The Beautiful Room Is Empty (15 page)

Maria stayed two more days. When we’d go to the student union, I’d cast hungry looks at the boys and yearn to escape Maria and reenter this anarchic fraternity which had, instead of secret handshakes, matched taps on the toilet floor, and instead of one hell night, endless nights of perverse pleasure and excruciating remorse.

Once we were alone again I’d forget these distractions, and Maria and I would lie on white sheets fading to blue in the long, late May evening light. I asked her if she’d marry me, and she laughed, rubbed my cheek with the back of her cool hand, and whispered, “My child groom …”

She sketched me as I wrote. In the warm summer rain we walked through the night. We sat for hours in a booth at the back of a Chinese restaurant. I told her how I was convinced the Buddhists were right, that the self is an illusion, and yet as a writer and even as a person (in that order) I responded to the individuality of everyone I met. How could I reconcile my religious convictions with this artistic response?

“I’ve got it!” she said, silencing me with her raised hand as she pursued a thought. At last she sipped cold tea and said, “But that’s just the way American life is anyway, because we all move around so much and keep losing touch. We have these smoldering encounters in which we tell everything to each other and pledge eternal love, and then a month or a year later we’ve drifted apart, we’re making new pledges and new confessions and—you see? American life is both Buddhist and intensely personal. It’s nothing but these searing, intimate huddles and then great drifting mists of evanescence that drown everything in obscurity. Write about America and you’ll reconcile these opposites.”

I heard the doubt and reproach in the midst of her disquisition and wondered how I could assure her I’d never drift away or stop loving her. I knew we hadn’t yet quite found the form our love would take, doubtlessly because of the conventionality of my social imagination. I didn’t have the insider’s advantage of refashioning public forms to suit my private needs. Yet I did have an ecstatic apprehension of her, of what she meant to me. I’d never let her go.

After school that spring I went to my father’s for three weeks before going on to Chicago for the long summer holiday. I was allowed to drive one of my father’s Cadillacs and accompany a debutante to a ball. My stepmother had found for me a sweet girl from a
nouveau pauvre
family. She was too poor to give a proper ball so she held a square dance in her grandmother’s barn with a genuine country caller and fiddler.

At the bachelors’ cotillion, a catered event for two thousand guests, I shook hands with Everett Hunton, the
real
Everett Hunton from whom William had stolen his name—William’s “cousin” or “patron,” I couldn’t remember which. I mentioned William’s name and Everett, a thin, balding blond whose bony nose moved and even went white as a knuckle
when he spoke, quickly cast his eyes up to beseech the cupid-heavy cupola for my complicitous silence.

I drifted away, but half an hour later Everett was at my elbow, guiding me through a back door into a service elevator and, on a tower floor high above the city, into a room he’d rented for the night. There we undressed efficiently, wordlessly, and he screwed me without a flicker of affection crossing his intelligent, indifferent face.

We washed and dressed again, all very quickly. As we were going out I referred to William as his “cousin.”

“But he’s just a tramp I picked up and sent to school out of my—well, no one ever said my heart was
big
, but out of my small heart. I felt sorry for him, but he’s nuts. He took my family name, which really isn’t cricket, and he stole things, good leather and crystal things, gold blazer buttons, a hunt cup, my grandfather’s signet ring. Then he met some appalling starved girl who wasn’t even from a social family but a sort of mannequin or tart. Then he flunked out and just vanished. He called me once drunk from a phone booth in Dayton, but I wouldn’t let him reverse the charges.”

As we were going out, he patted my back and said, “The girl, that mannequin—she’s in a mental hospital somewhere, I heard. Oh, American life, it’s past belief.” Thin smile. “He did give a good blow job though, didn’t he?”

FIVE

        That summer, Maria flew home to Iowa and my mother went to Europe for two months. She left me twenty-five dollars a week to live on and the key to her apartment. She’d estimated that the allowance was large enough to feed me and small enough to force me into getting a summer job. I did work for a while loading trucks all night. To get the job I had to tell the boss I’d be staying on in the autumn. I’d dropped out of school, I said, and wasn’t seeking just summer employment. But once I started working, the other men drew me aside, one by one, to tell me that I must go back to school. “Don’t get stuck here,” they said. “It’s shit. It’s a dead end.”

In the sweaty Chicago night we’d squat bare-chested inside the holds of semis, stacking cartons. Our sweating hands and arms would leave phantom brown prints on the tan cardboard boxes. My partner, a beer-bellied man whose five-o’clock shadow had deepened to midnight by dawn, never spoke to me; I could imagine marrying him, living in a trailer with him, and cooking him meatloaf. On the third night we worked together he finally opened up. He told me that when
he was a teenager his father, a young doctor, had died suddenly of a heart attack. No insurance. My partner had been the oldest boy and had gone to work to support his mother and to send the three younger kids through college. “But I got stuck. Now they’re all in professions with nice homes in the suburbs and they’re ashamed of me, don’t like me coming around. So I’m stuck in this shit job.”

We talked about books. He liked Stefan Zweig and Nelson Algren. And he liked Beethoven, especially the symphonies. When he talked about books and music, his flat Midwestern voice (he pronounced
milk
as “melk” and
wash
as “warsh”) warmed up, almost as though through the smoked window of his face I could see a young man approach, smile, then go away.

Two nights later he stopped talking, and when he had to say something he mumbled. Once again every noun was double-decked by “fuckin’ ” or “mother-fuckin’.”

I’d return to my mother’s skyscraper apartment, my face fierce in its warpaint of dirt, my T-shirt clinging to my wet body. The city at last was cool and the streets had run dry of traffic. I’d bow my head under the shower for twenty minutes, scarcely moving, then stand nude in the window and watch the city below slowly constructing itself like coral under incoming tides of light.

My father had told me his father had become a professor so he wouldn’t have to work the fields of his parents’ Texas farm. Now I understood my grandfather perfectly. I felt pride in my strength and shame over my position just as the other men did. No one respected them for their labor in a country where the idea of honorable poverty had vanished. And yet we had done something, we’d loaded transcontinental trucks. More than most fuckin’ men did in a night.

But mostly I just ached. The pain of work, real labor,
had driven splinters into my muscles, into the crouching muscles, the climbing muscles, the bending-over muscles, the lifting muscles, the just-standing-there muscles. My upper body had rusted shut in its basin of pelvic bones and couldn’t turn anymore. I was a tired animal, and I tied a feedbag of milk and cereal over my nose.

I couldn’t tell if I was big or small. In some ways I felt big, because the men said I was strong and could get stronger, but the boy in me was skinny and losing weight fast in that sweatbox. I couldn’t figure out my size, because in my mind I kept modeling a wax effigy of myself, now puny, now a big bear of a worker, now a supple girl without breasts or vagina although responsively female: treat me as a woman and you can rule me. The wax was soft and getting softer, nearly fluid, and as it melted its color became milkier. It would flow out of the chubby cool forms of a child, his sturdy legs, big head, lips lucent as fruit jellies, into lanky adolescence. A moment later it had set into a thick neck, barrel chest, thickening biceps, and even my penis, a moment ago nothing but a tiny urine spout, would thicken and grow, the river god’s sex in a bed of ropey moss.

On my day off I went to the Oak Street beach. Luxury apartment buildings lined the lakefront and the six-lane Outer Drive. On one side of the drive strolled businessmen in coats and ties and women in dresses and big summer hats. On the other was a wide, white-sand beach and bathers in swimsuits surveyed
by
lifeguards. Between these two worlds, one formal, the other nearly nude, the traffic streamed ceaselessly.

I felt my grip on this, the “nice” part of town, was slipping. I had no confidence I’d ever land a decent job after school. Would I be condemned to loading trucks? My shoulders thickened brutishly.

On the beach I saw a group of older gay guys, and I
spread my towel beside them. They quieted down as I stripped to my swimsuit, and one of them even put on his glasses. I couldn’t tell what the verdict was.

But Midwesterners are friendly people who chat and joke easily with strangers, and soon enough I was talking with one of my neighbors, a rosy-cheeked countertenor with a haze of silky hair unexpectedly covering his back and shoulders. His nose and the bald top of his head were painfully red. He put on a shirt and baseball cap.

Next to him lay a man who was introduced to me as Lou and who gave me a warm, brown, limp hand, which he presented at an odd angle as though I were meant to kiss it or touch it to my forehead. He was in blue jeans he’d sawed down to the briefest shorts I’d ever seen, which were held up by a thick bicycle chain and safety lock for belt and buckle. He was thin, which my mind stupidly attributed to the long, beautiful scar that traced the entire inner lining of his ribcage—up from the chain belt across the solar plexus and down the other side. His hair had been cut fuzzy-wuzzy short with clippers. When he smiled, his teeth looked like expensive replacements. Although he was clean-shaven, black Benday dots traced the narrow pathway of his thin mustache and the stippled edge of his jaw. His jawbone and nose looked out of joint, as if they’d been broken by the same event that had smashed his teeth and inscribed the scar. Even the index finger of his right hand didn’t quite lie down smoothly. It looked as if it had been snapped, rotated slightly, then rewired.

And yet nothing gruesome or shocking was suggested by these alterations. Rather, they counted as painful but elegant tribal decorations cicatrized into the flesh, a sort of allover circumcision. This tribal idea was emphasized by his hairless torso, his long, smooth, slightly bowed legs, and his small-pored,
high-cheekboned face, which fit as tightly to his skull as a swimming cap. He was half American Indian, the countertenor told me later that night.

I took the countertenor home with me. He held me against his capacious chest and sang in his piercing high voice. Later I stood over him in bed, which led the singer, who was serious and sentimental and full of imported beer, to smile and blow me kisses.

“Do you live here all by yourself?” he asked me, looking around my mother’s gilded cage.

“Yes,” I said.

“Are you in school or do you work?”

“No, I don’t do anything,” I said. “I know that sounds terribly un-American, but I haven’t decided yet what to do with my life.”

The tenor nodded and hugged me.

The next morning, after several telephone calls, he arranged for us to eat with all the other men we’d met on the beach. It turned out Lou lived in the same building, in the identical apartment twelve stories down.

We all went to a coffee shop on Rush for breakfast. I ate so many syrup-soaked pancakes and drank so much bitter coffee that I got a stomachache. Maybe it was due to the excitement I felt looking at and talking to Lou. He was wearing a blue velour sweatshirt.

No one I’ve ever known before or since had his curious way of moving. When something excited him (usually something he was saying), he’d sit up straight in his seat, widen his eyes, and talk with hushed, oracular intensity. A second later, God, that bored puppeteer, would drop the strings and Lou would lie splayed all over the table, nearly comatose. On the street he’d stop in the middle of a stream of pedestrians to make a point, and as he did so he’d hold my hand between
both of his, but lightly, lightly, almost as though he were a medium who needed only the merest touch to establish contact with the other world.

I found out that he was an advertising man who wrote poetry, but when I trotted out my newly acquired urbane ironies for him (“The Muses Bow to Mammon,” I think I actually said), he flushed with anger.

“I can’t bear middle-class ruefulness,” he said. He was sitting straight up, fully inflated. “I love advertising. It’s an art in no way inferior to poetry and not much different from it. Lofty disdain toward making money strikes me as …” He adjusted his head to an odd angle. “Yes!” Now he was in full cry. “Yes! all that well-bred ruefulness. That’s exactly what I despise about
The New Yorker
. A cartoon shows a middle-aged man in front of his typewriter typing, ‘This is the story of my life’—and
that’s
supposed to be a
joke!”
His features froze in horror as he looked through me. Then a rich baritone laugh, so at odds with his light speaking voice, poured maniacally out of him. “A
joke!”
he shrieked in agonies of disbelief. His laugh, soundtrack for a horror film, rang out through the restaurant.