The Beautiful Room Is Empty (26 page)

“Yes, what are you up to?”

“Marriage! Ava’s going to be my wife.”

“Oh, Lou, I’m so happy for both of you.”

“Well, you know, you introduced us. We wanted you to be the first to know. Baby, pick up a carton of Cokes, too. Oh, my life is changing. The lonely times are over. Ava’s going to be my wife and cook beautiful food and bear my children. Bye, baby. There goes my wife. My
wife!
I’m going to be her king. Do you know that wise old saying, ‘A man’s house is his castle’?”

“That’s great, just great, I’m so happy for you.”

“Yeah, isn’t it? I finally got out of that shitty gay life.”

Yet it didn’t seem so shitty just now. We maintained, of course, the premise that we were sick, that our experience was limited, that we were missing out on the good things of life, and that our old age would be lonely. Worse, we anticipated
a steady effeminization with the years. I knew I’d end up a seventy-year-old waiter, hair peroxided, camping with my gay customers and eyeing with hatred all the women customers I didn’t already know and share beauty secrets with, a wizened old bird lined from excessive dieting and unwilling to go out at night for fear of hoodlums.

But just now that seemed a long way off. With Sean, of course, I pretended to be very studious and serious and even unfamiliar with gay life, but on nights when I was free I went out cruising.

After the World’s Fair cleanup, gay bars started opening again, every month a new one. The Village gay life, which until now had collected along Greenwich Avenue, began to seep slowly down Christopher Street. Spring came, and boys were sitting on stoops almost all the way down to the Hudson.

Every day I’d arrive at work later and later. We were supposed to be there at ten, but I never arrived before eleven. No one said anything. I had my captions to write, then whole paragraphs, but the company was so overstaffed that we were given two weeks to write a hundred lines. We typed on lined paper that gave the exact character count, but it didn’t matter, since every textblock was rewritten by all those idle editors over us. I closed my door and fell asleep on my desk, called all my friends, took two-hour lunches, had my shoes shined by a man who went from floor to floor with his kit and who once even offered to bump off anyone I wanted for two hundred dollars.

I lived for my nights. I’d rush home and fall asleep in my clothes. Hours later I’d awaken, eat cottage cheese out of the carton and a whole tomato, then I’d dress for cruising and head out into the night.

The appeal of gay life for me was that it provided so many
glancing
contacts with other men. At the gym I was becoming an old hand, and now I was the one to show the new
guys how to work the lat machine or do heavy squats without injuring the back, but I never knew their names. At the bar I would buy drinks for “friends” and they for me, but again we seldom knew each other’s names. If at the time we’d been called on to make a comment about this anonymity, we would have said it was “sad” or “pathetic,” but a second later we would have been smiling and feeling that surge of popularity as we walked down Christopher greeting one guy after another, adding another detail to the mental dossier we were compiling on each acquaintance (Oh, Blondy is with Spare Parts—I wonder if Spare Parts is keeping him. No one’s ever figured out till now how Blondy can afford so many new cashmere crewnecks on a dental hygienist’s salary. Oh, and there’s Mike the Barber with his ratpack. I wonder if Mike will say hi to me when he’s with that glam bunch—he did!).

On Saturday afternoon while I was working out, a handsome stranger in a bomber jacket came in, walked slowly, arrogantly through the gym and locker room, came right up to me, shook my hand, introduced himself, asked me to pull up my T-shirt, which I stupidly did. He rubbed the back of his hand on my new washboard abs and said, “Nice. You’ll do. Here. Call me.” And he left. And I called the number on his printed trick card and went over, but the good part was just having been chosen like that at the gym.

Sean looked sad and I said so. He smiled and stood. He swayed slightly and leaned on my shoulder as he passed me on the way to the window. He climbed out on the fire escape and pissed into the dark.

“Did I say something wrong?” I called to him.

He stepped back in and said, “It’s just—”

“What?”

Sean shrugged. “Oh, nothing.”

“I’m strong. Don’t worry about hurting me.”

“I just don’t see why you’re interested in me. All your
friends sound like they’re so smart—I know Lou is. Besides, you’ve read a lot and you’re older.”

“Why do you think I’m interested in you then?”

“I don’t know.” He put his glass on the floor and smiled, but with an uneasy, baffled look in his eye, as though he were about to be hit.

I came over and sat beside him and put an arm around his shoulders.

He cleared his throat. “Do you think I’m intelligent?”

“Of course.”

“That guy Ted? He told me I was dense.”

“Ted knew you were hung up on being intelligent, so he said you were dense. It was a way of holding you.”

“Tell me your honest evaluation of me.”

“I am being honest. Obviously you’re very intelligent.”

“I don’t believe you.”

“You get good grades, don’t you?”

“That doesn’t mean anything.”

“Do you know what your I.Q. is?”

“No.”

“Of course, I don’t see any difference it makes anyway. I recognize that you’re smart, but that’s not why I like you.”

“Then why do you?”

“Because you’re handsome and strong and natural.”

“I don’t even know what that means—natural. You’re handsome, and just as strong as I am.”

“I don’t think I’m good-looking.”

Sean stood and pulled me up into his arms. He held my head in his hands, looked at me a long time, and kissed me. We went into the bedroom. The sheets were cold.

It was late April, but tonight was strangely cool. I had spent a quarter of my weekly paycheck to buy a gardenia plant for Sean. Its buds would obviously never open; one blossom was already brown, but the remaining three cast off
their intoxicating perfume, so heavy as to be distracting. It was almost as though I had two lovers in the room, the man and the flower, but I’ve always been someone who needed a distraction to concentrate, music I must tune out in order to focus my thoughts.

Now it seemed as though our conversation was continuing. Kisses that with other men were only empty forms now filled with content. Sexual acts served as shades of meaning, a darkening or lightening of the voice.

Afterward I said, “You have such wonderful hands. They’re so warm and gentle. I could spend my whole life sleeping in your hands.” As I said those words, I felt the tension in my body knitting. I did want to sleep in Sean’s hands. I pictured the fingers and thumbs cradling me as I lay in the hollow of the cupped hands. I said, “I mean it, my whole life.”

He smiled, his lips looking even redder than usual, Médoc red. He pulled me into his arms and pointed at our reflection in the mirror. It was really happening.

As we went into the kitchen, where the shower stall stood, raised high and narrow as a sentry box, Sean said, “Do you think I look gay?”

“No, of course not.”

“Why not?”

“Because gay types are stiff. They make a beeline down the street with their arms clamped to their sides and their legs as close together as possible.”

We stepped into the shower, pulled the tan plastic curtain shut, and looked each other in the eye.

Blue flames from the stove burners provided the only light in the room, two soft penumbras glowing on the tan curtain, picking out a wet lower lip, the curve of Sean’s chest, the shiny back of his hand in motion. He washed me all over, turned me around, scrubbed me with a fiber mitten.

Then we embraced and the water discovered a new body
for me to lave and love, as though we’d been immortalized in marble. Since my love preferred static myth to changing history, eternity to time, marble suited me perfectly—a marble fountain, the static figures fixed in an eternal embrace but the water providing the illusion of movement.

A week later I was sitting at my desk thinking of Sean. An acquaintance who worked down the hall had stopped in to confide in me about her new boyfriend, and I’d wanted half a dozen times to say, “Yes, that’s right. That’s just the way it is with me and my guy.” But I didn’t dare. I knew I had to hide my sexuality from most people, even though I was so proud of Sean, so pleased when we walked down the street bumping shoulders. I couldn’t remember exactly why we had to be ashamed.

“Hello, Bunny? This is Lou.” There was a pause over the phone, and my visitor mimed a farewell kiss and left me, pulling my door shut behind her.

“Lou! How are you? How was your trip to Chicago?”

“…”

“Did you meet Ava’s parents?” Silence. “They must have met yours, huh? A big family pow-wow?” Silence. I decided I would keep fooling around until I hit paydirt. “It must have been gruesome.” Despite the silence, I flew blind into: “I don’t know why you went out there. Seeing your own parents is bad enough …” But what if the trip was a success? I let a long therapeutic silence spread itself out between us.

Lou whistled. “That’s Miles Davis’s ‘Funny Valentine.’ ”

“Oh?”

“My … funny … val …”

Starting all over again, I said softly, with exactly the endearing, breathy, formal but tender lilt Lou could give the phrase, as though he’d just coined it, “How nice to hear your voice.”

“Thank you, Bunny…. They were terrible people.”

“Ava’s parents?”

“Do you know what her mother said to me?”

“No, what?”

“She asked me if there were any other children. ‘Are there any siblings?’ I said I had a brother who’d committed suicide. She said, ‘I don’t know whether I can accept that.’ ”

“How appalling.”

“I’m not sure I can accept her daughter as my wife.”

“How was the trip otherwise?”

“Fine except I went blind in one eye, got so doubled over with anxiety I couldn’t eat or walk, was knocked over by a taxi after I heard my drunken father lecture me about what perverted creatures out of hell my brother and I had been as children.”

“Oh no! Always such a mistake to leave New York.”

“Ava, can I have some nice soup?” Ava made some remark and Lou muttered, “Ava’s soup burned. This apartment is a dump. We haven’t had heat in a month. Stupid spic super. Today I was held at the office and then I was half an hour late for my shrink. So I rushed over on my bike and had my hour, now fifteen minutes, and then I asked the nigger elevator operator if I could use the John in the building but—”

“Do you have to use those pejorative—” I said.

“Don’t give me that sobsister shit: Kike analysts, nigger elevator men, spic supers…. You know we talk this liberal bullshit, but do we ever stop to wonder why these germs have been considered inferior for centuries? Anyway. I got out on the street, and the front wheel from my bike had been stolen.”

“But this is like a—”

“It’s
not
a nightmare, baby. It’s New York City. That’s what it is. So I hailed about forty cabs. They’d slow down
but then see the bike and take off. If you rode a bike you’d recognize how interesting it is that we take the most criminal element of our society, license them as cabdrivers, and set them loose behind ten thousand wheels on our city streets. And
not one
of them can speak English.”

He sighed. “Well, I walked, I
walked
all the way across town, and by this time I had to shit so bad I went down into the IND, finally located a dime, and what do I find in the John: there are two toilets and roosting on each of them is a big grinning fairy!” Lou paused after the lightning exclamation and waited for the thunder of his own revulsion to roll over him. “Ugh! I could strangle every fucking fairy. You know how we used to deplore efforts to clean up Times Square? Well, turns out the cops are right, fairies
are
subhuman, they
are
going to pervert our children. An adult man works hard for a living and tries to provide for his family in his little apartment—no wonder he wants to bash every lush-life pansy in the teeth, the grinning chortling
gargoyles
right off the roof of Notre Dame! Nobody would let me take a crap. I went back to the street, unlocked my wreck of a bike from the street lamp, and wheeled it home, like one of Beckett’s tramps.

“I had given up all hope of getting back to the office—they may fire me—and I had almost made it to my building when I shit in my pants. I couldn’t use the elevator; I wasn’t fit to ride with normal people. I walked up the four flights and took off my three-hundred-dollar Meledandri suit and washed it out with soap and water, and then took a shower. You wanted to know how I was.”

“Oh, Lou,” I said, “I don’t know what to say.”

“Why did I get diarrhea?”

“Couldn’t it have been just an accident?”

“Come on, Bunny. You’ve been in therapy.”

Just as I was beginning to speculate. Lou whispered into the phone, “Bunny, you’re the one. I don’t want to marry Ava. I see what a mistake I’ve made. Will you wait for me?”

“What do you mean?”

“You’re the real love of my life. Do you love that boy?”

“Who?”

“What’s-his-name.”

“Sean? I think so.”

“And you don’t love me anymore?”

“Lou, you’re my best friend.”

“Really?”

“Yes.”

“I never had a friend. I don’t like what’s-his-name.”

“Why not?”

“I’m jealous. You’re
my
lover. He’s taken you away from me.”

“He hasn’t taken me away. I’m your friend. I love you.”

“Do you?”

“Yes.”

“Baby, I can’t talk anymore. Ava’s calling me to supper. Goodbye.”

“Take care. Goodbye.”

“Goodbye. You’re wonderful.”

TEN