...and then I asked him with my eyes to ask again yes
and then he asked me would I yes...
and first I put my arms around him yes
and drew him down to me so he could feel my breasts all perfume yes
and his heart was going like mad
and yes I said yes I will Yes.
-James Joyce
I don't quite know how to tell you about what I've been up to over the
course of the last month...
TM decided to spend New Year's Eve in Times Square. Originally he was
going to drive up with some friends, but then it started snowing and Indy's
father wouldn't let her take her car, so she and the rest of TM's friends
bailed on him. He was determined to be in New York City for New Year's Eve,
though, so began considering other options. TM decided to rule out freight
train hopping because it was too uncertain; he had no guarantee of how long
he'd have to wait for trains or that he'd be able to make it there at all. So
TM decided to go Amtrack. Amtrack turned out to be sort of expensive, so TM
didn't buy a ticket. He stood on the platform with some other people, waiting
until the train was ready to be boarded. TM chatted up some people until he
found a family going to Penn Station. When the train began boarding, TM
slipped past the conductor and onto the train with them. Then, when the
conductor came around to check tickets, TM waited until he had checked the
family's tickets and then got up and walked past them and the conductor to
the bathroom. After a few minutes of hiding in the bathroom, TM emerged and
walked back towards his seat; as he passed the children's seat, he snagged
from above it the little piece of paper upon which the conductor had scrawled
their destination. Reaching his seat, TM placed the slip of paper above it,
and spent the rest of the trip pretending to be asleep whenever the conductor
came around.
New York City was fun. TM stayed in an expensive, yet run down, motel and
did a great deal of sightseeing. Then he returned home by the same means with
which he had arrived.
For a year or so I had a crush on this girl in highschool. She was
really nice and really cute. I had English with her, but we never spoke;
I was shy and she was in one of the "in" crowds. She went off to boarding
school for 11th and 12th grade and I didn't see much of her after that. I
kept, in the drawer of my bedside table, a copy of this story that she had
written for the school literary magazine, though, and I read it occasionally
and thought of her; it was a really good story.
The summer after she left, I wrote this really long story called
Becoming (actually, everything I wrote that summer was called
Becoming, interestingly enough). The main character was largely based
on her and I even used some of the scenes from her story as jumping off
points. I named her "Calliope".
She came up in the course of a conversation with a friend of mine a
couple of months ago.
"Do you remember her?", my friend asked.
"Yah... I do.", I told her.
She saw the look on my face and sighed. "Everyone falls in love with
her." I smiled.
TM got a call from Indy one night.
"Hey, want to go bowling?", she asked.
TM laughed. "Indy, you know I *hate* bowling!"
"Calliope is coming..."
"I'm there." Then TM paused; "But wait... oh, she probably doesn't even
remember me."
"She does...", whispered Indy.
"I'm there."
So I went bowling. I got there before any of my friends did and sat in
the smoke filled bowling alley, laughing to myself at the lengths to which I
would go for the memory of a crush, at the places where obsession can lead
one.
Two of my friends showed up next, and we sat around a table and chatted.
She was the next to arrive. I looked up from the conversation and saw her
walking towards us. "My word", I thought, "I forgot how beautiful she is."
By a bizarre twist of fate, TM turned out to be really good at bowling.
Fate was not so kind to Calliope; she got many a gutter ball. Everyone was
really busy chatting and catching up with each other, but sort of seemed to
be ignoring Calliope. So TM cheered for her and tried to give her tips on
what she was doing wrong in the way she released the ball and what not. They
talked about other stuff a lot too. My word, but she was beautiful. TM
remembered what Indy had said about how everyone falls in love with Calliope
and saw no reason to doubt that fact.
When we were done bowling and were all going, she came up with this really
weird excuse to give me her phone number and to get mine. Like an idiot, I
not only gave her my phone number at school, but I gave her the *wrong* dorm
room phone number. Then we all went and stood in the parking lot for a while
talking. Eventually we decided to go to Waffle House, wherein more talking
ensued and I awkwardly manuvered myself into sitting next to her. After we
had all eaten and talked and what not, we went our seperate ways. I told her
that I'd call her.
I called her the next afternoon and we talked for a long while. She
invited me to a movie, I accepted. It was a nice movie; afterwards I invited
her out for pastries, she accepted. We at pastries and talked until the wee
hours of the morning, then she took me home. She said she'd call me.
The next day she called me and asked me if I wanted to hang out. I said
"I'd love to"; she said "Good, what are we doing?" I said, "Do I have to
choose?" She said "Yah, I picked last night." I said "Okay, but all the
stuff I do for fun are really weird." She said, "Like what?" I said,
"Walking along train tracks, walking around in tunnels..." She said "Fun!"
TM took Calliope tunnelling. They got into part of the tunnels which he
had never been in. It was very hot down there.
"I'm hot", said Calliope.
"It is hot", agreed TM.
"I want to go swimming", said Calliope.
TM smiled. "We could crash a pool at a hotel or appartment complex..."
"Do you want to go to the Eno?"
"It's January; sure."
So they drove to West Point on the Eno River and walked around in the
woods in the dark looking for the river. Eventually they found it; they
walked along it for a while looking for a good spot to go in. They came to
a place where there were rocks jutting into the water, so they stopped and
stripped. TM hung his clothes on a shrubbery, Calliope layed her on her
shoes. They stood there and talked for a little while before stepping out
into the water. It was very cold; the thermometer on TM's watch said that it
was thirty five point something degrees. TM walked in until he was up to
his waist. It was very cold. He was standing at the edge of the rock, he
didn't want to touch the muddy bottom. It was very cold. TM closed his eyes
and began breathing in and out deeply, he slowly lowered himself into the
water up to his neck; TM kicked off of the rock and began swimming around,
trying to get warm. Calliope had finally gotten in up to her waist, she was
standing on the rock. It was very cold. TM remembered a bit of monologue
which DiCaprio had in Titanic in which he said that falling
into an icy lake was like being stabbed by a hundred needles all at once. TM
was having trouble feeling his toes, his shins, his thighs... he began to
wonder about pneumonia.
"You ready to get out?", she asked.
"Sure", I said. We climbed out of the water and stood there for a while
letting the water drip off of us, letting the breeze dry our naked forms.
"Oh my word", I moaned, "this feels so nice... To have been so cold and
numb and then to climb out of the water and slowly regain feeling... I feel
so warm and tingly; this must be what ground beef feels like when my mother
thaws it out." She smiled. I cursed myself for having taken off my glasses
before going into the water. Here I was, standing with a completely naked
girl for what was sort of the first time in my life (not counting having been
at Burning Man, at which just about everybody was naked) and I couldn't even
really see her. Nor could I just put them back on, lest I seem to obviously
hormonal.
When TM had gone to pick Calliope up for tunnelling, she had given him an
"unbirthday present", a thing of steel-grey nail polish, two japanese boxes,
and a bouquet of flowers. The next day, TM went back out to the Eno and
poked around along the water's
edge until he found a cool pebble to give to Calliope. Then he went home, cut
a cool page from a magazine, rolled it into the old dirty typewriter which he
had just finished restoring, and wrote upon it an acrostic and a quote and a
short vignette about himself taken from a chapter of LG. Everyone got
together that night to go to an Archer's of Loaf concert. Calliope came early
to hang out with TM before giving him a ride to the concert. He showed her
his room and gave her the pebble and the stuff he had written for her. Then
they went to the concert. TM didn't like it very much; it was very loud and
none of the Archer's new stuff was any good (understandably, as they wrote it
all while on the big 'H'). Calliope didn't seem to be enjoying herself
either, so TM suggested that they leave. She looked relieved at his
suggestion and agreed.
We got back to my house and went up to my room and took off our shoes and
sat on the bed and talked for a while and at some point I layed down on my
side and sort of curled up into fetal position and looked at her and she did
the same and we talked for a while and my hand was by my head and so was hers
and I thought "what the hell" and moved my feet over to hers and started
playing footsie with her and then she clasped her feet around mine and our
hands were sort of inching closer and closer together and then they were
really close and she suddenly linked pinkies with me and then I was clasping
her hand in mine and mine in hers and we were talking and staring into each
other's eyes and then she untangled herself from we and excused herself to
the bathroom. She returned and I had stretched myself out longways on the
bed and she came and layed down next to me and we were really close and her
forehead was almost touching my lips and my nose was in her hair and hers was
in the small of my neck and we talked and we talked about "us" and I told her
how I had such a crush on her in highschool and it turned out that she had
had a thing for me then too and she remembered this one time that I had
forgotten about when we had hung out with a mutual friend of ours and told me
about how much she had wanted to see me again after that but was too shy to
call me and how she had decided to not make the same mistake this time and I
smiled and I kissed her on the cheek and she kissed me on the cheek and we
talked and snuggled and things went on for quite a while like this until I
suddenly found myself kissing her lightly on the lips and then not so lightly
and it was so nice, yes, so nice, yes, yes. And I stopped at one point and
laughed and told her about the story, Becoming, which I had written
sort of about her. "What did you call me?", she asked. I thought about it
for a moment; "Calliope", I told her. She looked shocked and then laughed.
"What?!", I asked her. "I used to go by Calliope when I was little", she
said.
I've seen her every day since.
To quote from a past revision of my online bio:
"TeleMuse is the 10th muse, the only male among the lot. He lives up on
Mt. Olympus with the other nine, which might sound like a rather sweet life,
but he actually leads a rather lonely existence up there; you see, none of
the other nine will associate with him."
Then one day, Calliope, "the eldest and most distinguished of the nine
Muses ... the Muse of eloquence and of epic or heroic poetry"
(Encyclopedia Mythica), came
to see TeleMuse at his cave. They hang out a great deal now, and TeleMuse no
longer lives a lonely existence.
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