The Beautiful Room Is Empty by Edmund White

That’s Fukienese she’s speaking,” Kay said. Our party, discouraged, broke up. One of the men walked me partway home and said, “That woman doesn’t like Americans and she hates speaking English. She teaches Old High German—”
    “What!”
    “Yes, at Cornell, and she takes a bus all day and night just to come here to speak Fukienese to Kay for four hours. Then she turns around and goes back. She writes Kay and me. I’ll show you her letters. They’re very beautiful and literary. She’ll be watching college boys racing around the track and in three words she’ll make an allusion to a Han fu about swans skimming the old palace pond…. She lives in a mental China still. She arrives without warning.”
    “Was she upset to see me at the party?”
    “Maybe.” He smiled. “What a dialect! We say she speaks five languages, all with a Fukienese accent.”
    For the next few days I couldn’t stop thinking about the contrast between my happy Chinese friends, the plentiful table, the laughter and harvest-moon faces—and then the perfect stillness of everyone’s eyes lowered under the bright ceiling lamp while the visitor nattered on and on, half herroyal face concealed behind sunglasses, hand cutting the air. Her rank or distress had intimidated everyone except Kay, who seemed proud to be singled out. Maybe I was studying Chinese in order to have precisely these fleeting contacts with even a remnant of a society so different from my fragmented and compartmentalized life.
    My university had twenty thousand students, which makes a big school but a small town. Despite the smallness, I was able to keep several different lives separate from one another—I hid the Chinese from my fraternity brothers, the brothers from the bohemians I was mingling with in the middle room of the student-union cafeteria, and all three from those hairy legs and hard penises I was meeting under cold thick marble partitions or thin metal ones. When Kay or Betty would flirt with me I’d blush, and that became a new joke with them: I was nicknamed “Your Holiness” and teased for being a puritan. “We’ve heard about the American puritans,” Kay said unsmilingly. “Thoreau,” she said, pronouncing the name as though she meant the Hebrew holy book, the Torah.
    Since I’d read so many books about heterosexual sex and was specially well informed about the mysteries of the clitoris, my frat brothers thought I was a secret cocksman. Their stories were all about getting so drunk they were sick on their dates; girls were seen as good sports who held their heads over toilets and murmured, “It’ll be okay, honey.”
    The fraternity house was an Edwardian mansion. The outside was crosshatched by dingy timber on cream stucco like an old tic-tac-toe game. The fraternity was famous in the South for drinking, football, and racism; here in the North, we’d retained the drinking. Two or three of our members were jocks, but no one paid them much attention. As for the racism, we’d start quaking with laughter wheneverwe had to put on hoods with Halloween eyeslits for our secret ceremonies and pledge to protect white womanhood. There were at least three Negro star football players the brothers would have pledged if the bylaws had permitted them to do so, but this whoring after gladiators seemed to me only another form of racism. Our swords, the flowery Masonic language, and the Klannish sentiments would make our president scratch his head. He was a hawk-nosed man who liked to sleep and drink, always seemed to be genially confused, and appeared to be freshly hatched or peeled, certainly minus a vital protective layer. “Come on, guys,” he’d say, sheepishly holding his sword aloft, “show some respect.”
    “Let’s skip it and have some brews,” the vice-president would suggest, and soon we’d all be sitting around the chapel-size dining room in our fancy dress, drinking beers in the middle of a Tuesday afternoon. We never even succeeded in