The Beautiful Room Is Empty by Edmund White Page B

sicker than my compulsive cruising?), then I had to question everything I thought and did. My opinions didn’t count, since my judgment was obviously skewed. If I found something beautiful, perhaps it was merely decorative; if I regarded a couple as happy, admirable, I was sure to have chosen the wrong example, the people most likely to confirm my neurosis and lead me deviously back to my illness. If I argued a point, I was being over-intellectual (a sin I’d already become aware of from the painters and which Dr. O’Reilly considered the most serious impediment to my mental health). The mind as its own enemy. The mind desperate to outwit itself. The mind claiming virtue but intent on preserving its own viciousness. The mind a boat at sea rebuilding itself while under sail. The mind a rotting meat under expensive spices. The mind a pure spirit (the unsuspecting wife) under the sway of a murderous will (Bluebeard). Perhaps that’s why Buddhism appealed to me. It denied the existence of thesoul, the will, and even the self and sought to show that only illusion lends a spurious unity and dynamism to so many separate, detachable sentiments. For me, Buddhism was the welcome prediction of cosmic collapse, spiritual entropy.
    What I desired most was a man; desiring men was sick; therefore, to become well I must kill desire itself. “Or kill men!” O’Reilly shouted, triumphant, half rising from his chair behind the analytic couch where he usually dozed out of sight or bit his broad white mustache and fiddled with his drink. “You want to murder men! You see, old boy, you think I’m sleeping, that I’m counter-transferent, but even when I’m dozing I’m listening, putting the pieces together in the preconscious, creative part of my brain. You want to murder men by sleeping with them. The stiff cock is the torero’s sword. There’s a lot of bullfighting imagery here.”
    Any reference to my own penis embarrassed me; moreover, I was reluctant to explain that my penis played little or no part under the partition. I had no desire (no vulgar desire I might have said) to obtain sexual release. In my eyes, my preference for service to others over personal pleasure mitigated my corrupt desires.
    Annie Schroeder was also a student at my school. I gave her a ride the fifty miles back to our campus. She told me she planned to be a model. I wondered out loud if she’d photograph differently than she looked.
    “Do you think I’m fat?” She poured scorn into the word.
    “On the contrary.”
    “I suppose O’Reilly’s instructed you to say that. Don’t play dumb. I know he thinks I have an eating disorder. But if so, I’m not like all those little Jewish girls at school fretting over their waistlines. I have a real reason to obsess over food.”
    “Oh?” I had the sensation I was giving a lift to a fire. And yes, her hair was red, twisted around her head in abeehive too old for her thin young face, the face of a soldier wearing a bloody bandage.
    “Didn’t O’Reilly tell you?” She looked at me searchingly. I took my eyes off the slippery road to look into hers, outlined in kohl, her lips painted almost black, her face a long slice of Persian melon.
    “Tell me what?” I asked guiltily. My general moral discomfort was so swollen it could be lanced at any moment by anyone. The rain lashing the four-lane highway was turning to sleet. Big trucks buffeted our little Volkswagen, bison rushing past our ladybug.
    “I’m sure he told you about my father.”
    “Just that he was a character out of Dostoevsky.”
    “Literature has nothing comparable,” she said grimly.
    “Tell me about him, won’t you?”
    Annie told me of her father, a drunk madman who would be sober and sane a month at a time. Then he’d snap. Annie and her little brother would come home from school to their remote country house, and there Dad would be, grinning knowingly, pistol in hand. “Okay, wise guys, I found out what you’ve been cooking up.