An Honest Ghost (6 page)

I don’t know what sort of a genre this is. A kind of epic without the heroic attitude.

He wailed loudly and choked on his tears. It was depressing as hell. “She loves me,” he said, raising his tear-drenched face as though he must drive the unlikely statement home. Oh, incompetence! If you can unpack your heart with words, then what you express is already dead within you.

I sigh, depressed, and grind my teeth. “Yes,” I said, “I can see that.” I pulled myself back from politeness. The more I thought afterwards about what he said, the more uneasy it made me. If a man’s reason succumbs to the pull of his senses he is lost. Love is an “impounding” of someone else’s desirable beauty. Such an old story.

Times like this, I curse the human race.

I’m just trying to be a good father. This is not something that comes easily to me.

He dropped his bag and in a cold sweat sunk down, crouching behind a tall, thick tree, rigid and motionless with fear. “I’m sorry about the luggage,” he said, “I know it’s pretentious.”

The supreme vice is shallowness. David himself had already begun to believe it.

He looked me straight in the eyes. I knew I looked very attractive. “I pretended she was you. But you see,” he said, “I don’t think two men can love each other … in that way.” What an unnatural act—or was it? He was also very attractive. “The basis of character is will-power, and my will-power became absolutely subject to yours. The mind obeys the body. But maybe not. All day long I’ve been thinking of her. I had not believed it possible to give such pleasure, to satisfy such a variety of moods, to feel so demanded and so secure, to be loved by anyone so beautiful and to see that beauty enhanced by loving me. My private life has been dangerous from the beginning. We don’t need to examine that. But think about it for a moment. One has to restrict oneself, that is a main condition of all enjoyment.”

No thanks.

David talked in short bursts. “So I have considered gathering material for a book, entitled Contribution to the Theory of the Kiss, dedicated to all tender lovers. At least I have a style!” he concluded.

That is our ambition, that is our goal. But a style is only a start.

“To tell the truth, I’m afraid of you,” he added, by way of explanation.

Oh, pardon, madame! “Do you expect me to believe that?”

It was too late to go anywhere I knew people. The street is full of humiliations to the proud. The fairies perched on a couple of windowsills. As long as we are not burned at the stake or locked up in asylums, we continue to flounder in the ghettoes of nightclubs, public restrooms and sidelong glances, as if that misery had become the habit of our happiness. Young people, especially young gay men, migrate to big cities for just this reason.

I wanted to do something spectacular to blot out the silly scene upstairs; and I could think of nothing. It was too late. In any modern city, a great deal of our energy has to be expended in not seeing, not hearing, not smelling. “All right, let’s go to a hotel. The purpose is to keep you gay.”

“I’d love to, but it’s got to be quick.” In the translucent darkness between the trees he moved with a tread more like hovering over a cushion of moss a foot thick. “I can’t tell you anything until you sit down.” His warm, masculine voice seemed to mesh beautifully with the mildness of the night. David’s head dropped in a gesture of despondency. Added to this was an increasing sense of isolation.

“Why,” I said, “do you think you’ve wasted your life?” I threw him a quick glance: he really did not understand what I was talking about, could not for the life of him see what I was getting at.

“I don’t sleep well,” he replied softly. “What are you writing?”

It was an idiotic conversation and on one level I couldn’t believe we were actually having it. The intellectual attitude it is expressive of is one of disoriented agnosticism. I was astonished at how light and lighthearted this left me. “What do you think of this garden?” It’s good at first to be out in the night, naked to the cold mechanics of the stars.

“Doesn’t matter what I think,” said David. He was lying on his back, staring at the flies that buzzed overhead. He had given up trying to find out if words generated feelings or merely serve them. He had never lingered among the pleasures of memory. It is not conscious knowledge, or fresh knowledge, but the knowledge one did not know that one knew, or but dimly knew, that bursts upon one, an access of strength; and it bursts from inside where it has been nurtured with every unconscious skill.

“I wasn’t trying to insult you,” I said. Nothing, however, could prevent his inner consciousness inflicting on him the punishment which ate into his spirit like rust, and which he could only alleviate by drinking. For “style” has been his disaster. “Well, what is it?”

I heard some squirting sounds I couldn’t decipher.

“Listen,” he said, “they’re playing our song.”

Opportunity sometimes knocks very softly.

Another long silence followed.

How the hell does one keep out of romanticism? We should strive to be neither happy nor unhappy, but serenely unconscious of ourselves.

But I am beginning now to fear that I must wait a lifetime.

19.

Strange beds have rarely agreed with me, and after only a short spell of somewhat troubled slumber, I awoke an hour or so ago. A spot of insomnia is not without its uses for appreciating sleep, for projecting a certain light into that darkness. I was—and this admission pains me—I was terribly sexually frustrated and plagued by the most frenzied erotic fantasies, the majority of them completely impracticable, technically speaking (knowing next to nothing about sex and its usual positions since I’d devoted my entire libido to literature, I lacked basic physiological information, notably sensory-motor knowledge, and I imagined fantastic interlocking positions, unfeasible contortions, implausible spiraling, furious loop-the-loops, flips, entanglements, triple somersaults, and acrobatic stunts). Was love insane sex-hunger? I, too, wanted to make men leave their wives and run off with me. I know the type; most of my friends are case studies. I, too, wanted to escape the ennui of my petit-bourgeois world and embrace bohemia.

David sat quietly, surrounding a beer, still unhappy over the earlier conversation. “Anarchy,” he said, “is out to upset everything, even the proper relationship of man and woman.”

I made no reply, perhaps out of laziness, and, it seems to me, so as to be less alive. My mind drifts. Life in the temperate zone was full of fears and inhibitions, but in the tropics….

It was too exhausting: it was too cruel. Yet the vulnerable young creature was, I believe, already half inside the trap I was setting for him; I could read in his eyes how he still craved to gorge on the praise and attention the inadequacies of his career had hitherto denied him; and although I could not afford to have him too alarmed, the course to which I had committed myself was irreversible and there was nothing for me now but to press home what I felt to be my advantage.

“I have no one in the world but you.” I say that as much to comfort myself as to state something I think to be true. Life has but one true charm: the charm of gambling.

“I like men who have a future, and women who have a past,” he answered. “There’s a something to be said for wives,” he added, folding his arms and crossing his outstretched legs. He said that he would do everything I wished. Tentatively, he added that it looked like his generation would be the first for whom AIDS was simply a chronic illness. Then he smiled, and in a new good-natured manner launched into a funny story about some friend of his, an opera singer who once, in the part of Lohengrin, being tight, failed to board the swan in time and waited hopefully for the next one.

He liked to say that genius is memory. In truth, however hard you try, you can never retrieve an experience in full. Behind our thoughts, true and false, there is always to be found a dark background, which we are only later able to bring into the light and express as a thought. He raised his glass, the way he used to when he was on a roll, so someone would get him a refill (usually me). I ignored this. “I must kiss you once more,” he said. “One night,” he said, “I’m going to—what are you stopping for?”

He was a fearful man. Sexy. His favorite instrument was the cello, and Béla Bartók his favorite composer. A local artist painted his portrait in bed, looking like a little kid with a child’s illness—mumps of the soul, perhaps. Asleep, or perhaps sitting up writing love lyrics to his inamorata— inamoratus, that was more correct.

He picked up his little suitcase from the floor and went out.

The men I was not in love with have been more satisfactory in bed than the men I loved. That can hardly be unimportant. I wish I had a simple explanation—or, indeed, any kind of an explanation—to account for this rather unusual phenomenon (if I did, I’d patent it). As Gertrude Stein said, Life is funny that way.

20.

You can imagine what it’s like, when you open yourself like a book, and find misprints everywhere, one after another, misprints on every page! This is Eleanor’s story. Her whole life is like that. Life-bloated, baffled, long-suffering hag. She was woebegone, and so dejected that in all seasons one saw around her the stiff rushes and pure puddles of a swamp. She has given self-love a bad name. When she walked up to the closed window and looked steeply down into the little back garden, she was overcome by a kind of vertigo. “The force of gravity,” she remarked to the night; and suddenly the foolish words seemed to clinch her despair, shutting her up for ever in the residue of a life without joy, purpose or possible release; and wringing her dangled hands, she bowed herself over the sill, her mind circling downward like a plummet through a pit of misery, her body listening, as it were, to the pain of her breast crushed against the stone. “Ridiculous,” she said to herself.

Meanwhile, she also had to think about her money. We can’t talk about it, or I know she won’t so I don’t even try, but it’s what goes unsaid between people that builds up like masonry. Tears brimmed up—there I go again, she said. To be continued. She talks about getting “my MFA,” as if dropping by the school to pick up something she left there, maybe a coat.

Some situations brought out Eleanor’s competence, and others touched the secret springs of her insecurity; her marriage did both. No one can explain exactly what happens within us when the doors behind which our childhood terrors lurk are flung open. She had no interest in men, particularly of the servile class. She was thirty-one years old, and had been married eight years. They had married quickly, for love. It was the moonlight that had weakened her, the moonlight and her own desire. His rosy tongue had vanquished her.

He and his sister, it was credibly believed, indulged in a little incest from time to time. His hatred of the vulgar and the mediocre found expression in sarcastic outbursts of superb lyricism, and he held the old masters in such veneration that it almost raised him to their level. Exalted but remote. Whenever he went out she was afraid that he would never come back; otherwise she was extraordinarily happy and hoped they would always be together. He was desperate to be a success—at anything, more or less. She had cried with rage, after he had left her, at—she hardly knew what: she tried to think it had been at his want of consideration.

After that she was rich and free. There was nothing to do but drink.

She walked on, pleased with the adventure, thinking that perhaps the only satisfactory way of life was to live for the minute.

I remarked in jest that he had surely found his man. (We had sex in the laundry room of his apartment building a few times.) I’ve never cultivated his society, and he apparently has never found mine indispensable to his happiness. Later she was unfaithful to him: openly; deliberately; defiantly.

If there was anything childish or demure about her as a bride, that soon vanished. “I had an awful love affair,” she said, still weeping. She expected that I would disapprove. “Then I went home for the summer to Indiana.” She looked at me blankly and then, little by little, almost imperceptibly, a smile, or the irrepressible prelude to a smile, slightly rearranged her features. Mentally, I rolled my eyes. I didn’t love her, and she certainly didn’t love me, but perhaps in a way we could have made a life together.

Alone unchanging are women’s ambitions and men’s desires.

21.

Something very strange is happening to me, every face I see seems to be smiling. You know what I mean when I say that. Desirelessness.

So one day my son was taking a nap and I was looking at the local free throwaway newspaper and I spotted a curious ad in the classifieds: a dominatrix with a transsexual assistant was offering $100 one-hour sessions.

“Do come in,” she said, trying to sound gracious.

I make sure not to come out looking too damaged. It was like a victory.

The result is not the point; it is the effort to improve ourselves that is valuable.

Are you constantly conscious of the clock ticking?

How much time does love take? This is Freud’s implicit question. It is some sort of defense against death.