Summer has left before you. A few weeks of drought, a few cold nights, and between one lovemaking and the next the heat has receded, the leaves have started to brown. This morning I notice these deaths as I drive to work. And as I study the mountains, I ask myself why my love for the land—the comfortable earth that outlives and receives us—can be so diffuse, so serene, while my love for men—ephemera of body hair, beard stubble, biceps, and nipple—must be so sharp and maddening.
All about me autumn has arrived: purple tidal pools of ironweed, goldenrod’s funereal flowers, the frowsy road-edge foxtail grass. By the New River, golden leaves are congregating along the limbs of sycamore and box elder. Signs of age, like this early silver on my temples. The sunflowers edging garden plots seem exhausted, bending their weary necks to earth. I recognize despair. I recognize resignation before the guillotine.
For adulterers, every touch is furtive, hasty. If only I’d met you first. A few afternoon rendezvous stippled across one summer is what our timing has allowed. And now all the green we shared degenerates. The rain’s brief pointillism blurs my windshield, medians of redtop grass rush by. Stratus clouds collect, inside and out.
In the office, I check my voice-mail. Nothing. For a week, you have not called. Any day now you and your lover, diplomas in hand, will nail down jobs, load up a U-Haul, and drive off, heading for God knows which city and state. Just when I am convinced that you have finally bolted, that even with you, old patterns and new cowards assert themselves, you appear, grinning reprieve in my office doorway.
My officemate, teaching Southern literature this semester, bends over A Streetcar Named Desire. I tap on the office next door, which belongs to my friendly colleague Ethel. “May I borrow your office while you teach?” I ask. “I have a confused and upset student, and we really need some privacy.” She smiles, nods, and heads off to class. I lead you in, turn off the lights, lock the door.
“Romeo and Juliet, Tristan and Isolde, Edward and Gaveston, Jeff and Thomas,” I joke, pulling you to me. On this campus there are, for us, no other safe square feet. Any open touch of ours would heap us with scorn, real and metaphoric stones, the swing of pipes, steel edges that would end your beauty in an instant. All summer I have scrabbled together these rare and risky borrowed spaces, these hasty privacies. Outlawed fusions in secret niches, the double stigma of gay adultery. Only here do our bodies exist, our kisses petal into possibility.
Seconds after the lock clicks, I have your T-shirt tugged up around your neck, your jeans jerked down about your knees. My fingers dig into the hard curves of your biceps. My face nuzzles your chest hair, the cleavage-cloud of fur still moist from the gym-shower. I clutch you close as Antæus did the earth.
Our moustaches mash together, tongues stretched and wrestling to their limits, and still we graze only the shallows, we taste only the surface of each other’s darkness and depth. “Priapus,” you mutter. “Mephistopheles,” I whisper, between mouthfuls of musk and mercy. Soon you will be leaving the room, the town, the state, and I am ravenous in the face of famine, all my frame shaking as you unbutton my pure-white professorial dress shirt and touch my chest with what appears to be the silent and studious wonder every inch of you evokes in me. We never know what is mutual, what myths we embody, what myths our lovers stroke.
I want to beg, “Stay, stay!” but instead stifle speech with your cock, with your nipples, with the furry mounds of muscle over your heart. I take as much of your body into mine as I can.
At last we pull back before release. You’ll have no chance for another shower before you meet your husband, and he’s grown suspicious, having smelt extramarital musk on you before. Seconds after we’ve buttoned and zipped up, the backwoods janitor, without a knock of warning, unlocks the door and ruckuses in to empty the trash.
I am teaching freshman composition three doors down the hall in half an hour, and you have to head home. In the hallway, just before we part, you say casually, “Oh, I have something you want.” Tugging open your backpack, you hand me a package. A quick visit to the men’s room to wash my scent from your moustache, a blithe wave at the end of the hall, and then you are gone, dissolving around the corner into memory.
All that denseness of muscle, that softness and ripeness of pubic hair against my cheek, the spill of preseminal sap in my palm like liquid moonstone. One second there, and now suddenly only images stored inside some wrinkle of my brain, the neurons’ weak chemical hold on history. How many trysts have we left, I wonder, how many meetings more and more difficult to arrange? When we make love one final time, will we know that touch must be the last?
On my fingers, in my beard, the scent of you still lingers, my lips still sting with stubble-burn. Summoning my usual composed facade, I return to my office, where my officemate continues to reread Streetcar. I borrow the paperback for a moment, and on a whim read the epigraph out loud, my favorite Hart Crane stanza:
And so it was I entered the broken world To trace the visionary company of love, its voice An instant in the wind (I know not whither hurled) But not for long to hold each desperate choice.
I return the book, then silently behind his back I open the box you left. Amidst gift paper, white jockey shorts. I touch them. Still moist with workout sweat. A few stray hairs. I press the fabric to my face.
It is time for my freshman composition class. While I am teaching, defeated leaves, dry with drought, drop outside my classroom window. As I discuss the fine points of comma splices, the lurking dangers of mixed metaphors, I lift my left hand to my face, ostensibly to smooth my beard, and breathe you in, the vestige of your musk.
Not long after the seedtops of redtop grass comes first frost. You can stay no more than summer could. Back in my desk drawer, from your jockey shorts the sweat evaporates. From my fingers, your aroma fades. Collect what relics you can, derides autumn. You retain nothing.