“I know it,” I said. “You had no reason to do that to me.”
“I wanted to help you relax. Relaxation is very important in a personality of your type; you are an extremely tense man. We were talking about your roommates, weren’t we?”
“We were until this happened.”
“You said you disliked them. Why is this so? We always try to keep our people happy.”
I wanted to tell him that they were pigs, useless, Southern pigs possessed of that whimsy and arrogance which only the perpetually confused could know, but even as I opened my mouth then to tell him the truth, the final truth, I felt the drug he had injected into me take over with such stunning force that my jaw was virtually wrenched amidships, my legs buckling all the while so that I could barely make it to the bed. I felt dimly the pressure of his assistance, then the sheets themselves, and fell into them limp, like rubber, my eyelids beating furiously. His face like a balloon over me, inflated to enormous proportions, the eyes sunken within, the grey, sweating panels of his eager cheeks limp and hanging, and, as he moved toward me then, he whispered words: words which I could not possibly distinguish, words which seemed to have no meaning. Yet in some anterior part of the consciousness I must have recognized all of them because I passed then into true, deep slumber and that was the termination of the evening.
That is what I mean about this place.
They simply won’t let you function.
It is impossible to compose a meaningful retrospection confronted by such factors.
FOUR
“I never did get to the dishevelled tree in that province,” D’Arcy said cheerfully, the large mirror in his apartment casting back ruddy tones, tones of comfort, as he raised the sparkling glass delicately to his lips, “so I thought that this evening perhaps I would pick up the string of my narrative and get there.”
“Whatever you say, my friend,” I said, my own wine glass once again snug in my hand; everything as it had been, everything changeless from the past; that fine feeling of stolidity and permanence which I always derived from D’Arcy’s presence at its ripest flush, then. “I consider myself honored alone in that you pick me as your auditor; granted that you can tell me whatever you wish to say; I will listen.”
“Flattery, flattery,” D’Arcy said, a tone of harshness creeping into that complex voice. “How many times have I already told you that it is not necessary; that we must function—as I tell my reminiscences to you—on the closest of terms, not two persons but one, not distant souls but conjoined. Does a single person feel the constant need for self-praise and reassurance?”
“Sometimes,” I said.
“Well, by the same token, there should be no need for that between us.” D’Arcy seemed stricken with a meditative mood, his body a solemn frieze before the mirror, his hands clasped rubbing on the glass; then he emerged and beamed at me with a renewal of that flickering, wandering gaze which was the most salient feature of the beloved personality. “Let me tell you what happened to me then.”
I took out my pad and pencil and, draining the glass, placed it with a crash on the floor.
My experience with Bernice (D’Arcy said) was, of course, consequential. Not so much in its declamatory aspects—Bernice had come to do little more than express her own curiosity about the magazines and to ask me mildly enough if I really thought them fit for her daughter; what I had interpreted as the finger of crucifixion was little more than the fingertip of interrogation. No, it was the question of implication so richly aroused by this incident which can be said to have truly put me on my path. It became apparent to me that the magazines were important—in fact, central—to the performance of the masturbatory act.
I was not aware of this, as I have made clear to you. They were merely an adjunct. But the unusual significance ascribed to them by both Bernice and Rona; the sullen lecture which my father felt constrained to deliver to me that very evening, terminating with the public disposal of the magazines down the garbage chute, my own feeling of dim excitation as I realized as the sum of the wasted months that the magazines were crucial, all of these contributed to the development of what can be called my new philosophy. I purchased a royal sampling of replenishments on the succeeding day but I found a much more secure latch for them than the underside of the bed ... and the experimental period, then, truly began in earnest.
It was clear to me that the orgiastic act was related to women in some way; that, in fact, it represented some kind of tribute to them. Self-stimulation was a means toward that pouring of seed which was the only stock for women’s vanity and, perhaps, women stimulated themselves as well, reciprocally, with men in view. At the moment of extremis, therefore, one’s organ should be always pointed toward the woman if not, in fact, lodged somewhere upon her. I bent to this with a will. It was not my desire to obstruct or conflict with social mores in any fashion; I was a true adolescent. I wanted to make people happy.
A question might arise at this time: granted my naiveté—and there is no other word for it, unfortunately, one cannot call it social deprivation or lack of opportunity which caused my misreading of the sexual act—how could it possibly be maintained against the constant flow of schoolboy reminiscence, speculation and comparison which is the archetypal possession of everybody’s midcentury adolescence? Didn’t someone try, wittingly or unwittingly, pleasantly or cruelly, to straighten me out? How could such misapprehensions flow in the midst of the peer-group? A child-psychologist in the audience wishes to know.
I plead nolo contendere. In order to apprehend the peculiar facts of my development—a development to bear such fruit, of course, as to be entirely self-justifying and therefore beyond such questioning—one must apprehend the nature of the boys with whom I went to school. This is not easy. There was never such a group before or since in the whole history of the world. Or does every exceptional man say this, casting back to the retrospective glow of his accomplishments, causing his history to seemingly transcend itself? I leave the metaphysics to less practical men.
All of us in this school at that time—and I only made my acquaintances through the school, Rona having hardly counted as a “legitimate social contact”—were in a “special” category and the school itself was “special.” By “special” I do not mean the pejorative sense at all; we were not the insulated spawn of privileged fathers, but rather a different category altogether, boys whose development and tendencies had manifested themselves so early as being noteworthy that it was decided that we deserved to be placed only with one another. In this school there was a large staff—one for every other pupil, it seemed—who met our needs graciously and sympathetically, even to arranging that we be conveyed between home and school daily without the necessity of sullying ourselves with ordinary human contact. (This is why I got into so much trouble initially on the subway; if I had arranged for discreet pickup as usual nothing at all would have happened but I was late that day and from that single act of tardiness all kinds of enormous consequences flowed.) Pupils themselves were encouraged to find fulfillment in various means of their own selection and because the “special” nature of our category and facilities was impressed upon us from the first, relationships tended to be sullen and cautious. There was simply no saying what a “special” student or peer might do to one, one was already too familiar with what one could do to oneself. So we existed in a state of rather contrived fellowship, trading confidences very carefully and only one for one, and sexual matters were not within the realm of barter. One’s sexual experiences or lack of them were too provocative to be released to anyone. There were some hideous examples to point them out.
There was, for instance, the fat boy who it was rumored some years ago had confided to a schoolmate that he had cohabited with a pet sheep given him by his father to educate him in farming. Before the sense of this, seemingly, had even sunk into the school at large, the fat boy disappeared into the office of one of the principals for several hours, emerging shaken and uncommunicative. Wild rumors spread that he had been compelled to act out his sexual performances with the sheep—which had been sped by covered truck to the school—to an audience of faculty, and equally hideous tales asserted that the faculty had settled for long, picaresque descriptions. At any rate, this boy was never heard from again—not by the students, in any event—nor was the one who, it was similarly rumored, had pulled a dazzling supply of pornographic playing cards from his briefcase to display to others during a lunch break. The tales in this case indicated that he had been compelled to give a command showing of his entire stock to the faculty which was assembled in a dismal, small alcove known as the “teachers’ lunchroom.” At any rate, such tales breed a kind of caution, as you are doubtless aware.
So, I was on my own. In the truest sense of the term, of course, I have always been on my own; most important men, I find, have been, as well as the largest proportion, of course, of insignificant people. What I had to do, of course, was to reconstruct the entire nature and history of human sexual functioning upon the basis of a few magazines, one raised forefinger and one reaction from a contemporaneous female, along with the performance of my healthy, juvenescent self. This was not easy.
I found that preliminary masturbation was still best accomplished in a state of entire mindlessness, a deliberate revocation of consciousness, but as the crucial twinges and twitches made their reappearance, I would attempt frantically to relate them to the pictures of females which I held plastered by sweat against my throbbing organ. Oh, oh, oh, my vocal cords would mutter as I would attempt to direct the stream directly against a nipple or a slab of white skin below the buttocks and after I finished these excursions it was never without a sense of complete dismay; the other way had been so much better, a coincidental occlusion of semen and graphics adding up to a representation of completion. The other way, painfully developed, had been the direct outcome of my needs and intimations imposed upon my physical self; to negate it was to negate a year of assiduous research. Consider a chemist or a medical doctor placed in such a position! Nevertheless, I persisted. I wanted to be normal. I wanted to be doing whatever everybody else was doing, whatever the hell it was, of course.
This led me into difficulties.
In the first place, I was functioning entirely within the private realm at a time when most men began cautiously, for the first time, to enter into the public. And in the second place, my masturbatory ritual was now so unbearably prolonged by necessity that the danger of interruption was compounded enormously; nor more could I risk doing it in public or semi-public places (such as the men’s room in the terminal) and even in private it was taking so hideously long to traduce the first limpid drops of completion from my tumescent self as to multiply the chances of discovery. Yet there was no other way. I was stubborn.
Consequently, of course, I was found out. I was caught by my father in the very act of ejaculation one dreary Saturday afternoon when the choice had been between the movies, study or masturbation, and replenishment from the previous evening had been sufficient to justify the latter choice. My father found me in extremis itself, poised like a hound-bitch over a litter of magazines, my body half-twisted toward the grey overcast of the windows, my mouth uttering its customary uh, uh, as I strained to direct the stream toward its proper place, the jets soaking my fingers, the bed, as well as its presumed place of completion. He had come up, it appeared, to see if I needed help on my mathematics. My father fancied himself to be of an analytical turn of mind although he was actually a dismally failed poet who in his later years, on the brink of senility, took to belaboring his fellow-accountants with excerpts from what he called his “great unwritten ode.”
I am told that discovery-by-the-father is the prime Oedipal nightmare and I do not doubt the truth of this, at least in the case of youths who are directed toward normal completion. My father’s entrance in this case, however, was only slightly more embarrassing than it would have been if I had been interrupted in the simple act of defecation. I was only trying to be reasonable and normal, this was my feeling: what father could possibly take offense at a son who was only trying to fulfill by release his manly functions? So although I turned to confront him with mild trepidation there was more than a small underlay of pride ... at least he could not say that I wasn’t trying to be reasonable about the whole process. The presence of the dripping magazines scattered on the bed would add further confirmation, if such confirmation was at all necessary.
But there were intricacies to my father, of course, which were beyond my anticipation; this is, perhaps, the fundamental tragedy of human relations. He came into the room using a series of bounds which escalated his movement very much as if he were a rabbit and, terrible in his grandeur, in the verification of his worst anticipations, seized the magazines from the bed and hurled them to the floor.
“Look at the mess you’ve made of everything,” is what he said. “Is that the best thing you can find to do with yourself? Haven’t you got other things on your mind? What if your mother had seen this?”
“She’s not here,” I said. “She’s gone for the afternoon. There’s no chance that she could have seen me.”
He slammed me brutally on the back of the neck, midway between the ear and the medulla oblongata. “I’m perfectly aware of where your mother has gone and why she isn’t home. Now, I want an explanation of this. Do you know what you’re doing?”
“Yes, of course.”
“Do you?” There was another slam, somewhat softer this time since his physical energy, at best, was limited, and had to be hoarded for special occasions like this. “Give me the word for it.”
“The word? I don’t understand.”
“Damn you,” he said, leaning toward me, his eyes wide and intolerant in his damp face, the eyes caught against their will by the scatter of magazines on the floor, “Tell me what you’re doing.”
“You were downstairs. You were supposed to be reading or something. I didn’t know you were coming up here.” I found a shred of reasonableness, even of counter. “I’m entitled to some privacy.”
“Tell me what you were doing,” he said again. There was a slow insistence to his voice, a dreadful unaccustomed drawl; it was evident that he wanted to know the word for it at least as much as he would have wanted to know, on judgment day, his eventual outcome. “If you don’t tell me I’ll hit you again where it hurts.”
“I was masturbating,” I said.
“So that’s it? You were masturbating?” I had mispronounced the word, slightly placing the accent on the tur—and as he repeated it as I had said it, he seemed vaulted to a new level of fury. “Is that the word for it? Do you want to say it again?”
