once the elastic is snug around my waist, I rest my long fingers of one hand upon my hips and hold onto the draped shirt, with the other. Then I turn, little by little, a full circle, head tilted back so that my long hair tickles my shoulder blades. This is why he's hired me: to be the most perfect trinket to complement his collection.

When I finish, he lets out a small, yearning breath. “A sweet disorder in the dress,” he quotes, “Kindles in clothes a wantonness.” And because he cannot help himself, he concludes, “Herrick.”

I can’t resist a groan. This ornament’s sense of humor has somewhat returned. “Show-off.”

“Perhaps I am. But Kip?” I stand still in my attitude, raising only an eyebrow. I endure a pregnant pause before he continues. “I do appreciate when you call upon me.” My lips force a smile. “Perhaps next time…we’ll have a bit of Keats. Would that be nice?”

Moments before, I hadn’t been sure of a next time. But now I appease him with a more genuine grin and a cheeky view of my butt while I shake out my shirt and slip my arms inside.

“My coy mistress,” he laments, as if drawing a full stop to the evening’s poem.

But in the twilight, the mistress bikes home from The Professor’s home, regretting what must remain unsaid, due to the disparity in their stations: that while the poet has the impudence to chide her for coyness, he does so with words and quotes and rhyme that frivol away both the precious minutes they spend together and what limited time he has left, as that fabled winged chariot looms ever close.