The Beautiful Room Is Empty (25 page)

I wanted to tell him right away that I didn’t even expect that much. I was so afraid of appearing greedy. And I knew I had the capacity to wait. I recognized that he was too good for me. I was sure medieval knights knew they were unworthy of their lady, and that’s why they welcomed trials, proofs, labors.

The idea that he might like me radically revised my version of who we were. I was suddenly one of those funny, nutty, brainy guys welcomed precisely because he relieves the heavenly tedium of excessive beauty. Or we were buddies, and our camaraderie erased the difference between us; who could judge the looks of a childhood friend? Who would want to? Or he thought I was the brain, he the slow learner … No matter which scenario the next few minutes or years would confirm, at least I was
in
all of them.

I walked him back to his door. The rain had stopped, but big white clouds still circulated across the night sky, reflecting the city lights, clouds lit up like internal organs about to be studied to locate the fatal, microscopic flaw.

Our shoulders bumped as we walked along. I guess Sean wasn’t so tall after all; just my imagination had made him big. Bumping shoulders turned us into chums, and we stole little, embarrassed smiles at each other and looked at our feet. Falling in love is slightly embarrassing because love is a conspicuous and weighty thing. It is a marvel. I felt a bit like a hunter who’s captured a unicorn and parades it through the town streets, but the crowds were discreet enough not to stare.

Marilyn Monroe had died and President Kennedy had been shot, and everyone talked and talked about them in
those days as though they’d actually known them. People would argue about whether Marilyn had been “modest” or not, but the argument was only semantic trash, never a question of affection, because we were all friendly toward our martyrs. In the dry cleaner’s on my corner someone had hung up a woven portrait of Kennedy, but the artist had misjudged the perspective, so that his eyes crossed. It was a camp, but it expressed my reverence. It was the same way I felt toward Sean. I didn’t know him, but I felt a perfect right to have opinions about him; he’d become “my” Sean, just as she was “my” Marilyn.

In his little apartment, so similar to mine if less crowded and cleaner, I kissed him. He said, “That’s nice.” His skin had a burnt-almond taste and smell; his skin seemed to be a tissue of the brain, so directly did it record his feelings. It began to color.

He gently, so gently extricated himself from my embrace. Right away I felt fat again. “Hope you understand,” he said, “but I think we should wait until we know each other better.”

The next night Sean made me spaghetti. As I watched him, I grew more porous as he became increasingly impermeable. He wore a blue apron over his crisply creased khakis; this dark suggestion of a skirt contrasted with his high buttocks in their military drab. I still hadn’t seen him naked. Since I was seated and he was standing, moving about, I thought about his body. I wondered if that expressive skin continued below his neck—whether his chest could blush, his loins pale. And I wondered what his penis looked like, how big it was.

At this time I read James Baldwin’s
Giovanni’s Room
, in which Giovanni stops being attractive the moment he abandons his heterosexuality. Against this absolutism of
heterosexuality, few merits held up. A large penis or a muscular body or lots of money had some appeal, but they were fraudulent when they belonged to another queer. We would piously list all the great dead fags of history, but if someone mentioned a living conductor or pianist, we’d say contemptuously, “Who,
her?”
as though “her” (or “huh” in New York-ese) homosexuality were instantly disqualifying. Still more damaging to a man’s celebrity was the claim that one had actually slept with him. A New York queen would blow on what he pretended were freshly painted nails and say, “Who?
huh? Had
huh.”

I had not yet “had” Sean, and I wanted to forestall that inevitable disappointment. Although everyone at the time congratulated me on my new body, contact lenses, and surfer hairstyle, I now wonder whether my transformation wasn’t a capitulation to a dangerous commodity psychology. Of course, it’s better to be handsome than ugly, but I never came to feel good about myself. I had the mole between my shoulder blades burned off, every night I did facial isometrics, I trimmed the hairs around my scrotum to throw my penis into relief and make it look larger, but melancholy self-regard continued to alternate with a generalized guilt as the background to all my feelings.

After dinner Sean talked to me about Catullus. He struggled to express himself. Like me, he was a Midwesterner, someone without a ready way of discussing ideas. If the New York style was nonchalance toward the topic and aggressiveness toward the listener, our Midwestern way was to assume the listener was neutral and to burrow relentlessly into the question. Sean was serious, very serious, and when he spoke he winced.

He led me to his bed. He undressed me and lit a candle and put it beside a mirror on the floor. I looked at myself in
the mirror. I was perfect now except for the white silk stitches along my side, the stretch marks where I’d been fat. My vision of us, of Sean and me, was so large that it belittled our gestures or any moment we lived through as though our proper medium was myth, not history. We couldn’t stop smiling at each other.

I was so happy. Gratitude and love burned in my heart. I felt Sean was a superior being who was lifting me up and placing me on a throne beside him. Perhaps because I’d never lived with a happy couple, I had no notion of domestic love; dailiness even threatened what I knew about, which was ecstasy. I was ecstatic now, but the feeling wasn’t a crisis, rather a slow turning in the amber crosslight. Just as music is invisible but suggests motion, in the same way our muscles generated a sort of music we could see in the candlelight.

His shoulders were broad, too broad given his slender torso, as though a man were climbing up out of the adolescent. We looked down at ourselves in the mirror, not as one might watch pornography starring oneself but to confirm the happy fiction that we were in each other’s arms. The commotion of happiness ringing in my head was so loud I could scarcely hear what was happening.

Such moments in a whole long life are neither as rare as one fears at first nor as frequent as later one hopes.

His penis was crooked when erect. It was big and veered off to one side.

The next day I said, “Lou says it’s wrong to see each day as a separate beginning. It’s wrong to divide time up into days and weeks. He says you should live as though time is one unbroken flow.”

“Is that right?” Again that look of anxiety, that wincing look of concentration.

“Yes, and I have no business saying this now, after I’ve
just met you, but I feel that you’re going to turn my life into something like that. Today, all day at the office, I was so full of expectation.”

Sean nodded. We ate our salad out of a battered saucepan, sharing Sean’s only fork.

“Tell me about Lou,” Sean said.

What a fool I am, I thought. “Oh, he’s terrific; I love him very much.”

“Were you and he ever lovers?”

“Yes.”

“When?”

“About a hundred years ago. The best friends are old lovers, don’t you think?”

“I don’t know. I never had a lover.”

“I can’t believe that.”

“Well,” Sean said, “I had an affair with this guy Ted. But we’re not friends now. He drove me nuts. He’s a professional broken heart. Moons around all the time, threatens suicide, calls me up when he’s drunk.” Sean leapt up and opened the refrigerator. Staring into it he said, “I guess that’s what I think. That’s what my friend Julio says. It sounds right.”

“You don’t know?”

He sank back down. “I don’t know anything. Tell me anything and I’ll believe it. And
that’s
not even true.”

“Who’s Julio?”

“Oh, this great guy I met through Ted. You’ll meet him. He’s a famous dress designer.”

All evening long I questioned Sean about every detail of his life. I memorized each name. I wanted to know all of Sean’s history right away.

Every word he uttered either raised or dashed my hopes. “I’m very tired tonight”—bad, he wants to get rid of me. “But who needs sleep? It’s more important to talk to you
and” (radiant smile) “more fun”—good, very, very good. “I should study some Latin”—bad. “Can you read while I work? I don’t want you to go. I like you here” (pats the couch deliberately, looking me in the eye)—good. Excellent.

Every night for weeks we got together, sometimes at my place, sometimes at his. We didn’t have sex very often, but Sean liked me to stay over. He liked to hug me in the bed at night. He liked my mind and would force me to give opinions, which wasn’t my way. I wanted to write fiction precisely because I could only see things dramatically, not politically or abstractly. I assumed he liked my sweetness, but once I became sarcastic with a book salesman who had never heard of Ronald Firbank. The salesman kept saying, over and over again, “Is that the
suspense
writer? He’s the
suspense
guy, right?” I said something nasty and haughty. On the street again Sean chortled and said he liked that; he even referred to the incident several times later. “Gosh, you can be an arrogant bastard, can’t you?” His admiration confused me. I thought it was so unfair that he would push me into being an angry man when I just wanted to be his tender sidekick.

On a Saturday evening Sean tried to study, but after ten the heat in his apartment went off and we decided to go out for a walk. He had told me about the warehouse district south of Canal. I’d never been down there. By day it was crowded with trucks and workers and by night it was deserted, as best I could tell. But he loved it. He liked architecture and spoke about the cast-iron buildings. He knew what New York had looked like at the time of the Civil War, and as we strolled through block after block of dark, dirty unlit warehouses, he re-created the past. We walked down a rainy street lit by a single overhead lamp swaying on a high wire. Its light glimmered across the shiny hackles of the wet, black pavement.

I was afraid of Sean and wanted to make light of him. I made fun of his piety before old buildings when I phoned
Lou, but Lou just said, “Sounds like you’re falling in love.” I visited Maria and Boo-Boo in their garden apartment on the Upper West Side, but I was restless during dinner, couldn’t concentrate on the conversation, and kept pacing. Sounding rather strident to my own ears, I made fun of Sean, telling Maria that he lacked all sense of irony and thought Catullus’s poem on the death of Lesbia’s sparrow was
serious
, of all things.

“Dumpling,” Maria said, “that’s the tenth time you’ve brought up that boy tonight. It sounds like you’ve got it bad. And the death of a bird
is
serious.”

One night as we were lying in bed, Sean said that that afternoon he had used a public toilet and walked in on an orgy.

“Oh, how awful,” I said.

“What are they doing there?” he asked.

“What do you mean?”

“Of course I know they’re there for sex, but how can they do it? It’s really subhuman.”

“Totally subhuman,” I said.

NINE

        Lou called me one day and said, “Bunny, I want to get married.”

“To a woman?”

“Misty has moved out. He had a chance to go to Miami with a drag act in some sleazebag hotel. I don’t want to be alone anymore. I want to settle down, and boys are too unreliable. But the real reason is that I want to make more money. I’ve been looking at the guys who break the five-figure barrier in the ad biz and they’re all married.”

“It’s not just that easy,” I said, “marriage.”

“Sure it is. My shrink says you should always act ahead of your feelings. Do now what you know you’ll be doing six months from now—what’s best for you. But the real question is, how do you get married?”

“First you meet a woman,” I said. With Lou I was never certain as to how plain I should make things. “Then you date her. Then you ask her to get married.”

Long silence. Low voice: “How sweet …”

I promised to take him to a party of “straight people,” kids from my school living in New York. Everyone drank
gimlets and the hostess hired an oyster shucker to come up from Baltimore with crates and crates of oysters. The most famous person at the party was the jazz composer Charles Mingus, who was in a fat, paranoid phase. Even so, he talked to us all in his intense, original way. He turned off the music and asked us to listen to the layers of silence. He insisted that total silence didn’t exist and that he could even score all the hums and swishes of the city night. Then the music came back on (it was “My Guy”) and the hostess and I grabbed large wooden ladles from Mexico and held them in front of us like penises and danced our famous spoon dance—you had to be there. We were very drunk.

I introduced Lou to Ava, a girl I’d known for years. I’d first met her at Eton; she’d gone to our sister school.

A week later Lou called me. “Bunny, Ava and I—hold on,” he clunked the receiver down and mumbled, “baby, give me a banana. Not that one, it’s too brown. If you’re going out, get me Pall Malls…. Hello?”