The Beautiful Room Is Empty (18 page)

That night as we lay in bed, Lou’s room lurched here and there as though the camera were hand-held by a skater. He told me how he’d played jazz trumpet when he was nineteen. “I fell in love with our vocalist, a Negro woman a few years older than me, and when she became pregnant, my parents paid her off to go away somewhere. So I’ve got a twelve-year-old son wandering around—”

“You’re sure it’s a son?”

Lou looked bewildered, then irritated. “I’m not sure of anything, but I dream of a boy the nights when I’m able to dream of anything.”

I asked him what happened to him after that.

“I’d become addicted to heroin and my parents put me in an expensive psychiatric hospital, the one where the movie stars go. My brother was already there.”

“What a wild family!” I exclaimed, although my burst of enthusiasm made the whole room dip nauseatingly. I propped up on two pillows that had lost their cases and I prayed for solid ground.

“Yes,” Lou said witheringly, “quite
wild
. My brother
committed suicide soon after my arrival. He was living in a halfway house after five years of expert professional treatment.” A small black toad of a laugh hopped through his lips.

“Oh, Lou,” I said, “I’m sorry,” and I wanted to touch him, but I was afraid his body would be cold.

“But the
wildness
of my tale is just starting,” Lou insisted.

He told me of a family reunion shortly before his brother’s suicide, when both boys had been on leave from the hospital and the whole family had celebrated by going to the Lyric Opera. They sat together in the family box, but during the second act they, the brothers, started fighting. Everyone including the parents was dead drunk, a knife flashed out of a pocket, Lou was spurting blood, his mother was shrieking above the soprano, ushers and then the police were coming through the door, the orchestra was breaking up and bleeping into silence, the audience was in an uproar, and the house-lights came up.

“That’s when I got this,” Lou said, pointing to his stomach scar. “Not from my brother. I lost so much blood I passed out, and when I woke up I was in Methodist Central. A stupid cunt of a nurse had left me with a thermometer in my mouth, she’d gone out of the room—can you imagine, you never do that with a patient in a coma—and I knew it could be the basis for a really stiff malpractice suit, so I just chewed it up very slowly and swallowed it, all the broken glass and the mercury too, and I knew I’d either die, which was cool, or wake up rich enough to leave my parents for good. I woke up. They’d sliced me open and removed several feet of gut, that’s why I have to eat so often now, otherwise the food goes right through me—”

“But you
don’t
eat!” I wailed. “That’s precisely—”

Lou silenced me by laying his open hand over my mouth; then he played a little tune on my lips with his fingers. “But I hadn’t counted on my habit, which was becoming so
expensive that before I got the settlement money I had to rob my father’s house, which triggered some goddam new alarm he’d installed since I’d split, so I was nabbed, the fuzz found the tracks on my arms, it was all pretty
bogue
so the only way out of a sentence was to go back to the same bughouse.”

I don’t know how aware Lou was of the sexual longing he awakened in me, but as he told me his story, he kept hitching me tighter and tighter in his embrace. Or he used me as a guitar to strum or a flute to pipe, something inert but expressive he could play. “Then my brother killed himself—he was seeing a woman in town and only visiting the hospital every afternoon, and the woman, a local girl, couldn’t take him anymore, he was too crazy for her, so he O.D.ed, maybe he wasn’t even intending to die, just shake her up.”

Although I wanted to comfort him, or suggest through gestures that he, at least, was safe from such a fate, safe in my arms, I knew there was no room for me in this story.

“That was when I fell in love with Charlie, the pianist you met, he’d been a child prodigy, he’d played with the Cleveland and the New York Philharmonic, and then when he was a teenager, my age, he couldn’t take the responsibility and he, too, picked up a habit, he got busted. Well, we were both musicians and junkies, except he was a real musician. We used to lie out by the pool and sun and doze, and I’d look at his powerful arms and shoulders ‘driving the music to sleep under silence, darker and more elegant than roses,’ that’s the end of a poem I wrote about him.”

He laughed and sat up. “You know, Bunny, there’s nothing more romantic than a concert pianist, especially one who won’t play. He plays for me now, but only at home, he’s got a Steinway grand, and you should hear him tear through the Rachmaninoff Third, your hair would stand on end.”

Suddenly my own life seemed shabbily devoid of incident.
I longed for the courage to do something reckless and the years in which to regret it.

The only light was coming from a horrible fluorescent tube in the bathroom, which made our bodies appear larval and brought out muddy circles under Lou’s eyes. If I leaned my head back on the pillow I was looking at the cityscape upside down. The revolving searchlight at the top of the Drake tower beamed through low, tumbling clouds, as though a circus trainer were gliding a whip under the plunging bodies of horses in a lather. Here and there, windows of distant apartments still burned.

Lou left his curtains open and we awakened at noon, naked in a hemorrhage of sunlight under the gaze of office workers in the next building, so close we could see a typist take off her glasses and massage the bridge of her nose.

In the afternoons we’d sometimes go to the beach, but Lou came up with so many problems and fears and objections that usually we didn’t get out before evening. Since he was supposed to eat six small meals a day, after he toyed with one, he’d order a second, ignoring both.

I showed him a story I was working on, which I hoped to sell to
Esquire
or
The New Yorker
for a great deal of money, which would free me of my parents. “But your prose is so mindless,” Lou said. “As in this sentence, when you say, ‘I had no thought in my head,’ I mean, you don’t stop to think at all, do you, Bunny, you just babble. And then the way you dote on your characters. I can’t bear that sort of doting. And this chandelier. The only reason you bother to put it in the story is so that it can come crashing down at the end, which is an absurdly cheap touch. But the worst is the doting, this lip-smacking satisfaction you take in all these dreadful middle-class bores with their
problems
, as though having a problem were an automatic bid for sympathy instead of an invitation to impatience or contempt.”

His words stung me. Every criticism seemed irrefutable if previously unsuspected. It was true I loved my characters, to whom I’d distributed the various voices and vices of my friends. It was true I wrote in a trance and never revised; my mother had told me I was a genius. A genius doesn’t grope, learn, rework, or even work. And it was true I wrote to be adored—by my mother first of all, and then by Lou or whomever I was with. Yes, I wanted fame, and when the heat of vision, fired by Drambuie, was on me in my white room, I felt I was already famous. But there was another reason to write: to redeem the sin of my life by turning it into the virtue of art.

Until now, I’d showed my stories only to appreciative readers. Other young writers would ply me with compliments and in exchange I’d praise their work. The usual inspiration for my fiction was the “powerful” television drama with its cozy view of character, its melodramatic plot, and its message. To show that this was literature, however, one threw in a symbol or two, preferably something from the Passion of Christ, and a poetic haze of phrase condensed from our best Southern writers. An epiphany was clapped on to lots and lots of hard-hitting dialogue, which was easy to write, although one pretended otherwise. The characters were all suitably defeated and sensitive.

Lou had too refined an ear and too great a horror of the obvious to like my inflated playlets. He was also too unhappy and anxious to take an interest in other people’s lives. He ended up with a small canon of books about himself—John Rechy’s
City of Night
, which was just appearing chapter by chapter in magazines, the few isolated scraps of William Burroughs he could find in print, Jean Genet’s
Our Lady of the Flowers
. In these books he saw his own darkness reflected. He appreciated that in them there was no trace of
American optimism. He also liked that these pages were devoted to “sexy fairies” and that every page could cost the reader some come.

For Lou, who’d never known a conventional family, bourgeois life seemed remote—remotely risible when he was out gunning for squares, remotely appealing when he was fed up with the disorder of his own life. “Oh, Bunny,” he said to me late one night, hugging me and smelling of that strong odor of people who swallow too many vitamin pills in daily remorse for nightly bad habits, “I’m so sick of sick faggots and drunk old queens. I’m so sick of men! I don’t think I can bear the feel of one more man’s beard. Here I am, a thirty-year-old man, I should be founding my own sweet little family, but I’m still bouncing around the bars, being probed by fingers, mauled, stuffed with cock, and I wake up every morning hung over, hemorrhoids aflame, crotch hairs plastered down with someone else’s come.” Astounded pause, widening eyes, horrified shout: “And my face raw with beard-burn!” He shuddered, even stroked my face, from which I willed the noxious hairs to retract. Then he launched into rhapsodic praise of marriage in terms so banal, so painfully silly, that I kept looking for the ironic smile that might make some sense of his ranting. I’d liked Lou’s willingness to live a life of homosexual crime, but now he was talking himself into respectability.

I listened and nodded and felt obliged to go along with him. I had to scramble all the chromosomes of my beliefs to match his gene by gene. From my psychoanalysis and from my more private self-doubts—my certainty that the basic things in me were all wrong—I’d picked up the habit of mistrusting my instincts.

But as the weeks with Lou went by, something in me rebelled against him. I wanted my own way. If I put my will
aside temporarily, I did so to learn from Lou. for never before had I met someone who was so much an artist and so little an intellectual. If I gave a story an overly ingenious title, he’d say, “But a title should simply name what’s going on, like a good picture caption.
Family Portrait
is a good title, as is
Early Death.”
Slow smile. “Of course Faulkner titles are the best.
Light in August
. Did you know
light
is an old word for ‘pregnant’?”

Lou hated “college-boy” advertising slogans, clever take-offs on Shakespeare or the Bible (“The spirits are willing but the flesh is weak” for a hangover pill). “No, the dumber the better.
Shrink hemorrhoids
is still classic,” he told me with deep serenity in the way he said “classic.”

Lou’s eerie aestheticism—based on his conviction that he possessed a perfect ear and an irreproachable sense of decorum—took on anything and everything. He had an aesthetic of religion (Catholic orthodoxy over corny Protestant cultism), an aesthetic of psychoanalysis (Freud, not that seedy Jung), an aesthetic of drugs (the deadly nightshade of heroin rather than the “loco weed” of marijuana; “Pot’s for people who want to
feel funny
, like those cows that get high on loco weed and run into electric fences”).

One night toward the end of August I was sleeping upstairs in my mother’s apartment. I’d waited for his call all evening and I’d called him several times without success.

Now Lou wanted to see me. He breathed noisily and said with a thick tongue, “Bunny, I need—” and then the receiver must have fallen out of his grasp, since I could hear him still mumbling to himself. I hurried downstairs in the elevator. I rang his doorbell again and again, and even knocked, but I didn’t want to create a scene. His neighbors had already complained to the management.

At last he opened the door. A centimeter of cigarette smoked in his hand. Behind him in shoals of faint light, the
wreck of his furniture was heaped up. He walked with the floating gait of someone moved by tides, not the will.

“Lou, honey, what’s wrong?” I asked him. I followed him into the bedroom. His black cat was gorging itself on an overturned carton of chop suey Lou must have ordered in. I watched the cat swallow lump after lump of glutinous vegetables pooling on the carpet. Its working throat was reflected by the mirror that had fallen off the hook. The mirror had cracked in half but stayed upright. Glasses of rum and Coke stood empty or half full on every flat surface. The impression was of a middle-class apartment where a tribe of bums had been squatting for weeks. The fluorescent tube in the bathroom and the television screen, empty picture rolling, provided the only light.

“Bunny,” he said as he collapsed on the unmade bed, “you’ve got to get me—” static on the line, but for a moment I thought he actually said, “a high colonic irrigation.”

At last I realized he
had
said a “high colonic irrigation,” whatever that meant. In pained snatches he explained that when he shot up (heroin? he didn’t say), his digestive tract would sometimes “stall” as a result of his having lost so many yards of gut. The only way to restore peristalsis was to find someone with the archaic equipment necessary (small smile) for this disagreeable therapy (still smaller).

It was one in the morning, but in a controlled panic I strummed the Yellow Pages. The first two numbers didn’t respond but the third yielded a sleazy male voice filtered through Lord Calvert and Kools, a minor Mafia voice.

Fortunately Gerald, the doorman, had gone off duty and the lobby was unattended. It was drizzling. Lou was as hard to get into a taxi as a colt—he was all stiff legs, melting torso, and sharp elbows. He smelled funny and I was afraid the driver might complain, but no, we moved through the unpeopled streets in silence. The windshield wipers beat out a slow
two-quarter rhythm, the first stroke on the G below middle C, the second an octave above, played over brushes on cymbals: the rain sizzling under our tires.