by Edmund White
Judging from our sessions, he was always impotent, although it occurred to me that he wanted to please me but didn’t desire me and this lack of desire was the real reason he couldn’t get an erection. I didn’t mind. I even took a secret pleasure in the thought that the only stiff dick in the room was mine. I’d throw his legs back and hook them over my shoulders and fuck him with less performance anxiety and more genuine enjoyment than I’d ever known before. So little was at stake emotionally for me that I could relax enough to feel the sensations flowing through me. Sometimes after I’d come, while I was still in him, he’d jerk off modestly, hygienically, with a half-hard penis. If I had made the least grunt signaling impatience, I’m sure he would have waived his climax as an unnecessary luxury.
I felt a nice, simple affection for him, the sort of feeling a married man must have for an ugly mistress, one he keeps assuring is “the best pal a fellow ever had.” Our mutual friend told me that William was in love with me, but I didn’t want to hear too much about that. Usually I was the ironic, wounded, quick-to-forgive party (observant, mocking, grateful), a Merry Andrew of thoughts and half-thoughts, but with William I was the bluff, nice guy who just wants a hug and a squirt and who taps his partner woodenly on the back at parting and says, “See you sometime”—the very words my father would murmur, cigar clenched in his teeth, when he’d rush us at the last possible second to Union Station and put my sister and me on the train to go home to our mother.
One day I asked William if he’d told his lover we were fooling around. He blushed because I’d broken the unspoken etiquette of our relationship, the rule that we should never acknowledge what we were doing or the consequences it might have. He said, “Oh, well, you know, he and I have a New York marriage, sexless, companionable, flourishing.” He looked at me with his mild smile, his narrow head cocked to one side, and added, mildly, “Alas.”
A friend of mine had said, “Even if gays weren’t oppressed they’d still be unhappy since ninety-five percent are bottoms and only five percent tops,” or, as someone else put it, “Lot of hens around here and not enough roosters.” With William I enjoyed impersonating a cock because topping someone was the role everyone admired; in the old Mediterranean world the active partner wasn’t even considered to be gay. I knew, however, that I was a hen, though I’d not started out thinking that way at all. When I was a boy of twelve I’d convinced the neighbor boy that one guy could screw another (he could scarcely believe it, especially since I’d damaged my credibility by insisting that men always mounted women doggie-style, which Stuart knew for sure couldn’t be true).
One night when he stayed over I convinced Stuart I was right at least about the possibilities of the male anatomy and we took turns every afternoon thereafter cornholing each other. I can still remember the feel of the tops of his big cold feet against which I’d press my hot little soles when he’d lie on top of me. His skin smelled of acne medication and his retainer of grape jelly and peanut butter, which he always ate for lunch. His buttocks were nerveless and clammy, his chest flat and blue veined. In the Midwest of the 1950s before they had learned from television to deliver snappy, rueful one-liners about themselves, Americans were nearly comatose from lack of awareness, drugged on the simple fact of existing, of constituting the Ding an sich of Ohio in the summer heat. This unconsciousness even gave Stuart a dreamlike intensity for once I’d gotten him used to sex, every afternoon he’d sit beside me on the piano bench while I practiced and he’d stare at me with a half-grin suffusing his face, an expression that had a nearly geological pressure, as though it would continue until all the stone had compressed into a single diamond. I could see the dark spot on his grey trousers where his twelve-year-old desire was secreting its tincture, drop by drop.
When we ended up in my bedroom, as we inevitably did, there never was the slightest hint of romance or even friendliness. He wanted to stick it in me and I wanted to stick it in him and we’d each complain with grumpy humor about the “pain in the butt” that the other guy represented. “Aren’t you done yet?” he’d ask while I was screwing him. “Hold it!” I’d mutter, as he was shoving it in. “Take it out. Take it out, it hurts like hell, I think I’m going to poop.” It never occurred to us that anyone could enjoy being penetrated or that anyone could fuck with style or bring anal pleasure to his partner. Stuart would just lay his full weight on me, not even propping himself up on his elbows, breathe his peanut-butter breath on my cheek and rock his pelvis back and forth with almost no thrust until a sigh and a spurt would escape him.
His body was the pudding-soft, unexercised body of the teacher’s pet, the kid who never does anything more strenuous than reluctant jumping-jacks in gym class. He was still just a boy with knock knees and big elbows, legs skinny as stilts and huge feet, a rib cage that stood out in relief when he breathed in, a bellybutton that was an “inny” and collected lint. There wasn’t a hair on his pale body except the new, black, luxurious triangle planted so prominently below his flat little blue stomach. I was already sufficiently thoughtful—and therefore gay?—to fuck him first so that he wouldn’t come and then have to endure my exertions while resenting me. I preferred to make the sacrifice and be the no-longer-desiring passive victim who’d already come.
After we’d both ejaculated in the torpid Cincinnati heat, we’d get up and see a sweat-soaked, dark blue outline of a man on the pale blue bed cover, a blurred outline as though the man had moved during an X-ray.
I saw Stuart four years later at a party his parents were giving and though a whole crowd was reeling drunkenly up and down the stairs in a house that was normally dim and silent he dragged me into his room and locked the door and pulled his cock out of his fly. It had grown huge since I’d last seen it, not just long but wide, and with his geological smile he tried to make me sit on it. I whispered hoarsely and angrily, “Are you crazy!” No one could have been more conventional than Stuart, but now, unaccountably, he was fearless with lust and his usually stolid, silent house was alive with carnival excitement. That was the last time I ever saw him and I regretted that I held out on him. Now I hear he’s a grandfather. Would he pull it out now if I saw him in his downtown office? If I went there, where he manages the family business, would he lock the door, sprawl back in his desk chair and look at me with that old, unaffectionate, nearly unconscious desire?
But what struck me then was that there was no longer a question on the night of the party of our taking turns cornholing each other while the other waited impatiently. Now Stuart just assumed I was the one who’d sit on him. Of course he was right. I can still see him wearing a lazy, confident smile, so at odds with his usual bank-clerkly earnestness. Was he exhibiting the secret coquetry of the chief accountant? He was right in assuming I no longer cared about my cock, about getting my rocks off. His cock had become immensely wide and long and mine was still as small as when we’d met. Stuart didn’t reach for my crotch, as though he knew it meant nothing to anyone, least of all to me. He just gloried in his, as though he’d pulled me into a closet to show me his pet mink and we both stared at its caged lustrousness frozen and crazy in the beam of a flashlight.
KEVIN KEPT RECEIVING his dirty phone calls from “Jimmy” and eventually I grew used to closeting Kevin away with his invisible lover, even bringing him the necessary poppers from the fridge. When Kevin’s parents and grandmother came to visit us for a few days, he was soon enough wild with impatience. His granny was Welsh and sang in a choir back home. She was nearly deaf but always trotting about with a sense of purpose, even when she had nothing to do; she was like a wind-up toy that will scurry forward no matter where it’s set down, even on the edge of a very high table. One evening they were all sitting around our gloomy, underlit, underfurnished apartment singing a chorus from HMS Pinafore when the phone rang. I answered and called out, “Kevin, you can take it in my study.” I bustled off to fetch his poppers and rejoined our guests just in time to sing with them the last chorus of “For he is an Englishman.” Whe
n Kevin staggered in fifteen minutes later, grinning lopsidedly, he was perceptibly less tense.
Soon after Kevin’s parents left, “Jimmy” asked to meet him at the Eagle’s Nest at midnight. Jimmy said in detail what he was going to do with Kevin. “Of course I’ll never go,” Kevin said. “It’s one thing to serve a psychopath over the phone and another to be stripped and branded as dear Jimmy proposed tonight.”
“How would he recognize you, or you him?”
“Funny. I asked him the same question but he only grunted in reply. Do you think he knows me? Ghastly thought. Is he (groan) a Fan?”
I went out to the Candle and saw a guy at the bar who was tall and rumpled and wearing his keys on the right. I’d been to bed with several men who’d turned out to be masochists and often I’d visited a real fury on them, at least verbally, but I’d never had the nerve to present myself as a bona fide sadist at a bar where a masochist was clearly advertising his desires. I felt that whereas I might thrill a secret bottom who was expecting nothing more than “vanilla sex” (as we contemptuously called peaceful, reciprocal lovemaking), a self-declared masochist who was signaling in a public place for a master could only be disappointed by me.
Nevertheless the night was a cold, quiet, rainy weeknight in early March, no one could be expecting much excitement, there were only fifteen men in the bar, most of them friends chatting to each other. The real leathermen would be off at the Eagle’s Nest in West Chelsea, the very place Jimmy had named. I moved up behind my masochist and rubbed his ass, bought him a beer, soon had him up in my apartment. We smoked a joint sprayed with PCP. I had him undressed and was about to fuck him when he suddenly said, “You don’t know what you’re doing.”
He fucked me for hours until finally I gave up. Something coiled and watchful in me relaxed, blinked off. He who’d looked so rumpled and uneasy when he was playing a bottom now became a jackhammer of pure will. Did he envy the submissive men he brought so much pleasure to? Did he want to be a top topped by a still stronger top? Not that he had a muscled or well worked body. By our rigorous standards he was flabby although any normal person would have found him to be fit. But I didn’t think about what he looked like, only about what he was doing to me. He wouldn’t let me touch my own cock because he didn’t want me to come and no longer be cooperative. His whole body was permeated with sweat like an unglazed clay pot filled with water. The water was seeping through. His hair, blacker now that it was wet, clung to his forehead like a whiplash. His sweat dripped onto me, drop by drop. His eyes were closed, his mouth open. He smelled of cured black olives. For once I wasn’t worrying that my ass was too loose; in fact he was whispering, “Open it up. Give it to me.” I was dimly aware that Kevin had come home and I could hear the murmuring of a deep male voice, someone else’s. The man I was with was fucking me so hard, so constantly and for so long that finally Kevin whispered through the door that Daniella, our landlady, was in the hallway, irate because of the pounding noise. It was five in the morning. My bedroom was just above hers, apparently. Kevin said, “I told her that you were piling books but would stop now.”
I couldn’t bear for this man to be out of me even for a moment but I wriggled out from under him and led him into the living room, where he fucked me for another hour on the floor. Kevin had forbidden all curtains as old-ladyish. As the dawn twitched like the sphincter of a man who’s about to hit his climax, our neighbors across the way could have looked in had they not all been blind or feeble or asleep. Kevin’s guest left. I heard the bass murmur of his voice and the click of the front door. I was certain that their lovemaking had been romantic whereas ours had been bestial. Kevin’s beauty made him a member of a higher species, one that lived in an airy medium of flirtation, lingering kisses, murmured vows, whereas I was just nails clawing a back or a dirty butt lowering itself onto a lapping mouth. The daylight was now bright, high enough that it no longer cast long, canyon-like shadows. At last my partner came, his body doubled back like a bow that finally releases its long, straight arrow. I’d waited so long for his climax that now I couldn’t believe everything was over. My spine ached where it had been pounded, vertebra by vertebra, into the hardwood floor.
We sat on the couch—naked, dazed, stinking like horses—and I was still so stoned that I didn’t know if the guy’s cock was really huge or if I was incapable of judging size. We smoked cigarettes. Kevin came in, naked, childlike and friendly on drugs, and sat on the other side of the man. He smoked a cigarette, too, not inhaling but sipping at it like a schoolgirl. “You’ll never guess who that was,” he said. “My beau?”
“No, who?” I prompted.
“Well,” he said, politely explaining to our guest, “I’ve been getting dirty phone calls from a stranger named Jimmy. Tonight Jimmy wanted me to meet him at the Eagle’s Nest. No way, I thought, this guy sounds dangerous and crazy. But by chance I was with some friends and we ended up at the Eagle, where I saw Ross Stubbins, the famous theater director. I kept circling around him, grinning like an idiot, and finally he noticed me and I bagged him. I brought him home and as soon as we got in bed he started a dirty, violent rap and my hair stood on end and I said, ‘You’re Jimmy!’ but he just pressed his finger to his lips.”
“How terrifying!” I said, delighted.
“Not really. He’s a pussycat. He could barely get it up because he’d drunk so much vodka. After he came we talked about theater for hours.”
“How did he get your phone number?” my trick asked.
“Well, I’d made it with Stubbins’ lover, Maurice, a dancer. I gave Maurice my phone number and Stubbins found it and thought I was someone else, someone he’d met before on a heavy scene.”
“But he ended up with you after all,” I said. “What a weird coincidence.”
Finally at about ten in the morning our guest showered and dressed. At the front door he said, “Don’t you even want to see me again?”
And I said no. I found a small, inexplicable revenge in coolly rejecting the man who’d reduced me to a hungry hole; at the door social conventions were re-introduced, the formalities at customs even on the border of the Land of Dreams. I suppose I was so sated that I thought I’d never need to be fucked again. Although I spent hours every week looking for sex I had no interest in arranging for a regular supply of it from a steady. And I had said no in front of Kevin, almost as an offering on the altar of my love for him. All Kevin could say, when I told him the story of how my slave had become my master, was, “Well, of course, I saw the size of the meat.”
I craved love, sex, fame, money, food and drugs, and yet I never suspected I was addicted to these things because my specialty was hopeless love; sex I’d never institutionalized in my life except with William, my secretary; money and fame I wooed only very indirectly through my post-modernist metafiction, which already in the 1970s was a disappearing art form; I concocted elaborate French meals that were so demanding that the cost and effort of preparing them outweighed any pleasure in eating them; and I’d never bought drugs and didn’t even know a dealer. I had a puritanical horror of organized pleasure, routine lubricity, regular fêtes, and I would have agreed with that philosopher who said a habit always represents a failure.
The next day I sent Daniella a bouquet and a note: “So sorry about the noise I made last night, piling books. You’ll be pleased to hear ‘Books’ won’t be back.”
MY MOTHER was happy and healthy and back at work; she reported to me (with that candor about her intimate life that I took for granted but that my friends found so peculiar) that Randy, her lover, had treated her missing breast with wonderful tenderness. At fifty, he was fourteen years younger than she: “I was so worried and anxious that he’d reject me. You wouldn’t understand, dear, but men, normal men, are funny about things like that. They’re not tough like women—or like you. Aesthetics is so important to them. Maybe it’s because a breast takes them back to their infancy. Freud was undoubtedly right. Men need to be nourished. And then our age difference�
�. We think we’ve outgrown Freud what with the new thinking, the new emphasis on the physiological, I’m surprised that psychoanalysts are still in business, what can you be doing with a shrink, why don’t you just accept yourself as you are? I’d never let anyone tinker with my mind.”
This gust of strong-willed self-satisfaction gave way to gently ruminative self-satisfaction. “Randy just leaned over and kissed my scar—it’s horrible, I’ll have to show it to you, just for scientific interest—he leaned over and kissed it in the dark, he’d turned out the light, he’s so diplomatic like that, he lowered the strap of my nightgown and kissed the scar, I felt so vulnerable, you can’t imagine how a woman feels when she loses a breast, it’s as though she has been castrated, for you, for men, it would be the equivalent of castration, so I was feeling very vulnerable when he kissed me.” Mother liked Randy more than any of her earlier lovers, she said. “He’s the only one who ever liked to go grocery shopping with me. We just push our cart up and down the aisles without any rush and we choose what we need. We’re very cozy. And, honey, he always says the most beautiful prayers. Just today at dinner he said, ‘Oh, Lord, thank you for protecting us on the I-90, especially at that dangerous intersection where the traffic comes in from Gary’ Isn’t that beautiful? He’s such a feeling, religious man. He’s like my father. I don’t think Randy has any Irish blood, but he has that deep Irish soul like my father.” She remembered her original subject: “And honey, he was so sweet, he said when he was kissing my scar, ‘Hello, little missing boozy, my girl’s not complete any more but I don’t mind,’ isn’t that sweet? I cried, I tell you, I wept.”
I didn’t think what Randy had said was very gallant, much less sweet, but I didn’t say so. My mother spoke about the most delicate things in her own life with the irony-free manner, rough-and-ready vocabulary and clarion tones of a bad actress in a black-and-white film of the forties. My sister and I were always wincing. “Oh, Mother …” we’d complain.