None of the fears associated with the magic moment ever materialized. He was fully potent and able to sustain the act effortlessly. He brought her easily to orgasm, then erupted himself, emptying his passion into the warmth of her.
Afterward there was a heady glow that lasted for several hours. For some moments, alone in his own room, the girl mercifully gone, he managed to convince himself that he loved her. The notion passed rather quickly and he laughed at the thought of it. She was just a tramp, he decided. Her own date had passed out on her so she screwed the first person who asked her.
There were other girls, a great many of them. It was easy once you knew the moves. And, as the novelty of it wore off, so did much of the excitement. He never felt himself drawn to any of the girls he had sex with. They were vehicles for his own pleasure, and once he had used them he had little desire to see them again. He was not compulsive about this; there were girls he saw more than once, but he would withdraw from them completely and shut them out of his life once he sensed they wanted an emotional commitment from him. There was a danger in their moist warmth; it could capture a man by his private parts and suck him in like quicksand.
“It doesn’t mean all that much to me,” he said one night to a friend. “All through high school I walked around with a hard-on dreaming about what it would be like to get laid. And now it’s sort of a letdown, you know, discovering that that’s all there is to it.”
“Oh, come off it. Mr. Nonchalance.”
“No, I’m serious.”
“Well, you can afford to say it, for Christ’s sake. I mean, the amount of action you get.”
“All it is is action.”
“Bullshit. Then how come you’re chasing it as much as you do? When’s the last weekend you weren’t out there going after a piece?”
“I’m not saying I don’t like it.”
“White of you, LeGrand. Let’s hire a skywriter — ‘LeGrand doesn’t dislike pussy.’ Christ on a crutch.”
“I mean, it beats doing without. Or jerking off.”
Except that it didn’t, not really. There were times when he would masturbate in his room, touching himself while he listened to music, timing his strokes to the music, purposely delaying the orgasm as long as possible. Often he would refrain from orgasm, stimulating himself to the very edge of it time after time, then letting his passion ebb unfulfilled. His fantasies at such times were abstract and diffuse. Sometimes there were no fantasies whatsoever, only the physical fact of his manual manipulations.
And it was often better than what he achieved with girls. He did not require it as compulsively as he seemed to require girls. He was not driven to it. But there was something he could give himself which girls could not give him. He did not understand what it was or he could not deny its existence.
There was an uncertain point where his perception of the sex act shifted. At the beginning he saw it as an act in which the female was exploited, used for his pleasure by the male. He felt no guilt over this exploitation, rather, it seemed to him that the male role had to be asserted in such a fashion, that women were designed by a bearded God to be tricked and used. The idea was not uniquely his but was rolled out time and time again at bull sessions. The more intellectual brothers quoted Nietzsche.
But as time passed, his vision of who was the exploiter did an about-face. He began to regard the girls with whom he slept as bottomless pits in which he had to plunge himself forever. They took from him, they drained him, and all he got out of it was a momentary feeling of relief backed by the illusion of conquest.
It was hard to look back on the way he had been in those college days, those Don Juan days, hard to believe that he never felt an impulse toward homosexuality. Warren found the whole thing inconceivable.
“Of course you repressed it,” he said, “but you must have felt it. All those late-night gabfests, all that beery intimacy. Sweaty young bodies in the locker room—”
“I never saw a locker room, Warren. You don’t get sweaty bodies over a bridge table. The only sweaty bodies I came across were female.”
“But you must have had a yen for someone now and then. Pushed it out of your mind, of course. Natural enough under the circumstances. But I can’t believe you were that utterly unaware of the whole idea of it.”
Yet he had been just that unaware. There were a few men on campus who were generally presumed to be homosexual. A botany professor, an assistant in the psychology department, a couple of effeminate students. If Bert had spared a moment for a thought of any sort about any of these men, he could not recall it.
Then, the summer before his senior year, he found out who he was.
He was spending the summer at Virginia Beach as a bellhop in a resort hotel. The hours were long but the work was easy and pleasant enough and the tips were fairly good. There were girls — waitresses at his hotel and college girls on summer vacation. There were also older women, wives whose husbands left them there all summer and commuted from Richmond or Charlotte for the weekends. The older women were better in bed than the girls and less demanding out of it, but there was one very bad moment in the aftermath of sex when his partner’s face had become, for the briefest instant, the face of his mother.
One hot night in mid-July he wanted to be by himself. He had found himself in this sort of mood lately, wanting only to go somewhere dark and quiet and listen to the jukebox and drink. He never drank too much but managed to drink enough so that sleep would come quickly when he returned to the hotel.
In the third bar he hit there was a piano player, and when Bert sat at the bar and listened to the music the rest of the world went away. The pianist had light-brown hair receding in front and a quick, elusive smile, as though aware of a bitter private joke. His hands were large and strong, their backs hairless. He played good cocktail piano and sang along in an easy bouncy style that reminded Bert of Bobby Troup. He was taking requests, and after awhile Bert called out a couple of numbers. Each of his requests was greeted with a quick smile and a raised eyebrow.
During his break the pianist came and sat on the stool beside him. “Let me buy you a drink,” he said. “It’s a rare pleasure to have someone who’s really listening.”
“Well, it’s a rarer pleasure to hear someone who knows how to play. And what to play.”
“Do you play yourself?”
“I haven’t been near a piano all summer. I’m toting hags at the Ocean View.”
“Don’t they have a piano?”
“Not for the help. They made that clear.”
“Yeah, those pricks would. Look, I’ve got an upright at my place. It’s a little tinny but at least it’s in tune. I play one more set and that’s all she wrote.” A flash of the private smile. “You could drop over. We’ll do in a fifth of something and you can find out if your fingers still work. How about it?”
“I’m not really all that good.”
“If you’re terrible I’ll put cotton in my ears. What say?”
They drank martinis and played for each other; talked about music and women. The pianist — his name was Buddy — said he didn’t go with women much more. He’d been divorced, he said, and was still over it Bert said he wasn’t sure how he felt about women himself. He seemed to need them, but more and more they left him feeling empty.
“I know what you mean, man. They don’t do you any good, but try doing without ’em. Dig?”