The Book of Skulls (17 page)

34. Oliver

At lunchtime, as we were coming from our session with Frater Miklos, Frater Javier intercepted us in the hall. “Please meet with me after lunch in the Room of Three Masks,” he said, and went solemnly on about his business. There’s something repellent about that man, something chilly; he’s the only frater I prefer to avoid. Those zombie eyes, that zombie voice. Anyway, I assumed that the time had arrived for beginning the confession therapy that Frater Javier had told us about the week before. I was right, although the format wasn’t what I’d been expecting. I anticipated something like an encounter group: Ned, Eli, Timothy, and me and maybe two or three fraters sitting around a circle, and each candidate in turn rising and baring his soul to the entire gathering, after which we’d comment on what we had heard, try to interpret it in terms of our own life experience, and so on. Not so. Frater Javier told us that we were to be each other’s confessors, in a series of private one-to-one confrontations.

“This week past,” he said, “you have been examining your lives, reviewing your darkest secrets. Each of you holds locked in his soul at least one episode that he is certain he could never admit to another person. It is on that one crucial episode, and no other, that our work must focus.”

What he was asking of us was to identify and isolate the ugliest, most shameful incident of our lives—and then to reveal it, in order to purge ourselves of that kind of bad-vibes baggage. He put his pendant on the floor and spun it to determine who would confess to whom. Timothy to me; me to Eli; Eli to Ned; Ned to Timothy. But the daisy chain was complete among the four of us, with no outsiders included. It wasn’t Frater Javier’s intention to turn our innermost horrors into common property. We were not supposed to tell him or anyone else about the things that we would learn from one another in these confessional sessions. Each member of the Receptacle was going to become the custodian of somebody else’s secret, but what we confessed, said Frater Javier, was to go no further than one’s own confessor. The purge was what counted, the unburdening, rather than the information revealed.

So that we wouldn’t contaminate the pure atmosphere of the skullhouse by liberating too much negative emotion all at once, Frater Javier decreed that there would be only one confession per day. Again the spinning pendant decided the order of things. Tonight, just before bedtime, Ned would go to Timothy. Tomorrow Timothy would come to me; the day after that I would pay a call on Eli; and on the fourth day Eli would close the circuit by confessing to Ned.

That gave me almost two and a half days to decide what story I was going to tell Eli. Oh, of course I knew which one I
ought
to tell. That was obvious. But I threw up two or three feeble substitutes, screens for the real story, flimsy pretexts for hiding the one necessary choice. As fast as the possibilities arose, I shot them down. There was only one option open to me, only one true focus of shame and guilt. I didn’t know how I was going to be able to face up to the pain of telling it, but that was what I had to tell, and I hoped that maybe in the moment of telling it the pain would go away, though I doubted that very much. I’ll worry about that part of it, I told myself, when the time comes. And then I proceeded to banish the problem of the confession entirely from my mind. I suppose that’s an example of repression. By evening I had managed to forget about Frater Javier’s project altogether. But I woke, sweating, in the middle of the night, imagining that I had admitted everything to Eli.

35. Timothy

Ned came prancing in, winking, smirking. He always puts on an exaggerated swish routine when he’s really clutched about something. “Forgive me, Father, for I have sinned,” he said in a singsong tone. Doing a little soft-shoe number. Twitching. Grinning. Rolling his eyes. He was turned on, and, I realized, what was turning him on was this business of confessing. After all this time the old Jesuit was coming to life in him. He wanted to spill his beans, and I would be the target of the spill. Suddenly the thought of having to sit here listening to some slippery pansy story of his made me feel sick. Why the hell should I have to accept his sweaty confidences? Who was I to hear Ned’s confessions, anyway? I said, “Are you really going to tell me the big secret of your life?”

He looked surprised. “Of course I am.”

“Do you have to?”

“Do I have to? Timothy, it’s
expected
of us. And anyhow I want to.” Yes, he certainly did want to. He was trembling, tingling, all flushed and charged up. “What’s the matter with you, Timothy, don’t you have any interest in my private life?”

“No.”

“Tsk. Let nothing human be alien to you.”

“I don’t want it. I don’t need it.”

“Too bad, man. Because I have to tell it. Frater Javier says that unloading my guilts is necessary to the prolongation of my earthly stay, and so I’m going to ventilate, man. I’m going to
ventilate.
”

“If you have to,” I said, resigning myself.

“Make yourself comfortable, Timothy. Open wide the ears. You cannot choose but hear.”

And hear I did. Ned’s an exhibitionist at heart, like a lot of his kind. He wants to wallow in self-denunciation, in self-revelation. He told his story very professionally, sketching in the details like the short-story writer he claimed to be, underlining this, shading that. What he told me was about what I expected from him, something grimy, a fag fantasia. “This happened,” he said, “before you ever met me, in the spring of our freshman year, when I was not quite eighteen. I had an apartment off campus, sharing it with two other men.” Naturally, they were both queers. It was actually their apartment; Ned had moved in with them after midterm intersession. They were eight or ten years older than Ned, and they’d been living together a long time in a sort of gay equivalent of marriage. One of them was gruff and masculine and dominant, an assistant professor of French literature who was also a rugged athlete—his hobby was mountain climbing—and the other was more of a stereotyped fairy, delicate and ethereal, almost feminine, a wispy, retiring poet who stayed at home most of the time, took care of the housework, watered the potted plants, and I suppose did knitting and crocheting too.

Anyway there were these two gay lads happily keeping house, and they met Ned in some pansy bar and found that he didn’t like the place where he was living, so they invited him to move in with them. The arrangement was supposed to be strictly a matter of accommodation; Ned would have his own room, he’d pay rent and a share of the grocery bill, and there wasn’t to be any sexual involvement with either of the other two, who had quite a strong fidelity thing going. For a month or two the arrangement worked out. But fidelity among fags isn’t any stronger, I guess, than it is among straights, and the presence of Ned in the household became a disturbing factor, the way the presence of a nicely stacked eighteen-year-old chick would disturb an ordinary marriage. “Consciously or otherwise,” Ned said, “I fostered temptation. I walked around naked in the apartment, I flirted with them, I did a lot of casual fondling.” Tensions rose, and the inevitable inevitably happened. One day the lovers quarreled about something—possibly about Ned, he wasn’t sure—and the masculine one went storming out. The feminine one, all aflutter, came to Ned for consolation. He consoled “her” by taking “her” to bed. They both felt guilty afterward, but that didn’t stop them from doing it again a few days later, and then from making a regular affair of it, Ned and this poet, whose name was Julian. Meanwhile the other one, Oliver—isn’t that interesting, another Oliver?—who was apparently unaware of what was going on between Ned and Julian, started making passes at Ned and soon they were bedding down, too. So for a couple of weeks Ned carried on simultaneous independent affairs with both of them. “It was fun,” he said, “in a nervous-making way—all the clandestine appointments, all the little lies, the fears of having the other one walk in on us.” Trouble was bound to come. Both of the older queers fell in love with Ned. Each one decided that he wanted to break up with his original partner and live just with Ned. Tug of war. Ned got propositions from both sides. “I just didn’t know how to handle the situation,” Ned said. “By this time Oliver knew I was up to something with Julian, and Julian knew I was up to something with Oliver, but no one had made any open charges yet. If it came down to a choice between them, I inclined slightly toward Julian, but I didn’t intend to be the one who made any of the critical decisions.”

The image of himself that Ned was painting for me was that of a naive, innocent kid, caught up in a triangle not of his own making. Helpless, inexperienced, buffeted by the stormy passions of Oliver and Julian, etc., etc. But under the surface something else was coming through, conveyed to me not in words but in smirks, campy flicks of the eyebrows, and other nonverbal forms of commentary on the story. At any given time Ned functions on at least six levels, and whenever he starts telling you about how naive and innocent he is, you know he’s putting you on. The under-the-surface story that I picked up showed me a sinister, scheming Ned, manipulating those two hapless fags for his own amusement—coming between them, tempting and seducing each in turn, forcing them toward a rivalry for his affections.

“The climax came one weekend in May,” he said, “when Oliver invited me to go with him on a mountain climbing expedition in New Hampshire—leaving Julian behind. Oliver explained that there was much we needed to discuss, and the clear pure air of a mountaintop was the best place to discuss it.” Ned agreed to go, which sent Julian into hysterics. “If you go,” Julian sobbed, “I’ll kill myself.” Ned was turned off by that sort of emotional blackmail, and he simply told Julian to cool it—it was just for the weekend, it didn’t matter all that much, he’d be back Sunday night. Julian continued to carry on, with much talk of suicide. Paying no attention, Ned and Oliver packed for the camping trip. “You’ll never see me alive again,” Julian shrieked. Ned, telling this to me, did a fine contemptuous imitation of Julian’s panicky screeching. “I was afraid that Julian might be serious,” he said. “On the other hand, I knew it was a mistake to play up to that kind of tantrum. And also—secretly, deep down—I was flattered by the thought that I was important enough for anybody to consider committing suicide over.” Oliver told him not to worry about Julian—“She’s just being melodramatic,” he said—and that Friday they went off to New Hampshire.

By late Saturday afternoon they were four thousand feet up the side of some big mountain. Oliver chose this moment to make his pitch. Come live with me and be my love, he said, and we will all the pleasures prove. The time of dillydallying was over; he wanted an immediate and final decision. Choose between Julian and me, he told Ned, and choose fast. “I had decided by this time that I didn’t really care much for Oliver, who tended to be blustery and bullying a lot of the time, coming on as a sort of fag Hemingway,” Ned said. “And though I found Julian attractive, I also thought that ‘she’ was much too dependent and weak, a clinging vine. Besides, no matter which one of them I picked, I was certain to get all sorts of static from the other—flamboyant scenes, threats, fistfights, whatnot.” So, Ned went on, he declared politely that he didn’t want to be the cause of the breakup of Oliver and Julian, whose thing he respected in the utmost, and that rather than make any such impossible choice he’d simply move out of their apartment. Oliver then began to accuse Ned of preferring Julian, of conspiring secretly with Julian to oust him. The discussion got loud and irrational, with all sorts of shouted recriminations and denials, and finally Oliver said, “There’s no way I can go on living without you, Ned. Promise you’ll take me over Julian, promise me right now, or I’m going to jump.”

As he came to this part of his story, Ned’s eyes took on a freaky glow, a devilish kind of gleam. He was thoroughly enjoying himself. Spellbound by his own eloquence. In a way, so was I. He said, “I was tired of being whipsawed by these suicide threats. It was a drag, having every move dictated by somebody’s insistence that he’d kill himself if I didn’t cooperate. ‘Oh, shit,’ I said to Oliver, ‘are you going to pull that number too? Well, fuck you. Go ahead and jump, then. I don’t give a damn what you do.’ I assumed Oliver was bluffing, the way people usually are when they say things like that. Oliver wasn’t bluffing. He didn’t answer me, he didn’t even stop to think, he just stepped off the ledge. I saw him hanging in midair for what seemed like ten seconds, looking at me, his face very calm, peaceful. Then he fell two thousand feet, hit an outcropping, bounced like a dropped doll, and fell the rest of the way to the ground. It had all happened so quickly that I couldn’t begin to comprehend it—the threat, my peevish, snappy response, the jump—one two three. Then it started to sink in. I began to shiver all over. I was screaming like a madman.” For a few minutes, Ned said, he seriously considered jumping also. Then he got himself together some and headed down the mountain path, having a rough time of the descent without Oliver to help him. It took him hours to get down, and by the time he reached ground night had fallen. He had no idea where Oliver’s body was, and there were no state troopers around or telephones or anything, so he hiked a mile and a half out to the main highway and started hitching his way back to school. (Because he didn’t know how to drive then, he had to leave Oliver’s car parked at the foot of the mountain.) “I was in a state of total panic all the way back,” he said. “The people who gave me rides thought I was sick, and one of them wanted to take me to a hospital. The only thing running through my mind was a feeling of guilt, guilt, guilt, guilt for having killed Oliver. I felt as responsible for his death as if I had pushed him.” As before, Ned’s words told me one thing and his expressions were telling me another. “Guilt,” he said out loud, and telepathically I was picking up
satisfaction.
“Responsible for Oliver’s death,” he said, and underneath he was saying,
thrilled that someone would kill himself for love of me.
“Panic,” he said, and silently he was boasting,
delighted at my success in manipulating people.
He went on, “I tried to persuade myself that it hadn’t been my fault, that there wasn’t any reason to have thought Oliver was speaking seriously. But that didn’t work. Oliver was gay, and gay people are by definition unstable, right? Right. And if Oliver said he’d jump, I shouldn’t have virtually dared him to do it, because that was all he needed to make him go over the edge.” On the verbal level Ned was saying, “I was innocent and foolish,” and below that I received:
I was a murderous bitch.
He said, “And then I wondered what I was going to tell Julian. Here I had come into their household, I had flirted with them until I had what I wanted, I got between them, and now I had in effect caused Oliver’s death. And here was Julian left all alone, and what was I supposed to do? Offer myself as Oliver’s substitute? Take care of poor Julian forever? Oh, it was a mess, a fearful mess. I got back to the apartment about four in the morning and my hand was shaking so much I could hardly get my key in the lock. I had rehearsed about eight different speeches to deliver to Julian, all kinds of explanations, self-justifications. But as it turned out I didn’t need any of them.”

“Julian had run away with the janitor,” I suggested.

“Julian had cut his wrists right after we left on Friday,” Ned said. “I found him in the bathtub. He’d been dead at least half a day. You see, Timothy, I killed them both? Do you see? They loved me and I destroyed them. And I’ve carried the guilt with me ever since.”

“You feel guilty for not having taken them seriously enough when they threatened to commit suicide?”

“I feel guilty for getting such a charge out of it when they did,” he said.