The Beautiful Room Is Empty (11 page)

He was up and laughing again. “Champagne, I feel in the mood for champagne.” He twirled the two bottles ready and waiting in an ice bucket. “Where is that girl? Isn’t she fabulous!
So
glamorous! I can’t believe she likes me. I suppose you think it’s all frightfully lesbian, you horrid cynic!” And again he was back at my side, this time kissing me. His mouth was wet and sweet from the full red mouthwash
he was always swigging. I felt a floral rapture springing up inside me, as though a huge sunflower were about to poke out of my mouth, my entrails about to turn into soft ropes of wisteria, my cock into a red-hot poker. Everything in me rose up to greet him, and Willy grabbed my pants and shook my erection as if it were a hand: “Average, as you say.” He bit my ear, “Sorry, doll, I don’t go for pencil meat. I’m a hopeless size queen.”

He seemed delighted to have demonstrated his power over me. Buffeted by his own witticisms and sexual splashiness, he was smiling a really huge smile. I saw in him the wide-eyed boy I sometimes impersonated, which made me concede the field to him. He was so much better at it, so much more appealing. I could still feel in my palms the girth of his tight, muscled, turned waist as he’d wriggled out of my arms a minute ago, exactly as though he’d been a small but powerful fish, a rosy trout breaking through the ice with the thrust of his tail.

Then Annie came in and she and William flattered each other about their appearance and kissed, standing, for a long time as I sat and looked on—crotch-height, child-height. They were certainly aware of me and were posing for me.

I left the young lovers after they’d assured me how much they adored me. They had even laughingly asked me to be the best man. Outside, it was dark already although only four o’clock, and fresh snow was falling in the quadrangle. I could hear typewriters clattering and see genies of steam lifting off the heated shower windows in the dorms. I passed the chemistry building and looked down at a lecturer in a basement laboratory. So much activity, I thought, and none of it immediately productive. I considered only farmers and steel-workers to be truly productive. The notion of intellectual labor struck me as purest sophistry.

I turned back and headed for the student union. I’d
heard tonight was nude swimming for men only in the union pool. The showers were full, two facing rows of cubicles without curtains. I stationed myself in one and looked and looked across the aisle while trying not to stare. There was the man with the enormous black glasses now squinting glassless, and there, tucked in a protected pocket under his gut, was his penis. Two down was a swimmer with high, molded buttocks. As he turned, his ass seemed to be shaped by invisible hands, like the rubber balls boxers knead to strengthen their grip. I wondered how William Everett Hunton would evaluate the size of each penis—and suddenly a panic seized me, for I realized that I truly was limited by what God had given me, that I wasn’t a cloud of uncertainty but an animal with certain attributes and not others.

Perhaps because I hated my sexuality and believed it could be redirected, I’d come to see every aspect of my being as vague and shifting, and in that very cloudiness had lain my definition: I was the boy who hadn’t started living yet. But now I felt stigmatized by my actuality, by the mole between my shoulder blades, by the botched job of my circumcision, so that a dewlap hung down on one side but not the other. A Psych major had told me just yesterday that the army could spot queers by showing them slides of nude men. In spite of themselves, the queers’ eyes dilated a fraction—and that “in spite of” enraged me and scared me, for my pride, yes, my pride insisted I could be whatever I chose. Every morning the
tabula
was
rasa
. Maybe that was why the Buddhist doctrine of the non-soul, the
anattā
, attracted me so much, because it suggested I was potentially everything and actually nothing. I could wake up one morning gay or straight—or as nothing, since Buddhism seemed to annihilate such essences. I was afraid to make a choice of any kind.

From the showers and toilets my cruising moved out into the world. Although my school reputedly had a large
percentage of gay male students, no one was open about it and street cruising was too blatant. The real screamers, as I learned years later, drove hours and hours to a bar in Toledo, a lively spot with drag queens, hustlers, bull dykes, and couples dressed identically and sporting matching wedding rings, the site of nightly brawls and weekly police raids. Nevertheless, in our college town some married men cruised in their cars and a few students discreetly hung around late at night outside the union.

I became the most persistent street cruiser in town. For someone who till now had had a rather irritable, short-fused fussiness about wasting time, I was suddenly willing to turn whole acres of time over to pasture. Like a hunting lion, indifferent to the beauties of nature and the night but excruciatingly alive to even the smallest twitch or chirr, I paid no attention to the buildings around me and after staring at them hundreds of hours could not have told you if they had Ionic or Corinthian capitals or even columns; yet the moment someone male lingered for even a second, slowed his pace a fraction, or looked back with a frown, conspicuously snapping his fingers in the air to mime remembering something (transparent alibi), I had taken his photo, cured it, and glued it into a special identity kit just for him. I learned I couldn’t go home unsatisfied. At the beginning of the evening I’d rush haughtily past Fatty or Gramps, but four hours later I’d be on my knees in an alleyway doing him.

And I learned once is never enough. Nor is twice.

I felt a blind hatred for (and shame before) anyone who interrupted my cruising—a strolling family or a boy and girl on a date who sat on a bench to neck, if that bench was my territory.

The boredom I underwent was intense, painful, hard work, since all disciplined thoughts had been crowded out and soon in the toilets I’d even traded in my Chinese flashcards for
unadulterated stupor. I learned that everyone else in the world was less interested in sex than I. The others reached a point where they’d had enough. They stood, buttoned up, and hurried off, irked they’d wasted so much time on nothing. But I had no shred of dignity left to button. The other fairies could be spooked by a slowly passing cop car, or they would withdraw when the prey became too scarce. Not me. I was still there, blue with the cold, beating my gloved hands for warmth.

I’d had the same feeling when I was a child. I was the one who wanted to play late into the cold and the dark and to roughhouse (you be the rough, I’ll be the house). Just to feel that contact with other boys’ bodies, their knees burning into my biceps, their weight resting on my chest, or a strong forearm choking my neck from behind (I leaned closer into my tormentor)—to feel this contact, I was willing to defy the other boys, refuse to say
uncle
, or say it and recant.

Now I spent so much time on this harsh exchange, where I was selling myself for free but still could never find enough takers, where the buyers I despised despised the merchandise I’d become, that all other human reciprocities (between friends, teacher and student, parent and child) appeared excessively kind, extraordinarily considerate. And yet I couldn’t help thinking that other people were nursing illusions of which I’d been disabused. Other people were somehow naive. My mother prayed every day of her life that my father would come back to her—or, failing him, some mystical Herb, Abe, or Will—and she listed her own attractions, her professional standing, her fine character, her accomplishments as hostess and conversationalist, her cultural background; but I knew she was fooling herself, that men were quantitative not qualitative, that they only knew how to count years, inches, wrinkles, dollars. Just as my chest was too narrow, my glasses too thick, my penis too small, she was too fat, old, poor.
When Annie would tell me she was sure William Everett Hunton would come to love her because she had an inquisitive mind and a true heart capable of devotion, I thought, “Cut it, lady, just show me the figures.”

To that primitive skepticism I now added cynicism—not a mustache-twirling glee but a cynicism I took and ate with barnyard docility. People were bodies, I thought; the only valuable people have beautiful bodies; since my body isn’t beautiful, I’m worthless. That was the humble feed I pecked at night and day.

Every time I returned to the Main Hall toilets I thought to myself, “Well, here we are again.” Unlike those babied straight people, I was incapable of self-deception. Paradoxically (and this thought was as real as it was slippery), the toilets—their very degradation, my enslavement to them—struck me as the “big time.” Something so debased must be real, I thought. Like a whore who returns to the strip, I said, “Okay, here I am again, back in the Life.”

O’Reilly at my next session said, as he picked a red spot on his nose that had become infected, “For chrissake, what the hell have you done to our Annie, fixing her up with that sicko?”

“I didn’t fix them up,” I said.

“She’s in a hell of a mess. I had to work with her all night. She’s sleeping peacefully now. I have to get this off my chest with you. I’m not one of those goddam Freudian tin gods claiming I have no feelings.”

“But what happened?” I resented O’Reilly’s meddling, feared his rejection. I needed him. My addiction to homosexuality must end, must end soon, and he had said only he could save me. I was being shaped and stunted by my desires—sex with men had even entered my dreams. The army test would pick up a dilation of my pupils, and William Everett Hunton had sworn I was getting a “cocksucker’s mouth—like
mine!” he’d added brightly. “Big pouty lips. And our skin is smoother, like a girl’s, and our hips fleshier, maybe just a millimeter, and our nipples are more sensitive; one of mine even gave a drop of milk once. You can tell who’s gay—the little mincy steps, the loose wrists, the overly mobile features, lips always pouting in a
moue”
(which he pronounced “moo-ay,” on the theory that sounded more French), “the cadaverous chest and skinny waist, the estrogen-shiny hair, and of course the
voice!”
He shrieked to demonstrate, ran to the window, and called out, attracted the attention of grinning law students passing by: “Yoo-hoo, young boys!” He was being the giddy matron with the warbling operatic voice. “Young boys, cuckoo, cuckoo! Up here, Duckies, come up here to your very own Gertrude and Alice.” Sotto voce: “That’s you, Gertrude—suits you, today’s mannish woman on the go, the avant-garde scribbler.”

“What do you mean ‘sicko’?” I asked O’Reilly. “What did William do?”

“You’ll have to ask Annie, if she’ll be good enough to ride with you.”

“William’s rejected me,” Annie told me with a faint grin and excessive blinking, as though she’d just removed the bandages. “The awful thing is that he won’t let me go entirely. He likes the
idea
of me, he wants to be normal sexually, but he feels horribly claustrophobic when I’m around. I try to hug myself into vanishing, take up as little space as possible, but it’s no good; he’s frantic—the law school takes twice as many freshmen as it keeps on, really vicious system, the poor guy’s a genius, but not at all disciplined, and does he really want to be a lawyer I keep wondering or is it just the High WASP camp of the Brooks sack suit and the monogrammed briefcase from Mark Cross, but one thing’s sure he sure can sting, speaking of wasp, he says he loves me but all my girlie things drive him nuts, can’t bear my slip and garter
belt and makeup, though he’s better than I am at making up and he’s really a tyrant about my appearance; O’Reilly thinks he’s a sicko out to murder his mother but could O’Reilly be just the weeniest bit jealous ’cause I think William is oddly
curative
for me in that he’s more obsessive about appearance than I am and he makes me feel tired out by narcissism, speaking of negative psychology and he’s”—deep breath, the recollection of a smile—
“wonderful
. He really is, you know.”

Like a baby who’s panicked crawling through a tunnel but emerges smiling, Annie had pushed away her fears and was now quietly discussing “our future,” by which she meant hers with William. “He really does want to marry me, at least we’ve spent hours lingering in front of jewelry windows and he even sashayed into one and demanded to see the
costliest
diamonds.” I could hear an echo of William in the way she said “costliest.” “And now we both know everything about minks, how to let them out and match skins.”

At my fraternity we celebrated founder’s night, a “bachelor evening” when we all dressed in black tie, ate shrimp cocktail and well-done steaks, then went to the party room in the cellar and drank ourselves into a blackout. The style of the house was hang-dog: seasoned, weary, alcoholic. Our president, the one who looked freshly peeled, would wake up at six in the evening, climb out of his hooded sweatsuit and two pairs of athletic socks, his costume for sleeping in the un-heated “fresh air” dorm, spend an hour shaving and showering and emerge, flushed, in impeccable black tie and diamond studs, his debauches betrayed only by his red nose. He mixed potent cocktails, but he refused to serve them unless every detail was perfect—correct glass correctly frosted, the right kind of garnish, the right monogrammed paper napkin.

The camaraderie of founder’s night seemed doubly warm
because we were all decorous and idle in a new way. At dances everyone was naturally devoted to his date, and at the weekday dinners a third of the members were missing and another third critically hung over. The rest read magazines, staged lackluster burping or farting contests, or threw bread. The house had been built by the first dean of music, and the dining room, with its minstrel gallery, had been the university’s original concert hall—Caruso had stood up there, right there, and sung, “Oh Ginnie whisky late burn air.” The shiny, very dark, and turbulently ornate woodwork made one think of hobbyists who do sculptural things with their own body wastes and keep their successes in jars.

After the white wine and the red, we sang our way downstairs, underground, arm in arm. I suppose for the others there was something sad about such a gala evening without women, and obviously men alone don’t work up that glitter on their canines or press with the same suave, competitive leaning into the circle—alone they don’t even have the right excuse for joshing with each other.