After the snack in the kitchen, they went into the living room and talked for a while about Madame Bovary (which Ferguson hadn’t read), The Seven Samurai (which Ferguson hadn’t seen), and other films on the Thalia program for next month. Then something strange happened, or something interesting, or something strangely interesting, which in any case was unexpected, or at least it seemed so at first, but then, as Ferguson began to think about it a little, not as unexpected as all that, for once Andy asked the question, Ferguson finally understood why he was there.
He was sitting on the sofa across from Andy, who was sitting in an armchair by the window, and after a short lull in the conversation, Andy leaned forward in his chair, looked at Ferguson for a long moment, and then asked, apropos of nothing: Do you ever jerk off, Archie?
Ferguson, who had been a dedicated onanist for close to a year and a half, answered the question promptly. Of course, he said. Doesn’t everyone?
Maybe not everyone, Andy replied, but almost everyone. It’s perfectly natural, n’est-ce pas?
If you’re too young for real sex, what else can you do?
And what do you think about, Archie? I mean, what goes through your head while you’re jerking off?
I think about naked women and how nice it would be to be naked with a naked woman instead of jerking off into the toilet.
Sad.
Yes, a little sad. But it’s better than nothing.
And has anyone ever jerked you off? One of your high school girlfriends, maybe?
No, I can’t say I’ve had the pleasure.
I have—a few times.
Well, you’re older than I am. It makes sense that you’ve had more experiences.
Not many experiences. Just three, in fact. But I can tell you it’s a lot better when someone else does it to you than when you do it yourself.
I can believe that. Especially if the girl knows what she’s doing.
It doesn’t have to be a girl, Archie.
What’s that supposed to mean? Are you saying you don’t like girls?
I like girls very much, but they don’t seem to like me. I don’t know why, but I’ve never had any luck with them.
So you’ve been jerked off by boys?
Just one boy. George, my friend from Stuyvesant, who never had any luck with girls either. So last year we decided to experiment—just to see what it felt like.
And?
It was great. We jerked each other off those three times, and we both decided that it doesn’t matter who does it to you. A girl or a boy—the feeling is the same, and who cares if it’s a girl’s hand or a boy’s hand wrapped around your dick?
I never thought about it that way.
No, I hadn’t either. It’s what I would call a major discovery.
Why just three times, then? If you and George liked it so much, why did you stop?
Because George is at the University of Chicago now, and he’s finally found himself a girlfriend.
Too bad for you.
I suppose, but George isn’t the only person in the world. There’s you, Archie, and if you’d like me to do it to you, I’d be happy to jerk you off. Just so you’ll know what I’ve been talking about.
But what if I don’t want to jerk you off? Maybe George liked doing that, but I don’t think I’d be interested. Nothing against you, Andy, but I really do like girls.
I would never ask you to do something you don’t want to do. That would be wrong, and I don’t believe in pressuring people. It’s just that you’re such a nice boy, Archie. I like being with you, I like looking at you, and I would love to be able to touch you.
Ferguson told him to go ahead. He was curious, he explained, and Andy could jerk him off if he wanted to, but just this once, he added, and only if they turned out the lights and pulled down the shades, for a thing like that had to be done in the dark, so Andy stood up from his chair and one by one turned out the lights and pulled down the shades, and once he had completed those tasks, he sat down on the sofa next to the anxious, slightly panicked Ferguson, unzipped the younger boy’s pants, and dug in.
It felt so good that Ferguson started to moan, within seconds his soft and nervous penis began to stiffen and grow progressively longer with each stroke of the older boy’s hand, which was a skilled and deeply knowledgeable hand, Ferguson thought, a hand that seemed to know precisely what a dick needed and wanted on its journey from slumber to arousal and beyond, the exquisite back-and-forth between rough and gentle manipulations, so good, he said, when Andy asked him how it felt, and then Ferguson unbuckled his belt and slipped his pants and jockey shorts down to his knees, giving the wondrous hand more room to operate, and suddenly the other hand was on him as well, playing with his balls as the first hand worked on what was now a full-scale erection, Ferguson’s fifteen-year-old cock at the very limit of where it could go, and once again Andy asked him how it felt, but this time Ferguson could only grunt forth a wordless response as the pleasure spread through his thighs and up into his groin and the journey to beyond was done.
Now you know, Andy said.
Yes, now Ferguson knew.
Just two and a half minutes, Andy said.
The best two and a half minutes of his life, Ferguson thought, and then he glanced down at his shirt, which was visible now that his eyes had adjusted to the dark, and saw that it was splattered with the stains of his ejaculation.
Damnit, he said. Look at my shirt.
Andy smiled, patted Ferguson on the head, and then leaned over and whispered into his ear: D. H. Lawrence comes in torrents when his Balzac with desire.
Ferguson, who had never heard that old college ditty, let out a long squeal of surprised laughter. Then Andy recited the dirty limerick about the young man from Kent, another classic that was not yet familiar to Ferguson, and the young innocent, who was rapidly losing his innocence, burst out laughing again.
When calm was restored, Ferguson pulled up his pants and rose from the couch. Well, he said, I guess I should rinse out this shirt, and as he started walking from the living room to the kitchen, undoing the buttons as Andy stood up and followed him, he explained that the shirt was new, a birthday present from his mother and stepfather, and he had to get the spots out or else find himself in the unpleasant position of being asked questions he would prefer not to answer. Strike fast, he said, remove the stains before they settled into the fabric, and destroy the evidence.
As the two of them stood at the sink together, Andy asked Ferguson if he was a one-and-done sort of guy or someone with the staying power to go an extra round or two. Ferguson, who had forgotten all about just this once, asked him what he had in mind. Something good, Andy said, unwilling to reveal the secret, but he assured Ferguson that it would surpass the pleasures of the living room sofa and make him feel even better than he did now.
The stains were concentrated on the bottom part of the shirt, from the midpoint of the shirt tails to an area between the second and third buttons, and Andy washed them out for Ferguson, quite quickly as it happened, with little scrubbing required, and when the job was done, Andy carried the wet shirt into his bedroom and put it on a hanger, which he looped over the knob on the closet door. There you go, he said. Good as new.
Ferguson was touched by the sweetness of that small gesture, which showed how thoughtful and considerate Andy was, and Ferguson enjoyed being doted on in that way, cared for by someone kind enough to wash out his shirt and put it on a hanger for him, not to mention the kindness to jerk him off without asking to be jerked off in return. Whatever qualms or hesitations Ferguson might have felt in the beginning were gone now, and when Andy suggested he take off his clothes and lie down on the bed, Ferguson happily took off his clothes and lay down on the bed, anticipating the next good thing that was about to be done to him. He understood that most people would have frowned on what he was doing, that he had entered the dangerous territory of forbidden, deviant impulses, Faggot-Land in all its corrupting, lascivious glory, and that if anyone found ou
t he had traveled to that wicked country he would be mocked and hated and possibly even beaten up for it, but no one was ever going to find out because no one would ever be told, and even if it had to remain a secret, it would never be a dirty secret, for what he was doing with Andy didn’t feel dirty to him, and what he felt was all that mattered.
His cock grew hard again as Andy ran his palms over Ferguson’s naked skin, and when Andy put that hardened cock into his mouth and gave Ferguson the first blow job of his life, Ferguson was long past caring whether it was a girl or a boy who was giving it to him.
* * *
HE WASN’T QUITE sure what to think. Undeniably, the two orgasms that had swept through him and out of him in Andy’s apartment that day were the strongest, most gratifying physical pleasures he had ever experienced, but at the same time the means to the end had been purely mechanical, a one-sided operation in which Andy did to him what he had no desire to do to Andy. What they had done, then, was not quite sex in the strictest sense of the word, at least not sex as Ferguson understood it, since for him sex had always been about two rather than one, the physical expression of an extreme emotional state, the longing for another person, and in this instance there had been no longing, no emotion, no anything but the desires of his dick, meaning that what had happened with Andy wasn’t sex so much as a higher, more enjoyable form of masturbation.
Was he attracted to boys? Until then, he had never even asked himself the question, but now that he had allowed Andy to jerk him off and suck him off and run his hands over his naked body, he began paying more attention to the boys in his school, especially the boys he knew best and liked best, which included everyone on the freshman basketball team, all of whom he had seen naked in the shower and locker room scores of times without giving the matter a second thought, but now that he was starting to think about it, he tried to imagine what it would feel like to kiss elegant Alex Nordstrom on the lips, a true kiss with tongues digging into each other’s mouths, or to jerk off muscular Brian Mischevski until he came all over his bare stomach, but neither one of those pretend scenes produced much of a reaction from Ferguson, not that he was repulsed by them or scared by the thought of engaging in real boy-on-boy sex, for if it turned out that he was a faggot boy without having known it until now, then he wanted to know for sure, beyond any doubt or possibility for error, but the fact was that the idea of embracing other boys didn’t excite him, didn’t make his dick grow hard, didn’t fill him with the lustful thoughts that sprang from the wells of deepest yearning. But Amy excited him, and even now the thought of his never-again-to-be-touched-or-kissed lost first love continued to fill him with deepest yearning, and Isabel Kraft excited him, especially after he saw her walking around in her red bikini last June twenty-eighth on the ten-person group outing to Far Rockaway, and when he thought about the naked bodies of his friends and compared them to the almost naked body of Isabel Kraft, he understood that girls aroused him and boys didn’t.
But maybe he was deluding himself, he thought, maybe he was wrong to think that emotions were an essential part of sex, maybe he should consider the various forms of loveless sex that brought physical release but no emotions of any kind, masturbation, for example, or men screwing whores, and what that must have been like in relation to what being with Andy had been like, sex without kisses or feelings, sex for the sole purpose of attaining physical pleasure, and maybe love had nothing to do with it, maybe love was just a high-flown word to cover up the dark, uncontrollable demands of animal lust, and if you were in the dark and couldn’t see the person who was touching you, what difference did it make how you managed to get your juices flowing?
An unanswerable question. Unanswerable because Ferguson was still just fifteen years old, and whether time would transform him into a man who sought the company of women, or a man who sought the company of men, or a man who sought the company of both women and men, it was far too early for him to know who he was or what he wanted when it came to matters of sex, for at that point in his life, which was also that point in history, that particular moment in that particular place, America in the first half of 1962, he was barred from having sex with members of what he believed to be the right sex, for even if he managed to win back the affections of Amy Schneiderman or make a surprise conquest of Isabel Kraft, neither one of those girls would allow herself to do to him what Andy Cohen had already done, and now that his body had evolved into the body of a man, he still found himself trapped in his boy’s world of enforced virginity, even as he reached the moment when he had begun to crave sex with a passion that would not be equaled at any other moment in his life, and because the only sex available to him at that moment of thwarted desire was sex with a member of the wrong sex, he showed up at the Thalia Theater the next Saturday afternoon to see Rashomon with Andy Cohen, not because he had formed any special attachment to the City College boy who lived with his mother on Amsterdam Avenue and West 107th Street but because the things that boy did to him felt so good, so excessively and extraordinarily good, that the feeling was all but irresistible.
They got down to it more quickly the second time, dispensing with the preliminaries on the living room sofa and heading straight for Andy’s bedroom, where they both wound up with their clothes off, and while Ferguson couldn’t bring himself to touch Andy where he wanted to be touched, to jerk him off in the same way Andy was jerking him off, he watched as Andy did it to himself and didn’t mind when the cum landed on his chest, which felt rather nice, actually, the warmth of it, the suddenness of it, and then the languor of Andy’s slowly moving hand as he rubbed the ejaculation into Ferguson’s skin. It was becoming more about two now, less about one and more about leaving behind the good of glorified wanking for the better of something more like real sex, and for three Saturdays in a row following that second time together, the Saturdays of The Blue Angel, Modern Times, and La Notte, Ferguson gradually eased his way into abandoning himself to Andy’s bolder and bolder seductions, no longer holding back as he submitted to the promptings of Andy’s tongue as it moved up and down the length of his body, no longer frightened to be kissed or to kiss in return, no longer hesitant to take hold of Andy’s stiffened cock and put it in his mouth, for reciprocity was fundamental, Ferguson realized, two was infinitely more satisfying than one, and only by seducing the seducer could he thank him for the pleasure of being seduced.
Andy was softer and flabbier than Ferguson, skinny and tall but with the no-muscle body of someone who never played sports or did any exercise, and he was fascinated by the hardness of Ferguson’s muscles, the basketball body Ferguson had built for himself by lifting weights and doing a hundred push-ups and a hundred sit-ups every night, and again and again Andy would tell Ferguson how beautiful he was, running his hand over Ferguson’s taut stomach and marveling at its flatness, telling him that his face was beautiful, that his ass was beautiful, that his cock was beautiful, that his legs were beautiful, so many beautifuls that by the second of the last three Saturdays they spent together Ferguson was beginning to feel oppressed by them, as if Andy were talking about him in the way that he (Ferguson) would talk about a girl, which was another subject Ferguson was beginning to have some doubts about, the question of girls, since every time he mentioned Isabel Kraft’s remarkable looks or said something about how much he still loved Amy Schneiderman, Andy would make a face and then come out with some insulting crack about girls in general, saying that their brains were genetically inferior to the brains of men, for example, or that their cunts were cesspools of infection and disease, ugly, ridiculous statements that seemed to suggest that Andy had not been telling the truth in March when he said he liked girls, for not even his mother was exempt from his bitter condemnations, and when Ferguson heard him call her a sad, dumb cow and another time call her a revolting tub of shit, he countered by saying he loved his own mother more than anyone else in the world, to which Andy replied: Not possible, kid, just not possible.
Later on, Ferguson understood how badly h
e had misread the situation from the start. He had assumed that Andy was just another sexed-up boy like himself, unlucky with girls and therefore willing to have a go at it with a boy, two boys rolling around with each other for the fun of it, fuck-fun for adolescent virgins, but it had never once crossed his mind that anything serious could come of it. Then, on the last Saturday they spent together, just minutes before Ferguson had to leave the apartment, as the two of them lay side by side on the bed, still naked, still sweaty and out of breath, each one drained by the exertions of the past quarter hour, Andy took Ferguson into his arms and said that he loved him, that Ferguson was the love of his life and he would never stop loving him, not even after he was dead.
Ferguson said nothing. Any word would have been the wrong word at that moment, so he held his tongue and said nothing. Sad, he thought, so sad and demoralizing to have created such a mess, but he didn’t want to hurt Andy’s feelings by telling him about his own feelings, which were that he didn’t love him back and would never love him back for as long as he lived, and this was good-bye, and too bad it had to end this way because the fun had been so much fun, but damn it all, he shouldn’t have said that, and how could he be so stupid?