A Boy's Own Story

by Edmund White

  Herberto was also full of energy. Look at the vein pulsing in his neck, the aimless trills his long fingers are playing, the weird ululations hooting out of his mouth – until after the fact he invents an explanation of all this spontaneity by resolving himself into an airplane, the hoots modulating into the drone of jets, his flickering hands freezing into rigid wings, the ticking vein force-feeding fuel into the engine as he runs and runs, hysterical with youth, up and down the halls. After such an outburst he could be visited. I’d sit on his bed and watch him carve bits of balsa wood with an X-Acto knife. His eyes would dart up from his task. Everything about him was high-strung, tentative, off course. I never found out why he’d been shunted off to Eton in the middle of the year.

  The other newcomer, Howie, was my real companion, friend and enemy, someone whose room I couldn’t resist visiting though I didn’t want the other kids to see me going there. Howie had been a bleak, sit-in-a-stupor nihilist, he told me, but now he’d ascended to the discipline and heartlessness of the Nazi Party. A real Nazi. He’d written away for the “literature” of the American Renaissance Party and proudly I showed me his foot-long library of books on race, the Aryan heritage, the Fuhrer’s legacy, Communist lies about the “so-called death camps” and so on. He was almost as fat as he was tall. His eyes blinked and glowered and squinted and widened in mocking wonder behind the intense magnification of his glasses, but once denuded they lost all power of expression and seemed as pale and vulnerable as new skin under a bandage. Although he’d never traveled anywhere he was teaching himself French and of course German; he had pinned up photos of Berchtesgaden and the Riviera over his desk. He brewed espresso in a tin Napoletano that, when reversed, threw sputtering drops onto the glowing coils of the strictly forbidden hot plate, and he played over and over again his one record of Juliette Greco, the chanteuse beloved of the Existentialists, the waif who’d emerged out of the ruins of war with black eyes all pupils and lyrics all plangent, tough-guy sentimentality. Howie’s ties came from Charver on the Place Vendome because that had been Proust’s haberdasher.

  He and I shared the irregular, never-foreseen status of students too clever for afternoon study hall and too inept for afternoon sports. As a result we alone were free to spend those long vacant hours from two to six in the empty dorms or, when the weather was good, on walks through the baronial grounds of the estate. The weather, however, was usually polar and he and I then found our exercise in stubborn, smoldering debates about equality and democracy (I for, he against). I can still taste the bitter black coffee and hear the jolly accordion and sweeping strings of Juliette Greco’s accompaniment, music we’d have sneered at as polka-Polish or Hollywood-synthetic had it not been French, but that, since it was, we relished and hummed along to though neither of us was ever quite capable of translating the words (“Something . . . something . . . if you something I’ll always? Toujours? Is that toujours? Play it again”).

  Howie had a face only a medieval Japanese woman could have loved: perfectly round, pasty, just a wisp of fine hair above, below a dark, tiny dead rosebud of a mouth, the rudiment of a chin, like a child’s hand poking through a sheet, and those eyes, so arrogant and expressive with glasses, so myopic and defenseless without.

  “No, I don’t concede your point. Not at all,” he’d say, lowering his head so that the child’s hand poked farther out through the sheet and his voice, naturally high and nervous, took on a swallowed, subdued tone. “In fact,” he’d add, letting his features become beatifically composed, “I think you’re a fool.”

  I could hardly breathe. And yet, calling to me across the smoking valley sang a soprano telling me how exciting all this was, this verbal game that could at any moment take a nasty turn but that as of now remained a parody of spite. Until now I’d never known anyone my own age who was so willing to flout the bland convention that held that the normal unit of conversation should be the unfunny joke and the expected response a mirthless giggle. Howie didn’t want to be liked, or if he did, then only after I’d passed tests calculated to eliminate anyone with the least bit of pride.

  Despite my fears and my aching loneliness, I believed without a doubt in a better world, which was adulthood or New York or Paris or love. But Howie just as stubbornly knew things wouldn’t work out. He was convinced he’d die before he was twenty. He knew people weren’t equal, that they were wired for hatred, that they were glandularly incapable of decency and that any semblance of goodness had to be attributed to the last vestiges of hypocrisy that fools were tearing away, like gauze from a mummy – not, as we’d been assured, perfectly preserved but rather compounded of dust and rot.

  He had put on his large pale green officer’s hat with the mirror-shiny black visor and the pewter swastika and now he was striding about the dorm room slapping his boots with a crop. Everything in sight – the single cot, the piles of books on the desk, the mirror above the dresser, the rugless floor, the simple muslin cloth on big wood rungs that concealed the narrow opening to the walk-in closet – everything was spotless as it had to be for morning inspections, but everything smelled of a sulfurous acne cream. Howard was striding back and forth, his glasses slipping down his nose, his pale, pudgy knuckles dimpling and paling still whiter where he grasped the crop. He was laughing in short, metallic bursts.

  And yet he was someone I could talk to about Rimbaud, the poet who’d conquered Paris or at least Verlaine by age sixteen (I was fifteen – a year to go). I’d sneak into the bathroom after lights-out and sit on the toilet behind a locked stall door and read “The Drunken Boat” or “The Poet at Age Seven” or best of all “A Season in Hell” and I’d glance back and forth in my bilingual edition from the smooth French gallop to the jarring English trot, every night hoping to change magically our bony native nag for the sleek back of that Gallic charger but always falling off in midstream, unseated – or rather seated on that hardwood toilet seat, my eyes burning from the strain of reading by the light of a single dim ceiling bulb, my bare chest covered with goose bumps from the night chill and my left leg asleep, a horrible slab of dead beef to be dragged down the corridor until life sparkled back into it. Then I’d lie under covers in the darkness and conspire to be great: I must run away tomorrow, to New York, poems in hand, scorn and genius in my heart, an amiable, infatuated older lover within my grasp . . . It always disturbed me that Rimbaud was the infernal bridegroom, Verlaine the foolish virgin. Perhaps such a reversal of traditional roles shocked my bourgeois heart, or perhaps their truth came too close to my fondest if most dangerous fantasy, the one in which I’d no longer be the obliging youth but the harsh young lord, the prince with the pewter ornament stuck in his hat, my older lover helpless, betrayed. . . .

  Howard and I would fight and not speak to each other for a week, and then I was truly alone. Although I’d been popular for a moment back home, my suffering over Helen Paper and my bout of mononucleosis had caused me to lose my social nerve. I now looked back on those days at public school when I’d said hi to so many people as a fabulous era. I’d been rich and famous and young, before this long, bitter decline I’d entered, this threnody I’d become. Now I was living in shadow between two radiances, the mythic past and the mythic future, the past the dreamlike, confusing story of injured love, the future a cheerful, perfectly crisp fable of love about to be crowned, and this contrast, this partitioning of time into genres, articulated a sense of duration, of endured if not always endurable history.

  I suffered now. I felt isolated to the point of craziness, but with a faint recourse to melodrama, to a potential audience and an attendant end to loneliness, for if I imagined complete despair I pictured it as an emptying of the theater, a feeling that the stalls and boxes would never be peopled again but would vacantly surround the stage on which the sole actor writhes and sobs, then sleeps, then wakes to speak in a voice he need no longer project. I hadn’t reached that point. I was conscious of the emblem of proud and tragic loneliness I was embroidering stitch by stitch before the
eyes of the other boys. Every time I crossed the wintry quadrangle alone or sat alone in my room during free period (but with a door open to expose my solitude) I knew I was drawing another silk thread through the cloth.

  By day I gave myself over to a covert yearning for men. I’d linger in the locker room and study the brawny back of a senior, a body builder, a German with blond hair greased into symmetrical waves, with a faint dusting of brown hair on his shoulders and (he’s turning around, he drops his towel) with an almost pinkish-red puff of seemingly rootless pubic hair somehow floating in a cloud of smoke above his penis, as though the big gun had just been fired. In the shower room I’d linger as long as possible and watch the water turn wintry chalk into summer marble. Imprisoned under all our layers of long underwear, thick socks, shirts, vests, jackets, coats and hoods were these tropical bodies; the steam and hot water brought color back into the pallor, found the nacreous hollow in a hip, detected the subtly raised triceps, rinsed a sharp clavicle in a softening flood, swirled dull brown hair into a smooth black cap and pulled evening gloves of light over raw hands and skinny, blue-veined forearms.

  Just as each shell held to the ears roars with a different ocean timbre, each of these bodies spoke to me with a different music, though all sounded to me unlike my own and only with the greatest effort could I remember I was longing after my own sex. Indeed, each of these beings seemed to possess his very own sex: the Italian with the hairy butt, thick legs and jaw darkened by a four – if not yet five o’clock shadow; or take the blond darling of the football team with the permanent blush in his full cheeks, the distrustful smile of someone hard of hearing and the smooth, fleshy body and incipient beer belly resplendent with quivering health, feminine on a Rubens scale were it not for the way he moved – pigeon-toed athlete’s walk and lordly rocking tilt from side to side, something stiff in the back and shoulders and floppy in the hands and arms, loose ribbons around the rigid maypole.

  I’ve heard that some boys’ boarding schools are continuous orgies, that jealous rivals explode in fistfights over the favors of stunning first-form fags, that arrogant head prefects move favorites into their suites and exile cast-offs without even a nod toward adult authority – but Eton was not like that at all. Half the students were day boys who had cars, families and girl friends and came back every Monday with stories of wild heterosexual weekends. Each boarding student had his own room and the halls were periodically patrolled after lights-out. On Saturday night the students from our sister school were bused over for movies or dancing and under the gaze of chaperones romances sprang up between boys and girls even if they were seldom consummated. Who will ever know if any of those Eton boys ever longed for one another as they lay sleepless in their separate cells, each strumming the guitar of sex and humming who knows what tune or if they felt desire as I did during wrestling practice for the wiry, crew-cut boy with the sand in his eyes and the bluish false teeth that had replaced those lost in a bloody match last year, a boy who seemed to be everywhere at once and who, in spite of the sleepiness of his expression, crackled like a field of static electricity above me, a shower of sparks in gym shorts as he darted all over, found the exact point of leverage and effortlessly pulled me down. The Russians practice a kind of photography, called Kirlian, that reveals the subject’s aura, the varying patterns of radiant heat projected by his limbs as a kind of oriflamme, if that means the golden banner a knight wraps himself in. For me every male body inhabited just such a rippling flag, just such a field of force invisible to all eyes but mine – but to mine resplendent and dangerous, a smooth sheath though upon close inspection engraved with fine lines of tension. How else can I explain the way I’d swallow hard and begin to lose my sense of balance whenever one of these enigma machines came toward me?

  At that time I had a book on Rodin. Every afternoon I’d sit on my cot and look at a black-and-white photograph of an early sculpture, “The Age of Bronze,” a nude study of a Belgian soldier so realistic that the artist had been accused of casting it from life. I didn’t masturbate over that picture, nor did I imagine coupling with the statue or the soldier. No, I loved him and I told him so, again and again, in whispers that never sounded right because I could never figure out who I was – his son? Wife? Brother? Enemy? Husband? Friend? And there was the other problem of the century that separated me from the long-dead model and of the continent from the distant replica. I told myself that if I ever found him I’d know how to love him, but I had mistaken yearning for talent and I’d neglected to sort out the most essential thing, my own identity. Perhaps that’s why I’d become so enamored of a statue, for with it the only amorous activity could be the circle of my steps around that still form. No encounter, no vying for position, no chance of perfect understanding or total confusion. That is, everything suspenseful and mutable about the society of lovers had been eliminated in favor of an embrace as simple and unvarying (as eternal) as it had necessarily to be cold. Or perhaps I worried that if I had a real, living lover I’d wound him, subject him to all the rage I’d been saving up.

  Yes, I spent my days thinking about male bodies, each of which was as varied, as sequential as a long Chinese scroll through which the minuscule pilgrim travels in his straw hat, followed by a servant and a horse, now standing back from the steaming falls, now meditating cross-legged under a grass roof held up by bamboo poles as he surveys the valley filling up with mist or as he throws his head back in wild spiritual hilarity in response to the grandeur of the mountain or here, down here, where he’s picking at his rice in the company of monks in the long, narrow hall opened up to the sweet, gasped Oh! of the full moon and the long exhaled Ah-h-h of its reflection in the pond. If I could have lain in a bed beside any of these boys I jostled past every day, whose feet I had to sit on while they did sit-ups or whom I sat beside, shoulder to shoulder, during chapel, I would have explored him just as the Chinese pilgrim traversed that majestic, intimidating terrain to whose rhythm he hoped to adjust himself and from which he expected to take a wisdom not quite tenable.

  At night I’d pull the covers up to my chin in the cold and listen to the momentary gust of laughter outside as a master and his wife bade farewell to another couple after a late dinner (“Thanks, Rachel.” “So long, Hal.”). Car doors slammed. A cold motor struggled to turn over. Success. Lights on. Motor in gear. Final farewells. Then a handkerchief of brightness was drawn across my ceiling, next the magician pulled a beige out of the white, a gray out of the beige, finally black from gray. On that ultimate cloth I tossed the dice: I began to meditate.

  I threw back the blankets, took off my pajama top and, shivering but determined to master mere flesh, sat cross-legged on my cot. I knew nothing of bonafide Oriental procedures, but I made up my own from scraps of information I’d gathered here and there, overheard table talk at the banquet of bliss. Not limber enough to hook my feet over my thighs, I contented myself with a drooping lotus and pressed my hands together in my lap, thumb tip to thumb tip, second joints of my fingers united (the “people” inside the “church” of a more Christian childhood game). I proceeded to regulate my breathing through my nose, careful siphoning off aerial fuel, and while I concentrated on its flow my eyes turned upward and inward to the roots of my eyebrows until my eyes ached and I feared that they’d stick there, that I’d stay cross-eyed for life. Nor could I help wondering how I’d look to an observer, drugged lids over white crescents.

  Much as I focused on my breathing my thoughts would nevertheless rub against homework or hyperspace off into a new dimension and start drifting down to pinkish-red pubic hair, or they’d curl like a morning glory around the simple picket of a noise in the hall (whose footsteps?). As long as I gave myself commands to breathe I could almost exclude distractions, as though I were pressing a door against an invader, but then the ghost of an idea would float right through the door, I’d become distracted, soon the door was swinging wide open on its hinges, a hog was sniffing the floor for food, all was quietly, bucolically lost and
whatever was vegetative in me had engulfed whatever had been vertebrate – which in any case had begun to ache and arc in response to the tropisms of the flesh.

  But one night I soared. My brain, which ordinarily had too much resonance in it so that every thought boomed and echoed muzzily without definition, tonight had acquired an acoustical sharpness; I could. actually hear my thoughts as they rose and fell. And it seemed I hovered energetically over myself, ready to play my mind as a nervous but competent pianist might do, fingers flexing hungrily above the keys. But the real difference was one of attitude: I’d decided to take the very futility I so often felt, the vacant hum, the sense of subsisting outside whatever was vibrant and to equate precisely this secular emptiness with the sacred void, to make of my shame a jewel, to call my poverty wealth. If most of the time I saw myself as my sister’s despicable little brother, the nerd who smelled bad and walked and talked funny, tonight I stumbled on the happy idea of, yes, redefining this same insufficiency as a proof of salvation: the famous emptiness of the Buddha. Of course I admitted that Nirvana was rest and what I knew was torment, that Gautama wanted nothing and I everything, that I was crawling with desire – but couldn’t this very excruciation reverse itself and suddenly become peace?