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“I think so, too,” I said.
“What can we do about it?”
“Not much. We can’t force him to stay.”
“If he goes, what happens to us?”
“How do I know, Eli? I guess we’ll be in trouble with the fraters.”
“I won’t let him leave,” Eli said with sudden vehemence.
“You won’t? How do you propose to stop him?”
“I haven’t worked it out yet. But I won’t let him leave.” His face contorted into a tragic mask. “Oh, Jesus, Ned, don’t you see, it’s all coming apart?”
“I actually thought we were getting it together,” I said.
“For a while. For a while. Not any longer. We never had any real hold on Timothy, and now he doesn’t even bother to hide his impatience, his contempt—” Eli pulled his head into his shoulders, turtlewise. “And this priestess thing. The afternoon orgies. I’m bungling them, Ned. I’m not gaining control over myself. It’s great to have all that easy tail, sure, but I’m not learning the erotic disciplines I’m supposed to be mastering.”
“You’re giving up on yourself too early.”
“I don’t see any progress. I haven’t been able to last for all three women yet. Two of them, a couple of times. Three, no.”
“It’s a matter of practice,” I said.
“Are you managing?”
“Pretty well.”
“Of course,” he said. “That’s because you don’t give a damn for women in the first place. It’s just a physical exercise for you, like swinging on a trapeze. But I relate to those girls, Ned, I see them as sexual objects, what I do with them has enormous significance for me, and so — and so — oh, Christ, Ned, if I don’t master this part of it, what’s the good of working so hard on all the rest of it?”
He disappeared into a chasm of self-pity. I made properly encouraging noises: don’t give up, lad, don’t sell yourself short. Then I reminded him that he was supposed to be making confession to me. He nodded. For a minute or more he sat in silence, distant, rocking back and forth. At last he said, suddenly, with startling irrelevance, “Ned, are you aware that Oliver is gay?”
“It must have taken me all of five minutes to discover it.”
“You knew?‘
“It takes one to tell one, haven’t you ever heard that line? I saw it in his face the first time I met him. I said, this man is gay whether he knows it or not, he’s one of us, it’s obvious. The glassy eyes, the tight jaw, the look of repressed longing, that barely concealed ferocity of a soul that’s trussed up tight, that’s in pain because it’s not allowed to do what it desperately wants to do. Everything about Oliver advertises it — the self-punishing academic load, the way he goes about his athletic commitments, even his compulsive studding. He’s a classic case of latent homosexuality, all right.”
“Not latent,” Eli said.
“What?”
“He’s not just potentially gay. He’s had a homosexual experience. Only one, true, but it made a profound impression on him, and it’s colored all of his attitudes since he was fourteen years old. Why do you think he asked you to room with him? It was to test his self-control — it’s been an exercise in stoicism for him, all these years when he hasn’t let himself touch you — but you’re what he wants, Ned, did you realize that? It’s not just latent. It’s conscious, it’s just below the surface.”
I looked strangely at Eli. What he was saying was something I might perhaps turn to my own great advantage; and aside from the hope of personal gain from Eli’s revelation, I was fascinated and astonished by it, as one always is by intimate gossip of that sort. But it gave me a queasy feeling. I was reminded of something that had happened during my summer in Southampton, at a drunken, bitchy party where two men who had been living together for about twenty years got into an exceptionally vicious quarrel, and one of them suddenly ripped the terrycloth robe from the other, showing him naked to all of us, revealing a fat jiggling belly and an almost hairless crotch and the undeveloped genitals of a ten-year-old boy, and screaming that this was what he’d had to put up with all those years. That moment of exposure, that catastrophic unmasking, had been a source of delicious cocktail-party chatter for weeks afterward, but it left me sickened, because I and everyone else in that room had been made involuntary witness to someone else’s private agony, and I knew that what had been stripped bare that day was not merely someone’s body. I had not needed to know what I learned then. Now Eli had told me something that might be useful to me in one way but which in another had transformed me without my bidding into an intruder in another man’s soul.
I said, “Where’d you find all this out?”
“Oliver told me the other night.”
“In his confes—”
“In his confession, yes. It happened back in Kansas. He went hunting in the woods with a friend of his, a kid a year older than he was, and they stopped for a swim, and when they came out of the water the other fellow seduced him, and it turned Oliver on. And he’s never forgotten it, the intensity of the situation, the sheer physical delight, although he’s taken care never to repeat the experience. So you’re absolutely correct when you say that it’s possible to explain a lot of Oliver’s rigidity, his obsessive character, in terms of his constant efforts to repress his—”
“Eli?”
“Yes, Ned?”
“Eli, these confessions are supposed to be confidential.”
He nibbled his lower lip. “I know.”
“You’re violating Oliver’s privacy by telling me all this. Me, of all people.”
“I know I am.”
“Then why are you doing it?”
“I thought you’d be interested.”
“No, Eli, I won’t buy that. A man of your moral perception, of your general existential awareness — balls, man, you don’t just have gossip-peddling on your mind. You came in here intending to betray Oliver to me. Why? Are you trying to get something started between Oliver and me?”
“Not really.”
“Then why’d you tell me about him?”
“Because I knew it was wrong.”
“What kind of half-assed reason is that?”
He gave me a fu
Finally I said, “That’s a cop-out, Eli!”
“Is it?”
“It’s cynical shit that wouldn’t even be worthy of Timothy. It violates the spirit and maybe the letter of Frater Javier’s instructions. Frater Javier didn’t intend us to commit sins on the spot and then instantly repent of them. You have to confess something real, something out of your past, something that’s been burning your guts for years, something deep and poisonous.”
“What if I have nothing of that kind to confess?”
“Nothing, Eli?”
“Nothing.”
“You never wished your grandmother would drop dead because she made you put on a clean suit? You never peeked into the girls’ shower room? You never pulled the wings off a fly? Can you honestly say you have no buried guilts at all, Eli?”
“None that matter.”
“Can you be the judge of that?”
“Who else?” He was fidgeting now. “Look, I would have told you something else if I had anything to tell. But I don’t. What’s the use of making a big scene out of pulling the wings off flies? I’ve led a piddling little life full of piddling little sins that I wouldn’t dream of boring you with. I didn’t see any way I could possibly fulfill Frater Javier’s instructions. Then at the last moment I thought of this business of violating Oliver’s confidence, which I’ve now done. I think that’s sufficient. If you don’t mind I’d like to leave now.”