“Just what I thought.”
Warren’s voice dropped an octave. “Why don’t you stop abusing that piano,” he murmured, “and abuse me a little instead.”
“I thought you’d never ask.”
A month after Bertram Ryder LeGrand’s second birthday, his father put the family Buick into a curve at seventy miles an hour. The car left the road and stopped abruptly when it came to a tree. The steering column crushed Jack LeGrand’s chest and killed him instantly. The girl who had been on the seat beside him went through the windshield and bled to death from a slashed jugular vein. The first state trooper on the scene had never seen a car so utterly demolished. The only undamaged object was a pint bottle of corn whiskey which had somehow survived the impact. There was an inch left in it, and after a look at the car’s two occupants, the trooper felt the need to finish the bottle himself.
Bert had no true memories of his father, but it seemed to him that the ghost of Smilin’ Jack LeGrand was always present in the brooding Victorian house in downtown Charleston where he grew up. It was his grandmother’s house and he lived there with his mother and grandmother and was nourished on the stories his mother told of his father. Smilin’ Jack had been an athlete, a hard drinker, at once a man’s man and a ladies’ man. Sarah Ryder seemed as proud of his faults as of his virtues. He had been the first man in her life and was to be the last. She had loved him quite completely, and yet it seemed to Bert in later years that his abrupt death must have been a relief to her. She was a shy, timid girl, and it could not have been easy for her to be the wife of such a man. It was infinitely easier to be his widow.
She raised him in his father’s shadow and at the same time did everything she could to ensure against his growing into a copy of Smilin’ Jack. She protected him, smothered him, kept him at the piano while other boys were on the ballfield, and while she did this she told glowing stories of his father’s accomplishments. “You’re a Ryder,” she told him often. “Your father was a LeGrand, he had all the strengths and weaknesses of his blood, but you’ve always favored my side of the family. You’re a Ryder to the core.”
It was a hollow core for the first seventeen years of his life. When he looked back on those years he found he could remember very little besides music and books. At first he practiced the piano primarily to please his mother, but as time passed he could shut out the rest of the world effortlessly by sitting on that flat bench and letting his fingers work upon the keys. His training was all classical, and he practiced his classical pieces diligently, but when he had finished he worked at pop tunes, picking out melodies and figuring out harmonics by ear.
All through those years he existed in a social vacuum, friendless and unnoticed by his classmates. “I would have been gay then,” he said years later, “if anyone had taken the trouble. I was such an ugly skinny kid it never occurred to anyone to make a play for me. God, all the ingredients were there. The introverted kid with the protective mother and the dead idealized father—it was all there, but I wasn’t bright enough to figure it out for myself and nobody was interested in educating me.”
Throughout high school he dreamed of girls and never dared date one. He told himself that his entire life would change when he went away to college. He would emerge from the cocoon; he would be bright and witty and charming and debonair; he would have all the women he wanted and would want every woman he saw. He told himself all of this, and he could not make himself believe a word of it, and he graduated from high school and went to William and Mary on scholarship and was astonished to find that the dreams came true.
It never ceased to astonish him in retrospect. The caterpillar-to-butterfly metaphor was inescapable, except that it was not so much changes in himself as changes in his environment; the poise and assurance that he instantly acquired were taken on in response to his altered environment. What had been faults in a Charleston high school classroom were suddenly strengths. He had grown into his long, thin face, and what he’d thought of as ugliness was now seen as interesting and commanding, a face with character and presence. His intellect, which he’d willingly submerged before, was now respected and admired. Boys liked him. Girls were drawn to him. Even his piano playing, merely a curiosity in Charleston, was of social value now.
He was accepted, and discovered he thrived on acceptance. He pledged a good fraternity and found among his fraternity brothers the first friends he had had in his entire life. His classes were provocative as high school classes had never been. He wore the unofficial campus uniform, white bucks and chinos and button-down oxford cloth shirts, but he wore his hair long and carefully combed, a distinguishing characteristic in a swarm of shaggy crew cuts. Even as a freshman he was noticed, and noticed favorably.
But it was with girls that his success most astonished him. He couldn’t believe how easy it was to get them and how good he seemed to be at the whole business. He appeared to have a natural aptitude for the game. The easy banter came automatically to his tongue, and he intuitively struck the attitudes which would have the proper effect. The first girl he kissed had no idea of his inexperience. The first girl he had intercourse with would have been astonished to know she was claiming his virginity.
“I gather it’s different now,” he once told “The college kids have a much more mature attitude toward sex than we did. More mature, and at the sand time more idealistic. There’s this emphasis placed on honesty. Open and honest relationships openly and honestly arrived at. The only honesty I remember in sex at college was that you were supposed to tell the truth when you talked to your buddies about it afterward, Maybe the girls had the same code among themselves. I don’t know. But there was certainly no honesty between male and female. The guy was out to get as much as possible from her with the minimum emotional commitment, and the girl was looking for a fraternity pin or an engagement ring or a Mrs. degree. Even if all she wanted was a friendly fuck, she had to pretend differently. She might be laying a different guy every night of the week, but each time she would pretend she just got carried away and never expected to wind up with her knees pointing at the ceiling.”
He dated extensively, and most of the girls he dated obligingly ended the evening with their knees aimed skyward. The first time was in the fraternity house after a dance. He had taken his own girl home, petted furiously with her, and returned to the house. Another brother had passed out and his date was waiting around in the hope that he might get sober enough to take her back to her dormitory. Bert took her upstairs to a vacant bedroom and began necking with her, waiting for her to tell him to stop. There was a point when he realized that she was not going to stop him, and a great surge of triumph went through him—he was going to reach that impossible goal. It was going to happen; it was happening now.
None of the fears associated with the magic moment ever materialized. He was fully potent and able to sustain the act effortlessly. He brought her easily to orgasm, then erupted himself, emptying his passion into the warmth of her.
Afterward there was a heady glow that lasted for several hours. For some moments, alone in his own room, the girl mercifully gone, he managed to convince himself that he loved her. The notion passed rather quickly and he laughed at the thought of it. She was just a tramp, he decided. Her own date had passed out on her so she screwed the first person who asked her.
There were other girls, a great many of them. It was easy once you knew the moves. And, as the novelty of it wore off, so did much of the excitement. He never felt himself drawn to any of the girls he had sex with. They were vehicles for his own pleasure, and once he had used them he had little desire to see them again. He was not compulsive about this; there were girls he saw more than once, but he would withdraw from them completely and shut them out of his life once he sensed they wanted an emotional commitment from him. There was a danger in their moist warmth; it could capture a man by his private parts and suck him in like quicksand.
“It doesn’t mean all that much to me,” he said one night to a friend. “All through high
school I walked around with a hard-on dreaming about what it would be like to get laid. And now it’s sort of a letdown, you know, discovering that that’s all there is to it.”
“Oh, come off it. Mr. Nonchalance.”
“No, I’m serious.”
“Well, you can afford to say it, for Christ’s sake. I mean, the amount of action you get.”
“All it is is action.”
“Bullshit. Then how come you’re chasing it as much as you do? When’s the last weekend you weren’t out there going after a piece?”
“I’m not saying I don’t like it.”
“White of you, LeGrand. Let’s hire a skywriter—‘LeGrand doesn’t dislike pussy.’ Christ on a crutch.”
“I mean, it beats doing without. Or jerking off.”
Except that it didn’t, not really. There were times when he would masturbate in his room, touching himself while he listened to music, timing his strokes to the music, purposely delaying the orgasm as long as possible. Often he would refrain from orgasm, stimulating himself to the very edge of it time after time, then letting his passion ebb unfulfilled. His fantasies at such times were abstract and diffuse. Sometimes there were no fantasies whatsoever, only the physical fact of his manual manipulations.
And it was often better than what he achieved with girls. He did not require it as compulsively as he seemed to require girls. He was not driven to it. But there was something he could give himself which girls could not give him. He did not understand what it was or he could not deny its existence.
There was an uncertain point where his perception of the sex act shifted. At the beginning he saw it as an act in which the female was exploited, used for his pleasure by the male. He felt no guilt over this exploitation, rather, it seemed to him that the male role had to be asserted in such a fashion, that women were designed by a bearded God to be tricked and used. The idea was not uniquely his but was rolled out time and time again at bull sessions. The more intellectual brothers quoted Nietzsche.
But as time passed, his vision of who was the exploiter did an about-face. He began to regard the girls with whom he slept as bottomless pits in which he had to plunge himself forever. They took from him, they drained him, and all he got out of it was a momentary feeling of relief backed by the illusion of conquest.
It was hard to look back on the way he had been in those college days, those Don Juan days, hard to believe that he never felt an impulse toward homosexuality. Warren found the whole thing inconceivable.
“Of course you repressed it,” he said, “but you must have felt it. All those late-night gabfests, all that beery intimacy. Sweaty young bodies in the locker room—”
“I never saw a locker room, Warren. You don’t get sweaty bodies over a bridge table. The only sweaty bodies I came across were female.”
“But you must have had a yen for someone now and then. Pushed it out of your mind, of course. Natural enough under the circumstances. But I can’t believe you were that utterly unaware of the whole idea of it.”
Yet he had been just that unaware. There were a few men on campus who were generally presumed to be homosexual. A botany professor, an assistant in the psychology department, a couple of effeminate students. If Bert had spared a moment for a thought of any sort about any of these men, he could not recall it.
Then, the summer before his senior year, he found out who he was.
He was spending the summer at Virginia Beach as a bellhop in a resort hotel. The hours were long but the work was easy and pleasant enough and the tips were fairly good. There were girls—waitresses at his hotel and college girls on summer vacation. There were also older women, wives whose husbands left them there all summer and commuted from Richmond or Charlotte for the weekends. The older women were better in bed than the girls and less demanding out of it, but there was one very bad moment in the aftermath of sex when his partner’s face had become, for the briefest instant, the face of his mother.
One hot night in mid-July he wanted to be by himself. He had found himself in this sort of mood lately, wanting only to go somewhere dark and quiet and listen to the jukebox and drink. He never drank too much but managed to drink enough so that sleep would come quickly when he returned to the hotel.
In the third bar he hit there was a piano player, and when Bert sat at the bar and listened to the music the rest of the world went away. The pianist had light-brown hair receding in front and a quick, elusive smile, as though aware of a bitter private joke. His hands were large and strong, their backs hairless. He played good cocktail piano and sang along in an easy bouncy style that reminded Bert of Bobby Troup. He was taking requests, and after awhile Bert called out a couple of numbers. Each of his requests was greeted with a quick smile and a raised eyebrow.
During his break the pianist came and sat on the stool beside him. “Let me buy you a drink,” he said. “It’s a rare pleasure to have someone who’s really listening.”
“Well, it’s a rarer pleasure to hear someone who knows how to play. And what to play.”
“Do you play yourself?”
“I haven’t been near a piano all summer. I’m toting hags at the Ocean View.”
“Don’t they have a piano?”
“Not for the help. They made that clear.”
“Yeah, those pricks would. Look, I’ve got an upright at my place. It’s a little tinny but at least it’s in tune. I play one more set and that’s all she wrote.” A flash of the private smile. “You could drop over. We’ll do in a fifth of something and you can find out if your fingers still work. How about it?”
“I’m not really all that good.”
“If you’re terrible I’ll put cotton in my ears. What say?”
They drank martinis and played for each other; talked about music and women. The pianist—his name was Buddy—said he didn’t go with women much more. He’d been divorced, he said, and was still over it Bert said he wasn’t sure how he felt about women himself. He seemed to need them, but more and more they left him feeling empty.
“I know what you mean, man. They don’t do you any good, but try doing without ’em. Dig?”
“Dig.”
“And they always want something from you.”
“That’s the truth.”
“But just try going without. Hey, will you look at me? And that’s just from talking about it.”
He looked where Buddy was pointing, saw the bulge in the man’s pants. He wanted to avert his eyes but somehow couldn’t.
“How about you, Bert? The topic of conversation having the same effect on you?”
A large hairless hand dropped casually upon Bert’s groin. The fingers moved, handling him, and something within his head vibrated like a tuning fork. His mouth was dry. A pulse worked in his throat. And he felt him self growing, stiffening, in response to the ministrations of that hand.
“Yeah, I can see you’re in the same kind of mood I am,” Buddy was saying, his voice different now. “You must be feeling kinda cramped in those pants. I know I am.”
Buddy got to his feet, began to undress. Bert began to remove his own clothes. The whole thing had a dreamlike quality to it. He felt utterly bereft of will; he could only play out his part, could not affect the outcome in any way. He disrobed, and Buddy reached for him, positioned him on the couch, knelt beside him and went down on him.
Girls had done this. Not often, and never this well, but they had done this to him from time to time. It had been nothing like this. Nothing had been like this, nothing in his lifetime. He thought God, God, and then thought stopped and he gave himself over entirely to sensation.
After, still in a dream, still without thought, he knelt before Buddy and took the man’s penis into his mouth.
As he did so a feeling of contentment filled him. He could not identify the feeling, and he realized afterward that it was because he had never been contented before.
Fresh drinks afterward, and cigarettes, and for a long time he sat wordless at the piano, playing songs he
had played often before. For a long time he played and Buddy listened and neither of them spoke.
After awhile he said, “I guess you figured on this all along, huh? Back at the bar?”
“I thought we both figured on it, Bert.”
“No. I never … hell. I hate to sound like an idiot. It’s just that I’m finding out something about myself, and it’s taking time getting used to it. You thought I was queer right off, huh?”
“Gay’s a better word for it. Yeah, I thought so. Maybe I just wanted you to be or maybe I sensed something that was there. I wouldn’t have pitched you if I didn’t think it was what you were looking for. You’re crazy to waste the summer hopping suitcases. Can you use a fakebook?”
“I don’t need one. If I know a melody I can play anything.”
“Do you realize you’re ahead of sixty percent of the guys working this kind of gig? I’m serious. It doesn’t seem like an accomplishment to you because it comes naturally, it’s something you can do. There’s a club a few blocks from the joint I’m at, the guy’s looking to replace a guy who quit on him a few days ago. You don’t think you’re good enough but you’re better than the guy you’d be following. You won’t get rich but it’s a better way to spend the summer than what you’re doing.”
“I don’t know. I get my room and board and all.”
“Well, you could stay here, Bert.”
“Oh, I see.”
“No, you don’t see. You see strings attached and there aren’t any. All I’ll be doing is taking you to the club and telling the prick who owns it to listen to you, and I don’t want anything in return for that. You can buy me a drink because that’s as much of a favor as it amounts to. I’m saying you could live here because I think maybe you want to.”
“Maybe I do.”
‘Play ‘Laura,’ why don’t you? I never play it, it’s a private thing, but I like to listen to it. ‘Play it Sam.’ Yeah, that’s nice. I like that.”
The next afternoon he took a job at Bobo’s Club. He went back to the hotel and told them to shove their job, and moved his clothes to Buddy’s apartment. In September he went back to college for his final year. No one noticed any difference in him. He was very careful to behave as he had always behaved. Sometimes, but not often, he would experience urgent sexual yearnings for certain men on campus. Now and then he sensed that these feelings were reciprocated, but in any event he avoided acting on them. Instead, he dated girls as he had always dated girls, and he took these girls to bed and performed as he had always performed. There was no difficulty in performing with them. There never had been any difficulty and there was none now. As before, there was a certain amount of pleasure in the act; as before, it brought no contentment, no real satisfaction.