Authors: Louis Begley
Here he laughed, wiped his eyes, moved his armchair closer to mine, gave my knee a prolonged exploratory squeeze, and refilled our glasses.
You leave me speechless and ashamed, not just embarrassed.
Nonsense! Get some peanuts and ask your girlfriend in the restaurant to keep a table for us. We might as well dine together—just you and me.
I did as he said. Charlie’s cheeks were sagging; he looked gloomy. The effect of nearly straight gin? I doubt it; his tolerance for alcohol was prodigious. I poured another drink. My gesture must have interrupted a train of thought that had distressed him. As though a switch had been turned, I saw his usual alacrity return. He was taking the measure of the hotel guests in our vicinity, staring at them quite openly, his expression successively contemptuous, quizzical, and droll.
Dreadful, he announced. It is my habit, whenever I find myself in a place like this, to check whether there is anyone in sight worthy of being screwed. Zero! I was wise to bring Toby and, of course, lucky to run into you.
He gave my knee another squeeze.
It seemed stupid, and open to being understood as a form of rejection, to change the subject and talk about the new
hotel he was going to build, his other work, or American politics, although the latter subject was very much on my mind and he could have given me fresh information, having left New York only a few days earlier. Instead, I told him that his tirade had left me shaken, but also very curious. After all, I knew so little about his life. We had seen each other only once since he got married, perhaps twice—I wasn’t quite sure.
That’s true, he replied. I wouldn’t be surprised if you wanted to hear about the making of a pervert.
I began to protest that I didn’t mean to pry, but he stopped me with a particularly hard squeeze of my knee.
Don’t be so shittily humorless. I didn’t think you were asking about the sort of details you can look up in Krafft-Ebing next time you are in a library. I am keeping those for my memoirs, which I will write only after I turn celibate. I took your remarks as a perfectly appropriate question: How did you get from the man I knew to the man you have become?
I nodded.
The facts are uncomplicated; on the other hand, my nature, or rather the changes in it, and the work accomplished by time to bring about those changes, very mysterious. I was not a closet faggot during the years when we saw each other in Cambridge, or before that at school, or when I married Diane. Certainly, at St. Mark’s there were a few rather sweet incidents that today would be called homoerotic. That’s an odiously pompous adjective; try to avoid it as your interest in queers continues to grow! Group jerkoffs, a master who would have kissed my bum and everything near it if he had dared, a couple of characters rather like you having wet
dreams about my jockstrap. I took it as a tribute—it went with the job! If you are the captain of the crew and look like me you expect little faggots to want to lick your balls, but there was no one whose balls I had the slightest desire to lick. My dick was in fact getting licked by my first cousin—peace, Max, a girl cousin!—who had been thrown out of Milton and was living with my parents, to give her old man a chance to cool off. When the next chapter opens, I am in Korea, not in the fleshpots of Seoul, but in a foxhole, wetting my pants each time I am ordered to climb out and start running up some hill. I did make one visit to a teahouse in Pusan, just before some shrapnel visited me. The dose I got there was taken care of, together with everything else, in the hospital, which was a great piece of timing; the battalion commander would have had me up on charges. Getting the clap was like damaging army property; it ranked with rust in the barrel of your rifle!
One pleasant stop in Hawaii, and we will move along the highway of sex to Harvard and Janie. In the hospital in Honolulu, they did some specialized work on my back and got it into perfect shape. I was immobile for more than two months, though, and, just like in a war movie, a thoughtful nurse—Gauguin’s Tehamana on leave from the Art Institute in Chicago—extended her care to my dickey. She quite spoiled the little fellow.
An odd prelude to homosexuality, I remarked.
As usual, you are most perceptive, but we aren’t there yet.
He poured the remaining gin into our glasses, and we made our way into the restaurant. I was eager for Charlie to continue his story, but the waitress reduced the number of
dishes Charlie ordered by a third, saying that we would be wasting food, which stirred him into what sounded like the beginning of a lecture on
The Theory of the Leisure Class
. He regained his composure when, at my urging, she agreed to produce a bottle of rice wine. He had not yet tried Shaoxing; at the time, it was available in China only rarely.
Sweet Janie, he continued. What a pleasant memory! Weren’t you trying at one point to crawl under her Pringle sweater? No, of course it was Edna’s, and then goat-legs got you back on a leash! You are one of the happy few to whom I will have confessed this, but Janie and I only necked. I didn’t keep my neck in my pants all the time, though, and we played nice games together in bed; in fact, she continued the good work of my cousin and Miss Gauguin. But I never got to insert it. Sometimes Janie claimed she wanted to remain
intacta
, sometimes she said I was too big, and little by little I stopped pressing the point. Looking back on it, particularly when I consider my time with Diane, I think I must have realized it was a very pleasant, undemanding arrangement. Neither crew training nor martinis interfered with it! I ran into Diane at the Cotillion in New York, just as Janie was about to graduate, and Janie had already met that gangster from Chicago—I suspect he forced his way in on the first date!
He snapped his fingers at the waitress, who didn’t like it, but got her nevertheless to bring another bottle of Shaoxing. Nectar, he said, only served warm.
Back to Diane. As you may surmise, the families were pleased. I was too. You will recall that we looked remarkably good together. I was starting my training with Gordon Bunshaft.
My heart was set on working for him. With Diane’s money added to what I had, we immediately set up in a way that was quite handsome. Her parents were very decent too; throughout the season, every weekend I wasn’t on charette we would go out to New Jersey to shoot. But, rather quickly, Diane became a serious nuisance about sex—with reason! Between work and drink, I didn’t want it all that much, and when I did get the little man up, it was over, so far as I was concerned, as soon as I got him in. Wham bam thank you ma’am! She was willing enough to crank me up by hand and to do the Janie. But I didn’t want it; for her it was just the preparation, and what she was preparing me for wasn’t what I liked! I managed to put a stop to these efforts by telling her I had a dreadful trauma about oral sex—and I refused to reveal its origin because I couldn’t make up my mind whether I should say that I had been bitten or to make up something really lurid. How could I refuse, though, to visit a sex therapist with her, an old prune of a lady doctor in one of those buildings near the New York Hospital? She was full of constructive suggestions: count from one thousand backward to delay ejaculation, fuck in the morning when you are hard anyway, read dirty books together. I think that this sort of thing is best left unsaid—imagine that bit of prudishness coming from my lips! In brief, sex therapy had a negative effect.
1965! The year of the vaginal orgasm! Junior League Bacchantes rampaging through the parlors of the Colony Club! Diane was very advanced. Her women’s group decided that diaphragms are demeaning, because the Frau does all the work: she has to stick the thing up her pussy before she is
one hundred percent sure she will need it, she must lie down and spread her legs and take it, and finally, when it’s all over, more work. The gadget has to be taken out, powdered, and put away in its little box. The solution was to have me wear a condom. That brought the curtain down on my performance. Soon she got a lawyer, a cute little fellow in a derby hat who made house calls—I am referring to an unfortunate time I hit her—and in record time we were divorced.
Am I boring you? he asked while I paid that part of the bill which was not included in my board. Because now we will come to the interesting part, what Scotty Reston would call the watershed event.
There was nothing one could get to drink in the lobby at that hour. I suggested going up to my room, where I had some cognac. We sat down in the two armchairs. It was a strangely chilly evening. Fatigue or excitement, I found I was shivering. I turned on the electric heater.
My condition hadn’t escaped Charlie’s attention. Are we afraid to be alone with the satyr? Ah, that’s better, nothing like a glass of brandy before an open fire! Ha! Ha!
The watershed turned out to be the Vienna woods. I went to Vienna in June, right after the divorce, to look at the Sparkasse and some other Otto Wagner work.
There were ideas of design passing through my head. I was prescient, or I had simply looked at the photographs very well: whichever it was, this work, once I had actually seen it—stared at it as if in a trance—became the grain of sand around which gradually formed the pearl of my artistic invention. Absolute truth, although expressed bombastically. Do you know my Union Bank building in New York? It
rises over Madison Avenue exalted and yet humble; every element in its design is a call to order and an echo; I have conceived it so that the surrounding motley structures all take comfort in its presence.
I said truthfully that I found the bank building exceptionally beautiful.
Well, that was what I did downtown. The Vienna woods was where I went to drink wine with an architecture student who had been recommended to me as a combination assistant and guide. Bronzino portrait of a young man, but dressed in a green corduroy suit and reincarnated as a specialist in sex disorders! The diagnosis that had eluded Diane’s New York Hospital guru he made the moment we met. One evening, when all the stars were out and the cuckoo sang in the lilac trees, he began the therapy. I have not swerved from the road he traced.
Is this—I mean your having become a homosexual—generally known?
Having become? I prefer being. It’s known among the upper set in Sodom, and if one queer is onto a secret, in the next five minutes the rest of the world is informed. If you mean have I come out of the closet, the answer is no! I would like to lead a mass movement back into the closet; it’s so cozy.
And you’re all right in sex now, the impotence was just with women?
I have told you to read Krafft-Ebing for details, cutie pie. I don’t mind talking about girls; that’s good clean locker-room fun. The homo stuff is strictly personal!
He leaned over and massaged my knee, as if I had reminded
him that it had been neglected since before dinner.
His glass was empty. Apropos of closets, he inquired, is that where you keep that venerable brandy? You seem to be saving it for a rainy day!
I got up and poured him an enormous shot.
He scratched extensively and continued: I will explain to you the presence of Toby, so that he will be spared your hysterics when you meet again. Rest easy, I didn’t seduce him that summer when we met at the Joyce caravanserai. It’s not my form. He went back to school in Switzerland, but at the end of the year, he ran away. Disappeared for six months or more! His father had the Interpol and every other kind of police looking for him. Not a trace. Then, one day, out of the blue—that’s not a pun—he rang my office in New York. Fortunately, I picked up the telephone myself; my secretary might not have put him through. He said he was at a pay phone in the city—he refused to say where—and that he would come to see me if I had clean clothes put in a hotel room where he could first wash and rest. I had some things delivered to the Waldorf, down the street from me, and the next day I saw him. He was a mess. I have kept him with me ever since. Do you believe in the fatal irony of names?
I am not sure I know what you mean.
How odd! I should have thought its incidence would be painfully familiar to a manikin whose ma and pa had the pretention to call him Maximilian! I am obsessed by it. You see, my parents, God rest their souls, were avid readers of Proust. And yet they called me Charles! Private joke or imprudent respect for family tradition? Because I am in fact Charles III. Both my paternal grandfather and great-grandfather had
that name, but that was AP,
avant
Marcel. You see, just like Odette, Toby is a pissing tart, and the little bugger isn’t even my type.
H
E’S GOT A HEADACHE
, but I don’t think he’s hung over; that almost never happens, said Toby the next morning. He said we should go ahead without him.
Miss Wang had asked if she could take that Sunday off, to do laundry and visit her friend at Beijing University. The latter project involved many miles of pedaling. The Chinese I knew used the word “friend” asexually; there was no indication whether this one was a man or a woman, a question that gnawed at me, as this was not the first such expedition. Her wishing to see a girlfriend, in preference to traipsing around Beijing with me and sharing a couple of meals, I found quite natural. If it was a man, her choice did not merely annoy me; a bizarre failure of logic made me consider it foolish, almost unreasonable. What could an afternoon with some deadly serious, bespectacled law student or teaching assistant offer that could compete with me? Even taking account of the total lack of privacy that prevailed at Beida (that’s how the university was commonly referred to), I was able to imagine, of course, a certain activity there other than conversation, one from which I had refrained—I assumed that the decision had been mine exclusively—but didn’t the delicious tension between us, the fruit of that denial, offer an adequate reward? It occurred to me that if Miss Wang had told me the previous morning about seeing her friend at Beijing University, I might have been less enthusiastically optimistic about her chances at Harvard.
I suggested to Toby that we return to the Forbidden City by what I called the back way: the lively street parallel to Chang An, north of the hotel. We walked past the bicycle repair shop, the establishment where mechanics hammered on mysterious large motors—was this an attempt at repair or the process of turning them into scrap? Elderly men and women, bent almost in half from rheumatism or a lifetime of bearing loads of merchandise, shuffled along, winter vegetables in bags made of netting on their backs. Some looked out of windows or stood in doorways, puffing on long clay pipes. When we got to the canal, other old men were at their t’ai chi exercises, eyes unseeing, as though they were acting out a dream.