The Beautiful Room Is Empty (17 page)

I don’t mean to suggest, by the way, that I was or am dismissive or even critical of anything Lou was saying. His vision of sex, of boys, and of poetry, even (as I was to discover) of drugs, was my first and strongest encounter with a pure theory of beauty. I’d always heard sensible down-to-earth values praised, but they were the only kind I’d ever observed, and the repeated endorsements seemed redundant. Now at last I’d met the man everyone had warned me against.

I realized he’d never love me. Not that there was anything so wrong with me, but we didn’t form a couple he would have considered sexy. We were companionable, but I was too
big and educated to be the boy, and too much younger to be the man. For a week or ten days, Lou tried to turn me into the man, but I was too affectionate in a puppy-dog way. “I’m afraid you just put your dick in me, Bunny, wriggle around and kiss my neck, and shoot like a twelve-year-old,” Lou said, “which is sweet but ineffectual. You need to focus more on cock and ass, pull out farther and plunge deeper, balance your weight on your elbows and toes, that will give you better leverage, go slow. Do everything with deliberation.”

I was terribly wounded. Until now I’d never had any anxiety about performance because I hadn’t realized I was on stage. Just as William had made me self-conscious about cock size, Lou made me so nervous about fucking that I kept losing my erection. By default I became the “boy” and occasionally Lou fucked me.

Lou was fired from his advertising job, but he told me that happened every six months anyway in the biz. “Every time they lose a big account, they can the whole team. I want to write a book called
Love You, Love Your Work, Gonna Hajta Let You Go.”
Now that neither of us was working, we were free to go to the Oak Street beach every day or sometimes a mile or two farther north to some slabs of broken concrete, the Belmont Rocks, where the gay boys had staked a claim and which Lou called “Homo-lulu.” Now I knew the whole adolescent world I’d missed out on, the world of idle summer days, of tinny portable radios and coconut oil, of towel hopping and shared Cokes, of desultory exclamations (“Ow! That bug really bit me”) followed by wave-lulled silence and the indignant nursing of the glossy shoulder or silky thigh. Lou wrote a poem about cruising the Oak Street beach at night, but he felt the only good line was “the pollen-streaked lamplight.”

Ezra Pound was his true Penelope, and even Pound’s criminal politics and weird economics Lou was able to justify
when it suited his mood. For Lou, Pound was strategic in any dismissal of Eliot’s absurdly English posturing, and both men rose serenely above the local American battle between the Beats and Academics. Lou couldn’t be an Academic. His fear and hatred of schools forbade that, as well as his contempt for sterile exercises. But the Beats, despite their appealing cult of drugs and Whitmanian sincerity, lacked the cool elegance Lou venerated. The values he really embraced were those of Negro jazz musicians who divided the world into what was square and what was cool. Things labeled cool were highly controlled if sometimes arbitrary and decorative, an expression of a narrow range of feelings: happy-guy exuberance, cerebral noodling, or a foggy but anxious melancholy.

Each of those few times Lou wanted to like someone over fifty, he repeated Pound’s phrase about “old men with beautiful manners.” Only twenty years later did I stumble across the line and realize Pound was mocking the statesmen who brought on World War I. Lou had no sense of irony or history and none of comedy save the grand guignol of his indignation. At about this time, a homosexual magazine,
One
, began to be published in California. Lou was appalled.
“Why
should a bunch of criminals be allowed to have a
magazine
, for chrissake. They might as well let thieves publish
The Safecracker’s Quarterly. One
, indeed …”

If an apology for homophilia struck him as a bad joke (or was he afraid it might make gay life seem too square?), Lou was a respectful reader of the boy books that were emerging then, those magazines of black-and-white photos of teenagers with shaved chests, sucked-in if unexercised stomachs, and cloth posing-straps who stood on a dais silhouetted against a sunburst of seamless paper. They were pictured lifting a spear or throwing a discus so that the alibi of classical Greek homosexuality could be produced. Lou would roar with
laughter over the short articles by a minister about Christian fellowship or by an athletic director about a sound mind and a sound body or by a “scholar” about Greek love, but he stared for hours at the boys, especially one, Bobby Phalen, whom he followed from one publication to another, month to month, and whose greatest shots he’d blown up and framed. “Look at that perfect ass, Bunny, the way it’s almost too big, nigger big, but just misses by being not all high and hard but perfectly round, pneumatic with youth, just as though it’d been drawn by a compass, no flattening here, no sag, and then the
roundnessl
of those hairless arms and legs, imagine what they’d look like in cross section, and the full, vulgar mouth redeemed by that truly classical nose, so severe and martial, the only truly Greek thing in this whole fuckin’ cheap rag.”

I said, “Mnm, yes, Lou, he is well-built.”

Lou looked up at me startled, then a funhouse laugh rumbled up out of his depths, “Well!
Built!”
the laugh quickened in astonishment and sent him down the rapids. “Bunny,” he said, gasping for air, “you look so pained. How dreadful for you to be with a moony old queen like me,” and he rolled on his bed with fiendish glee.

The only dreadful thing was my realization that at nineteen I was already too old for Lou. I’d been waiting and waiting year after year to grow up so I could lead the gay life, and all the while I’d been wasting my most precious capital, my youth. Now my face was already disfigured with a beard I had to shave every second or third day, my legs were grotesquely hairy—at least there was some fuzz below the calves—and I had none of the baby fat left that Lou searched out with a magnifying glass on Bobby Phalen’s thighs or just above his small waist (“Do you see the shimmering ambiguity of that impertinent randy young maleness and those packets of girlish softness, just like Donatello’s
David?”)
.

Lou recognized, as everyone had to, that homosexuality
was sick; in fact, he insisted on the sickness. Although not spontaneously given to campiness, he’d catch my eye in the midst of his own lip-licking perusals of Bobby Phalen’s thighs and touch his chest with his great broken hand and murmur, “I’m
not
a well woman …”

But through some curious alchemy he’d redeemed our illness by finding beauty in it. He loved Baudelaire, and like Baudelaire he searched out beauty in whatever was foul, artificial, damned, although those words, too Continental to be hip, would have embarrassed him. He liked everything deformed by the will toward beauty, whether it was a ballet dancer’s mangled feet and duck walk, a nun’s pallor and shaved skull, or a trumpet player’s split pulpy lips. In those days S-and-M had not yet become popular. Lou was forced to admire things too tame for his radical taste (peroxided hair, drag), but those he admired fiercely.

Whereas William Everett Hunton wanted to go straight (or said he did), and spent a lot of time wanly imagining how warm and secure marriage must make men feel, Lou despised squares. He would proudly hold my hand as we walked down the street, and loved shocking the little old ladies in our apartment building with his sawed-off blue-jean shorts. If I got too folksy-chummy with the waitress or came out with an opinion worthy of our fathers, he’d blush and hang his head. He didn’t go to museums or read highbrow books, at least not systematically; he wasn’t interested in improving his mind or coming off as cultured. He did prize his taste, and that he imposed tyrannically on those few people he liked.

He and Maria were very different from one another, and I never introduced them. She read compulsively, but no poetry, not much fiction, lots of philosophy. Lou read the same books over and over, trying to coax from them their secrets, not of meaning but of lilt. He loved the poems of John Wieners and would quote again and again the stanza:

He’s gone and taken

my morphine with him

Oh Johnny. Women in

    the night moan yr. name.

or he’d say, “Don’t you love the way he uses proper names as in:

And I am lost beside the furs

and homburgs at Fifth and

Fifty-seventh where Black Starr

& Frost holds

Its annual sale of diamonds?

Could anything be more beautiful than ‘Black Starr & Frost’ which really is the
definition
of a diamond?”

Lines from songs would move him just as much. “I’m Travellin’ Light,” he’d murmur, or, “God Bless the Chile That’s Got His Own,” or, “Good Morning, Heartache,” which he insisted was the only way to translate the title of Françoise Sagan’s new novel,
Bonjour Tristesse
. He didn’t have much to say about why these phrases were beautiful, but he’d obviously scrutinized his small hoard with a jeweler’s loupe, and he’d bring all his gems out often and place them one by one against the plush of his admiration.

One day he came back from a drag contest and said that a Mexican boy named Spinoza had won it (his drag name, Gigi). “Bunny, there were all these other tired numbers with their falsies and pancake and falls, but Spinoza just walked out with his tough little mug unpainted and his duck’s ass haircut and his young boy’s arms with the tattoo in the web of skin between his thumb and index finger and his bare wetback feet and just a dumb black dress on, zipper broken down the back, and he looked like a teen killer someone had
forced into a frock at gunpoint and—Oh!” Lou let the intensity of his stare melt. He lowered his eyes, while a smile, a shy smile, dawned: “Oh, Gigi. Women in the night moan your name.”

We lay in his disordered apartment on dirty sheets surrounded by coffee cups growing mold and piles of cast-off clothes. Since Lou had been fired, he never arose in time to get to the laundry before it closed; his only solution was to buy new shirts at Brooks Brothers on their late night, Wednesdays. He had expensive groceries delivered from Stop’n’-Shop, but he forgot to eat them or even refrigerate them. They rotted and had to be dumped down the incinerator. I had friends to see and things to do, but like a vampire, Lou hated the daylight and slipped into a coffin of sheets every dawn only to emerge that evening, impeccably groomed. I suppose he and I were like my father and stepmother in our staggered hours.

I loved his tawny skin and the medals of hair radiating out from each nipple as though he’d been decorated twice for the same act of heroism. I loved his own ambiguity, shimmering from male to female. He could nuzzle against me like a woman, back his ripe hips up against me and be certain he was exciting me. On television a popular idea for a big dance number was for a beautiful blonde to stride past a line of flabbergasted men and domino the whole line over with just a fingertip; Lou had that effect on me. I had a constant erection around him, and I forced myself to disagree with him now and then lest I bore him with the uniformity of my admiration. As for the man in Lou, I never stopped seeing in him Pontiac, the Indian. His sense of ritual about sex only heightened this impression, as though he retained a brave’s respect for performing any physical ordeal. We still had sex from time to time, but I assumed Lou was doing it partly
because he’d found no one else and because his poetics of life required nightly intercourse. Between us sex was never love, that sudden flux of affection that causes two people to break stride, pull apart, and stare smilingly at each other. Lou never broke stride. He delved into me with a force and regularity unbroken by words or kisses or gasps. He disliked a spasm of delight much as he disliked any sudden visitation of feeling that broke through a form. He was a sexual formalist.

Late, very late at night, he’d start raving. He’d try to convince me of some absurdity that appealed to him only because it was the opposite of what all right-minded people believed. He’d oppose divorce because it put asunder what God had joined. Yet I was sure his opposition was inspired by the beauty of the word
asunder
. He wanted the chance to say it, and to say it in the only proper way, with Old Testament fury. Or he’d fulminate against travel and insist that everyone should stay in his own country, nourished by his native soil. He decided that Soviet-style censorship was defensible, even commendable, since people had no need to know what was happening in other lands.

One hot summer night, so late all the neighboring apartment windows were dark, he decided we should go out in search of jazz. He showered and combed his wet black hair back, tore a new shirt out of its Brooks package, and put on a perfectly pressed suit. He looked elegant and vulnerable, his eyes edging away from contact and set into a face of exquisite unhealthiness. He smoked as he did everything else, consciously, looking at the cigarette as though he didn’t quite know what it was for, testing it experimentally.

Half an hour later we were stepping into a club where a young white man holding a trumpet was singing “This Is Love” in an innocent voice—innocent but angular, before an audience of just two tables, both silent, hands bright under
lamps, faces lost in the filtered shade. The smoky, hard taste of whisky sank an upside-down question mark of warmth that plumbed my chest and swirled around inside my stomach. I was getting drunk. Lou’s face sparkled with sweat; a few points of moisture as definite as the dots on dice had broken out just above his nose. His dark jacket sleeves were pulled back to reveal heavy white shirt cuffs cuffing hands as cleanly as the gauze fits around a thoroughbred’s slender shanks. He sipped cigarettes, he sipped drinks with lips newly thinned by the opulent melancholy of the music. Nothing happened. There’s no payoff to this story and I repeat it only because the snapshot of Lou, so lost and so remote, impeccable despite the chaos in his apartment, still speaks to me with the force of an event (my plots are all scrapbooks).