A Boy's Own Story

by Edmund White

  The downtown of the city Dad lived in was small, no larger than a few dozen blocks. Every morning my stepmother drove me into town from our house, the fake Norman castle that stood high and white on a hill above the steaming river valley; we’d go down into town – a rapid descent of several steep plunges into the creeping traffic, the dream dissolves of black faces, the smell of hot franks filtered through the car’s air-conditioned interior, the muted cries of newspaper vendors speaking their own incomprehensible language, the somber look of sooted facades edging forward to squeeze out the light. Downtown excited me: so many people, some of them just possibly an invitation to adventure or escape.

  As a little boy I’d thought of our house (the old Tudor one, not this new Norman castle) as the place God had meant us to own, but now I knew in a vague way that its seclusion and ease had been artificial and that it had strenuously excluded the city at the same time we depended on the city for food, money, comfort, help, even pleasure. The black maids were the representatives of the city I’d grown up among. I’d never wanted anything from them – nothing except their love. To win it, or at least to ward off their silent, sighing resentment, I’d learned how to make my own bed and cook my own breakfast. But nothing I could do seemed to make up to them for the terrible loss they’d endured.

  In my father’s office I worked an Addressograph machine (then something of a novelty) with Alice, a woman of forty who, like a restless sleeper tangled in sheets, tossed about all day in her fantasies. She was a chubby but pert woman who wore pearls to cover the pale line across her neck, the scar from some sort of surgical intervention. It was a very thin line, but she could never trust her disguise and ran to the mirror in the ladies’ room six or seven times a day to reevaluate the effect.

  The rest of her energy went into elaborating her fantasies. There was a man on the bus every morning who always stationed himself opposite her and arrogantly undressed her with his dark eyes. Upstairs from her apartment another man lurked, growling with desire, his ear pressed to the floor as he listened through an inverted glass for the glissando of a silk slip she might be stepping out of. “Should I put another lock on my door?” she’d ask. Later she’d ask with wide-eyed sweetness, “Should I invite him down for a cup of coffee?” I advised her not to; he might be dangerous. The voraciousness of her need for men made me act younger than usual; around her I took refuge in being a boy, not a man. Her speculations would cause her to sigh, drink water and return to the mirror. My stepmother said she considered this woman to be a “ninny.” My family and their friends almost never characterized people we actually knew, certainly not dismissively. I felt a gleeful shame in thinking of my colleague as a “ninny” – sometimes I’d laugh out loud when the word popped into my head. I found it both exciting and alarming to feel superior to a grown-up.

  Something about our work stimulated thoughts of sex in us. Our tasks (feeding envelopes into a trough, stamping them with addresses, stuffing them with brochures, later sealing them and running them through the postage meter) required just enough attention to prevent connected conversation but not so much as to absorb us. We were left with amoeboid desires that split or merged as we stacked and folded, as we tossed and turned. “When he looks at me,” Alice said, “I know he wants to hurt me.” As she said that, her sweet, chubby face looked as though it was emerging out of a cloud.

  Once I read about a woman patient in psychoanalysis who referred to her essential identity as her “prettiness”; my companion – gray-eyed, her wrists braceleted in firm, healthy fat, hair swept up into a brioche pierced by the fork of a comb, her expression confused and sweet as she floated free of the cloud – she surrounded and kept safe her own “prettiness” as though it were a passive, intelligent child and she the mother, dazed by the sweeping lights of the world.

  She was both afraid and serene – afraid of being noticed and more afraid of being ignored, thrillingly afraid of the sounds outside her bedroom window, but also serene in her conviction that this whole bewildering opera was being staged in order to penetrate the fire and get to her “prettiness.” She really was pretty – perhaps I haven’t made that clear: a sad blur of a smile, soft gray eyes, a defenseless availability. She was also crafty, or maybe willfully blind, in the way she concealed from herself her own sexual ambitions.

  Becoming my father’s employee clarified my relationship with him. It placed him at an exact distance from me that could be measured by money. The divorce agreement had spelled out what he owed my mother, my sister and me, but even so, whenever my mother put us kids on the train to go visit him (one weekend out of every month and for long periods every summer), she invariably told us, “Be nice to your father or he’ll cut us off.” And later, when my sister was graduated from college, he presented her with a “life bill,” the itemized expenses he’d incurred in raising her over twenty-one years, a huge sum that was intended to discourage her from thoughtlessly spawning children of her own.

  Since Dad slept all day, he seldom put in an appearance at the office before closing time, when he’d arrive fresh and rested, smelling of witch hazel, and scatter reluctant smiles and nods to the assembly as he made his way through us and stepped up to his own desk in a large room walled off from us by soundproof glass. “My, what a fine man your father is, a real gentleman,” my colleague would sigh. “And to think your stepmother met him when she was his secretary – some women have all the luck.” We sat in rows with our backs to him; he played the role of the conscience, above and behind us, a force that troubled us as we filed out soon after his arrival at the end of the workday. Had we stayed late enough? Done enough?

  My stepmother usually kept my father company until midnight. Then she and I would drive back to the country and go to bed. Sometimes my father followed us in his own car and continued his desk work at home. Or sometimes he’d stay downtown till dawn. “Late at night – that’s when he goes out to meet other women,” I once overheard my real mother tell my sister. “He was never faithful. There was always another woman, the whole twenty-two years we were married. He takes them to those little fleabag hotels downtown. I know.” This hint of mystery about a man so cold and methodical fascinated me – as though he, the rounded brown geode, if only cracked open, would nip at the sky with inter-locking crystal teeth, the quartz teeth of passion.

  Before the midnight drive back home I was sometimes permitted to go out to dinner by myself. Sometimes I also took in a movie (I remember going to one that promised to be actual views of the “orgies at Berchtesgaden,” but it turned out to be just Eva Braun’s home movies, the Fuhrer conferring warm smiles on pets and children). A man who smelled of Vitalis sat beside me and squeezed my thigh with his hand. I had my own spending money and my own free time.

  I hypothesized a lover who’d take me away. He’d climb the fir tree outside my window, step into my room and gather me into his arms. What he said or looked like remained indistinct, just a cherishing wraith enveloping me, whose face glowed more and more brightly. His delay in coming went on so long that soon I’d passed from anticipation to nostalgia. One night I sat at my window and stared at the moon, toasting it with a champagne glass filled with grape juice. I knew the moon’s cold, immense light was falling on him as well, far away and just as lonely in a distant room. I expected him to be able to divine my existence and my need, to intuit that in this darkened room in this country house a fourteen-year-old was waiting for him.

  Sometimes now when I pass dozing suburban houses I wonder behind which window a boy waits for me.

  After a while I realized I wouldn’t meet him till years later; I wrote him a sonnet that began, “Because I loved you before I knew you . . .” The idea, I think, was that I’d never quarrel with him, nor ever rate his devotion cheap; I had had to wait too long. I’d waited so long I was almost angry, certainly vengeful.

  My father’s house was a somber place. The styleless polished furniture was piled high and the pantry supplies were laid in; in the fullness of brea
kfront drawers, gold flatware and silver tea things remained for six months at a time in mauve flannel bags that could not ward off a tarnish bred out of the very air. No one talked much. There was little laughter, except when my stepmother was on the phone with one of her social friends. Although my father hated most people, he had wanted my stepmother to take her place in society, and she had. She’d become at once proper and frivolous, innocent and amusing, high-spirited and reserved – the combination of wacky girl and prim matron her world so admired.

  I learned my part less well. I feared the sons of her friends and made shadows among the debs. I played the piano without ever improving; to practice would have meant an acceptance of more delay, whereas I wanted instant success, the throb of plumed fans in the dark audience, the glare off diamonded necks and ears in the curve of loges. What I had instead was the ache of waiting and the fear I wasn’t worthy. Before dressing I’d stand naked before the closet mirror and wonder if my body was worthy. I can still picture that pale skin stretched over ribs, the thin, hairless arms and sturdier legs, the puzzled, searching face – and the slow lapping of disgust and longing, disgust and longing. The disgust was hot, penetrating – nobody would want me because I was a sissy and had a mole between my shoulder blades. The longing was cooler, less substantial, more the spray off a wave than the wave itself. Perhaps the eyes were engaging, there was something about the smile. If not lovable as a boy, then maybe as a girl; I wrapped the towel into a turban on my head. Or perhaps need itself was charming, or could be. Maybe my need could make me as appealing as Alice, the woman who worked the Addressograph machine with me.

  I was always reading and often writing but both were passionately abstract activities. Early on, I had recognized that books pictured another life, one quite foreign to mine, in which people circled one another warily and with exquisite courtesy until an individual or a couple erupted and flew out of the salon, spangling the night with fire. I had somehow stumbled on Ibsen and that’s how he struck me: oblique social chatter followed by a heroic death in a snowslide or on the steeple of a church (I wondered how these scenes could be staged). Oddly enough, the “realism” of the last century seemed to me tinglingly farfetched: vows, betrayals, flights, fights, sacrifices, suicides. I saw literature as a fantasy, no less absorbing for all its irrelevance – a parallel life, as dreams shadow waking but never intersect it.

  I thought that to write of my own experiences would require a translation out of the crude patois of actual slow suffering – mean, scattered thoughts and transfusion-slow boredom – into the tidy couplets of brisk, beautiful sentiment, a way of at once elevating and lending momentum to what I felt. At the same time I was drawn to . . . What if I could write about my life exactly as it was? What if I could show it in all its density and tedium and its concealed passion, never divined or expressed, the dull brown geode that eats at itself with quartz teeth?

  The library downtown had been built as an opera house in the last century. Even in grade school I had haunted the library, which was in the same block as my father’s office. The library looked up like a rheumy eye at a pitched skylight over which pigeons whirled, their bodies a shuddering gray haze until one bird settled and its pacing black feet became as precise as cuneiform. The light seeped down through the stacks that were arranged in a horseshoe of tiers: the former family balcony, the dress circle, the boxes, on down to the orchestra, still gently raked but now cleared of stalls and furnished with massive oak card files and oak reading tables where unshaved old men read newspapers under gooseneck lamps and rear-ranged rags in paper sacks. The original stage had been demolished, but cleats on the wall showed where ropes had once been secured.

  The railings around the various balconies still described crude arabesques in bronze gone green, but the old floors of the balconies had been replaced by rectangular slabs of smoked glass that emitted pale emerald gleams along polished, beveled edges. Walking on this glass gave me vertigo, but once I started reading I’d slump to the cold, translucent blocks and drift on ice floes into dense clouds. The smell of yellowing paper engulfed me. An unglued page slid out of a volume and a corner broke off, shattered – I was destroying public property! Downstairs someone harangued the librarian. Shadowy throngs of invisible operagoers coalesced and sat forward in their see-through finery to look and listen. I was reading the bilingual libretto of La Bohème. The alternating columns of incomprehensible Italian, which I could skip, made the pages speed by, as did the couple’s farewell in the snow, the ecstatic reconciliation, poor little Mimi’s prolonged dying. I glanced up and saw a pair of shoes cross the glass above, silently accompanied by the paling and darkening circle of the rubber end of a cane. The great eye of the library was blurred by tears.

  Across the street the father of a friend of mine ran a bookstore. As I entered it, I was almost knocked down by two men coming out. One of them touched my shoulder and drew me aside. He had a three days’ growth of beard on his cheeks, shiny wet canines, a rumpled raincoat of a fashionable cut that clung to his hips, and he was saying, “Don’t just rush by without saying hello.”

  Here he was at last, but now I knew for sure I wasn’t worthy – I was ugly with my sissy ways and the mole he’d find between my shoulder blades. “Do I know you?” I asked. I felt I did, as if we’d traveled for a month in a train compartment knee to knee night after night via the thirty installments of a serial but plotless though highly emotional dream. I smiled, embarrassed by the way I looked.

  “Sure you know me.” He laughed and his friend, I think, smiled. “No, honestly, what’s your name?”

  I told him.

  He repeated it, smile suppressed, as I’d seen men on the make condescend to women they were sizing up. “We just blew into town,” he said. “I hope you can make us feel at home.” He put an arm around my waist and I shrank back; the sidewalks were crowded with people staring at us curiously. His fingers fit neatly into the space between my pelvis and the lowest rib, a space that welcomed him, that had been cast from the mold of his hand. I kept thinking, these two guys want my money, but how they planned to get it remained vague. And I was alarmed they’d been able to tell at a glance that I was the very one who would respond to their advances so readily. I was so pleased the handsome stranger had chosen me; because he was from out of town he had higher, different standards. He thought I was like him, and perhaps I was, or soon would be. Now that a raffish man – younger and more handsome than I’d imagined, but also dirtier and more condescending – had materialized before me, I wasn’t at all sure what I should do: my reveries hadn’t been that detailed. Nor had I anticipated meeting someone so crosshatched with ambiguity, a dandy who hadn’t bathed, a penniless seducer, someone upon whose face passion and cruelty had cast a grille of shadows. I was alarmed; I ended up by keeping my address secret (midnight robbery) but agreeing to meet him at the pool in the amusement park the next day at noon (an appointment I didn’t keep, though I felt the hour come and go like a king in disguise turned away at the peasant’s door).

  The books in the bookstore shimmered before my eyes as I worked through a pile of them with their brightly colored paper jackets bearing photographs of pensive, well-coiffed women and middle-aged men in Irish knit sweaters with pipes and profiles. Because I knew these books were by living writers I looked down on them; my head was still ringing with the full bravura performance of history in the library-opera house. Those old books either had never owned or had lost their wrappers; the likenesses of their unpictured authors had been re-created within the brown, brittle pages. But these living writers – ah! life struck me as an enfeeblement, a proof of dimmed vitality when compared to the energetic composure of the dead whose busts, all carved beards and sightless, protuberant eyes, I imagined filling the empty niches above the opera doors under a portico, which was now home to sleeping bums and stray cats but once the splendid approach across diamonds of black-and-white-marble pavement to black-and-gilt doors opening on the brilliant assembly, the fans and d
iamonds and the magic fire circling the sleeping woman.

  At home I heard the muted strains of discordant music. One night my stepmother, hard and purposeful, drove back downtown unexpectedly to my father’s office after midnight. Still later I could hear her shouting in her wing of the house; I hid behind a door and listened to my father’s patient, explaining drone. The next morning Alice, my colleague, broke down, wept, locked herself in the ladies’ room. When she came out, her eyes, usually so lovely and unfocused, narrowed with spite and pain as she muttered a stream of filth about my stepmother and my father (he’d tried to lure her to one of those fleabag hotels). On the following morning I learned she’d been let go, though by that time I knew how to get the endless mailings out on my own. She’d been let go – into what?

  That man’s embrace around the waist set me spinning like a dancer across the darkened stage of the city; my turns led me to Fountain Square, the center. After nightfall the downtown was nearly empty. A cab might cruise by. One high office window might glow. The restaurants had closed by eight, but a bar door could swing open to impose on me the silhouette of a man. Shabby city of black stone whitened by starlings, poor earthly progeny of that mystic metal dove poised on the outstretched wrist of the goddess of the fountain.

  Men from across the river sat around the low granite rim of the basin – at least, I guessed they were hillbillies from their accents, a missing tooth, greased-back hair, their way of spitting, of holding a Camel cupped between the thumb and third finger, of walking with a hard, loud, stiff-legged tread across the paved park as though they hoped to ring sparks off the stone. Others sat singly along the metal fence that enclosed the park, an island around which traffic flowed. They perched on the steel rail, legs wide apart, bodies licked by headlights, and looked down, into the slowly circling cars.