The American People: Volume 1: Search for My Heart

by Larry Kramer

  What were you thinking that day? What were you feeling that day? Oh, I used to pummel her with questions. It was as if I were a writer and she my best character and I couldn’t let her go.

  She gave me a gift. She showed me how the achiever can become a prisoner. This also made Stephen love her more. Lucas recognized the dangers and stepped down.

  People write whole books on any of these sentences. What am I trying to say?

  “You simply don’t understand me at all!”

  But I think I do. And it hurts. Which is what she wants it to do.

  The day she walks south to Doris Hardware’s she’s twenty-one years old. She spends her birthday the night before with Stephen.

  I know she’s with him. I know about their affair. I asked her all about it; she told me nothing. Do you tell him all your history? I demanded. No, of course not, she replied. I believed her. Her history—and that I’m the only one who knows it—is what joins us at the hip.

  When she’s twenty, she flies to San Francisco from Los Angeles, where she’s living with a young carpenter, to join an older man she met only briefly at a party in Malibu, who offers to indoctrinate her into what he calls “realms of sexual excitation within yourself which I think you have been unaware of.” He meets her at the airport and takes her to his home on Divisadero Street, and there he instructs her, and she becomes his total slave. After several months in San Francisco, she has experienced what it means to be a slave, all the implications, the crawling around on the floor and being tied up for hours and days and ordered to perform acts on him and others, and being totally without wishes of her own, except as they please him, her master.

  “I realized I had never been without wishes of my own. It was a novel experience. Now I had the general idea. Now, what to do with it? What did it mean to me?”

  “Why did you want to do anything at all with it!”

  “Life can be so miserable if all you do is regret all the time.” She says that to me the first time I enter her, the first time I have an erection with a woman, the first time I have an orgasm with a woman. She allows me to make love to her, ten times in all, during a monthlong period when we’re both in our early thirties, many years after she goes to Doris’s and twenty years after I first try. I make wonderful love to her, she says so, and she cries out in pleasure each and every time. We climax together each time, and I don’t know then that this is an accomplishment of sorts, having an orgasm together, or Claudia having one at all. I’m thrilled with the joy of succeeding at something I never expected I would even try, and though I know I don’t want to repeat it with any other woman, I also know I am more than happy—at that moment—to have done it, and with Claudia.

  That day, as she walks toward Doris’s, without so much as looking at them, she passes several men she’s slept with. She’s been a memorable person in their lives, too; this compliment (that they look at her, that they remember her, that they hope she’ll acknowledge them) means nothing to her. They nod to her anyway, not with any particular relish, because they were all rejected by her or hurt by her in other ways, but because they’d hop into bed with her again in a second should she so much as raise an eyelash of hope. But she doesn’t see them. And she doesn’t see me, because I’m hiding behind a house, a tree, a car here and there, scooting behind her to see if she’s actually going to do what she told me she was going to do. “You have no idea what you’re getting yourself into!” I cried; but of course that in itself makes it all the more entertaining to her. She has a very low threshold of boredom. Yes, she’s smiling to herself, because the commencement of any new activity, particularly one so startling in its conception, its bravura, its gall, is all.

  When she arrives there, at the great garden of the great house that is Doris Hardware’s, she stands there, among the green trees and blossoms. She actually looks full of repose. “Here it feels good, here I can rest. Just walking through the gates, everything is finally fine,” she tells me later.

  Those years ago in San Francisco … she showed me a photograph. She is bound up. Her wrists are tied together and then tied by an only slightly longer cord to a knobby protrusion that passes for the leg of a sofa, short and stubby and weighted down by the heavy Victorian plush above it. Her ankles are similarly corded, to each other and to this knob. Thus she is forced to remain for many hours in a slightly curled position, lying on her left side, unable to maneuver much. For an hour or so, there is a certain amount of sexual tension that pleases her. She is alone; he has left her; when will he come back and claim her, what will he require her to do when he does come back? Will he come back? He’d told her that once he’d flown off to Hawaii for a long weekend. While she feels comfort in the subservience, she knows he will come back and not go to Hawaii. He is strong and rich and his house, of which she pretends she is mistress, is filled with expensive items and a bedroom in which she is pleasurably fucked and wishes to be again. His body, that of a forty-year-old man, is firm and yet softening into something comfortable and no longer the hard, intractable one of youth. “His chest is covered with lightly graying soft hair and his arms have a defined musculature I feel when I’m allowed to hold him. His eyes are kind, when they wish to be, and his hair is brush-cut and bristly. He brushes it across my stomach like some sort of porcupine mop, which tickles me and then excites me. When he finds that this arouses me, he continues to do it again and again for a long time, until I come.” She tells me all this. She tells me everything in great detail. She looks out into space and talks to a far-off place. Will I someday tell it all to Stephen, or to Lucas? Is fitting them into this piece of the puzzle worth those encounters? Any finer points I feel deprived of I request, and receive. Coming in so extraneous a way—in that their sexual organs never touch—amuses her: “I am doing this in a way that no one else can.” That she doesn’t know his full name, or maybe even his real first name, and refuses to scout among his papers and mail to find out, that she doesn’t know what he does for a living, or with any certainty who he truly is, amuses her as well. That she is where she is, and doing what she’s doing, is the totality of the excitement.

  “Don’t you see, Daniel, that was it, that he had this hard cock of his inside me, and his skin was hard and soft and his head was covered with that brush cut and my skin was like his skin, which made us almost like brother and sister, and that he might have me tied up but I had him tied up too, because he needed my cunt for his cock to be inside, he needed me to climax, otherwise he could only do it in some second-best fashion by himself, with his own hand, he couldn’t be a part of something, of us, so I had him tied up too.” I’ve taken her clothes off by now, and have an erection of my own as I envision the two of them in San Francisco, that man with his hard cock, their skins alike, he inside her, she letting him. This would have been our eleventh time. This time she said, “No. No more.”

  Once she invites me to a party at her house, by then (her father having hit one of the jackpots he’s in the habit of winning and losing) in the best neighborhood of Northwest Washington—the third alphabet—Albemarle, Brandywine, Chesapeake, where the grand houses are, nestling in the outer edges of Rock Creek Park east of Connecticut Avenue, down elite tributaries haughtily bereft of public transport. To travel to that august locale takes at least ninety minutes on another set of three different buses from Masturbov Gardens, and then you have to walk because you’re only dropped off at its border. I’m in junior high school. I can feel the little boy in me reacting as closer and closer toward Mecca I come, my eyes growing wider and my imagination wild with unbounded hope. I will fall in love tonight. She’ll live in a house like that one or that one! This is where we’ll live, with maids and a chauffeur, I guess a gardener, too, and in all these other mansions will reside my friends. Oh, how I want to be rich and not have to worry about how much everything costs, as we seem to do every single second in Masturbov Gardens, where everything costs a great deal. I don’t know if the bus route is still the same today. I suspect it must be.
The big houses are all still there, as is the park that so often protected us as it enveloped us in darkness on our walks at night when she let me hold her hand.

  I don’t know why Claudia invited me. I thought when she left Masturbov Gardens that was it. She had found out about Mordy and Mordy had found out about her and I had found out about him. Tic-tac-toe and we all canceled each other out.

  Claudia says she invited everyone she knows. Most of the other kids are driven here by parents or staff; a couple of them probably drive themselves in their own cars with fake IDs. No one else takes three buses from the Other Side of the Park.

  “Do you think I invited you because I found you interesting and attractive and different?”

  “Yes!”

  “Well, I did.” This is years later, when she also tells me she always knew she could tie me around her finger and make me obey her wishes.

  “What were your wishes that evening?”

  “That you hadn’t arrived so early.”

  Her house is mock Tudor and sits on a small rise, filling its large plot amply. I stand on the street looking up at it. Claudia is going to private school now, and her guests will be dozens of kids I don’t know, which frightens me. They’ll look at me, and at my brown sharkskin suit bought on sale at some downtown store like Hecht’s where the rich never have to shop. I feel that both the suit and the self belong somewhere else. We are intruders. I am now an intruder in Claudia’s life.

  But up the flagstone steps I softly march. A black butler opens the door. I don’t know whom I expect to open it, but I don’t expect a butler, black or any other color, or a black maid to take my overcoat, another sale item from Hecht’s, in a dark pukey green “so it won’t show spots,” a working mother’s highest recommendation.

  Claudia appears. Is it from down a curving stairway or from beneath an arching portal, or does she spring full beautifully reborn from some god or goddess’s head? How many thousands of times have I seen her before? But have I really noticed her? She stands there surveying me from afar, as if she’s never noticed me either. It’s like a scene from one of the romantic movies I’ve already seen too many times.

  She is all in dark violet, looking old enough to be in college; as she approaches I can see her eyelids are dark violet too, and my heart stops from the awe of this exotic touch. She comes to me and takes my hand and kisses my cheek and says, “Janet Mesirow thinks you’re very cute and I’m telling you this in advance so when we play Spin the Bottle you can arrange to kiss her.”

  “I don’t know Janet Mesirow.”

  “She’s seen you.”

  Why is she fixing me up with someone else? Have I been summoned all the way from the other side of town for this?

  Still holding my hand, she leads me to a small, dark den and sits down on a plaid-covered sofa, assuming I will do the same, sit beside her, uninvited, which I do. I can still feel the embrace of that room. It was like a womb, like that thrilling moment of being held for the first time in a lover’s arms, like stowing away in a closet playing hide-and-seek. Somehow it was also somber and magisterial and ecclesiastic: I am courtier to her queen. If there had been incense burning I wouldn’t have been surprised. She lets go my hand and leans forward to kiss my forehead—I am being knighted!—and touches her tongue to my nose.

  “I’m going to let Janet Mesirow have you tonight but someday, when you and I have both accomplished what we’re meant to accomplish in the world, we’re going to be very good friends.”

  “I don’t want to be good friends,” I answer, fighting even then for the whole hog.

  But she ignores me and continues: “I’ve slept with many men already. Does it shock you that I should say this at a mere fifteen? I think I’ve been in love with several of them. Why doesn’t it last, do you think? I liked sleeping with them, but I don’t think it’s all it’s cracked up to be, do you? But then, you haven’t slept with anyone yet and that’s another reason why I like you. You’re not sad yet.”

  “Oh, I am sad, I am,” I hear myself say.

  “Then you’re sad for other reasons.” Her tone tells me that she will not be matched in accomplishments she considers her special province. But then she must have decided it’s okay for me to be sad too, for she brings her gaze back from outer space to see and be with me (she is as adept as Rivka in utilizing those I’m-not-really-looking-at-you looks). “We sad people must stick together,” she says, “for we’re the only ones who will ever understand … so many things. My mother is always saying I’m too grown-up for my age. But I’ve got nice tits and I’ve got a cunt that’s well broken in and I don’t see why everyone makes such a big secret of it all.”

  I certainly think she’s mature. I am also hurt that someone—from the sound of it a number of someones—has been with her so intimately already.

  It’s easy to smile about what a precocious child she was. It’s not so easy to smile that she’s stayed that way. Just before her murder, as Claudia and I are having a late afternoon lunch on Doris’s terrace overlooking all of Washington, for some reason she tells me of the time—only months after her purple dress on the plaid sofa—when she fucked with a couple in a hotel not so far away from where we’re sitting.

  “He said they were brother and sister and could I get off on that.”

  Again, still, I listen nervously. Yes, these tales of her sexual exploits are sad, but they make my penis tingle and I worry why such experiences—from which I was obviously excluded—excite me.

  She continues. “I nodded I could get off on that, and he fucked me while she watched and it was only later I realized they were husband and wife and that’s how they got their kicks.”

  She can see that I’m fascinated, that she can work her tricks on me. She runs two of her fingers up my knee, like two tiny people running after each other, and she rummages around in my crotch to see if my penis is paying attention, and so help me, even after years of being homosexual, it is. She can still make it hard. And of course, the minute she discovers that, she takes her hand away.

  Once, we go walking in her neighborhood, down a couple of blocks, across the street from a brick house with small windows. She takes my hand and starts running across the street, where we position ourselves in front of various windows to try to look inside. To no avail; heavy drapery is in our way.

  “Mr. J. Edgar Hoover lives here. He is trying to put my father in jail. But Daddy is smarter than he is.” Even more mystery wafts around this girl. I guess “girl” is no longer the correct definition of her. And of course she will tell no more. My own twin brother will fall into Hoover’s grasp but I am not to know about this either until many years pass.

  I kissed Janet Mesirow that night. I closed my eyes and pretended she was Claudia. There’s a scene in The Magic Mountain where Hans Castorp remembers taking a pencil from the young man he worshipped when they were boys together. They never exchanged anything beyond that pencil. But that boy haunted him, and when Hans falls in love with the divine Clavdia, it’s because Clavdia reminds him of the boy with the pencil. I’ve always thought it of minor literary interest that Mann does not delve into the sex change that transpires over the intervening years. (But then, we’ve since learned Mann loved men himself; what a sneak to so slyly keep it out.) That my Claudia is so close in name? Well, that is man’s coincidence.

  I don’t see Claudia for over a year after that night of her party.

  “I just didn’t want to see anybody, so I stayed home and was tutored,” she tells me when she surfaces and summons me to her home again. “I’m in high school now, just like you.”

  “Janet Mesirow is married. And so young. You should have carried on. She’s very rich. You care about that.”

  We’re both in bathing suits, because I’ve been invited to come and swim. She once told me that she liked my body, “sort of,” but it would be better when it had all the hair that was on its way to growing in. Now that it has I’m anxious to see if it meets with her approval. She pulls my suit of
f underwater (no one else is at home), and she submerges to have a look, treading water a foot or so away from my crotch. How much progress have we made, toward anywhere, since she kneeled in front of me when we were hairless in the dark basement tunnels of Masturbov Gardens?

  “It’s a nice dick,” she says, surfacing, her face, tanned and beautiful, breaking through the blue clear crystal water.

  I lean forward and kiss her. “Dick,” I repeat.

  “You still don’t get around much,” she says, kissing me back, though she won’t let me hold her.

  I feel the rejection awfully: one kiss is not enough. My cock is much bigger than when she submerged to see it. I try to put her hand down there to feel.

  “We’re not going to do any of that stuff with each other. We’re friends. We’re best pals. We’re brother and sister.”

  But her hand is on my penis.

  “Brothers and sisters don’t get like this,” I say.

  “Oh, of course they do,” she answers.

  “Is that supposed to give me hope for the future?” I ask plaintively.

  “I just don’t think people ever really change,” she says.

  “What does that mean?”

  “I can tell you’ll never be able to give me what I want, so I don’t want to get started with anything.”

  “How can you say that?” I’m still a few years away from hearing my grandmother Libby’s prophesies about my various strangenesses, but eerily, as if in some precognition, I sense something’s coming. “Why not? What’s wrong with me?”

  “Why do you automatically assume it’s you?”