Mirrors of Narcissus Page 9

  Christine was thoughtful. “So by your definition, ‘gay’ as a phenomenon, or a social existence, is a very recent development.”

  “True. As I mentioned, though homosexuality has always been around, the gay lifestyle is something new, a fairly recent phenomenon in history. As far as I’m concerned, the first truly gay man was Oscar Wilde.” He picked up the book he’d been reading and showed us the frontispiece. “This is Oscar Wilde.”

  We saw a handsome man with long, straight hair parted in the middle. He was wearing a full-length fur coat and was clasping a pair of white gloves in his left hand.

  “He was the first gay in the modern sense of the word. Oh, there were homosexual men before him, of course. But Wilde was the first to openly flaunt his gayness. He loved to camp it up, dressing outrageously for the sole purpose of outraging the world, becoming a rare bird of plumage in the gray monotonous world of Victorian England. People made fun of his mannerisms, the way he sniffed at violets, the way he fluttered his hands as he talked. And finally they crucified him—socially—for living as he did. For me, he is the patron saint of gay men, martyred for no other reason than for being gay.”

  “What about bisexuality?” I asked. “Someone who prefers both sexes equally.”

  “In my experience, the truly bisexual man is a very rare bird indeed. In a sense, we’re all bisexual; it’s the degree to which we desire men or women which characterizes us. In most cases, we stick to our main preference, but you’d be surprised at the number of basically straight men who dabble with other men. And at the number of gay men who have serious relationships with women.”

  “Is it possible?”

  “Oh, yes. Especially if the man hasn’t come to terms with his gayness. I know—I can speak from my own experience.”

  “You? But you seem so certain of yourself. I can’t imagine you ever being hesitant or reluctant about expressing yourself.”

  He laughed. “You may think so. But when I was young, there didn’t seem to be any other way. I was born twenty years too soon. Back in those days, there was no such thing as a homosexual—at least he didn’t have a human shape. He was a monster, sordid and beastly…lurking in closets ready to jump out and get you. Convert you. So you can imagine how I felt when I discovered—gradually, to be sure—what my true inclinations were. I lied to myself. I told myself it couldn’t be possible. I couldn’t be one of them, one of those. Not me. I denied my true feelings all down the line. Was I falling in love with Gary? No, it was just friendship, just what one pal would feel for another, right?”

  I could tell Christine was fascinated by this recital. She had forgotten all about her burger and was leaning forward toward Golden, trying to catch every word, mesmerized, like a small rodent by a snake. I found myself a little irritated at the hold he had over her, but I couldn’t deny my own fascination.

  Golden, at any rate, was used to this kind of attention on the part of his listeners. He seemed to be in his element. “Young people today don’t have to worry about all the lies we were fed. I think that’s probably why I’m so eager to educate people about gayness. I don’t want others to waste their lives as I did. I really didn’t begin to live until I was in my thirties. When I was your age, I was still living in a hypocritical world of lies, largely created by myself. Because of it, I…. There was a boy in my class who made certain overtures…but I repelled them. I was indignant, disgusted. And I felt so righteous about it afterwards. Thanks to the stupid, idiotic conventions by which I was brainwashed, I let my whole youth slip away without once making the slightest ‘mistake.’ Pure? Oh, I was pure, all right.”

  This was beginning to sound uncomfortably like my own experience. I thought of my friend Mark Warren back in high school. I, too, had rebuffed his advances. Perhaps things hadn’t changed very much after all. I found myself listening to Golden’s recital with renewed attention.

  “By the time I was sixteen, I couldn’t lie to myself anymore. My dreams didn’t lie. My own body didn’t lie. As I look back on those days now, I see that I was living with a constant feeling of unrelieved dread. I felt the world would crucify me if it could see what went on inside my head. That dread was like a companion, a lifelong friend, the only true one I ever had. It was with me always, until it got to the point where I would have felt lost without him—naked.”

  The warm, burry tone of his voice had a soothing, hypnotic sound. As I listened to his talk flow on and on, I found myself willingly drifting downstream with it, heedless of where it might take me. It was wonderful.

  “I wanted so badly to be normal, to be like all the others. Where most people want to be different, to stand out from the crowd, it was my fondest wish to blend in. To wake up one morning to find myself a regular boy, and that all the rest had been just a bad dream. I tried everything in my power to make it happen. It couldn’t happen, of course, but no one would have been able to convince me of it back then. So, like everyone else, I got myself a girlfriend. When we’d been together the requisite amount of time, we got married. Just like everyone else—as if I was normal.”

  He gave a bitter laugh. “The marriage was a mistake on both our parts for a number of reasons, not the least of which was the fact that I was living a lie. All my life was one long lie until I finally opened up with myself and made the first tentative steps to accept the truth which I’d tried so long to hide, to deny. That was about five or six years after we’d been married.”

  His face creased into a bitter smile and his gaze seemed to wander into the past. “We had a so-called trial separation. I guess it was a feeble effort to save what was a disaster from start to finish—which was my fault because I was using her to ‘cure myself.’ Cure something for which there is no cure but one. Of course she didn’t know the real reason why it wasn’t working, and I made no effort to enlighten her. We got back together after a while when I couldn’t stand being alone anymore. But it was a mere partnership, and a shaky one at that.”

  “Did you ever tell her you’re gay?” asked Christine.

  “Eventually, yes. I finally worked up the courage to tell her the truth. She couldn’t stand it, of course. She took it as an insult, a judgment upon her as a woman. Which it wasn’t, of course. For a while, she even tried to help me conquer my ‘problem’…to no avail. It was pitiful. A mess. In the end, the divorce was her idea.”

  He looked at me as he said this. I could find no words to say. It was obvious that the relationship with his wife had been the major tragedy of his life, but I was made a little uncomfortable at the way he’d spread it all out before us, as if it were an exhibit of some kind. For once, Christine seemed to be at a loss for a sympathetic phrase.

  “It was the times, I guess,” I ventured. “Maybe there were a lot of people in the same situation.”

  “True.”

  For a moment there seemed to be a lull in the conversation. Then, abruptly, Golden gathered his books together and picked up his tray. He’d already finished his food.

  “If you’ll excuse me, I have to get back to earning a living. Sorry to have bothered you at your lunch.”

  “Oh, not at all,” said Christine. “I found your talk quite fascinating.”

  He smiled at her. “As I said, if you and Guy feel like dropping by for the gay studies group, you’re always welcome.” He looked at me and nodded to us both, then walked away. Christine and I watched him deposit his tray on the counter, say a few words to the boy at the grill, and head out the door.

  “What a character,” she said, shaking her head slightly. “I can see why you find him so interesting.”

  “You seemed rather drawn to him yourself.”

  “Oh, I was. In fact, if I were a boy, I might even be making a play for him.”

  “Even if you were straight?”

  “Especially if I were. After what he’d just said, I might want to try to stretch my horizons, so to speak.”

  “Well, he might be interested in girls who want to ‘stretch their horizons.’”<
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  She looked at me mischievously, and the thought of her in Golden’s arms, for some reason, gave me a sudden, powerful erection. I crossed my legs under the table. “Looks like I’m too late, though.” She nodded up the street in the direction Golden had taken.

  I looked and saw that he had stopped to chat with a boy. I thought I recognized him from the group of students who had gathered around Golden’s lectern at the end of class that day. After a few words, they began walking off together up the street. I felt strangely envious of the picture they presented.

  4

  Unlike most of the other boys on the floor, Scott wasn’t a party animal. There was a certain innocence about him which set him apart, for he seemed fundamentally different from the others. He dutifully went along when he was invited out to drinking parties, but it was easy to see his heart wasn’t in it. He seemed most comfortable with a single friend—me—in serious conversation. He told me he was perfectly content as long as he had a good book to keep him company, but sometimes I felt a little guilty when I went out to see Christine, knowing he was going to be all alone in his room. So I tried as much as possible to invite him along when I went.

  Christine didn’t mind. The two of them had taken to each other from the moment I’d introduced them—something which would have been unthinkable with Jonesy—for they shared the same tastes in music and movies. Sometimes the three of us would go out together for the evening.

  One of the reasons Scott didn’t quite fit in with the others in the dorm was that he had the late arrival’s complex—he was the new kid on the block. Even after he’d been my roommate for a while, he still felt like a newcomer. The guys were always talking about Jonesy, he said, and he felt uncomfortable whenever he heard them recollecting yet another “typical Jonesy stunt”…as if he’d been responsible for the eviction of a more popular tenant. (After Jonesy was expelled, most of us only brought up the fun times we’d had with him, and refrained, as if from a tacit understanding, from mentioning the terrible truth we’d learned about him.) Scott had never met Jonesy, yet the earlier boy’s shadow always hung over him, a ghost which lingered.

  So he seemed very comfortable when it was just the three of us in Christine’s room. Sometimes Christine’s roommate would join us to make a foursome, but lately there was some bad blood between the girls, and Nancy had hinted more than once that she was ready to move out.

  It was on an evening just after the finals and the three of us were relaxing in Christine’s room, drinking beers. The talk had turned to occult matters, and Christine seemed especially animated tonight as she began explaining a theory that dreams were sometimes like a “reverse memory.”

  Even I had never heard of this one from her before. “Reverse memory? What the hell is that?”

  “Didn’t you guys ever have dreams that predicted future events?” She turned to Scott.

  “No, I can’t say that I have,” he said. He didn’t share Christine’s interest in the exotic byways of parapsychology but was willing to go along with her, for his intellectual curiosity made him open to many things which he really didn’t believe in. As if he felt that if someone believed in them, they must have some validity.

  Christine put her beer down and shook her hair out of her eyes. “Well I have—many times. I’ve seen things clearly in my dreams: places I’ve never been, people I’ve never seen. Yet I meet them, five, ten years later. It’s the strangest thing, yet apparently quite a common phenomenon.”

  “That would mean the future is already decided, instead of being merely a blank possibility.”

  “That’s one way of putting it. Though I don’t think of myself as being a fatalist.”

  “Do you believe in fortune-tellers?” he asked.

  “Oh yes. Not all of them, because I’m sure there’s plenty of fakes out there. But there must be some who’ve managed to tap into the essence of time and be able to see future events.”

  “By reading palms and things like that?”

  “Palm-reading is a very ancient art which has a lot of validity. I think it’s very possible that a lot about ourselves is revealed in outward physical manifestations. After all, you know that DNA molecules contain the information which help to form our personalities. Well, those same DNA also contain the blueprint for the individual lines and creases found on our palms. There might be a connection there, you know, which the ancients might have accidentally discovered in the course of their studies. Have you ever had your palm read?”

  “No.”

  “Will you let me? I’ll bet I can tell a lot about you just by reading it.”

  “Sure. What do I do?”

  “Nothing. Just let me look.”

  Christine had never manifested an interest in palm-reading before, so I knew she was probably just kidding around. She took his palm into her hand and bent over it, seemingly concentrating upon the whorls and lines there. With her index finger she lightly traced a pattern on his open palm and closely examined the minuscule ridges at the base of his thumb before announcing:

  “You’re creative…sensitive…and romantic. But your leadership line is very weak. You prefer to follow where led.”

  I was a little disappointed by the mundane nature of her analysis, but Scott seemed intrigued.

  “What else?”

  “Am I right?” she asked, quickly looking up.

  “Well…yeah. I guess I never was much of a leader in things. And I was always a loner…preferred to do things on my own.”

  “What were you like as a boy, Scott?” I asked.

  “Very quiet. Not very adventurous, I’m afraid.”

  “Quite the opposite of Guy here,” said Christine.

  “Adventure?” I said, putting on a mock-worldly air. “Let me tell you, I’ve done it all; I’ve tried everything—sex, drugs, you name it. Maybe I was crazy, but I don’t regret it.”

  Scott looked at me seriously, and a little sadly. “You know, Guy, I was thinking that if we’d met in high school, you’d have probably thought I was pretty dull.”

  “Why?”

  “Oh, I don’t know. I just never hung out with the kids that did the wild things.”

  I laughed. “I was exaggerating, Scott. Heck, probably the wildest thing me and my friends did was hyperventilate.”

  “Hyperventilate? What’s that?”

  “It’s a weird thing we used to do at parties, or even during school. Come here, I’ll show you.”

  A little reluctantly, he came over to where I was. I turned him around to face Christine and stood right behind him, slipping my arms in front of him, clasping him so that both my forearms rested on his abdomen. I explained:

  “You take about ten very deep breaths, as deeply as possible. Then, when you take your tenth breath, you hold it in while I squeeze your abdomen as hard as possible.”

  “What happens?”

  “You pass out. I think it cuts off the oxygen supply to the brain or something. But you’re out for only a few seconds.”

  “What if I fall down and hit my head on something?”

  “Don’t worry, I’m right behind you the whole time to catch you and lower you onto the sofa.”

  “So what’s the point of it?”

  “When you come to again, you experience the most fantastic feeling. It can’t be described; you have to experience it. It’s like an orgasm in a way, a sort of high—maybe caused by the rush of oxygen to the brain to bring consciousness back.”

  “It sounds a little dangerous to me.”

  “Well, the teachers and parents always discouraged it, but of course that only made us want to do it more. You wanna try it?”

  “I’m not sure.”

  “Come on.”

  “I’ll try it,” said Christine quickly. She’d been listening all this time with a growing sense of excitement. I knew it was just the sort of thing to perk her interest.

  “Watch this,” I said to Scott, seeing the sudden interest in his eyes as Christine got ready to try it.

>   I positioned her so that we were standing just in front of the sofa. I put both my arms around her from behind, in a hold just below her ribcage. She began taking very deep breaths as Scott counted them off. Just as she finished taking her tenth, I gave an abrupt squeeze to her belly and felt her go suddenly limp in my arms. Gently, I lowered her onto the sofa and sat back on the floor to watch her return to consciousness. In a matter of seconds she came to with a wondering look on her face which made Scott and me laugh.

  “What was it like?” asked Scott eagerly.

  “It’s…like bliss.” She was smiling, with a slightly silly expression. “I really can’t put it into words. It’s more like a drug high than an orgasm.”

  “Come on, Scott, now it’s your turn.” I knew he was still a little reluctant to try it, yet I felt a perverse urge to push him to it. The thought of bringing him that quasi-sexual pleasure made me excited. In a way, it was also a test to see how much he would trust me. “You won’t feel any pain, I promise you.”

  I pulled him over to me and steered him toward the sofa.

  “Now breathe, very, very deeply.” In my arms he became quite submissive. I felt his back expanding against my chest with every breath he took. Christine was looking on with delight, anticipating what he would be going through. After the tenth breath I squeezed. He slumped heavily in my arms and I let him down onto the sofa, then sat next to him, supporting him against me. He was out for about five seconds before coming to, blinking his eyes and looking around the room as if seeing it for the first time.

  “Well?” I asked. “How was it?”

  He didn’t say a word, just sat there with a beatific expression on his face.

  “Weird, isn’t it?” said Christine.

  “Yeah.” He still wasn’t sure what had happened. “What a rush.”

  As Christine and I laughed at his wonder, I felt that Scott and I had shared something a little illicit; something elusive and precious had passed between us. In my heart I whispered my gratitude.