The Beautiful Room Is Empty (22 page)

Many of my arty, bohemian friends from school had also moved to New York, and we went out together almost every night, usually to sit in a vast room on Bleecker Street. It had been a music hall in the nineteenth century and still possessed a rickety balcony and a ceiling chandelier with etched glass shades to screen the gas jets. No one went up to the balcony or lit the chandelier. The two old ladies with motherly vulgar voices (“What’ll it be, hon?”) seemed to be looking through us to eaplier, more prosperous times. They wore bedroom slippers and nylons rolled below their knees, but
above the neck they were impeccable: plucked eyebrows and glowing ruby lips. A few folding screens quarantined off most of the shadowy hall and surrounded half a dozen tables lit by the red neon letters in the window.

There we sat for hours, warmed only by the beer, listening to Barbra Streisand’s melancholy record of “Happy Days Are Here Again” and the first Dionne Warwick songs. All around us an adult world was revolving quite indifferent to us; we didn’t realize that it existed, much less that it excluded us. Exposed to nothing but the classics and confined to a provincial campus until now, we knew very little about the latest books and artistic trends; the “young” who represented the newest tastes were thirty, not twenty.

A few of the women in our crowd were sleeping their way up into more sophisticated spheres, and if I’d been handsome or socially ambitious I might have done the same.

We were so dazed by the speed with which we were changing that we mistook this virtuosity for insincerity.

My fellow workers had no idea what I did with my evenings. The married men commuted to their families on Long Island; the single women lived cooped up together on the East Side in doorman buildings. Nor did my school friends know that I walked up and down Greenwich Avenue sometimes till three in the morning looking for sex, dressed in “collegiate clothes” I’d never have worn in college.

We were all leftists, of course, although we favored Cuba and China and felt vaguely uneasy about Russia. We’d never examined our socialism, which was composed of sympathy, rebellion, and enthusiasm, no economics, little history, and a total absence of political experience. For us, socialism was primarily social, since everyone we liked was on our side—the poor young (but not the indigent old), foreign peasants (but not bigoted American farmers), the Eastern European proletariat (but not Detroit auto workers), the inspired
mad (but not the merely crazy), oppressed Negroes (but not white trash). Homosexuals we would never have thought of as a political entity, or if at all then as decadent sons of the
haute bourgeoisie
, the parasitical element every socialist state had had to execute or expel I was able to prove my seriousness as a socialist precisely by not even mentioning homosexuals.

One day Maria moved from Chicago and showed up, tearful, on my doorstep with just her black cat Boo-Boo and a box filled with the 1911
Encyclopaedia Britannica
. She had left Maeve, she said, because Maeve was such a heartbreaker, an intriguer, a Donna Juanna, an Irish drunk, charming and incorrigible.

We sat at my kitchen table, which had a metal top printed to look like grainy wood and a hanging lamp above it cozily dimmed by a shade of gathered brown fabric, left behind by the previous tenant. We drank red wine and ate lasagna and talked and smoked and listened to
Manon Lescaut
.

Maria had given up on Chicago. She’d never go back to its cold winds blasting off the lake, its comfortable, defeated, hard-driven lesbians, its big, underfurnished apartments. She talked with scorn of her affair with Maeve. “It was so humiliating, the broken promises, the tearful reproaches and steamy reconciliations, those drunken fights in bars, midnight phone calls, hurtling back and forth in cars on snow chains. All the hours of gossip with friends, of sympathy from other women—oh, I’m sick of it, sick of it!” She laughed through her tears, her shoulders shaking with sobs or merriment, I couldn’t tell which.

My grungy little apartment’s three windows gave onto a narrow alley noisy with flapping laundry that by day projected silhouettes like black wings on our yellow shades. The bathroom, the most recent addition, had a tub so small that
you washed with your knees around your chin. The sink had been designed for a dirty child. The outer halls, painted with a shiny glaze, smelled of roach spray and were lit by bare bulbs. Our place you entered through the kitchen. On one side was the room I gave Maria that also housed Boo-Boo’s bed—the empty
Britannica
box. On the other side was my room, the living room with a couch that pulled out. There I kept my Chinese flashcards in long boxes in anticipation of the day when I’d resume my studies; that day has never come.

Maria had a bright red loden coat that she wore with black Wellington boots and a black scarf. Dressed that way she’d accompany me to the Bleecker Street Tavern and the basement Italian restaurants. She tried to show an interest in New York, and her conversation willed itself toward enthusiasm by the frequent use of such words as “fascinating” and “wonderfully bizarre,” but her eyes looked as cold as two holes cut in the ice for fishing.

At night she’d rail against Maeve until a valve would turn and all this spleen would come out as dismal lost love. The phone rang every night, Maeve calling from Chicago. She’d be in a bar, drunk, shouting above the jukebox, or she’d be at home, apparently sober, very jokey and man-to-man with me: “How you guys doing in the Big Apple? I’m thinking of packing my Thunderbird and tooling out that way myself. I know a fellow who works on
Variety
and has promised me a job, want to put Maria on?”

“She’s not here I’m afraid. I don’t know. Fine. She’s fine. Yes, I’ll tell her.”

Maria followed my end of the conversation, intent on every one of Maeve’s gambits. She’d turn red, eyes blazing, then shake her head sadly. After I’d hung up, Maria would say, “I must never see her again. I can’t. If I want to survive.”

And she’d go back to her homework, learning to like her new life.

On the street one day I confided to Maria I was dying to buy the new
Grecian Guild
magazine of boys in posing briefs but that I was too shy to ask for it from the Italian lady in the corner newspaper kiosk. Without a pause Maria detoured over to the lady and said, “I’ll have that nice new
Grecian Guild
, if you please,” paid for it, and handed it to me, then teased me for blushing. I sat in the bathroom late that night, admiring Bobby Phalen’s artfully oiled buttocks, which were growing leaner and narrower.

Between Maria and me a new kind of intimacy developed, nurtured by her, even defined by her, for I wasn’t worldly enough to understand that a friendship can flourish only if watered by tact and pruned by diplomatic silences. With a friend we recognize bounds but within those bounds respond with candor; with a lover we expect limitless communion but resort to stratagems. Maria recognized the ways in which I feared sexual intimacy and firmly ended that possibility between us. But she didn’t cut the thread of courtship, of gallantry, even of romance that lent vitality to our love. We coined the notion of “passionate friendship” and we suspected that ours would last a lifetime. If our friendship was sustained by our past and tapped all the energies of family reciprocities, its tropism strained toward the future. At that time I was still too eager for love to appreciate friendship, but even so I imagined I’d spend my life with Maria, not with Mr. Right. When my mother told me she felt sorry for me, without a mate to console me or children to sustain me in my old age, I could only think, I have a mother and daughter: Maria.

Maria bought me a coffeepot and showed me how to use it. When the toilet got stopped up, she called the plumber. I was afraid to call and didn’t mind peeing in the sink or running across the street to the toilet in the Hip Bagel. I’d never had a checking account before; Maria explained how to open one.

Once I’d mastered these new games, I was better at playing them than she. She was less afraid than I of credit, officialdom, or the law because she took them less seriously. I took them so seriously that once I overcame my intimidation I did everything correctly—my “Capricorn nature,” as one of my new, hip friends explained.

Maria was so discreet that I dreaded she’d find out I was talking about us both to strangers, for she shared her feelings with no one but me, yet gave her ideas away to everyone. My case was the opposite: I showered my feelings on everyone, trying to defuse them by firing them again and again, whereas my thoughts—about literature, sex, society—I confided to Maria alone.

Of course Maria’s feelings for me I never doubted. I knew she loved me. For me, her womanness was always a strangeness, the idea that she belonged to another sex, which for me constituted virtually another species; but we managed to communicate across this ocean of gender. When we set sail during our midnight conversations, our ages were quietly dropped overboard as useless ballast. In our domestic dealings, however, we played the difference up. This emphasis gave a humorous gloss to what Maria wanted to do in any event—tidy up the place. More subtly, it reduced our embarrassment about existing side by side in such close quarters: She became a comically vexed, secretly indulgent older sister and I the lovable but slovenly kid brother always daydreaming over a book.

The instant we stepped out into the snow, she in her bright red loden coat, I in—what? I don’t remember and scarcely knew then—our ages shifted again. I became the serious young husband bespectacled and dignified, she the wife in need of protection, as though my edge of a few weeks in New York had somehow made me a native.

Having an actual woman at my side preempted my fantasy of being a woman, a fantasy that was as shameful as it was deep. One day, while browsing at the Gotham Book Mart, I stumbled on a book by the first sex-change, written in the 1930s. I slumped to the floor and read the whole book straight through, sweating in my overcoat. I read until the sunlight began to fade. My face burned with horrified recognition of this tale of a Dutch painter who felt he must at all costs liberate the dryad locked inside his male cortex. Here were the photographs of the
before
and
after
handwriting (vigorous downstrokes turned to rounded curves) and the
before
and
after
paintings (Mondrian to Marie Laurencin) and
before
and
after
bodies (Van Dyke and glinting pincenez to a nearly erased face peeping out from under a cloche hat, the tottering thin body supported in the wintry garden of the clinic by a German nurse). The post-op artist insisted on having not only his sex changed on his documents (a whim that the game Dutch officials were willing to oblige) but also his rebirthday (refused). In the painter’s eyes, a lengthening pendulous age, not mere pudenda, had been the culprit; he had considered the surgery to be a renaissance.

When he met his mother afterward, he could scarcely remember her. He chose as a husband an old friend of the family who’d agreed to marry him once he’d become a she. Her desire to have a child sent her back to have a second operation, from which she never recovered. The shorter and shorter journal entries, the indefinitely extended vacation of
the performing surgeon, the patient’s horrible pain—all led to the suspension dots of the conclusion, three bloody drops on a snowy page.

I was summoned to my army physical. With all these pale, tattooed boys I stripped and bent over, dressed and filled out forms. Here and there in the crowd I heard an arresting accent or saw eyes flashing with defiance; these anomalies were assembled at the end of the day in the psychiatrist’s office. He was almost deaf. Perhaps to be spiteful he’d moved his desk out of his office into the center of the waiting room. I heard each deviant shout the details of his problem. I had checked the box “homosexual tendencies” (the army recognized nothing more definite), but the doctor pretended he couldn’t see why I’d been referred to him.

“Here, here!” I shouted, pointing.

“Where? What? Oh. Homosexual. Tendencies. Have you tried psychiatric treatment?”

“Yes,” I shouted.

“And?”

“Useless. No. Good.”

“Are you the active partner or the passive partner?”

I’d never thought in these terms before. Did “active” mean the one who sucked (the “girl”) or the one who fucked (the “boy”)? I couldn’t sort it out but I decided “passive” sounded less curable.

“What?”

Face crimson I shouted, “Passive!”

I was medically disqualified from the army. The idea that my place would be taken by someone else, perhaps even a gay man too nervous to admit to his “tendencies,” didn’t trouble me in the least. A belief in morality is based on a belief in the group. I distrusted everyone. Hawthorne’s dim view of human nature confirmed mine, although I did not believe in Original Sin, only sin, far too common to be original.
Of course I pretended to entertain normal scruples; I didn’t want people to look down on me.

Maria found a job in textbook publishing and moved to her own apartment on the Upper West Side. The smell of cat urine slowly faded, and only cat’s hairs on the one pair of slacks I never wore (too snug, for some reason) and the clawed ravening of the upholstery up the back of a chair remained as reminders of her presence—those and the improvements (the electric can opener in a kitchen with only two plates, the coffeepot, the framed drawing of me reading).

For a while after she left I lived with a Russian ballet dancer who, when we met at a party, had been all muscled ass, starry smile, and scraps of Pushkin but who, upon moving in, was seldom out of a stained “hapi coat” mini-dressing gown from Tokyo and a wide-mesh hairnet. He detested everything American, told depressing stories of backstage pettiness, and longed to return to the Eastern Bloc, though Budapest this time. Accordingly, I had to drill him in Hungarian vocabulary every night. He lived on nothing but potatoes sprinkled with cumin seeds and scorned my wastefulness (dinners out, cab rides). He was saving every penny for a one-way ticket to Budapest. From time to time he’d let me into his bed, but the hairnet and hapi coat had turned him from a young prince into a sort of untidy Minnie Mouse with big thighs of mushroom pallor.