Skinned Alive (35 page)
Authors: Edmund White
I woke to the sound of shouts in the hall. Oh, no! I’d given Pablo not my room number, 610, but that of Libertad Lamarque, 612. I could hear her angry denunciations in Spanish and Pablo’s timid murmurs. At last, she slammed her door shut and I opened mine. I hissed for him to come in. He pushed past me, I shut the door, and he whispered curses in Spanish against me. He sat on the edge of the bed, a mountain that had become a volcano. I knelt on the floor before him and looked up with meek eyes, pleading for forgiveness.
I was appalled by the mistake in room numbers. In my fantasies love was easy, a costume drama, a blessed state that required neither skill nor aptitude but was conferred—well, on
me
, simply because I wanted it so much and because, even if I wasn’t exactly worthy of it, I would become so once love elected me. Now my hideous error showed me that I wasn’t above mishaps and that a condition of cinematic bliss wasn’t automatic.
Pablo undressed. He didn’t kiss me. He pulled my underpants down, spit on his wide, stubby cock, and pushed it up my ass. He didn’t hold me in his arms. My ass hurt like hell. I wondered if I’d get blood or shit on the sheets. He was lying on top of me, pushing my face and chest into the mattress. He plunged in and out. It felt like I was going to shit and I hoped I would be able to hold it in. I was afraid I’d smell and repulse him. He smelled of old sweat. His fat belly felt cold as it pressed against my back. He breathed a bit harder, then abruptly stopped his movements. He pulled out and stood up. He must have ejaculated. It was in me now. He headed for the bathroom, switched on the harsh light, washed his penis
in the bowl, and dried it off with one of the two small white towels that the maid brought every day. He had to stand on tiptoe to wash his cock properly in the bowl.
I sat on the edge of the bed and put my underpants back on. The Indian dressed and put one finger to his lips as he pulled open the door and stuck his head out to see if all was clear. Then he was gone.
A couple of years later, when my dad found out I was gay, he said, “It’s all your mother’s fault, I bet. When did it first happen?” He was obsessed with such technicalities.
“I was with
you
, Daddy,” I said, triumphant. “It was in Acapulco that time, with the Indian who played the piano in the Club de Pesca.”
A year later, after he’d made another trip with Kay to Acapulco, he told me he’d asked a few questions and learned that the pianist had been caught molesting two young boys in the hotel and had been shot dead by the kids’ father, a rich Mexican from Mexico City. I never knew whether the story was true or just a cautionary tale dreamed up by Daddy. Not that he ever had much imagination.
Recently I was in Mexico City to interview Maria Felix, an old Mexican movie star. She kept me waiting a full twenty-four hours while she washed her hair (as she explained). I wandered around the city, still in ruins from a recent earthquake. The beautiful town of two million had grown into a filthy urban sprawl of slums where twenty-four million people now lived and milled around and starved.
I returned to my hotel. My room was on the fifteenth floor of a shoddy tower. I had an overwhelming desire—no, not a desire, a compulsion—to jump from the balcony. It was the closest I ever came to suicide. I sealed the glass doors and drew the curtains, but still I could feel the pull. I left the
room, convinced that I’d jump if I stayed there another moment.
I walked and walked, and I cried as I went, my body streaked by passing headlights. I felt that we’d been idiots back then, Dad and Kay and I, but we’d been full of hope and we’d come to a beautiful Art Deco hotel, the Palacio Nacional, and we’d admired the castle in Chapultepec Park and the fashionable people strolling up and down the Reforma. We’d been driving in Daddy’s big Cadillac, Kay was outfitted in her wonderfully tailored Hattie Carnegie suit, with the lapel watch Daddy had given her dangling from the braided white and yellow gold brooch studded with lapis lazuli.
Now they were both dead, and the city was dirty and crumbling, and the man I was travelling with was sero-positive, and so was I. Mexico’s hopes seemed as dashed as mine, and all the goofy innocence of that first thrilling trip abroad had died, my boyhood hopes for love and romance faded, just as the blue in Kay’s lapis had lost its intensity year after year, until it ended up as white and small as a blind eye.
Edmund White was born in Cincinnati in 1940. He has taught literature and creative writing at Yale, Johns Hopkins, New York University, and Columbia; was a full professor of English at Brown; and served as executive director of the New York Institute for the Humanities. In 1983 he received a Guggenheim Fellowship and the Award for Literature from the National Academy of Arts and Letters. In 1993 he was made a Chevalier de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres, and was awarded the National Book Critics Circle Award and the Lambda Literary Award for
Genet: A Biography
. He teaches at Princeton University and lives in New York City.
Fiction
The Married Man
The Farewell Symphony
Skinned Alive
The Beautiful Room Is Empty
The Darker Proof: Stories from a Crisis
(with Adam Mars-Jones)
Caracole
A Boy’s Own Story
Nocturnes for the King of Naples
Forgetting Elena
Nonfiction
Our Paris: Sketches from Memory
(with Hubert Sorin)
The Burning Library
Genet: A Biography
The Joy of Gay Sex
(with Dr. Charles Silverstein)
States of Desire: Travels in Gay America
Marcel Proust
E
DMUND
W
HITE
THE BEAUTIFUL ROOM IS EMPTY
When the narrator of White’s poised yet scalding autobiographical novel first embarks on his sexual odyssey, it is the 1950s, and America is “a big gray country of families on drowsy holiday.” That country has no room for a scholarly teenager with guilty but insatiable stirrings toward other men. Yet even as he launches himself into the arena of homosexual eros, White’s protagonist is also finding his way into the larger world. Moving from a Midwestern college to the Stonewall Tavern on the night of the first gay uprising—and populated by eloquent queens, butch poseurs, and a fearfully incompetent shrink—
The Beautiful Room is Empty
conflates the acts of coming out and coming of age.
Fiction/Literature/978-0-679-75540-1
THE FAREWELL SYMPHONY
In
The Farewell Symphony
, Edmund White creates a novel of opulent sensuality and manifold sorrows that is at once the story of a writer’s education and an elegy for the gay world that flourished between Stonewall and the present. White’s narrator is that world’s survivor and its eulogist. As he marks the six-month anniversary of his lover’s death from AIDS, he leads the reader back on a thirty-year journey of memory and desire. From the 1960s to the 1990s, from Parisian salons to the dunes of Fire Island, and from evenings of brilliant conversation to nights of unfettered sex in the basement clubs of the West Village,
The Farewell Symphony
commemorates lust and friendship, the beautiful dead and their prematurely aged mourners.
Fiction/Literature/978-0-679-75476-3
THE BURNING LIBRARY
Twenty-five years of Edmund White’s nonfiction writings are collected in this volume of exhilarating wit, acuity, and candor—a book that is at once a living record of the author’s intellectual development and a chronicle of gay politics, sexuality, literature, and culture from Stonewall to the age of AIDS.
The Burning Library
includes such groundbreaking essays as “The Gay Philosopher,” “Sexual Culture,” “Out of the Closet, on to the Bookshelf,” and “The Personal Is Political: Queer Fiction and Criticism”—works that redefine sexuality, identity, and friendship in the light of gay experience and desire. Alongside them are brilliantly subversive appreciations of cultural icons as diverse as Truman Capote and Cormac McCarthy, Robert Mapplethorpe and the singer formerly known as Prince. The resulting volume confirms White’s reputation as a thinker of formidable intelligence and prophetic audacity.
Gay Studies/Essays/978-0-679-75474-9
CARACOLE
In French
caracole
means “prancing”; in English, “caper.” Both words perfectly describe this high-spirited erotic adventure. In
Caracole
, White invents an entire world where country gentry languish in decaying mansions and foppish intellectuals exchange lovers and gossip in an occupied city that resembles both Paris under the Nazis and 1980s New York. To that city comes Gabriel, an awkward boy from the provinces whose social naïveté and sexual ardor make him endlessly attractive to a variety of patrons and paramours.
Fiction/Literature/978-0-679-76416-8
FORGETTING ELENA
Forgetting Elena
takes place on a privileged island community where manners are
everything
. Or so it seems to White’s excruciatingly self-conscious young narrator, who desperately wants to be accepted in this world where everything from one’s bathroom habits to the composition of “spontaneous” poetry is subject to rigid conventions. But no sooner has he begun to intuit the islands’s Byzantine codes than the mysterious and charismatic Elena is urging him to transgress them, with results that are at once shocking and wickedly funny.
Fiction/Literature/978-0-679-75573-9
GENET
Bastard, thief, prostitute, jailbird, Jean Genet was one of French literature’s sacred monsters. In works from
Our Lady of the Flowers
to
The Screens
, he created scandalous personal mythology while savaging the conventions of his society. His career was a series of calculated shocks marked by feuds, rootlessness, and the embrace of unpopular causes and outcast peoples. Now this most enigmatic of writers has found his ideal biographer in novelist Edmund White, whose eloquent and often poignant chronicle does justice to the unruly narrative of Genet’s life even as it maps the various worlds in which he lived and the perverse landscape of his imagination.
Biography/978-0-679-75479-4
THE MARRIED MAN
Austin Smith is an American furniture scholar living in Paris. He is pushing fifty, loveless, drifting. One day at the gym he meets Julien: French, an architect, much younger, and married. Against every expectation, this chance acquaintance matures into a relationship of uncommon intensity. In the beginning, the lovers’ only impediments are the easily surmountable and comic clashes of culture, age, and temperament. Before long, however, the past begins to catch up with them. With increasing desperation, in a quest to save health and happiness, they move from the shuttered squares of Venice to sun-drenched Key West, to Montreal in the snow and Providence in the rain. But it is amid the bleak, baking sands of the Sahara that their love is pushed to its ultimate crisis.
Fiction/Literature/978-0-679-78144-8
SKINNED ALIVE
In
Skinned Alive
, Edmund White measures the distance between an expatriate American and the Frenchman who tutors him in table manners and “hard” sex; the gulf that separates a man dying of AIDS from his uncomprehending Texas relatives; and the inequality between a young playwright and the coquettish actor who is the object of his adoration. Beautifully written, uncannily observant, and by turns funny, erotic, and heartbreaking, these nine stories are brilliant shards of sensibility and experience, fashioned by one of the finest writers of our time.
Fiction/Literature/978-0-679-75475-6
VINTAGE INTERNATIONAL
Available at your local bookstore, or visit
www.randomhouse.com
Copyright © 1995 by Edmund White
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by Vintage Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York. Originally published in Great Britain in hardcover by Chatto & Windus, London, in 1995. First published in the United States in slightly different form in hardcover by Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., New York, in 1995.
Some of the stories in this work were originally published in the following: “Running on Empty,” “An Oracle,” and “Palace Days” in
A Darker Proof;
“Reprise” in
Grand Street;
and “Skinned Alive” in
Granta.
“Cinnamon Skin” originally appeared in
The New Yorker.
“Cinnamon Skin” appears in
Boys Like Us: Writers Tell Their Coming-Out Stories.
The author gratefully acknowledges the editorial assistance of Patrick Merla in preparing the manuscript.
The Library of Congress has cataloged the Knopf edition as follows:
White, Edmund, [
date
]
Skinned alive : stories / Edmund White.
p. cm.
eISBN: 978-0-307-76452-2
I. Title.
PS3573.H463S58 1995
813’.54—dc20 95-2665
Author photograph © Jerry Bauer
Random House Web address:
http://www.randomhouse.com/
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