City of Night (56 page)

           Perhaps this man, Jeremy, senses my doubts as to why I remain in this room with him.

           In an almost amused tone, he said: “Did you think that if I knew—since you didnt know that I had overheard you in that bar—that if I knew what you were really like—or might be like—what you were trying to tell those two about yourself—that I’d lose interest in you?”

           “It’s happened before,” I said. “You saw it happen then. People want you for what you ‘appear’ to be—unconcerned, toughened. You learn that immediately when you hang around the streets.”

           “Thats where people looking for streetpeople naturally go,” he said. “And maybe it’s true that for them you become more masculine if you appear ‘tough’—or even dumb. Or maybe—as someone once told me—they feel that, although theyve paid you, theyre ‘better’—smarter. And it could be also that theyre searching for their seeming opposite: the seemingly insensitive street-youngmen—as they themselves might want to be in order not to get hurt....”

           And I remembered the man in Los Angeles who had almost begged me to rob him.

           “Im sure, in part, it’s all of these—but not exclusively,” Jeremy went on. “It sounds too much like a defense.... It could be, rather,” he continued slowly, “that theyre resigned to finding nothing but a momentary sex experience. Maybe it isnt that they dont want something more; maybe theyve just given up on finding anything beyond sex, and theyre even afraid to ask, ‘Can I see you again?’ Theyll look for someone else rather than possibly hearing the answer ‘No’—an answer just as frightened perhaps as their own question. So they resign themselves to the brief contacts. Now they look for the people who ‘dont care’.... And the reasons of the people on your side are just as mysterious as those of the ones who pay you... like me,” he added, and went on: “How much of it, for you, is being a part of this alluring defiant world without really joining it?—so you can say (and Im talking about ‘you’ only generally—Im actually talking about many people)—so you can say, ‘I do it only for the money involved’; or: ‘I dont do anything back in bed myself; my masculinity is still intact—and in the meantime I can go with as many men as I—...
need
... to’?”

           Ordinarily, those words would have resounded as the score’s attempt to compensate for his previously indicated desire by questioning the very masculinity which had originally attracted him. Yet, coming from this man—somehow—perhaps because of the fact that hes paid me without that payment having been asked for or agreed upon—his words dont really register as the ordinary put-down after the battlefield of one-sided sex has been cleared by the leveling orgasms. For that reason, those words are doubly disturbing.

           And it was what Barbara had implied—and the memory of her saddens me beyond the fact that I had liked her so much: that she had tried to prove with me what she had told herself that I, and others, were trying to prove with her.... Yes, it was at least in part a mutual fear that had brought us together.

           Once again my thoughts had veered into a dangerous territory. To stop their direction—astonishing myself, yet responding commandingly to the burgeoning rashness, I reached impulsively for Jeremy’s hand and placed it on my leg. He left it there, without comment, almost as if he were unaware of my having done it.

           Or is he too pretending? Has he understood what my motion with his hand is meant to convey, what I was trying to indicate to him—that, at least in that direction, it was I who could make the rules.

           But he
had
understood: Whatever pang of victory I might have felt by executing that gesture, he erased swiftly by saying: “Wouldnt your masculinity be compromised much less if you tested your being ‘wanted’ with women instead of men?”

           “It’s easier to hustle men,” I defended myself quickly, at the same time trying to put him down—but, although that is true on the streets, it had sounded weak and I knew it. I had merely mouthed one of the many rationalized legends of that world.

           “I think it’s something else,” he went on relentlessly. “Even a wayward revenge on your own sex—your father’s sex....”

           I winced. He had aimed too cruelly. “You sound like a damn headshrinker,” I hit at him. But, automatically, I had begun to twist the ring my father had given me that lost morning; and Im remembering, out of that gray-shaded world of childhood—out of those moments of tattered happiness—the times when he would ask me for “a thousand”—when I would jump on his lap, when he would fondle me intimately—and then give me a penny, a nickel... reassuring me, in that strange way—so briefly!—that he did... want me.

           But... somehow... that was much too easy.

           “I cant blame my father—for anything,” I said sharply, sitting up. And having said that, I was amazed by the certainty, the ease, with which I had been able to vindicate my Father.

           “Im sorry,” Jeremy retreated. And he went on cautiously but again unexpectedly: “Some people tell themselves they want to be... wanted... when, actually, they wish, very much, they could want someone back. And notice I said ‘could.’”

           Suddenly I heard myself saying: “If I ever felt that I had begun to need anyone, I would—...” I stopped.

           “Run away,” he finished.

           I stood up, walked to the window.

           Against the shutters, restlessly moving shadows of people along the balcony seem to grapple, struggle, creating swallowing shapes in outline, as if to invade this room.

           I returned to the bed. Not only the fear of facing the streets—or the prolonging of the recurring anticipation—keeps me here, I admit now. It has something to do with Jeremy’s words.

           “I saw a dragshow in a bar once,” he was saying. “A beautiful queen was singing. She didnt do the actual singing, though. She merely mimed the words from a woman’s record. The queen looked very much like a sure woman. But when the record ended, and she was deprived of the female voice that had completed her for those moments, she broke down crying—and the sound of her crying was distinctly that of a man.”

           Wanting to ward off the mysterious implications of the story he had told me (is he referring to the forced stripping of any sustaining pose?), I said defiantly: “Hell, I knew a queen who was so sure she was a woman that she came to the door once, from taking a bath, covering her ‘breasts’ with a towel; she even pissed sitting down.”

           I had expected him to be annoyed at this attempt to explode his seriousness. But he laughed. “Is that a joke, or true?”

           “True,” I said.

           Then, in that unexpected way, he said this: “If I told you, right now, that I love you—and you believed it—what would you do?”

           I laughed, but Im sure hes aware that it’s a forced laugh—much like the laughter outside.... I had never stayed around anyone long enough to hear those words, except during the sex-scenes: words spoken over and over by hundreds of people, meaning the same thing each time—nothing.... I remembered that night in New York when I had made the decision that it would be with many, many people—through many rooms, through many parks, through many streets and bars—that I would explore that world. And what, really, had prompted that decision? An attempt to shred the falsely lulling, sheltered innocence of my childhood, yes. But had it also been, at least in part, fear?—a corrosive fear of vulnerability with which the world, with its early manifested coldness, had indoctrinated me; imbued in others: a world which you soon come to see as an emotional jungle; in which you learn very early that you are the sum-total of yourself, nothing more.

           I laughed again.

           “Im not sure what I’d do—if you told me that—and I believed it,” I said. “Maybe youre right: Maybe I would run away.... I mean: that word—... ‘love,’” and I had to pause before I could even bring myself to say it, and I smiled in order to emphasize that I wasnt taking the word seriously, “if such a thing exists as other than some sort of way-off thing, Way Out There, somewhere—if it exists more than as merely four letters—like ‘fuck,’” I said, trying to destroy the expected gravity of his answering words, to thwart it by anticipating it, “well, I dont really believe it.” The fact that with this man I can no longer resort to the street act of unconcern—and the intense sobriety after neardrunkenness—make me speak much more easily than I have before. “I guess the whole screwed-up world would have to change before I could feel that there was such a thing.” Laughing purposely now, I said: “And if there is such a thing as what you call ‘love,’ just the mention of it should send rockets into the sky.”

           “Be careful,” he warned, also laughing. “They may begin to do that outside at any moment. Then where would you be?” He added seriously: “But it doesnt have to be like that. No rockets. Just the absence of loneliness. Thats love enough. In fact, that can be the strongest kind of love.... When you dont believe it’s even possible, then you substitute sex. Life becomes what you fill in with between orgasms. And how long does an orgasm last? People—... people hunting different people every night—even someone they dont really want: They close their eyes, pretend it’s someone else.... The furtive, anonymous dumbshows in public toilets, in parks....”

           (And as I listened, I remembered—and I felt that strange, numb, helpless, cold fear when you realize you cant change the past—the first time someone had gone down on me in a public restroom. It had been on 42nd Street, in one of the all-night moviehouses. A man had stood smoking on the steps leading down to the toilet. Another had stood by the urinal. After I had finished pissing, I remained standing there with my pants still open, and the man near me approached me, reached quickly for me. The man on the stairs moved lower, watching; and I remember his face—the smiling mouth, and head nodding yes as the other knelt before me now. I remember the bursting excitement at the feel of the other’s mouth on my groin, an excitement doubled by the blazing look in the second one’s eyes; now tripled by the uncaring awareness of the imminent danger of the scene. It was over in a few frantic moments. The man before me stood up. I glance at him. And in that glance I see a look which somehow begs me to say something to him before I leave—something to acknowledge him as other than someone—a nameless anyone—who has merely executed furtively a desperate sexual act in a public toilet. I avoided the look. And he turned away from me quickly and fled. The man on the steps had remained standing there, now resuming his smoking, coldly.... I left the theater, I walked the lonely, crowded, electric streets, trying to forget the face which had turned toward me for acknowledgment after the great anonymous intimacy.... That had been at the beginning of a period in New York when, for days and nights, I hunted that fleeting contact, over and over, from theater to theater, park to park; rushing from one to another, not even coming, merely adding to the numbers. At the end of that period, I had masturbated... feeling completely alone.)

           For a long time, Jeremy had remained silent. He seems to know instinctively when to retreat, or, rather, when to stand still: when he may have come too dangerously close, too soon. Now he asked me: “Have you been to New York?”

           “Twice,” I answered, still thinking of the electric island. “I never learned how to swim, though,” I said jokingly, “and each time I realized I was on an island, I panicked.”

           “Thats were I live,” he said. “But that kind of island never bothered me. Just what I felt when I first went there—the feeling of being alone among so many people.”

           “I dont mind being alone,” I challenged him.

           “Then youre very rare—maybe very lucky,” he said. “Most people cant stand to be alone. Theyll do anything to avoid it.”

           “And you think I dont know that?” I asked him, resenting what I consider an implied accusation of coldness. In a way, I begin to interpret what is going on as a kind of battle between us—some secret, not-entirely-understood battle—at least, not understood by me, now. I fluctuate in my feelings toward him and his words. At the same time that he seems to be prying, he seems, too, to be reaching for something inside of me which, whether he is right or not, he feels may somehow release or liberate me. In preparation for the streets? For something else?

           “Im sure you do know it,” he said, “Im sure youve seen it.” After a short pause, he added as if to himself: “Yes, Im sure you can feel compassion. But it stops there.”

           Compassion! Yes, I knew that was true. There were those times when it ripped me, when I had to retreat from people, from their sadness—as I had done how many times?... But perhaps thats what he means.... As an end within itself, when it became impotent pity, was compassion merely another subterfuge to grasp at, to resort to in guilt when we questioned ourselves?—so that we could move away more easily, telling ourselves we could do nothing else.... Beneath it, was there a sheet of ice which forced all feelings to stop there? (What had the Professor called it?—a flicker of compassion rising up to thaw the icy blanket of the heart, and smothered by the very ice it sought to melt.) Beyond those feelings of abstract compassion, have I merely posed at caring? Again out of that inherited fear?

           Faces of strangers return like ghosts out of the graveyard of my mind. I had a sudden feeling of having played a game of charades.

           And I felt, suddenly, in that keyed-up, manic mood, as if my heart had begun to listen—to something.

           For something.

        
2

           “But you do want love,” Jeremy said.

           This time there was not the slightest note of a question. Hes so composed, so sure.

           And I think purposely: Only a short time earlier my legs straddled his shoulders. And at that thought I feel fully armed to cope with his words, aimed, Im sure now, at some kind of revelation of me. It is only their purpose which is to be determined.