The Beautiful Room Is Empty (7 page)

I couldn’t, of course, be the athletic or heterosexual man he wanted. He knew I was homosexual, although we never discussed it. I’d told him in a letter in order to get the money I needed to see the shrink, Dr. O’Reilly.

The next summer I spent with Dad at his Michigan cottage. My stepmother and sister and the maid weren’t allowed to join us until the end of the season. Until then I was alone with my father. He put me on a strict regime of
yardwork, mainly raking the pine needles that formed a thick carpet from top to bottom of the slope on which the house was built. When I asked him what possible reason there could be for removing the needles, he turned red, his already thin lips grew thinner, and he said, “Goddamn it, you’ll do what the hell I goddam well tell you to do.”

When my stepmother finally arrived, she revealed that my father thought he would drive the queerness out of me through manual labor. For weeks we had circled each other wordlessly, my father up on a ladder, me with my eternal rake and wheelbarrow, his anger between us, mysterious as the stone the Muslims worship. Since he knew how to cook nothing but steaks, every night we’d sit wordlessly over plates overflowing with fat and blood. He’d read the newspaper. I couldn’t guess why he hated me so much. In the past I’d always welcomed his indifference, since that was what I felt for him, though I took care to hide it, but his program of hatred frightened me. My stepmother told me my mother had accused my father over the phone of having brought about my “sickness” through his absence; my father was countering the charge by administering to me his grim discipline. Although I’d finally done something to grab his attention, that same thing repelled him. My stepmother said, “Your poor dad, this thing is killing him, he stays awake all night worrying; he was so angry at first I was afraid he’d kill you.”

At college I was finally free. I’d smoldered against other people’s rules for so long that now I felt freedom as a form of loneliness, a disturbing withdrawal of love. Certainly I was lonely and I wanted friends. I wanted to be popular, not just with indulgent bohemian grown-ups, but even with attractive people my own age, for here, being intelligent was, if not quite a social asset, at least not a liability.

English class was taught by Winthrop Shelley, a pale-skinned
black man whose blue eyes seemed to be a constant source of pain, as though their blueness were a form of encroaching blindness. He was always taking off his wire-rimmed glasses, which were so pliable that they had to be handled gingerly, and massaging his closed eyes and particularly the delicate bridge of his nose, the place where he located his objections to a student’s remarks. What Mr. Shelley said was always precise, quizzical. His queer air of listening to himself, the way he had of responding to his own idea in a complex sequence of feelings by a wavering, then pinched smile and a line of doubt drawn on his forehead—such scrupulosity vaguely irritated me. Didn’t Mr. Shelley see that most of the class couldn’t parse the syntax of so much refinement? And what kind of Negro was he, anyway, with his tweed jacket and the gold pocket watch he ceremoniously placed on his desk to indicate class was beginning? With his Oxbridge accent, his soundless chuckle, and his dumbshow of glee (titter behind an exquisitely manicured hand) when someone said something stupid?

Not that he was taken in by stylish but empty chatter. He’d run his lacquered, dusky pink index finger over his tweezed mustache and say, “Mr. Larkin, I’m not sure I follow your point. Are you suggesting we should turn against a friend who’s an enemy of the state? Or do you agree with Cicero that loyalty to a friend must outweigh up to a certain point even patriotism?”

Like any agile debater, I could defend either side of the question, but I was too immoral to wonder which side was right. I didn’t care and I couldn’t imagine anyone else did either. When it was revealed at this time that a young intellectual had cheated on a TV quiz show, I was amazed that other people were so scandalized. I looked around for winks of complicity and sly grins but found none. My own immorality didn’t trouble me, since I knew I responded to
other people and I mistook this ready sympathy for goodness. Besides, I wanted only to survive; other people, the ones with power—their acts might count.

Kant’s idea that one must act as a universal legislator setting a precedent for everyone seemed the purest nonsense to me—in fact, so pure I admired it.

I discovered the toilets in the student union. One afternoon after class, I burst through the door in a rush to piss and hurry home. Shoes scraped, bones cracked, I turned a corner and saw a student huddled over a urinal, face blood-red and turned down, his white shirttail sticking out in back. Just two urinals away from him in a line of eight was a beefy businessman, obvious toupee, out of breath. In the stalls a scurrying and the clank of belt buckle against metal partition. I chose my urinal, the farthest one away, and I too looked down.

The silence was intense, intensified by the timed flush of water. Then silence again, the throb of my pulse in my neck, the businessman’s impatient, audible exhalation, the scratch of a match in a stall and soon the rich scent of burning tobacco creeping out over the ammonia smell of disinfectant. The concentration was strong and focused, every heart pounding, every sense open. When it became obvious that I, too, was waiting and no longer pissing, the businessman shot his shiny black mohair cuff and consulted his massive gold wrist-watch. Face burning, fingers going cold on my cock, I turned to look at the businessman. He regarded me expressionlessly, leaned his head back hoping to glimpse into my urinal, took a step away from the wall to expose his short, engorged, nearly purple penis. I stepped back to show mine, though I knew he didn’t want me, just as a sign that I was a friendly player in the game. In a flash he was squatting, the student turned to feed the businessman’s mouth, the smoker in the stall dropped his cigarette in the water, quick hiss, and he and his
neighbor in the next stall were on their knees, hands reaching under the partition between them and grabbing each other, as I could see by stooping over. No one cared about me one way or the other. I was one of them.

I looked at the student being sucked. His soft white belly with its explosion of black hair and wet cock shiny as glass were flashed on the screen of my mind as was that rush of male hands under the partition. I listened to the quick clink-clink of a belt buckle on the tiles.

Then the muffled sound of an approaching step, followed by someone pushing open the door, released the echoing chatter in the corridor. Instantly the couple in the stalls regained their seats; the businessman and his client broke off their deal; and I revolved to face my urinal. The intruder, a big, pigeon-toed athlete, splashed, dribbled, left, but not before he’d made us feel like Sleeping Beauty’s courtiers the moment before the prince melts the rime of sleep…. If I use that implausible image I do so to cool my burning face, since the athlete, after buttoning up, flicked his hair out of his eyes and voiced a simple grunt of disgust.

Home to Chicago for Thanksgiving weekend, I managed to slip away for a wild evening with Morris, the clerk in Tex’s store. Tex had disappeared but had left a note promising to come back with money. Morris opened the store only when it suited him. He hadn’t been paid in months, and besides, there were no new books to sell.

Tonight he was wearing pocketless black trousers molded to his full buttocks. “Not bad, hunh?” he said, standing on tiptoe, sticking out his ass, hand on hip, and looking back over one shoulder like a wartime pinup.

We piled into a car with some friends of his, all a few years older than I, and as we passed a policeman directing traffic, the driver lowered his window and shouted, “Love your hat, Tilly!”

“Hush, you’re a caution,” someone in the back seat said, “don’t upset Lily Law, she be
bad
, that girl.”

In my middle-class way, I tried to show interest in my neighbor by asking him where he lived, what he did, but he peered right into my face and licked his lips slowly like a silent movie vamp. “Hey, it’s cute, this one, it’s real cute,” he announced to Morris in the front seat, pointing at me.

“Like it?” Morris asked, bored. “You like anything in trousers, shameless hussy,” he added, stifling a tiny meow of a yawn with a fluttering palm. Morris’s hands, I noticed, were huge and ropey with veins, strangely ill-suited to the frivolous gestures he liked to sketch in.

“Look, bitch,” my neighbor growled at Morris, “don’t get me started, or your mother will claw your little red eyes out—I’m on the rag tonight.”

“Certainly,” Morris said, smartly turning around and deliberately staring at the other man’s crotch, “you’ve certainly been ragging something; I never saw a white woman pack such a big box, I don’t mind if you tuck in the odd hanky coyly stuffed just to provide a little front interest, don’t you know, but Mary you’ve pushed a double bed sheet up that cooze of yours—not that you feel anything down there anyway, stretched out as it! must! be!” he said, ending his aria on an upbeat. He snapped his fingers and turned away.

“I’ll read you if you wreck my nerves, girl,” my neighbor said. Then he added a loud wailing “Oo-eeh!” just as Mahalia Jackson might have done after an all-out gospel hymn.

We were all smiling. I was mute and ponderous beside my new companions. I assumed each bit of repartee had been coined on the spot. Only later did I recognize that the routines made up a repertory, a sort of folk wisdom common to “queens,” for hadn’t Morris recklessly announced, “Grab your tiaras, girls, we’re all royalty tonight, why I haven’t seen so many crowned heads since Westminster Abbey—”

“I know you
give
head, Abbie, but the only crowns you’ve seen are on those few molars you’ve got left.” The speaker turned to me, nudged me in the ribs, indicated Morris, and said, “Can you fathom a slut pulling her teeth just to give a smoother hum job?” and then pulled his lips back over his own teeth to demonstrate. “She covers the waterfront, poor dentureless crone, looking for seafood trade.”

We stopped at a gay coffee shop. As the youngest and quietest, I was pushed to the aisle, just beside the next table of straights, two couples on dates, slumming, I guess. I prayed for the guys in my group to calm down. But the presence of hostile, if mesmerized, heterosexual spectators made them hysterical. Morris leaned across the table and asked a “sister” huskily, “Like my lashes? Ronnie dyed them, said it’d give me definition.”

“Honey, the only definition that fits you starts with Q and rhymes with—waitress,
beer
, please,” he shouted at an old tattooed man in white shirt-sleeves who worked the lobster shift. He looked at the waiter more closely. “Oh, you’re a waiter, not a waitress. Sorry, Dearie, I thought you were a Fish for a moment, there’s such a strong smell of Fish in here tonight, wouldn’t you say?” He was staring aggressively at the two girls beside me. “Can’t bear Fish or Fisheaters, smell like cans of old tuna.”

The girls had stopped chewing their gum and were noisily sucking the ice melt in their Coke glasses. I smiled conspiratorially at them, as if to say, Aren’t these guys weird, but I noticed that they were looking back at me with open disgust. One of their dates said, “Some people are sick, real sick,” which touched off a volley of birdcalls at our table (“Are you sick? Who’s sick? You don’t look sick”) and a whole dumbshow of fever tests (palm on forehead) and tongue checks (“Say ah”). For the first time I’d crossed the
line. I was no longer a visitor to the zoo, but one of the animals.

My mother had just moved to downtown Chicago, to a brand-new high-rise along Lake Michigan, a place where the floors were raw concrete and had to be covered by wall-to-wall carpeting. Hers was gold, as were the sheer curtains woven with metallic thread, and the upholstered armchairs and sectional sofa. The windows were sealed shut; cooled or warmed air seeped in through vents.

From the twenty-fourth floor I looked down on the older buildings and across to the newer ones. Their windows reflected the light or sank into shadow or glowed from within as the heavens turned, as a construction crane turned atop a rising tower or stood, dozing, inert against the night sky. Twenty-four stories below, over and over again a traffic signal gave its crude demonstration of spectrum analysis: red, yellow, green, and back again, a primary lesson sometimes imparted to the glossy hood of a car, sometimes wasted on the rain-slick pavement.

Out of another window the winter lake at night, unheard behind glass, flickered with foam like the black-and-white television I kept on, sound off, for the wan company it provided, Sid Caesar doing a pratfall, Imogene Coca mugging.

When my mother was out for the evening I’d take off my clothes and dance naked, barefoot, through the dim apartment on the shaggy carpets. The glittering spires outside surrounded me like astounded adults. Snow fell, swirled, slalomed past our windows. A cloud got caught between our building and the next. The second Sibelius symphony provided me with exalted feelings to interpret. What a relief to feel longing in my arms, passion in my legs, craving after beauty in my hands rather than in my head for once.

When I returned to school I started cruising all the time, all the time. Every free moment between classes I was in the student union or the third-floor toilet in Main Hall. I’d sit for hours in a stall, dropping cigarettes into the bowl, studying a book on Chinese social structure or Buddhist art, awaiting an interesting customer, like one of those gypsy fortune-tellers who prospect clients in storefronts where they also live. Their mixture of homely paraphernalia and mystical apparatus (TV beside crystal ball) might serve as an analogy to my blend of scholarship and sex.

I was obsessed. Hour after hour I’d sit there, inhaling the smells other people made, listening to their sounds, studying the graffiti scribbled all over the thick marble partitions in Main Hall or the metal ones in the union.

Someone comes in, heavy brown cordovans before the urinal, worn-down heels and scuff marks on the leather—neglects himself, can’t be gay. I can hear his urine splatter but I can’t see its flow. I wait for it to stop—the crucial moment, for if he stays on, then I’ll stand in my stall, peek through the crack, soundlessly unbolt my door as an invitation. Now, in this indeterminate second, I can put one head after another on his unseen shoulders, invent for him one scenario after another. I get hard in anticipation, stiff before the void of my own imagination.