An Idol for Others (5 page)

“Hey, I hoped I’d find you in here,” Harry shouted cheerfully above the sound of water. Paralysis passed, and Walter was able to glance over his shoulder to see Harry advancing on him, divinely naked. He immediately hated his own body. Except for the fact that he was a shade taller than Harry, he considered himself a physical nonentity. He managed to blurt out a greeting and turned back to scramble for the soap.

“Can I share?” It was customary to share when the showers were full, but it was surely unusual under the present circumstances. Walter made a sound that bore no resemblance to speech. “I”ve been wanting to talk to you,” Harry added. He seemed to fill the stall.

The lurch in Walter’s groin struck him with panic at what might happen. He had been feeling sexy before Harry turned up. It had nothing to do with anybody in particular. Now Harry was touching him all over. He bumped him with his chest and belly when he moved in to soak himself. When he took the soap, he seemed to make a point of their hands meeting. His arms and elbows were everywhere.

“What’s up?” Walter asked as soon as he could trust himself to speak.

“Well, it’s just that we never seem to get together. I figured we ought to be friends. After all, we’re the two top guys in the class. I’m the body, and you’re the brain. Actually, if my brain was as good as your body, I’d be a lot better off.”

“You must think you’re a half-wit.” To Walter, getting out a whole sentence, especially in a teasing vein, was a major achievement.

“I’m not kidding. You’ve got great shoulders.” Harry put his hands on them, and Walter felt the lurch in his groin again. He wished Harry would leave him alone. He wasn’t used to being touched. Harry’s eyes surveyed him. He rocked him playfully back and forth with his hands.

Walter fought an appalling impulse to press himself to his god, feel all of his body against him. “How come you’re not out at practice today?” he blurted.

Harry slid his hands down his arms and rested them lightly on his hips. He grinned. “I gave my ankle a turn. I’m supposed to take a day or two off. You know, you ought to try to get out more often. All you need is to fill out a bit here and there. I bet if you worked out with me for a month or two, I could turn you into a real athlete.”

“That’ll be the day.”

“I’ll bet you’re hung too.” Harry flicked Walter’s cock once, twice, with the back and front of his hand. Walter felt as if he had leaped 12 feet in the air. When he came to earth, his cheeks were burning. Harry chuckled. “What’s the matter? Don’t you like to be touched there?”

“No. I mean, I don’t care … I was only …”

“That was just a love tap. I like to see how guys are hung. It seems I’m bigger than average. You look as if you’re big too.”

“I don’t know.” Perhaps this was the way the athletes talked and acted together. It was all jolly and straightforward. If he could strike that note, he might be able to get by without disgracing himself. “I don’t see how there could be any comparison. You’ve got the most beautiful body I’ve ever seen.”

“Hey, listen, what are you doing after?”

“I don’t know. I thought I–”

“Well, how about it? Wouldn’t you like to find out? Why not come home with me? We’ll have some fun.”

Walter felt the muscles of his face going rigid. Rigidity was spreading down into his groin. His brain seemed disconnected from his eyes. He found himself staring at Harry without seeing him. “Yes, sure,” he managed. “If you–”

“Great Boy, you really are hung. I thought so. If we don’t look out, we’ll be able to compare right here. Come on. We’d better go before we give the whole school a show.” Harry stepped into the center of the shower and ran his hands over his body, displacing great bursts of spray. “Meet you at the door in five minutes,” he shouted and was gone.

Walter turned the cold water on so hard that it hurt, and he waited. As soon as dared, he turned it off and made a rush for his towel and covered himself. Safe at last, he hurried to his locker. He wouldn’t allow his imagination to dwell on what Harry had in mind.

It turned out that Harry had things in mind that went far beyond anything Walter’s imagination could have conceived. His hero obviously didn’t fear being branded a sexual outcast.

The last month of school passed in a trance of terror and delight, of resisting and indulging Harry’s vice, of awakened sexuality, of heartbreak and the discovery that he could be loved. At the end of the month, he escaped from Harry to the seashore, where his parents had a small summer cottage.

He felt driven to pursue the girls at the seashore. Despite his total lack of experience with girls, the outdoor life and the scanty summer clothes made it easy to get at them. It became quickly apparent that pursuit was hardly necessary. Nobody fled from him, perhaps because of the sexual confidence acquired from Harry and the fact that his body, developed in the gym for a month under Harry’s tutelage, was beginning to be almost impressive.

Still, there was the problem of virginity, and, in the few cases where that didn’t apply, there was the problem of pregnancy. The obvious solution to the latter was rubbers, which some of the boys made a point of carrying, but Walter found he couldn’t use them. His cock had enjoyed such perfect freedom with Harry that it had apparently developed a pathological resistance to being shrouded. When he tried to put one of those things on, it lay down and died. He practiced on himself to no avail. What felt like the most invincible erection collapsed in seconds at the contact of a rubber.

He lay naked or almost naked with a dozen girls that summer, but none of them aroused in him the intensity of feeling he had known with Harry. He supposed it was understandable. They fussed and withheld themselves instead of surrendering gratefully to his ecstasies as Harry had. At least, technically he was no longer a virgin. It seemed a small reward for so much effort, but he had established to his own satisfaction that he was firmly girl-oriented, which was what he wanted to be.

He had won a scholarship at Rutgers, and, abandoning dreams of Princeton or Harvard, he went there in the fall. He immediately discovered that this was where life would begin. He was lost in a big ugly town. He was free to make what he liked of himself. The notion of being self-created acquired a hold on his imagination. Nothing in his background contributed to what he dreamed of becoming. He would create his future out of himself and his own tastes and capabilities. The sexual adventure that had recently occupied him so intensely faded into the background, part of boyhood that he had had to get out of his system. There were many more important matters that required his attention–such as how to launch the brilliant career that Harry somehow had made him feel lay within his reach. It was simply a matter of proclaiming his goals to himself and the world and allowing nothing to stand in the way of achieving them. Something had happened with Harry that made him understand that.

Harry had also demonstrated to him the precarious control he had over his hitherto unexplored emotions and how dangerously off-balance he could be thrown by them. He was determined not to go Harry’s way sexually, to avoid the outcast’s brand, but above all he had resolved to steer clear of all emotional attachments. His ambitions would require the concentration of all his energies.

Walter was late for the theater. Debby had insisted on making love after supper. His presence at the performance wasn’t essential, and she knew it. It was the last night of the week’s run, and there was nothing more he could do with the performance, but he had found that his amateur actors took their work more seriously if they knew he was there.

Debby had been his girl since he had returned to Rutgers for his junior year a couple of months ago. She was a local girl who had been active in the little theater and was a great convenience to him because she liked to prepare food for him and he was able to add the money she thus saved him to his Broadway theater fund. The fund was supplied primarily by his buying books at the college bookstore, which charged them to his parents, and selling them secondhand. Debby’s culinary generosity was good for an extra balcony seat every few weeks.

She was also the first girl who offered him complete sexual freedom. The virginity problem didn’t exist, and she took the pregnancy problem lightly. As a consequence, he had learned a great deal about the female body, some of which he would have found distasteful without a strong effort of will. He had a girl, and she was beginning to become a burden. He didn’t like being late for the theater.

Fortunately, Debby lived not far from the community hall where the New Brunswick Buskers put on half a dozen plays every season. He walked rapidly through quiet streets toward it, a tall, graceful figure with a notably fine physique and an elfin child’s face. That a Rutgers undergraduate should be its director was an anomaly and quite unofficial. It had started the year before when the regular director, with whom Walter had struck up a friendship, had been suddenly called away. For lack of anybody better, Walter filled in for him. The committee was still talking about finding a replacement while Walter did the shows, an arrangement he felt sure would continue as long as he chose. For the first time in memory, people were coming to the theater for enjoyment rather than because somebody’s uncle was starring in the cast.

At college, he continued to take architectural courses, but only because he found they could be applied to theatrical design. He was taking every drama course offered, but this was more literature than theater. He read extensively on his own. He studied the early years of the Theatre Guild in New York, knew the theories of Gordon Craig, was familiar with the work and doctrines of the great Europeans, Stanislavsky, Copeau, Dullin. As he covered the last hundred feet to the hall, it became his theater in which he had total artistic control over sets, texts, music, casting, everything. It was a unique personal creation. He added a few years to his age–he was perhaps 27. Now that he was in fact 18 at last, he could think of himself as “practically 19.” It seemed like a long time to wait.

He arrived as the show broke for intermission. The audience was streaming into the lobby. A member of the committee waved to him across the crowd and beckoned him over. “Hi there, Walter. It’s going pretty well. There’s somebody here who wants to meet you. David Fiedler. Walter Makin, our boy genius.”

Walter turned to the stranger and was momentarily blinded. Eyes and teeth flashed at him, a hand glittering with gold exerted a warm pressure on his own.

“Andy Carlson told me to say hello if I ran into you,” David said in a voice that seemed to bubble with high spirits. “Nick here is an old friend. I came to see your show. It’s one of the best amateur jobs I’ve ever seen.”

“Thanks.” Walter made connections. Andy Carlson was one of the queer young men he had met in New York. This blinding apparition appeared to be in his mid 20s but spoke with the authority of vast experience. His dazzling blue eyes were slightly protuberant. All his coloring was vivid. His cheeks were peaches, his lips as red as Harry’s. He was shorter than Walter, and his body was compact, but something about his peachy skin and the smooth modeling of his features suggested a full, rounded physical opulence.

“I’d like to talk to you later,” David said, making it sound as if it would be fun. “You may be just the guy I’m looking for.”

“David’s the manager of the Steelman School of Dramatic Art,” the man called Nick interjected, while the other two studied each other with humor and approval. David’s eyes were loaded with messages that got though clearly to Walter.

“There’s a bar around the corner,” Walter said. “We could have a drink after the show.”

“Are you allowed in bars? You look 12.”

“Yes, I’ve always looked older than my age. Actually, I’m ten.”

David laughed. “OK. You win. I’ll buy you a drink, and we’ll talk. Unfortunately, it’ll have to be quick.”

The audience was moving back into the auditorium. David gave him another flirtatious look before he was led away.

Walter remained bemused in the lobby. Did Fiedler want to recruit him for his school, or was he interested in his person? The Richard Steelman School was well-known, with famous names on its roster of teachers. In the summer, in addition to offering training to paying students, it operated a theater on Long Island that was more star-studded than the general run of summer theaters. He had said he was looking for somebody. That could imply a job. Walter began to get tense with anticipation. He hoped there wouldn’t be sexual hurdles. Life must be so simple for the guys who casually jumped in and out of bed with each other. Girls had a way of complicating matters. If Debby had had her way, he wouldn’t have been here to meet this Fiedler character. A job. He would play him along until he saw what was up.

He was pleased to see that David was alone when he saw him after the show. They went to the bar around the corner and ordered whisky and took the drinks to a booth where they could talk in private.

“First of all, what is a gorgeous thing like you doing in this dump?” David began, rolling his eyes outrageously.

Walter laughed. “Learning things. It’s beginning to seem like a waste of time.”

“You mustn’t let it. I’m all in favor of education. You did some very canny things with that little show. It wasn’t the usual imitation Broadway hack job. I like the way you handled your actors so they didn’t get a chance to show how bad they were.”

“You noticed that?” Walter warmed to him. “I’m working out some theories about actors. The star system’s all wrong. Have you seen the Gielgud
Hamlet
? There’s a star for you. He acted all over the place, but he was a lousy Hamlet. The whole production was lousy. I’d like to get my hands on it with some plain competent professionals.”

David gave him a quick, shrewd glance. “I take it you plan to go into the theater seriously.”

“Yes, I don’t quite see how to go about it yet. So much of it seems to be luck.” David’s interest in him was obvious. This was the first time he had talked to somebody who was in a position to help him. He had to play his cards carefully.