The Beautiful Room Is Empty (3 page)

Away from her school and mine, we both relaxed. I
imagined she no longer had to observe everything with the exhausting attention of someone always expected to have an aesthetic opinion. Nor did she have to behave with that deliberateness required of someone who lives in a small society where no rules are explicit but every action may be setting a precedent. After all, the art academy students were all free to do exactly as they pleased, a terrible responsibility, and even their teachers were painters with odd personal habits, including the urge to be alone. Here were sixty young people, men and women, some of them away from their rural, religious homes for the first time, and they were all expected to paint great paintings, move nearly wordlessly into and out of each other’s austere single beds, listen to Bach or Charlie Parker, and wear strange clothing that ostracized them from the prep school boys as well as from the furred gentry of the adjacent estates.

In town Maria and I felt better. At least I did. The streets had been cleared, traffic lights lidded in snow burned like mad eyes, Christmas shoppers submitted to their forced labor, there were other cars cruising around as old and dirty as ours, everyone seemed busy and indifferent—the rich anonymity of the city. Maria invited me for a hamburger, not at the fancy Petite Auberge where “half-pounders” were loaded with melting Roquefort, but, as she said, “At that adorable greasy spoon.” From my mother I’d learned that “nice” people should always frequent “nice” places, but here was Maria, certifiably nice, who relished the diner, twirled on the metal stool like a bobby-soxer, and punched out tunes on the jukebox. “Don’t you just love the Everly Brothers?” she asked.

I shrugged, but I think in that one remark Maria changed my way of seeing things. My father was rich in his remote but solid way, and my mother, divorced from him ten years earlier, was poor in her flamboyant way, squandering money
on clothes and economizing on food. They each disapproved of each other; my father especially disapproved of my mother; the net effect was to confuse me. I never felt right in any setting. That I also feared I might be some sort of pansy only made me feel all the more weird.

I wanted to escape my childhood world and be superior to it. I’d read about Oscar Wilde. Wilde made brilliant repartee, but not in a void. People had listened, remembered his words. I, on the other hand, quoting Wilde, had said of the recently widowed mother of one of my junior-high-school friends, “I hear her hair has turned quite gold with grief,” and Kathy Becker, the class sweetheart who always wore baby blue cashmere, shook her head and said, “I feel sorry for you—you’re sick.” That Wilde was broken and Rimbaud driven into exile only seemed the reasonable price society demanded for such splashy transgressions.

The lurid decadence of nineteenth-century Europe, with its mauve glasses and moth-eaten velvets, its melancholy lords and suitably untouchable ladies—that was a world I pined after, not this Detroit of behemoth cars, beetling their way through snow, these peppy renditions of novelty songs (Rosemary Clooney singing “If I’d Knowed You Was A-Comin’ I’d’ve Baked a Cake”). I felt a real nausea whenever I faced America’s frumpy cuteness, the Red Nosed Reindeer stamped out of dirty white plastic, the Hit Parade singers on TV dressed up to look like little kids, grown women in nylon Gretchen braids.

But Maria turned this dross to gold by touching it, by holding it out and looking at it. She suggested it was sufficiently distant from her to appreciate.

Rather startled, I said, “You mean you actually like this music?”

“Little snob,” she laughed, her eyes tearing in some paradox of affection I couldn’t quite understand, “such a
snob,” and she kissed me on the cheek as if I were some wonderfully stuffy old man. Her flat-chested torso shook soundlessly. With the back of her hand she slowly nudged the tears out of her eyes.

And then I did relax. I cautiously admitted to myself that I liked this tiled restaurant and the teenage cook with the paper hat perched on his greased-back hair. I liked the idle pleasure of sitting over a third coffee with a friend, saying whatever came into my head, then lapsing back into a daydream, listening to snow chains on the street outside. Maria and I decided to collaborate on a best-seller. We took turns elaborating a plot about riches in Detroit, romance in Rio, broken heart in Paris, drug addiction in New York. We’d both burst into a new episode at the same time, laugh, insist the other one speak first. Maria deleted anything highbrow or arty. “We want this one to sell,” she said.

Until now I’d divided the world into either philistines or aesthetes. The pretensions of the aesthetes convinced no one, me least of all, since most of the jocks who attracted me were philistines. Or perhaps I felt that over here, in America, the aesthetes were weakened, languishing, having strayed too far from the mother ship of Europe. At the same time, I never doubted that the
Hammerklavier
sonata was superior to “Kitten on the Keys.”

But here was Maria with her smiling impertinence, suggesting that we aesthetes of course lived for high art, but (come on, admit it) we also loved wild rides in jalopies, heavy petting, window shopping, followed by a really greasy burger, cherry Coke, and chocolate cream pie. “Try not to hate your own country, Dumpling,” she said, no longer laughing, but as though she were telling me to bundle up against the cold.

She had a way of making a visit to her room or studio at once physically enervating and mentally bracing, for at
the same time that she was making hot chocolate on her hot plate or tilting the lampshade to screen the glare she was also challenging all my views. Although I was an atheist, I was a mild sort of unbeliever, looking back with reluctance at those brocaded chasubles and smoky censers, but Maria despised all churches with the wrath of a Savonarola. At the boys’ school we had to say grace before supper, and Maria thought this custom outrageous.

“I just go through the motions out of respect.”

“Respect?” she snapped. “Why respect mindless superstition? I refuse to go along with grace at family meals.”

And yet she loved her mother, who never argued with her brilliant daughter but just murmured soothing things: “If there is a Lord, I’m sure He loves you, what with all the good you do, I never saw the like. Did you try Aunt Sarah’s pickled watermelon rind?”

Maria was equally uncompromising about the revolution that was coming and the benefits Communism would bring to all of humanity. If I mentioned the imprisonment of dissidents, she’d say scornfully, “Do you seriously think the civil liberties of a few individuals outweigh the right of millions of ordinary people to feed and educate their children? And not just their boys, their girls too. There are so many women doctors and women party members in Russia. Anyway, it’s a brand-new experiment, not even forty years old. Of course, they can’t change Russia overnight, after centuries of czarist oppression.” She really talked that way. Before she’d come to the art academy she’d been at the University of Chicago.

When I asked Maria how she liked social realism in painting, she said, “But we know so little about their painting, we’re told it’s nothing but banal magazine illustration, but have we seen their best work? What if it is bad art, so what, if that’s what the people like? I worked on that socialist paper in Iowa City last summer and we learned that factory
workers and farmhands like illustrations precisely to the degree they are realistic. Anything the least bit abstract they loathed.”

“But what about your own painting?” I asked.

“I’d be willing to burn every painting ever painted to feed one person in India. Or Mississippi.”

“Then why do you keep on painting?”

“I tell myself,” she said, lowering her eyes and laughing, “that I’m painting for the masses a hundred years from now. Too crazy. I don’t know why. Perhaps I’ll stop.”

Maria’s political conscience struck me as admirable but superfluous, like some unusually harsh act of religious penance. I myself embraced the worm’s-eye view of the world. I thought no one would stick by me in a pinch. I owed nothing to anyone. My drive to ingratiate myself with other people was scarcely a moral urge, but rather the reverse, since I’d betray anyone or any principle to win the approval of whoever happened to be next to me at the moment. Although I had scarcely acted on my sexual impulses, I knew that if they were discovered I’d be an outcast, no matter in which society. When I repeated Maria’s socialist doctrines to the kids at my school, it was only to thrill them, to demonstrate my Christian willingness to sacrifice my comfort for the betterment of mankind. My socialist posturing was also a way of social climbing, since I always included my father among the capitalists I was determined to dethrone, whereas he was just a small entrepreneur.

Not that I was selfish. I never hoarded candy or dollars or ideas; in fact I anxiously gave them away to buy off hostility or to bribe affection. Far from being indifferent to suffering, I winced so much at the sight of pain that I couldn’t sit through a horror movie. The only condition for my sympathy was proximity. Unheard trees that fell made no sound to my ears, and hoards of the starving in India made no
demand, at least not on me. Yet even those people near to me I cared for in some way that was more immediate than the sentiment politics required. If I’d been a king, I would have been more likely to have cared for the sick by touching them than by building a hospital.

I was neither as warm as people thought nor as cold as I feared. After an exhausting day of smiling and asking interested questions of everyone, I’d be kept awake by feelings not of hate but of unreality.

I discovered that every day I looked forward to seeing Maria. She was more curious about me than was Ivan or Paul. With them I was typecast as the precocious kid. I suppose they felt sorry for me too; people who knew me then tell me that I was terribly nervous, always fidgeting and biting my nails. I had a tic, a constant bobbing of my head, that was so bad I hated to have anyone sit behind me in a movie or, worse, a play. Although I thought of myself as a sinister young man, now I realize that most people back then felt sorry for me.

Not Maria. She liked my mind. She was like one of those characters in a Chekhov story, a doctor or army officer, who fills a silence by asking, “What do you think people will be doing a hundred years from now?” Now, a hundred years later, I distrust ideas and have few enough. Almost any assertion suggests its opposite to me, and a wide if careless reading has taught me that every enthusiasm, if genuinely embraced, turns into folly or fanaticism. But back then, developing an idea was as neat as doing crosswords. And with Maria our intellectual conversations were as romantic as Puccini duets.

One day, a Sunday after church, I went walking with Maria and Sam, her lover, a bearded Assyrian king of a man who, when he shaved later that spring, appeared weak-chinned and plump-cheeked. He raked his beard with his fingers as
he walked along. His lips looked delicately pink inside the crisp curling beard. He seemed to find it amusing that he had a beard. He was very sure of himself, which I deduced from his smooth walk, his smile, and his mild spoofing.

Maria never sank into playing the happy couple with Sam while I was around. She didn’t turn me into a sidekick. Of course, I was used to being a sidekick. I spent a lot of time with the guys from Eton and their girlfriends, counseling them when they were quarreling, and cavorting to entertain them when they were happy. I was the blur of motley they glimpsed through dreaming eyes. I was their intermediary in that they sensed I was somehow intermediate. I wrote a story called “The Hermaphrodite,” about a creature full of longing who bound his breasts and worked at lowering his voice.

Yes, I danced attendance on my couples, confidant to him, cavalier to her. But Maria and Sam treated with me separately. They didn’t aspire to be a couple. They were friends. Maria called Sam, “My friend.” I was also her friend. And Sam seemed to like me in his beard-stroking way.

Now I sometimes think I don’t feel enough, perhaps because I know myself too well. I’ve grown tired of myself. But then I was still a stranger to myself. I was shocked by the turbulent waves of feeling coming out of me—a laugh, a harsh word, a simper, a fit of tears that would go on so long my Adam’s apple would ache. Now when I hunch over my solitary lunch in a Paris café I’ll overhear a group of American tourists. I’m sure the Parisians dismiss them without a second thought, these men in bold plaids and women in big, lime green homemade pants, but I stare for an instant at the well-behaved boy or glassy-eyed girl at their side. I suspect the boy (isn’t that a perfect church-attendance pin in his lapel?) may become an ax murderer, or the girl the president. They’re like cute novelty jugs, but containing potent liquor, possibly poisonous.

During spring vacation Maria wrote me a long letter in pencil. She used the simplified spellings the
Chicago Tribune
had introduced (“nite” for “night,” “thru” for “through”) and lots of abbreviations. Despite these eccentricities, her letter was as varied as her talk—observations on the Cold War alternating with praise of Jussi Björling as Des Grieux in
Manon Lescaut
, flattering concessions to my opinions (“Your dislike of Faulkner is making me reread him”) alternating with equally flattering rejections of my ideas (“You talk too much about happiness and not enough about fairness in your discussions of Communism. In fact your airy disregard of what’s fair I find shocking. It’s almost as though you are lacking a whole critical faculty”).

Without transition she wrote, “I’m considering breaking off with Sam. I don’t think he’ll even notice, he hasn’t called me or written in two weeks. I think I’m a much better friend than lover, anyway, at least I show more of my feelings to you than to him.”

That was when I fell in love with Maria. I’m a nominalist; I believe only in what’s named. Until then Sam had seemed so superior to me as to belong to another species. He had the lazy smile of someone many women had loved.

If Maria had been less elegantly reserved, I might have hashed out with her all my feelings of inadequacy and ended by losing her. But Maria didn’t want to get to the bottom of anything but ideas. Her feelings were all impulsive and uncritical. I once told her I thought love was a hoax and I repeated something I’d read, that love hadn’t existed in the ancient world and had only come in with the troubadours. She found this notion so absurd she’d often mention it to other people as a hilarious example of my gullibility. For her love was the one simple, painful or blissful fact in a world of shifting speculations. For her, love was as simple as Des Grieux’s cry to Manon: “In your deep eye I read my destiny.”
The wonder is that when she laughed at my theory of love no one ever defended me, since my theory is certainly arguable. But no one wanted to contradict Maria. She made her ideas—no, her very being—appear so likable no one wanted to be unlike her.