One for the Gods (The Peter & Charlie Trilogy) (30 page)

“You want me to have your stomach pumped out to see how much of his come you’ve swallowed? Get going.”

When he was returned to the base the next morning, after spending the rest of the night on a bench in an MP post, he found that his belongings had already been searched and his letters from Charlie seized. That such deeply personal and precious possessions should be subjected to uncomprehending or hostile scrutiny numbed him at first with despair. None of this must touch Charlie.

There had been a sort of passionate innocence in his enthralled submission to his first lover that had colored all their brief life together. Everything about Charlie represented beauty to him—his body, his face, his nature, his talent, his upright manliness—there was beauty in all of him. Going through the day with him, eating with him, laughing with him, discussing serious matters, walking around town or in the country together, playing, working, it was all wholesome and happy and beautiful. He had grown Up well aware of the taboo against homosexuality, but he had never been able to grasp that it could apply to them. It was directed against the habitués of queer bars, the effeminate men who tried to seduce schoolboys, the boys who wore makeup and were out for anything in pants. Even when he had been briefly, to some extent, a part of that world, when Charlie had rejected him and got married, it had never really touched him. He had been promiscuous, but he had gone to bed only with young men who attracted him and who wanted him. There had been nothing dirty about it. He had accepted gifts but they had been given freely and with gratitude. His one act of exhibitionistic masturbation in front of a rich man who afterward became his friend and benefactor had been performed when he was so drunk that it had seemed to have a kind of sexless purity. They had been wretched months, but nothing about them had induced guilt or shame.

For the first time in his life, he had been determined to lie night before and to protect Hal, but he couldn’t lie his way around the letters. In a way, he wasn’t sorry. It would have been a denial of his love. If he admitted his true nature, his insistence on his innocence the night before would surely be more convincing.

He was summoned to his first interview with a psychiatrist later in the day. The psychiatrist was a neat, efficient-looking, dark, youngish man with thick-rimmed spectacles. His manner was neutral, and he put his questions about the incident at the hotel dryly. He wanted to know more about his friendship with Hal. Peter tread warily. Now that Charlie’s letters had entered the case, it wouldn’t help Hal to suggest that they had been intimate.

“Didn’t Captain Bohlen state that you’ve shared a bed before?”

“Yes. I’m a bit vague about that. I remember a house party a couple of years ago where the guys had to double up to make room for the girls. There were a lot of us. I don’t remember much about it.”

“You admit being naked together?”

“Yes.”

“You deny that Captain Bohlen committed fellatio with you?”

“What’s that?”

The psychiatrist hesitated, looking exasperated. “In the vernacular, cocksucking.”

“I absolutely deny it. I was half-asleep and trying to get out of bed. So was Captain Bohlen. We were falling around on top of each other. Maybe my cock looked as if it was near his mouth for a second, but that’s all. Do you think we’re out of our minds? The MPs were already in the room.”

“You mean you would’ve been prepared for him to commit such an act if you’d been alone with him?”

“I don’t mean anything of the sort. He’s never given the slightest sign that he’d be interested in that kind of thing. If he had, I wouldn’t have let him.”

“You wouldn’t?” There was a silence as the psychiatrist opened a drawer and put the packet of Charlie’s letters on the desk between them.

Peter looked him in the eye. “All right. You know why I wouldn’t.”

The psychiatrist’s manner grew more sympathetic as he questioned Peter about Charlie. As his confidence was won, Peter tried to explain that the very fact of Charlie’s existence made his sex life of no more than academic interest to anybody. “I wouldn’t touch another guy with a ten-foot pole,” he exclaimed fervently.

“Well, it’s up to the legal department to decide how to handle the case. I can only advise on the psychological issues. They may want to make it a criminal case and try for a prison sentence.”

“Prison,” Peter repeated, falling deeper into a state of shock.

“I don’t want to alarm you unnecessarily. I’ll draw up a statement based on what you’ve told me. In essence, you’re an avowed homosexual. That’s grounds for immediate separation from the service.”

“But I don’t want separation,” Peter insisted, rousing himself. “I’m in love with somebody. What difference does it make to the Army if it’s a man or a girl?”

“Oh, come now. Surely, even you recognize that there are social issues involved. We’ve found that homosexuals don’t make a satisfactory adjustment to the military environment.”

“That’s a lot of crap. Is it my fault if Captain Bohlen got drunk and got into the wrong bed? He says himself that’s the way it happened. What about my record?” He reiterated his innocence with Hal, he continued to insist that Charlie was irrelevant to the case and that the Army had no legal right to introduce him into it. Neither now nor at any time later did Peter see in the episode an opportunity for a quick release and an early return to Charlie. He had made his commitment; he must honor it if he were to continue to cherish his love and demand respect for it.

He was one of the most popular men in his company. He had performed his duties well and scrupulously. He had prided himself on both counts. Nobody had the right to cast doubt on his ability to conduct himself properly in an admittedly alien atmosphere.

“Well, we don’t have to decide anything right now,” the psychiatrist concluded. “I’ll draw up a statement for you to sign. We’ll have another talk in a day or two.”

“Shouldn’t I have a lawyer?”

“We’ll see about that when the time comes.”

It was quickly apparent that the story had become public property. Everywhere Peter went, he felt space developing around him. In the shower rooms, the washbasins on either side of him were vacated when he took up his position in front of one. The frequently obscene horseplay under the showers was suspended at his appearance. The men who had been openly flirting with him went out of their way to avoid him. Only the laughing stock of the base, an undisguisedly effeminate, chinless youth was an exception. “Don’t let them get you down, doll,” he said when he encountered Peter the next day. “You’ve hit it lucky. You’ve had that luscious captain and you’ll soon be back in civilian drag. What more could a girl want?”

It wasn’t a great comfort, but he valued the intention. He went through two days of numb despair, shaken occasionally by spasms of terror as the word “prison” passed through his mind. His second interview with the psychiatrist was shorter and the man’s manner had hardened.

“Let me make the position clear. I have a statement here for you to sign. You’ll go through the formality of a court-martial and will be dishonorably discharged. You’re being let off lightly because we find it lowers morale to have the officers’ prestige damaged by a case like this. Captain Bohlen will be allowed to resign his commission. If you were both charged with unnatural acts, his only defense would be drunkenness and his bewilderment at the practiced advances of an experienced homosexual. The sergeant who arrested you has put in his report that he had the impression that you were trying to force your penis into Captain Bohlen’s mouth and he was fighting you off. Even if he were acquitted, his usefulness to the Army would be seriously compromised. Drunkenness is never an excuse for an officer. You would probably receive a stiff prison sentence, and the whole thing would leave a nasty taste in a great many mouths. If you really feel the sense of duty you profess, I advise you to sign.”

Peter glanced over the statement with eyes that refused to focus. He gathered that it was an admission of a past record of confirmed homosexuality. There was something about having enticed an officer into bed for the purpose of sexual gratification. It wasn’t clear to him whether he was supposed to have succeeded.

“There’s no catch to this?” he asked. His mouth was so dry that it could barely form the words. “You’re not getting me to sign and then throw the book at me?”

“I assure you that everybody involved in this is anxious to get it over with as quickly and quietly as possible.”

“Can I have my letters back?”

“They’ll be returned to you with your discharge, naturally.”

He gripped a pen in unfeeling fingers and scribbled his signature and sat back, feeling as if the world as he knew it had ended.

In the few days that preceded his court-martial, the numbness passed and he went a little mad with rage. He waited, hypersensitively alert, for the slightest affront. If anybody had said a derogatory word, he would have felt the full force of Peter’s unbalanced physical frustration. He wanted to beat everybody and anybody. In the void that had been created around him there was nobody to strike out at. Everywhere he went, he was on a constant lookout for the sergeant. There was no doubt what he would do if he found him. He would leap at him and kill him with his bare hands, or be killed in the attempt.

When the day came for his court-martial, he dressed carefully. In immaculate uniform, shaved, scrubbed, his golden hair tamed and neatly arranged, he looked like a romanticized, idealized version of the All-American boy. He knew it, which gave him a certain mad satisfaction. The court took time only to describe him in loathsome terms, which he had never dreamed could be applied to himself. He was a pervert, a sodomite, an unrepentent sexual deviate. He felt as if the filth of the world were being flung at him. He squared his shoulders and lifted his golden head and smiled slightly. He was aware all through the proceedings that the eyes of one of the officer-judges were constantly, insinuatingly, attempting to make contact with his. The world was a cesspool, but he wasn’t fit to inhabit it. He was a disgrace to his uniform, a disgrace to his country, everything he had believed in was vile.

Only Charlie’s angry, loving loyalty, expressed in his letters, had kept him on an even keel. When they were finally reunited, if Charlie had expressed the slightest doubt about the facts of the case, he would have been swept up in the torrent of Peter’s rage against mankind; his almost apologetic solicitude had made him a rock of faith to which Peter had clung.

Now, hurrying through the dangerous night past luminous whitewashed houses, paying for his haste with increasing pain, gladly suffered to spare Charlie a needless moment of anxiety, Peter was amazed at how successfully he had suppresses his memory of that black period. He knew more or less the way it had happened and remembered the worst parts, but there were big gaps in the sequence of events and none of it had the power to hurt him now. The threat that had seemed about to crush him then had failed to materialize; he had rarely been made to feel an outcast in the years that followed.

When he had found himself at last with Charlie once more, his first thought had been to arm himself for survival. His income was barely enough for both of them to live on. He wouldn’t hear of Charlie looking for a job again. His painting, which had developed excitingly during his year alone, was an integral part of Peter’s vision of making the most of their lives by defying convention. Hs was newly determined never to apply for a job himself; he wouldn’t submit to being questioned about his military record or draft status. He augmented their income from capital while he resumed his study of the stock market. Money might be a protection against society’s condemnation. He had already been startlingly successful with his investments and now he took to spending some time every day at his broker’s, listening to advice and picking up tips.

Charlie’s grandmother, who was the only member of his family he cared about deeply and who had banished him because of his liaison with Peter, died suddenly and left Charlie a token ten thousand dollars out of the large fortune that had previously been destined for him. Peter assumed management of the inheritance as a challenge; he couldn’t hope to make Charlie as rich as he would have been if he had renounced their love, but he could make a stab at it. He took risks, but he was gambling for high stakes. He was lucky and he was shrewd, and by the time the war ended he had built up a modest fortune. All along, he had been taking courses at Columbia with the aim of becoming an art dealer; now he was in a position to launch himself. He had learned that nobody worried about his sex life when self-interest was involved, although on a couple of occasions people had attempted to use it as a sort of blackmail to gain an advantage over him. He had seen to it that they regretted it. With the opportunity to erect barriers around their relationship that money provided, his bitterness passed and he slowly recovered his old, easy, cheerful responses to life. If the experience had left a hardness in him, it was the hardness that everyone who makes demands of life must acquire: in his case, a hard proprietary determination to protect and defend his love, buried beneath his soft, adoring submission to his lover.

After hurrying through dark streets for what seemed like hours, he came to a cross street with a few lights along it. It looked familiar. Wasn’t the port just beyond? His spirits rose and he put on another little burst of speed. In another few minutes, he came rushing out into the square that fronted the port. The boat was there. He stopped to catch his breath. Charlie must have been watching for him; he called Peter’s name.