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Authors: John Harwood
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our love for each other was free, equal, and absolute, but if I were to meet the girl in the wheelchair it could never be truly equal; and if I ever fell out of love with her, I might stay, out of duty. And so on.
But in my daydreams and fantasies, Alice refused to stay in her wheelchair. It might begin at the door of her room; or I might come in through the formal garden, along the gravel path, up the front steps, between two great wooden doors standing open. There was never anyone else around: the house was always shrouded in tense, expectant silence. Along the echoing hall, up flight after flight of stairs until I reached her door, which like the front entrance was always open when I arrived. There I would see her sitting at her desk, which I knew was old and made of glowing red cedar, very like the colour of her hair, with a soft green leather top on which her typewriter sat. She would be gazing out of her window, a tall bay window with the desk in the centre of the alcove, wearing her long white dress with the embroidered purple flowers, her chin resting on the palm of her left hand, so absorbed that for a moment she wouldn't notice me standing quietly in the open doorway. And then she would push her wheelchair back from the desk, turn towards me with that enchanting smile I had struggled so often and so vainly to recall, and rise gracefully, effortlessly to her feet ... and very soon, if I was safely alone in my room, we would be lying in each other's arms on the snowy white counterpane of her bed, her long legs entwined with mine in transports of bliss, and on to the inevitable solitary conclusion.
I tried everything, even blackmail. Didn't she long to see me and hold me and kiss me as much as I longed for her, to be lovers physically instead of only in dreams? Yes of course she did, but then we'd no longer be free, equal ... and besides, she added, subtly turning the tables, did I really feel that we'd 'only' been together in dreams, when for her it was utter, blissful, ecstasy? Didn't I feel the same?
By the time I was seventeen she had taught herself a technique called 'directed dreaming': you started by learning to visualise your hands in dreams, and to do simple things like clasping them and touching your face, and gradually you developed the ability to move around consciously in your dreams, and eventually to fly wherever you wanted to go. It was like astral travelling, she said, only you didn't have to believe in silver cords or astral bodies or anything like that, you just practised the mental exercises whenever you were going to sleep until you could do them while you were actually dreaming. Soon she and I were making rapturous love in her dreams—in which she was always healed, moving with complete freedom - whereas I practised and practised and got nowhere at all.
With the dreaming, that is. Instead, I was using her dreams to script my sexual fantasies about the composite Pre-Raphaelite goddess I imagined as Alice—I had never been able to recall her as she had appeared to me that one magical night—meanwhile pretending that I'd learned to dream as she did. Not knowing what else to do, I modelled my letters on hers, which were never physically explicit, but tenderly, ecstatically, erotic. I dared not confess my abject failure at directed dreaming; I knew the words they used at school, and felt myself sinking into the coarse, fallen world of shame and guilt and bestial obscenities on lavatory walls, whilst Alice soared higher and higher into the golden light of heaven, in pure, innocent, orgasmic bliss.
Which she believed we shared. The thought of losing her trust was unbearable, yet I knew I no longer deserved it. Until then, my letters had flowed as effortlessly as speech: whenever I felt I hadn't said what I really meant, I'd just keep on writing until I had. Now I began to labour over them, re-reading anxiously, tearing up whole pages as I had never done before, my mind more and more frequently as
But in my daydreams and fantasies, Alice refused to stay in her wheelchair. It might begin at the door of her room; or I might come in through the formal garden, along the gravel path, up the front steps, between two great wooden doors standing open. There was never anyone else around: the house was always shrouded in tense, expectant silence. Along the echoing hall, up flight after flight of stairs until I reached her door, which like the front entrance was always open when I arrived. There I would see her sitting at her desk, which I knew was old and made of glowing red cedar, very like the colour of her hair, with a soft green leather top on which her typewriter sat. She would be gazing out of her window, a tall bay window with the desk in the centre of the alcove, wearing her long white dress with the embroidered purple flowers, her chin resting on the palm of her left hand, so absorbed that for a moment she wouldn't notice me standing quietly in the open doorway. And then she would push her wheelchair back from the desk, turn towards me with that enchanting smile I had struggled so often and so vainly to recall, and rise gracefully, effortlessly to her feet ... and very soon, if I was safely alone in my room, we would be lying in each other's arms on the snowy white counterpane of her bed, her long legs entwined with mine in transports of bliss, and on to the inevitable solitary conclusion.
I tried everything, even blackmail. Didn't she long to see me and hold me and kiss me as much as I longed for her, to be lovers physically instead of only in dreams? Yes of course she did, but then we'd no longer be free, equal ... and besides, she added, subtly turning the tables, did I really feel that we'd 'only' been together in dreams, when for her it was utter, blissful, ecstasy? Didn't I feel the same?
By the time I was seventeen she had taught herself a technique called 'directed dreaming': you started by learning to visualise your hands in dreams, and to do simple things like clasping them and touching your face, and gradually you developed the ability to move around consciously in your dreams, and eventually to fly wherever you wanted to go. It was like astral travelling, she said, only you didn't have to believe in silver cords or astral bodies or anything like that, you just practised the mental exercises whenever you were going to sleep until you could do them while you were actually dreaming. Soon she and I were making rapturous love in her dreams—in which she was always healed, moving with complete freedom - whereas I practised and practised and got nowhere at all.
With the dreaming, that is. Instead, I was using her dreams to script my sexual fantasies about the composite Pre-Raphaelite goddess I imagined as Alice—I had never been able to recall her as she had appeared to me that one magical night—meanwhile pretending that I'd learned to dream as she did. Not knowing what else to do, I modelled my letters on hers, which were never physically explicit, but tenderly, ecstatically, erotic. I dared not confess my abject failure at directed dreaming; I knew the words they used at school, and felt myself sinking into the coarse, fallen world of shame and guilt and bestial obscenities on lavatory walls, whilst Alice soared higher and higher into the golden light of heaven, in pure, innocent, orgasmic bliss.
Which she believed we shared. The thought of losing her trust was unbearable, yet I knew I no longer deserved it. Until then, my letters had flowed as effortlessly as speech: whenever I felt I hadn't said what I really meant, I'd just keep on writing until I had. Now I began to labour over them, re-reading anxiously, tearing up whole pages as I had never done before, my mind more and more frequently as
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