The Young Apollo and Other Stories (6 page)

My patient believed now that he was doomed to live chastely. Though his sins were as scarlet, they would be as white as snow. If, returning to school, he sometimes succumbed to the temptation to masturbate at night, he would attempt to lessen the black feelings of guilt that he knew would assail him afterward by fantasizing that he was making love to a girl. At Yale, where he matriculated after graduating from St. Luke's, he allowed himself what he hoped was the harmless pleasure of reading the works of Oscar Wilde, Walter Pater, and John Addington Symonds and seeing his own repressed idealization of a certain kind of love condoned.

In his summer vacations while he was an undergraduate, Marvin became interested in the daughter of Meadowview neighbors, a lively, good-tempered, dark-haired, wide-eyed girl called Barbara Shields. She loved fishing and hiking and riding to hounds with the local fox hunt; the latter sport was also a favorite of his. The other girls he had met at Long Island parties had by no means been indifferent to him. He was at least passably handsome, though shy with them; his manners were modest, at times even charming; his family, of course, was socially prominent. His mother indeed had found fit to warn him, although smilingly, to be careful about girls who might be "after his chips." But he didn't think Barbara was. She had none of the coyness, the affected shyness, the faintly feline glitter that he saw, or fancied he saw, in other girls of their opulent neighborhood. She was too much the outdoors sort for that, too much a good sport. He found himself at ease with her as he had never been with any member of her sex except for his sisters, who "didn't count." It only bothered him slightly when he heard from his sister Cynthia, the one closest to him, that people were beginning to speak of him and Barbara as a possible match.

The reason that such talk didn't frighten him more was that Barbara didn't appear to expect him to play the game of sex, which all young men and women seemed expected to play, whether they wanted to or not. It was like football at St. Luke's, a rigid sports requirement until a student's last year, when he could elect, braving a slight sneering, the alternative of tennis or squash. But to Barbara being pals seemed quite enough. No matter how frequently they saw each other, there was no talk of a more intimate relationship. They shared hikes and rides and books and swapped anecdotes, sometimes hilarious, at the expense of each other's family. Marvin began to enjoy his new reputation of having a "steady" girlfriend, and Barbara was highly approved of by his mother. He even began to entertain warmer thoughts about her; at night in bed he would imagine what it might be like to hold her naked in his arms, causing him to have erections of which he no longer had to be ashamed.

What happened next engendered a grave crisis in Marvin's life, and I turned on my recorder to catch his exact account of it.

It turned out, doctor, that Barbara's failure to initiate a sexual relationship with me sprang not from her inexperience in such matters but from a familiarity with them considerably more sophisticated than my own. She was taking her time and knew what she was doing. In 1939 there were a lot more virgins in our Long Island set than there would be today, nor was there any stigma to it. Indeed, rather the reverse. If a girl was "fast," she didn't brag about it. Which is why I didn't know that Barbara had had an affair with a married groom attached to the stables of our country club. But some mothers knew about it, and it had not made her more marriageable in the area. Barbara was twenty-three, a bit older than I, and her father's financial reverses in the Depression had made penniless matches, however romantic, less tempting. Oh, I don't mean that she was really mercenary, but her friends were all married or getting married, and she wanted to get away from her family and be on her own, and she liked me and liked to be with me, so why not? I was what is called a catch. And she knew she would be a good and loyal wife, which is indeed just what she has been—to Frank Cooper.

She had the acumen to understand that sexual timidity in a virginal young man was not necessarily fatal to his becoming an adequate, even forceful, lover. She also had the rarer sense, usually possessed only by older women, to know that gentleness was the way to handle such cases. We began to kiss on meeting and parting, at first cheek-to-cheek, then on the lips. Soon we were hugging and even necking. There was a children's playhouse on her family's estate, long disused, as she and her brothers were grown, and we sometimes met there. She at last dared to consent to lie naked in my arms on the couch if I agreed to remain dressed and would only stroke her. Startled but excited, I agreed.

I grasped her tightly as soon as she was bare, almost as if I were trying to cover her up to spare her the shame of her nudity, but when my hands glided over her soft back and buttocks, I felt a surge of ecstasy with a stiff erection. I started to pull down my pants, and then it happened. Far from urging me to desist, she cried, "Hurry! Hurry!" with a shrillness in her tone I had never heard before.

Of course, it was the urgency of her cry that revealed the full force of her expectation. She wanted it! How she wanted it! And wasn't it her right? But being her right made it, alas, my obligation. All my old doubts about my masculinity, plus the hideous fear that I was presuming to play a role I was not fit to play, rose up to throttle me. My erection was lost, shriveled beyond hope of revival, and I could only abjectly apologize.

Thinking back now, I can wonder what would have happened if Barbara had been able to laugh and pooh-pooh the whole thing, if she had got up with an air of insouciance and said, "Better luck next time." She certainly had the intelligence to know that that might have been the way to handle me, and she tried to act accordingly later. But then it was too late. At the time, the poor girl was so aflame with readiness that the frustration was actually physically painful, and she could not help bursting into tears. I was shattered.

Despite all her efforts, we were never the same again, and when she started seeing Frank Cooper, a handsome hulk of a man who had nothing like my money but who held down a big job at a big bank, I did not feel I had the right to interfere.

As I have pointed out, this was certainly a grave crisis in my patient's life. Had Barbara been able to make light of it immediately afterward, who knows what might have happened? The next time they might have tried it with him stripped and her clothed. It could have worked. The question Marvin was to put to me sarcastically when he became my patient—could I have turned him into the commuting husband with the wife in the station wagon—might conceivably have been answered in the affirmative. As a psychiatrist I have seen stranger things.

At any rate, the war intervened, and Marvin, as a naval officer on the staff of the admiral in command of the Eastern Sea Frontier—a position that his father, unknown to him, had wangled for him—spent four years at a desk at 90 Church Street in New York. He put in again and again for sea duty, but his work was good and the admiral wouldn't let him go, and Marvin suffered all the pangs of the noncombatant as his classmates departed for combat zones, some never to return.

His sense of isolation was rendered much worse by the loss of both his parents during the war, his father first of heart failure and his mother a year later, at only sixty, from ovarian cancer. Stationed in New York, he was at least able to be at her bedside at the end, which she faced with all the charm that had characterized her life.

"Dear child," she said, holding his hand in both of hers and shaking her head sadly at the sound of his sobs, "you must try not to grieve so hard. I've had a lovely life and done all the things I wanted to do, and I don't think I'm really missing too much in missing old age. Some women age wonderfully, but others become old crones. You wouldn't want your ma to be that, would you? But I worry about you, dear boy. Your sisters are all married and taken care of. You must promise me to try to find yourself a nice girl. Wherever I am, if I'm anywhere, I'll help her to watch over you."

Peace found Marvin rich but homeless and alone. Meadowview, devised not only to him but to his sisters, had been sold, at their insistence, and was now a golf club. He had wanted to keep it, but he had had to acknowledge that it would have been absurdly large as the residence of a single man who had no interest in entertaining or giving house parties. Besides, it was too evocative of his mother, whom he was going to have to learn to live without.

He had little idea what to do with the dreary gap of life that remained to him. He had finished one year of law school before being called into the navy, but he had found it a dry field, where words were used so differently from the romantic literature in which he reveled, and he had no desire to return to it. There was Wall Street, with its banks and financial houses with plenty of openings for one with his capital, but their sole purpose, so far as he could see, was to make money, and money he already had. His classmates were engaged in reconstructing marriages formed before the war or entering into new ones, but he continued to feel that his disastrous experience with Barbara foreclosed that solution to his loneliness. Would he end up as one of those perennial bachelors, the friend and confidant of both husbands and wives, the recipient of conjugal complaints, the constant single guest at holiday dinners, the godfather to a multitude of godchildren? Heaven forbid!

In the meantime, anyway, there was the narcotic of travel. Spending a year seeing the world might widen the area of possible careers to choose. Early in 1947 he flew to Italy, which he toured from Milan to Naples, ending in Florence, where he decided to remain for an indefinite number of months. He suggested to me that the presence there of Michelangelo's nude
David
and Cellini's
Perseus
and the cult in art of the unclad male, with an infinity of arrow-pierced Saint Sebastians, may have had something to do with his choice, but he insisted that this was not a conscious motivation at the time. He rented a studio apartment overlooking the Arno and set himself up as an amateur painter. It was at least an occupation that could explain his choice of temporary residence to his critical but loving and constantly inquiring sisters.

For his next crisis I return to my tape.

I went every night for a cocktail at the rectangular bar at the Hotel Excelsior, which was a favorite meeting place for many young American expatriates, including writers, painters, sculptors, and more or less disreputable idlers. A regular patron was Sylvester Seton, a former classmate of mine at both St. Luke's and Yale, whom I had never particularly liked but who, in a town full of strangers, struck me as an oasis of friendliness. Even his homely, sarcastically grinning, equine countenance was welcome after a long day of daubing and wandering the streets with a guidebook, and as he had been living in Florence since the war, he was easily able and willing to identify the various characters at the bar and acidly spell out for me the reasons, often scatological, that explained their preference for life in Italy over life at home. Sylvester, or "Silly," as he was inappropriately known, for the nickname hardly suited his agile mind and mordant wit, exhibited a sly but unsatisfied curiosity as to my motives for being in Florence. Obviously, he harbored lurid suspicions, but he was amusing and instructive, and I had no one else to play with, so to speak.

At Yale he had been considered something of a fairy or faggot—those were the terms we used—but as he was funny and genial and rigidly persistent in his flattering cultivation of the class leaders, and as he had no visible discreditable sexual attachments, he was accepted into the "in" circles, though never considered eligible for such "real" Eli honors as the sacred senior societies. But Silly was content to be a kind of court jester.

In Florence, except with visitors from home, he made no pretense of concealing his sex life and lived quite openly with an Italian youth, who tactfully disappeared when a Seton relative or Yale classmate (other than myself) appeared in the Grand Hotel. His candor with me showed only too clearly that he suspected my inclinations, whether or not they happened to be repressed. "So long as you don't throw it in people's faces," he assured me, "it doesn't matter a hoot what they surmise or even know. Life can be a simple matter if you follow a few rules."

It fascinated me that he felt not the slightest twinge of guilt at his behavior. In his opinion, to have exposed his habits to the gaze of convention would have been like going to a black-tie dinner in a blazer and white flannels. I even wondered if he were not wicked. Yet I found myself seeking his company nightly at the Excelsior Bar and listening fervently to his racy tales of all that went on in Florence. Was he trying to convert me? Why? Was he playing Mephistopheles to my Faust? He had rather the appearance of a devil. Or did he simply want to set me free to enjoy myself, to express myself? Or did he want to tie me to him by a bond that would enable him to dip his hand into my pocket? For Silly, though possessed of a modest trust income, had been well known among his many rich friends at home for being a constant borrower and not a constant repayer. It had been his one flaw as a successful social climber.

At last, one night when he invited me for supper at his flat, which he rarely did, I usually being the host, I found there not only his Italian boyfriend but one of the latter's pals. He was a handsome olive-skinned youth of eighteen or nineteen called Tonio. We had a pleasant evening of much red wine and idle chatter—the boys were hardly intellectuals, and my Italian was still up to only simple expressions—but when I rose to take myself home, Silly took me aside and muttered, "Take Tonio with you. He's primed for anything. And be generous with the poor boy. He has to help support a mother and three younger sisters." He paused as he took in my gaping expression. 'Now look, Marvie. For once in your life don't be an ass. You're going to love it. Live it up, fella!"

Well, of course I did take Tonio to my studio, and he started me on the career that has brought me to this couch. For a brief time my life was ecstasy. Those Italian boys are nothing if not sophisticated in sexual relations with either sex, and even when they do it for money they can still derive pleasure from it, provided that their partner is not old or fat or otherwise repulsive, which makes them different from prostitutes in other climes. For weeks I lived in a feverish blaze of amorous activity, seeing Tonio every night. He was my John the Baptist in the realm of sin, and I gratefully bought him anything he wanted, including a Bugatti roadster, which made all the noise he loved and which infuriated Silly, who said I was ruining the market for others. I was happy, but it was the happiness of one living in a dream.

What awakened me, like the jarring clang of a strident alarm clock, was the visit to Florence of my favorite sister, Cynthia, only two years my senior, with her husband, Ernest Fowler. Cynthia had always been a spoiled but very special darling; she was pretty, sweet-tempered, affable, and always ready to see the best in everybody, even in a kid brother who refused to settle down in a regular job and showed distressing signs of becoming an expatriate. To say that her husband was clean-cut would be an understatement. Ernie was the epitome of what some people consider the Groton-Harvard type: cheerful, breezy, clad in gorgeous tweeds, manly, handsome, and oh-so-determined to be fair about the many things he inwardly but obviously disdained, including a wayward brother-in-law.

They both tried to be enthusiastic about my drab paintings of street scenes, dead fish, and bowls of fruit. Of course, I had put away the few sketches I had made of the nude Tonio—the only things I had done that actually showed even a scintilla of talent. Seeing my other things now through their eyes, I ruefully recognized that I would never be an artist of any note. They were not art critics, but still, it was enough.

I had an even worse time that night at dinner in a restaurant with the Fowlers and Silly, even if it was the best, or certainly the most expensive, café in Florence—trust Ernie for that. He and Cynthia had known Silly for years and liked him, and the three of them chattered away about the feasances and misfeasances of New York friends, but I was little inclined to join in. Silly, of course, knew just how to deal with them and just what sort of gossip they wanted to hear, and he avoided any reference to subjects dear to his and now to my heart, though his occasional double-entendres, accompanied by a sly glance in my direction, made me squirm. When he left us later with the excuse of having to attend the reception of a certain principessa—Silly's double life did not for a minute keep him from cultivating fashionable Florence—the three of us stayed on for a nightcap. Ernie in talking to me now allowed himself a longer rein.

"Silly's good company, even if he is a fag.
Chacun à son goût
, I suppose, even if it's not yours or mine. And I guess plenty of that sort of thing goes on here." He cast a dubious eye over the other tables in the room. "I daresay half the Yanks in town are given an allowance by their families on condition that they don't live at home. If you go to Silly's more private parties—the ones he doesn't ask principessas to—you'd better keep your back to the wall."

And despite his wife's reproachful "Oh, Ernie," he indulged in a coarse chuckle.

Something in me snapped. I mumbled a word about an early art lesson the next morning and took my leave. The moonless cloudy night perfectly fitted my state of mind as I walked slowly home. It seemed to me that I at last realized that the black gulf that yawned between my old life and my present one was going to be too wide for me to bridge. By every standard that I had learned from childhood, my Italian existence was a sordid failure. I had no real home, no real family, no job, not even a decent hobby, and my absorbing concern was what I was doing every night with a young man who could offer me nothing but that. If I would be a horror to my sisters if they knew, what would I have been to my mother? It was unthinkable!

In the weeks that followed, I sank into deep and deeper depression. I gave up seeing Tonio, writing him a check that was undoubtedly much too large but that utterly contented him. It was probably enough to allow him to marry the girlfriend of whose existence I had been faintly but uncomfortably aware. To avoid Silly and his importunate calls, I went to Siena and holed up in a hotel there. I had to recognize that I was in the grip of a major nervous breakdown.