chapter thirty-four

Oliver

At lunchtime, as we were coming from our session with Frater Miklos, Frater Javier intercepted us in the hall. “Please meet with me after lunch in the Room of Three Masks,” he said, and went solemnly on about his business. There’s something repellent about that man, something chilly; he’s the only frater I prefer to avoid. Those zombie eyes, that zombie voice. Anyway, I assumed that the time had arrived for beginning the confession therapy that Frater Javier had told us about the week before. I was right, although the format wasn’t what I’d been expecting. I anticipated something like an encounter group: Ned, Eli, Timothy, and me and maybe two or three fraters sitting around a circle, and each candidate in turn rising and baring his soul to the entire gathering, after which we’d comment on what we had heard, try to interpret it in terms of our own life experience, and so on. Not so. Frater Javier told us that we were to be each other’s confessors, in a series of private one-to-one confrontations.

“This week past,” he said, “you have been examining your lives, reviewing your darkest secrets. Each of you holds locked in his soul at least one episode that he is certain he could never admit to another person. It is on that one crucial episode, and no other, that our work must focus.”

What he was asking of us was to identify and isolate the ugliest, most shameful incident of our lives — and then to reveal it, in order to purge ourselves of that kind of bad-vibes baggage. He put his pendant on the floor and spun it to determine who would confess to whom. Timothy to me; me to Eli; Eli to Ned; Ned to Timothy. But the daisy chain was complete among the four of us, with no outsiders included. It wasn’t Frater Javier’s intention to turn our innermost horrors into common property. We were not supposed to tell him or anyone else about the things that we would learn from one another in these confessional sessions. Each member of the Receptacle was going to become the custodian of somebody else’s secret, but what we confessed, said Frater Javier, was to go no further than one’s own confessor. The purge was what counted, the unburdening, rather than the information revealed.

So that we wouldn’t contaminate the pure atmosphere of the skullhouse by liberating too much negative emotion all at once, Frater Javier decreed that there would be only one confession per day. Again the spinning pendant decided the order of things. Tonight, just before bedtime, Ned would go to Timothy. Tomorrow Timothy would come to me; the day after that I would pay a call on Eli; and on the fourth day Eli would close the circuit by confessing to Ned.

That gave me almost two and a half days to decide what story I was going to tell Eli. Oh, of course I knew which one I ought to tell. That was obvious. But I threw up two or three feeble substitutes, screens for the real story, flimsy pretexts for hiding the one necessary choice. As fast as the possibilities arose, I shot them down. There was only one option open to me, only one true focus of shame and guilt. I didn’t know how I was going to be able to face up to the pain of telling it, but that was what I had to tell, and I hoped that maybe in the moment of telling it the pain would go away, though I doubted that very much. I’ll worry about that part of it, I told myself, when the time comes. And then I proceeded to banish the problem of the confession entirely from my mind. I suppose that’s an example of repression. By evening I had managed to forget about Frater Javier’s project altogether. But I woke, sweating, in the middle of the night, imagining that I had admitted everything to Eli.

chapter thirty-five

Timothy

Ned came prancing in, winking, smirking. He always puts on an exaggerated swish routine when he’s really clutched about something. “Forgive me, Father, for I have sinned,” he said in a singsong tone. Doing a little soft-shoe number. Twitching. Grinning. Rolling his eyes. He was turned on, and, I realized, what was turning him on was this business of confessing. After all this time the old Jesuit was coming to life in him. He wanted to spill his beans, and I would be the target of the spill. Suddenly the thought of having to sit here listening to some slippery pansy story of his made me feel sick. Why the hell should I have to accept his sweaty confidences? Who was I to hear Ned’s confessions, anyway? I said, “Are you really going to tell me the big secret of your life?”

He looked surprised. “Of course I am.”

“Do you have to?”

“Do I have to? Timothy, it’s expected of us. And anyhow I want to.” Yes, he certainly did want to. He was trembling, tingling, all flushed and charged up. “What’s the matter with you, Timothy, don’t you have any interest in my private life?”

“No.”

“Tsk. Let nothing human be alien to you.”

“I don’t want it. I don’t need it.”

“Too bad, man. Because I have to tell it. Frater Javier says that unloading my guilts is necessary to the prolongation of my earthly stay, and so I’m going to ventilate, man. I’m going to ventilate.”

“If you have to,” I said, resigning myself.

“Make yourself comfortable, Timothy. Open wide the ears. You cannot choose but hear.”

And hear I did. Ned’s an exhibitionist at heart, like a lot of his kind. He wants to wallow in self-denunciation, in self-revelation. He told his story very professionally, sketching in the details like the short-story writer he claimed to be, underlining this, shading that. What he told me was about what I expected from him, something grimy, a fag fantasia. “This happened,” he said, “before you ever met me, in the spring of our freshman year, when I was not quite eighteen. I had an apartment off campus, sharing it with two other men.” Naturally, they were both queers. It was actually their apartment; Ned had moved in with them after midterm intersession. They were eight or ten years older than Ned, and they’d been living together a long time in a sort of gay equivalent of marriage. One of them was gruff and masculine and dominant, an assistant professor of French literature who was also a rugged athlete — his hobby was mountain climbing — and the other was more of a stereotyped fairy, delicate and ethereal, almost feminine, a wispy, retiring poet who stayed at home most of the time, took care of the housework, watered the potted plants, and I suppose did knitting and crocheting too.

Anyway there were these two gay lads happily keeping house, and they met Ned in some pansy bar and found that he didn’t like the place where he was living, so they invited him to move in with them. The arrangement was supposed to be strictly a matter of accommodation; Ned would have his own room, he’d pay rent and a share of the grocery bill, and there wasn’t to be any sexual involvement with either of the other two, who had quite a strong fidelity thing going. For a month or two the arrangement worked out. But fidelity among fags isn’t any stronger, I guess, than it is among straights, and the presence of Ned in the household became a disturbing factor, the way the presence of a nicely stacked eighteen-year-old chick would disturb an ordinary marriage. “Consciously or otherwise,” Ned said, “I fostered temptation. I walked around naked in the apartment, I flirted with them, I did a lot of casual fondling.” Tensions rose, and the inevitable inevitably happened. One day the lovers quarreled about something — possibly about Ned, he wasn’t sure — and the masculine one went storming out. The feminine one, all aflutter, came to Ned for consolation. He consoled “her” by taking “her” to bed. They both felt guilty afterward, but that didn’t stop them from doing it again a few days later, and then from making a regular affair of it, Ned and this poet, whose name was Julian. Meanwhile the other one, Oliver — isn’t that interesting, another Oliver? — who was apparently unaware of what was going on between Ned and Julian, started making passes at Ned and soon they were bedding down, too. So for a couple of weeks Ned carried on simultaneous independent affairs with both of them. “It was fun,” he said, “in a nervous-making way — all the clandestine appointments, all the little lies, the fears of having the other one walk in on us.” Trouble was bound to come. Both of the older queers fell in love with Ned. Each one decided that he wanted to break up with his original partner and live just with Ned. Tug of war. Ned got propositions from both sides. “I just didn’t know how to handle the situation,” Ned said. “By this time Oliver knew I was up to something with Julian, and Julian knew I was up to something with Oliver, but no one had made any open charges yet. If it came down to a choice between them, I inclined slightly toward Julian, but I didn’t intend to be the one who made any of the critical decisions.”