A Boy's Own Story (18 page)

After I left her I raced home through the deserted streets laughing and leaping. I sang show tunes and danced and felt as fully alive as someone in a movie (since it was precisely life that was grainy and sepia-tinted, whereas the movies had the audible ping, the habitable color, the embraceable presence ofreality). I was more than ready to give up my attraction to men for this marriage to Helen Paper. At last the homosexual phase of my adolescence had drawn to a close. To be sure, I'd continue to love Tommy but as he loved me: fraternally. In my dream the stowaway in the single bunk with me, whom I was trying to keep hidden under a blanket, had miraculously transformed himself into my glorious bride, as the kissed leper in the legend becomes Christ Pantocrator.

When I got home my mother was in bed with the lights out. "Honey?"

"Yes?"

"Come in and talk to me."

"Okay," I said.

"Rub my back, okay?"

"Okay," I said. I sat beside her on the bed. She smelled of bourbon.

"How was your date?"

"Terrific! I never had such a good time."

"How nice. Is she a nice girl?"

"Better than that. She's charming and sophisticated and intelligent."

"You're home earlier than I expected. Not so hard. Rub gently. You bruiser. I'm going to call you that: Bruiser. Is she playful? Is she like me? Does she say cute things?"

"No, thank God."

"Why do you say that? Is she some sort of egghead?"

"Not an egghead. But she's dignified. She's straightforward. She says what she means."

"I think girls should be playful. That doesn't mean dishonest. I'm playful."

"-----"

"Well, I am. Do you think she likes you?"

"How can I tell? It was just a first date." My fingers lightly stroked her neck to either side of her spine. "I doubt if she'll want to see me again. Why should she?"

"But why not? You're handsome and intelligent."

"Handsome! With these big nostrils!"

"Oh that's just your sister. She's so frustrated she has to pick on you. There's nothing wrong with your nostrils. At least I don't see anything wrong. Of course, I know you too well. If you like, we could consult a nose doctor." A long pause. "Nostrils... Do people generally dwell on them? I mean, do people think about them a lot?" Small, high voice: "Are mine okay?"

A hopeless silence.

At last she began to snore delicately and I hurried to my own room. My sister's door, next to mine, was closed but her light was burning resentfully.

And I gave myself over to my reverie. I had a record player I'd paid for myself by working as a caddy and records I exchanged each week at the library, the music an outpost of my father's influence in this unmusical female territory.

I slipped out of my clothes as quickly as possible, though I tried to do everything beautifully, as in a movie of my life with Helen. In some way I felt it was already being filmed— not that I looked for hidden cameras but I simplified and smoothed out my movements for the lens. There were those, my mother and sister, who suffered too much and were too graceless to be film-worthy, but there were those others I aspired to join who suffered briefly, consolably and always handsomely, whose remarks were terse and for whom the mechanics of leaving a party or paying a bill had been stylized nearly out of existence in favor of highly emotional exchanges in which eyes said more than lips. Every detail of my room asked me to be solicitous. When the dresser drawer stuck I winced—this sequence would have to be reshot. I turned my sheets down as though she, Helen, were at my side. I rushed to snap off the lights.

She and I lay side by side in the narrow boat and floated downstream. The stars moved not at all and only the occasional fluttering of a branch overhead or the sound of a scraping rock below suggested our passage. The moon was the wound in the night's side from which magic blood flowed; we bathed in it. By dawn I'd made love to Helen four times. The first time was so ceremonial I had a problem molding the mist into arms and legs; all that kept flickering up at me was her smile. The second time was more passionate. I was finally able to free her breasts from their binding. By the third time we'd become gently fraternal; we smiled with tired kindness at each other. We were very intimate. At dawn she began to disintegrate. The certainty of day pulsed into being and all my exertions were able to keep her at my side only a few more moments. At last she fled.

I stumbled from class to class in a numb haze. Strangely enough, I was afraid I'd run into Helen. I didn't feel up to her. I was too tired. In home room I yawned, rested my head on my desk and longed for the privacy of my bed and the saving grace of night. I wanted to be alone with my wraith. In my confusion the real Helen Paper seemed irrelevant, even intrusive.

That night I wrote her a letter. I chose a special yellow parchment, a spidery pen point and black ink. In gym class as I'd stumbled through calisthenics and in study hall as I'd half dozed behind a stack of books, phrases for the letter had dropped into my mind. Now I sat down with great formality at my desk and composed the missive, first in pencil on scratch paper. If I reproduced it (I still have the pencil draft) you'd laugh at me or we would laugh together at the prissy diction and the high-flown sentiment. What would be harder to convey is how much it meant to me, how it read to me back then. I offered her my love and allegiance while admitting I knew how unworthy of her I was. And yet I had half a notion that though I might be worthless as a date (not handsome enough) I might be of some value as a husband (intelligent, slated for success). In marriage merits outweighed appeal, and I could imagine nothing less eternal than marriage with Helen. Naturally I didn't mention marriage in the letter.

A week went by before I received her answer. Twice I saw her in the halls. The first time she came over to me and looked me in the eye and smiled her sweet, intense smile. She was wearing a powder-blue cashmere sweater and her breasts rose and fell monumentally as she asked me in her soft drawl how I was doing. Nothing in her smile or voice suggested a verdict either for or against me. I felt there was something improper about seeing her at all before I got her letter. I mumbled, "Fine," blushed and slinked off. I felt tall and dirty. I was avoiding Tommy as well. Soon enough I would have to tell him about my proposal to Helen, which I suspected he'd disapprove of.

Then one afternoon, a Friday after school, there was her letter to me in the mailbox. Even before I opened it I was mildly grateful she had at least answered me.

The apartment was empty. I went to the sun-room and looked across the street at the lake churning like old machinery in a deserted amusement park, rides without riders. My mind kept two separate sets of books. In one I was fortunate she'd taken the time to write me even this rejection, more than a creep like me deserved. In the other she said, "You're not the person I would have chosen for a date, nor for a summer or semester, but yes, I will marry you. Nor do I want anything less from you. Romance is an expectation of an ideal life to come, and in that sense my feelings for you are romantic."

If someone had made me guess which reply I'd find inside the envelope, I would have chosen the rejection, since pessimism is always accurate, but acceptance would not have shocked me, since I also believed in the miraculous.

I poured myself a glass of milk in the kitchen and returned to the sun-room. Her handwriting was well formed and rounded, the dots over the
i
's circles, the letters fatter than tall, the lines so straight I suspected she had placed the thin paper over a ruled-off grid. The schoolgirl ordinariness of her hand frightened me—I didn't feel safe in such an ordinary hand. "I like you very much as a friend," she wrote. "I was pleased and surprised to receive your lovely letter. It was one of the sweetest tributes to me I have ever had from anyone. I know this will hurt, but I am forced to say it if I am to prevent you further pain. I do not love you and I never have. Our friendship has been a matter of mutual and rewarding liking, not loving. I know this is very cruel, but I must say it. Try not to hate me. I think it would be best if we did not see each other for a while. I certainly hope we can continue to be friends. I consider you to be one of my very best friends. Please, please forgive me. Try to understand why I have to be this way. Sincerely, Helen."

Well, her phrasing was less childish than her hand, I thought, as though the letter were a composition in class that concerned me in no way. Even as this attitude broke over me but before I was drawn into another, more troubling one, I had time to notice she said I was one of her very best friends, an honor I'd been unaware of until now, as who had not: I registered the social gain before the romantic loss. Unless (and here I could taste something bitter on the back of my tongue)—unless the "mature" advice ("I think it would be best if we did not see each other for a while") was actually a denial of the consolation prize, a way of keeping me out of her circle at the very moment she was pretending to invite me into it. Could it be that the entire exercise, its assured tone, the Concision and familiar ring of the phrasing, figured as nothing more than a "tribute" (her word) she had piled up before the altar of her own beauty? How many people had she shown my letter to?

But then all this mental chatter stopped and I surrendered to something else, something less active, more abiding, something that had been waiting politely all this time butthat now stepped forward, diffident yet impersonal: my grief.

For the next few months I grieved. I would stay up all night crying and playing records and writing sonnets to Helen. What was I crying for? I cried during gym class when someone got mad at me for dropping the basketball. In the past I would have hidden my pain but now I just slowly walked off the court, the tears spurting out of my face. I took a shower, still crying, and dressed forlornly and walked the empty halls even though to do so during class time was forbidden. I no longer cared about rules. I let my hair grow, I stopped combing it, I forgot to change my shirt from one week to the next. With a disabused eye I watched other kids striving to succeed, to become popular. I became a sort of vagabond of grief or, as I'd rather put it, I entered grief's vagabondage, which better suggests a simultaneous freedom and slavery. Freedom from the now meaningless pursuit of grades, friends, smiles; slavery to a hopeless love.

Every afternoon I'd stumble home exhausted to my room, but once there my real work would begin, which was to imagine Helen in my arms, Helen beside me laughing, Helen looking up at me through the lace suspended from the orange-blossom chaplet, Helen with other boys, kissing them, unzipping her shorts and stepping out of them, pushing her hair back out of her serious, avid eyes. She was a puppet I could place in one playlet after another, but once I'd invoked her she became independent, tortured me, smiled right through me at another boy, her approaching lover. Her exertions with other men fascinated me, and the longer I suffered, the more outrageous were the humiliations I had other men inflict on her.

I became ill with mononucleosis, ironically the "kissing disease" that afflicted so many teenagers in those days. I was kept out of school for several months. Most of the time I slept, feverish and content: exempted. Just to cross the room required all my energy. Whether or not to drink another glass of ginger ale could absorb my attention for an hour. That my grief had been superseded by illness relieved me; I was no longer willfully self-destructive. I was simply ill. Love was forbidden—my doctor had told me I mustn't kiss anyone. Tommy called me from time to time but I felt he and I had nothing in common now—after all, he was just a boy, whereas I'd become a very old man.

The more isolated I became, the more incapable I thought I was of resisting my homosexual fate. I blamed my sister and my mother—my sister for eroding my confidence (as though homosexuality were a form of shyness) and my mother for babying me (homosexuality as prolonged infancy). At the same time I recognized that my mother was my best and truest friend, that she alone fretted over my health, listened to my term papers, waited up for my return, attempted to understand my enthusiasms.

In my immense world-weariness I decided to become a Buddhist. My mother had for years encouraged my sister and me to find a church of our own, one that answered our real needs. True to type, my sister in her burrowing if vexed drive toward normality had become a Presbyterian. The local church had the most affable, crew-cut minister (former football coach) and the most prestigious congregation (semi-believers in a heaven of jocks, a hell of brains and a purgatory of friendless stay-at-homes).

I interpreted my mother's mandate in a different way. I spent day after day at the library reading through Max Muller's
Sacred Books of the East
as one might try on clothes— but isn't Hinduism just a bit busy? Confucianism? Too sensible, no flair.

But Buddhism appealed to me. Not in its later, elaborated northern form, the Mahayana with its infinite regress of paradises, its countless bodhisattvas (those compassionate midwives), its efficacious prayers and praying effigies given over to the pornography of worship, squirming nude maidens representing the anima straddling the erect lingam of the meditating animus. No, what I liked was the earlier Hinayana, those austere instructions that lead to an extinction of desire (in Sanskrit, nirvana
means
"to extinguish," as one might blow out a candle flame). I felt a strong affinity to this curiously life-hating religion that teaches us we have no soul and that the self is merely a baggage depot where random parcels have been checked (labeled
emotions, sensations, memories
and so on) soon enough to be collected by different owners, an emptying out that will leave the room blissfully vacant. That emptiness, that annihilation is what the Christian most dreads but the Buddhist most earnestly craves—or would if craving itself were not precisely what must be extirpated. Desire—hankering after sex, money, fame, security— ties us to the world and condemns us to rebirth, "the cycle of rebirth" I pictured as a wheel on which the sinner was stretched and bound, the wheel that crushed him as it turned but cruelly failed to kill him.