‘Willa Cather could write my life,’ he thought without a pang of mirth in his long strong frame. The Professor and the dog were at ‘the spot,’ their lurking spot for looking at nothing. Every night when weather was kind enough for the old dog they came out here, only after dark, into the city park.
Not really a city, corrected the Professor, a plague town lost on the prairies where the buffaloes once roamed. No buffaloes now, ever, at this spot, just the protective bank of evergreen shrubs and one thick maple trunk for the dog to piss on. Around about midnight when the park seemed assuredly empty then sometimes the Professor discretely pissed on it too. Empty as it was now as it almost always was. The professor was not in pissing mode. He was lonely.
‘They’ve all gotten too fat to walk, too full to wander — or wonder;’ the Professor had strong thoughts of his fellow Americans.
Only faint wiggles from the leash as the dog snuffled weakly. Too old for that and this gave the Professor a tickle of awe to think of passing years shown in the hide of his dog. He’d arrived at posing virtually nightly here in the murk of a deserted park, playing dog walker to a dog rug.
It had once been a large beagle but age had shrunk it. Its coat lay dandruff matted, dull and undesirable. Gray snout poked at unresponding earth. The beagle had arthritis, his wife affirmed. It had a weak heart, she said. The beagle was also senile, which his wife refused to admit. She had no children and so the dog and professor were it.
The professor was not hot now, sun down and at this hour even a humid late summer night felt fine on his skin. A soft breeze ruffled the hair he had left. It seemed to quell the always present image of his own red face, deep scarred from acne. Coming up it helped him feel better too. He enjoyed the time in the park, the green earth smell of spring and now with the breeze even such as it was bringing him the reminiscence of trash barrel fires from back when he has a kid.
The dog grunted, farted. The Professor farted. Of the pair he was a younger creature, mid 40s, yet trim, under control and still avid for life.
Across open ground from his shadow-screened lair of low evergreen and maple branches– the ‘hiding edge of life’ he called it although there wasn’t anything to hide from except now and then drunken frat boys stopping to puke in the park– a pool of light from a nearby street lamp lit up a deserted picnic table. Night after night it provided the only scene to watch, an abandoned place for the ghosts of gaiety and communion where none took place.
It irritated him that the scene always gave him two fleeting thoughts: William Inge and Edward Hopper. ‘Pavlovian,’ his cynicism ever at hand. And then to be better in mind more spoke softly, vividly to the cringing thing at his feet.
That picnic table had in times gone been a more comfortable spot, a sitting place, for taking care of the dog. But the dog wanted his maple, this maple, an exact spot. And the professor himself did not want to be on display for any passerby to gawk at. He was a thought PhD in American lit.
So they had settled on standing there night after night awkward together in the darkest heart of greenery.
The dog was weakly whizzing when the Professor caught the first movement. It came from just off the street, a furtive motion of human beings approaching the picnic table.
Two men were quite young, students without a doubt.
At home now the Professor’s wife would be curled up barefooted on her $1000 couch, watching a Wim Wenders CD, drinking a martini, all in black, all costly and groomed. Languishing unhappily in equally groomed and very tasteful bohemian home she had fashioned for him.
The Professor had no such vision for himself. He’d been reared off a scabby East Texas farm, and before leaving it forever as fast as he could, his beaten down worn out daddy–that mean son of a bitch–had told him never marry a rich girl boy unless she ain’t too pretty and if’n she can cook good.
Too bad daddy. The Professor had married a rich Dallas girl, and she was pretty and couldn’t cook for shit. She had him get a vasectomy and then instead she prepped herself to adorn whatever scene she lolled in, even one when being alone in their Architectural Digest living room.
The two men closing in on the table were clearer. Two young men, a good 20 years off the Professor, an entire life time off the dog.
They sauntered almost steadily forward, so the Professor could guess they were peppered with no more than some minor grass, or maybe a pinch of hash. Each held a Dr Pepper can in hand. He searched for some recognition of them, figuring he would know them, small town and small college that it be.
Yes, one was a student of his, perhaps– he tried not looking at his classroom, it seemed to help turn it into something more anonymous, clinical, like the waiting area of an Emergency Room. So here he had no more than a vague recollection of an irregularly handsome, too-serious young guy, de rigueur long hair and beard, tall and arrogant. The kind the Professor absolutely did not like.
Now and then he responded to the coeds in class who gave him an erection but this type of smug fellow he resented strongly. This type was not impressed by the professor’s disdain for most literature, nor by his cynical smirk that turned on the weaker minds attributing it to sex not literature.
Year after year they paraded, uninteresting genetically modified frontal, lobes. Nevertheless he still bent to his work sowing them with Faulkner, Hemingway, and passages by heart from The Great Gatsby. Knowing full well that what might take seed would be devoured by locusts.
He’d found college soil to be just as hard to work as that worthless land down by Wildwood, Texas. Was Daddy laughing? It’d be his mocking crow hack, the same making his kids run for cover and start his wife to bawling.
Looking up from slow heaving dog flanks, the beating time of his own passing days, the Professor found the young men sprawled out side by side, on their backs, on the picnic table. Star gazing, he could see that plainly enough.
This because the other fellow– who was lankier, leaner, and in the dim glow of the spill off from the street lamp angelic-faced with white blonde hair– was poking out stars with a finger for the other to notice. ‘A Billy Budd in the park?’ the Professor thought with a tweak of interest.
The Professor was also supposed to be a writer, he’d been hired as one and to teach as one. But he hadn’t written anything since settling into their old Victorian house near this park, one soon over decorated by his wife’s Kansas City faggot friend.
But he had written once ago, so proud of that it hurt. No matter, the American lit Department relegated him to kitty lit. Illiterates.
Was the dog trying to snuggle? It amounted to a pathetic low whimper and something that might have been a tongue on the top of his left tennis shoe.
The one young man continued holding up his arm for the sky to see as if in a salute. Forefinger wagged deftly at the infinite Knowing or Unknowing. Yes, this one he would call ‘angel’.
His companion– the another-would-be writer too-young-to-know it would all-come-to naught– watched that sky lesson with clear cut intensity. This one he would call Ismael.
Ismael slid closer to Angel, this stargazing couple on their picnic table bed.
This was of note to the Professor. As a writer– and damned if not a good one too with a published, praised, if single, novel to prove it– he’d been a greedy watcher of others, sometimes even of himself. So now he watched professionally.
The story was one he already knew, he nosed the air for sex. It being even older than the dog and having come to be a prominent motif in American literature.
His own beguiling conjugal bed was not beguiling. No reason to change the sheets, except that his wife had nothing else to do.
She’d make a woman’s way of offer and he’d play dumb. He’d make a manly move and she’d turn away. That phase led to what the Professor termed their Mexican Stand Off stage–when neither sure of what role to assume or how to play it. ‘We both looked back and turned to salt.’ The professor was prone to Biblical allusion. Now too many thwarted tries were notched on each side of their antique four poster.
Don’t blink or you’ll miss something, the professor warned himself. Feeling the rise of his old delight in voyeurism. He yearned for living that could be put on pause, still framed, slow forwarded, backed up.
Ismael was whispering into Angel’s ear and some eye blink agreement seem to come from this. Next, a nearest hand of he who had whispered, husky, tentatively fearing rejection– began a desultory stroking of the other young man’s thigh. It slid up over the jeans toward the belt line.
The tour of the heavens proceeded unabated.
The Professor found himself almost warmed, strangely moved, by this odd scene, ‘like John Wesley.’ Those Wesleyan pews of his childhood were still a damn hard backboard to his life.
Faith and love had been the themes of his written work. Studies he’d fashioned of differing kinds of human faith in different kinds of gods. Sketches he thought profound of variant, even deviant, human love for varying objects of desire.
On the picnic table that moving hand roved his own thoughts, roving over jean fabric and groin flesh. Could he fathom the electricity of wanting that stimulated that hand; could he really gather in the curiosity of passive lust in that motionless groin?
Suddenly the hand slipped out of sight down beyond the belt and zipper, straight into the pants crotch of Angel. Who was didn’t react at all, not a flinch, not grimace or threat.
The he saw that while the young man he’d come to call Ismael explored his friends body, the fellow Angel calmly proceeded as before, arm held up straight, finger without a tremor plotting out the constellation.
Moving his own shoe, the Professor dislodged the dog. It seemed to struggle back toward senescence. Thrashing about dully, perhaps it stirred for the perfume of his rich woman from Dallas.
And how that dog did love that woman; and oh how his wife did love this half dead canine at his feet. The professor was the cuckold taking the cuckolder out for a walk.
But nothing less than a police car on the scene could have nudged the Professor from his hiding and watching–the longest most fixed absorption of his recent lifetime. Those two young men riveted him to their stage.
No more than a minute later– of what from his distance and mind seemed an entire literary age of ribaldry and love– the almost-remembered lad, his Ismael, turned his face to the other. And the other, his angel, turned his head likewise in return.
And then came one of the more breathless moments in the Professor’s history. He watched from his spot of dense shadow in the deserted small town park, maple leaves caressing for sound track, as these two before him kissed.
One short kiss. But even from afar an eyes-closed kiss.
Then, lips withdrawn, the star gazer began reeling in the other man’s hand from out of his pants, dong so tolerantly, laughing. He sat up with what the Professor would have written as ‘total nonchalance.’ Shaking his head he nudged his companion’s knee. Also shot his Dr. Pepper in a manly slug into his companion’s arm, saying loud enough for the professor to hear.
“Wow, that was a cheap thrill. Let’s go eat.”
This made Ismael burst out with laughter. While the Professor felt it like a knuckle in his nuts. He had what he had just witnessed down by heart, frame by frame, joining in his mind those passages he possessed from Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson and Willa Cather.
Scrambling off the picnic table the two young men went wandering away into the night.
‘Did you feel that too?’ he whispered to the dog. ‘Come on, let’s go home and get cold.’
Gently tugging on the leash, he and the dog pivoted out from their edge of shadow