But what if he’s right, thought David and felt a curious new excitement flow through him. He felt as if part of him were on fire and his face grew flushed and his hands were moist. Music did this to him sometimes. Really great music played in a great auditorium. Music that contained a great many crashing crescendos. But music often left his mind in chaos while now, suddenly, his thoughts seemed to be articulate.
He could be free! He could be unafraid. He could do anything without fear of the consequences. If he chose, he could lead an utterly bacchanalian life without a single fear of punishment.
What have I missed? David asked himself. How could I have missed knowing that life could be happy and carefree and fearless?
David drank from the fresh glass that Mark put in his hand and wondered if he might be getting a little tight.
Well, what if I am? he asked himself angrily. What difference does it make? I guess I’ve got a right to get slightly plastered if I feel like it.
“You can’t afford to waste time, David,” said Mark. “You’re young and beautiful now, but youth and beauty are soon gone. If you hesitate now to take all the joys and pleasure that are rightfully yours, you’ll wake up one day and find that it’s too late. You’ll be old and bent and you’ll sit and weep for all your wasted golden years. Don’t waste time, David. Don’t torture yourself in trying to become what you can never be.” Mark gave a short, sharp laugh. “Just think how tiresome it would be to be a dreary, dreadful so-called normal man with a fat wife and a slew of runny-nosed children and a house in Cooper’s Mills. No, David. Live the wonderful life that is yours. Enjoy it.”
“Perhaps it’s too late already,” said David and felt like crying. “Too, too late.”
Mark Griffin walked slowly through David’s studio, extinguishing lights.
“Don’t be silly, Davy,” he said. “Of course it’s not too late.”
The room grew darker and darker and it seemed to David that Mark’s words still sounded eloquently in the room.
“Not too late?” asked David.
“Of course not,” replied Mark, and as he walked toward David, it seemed to him that all the words he had spoken to David had had a special beauty. A beauty that they had never possessed when Oscar Wilde had put them into the mouth of Lord Henry Wotton that they might fall on the ear of Dorian Gray.
Hours later, in the darkness of his room, David Strong woke suddenly. His cheeks were wet with tears but it was the heaving sensation of sickness that had awakened him, and he stumbled awkwardly through the dark toward his bathroom. He vomited until there was nothing left in him but bitter, green bile and still his stomach heaved and he retched weakly. When it was over he stood, shivering, against the cold tile of the walls while sweat broke out all over his body and his teeth began to chatter. At last, he felt strong enough to find a face cloth and dab at his face, then he brushed his teeth and gargled very cautiously.
“Oh, God,” he moaned as he fumbled his way back to bed. “Oh, dear God, help me.”
He covered himself with bedclothes that still smelled of Mark Griffin’s lavender cologne and although the odor nauseated him all over again, he knew that he hadn’t the strength to strip the bed and make it up fresh. So he huddled himself and tried to keep from shivering. He had been dreaming, he remembered, and now he groped vainly for the warm, golden feeling of comfort that had enfolded him earlier. He searched his mind for the belief that he had taken for his own, but he could not find it even when he repeated Mark’s words over and over.
Sin is nothing and pleasure is all, he told himself. But the feeling of comfort would not come and he knew that his new philosophy was an empty one made up of words that held neither conviction nor truth.
Suddenly, David could stand his bed no longer and he kicked impatiently at the sheets and blankets that seemed to hold him pinned and helpless. At last he was free of their hatefulness and he stood up, shivering in the cold room. He wrapped himself in a heavy robe and felt his way across the darkness to the coffee table where he found a cigarette. As he smoked he walked carefully around his studio and his hands seemed to encounter only the things that were most dear to him. His fingers stroked the satiny finish of his piano and then he caressed a small statuette on the mantelpiece. He walked to a window and stood staring down at the snow-clean sleeping street and suddenly he was strangely calm. He could see clearly now, as if each of his thoughts were a painstakingly perfect pen-and-ink drawing and he would not allow the blunt, wish-filled edges of his mind to rub across his thoughts, to smudge their clarity with the forgetfulness. He thought first of Jess Cameron and of the doctor’s words quiet and casual almost, so David had thought at the time, to the point of indifference. It had been the day after David’s first experience with Mark.
“That’s something you’ll have to answer for yourself, David,” the doctor had replied to David’s awkward, embarrassed question. “But if that’s what it is, for God’s sake don’t try to turn it into something else. Face it, admit it, and then perhaps we can begin to do something about it. A good psychiatrist could help you.”
It was really comical, David thought later, the way he had always pictured psychiatrists as being short and rather plump with beards like Sigmund Freud’s and interesting foreign accents. The one to whom he had gone had been nothing like his mental image. He had the rather improbable name of Henry Smith and he was large and jovial to a degree that seemed almost farcical to David. It seemed to David that Dr. Smith was bent on establishing a buddy-buddy relationship right from the start.
“Strong, I don’t believe that your, —er, idiosyncrasies have a physical causation which makes you one of the lucky ones. If they had, I wouldn’t be able to help you. No. It’s my opinion that you were forced into the paths of homosexuality as a child and that means we’re going to have to dig, dig, dig. So come on now, start at the beginning if you can and let’s have it all.”
A few weeks later, Dr. Smith said, “That mother of yours must have been a pip! There are some women, Strong, who should be sterilized before puberty. It seems to me that your mother was one of them. How you must have hated her!”
“But I never hated my mother,” objected David. “She was the soul of goodness. She was saintly, I tell you. I can never even begin to tell you what she had to put up with from my father.”
“Saintly or not,” said Dr. Smith, “she certainly managed to do a fine job of turning you against women for all time whether you’ll admit that or not.”
“For all time?” asked David.
“Unfortunately, it usually works out that way,” said the doctor. “But don’t worry. There are many ways in which we can help you to adjust to your problem.”
That night, David decided that he would not go back to Dr. Henry Smith and with the decision he felt almost peaceful. He went to sleep almost at once and he dreamed of Millie.
“What’s your last name?” he asked her in his dream. “I don’t believe I’ve ever heard it?”
But Millie would not answer his question. She turned and ran a few steps away from him and when she finally spoke her voice was high and shrill with outrage.
“What are you anyway?” screamed Millie, and even the next morning it seemed to David that she had been much too substantial and her voice far too real for her to have been nothing but a dream and he had the eerie feeling that she had somehow actually been in the same room with him. “Just what are you anyway?” screamed Millie. “A goddamn fairy? I don’t make a pass at a guy only to have him puke all over the goddamn place. That’s what you are, a stinkin’, goddamn fairy. I oughta call a cop!”
David woke. He sat up, frightened, trembling and covered with sweat with the sickness hard-fisted in his stomach. He turned on all the lights but of course his studio was empty, and his eyes fell on the water color that Martin Mallory had done for him many years ago in Paris.
Martin hadn’t called him vile names,
remembered David with something almost like gratitude. In his way, Martin had been kind.
“It’s nothing to be ashamed of, David,” Martin had said. “What we have is exactly the same kind of love a man has for a woman except unfortunately for us we both happen to be men.”
“You’re crazy!” David had cried. “And you’re dirty and perverted and evil.”
Looking down at the quiet Cooper Station street, David remembered his flight from Paris and the months in New York that followed. He had played the piano at a great number of small, badly-lit bars and he remembered the high-voiced men who had peopled those places. He remembered the languid glances, the pancake make-up and the soft-tipped fingers that had reached out on many occasions to stroke his arm or his cheek, and for a time he had almost managed to acquire a feeling of belonging, of having found his place in the world at last. But one evening, a couple of tourists had come in to the bar where he was working. The man had a paunch and wore a blue striped suit and the woman had a new permanent wave and wore a violently pink hat.
The man had ordered drinks, after insisting on seeing the bottle and then he turned to his companion.
“Well, Elsie,” he said, loud enough for David to hear, “you always wanted to see one of these pansy beds and here you are.”
“Gee, Al,” said Pink Hat, “I never really believed there was guys like this, not really I didn’t. I thought they was just guys that people told jokes about, you know? My God.”
The two of them sat there for a long time, getting even drunker than they had been when they came in and staring around and nudging each other with a great deal of giggling. Pink Hat’s hat was tilted slightly and a few wisps of hair had begun to trail across one cheek when she finally pinched Blue Suit playfully and indicated David with a nod of her head.
“Say, mister,” she called to David. “What’re you doin’ in here?”
David ignored her but his fingers trembled as he tried to find the keys to his next number.
“Say, mister,” called Pink Hat and her words slurred a little. “You don’t really look like one.”
Every head in the place was turned toward her and David felt his stomach begin to quiver.
“Say, mister. Are you really one of them fairies?” asked Pink Hat and her companion was convulsed with laughter at the look on David’s face.
“Come on, Elsie,” he roared. “He ain’t gonna answer you. Let’s go someplace else. The perfume in here is beginnin’ to make me feel sick.”
The room was quiet for a long, stretched-out moment after the two had gone, but at last the bartender came up to David. He put one arm around his shoulders and said, “Don’t you care, Davy. They were just stupid, drunken boors and I never should have served them in the first place.”
“No, you shouldn’t,” mumbled David and ran quickly toward the men’s room.
But even while he was throwing up, David thought of Blue Suit and Pink Hat. Drunken, stupid boors they might be, but no one outside was ever going to look at them with curiosity, amazement and disgust. Because Blue Suit and Pink Hat had the great gift of normalcy. Perhaps they sneaked around and fornicated in the back seat of Blue Suit’s car, but still the world would look upon them as normal, as infinitely to be preferred to people like David Strong. There was no safety, no security, even in the tight, closed little world of the bar outside because at any time its walls could be invaded by outsiders who felt no pity but only contempt.
David Strong turned away slowly from his window and the beautiful still scene outside. He walked directly into his bathroom and reached carefully into the medicine cabinet. Even in the dark, his fingers found the small bottle of sleeping capsules. He filled a glass with water and he did not trip or spill a single drop as he went back to bed. He swallowed every capsule in the bottle carefully and slowly and washed each one down his throat with a mouthful of water.
Even now, at the end, I’ve chosen the woman’s way, he thought. Pity I don’t own a gun. I could have done a real bang-up masculine job of this.
He lay flat on the bed and pulled the sheet up to his chin.
Thou shalt not kill, Mother? he asked silently. Not even oneself does that mean? Does it, Mother?
He turned his head and looked toward the windows where the wide-open draperies moved gently in the winter cold.
But, Mother, he argued silently, wouldn’t you rather have me dead than living the kind of life I’d have to live? Wouldn’t you? You wouldn’t want me to go through life with people pointing fingers at me, would you ? You wouldn’t want them pointing stubby, dirty-knuckled fingers at me and laughing and whispering and making vulgar little jokes, would you, Mother? And what if I got caught? Why, it’d be worse for me than it was for Chris and Lisa Pappas and you wouldn’t want that, would you? And I’d get caught, don’t worry about that. Everyone knows already. Doris Palmer’d call a special meeting and everyone in town would denounce me, just like they did Pappas. There’s no place to hide in Cooper Station, Mother. No place at all. Lisa Pappas found that out. Everyone knew about her and Anthony Cooper and they talked and laughed and denounced her. You wouldn’t want that to happen to me, would you, Mother? I’d have to leave town, run away, and it wouldn’t do any good. It would happen all over again somewhere else. Mother? Are you listening to me?
The room was filled with a pale, golden light which grew dimmer and softer even as David watched. He smiled sleepily and watched the room turn from gold to a soft rose color and all around the edges of the rose he could see a border of deep, velvety blue-black that was softer looking than anything he had ever imagined.
I used to wonder what it would be like to be dead, he thought, and soon, now, I’ll know. I wonder if God will look as stern and forbidding as he does in the pictures that men have made of him.
No, Lord, said David and thought he was speaking aloud, I haven’t sinned in killing myself. In Your Prayer, You gave me the words Yourself. Lead us not into temptation, You said, but deliver us from evil. Martin was evil. So was Mark. And I allowed myself to be led into temptation. So now I’ve delivered myself from evil. Please be kind to me now and make Mother be kind. Don’t let her scold me. Even if no one else is kind, You should be able to be kind. Be kind. Be kind . . .
At nine o’clock the next morning, Valerie Rutgers walked out of her front door and stood on the walk that led to the street. She looked up and down and all around with an interested kind of curiosity. Not, she told herself, that she expected to see anything different from what she saw every morning but still, you could never tell. She shivered in the cold and looked at the snow-covered landscape, but it seemed to her that there was a trace of softening in the sky this morning. About time, too, she said to herself. Almost March and that meant spring should be right around the corner. Not that March was spring-like by any matter or means, but it did mean that warmer days were on the way. Well, she supposed, the good Lord must have had His reasons for sticking March in the calendar. Probably to get folks to look after their gardens and start the spring cleaning and all. Goodness! There went the quarter-past bell up at the high school. What was she thinking of, dillydallying around in the front yard when she should be getting the wash started. Ought to be a good drying day today. Good day for doing sheets. They might freeze right up to the line at first, but it was going to warm up later in the day and they’d thaw out in good shape. She’d best get right upstairs and get the sheets off Mr. Strong’s bed. She’d do his first.
Valerie Rutgers went up to the tower room and unlocked David’s room with her own key. She saw, at once, that he was still in bed.
“Mr. Strong!” she called, shocked. In all the time David had lived in her house, she had never known him to be late for school once. “My word,” said Valerie. “Wake up, Mr. Strong. It’s way after nine and you’re late as it is.”
She reached out a tentative hand to shake his shoulder and her fingertips had no more than grazed
his skin before she knew that he was dead and started screaming.
Within minutes the deserted street in front of Valerie’s house was filled with people. Some of them burst into the house and followed Valerie’s screams to the tower.
“Get the doctor!” shouted someone.
“Call the hospital!”
“Get the sheriff!”
Jess Cameron was called and in a few minutes he was running up the stairs to David’s studio.
Please, God, prayed Jess. Don’t let me be too late.
“I just touched him, Jess,” said Valerie, “and I knew right off he was dead. Cold as a mackerel and stiff as a board.” She sat down on one of David’s chairs and burst into tears. “He was a good man,” she sobbed. “Never bothered anybody in his whole life.”
“Val, you get downstairs and have one of the women make a pot of coffee,” said Jess. “Quickly, now.”
But Jess knew that it was useless and he gave instructions to Valerie Rutgers only to get her out of the room. He, too, had barely touched David and had known, but he went through all the motions of making sure. He saw the empty bottle with its neatly typed label on the table next to David’s bed.
“One capsule at bedtime,” read the label. “Dr. Cameron. Not to be refilled. The Cooper Station Pharmacy.”
“I put the coffee on, Jess,” said Valerie Rutgers, coming back into the room.
“Good,” said Jess. “I need it now, for myself. It’s too late for David. He’s dead. Took an overdose of sleeping pills.”
Downstairs, in her kitchen, Valerie poured coffee.
“But what did he want to go and do a thing like that for?” she asked, already her horror replaced by her incurable curiosity. “He was such a nice fellow. Neat as a pin. Never left a mess around the way some do. And he had a good job at the school and all. What’d he want to go and kill himself for?”
The Tight White Collar Page 22
