The Book of Skulls

  Timothy studied me for an endless moment.

  “When I was in my last year at prep school,” he said in a voice as hollow and as rusty as an abandoned tomb, “I raped her, Oliver. I raped her.”

  I think he expected the heavens to open and lightning to descend when he made his big confession. I think that at the very least he expected me to recoil, covering my eyes, and cry out that I was shattered by his shocking words. Actually I was a little surprised, both that Timothy should have bothered with any such grubby business and that he had managed to put it to her without any immediate consequences, such as getting horsewhipped when her screams brought the rest of the family running. And I had to rearrange my image of her, knowing now as I did that her supercilious thighs had been furrowed by her brother’s cock. But otherwise I wasn’t exactly astounded. Where I come from the sheer weight of boredom is always driving the young ’uns to incest and much worse; and though I hadn’t ever balled my sister, I knew plenty of fellows who had had theirs. It was lack of inclination, not tribal taboo, that led me to keep my sticky hands off Sis. Still, this was clearly a serious business to Timothy, and I maintained a respectful silence, looking grave and disturbed, as he told me his story.

  He spoke haltingly at first, in obvious embarrassment, sweating and stumbling and stammering, like Lyndon Johnson beginning to explain his Vietnam policy to a war-crimes tribunal. But before long the words were flowing freely, as though this was a story Timothy had told many times in the privacy of his own head, rehearsing it so often that by now the telling of it was automatic once the first awkwardness of speaking was behind him. It had happened, he said, exactly four years ago this month, when he was home for Easter recess from Andover and his sister was in from the girls’ academy in Pennsylvania that she attended. (At that time my own first meeting with Timothy was still five months in the future.) He was 18 and his sister about 15½. They didn’t get along well, never had; she was the sort of kid whose relationship with her older brother had always been conducted on the sticking-her-tongue-out-at-him level. He thought she was impossibly snotty and snobbish and she thought he was impossibly rude and brutish. During the previous Christmas holiday he had laid his sister’s closest friend and classmate, which the sister had found out about, and that had placed an extra strain on their relationship.

  It was a difficult season in Timothy’s life. At Andover he was a powerful and universally admired leader, a football hero, president of his class, a famed symbol of virility and savoir faire; but in a couple of months he’d be graduating and all that accumulated prestige would count for zip as he moved on to become just another freshman in a large, world-famous university. That was traumatic for him. He had also been conducting a strenuous and expensive long-distance love affair with a girl from Radcliffe who was a year or two his senior; he didn’t love her, it was just a status thing for him to be able to say he was fucking a college girl, but he was pretty sure she was in love with him. Just before Easter he had accidentally learned from a third party that in fact she regarded him as an amusing pet, a sort of prep-school trophy to display to her innumerable suave Harvard boyfriends; her attitude to him, in short, was even more cynical than his to her. So he came home to the family acres that spring feeling pretty crushed, which was a novelty for Timothy. Immediately he was into a new source of uptightness. In his home town there was a girl he loved, really loved. I’m not sure what Timothy means by “love,” but I think it’s a term he applies to any girl who fits his criteria of looks, money, and birth, and who won’t let him sleep with her; that makes her unattainable, that puts her up on a pedestal, and so he tells himself he “loves” her. The Don Quixote number, in a way. This girl was seventeen and had just been accepted by Bennington, came from a family with nearly as much bread as Timothy’s, was an Olympic-quality equestrienne, and, to hear him tell it, had a body that was strictly Playmate-of-the-Year category. He and she belonged to the same country-club set, and he had been golfing, dancing, and playing tennis with her since before puberty, but his occasional attempts to achieve a deeper friendship had been expertly turned aside. He was obsessed by her to the point where he even thought of marrying her eventually, and he deluded himself into thinking that she had already picked him as her eventual husband; therefore, he reasoned, she wasn’t letting him get his hands on her because she knew he was a double-standard man at heart and was afraid he’d regard her as unmarriageable if he got into her this early.

  The first few days he was home he phoned her every afternoon. Polite, friendly, distant conversation. She didn’t seem to be available for solo dating—dating apparently wasn’t much of a custom in their group—but she said she’d see him at the country-club dance on Saturday night. High hopes building. The dance was one of those formal deals with constantly changing partners, interrupted by interludes of necking in various approved recesses of the club. He succeeded in getting her into one of those recesses by mid-evening, and, though he didn’t even come close to entering her recesses, he did manage to get further with her than ever before: tongue in the mouth, hands under the bra. And he thought he saw a certain glitter in her eye. The next time he danced with her he invited her to take a stroll with him—also part of the country-club ritual. They paraded the grounds. He suggested that they go down to the boathouse. In that set, a trip to the boathouse was code for fucking. They went to the boathouse. His fingers slithered eagerly along her cool thighs. Her palpitating body throbbed to his caresses. Her passionate palm rubbed the swollen front of his trousers. Like a maddened bull he seized her with the intention of plonking her right then and there, and with the skill of an Olympic virginity champion she gave him a maidenly knee in the balls, escaping certain rape at the very last minute. After delivering some choice remarks on his bestial habits she stormed out, leaving him numb and dazed in the chilly boathouse. There was a fierce ache in his groin and there was blind rage in his head. What would any red-blooded American youth have done in such a situation? What Timothy did was to stagger back to the clubhouse, grab a half-full bottle of bourbon from the bar, and go lurching out into the night, feeling furious and very sorry for himself. After gulping half the bourbon he jumped into his sleek little Mercedes sports car and drove home at eighty miles an hour; then he sat in the garage finishing off the bourbon; then, blind drunk and raging mad, he went upstairs, invaded his virginal young sister’s bedroom, and flung himself on top of her. She struggled. She implored. She whimpered. But his strength was as the strength of ten and nothing could swerve him from his chosen course, not with that giant hard-on doing his thinking for him. She was a girl; she was a bitch; he was going to use her. He didn’t currently see any difference between the luscious cockteaser in the boathouse and this uppity sister of his; they were both bitches, they were all bitches, and he was going to get even with the whole tribe of women at once. He held her down with his knees and elbows. “If you yell,” he told her, “I’ll break your neck,” and he meant it, because just then he was out of his head, and she knew it, too. Down came his trembling sister’s pajama bottoms. Cruelly the snorting stallion of a brother battered at her tender gate. “I don’t even think she was a virgin,” he told me morosely. “I went right in, easy.” It was all over in two minutes. Then he rolled free of her, and they were both shivering, she from shock and he from release, and he pointed out to her that it wouldn’t do her any good to complain to their parents about this, since they probably wouldn’t believe her, and if they called in a doctor to check the story there would certainly be a scandal, whispers, insinuations, and once that began to get around town it would ruin her chances of getting married, ever, to anyone worth marrying. She glared at him. He had never seen such hate in anyone’s eyes.

  He made his way to his own room, falling down a couple of times. When he woke, sober and aghast, it was late the next afternoon and he expected to find the police waiting for him downstairs. But there was no one there but his father and his stepmother and the servants. Nobody acted as if anything unusual ha
d happened. His father smiled, asked him how the dance had gone. His sister was out with friends. She didn’t return until dinnertime, and when she came in she behaved as though everything was as it should be, giving Timothy a cool, distant, customary nod as a greeting. That evening she called him aside and said in a menacing, terrifying voice, “If you ever try anything like that again, you’ll get a knife in the balls, I promise you.” But that was the last reference she ever made to what he had done. In four years she hadn’t spoken of it once, at least not to him and probably not to anyone; she apparently had sealed the episode into some stony compartment of her mind, filing it away as a night’s unpleasantness, like an attack of the trots. I could testify that she maintained a perfect icy surface, playing the role of the eternal virgin no matter who or what had been into her.

  That was all. That was the whole thing. When he was finished, Timothy looked up, drained, empty, gray-faced, a million and a half years old. “I can’t tell you how crappy I’ve always felt about doing something like that,” he said. “How much goddamned guilt I’ve had.”

  “You feel better now?” I asked.

  “No.”

  I wasn’t surprised. I’ve never believed that opening your soul brings you surcease from sorrow. It just spreads the sorrow around some. What Timothy had told me was a dumb story, a sordid story, a downer, a bummer. A tale of the idle rich, mind-fucking each other in the usual fashion, worrying about virginity and propriety, creating little melodramatic operas starring themselves and their friends, with snobbishness and frustration spinning the plot. I almost felt sorry for Timothy, big hulking good-natured upper-crust Timothy, as much victim as criminal, simply looking for a little action at the country club and getting kneed in the groin instead. So he got drunk and raped his sister because he thought it would make him feel better, or because he wasn’t thinking at all. And that was his great secret, that was his terrible sin. I felt soiled by the story. It was such a shabby thing, such a pitiful thing; and now I would have to carry it around in my head forever. I couldn’t say a word to him. After what seemed like ten silent minutes he got heavily to his feet and shambled toward the door.

  “All right,” he said. “I did what Frater Javier wanted me to do. Now I feel like a load of shit. How do you feel, Oliver?” He laughed. “And tomorrow it’s your turn.”

  He went out.

  Yes. Tomorrow it’s my turn.

  thirty-seven

  eli

  Oliver said, “There was this day in early September when my friend Karl and I went hunting, just the two of us, chasing doves or partridges all morning through the scrubby woods north of town, catching nothing but dust. Then we came out of the trees and saw a lake before us, a pond, really, and we were hot and sweaty, for summer wasn’t entirely over yet. So we put down our guns and got out of our clothes and took a swim, and afterward we sat naked on a big flat rock, drying ourselves and hoping some birds would fly by, so we could pot them—pow—without even getting up. Karl was fifteen then and I was fourteen, and I was finally bigger than he was, because I had reached my full growth and passed him in the spring. Karl had seemed so mature and big a few years before, but now he looked thin and flimsy next to me. We didn’t speak for a long time, and then, just as I was thinking of suggesting that we get dressed and move along, Karl turned toward me with a peculiar look in his eyes, and I saw he was studying my body, my groin. And he said something about girls, how stupid girls are, what stupid noises they make while you’re laying them, how tired he was of having to make love talk with them before they’d let him get into them, how bored he was with their dumb floppy tits, their makeup, their giggling, how much he hated buying them sodas and listening to their chatter, and so on. He said a lot of stuff along those lines. I laughed and said, Well, girls may have their flaws, but it’s the only game in town, isn’t it? And Karl said, No it isn’t.

  “Now I was sure he was putting me on, and I told him, I never went much for fucking cows or sheep, Karl. Or maybe it’s ducks you’ve been going with lately. He shook his head. He looked annoyed. I’m not talking about fucking animals, he said, in the sort of tone you’d use in speaking to a small child. That kind of shit is for morons, Oliver. I’m just trying to tell you, he said, that there’s a way you can get yourself off, a good way, a clean way, it doesn’t involve girls, you don’t have to sell yourself out to girls and do all the shit they want you to do for them, you know what I mean? It’s simple and it’s honest and it’s clear-cut, all the cards on the table, and I want to tell you something, he said, don’t knock it till you’ve tried it. I still wasn’t sure what he meant, partly because I was naive and partly because I didn’t want to believe that he meant what I thought he might mean, and I made a noncommittal grunt which Karl must have mistaken for a go-ahead, because he reached over and put his hand on me, high up on my thigh. Hey, wait, I said, and he said, Don’t knock it till you’ve tried it, Oliver. He went on talking in a low intense voice, words tumbling out of him, explaining to me that women were nothing but animals and he was going to keep clear of them for life, that even if he got married he wasn’t going to touch his wife except to make kids, but otherwise, so far as his pleasures went, he hoped to keep them on a strictly man-to-man basis because that was the only decent and honest way. You hunt with other men, you play cards with other men, you get drunk with other men, you talk with men the way you’d never talk with women, really opening yourself up, and so why not go the whole route, why not get your sex kicks from men, too?

  “And as he was explaining this to me, speaking very fast, never once letting me get a word in edgewise, making everything sound almost rational and logical, he had his hand on me, putting it there in a very casual way, on my thigh, the way you might put your hand on somebody’s shoulder while you’re saying something to him, meaning nothing particular by it, and Karl was rubbing this hand up and down, up and down, still talking a streak, moving the hand closer and closer to my crotch all the time. And he was getting hard, Eli, and so was I, that’s what amazed me so much, so was I. I was getting hard. With an empty blue sky above us and not another human being within five miles. I was afraid to look down at myself, ashamed of what I knew was happening to me. That was a revelation to me, that another fellow could arouse me like that. Just this once, he said, just once, Oliver, and if you don’t like it I’ll never mention the subject to you again, but you mustn’t knock it till you’ve tried it, you hear? I didn’t know how to answer him and I didn’t know how to get his hand off me. And then the hand moved farther up, up to here, and even higher, and—look, Eli, I mean, I don’t want to get too graphic. If this is embarrassing you, just tell me and I’ll try to describe it in general terms—”

  “Say it however you need to say it, Oliver.”

  “Reaching his hand up and up, until his hand was clasped tight around my—around my cock, Eli, he was holding my penis, holding me there just like a girl might, the two of us naked by that little lake where we’d just been swimming, at the edge of the woods, and his words pouring through my head, telling me how we could do it with each other, how men managed it. I know all about it, he said, I learned it from my brother-in-law. You know, he hates my sister, they’ve been married only three years and he can’t stand her, the way she smells, the way she files her nails all the time, everything about her, and one night he said, Let me show you some fun, Karl, and he was right, it was fun. So let me show you some fun, Oliver. And afterward you tell me who gave you a better time, me or Christa Henrichs, me or Judy Beecher.”

  The bitter odor of sweat was strong in the room. Oliver’s voice was hard-edged and sharp; every syllable came forth with the force of a dart. His eyes were glazed and his face was flushed. He seemed to be in some sort of trance. If it hadn’t been Oliver, I would have thought he was stoned. This confession was costing him some tremendous inner price; that had been plain from the moment he walked in, jaws rigid, lips clamped, looking weirdly uptight as I had seen him only a few times previously, and began his ra
mbling, hesitant tale of a late-summer day in the Kansas woods when he was a boy. As the story unwound I had been trying to anticipate its route and guess its payoff. Obviously he had betrayed Karl in some way, I supposed. Had he cheated Karl in the division of the day’s catch? Had he stolen ammunition from Karl when his friend’s back was turned? Had he shot Karl dead in some sudden quarrel and told the sheriff it was an accident? None of those possibilities persuaded me; but I was unprepared for the actual turn in the narrative, the wandering hand, the skillful seduction. The rural background—guns and wild game and woods—had misled me; my simple-minded image of Growing Up In Kansas left no room for homosexual adventures and other manifestations of what to me was a purely urban species of decadence. Yet here was Karl, the virile huntsman, groping innocent young Oliver, and here was an older Oliver crouching before me pulling the reluctant words from his bowels. The words became less reluctant; Oliver was caught up in the rhythms of his tale, now, and, though his anguish seemed no less, his flow of description became more copious, as if he took some masochistic pride in baring this episode to me: it was not so much a confession as an act of abasement. The story rolled inexorably on, liberally embellished with telling detail. Oliver portraying his maidenly shyness and uneasiness, his gradual succumbing to Karl’s earnest sophistries, the critical moment when his uncertain hand at last sought Karl’s body. Oliver spared me nothing. Karl had not been circumcised, I learned, and in case I might not be familiar with the anatomical implications of that fact Oliver carefully explained to me the appearance of an uncircumcised member, both flaccid and erect. He told me also of the manual caresses and of his indoctrination into the oral joys, and finally he painted the picture of the two sinewy young male bodies writhing in elaborate copulation beside the pond. There was Bible Belt fervor in his words: he had committed an abomination, he had dabbled in the sins of Sodom, he had fouled himself unto the seventh generation, all in that one afternoon of boyish fun. “All right,” I wanted to say, “all right, Oliver, so you made out with your pal, why stretch it into such a big megillah? You’re still basically hetero, aren’t you? Everyone fools around with other boys when he’s a kid, and Kinsey told us a long time ago that at least one male adolescent out of three goes to the point of climax with—” But I said not a word. This was Oliver’s big moment and I didn’t want to put him down. This was his shaping trauma, this was the fiery-eyed demon that rode him, and he was letting it all hang out for my inspection. He had awesome momentum now. He swept me grandly along to the final orgasmic spurt, and then sat back, spent, dazed, face going slack, eyes going dull. Waiting for my verdict, I guess. What could I say? How could I pass judgment on him? I said nothing.