The Beautiful Room Is Empty (28 page)

One night I talked with a woman who explained to me she’d had her sex changed. “My husband doesn’t even suspect I was once a guy. We live in a huge housing development. We even have our own shopping center, can you believe. One day at the mall I saw another post-op also passing. She’s never told her old man neither. Anyway, we’re best girlfriends, we watch the soaps together. But sometimes I get lonely for gay guys. You gay guys do know how to have fun.”

A man I’d met at a bar invited me to the house he’d rented in Cherry Grove on Fire Island. The house had a name, “The Wicked Witch’s Ding-Dong,” and the instant we arrived my host put on a silk caftan and mixed cocktails in the blender out of crème de menthe and milk. He made a cognac icebox pie with a graham cracker crust and started his famous key lime chicken basted in rum, but then he began to drink those cocktails with the neighbors, Bill and “Dot.” We all sat on the small front porch, while the others evaluated each passing number. “She buys her polka-dot schmattes at F.A.O. Schwarz.” “That one told me she’s got an inner beauty, but she could die with the secret.” “Here’s Edwina—she lost her husband to that slut over on Tuna,” naming a boardwalk in the next community, the far classier Pines, where most of the renters were still heterosexuals.

On and on they went, dishing every passerby. My host, drunk and belligerent by now, told me that the usual thing was for a guest to bring a quart of J&B scotch for the weekend. Shamefaced, I scuttled down to the liquor store and rushed back the requisite tribute.

The burned chicken was served at midnight, but we were all too smashed to do anything except toy with the cinders. We went dancing at the disco, where by local law every group of men had to include at least one woman. At last I escaped to the Meat Rack, that stretch of scrub pines and sassafras bushes that lay between the ocean and the bay.

I was so sad about losing Sean that I felt my life was over. In the mirror, we’d looked into our reflections as though we were contemplating an allegory whose symbolism had been lost but that was still replete with meaning, a serenade on the grass that may speak of sacred and profane love or of the Platonic love of wisdom or of Meleager’s love of Atalanta—but love in any case, some strong form of love.

In the dunes I felt sacralized by suffering. If as a child I’d known my whole long life was going to be so painful, I’d never have consented to go on leading it. At each step I had looked forward to more freedom. Paul had told me someday that I’d have too much freedom, and he was right. At least, I had too much free time. I had wanted to have fun with other gay men and to make my own money. Now I’d done that and I’d made my body beautiful, or so people told me; but I loved Sean and he wasn’t even part of my life anymore. My suffering had humbled me, and his had extracted something vital out of me. I worked out every evening at the gym, wishing I could start a conversation with another man, but I lacked the confidence or necessary hope. I snatched up every issue of the
Post
, which was running a series on love, on how to give it and receive it, and I read every word.

Sean seemed like a sickness I’d contracted, a sickness
such as malaria that you never get over and that gives you a spell of chills during the least expected moments. Because I had always doubted the authenticity of my feelings, I was shocked at the virulence of my love. Now I could only wander around the world, charismatic with suffering, handing myself over to whoever would have me, just as a Buddhist monk must eat whatever is placed in his begging bowl, even if it is meat, even poisoned meat (the very dish that had killed the Buddha). In the pines under the moon, listening to the surf—which was invisible, since it was on the other side of the dunes, crashing slowly and voluminously—I felt the shock of each wave in the ground under my moccasins and moved, a mendicant, eating whatever was given me. I ate all the men and didn’t mind or even really notice. I cried while I sucked one cock because it was bent to one side, just as Sean’s had been.

I came back to the city and my sad serenity vanished. At night I’d be about to drift off to sleep when I’d sit straight up, gasping for air. The magazine I worked for published an editorial on homosexuality for no particular reason. It denounced the “chic new trend toward treating homosexuality as though it were a
different
way rather than a
lesser
way.” The essay deplored homosexuals’ “glibly self-justifying references to the ancients.” It actually said, “We must blush for fifth-century Athens.” In conclusion, the essay read: “Let’s face the sour music: homosexuality is not a sophisticated or naughty aberration but a pathetic malady. We must make certain that in this era of drugs, free sex, and sloppy liberal rhetoric the Homintern, that conspiracy of bitter inverts who already have a stranglehold over the theater, fashion, and fiction, does not pervert the lives of decent people by glamorizing vice, neutering the female body, and making the fine old art of being a mature man or woman look dull—or as
they
would say, campy.”

When I cried in group therapy about Sean, about the helplessness I felt now, Simon said, “I wanna hear about de goils.”

A rage I couldn’t control boiled up inside me. The other men in the group had to pull me off Simon. I knocked his chair over and was sitting on him, choking him with both hands and shouting, over and over, “Don’t you
ever
, don’t you
ever
—” but I didn’t know how to finish the sentence.

I’d always regarded my sister as the norm. She had managed to marry, have children, settle in the suburbs and lead a respectable life. I saw her only occasionally when I was home for the holidays, and then she’d shyly press her three children forward. One Christmas Eve she and I stayed awake all night trying to sort out the parts of a tricycle to be assembled according to instructions written in English by a Japanese. I never talked to her about my real feelings or my real life, but I assumed I knew everything about hers.

Then she announced that she wanted to visit me in New York. She’d be coming without her husband but with the neighbor lady, Peg. Since by now I was making a decent living, I bought a new sofa bed for them.

My sister was in love with Peg. Awkward, bespectacled, ashamed, my sister gazed at the handsome Peg with adoration and recounted to me by the hour the sad saga of Peg’s life (brutal parents, elderly husband, delinquent children, unfulfilled artistic ambitions). It was obvious to me that Peg didn’t love my sister but enjoyed all the attention, something her husband wasn’t providing.

The two women never stopped drinking. First thing in the morning they’d stir up a batch of bloody marys, declaring that they were on vacation and determined to whoop it up. I discovered that my sister no longer thought I was a weirdo
but someone who’d had the courage to lead a free life. She seemed strangely gratified that I found Peg beautiful—my sister apparently was as obsessed with physical beauty as I. I think she also was hoping that somehow, mysteriously, things would work out between Peg and her in my presence.

I was shocked. I called Maria and said, “I had closed the books on my sister. She was the mother of three and the PTA member. Do you think she’s really a lesbian? Or is she just copying me?”

Maria laughed. “Didn’t you tell me she was always getting crushes on other girls? She never dated men and she married the first guy who asked her.”

My sister and Maria spent a long boozy evening in New York together after Peg flew home early. “Your sister is a riot,” Maria reported. “She is so extraordinarily frank—frank to the point of shocking even jaded old me. But she has no sense whatsoever of her rights as a woman. She’s terribly confused. She says the worst things about herself, thinking she’s being honest. She hates her husband, she never stops drinking and she’s absolutely desperate about Peg, but funny at the same time. It sounds like the suburbs are a lesbian hotbed. Tomorrow night we’re going to a dyke bar; your sister has already bought boots and trousers.”

Another night my sister made me accompany her to a black-and-tan lesbian dance place where a lesbian band was playing. There we were, me in a coat and tie, she in her suburban pleated gray skirt and shoulder-strap bag (we’d been to the theater), trying to get past the bouncer, although we looked like a provincial husband and wife who’d strayed to the wrong door. “But we’re gay!” we kept protesting, laughing. “We look square but we’re a hundred percent gay.” Then I added, “This is my sister and she’s trying to come out and she’s afraid to come in here alone.” That did the trick.

I’d never felt so close to my sister before. I was no
longer the younger brother but the older mentor, despite my misgivings. We sat in a corner, studied the dancers, and, hypnotized, watched a standing woman comb her seated girlfriend’s hair with an Afro pick, slowly, hair by hair. The face was as rigid as a Benin bronze and the hair was caught in a lavender and gold crosslight. I asked my sister how she could give up the security of marriage.

“There’s nothing secure about suffering,” she said. “Dick is frustrated and wounded. He wants to have sex all the time; I never knew people could be so horny, and I can’t bear for him to touch me. I sit near the window for hours hoping to catch a glimpse of Peg. I invent excuses for going over there. I’m sort of the ringleader for the whole neighborhood, all the women admire me; but I create activities just to involve Peg and have another excuse for being with her. The kids—I love my kids, but they make me nervous, and I suppose I sometimes snap at them because I think that without them I could leave Dick.”

I feared my sister would suffer for years to come. Although her coming out meant that I’d lost my sole hostage to normality, at the same time her homosexuality exonerated me. There was something—genetic or psychological—in our family that had made us both gay. I asked her if she’d told our father. I wanted her to share my culpability in his eyes. But she wept and pleaded with me not to give her away. I understood that just as I was married to our mother, she was married to our father.

Maria would stop off in Chicago now to see my mother and sister on her way home to Iowa. When I was growing up, my mother had had a horror of evenings out with the girls and had frequently said, with a smile, “I like
men.”
But now, without ever renouncing that theoretical preference, she grew closer and closer to Maria. And my sister, bewildered by the tough lesbian world she saw at the bars (she and Maria went
back to the Volley Ball in Chicago), found in Maria someone she could emulate.

I did not travel.

I didn’t experience the melancholy of tramp steamers or of mornings waking up cold in tents.

I stayed on in New York.

I went out a lot and I had new adventures, but I never forgot Sean. At last he wrote me that he’d found a lumberjack for a lover and they’d opened a dude ranch in Arizona. He said I’d been “too gay” for him. I lived too much in the “ghetto.” But I hadn’t caused his breakdown. His suffering had been due to money pressures, intellectual self-doubt, and the “usual” coming-out anxieties. What he liked about his lumberjack, he said, was that no one would ever guess he was gay, not in a million years.

A million years passed.

Lou called me one day. “Wanna turn a trick? I’ve got a double for us. Two Johns from Akron in a midtown hotel room.”

He gave me the address and I joined him.

Lou had been sober for the last few months. Ava had left him, not because of the boys, but because of the drugs and booze. He’d passed out in the corridor of his building. Neighbors (he didn’t know which) had dragged him into his apartment and left an Alcoholics Anonymous leaflet on his chest. He joined that day. His sponsor in A.A., an eighty-year-old crime novelist, told him that she thought shrinks were for shit. She said it was obvious to her that despite whatever psychological problems might have triggered his drinking (such as growing up in a totally alcoholic family), the disease was now self-perpetuating and created the problems it pretended to solve. When Lou told her that he was afraid sobriety would
make him a square, she suggested he add a new vice to his life, one irrelevant to drink, but totally unacceptable.

Lou had turned to prostitution. Although he was now earning over a hundred thousand dollars a year in advertising and was in his late thirties, he could still look like a dumb teenage drifter. After a full day of pitching a campaign, he’d change into a T-shirt and jeans right out of the dryer and a corny cowboy hat of the sort never seen west of Jersey. Then he’d stand, skinny and forlorn on Third Avenue and Fifty-first, and be picked up by married men in cars.

I met him at the hotel just off Times Square. Our customers were already drunk and playing a tape of Beethoven’s Fifth they’d doctored with trippy insertions of Joni Mitchell’s talkative ballads. Lou and I knew who Joni Mitchell was, but we pretended we’d never heard of Beethoven. Our clients winked at each other over our heads.

I had to put on a leather harness, stick a swan feather up my John’s ass, and call him “Pretty Peacock” as he strutted proudly about, cocking his head from side to side like a bird while wanking off in an all-too-human way. Fifty bucks for me and seventy for Lou who, after all, had organized the party.

Afterward Lou and I drifted down toward the Village. We didn’t despise our Johns. In fact, I was flattered that I’d been able to sell it at my advanced age (I was twenty-nine). I felt for now at last as though I were one of those tough guys I’d admired at Riis Park and here at the Stonewall.

The night was hot. We gay guys had taken over all of Christopher Street; even the shops were gay. Although the bars were owned by the Mafia, we somehow thought of them as ours. Just as this street, this one street in a city of ten thousand streets, felt like ours.

Of course, stories of police violence still circulated.

In the Stonewall the dance floor had been taken over by Latins. I had a friend, Hector Ramirez, a kindergarten teacher who, because he lived with his parents in the Bronx, borrowed my apartment every afternoon after school to rehearse new dance steps with another Latin twenty-two-year-old, similarly mustached and dressed in carefully ironed beige cotton shirts over guinea T-shirts and highwaisted pleated pants held up by a thin black crocodile belt. They were here tonight, twirling out of a tight clench, hips on small pistons, faces illegibly cool. Another friend, the death machine, came up to me and rested his size-twelve black hands on my shoulders and stared into my eyes with a mad gleam: “… is dead.”