The Beautiful Room Is Empty (9 page)

Since I’d read so many books about heterosexual sex and was specially well informed about the mysteries of the clitoris, my frat brothers thought I was a secret cocksman. Their stories were all about getting so drunk they were sick on their dates; girls were seen as good sports who held their heads over toilets and murmured, “It’ll be okay, honey.”

The fraternity house was an Edwardian mansion. The outside was crosshatched by dingy timber on cream stucco like an old tic-tac-toe game. The fraternity was famous in the South for drinking, football, and racism; here in the North, we’d retained the drinking. Two or three of our members were jocks, but no one paid them much attention. As for the racism, we’d start quaking with laughter whenever
we had to put on hoods with Halloween eyeslits for our secret ceremonies and pledge to protect white womanhood. There were at least three Negro star football players the brothers would have pledged if the bylaws had permitted them to do so, but this whoring after gladiators seemed to me only another form of racism. Our swords, the flowery Masonic language, and the Klannish sentiments would make our president scratch his head. He was a hawk-nosed man who liked to sleep and drink, always seemed to be genially confused, and appeared to be freshly hatched or peeled, certainly minus a vital protective layer. “Come on, guys,” he’d say, sheepishly holding his sword aloft, “show some respect.”

“Let’s skip it and have some brews,” the vice-president would suggest, and soon we’d all be sitting around the chapel-size dining room in our fancy dress, drinking beers in the middle of a Tuesday afternoon. We never even succeeded in making a float for Homecoming, though we bought the chicken wire and crepe paper.

A hard core of juniors on warning and suspended seniors would play cards and drink all night, sleep all day, and stagger down to roast-beef dinner in their bathrobes, never leaving the house, sending out pledges for brews and smokes. I could hear them all night downstairs, shouting and laughing, someone roaring with triumph, someone else laughing like a hyena. The fad of the moment was to say the opposite of what was meant. “You
are
a wit,” was addressed to an idiot, “He
is
a face man,” of someone brutally ugly.

In ranking pledges during rush, the brothers would say someone was a legacy (as I was, since my father had been a member down South), a jock, a brain (“He’ll pull up the house average”), or a face man. Until now, all the heterosexual men I’d known had pretended they were unable to tell whether another male was attractive or not, but the
reputation of the house required the brothers to measure even such an elusive factor and they did so, protected by this strangely objective term they’d invented, “face man.”

The frowsy, boozy camaraderie of the fraternity amounted to permissiveness. The brothers frequently said to one another, “You’re
not
a pervert,” but they were referring to yet another lapful of beerbarf or a vaunted preference for cunnilingus (“oyster diving” or “beaver heaven”). Of course they didn’t even whisper about a real perversion such as mine.

They could be seen strolling with sorority girls through autumn leaves or dashing out distraught into the garden during a dance (“Hey, Sal, I’m sorry, I
am
just couth”), but when they replayed the weekend for the guys on Monday morning, their reports contained no mention of feelings beyond nausea and highly localized lust (“I’m such a beaver man, just put a shaving brush to my lips when I’m asleep and I’ll start munching”). Whereas I was the real pervert, worshipping men I knew only from the knees to the waist, but at least I loved them all—especially if I thought behind the partition they were straight, blond, athletic, indifferent.

Of course there were the John fairies, the “tearoom nellies” like me, and them I despised. One man would establish shoe contact and then slip under the partition a questionnaire written on toilet paper: “Inches? Cut or uncut? Body hair? If so, where? Underarms? Chest? Stomach? Crotch? Legs? Heavy growth?” I’d simply pass it back unanswered, which would provoke a peeved “Tsk,” a storm of flushing, and a hasty exit. Something about that guy’s fetishism offended me, not because it was abnormal, but because it was unromantic. I sat on my toilet shuffling Chinese flashcards and aching—not to be loved but to be permitted to love.

I was still seeing Dr. O’Reilly, the psychiatrist I’d first consulted in prep school, desperately trying to go straight. He’d told me I couldn’t attend Harvard but must remain at
the local university to be near him. “I’m the only one who can save you, old boy,” he’d said, “because I love you and you know it.” I borrowed a friend’s car and drove the fifty miles each way twice a week to see him. Dr. O’Reilly swallowed amphetamines by the handful in the morning to get going and started calming himself in the evening by sipping bourbon. His waiting room was full of angry birds, the gift of a patient, and Japanese prints.

He introduced me to Annie Schroeder, another patient. “Those stuffy Freudians would split a gut,” he said, or rather mumbled, since the pills and alcohol slurred his speech. “But Annie’s a good gal, though she’s got a psycho for an old man, right out of Dostoevsky, and a mother who wants to be Annie’s daughter.” He clapped me on the shoulder with too much force. “A fine gal, Annie, but don’t think I’m jealous. I’m not the avenging father.”

If I started from the premise I was sick (and what could be sicker than my compulsive cruising?), then I had to question everything I thought and did. My opinions didn’t count, since my judgment was obviously skewed. If I found something beautiful, perhaps it was merely decorative; if I regarded a couple as happy, admirable, I was sure to have chosen the wrong example, the people most likely to confirm my neurosis and lead me deviously back to my illness. If I argued a point, I was being over-intellectual (a sin I’d already become aware of from the painters and which Dr. O’Reilly considered the most serious impediment to my mental health). The mind as its own enemy. The mind desperate to outwit itself. The mind claiming virtue but intent on preserving its own viciousness. The mind a boat at sea rebuilding itself while under sail. The mind a rotting meat under expensive spices. The mind a pure spirit (the unsuspecting wife) under the sway of a murderous will (Bluebeard). Perhaps that’s why Buddhism appealed to me. It denied the existence of the
soul, the will, and even the self and sought to show that only illusion lends a spurious unity and dynamism to so many separate, detachable sentiments. For me, Buddhism was the welcome prediction of cosmic collapse, spiritual entropy.

What I desired most was a man; desiring men was sick; therefore, to become well I must kill desire itself. “Or kill men!” O’Reilly shouted, triumphant, half rising from his chair behind the analytic couch where he usually dozed out of sight or bit his broad white mustache and fiddled with his drink. “You want to murder men! You see, old boy, you think I’m sleeping, that I’m counter-transferent, but even when I’m dozing I’m listening, putting the pieces together in the preconscious, creative part of my brain. You want to murder men by sleeping with them. The stiff cock is the torero’s sword. There’s a lot of bullfighting imagery here.”

Any reference to my own penis embarrassed me; moreover, I was reluctant to explain that my penis played little or no part under the partition. I had no desire (no
vulgar
desire I might have said) to obtain sexual release. In my eyes, my preference for service to others over personal pleasure mitigated my corrupt desires.

Annie Schroeder was also a student at my school. I gave her a ride the fifty miles back to our campus. She told me she planned to be a model. I wondered out loud if she’d photograph differently than she looked.

“Do you think I’m
fat?”
She poured scorn into the word.

“On the contrary.”

“I suppose O’Reilly’s instructed you to say that. Don’t play dumb. I know he thinks I have an eating disorder. But if so, I’m not like all those little Jewish girls at school fretting over their waistlines. I have a real reason to obsess over food.”

“Oh?” I had the sensation I was giving a lift to a fire. And yes, her hair was red, twisted around her head in a
beehive too old for her thin young face, the face of a soldier wearing a bloody bandage.

“Didn’t O’Reilly tell you?” She looked at me searchingly. I took my eyes off the slippery road to look into hers, outlined in kohl, her lips painted almost black, her face a long slice of Persian melon.

“Tell me what?” I asked guiltily. My general moral discomfort was so swollen it could be lanced at any moment by anyone. The rain lashing the four-lane highway was turning to sleet. Big trucks buffeted our little Volkswagen, bison rushing past our ladybug.

“I’m sure he told you about my father.”

“Just that he was a character out of Dostoevsky.”

“Literature has nothing comparable,” she said grimly.

“Tell me about him, won’t you?”

Annie told me of her father, a drunk madman who would be sober and sane a month at a time. Then he’d snap. Annie and her little brother would come home from school to their remote country house, and there Dad would be, grinning knowingly, pistol in hand. “Okay, wise guys, I found out what you’ve been cooking up. I’m going to give you one last chance to make it up to me.” And for the next three days he’d force them to work at gunpoint as he kept pulling at his bottle of scotch. In the snow, in the mud, they’d haul bricks, sniveling, pleading for forgiveness, but he’d keep them at it, laughing, sometimes brushing off voices and wings he alone perceived.

Annie stopped talking. Then she said, “Someday I’ll show you the barn my brother and I built with our own hands.” She seemed very close to tears again. I wanted to say something right, to make it all up to her, not because I felt such sympathy (I feared her too much to pity her), but because I wanted that sort of power over her—the sort
O’Reilly wielded. Maybe I envied the horror of her childhood; she had a legitimate reason to be messed up now.

“The worst of it was when he would come out of it. Then he’d be so repentant he’d crawl across the floor, kiss our feet, and cry. He’d force us to hold the gun to his head and beg us to pull the trigger. We’d kiss him and comfort him and forgive him. Though he’d hurt
us
, though it was
our
nails that were torn,
our
faces covered with dirt—we’d forgive him so quickly.”

Now she was crying, and the huge semis hurtling past, creating a momentary vacuum that sucked us into their wake, seemed for a second like the passions that grown-ups wreaked on their children. In this little car every revolution of the wheels, every segment in the pavement, was registered as a shock; we worked for every mile we gained. But perched high above us, comfortable in their crow’s nests of nude pinups, dangling foam dice, family snapshots, a dashboard tWinkling with lights, the truckdrivers were smoothly guiding their liners through the night, politely saluting each other with doffed brights.

FOUR

        Maria and I never stopped exchanging letters. She was back at the University of Chicago completing a graduate degree. Or she was in Iowa for the summer working for a socialist candidate for the state legislature. “It has nothing to do with being pro-Russian!” she bitterly replied to my note of muted caution (the McCarthy era had just ended). “The Midwest has its own tradition of populism, which you’d know if you ever read some political history instead of all that crepuscular fiction. Or at least some honest Midwestern novelist like Sherwood Anderson or Dreiser rather than your putrescent Barbey d’Aurevilly!” And I could just hear her laughing with her beautiful musical laugh at her own fulminations.

At Christmas I saw her in Chicago. My mother invited her to dinner. The only other guest was my mother’s new secretary, a suburban simpleton in penny loafers, knee socks, a tartan skirt closed by a giant safety pin. Maria (chic black dress and stiletto heels, brilliants in her upswept hair) helped Beth wash my mother’s dishes, as guests often did out of neighborliness in those days in the Plains states. I overheard

Beth say to Maria, “Don’t you just love that song ‘When you walk through a storm, keep your chin up high’? Isn’t it inspiring? Doesn’t it make you want to cry?”

“I think it’s sickening rubbish,” Maria said evenly.

And yet Maria doted on my mother, admired her for her courage and resourcefulness as a woman on her own. Indeed, through Maria’s eyes I began to see my mother as a character of some interest, although what most redeemed her was simply the distance that allowed her to be seen at all. As a boy, I’d loved and loathed my mother with the same relentless energy I’d devoted to myself. Or perhaps I should say I studied my mother instead of myself as though she’d been a mirror to my failings. Now I was a student and, as Maria claimed, an “intellectual.” This identity by way of an honorific allowed me to look at my mother as someone brave “for her time”: condescension permitted admiration.

After the Christmas Day dinner, which began at three in the afternoon but continued until seven-thirty, Maria and I escaped. Once again we were driving through loose wet snow that melted on contact. After living in a college town with its noisy dorms and hushed libraries, its meteor crater of a stadium, its dark streets lined with illuminated fraternity houses, its sketchy downtown of textbook stores and hamburger joints, coming back to a real city made my pulse race. Here were all these adult men and women with money to burn—burn in the form of
crêpes flambées
, of smoldering cigars, of burning whisky, of steamy sex, fires flaring up against the cold night.