Authors: Donald Harington
Trying to kill the rest of the day in her dormitory, she reflected that he hadn’t even given her a good-bye kiss, which might have left her with something to help endure the rest of the dying but everlasting day.
Killing time in his barnyard and killing a rooster for Piney to cook for supper, he realized that he and Tenny had not agreed on a specific time to hop into their dreambed together.
Time, though, is just something you kill in your waking hours. In dreams, time is indestructible, undying.
But Tenny could not get to sleep. Away in the night, Zarky whispered, “You still awake, Ten?”
Long after bedtime, Piney said, “You still awake, hon?” but Colvin lay there feeling like a kid on the night before Christmas.
It must have been after midnight before Tenny and Colvin finally met, and joined hands and gazed together at the huge mahogany four-poster with a quilt in a Garden Butterfly pattern of velvet and linen broadcloth, and a canopy hung with long chiffon curtains a-wafting gently in the breeze to the tune of slow violins on the Victrola. Tenny was dressed in a royal purple silk nightgown that clung nicely to all the swells and buds of her young body. Colvin was dressed in a loose-fitting flouncy-sleeved white shirt such as swashbucklers wear to do their duels and adventures in.
Can you see me?
he asked her uncertainly, because the atmosphere was just a mite clabbered.
Naw, I’m blind of one eye, and caint see out th’othern,
she replied, but she was just teasing in response to his silly question, because of course she could see him, and he had never looked handsomer, even in her previous dreams.
Well,
he said, gesturing at the extravagant bed,
do you want to crawl in first, or you want me to, or both of us at the same instant, or what?
She put her finger on his lips, saying,
Oh hush, Colvin. Could you jist hold me real tight for a long time, first?
So they just put their arms around each other, and mashed their fronts together, and squeezed. Neither of them had any further doubt that they were “real.” But just to be certain, she stroked the back of his neck with one of her hands, and he lay one of his hands alongside her cheek, and they spent a long moment assuring themselves that their hands were indeed touching live flesh that was warm, almost hot. Even that was not enough, so Tenny said, or asked,
Do you think we could kiss, now?
and she raised her lips and after an awkward few moments of readjusting their noses to keep them from bumping into each other, they succeeded in getting their mouths to mash together. He reflected upon how the anatomical juxtaposition of two
orbicularis oris
muscles in a state of contraction can be felt in the soles of the feet, the spine of the back, and in every corner of the brain. She had tried to kiss him on the mouth that very first evening of that first day they’d met, last October, but her aim had been off, and she’d missed, and she’d waited all year for this second chance. Now her aim was pretty good, except for the noses. Each of them was thinking, simultaneously, in the same words, “I wonder how long a kiss ought to last,” but neither of them did anything to remove their lips, and pretty soon Colvin realized that his
corpora cavernosa
were engorged with blood, while Tenny studied the sensation of a liquid seeping from her vulva that was certainly not blood but something else.
I’d better take a look,
she said, concerned, and stepped back, but Colvin misunderstood her, thinking she wanted to have her very first view of the male organ, and rather timidly he exposed himself to her view. It is possible that some things get exaggerated in dreams, and maybe the penis Tenny saw was larger than in “reality,” but whatever the case that sudden materialization before her sight of an object the textbook hadn’t even had the guts to illustrate distracted her entirely from her immediate objective, which was to determine the color and composition of whatever was smearing up her groin.
Hold on a second,
she told him, and nervous Colvin took that to mean she wanted him to handle his own part, so he got a good grip on it. But what she meant was that she needed a second to lift her own royal purple nightgown and run her hand up between her legs to find out what that substance was. She examined her fingers: it certainly wasn’t blood, it wasn’t even the least bit reddish. It was kind of like some clear ointment. Tenny had a quick mind, and if dreams exaggerate, then her mind was even quicker now, as she stared back and forth between her fingertips and his greatly distended penis, and realized the connection: what was coming out of her was an involuntary liniment intended to grease the passage of that big penis into her vagina. All year in hygiene she had studied the marvels of the involuntary system—heartbeat and breathing and glandular activity—the things that go without any effort on our part to keep them going, and now
this
struck her as the most marvelous involuntary doing of her whole body, and made her think again of ’See, as if ’See had returned once more to oversee the sweet ceremony of saying good-bye to virginity, and was bringing along the oil to do it with. This hard breathing she was doing was certainly as if ’See had resumed control of her lungs. Of course Colvin’s mind was just as quick as hers, if not quicker, and he understood what she was doing, and thinking, and therefore he did not even need to say, as he was tempted to,
That there is jist the secretion of the greater vestibular glands of Bartholin.
No need to bring that Danish physician into their bower, nor that British surgeon William Cowper, who named the glands that were producing a big drop of dew on the end of Colvin’s instrument. In just a little while, he might say something like,
Let’s mix your Bartholin with my Cowper,
but before they did that he wanted to make sure that Tenny understood two important things: the rupturing of the hymenal membrane, which would mingle one kind of new blood with the older blood of her menses, and her possession of a tubercle at the top of her vulvar groove which was homologous with the penis and ought to be respected as the seat of the woman’s pleasure just as the penis was the man’s. All the textbook had dared to say about it was to name it,
clitoris,
and to say it was very sensitive. Colvin wanted to be sure Tenny knew how to use it, because it wasn’t something a girl could wrap her fist around and jerk off.
In dreams it scarcely matters, or is even known, whether one is right-side up or upside down, so without even being aware of it they were no longer vertical but horizontal, stretched out together upon the percale sheets of that fabulous bed, and Colvin took Tenny’s fingers in his own and guided them to the exploration of her vestibule, while he gave her a rather lengthy explanation of the structure and function of, as well as both the practical and pretty reasons for, the hymen and the clitoris. Tenny grew squirmy, not because she was embarrassed, nor because she was impatient, but because it was exciting her as she had never been aroused before, not the feel of her own fingers
there
but the thought that it was his fingers which were making her fingers feel. We all need to feel that others are making us feel. But I’m afraid there was one other reason for her squirming. All this time, the Victrola had somehow started a new platter; this was a good sixteen years before the first automatic changeable Victrola, but dreams don’t know that, and it was playing not just the violins getting faster but a bunch of clarinets and oboes and flutes getting faster and faster, urgent and immediate, and Tenny thought she was approaching a glimpse of that Other Place where people and birds and bugs don’t never have to eat nor breathe nor defecate. But she suddenly realized that here on the doorstep of Paradise she needed to go to the privy. They had not taken the trouble to furnish their dream with an outhouse, but there was a lush virgin forest all around their bower, and she could “use the bushes” just as well as she had back home on Brushy Mountain.
’Scuse me,
she said,
I’ll be right back.
And she jumped out of that big four-poster and ran off into the forest, hoping she was not ruining the moment or the mood. Colvin sadly watched her go, and worried that his
corpora cavernosa
would release their blood and let his pecker droop and he might have an awful time getting it to rise again.
Now I hate to mention it, but I myself have got to attend to one of nature’s subpoenas. Son, I’m going to have to ask you to excuse me while I summon the orderly to help me get out of this bed and into that potty-chair yonder. No, no, I don’t want you to help me; I’m such a goddamned cripple I have to be lifted and carried. The whole process is so complicated and cumbersome that I’d appreciate it if you’d just run along now and hold your curiosity until tomorrow, when I’ll be obliged to reveal the somewhat disturbing conclusion to that wonderful dream-tryst they were having.
Damn it all, I’m almost eager to get myself to that Other Place where people don’t have to eat nor breathe nor
Chapter seven
I
don’t mind telling you that yesterday after you left and I finished my interminable business, Mary C. and I got to talking about this matter of being able to take a roll in the hay in your dreams. Mary said she didn’t think it was possible. Well, you’ll recall when I was a graduate student in psychology at Clark, I did my whole damn thesis on dreams, and I must’ve read everything written on the subject, not just Freud, but Jung, Ferenczi, Brill, Abraham, all those fellers. Two things I learned pretty fast: one, all dreams are sexual, period. But two, there are very few dreams that are explicitly sexual. Dreams are filled with sexual symbols, but you hardly ever see a real pecker or a real twitchet in a dream, let alone such particulars as maidenheads or clits. I not only kept records of all my own dreams in those days but I went around talking to other graduate students, women as well as men, and getting them to tell me their dreams, and I almost never found a case of anybody actually getting their ashes hauled in a dream, and let me tell you this right now: I never once found a single case of any two people having the same dream at the same time, goddamn it!
So what are we to make of this story? This is what me and Mary got into an argument about that lasted till bedtime last night, and then she had the boldness to suggest to me that we give it a try, I mean, see if we couldn’t “get together” in our dreams. Hell, maybe I shouldn’t be saying it, but Mary and me haven’t “got together” in the world of “reality” for many and many a year. We don’t never even sleep together. I was already past seventy when I married her, and it wasn’t no May and December marriage neither, more like November and December. But anyhow, just as an experiment, we agreed last night to see if we couldn’t meet in our dreams. We tried our best, too. But the sad fact is, you don’t have no control whatever over what you’re going to dream. Among the involuntary systems of the human body, the dreaming system is the most involuntary of them all.
That don’t mean the story of Colvin and Tenny is a bunch of hooey. Nor even a fairy tale. Any good story, in order to hold our interest and entertain us,
must
concern itself with things that never happened to us but which we believe could possibly happen to us. And I for one, even though I never met Mary nor anybody else in my dreams for the explicit purposes of unashamed and undisguised he’n-and-she’n, have the right to believe that what happened to Colvin
could’ve
happened to me!
So if you and Mary want to sit there and laugh behind your hands while I try to tell this, go right ahead, that’s your privilege. If you don’t want to believe me, you might as well just turn off that hearing aid, goddamn it, and I’ll lay here and finish telling the story to myself, which is what I’ve been doing most of the time anyhow when you aren’t here or Mary Celestia has faded off into whatever celestial realm she prefers to inhabit.
Anyway, excuse the interruption, and excuse my present dyspepsia. I hope you didn’t get too impatient, being sent away right smack in the middle of the first really good sex that we’ve had so far, before it even had a chance to “consummate” itself, as they say. Maybe yesterday I didn’t have the heart, nor the bowels, to reveal that this sex story didn’t have a climax, but an anticlimax.
Because when Tenny, hurrying so fast to finish her visit to the bushes that she dampened her pretty purple nightdress, finally got back to the four-poster, rehearsing in her mind how the time had come at last that she could say,
Colvin Swain, I love thee,
she discovered to her horror that there was a naked lady in bed with Colvin! Being smart, she knew that sometimes in dreams we can step aside from ourselves and see ourselves as if we were somebody else, so she calmed down enough to attempt to tell herself that the naked lady in the bed was herself. But the lady’s hair was blond, not light brown nor nearly as long as her own, and it was cut in the fashion of Mrs. Breedlove’s. And she and Colvin were wrestling to beat all, something fierce, with Venda on top! Colvin looked over Venda’s shoulder and saw Tenny and yelled her name,
Tenny!
but she had already turned and was running as hard as she could, trying to find her way out of there.
Zarky was shaking her shoulder, saying, “Wake up, Ten! You’re havin a nightmare.”
“I sure am,” she said, and burst into tears, and cried so hard that Zarky had to hold her until sunrise, when she got up and began stuffing her clothes and books and things into a gunnysack to take them back home to Brushy Mountain.
“Who’s Tenny?” Piney asked Colvin.
He stared at her while he rubbed his busted dream out of his eyes, and began to feel the intense frustration of not having achieved his expected joy. “Aw, heck,” he said. “I was jist havin this dream of treatin ole Jim Bullen for his heart problem, and I asked his wife, Sarah, ‘He took that there medicine I gave him, din’t he?’ And when she wouldn’t answer, I kept a-saying, “Din’t he? Din’t he?’ You must’ve jist heard me saying, ‘Din’t he,’ not ‘tenny.’” Then Colvin jumped out of bed, grabbed a quick breakfast, and told Piney he had to go back up to Parthenon to collect his belongings. Piney wanted to know why he hadn’t just collected his belongings yesterday, on the last day of school, but he could only say that he’d overlooked a bunch of things.