The Beautiful Room Is Empty (24 page)

When summer came, we three went to Riis Park together, taking the subway all the way to the end of the line, then switching to a bus that let us off at the big Brooklyn public beach.

One section was gay, and there, late in the long hot afternoon, these cute Puerto Rican guys would start dancing to a portable radio or even a stack of the latest 45s.

Beers would pass from hand to hand, a circle gathered,
the late sun stared into its own reflection, the smell of seaweed blended with the cooking smells drifting over from the takeout stands along the boardwalk, the smell of franks and steamer clams. Gay boys sat and combed each other’s hair or scampered into the nearly becalmed surf as someone’s mother, a Mrs. Meyer, “spritzed” herself by flicking drops over her shoulders from diamonded old fingers.

Someone had set up a white tent in the sand, not the usual boy-scout sort but a noble tent right out of a medieval movie, and three black drags kept going in and out of it to change clothes. Misty was in raptures over a Dionne Warwick look-alike. The dance gathered momentum. We were too zonked from the heat and beer and the sun’s stare to stroll over, but we lay on our sides and watched the virtuoso turns each soloist took, daring the next dancer to greater intricacies. I closed my eyes. I listened to the rhythmic clapping of the tribe. When I looked again, the red-haired Puerto Rican boy on the next towel over, wearing a swimsuit that said “Made in USA,” had finally stopped doing sit-ups and seemed to be sleeping.

I felt far from the private beach of my childhood in front of our Michigan summer cottage. Now I was at once thrilled to be among so many poor people and afraid I had become one of them. Of course, I wanted to sleep with them, a good many of them, and they were strong and brown and at home on this beach and in this city, whereas I was a white foreigner.

Simultaneously, in another corner of my mind I felt a queasiness about being here with so many tacky queens, these drags with the plucked eyebrows and bass voices, with the silver toenails and immense feet—chagrined and attracted and afraid.

Lou had no such hesitations. He maintained his high-paying job and knew how to pitch an account to the president of a corporation, just as in group-therapy sessions he knew
how to cite Freud’s distinction between mourning and melancholia. But leaving aside these concessions to the middle class, he’d moved into a marginal neighborhood and even had Misty’s initials tattooed on his shoulders in a blue-and-red heart.

On the train back to town, the subway came up above-ground to pass over a long low stretch on trestles. The eight-o’clock sunlight fell on a girl standing at the head of the car. Her blonde hair caught in the wind pouring in through an open window, danced around her like the energy at the heart of the sun. I rested my head on Lou’s tattooed shoulder and half dozed. Some of the gay boys were still playing records, and two were jitterbugging. I longed for a Coke. As my eyes fluttered open and shut with delicious sleepiness, our train passed above an inland marsh and the girl turned slowly, idly around a pole while her hair transformed the solid silver cylinder into goldest filigree.

EIGHT

        For a year I lived as a fat man. Sometimes I’d be picked up by an older man or a black man. Both categories seemed more indulgent than the white guys my age, who struggled to be as thin and boyish as possible and who saw only each other. Once an attractive couple picked me up. They wanted me to take turns servicing them as they embraced. I felt like a home appliance one seldom buys but rents when needed, something like a rug shampooer. Yet I was disappointed when they failed to invite me back.

When depressed after a long fruitless search, I’d buy a midnight sack of groceries at the deli: English muffins, chocolate bars (the big expensive European kind), pepperoni, donuts, and I’d head guiltily home.

In November Lou took me in hand. He sent me to a diet doctor who saw me once a week and prescribed steak, salad, white wine, and amphetamines. In those days students might take a Dexedrine to pull an all-nighter, but the drug was little used, although Dr. O’Reilly had of course sworn by it.

The weight melted off me. In eight weeks I lost forty pounds and became slender. At the same time Lou insisted I
start coming with him to the gym. As a teenager I’d been hit in the head by a baseball; I was always the only one to get vertigo when climbing a rope and a severe burn when sliding down it; I was a perpetual malingerer, despite regularly falling in love with my gym teacher. Now I became nauseated after doing just a few leg lifts and had to sit with my head between my knees. The locker room sent me into a fit of shyness.

But a weightlifting gym for adults is a democratic place. People do what they can, given their size, age, and strength. No loudmouth giant with a T-shirt he’s ripped open to fit into will refuse to help even the weakest wimp lift barbells out of a rack. My gym had been the exclusive province of straight Italian guys, all talking football or joking about eating out pussy. But every month more and more gay men joined, at first prissy but soon enough outspoken. A chorus boy with a trick knee who’d been forced to retire at twenty-eight was the first to get really big at our gym. Like the Italians, he was working out three hours a day, six days a week, and running to the deli and bringing back whole barbecued chickens he’d wash down with quarts of milk drunk right out of the carton. He even experimented with drinking bull’s blood and had a passing case of gout. When he hit two hundred and thirty pounds, he felt he was imposing enough to turn the radio on Saturday afternoons from rock to the Metropolitan Opera. And in his teeth-drilling high voice he started debating the merits of cocksucking versus pussy eating. The Italian guys didn’t care. They thought it was funny. They’d grown up in the Village.

Slowly my body took shape in the gym mirror. Stomach muscles emerged. A chest, biceps, triceps, lats—the whole kit. The gym instructor measured my arms (which grew) and my waist (which shrank). The diet pills gave me a jaw-clenching intensity. If I started looking up something in the
Yellow Pages at eight in the evening, I’d still be reading the columns of names at four in the morning, docilely obeying the cross-references (see appliances; see sanitary engineering). If I lay my head on the pillow I’d dip just below the water-line, but I was like a fish kept in a net bag and dragged through the waves buffeted by the speed. I wrote with the attentiveness of a manuscript illuminator, but after hundreds of hours I’d produced only a gnomic one-act about a pair of lovers, in some scenes played by two men, in others by a man and a woman. I had this idea that my play would demonstrate that the dynamics of love are always the same, no matter which sexes are involved.

And then I met Sean.

He rang my bell one day because he was looking for the Russian dancer who’d lived with me. I invited him in for a cup of coffee. He shed his coat and sat down. He didn’t say anything but seemed expectant and bursting with contained energy. He drummed his fingers on the tabletop.

He was six feet tall and had white blond hair that covered darker layers as though his head were a hay mow. He had a hearty manner irrelevant to his surroundings, for I was murmuring in my usual vague, ironic way, whereas he was replying with loud, strangely definite emphases almost as though he’d been paid to exclaim in a commercial. He gave the impression of having been scrubbed very clean. Even his cheeks glowed ruddily. I thought he wouldn’t smell of anything if I sniffed his body. He laughed loudly when I said something sort of amusing, but his restless eyes roamed over my little kitchen as though he found nothing worthy of his attention. He leaned forward when he spoke. He seemed to be one of those people so anxious that they don’t listen to anyone else and only worry about their own next statement.

He appeared to be Polish, or my idea of Polish. The
back of his head was flat, as though a Polish grandmother had molded it that way so he wouldn’t roll out of his cradle. His eyes were too small to be handsome, but his skin was so taut that there was only a single fold under his eyes and not a hint of darkness. The pure skin ran right up to the edge of the pale lashes and framed the sort of pale blue eyes that in a flash photo come out pink as a rabbit’s. His skin reminded me that the French word for complexion is
carnation
.

When he strode about my little kitchen he kicked his legs straight out. He happened to mention his father was a billfold distributor in Ohio, and I realized that although he was talking books and ideas, his way of talking was a traveling salesman’s—insistent, unstoppable. If I stopped him and took exception, he had an easygoing way of shrugging, laughing at himself, and trying a new tack, as if to say, “Since you didn’t fall for that one, try this one on for size.” When I spoke at any length, he frowned. He winced with concentration, just as though he were a nutcracker and my words a giant nut.

I processed everything he said in several different ways.

Mainly I was afraid of him. I’d never had anyone so handsome so near me before. Of course I had, but the experience was powerful enough to seem unique. This guy—but have I neglected to say he was luminously attractive, even at first glance, not like a model, for he wasn’t that fine, his nose had something odd about it, perhaps it was, yes, too thick, the same thickness from the top to the tip, but all the same he stunned me. I was afraid of him because I wanted him. I didn’t like the suspense. Because I wasn’t a handsome boy, I couldn’t enjoy the luxury of knowing that eventually he’d come around and that meanwhile the game was fun. For me, the game was intolerable.

And yet, just as he was leaving he stood by the door in
his dark blue military overcoat and he touched my hand with his, held it simply, normally, and asked me if I wanted to grab a bite to eat later. I said why not.

Then he was gone. I put my lips where his had been on the coffee cup. I felt elated, because that was all I’d ever wanted, to be loved, and nobody ever had. I questioned my sincerity. Why was I falling for someone so handsome? Then I thought, Why not? Beauty is something noble, like an old name, and I’ll keep on seeing it in him even after he’s lost it. I thought it was natural that he’d be willing to confide his beauty to my intelligence (now that he was gone and I was less afraid, I esteemed my mind more highly). As he’d held my hand, an appreciative smile had even flickered over his dark red lips.

Sean and I went out to a Village coffee shop on Sheridan Square. The snow had melted, and it was raining. We sat in a window booth and watched all the couples hurrying past, battling with their umbrellas in the wind. For us, the feeling was very cozy, being inside. It wasn’t bad for the passersby, either. They were mostly couples on dates who seemed to be enjoying their struggle with the wind; nothing is more urban than a rainstorm. One after another these smiling, wet, fresh-faced couples, laughing and shaking their heads in mock annoyance, came running to stand under our awning. We couldn’t hear them through the glass.

It turned out that Sean had met the Russian dancer through Lou, whom he’d encountered at the Carmine Street public pool.

“I think Lou is so intelligent. He’s really the most intelligent person I’ve ever known,” Sean said with a curious agitation, as though something were at stake. Then, to cover his embarrassment, he sang three deep notes to himself, “Oom
pah pah.” After a short silence he said, “I don’t know why he dropped me.”

“Maybe you were too butch for him. Have you met Misty?”

“I bore Lou. I called him Monday and he sounded like he was falling asleep. I waited three days for him to call me—he said he would. Oom pah pah.”

I received an odd sensation when it dawned on me that this deep voice, with its overly clear, penetrating salesman’s diction, was telling the truth and conveying an emotion. “He’s been very busy this week,” I said.

“Don’t.”

“You seem to be afraid of me,” I said, suddenly intuitive. Until this second, when he’d disclosed his feelings about Lou, I hadn’t imagined he might be insecure.

“I am.”

“Why?”

“Lou told me you were very intelligent.”

“But you’re far more intelligent than I. You read books in several languages; you know all about the pastoral tradition and the medieval allegory.” To my way of looking at things, of course, knowledge wasn’t intelligence. I believed in that pure, radiant isotope called “general intelligence,” something so abstract that any concrete knowledge would only diminish it.

“Strange you could admit that so easily,” Sean said. While we spoke I couldn’t forget his beauty, which seemed eucharistie. “Aren’t you ever insecure?” he asked.

“I can’t endure suspense,” I said.

“What are you talking about?”

“Well, once I’m into a friendship I’m really very relaxed and—well, I’m a good friend, I think. But in the beginning, when you don’t know whether the other person likes you or not …”

“Oh, I see.” Sean smeared the ring his cup had made on the table. He said very softly, “I like you very much. Dee-dee-dee dum.”