The Beauty of Men Never Dies: An Autobiographical Novel

A Dream

17 A Dream Idreamed last night I was walking on a wide stretch of beach with Ricky, my childhood lover. We were lovers from when we were very small children through our teen years. He was always going to marry me. As we walked we could see white clouds piled high before us, with an opening at horizon level, through which the setting sun shone. I could feel Ricky’s penis against me from behind as we walked, and I anticipated that sometime before long he would be within me. As we looked at the horizon, there was a beautiful sailing ship turning in the wind. It was much more like a Maxfield Parrish painting than anything one might actually see in nature. We were walking across the sand toward low-lying buildings that were film studios where I was going to work. Ricky was accompanying me. As we approached the buildings, there was a group of people posed in the sand, framed by an aperture in the clouds on the horizon beyond them. They were all in white. Again, it was very beautiful and very Maxfield Parrish. As I slowly awoke, I thought that perhaps it was a flash forward as to what heaven might be like. And then I thought that it was more certainly what I might imagine heaven to be like. Ricky has been dead for a decade at least, and we never saw each other as adults. We had a relationship where our bodies loved to make love, although I was never in love with him as I was to be with other men later. It was a kind of love relationship but not a romantic one. Perhaps 18 A Dream the kind people had before they learned about romantic love in the nineteenth century. ...