by Louis Begley
We reached the melancholy dwelling place of the eunuchs: a square space of marble, formed by four low buildings containing cells with vaulted ceilings. Their doors opened on the courtyard. Standing at the balustrade of the adjacent terrace, one looked down on the dull roofs. The place could have served as a stable. Ghostly presences—this was where memories of a lost world seemed to me most present, almost physically, as though some acrid scent had lingered undisturbed in the still air.
Society was turned upside down here, announced Charlie. The perversity of its structure will entertain and instruct you. No comradeship of men. The emperor alone with his sons and women lived in the Imperial Palace, and the sons only while they were small children. Afterward, they were moved out, away from the Forbidden City, until the son who had been selected to succeed returned to ascend the Peacock Throne. It was the fear of assassination: where two males meet, one will try to kill the other. For that same reason, the choice of the heir remained occult; should it become known, his envious brothers or their mothers might assassinate him. So within the walls of this enclave no one but the emperors’ women—wives, concubines, women servants, and, of course, eunuchs. Men who had stopped being men. The women the emperor fucked each had her name inscribed on an ivory marker. Like your backgammon pieces! In the evening, an important eunuch presented all the markers to the emperor and he chose one. Then the eunuchs went to the woman’s house, stripped her so that she had no place to conceal a knife or a vial of poison, and brought her, wrapped in a blanket, to the imperial bed.
Why only one a night, Miss Wang? he asked abruptly. Why not many? After all, it’s said that they hardly ever came, you know, ejaculated, just wanted to bathe the member as much as possible in a woman’s juices. Absorb them through the rigid phallus. Juices bringing health and longevity, like vitamins! Do you know the answer? I may be wrong: perhaps every night they brought one woman after another!
I am so very sorry, it isn’t mentioned in the guidebooks I have studied.
Having delivered this standard reply of a well-trained guide to most questions about Chinese history before liberation, Miss Wang giggled very hard.
How curious what guidebooks will omit, Miss Wang. And what is the present position with regard to women’s juices? Do you know that?
Now Toby was giggling as well, besides having turned beet red, while I wondered whether each time I met Charlie it would be necessary to think of braining him.
I needn’t have bothered. Miss Wang could take care of herself. It can’t matter, Mr. Swan, she replied, family planning is obligatory in China, as you probably know, and it requires Chinese men to use contraceptive devices.
Quite right, I should have thought of that myself. And a good reason for substituting the pill! But we must get on with our eunuchs. These were volunteers, Toby, often married and fathers of families! I don’t know that there was a competitive examination, as with other offices in China. Men who applied for the position, and were lucky enough to be accepted, sat down on a stool rather like a chaise percée, and someone underneath went snip. The testicles were placed on a shelf, in an individual jar marked with the owner’s name. That way the eunuchs could be buried with their balls and be complete again, a matter of crucial importance for the Chinese, right Miss Wang?
Charlie had not noticed that he had lost the indigenous part of his public. Miss Wang had apparently decided to walk ahead of us. He raised his eyebrows in what could have been a sign of disappointment and continued.
The superstition led to a comical scene when the last emperor fled and this establishment was shut down. The old eunuchs all departed, a suitcase full of spare pajamas in one hand and the jar containing the balls in the other. What a ball!
Balls, said Toby, why is this stuff supposed to entertain or instruct me? It’s disgusting from beginning to end.
That’s the point, baby, that’s the point. A woman is a hole filled with juice that starts to smell like fish upon contact with air. Happiness, comradeship, cannot be built upon the cult of the hole.
Here Charlie threw his arms wide open and shouted to the empty space:
But to the girdle do the gods inherit,
Beneath is all the fiends’: there’s hell, there’s darkness,
There is the sulphurous pit, burning, scalding,
Stench, consumption. Fie, fie, fie! Pah, pah!
And looking around him with great satisfaction, because his memory had served him well, he repeated: Fie, fie, fie! Pah, pah!
Afterward we had lunch, all four of us, in the restaurant in my part of the hotel, which was really quite decent and available to clients paying cash and to state guests whose sponsoring organizations had taken a deep breath and decided to register them there, notwithstanding the higher price, rather than in the greasy spoon at the Canadian-built annex. I had been so registered; moreover, on the advice of Miss Wang, at the very beginning of my stay I presented to the maître d’hôtel, who was a young woman probably from the north of China, she was so tall, a silk scarf printed with some flowers. This simple gesture had lifted me to a pedestal of importance I had never enjoyed either at Cronin’s or the Faculty Club, the eateries with which the Beijing Hotel restaurant was now tied for first place in my affections. The quality of the welcome I received, and the news I sprang on Charlie that I lived in the old building—he admitted sourly that he and Toby had checked into the Russian horror, a place of cockroaches and thirty-watt lightbulbs—left Charlie temporarily with nothing specific to patronize me about. I relished the moment. The food came in a rush of dishes slammed on the table; prodded by Charlie, we had ordered too much. Miss Wang would have plunged her chopsticks into the platters like a surgeon who questions a wound, delivering to our plates sea cucumbers, noodles, or whatever else was most slippery without a drop of sauce lost in transit, but Charlie, instinctively the paterfamilias, would have none of it. Under his ministrations the tablecloth soon turned into a gloomy, brown Jackson Pollock, the impasto of drippings richest near his own plate. Again, he was pushing food, particularly rice, with his fingers. I averted my eyes and asked Toby, who had spoken only in monosyllables since we left the Forbidden City, whether he had already graduated from college.
I never went.
And what have you been up to?
I’ve been working on a design for Charlie’s New York office.
Oh.
The answer chilled me. I thought about it during lunch, which ended only when the waiters, impatient to close, gathered in a silent circle around our table, and while Miss Wang and I strolled from the Dongsi mosque through the alleys leading to a maze of hutons that had survived the zeal of the Liberation, peeking into secret and hostile courtyards and admiring an occasional sculpted gate or a roof decorated with dragons, and much later, when I rested in my room. Charlie and Toby had been unable to come with us on the walk because there were drawings Charlie needed to review. He was making a presentation to his clients, colossally rich overseas Chinese planning to build a luxury hotel on the outskirts of Beijing. They had invited him to China. We were to have a drink, though, before dinner, Charlie, Toby, and I.
I WAITED FOR THEM downstairs, in that part of the lobby which doubled as a bar. All foreigners of any note who blew into town—businessmen, journalists, government officials, do-gooders like me, and an occasional fancy tourist—passed through it, as well as a great many members of the Chinese nomenklatura and the sort of gilded youth that had begun to be visible in Beijing: children of high officials equipped with one or two items of apparel not conforming to the proletarian dress code, and sometimes looking downright expensive. Cowboy boots, belted trench coats, sweaters that might have just walked out of the Paul Stuart window; they wore them like identification badges. But the background was made up of a less interesting fauna. Sprawled out in 1930s armchairs upholstered with green or brown plush, their legs and feet a menace to passersby, with bottles of beer, cans of peanuts, and ashtrays overflowing with cigarette butts on the coffee tables before the
m, these were the Westerners whose principal occupation was waiting. Men. Overweight, guts spilling over their belts. Engineers and salesmen. They waited for the restaurant to open, the bar to close, for the arrival of the ministry employee who was to meet them there or who might convey them to an appointment outside, for a telephone call from Hong Kong, or the hour when it would be right (according to what rules?) to go upstairs to sleep. In the four months I spent going in and out of that place, I do not think I ever saw one of these recumbent figures open a book. Girlie magazines were forbidden in China. I suppose they did their reading in bed.
Charlie showed up alone.
Il fanciullo is indisposed, he said. Headache; might be the grippe; anyway, he has decided to stay in the room. We must be here another ten days, so let us pray to St. Anthony of Padua that it is only a headache. The embassy fellow who met us at the airport claims that the hospital for foreigners is like a morgue. Friendship Hospital! How I wish something here was openly unfriendly!
I offered to mix a martini for him with my own supply of gin and vermouth. Having already consumed one myself, I felt more “openly unfriendly” than usual. In any case, I was tired of Charlie’s setting the direction each time we talked. Therefore, as soon as the concoction I had prepared was cradled in his hand—we were drinking out of water glasses—I let him have it: Don’t you think it more likely that he is upset by our meeting here, and the lecture on smegma and eunuchs’ testicles? He may prefer not to see me a second time today.
Evidently, this attempt to avoid my customary circumlocutions did not impress Charlie. He stirred the martini with his median finger, drank it, and made another one. Remembering his taste for the stuff, I began to wonder whether I had brought enough gin from my room.
You mean that Toby is embarrassed because you have found us out and, in consequence, is hiding? he asked, an immense smile spreading over his face. What a pity you’ve been playing hard to get—I don’t mean it that way, you ass, oops, these aren’t words a queer should use—it’s just that if you had come to visit me from time to time I would have shown you something of the world that lies outside Cambridge. On second thought, everything you need to know can also be learned in Cambridge, I mean that which was not imparted to you at the Law School and wherever in Rhode Island it was that your mommy brought you up. All you need is a mentor like me. Toby doesn’t give a hoot; in New York, Toby is a hot date! It’s you, baby, who are embarrassed. And you know why? It’s because you don’t know how to act with a queer. Possibly you are even a teensy-weensy bit afraid. After all, at your age you are unmarried, you are an intellectual and a part-time aesthete. The profile of a homo! Suppose someone you know who knows about me or who can spot a queer sees us together—or you with the boy!—what will they think? Naughty, naughty! Or suppose, now that I know that you know, I make a pass. Or even better, the delectable Toby tries one—have you thought of that? And suppose you like it: What happens then? A big pile of emotional merde for the respectable, slightly fey law professor! Explosion! Propelled out of the closet he didn’t even know he was in! I am a little bit embarrassed too, but for you, because although I suffer fools I don’t suffer them gladly. Let’s face it, baby, I like you. No, don’t worry, not that way!
Here he laughed, wiped his eyes, moved his armchair closer to mine, gave my knee a prolonged exploratory squeeze, and refilled our glasses.
You leave me speechless and ashamed, not just embarrassed.
Nonsense! Get some peanuts and ask your girlfriend in the restaurant to keep a table for us. We might as well dine together—just you and me.
I did as he said. Charlie’s cheeks were sagging; he looked gloomy. The effect of nearly straight gin? I doubt it; his tolerance for alcohol was prodigious. I poured another drink. My gesture must have interrupted a train of thought that had distressed him. As though a switch had been turned, I saw his usual alacrity return. He was taking the measure of the hotel guests in our vicinity, staring at them quite openly, his expression successively contemptuous, quizzical, and droll.
Dreadful, he announced. It is my habit, whenever I find myself in a place like this, to check whether there is anyone in sight worthy of being screwed. Zero! I was wise to bring Toby and, of course, lucky to run into you.
He gave my knee another squeeze.
It seemed stupid, and open to being understood as a form of rejection, to change the subject and talk about the new hotel he was going to build, his other work, or American politics, although the latter subject was very much on my mind and he could have given me fresh information, having left New York only a few days earlier. Instead, I told him that his tirade had left me shaken, but also very curious. After all, I knew so little about his life. We had seen each other only once since he got married, perhaps twice—I wasn’t quite sure.
That’s true, he replied. I wouldn’t be surprised if you wanted to hear about the making of a pervert.
I began to protest that I didn’t mean to pry, but he stopped me with a particularly hard squeeze of my knee.
Don’t be so shittily humorless. I didn’t think you were asking about the sort of details you can look up in Krafft-Ebing next time you are in a library. I am keeping those for my memoirs, which I will write only after I turn celibate. I took your remarks as a perfectly appropriate question: How did you get from the man I knew to the man you have become?
I nodded.
The facts are uncomplicated; on the other hand, my nature, or rather the changes in it, and the work accomplished by time to bring about those changes, very mysterious. I was not a closet faggot during the years when we saw each other in Cambridge, or before that at school, or when I married Diane. Certainly, at St. Mark’s there were a few rather sweet incidents that today would be called homoerotic. That’s an odiously pompous adjective; try to avoid it as your interest in queers continues to grow! Group jerkoffs, a master who would have kissed my bum and everything near it if he had dared, a couple of characters rather like you having wet dreams about my jockstrap. I took it as a tribute—it went with the job! If you are the captain of the crew and look like me you expect little faggots to want to lick your balls, but there was no one whose balls I had the slightest desire to lick. My dick was in fact getting licked by my first cousin—peace, Max, a girl cousin!—who had been thrown out of Milton and was living with my parents, to give her old man a chance to cool off. When the next chapter opens, I am in Korea, not in the fleshpots of Seoul, but in a foxhole, wetting my pants each time I am ordered to climb out and start running up some hill. I did make one visit to a teahouse in Pusan, just before some shrapnel visited me. The dose I got there was taken care of, together with everything else, in the hospital, which was a great piece of timing; the battalion commander would have had me up on charges. Getting the clap was like damaging army property; it ranked with rust in the barrel of your rifle!
One pleasant stop in Hawaii, and we will move along the highway of sex to Harvard and Janie. In the hospital in Honolulu, they did some specialized work on my back and got it into perfect shape. I was immobile for more than two months, though, and, just like in a war movie, a thoughtful nurse—Gauguin’s Tehamana on leave from the Art Institute in Chicago—extended her care to my dickey. She quite spoiled the little fellow.
An odd prelude to homosexuality, I remarked.
As usual, you are most perceptive, but we aren’t there yet.
He poured the remaining gin into our glasses, and we made our way into the restaurant. I was eager for Charlie to continue his story, but the waitress reduced the number of dishes Charlie ordered by a third, saying that we would be wasting food, which stirred him into what sounded like the beginning of a lecture on The Theory of the Leisure Class. He regained his composure when, at my urging, she agreed to produce a bottle of rice wine. He had not yet tried Shaoxing; at the time, it was available in China only rarely.
Sweet Janie, he continued. What a pleasant memory! Weren’t you trying at one point to crawl under her Pringle sweater? No, of c
ourse it was Edna’s, and then goat-legs got you back on a leash! You are one of the happy few to whom I will have confessed this, but Janie and I only necked. I didn’t keep my neck in my pants all the time, though, and we played nice games together in bed; in fact, she continued the good work of my cousin and Miss Gauguin. But I never got to insert it. Sometimes Janie claimed she wanted to remain intacta, sometimes she said I was too big, and little by little I stopped pressing the point. Looking back on it, particularly when I consider my time with Diane, I think I must have realized it was a very pleasant, undemanding arrangement. Neither crew training nor martinis interfered with it! I ran into Diane at the Cotillion in New York, just as Janie was about to graduate, and Janie had already met that gangster from Chicago—I suspect he forced his way in on the first date!
He snapped his fingers at the waitress, who didn’t like it, but got her nevertheless to bring another bottle of Shaoxing. Nectar, he said, only served warm.
Back to Diane. As you may surmise, the families were pleased. I was too. You will recall that we looked remarkably good together. I was starting my training with Gordon Bunshaft. My heart was set on working for him. With Diane’s money added to what I had, we immediately set up in a way that was quite handsome. Her parents were very decent too; throughout the season, every weekend I wasn’t on charette we would go out to New Jersey to shoot. But, rather quickly, Diane became a serious nuisance about sex—with reason! Between work and drink, I didn’t want it all that much, and when I did get the little man up, it was over, so far as I was concerned, as soon as I got him in. Wham bam thank you ma’am! She was willing enough to crank me up by hand and to do the Janie. But I didn’t want it; for her it was just the preparation, and what she was preparing me for wasn’t what I liked! I managed to put a stop to these efforts by telling her I had a dreadful trauma about oral sex—and I refused to reveal its origin because I couldn’t make up my mind whether I should say that I had been bitten or to make up something really lurid. How could I refuse, though, to visit a sex therapist with her, an old prune of a lady doctor in one of those buildings near the New York Hospital? She was full of constructive suggestions: count from one thousand backward to delay ejaculation, fuck in the morning when you are hard anyway, read dirty books together. I think that this sort of thing is best left unsaid—imagine that bit of prudishness coming from my lips! In brief, sex therapy had a negative effect.
