The Beautiful Room Is Empty (27 page)

        Sean didn’t want to be gay, and waking up beside me was too much evidence for him that he was becoming homosexual. I suggested that we start therapy together and go straight together—slowly, I hoped. Through Ava I found a psychotherapist named Dale who specialized in a treatment based on the idea that everyone at all times was playing a game.

Sean and I were placed in separate groups in which all the other members were heterosexual. A group met once a week with Dale in her office, and one other evening without her in the apartment of a member. Unhappy marriages, celibacy, impotence, adultery, alcoholism, divorce, career frustration, the coldness of men and the hysteria of women, bankruptcy, friendships riddled by spite and envy—we watched the painful surfacing of all these problems. Like a team of midwives, we encouraged the birth of each memory.

What came harder was the shrink’s theory that we must re-create among ourselves the hostilities that had divided but perpetuated our families. Listening to each other’s stories was no problem; that called on the familiar American skills
of shocking confession and compassionate audition. But it was trickier to point a finger at a fellow member, a housewife from Scarsdale, and shout, “You’re trying to guilt-trip us by playing Poor Me.”

We usually sought the origins of our pain in the unresolved conflicts of childhood. Those of us who had bad memories had to keep rereading the same old tea leaves. I was let off lightly. Since I was a homosexual, everyone knew what caused my disease (absent father and overprotective mother), so no one poked about for further explanations.

My only enemy was Simon, a recent Russian immigrant in his sixties. He’d entered therapy to convince his wife that he was making an effort to curb his rages, but he still beat her regularly. He’d even knocked out a tooth. As a Russian, Simon wasn’t used to the American way of coddling people. He hated our welfare system, detested out-of-work blacks and thought they should all be sent back to Africa. He thought sexual perversion should be punished by castration or lobotomy, but he was convinced by the other group members that I was making an honest effort to go straight. In his mind the cure was simple. I should go out with girls, buy them candy, strike them, no doubt, finally marry them. Whenever I started spinning my analytic gossamer, he’d say, “But wot about de goils? I wanna hear about de goils.”

I embraced Dale’s system with passion and rigor. I thought about the games people play not only during my sessions but also at work. In my own modest way, I even set up shop as a therapist for a few of my fellow employees. We were all so idle—and so frustrated from the company’s duplication (or negation) of our efforts—that we had the time and spleen conducive to auto-analysis.

In therapy I became so expert in spotting covert games that Dale herself would sometimes ask me for my opinion. Once in a great while someone would notice that I had said
nothing about myself for ages, but I was too valuable an ally to alienate. In my mind I was earning chips I’d be able to cash in one wonderful day when I would need everyone’s attention and sympathy.

One night over supper with Maria I yawned and said, “Of course Maeve was just playing Yes, But.”

“What do you mean?” Maria asked.

“That’s one of the games people play,” and I went on to explain it with majestic confidence.

Maria put her knife and fork down and grew silent. Without raising her eyes she said, “When I met you, you had one of the sharpest, most open, most skeptical minds I’d ever encountered. Now you’ve become the dullest sort of bigot. You see absolutely every last thing through those ridiculous therapeutic glasses. You’re as smug as a Catholic convert or an American Marxist without enjoying the intellectual range and depth of either system.”

“Why do you find my therapy so threatening, Maria?” I asked, already trying to label the game she was playing.

“You’re my best friend, Dumpling, but I don’t think I can continue this friendship if you don’t change. I can’t bear to see the wreck you’ve made of your mind. It’s all because you can’t accept being gay, which isn’t such a big deal. You’re still white, a man, handsome, charming, from a well-to-do family, intelligent—everything’s been handed to you, but you—”

Keep collecting injustices, I thought, naming one of the games members sometimes played.

Maria’s case interested me. I noticed how she was slowly giving up her pro-Russian stand in favor of feminism. Women’s rights. I asked her what earthly rights women lacked. They could already vote, divorce, work. Maria became so angry with me that she had to swallow an extra high-blood-pressure pill. Her voice shaking, she told me how
women earned half of what men made for the same work but how they were usually refused the better jobs. “The woman problem is a poverty problem,” she said. “You joke around about whether to say
Miss
or
Ms.
, but the real issue is poverty. Most of the poor families in America are headed by single women, usually black.”

We ordered brandies. She said, “Do you remember how we used to smile at Buddy and Betts, those two old dykes at Solitaire? We used to think it was so amusing the way Betts played the
malade imaginaire
. I just got a letter from the colony director telling me that Betts’s malady was hunger. The poor old things didn’t have any money, and Buddy got too old to be the sheriff. They never did have much money. Then Buddy started drinking. Last winter they both froze to death.” Maria’s eyes filled with tears. “Those lovable old eccentrics were starving. The real woman question is poverty.”

When I’d first met Maria, she’d held in contempt everything she was—middle-class, American, artistic—in favor of a remote ideal, a Soviet Union we knew next to nothing about except that it stood for principles we considered progressive: respect for labor, division of wealth, equal opportunity for women, atheism, science. In recent years, however, we’d read more and more accounts about Russia that had disillusioned and finally appalled us.

Simultaneously, Maria had become aware that women were oppressed in every country regardless of national policies or economics. She became angry with me when I suggested that her own lesbianism made her especially sensitive to women’s indignities. “Why do you have to search for a personal reason for political convictions that can be established through rational arguments? It’s so demeaning.”

Maria’s feminism may have been objective, as she insisted, but nevertheless it provided subjective benefits to her.
Because she was now defending what she was. a woman, her politics elicited pride not guilt, affirmation not chagrin. She began to paint again. Art was no longer a badge of privilege, but a quiet, deft way of making things, as one might make a new window box. She painted, listening to
Der Rosenkavalier
, as she had that first day I’d ever seen her, so many years ago, waltzing around her studio at the Eton art academy, her eyes closed.

By chance I knew a young woman who was in Sean’s group. I badgered her to break the rule of secrecy and tell me what he was saying about me. She and I were seated in a cozy, dirty booth in a coffee shop on upper Broadway.

“But he’s really sick,” she said. “He paces up and down and talks about feeling flames leaping along his arms—‘bizarre somatic delusions’ is what Dale calls them. He tries so hard to detect a heterosexual urge in himself he even pretends he’s getting excited over Dale, who could be his mother and has ankles thicker than his waist.”

“I know it’s going to hurt,” I said, “but what does he say about me?”

“He’s never even mentioned you.” She was polite enough to add, rather feebly, “That’s the sickest thing of all.”

Under pressure from the group to date girls, Sean told me the sexual part of our relationship was over. He looked so pitiful, so
flayed
, that I didn’t object. I thought that a real person in my position would have said, “Fuck you. So long,” and walked out for good. But I felt sorry for Sean. The report of his behavior in group made me fear he was far more disturbed than I’d imagined.

I also felt sorry for myself. I had stopped my compulsive toilet cruising since I’d met Sean. His sexual acceptance of me, paradoxically, had given me the courage to seduce other young men and take them home. In our mythology, a proper trick was more respectable than a tearoom quickie. A trick
committed enough of his time to you to come home with you, mount your stairs, mount you, expose all his body, not just his penis, share a cigarette, and go through the usually empty but respectful ceremony of exchanging phone numbers.

If Sean left me, I’d be consigned back to the toilets, to my grubby, sleepwalking, streetwalking life. Since he’d been the first break in my bad luck, I assumed he’d be the last.

When we were together, I thought of nothing but strategy. I refused to give Sean reassurances, hoping he’d come back to me pleading for them.

But what I hadn’t taken into account was how small a part I played in Sean’s life. If he thought of me at all, he must have seen me as a nice guy though sometimes a pain in the ass, always coming on. But he was contemplating the flames dancing on his flesh, flashing on his money worries and school, brooding about going straight. He grew thinner and thinner, and Dale had to feed him with a spoon during their sessions, which had become daily, or he wouldn’t eat at all.

Then she put him in St. Vincent’s, in the psycho ward. He ran up and down the halls, knocking down nurses and patients, and had to be heavily medicated and put into restraints. He cried when he wasn’t sleeping. Dale turned his case over to a doctor on the ward, who promptly went on vacation.

Lou, an old hand at being in bughouses, visited Sean with me. “Listen, Sean, you’ve got to talk to anyone and everyone around the clock,” he said. “Start your own group therapy in the TV room. Psychoanalyze your roommate. Talk the psych-grad student’s ear off. That’s the only way to get well and get out. There’s a bed shortage and it’s costing the city money; they don’t want you in here a second longer than necessary. There’s no conspiracy.”

“Is that right?” Sean asked tonelessly, his lips cracked from the dehydrating sedatives.

I cried in group, but Simon froze my tears by asking, “What about de goils?”

Eventually Sean, bloated from suffering and pills and completely silent, was shipped home to his parents in the Midwest.

I wondered how much I’d been responsible for his breakdown. The worst thing had been my inability to remember that he was weak. For an instant I would grasp he was fragile, but a second later I’d resent his intransigence, his casting me back out into the darkness.

I missed Sean so much I started to fester with it. I’d lie in bed and cry
it
and turn in
it
until I’d soiled myself with
it
. Everything, feebly, spoke
it
, even the neighbor’s laundry palpitating shadows on my blinds. “Woke up this morning, blues around the bed. Sat down to eat, blues in my bread,” said the song, and I sang it. I’d played a game, pretending to fall in love, but now the game had tricked me; I was caught.

I started hyperventilating, although it felt as though I was getting too little air, not too much. Pins and needles started in my hands and feet and spread upward. If the numbness reached my heart, I thought, I would die. I carried a brown paper bag and breathed into it on the subway as a way of cutting down on the amount of oxygen. My hands would jerk and fly around all on their own, and if I was in public I’d cover by pretending to pat my hair.

When the weather became warm, I lay on a towel in the park in hopes of getting a tan. I basted myself in suffering. If Sean had stopped loving me, I was unlovable. My memory would wander back to his apartment, to the blue gas jets by which we’d showered, to the salad we’d eaten out of a saucepan, to our mortally young faces in the candlelit mirror—but then I’d slap myself awake as you must treat someone who’s swallowed too many sedatives.

In the park on my towel I searched for something to
like. If I could find one thing in the whole world to like, I could start again. I saw a cop on a horse riding toward me and I thought, looking up at this centaur, admiring the shiny flanks and gleaming leather boots, hearing now the creak of the tack, here’s something beautiful, something I can like. The cop rode up, looked down and said, “Get your shirt on, this isn’t a beach. You’re breaking the law.”

Sean wrote me twice. Flat notes, and each sentence I saw as a safe compromise between several dangerous ways of saying things. The joke was that the great love of my life was a man who knew nothing about me and next to nothing about himself.

Suffering does make us more sensitive until it crushes us completely. I started to write about Sean, and the writing, like a searchlight sweeping wildly, almost caught my fugitive feelings. A close call, but another failure, for I was so afraid of being sentimental or self-indulgent, of not distancing myself through the appropriate irony and understatement and objectivity, that I wrote about myself in the third person. I invented a stand-in for myself but with ten points less intelligence. Yet how could I like myself or ask the reader to take seriously a love between two men? A plea for tolerance was the best I might have come up with, but I was too proud to plead for anything.

On early summer nights in the city I drifted down Christopher Street to a new dance place, the Stonewall, which had the hottest jukebox. The clientele was a bit tacky, all those black and brown boys and drags who’d attracted me at Riis Park, but they were the best dancers, the sharpest dressers, the most generous lovers. Many of my old friends didn’t interest me much because they wouldn’t let me talk about Sean anymore. Only Maria and Lou indulged me.

For me, the Stonewall was a place where I could watch
people in the inner, darker room, sit along the wall and feel at once alone and comforted. I liked to watch a giant black man who’d twirl and slice the air dangerously with his out-flung arms and pointed toes, a flailing death machine of a ballerina. I was so glad I’d bothered to acquire a nice body, since it gave me something to offer every night to a different man—the graying high-school principal, the Puerto Rican hairburner, the death machine. I went to bed with anyone who wanted me.