City of Night (55 page)

           But I cling to sobriety when I hear someone say: “Youll feel much better if we leave this place.” When I opened my eyes, I saw a man standing before me looking at me strangely. “Im staying right around the corner,” he said. “Will you come with me?”

           Outside, a small stranded hotdog wagon steams ominously like a relic out of hell.

        
JEREMY: White Sheets

        
1

           PONDEROUSLY EXHAUSTED AFTER THE DETERMINED EJACULATION—which had come, strained up to the actual moment of discharge, in those doubly orgasmic thrusts as if I had tried to drain from myself something infinitely more than the mere sperm—I had lain back in bed and instantly fallen asleep. Waking up just as suddenly—suddenly alert as if someone had called me—I saw, still lying on the other side of the bed, looking at me, the man who had talked to me earlier at Les Deux Freres bar.

           Outside, beyond the draped and shuttered windows of this balconied room on Royal (it’s still not time for the Parade, I notice, looking urgently at my watch), the sounds of the revelry continue, like hundreds of phonographs playing different but equally blaring records.

           Quickly, I sat up on the sheet-rumpled bed and reached for my clothes—to get out of this room, to hurl myself back into the streets, to join the summoning anarchy raging outside: as if I have begun to lag in an important race which I
must
run.

           But before I can begin to dress, the man in bed says: “Dont go yet. Have a cigarette.” He holds out the cigarette as if, I think, it were an indication of truce after the sex act which has suddenly, for me—now remembered vividly after the brief, blacked-out period of sleep—made us Strangers.

           I take the cigarette from him. He reached for his pants on a chair next to him and retrieved from a pocket several bills which he places for me on the table beside the bed. He did this as if, for him, this is the most insignificant aspect of the scene we have played out.

           Coming here with him—I remember distinctly—I hadnt mentioned money. There had been nothing about him to suggest he was a score. In the state of pilled and liquored panic which I had felt threatening to bludgeon my senses at that bar, the evenness of his voice, the calmness, had acted immediately to sap my nerves in that advancing tide of forcedly laughing faces determined above all else to enter an engulfing tide of madness.... And so I had merely been grateful to him for the offer of momentary respite from the crowds.

           Now, aware acutely of the thriving street, as if its sounds were connected electrically to my senses, and remembering the previous sex scene, during which I had played the unreciprocal role more obsessively than ever before (as if the dropping of the streetpose, in the bar previously with those two scores, had made it necessary for me to prove with greater urgency that I could still wear that mask), I thought of one thing:

          
Escape from this room!

           Escape from the bedcover thrown in a heap on the floor—escape, especially and mysteriously disturbingly, from the rumpled sheets.... But I lay back in bed. I would stay only a few more minutes, I told myself, trying momentarily to shut out the hypnotizing, seductively beckoning sounds of the frenzy roaring Outside: beckoning like a ritual prepared especially for me.

           “Why is it,” this man was saying slowly, almost as if he were seeking an excuse, by talking, in order not to join the streetcrowds—or to keep me from it, “that the moment the orgasm is over—or the moment it’s remembered, after sleep,” he added, as if understanding very clearly my anxiety to leave—as if, too, he is speaking about me personally, “why is it that people want to leave, as if to forget—with someone else—whats just happened between them—which will happen again and again—and again have to be forgotten?”

           The inappropriateness of his searching remarks, while the carnival fury which we have all come to seek—that very cramming of experiences with many, many people—roars outside—the vast inappropriateness of it strikes me immediately. Of course, what he had said was largely true: Afterwards, in those hurried contacts, you want to leave instantly, as if in some kind of shame, or guilt, for something not exchanged.

           But I said: “It’s just the carnival outside; it’s what everyone comes here for.”

           “Youll see it all,” he assured me, indicating that to him it’s not important. “It doesnt really begin again until after the morning parade. Ive seen it before. There nothing going on now that wasnt going on when you were down there just a while ago—only more of it.” He spoke softly, nevertheless compelling conviction.

           He was a well-built, masculine man in his early 30s, with uncannily dark eyes, light hair. He is intensely, moodily handsome.... Looking at him, I wonder why such a man would pay another male when he could obviously make it easily and mutually in any of the bars, and I wonder if perhaps there is another reason for his having given unasked-for money. It is a sudden feeling, not substantiated by anything that has actually happened. But it is a strong one. The money rests there, something constantly present, but, still, by the fact of my not having yet taken it, unacknowledged.

           He was propped against the headrest on the bed, a pillow at his back; covered from his waist down by the sheet. I lie on top of the sheet in order not to feel that Im actually in bed with him.

           This room, just around the corner from the bar where I met him, is obviously one of those expensive rooms reserved months in advance of the carnival: their prices determined almost exclusively by their location in the French Quarter, the balcony from which the carnival rites can be viewed. The furniture attempts to suggest the Old New Orleans of novels and movies, romance; but there is an air of emulation—of carnival-masquerade, even about this room.

           “Besides,” he was saying, “if you rest a while longer, you can take full advantage of it all.... Thats what you feel you have to do, isnt it?” he shot at me strangely. Then, quickly, before I could answer his question, as if he had already known the answer: “What is your name?”

           Following the rules of that nightworld which tacitly admits guilt while seldom openly acknowledging it, I told him my first name.

           He smiled. “My name is Jeremy—Jeremy Adams,” he said, announcing his last name pointedly. And, curiously, something which is seldom done in those interludes, he held out his hand for me to shake, and I took it.... (I remember Mr King and his resentment of the distrust implicit in merely giving first names. I remember him with a sharp, pungent loneliness, not only for him but for the situation he had resented.... “I’ll give you ten, and I dont give a damn for you,” Mr King had said, and with those words he had verbalized the imposed coldness of the life he lived, of the life I would soon, then, discover.)

           I told Jeremy Adams my own last name.

           “It’s your first Mardi Gras, isnt it?” he asked me.

           “Yes.” I felt amazingly sober after the short intense sleep. All at once, Im not so anxious to be back on those streets. For a moment, the prospect terrifies me. It’s only that Im still tired, I told myself. It has nothing directly to do with this man.

           He moved his leg slightly under the sheet, closer to mine. I leaned over as if to retrieve something from my clothes on the floor. Actually I merely wanted to move away from something oddly threatening about him—strangely, the very evenness of his voice now, the certainty of his manner—the moody handsomeness—the ease. Even during the sex, although I had detected no inhibition in him, this ease had manifested itself. There had been none of the hurried hungriness of some of the others.

           And then—as I sat up on the bed again, farther from him now—he said this, completely unexpectedly, without hint of its coming, without preparation; bluntly:

           “You want, very much, to be loved—but you dont want to love back, even if you have to force yourself not to.”

           I faced him on the bed. He was looking at me steadily. I grasp defensively for the streetpose that will dismiss his statement. “Oh, man, dig,” I said, “I just want to ball while I can.”

           “I was standing right near you at the bar when you were talking to the two men you were with,” he said. “I heard you—everything you said—everything about ‘pretending’—about being just as frightened as everyone else.”

           I felt my face burning with shame. Emotionally, in that bar, for those few moments, I had stripped myself naked; and this man had witnessed it.

           “Dont be embarrassed,” he said quickly. “I had sensed something like that, even before I heard you in the bar. I’d seen you several times before—the first time was near the French Market. I saw you staring at the cooped-up roosters there, I saw your reaction when they seemed to want to claw their way out of their cage. Do you know that you actually winced? Do you remember?”

           Yes, I remembered—and I remember the eery feeling that I had been in that cage.

           “I would have talked to you then,” Jeremy went on, “but you walked away very quickly.... I knew you wouldnt speak to me—it’s difficult for some people, and I was sure it was so for you.... I was right, wasnt I?—about not wanting to love back; not even wanting to feel anything—for one person.”

           Curtly, squashing out the cigarette to indicate that the direction of the conversation will push me to leave, I said: “I dont even know that I want to be ‘loved.’ I just know that I want to feel Wanted. I dont even want to feel that I
need
any one person.”

           “Just many,” he said ineluctably. “Im sorry,” he apologized. “Dont be... ‘bugged’” he laughed.

           His use of that word, so obviously for my benefit, made me laugh too.

           He seems to realize that Im not so eager now to leave; and he seems to sense, too, my unfocused fears of the streets. Perhaps taking advantage of that, he pursues the subject. “Youve never loved anyone?” he asked me.

           I wanted to say something flippant that will make his question seem ridiculous, particularly at this carnival time. Instead, I answered hurriedly. “Not the way you mean.”

           But I think of my Mother—her love like a stifling perfume.... Yes, that was “love”—on both sides—a devouring potentially choking thing—like Sylvia’s love for her son—but love nonetheless.... The always-scorching memory of my Father, emerging—“loved”—out of the ashes of that early hatred.... Yet I know that this is not what Jeremy means.

           He had pushed my thoughts into an area I preferred to leave unexplored. I grasped for the least dangerous thought: Could I have really loved Barbara? (The stabbing unhappiness inside me when I saw her that last time—but hadnt we merely used each other, in some kind of mutual fear?) And my mind sprang forward: Dave.... (I try to picture his face when I first met him; but the face I remember is another one—the one which had stared at me in disbelief that afternoon when I had walked out, that look branded in my mind, recalled so clearly, so often....) And how much of what I had fled from had been fear for myself?—how much had been fear of hurting him?... Lance.... Pete: the feeling of hopelessness and pain and embarrassment and isolation that night when he had held my hand for so long in bed.... The man on the beach in Santa Monica (and I remember him, instead, as I had seen him earlier here in New Orleans).... Mr King’s loneliness—shared!—shared and acknowledged; and it had been that very awareness of his pain (as perhaps, too, it had been toward Dave) which had sent me from him. By fleeing impotently, hadnt I manifested what could be, perhaps, a shape of “love”?...

           “No,” I repeated emphatically, “Ive never loved any
one.”

           And when I said that, I thought of this: That night in Chicago, walking along the lake, when I felt myself exploding with love—but it was something else, something that was closer to pity (as it had been in my feelings toward Mr King, the others, I now realized).

           Outside, there is a sudden change in the noises. Voices are shouting: “Let them go! Let them go!” Soon the shouting becomes a chant, the same three words: “Let! Them! Go!” The clapping of hands in rhythm to the commanding words. The sound of feet stamping.

           “The police, probably,” said Jeremy. “Probably trying to arrest someone—but that crowd isnt going to let them. It’s the crowd’s day of complete freedom, if anarchy is complete freedom. The police know it too. Theyre largely powerless—but still they put up a pretense.
Their
masks are the last to come off,” he said ambiguously....

           After a short pause, he asked me—again bluntly: “Do you always go for money—only?”

           “Yes,” I lied. How impossibly difficult it seemed to explain to him that it was the mere proffering of the sexmoney that mattered; the unreciprocated sex: the manifestations that I was really Wanted.

           “Oh?” he asked, as if something in the way I had reacted so quickly has made him doubt it, perhaps, too—certainly—the fact that I hadnt asked him for money, that he had given it. “Somehow, listening to you with those two in the bar—and having seen you with others—I got the impression that the money they gave you wasnt the important thing—that you were, maybe, compulsively playing a game.”

           His words annoyed me. Yet I can stop them by merely walking out on him. Nothing keeps me here, I keep insisting to myself. Still, I remain lying on the bed.

           There is a new relief in the knowledge that he has overheard me in the bar with those other two—beyond the adopted pose—when I had acknowledged my own terror. Knowing that, he had nevertheless sought me out.

           At the same time, my senses seem completely alive, tingling, after the resurrective sleep. What could be false, momentary sobriety—which, if false, could hammer me into drunkenness with just one more drink—makes me feel reckless. It could be, too, the noises outside, the recurrent anticipation—beyond the fears—of rejoining the people sweeping along the streets madly. It could be that like a child before a luscious dessert, Im savoring the anticipation before the actual taste—trying to stretch the time before I’ll be in the midst of the steadily growing, thunderous frenzy....