The Beautiful Room Is Empty (14 page)

And yet there was no cause for shame here, not even when I looked up for a kiss and got one. He didn’t desire me (what god would?), but he would let me stay in his arms until the end of this song or the next and that was more than I’d ever expected. Of course I felt foolish, a grown man wanting to be sheltered by another. Even the tenderest wedding between two men is always hooted at by their own overly active sense of the ludicrous. The freedom to dance with a man (I don’t say “another man” since he was the only person here who counted as a man) seemed remarkable enough to be a one-time-only privilege, but maybe parties like this one went on all the time. Was there a secret fraternity that
linked homosexuals across the states, countries, centuries? Was I being rushed?

Shame and gratitude, I said a moment ago, but surely gratitude was normal enough. Anyone who ever let me in his body or arms I still feel grateful to. That’s why so many of my friends are old lovers, I suppose. And that includes, these days, dying and dead friends as well, to whom the flesh, my flesh, still connects me.

The smells of sweat and English Leather or Canoe aftershave and cigarettes and beer and, now, cooking popcorn in the kitchen all floated around me. “You gave him a hard-on,” William hissed in my ear. “I could see it in his pants. Not as big as it should be considering his height but acceptable; family size,” and he nodded sagely as though he were a grandfather whispering, “An acceptable dowry.”

William was obsessed with size, and because I spent so much time with him I started checking out men’s crotches too. We’d be walking down the street and he’d say, “Catch this one. It’s not as huge as he’d like us to think. That’s all balls, the man has a beach ball for a scrotum. Now
this
one’s big—darling, don’t look in the zipper area for the bulge. The really big ones can’t wear jockey shorts, too binding, just like your mother’s love. No, they wear boxers and let it hang down their leg. Be on the lookout for baggy pants. Believe it or not, the really humongous dicks are embarrassed, they try to hide it in loose folds. Now Negroes are good bets, but not invariably. Italians are reliable, if you don’t mind fur-balls in your mouth, they’re so hairy, and if you go for pecorino.”

“What’s that?”

“Italian goat cheese. They’re all uncircumcised and on a hot summer day It—Can—Get—Pret—ty—Smel—ly—in there.” He shook his head and growled:
“Love
it.” A glance at my shock and he coolly added, “An acquired taste.”

He had other guides to cock size—big hands, big feet, big nose, fleshy ears, early balding (“Due to an excess of male hormones”), big thumb-to-palm ratio. He favored tropical people over those from temperate climes, though he’d discovered that as one approached the poles, cocks become larger again (“Nothing like a big Swede”). Short thick ones (“But
beercan
thick”) he preferred to very thin long ones. “But
you
, I don’t think you’d know what to do with a truly big dick except throw it over your shoulder, burp it, and weep. Are you Irish?”

“Yes.”

“I
knew
it, you Irish boys all have small mouths and small dicks, the worst of both worlds.
Why,”
and he rolled his bulging eyes up to heaven, “do I always keep running into Irish boys? Punishment for being a Lit—tie—Bit—Pig—gy in my last life, you think?”

When the new semester started I had my own room in a boardinghouse and I was free from all supervision for the first time in my life. I’d moved out of the fraternity house, although I continued to take my meals there. Indeed, I continued to juggle all these elements—fraternity brothers, Beats, Chinese, and my anonymous, half-seen lovers. I painted everything in my room white except the old desk I’d bought at a junk store, which had a tiny escritoire that folded out and a small oval mirror placed high above my head on a ladder-back of carved black pegs that inscribed the wall with an abacus of shadows. There I did my homework; everything else in my life was so chaotic that I needed to receive good grades. I covered the bed with a white blanket bordered in whitest, widest ribbon and I’d lie on it and watch the sunlight singing to itself out of that small Irish mouth of a mirror.

I met a pretty Korean (“Forget Koreans,” William
hissed angrily, “it’s clit size”) who lived next door. Whenever the mechanical world frustrated him—if his bike jammed or the laundry machine swallowed his coins, or his key snapped off in a lock—he’d ring my bell, trudge in, take off his clothes, fold them neatly on my white wooden chair, and lie face down on my white bed. He’d take it like a man, bite the pillow if I hurt him, and nothing had ever felt quite so good as those small taut muscles under that chamois-soft skin, the color of cinnamon when it’s sprinkled on cappuccino. That’s my way of saying that a low fire, a pilot light, burned under that glove-smooth skin, and that he smelled excitingly of that foul fermented cabbage the Koreans like to snack on. The minute it was over he’d dress and leave, his eyebrows raised in painful doubt as though he didn’t quite understand what had just happened. He had the whitest teeth.

And then, after I closed and locked the door, I was alone. I had a record player and twelve records, which I played over and over again, especially the Bartok violin concerto, its harmonies edgy enough to make me feel modern but its sweep romantic enough to hurl me back on the bed in a flood of ardor. Until then I’d always wanted to write, but when I did, I wrote down nothing but the time and key signatures of my feelings or the chords. Most of the melody, as it were, remained in my head, and all the orchestration. Endless scenes of he said-she said poured forth from my pen, the automatic transcription of what I was currently living through, but my characters remained voices in the dark. I never described them or said what I was feeling. I took a creative writing course from a published novelist, who told me during a private conference, “You should arrange the nouns in each paragraph like the heads in a painting by Uccello.”

“Utrillo?” I said brightly.

He turned away in disgust.

But now I read a collection of short stories by new
writers, and I saw they did something I can only call “braiding,” the interlacing of phrases, details, snatches of dialogue. Until now I’d written mindless confession in a desperate effort to keep my head above the rising waters of despair and confusion, which could also be called the flood of circumstantiality. Nothing had ever seemed more important to me than who said what first, what she said back, and where it happened, but now I was toying with the idea, gleaned from my recent reading, that a design of sorts, not a stencil but a weave, could be teased out of all these balls of yarn.

I’d drag men back to my room, one after another, guiding them up the fire escape into my window; they didn’t want to be seen by the other boarders any more than I wanted them seen. Afterward they’d smile awkwardly, dress, stand on tiptoe to comb their hair in my pointlessly high desk mirror, say, “Well, see you ’round,” and duck out the window and back down the rusting metal steps that boomed faintly with each step. Once the man was gone, I’d return to my story. I’d switch on my record of Puccini’s
Manon Lescaut
or Bartók’s violin concerto and pour myself a shot of Drambuie, a liqueur I didn’t realize was meant to be a sort of liquid dessert, not a steady drink. In a moment I’d weigh anchor, the white room would drift into a fast current, and I’d be alone with my characters. No mother to say, “Lights out,” no dormitory master patrolling the corridors, no fraternity brothers interrupting me, just four walls of my own, rent paid, and five months to go until summer vacation would spoil my sport. My lights burned their way into the dawn.

At first I’d feel lonely, afraid, itchy, very afraid to go on with my story, afraid it wasn’t any good, afraid it was terrific and I was about to spoil it, afraid it was better than I understood and I would never know how to equal it again, afraid it was cold, repellent, inhuman, and my friends would see through me and realize I wasn’t such a nice guy after all.

I’d jump up, pace the room, get halfway down the fire escape in search of the third sexual partner of the night—and then this partial retreat would calm me sufficiently so that I could pick up the signal my page was faintly beeping. What if I were to give my character, Sally, a version of Annie’s poor beehive?

I sat around the middle room of the union and talked about art and poetry and fiction for hours with other Beatniks, for I thought of myself as a Beatnik even though I didn’t have the courage to wear a black turtleneck or sandals, or carry a green bookbag. All that serious talk, as enthusiastic as it was imprecise, between companionable sleepwalkers, each cut off by his dreams but convinced that he was in airtight accord with the others.

Some afternoons, after twenty uninterrupted hours of writing, reading, drinking Drambuie, playing my twelve records, and hectoring and praising myself, I’d stagger into the union and there find a woman sculptor who had the unsettling habit of nodding before I’d said ten words while murmuring, “Yep. I can see it.” At some minor point in my account of my artistic struggles she’d blurt out, “That’s it! brother, is that ever it,” and I’d smile foolishly, not sure whether I should go on or correct her misunderstanding or coast on it and just give in to the wash of good feeling, misplaced as it might be. I usually gave in and said, “God, I’m glad
you
understand.” And she did seem to understand the most important thing about my work, which is that I’d lived through something, as though I’d saved a child from drowning.

That room was a debriefing room. It was also the room where a potter from New York, as small-shouldered and full-bottomed as her own vases, told me, “I was a math major six years ago, until the day I saw some Japanese porcelains and decided to pot. I was a complete klutz. I threw pots for three years, night and day, before I could get one even to stand up.
Any kid at arts-and-crafts camp was better than me. I’d cry and hit myself out of anger.”

“And now?” I asked, eager for the sequel.

She shrugged and, opening her hands as though to show four aces, radiated all the uncomplicated happiness of a self-made genius. I envied her in a knotted way it took me a moment to untie. Yes, envied her clear picture of what she wanted to make and her strength in submitting to a discipline she’d invented. I wasn’t like her. Everybody said I was intelligent, but I feared I wasn’t artistic. Unlike the potter, I had lots of facility but no goal and very little taste. My mother had convinced me I was or would be “brilliant,” and her belief in me kept me writing. But I didn’t trust my own instincts. I didn’t know what I ought to feel.

Just as school was ending, Maria drove up in her old station wagon to stay with me for a few days. She brought a bottle of Armagnac, a carton of cigarettes, and Nietzsche’s
Thus Spake Zarathustra
, which she finally hurled across the room in exasperation. “I like poems to be poetic and prose to be prosaic, religion to be prophetic and philosophy to be crystal clear. Give me Bertrand Russell any day.”

The days were hot and the nights warm. Fraternity boys were staging panty raids on sorority houses, but there was nothing unconscious about such bacchanalias; everyone referred wearily to Bacchus. I’d never confessed to Maria that I’d joined a fraternity at all (although I liked the brothers and went to the house nearly every day). Now we stuck close to the Beat poets and chicks I’d collected—the lanky painter next door who copied Larry Rivers and strode the halls nude; his hearty “old lady” who’d thought he was complimenting her when he called her the Venus of Willendorff, until she saw a photo of the prehistoric fertility goddess; the New York poetess who proudly claimed she’d been conceived in Greenwich Village and whose father had fought in the Lincoln
Brigade but now provided janitorial supplies to factories by day and attended Trotskyite meetings by night; the bearded sculptor with the eternal smile who roared with laughter when he fucked his girlfriend, another sculptor, up in the freezing tower of our boardinghouse. I feared Maria would find me dull. I kept making luncheon and dinner dates for us with my friends until she burst into tears and begged to spend one evening alone with me.

We could sit for hours talking art, love, politics. Other women offered me as a man one kind of deference (my opinions prevailed) and expected another kind (their wishes were to be obeyed). Maria neither gave nor wanted such courtesies. She’d light my cigarettes and tell me I was a fool. She teased me when she overheard me agreeing coquettishly with every absurdity uttered by a handsome athlete.

In her ponderous old station wagon we drove to Flint to spend the weekend with a college dance teacher, Anita, who’d been Maria’s first love. Around Anita I was demoted back to being a kid, and Maria would literally pinch my cheeks and roll her eyes as though to remind us that kids will say the darnedest things. Anita was not only on the school staff but also toured with a company versed in the Graham technique, all to earn money to send her sister to graduate school and to support a widowed mother. Her family responsibilities somehow neutralized her lurid status as a lesbian. Although I pretended to be sophisticated and could listen to tales of erotic mayhem without blinking, privately I still considered us all damned. This disparity between my surface smile and inner anguish condemned me to savoring my guilt in silence, a guilt I couldn’t expiate since it was thoroughly secular.

Back in my white room after the weekend, Maria stopped playing the big sister. Now that we’d lived together for five days, we’d pressed beyond a border into companionable
silence. Much as we might protest our devotion to each other, until now our bodies, tense, edgy animals, had stayed on guard. On this fifth day, they sighed and lay down to sleep side by side like two cats who’ve finally stopped prowling and hissing their rival claims to the sewing basket and squabbling over precedence at the water bowl.

Now we sprawled on the bed, smoking and reading and listening to Bartok. One afternoon we started kissing. In
a
second we’d undressed. Maria thrashed with shocking passion in my arms and in my ear her smoky mouth breathed with short, voiced gasps. She was so fragile, so supple in contrast to all the big clumsy men I’d known. I’d thought a heterosexual man must weary of always having to instigate things, but there was no question of aggression and passivity, we were both swept like lovers into a tempest that raged around us, and, yes,
for
us. We were its victims.