The Beautiful Room Is Empty (16 page)

He turned on a dime into a low, father-explaining-to-son voice as he took my hand across the table and said earnestly, “Don’t you see, Bunny, middle-class rue is a way of condescending to our noblest feelings out of middle-class embarrassment.”

Suddenly, the divine fire passed out of the oracle and he slumped to the table, almost inert.

“Lou,” the countertenor said, trying to defend me, “you’re just creating a federal case, probably because you’re embarrassed about making so much money.”

I didn’t want to be on any side other than Lou’s. “No, no, I see your point and I’m sorry I took such a cheap shot.”

“Don’t go overboard,” the singer said to me. All the
previous night he and I had exchanged classy book titles and well-bred quips and shared information about discography, but now he could see I wanted to push all that aside for this, what Lou represented, which was something new.

The countertenor went back to Bloomington, where he was studying voice. Lou said nothing when I shook his strangely cocked hand. I said, “Well, we do live in the same building. I’d love to have dinner with you some night.” Lou lowered his eyes like a beautiful woman used to hearing compliments, and when he raised his eyes, like a beautiful woman’s they looked right through me.

A week later I found him on the same beach. He was reading Alexander Trocchi’s
Cain’s Book
. “It’s really one of the best books I’ve read in a long time. It’s about an artistic junky in New York.” He looked at me for a reaction. “Does it sound very ladies’ club to have opinions about books?” His horror-movie laugh seized him and he rolled on his towel and laughed. I imagined he was someone without a sense of humor in any ordinary sense. My body ached from my night job. In another hour I was due to go in, though we were paid in cash every morning by the foreman and no one cared if we didn’t show. It was a drifter’s and drunk’s job; men often went on a week-long bender if they earned a little overtime.

Suddenly he’d stopped laughing and had taken my hand in his, as heavy and nonhuman as a dog’s padded paw. “The truth is,” and he was looking me right in the eye and putting his soft tenor voice across like a lyric jazz trumpet player who for once plays the tune straight, mute in, “I don’t have the right to talk about books. I never went to college. I never studied English.”

“Neither did I,” I said triumphantly, and I told him about my classes in Chinese with the Straight Lady. But Lou ignored my explanation, which didn’t fit in with the point he was making.

“You’ve studied the classics,” he said with rapture. “You have a solid foundation in the literature of the world. You can read Ezra Pound with understanding. Pound must be one of your favorites. He has the most perfect ear in English since Herbert. Never a bad line.” He placed his hand, as limp and expressive as the dead Christ’s in a marble
pietà
, on my ass.

“Can we have dinner tonight?” I asked him, though I wanted to say, “Can I sleep with you?” The
pietà
, yes, with Lou’s thinness, mortified flesh, wounded hand, the excruciated angles he assumed. But also, I thought, an Indian chief: thick nose; tawny skin; and eyebrows that grew together. Pontiac. That Ottawa chief who led an Indian federation against the English. Lou had an Indian’s lithe, strong legs, and I wanted them wrapped around me, but now his eyes were swooning shut, sleep came over him as suddenly as in a fairy tale, and I was left alone with my erection in a swimsuit and this handsomely ugly man in full glorious sunlight. He wore a big silver ID bracelet, the sort I’d worn in high school, and he slept with his exquisite damaged hand across my back, the metal links burning cold into my skin.

That night we ate dinner at the Cape Cod Room of the Drake and I spent twenty of the twenty-five dollars my mother had allotted for the entire week. A chubby bald man named Charlie joined us, and I learned he was a concert pianist, or had been, but now he couldn’t play in public anymore for some reason.

He liked me, I saw, and we argued about Tchaikovsky. That was during the full confident flush of the Baroque Revival, and I’d been quick to learn that the Romantics should be dismissed as gushy and empty-headed. “But what about Tchaikovsky’s own counterpoint?” Charlie asked. “If that’s what you admire so much in Bach and Handel, then you have to admire Tchaikovsky’s inner melodies, so fresh—and always powered by that breathless, passionate syncopation!”

All I could admire was us, the three of us in our white shirts and dark ties and still darker jackets and tan faces. All my life I’d sat with my mother and sister in restaurants and studied the handsome young men at the corner table. Not that many men ate together in those days, but when they did, I poured myself into the wine they drank, I threaded myself into the napkins they fingered.

Now I was one of them. It was a civil summer night and it was raining. We were here, drinking too much, joking with the waiters, who were men too, after all, and our hands looked very brown next to the silver of white shirtcuff. The curse of being the little creep my sister said smelled bad, of being the town queer as I scuttled from one toilet stall to a choicer one just vacated—this shame seemed to be lifted by the flaky turbot, the pale green Pouilly Fumé, the slivered green beans and toasted almonds.

Lou and I left Charlie at the corner. He hopped into a big cab. And then we were in our own cab heading in the opposite direction along the curving Inner Drive, which Lou said made him think of New York and Riverside Drive. He held my hand, not with the consciousness of exploration but with invasive familiarity. He sprawled on the back seat and hooked a leg over mine. Although I was ten years younger than he, I was the one who felt stuffy and elderly. I could see the driver’s angry, disapproving eyes in the rearview mirror, just that part of the face the black band cancels out in pornographic photos.

We stopped off at a bar. I don’t remember much about it except the respect Lou felt for it. A large oval bar with two bartenders corralled inside it, a jukebox, smoke drifting through colored lights—I couldn’t see why we were here instead of home in bed. He never stopped touching my knee or shoulder, sometimes tapping me, then abandoning his nerveless, unexpectedly heavy hand to my care. “Now look
at little Jimmy here,” he said with a curator’s pride, “isn’t he fabulous?”

A round-faced man of thirty trying to look twenty in skin-tight black jeans and white boots and an open white shirt tied high at the waist to show a hairless midriff came hopping up to us. He kissed Lou in a crisp stylization of a kiss and revolved into his arms as Lou reached down from the stool to embrace him.

“Hi, toots, who’s the brainy chicken?” Jimmy jerked his head toward me, effortlessly lifted my horrible glasses off my face, and perched them on the tip of his adorable snub nose. “Don’t let me wreck your nerves, doll,” he whispered to me, very gal-to-gal, “I’m just the frisky type.”

Lou lowered his eyes, charmed by such brassiness.

We drank beer after beer, darted across the street to another bar, so I could see that bartender’s “perfect buns,” then headed down Rush toward the Chicago River where a little gay dance spot was hidden behind a restaurant with checked tablecloths. We watched couples foxtrotting cheek-to-cheek to Timi Yuro singing “Make the World Go Away.” A black man the color and shininess of eggplant was dancing with a white boy the shape and golden paleness of a pear. A thug with a porkpie hat and a cigar guarded the door.

At last we stumbled into a taxi. I got out a block away from home because I didn’t want Gerald, the doorman, to see me with Lou. Gerald was very thick with my mother. But then at last I was in Lou’s apartment; he bolted the door and we stood in his living room, not floating above the night city as in my mother’s apartment but rather surrounded by it. Between two unlit glass-sheathed buildings I could see Lake Michigan and its trails of breaking foam on black water. We picked our way over the debris in the dark and drank one more beer on the low couch. Lou kept dozing off. At last we undressed, our clothes thrown on the floor. But when I held

Lou in my arms and kissed him all over, he whispered, “Let’s wait till the morning. I’d like to sleep with my ass pressed against your hard-on,” and he drifted off.

Several times at the bars he’d introduced me with a laugh as his new “college-boy trick,” and now I could see myself as just that. It all fit, the brush cut, the glasses, the stuffy opinions, the ruefulness about advertising, even my rock-hard college-boy erection placed between the smooth muscular buttocks of an older man who was neither butch nor femme but as plushly ambiguous as the blue velour sweatshirt he had worn to breakfast at the coffee shop, or as the crewcut that went along with his broken nose to give him a boxer’s toughness, except that now, as I ran my hands over the bristles, I could think only of a Persian cat’s silky fur as it sensuously flexes against a hand. For Lou, though asleep, was snuggling richly against me, and I thought of him for a moment as a beautiful kept woman. He’d left the classical music station on, and the Brahms violin concerto, my father’s favorite music, was at last accompanying a tender longing that had an object. When I had waited on my father’s green-and-white-striped silk couch through the night, smelled his pipe, and listened to his calculating machine, I’d wrapped myself in empty regret, hugged my arms to my chest, and sorted through odds and ends of fantasies, none substantial enough to work into a quilt of desire. But here I was, suddenly awake, the room surging drunkenly around me every time I closed my eyes, with a lavishly asleep adult man in my arms, his body a degree warmer than mine, his clipped head full of intense opinions; when the violin shimmered like starlight that glints blue then green, signaling someone but not me, I felt at last I had been given the code for deciphering the message. I held still, I didn’t want to trouble Lou’s sleep, but I was warming myself against his body.

The next morning, lightly silvered in hangover sweat,
he finally let me plunge into that strong ass, but not before he’d greased me up with KY and produced his “trick towel.” He wouldn’t kiss or let me face him when I took him. But I could reach my hands around his waist and feel the shifting muscles of that long flat stomach working as he twisted and pushed back against me. It dawned on me the stomach scar was there from the time when the doctors must have inserted extra muscles, the long sexy kind—the interior ones gripping me now. I had to say the alphabet backward to keep myself from coming. The moment I looked at what I was doing to him, I could feel myself ready to explode. My come wanted to enter him in order to stake even the smallest claim on someone who seemed superior to me in every way. William Everett Hunton had talked as though the one who does the fucking is the “man,” but with Lou that didn’t make much sense. Obviously he was in control of everything we were doing. It didn’t occur to me that this shockingly intense pleasure could be sought after. If you’re someone mainly eager to please others, you don’t think much about your own pleasure; taking pleasure is not a survival skill, while giving it most certainly is.

Lou and I saw each other every day. I stopped going to work, but it didn’t matter, since Lou had lots and lots of loose money in his pockets and he picked up checks without seeming to notice; his carelessness made a mockery of all those hours I’d crouched inside trucks. With a red face I started to explain the lie I’d told the countertenor, but when I confessed the apartment was actually my mother’s, Lou wasn’t interested in either the truth or its distortion. He’d never stopped to wonder how a college kid had his own apartment on the Gold Coast or why it was full of matronly clothes.

He was only concerned with realizing his own myths and explaining them to me in order to convince himself. He found anything extreme to be “beautiful” or “moving,” even “heart breaking,”
and his favorite phrase was “shimmering with ambiguity.” He divided all homosexuals into “boys,” “men,” and “vicious old queens.” A man (laborer, truckdriver, even “high-powered exec”) must lust after and love a boy, who would be “beautiful” or at least “cute” but given to sudden enthusiasms, usually reckless and foolish. A man was brawny, cruel, except to the boy, whom he cherished, although sometimes cruelly. The man could be forgiven if he beat someone up, the boy if he bleached his hair. The boy felt a natural affinity to girls, with whom he was always exchanging makeup tips. The man had once fucked girls but now had no further use for them.

When the man fucked the boy, the boy always had his rump up in the air, propped up on a pillow, and the man would lick his anus and tongue it and finger it before greasing it up with KY and fucking it, long and hard, while the boy squirmed in pain or pleasure. While being fucked, the boy ignored his own dick and even lost his hard-on, proof of how thoroughly his was concentrating on his ass. After the man shot his load, he’d stay in the boy, they’d roll over on their sides, and the boy would now be free to masturbate quickly while held tightly in his man’s arms. Once in a while, the boy was permitted to fuck the man, as a loving concession to the boy’s own masculinity, espaliered but still rawly alive, shimmeringly ambiguous. As soon as the boy came, they wiped off with the already stiff and greasy trick towel, and the boy sat on the toilet and shit out sperm. Lou reserved special scorn for boys who whispered to their lovers on the way to a midnight movie, “I’ve still got your babies inside me.”

“Don’t they know those
babies
are dead spunk festering up their filthy bungholes!”

A real boy, someone skinny and under twelve who walked around with his mouth open, sent Lou into raptures. One sweaty afternoon in Chicago we rode the elevated and
sat behind a boy of eleven or so in shorts and T-shirt. The boy stared out the window and wagged his right leg against his stationary left leg, in a ceaseless, thoughtless way. A hard little erection could be seen pressed flat against his tummy in his white shorts. Unconsciously he kept batting at the erection with the back of his right hand, now to one side of it, now to the other, as though despite trial and error he had yet to find the exact spot. His skin had no pores, no bulges, and no sheen—it was as mat and consistent as face powder, except it looked cool, firm, and alive. It drank the light as soil drinks water. His shoulders and thin arms hung limply down with sublime inconsequence, though his shoulder blades looked too knotty under the cotton, as if they were about to hatch wings. The same fine, nearly invisible gold down that covered his cheeks, and had collected in a haze just below the line of his light brown hair, dusted his nape in a precise pattern, the shape of a cursive letter M, rising on either side and dipping in the center toward his spine. If the down had been molten it would have roared as it rose to descend that glistening chute. “Yes,” Lou insisted,
“if
it made a sound.” He sank into a silence then sighed: “If it were gold … just look at that nape.” Lou spoke as loudly as if we were conversing in a language all our own.