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Subject: {SJR}"The Adventures of Me and Martha Jane 06B"( bf mF mF+ )[20/52]
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This particular series is by Santo J. Romeo. That might even be his
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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 6B:
Thursday was overcast and chilly. Martha Jane and I made a long
trip over two local bus lines to the campus of Memphis State, which
was farther out than I had ever gone in my explorations. When we
arrived I was both excited and apprehensive. There was so much to
it! Surrounded by a well-to-do suburb and even a few estates, the
campus of several Georgian buildings and dormitories spread over a
rustic landscape that alternated between broad green pasture and
heavily forested alcoves of pine, maple, oak and magnolia.
I'm certain I must have seemed like a spellbound infant.
Tongue-tied, I stayed at her side like a puppy as Martha Jane, one
arm carrying a shopping bag loaded with books and notebooks, led me
down the long rambling drive toward the main library. I spent so
much time looking up and stretching my neck to take in everything
that I tripped over every curb and twig along the way. Martha Jane
finally had to lead me by the hand. At the library's columned
entrance I ran to the door and tried to yank it open for her. Sur-
prised by its weight, I was jerked back against the door and had
to lean far backward to open it again.
She laughed, "Don't be in such a hurry."
Inside, I was overcome by the solemnity and silence in the large
and spacious building, which was far more imposing than the small
branch library I knew in my neighborhood. Martha Jane walked ahead
of me to the front reception desk. I followed, my neck craning and
my eyes agape at the high walls solid with shelves and books. My
tennis shoes squeaked softly on the tile floor and echoed into the
ceiling. I was so flabbergasted that I walked right into her as she
stopped to have the receptionist check her bag. I shifted to avoid
standing on her feet, apologizing so loudly that my voice shot back
at me several times over, startling me, and I had to lower my
volume. Turning around and trying to take it all in, I took a step
or two in each direction to try to see down the paths of shelves and
oak tables to my left and right, only to stumble backward with a
loud clunk into the face of the reception desk.
Martha Jane said quickly to the receptionist, "He's going to be
with me. He's not a student or anything, he doesn't have an i.d.--"
The bespeckled, matronly woman smiled at Martha Jane and handed
her back the shopping bag of notebooks. The lady looked exactly the
way I had always imagined librarians would look.
"That's perfectly all right," the woman said warmly, and she
peered down at me cheerfully through her bifocals. "Well, young
man, this must be your first visit."
Martha Jane laughed and blushed. "Yes, it is. I'm afraid he
doesn't have his bearings yet. Bumping into everything..."
"Oh, don't you worry, he'll find his way around. You enjoy
yourself, young man. If you're interested, there is a child's
section right over there in that far corner just past the card
catalog cabinet."
I asked, "Where do you have the newspaper stacks? I guess I'll
start with The New York Times Index? Do you have it back to the
1920's?"
She looked at me and then at Martha Jane, a little surprised.
Martha Jane grinned at her. "He likes newspapers."
"Oh, how interesting. He's your son, is he? Oh, I'm sorry, you
certainly don't look that old. Your brother?"
"No, he's my..."
"Student," I interjected, somewhat formally. Behind me, out of
the lady's sight, I felt Martha Jane poke a finger in my back.
"Oh, I see. How nice, bringing your students to the library in
person, that's a wonderful idea. Well, now, you get settled and
then come back here and I'll show you to the periodical stacks."
"Thank you," I said, and Martha Jane also whispered a thank you
and led me by the hand into a small alcove with a large writing desk
upon which she parked her shopping bag. She smiled wryly at me as
she removed her sweater. "You're my what? My student?"
"It had a certain status."
She blushed. "I'm glad you spoke up. I had to stop myself
because I almost said you were my boyfriend. I'm certain she would
have got a rise out of that."
I smiled broadly.
"Now, you've been in libraries before, so you know what the
general setup is. I'll be working right here if you need anything,
or anybody at the big front desk can help you."
She left me on my own. A young woman at the front desk gave me
a brochure with a map of the building and directed me to the card
catalog filing cabinet. On first seeing it I was taken aback. So
many drawers! And in each drawer were hundreds of index cards, some
packed so tightly they had to be shoved back firmly to be read. I
didn't know where to begin. There were so many choices. The
problem was, I wanted to see everything at once. Going through them
became stultifying after a while; I wanted something more substan-
tial, something I could hold in my hands.
Leaving the card catalog as a hopeless case of too much to absorb
at once, I moved to the stacks themselves. Looking over the titles,
I couldn't imagine how any book or index or subject might be missing
from this building. Following the map, I took the elevator to the
next floor and found myself confronted with hundreds of shelves,
thousands of books. The musk of paper filled the room. And on the
next floor I encountered the same odor, and the same endless maze of
stacks and shelves and labels and volumes. On the elevator again,
to yet another floor of the same thing. And from there, a curled
iron stairway leading to still more, and then to another wing of
more floors, more tiers of books. I grappled with one thick book
that almost pulled me to the floor as it slid from its shelf. It
was a weighty volume of nineteenth century photographs. Opening its
large pages separated by translucent tissues which themselves had
chipped and yellowed, I found myself in the grip of an eerie
fascination with the faces of the people in the pictures. Starkly
and stiffly posed, their eyes seemed alive and knowing--a strange
and hair-raising sensation, because these people had posed for the
photographs in the 1870's. There were long shots of tailcoated,
booted men in front of banks and post offices and on street corners.
And there were pictures of the streets. New York City in 1876. An
interior of a fancy restaurant, the shot taken so that the tall
windows lined up along the right and rays of sunlight drenched the
floor and the tables, leaving the corners of the room deep in
shadow. I could smell the wood frames of the windows, hear the
photographer prompting carefully as he held the shutter open for the
long exposures required in those days. The streets and the build-
ings and the rooms struck me as being oddly familiar; I was not
surprised at seeing them, and felt that I was seeing nothing new.
Everything seemed to be exactly in its proper place. The surprise
was my knowing that it was so, that I had seen these buildings and
their arched windows and tall shadowed doorways before.
A rustle of clothing startled me. I looked up. Martha Jane was
strolling toward me. I had been studying the book so closely that
my eyes watered and the back of my neck was cramped.
"You've been gone for hours," she said. "I looked everywhere
for you. Do you have any idea what time it is?"
"I'm sorry," I stuttered, finding my mouth dry.
"Find anything interesting?"
"This," I said, holding the book open with both hands. I
touched my fingers to a full-page photograph of 4th Avenue, in
downtown Manhattan, taken in 1881.
She looked at it. "What about it?"
"I've..." I was startled as the words came out of my mouth,
almost on their own accord. "I've been here."
"Here? You've been on this street before?"
I nodded.
"Speedy, this is...Hon, this street is in New York City. The
picture was made sixty or seventy years ago. Maybe it reminds you
of Adams Street in Memphis. It looks a lot like it."
I shook my head slowly, not believing it myself. "No," I
muttered. "I mean it feels like...I was here, on this street.
This street."
"You mean, like deja vu. You know about deja vu?"
"Yes. I remember looking it up. This is what deja vu is?"
Standing beside me, she gazed into the picture. I saw her
eyelashes flutter as she scanned the page from corner to corner.
I felt embarrassed. It was true: the photograph was from another
century, from a place I'd never seen.
She looked into my eyes with her piercing blue-green orbs
floating in white. "You feel you were there? Really?"
I nodded.
"I've had feelings like that too, hon."
Her words both astounded and intrigued me. For a moment both of
us stared at the photograph.
Then she said, "Come with me. I want to show you something."
She led me down the iron staircase and then down another, to a
floor of magazine stacks and dozens of metal shelves piled with
loose papers and brochures. She took me to a corner where her hand
went straight to an enamel-backed issue of a National Geographic.
"Look at this," she said mysteriously, and flipping the pages
along her thumb she seemed to know exactly the page she wanted and
found it right away. She held the magazine open and motioned for me
to take it. "Look," she said quietly.
It was a grayed, gold-bordered monochrome photograph. The woman
was in a shawl and held a child wrapped so heavily that only part of
its forehead could be seen. In the background was what appeared to
be a desert. The picture was taken from the knees up. The woman
wore what looked like a light gray (pale blue? pale yellow?) heavy
shift tightly girdled at the waist with a white cord. The folds and
shadows of the loose garment revealed that she was slim and deli-
cate. Looking suspiciously toward the camera, her bright eyes
projected a strange mixture of fear and concern. Her left arm
cradled the child closely; but her right was extended across the front
of the child's wrapped body, facing the camera, and the sleeve of
her garment fell back to reveal her long, slender white arm with her
fingers spread around the child's covered head.
She breathed, "It's me."
And as I continued studying the woman, who did not look like
Martha Jane except for her remarkable eyes, Martha Jane stretched
her right hand across the page and spread her fingers in the same
pose that was in the picture. I was silent, numbed. Their arms
and hands looked alike.
She mused aloud, "There's probably nothing to any of it. It's
just a feeling I have when I see this picture. I've looked at it
hundreds of times. But always, I get the same feeling. I've seen
that desert. And those mountains back there on the landscape." She
sighed, taking the magazine from me. "Or maybe I'm just going crazy
or..." She jammed the magazine back in its place and added soberly,
"...maybe I just take myself too seriously."
I felt giddy at the prospect that I wasn't the only creature in
the world who had otherworldly sensations. Martha Jane reinforced
that when she said, "Speedy, I hope you don't think I'm just weird,
but I feel those things all the time."
I said earnestly. "I feel the same way sometimes."
As she led me out of the room she confided, "Speedy, you're the
only person in the world I could have shared that with."
"What do you think it means that we both feel those strange
things?"
She put a finger to her lips and whispered mischievously, "Shh.
It means we're both crazy."
I whispered back, "I won't let the lady at the front desk know."
"Come on, let's go to the cafeteria before they close and get
a late lunch. I'll introduce you to the wonderful world of institu-
tional food."
The cafeteria was closing when we arrived, so we picked out
cold sandwiches and cokes in plastic cups and went outside to sit
on the massive steps of the administration building. From there
most of the campus spread before us, as far as we could see, into a
dense wood beyond a grove of magnolias. A chill, early spring wind
picked up and rustled the stiff leaves of the magnolias. Some
sparrows and mockingbirds hopped around us and we pitched them the
crumbs that were left from our lunch. Martha Jane was finishing the
last of her coffee, which she referred to as "college soup."
"Horrible stuff," she said, sipping. "It's addictive. Ruins
your tummy. Gives you insomnia."
"Why do you drink it?" I asked.
"Because it's oh so necessary, hon. When you get into college
you'll find out how very very needed it is. I was falling asleep
taking those notes in the library. Sometimes you think you'll go
into a coma, but you just keep on working."
She finished the coffee and sat one step lower than me, her
knees raised and her head propped on them. She looked up at me
sideways.
"You're finally leaving the project. I'd give anything to be
leaving, though I know I will someday, not long from now. My
mother's dating now. She met a very nice man in the office supply
business. He has a beautiful home right out there, near where you'll
be living with your mom and your dad. He's in a richer neighborhood,
so I know it's not quite the same, but...it'll be yours, and you'll
have your own place. You're way too old to be living in a closet,
you have too many interests. I should think you'd be very happy
about all that. But you're not."
I shook my head. I pinched a small piece off the remains of my
sandwich and pitched it to a lone mockingbird a few steps below.
"Why not?" she asked gently.
I didn't respond, holding back the real answer. Finally I just
shrugged.
"Is it because I won't be your neighbor anymore?"
I nodded.
"Speedy, that's very nice. But you can't give up everything
just to live next door to me. I'm hardly there anymore, anyway.
And when I can, I'll be moving away again. Then what would you do?"
"Well...I'll stay in the project until you move again."
"And then what?"
I shrugged.
"And then what?" she repeated.
"I don't know."
"Speedy, listen to me--"
I tried to remain casual. Stubbornly I said, "You're my friend."
"I know, hon, but both of us have to get out of that place sooner
or later. Both of us need homes, not just a hole in a wall."
"You're my friend," I said again, offering another crumb to the
white-trimmed mockingbird, who chased greedily after it.
"I know, but you'll have other friends. A whole neighborhood
full of them, not like those rough kids downtown."
"You're my friend," I said again, stubbornly, and pitched another
crumb.
"And you'll be in high school before long, at Christian Brothers,
and there's so many smart kids there just like you--"
"Don't make me cry!" I demanded, crying and then choking it back
in the same instant--but not soon enough to stifle the single tear
that dripped down my face. My nose ran and I sniffed loudly.
"Honey!" she whispered in amazement. "Here..." She produced a
kleenex from her sweater pocket and reached up toward my face.
But I took it from her. "No!" I said stubbornly, and wiped my
nose. "No, I won't cry. I will...not...cry. I'm too old to cry.
I don't have any business crying."
She started to rise but I put my hand on her shoulder, so she
moved up only one step and was sitting next to me.
"Baby," she crooned, "you've been holding this back from me for
a long time, haven't you?"
"There's nothing to hold back. You're my friend. That's all.
I've lost friends before. And I've liked people who didn't like me.
And you told me things you didn't like about people and how much
work you're doing and how you can't spend all your time with them.
I know you have to leave the place. I know you want a home. This
week I went down to the river front and watched the sun, and I saw
the whole world in front of me and I wondered how big it was, how
much of it is out there and how much I had to do. How much I had to
learn. It's your world, too. I know you'll leave, or I'll leave.
And I'd never try to stop you. I'd never try to take that away from
you and I'd never blame you, like I did last time. 'Cause I know
it's not because of me, it's because of what you have to do, it's
what you want. And because--"
I blew my nose hard, once and for all. "Because I know you
don't like schmucks, and I don't wanna be a schmuck!"
"Speedy..."
I would not look at her. I could feel her looking across at me,
leaning toward me. "I don't have to actually *like* leaving my
friend on the other side of town, do I?" I complained. "I don't
have to be a schmuck, but I don't have to like it either."
For a long minute she didn't say anything, and I refused to let
her see my face until I felt I was totally in control again.
I felt her arm go around my shoulder. She put her cheek to mine
for a second then pulled away from me. "Look at me," she said.
When I hesitated she said, "Look at me, hon."
I turned to her and she had her teeth and jaw set in a playful,
mock-tough, happy little smile. She said, "C'mere" and put both
arms loosely around my neck and pulled me to her slightly so that
our foreheads were touched.
"Hey, bud, answer one question."
"Yeah?"
"Did you mean everything you just said?"
"Yes."
"You didn't just get it from some movie somewhere?"
"Hey, lady...This ain't Hollywood."
"Speedy...Steven...don't ever let me call you a little boy
again. Don't even let me think it. If you catch me doing it,
remind me of today. Promise?"
"Promise."
"I've got a proposition for you, Mister Ricci."
"Proposition?"
"Yeeeahh...We still going to the movies tonight?"
"If you want."
"Yeah, I want, but after that...I want you to spend the night
with me."
She stuck her tongue out, far out, and licked my nose.
I wiped it off with the kleenex. "What if my folks come home
early or something? Tomorrow's Friday."
"Then we'll stay up and keep watch."
"You don't have to. Stay with me, I mean."
"Yes I do, hon. Yes I do."
====================================
THE ADVENTURES OF ME AND MARTHA JANE
by S.J.R.
PART 6B
-30-
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