A Boy's Own Story by Edmund White Read Free Book Online Page A

the fire and get to her "prettiness." She really was pretty—perhaps I haven't made that clear: a sad blur of a smile, soft gray eyes, a defenseless availability. She was also crafty, or maybe willfully blind, in the way she concealed from herself her own sexual ambitions.
    Becoming my father's employee clarified my relationship with him. It placed him at an exact distance from me that could be measured by money. The divorce agreement had spelled out what he owed my mother, my sister and me, but even so, whenever my mother put us kids on the train to go visit him (one weekend out of every month and for long periods every summer), she invariably told us, "Be nice to your father or he'll cut us off." And later, when my sister was graduated from college, he presented her with a "life bill," the itemized expenses he'd incurred in raising her over twenty-one years, a huge sum that was intended to discourage her from thoughtlessly spawning children of her own.
    Since Dad slept all day, he seldom put in an appearance at the office before closing time, when he'd arrive fresh and rested, smelling of witch hazel, and scatter reluctant smiles and nods to the assembly as he made his way through us and stepped up to his own desk in a large room walled off from us by soundproof glass. "My, what a fine man your father is, a real gentleman," my colleague would sigh. "And to think your stepmother met him when she was his secretary—some women have all the luck." We sat in rows with our backs to him; he played the role of the conscience, above and behind us, a force that troubled us as we filed out soon after his arrival at the end of the workday. Had we stayed late enough? Done enough?
    My stepmother usually kept my father company until midnight. Then she and I would drive back to the country and go to bed. Sometimes my father followed us in his own car and continued his desk work at home. Or sometimes he'd stay downtown till dawn. "Late at night—that's when he goes out to meet other women," I once overheard my real mother tell my sister. "He was never faithful. There was always another woman, the whole twenty-two years we were married. He takes them to those little fleabag hotels downtown. I know." This hint of mystery about a man so cold and methodical fascinated me—as though he, the rounded brown geode, if only cracked open, would nip at the sky with interlocking crystal teeth, the quartz teeth of passion.
    Before the midnight drive back home I was sometimes permitted to go out to dinner by myself. Sometimes I also took in a movie (I remember going to one that promised to be actual views of the "orgies at Berchtesgaden," but it turned out to be just Eva Braun's home movies, the Führer conferring warm smiles on pets and children). A man who smelled of Vitalis sat beside me and squeezed my thigh with his hand. I had my own spending money and my own free time.
    I hypothesized a lover who'd take me away. He'd climb the fir tree outside my window, step into my room and gather me into his arms. What he said or looked like remained indistinct, just a cherishing wraith enveloping me, whose face glowed more and more brightly. His delay in coming went on so long that soon I'd passed from anticipation to nostalgia. One night I sat at my window and stared at the moon, toasting it with a champagne glass filled with grape juice. I knew the moon's cold, immense light was falling on him as well, far away and just as lonely in a distant room. I expected him to be able to divine my existence and my need, to intuit that in this darkened room in this country house a fourteen-year-old was waiting for him.
    Sometimes now when I pass dozing suburban houses I wonder behind which window a boy waits for me.
    After a while I realized I wouldn't meet him till years later; I wrote him a sonnet that began, "Because I loved you before I knew you..." The idea, I think, was that I'd never quarrel with him, nor ever rate his devotion cheap; I had had to wait too