The Beautiful Room Is Empty (19 page)

The irrigationist’s office was in the Loop between two movie theaters and above a taffy-candy apple stand. Wearing a dirty white nylon uniform half-snapped up the back, he let us in through the smoked-glass door. He showed us through a dim room. We walked on dirty linoleum imbued with the smell of Lysol and cigarettes. Lou’s wobbly legs didn’t surprise the man. We went into a smaller room dominated by a raised surgical table and gleaming aluminum tubes coming out of a grotty tile wall over a sink.

Whining like a sleepy child, Lou undressed and crawled onto the table, his practiced rump rising automatically in the air. Pedantically I explained to the irrigationist that Lou’s peristaltic motion had stopped, that for some reason hospitals no longer possessed the necessary equipment, that—

“Sure, sure.” The man’s yellow-toothed chuckle and the familiarity with which he patted Lou’s butt tipped me off. Lou had been here before. The man extinguished his cigarette and set to work. Lou looked up at him with eyes swimming around a fixed point of longing. This man had—or could do—something Lou wanted. The man put on clear plastic gloves.

He lubricated the tip of a tube with KY and inserted it into Lou’s rectum. Lou arched his back, tilting his ass still higher. The miserable room, the weirdness of this transaction, the gurgling and flushing water, the burning lateness of the hour—all chilled me. I’d fallen off the edge of the world. My hero was a pervert, eyelids drooping shut from heroin, inner arm blue with bruises, and now he was cooing like a baby and had curled on his side and was staring up at his savior, his tormentor.

SIX

        Gerald, the doorman, had of course figured it all out. Every free moment he was studying the floor indicator above the elevator. Since there were only four apartments on each floor and he knew who was at home, by a simple process he’d deduced that I was coming down from my mother’s to Lou’s all the time.

When she returned from Munich, my mother told me she was worried because I had taken up with a friend ten years older, a notorious homosexual and drug addict whose family, though once nice, could by no means be considered nice now.

“Honey,” she said, looking at me from brown eyes as sweet as mine but far more intense, “what’s going to happen to you? All your fine gifts of mind will be destroyed, your reputation and character.”

I knew she was right, and I considered her small warm hand in mine to be an intolerable reproach. I jumped up from the couch and started pacing. “I know what I’m doing.”

“Don’t bite my head off,” she said, clouding over. “Anyhow, honey, I don’t think you do know. You’ve compromised
me, and I have to live in this building. Besides, you wasted the summer. You didn’t earn any money for school. You look pale and unhealthy; you didn’t even have good, wholesome fun with kids in your own age bracket.”

She was so short that when she settled back in her seat, her feet didn’t quite touch the floor. Although she was trying to generate calm (her head was lifted back to a noble angle suitable for framing), her face seemed to be filling up, turning darker with emotion. She was being flooded by it. “You’re a special person, a quality person. I don’t know why you have to throw yourself away on cheap people. We’ve never been cheap in our family. I work so hard, and your father, well, he may have horrible faults but he’s always been honorable. He’s observed the divorce agreement to the letter, you can’t take that away from him. But maybe we overestimated you; after all, we never had you properly tested, we don’t even know for sure you’re so bright.”

The minute the terrible possibility of my having merely normal intelligence presented itself, my mother’s bruise of a face took on a nasty expression. She lifted the tailored jacket of her suit away from her body and let it relax in new, more satisfied folds. “I don’t know where these urges in you come from—perhaps from your father’s mother’s side. My family is completely normal on both sides. My own father, bless his heart, had a real romance with his sweetheart, my mother, and my mother’s father sired twelve children, nothing wrong there, nothing homo there or—ha!” and she let out a cry of delight at the recollection, “no
morphrodites
, for that’s what they called homosexuals down South. No morphrodites in our bloodlines!” The merriness of the memory gave way as her smile faded to the seriousness of the eugenicist claim and implied moral lesson. Once again she picked here and there at the sticky fabric of her jacket. In her eyes,
clothes were an infallible sign of character; when listing people’s merits, she often cited their wardrobes. Perhaps she was fussing with her apparel by way of demonstrating her imperviousness to my moral contagion.

“You disgust me,” I shouted. She pointed her jaw out, it went white, and her mouth looked as stitched and definite as the seam on a baseball. “Don’t you realize I know I’m neurotic, that I’m a brilliant person saddled with a terrible disease, that I’m working day and night feverishly to cure myself, and that anything you can say against me I’ve already analyzed in depth with Dr. O’Reilly?”

For an instant I was terrified she’d ask me for an example of this wisdom; I couldn’t remember a thing. I felt that I was a fake, an amnesiac, improvising my life moment by moment, and that nothing stuck to me, least of all insight. Even the essays I had written at Eton looked completely unfamiliar to me now and revealed a general intelligence as well as quite particular information I’d since lost. Every night I was shorn of the experiences I’d gained during the day.

Over the summer I’d read nothing save a history of eighteenth-century philosophy, and even that had scarcely registered since my mind had always been boiling with Lou (where was he? when would he call me next?). But one thought that had sunk in was Hume’s oddly Buddhist notion that there is no self. We’re only one discrete state of consciousness succeeding another, and our so-called memories are just deceptions invented now … and now … and now.

In my case, amnesia, the wet sponge trailing the chalk marks, did away even with the serviceable illusion of continuity. I felt entirely in thrall to the present, which made my suffering all the more acute, since I could never put my pain in perspective except through humor; for me, clowning had taken the place of memory.

“We’re shelling out all this money to O’Reilly,” my mother was saying, “but you don’t seem to be getting any better. I blame your father. Every boy needs a male model.”

Indeed, I thought. I imagined Bobby Phalen, Lou’s favorite pinup, as
my
male model.

“I had to be both father and mother to you. But now what? Now you’re an adult and what’s done is done. You seem to be getting worse. You’re so nervous and, frankly, more and more effeminate. By the way, I’ve read of some interesting hormone treatments for your problem they’re experimenting with in England; they implant female hormones in your leg through a simple operation and—”

“Female?”

“Yes, because estrogens neutralize your sex drive altogether; they neuter you and soon you’re free to lead a normal life.” Her right hand made a small rounded motion in the air when she said the word
normal
. I could see the pure technology of the hormone pack appealed to her practical side.

“Don’t be ridiculous,” I said, but a sudden chill grasped me, exactly as though my lungs were being squeezed by cold hands. My mother went on to ask if I thought I should be put in a psychiatric hospital—and the hands squeezed tighter. It occurred to me that this woman, who was as familiar and shameful to me as my own body, could take it into her head to lock me up. After all, I wasn’t disobliging her in a mild, acceptable way, choosing chemistry rather than physics. No, to her I was a sort of criminal; I’d chosen crime, sex crime.

I wanted to be heterosexual, or so I told myself. As a budding writer, I knew I’d never be able to give a convincing account of marriage, birth, parental love, conjugal intimacy, the spicy anguish of adultery—none of the great occasions—until I’d rid myself of this malady which was so narrowing. O’Reilly had warned me that homosexuality would condemn
me to an embalmed adolescence, that I’d never grow out of a stale narcissism.

And yet something wild and free in me didn’t want to give in to them, the big baggy grown-ups. No, if I were perfectly honest (and I couldn’t be, I lacked the necessary confidence), I’d have to admit that there was a world run by women and feminized men (not effeminate but feminized men) that I wanted to escape, the world of mild suburban couples, his and her necks equally thick and creased, their white hair similarly cropped. The hard hot penis I grabbed for under the toilet-stall partition or the slow wink of a drag queen looking back at me over her ratty fox neckpiece just before she turned the corner—these glimpses piqued my craving for freedom, despite my yearning after respectability.

I felt I owed nothing to anyone. My only job was to dodge out of the crossfire. Homosexuality did not constitute a society, just a malady, although unlike many other maladies it was a shameful one—a venereal disease. Could one be loyal to syphilis?

And yet syphilis was not a desire one pursued; once contracted, it left nothing else to be done. But a homosexual could be condemned precisely because he persisted in
practicing
his vice. If I despised homosexuals, I distrusted everyone else. Of course heterosexuals had to be placated and amused. When I was with them, I memorized their reticences and enthusiasms, the subjects they would guffaw over and those they ignored, embarrassed. But I felt not at all attached to any other human being.

This distrust was confirmed when I returned to school by a series of arrests of homosexuals in the toilets. A professor of engineering, and the administrator in charge of “in-plant feeding” (the cafeteria), and four students were nabbed. Their names but not their pictures were published in
the town and school newspapers. I knew one of the students, Jeremy, a tall fat boy with red cheeks, redder lips, ears as neat and protuberant as the handles on a pre-Columbian jar, and a gross soprano voice which he’d suddenly unsheathe, dazzling and flexible as a saw in sunlight. He’d be in his stall, a clucking, roosting hen, and suddenly that falsetto, loud and upsetting, would flash forth.

“It was entrapment,” he told me. “There was a guy—I should have suspected something. His
shoes
, no queen would be caught dead in such clodhoppers, spoil her frock, her line, don’t you know. He showed me this big old thing hard, I mean it was
hard
, you can’t fake that, she was an excited
gal
, and then, don’t you know, the next thing somehow I felt myself being drawn against my will, and before you could say
wunderbar!
I was bending over this bratwurst when he opened his palm and there, Fräulein Ding,
there
—” and Jeremy drew a deep breath, raised his hand, pursed his lips like an overly animated children’s entertainer creating suspense “—
there
was a cop’s badge.”

“How horrible! What did you do?”

“At first I just drew myself up and thought, If I act like a perfect lady nothing truly untoward will happen to me. I lifted an eyebrow, threw my scarf around my neck, and turned to march out head high, but the next thing I knew he’d slapped this rather gauche ID bracelet around my wrist which cunningly enough was attached to a matching bracelet on
his
wrist. For a moment I thought we were going
steady”

Jeremy was given a seven-year suspended sentence, provided he reported every month to his parole officer and saw a state-appointed psychotherapist three times a week. He who’d always been so flamboyant, who could make us believe his shabby knitted scarf was a marabou boa, turned wren-brown, his big, fleshy body no longer a diva’s girth but now a heavy penance to be concealed. He stopped vocalizing in
the corridors, he cropped his hair (“I’ve entered my sensible lesbian period,” he solemnly explained), and he even started dutifully escorting a girl to the movies.

Even though I was terrified of being arrested, I couldn’t stop going to the toilets. Now when someone suspicious-looking came in, the toilets would flush in a chorus of panic and, just by standing there a second too long, the stranger could clear the house. When someone would dare to sink to his knees in the next stall I’d greedily suck him without hesitation. I’d plunge his cock as fast and as deep into me as possible.

I knew I had to leave Dr. O’Reilly. Annie Schroeder had dug a kitchen knife into her heart. She’d been hospitalized, released, and she’d stabbed herself a second time. Now she was in a maximum-security ward. O’Reilly himself was deteriorating quickly, more and more often falling asleep during my hours, forgetting my name, mumbling incomprehensibly. I knew I had to leave him, but even my body rebelled against such a rebellion. I fell sick with a high fever, then I danced one night at a fraternity party in a shoe so tight that three days later my left foot was abscessed and I had to be hospitalized. The foot became painfully swollen and had to be lanced. Afterward it was placed inside a sort of aluminum dog kennel that protected it from the touch of sheet and blanket.