The Beautiful Room Is Empty (5 page)

The rest of the morning we spent on the porch in front of Maria’s cabin. She was wearing a floppy straw hat and a halter top. She was painting a still life—wine bottle, apple,
Cinzano ashtray—and she laughed and said, “This is hard. Abstract Expressionism eliminated all this tiresome observation.”

Although she was a Communist, Maria liked the songs of Noel Coward, Mabel Mercer, and Marlene Dietrich, and she played their records for me in the underfurnished rec room at the inn. She was the first to see the irony in this inconsistency, but her merely personal taste scarcely counted, she thought, when the question was one of a “scientific theory of history.” I quickly came to love the tumbling wit of the Coward lyrics and the quixotic charms of Mercer and Dietrich, two stylists without voices and with a range of about five notes. Coward’s rolled r’s and theatrical diction, joined to the gossip that he was “gay,” interested me. “Yes,” Maria said casually, “all slander, no doubt.”

Closer to hand were Betts and Buddy, an ancient lesbian couple who lived in the most remote cabin at Solitaire. Just once I saw Buddy, who had been elected the local sheriff. I mistook her for a man, a short wide man, with grizzled, close-cropped hair and a swaggering walk. She was wearing her uniform and talking to the colony director, a much younger woman. I never saw Betts, but Maria often did, and loved describing her. “They’re terribly poor, but Betts must have been a debutante fifty years ago because she has such fussy, elegant manners. She never leaves the cabin and is always wearing silk lounging pajamas and angora high-heeled slippers, She draws and redraws her makeup. She smokes with a cigarette holder and languishes. We’re led to believe she’s ill, but of what no one is crude enough to ask. Buddy stops at the bar in town for a drink every evening to shoot the shit with the guys, but then hurries home to her better half. Isn’t it bizarre we find their marriage charming but we can’t endure the heterosexual original they’re aping?”

As I listened to Maria, I absorbed each small wrenching
of convention without a blink. The teasingly affectionate portrait of two such eccentrics stunned me, though I never let on. I knew I might be as diseased as they were—in fact, I had no doubt of it—but I’d never aired my neurosis as these women did, and if it were found out, I’d expect to be run to ground, not gently chided. But as the records spun, as Noel Coward talked about life coming to Mrs. Wentworth Brewster at the Bar on the Piccola Marina, when Marlene confessed that men clustered round her like moths to a flame and if they burned their wings she was not to blame, I felt plunged into a piquant world where sins were winked at, where in fact a juicy peccadillo was the price of admission. We sat in shabby rattan chairs under a naked light bulb inadequately screened by a lantern-shaped basket whose weave was too wide and let our eyes stray over the Ping-Pong table, the game of Chinese checkers, and the dart board, while just outside more and more moths, drawn by the light, or Dietrich, beat against the screens. Maria walked about restlessly as though she only half-believed her own daring words.

We drove into town in her station wagon. It felt strange to be chauffeured by Maria, and I registered this new awkwardness, which certainly I had not known last winter. But then I’d still been her little Dumpling, whereas now I was, well, what I imagined the other colonists took me to be: bourgeois visitor, friend, possibly suitor. Yes, complete with bourgeois male anxiety about who drives the car.

Maria led me in the slow dance at the bar, a noisy friendly hangout illuminated by the endless Niagara of the Miller’s High Life sign and by the bubbling jukebox. I was too young to be in a bar legally, but no one noticed and we drank beer after beer and danced to polkas or slow hillbilly songs. Maria said she loved the hillbilly songs because they were about grown-ups, adultery, divorce, heartache. With her, even loss sounded as glamorous as gain.

TWO

        My last year in boarding school during Christmas vacation in Chicago, I met a small Texan with bad eyes, bad skin, and the smell of Luckies on his breath. Tex ran a book and record store next to an art house showing movies near the Loop. “Art movies” were still new then. The label might mean Gina Lollobrigida jiggling provocatively up and down hills on a donkey or it might mean Gérard Philipe meeting an early death as the crazed painter Modigliani. Despite the range, art meant Europe, and something European shed its glow on Tex. I’d get on the elevated train in Evanston and ride an hour each way late in the afternoon just to escape my mother and sister and spend thirty minutes with him.

He loved books. I remember running with him down the street one gray winter afternoon when the sun, discouraged by a cold reception, had withdrawn. Tex had nothing on but a tweed jacket and a ratty scarf steeped in smoke, itself the color of smoke. He was racing like a kid to the post office to carry back to the store two boxes of books, all copies of
The Outsider
by Colin Wilson. I carried one box. Tex had
ripped open the other and was juggling with it as he read random pages to me. “Listen to this, will you,” Tex shouted with a sudden reemergence of his warm Southern accent. Generally he tried to sound contained, as though he’d just sucked a lemon, but now his mouth was filling up with hot sweet potato pie.

In another instant we were back in Tex’s cozy store, which had been temporarily confided to the care of his pouty assistant, Morris. We settled into a heap on the pink velvet loveseat by the window to read
The Outsider
to each other in excited snatches. That was the way Tex read, as though a new book were a telegram addressed to him personally. This one was about a whole fortune that a spiritual uncle somewhere off in England had willed him, since the book told us about existentialism and its roots and suggested that, over there at least, to be an outsider was not a cause for shame but a condition that could be capitalized on, even capitalized. Tex talked to me about the Human Condition. Because he didn’t introduce his ideas and he threw away the ends of sentences, he seemed to be letting me in on a conversation I’d be gauche to interrupt and question. The bitter coffee we drank, the sound of the discreetly murmuring announcer on the classical music radio station, and the sight of reflected spotlights tilting off varnished new books and records still in their cellophane wrappers—all of these things came together to excite me, especially since I knew Tex was gay.

Morris, the assistant, even used that word when there was no one else in the shop. He’d pulled up one trousers leg and caressed his calf and said, “I’m feeling so gay tonight.” Then he shook his head as though he had curls instead of a close crop. He wasn’t smiling; he was completely serious. I didn’t know exactly what he meant but I knew he meant something quite precise.

“Shut up, Morris,” Tex snapped in a cruelly direct voice
and jerked his head to indicate me. I turned just in time to catch it. “And Morris,” he added, “lay off the fuckin’ eyeshadow for chrissake. I’m running a respectable operation here. One more warning you’re out on your little depilated tush.”

I looked more closely at Morris. I couldn’t see any trace of makeup. Why would he wear it? I wondered. Do queers like that? Is that how they can tell who’s who?

The joy of reading
The Outsider
had turned ugly. Snow whirled in a sudden updraft, then fell through the streetlights.

Day after day the snow fell and the streets rang with the sound of shovels. People in fur hats and many layers of clothing tiptoed awkwardly over gutters piled high with the snow that street plows had turned back.

At home I felt a constant tingling excitement just knowing that yesterday afternoon I’d seen Tex and again today I would snatch a few minutes with him. In Evanston, I stood in the bay window and looked out at Lake Michigan beating itself up. Ticking steadily inside me was the thought, half-thrill half-fear, that within my grasp, or almost, lay this other world. This “gay world,” you might say, with its mood swings turning slowly, then slamming you to one side like a roller coaster on a sharp turn. This world with its childlike enthusiasms and vicious attacks. I associated it with Morris’s silent pouting and the way he’d stroked his leg, licked his lips, and said, “I’m feeling so gay tonight.” Although I knew something would have to come out of my visits if I continued paying them, I feared what I hoped, and what I hoped I didn’t want to know.

Tick, tick, tick. The excitement was in my pulse. I couldn’t think of anything else nor did I want to. I’d look at the mashed potatoes exhaling steam and I’d hear the ticking in my ears. In my bed at night as I peeked through the curtains at the old man across the way reading his paper
and luxuriantly picking his nose, I’d hear the tick taking me nearer to my next encounter with Tex.

The next afternoon Tex and I were alone in the shop. Morris was home with what Tex sourly referred to as a “sick headache” and Tex kept complaining about Morris’s inept bookkeeping. He was looking through the accounts and a long gray silence installed itself in the room. For once the radio wasn’t on and no well-bred announcer was reading to us from Pound’s
Cantos
or playing us alternative interpretations of
“Nessun dorma.”
People stopped and looked at the books in the window but hurried on.

Tex slammed the glass counter and moaned, “Honey-chile, your mother’s in a bad way.” For an instant I imagined my real mother had phoned in an emergency, but then I understood he meant himself. I was flattered that he was about to confide in me. My mother often told me her secrets, and I was an experienced listener. I could look sympathetic and I gave only welcome advice.

“Your momma’s done hocked her jewels for her man and now I’s too hard up to buy needles and thread for my notions shop. Oh sweetheart, tell me, who will feed Baby?”

Instantly I grasped that this funny, imaginative way of talking was a form of politeness, a way of conveying his distress in general terms without treating me to the unpleasant details. “Are you completely broke?” I asked, though I wanted to ask, “Who is this man?”

“All my money is here,” he said, pointing to his glossy books and records. “If she can’t sling this hash, Mom will have to close the diner.” Every time Morris had started to substitute female for male pronouns, Tex had shut him up out of deference to my supposed innocence. Now Tex himself was inverting genders—was it a sign of embarrassment?

“Who’s your man?” I asked.

He slid off the stool behind the cash register and came
over to me on the pink loveseat. His shoulders dropped. He was really very homely, with clammy skin, small boneless hands, a meager sparrow’s torso. When he took off his glasses, his eyes looked huge and wet.

“You see, my lovers always turn out to be straight.” I must have looked confused, despite my efforts to appear all-comprehending, for he added, “Heterosexual, normal. My current beau is a cop, Bob, and I just paid three hundred bucks for his wife’s abortion.”

“Does she know about you and Bob—what you are?” I asked, not quite sure what they were. How could a bona fide heterosexual like a queer?

Tex lit a cigarette. He was strangely likable, despite his melancholy air—likable because he carried his whole story with him wherever he went, like the housekeeper who worked for my father and stepmother, scattering her ash in her tenth cup of coffee, chatting away about the men in her life, still wearing her bathrobe at three in the afternoon, her sympathy universal even when her understanding was partial.

As for Tex, he was so intimate that he erased the distance between adolescent and adult. I had heard my mother and her friends discussing the “man problem”; now Tex was doing the same, and I was listening as a provisional equal.

“I think she suspects her husband’s fooled around with me, but it suits her to look the other way. She knows they can count on me for loans, like for this abortion. They already have three kids. I like her and she knows it. We all go bowling together in Rogers Park when she’s not wore out.”

“Then what’s the problem?” I asked briskly to cover my confusion. His novel way of looking at things was so human and unconventional. You could say he wore down the spikes of moral imperatives by holding things—dangerous explosive things—in his soft hands and turning them this way and that. At least right now, sitting beside me, he spoke of
his cop, the wife, the abortion, the loans, the bowling evenings, with such domestic sighing familiarity that I took them all in the same way, his way, touched them all over in a friendly way.

“The problem, my Poor Little Rich Girl, is money, moolah—not that you’d understand,” and he ruffled my hair and smiled with fond exasperation, his eyes supplicating heaven for patience. I didn’t feel spoiled; I felt neglected. Nor did I choose to step into the role he was holding up for me. I took his hand and said, “But I do understand,” and I did.

Then, out of a reflex of good manners, he cocked his head to one side speculatively. “But tell me, Baby Doll, what are you looking for in a man? What kind of sex? Start with that.”