The Beautiful Room Is Empty (12 page)

But for me, the tuxedos (which depersonalize waiters and lend distinction to friends), the banquet, and the toasts all permitted me for two minutes at a stretch to imagine we were a club of lovers—not the freaks at the toilets or those zombies endlessly laundering their genitals under the showers, but regular guys at ease in their skin, carelessly reaching a meaty hand back in a giant arc to scratch a shoulder blade, big panda eyes taking in the world, voices too loud for indoors. If I elaborated this fantasy it fell apart, since I knew a man stopped being desirable the moment he desired another.

By three in the morning the President’s Punch had been delivered as the coup de grace to the few survivors. On every buttoned leather couch, unconscious men sprawled, as “totaled” as the cars they liked to wreck. Some of the brothers sat bolt upright, mouths open, ties and shoelaces undone.
Their snoring bleated and gasped antiphonally from room to room. The lights on all four floors were blazing. I was the only one awake.

No. There was one other person, another pledge, Mick, a guy who grinned too much and who talked about weapons and physical fitness with a creepy enthusiasm, as though everyone must agree that hacking through the ice to swim in Lake Michigan was a self-evident pleasure as was the prospect of parachuting out of a plane into enemy-occupied territory. Like certain religious fanatics who supply their own chorus of assent (“That’s right, by golly, Lord knows”), he murmured to himself all the affirmation he needed.

Mick was from the South. Everything about him was glossy. Each hair on his head looked as though it had been individually dipped and twirled in hot mink oil. His prominent temples, his bony jaw, the machine-tooled grooves of his ears, his sealskin eyebrows all threw off highlights, and his big black eyes looked like the reservoirs of that lubrication, just as his shiny black nipples looked like the controls. He wasn’t “masculine” with the full pachydermal weight that word carried back then. He was more like a ferret—quick, intent.

And a loner. He was always alone, backing out of rooms with a grin and that nearly subvocal chorus of yea-saying (“Yessiree, better get crackin’ if I’m going to make ROTC”). He’d hang on the witticisms of the older guys with that huge grin. It was hard to look at it since there was no scrim over it, and only if someone teased him (“Stop eatin’ shit, Mick”) did he become conscious of his smile. Then he used it defensively; he’d dial it bigger and brighter, rotate and beam it into every corner. The brothers didn’t think he was a “face man” only because he wasn’t given to an eye-batting awareness of his own beauty. But he did have the sort of good regular looks that go with a parade uniform. One could
picture his features under a helmet, deep-set eyes sunk into the shadow cast by the brim.

He had a girlfriend whom he never stopped touching when he was with her—fingering her sash, stroking her hair, massaging her neck, guiding her through the door by patting her shoulder. They were always the first to hit the dimmed make-out room at a dance and the last to leave in complete dishevelment. She wasn’t a “Greek.” In fact, she had no distinction in our eyes except as Mick’s girl. Mick seemed much less complicated than everyone else about sex; he didn’t talk about cunnilingus for hours and didn’t vomit on his date. He seemed curious in the same uncomplicated way about men. When he was on wake-up duty, he’d tap me (I slept on an upper bunk) and then he’d just stare at my early morning erection in my jockey shorts. He didn’t smile unless I caught his eye; then he’d sort of come out of his trance and give a grin. He was what the other fellows would have called a horny bastard, except he never posed as one. Maybe he wasn’t very intelligent.

Now he and I were the only people awake in the whole glittering after-party house, surrounded by wheezing and gibbering penguins. I was sitting stunned by drink on a broken-down couch on a landing at the head of the grand staircase. Someone had passed out beside me. “Do you mind if I join you?” Mick asked. It was almost as though we’d had an appointment. Several times during dinner he’d caught my eye with his usual curiosity. His black hair had just been cut very short and I had the strongest urge to run my hand through it and before I’d thought twice I’d done it and suddenly his mouth was pressed to mine and we were rolling in each other’s arms and our hands were blindly tearing at shirts to open them and to feel that skin. Mick’s mouth tasted of crème de menthe. His hand had wormed its way down my trousers and was on my cock and I was thinking,

We’ll become lovers we’ll live together forever I love him why were there no signs. He looked and acted like a ferret and now his hand became one;
my
hand stroked his stomach, so taut from all his sit-ups a dropped dime would have bounced on it and I thought, Does he love me too much, will he become a nuisance always underfoot in the fraternity house, this is probably a mistake.

And then we’d half undressed each other, my cummerbund was cast on the floor, my studs had popped, and shifting streams of red and yellow light and heat flowed up from my legs through my chest and blazed across my closed eyes. “We’re crazy,” I whispered in his ear, “the other guys …” He pulled back and looked at me quizzically and then his tongue, muscular as a snail’s foot, was washing my face, the tip probing my nostril, now licking inside the arch above my eyelids and a second later back on my tongue and I was grateful for the ferocity of his desire because I felt borne up by it, just as though I were flying on the back of a stork—yes, one of those babies the stork wings down to its parents.

His hand, calloused from all his commando workouts, closed over mine and led me into the room he shared with three other guys. Not a tender squeeze, just the practical pressure of horniness. His roommates were asleep, snoring or groaning only a few feet away from us. We finished undressing in a flash. Mick was standing naked beside me, smooth torso, furry legs, as though he were still wearing hip-length black stockings but had peeled off the matching tops. Then he slid in bed beside me and took liberties, we took and took liberties touching each other all over in all those secret places our eyes had glanced at obliquely in the fraternity shower room.

Now my fingertips found that long muscle that ran from the anus up to the base of the penis—this second submerged penis, the father penis, sheathed by the body itself. And
his fingers were digging into my buttocks as though he hoped to push me into him, blend two willing but separate entities, less separate now that his mouth was on my ear, thundering breath into me. Certainly my thoughts were inflating and floating upward. Now he was straddling my chest and his cock was sliding over my lips. A second later he’d swung around and we were sucking each other, lying on our sides, Romulus and Remus before the wolf arrived to nurse them. In the hall light that came in through the open door I could see the red veins in his translucent scrotum, autumn leaf, and I looked up the crack of his ass. My mind reeled in a drunk waltz back and forth between my cock and his, between getting and spending.

Then he said, “Why don’t you stick it in me.”

I said, “Okay …,” with a trace of hesitation.

“I’ve never done this before,” he said.

“Neither have I,” I lied. “But maybe it’s done like this,” and I folded his strong legs back, plowing into them as a lineman digs into his opponent’s shoulder. His calves hooked over my shoulders. His legs, long and firm in their black stockings of fur, felt cool. He was like a trick bottle that must be turned at a queer angle for it to pour, but then it pours freely. Since he had been built to stand perfectly still at attention under a general’s glance, he knew how to take orders, even silent ones. For once he wasn’t keeping up his stream of self-encouraging comments. Nor was he smiling.

When I started to enter him, he said “Jesus Christ” out loud and grimaced with pain. The closest roommate stirred. I pulled out and he dashed for the toilet. I followed him. He sat on the toilet, door open, and said in a loud voice, “You’re really a pain in the ass,” and smiled that big unveiled smile. I stood there while he winced and talked and looked down into the toilet to see if anything had come out. His body had been tanned so often it retained a permanent swimsuit line.

We didn’t go back to bed, neither then nor ever, but the next semester I had a room of my own in a boardinghouse and Mick would borrow it every Tuesday and Thursday afternoon when I was in class. He used it as a place where he could sleep with his girlfriend. Once I found a single drop of blood on my sheets. Often I could smell the scent of his clean but athletic and unperfumed body. By that time he’d been teased so much for his smile—and had even had a caricature drawn in which he was all teeth—that he’d lost his naturalness. The next year he dropped out of school and joined the paratroopers.

Two days after the bachelor dinner, William Everett Hunton called me at three in the afternoon and begged me to hurry over to the law quad. When I arrived, there was Annie slumped outside his door, barefoot, wearing a pretty rose silk slip and nothing else, her beehive collapsed. She looked up at me with huge muddy eyes, but the clinch of recognition quickly relaxed and she glanced away, hopeless.

“For God’s sake, Annie, get up!” I shouted, as concerned about the scandal she was making as the pain she was suffering.

The minute I spoke, the door flew open and framed William. “Thank heavens you’ve come.” He looked with fear and loathing at Annie. “I see you’ve met my little doggie. Don’t pet her. We’re leaving her out here to punish her. She barked all night. You can call her Sam.”

He yanked me into the room, after I caught a glimpse of a mad grin on Annie’s face at the name Sam. She even mouthed it silently. And then her mouth turned from comic to tragic, and her eyes filled with tears.

As soon as he’d closed the door he leaned up against it, as though to keep Sam out. “Oh, my dear, you’d never guess the cheap paperback I’ve made of my life, pure
roman de gare
—why wasn’t I content to stay a thoughtless queen in quest of big dicks? This GF (by which I mean ‘genital
female’ to distinguish her from us, darling, who are women by choice, not by necessity, though in your case I do see the iron hand of fate)—this GF has been turning my life into hell. I haven’t been to class for a week and, listen!”

We stood stock still.

“Do you hear the typewriters? They keep that up night and day, typing up class notes, they never stop. Or do you think it’s just a tape of typing on a loop to torment me? I may be
smart
, but more in the sense of isn’t-that-a-smart-hat, anyway, there’s no way to fake an exam on the tort, which I persist in seeing as a soggy onion quiche—or as what you are, a cheap Southern tart who’s plumb wore out.”

“But what about Annie? We can’t leave her in the hall like that.”

“Why not, Miss Priss? Are you afraid she’ll tattle to Sheila?” That was William’s name for Dr. O’Reilly. “Too late. You’re already in the bitch house with Sheila, who incidentally is on her way up here now (if she doesn’t nod off first) to rescue Sam—so careless of you to hire a shrinker who’s a juicehead and goof ball artist; I
mean
, my dear, I talked to the old fright on the blower and she was as incoherent as I get with ten inches up my bum, only she wasn’t happy about it. She got more foam on the receiver than you get on your skirt when you see a film starring Montgomery Clift, who’s not even worth soppy panties since Monty’s just a tired old fruit herself.”

“O’Reilly’s coming here? My God!” and I felt the most terrible guilt. The day was brilliantly cold and sunny. William had thrown a window open, which let in the cold above the sizzling steam heater.

Annie came in. Her eyes were huge, enlarged by the smudges she’d made of her mascara. Her body looked all the more emaciated in her slip, and when she started to sob I could see her poor flat belly shaking under the flimsy fabric.
William and I sat on the edge of his bed and looked at her as she bent over the sink. She studied her face in a small mirror. Then she splashed cold water all over herself, which at first seemed ordinary except that she didn’t stop. She bent her head farther and farther down and her hands continued to scoop up water and fling it over her shoulders, splashing her back and the varnished floor behind her.

“For chrissake, Ophelia, give us a break. Medical help is on the way in the form of bourbon and amphetamines and Big Sheila, so just hold tight. Or get tight. Here’s a bottle.”

I couldn’t bear either her suffering or his vitriol. Until now I hadn’t realized how much I’d wanted them to make each other happy and how sickened I was by the mess they’d—wow, maybe
I’d
made. I put an arm around Annie’s shoulder, dried her off, and seated her on a chair. She was surprisingly docile, but the instant I turned to find her blouse she’d risen and was pacing the room, touching everything as though she were a miser counting her possessions.

“I can’t bear this,” William said. “I thought I was getting a girlfriend, but I’ve come up with one of Sheila’s botches, just scrambled eggs for brains.” He threw a tweed jacket on over his striped button-down shirt and headed for the door, but Annie sank to the floor and wrapped her arms around his legs.

“Don’t go,” she said in a normal hostessy voice, “I promise to be more amusing,” and she actually managed a beguilingly sociable smile, but then a high moan, an Algerian widow’s moan, started in the back of her throat and grew louder.

William went white. He said, “You’ve spoiled everything,” kicked free of her, and headed out. Then we were all three out in the brilliant blue-and-white day, a day so surgically clean and sharp that even the clouds looked like cotton soaked in alcohol. It was the ten-minute break between
classes. The walkways, bordered with snow-laden bushes, were jaunty with red scarves flowing into the wind like blood the instant it’s drawn up the pipette. William was walking briskly ahead, his baggy khakis luffing around his legs. He was talking to himself, chatting up the wind. I was embarrassed, wishing my cigarette smoke would condense and turn into new friends or at least conceal me from the ones I already had. I looked back, as did William, and there was Annie, still in her slip, but on her knees in the snow, her mouth an oblong of grief, her hands raised and hyperflexed. She was crawling on her knees in the snow.