The Beautiful Room Is Empty (6 page)

“Sex?”

“Do you like being screwed—we call that being browned, and the person is a brownie queen.” When I looked embarrassed he politely turned philosophical. “That’s more European, of course. It’s your Continental gentlemen who like to brown each other. We Americans are better known for giving blow jobs. Are you a suck queen?”

The pink velvet felt as rough as wool under my legs. “Can I ask a dumb question? Do you actually blow?”

“You suck, silly.” Tex turned away to hide his laughter, but his skinny back started quaking and then he was sobbing into his hands the way my Texas grandmother did, a big country woman who’d weep with merriment. I smiled in mild resentment at the wonderful joke I’d become.

“You suck, silly, but”—he wiped away his tears—“ooh-ee, I needed that!” Suddenly serious on a downbeat of breath: “But gently, not like a Hoover. The main thing is plenty of spit. The juicier you make it, the better they like it.” He straightened his tie fractionally and flicked a glance at
the street. “Will you listen to me, teaching you, and you just jailbait, how to service peter, and me not even a chickenhawk. That’s what we call the young stuff—chicken. Honey, I’ll have to give you a demonstration one of these days; I can’t
believe
how
naive
you are.” He sang out the rhyme and gave the impression he was as pleased by his own worldliness as by my innocence. “Me, I was never naive. Your mother was a born slut. That’s the name of my fragrance.” He dipped his wrist beneath my nose: “Born Slut. Like it?” Then he edged away from his extravagance. “Shouldn’t corrupt you too soon. You know the expression, ‘Today’s trade is tomorrow’s competition’?”

It took quite a bit of explaining for me to grasp the thinking behind that one.
Trade
turned out to mean a heterosexual man willing to let a homosexual blow him. But the idea was that a “piece of trade” didn’t remain straight (that is, desirable) for long and soon was corrupted and turned into one more useless “nelly.”

“But can’t two nellies go to bed with each other?” I asked.

“Miss Thing,” Tex hissed, indignant. “And do what? Bump pussies?”

I shrank back from this image—then laughed, feeling suddenly too big for my clothes, compromised. Did Tex think I was trade, attractive for an instant, like highly perishable fruit that’s edible only for a day before going off? It seemed a tragic situation, because whoever succumbed to homosexual desire became immediately undesirable.

“But I really don’t think about sex too much,” I said. “I’ll do whatever the … other person wants to do.” I often said “other person” to avoid mentioning that person’s sex.

“Yeah, but what kind of other person?” Tex asked.

“Someone older,” I said dreamily, ashamed of having a fantasy, though entranced by it. “Someone rich and handsome
who’ll take care of me, pay for my boarding school, free me from my parents.”

“Be real—the rich ones only go for each other. If you were rich and handsome, wouldn’t you look for another one just like you?”

Until now, I’d considered wealth a latent capacity realized only in giving itself away, but now I saw that it was a closed club. I recognized Tex was right, since I could find plenty of evidence for his view among my father’s friends. Hadn’t my father said to me only last summer, as I started attending my first debutante parties, “I’m not saying you should marry for money. Just make sure the girls you go out with are all rich.”

Two days after this talk with Tex, on a Friday evening, I told my mother I was going to a sock hop at the Y, but I headed right for Tex’s shop. The elevated train lurched past squalid apartments, and I could look right into a room where an old woman sat hunched under blankets trying to keep warm, beak sunk into feather ruff. Down there, kids played in a garbage-littered backyard, and through another window I saw a man in a torn undershirt eating directly out of a refrigerator, his silhouetted hand lifting the milk bottle to his lips. I looked at every man, on the train or in these lit cubicles, and asked myself if I could marry him. Could I live with him forever?

Now I know myself. Now I know “forever” is a word that excites me, that just the word
marry
(not marriage itself) is a stimulant and I’m afraid of wounding others or trapping myself. But then? Then, in the winter I’d see a couple, man and woman, out walking in the snow, both of them hooded, torn plumes of vapor streaming from their mouths, or in summer, in the blue electric flash struck by the El, I’d snap a mental photo of those two people on the fire escape, beers in hand, he bare-chested, she in shorts, both
pale as moths, and my spirit would hover over them, restless, half jealous, trying him on for size, now her, not finding a good fit.

That evening there was no hint of disaster at the bookshop. Morris, his lashes suitably brown, not black, was seated behind the cash register, ringing up sale after sale. Despite his shyness, Tex was circulating among the customers in a dim parody of a Southern belle. The polite young male announcer on the FM station was reading long sentences with a venom in their bite and a rattle in their tail. Then he announced he’d just finished the first part of tonight’s story, “The Beast in the Jungle.” Tex silenced him and put on a record of Callas’s mad scenes. I myself preferred the radio and the idea that other listeners liked Henry James.

At one point, Tex whispered to me that the man in the corner owned several quality bookshops in New York and, though he was married, might make a nice date for me.

“But if he’s married …?”

Tex said, “My pet, he’s a New Yorker. They’re all bisexual, at least a man of his class. He’s here alone without his wife, you’re here, not an uncomely ephebe. If you’re subtle about it, he might let you demonstrate the difference between sucking and blowing.” A crazy Texas laugh, so at odds with his modulated tone, wildcatted up out of him till he capped it over by slapping himself and saying in mild admonishment, “Miss Me.” And he slid toward a potential customer and said professorially, “The Kierkegaard boom seems to be continuing, doesn’t it? Sartre’s influence, no doubt.”

I had an image of a vast city in which people ate breakfast when it was still dark out, drove to work in patient files under raw red skies, peeled off boots in fluorescent-lit offices, at home after work practiced the Hammond organ or dozed, joked about their “spare tire” and patted it fondly—a whole gray world in which I was biding my time, stupid with
longing and fear. But here, in Tex’s shop, something dangerous was glowing as bright as the waste gas flaring day and night off exhaust stacks above the factories in Gary, Indiana. I felt exhilarated by the presence of so many sophisticated adults: the woman in a black turtleneck examining
Either/Or;
Morris playing efficient behind the cash register and conspicuously effacing himself like a glamourpuss actress in a nun film; Tex tapping his cigarette in a Ricard ashtray, his fear of bankruptcy temporarily pushed aside; and this successful New York heterosexual who might tolerate me in his bed.

Tex introduced us. The man’s first name was Lester and the last something Russian that ended in “iak.” He wore horn-rims that he kept taking off as he spoke or examined a book, as though they served no function other than rhetorical. He wore a shaggy coat as a metonym for the hair I felt certain must cover his entire body. He had the bulging forehead, shaggy brows, and strong jaw of Beethoven in the hand-size, chalky busts that my childhood piano teacher, Herr Pogner, doled out to students as prizes.

And now Tex had proposed this New York Beethoven as a prize for me, someone I’d be allowed to service later as he reclined on the anonymous hotel bed, his thoughts winging back to the East Coast a full day before his heavier body. Surely this man had no need of me. Surely Beethoven was entirely self-reliant.

At that time I had a horrible brush cut my father had chosen for me, neither long enough to comb nor short enough to be marine-sexy, and I wore not ivy-league horn-rims but thick black glasses that girls said made me look “intellectual,” a dubious compliment in the 1950s. Although Tex had assured me only the other day that New Yorkers prized intelligence, I wasn’t sure mine could be counted on. It didn’t feel like a thing in our very thinglike world, a world where identity
began with the choice of massive automobile (my mother was a “gay divorcee” as could be seen from her powder-blue Buick convertible with its upholstery outlined in red piping; my father was “no-comment” rich in his midnight-blue Cadillac).

I asked the man what he thought of the Kierkegaard boom. He mouthed the word
boom
and picked up another book. I was left standing there.

But then, despite or maybe because of the rebuff, it became more and more important to me that he be aware of me, realize that I was “feeling gay tonight.” I kept standing next to him, like a horse whose bridle has been dropped. I picked up a book and turned the pages without seeing them. I inched closer to him and let my shoulder brush his. He stood there taking it, until suddenly he looked up, frowned, put the book back, and moved away.

For the next hour I kept inching close to Lester while maintaining a space between our shoulders or stationing myself in the next aisle face-to-face with him over bookshelves. If he caught my glittering eye he’d smile the pained smile reserved for possibly crazy people. I guess Lester must have been waiting for Tex to close shop.

When I desired someone, especially a stranger, I poured myself into him (“Don’t stare,” my mother would tell me). Not that I found Lester so handsome; it was just that he was a chance, some sort of chance.

My face burned and my hands were cold. I was terrified the other people, the normal people, in the bookstore would detect my desire, that it was steaming off me like a bad smell. Worse, Tex stole up behind me and rested his hand on my shoulder. I blushed. We were two men touching! Real men (athletes, soldiers, workers) could touch each other with impunity. They even flaunted those pats on the ass and playful punches. But the rest of us must keep our voices
subdued, hands soldered to our sides lest a gleam of desire or a shriek or lisp or limp wrist betray us. That staring of mine, the complete absorption in another man, would incriminate me yet, I felt certain.

Finally Tex closed the store at midnight, and he and Lester and I walked down windy Rush Street. When we came to the corner of Rush and Clark, Lester said to me, offhandedly, “Do you want to come up to my room for a moment? I’m staying here in the Ambassador East.”

“No, thank you,” I said. We shook hands and he and Tex made plans to have lunch the next day. Then he was gone.

“What got into you, chile?” Tex asked gently. “Lose your nerve?”

“Oh, Tex,” I said, “I don’t know him. He doesn’t really want me. He likes girls. Can’t I go home with you, Tex?”

“Hon, I’m bushed,” he said, but he smiled with weary kindness at me.

“Just for a few minutes,” I said.

We went up to his modest hotel room, devoid of personal touches aside from a half-empty bottle of bourbon and, pinned to the lampshade, a photo of the cop, a beefy guy with ears that stuck out.

Tex’s body, pale and hairless, looked much younger than his face, which was large and endowed with too much humor and mobility to go with such a featureless torso. I worried about what he was going to spring on me, but he kissed me and massaged my shoulders and back with surprisingly strong hands, then he explained step-by-step what we were about to do. Always the good student, I responded competently, never guessing I was meant to feel any pleasure.

The minute I came, a wave of sickening guilt rushed over me. The hotel room looked depressing. I noticed the stain on Tex’s underpants and the hole in his stocking. Down the hall someone was coughing. Tex’s obsession with the
policeman had reduced him to this. Compared to my father’s solid if cheerless fortune, Tex’s poverty was too great an expense of spirit,

I pecked him on the cheek, barely able to conceal my shame and disapproval. He yawned. I hurried down the cold street, my mouth sour from Tex’s cigarettes, my cock and ass glowing, my heart sinking, sunk. I swore to myself I’d never, never sleep with another man. Defiance against my mother, no doubt, had propelled me into Tex’s bed. It was her fault that I was “acting out” on my homosexual impulses (my psychiatrist, Dr. O’Reilly, had explained it all to me).

As the elevated train clattered back to Evanston and rewound the film I’d seen coming down, glimpses into slum apartments, these pitiful cuttings from the domestic life I’d been taught to admire but could never like, flickered past, educational and tragic.

THREE

        Soon after I entered the University of Michigan, I joined my father’s fraternity, Alpha Tau, simply to please him. Friends of mine who complained about the “lack of communication” with their fathers always amazed me, since it never occurred to me to hope for or even want from mine an exchange of confidences. He lectured me about the impersonal things that interested him—stocks and bonds, insurance policies, politics, civil engineering principles—and I provided him with a simulacrum of the son he wanted: I joined his club; in the summers I escorted debutantes to balls as he wanted me to; and I wore the clothes he chose.