The Book of Skulls

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 funny chuckle and an embarrassed grin. “It provides me with something to confess,” Eli said. “I regard this breach of confidence as the most odious thing I’ve ever done. To reveal Oliver’s secret to the one person most capable of taking advantage of his vulnerability. Okay, I’ve done it, and now I formally confess that I’ve done it. Mea culpa, mea culpa, mea maxima culpa. The sin has been committed right before your eyes, and give me absolution, will you?” He rattled the words out so fast that for an instant I couldn’t follow the Byzantine convolutions of his reasoning. Even after I understood, I wasn’t able to believe that he was serious.

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.”

He moved toward the door.

“Wait,” I said. “I reject your confession, Eli. You’re trying to make me go along with an ad hoc sin, with willed guilt. Nothing doing. I want something real.”

“What I told you about Oliver is real.”

“You know what I mean.”

“I have nothing to give you.”

“This isn’t for me, EH. It’s for you, your own rite of purification. I’ve been through it, Oliver has, even Timothy, and here you stand, putting down your own sins, pretending that nothing you’ve ever done is worth feeling guilty about—” I shrugged. “All right. It’s your own immortality you’re screwing up, not mine. Go on. Go. Go.”

He threw me a terrible look, a look of fear and resentment and anguish, and hurried from the room. I realized, after he was gone, that my nerves were stretched taut: my hands were shaking and a muscle in my left thigh was jumping. What had strung me out this way? Eli’s cowardly self-concealment or his revelation of Oliver’s availability? Both, I decided. Both. But the second more than the first. I wondered what would happen if I went to Oliver now. Staring straight into those icy blue eyes of his. I know the truth about you, I’d say in a calm voice, a quiet voice. I know all about how you were seduced by your pal when you were fourteen. Only don’t try to tell me it was a seduction, Ol, because I don’t believe in seductions, and I have some knowledge of the subject. Being seduced isn’t what brings you out, if you’re gay. You come out because you want to, isn’t that so? It’s in you from the start, it’s programed into your genes, your bones, your balls, it’s just waiting for the right occasion to show itself, and somebody gives you that occasion and that’s when you come out. All right, Ol, you got your chance, and you loved it, and then you spent seven years fighting against it, and now you’re going to do it with me. Not because my wiles are irresistible. Not because I’ve stupefied you with drugs or booze. It won’t be a seduction. No, you’ll do it because you want to, Ol, because you’ve always wanted to. You haven’t had the courage to let yourself do it. Well, I’d tell him, here’s your chance. Here I am. And I’d go to him, and I’d touch him, and he’d shake his head and make a rattling, coughing noise deep in his throat, still fighting it, and then something would snap in him, a seven-year tension would break, and he’d stop fighting. He’d surrender, and we’d make it at last. And afterward we’d lie close together in an exhausted sweaty heap, but his fervor would cool as it always does just afterward, and the guilt and shame would rise up in him, and — I could see it so vividly! — he would beat me to death, clubbing me down, smashing me against the stone floor, staining it with my blood. He’d stand above me while I twitched in pain, and he’d howl at me in rage because I had shown him to himself, face to face, and he couldn’t bear the knowledge of what he had seen in his own eyes. All right, Ol, if you have to destroy me, then destroy me. That’s cool, because I love you, and so whatever you do to me is cool. And it fulfills the Ninth Mystery, doesn’t it? I came here to have you and die, and I’ve had you, and now at the proper mystic moment I’m going to die, and it’s cool, beloved Ol, everything’s cool. And his tremendous fists crush my bones. And my broken frame twists and writhes. And is finally still. And the ecstatic voice of Frater Antony is heard on high, intoning the text of the Ninth Mystery as an invisible bell tolls, dong, dong, dong, Ned is dead, Ned is dead, Ned is dead.

The fantasy was so intensely real that I began to shiver and quake; I could feel the force of that vision in every molecule of my body. It seemed to me that I had already been to Oliver, had already grappled with him in passion, had already perished beneath his flaming wrath. Thus there was no need for me to do these things now.