Beau & Eros: A novel by J.C.Sutton

By J. C. Sutton

Her name is Ann. Her journey from smart, sexy bookworm with self-esteem issues to wise, sexy bookwoman who’s resolved them is the story she tells in J.C. Sutton's new novel, Beau & Eros.

The Beau of the title is the beauty of the books Ann can’t do without. It is also the beautiful family she

• Language: English
• Publisher: WordsWorth Publications
• Release date: Sep 24, 2019
• ISBN: 9781733074919

Book preview

cover-image, Beau & Eros

Beau & Eros

a novel by

J. C. SUTTON

—

WORDSWORTH PUBLICATIONS

BEAU & EROS

Copyright © 2019  J. C. Sutton

WordsWorth Publications

P.O.Box 84

West Creek, NJ 08092

First printing August 2019

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used, reproduced, scanned, distributed or stored by any means or in any printed or electronic form, including video, audio or mechanical, without the written permission of the author and the publisher. For permission and information, contact:

www.wordsworthpublications.com

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events or locales is coincidental.

ISBN: 978-1-7330749-1-9

Cover design by Dawn Frances Simon

Cover photograph courtesy of J.M. Carbonara

Book design by Jason Travis

Also by J. C. Sutton

Blood Sisters (e-title Antoinette)

Ann Smith Stoddard tells her coming-of-age story as it happens.

From the not-always-fabulous 50’s to a 50th college reunion,

the beauty of her friendships—BEAU—and of loving—EROS—

grow a smart, sexy bookworm into a wise and sexy book-woman. 

BEAU & EROS: a novel by J.C. Sutton

Visit the author at www.wordsworthpublications.com

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In  J.C.Sutton’s new novel, Ann Stoddard learns there’s no such thing as free love. From reading books to misreading men, Ann tries not to make the same mistakes twice. While her journey is unique, this is also the story of a generation that lost its innocence and faith trying to make the world a better place and finding contentment and happiness in friendship and love.

Peter Murphy founded Murphy Writing of Stockton University. Leader of workshops and writing retreats here and abroad, he has received fellowships from The National Endowment for the Humanities, among others. Murphy’s ten books and chapbooks include The Man Who Never Was and More Challenges for the Delusional.

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The language is breathtakingly beautiful. I love the narrator’s voice, and she’s a character I happily spent time with. It is a wonderful picture of a life lived to the fullest and wisdom won hard.

Cathie Cush, C+C Communications, author, Shipwrecks

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"Beau & Eros is unique in that it’s ultimately about an older woman’s continuing erotic life, which I think is a very important – and rarely discussed – subject indeed!"

Rosemary Daniell founded and leads the uniquely empowering Zona Rosa writing communities in the U.S. and abroad. Her book Secrets of the Zona Rosa: How Writing (and Sisterhood) Can Change Women’s Lives is a go-to for all writers. Her other titles include The Woman Who Spilled Words All Over Herself and the Palimpsest prizewinning memoir Fatal Flowers, and several poetry collections.

Dedication

To family, mentors and colleagues;

advance readers, authors and editors;

artists, poets and friends: this book’s for you.

The story could not have been told without your help. I am grateful for it.

— Before —

The thick, creamy envelope arrives by mail six weeks before the event. The invitation inside is engraved and there’s a self-addressed, stamped R.S.V.P. envelope. Delmarva University doesn’t want me to dance at a wedding, though—it’s a class reunion they’ve gone all out for. I haven’t made it to earlier reunions. Is it worth the round-trip airfare from Florida, not to mention long-weekend expenses, to make this one?

Fifty years is a big deal, and so after dinner tonight I visit the website created for our class of ’65. I scan the highlights from former classmates. They crow about their retirements and their grand-kids’ achievements and their bucket-list check-offs. The catch-up questionnaire is different. Most of the questions call for the same sort of answer I’d put on a resume. The last one halts me in mid-sip of my after-dinner red: Name a guilty pleasure from back in our day you still enjoy these days.

Wow is all I think before my fingers start typing: Do you really want to know? Back in our day, it was sex. Plenty of pleasure and plenty of guilt, thanks to a really religious upbringing. I take a deep breath and type on. Am I enjoying sex these days? You bet. Tops my guilt-free pleasure list. Along with that bookworm reading habit I’ve yet to break.

I take a long swallow, staring at the screen, wondering whether to hit Send. No. But if I do decide to reunite with people I haven’t seen since 1965, would it be over-sharing to get into it? Taboo or not taboo? Good question—for another night. Just now, I’m yawning.

— 1 —

Is anything down there a sin against the

I must be pure in word and deed commandment?

Our classroom’s turn for morning recess. All the boys are on one side of the play yard, all the girls on the other. You could fit swings and slides and seesaws on the concrete in between, but nobody has.

I finished reading Black Beauty last night, so I’m starting My Friend Flicka tonight. I’ll request National Velvet next bookmobile day. My old neighborhood in Indiana didn’t have one, but one comes around here in Missouri. I look for it more than I do the ice cream truck.

It’s the last week we’ll be fourth graders. Girls are allowed to wear dresses instead of uniforms. I’m not good at dodging a dodgeball or getting over the jump rope in high over the water. I am good at thinking up games some of the other girls like to play, so I go up to one I know is horse crazy.

If we untie our dress sashes, I tell her, we could pretend they’re reins.

She likes the idea, and soon there are six of us galloping around, grabbing reins and yelling giddyap. When Sister Bernadette comes out to clang her end of recess bell, we all trot over.

What in the name of—dear God! She shouts, pointing at what’s left of our dress sashes. The other girls point at me. Sister Bernadette yanks me out of line and marches me inside to the principal’s office for the first time in four whole years. She pushes me to a regular-size desk right in front of Sister Joseph’s huge one, bows to her and backs away.

There’s a big framed photograph of Pope Pius XII in his white cassock on the wall behind Sister Joseph, and a smaller one of President Eisenhower in his general’s uniform next to it. She’s scary no matter what. With her cheeks puffing up, red as apples, she’s even scarier.

"Instigator," she snaps.

I never heard the word, but I can tell it’s a bad one. I have heard irresponsible and thoughtless and stupid. That’s the worst. I have to act like I’m not scared. Crossing legs is a no-no, but I’ve dug myself such a big no-no hole with the sashes, I cross them anyway while she goes on scolding: "Those dresses are property. You instigated property damage. Sinful."

I scrunch down, tuck my skinny right foot behind the left, and squeeze. The feeling is so good I squeeze some more, starting up around my hips. That feels even better, all the way to my down there place. I squeeze tighter; feel a thump-thump like my heart’s beating down both legs, right to my toe tips.

Stop slouching, missy! Sister Joseph’s ruler cracks down.

I bolt upright, back from—was I instigating?—feet on the floor, hands under my sash-less dress. Sister Bernadette’s recess bell rings through an open window.

Dismissed, Sister Joseph snarls.

My legs are shaking as I stand up. They’re still shaking when I get to my classroom door. Is it from the thing that just happened, under the desk where Sister Joseph didn’t see? Or maybe it’s from never being sent to her office before? Somebody goes there every day. Yesterday it was Tommy Thompson, for sticking his already-been-chewed gum under his desk. Sister Theresa spotted it during the atom bomb drill when she went along the rows checking if we did our duck-and-cover correctly. When he got back, he bragged about his ruler whacks. Tommy’s a troublemaker, though. This is me. Goody-goody four-eyes me.

I make it down the middle aisle dividing the six rows of desks, four to a row on each side. Everyone keeps eyes front, watching Sister put our spelling words on the blackboard. One of the girls who played horses has the first desk on the end of my row.

It’s okay, she whispers as I edge past. My mom sews good.

I have to stay inside at afternoon recess to write I will respect the property of others one hundred times in my best Palmer method cursive before I’m allowed to erase the blackboard. I think while I write, about the thump-thump thing. I either instigated it or it just happened. Whichever it was, it took me somewhere else. Not the way books do, but away.

Is it a sin? I wonder. If it is, is it venial or mortal? There’s a drawing in our catechism of a bottle of milk labeled Your Soul; the black specks in it are venial sins, the black blobs are mortal. My sins are specks, mostly, for breaking the commandment to honor your father and mother. Mortal sin would be slapping Mom or Dad. The back-talk I sometimes can’t help gets forgiven on Fridays when our class goes to confession. Is anything down there a sin against the I must be pure in word and deed commandment?

Guessing is pretty much how I get through the summer of ’54, when I discover I can make myself feel the same thump-thump way if I’m nervous about something. There’s more to be nervous about when fifth grade starts. I sit where nobody is looking when I make it happen. I do it at times like when I hear being pure in deed definitely means no down there touch. I’m not touching, though, so I’m safe.

I don’t want to move again, but Dad travels to sell chemicals and his company gives him the Ohio territory. I’ll miss the park with the swimming pool I could walk to. I took free lessons there and I love to swim, but there’s nothing like that near our new house. I hope there’s a bookmobile.

We’re taught more about our wombs in sixth grade. "A special place inside the mother" it says in the pamphlets we’re only allowed to read in class, "where a baby grows before it is born." Not a word about while it’s being born. I think it could be through your belly button but I’d never ask Mom about it and Dad’s not around to ask. I wouldn’t ask him anyway. Too embarrassed.

Another pamphlet almost explains things: When the time comes, the precious new life leaves the womb, emerging from a special spot between the mother’s legs. What time? What spot?

Halfway through seventh grade, Dad’s given the Maryland territory, so I start eighth in the company’s home state of Delaware.

I learn at least one fact of life from a non-Catholic neighbor kid I’m not supposed to play with. It’s just the two of us in her kitchen one Saturday, when she opens the refrigerator door, reaches in, and holds out a hot dog: Looks just like my brother’s wiener, she hoots. You know from wieners, right?

Right. I don’t have a brother, but I know what she’s talking about. There’s even a holy card in my prayer book that shows the one Baby Jesus has.

"Wiener’s more fun to say than penis. She squeezes her eyes shut. And you know boys put their penis inside your vagina, right? They open again. I nod. If it spits, that makes a baby."

Spits?

And the baby comes out of your vagina too. Her nose wrinkles. Same place your pee comes out.

Eeeuw, I hear myself say. Ick. But she’s just answered a question or two.

I notice other things besides the ones that have to do with making babies. I wonder about them until they bother me enough to raise my hand in religion class: Why can’t girls be nuns and priests?

I don’t get an answer. I get pursed lips instead, and dark looks, along with a Sister Francis lecture about loss of faith. She starts with me, but spreads it to the whole class.

I know better than to ask about the cross-legged thumping that’s given me secret pleasure since fourth grade. My ankle hooks happen mostly when I’m nervous. Lately I’m getting nervous flutters watching this boy in my class who transferred here all the way from California. He has curly brown hair and big brown eyes and he’s so tall his legs reach under the desk in front of him. I’ve never talked to him and vice versa, but he’s the reason I’ve given in the urge I’ve named an ankle hook.

Impure touching is the mortal sin to avoid. Squeezing myself in the bathtub can’t be impure touching. If I cover my hand with a washcloth, I’ve reasoned—I’m a whiz at reasoning—it’s not touching. 

Complications arrive with my pubic hair. I’m a brunette, but this new hair is black. It grows in thick and curly, not a bit like the straight, thin hair I wear in a French twist because it won’t bouffant. The hair between my legs grows long enough to braid. I do that sometimes, careful to keep my fingers away from the skin beneath. Fingers are the crucial component of impure touch. Mine only touch hair, so there’s no confess-able sin. Talk about hairsplitting.

Pubic grooming and ankle hooking graduate from eighth grade with me and go on to the all-girl Academy of the Sacred Heart where the same order of nuns teach. True, it’s a sectarian, parochial education, but I’m also learning how to learn, which is fine with me.

Because I’m smart, I’m on scholarship. Mom likes to add alec to smart, but that’s Mom. Too smart for my own good, she says, and usually adds something about my having a smart mouth. I imagine I’m visiting her from a foreign country, an exchange student and not her daughter. It doesn’t get my goat as much that way. 

Mom doesn’t cook, or sew, or leave the house for anything except Saturday confession, Sunday Mass, and the holy days of obligations when she takes her hair out of pin curls and changes out of the housecoat. If Dad’s traveling, we wait for a woman from the Altar Society to get her there and back. They don’t seem to care that she never invites them to come in for coffee. Or tea.

Mom has headaches and trouble breathing and swollen ankles and bad knees and more than one doctor. She likes to lower her newspaper to give me a look. The look. The thankless child with your nose always in a book look. She blames my reading for the glasses I’ve had to wear since third grade. And she blames Dad for never being around.

It isn’t never, really, and when he is home he’s better at the talk and even the hug end of things. He agrees with Mom about my being a bookworm, though. Neither of them is what I’d call a reader. Dad claims the obituaries in the newspaper are Mom’s Irish box scores. Mom says Dad’s jealous because he’s not Irish. He says so what, he’s American. They’re both only children, like me, but they’re also children of the goddamn Great Depression. That’s what they both call it. It’s the main reason for living within our means. I hear that a lot.

Dad’s parents are both gone—that’s what he says instead of dead. Mom’s are alive and living in the middle of Texas somewhere. I get a five-dollar bill from them in my birthday cards, and they sent ten when I graduated last June. They telephone Mom once a month or so. When she puts me on, I make small talk about the weather and my grades.

There’s no school bus and Mom’s license expired, but it’s only a few blocks to a regular bus stop. The ride is great for the people-watching I enjoy almost as much as reading. Besides reading, and riding my bike, I don’t do much after school, or on weekends.

My only pet so far was a neighbor cat’s kitten. I begged for it until Mom and Dad gave in. I named him Fred for Fred Astaire, because he looked like he was wearing a tuxedo. Fred’s litter box never left my room. Neither did he. That was the deal. Fred’s fleas hatched in the hall carpet. That wasn’t the deal. I haven’t asked for another pet. Not much point. I read about them, though. And I ask about braces to fix the gap between my two front teeth.

Other girls in my class have them.

Other girls’ families can afford them, Mom points out.

Be grateful you have as much as you have, Dad puts in. You’re not growing up in the goddam Great Depression.

Great way to end a discussion before it begins.

We’ve moved so much I never have made a best friend. I do have a few school friends, and I’m invited to an occasional birthday party, but that’s about it. I count on book friends, and when we got our first television, I wished Annette on The Mickey Mouse Club was a real one.

I get my first period a week after a layperson’s lecture on the onset of menses—no nun would ever discuss such things. She moves her pointer along the posters she’s propped on the chalk tray: ripening eggs to Kotex pads. I can’t help noticing everything is black and white. Not a drop of red.

I feel my blood before I see it, turning the toilet bowl water so crimson I scream. And keep screaming, because it keeps coming.

Mom knocks before she comes in the bathroom. Where is that thing from school? she asks. She means the Welcome to Womanhood kit the layperson handed out.

Second shelf down in the linen closet. I’ve stopped screaming. Behind the blankets.

I’m still on the toilet when she gets back and hands it to me.

You know being a woman means you can have a baby.

I know.

Remember that.

I will. I don’t expect hugs or kisses because it’s not exactly a cause for celebration. I find myself smiling anyway. Mom smiles back, and leaves me to it. I manage the belt and the pins and the pad, and after the cramps go away, there’s something about the feel of that heavy, full thing going on inside me, between my navel and what I still think of as down there, that’s, well, pleasurable.

Anybody who reads as much as I do is bound to fantasize. Mine come from characters in books, or the places their stories take me. Not much boy-girl goes on in them. Girl-girl fantasy? Don’t see the least signs in books or school. And it’s impossible to slip anything, fantasy or otherwise, past the nuns. They’re everywhere in the corridors—not halls, corridors—where we stay to the right and keep custody of the eyes, downcast, no roving allowed. How do nuns keep custody and still see every damn thing that goes on? I wonder more than once.

When it’s cold, we play volleyball indoors, field hockey outdoors when it’s not. The only excuse to sit out, aside from being sick enough to go home, is It’s my time of the month.

My breasts arrive not long after my pubic hair. I like them, though not enough to risk impure touching. They’re not too big, not too small and they stand up and out all by themselves. So do my nipples, from the middle of matching puffs of pinky brown skin. I’d love to have a Maidenform bra like the other girls, but Mom says they’re too expensive. After gym, I settle my breasts into the stiff cones of my no-name bra before I stuff the wet one in my locker with my bloomers. We’re supposed to take them home and launder them, but nobody does.

Fraternizing outside the faith, especially with boys, is frowned upon unless they attend the parochial high school. I’m not allowed to date, but I spend time where those boys are because their school has a fully-equipped stage. My school doesn’t do plays. Mass, especially high Mass, is drama enough. We can, however, perform in the musicals they put on twice a year.

I audition for everything and land at least one part a year in a comedy or musical. I really like putting on a different personality along with a costume, and the applause when we take our curtain call bows sends the good kind of shivers up my spine. I also enjoy helping out backstage, where there’s a battered old upright piano. This year, there’s a boy named Eddie who knows how to play Great Balls of Fire on it.

Eddie’s more of a Troy Donahue than a Jerry Lee Lewis. He’s going into the seminary after graduation, but I still kind of have a crush on him. Impromptu dancing happens sometimes, girls with girls, mostly. The boys watch and applaud, or do their own dancing to Eddie’s excellent rendition of Jailhouse Rock.

— 2 —

I giggle. Nerves, yes, but something else.

Something as frightening as it is beckoning.

Junior year begins in the 50’s and ends in the 60’s. I’ve gone from the chorus to actual singing parts: Ado Annie in Oklahoma! and Carrie Pipperidge in Carousel. At the end of the summer before senior year, I spot a notice in the entertainment section of the newspaper announcing open auditions for a popular community theater’s production of Our Town. I read the Thornton Wilder play for extra-credit last year, and I’d really like to play Emily Webb, who marries the boy next door, dies in childbirth, and comes back, invisible, to her grieving family.

A classmate’s mother drives us to the auditions where we’re up against thirteen other girls. Polly’s too nervous to get her lines right, even with the script pages in her hand. I have Emily’s lines by heart and say them looking out into the dark of theater where the director and the other deciders are sitting. Three hours and two callbacks later, they pass around the clipboard with the cast list. I’m Emily!

Polly didn’t get a part, so I keep my thrill to myself on our way back.

Dad’s home the night of the first rehearsal, so he drives me to their theater building. It’s nothing like high school. A circle of folding chairs is set up on stage. Each seat has a blue-covered script, cast list, rehearsal schedule, and play contract to sign.

Mrs. Webb, my stage mother, reminds me of Doris Day, all blonde and bubbly. Mr. Webb, my stage father, is no Rock Hudson. Not with those chubby cheeks, and the sandy hair balding back on both sides of his widow’s peak. He’s shorter than she is, and not much taller than I am. He wants us to call him Douglas. I would’ve anyway. He’s no Dougie. He has great eyes, though—clear, bright green, framed by surprisingly dark lashes, almost as long and thick as mine.

Dad’s waiting in the back row while we stack the chairs after the read-through. He can’t wait to tell me my stage mother told him she’ll get me to rehearsals after tonight.

No trouble at all, she assures me.

Thanks. That’s great, Mrs. Williams.

Call me Betty, please, ok?

School life and home life take second places to life in Wilder’s imagined town of Grover’s Corners. Douglas and I are the first to go off-book. Knowing my lines makes rehearsals even better.

Dad’s out of town on opening night, so Betty insists on taking Mom with us. Knowing she’s in the audience adds to the strongest surge of stage fright I’ve ever had, but when the curtain goes up, the fear dissolves into Emily and her other world.

In the crowded lobby afterward, Mom’s as uncomfortable as I expected her to be. I shepherd her to an unoccupied love seat and head back to my stage parents.

Here’s our girl, Betty crows to the eager first-nighters.

Douglas leans around her, reaches for my hand. You did a terrific job tonight.

We’re at the end of the impromptu receiving line. Betty’s in her element; I’m not.

"Remember it’s Emily they’re gushing over," Douglas whispers in my ear. He knows I’m having a hard time with the thanks and the smiling. Becoming Emily again, for these last few minutes, makes it easier.

Betty breaks the silence first on our way home: You must be so proud of your daughter!

Yes, Mom says, adding It’s taken a lot of her time.

She’s really held her own among all these adults. Including an Actor’s Equity member.

More silence, before Mom comments, Ann’s an only, so it’s nothing special.

Yes, it is!

Well, she was sensational tonight. How did you enjoy the show?

I liked parts of it, but—all those people in the graveyard at the end. Ann shouldn’t have died.

I get to be Emily every weekend until the end of November. I don’t want to leave Grover’s Corners, but have to take that last bow and help strike the set anyway. The cast party is tonight, but that isn’t the same. When it’s over, so is the something that was all mine, all Ann Smith’s, not daughter of, or any other of.

Betty phones at six o’clock before the cast party. Have to drive my husband to the airport.

Your real husband?

My real husband, she laughs. I’ll get there, but not much before ten. But your Emily father will pick you up in an hour.

Douglas’ wife isn’t with him. Joanna’s not much for cast partying, he explains.

She didn’t look like she would be. I cringe at the unkind thought. She had stood quietly off to one side on opening night. Not pretty, but not ugly either, hair in a bun, matching pearl choker and earrings that looked real.

Douglas is quiet, so I am too. His Volvo is small, but not enough for us to be touching. It has a citrus smell, faint and pleasant. Or maybe his aftershave? He’s changed into his street clothes: cordovan penny loafers and a jacquard-patterned wool vest over a crisp white shirt, sleeves rolled up, button-down collar open.

He’s a good driver, relaxed and confident. I’m not relaxed or confident, but the silence gets to me. He’s a physics professor at the state university, so I take a deep breath and break it with Do you wear a coat and tie to class?

I do. His bright green eyes move from the road to me, and back. Your school requires uniforms, doesn’t it?

It does. Blazer and tie. Well, more of a scarf. Under our collars.

Lovely campus, Douglas says. I pass it going to and from work.

Small world, is the best I can come up with.

Indeed. Are you by any chance studying physics?

I wouldn’t chance it. His laugh encourages me to keep going. Honest. I know it’s a cliché, but math isn’t my subject. And you need math for physics, right?

Right. There’s such beauty in it, though. He shifts his grip on the wheel slightly, gives me another look. "Euclid alone has looked on beauty bare…"

I’m stunned. Edna St. Vincent Millay! That’s the first line of one of her sonnets!

Favorite poet, is she?

Oh, yes!

Well, Euclid’s a favorite mathematician. His green eyes are fixed on the road, but the one I can see is crinkling at the corners. Other favorites? he’s asking. How about musicals?

I’ve never seen a Broadway show, but I have original cast recordings.

"The Fantasticks must be one of them."

Wow. How did you know?

"I also happen to be a Fantasticks fan."

I start the song the girl my age sings, about being special, and Douglas joins me! We sing together, about her praying to be anything but normal. Something sparks between us. Something not at all the way we were onstage.

The cast party is held in the director’s basement rec room. A Formica-topped bar bristles with whiskey, wine, and beer bottles. There are big bowls of potato chips, smaller bowls of onion dip, platters of cocktail-size pigs in blankets. There’s even rumaki, a fancy appetizer made from a chicken liver and a water chestnut wrapped in bacon and broiled.

Everybody gets pretty drunk early on, and nobody gets less drunk later. Douglas is the exception. I’m sitting on a sofa that’s more love seat when he sits on the other half.

I’d like to share something with you, Ann, he says. I hope you won’t be offended.

I shake my head no and smile and wait for him to go on. Share! Please share!

Are you familiar with the theory of the old soul?

Souls? Oh yes. Since first grade, before, even. But I don’t remember hearing anything about a soul—theory? Is it something to do with physics?

No, not really. It’s more on the order of a philosophy, a belief, that some of us have lived before.

Oh, okay. Reincarnation.

Yes and no. He looks away, clears his throat. Some people are born with wisdom, understanding, insight, that go far beyond what we consider the norm. He looks right at me: Do you understand?

I nod yes this time, smile again, and wait.

You, Ann. You are an old soul. He looks away. "It was impossible to avoid realizing it, while we were inhabiting Our Town. He clears his throat. I am a good Catholic, Ann, as you are. I am also an old soul. He clears his throat again, And I am—married. There can never be divorce."

I sit very still.

Joanna is not an old soul. Douglas moves closer, close enough to reenact our one brief onstage hug. There were times it gave me a sort of jolt.