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Subject: {SJR}JDR"The Adventures of Me and Martha Jane 10C"( bf mF mF+ )[36/52]
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CORRECTED VERSION The previously posted version of this chapter was
cut off in the middle. This should be the entire thing. Sorry for the
inconvenience.
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This particular series is by Santo J. Romeo. That might even be his
real name. The version that I have copied used his initials, and I have
followed suit. It is more a tragic story of coming of age than simply a
sex story, and individual segments might not contain any sex. The entire
story, however, is a hot one.
========
**** WARNING **** WARNING **** WARNING ****
THIS DOCUMENT IS A SEXUALLY GRAPHIC STORY ABOUT AN INTENSE SEXUAL,
EMOTIONAL AND INTELLECTUAL RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN A TEENAGE GIRL AND
A YOUNG BOY AND THE COURSE OF THEIR RELATIONSHIP OVER A PERIOD OF
10 YEARS. IT IS A DRAMATIZATION ABOUT REAL PEOPLE AND THEIR CON-
FLICT WITH SOCIAL EXPECTATIONS. IF THIS SUBJECTS OFFENDS YOU OR IF
SEXUAL LANGUAGE UPSETS YOU, OR IF YOU DON'T WANT THIS MATERIAL SEEN
BY UNDER-18 OR OTHERWISE UNQUALIFIED PERSONS, DELETE THIS DOCUMENT.
THIS DOCUMENT IS COPYRIGHTED 1994, 1996 BY SJR. SO--HEY, YOU CAN
COPY IT BUT YOU CAN'T CHANGE IT OR SELL IT UNLESS I SAY SO.
====================================
THE ADVENTURES OF ME AND MARTHA JANE
by S.J.R.
sjr <73233.1411@CompuServe.COM>
============
PART 10C:
By ten-fifteen that night we returned to Martha's place and set the
tiny dining table with a bottle of wine, three cheeses, and two boxes of
imported crackers. We kicked off our shoes. Martha struggled with the
corkscrew while I fetched two glasses.
"Begin," she said.
Almost two hours later I was slurring my words and pacing the living
room with a cigarette in one hand and a wine glass in the other. I
wasn't drunk, but I was "loose" for the first time in my brief life.
Little did I suspect that a small amount of wine would extract from me
such a detailed two-year autobiography. Defenseless, and listening to my
own long, rambling sentences, I felt almost removed from myself, as if I
were some one sitting beside Martha, who remained perfectly sober and
attentive as she curled lazily on the sofa with her glass and crackers.
I told her everything, starting with the dumping of the Black Beauty; my
three jobs, undertaken solely to get me to New York while sacrificing
everything else; my isolation from my parents and my lack of friends, my
efforts and adventures on the delivery bike and the paper route; my with-
drawal from activities at school, my distrust of everyone; my refusal to
accept my faults, my dislike of my own appearance and even of my way of
speaking; my inability to live tolerably with my parents -- all of it
tumbled out of me in stolid, dry detail, as if talking about it under the
influence of the wine-induced fog made everything seem galaxies away from
Memphis and from me. I was so mildly but pleasantly boozed, I felt as if
I were describing someone else.
Martha listened calmly and solemnly, asking an occasional question
to keep me on track. Just before one o'clock in the morning, I became
drowsy and ended my story, settling with a sardonic laugh into a chair
across the room from Martha, who smiled sleepily and sympathetically and
brushed a stray hair from her forehead.
"It seems so far away," I sighed, looking out the window at the roofs
of the sleeping city. "I'm so far away from it now, I wonder if it real-
ly happened."
"Maybe you had to physically get away from it," Martha said, "before
you could tell me about it."
"No," I said sarcastically, "first you had to get me two thousand
miles from home and put a bottle of zinfandel in front of me."
She smiled indulgently. "You're not that drunk. Not on zinfandel.
But, yes, I did ply you with liquor, hon. I'm sorry. No -- I'm not
sorry. I haven't seen this much of you in a very long time."
We both yawned. Martha suggested, "Let's get our jammies." We did,
Martha slipping into a pair of pale blue pajamas while I donned a thin
sweatshirt and jockey shorts, in which I usually slept. But as we were
putting away the leftovers, Martha said she wouldn't be able to sleep.
"I'll make coffee," she said.
I said, "Coffee? At one A.M.?"
"Yes," she said frankly. "I wanna talk to you. Do me a favor while
I make the coffee: go put your glasses on."
"Oh, Martha, I hate those damn--"
"Hon, go put your glasses on."
I did, reluctantly. In the kitchen she looked me over and decided
that it wasn't the fault of the eyeglasses themselves. I protested,
refusing to wear them any longer. She made me promise that I'd go with
her to a shop where I could replace the cheap plastic frames with some-
thing more attractive. She urged me, "Don't passively accept the bad
taste others force onto you, Steven. Your face is fine, you just need
decent frames." But she wouldn't force me to would wear them publicly
until I accepted myself with glasses.
While we sat at the dining table sipping French coffee, she took
control of the conversation. She said:
We grew up without parents. In her case, she had a mother who was
willing to be close to her in at least a minimal way, though they had
never shared the same values and never would. Martha had at least the
memory of a father, whom she described as tall, lean, intelligent,
affectionate and independent; he was never very successful, but he was
very much a man. He was close to his two daughters and encouraged them
to think for themselves. He was killed overseas when Martha was eight.
But in my case, she said, things took a different course. Martha saw my
mother as a good, conscientious, likeable woman. Martha cautioned me
that I should not think my Mom didn't love me; but I should accept the
fact that Mom might never be the mother I needed. Nor did I have even
the memory of a father, mine having died when I was barely two. In my
family circle there were few competent male figures; those that remained
were simply worn out, resigned to life as dictated by others. My over-
bearing stepdad typified the opposite extreme of heedless masculinity and
intolerance. I'd apparently been living in an emotional and intellectual
vacuum; I lived surreptitiously, letting others see only those parts of
me that I could twist into a mere copy of what they expected.
"I hate all of them," I said glumly, agreeing with her. "I distrust
and dislike every one of them."
"No,!" Martha said forcefully. She pounded the table once with a
clenched fist. "No, Steven! Don't hate. Understand. They did what they
could. They did what they knew to do. It wasn't much, in my humble
opinion, but it was the best they could do. And you do owe them respect.
But nobody ever said you had to love them. Anyway, I don't think you
can -- I don't think I could love most of the people I was involved with,
either, not in the way most people usually do."
She said we both grew up as if on a deserted island. We developed
our own means of survival, our own ideas, our own view of the world, our
own morality. In many ways most children grow up to be like their
parents, she said, but in our case we grew up to be more like ourselves,
untended, untaught except through our own isolation. "If we feel un-
loved," she said, "it's not because we weren't loved. It's because we
weren't loved for who we are."
The night wore on with neither of us able to stop talking. The
subject eventually moved to the unique relationship between us.
"It just happened," Martha said, lighting another cigarette and
hugging her knees to her chest, her feet propped on her chair seat.
"It's so strange, how it happened. Neither of us had the slightest idea
what we were doing. We couldn't trust what others told us, because we'd
already learned something different. What they told us made sense only
in their lives, not ours. It just happened that way." She knocked the
ashes off her cigarette and asked me, "Were you ever afraid you'd die and
go to hell?"
I inhaled and blew out with a bitter huff. "There is no hell," I
said. I told her I'd never felt that we were wrong; it was everyone
else who was wrong.
"I was always afraid," she said, looking down as if remembering.
"Afraid of what?"
"I don't know," she said, absently and sadly. She paused. She
rubbed her shins and then fiddled with her toenails. "I was afraid of a
lot of things. But, then, I tried anyway. I was always afraid I'd never
be smart enough to be a teacher. But fearing it, somehow, made me need
to do it."
"Working on the delivery bike was like that. Physically, I'm not cut
out for it. The other guys have an easier time of it. I came to that
job and the first thing I learned was that I couldn't do it. All it did
was make me want it."
She made a wry little smile. "You don't belong there. You belong in
the theater. You belong in creating and in doing. I wish you didn't
want so much to be like everyone else. You're not like everyone else,
Steven. You can't be and you shouldn't be. You can't be someone else
and neither can I, despite how others might demand it and regardless of
how much we might want it." She crushed her cigarette. "That's Ronnie's
problem. She wants to be me, she wants the same boyfriends others have,
she wants to be anyone but herself. I can't be what my mother wanted,
and won't be what Mr. Buchanan wanted. I'm not submissive, and I'm not a
saint. I'm stubborn and different. I learned to be alone and to see
what others do without being involved in what they do. Maybe that's why
I could stay friendly with your mother, without feeling guilty about her
ignorance of us. I'm different and rebellious and wicked and I can't
help it. I suppose you and I could attempt to do and be what others
want -- we might even be good at it. But we'd suffocate."
We both yawned, stretching in our chairs and moaning about how late
it was. We saw through her living room window that the sky had begun to
brighten. Birds chirped outside.
I yawned again. "I hope I can get to sleep."
"After all this? What would keep you awake?"
I thought about it; I was tired, but tense and impatient. "Thinking
about all the things we talked about. Worrying, I guess. Wanting it to
change, or...wishing it were different."
"You can't change what's happened, hon."
I yawned again. "No. I guess not."
"You're at a disadvantage, not knowing what a father is. I don't
know myself what it means to have one, in the way most people do. But I
am a teacher, and I did learn things that helped me. I don't know what I
can be to you. I certainly can't replace the people you had in your
life. But I can teach you...if you promise me something."
I rubbed my swollen eyes. "Another promise? Okay. What's the deal?"
"Promise that you'll accept the fact that you're not stupid, you're
not ugly, you're not incompetent. It's just that -- and don't take this
the wrong way, hon -- it's just that you have things to learn. Promise you
won't just beat yourself over the head for what you can't be."
"Easy for you to say," I told her drily, and reached up to scratch a
pimple under my chin.
Martha gently pulled my hand away from my face. "Don't, hon. Don't
do that to your face."
"But it itches," I complained, scratching again.
"No!" Again she took my hand, this time holding it firmly and close
to her. "Listen to me. If you don't like the way you look, do some-
thing about it. I'm going to show you how. This morning I'm sending you
to someone at my health club. He might strike you as very eccentric, but
I want you to listen to what he has to say. Learn from him. His name is
Fiore. He's trains athletes and dancers. Promise you'll listen?"
"Oh, okay," I said petulantly.
"Don't say okay unless you mean it."
"Okay," I said, halfheartedly.
"You think I have a nineteen inch waist because I mailed in enough
box tops? Fiore showed me how, and I want him to show you how to get rid
of those damn things by the end of this week. Promise me you'll listen
to him."
"Okay."
"And work hard."
"Okay, okay, promise."
"Don't pout, Steven."
"What's the sense of it? Seems like such a hopeless case."
"Jeez, where in the world did you latch onto such a low opinion of
yourself?"
"I just...learned to face facts, that's all. I'm not pretty, I'm
not anybody. I'm not very smart, I'm clumsy, I sink into a hole in the
ground when I'm around people, and I -- "
"Oh, hon!" she said, her voice heavy with anger and disappointment.
She gripped my hand tightly, frowned at me, and then dropped my hand onto
the table. "Steven, what's happened to you?". Groaning with frustra-
tion, she rose from her chair and walked to the living room window,
sighing distressfully three or four times. She leaned against the window
frame, folding her arms and gazing outside.
"I'm sorry..." I began.
"Please...be quiet while I get this together."
"I didn't mean to make you--"
"Stop, Steven. I won't let you trick me into feeling sorry for you.
And I won't let you feel sorry for yourself, either. It won't get you
anywhere and you need more than that. Please be quiet a minute."
I waited as she gazed out the window, her arms folded tightly as she
shifted her feet and frowned thoughtfully for a few moments. Finally,
after a deep sigh, she began:
"Hon, I have to tell you something. I wanted to tell you this so
many times, but I never knew how. I still don't know how. That last day
we were together in Memphis, when we went to the Holiday Inn...just be-
fore it was time to leave...I wanted so badly to tell you, it hurt. It
physically hurt. But I didn't know how you'd take it. I didn't know how
I could possibly make you understand. I once told you that there was
some momentous secret I wanted to share with you, and I wanted so much to
tell you then. But I couldn't. And I tried to tell you the day my
mother was married, and I tried to tell you the day I left Memphis. And
there were so many other times I tried. But I was so afraid you wouldn't
understand."
She stopped and then breathed heavily, wincing with consternation.
"If it's so hard to do," I said softly, "then forget about it."
"No! Dammit." She rubbed her forehead and gazed out the window.
"You need to know this. It's one thing to think no one loves you. but
it's another to think you're not lovable. I used to think that way. I
know how it feels. I work every day with young people who know that
feeling all too well."
"Martha, I've heard all this from the Brothers and the -- "
"No you haven't, Steven, and stop thinking you've guessed what I'm
going to say. Please, just stop thinking and just...listen. This is
hard enough for me to say as it is."
I opened my mouth to say okay again, but thought better of it. She
hugged herself tightly, her hands clinching and unclinching. Thinking
she might feel less pressured if I didn't have my eyes on her, I turned
away from her in my chair and sat still.
After another pause she said quietly and earnestly, speaking into the
warm dark outside the window, "I love you, Steven...I've always loved
you. From the first time I saw you, barely waist-high to me, I loved
you. You were the sweetest, most unique, most open and loving person I'd
ever seen. Your eyes had such a beautiful light...so eager, so trusting
and so...so very brave. I fell in love with you, and you were so free
and giving that...I simply couldn't resist. I never could. I still
can't."
She blinked. She covered her face with her hands for a moment, and
then folded her arms again and gazed out the window. "I don't know what
kind of love it is...It's not a romantic, Hollywood kind of love, it's
not like married love, it's not motherly. Or maybe it's all of those.
Maybe it's what philosophers refer to simply as love, the kind you can't
define by any known standard, the kind you can't put in a box. Whenever
I tried to control my feelings for you or rationalize them away or
moralize about what we did over the years, I couldn't. I once went to
one of my advisors, to try to describe what I felt, and later I went to
a psychologist. But I couldn't even begin to explain it to them, or even
to myself. All I heard from them was the same moralizing that I could
get from anyone on the street. I don't know what you're going to make of
this, or how you explain any of this to yourself, or even if you know
what the hell I'm talking about. I don't even know how to describe what
happens to me when we're together or why I sometimes feel so primitive,
so free, so wonderfully...alive with the pleasure that, for some reason,
I know only with you. I tried to justify my actions, but I can't. I
tried to condemn them, and I can't do that either. I tried to make plans
around it, tried to resist it, tried to analyze it. I can't. It's just
there. It's just...just me-with-you, and I can't conceive of it or
experience it in any other way."
Again, she sighed and searched for words. "It's just me...and it's
just you. It's what you do and it's who you are and it's how you think.
I don't think about you all day every day. I don't seem to pine when
you're away, not the way I'd miss a boyfriend or a parent. But when I
see you in front of me I become a completely different woman...or maybe,
I think, I become a secret 'Me' that I can't define or describe. Please
understand, hon -- I have no idea what's going to happen to us. Every
time I try to control it, it's a little like trying to tell the universe
how to change shape. Sometimes I think you'll find someone, and I'd be
so happy for you if that happened. I have no desire to own you. I know
you'll change with time, and I have no idea what you'll think of me years
from now. And I dread...Steven, I dread the day when either of us
changes or goes away or moves on with our lives, and I know both of us
will. There's nothing that you or I can do to stop that." Her voice
cracked a little, and she paused to wipe a tear from one eye. "And, oh,
hon -- if I ever did anything to break your heart, I don't know what...I
really don't know what I'd do."
Still gazing out the window, she collected herself quickly and went
on. "Maybe you're getting some kind of ambivalent message from me. Am I
wrong to feel the way I do? Were we wrong to break the rules? Am I
expecting something from you I have no right to expect? I've learned so
much since I left Memphis. I've seen so much. I've...changed so much. I
agonized over whether or not to bring you here and see what I'd become,
what I'm becoming. But I do trust you. I've always trusted you, because
I believe in what we feel for each other. I see honesty and caring in
the way you treat me and in every action you took with me. I could see
it and I could feel it."
She shook her head, slowly and sadly. "We were both so innocent,
Steven. Innocent, until we come face to face with the other morality
that's out there. Their morality. My sister casually slept with men
whenever she felt like it. So many, she doesn't remember their names.
Not because they wanted her. Because they liked her. And she was so
likeable, she fit in so well, so easily. I didn't have that. I had to
work and keep trying to change myself. But men didn't like me -- they
wanted me. They thought wanting was morality enough. But not you,
Stephen. Your touch and your eyes had love in them. You looked into me,
not at me. My father had that about him, too. I wanted him very much,
my father. I wanted him sexually, too. I don't know that he ever knew
what I was thinking. But when he looked at me, and talked to me, and
hugged me...oh, I loved him so! He loved me, too, just...just me. He
never made me be someone else or be like someone else; he just wanted me
to be the best me I could. And it made me want him completely. I never
wanted to own or possess him, and I never wanted him to own me. But I
did want to have the whole experience of him. And then let him go his
way, let him be him. I feel that way about you. Can it go beyond that?
Should we cut our wrists and mix blood? What can we do, how can we show
someone how much we love, and how we love, how much we want to totally
please, without owning? How do we even marry, without owning? Steven,
do you know that when I talked to your mother a few years ago, she told
me she was shocked to learn that your Aunt Yvonne regularly slept nude
with her husband? Your mother was so incensed, so scandalized. She
said, 'God knows, I've never let either of my husbands see *me* with
nothing on at all'. She's a good, suffering woman, Steven...but how can
people live that way? What kind of morality is that? Mr. Buchanan waits
until he's worn out with so many women, women he called whores, and then
decides to marry my submissive mother so he can settle down and be waited
on hand and foot, with a few of his old whores hanging around in the
corners. What kind of morality is that? So many wives faking orgasms,
getting pregnant so they can say they're respectable with a home in the
suburbs and a new Chevrolet every two years. But without love, without
joy, what kind of respectability is that? We pray to God to keep our
stocks going up, to help us make more cars and more toasters and bigger
bombs. We pray for our team to win the World Series. But no one prays
that we'll learn how to love, how to please, how to understand and
accept. Hmp. Morality. It's so strange, my talking to your mother and
asking your folks to let you visit, let you come here and see the city
and the art and new life, new people, new ideas -- life and ideas that
they don't really want you to see. Such a pretense I've had to make, so
many omissions and white lies, to match up with their morality. My
mother's morality, my teacher's, my supervisor's. How could their moral-
ity conceive of the...the joy and fulfilment I felt as a young woman the
first time I shared myself with you? Their morality forbids it. Their
morality forbids neglect, forbids abuse -- and yet we are neglected, we
are abused. And what kind of honesty is this, having to be honest behind
everyone's back? What kind of morality is it that forbids pleasure,
forbids intimacy, forbids ecstasy? Forbids individuation and knowledge
and self-realization? It's not *my* morality. It's not my battered
wives or my screw-up kids or my frigid women or my impotent men. Not my
Mississippi lynch mobs or my wars. My morality tells me I shouldn't lie
to them; their morality demands that I do, if I'm to be honest about
myself."
She bowed her head and sighed. Her voice lowered. "But I can't lie
to you, Steven. I don't know if...Hon, I don't know what you expect of
me. I have an idea what it is. And I don't know if I can fulfill your
every dream. I don't know that you can fulfill mine, either. I don't
know that anyone, anywhere, can fulfill everyone's dreams and needs all
the time, in every way." She shook her head. "I knew...I knew that one
day I'd go to hell for this. And there is a hell, Stephen. It's all
around us. Whatever we do or don't do, whether we're right or wrong...
we're damned if we do and we're damn if we don't. I can tolerate it. I
can tolerate knowing that I do what I think and feel is best. I can
tolerate it because even though I don't know if I can do everything for
you, I will always, always be as good to you as I can. And I'll always
trust that you'll do your best. So if I can't live up to it all, or if
you can't, I can accept it. I can live with that much hell."
She stopped. She raised her head and breathed deeply from the night
breeze that faintly rustled the window curtain. "Oh, hon. I hope I'm
not letting you down." She sighed again.
She straightened, her voice changing from plaintive to bold. "But
there's one thing I simply will not accept. I won't accept thinking
that I might have done something, said something, that makes you feel
unlovable. Something has made you feel that you can't depend on yourself
or your ideas or your efforts. If you feel that way, then I've failed
you. Right now, right this minute, I don't really know what to do about
it. But I have nine days to change the way you feel about yourself. And
I intend to try. No. I don't intend to -- I will."
For the first time since she had moved to the window, she turned to
look me straight in the eye. "You have no idea how difficult it was to
say this. I agonized over it for years. Please don't use it against me,
Steven. I think you're old enough to understand what I mean."
====================================
THE ADVENTURES OF ME AND MARTHA JANE
by S.J.R.
============
PART 10C
-30-
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