A Boy's Own Story

by Edmund White

  Once I accepted my extravagant mendicancy I stumbled upon the sober, intelligent little boy I had once been. This was the kid with the sweet smile and an interest in all sorts of things, the boy with brushed hair and cloudless eyes, the child so whole he could forget himself: the birthday boy. Tonight as I sat cross-legged on my cot I could see shining out from within me that boy who’d been entranced by the marionette show: his smaller, sweeter body burned through this neglected exile I’d become. Or was I simply at fifteen learning to love myself at four as now so many years later I like the fifteen-year-old (even desire him), self-approval never accompanying but always trailing experience, retrospection three parts sentimental and one part erotic?

  Perhaps this composite self, older cherishing younger, provided me with some companionship. At least tonight my attention wasn’t out wandering the corridors. A warmth welled up out of the solar plexus, which, true to its name, I pictured as plaited sunlight, sensitive bands reaching out into the most remote points of my body, even the cold tip of my nose and freezing toes. Like a heated square of pavement in an otherwise snowy sidewalk, the child burned through the adolescent and, luminous within the child, glowed this shifting cat’s cradle of sensation, whether spiritual or physical I’m unable to say.

  I began to rise. I drew back for an instant, startled, but then I gave in: I was determined to be adequate to the miraculous. I rose and rose, not pneumatically as a swami might but imaginatively, that is, really. I was being enisled, the lotus rising out of the mud, and now I was being drawn, molten and blossoming, up through the void until we (for I was no longer alone) – until we entered a ring of the eager faces of infants called away from their games to this curved window from which they peered with mild pleasure, meaty hands pressed to the glass, moist lips open, eyes filmy with wonder. Their whispering was being dialed in, now amplified, and I was losing my whiteness and taking on a gold color, warm as a new tan.

  Shortly before Easter I managed to become friendly with my gym teacher, Mr. Pouchet. He was French Canadian and a recent Olympics competitor in track who’d come to our school as a coach and math teacher for the lower formers. He was very good with those kids. He lived in their dorm. They could be seen hanging on to him wherever he went, which he seemed to like in his shy, melancholy way though he pretended to find them tiresome (“What a pain,” he’d mutter as yet another giggler leaped on to his back). At twelve and thirteen the boys alternated between being babies and being brutes, sometimes clinging sulkily to his waist, sometimes socking him and screaming. He couldn’t keep them out of his room. They were always finding an excuse to sidle in and to look once again at his sports photographs and medals. I avoided talking to him about his medals, for his success had been neither major nor minor – in fact his was exactly the sort of ambiguous success calculated to invite regret.

  To the degree that he was not concerned with his past he was interested in me, since I could talk to him about everything except sports. I don’t mean to suggest we had a great, flourishing friendship (that kind of friendship came later, with another teacher and his wife). But Mr. Pouchet and I did go to church together. At Eton we were expected to attend services every Sunday, ordinarily those conducted by our own Anglican chaplain, an overgrown boy of startling good looks, great prowess as a skier and no imagination who lived on a strangely easygoing, joshing basis with Our Lord. The matey tone of Eton forbade preening of any sort; the chaplain, true to form, acted as though Christ had been putting on airs and needed to be brought down a peg. When forced to relay some real stunner (And then, on the third day, He arose from the dead), the chaplain would widen his eyes with mocking astonishment (Oh, come now), and after he had finished speaking, he’d snicker skeptically (God only knows how he pulled off that stunt). Mr. Pouchet was too discreet to complain about the chaplain but I’m confident Pouchet, a good Catholic boy, found chapel every weekday morning insupportable enough without having to submit to the longer Sunday sermon as well. He and I happily slipped away to services elsewhere, semi-anthropological field trips in his old car to a Greek Orthodox church one week, Roman Catholic the next, Baptist the third, a spiritual smorgasbord I found to be a natural continuation of my earlier sect-hopping.

  Mr. Pouchet had very full lips the color of raspberry ice when it’s still in the carton, before it’s licked lighter, and slightly protuberant eyes as liquid as a spaniel’s. His skin was very thin and olive and his mustache, though shaved close every morning, appeared as a black band by noon, nor did it grow close to his lip but well above, the sort of narrow, absolutely horizontal dash a child might charcoal in on Halloween. His chest was hard and covered with swirling, soft, lustrous black hair from his stomach up to his shoulders; his nipples were small and almost purple. His belly, ridged with muscle, stood out as a distinct zone, tucked in between the arc of his rib cage and cupped by his pelvic bones – the shape of a turtle’s shell. Those famous legs were surprisingly lean. They were not the massive machinery I would have anticipated. As a naïve materialist, at least when it came to men, I missed the carnality of limbs that could perform so astonishingly. Where did the strength come from? When he was at rest, where did the speed go?

  During our field trips I’d sit beside him in a hardwood pew or stand close to him under a dusty chandelier as men’s voices chanted behind the iconostasis and I felt as though I were already Mr. Pouchet’s lover and why not, for he was as much a superfluous man as I was an excluded boy.

  Every morning at six he was out on the track running through the mist, stopwatch in hand, puffs of vapor issuing from his mouth, but surely he was running down. I had no idea how old he was (twenty-something), but doubtless he was declining physically. Here he comes, blood drained from his dark cheeks, lips purple and open to reveal wet, white teeth, legs lean and slightly bowed, the calves compact, not bulging, his whole body so intelligent that despite its hairiness nothing about it suggests an animal. He’s the cautious, isolated man who sleeps alone, rises before dawn, runs, irons his chinos, pares his beautiful nails that haven’t a single ridge or moon in them but that seem built up out of layer after layer of clear lacquer, who never seems to have a headache or hangover, who’s a well-maintained machine but idling, idling, who approaches each new experience (the iconostasis doors break open and the black nave floods over with candlelight: Christ is risen) in a spirit of mildly detached curiosity, and yet nothing has touched him. He is vulnerable and he’s untouched. He is a man to whom something is about to happen.

  In the meantime he sits under the buzzing fluorescent lamp over his desk in his dorm room and grades algebra quizzes. Between the first and second hour in the study hall in the evening the boys have ten free minutes. A bell rings, they explode out of their rooms, toilets flush, four guys are pounding a fifth where the stairs turn and Mr. Pouchet winds the gold wristwatch he received for high school graduation not so many years ago, stands and looks out his window across the courtyard at the opposite windows filled with yellow light and the coming and going of the upper formers. Mr. Pouchet is waiting. His mind is open, patient, expectant. Perhaps he’s the Buddhist, perhaps the Buddha, and if he doesn’t focus on this state of grace, then that oblivion is proof he’s blessed.

  If I imagine Mr. Pouchet masturbating I see him turning the light on and blinking as he hunts for some tissue, which he puts on the night table beside his cot. An annoying but necessary task. He’s wearing a clean white T-shirt and blue cotton pajama bottoms. He’s an entirely serious person, a lonely adult. Off with the light. He folds the blankets down till their doubled weight rests on his knees. He pulls the sheet halfway up his chest, so that whatever happens under it will seem less sordid – or so he tells himself. (The truth is, the sheet declares the autonomy of desire, just as a tan line, by isolating the genitals, emphasizes them.) His dark hand pulls open the pajama flap and grabs his penis, which in a moment is as hard as hickory, but his thoughts are scattered, the flesh is strong but the spirit is weak. He assembles the features of various g
irls he’s known or seen in magazines or movies into a face he kisses, then violates – wrong, cancel – kisses again.

  And then he sees mental pictures of that time Julie and he were lying on the rug and talking about their futures. They were going to different colleges, they’d be apart for a year, suddenly his hand is rubbing those panties over a mound that just barely hints through the thick spandex that there might be an opening below – and then he’s wriggled under the armor into something flossy, ringleted and then hot and wet and labyrinthine and straining up to meet his fingers even as her throat moans no and she gasps, “Too sweet, you’re so . . .” And she buried her face in his sleeve, bit a fold in his shirt. She pulled away and sat him on a chair across the room from her and mimed fluffing her skirt and straightening her hair and said, “There, now,” but she didn’t turn on the lights, he noticed, and in a moment he had scooted back over and was sitting on the floor below her chair and he was kissing her knee very tenderly, respectfully, but his hand was straying almost in spite of itself back up between her smooth warm legs, as lean as a boy’s, as warm as new bread, while his other hand clawed at his own trousers and he whispered, hoarse and dry-mouthed, “Julie, just let me, just this much, something to remember –”

  I came. I had seen. He could conquer me. If I was Julie or Helen or whoever else, just so long as I was in his mind somehow. Or no, perhaps I didn’t want to be a character in Mr. Pouchet’s head, just a virus that had entered the very gland of his consciousness from which I could study, even experience, his longing for a woman. I didn’t want him to like men, just me, not even me as a man but me as discarnate ardor, pure willingness in his naïve, manly, exquisitely untested arms.

  Using the same ill-fated parchment on which I’d written Helen, I indicted a love poem to Mr. Pouchet. I didn’t sign it and I was careful to disguise my handwriting, to imitate laboriously the long, lean eccentricities of an italic script I traced out of a copybook. His compliance in going to church with me every Sunday and his reluctance to talk to me about his private life (if he had one) had enabled me to fancy he was quite prepared to love me – his compliance and reticence were the soft wax I impressed with the intaglio of my daydreams. In the afternoon, when I knew he’d be with the track team, I flew by his room and pushed the poem under his locked door.

  Now it was done.

  Would he read it and search me out after supper, invite me to drive with him into town where we’d sit in a dirty hamburger joint and feed nickels into the miniature juke-box at our table? Would he frown and pretend to be studying the song titles on the movable cards revolving under the smudged glass while he muttered his love for me, almost as though he were angry at me or embarrassed?

  Or would he really be angry? Would he grab my arm as I came out of the dining hall and sadistically dig his nails into my biceps as he steered me down brick walkways glittery with ice and gritty with cast sand until we reached the deserted gymnasium, where he would unlock door after door, pushing me ahead of him onto a varnished, echoing, suddenly floodlit basketball court and would order me to do hundreds of push-ups and jumping jacks in expiation, hours and hours of exercise as punishment and cure?

  But he never lifted his long-lashed eyes at dinner except to wisecrack with one of his kids and to hand out the pudding. I kept looking at him from my table. He was illegible. Had he, come to think of it, been able to read my fancy writing? Was he so dim he didn’t recognize, in spite of my flimsy precautions, that I was the author of this great love poem? Did he – oh, many questions, one fear: he would hate me.

  I never found out. He didn’t mention the poem to me. He didn’t invite me to go churching with him the next Sunday, nor did I seek him out. We both attended our fatuous chaplain’s service. “Dearly beloved,” the chaplain said, his eyebrows bouncing roguishly, “let us pray,” and then, since he had no style for seriousness, he became horribly boring. He bowed his head and spoke in a monotone so dull it repelled attention. A rich person’s smell of wet wool and perfume pressed down on us. The dismal leaking of the hushed organ trickled out around us. Sunlight came and went behind a rose window coarsely stenciled in lead, harshly colored with aniline shades, an industrial rose. After that, whenever I’d pass Mr. Pouchet in the hall, he’d smile and say hi, softening his rejection as much as possible: faintest watermark that had to be held to the light to be seen at all.

  I decided I had to go to a psychiatrist. In the back of my mind I had kept hoping I’d somehow outgrow this interest in men, an interest I had nonetheless continued to indulge. But now I was becoming frightened. I was being pushed out of the tribe. I had a dream in which I was a waiter in an elegant restaurant where I served happy, elegant couples. That was upstairs. Downstairs the filthy kitchen was staffed by bald, grizzled men, convicts, really, mute, bestial with grief. They wore blood-stained aprons and gleamed with sweat. I was one of them and, although I could rise to circulate among the happy diners, I always had to descend back down to the hopeless workers, each suspicious of the others. And then the police van arrived and the help, all of us, were dragged out into the night street ablaze with revolving red lights. We were hauled off to prison, where we’d remain forever. As I was being herded into the van I could feel on my back the eyes of the diners looking down from the windows upstairs. Now they knew I wasn’t one of them but one of the convicts.

  I woke with tears in my eyes so salty they burned the canthus. Everything I touched or did spoke to me of sadness. Each article of clothing – shirt, tie, jacket – felt cut out of different bolts of sadness, each a peculiar weave and shape and hang of sadness, as though sadness came in lots of styles. My shoes posed above their reflections on the glossy floor, and they looked to me like imperfect molds cast from the original, perfect sadness; I mean they were big, solid things, crude actually, and yet the frayed end of a lace, the rim around the opening that bulged here and there, the unevenly worn heels – they all spoke of use, my use, they were sensitive records of dailiness, nothing sadder.

  The father of a classmate was a local psychiatrist and he arranged for me to see a famous analyst John Thomas O’Reilly. O’Reilly’s office was next door to his home, the two buildings unassuming suburban clapboard houses separated by a concrete drive. Once I was inside the office, however, I found the decor to be luxurious and exotic, not at all what I had expected. The waiting room was carpeted in delicate tatami mats bruised by horrid Western shoes. A large birdcage, woven out of bent reeds to resemble a baroque Brazilian church, confined a dozen bright choristers all cheeping at once. Long scrolls, rubbings from Han Dynasty tombs, pictured featureless warriors standing in tall, narrow chariots under stiff fans and drawn along by surprisingly small ponies twisting nervously in their traces – a whole traffic jam of military chariots describing interlocking curves, fan beside palmetto fan, one horse’s neck dipping behind and below another’s raised hood. The artist had been at least as interested in the abstract pattern as in the subject and as a consequence had turned a dusty pandemonium into immaculate machinery. I studied these details because I had so long to wait (I’d arrived early and the doctor was running about an hour behind schedule).

  At last he emerged with a red-nosed woman in a green dress who was humble, even cringing. She slipped into a full-length black coat made of the wool of unborn lambs; once she’d extinguished the color of her dress she regained her composure and accomplished an unsniveling exit.

  Dr. O’Reilly smiled at me, teeth spaced and white, lips full and raw, gnawed raw, it seemed, under full mustaches, his hair white and to his shoulders – a startling length in those days. His costume also gave one pause: a piece of rope to hold up baggy, stained trousers, bare feet in hemp sandals, a great tent of a minutely and intermittently pleated lime-green Havana shirt containing his corpulence, and in the stubby fingers of his right hand a dirty hanky he kept pressing to his red, raw face, for though we were still in midwinter, sweat lent an incongruous dazzle to his face.

  “Come in, come in,” he said,
stepping aside to usher me into the inner office, a soundproofed cube with one wall all glass looking out on a garden and a small replica of the Kamakura Buddha, gilt everywhere save for a lap full of new snow. “See that log and that hatchet?” the doctor said, pointing to a palisaded enclosure just to the right of the garden. “My patients dub the log Mom or Dad as the case may be, usually Mom, and then have a grand ol’ time hacking away at her.” His small blue eyes, veined in red, rotated dryly in their sockets to take in my reaction to the idea of murder – except his act of “observation” was so stagy it preempted the need for another response. There was nothing about this actor that couldn’t be read from the top balcony.

  I declined the analytic couch’s invitation to the voyage and chose an earthbound chair that faced the desk. Not that I wasn’t eager to test the couch’s splendors, which I instinctively (and I hazard astutely) equated with those of sexuality. It was just that I felt somewhat abashed by the couch’s very explicitness, as though it were someone’s beautiful mother who wouldn’t cross her legs, who had even decided to flaunt her most intimate charms. That was just how musky and startling I found the couch, which so shamelessly resembled itself in a thousand cartoons, although now I understood the cartoons had done nothing so much as to sensitize me to its heroic and decidedly unfunny actuality.

  My first sight of the analytic couch constituted the primal scene, for only its existence jarred me into recognizing that the world is governed by a minority, the sexually active, and that they hold sway over a huge majority of the nonsexual, those people too young or too old or too poor or homely or sick or crazy or powerless to be able to afford sexual partners (or the luxury of systematic, sustained and shared introspection, so sexual in its own way). All advertisements and films and songs are addressed to sexuals, to their rash whims and finicky tastes, but these communications cleverly ignore nonsexuals, those pale, penniless, underdeveloped bodies, blue nipples flung like two test drops of ink from a new pen across the blotting paper of a chest, or high, hairless buttocks, unmolded by hands into something lovely, something enticing, left pure and formless like butcher’s lard. The patient who always preceded me was the lady in the Persian-lamb coat; she left behind the peculiar perfumed smell of the paper tissues she wept into, a weak solution of those chemical towels handed out after lobster in family restaurants, and the heavier, more aggressive and I suppose offensive smell of her stubbed-out cigarettes (eight or nine in the sterling-silver cupped hand that served as the ashtray). These smells and the ghosts of smoke circulating through the sunlight, colloidal souvenirs, seemed to be the echoes of a just-completed drama by Racine in which lambent passions had glowed within the glass chimney of formal measures, in which all the action must occur offstage and is merely reported here and the only permissible emotions are the great ones – incestuous longings, guilt, and the impulse to murder – whereas the dimmer, more usual feelings of sloth, boredom, spleen, irritability are airily dismissed. For psychoanalysis feeds on intensity, as though life were all flame and no ash.