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

explaining for me to grasp the thinking behind that one. Trade turned out to mean a heterosexual man willing to let a homosexual blow him. But the idea was that a “piece of trade” didn’t remain straight (that is, desirable) for long and soon was corrupted and turned into one more useless “nelly.”
    “But can’t two nellies go to bed with each other?” I asked.
    “Miss Thing,” Tex hissed, indignant. “And do what? Bump pussies?”
    I shrank back from this image—then laughed, feeling suddenly too big for my clothes, compromised. Did Tex think I was trade, attractive for an instant, like highly perishable fruit that’s edible only for a day before going off? It seemed a tragic situation, because whoever succumbed to homosexual desire became immediately undesirable.
    “But I really don’t think about sex too much,” I said. “I’ll do whatever the … other person wants to do.” I often said “other person” to avoid mentioning that person’s sex.
    “Yeah, but what kind of other person?” Tex asked.
    “Someone older,” I said dreamily, ashamed of having a fantasy, though entranced by it. “Someone rich and handsomewho’ll take care of me, pay for my boarding school, free me from my parents.”
    “Be real—the rich ones only go for each other. If you were rich and handsome, wouldn’t you look for another one just like you?”
    Until now, I’d considered wealth a latent capacity realized only in giving itself away, but now I saw that it was a closed club. I recognized Tex was right, since I could find plenty of evidence for his view among my father’s friends. Hadn’t my father said to me only last summer, as I started attending my first debutante parties, “I’m not saying you should marry for money. Just make sure the girls you go out with are all rich.”
    Two days after this talk with Tex, on a Friday evening, I told my mother I was going to a sock hop at the Y, but I headed right for Tex’s shop. The elevated train lurched past squalid apartments, and I could look right into a room where an old woman sat hunched under blankets trying to keep warm, beak sunk into feather ruff. Down there, kids played in a garbage-littered backyard, and through another window I saw a man in a torn undershirt eating directly out of a refrigerator, his silhouetted hand lifting the milk bottle to his lips. I looked at every man, on the train or in these lit cubicles, and asked myself if I could marry him. Could I live with him forever?
    Now I know myself. Now I know “forever” is a word that excites me, that just the word marry (not marriage itself) is a stimulant and I’m afraid of wounding others or trapping myself. But then? Then, in the winter I’d see a couple, man and woman, out walking in the snow, both of them hooded, torn plumes of vapor streaming from their mouths, or in summer, in the blue electric flash struck by the El, I’d snap a mental photo of those two people on the fire escape, beers in hand, he bare-chested, she in shorts, bothpale as moths, and my spirit would hover over them, restless, half jealous, trying him on for size, now her, not finding a good fit.
    That evening there was no hint of disaster at the bookshop. Morris, his lashes suitably brown, not black, was seated behind the cash register, ringing up sale after sale. Despite his shyness, Tex was circulating among the customers in a dim parody of a Southern belle. The polite young male announcer on the FM station was reading long sentences with a venom in their bite and a rattle in their tail. Then he announced he’d just finished the first part of tonight’s story, “The Beast in the Jungle.” Tex silenced him and put on a record of Callas’s mad scenes. I myself preferred the radio and the idea that other listeners liked Henry James.
    At one point, Tex whispered to me that the man in the corner owned several quality bookshops in New York and, though he was married, might make a nice date for me.
    “But if he’s