A Boy's Own Story (13 page)

And yet—what if he wasn't at home at all? What if he had forgotten our lesson? As long as I thought his closed door was barring me from those deep invasions of a fragile body, just so long was I content to stand in that shabby, windowless corridor. Waiting for my teacher was no burden to me (wasn't Hesse himself teaching me the value of a patient apprenticeship?). But what made me frantic was the fear that no one was behind the door. No bed, no lazily smiling German face, no huge hand stroking a pale, engorged pelvis— nothing, an unlit room devoid of everything but a ticking clock and a refrigerator that groans and goes dead, groans and goes dead.

And I was terrified someone would ask me what I was doing in the hall. A great deal of time had already gone by. People had begun to cook supper and the overheated corridor was filling with the smells of food. I had peeled off my coat, scarf and sweater. I sat on them and leaned against a wall. In the distance I could hear the elevator doors opening and closing. An old woman shouted into a telephone. Another woman was giving instructions to a child. This corridor was a sort of catch basin for the domesticity trickling down around me. The smells. The irritations. The complicated lives of absolutely everyone.

My professor didn't come that day. Of course he phoned the next with a reasonable excuse. Of course I should have anticipated just such a hitch and explanation, but my need, though usually held in check or released only on imaginary beings, could, if turned on someone real, devour him. I had worshipped my teacher, I'd even forgiven him for not loving me—but now I hated him. I dreamed of revenge. In the past I'd been protected from humiliating rejection because I so seldom asked anything of anyone. The gods were my company; the lilac in flower embraced me; books did all the talking but only when I permitted the monologue to begin. They were transparent companions whose intentions were never in doubt. Gods, flowers, words—why, I could see right through them! Nor did they waver into or out of focus or leave even an inch of the surround blank. Whereas people batted thoughts and feelings like badminton birdies at you, a whir that might take you by surprise, that you might not even see but that you were expected to return until the air began to go white, the gods made no such demands. They propped themselves up on gold elbows and lazily turned their wide, smiling faces down on you. When their glance locked with yours their eyebeams lit up. In an instant you were they, they you, gods mortal and mortals divine, the mutual regard a reflecting pool into which everything substantial would soon melt and flow.

When I was twelve, the year after I began my German classes, the boys I knew started playing a violent game called "Squirrel" ("Grab his nuts and run"). Guys who'd scarcely acknowledged me until now were suddenly thrashing, twisting muscles in my arms, their breath panting peanut butter right up into my face, my hands sliding over their silky skin just above the rough denim... and now his gleaming crotch buttons were pressing down on me as his knees burned into my biceps and I put off shouting "Uncle" one more second in order to inhale once again the terrible smell of his sweat.

Or the light was dying and piles, of burning leaves streaked the air with the smoky breath of the very earth. My hands were raw with cold, my nose was running, I was late for supper, my shirt was torn, but still I called him back again and again by shouting, "I'm not sorry. I just said that. I'm not sorry, I'm—"

"Look, you little creep"—his voice was much lower, he was a year older, he came at me, really mad this time, I didn't want his anger, just his body on top of me and his arms around me.

Or Harold, the minister's son—that small, athletic blond with the pompadour preserved in hair lotion and the black mole on his full, hairless cheek, that boy who strutted when he walked, preferred his own company to everyone else's and who had a reputation among adults for being "considerate" that was directly contradicted by his cheerfully blind arrogance—he was someone with whom I could play Squirrel in the late afternoons after his trumpet practice (he shakes the silver flood of saliva out of the gold mouth and snaps open the black case to reveal its purple plush, worn down here to a slick, reflecting whiteness, roughed up there into a dark bruise, then he places the taut heroism of the instrument into that regal embrace and locks it shut).

Even in the winter, as winds blowing up off the lake cast nets of snow over us and the sun pulsed feebly like the aura of a migraine that doesn't develop, we lunged at each other, rolled in drifts, squirrels hungry for hard blue nuts in the frozen land. Suddenly fingers would be squirming and pulling, a wave of pain would shoot through me, his sapphire eye set in white faience would arc past and dip below the shadowy horizon of my nose, hot breaths would tear out of my lungs and cross his—at cross-purposes.

The summer I was twelve I was sent in a Greyhound bus to a camp for boys. We lived in tents in rows on the grounds of a famous military academy. The massive, reddish brown buildings with their green turrets and gables were closed for the season, but the adult staff—the captains and generals in perpetual uniform—stayed behind to run the camp and earn an extra income. The campers, though younger than the usual cadets, were nevertheless submitted to the same military discipline. In fact our camping activity, beyond nature hikes and swimming lessons in a chlorinated indoor pool, consisted of nothing but drill and inspection. We learned to make a bed with hospital corners and to stretch the rough flannel blanket so taut a coin would bounce on it. Everyone owned precisely the same gear, stowed away in precisely the same manner. Shoes were placed just under the cot, each pair four inches from the next, each shoe of a pair two inches from its mate. Trumpets awakened us and sent us to bed. We marched to the mess hall where we were served cold mashed potatoes and boiled cabbage; more horribly at breakfast we ate bacon in congealed grease and scrambled eggs floating on hot water. After breakfast we marched double-time back to our tents, where we had an hour to prepare our quarters for white-glove inspection. Our captain saw everything and forgave nothing. He could find that single pair of kneesocks at the bottom of a steamer trunk that wasn't properly rolled and he would hand out to the offender enough demerits to fill all his free time for the rest of the summer.

He was a small, wiry man with black eyebrows so full that if they weren't pressed or combed into place they would stick out in disconcerting clumps like brittle, badly cared for paintbrushes or could droop down over an eye in a droll effect at odds with the commands he was barking. His skin was a tan mask clapped over a face that always appeared seriously exhausted; the dark circles and drained, bloodless cheeks could be seen through the false health of his tan. I ascribed his weariness to irritation. In fact he was much older than the other instructors. He may even have been close to retirement age. He might have been ill and in pain and perhaps his irritation was due to his ailment.

After lights-out he became someone new. Although he was still in uniform his tie was loosened, his voice seemed to have dropped an octave and a decibel, he had Scotch mysteriously and pleasantly on his breath, and his regard had grown gentle beneath its thatch of drooping eyebrows. He stopped by each tent, sat on the edge of each cot and spoke to each boy in a tone so intimate that the roommate couldn't eavesdrop. My roommate was a tall, extremely shy and well-bred redhead from a small town in Iowa: someone who seemed not at all eager to confide in me or to seek my friendship or even comments, as though he recognized that
this
life, at least, was worth enduring only if it remained unexamined. And yet his silences did not guarantee that he was altogether without thought or feeling. At unexpected moments he'd blush or stutter or in mid-sentence his mouth would go dry—and I could never figure out what had prompted these symptoms of anxiety.

One night, after our captain had lingered longer than usual in his cloud of Scotch and then passed on to the next tent, I asked my roommate why the captain always stayed longer beside him than me.

"I don't know. He rubs me."

"What do you mean?"

"Doesn't he rub you?" the boy whispered.

"Sometimes," I lied.

"All over?"

"Like how?" I asked.

"Like all"—his voice went dry—"down your front?"

"That's not right," I said. "He shouldn't do that. He shouldn't. It's abnormal. I've read about it."

A few nights later I woke up with a fever. My throat was so sore I couldn't swallow. My sheets were wet and cold with sweat. Even when I lay still I could feel the blood running through my veins; a metronome was ticking loudly within me and with each tick an oar of sensation cut into the water and pulled against it. No, now I could detect a line of divers jumping off the prow to the right, the left, right, left—the columns of marching boys advanced across the floor of the chlorinated pool. I closed my eyes and felt my heartbeat pluck a string in the harp of my chest. Was the night really so cold? I had to get help; the infirmary; otherwise pneumonia. My roommate was propped up on his elbow speaking giddy nonsense to me ("I like, I like, I like the Lackawanna") until I opened my eyes and saw him serenely asleep, his face the cutting edge of the prow as it parted a sea of liquid mercury. The flow, clinging to itself, boiling but cold, had swept me overboard with a chipmunk who was singing snatches from the Top Ten through the painful red hole in his neck—I sat up. I could barely swallow. I whispered my roommate's name.

When he didn't respond I put on my regulation cotton robe and regulation black slippers and walked up and down the raw clay roads between the rows of tents. Was that the first streak of dawn or the lights of a town? Should I wait till reveille? Or should I wake our captain up now?

I walked and walked and watched the night sky phosphoresce like plankton in the August sea. Gold would glimmer at the horizon and then feed its way up through delicate glass circuits into the main switchboard, where it would short out in a white explosion that would settle into a fine jeweler's rouge. Were those bats overhead? I'd heard that bats lived in the school towers. Here they were: blind, carnivorous and getting closer, lacing their way from eye to eye up the tongue.

At last the captain heard my knock and came to the door. He had a whole tent to himself, I could see, and he was still awake with a mystery novel and a bottle of Scotch. He appeared confused—at least he didn't know who I might be. When he'd unraveled my identity and figured out I was ill, he urged me to spend the rest of the night with him. We'd go to the infirmary first thing in the morning, he said to me. We'd go together. He'd take care of me. I had to insist over and over again on the urgency of my seeing a nurse now ("I'm really sick, sir, it can't wait") before he finally relented and led me to the infirmary. Even as I was pleading with him I was wondering what it would be like to live in this spacious tent with him. But why hadn't he noticed me before? Why hadn't he tried to rub me? Was I inferior to my roommate in some way? Less handsome? At least I wasn't abnormal, I said to myself, glancing over at his haggard unshaven face, at his profile with its shelf of eyebrows in the darkness bright with mercury.

The next summer I refused to go to camp until my mother lied and told me I'd be a junior counselor in charge of dramatics at a lovely place in the northern woods where practically no discipline existed and what there was would be waived in my case. I rode up north before the season began with the owner of the camp, who humored me ("Yes, well, you'll have to decide which plays you'll want to stage—you
are
the dramatics department"). After he said such things, he seemed to choke on his own generosity; his mouth would contract into an acidic kiss.

We were driving farther and father north. I sat in the front seat with the owner of the camp and looked out at the tall pines, so blue they were almost black against the gray spring sky. The road was the same color as the sky. When we came to the top of a gentle rise and looked down, the road below seemed forlorn and distant, enchanted into the shadows. But as we sped through the valley, the road came close and brightened and the crowns of the blue-black trees slid over the car's polished metal hood. In the backseat behind me lolled a special camper my mother, upon the advice of the owner, had warned me to avoid ("Be polite, but don't let him get you alone"). She seemed reluctant to explain what the danger was, but when I pressed her she finally said, "He's oversexed. He's tried to take advantage of the younger boys." She then went on to assure me that I mustn't despise the poor boy; he was, after all, brain-damaged in some way, under medication, unable to read. If God had gifted me with a fine mind He'd done so only that I might serve my fellow man.

In this brief parting word of warning, my mother had managed to communicate to me her own fascination with the wild boy. The day had turned cool and the car windows were dosed. The motor ran so smoothly that the ticking of the dashboard clock could be heard. When I cracked the vent open I heard volleys of birdsong but the birds themselves were hiding. In the valley below, empty of all signs of humanity except for the road, a mist was curling through the pines. I didn't really know the owner of the camp, and so I felt awkward beside him, ready to discuss whatever he chose but afraid of tiring him with my chatter. I sat half-rigid with expectation, a smile up my sleeve. And I felt the sex-crazed boy behind me who was half stretched out on the backseat, the sunlight from between the passing pines rhythmically stroking his body.

After it got dark we stopped for gas and a snack. Ralph, the special camper, said he was cold and wanted to sit up front with us just to keep warm. There was nothing affectionate or come-on-ish in his manner to me in the coffee shop; I could tell desire and affection had not clasped hands across
his
heart. He was alone with his erection, which I could see through the thin fabric of his summer pants. It was something he carried around with him wherever he went, like a scar. In the dark interior of the car, brushed here and there by a dim, firefly glow from the panel, Ralph's leg pressed mine. I was forced to return the pressure lest I lean against the driver and cause comment. When I caught sight of Ralph's face in the magnesium explosion of passing headlights, he looked exhausted, mouth half-open, a thirsty animal whose eyes had turned inward with craving.