Identity Matrix (1982) (2 page)

Some just got naked in cold, plastic motel rooms and jerked off to some private fantasy they might not ever want to actually experience.

I got up after a while and walked into the bathroom. It was one of those kind with a full-length mirror—you couldn't even shit without watching yourself doing it—and I stopped and stared at myself as I had so many times before.

Behold Victor Gonser, I thought. Age—thirty-five. Height—five eight and a half, something like that. Average. Over-all—average. Caucasian male who'd always been almost scarecrow-thin and still looked that way, only now there was an incongruous double bulge at the tummy that looked totally ridiculous. Most people gained all over, or at least had heavy asses, but, no, mine ballooned around the navel like some hydrogen gas bag.

There wasn't much hair left, and the thin moustache, all I could ever really manage, gave me one of those mild-mannered accountant looks. Truth was, I looked weak in all areas, the face a patsy's face, the kind of face that told you you could walk all over this guy. And even this Caspar Milquetoast was something of a fraud. The uppers were kept in a jar overnight, and I peered at myself from a distance of six inches through glasses that looked like the bottoms of Coke bottles.

There'd be no release tonight, I knew. I was too down, too depressed, too sober despite the double bourbon. It was, I thought, a ridiculous situation for somebody like me, but, damn it, there it was.

Somebody once said that a few of my colleagues envied me, and that had shaken me up for quite a while. The people in question were better looking, more outgoing, seemed to enjoy their lives. Envy? Me? But, of course, there were the things they saw that I'd attained that I'd once also seen as wonderful, only to find they were meaningless once you had them.

Money, for example, was always envied, and I'd had nothing to do with that department. Dad had been a corporate lawyer with a really big-shot firm and he'd made a bundle in his time. Home to me would be a mansion to most people, sitting in the very wealthy Virginia suburbs of Washington, D.C. In a place where a two-bedroom shack was a quarter of a million; we had twenty-two rooms on fourteen wooded acres, complete with pool, riding stable, tennis courts, you name it. It was a lot particularly when you consider that Mom had to have a hysterectomy for a cancerous condition only a year or so after I was born and that left just the three of us on the place. Two, really, since I guess we saw Dad for about an hour a night and maybe every sixth weekend. That was another of life's little jokes on people, I always thought. Self-made men who worked damned hard and made a couple of million dollars were always so busy they never were home enough, never had time enough, to enjoy any of that money. And, when they started realizing this, as Dad finally did, they'd wind up dropping dead of a heart attack just when they've decided to take it easy and enjoy life.

As Dad did. Dead at forty-six. No geriatric cruises, no graduations, weddings, sailing, none of that for him. That was left to the nonentities, the retired feed grain salesmen from Des Moines with the IRA account.

Life was always full of cruel jokes like that, I thought glumly. And, when I'd stood there, watching him being lowered into the ground surrounded by enough big shots to buy California, I'd felt no. loss, no pain, no sense of grief, and I'd felt guilty for that, but damn it all, it's hard to grieve for a man you barely knew.

Mom, now, she was a different case. I had to hand it to my father that he'd remained married to her all that time, although he was no TV sex symbol star himself. She was plain, beyond the best beauty and fashion con-sultants money could buy, and she'd been poor. They both had been when they'd married just out of college, and she'd gone to work and supported him through law school.

There was a bond there, between these two seem-ingly plain, ordinary people from Moscow, Idaho, one that didn't fall apart as his spectacular law school grades had attracted a large firm well connected to Senator Carlovich and which he'd ridden to Washington and the seats of power. I don't know if it was love—I was never sure of that—but it was more than a strict Catholic upbringing that kept them together. I think, perhaps, that they each had what they wanted out of life, or thought they did. Money, power, prestige.

But Mom wanted more than Washington social life, more than the routine of being married to the powerful and well-connected, more than her political activities and championing of liberal causes. I was the only child she had, and, by damn, I was going to be somebody, too!

A private all-male military style prep school, one of the best, shielded from the world, from the ordinary folk and the roots both she and Dad had risen from, only the best training and prepping for Victor Leigh Gonser, yes, ma'am!

Hell, I was eighteen before I even
met a
girl in other than the most rigidly controlled social situations, and by that time it was getting too late. I discovered that I simply didn't know what to do. I hadn't had a childhood, I'd had a mini-business adulthood, so pro-tected from my peers that I could hardly identify with them. It's in the teen years, particularly, that you learn the rules society has set down—how to meet and mix with other people, all the social and sexual signals, the anthropology of your culture. Without them, and out in the world, you find you're as well prepared for socializ-ing as you would be if you were living amongst a New Guinea tribe. You're not a part of it, you don't fit.

And, of course, when you fail out of ignorance to respond to the rituals of society you get pigeonholed and stereotyped and promptly ignored. In my case the men, and women, at college at first thought I was gay, then decided, finally, that I was sexless, a neuter without the needs they all had. God! How I envied them.

So I threw myself into my studies, for that was all I had, and ignored the social life and activities that the rest of the world enjoyed around me. The work was absurdly easy, even at Harvard—money-hungry univer-sities had gone for the least common denominator in a generation where such basics as reading and math were largely irrelevant, and it had reached even here. Not that there wasn't some intellectual stimulation, but it was the rare professor and the rare course that offered it, and you could tell
those
men and women were not long for the academic life. They did the inexcusable at a modern university—they thought, and, worse, promoted thinking among those with whom they came in contact.

I excelled at university studies, not merely for this reason but because it was the only thing I had to do that I could take some pride in accomplishment. I took mas-sive loads, partly because I was interested in practically everything but also because I had nothing outside the academic life to occupy my time or mind, and the heav-ier the workload the less time I had to dwell on my lack of humanity.

Oddly, the social sciences held the greatest attraction for me, as if, somehow, I could find what was lacking in my own being by studying others in a clini-cal, professional pattern. I studied human behavior the way the biologist studies the workings of a cell or the life of a paramecium. I wound up graduating
summa
cum laude
with double majors in psychology and sociol-ogy and a strong minor in political science. For gradu-ate studies I concentrated on psychology simply because I felt that I understood the interaction of human beings in groups as much as anyone did up to then. It was the individual mind, the human psyche, that somehow eluded me. Yet it was political science that I finally got my doctorate in. The truth was, everybody I met in the psychology department was definitely nuts, and a good deal of modern psychology exposed too much of the human being studying it to others—the essence of psy-chology, of course.

This is not to say that I didn't try analysis. On a one-to-one basis I could be frank, open, and free, but the problem was that I generally seemed to know as much as the psychiatrist and more than many. The foundation of clinical psychology is to get you to admit and recog-nize the causes of your problems so that you can work them out. My trouble was that
I knew
the causes of my problems, understood myself quite well, but that I could articulate what I needed to join human society only to another similarly afflicted. The rest just couldn't really understand.

Just after my twenty-fifth birthday something truly disenheartening happened.

I had graduated, received my Ph.D., and I was ready to make my own way in the world from an academic standpoint, but not at all prepared to do so on an emotional level. I was a twenty-five- year old sexually repressed virgin. There seemed only one thing to do, and I did it, back home in Washington; when outside a restaurant on Connecticut Avenue I was approached by an attractive black woman, nicely dressed and finely featured. I actually approached the proposi-tion clinically, as I did everything, reflecting that I had little to lose with almost no money on me if it were a set-up for a rob-and-roll, and, what the hell…

It was legit, and it was fascinating, and it was as coldly businesslike as any academic lab exercise on both sides. It broke my cherry, but it was neither satisfying nor particularly pleasurable in the end. All it showed me was that I was a normal male with the ability to perform; it did nothing to integrate me into the lives of real people.

I was offered an instructor's position in political sci-ence from a number of places, but selected Johns Hopkins in Baltimore partly because it was close to home and familiar surroundings and partly because it was the most prestigious institution offering me anything. I did a couple of books that sold moderately well, mostly examinations of political attitudes, and while I found the faculty politics and under-graduate standards at Hopkins to be a mini-Harvard, I managed to find myself a niche. Although my political writings weren't really pop-ular with my colleagues, I was non-threatening, never rocked the boat, and found it easy to say the right thing at the right time to the right person to keep it that way. Not only the psychology, but all those years growing up around Washington hadn't been totally wasted. Still, I tended to associate more with faculty in other, unre-lated disciplines than with my own immediate colleagues. It made it easier to keep out of arguments and office politics, and, of course, it helped satiate my never-ending curiosity about practically everything.

And so, I guess, those who could not know what was going on in my head (and no one else could) could envy me—rich, with a solid position at a top school, and with a modest amount of national fame through my books and occasional TV talk show stints. They especially loved me for voter analysis around election time.

Mom died when I was thirty-three. Funny—she'd always been paranoid about cancer since that operation so long ago and it had become a passion with her.

So she died of a heart attack on the tennis court at age sixty-one.

I felt real grief for her, even though she was at the heart of most of my problems. She had meant well, and she'd been proud, and, I guess, she'd been the only real human being I could relax with. I considered an offer from American University so I could live in the house, but one look at the place with just me and no social life made that idea ridiculous. I just rented it for a fantastic sum to the Majority Whip of the Senate, who needed it, and took a large old brownstone near Hopkins.

Mom's passing, though, had a serious effect on me. For the first time in my life I was totally, utterly, truly alone. There was no one else now (I suppose Mom went to her grave bewildered that her frenzied matchmaking did no good at all) and every time I looked in a mirror I saw myself growing older, falling apart a little more, losing my last chance at ever joining humanity. I was becoming, had become, not human at all, but a sort of friendly alien, a creature that was nonhuman in all respects and, like Marley's ghost, could only wander the world watching happiness it could not share, existing but somehow apart. I moved through crowds, the only one of my kind.

I often envied women, and even occasionally fanta-sized myself as one. Not that I was gay, as I said—this was different. It seemed to me that women had an in-nate social advantage in a society that was male created and, despite years of liberation, still predominantly male dominated. Women, even the most sheltered, were raised to know the rules of the game. Oh, it might be as a warning—if this guy does this, watch out!—but they all knew. They had more options than men, too, in a curi-ous way. I suppose that was why many men feared the women's rights movement. Society—not codified laws, cultural laws—now gave them all the options. Marriage was an option. Children, in or out of marriage, was an option. They could work, with the full backing of the law and the courts, in any field they wanted competing directly with men, or they could opt to be supported by men. Men, on the other hand, had none of these options. The courts still put the burden of divorce and child support on the man while granting custody to the woman, no matter what the relative age or income. Men couldn't have children. Men could not opt to be supported by women if they so chose.

And, in any case, no woman seemed to be in my position in a crowd.

Women could walk into a motel bar and be the center of attention, no matter what they looked like, of lonely men on the make. A female colleague of mine once confessed that she'd dropped a bundle in Reno and was left with nothing but a bus ticket home—yet men bought her breakfast, lunch, and dinner with only a little prodding, and she'd made out quite well, thank you. And she was as ugly an old bag as you could imagine.

It wasn't the sexual part of a woman's life I craved, it was the social interaction that was seemingly almost automatic. Academically I knew that there had to be some women, somewhere, who were in my kind of fix, but I couldn't conceive of them in real-life terms.

I wanted a wife, children, parties, dancing, mixing, socializing, feeling, love, tenderness, togetherness with another human being.

And there I stood, looking at reality, in a motel john in Whitehorse and knowing it just wasn't going to happen.