The Trouble With Eden - Lawrence Block [101]
There was an uncertain point where his perception of the sex act shifted. At the beginning he saw it as an act in which the female was exploited, used for his pleasure by the male. He felt no guilt over this exploitation, rather, it seemed to him that the male role had to be asserted in such a fashion, that women were designed by a bearded God to be tricked and used. The idea was not uniquely his but was rolled out time and time again at bull sessions. The more intellectual brothers quoted Nietzsche.
But as time passed, his vision of who was the exploiter did an about-face. He began to regard the girls with whom he slept as bottomless pits in which he had to plunge himself forever. They took from him, they drained him, and all he got out of it was a momentary feeling of relief backed by the illusion of conquest.
It was hard to look back on the way he had been in those college days, those Don Juan days, hard to believe that he never felt an impulse toward homosexuality. Warren found the whole thing inconceivable.
“Of course you repressed it,” he said, “but you must have felt it. All those late-night gabfests, all that beery intimacy. Sweaty young bodies in the locker room—”
“I never saw a locker room, Warren. You don’t get sweaty bodies over a bridge table. The only sweaty bodies I came across were female.”
“But you must have had a yen for someone now and then. Pushed it out of your mind, of course. Natural enough under the circumstances. But I can’t believe you were that utterly unaware of the whole idea of it.”
Yet he had been just that unaware. There were a few men on campus who were generally presumed to be homosexual. A botany professor, an assistant in the psychology department, a couple of effeminate students. If Bert had spared a moment for a thought of any sort about any of these men, he could not recall it.
Then, the summer before his senior year, he found out who he was.
He was spending the summer at Virginia Beach as a bellhop in a resort hotel. The hours were long but the work was easy and pleasant enough and the tips were fairly good. There were girls—waitresses at his hotel and college girls on summer vacation. There were also older women, wives whose husbands left them there all summer and commuted from Richmond or Charlotte for the weekends. The older women were better in bed than the girls and less demanding out of it, but there was one very bad moment in the aftermath of sex when his partner’s face had become, for the briefest instant, the face of his mother.
One hot night in mid-July he wanted to be by himself. He had found himself in this sort of mood lately, wanting only to go somewhere dark and quiet and listen to the jukebox and drink. He never drank too much but managed to drink enough so that sleep would come quickly when he returned to the hotel.
In the third bar he hit there was a piano player, and when Bert sat at the bar and listened to the music the rest of the world went away. The pianist had light-brown hair receding in front and a quick, elusive smile, as though aware of a bitter private joke. His hands were large and strong, their backs hairless. He played good cocktail piano and sang along in an easy bouncy style that reminded Bert of Bobby Troup. He was taking requests, and after awhile Bert called out a couple of numbers. Each of his requests was greeted with a quick smile and a raised eyebrow.
During his break the pianist came and sat on the stool beside him. “Let me buy you a drink,” he said. “It’s a rare pleasure to have someone who’s really listening.”
“Well, it’s a rarer pleasure to hear someone who knows how to play. And what to play.”
“Do you play yourself?”
“I haven’t been near a piano all summer. I’m toting hags at the Ocean View.”
“Don’t they have a piano?”
“Not for the help. They made that clear.”
“Yeah, those pricks would. Look, I’ve got an upright at my place. It’s a little tinny but at least it’s in tune. I play one more set and that