The Beautiful Room Is Empty (8 page)

Nothing. His calves flex slightly as he buttons up (heavy weight to lift) and then he’s gone. One of the toilets two stalls down drips and I picture the mad anesthesiologist mixing poison, drop by drop, into the sedative.

Time and again I’d focus on this stranger on the other side of the door, will him into wanting me, impart to him perverse demands, blond hair, full lips, only to see him through the crack in the door: the middle-aged janitor with hairy ears. But then, just as I was ready to cash in my chips, someone sat beside me, dropped his pants to the floor in a
puddle, revealing strong tan calves above crisp white ribbed athletic socks. A silence like a storm cloud gathered over the room, blocking out the hall noises. He tapped his foot slightly; I tapped mine. Then two taps, matched by two of mine. Three and three.

And without further prelude, he sank to his knees shoving his brown thighs and white groin under the partition, and I also knelt to feast on his erection, inhaling the clean smell of soap, my hands exploring the lichee-size testicles, then traveling up smooth skin. I’d dreamed about this moment so long that now I wanted to freeze the frame.

In my anthropology class I was learning that although man had started off as an animal subject to natural selection, he had soon begun to evolve in a direction determined purely by culture. Human beings stood upright to free their hands, they needed their hands to hold tools, the tool-and-weapon-wielding parts of their brains developed to accommodate their newly prehensile grasp, language was enabled by tool-wielding—but now, if culture were yanked out from under us, we’d be destroyed, like one of those cartoon cats who scamper off a branch and tread thin air until sudden awareness makes them plummet.

Here, under my gaze, was this creature half-natural but half-invented by himself. The tan line suggested poolside swimsuit, frosted glass, sunglasses—everything as symbolic as the life pictured by advertisements. But the hickory-hard straining of this cock upward spelled animal—a straight line of ascent inflating slightly as the balls rose and tightened for blast-off, a thrust that propelled life upward. The cleanness, however, the feathery lightness of the blond hairs, the neatness of the circumcision were all preppy, while the heavy hamstrings (and now the jets of semen filling my mouth) were primate.

For an instant I stayed attached to him, though here
I was on a dirty tile floor on hands and knees before a stranger I’d seen only from the waist down but whom I remember to this day because he’d presented himself so fearlessly, because his body, at least the half of it I knew, seemed ideal, and because his desire was so strong it was as expressive as words or deeds, the things that normally define individuals.

Then he was gone. His exit was so hasty I couldn’t see him, just a flash of blond hair and white shirt collar through the narrow vertical slit of my sentry box. I waited patiently for someone else.

I was alone with my sexuality, since none of these men spoke to me, nor did I even know their faces, much less their names. Their most intimate tender parts were thrust under the stone partitions, like meals for prisoners, but if I poked my head under the partition and glanced up at them, they’d hide their faces with their hands as a movie star wards off a flash. I’d rush from one toilet to another between classes. Sometimes all four stalls in Main Hall or all eight in the union would be occupied, full house. I’d wait for someone to emerge, but if no one did I would realize I was spoiling their fun and leave. Perhaps my presence was interrupting an orgy that would resume the second I left and even now eight doors concealed eight erect penises.

Someone with a convict’s patience had drilled a dime-size hole in one of the marble slabs in Main Hall. I’d sit on the toilet, suddenly remember the hole was here, between this stall and the next, look up and see a black pupil glossy, quivering. If the eye persisted in its liquid restlessness, at once thoroughly anonymous and shockingly vulnerable, I’d look back toward this live camera, this unseen seer. I stood up to expose my erection. I posed a bit self-consciously, turning halfway toward my audience while still keeping my feet
forward in the usual position so as not to arouse suspicion in anyone outside glancing at the floor.

His lashes squeezed shut for a second as he blinked. The effect through the judas was of a carnivorous plant swallowing a black, trembling life. The soul and intelligence usually attributed to the eyes had been annulled by this extreme close-up: nothing left but motility. “The quick,” I thought, as in the phrase, “The quick and the dead.”

Then I exploded, he flushed and shot out of his booth, the door to the hall sighed shut behind him, and I was alone with the faintly blue light filtering down through overhead frosted glass onto white porcelain and with the sound of the leaking toilet and a paw full of come, which I licked clean and swallowed like a savage or a cat. If I’d had the courage, I would have advised my anthropology class that primitive man believes in the conservation of energy through the recycling of bodily fluids.

I was a Buddhist, or would have been if I could have given up this hankering after a penis attached to two furry legs below and one Cyclopean eye above, as black and wobbly as black-currant jelly. Because of my Buddhist longing for peace, I’d decided to study Chinese. Wherever I went—fraternity house, dorm room, student union, dinner party, toilet—I had my handmade flashcards with me. Chinese character on one side, on the other its pronunciation and correct tone above the definition, or rather dated definitions, since meanings shifted over the centuries.

We were just a handful of students clustering three nights a week around our conversation teacher in the one lit classroom in an otherwise dark building. The stairs creaked. Our teacher, an ageless Chinese woman in a dark blue lusterless
silk dress, asked me in Mandarin to run out and see if it was a strange “nose person”
(bi ren)
—and in that instant we kids, all Caucasian, learned that’s what the Chinese called us because of our big noses. Our teacher clapped a hand over her mouth under her own suitably snub nose and blushed.

We called her the “straight lady,” because she could have been drawn entirely in straight lines, her pageboy and bangs, her eye slits and thin wrists, her breastless body. She was quite proud of her up-to-date attitudes (she was both a Methodist and a lifetime member of the YWCA), but she retained odd scraps of folk wisdom (and the Chinese inability in English to distinguish between
he
and
she
). She said to me, “You look tired” (pronounced “tod”), “very, very tod. Me too, I always tod. One day I look at my dog and say, ‘Why he never tod? She never tod.’ Then I realize he never tod ’cause she sleep all the time. Now I sleep all the time too. When I have moment between class or food cook, I sleep. I sleep all the time. I never tod.”

Through her and a Chinese social club I met a large group of students from Taiwan and Singapore. Two girls, Betty and Kay, invited me and other friends to an enormous dinner served Chinese-style with no tea (“Tea is for every time of the day except mealtime,” they explained) and dozens of tiny plates flying through the air, and, in the center of the table, big bowls of soup and steamed rice.

Somehow I’d imagined Chinese women would be—well, Japanese, that is, modest, self-effacing, tittering. But, in fact, Kay, who wore her black hair held back by a wide pink band, was strong enough to defy her family’s insistence that she study medicine or law. All her Chinese friends had an artistic bent, but she alone had the courage to pursue a music degree (she played Chopin études for us on her overly live upright). And she and all her friends loved to tease, not titter, and
even played rough practical jokes on one another. Her roommate Betty, women’s tennis champ of Hong Kong, was minuscule and looked no older than fifteen, though she was finishing a doctorate in chemistry. She was wound too tight and kept gaining time; obsessively efficient, she was able all at once to run up a dress, jot down a stream of formulae, practice her backhand, bicycle to the lab, and plan an elaborate evening of amateur theatricals to spoof several friends.

At the dinner, Kay decided to test how gullible and distracted a friend of hers, a Chinese grad student in physics, actually was. As we listened, she phoned him at his apartment, where she knew he’d be lost in calculations. She told him she was the operator calling to test his “unit” and, despite her heavy Chinese accent, he believed her. “I want you to walk across the room and put your unit in the top drawer of your walnut dresser, close the drawer, return to your present position, and say, Wong, wong.’ ” The physicist’s compliance, coupled with the fact that dogs in China say wong-wong instead of bow-wow, made us sick with laughter. Soon Kay had him whistling, hooting, and grunting at his unit.

Betty was at the same time quickly loading the table with dishes. We were drinking beers, and the cold imperious Kay had turned bright red from drink: “Autumn Moon” became her new name.

Then it was Betty’s turn to be teased. She’d made the mistake of complaining that she felt fat, though she carried no more excess weight than a cricket. Kay told us how she’d recently called an exercycle company in Detroit and, in Betty’s name, asked for a free demonstration. One afternoon while Betty was deep in her chemistry book, a big blonde in black high heels clomped-clomped up the wooden fire escape, rising into Betty’s view like a sea monster. “Are you Betty Wong?” she demanded.

“Yes.”

“One minute please while I assemble the horse.”

Before Betty could say
ee, erh, san
, which is one, two, three in Chinese, she’d been strapped, all eighty-five pounds of her, onto the weight-reducing demon.

“That night,” Kay was saying, “when she asked me in tears how they’d come up with her name, I told her they go through the infirmary files and approach anyone who’s overweight.”

The two other male guests were Chinese in white shirts, sober ties, and gray suits, smiling and nodding, knees together, hands to either side flat against the chair seat as though ready to spring up at any moment. Before long I’d grasped the underlying idea. The girls were supposed to have all the personality, but everyone, men included, was meant to be a “character”—Betty a cheerful but driven maniac; Kay the severe kidder, until she became “Autumn Moon”; the men polite and neat, but each harboring his secret though innocuous foible: gluttony for cherries, passion for Elvis. This jokey, satirical style was far more pointed than the mirthless Midwestern joshing I was used to, the flaccid wordplay, and the tiresome envisioning of dull improbabilities (“Wouldn’t it be really neat if the moon really was made of green cheese?”)

For white Americans of that time and class and place, the only alternative to public joshing was intimate confession; we gave too little of ourselves or too much. But the Chinese students I met were guardedly friendly when alone and gleefully satirical in groups—but satirical of minor vices, none too close to the bone. We white Americans were grim psychoanalytic theorists, sure that sex (greedy sex, guilty sex) was our sole motivation, whereas the Chinese were capricious, artistic. Kay told me, “You always wear blue because you like blue eyes,” and it was perfectly true that the boys who attracted me—the boys I fell in love with, not the brunettes
I lusted after—were blue-eyed blonds. Or she’d say, “You eat as fast as possible, like a badger,” or, “You always drawl out your
yes
when you really mean no,” or, “You rub your nose with the back of your hand like a cat.” Knowing I was being scrutinized flattered and alarmed me.

Into the party burst a thin Chinese woman in her fifties, salt-and-pepper hair drawn back, black pants, black sunglasses, fingernails and lips unpainted. Everyone grew silent and uncomfortable. The newcomer spoke rapidly in a maddening whine; I couldn’t pick out a word in her dialect. After half an hour she stood and left, nodding at Kay and one of the men and ignoring the rest of us.

“She’s a sort of princess. That’s Fukienese she’s speaking,” Kay said. Our party, discouraged, broke up. One of the men walked me partway home and said, “That woman doesn’t like Americans and she hates speaking English. She teaches Old High German—”

“What!”

“Yes, at Cornell, and she takes a bus all day and night just to come here to speak Fukienese to Kay for four hours. Then she turns around and goes back. She writes Kay and me. I’ll show you her letters. They’re very beautiful and literary. She’ll be watching college boys racing around the track and in three words she’ll make an allusion to a Han
fu
about swans skimming the old palace pond…. She lives in a mental China still. She arrives without warning.”

“Was she upset to see me at the party?”

“Maybe.” He smiled. “What a dialect! We say she speaks five languages, all with a Fukienese accent.”

For the next few days I couldn’t stop thinking about the contrast between my happy Chinese friends, the plentiful table, the laughter and harvest-moon faces—and then the perfect stillness of everyone’s eyes lowered under the bright ceiling lamp while the visitor nattered on and on, half her
royal face concealed behind sunglasses, hand cutting the air. Her rank or distress had intimidated everyone except Kay, who seemed proud to be singled out. Maybe I was studying Chinese in order to have precisely these fleeting contacts with even a remnant of a society so different from my fragmented and compartmentalized life.

My university had twenty thousand students, which makes a big school but a small town. Despite the smallness, I was able to keep several different lives separate from one another—I hid the Chinese from my fraternity brothers, the brothers from the bohemians I was mingling with in the middle room of the student-union cafeteria, and all three from those hairy legs and hard penises I was meeting under cold thick marble partitions or thin metal ones. When Kay or Betty would flirt with me I’d blush, and that became a new joke with them: I was nicknamed “Your Holiness” and teased for being a puritan. “We’ve heard about the American puritans,” Kay said unsmilingly. “Thoreau,” she said, pronouncing the name as though she meant the Hebrew holy book, the Torah.