30
THE NEXT MORNING, I woke early. This was unusual, since I was, in those days, a heavy sleeper. At home, I slept as late as I could, and when I finally did wake up, or when my mother woke me with a shout up the stairs, I lingered lazily in bed for a while longer, trying to recapture and recapitulate my dreams, to slip back into sleep where I could experience those dreams again. Often, in those days, I received in my dreams the attentions and caresses of girls I pined for when I was awake. Lying in bed I would try to ignore the homely sounds downstairs and the aromas of the breakfast that my mother was cooking, and instead focus my thoughts on the girls of my dreams. Eventually my stomach would begin growling, and I would give up, but the effort itself was, I maintain, important intellectual training, and, carried into adulthood, it has certainly helped me to become the master of my thoughts. I hope that if I continue this rigorous intellectual drill—which I like to refer to as “meditation”—I will be able to keep a firm grip on my mental faculties right into my years of physical decrepitude.
That morning was another story. Nothing I had ever dreamed could compare to what was beside me, on either side of me, in the twins’ big bed. I woke early, before the girls. I blinked into the morning light, found them still in bed beside me, remembered where I was, and wondered what in the world was going to happen to me now.
The thought occurred to me that the prudent thing to do would be to slip away silently, but Margot and Martha were too delicious to desert. For an hour or more, I lay there observing them, inspecting them, enjoying them. Slowly, slowly, I leaned over each one in turn, so that I could kiss her, just barely touch my lips to hers, and each of them twitched her lips when mine touched them, and shuddered, as if she had felt a draft. Their foreheads were utterly smooth, entirely untroubled, but their lips were pouted, as if sleeping annoyed them a little. Minutes passed while I marveled at the honey-colored roundness of their shoulders. I wanted to see more of them, of course, but in the night, as the chill had penetrated the stone walls, they had pulled their blankets over us, so I couldn’t see much more beyond those honey-colored shoulders. I tried, gingerly, to pull the covers away from them, but they stirred in their sleep and grabbed at the blanket, and pouted some more, so I didn’t get very far. I let my head fall to the pillow and lay quietly on my back between them, trying not to wake them, and concentrated on recalling everything that had happened, every detail, starting with the moment when I walked out the back door of my house and headed for the Glynns’, since it seemed to me, at the time, that my good fortune must have begun at that moment, when I left my house, and not at any earlier moment: not, say, when they taught me to roll my peas, or when they decided to teach me to roll my peas, or when I was born.
I must have passed another hour in the punctilious reconstruction of that astonishing night, until, at last, the girls began to stretch and turn. They smiled, they reached out to me, they sidled up to me, they wrapped their slender legs around me, and I would have been entirely happy to have had that blissful snuggling go on and on throughout the day and for days to come. I could gladly have devoted myself entirely to playing my part in it. I think that I felt—but at the time, of course, my mind wasn’t working very well, and these thoughts and feelings that I’m attributing to myself are only the suppositions of a fifty-year-old man about his barely-thirteen-year-old self—that I might never go home again, that I had been ensnared, as boys in fairy tales sometimes were, by enchantresses, that although I had found bliss, I was really a prisoner of it, and now I would be constrained to live my life within these stone walls, a prisoner of pleasure, captive in this enormous bed, abed with twins.
Wonderful.
I grinned a goofy grin and slid a little farther under the covers.
The girls had other ideas.
[to be continued]
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🎧 845: The next morning . . .