“I will,” I said. Why not? My bowels were clean, my testes were clean; I had been purged of all normal and abnormal desires and terrified as well. It was the slightest of concessions.
“Until you’re married.”
“When I’m married I can do it?”
“When you’re married you won’t have to do it.” He walked toward the door, opened it, turned back on me. “You don’t think that that has any place in the marriage bed, do you?”
“Oh, no,” I said. “Oh no.”
“Well, then—”
He closed the door.
I contemplated myself for a long, long time as night came fully through the windows and into the eaves of being; after a while I heard the slamming of doors and shrill laughter which meant my mother had returned. I found myself, against the background of the voices, wondering for the first time what my parents were really doing with one another. It didn’t seem to make that much difference. I took the magazines carefully, cautiously one by one and put them back in their hiding place, then went down to greet my parents. My father’s face must have looked as purged as my own. Mother said that we both looked dreadful.
“Shocking,” I said, nodding vigorously, running both hands through my beard and going in search of the wine decanter which, when last seen, had been near the rear of D’Arcy’s small, sparse bar. “Indeed, the implications of this must have been vast.”
“Not necessarily,” he said, his own two hands reaching to move restlessly through his thin, slightly decaying hair. “As a matter of fact, although I once thought this incident to be of the highest significance, being absolutely central to most things which I did subsequently, I now regard it as mildly laughable; provocative, certainly, but in ways more relevant to my father than to myself. You must understand that he was a man of exceedingly weak temperament, and that the discovery must have been even more disconcerting to him than it was to me. Otherwise, his reaction must be inexplicable.”
“Perhaps,” I said, and then overwhelmed with a burst of admiration (as I found the decanter and cracked it open heartily to pour three dashing inches into my glass), added, “but surely, no little credit can accrue to you as a result of this. For an ignorant adolescent to be so accosted and abused by a father at the most delicate stage in his formative years ... why, it might have turned a lesser man, a less exceptional man I was trying to say, into a thorough-going homosexual! But you, D’Arcy, my dear, great, discovered friend ... you went in the other direction entirely!”
“That is only if you link causes and effects in the normal, routinized fashion,” D’Arcy said quietly. “But as I have pointed out, there is very little in my life, exploits or functioning which is so easily explicable. Do you really think I would have become homosexual?”
The query was delivered so insidiously and with such emotion underlying its bland exterior that I realized that I had, very possibly, hurt D’Arcy to the bone and this afflicted me with terrible dismay; I had only been making conversation, a kind of transition! “Oh, no, no, no,” I cried, “that would be impossible for any man such as you and doubly so in your case, granted your sensibility, your compassion, your warmth! I did not mean in the least to imply this kind of aberration in your development, but only to indicate that for a far lesser man this possibility existed. It never occurred to me, not for a moment.”
“I have never understood homosexuality,” D’Arcy said after a pause, his voice rich and meditative as he fondled his glass. “The dreariness, the overwhelming reiteration of it. I have always thought of sex, even in my greenest years, that folly I am now recounting to you, as, perhaps, the last true available means of self-liberation, of the release of the doomed self. But this homosexuality, the entwining of forms upon the same forms, passions upon their mirror, has always stricken me numb; it is such an eternal reaffirmation of the very dwelling which the orgasm has been created for us to escape. Instead of a renewal it is a rediscovery of everything contemptible because already known. Surely, my friend, only a man not aware of himself, only a man who had not yet found his own identity could possibly be a homosexual as he tries to trace out the form and shaft of his being on another. Having once known oneself, one could not possibly be a homosexual. Would you not think that true?”
“Of course,” I said. “The majority of homosexuals whom I have known strike me as the dreariest kind of types, really; people who indeed, as you so aptly say, lack identity. Only the proud, functioning, historic heterosexual—such as you, D’Arcy—can be truly known as the liberated man because his functioning has torn him free from his history, blown him loose from entrapment. Yes, of course, you are perfectly correct.”
But D’Arcy, seemingly unmoved by this sincere burst, remained in a pensive attitude, his hands damp on the glass, his brow drawn tight with thought. “The breasts,” he was saying, “the thighs, the buttocks, the true, warm flesh of these women who are both our partners and the eternal strangers ... this is the key to the unlocking of the door that is the doomed, departed self: in those surfaces is the beginning of our voyage. I simply cannot understand this fellatio, this anal entrance, this series of metallic contacts which appears to circumscribe the life and times of the homosexual. No, this means nothing to me, it is not even metaphor, for if the life of this country can truly be interpreted as the flight from self, the search for identity through the superimposition of diversion—and please understand me, I do not approve of any of this in the slightest—then surely the homosexual is a functional anachronism. You are quite right, my friend: I do concede the point after all; if there were ever a time when the possibility of homosexuality flaunted her equivocal head, it was after this interview with my father. Yet it could never be. Never. I assure you of that. Of such contacts, I have never had the slightest knowledge. You do believe me?”
“Of course,” I said, sipping the wine gratefully and realizing for the first time that D’Arcy’s apartment was slightly oppressive, cluttered with far too many furnishings for its limited spaces and stuffy in the bargain; repressing with anger a sudden compulsion to go around flinging up windows and singing heartily to myself to be reminded of the existence of air. “What do you think brings me to your rooms? Why do you think we have embarked upon this study? Surely not the laughable prospect of homosexuality!”
“Tell me,” D’Arcy said shyly, his eyes full and round, now. “Tell me why you are here. Tell me the true reasons for this study as you call it, my reminiscences, your attention.”
“Do you really need to know?”
“Of course I do. Otherwise, why would I ask?”
“Why,” I said, “your heterosexuality, of course. Your monstrous, overbearing heterosexuality which cut a swathe through three nations, several subdivisions and literally hundreds of women; that consuming, tormenting, transcendent heterosexuality which has made you, D’Arcy, virtually a legend before your senescence; that is the whole of it and the reason for it. Of course! Do you really need reassurances at this date?”
His eyes held infinite knowledge, infinite sadness. “Yes,” he said, “sometimes I do. Sometimes everyone does. You have no idea of the burden, the obligation, the responsibility—”
“Of course,” I said.
“I guess I should go on. There is so much that is crucial for me to explain to you and so little time. Life is a feather; it can be wafted away at any instant. And I have barely started.”
“We have time,” I said comfortingly, “We have time.” And indeed, between the wine, the clamor of D’Arcy’s conversation and the constriction of his room I felt a dismal lightheadedness, an apprehension of consequence in that I suspected, with enormous gloom and for the first time, that I would pay; that I would pay in some obscure and costly way for being D’Arcy’s biographer; that nothing was without recompense and that my recompense might take a particularly ghastly form. But there was nothing to say, not when his limpid dark eyes were holding me so closely. So I merely leaned back, clutching the glass in my fingers and feeling the volatility of the liquid driving up against my palm and said, “Yes, yes, by all means go right ahead, don’t feel that I’m limiting you at all. Please go on and tell me what happened next. I simply can’t wait to find out and I want to get all of it down into your memoirs.”
Did I grasp the institution then, this end, these forms, this penance? Did a breath of still air move back from this time to that, enveloping me in its vapid chill? Or was I merely distressed by the power of D’Arcy’s recollections, his rhetorical ability to transmit his own oppression?
“Go on,” I said, rather restlessly.
The interview with my father (D’Arcy went on) forced certain alterations upon my life just as the interview with Rona had, although they took a different outlet. No man is immutable. In my case, they tended to once again force me to examine my considerations of sex, my interpretation of the role of orgasm. I did not stop masturbating of course, not even for the length of a day. There were two reasons for this.
The first reason is that I could, under no circumstances, have stopped for any reason at all; I was then entering my sixteenth year, and ripeness being all, demanded an outlet of some kind under any circumstances. It was no more possible for me to stop masturbating than it would have been for my parents to have withdrawn me from the “special” school which yielded, upon entrance, a contract committing the student for several terms of study through graduation, to be revoked only in the event of death or insanity. The second reason was only slightly more complex: I suspected that if caught again my father’s reaction would not be worse and might be considerably better. There was no possibility that he would turn me in, so to speak, to the proper authorities. Rather, we were collaborators toward a solemn destiny which was being worked out through the thumpings and thuddings of that agent, my prick. Although I was never found out again it was not for lack of opportunity on my father’s part because, on almost all the occasions that we were left at home together, I would withdraw from his presence to either “nap” or “do some studying,” leaving no doubt in his mind as to my true intentions. I suppose the fact of the matter was that I wanted to be discovered again. My father had never been so interesting before or since. On the other hand, he evidently decided that it would not be in his best interests to reiterate the scene. I can respect this.
I had to, as I say, reevaluate the sexual act. My father’s talk of the “marriage bed,” to say nothing of the “temple of the holy spirit,” had convinced me that there was more to the spurtings of orgasm than simple mechanization, more to its involvement with women than coincidence. It was possible—this was a new thought!—that women were participants in the orgasm themselves, that the actual ejaculation spurred them into a responding, if minuscule parody of what occurred within my own body. Perhaps—this was an interesting possibility—the “temple of the holy spirit” was the body of the woman itself and the spurtings of orgasm a kind of ritual offering. This would have been easier to work out had I come from a religious background.
There were at this time, doubtless, all kinds of texts available to me which could have solved the mystery in a trice. But, considering it somewhat more profoundly, I doubt if they would have after all. The sheer, medical facts of copulation I knew—insertion, excitation, further excitation, orgasm—what I did not comprehend was the actual relationship of the bodies. My original assumption had been, of course, that the male masturbated directly into the vagina rather than with the use of his hands, a minor inconvenience which was imposed by what were known as the “marital responsibilities” the counselors were always talking about, but it did not go into the quality of that masturbation itself. Rona’s reaction to the magazines had been my first real clue, my father’s lecture had been the second. But there were still loose ends. How did they—females, that is—derive their own satisfaction? What did they think about when it was being done to them? Wouldn’t it be easier if they offered their hands instead of their orifices? And so on.
I put these questions, incidentally, to a prostitute in T—many years later and I am sorry to say that she did not produce answers any more satisfactory than my frenzied imagination did at that time. She was a charming and responsive girl, well-built, with that kind of easy languor which moves into the most rigid and desperate kind of pumping; but her intellectual processes, at least in relation to my queries, were almost nil, although she approached them with a good deal of sophistication. “What do we think about, darling?” she asked me as we lay exhausted from the afterplay, our cigarettes joined to one another as our slimy organs had been only a few moments ago, “Well, that all depends. I mean it’s hard to tell you. Sometimes we think about one thing and sometimes we think about the other. And sometimes we don’t think at all. It has a lot to do with the mood you’re in and with the man you’re with, if you know what I mean.” And gave me a rattling good wink and a thumb in the ribs. “What else can I tell you?”
But I persisted, trying to ascertain what her responses were, the quality of feeling, the very quality of ambition that underlay the conjoining of the female in bed, that fine, desperate, oily winding in the limbs. “What do you make of it?” I asked her, reasonably enough, I thought. “What makes you do it, anyway?”
“Well,” she said, “sometimes it’s money and sometimes it’s love and sometimes it’s both but more often than not it’s simply something to do.” And gave me the wink again and a lingering caress moving from shoulder to balls in a swoop, fingering them to the suspicion of pain and then releasing to plumb the depths of my buttocks. “We have our thoughts,” she said demurely, and put the leftward of her two enormous breasts in my mouth. “Suck away now, darling D’Arcy and don’t ask so many questions.”
So I sucked away, a willing nursling for her better pride, subsiding in the numb awareness that I would never know; that 31 as 16, the true quality of their marvels would never be known to me, the thrust of their obsession, the purposes of their drifting. And she made the proper whore’s noises, groaning away properly under me while I gave her what I thought she wanted and as I did this I realized for the first time the truth of it: if I had known it many years ago it would have saved me all kinds of trouble, but knowing it even then as I did, it could have been the beginning of salvation because a man’s sexual powers do not dwindle and vanish at 31 but, in certain subtle ways, are only undergoing their truest metamorphosis: there could be many a decade of merry fucking if I could only grasp this insight and hold it close and the insight, then, was this: there was nothing inside them at all. They had nothing to say, there was no interior; it was boredom and the genes and certain slow convulsions of the juices which brought them into the bed, and for the remainder there was nothing at all, absolutely nothing that could be touched.
And, oh yes, the whole legend that they had built up of feminine demureness, feminine mystery, feminine coyness, was only to cover up all of this: the suggestion being made that what they felt was beyond the reward of words, but the fact of the case being—deponent maketh a proper case—that inarticulacy was the best defense against discovery. And as her huge nipples, one by one, exploded slowly and ripely in my mouth, her peculiar moans—twenty dollar moans, to be sure, perhaps thirty dollar moans and mine for the all-night rate of twenty-five and a half—carried me back past the web and network of the years toward the oldest necessity, the truest necessity, the original necessity of all, and a massive glowing eagle with wings of fire, I carried her on my back in slow circles, wrenching her into position as I moved skyward, free at last from the sea and caving waters, moving in my element at last past the broken and crumbling land.
I digress. The questions I wished to have answered I could, I suppose, have verified through experience; I was at an age where “dating” began and even for tenants of the all-male “special” school there were sufficient opportunities afforded by dreary dances provided by the school management once a month at which the tenants of a girl’s “special” school were the constant and sole invitees. Girl “special” students were unlike the boy specialists I had known; both more boisterous and adventurous, there were whispers, even in our sullen corridors, of quick rewards asked and given during and after these dances in secret places. But I was not interested in these girls. They had no allure for me whatsoever. They struck me as barely female. What I was truly after were the girls whose pictures lay in the magazines. They were the ones to take up the issue with; hadn’t I, in one fashion or another, been dealing with them in huge fidelity for years?
But the girls in the magazines were almost wholly inaccessible. I am finally at the point now where I want to tell you what went on in that blasted and deserted province during the summer to which I referred. We were some time getting there, that is perfectly true. But by the same token, we will be some time in getting out. There is no way to sufficiently overstate the importance of the events which occurred to me. Or do you misunderstand me, my friend? Do you like the rest of them now find D’Arcy contemptible, weary, effete, something of a bore? Do you repudiate him as so many of them have been prone to do? Or do you truly understand him? Can you understand the connections, the fine, limpid connections which so key in to his mystery? I hope you are attending well, my friend. I hope you are manifesting the proper emotional concern toward me; that this is not all an elaborate joke—this biography, this attentiveness, this constant, flattering auditor—prepared by my enemies for my greater humiliation.
At this point, D’Arcy’s handsome head lolled upon his shoulders, drifted toward his chest and receded, passing out of the reciprocal gaze of the mirror. Immersed as I was in my notations, the necessity to catch everything he was saying without a single lapse, it was some time before I realized that he had fallen asleep.
And so, then, on the second of our nights, on the second night of our reconciliation, I sat quietly in the ticking and beating spaces of D’Arcy’s lodgings, tapping one hand upon a knee and listening to his breathing while I waited for the dawn and wine to come again so that D’Arcy could speak to me of the provinces, of the wild lost provinces, of the bare, deserted provinces where the horses themselves came out in the dusk and cast their screams at one another while the diseased sun sent shafts of misery catching them timeless in a stricken frieze, a frieze much as my poor friend’s head might have formed, suspended as it was between cabinet and mirror, between ceiling and floor, between history and judgment.
