The Beautiful Room Is Empty (10 page)

I was still too young to go to a bar, so Maria and I sat in the Italian coffee shop next to Tex’s bookstore. Before entering the coffee shop, we looked in through Tex’s windows. Gone were those glossy new novels and records, the plush carpet, the spotlights. Now nothing but concrete floors, dangling wires, and on the door a bankruptcy notice. Where was
Tex now? Morris? Who was fleshing out the cop’s domestic expenses? Tex, like a torch singer, had ruined himself for love. He’d hocked his jewels to win one more smile from the policeman with the jug ears. Once Tex had said to me, very sister-to-sister, “Aren’t we mad, we gay boys, starving ourselves to sylphlike fragility, all so we can attract a straight cop with a beer belly?”

As Maria and I sat in the coffee-shop window and drank hot cider, I told her about my friendship with Tex. Something about the passionate opera music stirred me; this scene was scored for confession. Just as the betrayed Des Grieux sang, “Be silent, you’re breaking my heart,” I spoke up. “I don’t know what you’d think if I told you, uh, that guy next door? Tex? was a little weird?”

Des Grieux was singing
“Nell’occhio tuo profondo to leggo il mio destin”
as I looked into Maria’s eyes for my destiny, her scorn or disgust.

“Are you trying to say your friend Tex is homosexual?”

“Yes.”

“These are my kisses,” the lovers sang, “this is my love,” as I added, “So am I.”

“So am I, Dumpling,” Maria replied with a puzzled smile. “I thought that was the whole idea. I thought we were both gay.”

“But what about Sam?” I asked, naming her bearded ex-lover.

“Oh, I have a
faiblesse
for men,” she confessed. “I even prefer making love with men, but I only fall in love with women.” Her thoughts went on silently until a sigh replaced her jaunty smile and she said, “Alas. Women are no damn good.”

Maria sketched in her gay past. “Women are so impossible, always hurtling about in station wagons and Pendleton shirts and swearing drunken vengeance on Cuddles or
Babs. And then this fatal attraction to the
country
—you can’t get the farm out of the girl And no fashion sense. Nothing wrong with a dyke that couldn’t be cured by six months in finishing school.” She went on talking in the lightest, most frivolous terms, concocting a heady mix of diesel dykes and sulfurous
femmes damnées
(“Damn women, as Baudelaire said”). Although her lesbianism relieved my anxiety, the ease with which she apparently went from men to women dismayed me, as did the glamour of her milieu. There was nothing glamorous about my time in the toilets, that long sentence I was serving.

Although I was appalled by the hair fetishist who slipped his questionnaire under the partition, at least his tastes were specific enough to be fulfillable, whereas mine were raging but shifting, leaving me no peace. I couldn’t find the answer because I couldn’t phrase the question. After I ejaculated I felt full of self-hatred every time, and every time I swore I’d never return to the toilets.

Every time I had a free moment during the day when I could roost in the poultry house, I felt the excitement of anticipation creep over me. My hands went cold, a blotch of blush would float cloud-slow up my chest and neck, cover my face. If a girl stopped me to chat in the hall, I’d be torn by anxiety. What if he got away, the one big fish to cruise our pond today?

I’d never said one word to all but one of the other campus homosexuals who were John queens. But I knew them all: the beetle-browed man whose outsize glasses touched his hairline above and his beard below and who, in his stall, would lower his ponderous haunches just far enough for my hand to touch his canine penis; the tall law student bearing a heavy tome of torts and investing his stall like a city under siege—no cough, no tapping foot, no lightest emery board of a sigh; the businessman in monogrammed shirt and glossy
sharkskin I’d seen give a blow job that first day; and Jeremy, the only one I spoke to, a fat boy with a huge mouth and pomaded hair who waddled out of his booth with a diva’s disdain, gathering his reversible windbreaker around him as though it were a sable. None of us wanted each other but contempt had bred familiarity and we’d raise a weary eyebrow or stifle a yawn as we passed each other on our rounds as though to say, “Still at it?” or, “Slim pickings tonight.”

The thrill came when one bagged not another old fruit but a hot young college kid, for although I myself was at least young and in college, I already saw myself as vampire-cold, turned prematurely old as a punishment for vice, and not nearly enviable enough to be that exciting thing, a “college kid.” I’d learned to feel nostalgia for my own youth while I was living it.

I started dating Annie Schroeder, although I sometimes felt I was carting an aunt about. Her makeup was too elaborate and her clothes too stylish for the Beatniks I was meeting, among whom the women wore little other than black wool sweaters and skirts and black tights and paisley babushkas. For variety, they might tote a green bookbag or paint on badger eyes or let their bushy, waist-length hair bounce over their shoulders.

Sorority girls, unlike Annie, had lots of “personality” of the sort I still see at airports (“You guys! I can’t believe it! This is too incredible!”), a pantomime that can go nowhere beyond being repeated for someone else’s benefit (“Come over here, you won’t believe it, look who’s here, Holly is here, I can’t believe it, Holly in Paris!”). Some were sweet and big-sisterly, good shoulders to cry on; others eternal cheerleaders, all freckles and bobby sox; still others were serious campus leaders with their blond hair in a severe twist.

My Annie, although she’d pledged a rather dim sorority
that seemed to have nothing but sluts and Home-Ec majors as members, was too moody and far too shy to have much personality. She looked on with confusion, even fear, as other girls kept digging their spurs into their own flanks, neighing louder and louder, pawing the air. She wore that scared smile that the partially deaf produce or that foreigners evince at boisterous parties of people speaking in another language. She didn’t get it.

The Beats didn’t make much sense of her either. After all, she wanted to be a “top New York model,” as she said. The Beats were proud to feel they were outsiders against a majority that included nearly everyone else. She was histrionic, but not in the Bronx Ophelia manner of Beat women, who went about scattering black flower petals.

Nearly simultaneously, we discovered William Everett Hunton, a first-year law student. I hadn’t slept with Annie. I was (I am) afraid of all women, but especially one so bony, painted, and breakable. Annie pretended to be hurt by my lack of ardor, but only to gain an advantage over me. I suspect she was actually relieved. William was as gay as I but far more eager to try sex with women. I’d conveniently adopted O’Reilly’s theory that homosexuality was only a symptom—a theory, to be sure, that made my urge to love men no more acceptable than Annie’s urge to vomit her supper, but at least the theory didn’t rush me into trying anything so flighty as tinkering with the symptom by literally sleeping with women. I could look forward to years of speculation about Mommy-Daddy; once all my mudpies were neatly stacked, in principle I’d wake one day finding my penis pointing due south, no longer north.

“What do you think of him?” Annie asked me. We were walking diagonally across campus. The snow lay in dirty piles all around us as though it represented all the soiled linen we’d ever slept on. “Isn’t he exciting?”

“And just a bit phony,” I said.

“Does he excite you?”

I swallowed. “Yes.” I’d never discussed these things with her before, although O’Reilly had told her of my diagnosis.

“He excites me,” Annie declared. “I love his big blue eyes. They look like they’re going to pop out. And the cute way his teeth are gapped. He’s a real little dynamo. And that baby skin—I’ll bet he’s smooth all over. Well, I may be finding out tonight.”

“Aren’t you going too fast? I think you’ve got sex on the brain,” I muttered.

“And you don’t?”

I pinched my mouth sourly and said, “Chinese is not exactly an easy major, Annie.” We fell into silence as we squeaked our way through the black sludge. The wind blew a shelf of snow off a low eave.

“Are you jealous?” she asked. I glanced over and I could see from her reined-in smile and nearly crossed eyes that she wanted me to say yes. I ducked out by taking a higher philosophical line: “I’m not sure what jealousy is.” Then, bearing down on her as O’Reilly might: “Why are you so eager to wound me? Have I become a substitute father for you, someone who tortures you (in my case by not sleeping with you) and whom you must punish because you could never punish your real father?”

And we were off. She and I ascribed the most appalling motives to each other out of some seemingly scientific zeal, but unlike a real scientific proposition, which can be verified or at least negated, ours submitted to no proof, since the very things being discussed were unconscious, hence unknowable. I say “things” because I hesitate to speak of them as feelings. An “unconscious feeling” strikes me as an impossibility; the one thing we know for sure is what we are
feeling. At least now I believe that no one else can correct our feelings; they are pure, incorrigible.

Always, at the onset of such a conversation, I had the half-thrilling, half-dreadful sensation of being cranked up to the first, highest hill of a roller coaster. We were scaring each other (“You want to castrate me,” or, “Have you looked at your incestuous feelings toward me?”), but the mutual attention was flattering, as when a lovely palm reader holds your hand, looks into your eyes, and predicts tragic eventualities.

There was also a Talmudic fascination about the exercise. If the real horror of living is its failure to mean, to accumulate, then our constant decoding was a comfort, for it found design everywhere—still better, a design of one’s own making. It was easier for us to accept that we were sick than to acknowledge that we were powerless and life vapid.

Of course, we would have been insulted if someone had accused us of cheating on an exam or confounding
lie
and
lay
, but we smiled charmingly when charged with wanting to murder our father—smiled and shrugged our shoulders. The attribution of Sophoclean passions to ditherers could only be heartening.

William Everett Hunton was one of the first handsome homosexuals I’d ever met, a small, neatly made little guy who would flounce and languish around me but turn gravely masculine around the other law students. Even though he was hoping to reform himself and was quite optimistic about a cure, at least for a while he had been gay, and could still be considered at least a transitional case. Annie and I would sit around his room in the law quad and listen to his adventures, presented as evidence of his depravity but with a suggestion that
his
scarlet sins, at least, had been mink-lined.

We were alone, he and I, for a moment. He was shaving and dressing and I watched him as a child might, as though I myself didn’t perform these same rites every morning (or
in the case of shaving, every third morning). When I told him in which Midwestern city I’d been born, he laughed and said, “But that’s where my patron lives, the real Everett Hunton.”

“Come again?”

William widened his blue eyes, smiled, and came over and sat on my lap. “Oh, look, I’ve gotten foam on your neck,” and he brushed it away. He swiveled in my lap, linked his hands behind my neck, and leaned back to look at me. With one more wiggle of his bottom he whispered, “I was wondering if I could get a rise out of you.” He stood and pretended to be a matron slowly raising a lorgnette to her eye to inspect the degree and angle of the damage she’d done. “I can’t tell if you pack a big basket or not.”

“What do you mean exactly?”

“You’re not that naive.” He went back to his sink and mirror. “God, but do I feel like a tarnished angel around you.” He turned and held up a warning finger. “Equal emphasis on tarnished
and
angel.”

“You are angelic, William, a naughty angel,” I said, surprising myself with my low tone, which was the vocal counterpart to a lazy pat on a chorus girl’s fanny. William instantly responded with a shiver. “You think so? Oh, I was telling you about my ‘patron.’ He’d die if he heard me using that word; he tells everyone we’re cousins, though that’s just as dangerous—with these really old families the cousins are all present and accounted for.” He clapped his hand over his mouth. “No, I must change the subject. So, tell me, Ducky, are you hung or not?” He slapped himself, looked at his reflection, and hissed, “You slut, I didn’t say that.”

“Do I have a big penis? Oh, I suppose it’s just average.”

“Suppose?
Darling, a real man might get away with vagueness about that one vital statistic, but it’s not as though you haven’t done major comparison shopping.” He laughed
as an actress might, tossing his head back to emphasize his long neck.

His things were all severely, unexceptionably masculine and patrician—his cologne from Panhelicon, his shoes from Church’s, his suits, shirts, and ties from Brooks, his black lisle stockings knee-high and held up by garters, his hat from Lock’s in London: exactly the wardrobe lots of money and no confidence would have selected in London or New York, but here in homey old Michigan, where mothers ran up their kids’ clothes on the sewing machine, or ordered them in bulk from J. C. Penney’s, such garments looked exaggerated, certainly conspicuous. He even had a monogrammed silver hairbrush set, an old Vuitton trunk, a cut-glass sherry bottle. “Such a hoot!” he shrieked when I teased him. “Mad for High WASP camp! Only a retired English officer makes me get really hard.”

Suddenly he turned sad, sat on his bed, and hugged his knees, again as an actress might, this time for a meditative head shot staring into the setting sun beside a lake. His speech rhythms were unpredictable and snagged deep into my mind. “You see, we were dirt poor, real white trash. River rats—that’s what they call people who live so far down the hill they’re washed out every time it floods. We were river rats. William … Everett … Hunton, what a hoot …” He buried his face between his knees for a second. “Some day when we’re sisters I’ll tell you my real name, but if you snitch on me I’ll pull your braids and dip them in the inkwell.”