The Beautiful Room Is Empty by Edmund White Page A

making a float for Homecoming, though we bought the chicken wire and crepe paper.
    A hard core of juniors on warning and suspended seniors would play cards and drink all night, sleep all day, and stagger down to roast-beef dinner in their bathrobes, never leaving the house, sending out pledges for brews and smokes. I could hear them all night downstairs, shouting and laughing, someone roaring with triumph, someone else laughing like a hyena. The fad of the moment was to say the opposite of what was meant. “You are a wit,” was addressed to an idiot, “He is a face man,” of someone brutally ugly.
    In ranking pledges during rush, the brothers would say someone was a legacy (as I was, since my father had been a member down South), a jock, a brain (“He’ll pull up the house average”), or a face man. Until now, all the heterosexual men I’d known had pretended they were unable to tell whether another male was attractive or not, but thereputation of the house required the brothers to measure even such an elusive factor and they did so, protected by this strangely objective term they’d invented, “face man.”
    The frowsy, boozy camaraderie of the fraternity amounted to permissiveness. The brothers frequently said to one another, “You’re not a pervert,” but they were referring to yet another lapful of beerbarf or a vaunted preference for cunnilingus (“oyster diving” or “beaver heaven”). Of course they didn’t even whisper about a real perversion such as mine.
    They could be seen strolling with sorority girls through autumn leaves or dashing out distraught into the garden during a dance (“Hey, Sal, I’m sorry, I am just couth”), but when they replayed the weekend for the guys on Monday morning, their reports contained no mention of feelings beyond nausea and highly localized lust (“I’m such a beaver man, just put a shaving brush to my lips when I’m asleep and I’ll start munching”). Whereas I was the real pervert, worshipping men I knew only from the knees to the waist, but at least I loved them all—especially if I thought behind the partition they were straight, blond, athletic, indifferent.
    Of course there were the John fairies, the “tearoom nellies” like me, and them I despised. One man would establish shoe contact and then slip under the partition a questionnaire written on toilet paper: “Inches? Cut or uncut? Body hair? If so, where? Underarms? Chest? Stomach? Crotch? Legs? Heavy growth?” I’d simply pass it back unanswered, which would provoke a peeved “Tsk,” a storm of flushing, and a hasty exit. Something about that guy’s fetishism offended me, not because it was abnormal, but because it was unromantic. I sat on my toilet shuffling Chinese flashcards and aching—not to be loved but to be permitted to love.
    I was still seeing Dr. O’Reilly, the psychiatrist I’d first consulted in prep school, desperately trying to go straight. He’d told me I couldn’t attend Harvard but must remain atthe local university to be near him. “I’m the only one who can save you, old boy,” he’d said, “because I love you and you know it.” I borrowed a friend’s car and drove the fifty miles each way twice a week to see him. Dr. O’Reilly swallowed amphetamines by the handful in the morning to get going and started calming himself in the evening by sipping bourbon. His waiting room was full of angry birds, the gift of a patient, and Japanese prints.
    He introduced me to Annie Schroeder, another patient. “Those stuffy Freudians would split a gut,” he said, or rather mumbled, since the pills and alcohol slurred his speech. “But Annie’s a good gal, though she’s got a psycho for an old man, right out of Dostoevsky, and a mother who wants to be Annie’s daughter.” He clapped me on the shoulder with too much force. “A fine gal, Annie, but don’t think I’m jealous. I’m not the avenging father.”
    If I started from the premise I was sick (and what could be