The Beautiful Room Is Empty (20 page)

For some reason, a graduate student in psychotherapy came by my bed. Outside, the first snow of the year was falling. The therapist, whose forehead was flushed and scaling, wore a tweed jacket and smelled of sweet tobacco. His mouth shot up on one side in an
accent aigu
of irony.

We didn’t speak very directly. I was sharing the room with someone who was asleep, to be sure, but he might have been faking it. I said that I thought I was resisting breaking off with Dr. O’Reilly. “At least that’s what I assume. I don’t
feel
anything, naturally, since I’ve somatized the anxiety.”

He wasn’t smoking, but he touched his lip with his pipe as though he needed the feel of the cold amber mouthpiece to release his thoughts or words. “But why are you going to a shrink at all?”

“I want to change.”

“Change what?”

“My object choice.”

He looked me intently in the eye, and now I could see that he, too, must be homosexual. “But people don’t really change,” he said. “It’s useless to try. It’s more a question of adjusting, of learning to play the hand you’ve been dealt.”

“Oh no,” I said, angry. “I
am
changing, I
must
change. I’d kill myself if I thought I was stuck with these cards, which frankly are lousy—and you know it.”

His face folded shut, and he left after exchanging a few of the necessary banalities. I felt triumphant.

I couldn’t get well. I stayed in the infirmary, first with one ailment, then another. I watched the snow fall. My foot healed, but I broke out in hives. The hives subsided, and I was wracked with diarrhea. My roommates came and went. One of them, who was in traction, turned the conversation one evening to girls, then more generally to sex, finally to men. I watched his erection grow under the sheet. My own pressed against my stomach like a ruler on a board, hour after hour through the slow routines of the hospital. After lights out, I hobbled over to his bed and sucked his cock, which was nearly black and looked like a horse’s, the same abundant foreskin.

Finally I realized I’d never get well until I saw O’Reilly and settled things. One of my fraternity brothers, a guy with perfect teeth and the knack of appreciating everything, drove me and waited while I looked out at the snow filling O’Reilly’s garden and gathering like a rabbit muff over the folded hands of the gilt Kamakura Buddha.

O’Reilly nodded simply, picked at a scab on his face, and said, “Yes, I agree, you’re right, our work isn’t going well. It’s best you find someone else.”

And it was all over. His outrages against me, his unfulfilled promise to cure me—all the grievances I’d been hoarding were canceled like debts voided by a new government. He didn’t owe me anything, nor I him, and on the trip back I was lonely and bruised, and I envied my friend his broad shoulders, his steady hand on the wheel, his manliness, which was so pungent I could smell it, although I couldn’t make use of it. A few weeks later O’Reilly had a breakdown and was sent to the same hospital where his beloved Annie was already a patient.

When I got well, I went to the union pool and stood under the showers. I’d become pale and scrawny after two months of being in the hospital.

I met a man. He was in the shower across from me, tall, older, smooth-skinned, his face more olive than his body. I’d never seen him before. He smiled at me. His smile relaxed me, as though I’d just been restored to the human race.

In the locker room the man smiled at me again, not in the usual furtive way (seductive, hostile, afraid) but just as though we were already friends. He had wonderful green eyes and an engaging smile, although one tooth was a delicate biscuit brown. His shoulders reflected the overhead light. When he turned I could see that his buttocks registered in sinewy detail every motion he made; they weren’t piled high like stiff mounds of whipped cream, the way teenage boys’ butts looked. No, his hips were narrow and fluent.

No one else was around in the locker room, although two or three voices boomed from the pool. The smell of chlorine was giving me a headache.

We started talking, and everything I said made him nod and smile. I thought he might be laughing at me. What puzzled
me was why someone so handsome would show an interest in me. As he dressed, I could see he had beautiful clothes, and that intimidated me, too.

He invited me to come to his apartment for a cup of tea. It was already dark out. A cold wind was blowing steadily, sifting snow. The afternoon had been warm enough to melt the snow on the sidewalk, but now it had frozen white as milk glass. I felt a small secret pride in being with someone so handsome. His carefully combed hair froze stiff. His salient cheekbones shone and caught the passing lights. The intimacy between us seemed as sudden and transitionless as in a dream. When we reached a dark side street, he put my mittenless hand in his pocket and held it without saying anything.

His apartment was big and underfurnished, as though a flood had scattered the contents of a single room over several. He sat me on a straight-back chair stranded in the middle of a carpetless wood floor, but when he stepped back and saw me marooned there he laughed and invited me into his bedroom. His name, he said, was Fred. His window cast a yellow trapezoid on the pure blue snow outside. The wind had traced in snow the black bark of the tree below. A soft tango was playing on the radio. He switched off the light. The snow looked fluffier, almost as though it had risen slightly.

We sprawled side by side, athwart the bed, fully dressed, our wet shoes on the floor, staring at the ceiling. Fred’s voice and the tango explored the folds of my brain like a deadly parasite, whose progress can’t be detected except after it slowly starts to unsnap higher functions. In the center of the ceiling a pressed metal rosette had lost detail under each new layer of paint. Fred’s voice made my ear glow, or was it the cold? He told me that he’d just been released from a mental hospital.

“I was in for a year. That’s why I don’t want to sleep with you right away. I’m very tender, just like a crayfish
between shells.” We both laughed at the image. Our remarks slowed and scattered; a composer wouldn’t have had an easy time scoring them.

My feet were warming up. Fred seemed really perfect because he needed me. I had a function to serve. Ordinarily I couldn’t imagine what use I could be to anyone. I asked him what he was studying. He said he was finishing a degree in English. “I’m writing on Herrick, on his ‘Corinna’s Going a-Maying,’ which is odd to think of in the snow.”

A long sighing silence, the sigh of contentment. “What does ‘green-gown’ mean?” I asked.

“A ‘green-gown’ is a tumble in the grass. I suppose it’s like a birthday suit.” And we both laughed together. “But surely you already knew that. You
had
to know it in order to ask,” and we both laughed harder. I liked the way our laughs sounded, although I still cringed at the sound of my speaking voice. I couldn’t lower it. Physically I could, but psychologically it felt presumptuous, as though it were arrogant to sound like a man instead of a boy.

He told me his story. When I glanced over at him, his Adam’s apple was as prominent as his chin and nose. The idea that his voice resided in this box intrigued me. I wanted to touch it.

I told him I needed to sleep with him because my insecurities were sexual.

“But then you might not see me again. And that could be a little … risky for me.” He said he thought gay men lost interest after they did the “deed of darkness.” I said I wasn’t a generic gay man.

“I certainly don’t want to be in the absurd position of rejecting you,” he said, “because to me you’re a wonderfully romantic young man, so tense.
Intense
. That’s the word.” And he opened the wet papaya pulp of his kiss to me. We kissed and undressed. The sheets smelled freshly ironed and
felt as flimsy as rose petals. We kept stopping to talk, which at first vaguely irritated me, who thought sex was a crime to be committed as quickly as possible. Perhaps I’d been conditioned by the toilets. But then the
realness
of what we were doing touched me. I was here in a bed with cool sheets we were heating up, and each part of my body he stroked released some new thought in him and feeling in me. The heroics of sexual frenzy had been replaced by this voice, confiding secrets to me in the dark, lit by reflections off the deep lovely miles of snow outside.

And yet the next day I didn’t phone him. And the day after I couldn’t, and the third day confirmed my silence, and I couldn’t understand why I’d betrayed Fred, betrayed myself. It seemed after all that I was just another gay man who lost interest after the deed of darkness.

Maria called me from Chicago to tell me that Paul had killed himself—Paul, the painter I had so much admired when I was at Eton and who’d told me, “Someday you’ll have more freedom than you’ll want.” Maria had heard the story from Paul’s girlfriend, who’d found Maria’s phone number in Paul’s address book. Apparently Paul had moved to the Brooklyn suburb of Sheepshead Bay, where he’d rented the attic in someone’s old wooden house. He’d painted a bit but grown so despondent that he’d thrown himself off the Staten Island ferry. There was talk of organizing a memorial show of his work at the Eton museum.

The friends I’d chosen seemed to be going crazy or dying or getting arrested or succumbing to drugs. The self-destruction all around me scared me. Maria cried over the phone. I knew she and I must take care of each other. Paul had once told me that art should be a consolation for life, not a reflection of its ugliness. Until now I’d seen my own writing as nothing but a polygraph test, but now the suffering I witnessed led me to reconsider my work. Since I was a Freudian,
I told myself that wish fulfillment should join the repetition-compulsion as a motive for making art. According to Freud, people repeated the most painful events of their past in order to gain mastery over them—my fiction until now had seemed born out of just such an urge. But now the fresh colors of a wished-for world, a utopia in which kindness reigned, called to me. The puritan in me was afraid to falsify this vale of tears by rendering it as Happy Valley, but Lou had said truth must be sacrificed to beauty, which made Freudian sense if
truth
means repetition and
beauty
our fondest wishes in search of fulfillment.

I hitchhiked the three hundred miles to Chicago and stayed with Maria. Again we set sail every night, flying the colors of art and love. Again we drank wine and played
Manon Lescaut
, an opera in which the jumbled text scarcely justifies the pell-mell duets and ecstatic high notes—a disparity that resembled our love, Maria’s and mine, so reticent though ardent. Half playfully, we flirted with the idea of marrying.

“Would I have to change my name?” she said.

“I’d change mine to yours.”

We carried home bags of groceries, went for a ride in the suburbs, snuggled up to watch television. Maria enjoyed the world, the world’s charms, without paying the world’s price. She simply refused to see our homosexuality or age difference as a problem. She wouldn’t discuss it. She started with the idea that bohemians were exempt from the ordinary rules.

We went to a lesbian bar together. Maria entered the Volley Ball arrayed in black: a black trench coat over black jeans and a man’s black shirt. Her delicate white skin looked as raunchy as Elvis Presley’s flickering image on television. We watched the women dancing together while three old Negro men in the band, faces petrified into indifference, tooted and banged. A butch entered squiring a blonde whore
tottering along on spike heels under dairy whip hair, her chubby hand rising again and again to tuck a stray wisp back into the creamy dome. On the wall was a sign, flyblown and fading, that read: “Hard Times Party Tonight.” Maria explained that the sign suggested a costume party and was a dodge around the law that forbade women to wear more than three articles of men’s dress—jeans, boots, and a T-shirt, say. A few businessmen, whose fantasies ran to lesbian couples, sat around the bar, eyes glued to the dance floor. A bouncer kept them away from the women—look but don’t touch! The one toilet was unavailable for a whole half hour at a stretch. Two women had barricaded themselves inside and were necking. Most of the women addressed each other with names drawn from children’s books (“Piglet,” “Eeyore,” and “Pooh” were favorites) or by men’s nicknames (“Andy” and “Tony” seemed popular).

Maria’s apartment smelled of oil paint and turpentine. Her father had carved a grandfather clock for her in his basement shop at home. The Salvation Army couch Maria had upholstered in crisp blue-and-white bed ticking. She would sit on a high stool, dressed in a white smock, a cigarette burning in her hand like incense before an idol.

I posed for her, but she said I wasn’t a good model. She spent most of her time modeling in clay two nude female figures whose linking arms and legs formed the oval frame of a mirror.

She clung to me when I left. She said, “You’ve spoiled me with your visit. How can I go back to my spinster’s life?”

“I’ll write you every day and get back down here in a week or two, three at the most.”

I wanted to marry Maria and avoid the solitude and suffering everyone had told me homosexuality would bring. I thought marriage would define my nebulous feelings toward her; if I were married, I’d be a husband.

Yet something kept me from answering her letters. I resolved every morning to write her; but every night I went to bed without having mailed off a letter. Her letters dropped regularly into my box. Then two weeks of silence. Then this letter: “Dumpling, you haven’t written or called in a month, an insulting silence I can only assume is intended as a rejection. No lover would act the way you have. I accuse you of gross neglect.

“It’s just as well, anyway. Boys really don’t thrill me. Last week I met a fabulous dyke named Maeve at the Volley Ball who looks just like Anthony Quinn and who’s bombarded me with champagne and kilos of chocolates. Thank heaven for dykes, or where else would a girl find a little gallantry? Certainly not from you, you naughty neglectful Dumpling.”