A Boy's Own Story (28 page)

Anxiety swept through me. Like most of the other students I refused to wear an overcoat even on the coldest days. Now I was trembling as I hugged myself and hurried down the brick walkway toward the music building. My teeth were chattering by the time I ducked in the door.

There was Mr. Beattie picking out chords on the piano. No one else was around. "Hi," he said. He stood and gave me his limp hand, a courtesy that puzzled me. No other master routinely shook hands with students. I felt shame rise to my face. I looked at the clock: it was three-fifteen.

He asked me if I played the piano and I said just a bit. He surrendered the instrument to me. I played a recital piece from long ago, something simple by Brahms my father used to like.

"Hey, Mr. Beattie," I said, "Chuck tells me some famous jazz guy's coming to visit you this weekend."

"Bugs Tice," he said. He was standing in the incurve of the grand piano's embrace, one hand pressing down on the polished black lid. "He's staying in the parents' suite here at school. You'll have to hear us jam—he's the greatest on the horn."

Somehow I was picking up the sound of sex. I was always on the alert for it, I studied boys as they came out of one another's dorm rooms, I lounged on other guys' beds during free time, always in expectation of a held glance, a missed beat, but I never heard a single hint. Now I was hearing something—tentative to be sure, but something real.

"These jazz guys?" I said as I struck the final chord.

"Yes?"

"Some of them are oddballs, right? No offense, Mr. Beattie. I mean, the jazz world's pretty progressive, right?"

"Yeah. We say hip."

"Is this Bugs hip?"

"How do you mean, exactly?"

I smiled. The clock hands refused to move.

"No, how do you mean?" Beattie repeated. He was also smiling.

"Well, I was just wondering why you were putting him up in the parents' suite instead of at your own house with your wife and kids."

Mr. Beattie's eyes widened rhetorically; he wanted me to see them widening. "Boy," he said, shaking his head, "you're wild." He covered the next beat by miming playing a saxophone. His fingers ran up and down imaginary keys and his cheeks swelled. He closed his eyes and rocked back on his heels.

"Seriously," I said, breathless and exhilarated but only in my capacity as spectator; as a performer I was beautifully calm. "Chuck says that marijuana—"

"Sh-h-h!" Mr. Beattie hissed. "Don't go talking that shit. That's real bogue, man."

"Sorry," I said, "Mr. Beattie."

"So what did you want to know?" His smile had migrated back and now he was wailing one more long note on his imaginary sax.

"I just wanted to know if it's good for sex."

"Is it—? Well, yeah." He laughed. "Yeah. I had you pegged all wrong. I thought you were the Little Lord Fauntleroy type, but you're hip. I like the way you just truck right in." He mimed driving a truck. He took a swerve, then pressed down on the brake, glided to a halt, switched off the key, pulled it out, twirled it once and pocketed it. "Just as neat and simple as you please." Very deliberate, now: "Yeah, kid, it's great for sex. Next question."

I played a C-major scale. "Are you going to make me do all the work in this conversation?"

"Possibly." He grabbed his crotch, then looked down at his white hand, the white of cooked ham, gave it an extra shake and, as though satisfied with his test, smiled. "You're a good kid," he said, releasing himself.

I could hear the football team shouting as the guys entered the athletics building next door; that must be the thunder of their cleats on the stone floor just inside the double doors. "Say you and Bugs are listening to music or something and you're all alone in the parents' suite and nobody's around, because it is real isolated after all, and say you smoke some—"

"We get high. So go on."

"You both get high and..." I closed the lid over the keys and rested my hands on the curved, reflecting wood. "Suppose he was the kind of guy who wanted to fool around. Who wanted to party." I used the word the black whore had used.

"I'm with you. You're amazing. Here we are in goddamn suburbia and I've got some fuckin' teenage hipster on my hands. Go on."

"Well, suppose he gets high and wants to blow you, nothing more, you don't have to do a thing, just dig the music, would you let him?"

Mr. Beattie was brushing his right hand back and forth over his crew cut. He seemed to be concentrating on this job, getting the feel of those soft quills against his palm. He wasn't looking at me. "That's a pretty funny question. Why do you ask? Is your question
academic
or what?"

"I'm asking," I said, "because I'd like to party with you."

He nodded quickly. "Got it. Groovy." He looked at the clock. "I could make it real good for us both. Come back at five-fifteen, five-thirty and it'll be dark and the fuckin' animals next door"—head jerk to indicate the athletics building— "will have cleared out by then. We'll be all alone down here and I'll put on some nice classical music and we'll blow some weed, I've got nice stuff, and we'll see, just see what happens. Okay?"

I who was always conscious of the formlessness of real life now saw it imitate art, though the meaning of this action, which was surely turning out to be tragic, escaped me. I had my appointment with the headmaster at four. At five-thirty, after I'd betrayed Mr. Beattie, I'd return to have sex with him. The next day he'd be fired. He'd learn of my denunciation and he wouldn't be able to say anything against me. He wouldn't be able to discredit me by saying I was a practicing homosexual since we would have practiced homosexuality together. He'd be powerless. I would have gotten what I wanted, gotten away with it and gotten rid of him: the trapdoor beside the bed. At last I could seduce and betray an adult. This heterosexual hipster would be my momentary Verlaine.

I smiled at him, nodded encouragingly, even grabbed my own crotch in friendly imitation of his trademark gesture. Once I was outside I looked up at the gray and white clouds boiling and flowing over the tower beside the chapel, a brick reminiscence of the silo it had replaced (the whole estate had once been a farm). I hurried under a stone arch carved with the motto "A Life Without Beauty Is Only Half Lived." A shiny black head of a woman was poised in a niche above the arch. Though the sculptor had undoubtedly hoped she would appear ageless, in fact her hairdo was all too patently a style of the 1920s, giveaway finger waves.

But everything I observed was at the edge of consciousness, for I thought of myself as a sturdy cutter slicing through waves of cold air, as a tough, almost square vessel set on a straight course. Usually I'd sense I was permeable, insubstantial, at most a bank of moving air, a cold front, and only in conversation did I condense into a downpour of being. But now I was dense and potent. There were no eddies of empty time to swirl me off course, no horse latitudes of nothingness to becalm me.

The headmaster found my information too upsetting to accept readily and I observed his dithering with scorn. I was summoning him to battle, but he kept fussing over how he should wear his uniform. "Well, of course Mr. Beattie is not a full or even regular member of the Eton faculty," he said, as though that made any difference one way or another. He was performing all the tiresome operations of cleaning, fueling and lighting a pipe. "I suppose we'll have to report him to the Federal—would it be the Treasury Department? Is the Bureau of Narcotics a subdivision of the Treasury ?"

"I don't know," I said, by now just a boy again.

After the headmaster had covered every subsidiary issue, as though he were constitutionally drawn to the incidental, I brought him back to what was essential at least to me. "You must promise you won't talk to Mr. Beattie until after I've gone home for Christmas vacation," I said solemnly. "And then you must make sure he's out of here by the time I get back. I don't want to have to see him. That might be dangerous for me." I thought the headmaster owed me at the very least this protection in return for my having saved the school.

"Nonsense," he said, peeved, "I can't promise a thing." He looked longingly at the closed door as though he hoped someone would open it and end this eternal interview. "And are you quite sure you haven't become an addict yourself?" he asked. "Shall I have the Narcotics people bring you some of their interesting literature on addiction? I'm sure they have some splendid brochures, they should, our tax dollars, you know..." And he went on mumbling to himself until I was able to slip out.

No one was worthy of me.

I had twenty minutes to kill before my rendezvous with Beattie, an interval I resented, so habituated had I already become to the tight scheduling of the great man, the man of the world.

The headmaster, as it turned out, botched everything. He did bring in the narcs, who did give me a brochure about heroin; I was basalt with indignation. Mr. Beattie was fired, but he was allowed to hang around until well into the next semester. Since Beattie couldn't say we'd had sex, at a faculty meeting he accused me and DeQuincey of being lovers. Good old Quince stood by me, though he was badly shaken; the accusation had been just accurate enough to scare him. At last Beattie left us; I didn't see him again until three years later, when I was in college and he was playing drums in a two-bit band at a fraternity dance. His eyes locked with mine. I felt I should tell him how much I repented what I'd done to him.

I'd used and discarded him—just as my dad had mistreated Alice, the Addressograph operator.

Oh, there are lots of stories I could tell. Dr. O'Reilly, who of course turned out to be a speed freak, had a breakdown one day and had to be hauled off to a clinic for several years. My friend Howie, true to his prediction, died before he was twenty. I saw him when he was very ill in the hospital. He was yellow and bloated from nephritis. I had to hold a mirror for him while he trimmed his own hair: "Don't want to leave my last haircut to these hacks," he said gallantly, a trace of the old Nazi dandy having reemerged in extremity. At the funeral Howie's father turned out to be a young middle-level executive for a big corporation. The funeral was held at the McCabe Funeral Home (I pronounced it "macabre"). I was a pallbearer. There was a Hammond organ toothlessly mouthing hymns as though the music were bread soaked in milk. Our handsome, oafish chaplain gave the sermon. He'd never spoken for two seconds to Howie, who in any event had been a militant atheist. Oh, and the chaplain was found soon afterward in another master's wife's bed and he was not only dismissed from Eton but also defrocked. His brother found him a job leading ski tours of eager coeds to Switzerland, where he was last heard yodeling on his way to his death as he missed a turn and sailed off into a crevasse.

The college I went to was near Eton and I often visited the Scotts. One day I discovered Rachel laughing and sobbing. Finally overcome by curiosity, she'd broken open the casket where DeQuincey kept his pastoral letters from Father Burke. They were all love letters, hysterical avowals of pornographic desire, some of it clearly referring to actual nights of passion they'd spent together. "To think Burke kept urging me to stay with Quince," she said. "I was their cover." She kept sifting through the letters, and her horrible silent chuckle resumed. Tim, older now and in first grade, looked in, but when he saw his mother talking to herself he frowned and clattered up the stairs to his room.

As I left the headmaster's office that day I noticed the wind was now sharp with snow needles. Evening was coming on rapidly. It had been implicit in the dim day all along, just as the snow had been. In the gray light the snow could be felt but not seen; suddenly lamps along the walkway snapped on and their halos were grained by a million, million lights. The return to the music building wasn't lustful or fearful but ceremonial. I felt as though I were a dancer not up to his role but inspired by the expectation everywhere in the darkness around me. Or I felt like someone in history, a queen on her way to the scaffold determined to suppress her usual quips, to give the spectators the high deeds they wanted to see.

Mr. Beattie was stoned. His smile was unfocused and perpetual. He started telling me a long story I couldn't follow, something about something someone had once said to him somewhere, but then he noticed we'd drifted into the listening booth. He didn't turn on the light. The darkness was illumined by light reflected up through the windows off the snowdrifts outside. He put on a record. He sat in an armchair, lit another marijuana cigarette and blew smoke at the ceiling. When he offered me a drag I smiled with what I hoped passed for affection and shook my head. A moment later I was kneeling on the floor beside him. I opened his fly and pulled out his large and already erect penis. "Here," he said, "let me make it better for you," and he undid his belt and dropped his trousers to his knees. I'd been right; his thighs were very powerful. He took my right hand and guided it to his testicles in the loose, floppy bag. I gathered I was supposed to roll them around.

I can swear that not even one volt of desire passed through me. I did my job; I simulated excitement. But I was scandalized when Mr. Beattie asked me to lick the bright red head, to roll my tongue around the head of his penis. I'd forgotten that this act was not as purely symbolic for him as it was for me. I remembered that he considered all this to be pleasure, as Herod thought Salome's dance was fun until he heard what she wanted as a reward.

At last it was over. Mr. Beattie told me to go on up to the dining hall for supper. He'd follow me in a few moments. He didn't think we should be seen together, just in case.

Sometimes I think I seduced and betrayed Mr. Beattie because neither one action nor the other alone but the complete cycle allowed me to have sex with a man and then to disown him and it; this sequence was the ideal formulation of my impossible desire to love a man but not to be a homosexual. Sometimes I think I liked bringing pleasure to a heterosexual man (for after all I'd dreamed of being my father's lover) at the same time I was able to punish him for not loving me. My German teacher and Mr. Pouchet had not loved me. Tommy had not loved me. My dad had not loved me.