The Beautiful Room Is Empty (13 page)

I had to take charge. She should be hospitalized, but it wasn’t my place to do that; yet I could get her indoors, warm her up, dress her, try to calm her. Suddenly I saw her as my sister, not the hard tyrannical sister I actually had, but another waif.

William had vanished. He’d left his door open and Annie and I returned to his room. Hours later, long after sunset, O’Reilly arrived, his nose inflamed from the way he kept clawing at the infected spot with his mini-nails, for he’d chewed them down nearly to the quick. His white hair was flying. He was wearing sandals in the snow. Nevertheless, he had an expensive silk-lined cashmere overcoat on, the sort a broker wears, but underneath he wore his embroidered cossack shirt, and a rope for a belt. He embraced Annie, whom I’d wrapped in William’s plaid bathrobe. He crushed her against his chest. The two of them stood there rocking back and forth for a long time.

I didn’t know which way to look. My only feeling was embarrassment and relief, relief that I was no longer responsible. But O’Reilly said to me, “Okay, you can come over for your share too,” and he raised an arm and beckoned me to his side. I didn’t want to go. I didn’t want love of this
kind, love from a man who didn’t really like me though he professed he did, a humiliating love to promote “regression,” for O’Reilly subscribed to the theory that his patients must revert to infancy and grow up all over again under his benign tutelage. I preferred loneliness and pain. The wolf in me trotted away from the campfire, threw back a finely modeled head, and howled—but the sheep went to O’Reilly, because I didn’t know how to say no. Taken out of his office and spirited here, O’Reilly looked crazy and ill—puffy, disordered, breathing laboriously, reeking of bourbon. I was ashamed of him.

Over the next few weeks, Annie stopped eating. She’d got it into her head that William had found her repulsively fat, and she’d spit with scorn at the reflection in the mirror of her meager breasts and nearly fleshless hips. She longed for the purity of a boy’s body (a boy before puberty).

She’d found another girl at school with the same obsessions. They slept all day, prided themselves on their luminous paleness, grew their hair very long. They wrote poetry and began to go to cocktail parties with professors; they were invited by a teaching fellow in art history whom they’d befriended. At midnight they’d get together in Annie’s dorm room, light candles, and take several hours to eat two cucumbers. The rest of the time they lived on vodka, cigarettes, and black tea. O’Reilly hospitalized Annie for not eating, but she tore the intravenous tubes out of her arms and trotted frantically up and down the stairs to work off the disfiguring calories.

I took her home to my father’s for Christmas. My stepmother gave us a tour of the house, as Midwesterners will do. We looked at cedar closets, the linen cupboard with enough sheets to outfit an infirmary, the whole cooked turkey and cold ham waiting in the fridge for our midnight snacks. We inspected the basement, saw the furnace, the bar locked tight
against pilfering maids, the Ping-Pong table. “If you kids feel in the mood for a game,” Dad said, “even in the middle of the night, go right ahead since it’s soundproof down here.”

“Anyway,
you’ll
be up,” my stepmother said to my father sourly. She launched into a recital of his annoying nocturnal habits. “He doesn’t get up till late afternoon, and at six in the evening he sits down to a breakfast of a pound of bacon. I’ve had to go my own way. Otherwise I’d never have had a life.”

Which was my father’s cue to brag about his wife’s social successes as chief Friend to the Symphony, as docent at the art museum, and as the star of Mr. Feltrinelli’s painting class. She said, “I did a portrait of your dad as a sad clown and then a sort of Michigan landscape that got out of hand so I made it abstract but it’s kinda cute anyway.” She was also going to play Scrooge in a Christmas production for the Home for the Incurables (“If only I can get my lines down. Will you help, Annie? I’ve got a wonderful costume and beard and bah-humbug all worked out”). In her busy life, slide shows of trips to Mexico alternated with four-hand piano renditions of “Mister” Haydn’s symphony (“Thank heavens he wrote so many; we girls just adore him, he’s easy to count to and the bass part is good for beginners”).

My father distrusted men and felt uncomfortable around them, but he came to life near a pretty girl. Annie counted as a pretty girl in spite of her skinniness and her professionally applied makeup, so in contrast with the faintest pink our local debutantes touched to their lips and then mumbled away on Kleenex. Although she could scream “Shit!” at nurses who force-fed her, she also knew how to ape the manner of the debs—or almost. Actually, Annie simpered and languished, whereas the debs were thrillingly alert to everything. I noticed the difference and I’m sure my stepmother did, but my father was sufficiently seduced to change
his habits. He who usually stayed up all night and flooded the house till dawn with Brahms symphonies, who never spoke except to lecture (“You may have been wondering about the comparative advantages of long-versus short-term bonds”), now sat down at nine to eat a proper sociable meal with candlelight and conversation and even a bottle of vinegary wine he’d dusted off. “Just the tiniest thimbleful for me,” Annie said, overplaying it, I thought, since she lived on vodka.

“I’ll stick with coffee,” my stepmother said reproachfully.

My father called Annie “Young lady” and laughed at what she said. When he laughed, he cocked his head to one side and held his cigar away from his mouth. It gave me goosebumps to see his teeth—I suppose partly because they were so yellowed from tobacco, but mainly because his smile looked so fake.

I knew geniality was a strain for him. He preferred solitude, and if he was forced to socialize he wanted to do it with employees. If he had to entertain equals, his idea of a party was a once-every-two-years blow-out for which the house would be repainted, bricks pointed, gutters cleaned, lawn rolled. Every room on every floor would be thrown open for white-glove inspection. Not a speck of dust lurked behind a single figurine, not a vase went without a bouquet, not a single blown-glass, kidney-shaped ashtray that wasn’t spotless beside its gaping “silent butler,” not a single lamp unlit, not a bathroom rack without its full rigging of guest towels. Outside, drinks were served and a band played and couples danced in a tent. For days in advance my stepmother would ask, “Do you think people will want a banana daiquiri? What if someone orders a Rob Roy?”

“Let’s get all that,” my dad would say. “We don’t want to be caught short.” Just as Mormons stockpile their basements with canned goods and weapons in anticipation of Armageddon, my father’s approach to any festivity was
apocalyptic. The appalling moment when Betsy McAllister, past president of the United Fund, might ask for a B&B and be told there was no Benedictine must be staved off at all costs, as must the equally shocking moment when a guest would inflict a wound on himself and not find in each of the six bathrooms a fully stocked medicine cabinet. But if high, unforgiving standards were ascribed to real or potential guests, the hosts were as eager to judge their friends. A man who dropped in would be laughed at for wearing cologne or even the chastest ring or for showing his calf when he crossed his leg or for turning the creases in his trousers when he sat down as poor men do, and his wife would invariably have too loud a voice and too much jewelry and she’d smoke and drink too much, availing herself, in other words, of those very bottles we’d laid in and those silver felt-bottomed lighters we’d posed on side tables with such anxiety to make them appear casual. It was a milieu where even the most passing acknowledgment of the body was considered “off color.” Now that I’d lived away from home for several years at boarding school and college, I found myself breaking the delicate membrane that sealed off decent talk from the world’s grossness.

That night, my stepmother escorted Annie to her room, far from mine, since in those days there was no question of putting an unmarried man and woman even in adjoining rooms. My father lit another cigar and said, “Damn nice young woman. And seems to have a good head on her shoulders. She asked good solid questions about group versus individual life insurance.” I doubt whether my father thought Annie was either solid or nice, but she
was
a woman—a step in the right direction.

My stepmother discovered in the morning that the entire ham and turkey had vanished from the refrigerator overnight. That evening, when my father arose, he found that his sink had stopped up. The blocked drain was located exactly one
floor below in Annie’s bathroom. When he put on his special, comical plumber’s cap and overalls and roguishly opened the pipe leading down from her sink, his face fell, his mouth turned down in disgust, and he pulled out stinking, half-chewed gobs of turkey and ham with his bare hands.

“I just don’t understand,” my stepmother whispered. “Why couldn’t your friend get sick in the toilet instead of the sink? And it seems such a waste of good food—I was planning a cold supper.”

Annie had tried to prevent my father from opening the drain, but once he did she calmed down and packed her bag. My stepmother drove her to the station and waited as I put her on the train. On the platform Annie said, “Are you furious?”

“No, it serves them right,” I said smiling. “I wish I had your guts—they need to be shocked.”

“I wasn’t trying to shock them. But no matter. I don’t see how you came out of this family. You’re so much better than they are—sweeter, more open.”

I tasted her praise but suspiciously, as though the candy might be poisoned.

Like my sister, who scorned our real mother’s habit of praising herself, I felt I was being honest only when I said the worst things about myself. Now, all these years later, I realize one self-evaluation is as true as another and that my mother’s relentless Pollyannism was a less melancholy and more efficient way of muddling through than my gloom or my sister’s saturnine honesty. Nor did my sister’s honesty keep her from talking herself into marrying a man she didn’t love and becoming the suburban mom she had a drive but no talent to impersonate. My sister was ashamed of my mother and me for being so weird. She locked herself into an iron-maiden normality that gave her no room to breathe. She was stifling as she mixed the frozen orange juice
on wintry mornings, attended PTA meetings, baked brownies, suffered the attentions of a dull, doting husband. Her upper lip would swell every time he wanted to make love to her. She sipped from bottles of liquor she’d secreted all over the house (mouthwash bottles, perfume bottles, Coke empties under the sink, a Lysol bottle in the spare bathroom).

After Christmas vacation back at school I was invited by William Everett Hunton to a gay dance. “Spit-polish your Mary Janes,” he said, “and pray a man will see reflected in them up your skirt that you don’t have any panties on, you naughty thing.”

Someone had a studio apartment just above a used-textbook store on a corner of an otherwise nonresidential block. There at ten on a Saturday night in January, I found myself armed with a cigarette and beer (one of the four cans William had had to buy for me with my money, since I was still below drinking age). We sat on top of stacks of books, sipped and watched the twenty men squeezed into the small room. I didn’t know any of the other fellows. I’d never seen any of them at the toilets. I suspected that handsome gay men all knew each other and avoided public cruising. For the first time William seemed shy, but he said he was simply trying to butch it up. “Look, doll,” he whispered, “people think a queen’s a hoot, but the life of the party goes home alone while everyone makes a last-ditch play for the idiot hood who’s been standing in the corner all night by himself. My dear, who did the lighting here? I should get my own light man written into my contracts just like Marlene. Nothing like a baby-pink follow spot to take years off a gal.” At twenty-two William was terrified of aging. “I’m going to kill myself when I turn thirty. Thirty is gay menopause. I’ve always liked that saying, ‘Live hard, die young, and leave a beautiful corpse.’ ‘O Rose, thou art sick.’ Maybe that would make a good drag name for you: Rose.
Sick
you certainly
are.” And William laughed with his special blend of mischief, compounded of humor, spite, and sadness in a ratio even he wasn’t sure of but that he mixed by feel.

I saw a big blond man in a blue crewneck sweater and tan slacks and suddenly I had the impression we were all here to please him but no one could. Pagans would have known how to worship him as the temporary perch of a winged demon; poor monotheists blind to all gods but the invisible one must ascribe their attraction to love rather than fear. And yet actually everyone in the room was afraid of Harry, the huge biology major from Canton, Ohio.

Not me. I’d always had good luck with gods if I could make myself believe in their disguise as a shepherd, messenger, or biology major. I asked Harry questions which he answered politely but from a great distance, as though the neural impulse had to be translated into several intermediary codes before reaching me as speech. There were two things going on, completely incongruous: his response to my questions about trilobites, dialogue for an
Encyclopaedia Britannica
science film; and the damage done to the air every time he moved or smiled. If his laugh was a hollow boom, his gestures studied, the timing of his great smile off just a second, that was because his demon wasn’t yet quite comfortable in this incarnation—or perhaps he was receiving instructions from another star, which accounted for the fractional delays, I was relieved that his eyes, wild as beasts, were securely caged by long lashes.

I asked him to dance. He looked startled by the impiety. Maybe he wasn’t a god but just a handsome guy from Canton (though a misfit in high school) who now at last wanted to dance with someone else cute, not a troll like me (William called the tearoom regulars “trolls” or sometimes “dragons”). Or maybe Harry, like me, had never danced with another man before. Who would lead?

“Sure, why not,” he boomed. And a second later I’d glided into his arms, his hands rested on my shoulders, my arms reached around his waist, we closed our eyes and the blind led the blind. Brenda Lee was singing, “Break it to me gently,” but I ignored the words. I rested my cheek on his chest and thought, All I’ve ever wanted is to rest here, the word really was
rest
. (For me desire is always static.) I thought dimly that I have to go round the world impersonating a grown-up and a man and a heterosexual, whereas I’m none of the above. But I had no desire to think things out precisely. It was just a relief to be here hugging this big man. He was wearing a cashmere sweater and we were both sweating. The best explanation of masochism, the appeal of masochism, is that it accepts shame; the sickening shame one must swallow and hide is at last accepted, employed, even loved—the shame about a mutilation, hairiness, too much or not enough fat, the shame about wanting to serve, to be a dog, son, wife, slave, horse, prisoner. If so, my feelings then were masochistic, since for years I’d felt ashamed of my longing to dance with the swimming captain, to be worthy of him. Ever since, shame and gratitude have been for me the caste marks of passion.