A Boy's Own Story

by Edmund White

  “Yeah, Rachel wants two pricks; one in each hand.”

  I drew back inwardly at the terrible words and the smile that was leaking out of DeQuincey’s face like candlelight from a carved pumpkin. He had just given a haywire emphasis to the words two pricks that made me no longer think of him as a lovable, befuddled, overgrown preppy but rather as a man who had really had real mental breakdowns, whose imagination had festered. I looked for a reflection of my disgust in Rachel’s face, but she was grinning and staring at her accomplice, perhaps her impresario. There was an air about them of driven but thoroughly professional gamblers. He had just placed a roll of chips on a number. She more than matched him and pushed forward with both her small hands, slowly but firmly, all her remaining wealth. “Okay,” she said softly. Her terrible silent chuckle had begun. She spread her legs under the full skirt, planted her elbows on her knees and looked up at us. Her gaze was steady and provocative, although from time to time she had to steal a glance at the cue card to break the tension.

  “Oho!” DeQuincey shouted. Then he said in a stage whisper to me, “She thinks we’ll be the first to chicken out.” (I liked that we.) “But she’s got us pegged all wrong.” He raced about the room turning off lights and saying over and over again. “Ooh-la-la,” as though sexual adventure must be French.

  In the past, whenever the Scotts had come close to a decisive action, they’d annihilated it through paralyzing discussion. That’s what kept them together, I imagine, their Sisyphean talk. He’d annoy her, she’d lapse into ponderous, savage silence, he’d cajole her out of it, she’d tongue-lash him, he’d whimper, then cringingly strike back, she’d retreat, he’d pursue – and all these feints and thrusts they simultaneously analyzed from so many angles and with such a strange blend of vanity, self-hatred, Christian moralizing and cross-cultural reference that finally nothing took place. Rachel didn’t walk out on DeQuincey. DeQuincey didn’t burn his poems, his “life work,” as he threatened to. She didn’t send Tim off to her monster father in Miami (“At least he’s a real man, and absolute evil is preferable, far preferable to your mauvaise foi”). He didn’t run away to become an Augustinian. She didn’t turn on the gas to asphyxiate them all. None of this happened. They outsat each other, the air turned blue with tobacco smoke, irony and exhaustion. Dawn made its killjoy appearance, like a parent returning home to halt the children’s party, by now a seedy, nearly comatose event.

  But tonight talk wasn’t sapping resolve. In fact tonight the Scotts seemed in collusion, as though they’d decided in advance to seduce me. Given my failure with the black prostitute, I feared I wouldn’t be able to get it up for any woman, much less a teacher’s wife. But I didn’t want to be the one to back down.

  When we all three finally got into bed, DeQuincey kept the wisecracks coming. He was the eternal kid who’s forgotten to change his underwear, who keeps his socks on and can hardly wait to dive in (“Oh boy, oh boy”). Rachel, however, lost her bravado. She wasn’t frightened or ashamed but she was shy, even a little romantic. She lay between us. DeQuincey took no interest in me; perhaps Christ really had driven out all his homosexual devils. As it ended up, he mounted her while I stroked her face. When we were all dressed again, the Scotts seemed exhilarated – too much so, to my mind, considering how little had happened. Only gradually did I come to understand that whereas the Scotts certainly did have a serious Anglican admiration of sin, they had an equally strong horror of seeming to themselves bourgeois. Their desire to be bohemian outweighed their resolve to be good. Our “orgy,” as they called it, reassured them that their morality must be of a higher sort, no mere suburban primness.

  Sex now seemed a strange thing to me, a social rite that registered, even brought about shifts in the balance of power, but something that was more discussed than performed, a simple emission of fluid that somehow generated religious, social and economic consequences.

  What I daydreamed of was a lover who would be older than I, richer and more influential, but also companionable. He would prize me for my sexuality, which was at once my essence and also an attribute I was totally unfamiliar with, like the orphan’s true name, a magical identity he knows nothing of until the very moment of revelation. The name ennobles the orphan, just as one’s sexual nature confers a previously undivined but achingly anticipated human nature upon love’s candidate. I knew I was worthless and at the same time I was convinced somebody would find me worthy, would worship me for this sexual allure so foreign to my understanding yet so central to my being.

  Although I lived surrounded by people and regularly visited a psychoanalyst, it never entered my mind to discuss with anyone my fantasies, those in which the Belgian soldier or a silver-haired stranger in a dove-gray suit seated in his Silver Cloud took me away and married me. For other boys, who can legally marry their fantasies, marriage itself must seem less magical. It is, after all, a ceremony they will eventually go through. But for me, who’d never even read about the sort of union I longed for, marriage became more and more impossible, a transubstantiation as eerie and irreversible as death. Perhaps by framing this ideal and funereal homosexual marriage in a prospect of poisonous flowers, I was making it more and more remote, thereby putting off the day when I’d have to decide whether I myself was a homosexual or not. Of course I wanted to love a man and to be heterosexual; the longer I could delay sorting out this antinomy the better.

  I didn’t go home for Thanksgiving but spent the long weekend with the Scotts. They took the opportunity to introduce me to Father Burke, their “confessor,” and spiritual guardian. Rachel had told me that he regularly wrote her long letters full of counsel and prayer, although he lived only some fifty or sixty miles away and she and DeQuincey saw him often. Father Burke also wrote Quince long letters, which Quince would never show to Rachel. Father Burke had taken over the poorest, oldest, most backward parish in the state: a mortification, I suppose. In his unheated, shabby little church he officiated at several services a day. He was famous, at least to the Scotts, for his short, lucid sermons – “Worthy of Boussuet,” DeQuincey assured me, “little miracles of theology and common sense.”

  In his letters to Rachel, Father Burke argued in page after page of his effortlessly flowing script against her longing to leave DeQuincey. Once she even showed me an excerpt from Burke’s latest: “Nor, my daughter, can you leave your husband any more than Our Lord can abandon the sinner or God the prodigal. In a very special, very private sense DeQuincey is your Cross and your marriage is your Calvary. Don’t imagine for a moment, my child, that I am insensitive to your plight. I know what sort of man DeQuincey is, and I know how little he is suited to you in the way the world thinks. What, then, could have been God’s plan in linking you to such a man with an eternal vow except to purify you through pain? Rather than despising and fleeing our sufferings, we should treasure them and thank the Lord for them, since we are each given the exact sort of suffering we require to break our will and to increase our spirit, as though the will were the seed’s hull and the spirit its germinating embryo.”

  Something in me thrilled to this talk. Certainly such a religion raised our flat, squirming little lives into the high static relief of allegory. The Church had set aside its legal and political ambitions in order to ensure its continued colonization of dailiness. This invasion advanced into every last corner of consciousness by virtue of a flair for drama. Reality isn’t dramatic but the mind is; the Church accommodates itself accordingly to mental physiology rather than to the anatomy of the real.

  For the Scotts the medieval ring to Father Burke’s style made it all the more seductive. Far from impressing them as a drawback, the farfetched nature of his language and his insistence on its literal truth had for them all the appeal of the antique. They belonged to that generation of humanists who found the advances of science alarming and who imagined the atelier and the chapel must defend themselves against the laboratory. To me this view of things seemed quaint; I was content to accept every truth scienc
e might establish, though at the same time I recognized that what most interested me science couldn’t address: subjectivity. The Scotts weren’t willing to reduce the claims of the spirit. They wanted to vaunt the “higher” truth of religion and art over the somehow mechanical or merely factual truth of science. Father Burke, clearly intelligent, erudite and dedicated, thrilled them when he insisted on the literal miracle of the Virgin Birth and the actual existence of hell, although in his version hell got improved, its status as fiery real estate changed to a cold, unreal state in which the degree of damnation is measured by the soul’s distance from God. “Hell is God’s absence,” he told me.

  For Thanksgiving Mrs. Scott had on an unprecedentedly girlish blue dress and a mauve ribbon bobby-pinned to her still-wet hair. She kept blinking mildly and smiling meekly as she brought in dish after dish to the heavy oak dining room table. DeQuincey stood to carve. He performed the ritual with solemnity. When we toasted one another with red wine, DeQuincey said to Father Burke, “I welcome you to the hospitality of our table; you are our honored guest,” and the priest smiled and inclined his head. I kept feeling that everyone but me was following a secret book of etiquette and that the deliberateness of the courtesy was as medieval as Burke’s theology.

  The dinner conversation was philosophical. Aristotle was dismissed in favor of Plato, a preference I again ascribed to the very improbability of Plato’s thought. It seemed that the more bizarre a belief, the more poetic it must be, and hence the more noble it was to embrace it. I couldn’t help sensing that the Scotts were, underneath everything, as American as I, just as skeptical of ideas, and that like me they were convinced by the sincerity of an impulse rather than the rigor of a system. Very well. By a snobbish reverse, the preposterous claims of Platonism and a Platonic Christianity were what most excited them, as though anything that so taxed one’s credulity must be – well, not true, but aristocratic, superior. When they’d talk about Original Sin or the Creation or the Devil they’d become agitated, their cheeks would flush and their eyes would sparkle, as though they were hypnotizing themselves into espousing this obvious nonsense. And the more vague and absurd – the things they discussed (angels, the resurrection of the body), the more they used such words as precisely, undoubtedly, clearly and naturally, and each time they uttered such a word their eyes would dilate with glee – lying made them gleeful, just as children shriek with pleasure as they egg each other on to think up more and more gruesome details in a ghost story.

  After dinner I found myself alone with Father Burke. Tim was taking his nap and the Scotts had rather stagily gone out for a walk. The priest was by no means the dour figure I had pictured him to be. He was small, clubby, wore a gold seal ring, swilled his brandy in a snifter and inhaled its fumes with his eyes closed and eyebrows raised as though he were hearing a tenor float a high note. When he spoke he did so with a faint Tidewater accent. Like other upper-class Southerners he had an interest in history and acted as though he were on an intimate footing with the famous dead. The Roman Republic had been discussed over the pumpkin pie and Father Burke had winked at me and said, “You know that Julius Caesar was a terribly attractive man. He made Conquests wherever he went, and not just among the ladies.” I dared to hope he meant Caesar had loved men as well, although possibly ladies were being contrasted to sluts. Assuming Burke had meant men, was his wink a way of showing me the Scotts had told him about my homosexual problem and that he was too worldly to be appalled by it?

  I’d never known this particular shade of Christianity before. I’d met know-nothing Fundamentalists, or at least heard them rave over the radio. Higher up the social ladder came the suburban Presbyterians and Unitarians and Congregationalists who joined a vanilla-pudding sort of earnestness to a complete lack of charity. Fortunately, they had no urge to proselytize, since they maintained their faith as a closed club, a Rotary lodge for well-heeled businessmen. Then I had had my brush with Marilyn’s Catholicism, but it was all rapture and votive candles and tears, something I filed in my imagination next to Puccini arias and the names of expensive perfumes (Poème d’Extase). The Scotts, however, were serious people. They cared about the poor. They liked their pleasures. They were well read. And they were spiritually on the make; they wanted me to convert. Father Burke himself was both cerebral and sensuous, unshockable. He had small dark eyes that he would let deliberately cloud over only so that they could suddenly clarify. As I spoke he’d tap his fingertips together and wear a wan smile that said, “I’ve heard this all a hundred times before. Please continue.” At the moment I was spelling out for him my objection to God, an argument I’d worked out previously but that the wine was muddling: “But if God is all-knowing He must have foreseen from the beginning how people would suffer, and if He foresaw it, then we didn’t really ever have a choice, and if He was all good, then why did He let us suffer, wait a minute, wait a minute . . .”

  Father Burke had stopped tapping his fingers. His smile had faded and his eyes had gone cloudy. He’d let his face become old and weary, as though to say I had done this to him. Suddenly his eyes were homing in on me, a flicker of his tongue stung his lips back into life and he said, “But shouldn’t we set aside this philosophy” – generous dollop of irony to suggest that if he was interested in my soul he was bored by my mind, for my soul might be eternal but my mind was all to obviously adolescent – and move on to something a little more urgent.” He pressed his fingertips to his brow and hid behind his hands. “Haven’t you something you want to tell me about?” he asked out of this manual tent, his voice hollow.

  But he was trying to intimidate the wrong person. I was, after all, a Buddhist. I’d never believed, or only in fleeting reverie, in a warm, concerned, touchy Christian God, who seemed all too obviously a conflation of what people wanted and feared. As a character, Burke intrigued me more than his deity. I appreciated the sense of drama he wanted to inject into my existence and I was flattered he thought I, or at least some essential if rather abstract principle within me, was worth saving.

  But I also felt surging within me a fierce need to be independent. Of course I responded to the appeal of divine hydraulics, this system of souls damned or crowned or destroyed or held in suspense, these pulleys and platforms sinking and lifting on the great stage, and I recognized that my view of things seemed by contrast impoverished, lacking in degree and incident. But the charming intricacy of a myth is not sufficient to compel belief. I found no good reason to assume that the ultimate nature of reality happens to resemble the backstage of an opera house.

  On a more emotional level I had an aversion to anything authoritarian. I might long for the capacious, sheltering embrace of a father but I detested paternalism. I was quite hostile to it, in fact. “Well, yes,” I said, “I am seeing a psychiatrist because I have conflicts over certain homosexual tendencies I’m feeling.”

  At these words Father Burke’s face lurched up out of his hands. Not the nervous little confession he had expected. He recovered his poise and decided to laugh boisterously, the laugh of Catholic centuries. “Conflicts?” he whooped, in tears of laughter by now. Then, sobering for a second, the priest added in a low, casual voice, “But you see, my son, homosexuality isn’t just a conflict that needs to be resolved” – his voice picked up these words as though they were nasty bits of refuse – “homosexuality is also a sin.”

  I think he had no notion how little an effect the word sin had on me. He might just as well have said, “Homosexuality is bad juju.”

  “But I feel very drawn to other men,” I said. Although something defiant in me forced these words out, I felt myself becoming a freak the moment I spoke. My hair went bleach-blond, my wrist went limp, my rep tie became a lace jabot: I was the simpering queen at the grand piano playing concert versions of last year’s pop tunes for his mother and her bridge club. There was no way to defend what I was. All I could fight for was my right to choose my exile, my destruction.

  “Just because you feel something is no rea
son to act on it,” the priest said. “Americans hold up their feelings as though they were . . . dispensations.” He drained off the brandy. “For instance, I’ve taken a vow of chastity and I abide by it.”

  “What do you do for relief?”

  He smiled at my impertinence. “Do I masturbate, is that what you’re asking? I don’t. Occasionally there’s a nocturnal emission.” He touched his lips with his fingertips. I wondered if the women of his parish who volunteered their services as housekeepers to the priest treasured those stiffened linen relics of sanctity.

  The pastoral chat was not turning out. Father Burke was miffed. He was most irritated with the Scotts, who’d misrepresented to him my readiness to leap up into the lap of Mother Church. The priest consulted his pocket watch, then worked a toothpick behind a screening hand, a nicety that seemed to me nearly as repulsive as nocturnal emissions.

  My stubbornness caused the Scotts to cool considerably. When I dropped in on Rachel the Monday after Thanksgiving, she scarcely looked up from her Imitation of Christ. At last she sighed impatiently, set it aside and said, “I don’t think you should spend quite so much time here. It’s not healthy for you. You should run and play with the other boys. Besides, I’m doing a lot of reading in The Golden Bough for my next poem and I can’t just chew the fat with you for hours and hours and hours.” Tears sprang to my eyes and I hurried away.

  Recently a new part-time teacher had been added to the staff, a Mr. Beattie, who had been hired to instruct three afternoons a week those students interested in jazz. Beattie himself was a jazz drummer and had even toured with a band; he still held regular jam sessions somewhere downtown on weekends. Chuck told me Beattie was a “character,” his highest accolade. Chuck was so sure of himself he was always seeking out “characters” in order to introduce dissonance into his otherwise tonic experience.