The Beautiful Room Is Empty (23 page)

Then he was gone in a fury (I’d giddily torn the
entire
paper seal off the top of a jar of instant coffee rather than leaving
half
on as a leveler for the teaspoon). I drifted into a busy, dissatisfied life of amateur office work by day and professional cruising by night. The gay bars were being closed down because the mayor was cleaning up the city in anticipation of the World’s Fair. One day a new bar would open up
way west, south of Canal, in a no-man’s-land, and we’d all rush down there, jungle tomtoms having given us the address and hours. But three days later the police raided the bar. We ran up the back stairs, leapt from roof to roof, and clattered down a neighbor’s fire exit into a night panicky with silently revolving red lights and the muffled racket of messages radioed to the squad car.

Then a place opened off Times Square, near the Peppermint Lounge where the Twist had started, and we were up there dancing at the back on a small floor behind a Spanish metal grille strung with Christmas tree lights that began to twinkle the minute a suspected plainclothesman walked in; that was our signal to break apart. But that bar was closed down, too.

Subway toilets, last cleaned and stocked with paper towels on the eve of World War I, were sudden descents into the filthy, thrilling tropics. On the way home from the office, my stomach sour from coffee, frustration, and boredom, I’d sway against strangers and read the subway ads for the tenth time.

Because a novel—these words—is shared experience, a clumsy but sometimes funny conversation between two people in which one of them is doing all the talking, it will always be tighter and more luminous than that object called living. There is something so insipid about living that to do it at all requires heroism or stupidity, probably both. Living is all those days and years, the rushes; memory edits them; this page is the final print, music added. But for an instant imagine the process reversed, go with me back through the years, then
be
me, me all alone as I submit to the weight, the atmospheric pressure of youth, for when I was young I was exhausted by always bumping up against this big lummox I didn’t really know, myself. It was as though I’d been forced
into solitary confinement with a stranger who had unaccountable tastes, aversions, rhythms.

Come with me, then, up the concrete steps to the toilet door, place a dime in the box, turn the chrome handle, open the door a crack, and slip in.

You’ll be surprised by how many silent men are standing around. This businessman has rested his expensive leather briefcase on the filthy sink and is leaning against a tile wall. On the floor a bum, reeking of sweet red wine, is sleeping it off, snoring loudly, a sound that draws a red line under the conspicuous silence. Both stalls, one doorless, the other with its door half open, house men sitting right on the porcelain (the seats have long since been stolen). Both occupants have dropped their pants to the damp floor but are leaning forward to conceal their erections. The mood of the room is a cheap alloy of tension and boredom. A train clatters in, you can hear the doors open and shut, then shoes ringing on the pavement in the cavernous station.

And then you lean against the wall and, enduring seconds that pulse in your ear, stretch out your hand toward the crotch of the man beside you. Your action triggers vitality all around you. In a second this raw country boy at the urinal with the rosy forearms and red knuckles, the sickle of a vein superimposed on the hammer of his hand, has turned toward the room, brandishing a big red penis. An instant later everyone has converged on him, the men in the stalls emerge, one is kissing him, the second licking his testicles, a third man the penis, and another is standing beside him, arm around his waist, as though to lend him courage and companionship. The businessman with the expensive briefcase has planted his face between the farmboy’s buttocks in total disregard of his expensive trousers, which are getting damp and dirty on the floor, wet with backed-up sewage. He’s lapping and lapping; I
can see his eyes drifting peacefully from side to side, dreamily independent of the suckling action.

Then the man sucking the cock comes up for air and you take his place, fitting yourself around a tumescence still warm and tasting of the other guy’s spit. You look up as someone else unbuttons the country boy’s shirt, revealing a hairless chest marbled by blue veins and decorated like a piece of wedding cake with two candle sockets in pink frosting—the erect nipples.

Now everyone is at work on him at once, breath in his ear, lips on his lips, mouths on his balls, cock, and ass, that arm around his waist, as though he really is a bride and this the last-minute flurry of seamstresses fitting him into his gown.

When he comes, he lets out a cry. His body stiffens and he leans back. You swallow gratefully the surprisingly meager but sweet semen, and the boy’s ecstasy sets off his bridal attendants, who shoot and shout in a chorus around him. The drunk is still snoring.

In two seconds you’ve buttoned up, wrapped your raincoat around you, and rushed out into the flood of passengers flowing up the stairs and rivuleting into the night. Your hair is rumpled, your face flushed, and your hand still smells of the country boy. At the subway entrance you catch sight of the businessman just behind you. Without thinking, you glance at his trousers, not too bad, he looks at your wet knees the same moment, and you and he exchange the tiniest smile of wintry complicity.

A beautiful young woman at the office to whom I’d confided the secret of my sexuality (she’d sworn never to betray my confidence) looked at me now with compassion during coffee breaks, held my hand, and treated me as though I had leukemia.
From her scattered remarks I grasped that she thought homosexuality was a sadness, a wound, more a poetic disposition than a perverse activity. What would she have thought if she’d seen me on my knees in a subterranean slice of jungle inserted under the leafless, treeless forest of gray Manhattan?

During lunch hour, in the cruisy toilet at the old Whitney Museum (when it was still next door to the Modern), I saw a painting student I’d met at the Eton art academy. He frowned at me and said, “I scarcely recognized you, you’ve become so fat—what a shame to ruin your looks when you’re still so young. How old are you?”

“Twenty-three.”

“Well, you look horrible, at least thirty; you should enjoy what’s left of your youth.”

A week later I mentioned to Maria that my new suit bought on time from Rogers Peet must be made of an inferior fabric since it was already wearing thin just below my crotch.

“That’s because you’ve gotten so chubby, Dumpling, that your legs rub together when you walk.”

Until now I’d always eaten just as much as I liked whenever it suited me and I’d always been slender. Although I’d hated gym class and gladly avoided exercise, normal campus comings and goings had sufficed to burn off the huge quantities of food I devoured. Of course, at my fraternity house we’d been given roast beef; now I was too poor to eat anything but spaghetti.

The calamity of having gone to fat shocked me, first because I hadn’t noticed it, second because it seemed irreversible. I couldn’t imagine dieting. A grim fatalism settled over me that was too anxious to be called resignation. Every morning I’d stand on the toilet to inspect my body in the only mirror in the apartment, the tiny one above the sink, but I could never tell if I was thinner or fatter. I refused to buy a
scale and enter the realm of fact; I preferred to conjure my fictions, bloat in despair, dwindle in joy, stay constant to that mild anxiety Freud had termed “boredom.”

And then there was something stubborn in me that didn’t want to lose weight to attract a man. If the right man came along, he’d be able to see my virtues magically. Once he kissed me, the frog would turn into a prince. I had become a trick question, a heavy disguise, but behind the disobliging exterior was the welcoming child I would always be. Of course, what I’d forgotten was that a lover was not Parsifal and I was not the Grail; the medievalism of my imagination was not sufficiently up-to-date to recognize that the lover was a shopper and I a product.

On cold winter nights, lit like a pumpkin from within by the flame of liquor, I’d cruise the corner of Christopher and a back street called Gay (any chance of commemorating a plaque there now to my hungry ghost?). I’d memorize the shop windows and run around the corner to the neighborhood bar for another drink.

It was the most venerable gay bar in town, its greasy ceiling caked with an inch of accumulated dust, its photos of sporting and theatrical celebrities strangely irrelevant to its clientele. The owners were nervous that their bar, too, would be closed by the police and they instituted curious rules: no more than three men could stand in a conversational group, women were given free drinks, and mixed couples were warmly welcomed whereas the doorman sent away one out of every two single men. On some evenings he’d insist that everyone turn his back to the bar and face the windows and street, as though we were in a display, merely pretending to drink and laugh while actually modeling the new line of hopsack pants or wheat jeans, saddle shoes or penny loafers, and surfer haircuts. I’d had my slightly curly hair relaxed by the same dangerous chemical blacks used to “conk” their
hair at that time; once it was properly limp it hung over my eyes in a languid swag.

My fatness abolished the space between my mother and me. She was a thousand miles away in Chicago, but the distance between us was fingernail thin. Like her, I juggled an inner melancholy and surface cheer. Like her, I was always on stage in a role calculated to please. The strangers I wanted to win over were all men—indifferent men whose fierce desires for each other crackled just above my head.

I remembered when I was a boy, after my mother was divorced. It was my eighth birthday. She thought we should celebrate it in an Italian restaurant on Rush Street. She liked to go there because she could meet men at the bar. We split a dish of green noodles and she drank Chianti. She kept smiling at a man at the bar. When my birthday cake was brought in, it created an excuse for the man to come over to our table. My mother was quick to offer him a piece of cake, and he bought her another small straw-covered bottle of Chianti. They arranged to meet later. For a while, she went out with him, but one day he stopped returning her calls.

“It’s because I’m too fat,” she said. “I don’t eat much. I eat like a bird. It’s my metabolism. Some people are cursed with a slow metabolism. I have to eat. If I don’t eat, I get weak and can’t work. God knows I have few enough pleasures. Eating is a consolation. But I eat like a bird. You see what I eat. Do I eat too much?”

“No,” I said, “very little.”

Now I was just like her. On some days I’d think of my fat as manly, the potbelly of the laborers I’d worked among. But most of the time fat feminized me, turned me into a pink, quivering Rubens with breasts that jiggled when I ran down steps.

I complained to Lou. He was tonic and pitiless. He said, “It’s easy to be anything you want. You must want to be fat.

It’s a form of loyalty to your mother. Or maybe you’re merely afraid of being queer. It’s logical. There are no fat gay boys. You’re fat. Therefore you’re not gay. Certainly the fat keeps you from having gay sex.”

I thought bitterly of his stomach, which had been half removed and permitted him to eat constantly and stay skinny.

Lou lived by extremes. After the debacle of his last days in Chicago, here in New York he’d found a high-paying job, joined a gym, bought a luxurious wardrobe of dark cashmere suits. He worked twelve to fourteen hours a day at his office and weekends as well. His West Side apartment he filled with comfortable, anonymous furniture and blowups of his heroes, Ezra Pound, Bobby Phalen, and Cassius Clay. He had no plants, which would have required watering. He suspended his graceful blue bicycle from the ceiling when he wasn’t riding it. He did a thorough housecleaning every Thursday night to prepare for a solid weekend of tricking. He liked the black and Puerto Rican neighbors, the cheerful music, the kids playing on the stairs, the fiesta in the streets, the smell of saffron in the halls—saffron or its cheaper substitute, Bimol.

Lou had met a tiny peroxided blond kid named Misty who he had move in with him. “Oh, Bunny,” he said, touching my hand as we ate at a Broadway coffee shop. “It was here, right here, that I met him one night.”

“At three in the morning.”

“Four. The bars had closed. I hadn’t scored and, anyway, I couldn’t feature another night with a grown-up, some accountant from Jersey City with a screw-on collar pin who wants to sixty-nine because he thinks it’s
fair!”
Horrified laugh. He’d been leaning across the sticky Formica table, scrutinizing me, his face in mine, but now he slammed back and disturbed the man behind him. “So, discouraged and
rather tipsy”—a grimace to indicate his disgust with himself—“I came in here, ordered my mournful
stack
and two burned sausages, and looked in the corner and saw a divinity, a little blond god or goddess smiling at me. I could focus on him only by closing one eye, and I was so ashamed of myself I wanted to head home and hide. I’d fallen so low I was completely bitter and paranoid and really thought he and his little drag friends, all so chic and desirable, had decided to pick on me as a comically woebegone specimen. But finally this little goddess—I really wasn’t sure what sex she was, she’d been sewn into white jeans with green thread, she had an Hermès scarf tied to her shoulder bag—anyway, she came over and I bought her a cup of coffee and now she’s moved in, I can’t believe my luck, a perfect little boy-girl all my own, he makes me dinner just like a little wife and goes to sleep listening to rock ‘n’ roll from the radio under the pillow, our whole nights are afloat on a sea of rock-’n’-roll wisdom.”

I had dinner several times with Lou and Misty, but Lou never participated in the conversation. He preferred to watch me interview Misty. Then he’d watch Misty respond at tedious, childlike, mendacious length—I say “watch” us because he sat at some distance from us, as though we were actors having a quick runthrough and whispering our lines. His pleasure at having such a fabulous creature in his house was increased when he gazed at Misty from a distance.