#120 – NOT QUITE THE SAME

It was the same but it wasn’t. I did not go to the Sunday evening meeting at the Corlears School, a fast l0-block walk down from my place on 25th Street. It was Gillian’s only meeting, the one she called “my therapy,” and I heard she had talked about me in it. Telling everyone about driving with that she called “a program friend” around his family’s “magic kingdom” in New Hampshire. Everyone in Manhattan ACOA knew about my search for what had happened in New Hampshire, and knew that I had recently gone back. They did not know until now that this sexually riveted, deceptively sweet appearing blonde girl/woman had been trysting up there with there me. I learned about what she had been saying in one of those syrupy threatening letters that my stalker Abigail sent me.

I did nothing. I hardly missed Gillian, though despite what she had said I did think the sex had rarely been better – rarely better neither with serious past girlfriends, nor with semi-pros and professionals in exotic countries. I did not miss Gillian after the initial disappointment. It was more as if I had escaped with my life. And now there were Janet and Melanie and Susan and so many more on this circuit I was on – no lack of women with whom I could flirt, with it maybe or maybe not being the surface of something captivating.

Then one evening Gillian came unannounced and rang my buzzer. I was not sure why. The ending had seemed so conclusive. She immediately saw that on a table in my living room were photographs of myself, some in infancy, all in phases of childhood, that I had assembled in the past year. One was a portrait from a time when I was 15 and our Southern grandmother had paid to have formal portraits of the twins done in a photographer’s studio In his, my brother Peter was looking ahead as if he saw an ordered future that would need his tending. His jaw was firm in the portrait just as it had been in life when he would stride into a room like a determined grown-up. The grandmother said she could see in his portrait that Peter was going to be such a man. All she said about mine was that it made me “look pretty,” and so it had made me cringe when I saw it displayed at our house in Connecticut.

Now Gillian said, “Look at that boy. The girls must have gone crazy. They all most have wanted to lap him up. I would.” And I knew she was good at lapping all over in the course of wetting a man’s cock in her mouth and then, just before he came, pulling back to blow on it gently.

So there was a quick sexual surge, but it quickly passed and I was feeling familiar creepiness in the situation – this woman in my apartment with this boy in the picture.

Then she told me that she was fucking an Irish street person who was helping out with her sidewalk sales. She said that was all she could handle because of her self esteem situation. And then she brought up Abigail, the grim, gray possibly homicidal woman who had been stalking me. She and Abigail were suddenly friends, she said. And then, sounding especially pompous, she said she had hired Abigail to help her with her what she called her business, meaning illegal street sales of mass produced wooden fetish figures. She referred to the business as if it were a major undertaking, and she said, her British accent thick, that Abigail was proving to be a talented “art restorer.”

And this news really frightened me, for I knew that Abigail would have hated Gillian if for no better reason than that Gillian looked so young and sexy. And surely my grim stalker would have wanted to kill Gillian after hearing her describe in such a public place as the Sunday night Corlears meeting what we had been up to.