Love and Power: II
What Is Gone Becomes Reality
Goethe, Faust, Prologue
Perched on the windowsill, Ted stared for a long time out the window down the airshaft, onto the ash heap. There the rats scurried with purposes of their own among the garbage and the dung. He watched them disappear inside burrows of garbage, but without any purpose of his own, without the will even to right himself and straighten up from his crouch, even when his knees were cramping. The only place in this attic dungeon -- the one skylight gracing its ceiling's western slope conferring a celestial aspect on it, but the use for which it had been now designated making it a dungeon nonetheless -- where he could almost stand up was at the center. Not even there really. No matter where he stood, he had to stoop.
He stared at the wall across from him, blank, insensate, blown away. There was nowhere to look where he might find himself reflected back as anything but a vacuous expanse. What had happened, being rejected by Giovanni, expelled from his presence and his nexus, was beyond him. It was nothing he was able to handle. It was without cause or reason. It was nothing he even dared to analyze.
He had learned to feel pain with submissive joy, to crave it as a sleepwalker craves a dark and transcendental overwhelming nowhere that draws him on. But what he faced now was not pain or the discipline of submission but vacancy, vacancy that turned him inside out, a waking, demagnetized, dreamless sleep that drew him nowhere. Giovanni had consecrated him through pain, had drawn him into a blazing dimension. He had resonated within him like thunder.
But this, now, was nothing, emptiness a black hole, essential negation. You cannot feel yourself not feeling. You cannot experience your own absence. You simply become the absence.
He touched himself and he was hard, hard as ice.
It was after he did not know how long that Ted became aware that he was hungry. Hunger, not daring, disobedience, or deliberation drew him to the edge of the staircase and propelled him downstairs. He stole slowly down the attic steps, with a sense of dread whose cause he could not identify -- it was not so much an attic as, what is called in France, a "petite chamber de bonne" -- trying to make no sound with his footsteps, as if any overt motion would cause an implosion. The door gave onto the landing and had been open when he climbed up and he had not closed it behind him. Now it was locked. It would not open when he tried it. He dared not bang on it. Without a will, he slumped on the step in the darkening stairwell, clutching his knees, paralyzed. His head fell. The air was stale. He slept.
When the door was opened, he could not see by whom.
Light flooded through the immense windows in the empty living room. Out of them, beyond, seen through the glass sheets like an image cast on a cinema screen, Central Park appeared like a scene on a tourist postcard.
On a side table was an apple cut into slices.
Eat, he heard someone say.
He gnawed at the slices.
Leave now. It is over.
It was not Giovanni's voice.
•
Nothing like what Ted had paid for his old place was available anymore when he looked for a new place to stay.
The first nights, he took a room at the Y on Twenty-third Street. He lay much of the nights in vacant wakefulness. He wandered aimlessly the following mornings, thinking to look for a job and unable to focus or knowing where to begin. He took naps in the afternoons, exhausted by inertia. He went out again when it got dark, still defocused. He hardly ate.
His wanderings led him to Benny's. There he'd nurse a cheap scotch and then he went back to his room forlorn through unyielding streets, and sleep until it was time to repeat tomorrow what he had done yesterday.
Ted was good looking, handsome in a very sweet way. He was slim and through Giovanni's training, he had become firmly wrought, gracefully muscled. Giovanni's training had imbued him with an elegance of posture and an elegance of style in his dress that had become inherent and remained his even after he had been dismissed. Even in his fraying jeans and fading T-shirt, he was alluring.
Giovanni had accomplished that. He had remade him. Ted was not the mess he had been when Giovanni took him over.
His training, too, had made working out a necessary habit. On the third day of his stay at the Y, he began using the gym and the pool.
So why is a guy who is so fundamentally alluring sitting here by himself night after night? Matt asked him as he poured him a scotch.
On the house, tonight.
You think I'm alluring? Ted said with a half smile.
Sure, Matt said. Lotsa guys do. They ask me about you. I tell them to talk to you, but everyone of them says that there's something about you that says, Keep your distance. You spook them.
I'm a little bit dead, Ted murmured without looking at him.
That's not good, Matt said.
I need a job.
What are you waiting for? Matt said.
•
It was not absolute but a terrible feeling of disgust, accompanied by a ringing in his ears and dizziness took possession of Teddy when his mother called him to ask him to attend her wedding.
Lou? he asked, unable to hide the censure in his voice .
Why not Lou? she snapped back.
Because he is a moron.
What's it to you? she said. I think someone is jealous.
That's sick, Ted replied shaking his head.
I would not be so quick to call names when they might best of all apply to myself, she said.
I'm not going to go.
What?
I won't go to the wedding, he said.
That's alright, she said. We don't need you in order to get married.
•
Narrative is inherently endless and its life blood is tergiversation, twists and turns that keep a road unwinding without coming to a final destination. Every point on the road is a destination, and every destination is full of beginning.
Its only serious demand on whoever is going to spin it is the tirelessness of an imagination powered by obsession, by an insatiable pricking upon the sensations endlessly to repeat the achievement of a sensation that has never actually been achieved.
A story needs deception in order to keep going. Its narrator must overcome the obstacles that have stymied him in his real life, have pent him up in his own identity. He must transcend them and twist out from the failure of his own experience a character who can continue where he has failed to. This is essential for the sake of his fiction or else his story hits a wall.
When he began to write, the urgency that propelled Ted's fingers across the keyboard of his laptop was an unflagging fascination with the moment of violent humiliation, the moment of being turned out of paradise, the experience of an inexplicable expulsion.
Unlike our mythic parents, however, Ted had not violated any rules of obedience nor acted in opposition to commands, none that he had been told of, nor had he stepped over into the realm of the forbidden, unless the paradise itself into which Giovanni had led him was the forbidden realm, was itself the proscribed fruit he might not taste, from which his original ineptness had served to hold him back and whose very definition included expulsion.
He was therefore bewildered to find himself so hurled against the currents of his desire.
•
He began to write when Ozzie Kelly quit the city with the fierce determination that dictated all his actions and left him his computer. Ozzie Kelly was a compact young man, stiff in his posture, harsh in the tension of his brow, five foot seven and well-muscled. Ted met him in the gym, where he had begun to go early each morning after his first week of wanderings. He had decided to look for work despite himself and deceive his torpor with feigned determination.
I've had it with New York, Ozzie Kelly said. I'm going back to Michigan.
Why are you leaving? Ted asked.
I don't like it here. Too noisy, too isolating despite the crowds.
Kelly had work. He went from one construction site to another with the tool box he himself had carpented and coated with a cadet blue enamel and which more than once another one of the labor gang had looked at with an evil intention.
This city is not for me.
He wanted to find a girl, but all that ever happened was that guys kept trying to pick him up and he would smile and politely excuse himself and later complain to Ted about it and how lonely he felt.
He looked at the girls as they passed on the street or sat at another table in a café, but he never made contact, except once with a redhead he met in a night course on Japanese landscaping, but she was too confused for him. She would have slept with him, but she was sleeping with everybody. He wanted something solid and steady and special and serious.
So I'm going home, he told Ted. I know where I am when I'm there and I don't have to keep dealing with the frustration of desires that stay unachieved.
Ted protested when he brought him the laptop.
I don't need it, Ozzie Kelly said. I'm simplifying my life. I'm getting rid of baggage. I'll build a cabin in the Upper Peninsula. I'll make a pair of skis. I'll live in nature. Nature provides.
They hugged when he left, but electricity had never made a circuit through them, and it did not then, either.
•
Why do you waste your time writing this stuff? Margaret said.
I did not think of it as wasting my time, Ted responded.
It's trivial, she said. Your heart was broken and all you do is write one story after another about abandonment.
It means something to me, Ted insisted. It must. Every time I sit down to write that's what comes out.
Well, I can't use it, she said. If you want to sell something, you have to write for the market, not for yourself.
•
It had been a spring rain, and now it had stopped but the streets were slick and reflected the headlights and the street lights and the storelights in luminous elongations. The city almost, for there were trees in leaf, smelled like the country.
It is a beautiful night, Frederick said.
Ted looked over and saw him walking beside him.
Not a night for solitude. Come home with me, he said, and took Ted's hand.
Ted did not resist, but let him guide him.
Soon they were in his rooms in one of the new towers on West Street overlooking the Hudson.
Your nipples are pierced, Frederick said with a mixture of surprise and delight as he watched Ted strip off his loose T-shirt.
May I? he said, moving his fingers towards the rings and slowly beginning to twist and pull them before Ted answered, but the glaze that coated his eyes was answer enough and the stiffness of his erection as it filled his tight boxers with the thick swelling was answer enough. Frederick brought his lips to Ted's and slid his tongue along them and felt their velvet parting and the sweet cool surface of his tongue against his own. He let his breath out and felt Ted draw it down into him and returned it mingled with his own.
When their lips parted, Ted let out a sigh and then another.
Frederick clasped him in his arms.
My poor baby, he said, not knowing what pain this pleasure they had wrought had renewed but sensing a defeated spirit, a soul that had been reminded of a lost paradise.
I know what you need, Frederick said.
What do I need? Ted asked.
A Master.
I had one, Ted said.
What happened?
I'm not sure. He dismissed me?
Why?
I don't know. I have searched my mind to find the fault but I can discover no reason for his action.
Perhaps that is the fault.
What is?
That you imagine he must have reasons to guide the way he treated you or disposed of you.
But...
There is no but involved. At the heart of being a Master, for the one who submits to him is his incomprehensibility. The ways of a master are beyond you. That is the essence of power.
What about love? Is that any more comprehensible? I keep trying to figure out what distinguishes love from power. But I can't. It seems to me love is a form of power when power is benign. But then I wonder, if it is benign, is it power.
Are you looking for love?
I don't know what I am looking for?
But your mind is a perpetual motion machine, rushing up one alley of a maze and back when it hits the wall, bruised and frustrated.
Ted was silent.
Your search for a Master, Frederick resumed, is a search for stillness.
He had fixed his gaze on Teddy as they spoke and the beams of their eyes were linked.
You can feel that desire for stillness now, can't you? Frederick said.
Yes, Ted answered. I can. But he was anything but still.
He was trembling violently.
How important this event was can be judged by the intense insistence of this uncontrollable clonicity and by the high measure of pleasure that crested and broke on the waves of this agitation.
You are shaking, Frederick said.
Yes, Ted answered, clutching him hard to his hard chest and burying his face in the nape of his neck.