A Boy's Own Story

by Edmund White

  Dr. O’Reilly was not a good listener. He was always scooping up handfuls of orange diet pills and swallowing them with a jigger of scotch. As a great man and the author of several books, he had theories to propound and little need to attend to the particularities of any given life – especially since he knew in advance that life would soon enough yield merely another illustration of his theories. To save time, O’Reilly unfolded his ideas at the outset and then rehearsed them during each subsequent session since, as he explained, although these notions could easily enough penetrate the conscious mind, they soaked less readily into the hairy taproot of the unconscious. When he wasn’t presenting his theories, O’Reilly was confiding in me the complexities of his personal life. He’d left his wife for Nancy, a patient, but the moment his divorce had gone through, his wife had discovered she was dying of cancer. O’Reilly complied with her last wish and remarried her. The patient promptly went mad and was now confined in an institution in Kansas. O’Reilly, to console himself, was throwing himself into his work. He was taking on more and more patients. He saw the last patient at midnight and the first at six in the morning.

  Sometimes I would have both the last hour and the first and I would get permission from the school to spend the night on the analytic couch. I’d set the alarm for five-thirty. I’d arise and hurry over to O’Reilly’s apartment next door. It was decorated like a ship’s cabin, complete with bunk beds, coiled ropes on the walls, portholes for windows, a captain’s desk and red and green lights to indicate port and starboard. To awaken O’Reilly I’d put on his favorite record, “Nothing Like a Dame,” a song he considered “healthy.” I’d then make a cup of coffee for him and with it hand him his jar of Dexedrines. By six-thirty at the latest he was alert, dressed and ready to return to his office. I associate those morning hours with the smell of his lime cologne.

  Just as years before, when I was seven, I had presented myself to a minister and had sought for his understanding, in the same way now I was turning to a psychoanalyst for help. I wanted to overcome this thing I was becoming and was in danger soon of being, the homosexual, as though that designation were the mold in which the water was freezing, the first crystals already forming a fragile membrane. The confusion and fear and pain that beset me – initiated by my experience with the hustler, intensified by Mr. Pouchet’s gentle silence and made eerie by my fascination with “The Age of Bronze” – had translated me into a code no one could read, I least of all, a code perhaps designed to defeat even the best cryptographer. Dr. O’Reilly was far too Mosaic to read anything other than the tablets he himself was carrying on which he’d engraved his theory. I subscribed to his theory, I placed myself entirely in his care, because learning his ideas was less frustrating and less perilous than teasing out my own.

  I had no one and he liked me or at least he said he did. Of course, he needed someone to talk to about his problems, and I was a good listener.

  I see now that what I wanted was to be loved by men and to love them back but not to be a homosexual. For I was possessed with a yearning for the company of men, for their look, touch and smell, and nothing transfixed me more than the sight of a man shaving and dressing, sumptuous rites. It was men, not women, who struck me as foreign and desirable and I disguised myself as a child or a man or whatever was necessary in order to enter their hushed, hieratic company, my disguise so perfect I never stopped to question my identity. Nor did I want to study the face beneath my mask, lest it turn out to have the pursed lips, dead pallor and shaped eyebrows by which one can always recognize the Homosexual. What I required was a sleight of hand, an alibi or a convincing act of bad faith to persuade myself I was not that vampire. Perhaps – yes, this must be it – perhaps my homosexuality was a symptom of some other deeper but less irrevocable disorder. That’s what Dr. O’Reilly thought. After I’d confessed all, he pressed his hankie to his glistening forehead, gnawed his raw lips and said with a dramatic air of boredom, “But none of that matters at all. In here, you’ll find” – the traveling blue eyes stopped meandering across the ceiling and fixed me – “that we’ll ignore your acting out and concentrate on your real conflicts.”

  How thrilling to discover one had depths, how consoling to find them less polluted than the shallows, how encouraging to identify the enemy not as a fissure in the will but as a dead fetus in the specimen jar of the unconscious. My attention was being paternally led away from the excruciating present to the happy, healthy future that would be enabled by an analysis of the sick past, as though the priest had nothing to do but study sorry old books and make bright forecasts, the present not worthy of notice.

  Since Dr. O’Reilly was a very famous analyst, his fees were high; since he considered me to be acutely ill, he decided I had to see him three times a week; the result was a staggering monthly bill. My mother agreed to pay half the cost, but my father refused my request. He couldn’t find any good reason for me to be in therapy, nor was he at all convinced that therapy worked. “It’s just a bunch of crap,” he said over the phone. “I thought sending you to Eton was supposed to straighten you out.”

  I assured him it had in that it had removed me from my dependency on my mother. Paraphrasing Dr. O’Reilly, I added, “But you see, Daddy, I’ve internalized my mother and when I fall in love I merely project her introjected image –”

  “Love?” I could hear the wires singing between us as they dipped and rose in rhythmic arcs over the cindered sidings of railroad tracks or plunged underground and threaded their way through the entrails of American cities. Instantly I recognized that in such a big, hardworking country and in the vocabulary of such a sober man the word love took on a coy, neurasthenic ring. Women lived for love and talked about it and made their decisions by its guttering, scented light; men (at least a real man like my dad) took the love that came their way gratefully but suffered its absence in silence. Certainly no real man ever discussed love or made a single move to woo it.

  “Let me put my thoughts on paper,” I said, for by now I’d learned he preferred personal transactions to resemble business invoices.

  That night during study period, as I sat in my cold room at my desk, my pen flew over page after page as I drew in a portrait of myself as an adolescent desperate for medical attention. Once again I wrote on my special parchment, once again I was petitioning someone. But this time I had more confidence, for I felt I was within my rights. I knew Dr. O’Reilly was my one chance to escape the cage and treadmill of neurosis, to head out, ears up and whiskers twitching, into the enchanting unknown.

  The dorm master tiptoed past my open door. He was on the lookout for boys breaking rules. Across the hall from me at his own desk a square-jawed German lad – who wrestled for the team, excelled at trig and played records of music he called “easy listening” – was working a slide rule and jotting down figures in his minuscule hand. His glasses blazed when he cocked his head at a certain angle, as though the numerical intelligence projected light rather than drank it in. On the wall above his head was an Eton pennant, placed with mathematical precision at the correct, casual angle, Gustav’s concession to frivolity. The master tiptoed back past my door. In fact, he was cutting up, taking giant, slow-motion steps, his hands raised high as a marionettist’s, his mouth turned down as though he himself were a truant who feared making a floorboard squeak – good for a chuckle.

  In my letter to my father I used the word homosexuality, thereby breaking a taboo and forcing two responses from him: silence and the money I wanted. Much later my stepmother told me I’d caused my father weeks of sleepless despair and that at first he had chosen to believe I wasn’t really a homosexual at all, merely a poseur hoping to appear “interesting.” Dad never asked me later if I’d been cured. He was no doubt afraid to know the answer. Certainly he and I never discussed my problem. Indeed, horror of the subject led to a blackout on all talk about my private life. My father didn’t like other men; he had no close male friends and he behaved toward the men in his own family accord
ing to the dictates of duty rather than the impulses of his heart. He so often ascribed cunning to other men, a covert plotting, that he approached them as enemies to whom he must extend an ambiguous hand, one that when not offering a cold greeting could contract into a fist. I was one of the men he didn’t like.

  Or should I say he simply didn’t like my nature – the fact that I was drawn to art rather than business, to people rather than to things, to men rather than to women, to my mother rather than to him, books rather than sports, sentiments not responsibilities, love not money?

  And yet he always ended by lavishing his money on me, more than he spent on my sister, whom he really did adore in his obstinate, silent, astringent way.

  Difficult as my father might be and obsessed with him as I might have been, Dr. O’Reilly had decided my dad was merely a son of a bitch but not the true villain, not like Mom. It was she who had broken past the immunological barriers of my frail psyche and infected every last inch of my soul. It was she who’d ensnared me in silk fetters, she who’d shorn my strength and blinded me to the gross imposition of her will. Indeed, she’d so thoroughly invaded me that scarcely anything of my own remained to me. Dr. O’Reilly’s mission was to purge the invader and to fatten up my ego. Although he’d never met her he spoke of her with real venom. His blue eyes blazed with scorn. When I said I feared what would happen to her if I rejected her, he said, “That old cow? She’ll outlive us all,” as though he and I were a pair of young boys and she all the tenacious wickedness of the adult world.

  During World War II O’Reilly had served as an army doctor in Polynesia, where he had studied the childrearing methods of the natives. There no infant was ever punished, he said, and none ever cried. An infant’s deepest insecurity, he went on, was derived from its physical smallness and helplessness. The Polynesians, especially those on the happy isle to which fortune had blown the good doctor, countered this insecurity by carrying their babies on their backs in a sling pitched so high that Baby’s eyes peered out over Mama’s head. This literally superior position insured the infant against all future anxiety and guaranteed him a lifelong serenity. Eager to spread these advantages to America, O’Reilly insisted his patients emulate the Polynesian mode of transporting a baby. I saw those patients, men and women alike, all over town, sheepishly stepping over snowdrifts or gliding down supermarket aisles, their infants, petrified with fear, squawling and clutching locks of parental hair.

  But this practice figured as only one of the many ways in which O’Reilly reformed our lives. Unlike those tight-ass Freudians, he said, who never suggested anything, who judged silently and interpreted rarely, he quite cheerfully broadcast his wisdom by spilling handfuls into fertile minds he himself had furrowed.

  He believed that since I’d missed out on a loving childhood I had to feel my way backward in time, to regress in order to be raised all over again by him. “An adult,” he said, “has no right to expect unqualified love, but a child does. That’s what I’m offering you: love with no strings tied.” He invariably made that mistake – “tied” not “attached.” Sometime during each session he would repeat this extraordinary assertion of his love, and each time I felt embarrassed, for I couldn’t help noticing how poorly he remembered the names of my parents and best friends and the major facts of my life. Perhaps foolishly, I thought of knowledge as a necessary if not sufficient condition for love. When I told him of my doubts about him he chastised me for being overly cerebral. “But you see,” he said, “that’s your unconscious pushing me aside because on some level you realize how much I love you. You’re afraid of intimacy. Real love would force you to discard the mother image you’ve introjected.”

  Spring approached and the gold Buddha grew more resplendent as rain washed away winter smuts. Although we were hundreds of miles inland, on some days the air smelled of salt and I half expected to see a gull perching on the statue’s topknot like Maitreya, the Bodhisattva of the future. Everything quickened, even my heartbeat. The sense of smell, so long banished from out-of-doors save for a whiff of exhaust or the scent of desultory smoke unspooling from a chimney, now returned and released memories long buried in the pockets of earth’s apron. I’d cross the piazza at school and smell something earthy or rusty or a dog’s stale turd, much washed and often salted, leeched of everything except its palest quintessence. Or last autumn would rise like a revenant from a scattered pile of burned leaves long covered with snow, and behind that ghost stood one even taller, more deeply shrouded in sadness – the memory of the hollow behind the house where I’d lived and played as a child. But if all these odors awakened memories, the salt smell, suggesting nothing of my past, promised a future, a journey, and I could hear sails luffing and snapping as they were cranked up the mast until they shivered under the weight of the cold wind.

  Two developments were unfolding within me, or rather two quite different stories about a single life were getting told. In one, Dr. O’Reilly’s version, I was wrestling with my unconscious, an immense, dark brother who seeped around me when I was awake, flowed over me when I slept, who sometimes invaded my body, caused my pen or tongue to slip, who erased a name from the blackboard of memory – a force with a baby’s features, greedy orifices, a madman’s cunning and an animal’s endurance, a Caliban as quicksilver as Ariel. This doppelgänger was determined to confine me to what I’d already experienced and to deny me adventure, as though life were a cynical editor of gothic romances who demanded that every novel conform to a formula, who might accept slight variations in detail so long as the plot remained the same. O’Reilly’s job was to outwit this brilliant tyrant.

  While I observed the rounds in this psychoanalytic struggle, a quite different, less lurid, more scattered sort of story was taking place within me, one that lacked narrative drive or even direction. It sprang up without warning like mushrooms after rain; it came and went, circled around itself, died away and then was crawling like moss over the rock face of my will. Like a whole rootless plantation of algae, it washed in tides of longing and self-loathing. For the real movements of a life are gradual, then sudden; they resist becoming anecdotes, they pulse like quasars from long-dead stars to reach the vivid planet of the present, they drift like fog over the ship until the spread sails are merely panels of gray in grayer air and surround becomes object, as in those perceptual tests where figure and ground reverse, the kissing couple in profile turn into the outlines of the mortuary urn that holds their own ashes. Time wears down resolve – then suddenly violence, something irrevocable flashes out of nowhere, there are thrashing fins and roiled, blood-streaked water, death floats up on its side, eyes bulging.

  If I had the skill I’d write about the way that place – the cold corridors of the school, its symmetrical parterres of snow, the replicas of the “Discobulos” and “Dying Gaul” – how that place became the espalier which my moods crept up. I’d find a way to connect moods to weather, to rhyme books I was reading with bouts of illness I endured, to link pop tunes of the moment with persistent fantasies I concocted (I was Rimbaud; Verlaine loved me so much he fired on me; I endured, lonely, smoking cigarettes on an African beach), I’d place Buddhism over Hesse, divide a laugh I borrowed from a popular senior with an incurable rash on my left ankle I scratched day after day – all figures in an algebraic equation in which X would stand for Stimmung and Y for truth.

  What I was doing in those spring months was once again steeling my social nerve. I was becoming popular – not in a big way, of course, but as a bit player. I started smoking cigarettes in order to join the Butt Club, a coterie of fascinating disreputables who’d obtained parental permission to meet for fifteen minutes after lunch and dinner and for half an hour before bedtime to smoke. Serious athletes, admired prefects, good school citizens – they all looked down on us. We were not square, we were bums, hoods, bad characters. One small windowless room in the basement had been set aside for our regrettable hobby. Someone pinned up the famous nude calendar pose of Marilyn Monroe on the cinder
-block wall, but even her maraschino charms looked bilious under the low-wattage green bulb screwed into the ceiling for “atmosphere.”

  I had never been bad before. Of course I’d been intolerably wicked or maybe just sick in sleeping with other boys and men, but those transgressions were secret and solitary. Now at last I, who’d always been considered obedient, even docile, was rubbing shoulders with guys who were about to flunk out, who got drunk and totaled cars, who knocked up girls, who got into fistfights with their dads, who stole motorcycles and went off on joy rides, who had created such chaos at home they’d been banished to Eton. These boys accepted anyone at all so long as he was a smoker and a failure. Here came the hell raisers who sneaked off campus after lights-out, who downed a quart of vodka a day and nodded off in class, who faked medical excuses to get out of gym, who went weeks without showering (“Give us a break”), who jerked off in the back of class to the amazement of their neighbors (“Yuck”), who farted and popped their zits in assembly (“Ee-yuh”), who bought term papers from brains or beat the brains up, who in one case seduced a master’s wife (“Neat”), in another a fat Latvian wash-up girl with greasy braids on the kitchen staff (“Barf”).