ALCHEMIES OF THE HEART. David Dorian
in Dijon with his Resistance friends and executed. This information arrived in a letter addressed to my mother by the Bureau of Disappeared Persons organized by the new French government. My mother told me I looked like him.
Teen Angel
If I had caressed Marge DiAngelo’s breasts that evening, my life would have been altered forever. While waiting in line outside the Forest Hills movie theater featuring shorts of Charlie Chaplin, she had deliberately struck up a conversation. During the film, she had put her arm on the armrest. The imagined scent of her nipples preoccupied me more than the spastic gestures of that English comic. Hold her hand! I kept saying to myself. It was a defining moment, trivial, distorted, grotesque. The afternoon ended in a terrible emptiness. It could be summed up in a single word: dread.
At the age of fifteen, progesterone and estrogen, secreted by the ovaries, produce pads of fatty tissue around the breast and buttocks. Samantha Waters’s face was exceptional. When I saw her the first time making an entrance in my chemistry class in the hallway, I felt violent contractions in my lower abdomen. Sexual frustration manifests itself as intense tightening of the abdominal area as sperm backs up.
At the age of fifteen, she had not noticed that silence reigned when she entered in a public place: classroom, café, bookstore, library. Like everyone else, I revered her, from a distance. Idolatry is a religion. Teenagers are pagans. They’ve not been converted yet to the cult of compassion. Because of her beauty, she was deemed unapproachable. Everybody felt she was out of their league. Good guys didn’t have the guts to ask her out. They couldn’t imagine they could ever get near her breasts. The low-life elements in school hit on her.
Great beauty seems invariably to foreshadow some tragic fate. She lost her virginity to a meth addict who wasn’t intimidated by her unearthly beauty. I couldn’t explain why Dante’s Beatrice would suck a gnome’s cock? Didn’t Venus marry that ugly god of war, Mars? As a future medical student curious about the behavior of organs, I learned that the shaft of the clitoris is covered by Krause’s corpuscles rich in nerve endings. When touched, they send signals to the brain which releases endorphins.
It isn’t the first time a classy woman fell for a simian. There’s nothing more archaic and pathetic than a teenage boy with a perennial hard-on. I’ve read in some book on the psychopathology of seduction that ancillary affairs have an erotic component. It’s the eternal theme of the beauty and the beast.
Samantha Waters’s association with Antonio Lope de Vega spelled doom for this angel of light. It was a first step in an irrevocable decline. Her boyfriend sent her on errands to his clients. She was bartered for drugs. And then one day, she stopped coming to school. The principal told the kids in the assembly hall that she had vanished. Agents came to interrogate her friends in school.
I remember, after the disappearance of Samantha, I became addicted to serial-killers novels and movies. The perpetrators were all psychotic, autistic, mentally deranged boys who couldn’t get laid. I studied the high school and college homicidal maniacs who went on a rampage on campuses all over the country. I collected and cataloged mountains of data. What became apparent and was lost on all the state forensic psychologists, reporters, journalists, radio and TV commentators was that those kids were horny adolescents who couldn’t get laid. The sexual frustration was so piercing, the orgastic blockage so oppressive that they detonated in the only way they could, through a different kind of sublimated discharge. They disburdened themselves, unloaded their repressed lust through the barrels of handguns. They experienced the euphoria and hysteria, the spasms, their body racked by the coital recoil of a fired Glock.
The Scented Octopus
My hours in college were under the gravitational pull of the goddess. The proximity of a woman’s body plunged me into a state of agitation. I was a biology student at Queens College in Queens, New York. Girls from immigrant families filled classrooms. They were girls from Peru, Greece, Korea, Finland sitting on these narrow seats, their legs exposed, their sweaters stretched by blooming glands. I endured a constant erection. During the day, between classes, I’d rush into the men’s room to relieve myself, giving some slack to the taut skin of my penis. I then stored my now-limp penis in my brief, belted my pants, and joined my fellow students in the lecture hall to hear my professor’s discourse on molecular biology. I realized then an obvious truth, that genitals are a source of permanent, available, accessible pleasure. It was a compensation from all the ills the flesh is heir to. Genitals make us cling to life. And when other organs let us down one by one, as we endure the degeneration and humiliation of old age, we grip our sagging balls and rub our penises and feel that élan vital which makes life a vibrant journey.
The windowless auditorium was badly ventilated, and the feminine scents infused this closed planet. I was captivated by the feminine audience. I was calculating the mathematical probability of girls menstruating simultaneously in this place and time. The auditorium was full, all its five hundred seats occupied. I speculated 60 percent were women. They were at least around three hundred female students. I entertained there must have been at least seventy-five women having their period in the here and now, to use Eckhart Tolle’s expression which sold him a lot of books turning a German hobbit into a rich ascetic. Many students were wearing skirts, which promoted the aeration of their vaginas. That vesicle, the feminine organ, is not a lifeless amalgam of cells. Secretions lubricate it and protect it from bacterial infections. It exudes aromas. Didn’t the twelfth-century Tunisian Berber Umar Nafzawi write the erotic masterpiece The Perfumed Garden at the request of the sultan of Tunis Aziz Al Matawakki? I was inhaling a rich, scented air that didn’t in any way trigger my asthma. I rejoiced at the fact that I wasn’t allergic to women’s odors.
Years passed. I forgot about Samantha. One evening, I was alone in the house. I defrosted salmon and was marinating it in an olive tapenade in preparation for frying. I poured myself a glass of Graves. The program Cold Cases was on. It was about crimes that hadn’t been solved because the investigation had failed to identify any suspects and time had passed without any new piece of evidence. The reporter was examining the case of Samantha Waters. Photographs of the victim flashed on the screen. Interviews with friends and neighbors were replayed. There was nothing new in the investigation. Her parents made an appeal for anyone who had some information to call a particular number. Anonymity was promised. The sum of thirty thousand dollars was allocated to anyone with a solid lead.
Sleep evaded me that night. I swallowed three clonazepams.
I don’t know why, after I had seen Samantha in that Cold Cases show, I bought a finch. I got a spacious cage with swings. But the bird was mute. It was autistic, I figured. I found out finches don’t like to be alone. I got my zebra finch a companion. I placed it in the cage. The excitement was palpable as they flew around the cage performing a mating dance. A romance flourished. In a few days, music filled the room. They were both singing—sometimes solo, other times duos. I called it harmonic resonance.
Nerve Endings
When I came home around eight o’clock, the dining room table was well-appointed. Crystal goblets reflected the flames from elongated blue candles in silver holders. My wife uncorked the bottle of chilled Chenin Blanc.
“I’ve prepared canard à l’orange with a Grand Marnier sauce for your birthday. I didn’t invite your friends as you requested.”
“Thank you.”
I hate birthdays, particularly my own. I am susceptible to amnesia around that time of the year. I’m always reminded of that day by family and friends.
I washed my hands stinking of acrid hospital antiseptic soap and sat close to my wife.
“Your mother called. She’d like you to visit her. She has a present for your birthday.”
“I’ll call her.”
Maren disappeared in the kitchen. The house was quiet. I cherished the momentary stillness. A compulsive woodpecker perched on one of the tall trees around the house was banging its head against a resilient bark. Its hammering disturbed the delicate serenity of that bucolic