The Beautiful Room Is Empty by Edmund White Read Free Book Online Page A

wife’s abortion.”
    “Does she know about you and Bob—what you are?” I asked, not quite sure what they were. How could a bona fide heterosexual like a queer?
    Tex lit a cigarette. He was strangely likable, despite his melancholy air—likable because he carried his whole story with him wherever he went, like the housekeeper who worked for my father and stepmother, scattering her ash in her tenth cup of coffee, chatting away about the men in her life, still wearing her bathrobe at three in the afternoon, her sympathy universal even when her understanding was partial.
    As for Tex, he was so intimate that he erased the distance between adolescent and adult. I had heard my mother and her friends discussing the “man problem”; now Tex was doing the same, and I was listening as a provisional equal.
    “I think she suspects her husband’s fooled around with me, but it suits her to look the other way. She knows they can count on me for loans, like for this abortion. They already have three kids. I like her and she knows it. We all go bowling together in Rogers Park when she’s not wore out.”
    “Then what’s the problem?” I asked briskly to cover my confusion. His novel way of looking at things was so human and unconventional. You could say he wore down the spikes of moral imperatives by holding things—dangerous explosive things—in his soft hands and turning them this way and that. At least right now, sitting beside me, he spoke ofhis cop, the wife, the abortion, the loans, the bowling evenings, with such domestic sighing familiarity that I took them all in the same way, his way, touched them all over in a friendly way.
    “The problem, my Poor Little Rich Girl, is money, moolah—not that you’d understand,” and he ruffled my hair and smiled with fond exasperation, his eyes supplicating heaven for patience. I didn’t feel spoiled; I felt neglected. Nor did I choose to step into the role he was holding up for me. I took his hand and said, “But I do understand,” and I did.
    Then, out of a reflex of good manners, he cocked his head to one side speculatively. “But tell me, Baby Doll, what are you looking for in a man? What kind of sex? Start with that.”
    “Sex?”
    “Do you like being screwed—we call that being browned, and the person is a brownie queen.” When I looked embarrassed he politely turned philosophical. “That’s more European, of course. It’s your Continental gentlemen who like to brown each other. We Americans are better known for giving blow jobs. Are you a suck queen?”
    The pink velvet felt as rough as wool under my legs. “Can I ask a dumb question? Do you actually blow?”
    “You suck, silly.” Tex turned away to hide his laughter, but his skinny back started quaking and then he was sobbing into his hands the way my Texas grandmother did, a big country woman who’d weep with merriment. I smiled in mild resentment at the wonderful joke I’d become.
    “You suck, silly, but”—he wiped away his tears—“ooh-ee, I needed that!” Suddenly serious on a downbeat of breath: “But gently, not like a Hoover. The main thing is plenty of spit. The juicier you make it, the better they like it.” He straightened his tie fractionally and flicked a glance atthe street. “Will you listen to me, teaching you, and you just jailbait, how to service peter, and me not even a chickenhawk. That’s what we call the young stuff—chicken. Honey, I’ll have to give you a demonstration one of these days; I can’t believe how naive you are.” He sang out the rhyme and gave the impression he was as pleased by his own worldliness as by my innocence. “Me, I was never naive. Your mother was a born slut. That’s the name of my fragrance.” He dipped his wrist beneath my nose: “Born Slut. Like it?” Then he edged away from his extravagance. “Shouldn’t corrupt you too soon. You know the expression, ‘Today’s trade is tomorrow’s competition’?”
    It took quite a bit of