by Edmund White
Our mother told us she’d been popular as a girl, but she had grown up on a farm where families did everything together. How could I explain to her how much things had changed, that we kids scarcely admitted we had parents, that to us parents were as uninteresting as the rich in novels about backstairs life; they were large naïve personages who ask irrelevant questions from time to time and from whom the truth must always be kept. In particular the logical or at least consistent standards of adults, their admiration of money, of substance, of homely virtue, were valuable to us kids precisely as rules to flout, for our preferences in clothes, music, people were rigorously whimsical.
As long as I remained unpopular I belonged wholely to my mother. I might fight with her, insult her, sneer at her, ignore her, but I was still hers. She knew that. She even had a way of swaggering around me. There was a coarseness in the speculations she made about me to my face, the way an owner might talk about a horse in its stall. At times she insisted that I had a great future ahead of me, by which she meant a job and a salary, but just as often she’d look at me and ask, “Do you think you’re really bright?” Quick smile. “Of course you are. You’re very very bright.” Pause. “But I wonder. We think you are. But shouldn’t we have a second opinion? One that’s more objective?”
She subjected herself to the same doubts – I was so completely hers that I had to eat what she ate, even her self-hatred, as a fetus must live off its host’s blood. The great event of our household had been that my father had left us for someone else. Afterward, how could we like each other all that much, since we were all equally guilty of having driven him away? At least, we’d failed to keep him. Nor was our shared fate black as good ink or crisp as a crow’s wing on snow; we hadn’t been assigned clear, tragic roles we could play with any sort of despairing joy. Instead, we’d been shamed and we’d become vacant, neglected, shabby with neglect. I don’t mean to say that we exhibited interesting symptoms or made trouble for anyone. But we were shadows, like the dead after Orpheus passes them on his way through the Underworld, after this living man vanishes and the last sound of his music is lost to the incoming silence. All my life I’ve made friends and lost lovers and talked about these two activities as though they were very different, opposed; but in truth love is the direct and therefore hopeless method of calling Orpheus back, whereas friendship is the equally hopeless and irrelevant attempt to find warmth in other shades. Odd that in the story Orpheus is lonely, too.
*
Helen Paper had a wide, regal forehead, straight dark hair pulled back from her face, curiously narrow hips and strong, thin legs. She was famous for the great globes of her breasts, as evident as her smile and almost as easy to acknowledge and so heavy that her shoulders had become very strong. How her breasts hung naturally I had no way of knowing, since in her surgically sturdy brassiere her form had been idealized into – well, two uncannily symmetrical globes, at once proud, inviting and (by virtue of their symmetry) respectable.
But to describe her without mentioning her face would be absurd, since everyone was dazzled by those fine blue eyes, harder or perhaps less informative than one would have anticipated, and by that nose, so straight and classical, joined to the forehead without a bump or transition of any sort, the nose a prayer ascending above the altar of lips so rich and sweet that one could understand how men had once regarded women as spoils in wars worth fighting. She was a woman (for she surely seemed a woman despite her youth) supremely confident of her own appeal, her status as someone desirable in the abstract, that is, attractive and practicable to anyone under any conditions at any time, rather than in the concrete, to me now as mine. She wasn’t shy or passive, but to the extent she was a vessel she was full to the brim with the knowledge that she represented a prize. She was the custodian of her own beauty.
She acted as though she were royalty and being beautiful a sort of Trooping the Colours. At any rate, I once watched her through a window (she didn’t know I was there) and she was acting very differently. She was with just one other person, a girl from school, and they were on the floor in front of the television with beers and a big bowl of popcorn. It was a summer night and it must have been very late and they were laughing and laughing. Helen Paper, wearing just shorts and halter, was sprawled on the floor sick with laughter, in a squalor of laughter. She kept saying, “Stop or you’ll make me pee.”
Our date was quick, unremarkable (it’s the particular curse of adolescence that its events are never adequate to the feelings they inspire, that no unadorned retelling of those events can suggest the feelings). Tommy’s mother collected us all in her car (we were still too young to drive) and deposited us at the theater. Green spotlights buried in fake ferns in the lobby played on a marble fountain that had long since been drained. The basin was filled with candy wrappers and paper napkins. Inside, behind padded doors each pierced by a grimy porthole, soared the dark splendors of the theater brushed here and there by the ushers’ traveling red flashlights or feebly, briefly dispelled by the glow of a match held to a forbidden cigarette. The ceiling had been designed to resemble the night sky, the stars were minute bulbs, the moon a yellow crescent. To either side of the screen was a windswept version of a royal box, a gilt throne on a small carpeted dais under a great blown-back stucco curtain topped by a papier-mâché coronet. When I finally held Helen Paper’s hand after sitting beside her for half an hour in the dark, I said to myself, “This hand could be insured for a million dollars.”
She surrendered her hand to me, but was I really a likely candidate for it? Was this the way guys became popular? Did certain girls have the guts to tell everyone else, “Look, be nice to this guy. He’s not a nerd. He’s worth it. He’s special”? Or was this date merely some extraordinary favor wangled for me by Tommy, something that would not be repeated? Could it be (and I knew it could) that the Star Chamber of popularity was sealed and that no one would be admitted to it – no one except some casual new prince who belonged there?
Tommy was a prince. He had a knack for demanding attention; even when he called the telephone operator for a number, he’d hold her in conversation. Once he even talked her into meeting him after work. The receptionists in offices downtown, salesladies in stores, the mothers of friends – all of them he sized up, mentally undressed, and though this appraisal might seem to be rude, in fact most women liked it. An efficient woman would be sailing past him. He’d grab her wrist. He’d apologize for the intrusion, but he’d also stand very close to her and his smile wouldn’t apologize for a thing. And she, at exactly the moment I would have expected outrage, would flush, her eyes would flutter, not in an experienced way but meltingly, since he’d touched a nerve, since he’d found a way to subvert the social into the sexual – and then she’d smile and rephrase what she was saying in a voice charmingly without conviction.
After the movie we went somewhere for a snack and then I walked Helen home. Her beauty stood between us like an enemy, some sort of hereditary enemy I was supposed to fear, but I liked her well enough. Even the fiercest lovers must like each other at least once in a while. The trees arching above the deserted suburban streets tracked slowly past overhead, their crowns dark against a hazy white night sky, clouds lit up like internal organs dyed for examination, for augury . . . I spoke quietly, deliberately, to Helen Paper and I snatched glances of her famous smile rising to greet my words. Our attention wasn’t given over to words but to the formal charting of that night street that we were executing. I mean we, or rather our bodies, the animal sense in us, some orienting device – we were discovering each other, and for one moment I felt exultantly worthy of her. For she did have the power to make me seem interesting, at least to myself. I found myself talking faster and with more confidence as we approached the wide, dimly lit porch of her house. Some late roses perfumed the night. A sprinkler someone had left on by mistake played back and forth over the grass. A sudden breeze snatched up the spray and flung it on the walkway ahead, a momentary darkening of the white p
avement. Inside, upstairs, a room was just barely lit behind a drawn curtain. Crickets took the night’s pulse.
Although I said something right out of dancing school to Helen – “Good night, it’s been great to spend some time with you” – an unexpected understanding had fallen on us. Of course her allure – the sudden rise and fall of her wonderful soft breasts, the dilation of her perfume on the cool night air, the smile of a saint who points, salaciously, toward heaven – this allure had seduced me entirely. I loved her. I didn’t know what to do with her. I suspected another, more normal boy would have known how to tease her, make her laugh, would have treated her more as a friend and less as an idol. Had I been expected to do something I would have fled, but now, tonight, I did love her, as one might love a painting one admired but didn’t, couldn’t, wouldn’t own. She was completely relaxed when she took my hand and looked in my eyes, as she thanked me and bobbed a curtsy in a little-girl manner other men, I’m sure, liked better than I; sensing my resistance to anything fetching, she doubled back and intensified her gravity. By which I’m not suggesting she was playing a part. In fact, I don’t know what she was doing. Because I loved her she was opaque to me, and her sincerity I doubted not at all until I doubted it completely.
I thanked her and I said I hoped I’d see her soon. For a moment it seemed as though it would be the most natural thing to kiss her on those full, soft lips (had I not seen her a moment ago covertly pop some scented thing into her mouth to prepare for just such an inevitability?). Her eyes were veiled with her awareness of her own beauty. I suppose I suddenly liked myself and I could see a light in which I’d be plausible to others. My love for Tommy was shameful, something I was also proud of but tried to hide. This moment with Helen – our tallness on the moon-lashed porch, the cool winds that sent black clouds (lit by gold from within) caravelling past a pirate moon, a coolness that glided through opening fingers that now touched, linked, squeezed, slowly drew apart-this moment made me happy, hopeful. An oppression had been lifted. A long apprenticeship to danger had abruptly ended.
After I left her I raced home through the deserted streets laughing and leaping. I sang show tunes and danced and felt as fully alive as someone in a movie (since it was precisely life that was grainy and sepia-tinted, whereas the movies had the audible ping, the habitable color, the embraceable presence of reality). I was more than ready to give up my attraction to men for this marriage to Helen Paper. At last the homosexual phase of my adolescence had drawn to a close. To be sure, I’d continue to love Tommy but as he loved me: fraternally. In my dream the stowaway in the single bunk with me, whom I was trying to keep hidden under a blanket, had miraculously transformed himself into my glorious bride, as the kissed leper in the legend becomes Christ Pantocrator.
When I got home my mother was in bed with the lights out.
“Honey?”
“Yes?”
“Come in and talk to me.”
“Okay,” I said.
“Rub my back, okay?”
“Okay,” I said. I sat beside her on the bed. She smelled of bourbon.
“How was your date?”
“Terrific! I never had such a good time.”
“How nice. Is she a nice girl?”
“Better than that. She’s charming and sophisticated and intelligent.”
“You’re home earlier than I expected. Not so hard. Rub gently. You bruiser. I’m going to call you that: Bruiser. Is she playful? Is she like me? Does she say cute things?”
“No, thank God.”
“Why do you say that? Is she some sort of egghead?”
“Not an egghead. But she’s dignified. She’s straightforward. She says what she means.”
“I think girls should be playful. That doesn’t mean dishonest. I’m playful.”
“—”
“Well, I am. Do you think she likes you?”
“How can I tell? It was just a first date.” My fingers lightly stroked her neck to either side of her spine. “I doubt if she’ll want to see me again. Why should she?”
“But why not? You’re handsome and intelligent.”
“Handsome! With these big nostrils!”
“Oh that’s just your sister. She’s so frustrated she has to pick on you. There’s nothing wrong with your nostrils. At least I don’t see anything wrong. Of course, I know you too well. If you like, we could consult a nose doctor.” A long pause. “Nostrils . . . Do people generally dwell on them? I mean, do people think about them a lot?” Small, high voice: “Are mine okay?”
A hopeless silence.
At last she began to snore delicately and I hurried to my own room. My sister’s door, next to mine, was closed but her light was burning resentfully.
And I gave myself over to my reverie. I had a record player I’d paid for myself by working as a caddy and records I exchanged each week at the library, the music an outpost of my father’s influence in this unmusical female territory.
I slipped out of my clothes as quickly as possible, though I tried to do everything beautifully, as in a movie of my life with Helen. In some way I felt it was already being filmed – not that I looked for hidden cameras but I simplified and smoothed out my movements for the lens. There were those, my mother and sister, who suffered too much and were too graceless to be film-worthy, but there were those others I aspired to join who suffered briefly, consolably and always handsomely, whose remarks were terse and for whom the mechanics of leaving a party or paying a bill had been stylized nearly out of existence in favor of highly emotional exchanges in which eyes said more than lips. Every detail of my room asked me to be solicitous. When the dresser drawer stuck I winced – this sequence would have to be reshot. I turned my sheets down as though she, Helen, were at my side. I rushed to snap off the lights.
She and I lay side by side in the narrow boat and floated downstream. The stars moved not at all and only the occasional fluttering of a branch overhead or the sound of a scraping rock below suggested our passage. The moon was the wound in the night’s side from which magic blood flowed; we bathed in it. By dawn I’d made love to Helen four times. The first time was so ceremonial I had a problem molding the mist into arms and legs; all that kept flickering up at me was her smile. The second time was more passionate. I was finally able to free her breasts from their binding. By the third time we’d become gently fraternal; we smiled with tired kindness at each other. We were very intimate. At dawn she began to disintegrate. The certainty of day pulsed into being and all my exertions were able to keep her at my side only a few more moments. At last she fled.
I stumbled from class to class in a numb haze. Strangely enough, I was afraid I’d run into Helen. I didn’t feel up to her. I was too tired. In home room I yawned, rested my head on my desk and longed for the privacy of my bed and the saving grace of night. I wanted to be alone with my wraith. In my confusion the real Helen Paper seemed irrelevant, even intrusive.
That night I wrote her a letter. I chose a special yellow parchment, a spidery pen point and black ink. In gym class as I’d stumbled through calisthenics and in study hall as I’d half dozed behind a stack of books, phrases for the letter had dropped into my mind. Now I sat down with great formality at my desk and composed the missive, first in pencil on scratch paper. If I reproduced it (I still have the pencil draft) you’d laugh at me or we would laugh together at the prissy diction and the high-flown sentiment. What would be harder to convey is how much it meant to me, how it read to me back then. I offered her my love and allegiance while admitting I knew how unworthy of her I was. And yet I had half a notion that though I might be worthless as a date (not handsome enough) I might be of some value as a husband (intelligent, slated for success). In marriage merits outweighed appeal, and I could imagine nothing less eternal than marriage with Helen. Naturally I didn’t mention marriage in the letter.
A week went by before I received her answer. Twice I saw her in the halls. The first time she came over to me and looked me in the eye and smiled her
sweet, intense smile. She was wearing a powder-blue cashmere sweater and her breasts rose and fell monumentally as she asked me in her soft drawl how I was doing. Nothing in her smile or voice suggested a verdict either for or against me. I felt there was something improper about seeing her at all before I got her letter. I mumbled, “Fine,” blushed and slinked off. I felt tall and dirty. I was avoiding Tommy as well. Soon enough I would have to tell him about my proposal to Helen, which I suspected he’d disapprove of.
Then one afternoon, a Friday after school, there was her letter to me in the mailbox. Even before I opened it I was mildly grateful she had at least answered me.
The apartment was empty. I went to the sun-room and looked across the street at the lake churning like old machinery in a deserted amusement park, rides without riders. My mind kept two separate sets of books. In one I was fortunate she’d taken the time to write me even this rejection, more than a creep like me deserved. In the other she said, “You’re not the person I would have chosen for a date, nor for a summer or semester, but yes, I will marry you. Nor do I want anything less from you. Romance is an expectation of an ideal life to come, and in that sense my feelings for you are romantic.”
If someone had made me guess which reply I’d find inside the envelope, I would have chosen the rejection, since pessimism is always accurate, but acceptance would not have shocked me, since I also believed in the miraculous.
I poured myself a glass of milk in the kitchen and returned to the sun-room. Her handwriting was well formed and rounded, the dots over the i’s circles, the letters fatter than tall, the lines so straight I suspected she had placed the thin paper over a ruled-off grid. The schoolgirl ordinariness of her hand frightened me – I didn’t feel safe in such an ordinary hand. “I like you very much as a friend,” she wrote. “I was pleased and surprised to receive your lovely letter. It was one of the sweetest tributes to me I have ever had from anyone. I know this will hurt, but I am forced to say it if I am to prevent you further pain. I do not love you and I never have. Our friendship has been a matter of mutual and rewarding liking, not loving. I know this is very cruel, but I must say it. Try not to hate me. I think it would be best if we did not see each other for a while. I certainly hope we can continue to be friends. I consider you to be one of my very best friends. Please, please forgive me. Try to understand why I have to be this way. Sincerely, Helen.”