Read Online The Great Lover by Rhys Hughes, Michael Cisco - Free Book Online Page A

unexaggerated smile. Twice she flings out her arms to clasp her friend warmly, all unabashed. Nothing comes from her without a flourish. Compact, warmly effusive, generous. At least from a distance — through glass. But even from here, I can’t take my eyes from her; she has me, and though I stay hunkered down where I am, by the dumpster, I go with her, like the flu. Take me with you, my heart wails, and she takes me along as heedless of me as an updraft is of the newspaper it carries soaring into the air.
    She unfolds into a huge creamy blonde world. I am breaking into the old weather station in the park. Formerly the guest house of an estate that had passed to the parks department, the station is a two-story Victorian gingerbread, sealed like a mummy in rubbery institutional paint. Soft warm night, with air like fine sand.
    There is an empty corner room on the ground floor, with dead leaves in the corners. He kneels on bare boards, carefully places his notebook closed on the floor in front of him, and draws his grease pencil ring around himself. A draft stirs the leaves. He recites the “universal monochord” and thick sewage flows out from beneath his coat, its circle, brown and black, spreads uniformly and stops at the grease boundary. In his mind already he sees the downy breast of her dream, an incandescent fog of caressing pink and gold light: the elegant summer dusk, the cordial house, the family.
    Here she is, her syrupy hair sheds a heated little glow over her face, her fluffy white body. Her lover, a blonde dream-boy dressed for the moment in a powder-blue prom outfit, is just offstage, shuffling his feet. He’s waiting nervously to be introduced to the parents, hefts the bouquet, clears his throat and checks his breath in cupped hand. In the weather station, I drop forward in the circle, head down, and thrust out my hands. These appear behind young Lochinvar, reach slowly out for him, then whisk! He is yanked backwards into the shadows. A frenzied cascade of arms and legs. The dream-boy flops about in wild convulsions, stuttering and grabbing at his face. His eyes sink into the sockets, his eyelids sag inwards, gape open on an inner abyss into which his eyes are tumbling. In the front room of the abandoned weather station, there I rock back and forth; my arms behind him, I lean back, and my eyes disappear into my head. My face gleams mother-of-pearl. My notebook rises in the air, flips open with a pop, and dream-boy’s eyes appear on its pages, staring incredulously into each other with a moral expression of helpless terror. Meanwhile, my eyes are in her dream.
    A desperate struggle ensues: dream boy’s eye sockets bulge out grotesquely as his face wrestles with my eyes. The whites glimmer between the shuddering lashes, and now his lids are forced apart — wildly misaligned livid eyes fairly exploding from between them. Dream boy’s feeble will subsides. The Great Lover awkwardly raises his body from the floor, doggedly adjusting the necktie as the legs kick out, give way, stick straight out again.
    She is waiting, beginning to get impatient. His cue still hangs unheeded in the air. The dream lists uneasily, but the Great Lover’s nerve-projection is firming up swiftly. Now the rosy-cheeked young man strides onstage leading with his forehead, louring up through his eyebrows, dragging the bouquet on the floor behind him — walk like the boy! Suddenly he straightens up with a winning grin and comes on stepping high, quick offer of the flowers.
    The dream settles again, she beautifully returns his smile. He pulls his blazer around to hide the huge satyr-play erection bulging down his pant leg to the knee. Turns his head to cough into his fist, clandestinely yanks his tongue and the erection retracts. This is her father in his cardigan and her mother in hers... her pimply brother who assembles model airplanes in his spare time... how do you do?... the cousins... the minister. The smiles the extended hands