A Boy's Own Story

by Edmund White

  His eyes, magnified by thick glasses, never met mine. When he spoke to me he scrutinized a point precisely a foot to the left of my head. His voice was so soft and low and expressionless that one might have ignored him had Marilyn not listened to him with such deference. Since everything she did was theatrical, “listening” also had to be pantomimed: she stood like a schoolgirl and her hands, pointing down, were pressed together in inverted prayer. Her mouth was pursed, her head lowered; at a certain moment in Fred’s mutterings her head would start to bob wildly and those strange tones of assent that can only be transcribed as “Mmnn” would issue forth from her throat on a high, surprised note and then on lower, affirming ones – even, finally, on a very low grunt that bore the unintentionally rude message “Of course. Everyone knows that. Get on with it.” None of this was subtle. It was really quite ridiculously overdone – or would have been had Marilyn been concerned at all with the impression she was making on other people. As it happened, she wanted only to conform to a role she was simultaneously writing and reciting.

  The exact dimensions of that role became clear only as the years went by. She saw herself, I was to learn, as the grisette in a nineteenth-century opera – as Mimi or Violetta or Manon. Like them she was impulsive, warm-hearted, immoral and pious. Like them she must remain eternally young – hence her flamboyant clothes and gestures and hectic displays of energy (the middle-aged imagine the young are energetic).

  Later, much later, when I was sixteen and eighteen and twenty, I’d meet her downtown where she worked at a museum and we’d go off in the middle of a dim winter afternoon to a deserted bar and drink manhattans (I remember because they were the first drinks I ever ordered). Another afternoon I attended a madrigal concert she sang in at the public library, something planned in conjunction with an exhibition of one page from the hand of that monster Gesualdo. There she was, breasts half-exposed and working, eyes turned inward, trembling upper lip rising on one side until it had suddenly been everted, her face painted an unlikely yellow and her hair dyed a brittle blue-black, her clothes still “youthful” but now so out of date that the few members of the audience under twenty-five would have had no idea what she was signifying. They might have thought that she was an émigrée wearing the national costume of Estonia and that these songs – these gliding transits, startling rhythms and suave, uncomfortable harmonies – were folk songs in need of a pitch pipe. One afternoon over manhattans I confessed to Marilyn I was gay and she told me she was, too, and that she and Fred had known all along that I would be, even when I was eleven.

  “And Fred? Was he gay?”

  “Oh yes. Didn’t you know? I thought we all knew about each other,” Marilyn said as she redrew her eyes in the compact mirror.

  “Well, I knew you both liked me and that I felt good with you, better than with most grown-ups.”

  “Then why did you stop coming by the shop? Waiter, another round.”

  “Because my mother told me I couldn’t see you anymore. The old ladies in our hotel told my mother that you and Fred were Communists and living in sin.”

  Marilyn laughed and laughed. “Of course the truth is we’re both Catholics and gay and never touched each other. Perhaps those ladies even knew the truth but – but” – shriek of laughter – “assumed that communism and living in sin, that those two things together equaled being gay.”

  I was wearing a Brooks Brothers sack suit of black and brown twill that ran on the diagonal and a soft felt fedora from Paris, and this getup, which seemed so stylish to me, cast our conversation into the light of an excited urbanity, as did the cocktails, no doubt. Elevated tracks ran outside above the bar, and whenever a train passed by, our table trembled under our elbows and the glasses, accidentally touching each other, registered the shock in a muted chime. The light in the bar was as murky as old water in an aquarium dimmed by storms of fish food beat up by lazy fins. I could peer out through it on to a sidewalk bright with mica chips and frost, the permanent glitter and the passing. A radio played a rumba.

  I asked her news of Fred, and Marilyn said she’d lost touch with him, that the last she had heard he was still living with an Indian tribe in the Yucatán, where he’d gone to write his stories. And I recalled that when I was thirteen I’d run into him at the public library after not seeing him for a year. But he was no longer contained in his blue vest and brown jacket with his hair tousled but cut – no, now he was a wild man, something strapped with hemp to his back, his hair and beard flowing red and gray over his shoulders, his calves wrapped up to the knees in orange and red rags, feet shod in boots with cleats, eyes still big and averted behind glasses now mended with tape and his hands much redder and bigger and flatter somehow, as though he’d hammered each finger flat. I didn’t recognize him, but he touched me on the shoulder; and when I looked up into those eyes peering a foot to one side of me and saw the acne scars above the sprouting whiskers and heard his dull, mechanical and very soft voice, the sound of a voice choking on its own phlegm – well, then I knew him but didn’t want to, so drastically transformed was he. If he’d had an iguana on his shoulder he couldn’t have been more exotic. He told me he’d been in Mexico for a few months and was heading back there soon, that he had no money but lived by doing odd jobs – that this precariousness was necessary to his art. Before, in the shop, his dull muttering and his magnified, frozen eyes had seemed pitiable signs of shyness, but such an interpretation had fitted him only in his scruffy bourgeois guise, had fitted the sound of the clanking radiator and the smell of reheated coffee. Now that he was released out of his confining shop and had turned himself into a gaudy fetish, into a hank of streaked hair and bright rags, now his gaze seemed paralyzed by grandeur and his voice remote only because it was the sound of divinity.

  As a little boy I’d recognized that my imaginary playmate, Tom, was free but only by virtue of enduring total isolation; now Fred (but was this huge, mumbling, godlike bum really Fred?), now this new Fred was telling me mendicancy was the price of making art.

  And what finally became of him and his stories? Was he absorbed one day into the Yucatán jungle? I’ve been told that in some Indian villages in Mexico homosexual men live in a separate compound where they take care of the tribe’s children; is Fred still living as some ancient nanny respectably obscured by pure white veils of beard and hair, his glasses long since broken and abandoned, his constant murmur unheard below the squeal of warm, naked toddlers who clamber over him as though he were nothing but a weathered garden god half-sunk into the creepers and vines, his notebook of handwritten stories open to the elements to scatter its pages as the leaves of a calendar in old movies fly away to indicate the passage of years, even decades?

  And Marilyn? The last time I saw her the color of her makeup had gone iodine, her lips had thinned, her hair had become a spiky black cap and her large, rolling eyes no longer seemed a coquette’s but those of a virgin martyr, protuberant, cast up, the whites wept clean, the lower lids sooty with despair. She told me that for the last two years she’d been living in a boardinghouse in a room next to that of a young violinist whom she loved and who loved her fraternally but, alas, not passionately. He was planning to become a Benedictine and she thought she’d follow him into Holy Orders. “This is the great love of my life – not a woman as always before but a beautiful young man who doesn’t want me. How ironic! We met through music. His beauty, his music, his indifference – don’t you see?”

  “Not exactly.”

  She smiled the hazardous, hard-won smile of the lover determined to have found a consolation: “He was sent to me to awaken in me an appetite only God can feed. I’ve been such a sinner – waiter, another round – but I never became coarse or jaded or thick-skinned. I was ready for God’s gift.” Her hair didn’t satisfy her. She studied it in her compact mirror, shifting the small round glass from side to side, top to bottom; a macula of light searched her face intensely and dissected it inch by inch, swerving here, hovering there, highlighting the with
ered cheek, the crepey neck, the hard, jutting chin. It moved where the glance of the contemptuous beloved would go. She propped the compact up between the oil and vinegar cruets and her fingertips touched her hair with wonderful delicacy as the reflection glowed steadily in her right eye and even seemed to travel surgically through it. At last she blinked and snapped the glass shut. “I still feel like a young girl, as though everything is about to happen. And don’t you see” – her dry, rough hand with the painted nails seized mine – “I am a sort of spiritual debutante.”

  In our imaginations the adults of our childhood remain extreme, essential – we might say radical since they are the roots that feed luxuriant later systems. Those first bohemians, for instance, stay operatic in memory even though were we to meet them today – well, what would we think, we who’ve elaborated our eccentricities with a patience, a professionalism they never knew?

  Soon after I first met Fred and Marilyn they decided I must learn German in order to read the novels of Hermann Hesse, at that time still largely untranslated. Hesse’s mix of suicide, mysticism and sexual ambiguity had launched them into a thrilling void; reading him, they said, was like being in an airplane above the breathable stratosphere. He wasn’t healthy. In fact, a smell of taint seeped off his pages. He wasn’t right or even wise, but they never stopped to check his words against what they knew to be true since they adored him precisely as an exit out of experience and an entrance into the magic theater of sensations wholly invented. In place of the torpor of everyday life Hesse called them to a disciplined quest – even if the Grail he offered was vaporous and poisoned.

  The teacher they’d selected for me was a part-time professor at the university. He lived in one room in a huge pile thrown up as faculty and graduate-student housing. He had a double bed that pulled down out of the wall; by day it hid behind two white doors with cut-glass doorknobs. When he greeted me for my first lesson I was overwhelmed by his size. He was six foot four and brawny and I looked up into chestnut hair sprouting from his nostrils; my hand was lost in his. He was at once formal and hearty and spoke with a strong German accent. Our lessons followed an exact system and began and ended at fixed times without interludes or chitchat. By the same token the professor bounded about in a shirt open to his navel, his sleeves rolled up above his massive biceps, and on his desk I saw a photograph of him in a swimsuit at the beach holding his girl friend aloft with just one hand. Like many athletes he found it impossible to sit still, and his grammatical points and pronunciation tips were underscored with a ceaseless tattoo. He slapped his knees. He rocked back and forth in his straight-backed chair. He shot his hand up in a menacing Sieg Heil – but only to reach back to scratch between his shoulder blades, a difficult feat for someone so muscle-bound. As I sat beside him (I almost said within him, so totally did he surround me) I became more and more feeble. He’d stride up and down the small room, kicking the baseboard of each wall when he reached it as if to protest the insult of such a small cage for such a mighty lion. Before I met him I could have imagined someone huge and stupid and taciturn; I could just as readily have pictured a brilliant tiny chatterbox, bald pate and soft curls fringing it, a midget dynamo who read everything and played the cello when depressed. But a giant with calluses on his palms at the base of each finger, someone who breathed in a conscious, voluntary way as I tentatively recited my lesson and who stood and folded a huge paw over his jaw before delivering a judgment about my performance – such a man was so new to me that he confused me, he thrilled me.

  One winter Friday afternoon at four he didn’t answer his door. Desperation seized me. I hadn’t realized how devoted to him I’d become. Our sessions didn’t call for devotion. I’d simply show up, obey his commands and sink into a desire to please him that could only have been called devotion. But things didn’t go that far, there wasn’t the absence necessary for adoration until that afternoon when he didn’t open his door. For some reason I was convinced that he was inside but in bed with his girlfriend, that lithe, tiny woman in the black swimsuit whom the Herr Professor had held so effortlessly aloft last summer, a simple smile on his face. He was in that bed which, when pulled down, no doubt filled his whole room and there he was heartily rolling on his tiny but acrobatically receptive partner. Soon enough it would be time to push the bed back behind its white doors, to gnaw on a sausage and quaff a beer and then, in his lordly way, open the door to his ridiculously young pupil. I didn’t knock very loudly because I didn’t want to break his concentration or rhythm; the only question was had I calibrated my knock so as to indicate my presence but not to annoy him?

  And yet – what if he wasn’t at home at all? What if he had forgotten our lesson? As long as I thought his closed door was barring me from those deep invasions of a fragile body, just so long was I content to stand in that shabby, windowless corridor. Waiting for my teacher was no burden to me (wasn’t Hesse himself teaching me the value of a patient apprenticeship?). But what made me frantic was the fear that no one was behind the door. No bed, no lazily smiling German face, no huge hand stroking a pale, engorged pelvis – nothing, an unlit room devoid of everything but a ticking clock and a refrigerator that groans and goes dead, groans and goes dead.

  And I was terrified someone would ask me what I was doing in the hall. A great deal of time had already gone by. People had begun to cook supper and the overheated corridor was filling with the smells of food. I had peeled off my coat, scarf and sweater. I sat on them and leaned against a wall. In the distance I could hear the elevator doors opening and closing. An old woman shouted into a telephone. Another woman was giving instructions to a child. This corridor was a sort of catch basin for the domesticity trickling down around me. The smells. The irritations. The complicated lives of absolutely everyone.

  My professor didn’t come that day. Of course he phoned the next with a reasonable excuse. Of course I should have anticipated just such a hitch and explanation, but my need, though usually held in check or released only on imaginary beings, could, if turned on someone real, devour him. I had worshipped my teacher, I’d even forgiven him for not loving me – but now I hated him. I dreamed of revenge. In the past I’d been protected from humiliating rejection because I so seldom asked anything of anyone. The gods were my company; the lilac in flower embraced me; books did all the talking but only when I permitted the monologue to begin. They were transparent companions whose intentions were never in doubt. Gods, flowers, words – why, I could see right through them! Nor did they waver into or out of focus or leave even an inch of the surround blank. Whereas people batted thoughts and feelings like badminton birdies at you, a whir that might take you by surprise, that you might not even see but that you were expected to return until the air began to go white, the gods made no such demands. They propped themselves up on gold elbows and lazily turned their wide, smiling faces down on you. When their glance locked with yours their eyebeams lit up. In an instant you were they, they you, gods mortal and mortals divine, the mutual regard a reflecting pool into which everything substantial would soon melt and flow.

  *

  When I was twelve, the year after I began my German classes, the boys I knew started playing a violent game called “Squirrel” (“Grab his nuts and run”). Guys who’d scarcely acknowledged me until now were suddenly thrashing, twisting muscles in my arms, their breath panting peanut butter right up into my face, my hands sliding over their silky skin just above the rough denim . . . and now his gleaming crotch buttons were pressing down on me as his knees bummed into my biceps and I put off shouting “Uncle” one more second in order to inhale once again the terrible smell of his sweat.

  Or the light was dying and piles of bumming leaves streaked the air with the smoky breath of the very earth. My hands were raw with cold, my nose was running. I was late for supper, my shirt was torn, but still I called him back again and again by shouting, “I’m not sorry. I just said that. I’m not sorry, I’m—”

  “Look, you little creep” – his voic
e was much lower, he was a year older, he came at me, really mad this time, I didn’t want his anger, just his body on top of me and his arms around me.

  Or Harold, the minister’s son – that small, athletic blond with a pompadour preserved in hair lotion and the black mole on his full, hairless cheek, that boy who strutted when he walked, preferred his own company to everyone else’s and who had a reputation among adults for being “considerate” that was directly contradicted by his cheerfully blind arrogance – he was someone with whom I could play Squirrel in the late afternoons after his trumpet practice (he shakes the silver flood of saliva out of the gold mouth and snaps open the black case to reveal its purple plush, worn down here to a slick, reflecting whiteness, roughed up there into a dark bruise, then he places the taut heroism of the instrument into that regal embrace and locks it shut).

  Even in the winter, as winds blowing up off the lake cast nets of snow over us and the sun pulsed feebly like the aura of a migraine that doesn’t develop, we lunged at each other, rolled in drifts, squirrels hungry for hard blue nuts in the frozen land. Suddenly fingers would be squirming and pulling, a wave of pain would shoot through me, his sapphire eye set in white faience would arc past and dip below the shadowy horizon of my nose, hot breaths would tear out of my lungs and cross his – at cross-purposes.