A Boy's Own Story (22 page)

I woke with tears in my eyes so salty they burned the can thus. Everything I touched or did spoke to me of sadness. Each article of clothing—shirt, tie, jacket—felt cut out of different bolts of sadness, each a peculiar weave and shape and hang of sadness, as though sadness came in lots of styles. My shoes posed above their reflections on the glossy floor, and they looked to me like imperfect molds cast from the original, perfect sadness; I mean they were big, solid things, crude actually, and yet the frayed end of a lace, the rim around the opening that bulged here and there, the unevenly worn heels—they all spoke of use, my use, they were sensitive records of dailiness, nothing sadder.

The father of a classmate was a local psychiatrist and he arranged for me to see a famous analyst John Thomas O'Reilly. O'Reilly's office was next door to his home, the two buildings unassuming suburban clapboard houses separated by a concrete drive. Once I was inside the office, however, I found the decor to be luxurious and exotic, not at all what I had expected. The waiting room was carpeted in delicate tatami mats bruised by horrid Western shoes. A large birdcage, woven out of bent reeds to resemble a baroque Brazilian church, confined a dozen bright choristers all cheeping at once. Long scrolls, rubbings from Han Dynasty tombs, pictured featureless warriors standing in tall, narrow chariots under stiff fans and drawn along by surprisingly small ponies twisting nervously in their traces—a whole traffic jam of military chariots describing interlocking curves, fan beside palmetto fan, one horse's neck dipping behind and below another's raised hoof. The artist had been at least as interested in the abstract pattern as in the subject and as a consequence had turned a dusty pandemonium into immaculate machinery. I studied these details because I had so long to wait (I'd arrived early and the doctor was running about an hour behind schedule).

At last he emerged with a red-nosed woman in a green dress who was humble, even cringing. She slipped into a full-length black coat made of the wool of unborn lambs; once she'd extinguished the color of her dress she regained her composure and accomplished an unsniveling exit.

Dr. O'Reilly smiled at me, teeth spaced and white, lips full and raw,
gnawed
raw, it seemed, under full mustaches, his hair white and to his shoulders—a startling length in those days. His costume also gave one pause: a piece of rope to hold up baggy, stained trousers, bare feet in hemp sandals, a great tent of a minutely and intermittently pleated lime-green Havana shirt containing his corpulence, and in the stubby fingers of his right hand a dirty hanky he kept pressing to his red, raw face, for though we were still in midwinter, sweat lent an incongruous dazzle to his face.

"Come in, come in," he said, stepping aside to usher me into the inner office, a soundproofed cube with one wall all glass looking out on a garden and a small replica of the Kamakura Buddha, gilt everywhere save for a lap full of new snow. "See that log and that hatchet?" the doctor said, pointing to a palisaded enclosure just to the right of the garden. "My patients dub the log Mom or Dad as the case may be, usually Mom, and then have a grand ol' time hacking away at her." His small blue eyes, veined in red, rotated dryly in their sockets to take in my reaction to the idea of murder—except his act of "observation" was so stagy it preempted the need for another response. There was nothing about this actor that couldn't be read from the top balcony.

I declined the analytic couch's invitation to the voyage and chose an earthbound chair that faced the desk. Not that I wasn't eager to test the couch's splendors, which I instinctively (and I hazard astutely) equated with those of sexuality. It was just that I felt somewhat abashed by the couch's very explicitness, as though it were someone's beautiful mother who wouldn't cross her legs, who had even decided to flaunt her most intimate charms. That was just how musky and startling I found the couch, which so shamelessly resembled itself in a thousand cartoons, although now I understood the cartoons had done nothing so much as to sensitize me to its heroic and decidedly unfunny actuality.

My first sight of the analytic couch constituted the primal scene, for only its existence jarred me into recognizing that the world is governed by a minority, the sexually active, and that they hold sway over a huge majority of the nonsexual, those people too young or too old or too poor or homely or sick or crazy or powerless to be able to afford sexual partners (or the luxury of systematic, sustained and shared introspection, so sexual in its own way). All advertisements and films and songs are addressed to sexuals, to their rash whims and finicky tastes, but these communications cleverly ignore nonsexuals, those pale, penniless, underdeveloped bodies, blue nipples flung like two test drops of ink from a new pen across the blotting paper of a chest, or high, hairless buttocks, un-molded by hands into something lovely, something enticing, left pure and formless like butcher's lard. The patient who always preceded me was the lady in the Persian-lamb coat; she left behind the peculiar perfumed smell of the paper tissues she wept into, a weak solution of those chemical towels handed out after lobster in family restaurants, and the heavier, more aggressive and I suppose offensive smell of her stubbed-out cigarettes (eight or nine in the sterling-silver cupped hand that served as the ashtray). These smells and the ghosts of smoke circulating through the sunlight, colloidal souvenirs, seemed to be the echoes of a just-completed drama by Racine in which lambent passions had glowed within the glass chimney of formal measures, in which all the action must occur offstage and is merely reported here and the only permissible emotions are the great ones—incestuous longings, guilt, and the impulse to murder—whereas the dimmer, more usual feelings of sloth, boredom, spleen, irritability are airily dismissed. For psychoanalysis feeds on intensity, as though life were all flame and no ash.

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 marionettists'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 according 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.