Footy

ADAM AND JASPER (6)

Adam was accepted into Montmorency, Melbourne University’s most prestigious residential college, an ivy-covered stone pseudo-gothic replica of Britain’s ancient university colleges. Apart from a few country students, Montmorency was the dumping ground for the product of Melbourne’s eastern suburbs expensive private schools, where ‘mummeh’ and ‘daddeh’ played tennis and threw cocktail parties and voted for the right-wing Liberal party.

Adam was desperately lonely at college, because he was from the country, because he was a closeted gay, because he was brilliant even for a Montmorency student, because he was poor, but mostly because he was an outsider. He knew by then that he always would be an outsider.

“Hi.” Adam was on refectory duty. Everybody had to take their turn clearing the tables, cleaning up spills, stacking the dirty crockery and cutlery in the giant dishwashers.

“G’day. I’m Jasper”

“I’m Adam. How’re you going?”

“I could do without this,” said Jasper gesturing at the greasy plates.

“Yeah.” Adam shrugged. He was used to hard work.

“Want some weed afterwards?”

Adam disliked dope. It made his heart beat too fast, and he worried about the loss of control that it engendered in him.

“Yes. Cool.”

When they had stacked the last of the plates and knives and forks, he followed Jasper to his room on the third floor.

Jasper had shoulder-length curling honey blond hair and green eyes. He possessed an endearing casual charm and confidence. Adam would probably have fallen for anyone who befriended him, he was so lonely. But Jasper was charming in a way which quite misled Adam. By the time he realized that Jasper was straight, it was too late. He was in love. They would spend hours in each others’ rooms discussing girls, what they would do when they left uni, the best computer games, music, and life.

Jasper was on the rowing team, and Adam would get up at the crack of dawn to take the clanging Swanston Street tram down to the banks of the Yarra, where huddled against the cold, in the same jersey and windcheater he’d used as a teenager, he would watch as Jasper and his team rowed up and down the river. The snug lycra bodysuits the rowers wore showed off Jasper’s body to perfection, and Adam would covertly admire it. Afterwards they would have coffee and breakfast on Lygon Street. Jasper always paid. His family was rich.

At night, in bed, Adam would imagine Jasper fucking him. He had never had sex with anybody, so he had no idea what it felt like. In the Uni library he’d found some books in one of the stackrooms and had read about the pleasure a man could get from having another man inside him. It had excited him and he wanted to try it out for himself. But he didn’t know any blokes and he was much too shy to try to pick up a stranger. So he would imagine Jasper thrusting into him, while his own hand stroked his cock to ecstasy. While it was happening, it didn’t matter that it wasn’t real. When he went to sleep, he would pretend that Jasper’s arms were round him, and that Jasper whispered “I love you” into the back of his neck.

One Saturday, late at night, after a drinking session followed by a joint, he was sitting on Jasper’s bed, his legs crossed. They were listening to Simon and Garfunkel’s ‘Sound of Silence’.

“I love you Jas,” said suddenly feeling nothing in himself or Jasper that could stop him admitting it.

“I love you too, Adam.”

“No I meant love, you know, proper love.”

“You mean, like boy-girl love?” asked Jasper with a frown.

“Yeah,” said Adam, not looking at Jasper.

Jasper took his hand.

“I can’t love you that way, Adam. You’re my friend, my best friend, but... I’m just not, you know...”

“Yeah, I know, Jas. It doesn’t matter.”

But it did.

They remained friends, though the friendship inevitably became more awkward. Jasper took to giving Adam huge hugs when they met or parted, to show that he cared. But to Jasper it wasn’t really important, for he could never truly understand what it was like to be so thoroughly excluded from the comfortable broad mass of humankind, and in a while, without him even noticing what he’d done, he had let slip that Adam was gay. The cruelties of university are more subtle than at school. Adam could see in the ironic gleams in people’s eyes that they knew. In a way, he was glad. It saved him the trouble of pretending.

Though Beryl Titney paid Adam’s college fees – at some hardship to herself, which he knew only too well – she couldn’t afford to give him an allowance. He worked in Coles supermarket part time, packing shelves, got a Saturday job at Allans, the giant music store, which meant he had to give up going to watch Jasper row. Now that he knew he’d wasted his attentions on an unresponsive object, he spent less time there, though he still loved Jasper, and they were still friends.

After they left uni, they drifted apart.

And eventually, Adam stopped fantasizing that he was with Jasper when he jerked off.

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