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

could defend either side of the question, but I was too immoral to wonder which side was right. I didn’t care and I couldn’t imagine anyone else did either. When it was revealed at this time that a young intellectual had cheated on a TV quiz show, I was amazed that other people were so scandalized. I looked around for winks of complicity and sly grins but found none. My own immorality didn’t trouble me, since I knew I responded toother people and I mistook this ready sympathy for goodness. Besides, I wanted only to survive; other people, the ones with power—their acts might count.
    Kant’s idea that one must act as a universal legislator setting a precedent for everyone seemed the purest nonsense to me—in fact, so pure I admired it.
    I discovered the toilets in the student union. One afternoon after class, I burst through the door in a rush to piss and hurry home. Shoes scraped, bones cracked, I turned a corner and saw a student huddled over a urinal, face blood-red and turned down, his white shirttail sticking out in back. Just two urinals away from him in a line of eight was a beefy businessman, obvious toupee, out of breath. In the stalls a scurrying and the clank of belt buckle against metal partition. I chose my urinal, the farthest one away, and I too looked down.
    The silence was intense, intensified by the timed flush of water. Then silence again, the throb of my pulse in my neck, the businessman’s impatient, audible exhalation, the scratch of a match in a stall and soon the rich scent of burning tobacco creeping out over the ammonia smell of disinfectant. The concentration was strong and focused, every heart pounding, every sense open. When it became obvious that I, too, was waiting and no longer pissing, the businessman shot his shiny black mohair cuff and consulted his massive gold wrist-watch. Face burning, fingers going cold on my cock, I turned to look at the businessman. He regarded me expressionlessly, leaned his head back hoping to glimpse into my urinal, took a step away from the wall to expose his short, engorged, nearly purple penis. I stepped back to show mine, though I knew he didn’t want me, just as a sign that I was a friendly player in the game. In a flash he was squatting, the student turned to feed the businessman’s mouth, the smoker in the stall dropped his cigarette in the water, quick hiss, and he and hisneighbor in the next stall were on their knees, hands reaching under the partition between them and grabbing each other, as I could see by stooping over. No one cared about me one way or the other. I was one of them.
    I looked at the student being sucked. His soft white belly with its explosion of black hair and wet cock shiny as glass were flashed on the screen of my mind as was that rush of male hands under the partition. I listened to the quick clink-clink of a belt buckle on the tiles.
    Then the muffled sound of an approaching step, followed by someone pushing open the door, released the echoing chatter in the corridor. Instantly the couple in the stalls regained their seats; the businessman and his client broke off their deal; and I revolved to face my urinal. The intruder, a big, pigeon-toed athlete, splashed, dribbled, left, but not before he’d made us feel like Sleeping Beauty’s courtiers the moment before the prince melts the rime of sleep…. If I use that implausible image I do so to cool my burning face, since the athlete, after buttoning up, flicked his hair out of his eyes and voiced a simple grunt of disgust.
    Home to Chicago for Thanksgiving weekend, I managed to slip away for a wild evening with Morris, the clerk in Tex’s store. Tex had disappeared but had left a note promising to come back with money. Morris opened the store only when it suited him. He hadn’t been paid in months, and besides, there were no new books to sell.
    Tonight he was wearing pocketless black trousers molded to his full buttocks. “Not bad, hunh?” he said, standing on tiptoe,