Book of Skulls Read online

  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.”

  The image of himself that Ned was painting for me was that of a naive, innocent kid, caught up in a triangle not of his own making. Helpless, inexperienced, buffeted by the stormy passions of Oliver and Julian, etc., etc. But under the surface something else was coming through, conveyed to me not in words but in smirks, campy flicks of the eyebrows, and other nonverbal forms of commentary on the story. At any given time Ned functions on at least six levels, and whenever he starts telling you about how naive and innocent he is, you know he’s putting you on. The under-the-surface story that I picked up showed me a sinister, scheming Ned, manipulating those two hapless fags for his own amusement—coming between them, tempting and seducing each in turn, forcing them toward a rivalry for his affections.

  “The climax came one weekend in May,” he said, “when Oliver invited me to go with him on a mountain climbing expedition in New Hampshire—leaving Julian behind. Oliver explained that there was much we needed to discuss, and the clear pure air of a mountaintop was the best place to discuss it.” Ned agreed to go, which sent Julian into hysterics. “If you go,” Julian sobbed, “I’ll kill myself.” Ned was turned off by that sort of emotional blackmail, and he simply told Julian to cool it—it was just for the weekend, it didn’t matter all that much, he’d be back Sunday night. Julian continued to carry on, with much talk of suicide. Paying no attention, Ned and Oliver packed for the camping trip. “You’ll never see me alive again,” Julian shrieked. Ned, telling this to me, did a fine contemptuous imitation of Julian’s panicky screeching. “I was afraid that Julian might be serious,” he said. “On the other hand, I knew it was a mistake to play up to that kind of tantrum. And also—secretly, deep down—I was flattered by the thought that I was important enough for anybody to consider committing suicide over.” Oliver told him not to worry about Julian—“She’s just being melodramatic,” he said—and that Friday they went off to New Hampshire.

  By late Saturday afternoon they were four thousand feet up the side of some big mountain. Oliver chose this moment to make his pitch. Come live with me and be my love, he said, and we will all the pleasures prove. The time of dillydallying was over; he wanted an immediate and final decision. Choose between Julian and me, he told Ned, and choose fast. “I had decided by this time that I didn’t really care much for Oliver, who tended to be blustery and bullying a lot of the time, coming on as a sort of fag Hemingway,” Ned said. “And though I found Julian attractive, I also thought that ‘she’ was much too dependent and weak, a clinging vine. Besides, no matter which one of them I picked, I was certain to get all sorts of static from the other—flamboyant scenes, threats, fistfights, whatnot.” So, Ned went on, he declared politely that he didn’t want to be the cause of the breakup of Oliver and Julian, whose thing he respected in the utmost, and that rather than make any such impossible choice he’d simply move out of their apartment. Oliver then began to accuse Ned of preferring Julian, of conspiring secretly with Julian to oust him. The discussion got loud and irrational, with all sorts of shouted recriminations and denials, and finally Oliver said, “There’s no way I can go on living without you, Ned. Promise you’ll take me over Julian, promise me right now, or I’m going to jump.”

  As he came to this part of his story, Ned’s eyes took on a freaky glow, a devilish kind of gleam. He was thoroughly enjoying himself. Spellbound by his own eloquence. In a way, so was I. He said, “I was tired of being whipsawed by these suicide threats. It was a drag, having every move dictated by somebody’s insistence that he’d kill himself if I didn’t cooperate. ‘Oh, shit,’ I said to Oliver, ‘are you going to pull that number too? Well, fuck you. Go ahead and jump, then. I don’t give a damn what you do.’ I assumed Oliver was bluffing, the way people usually are when they say things like that. Oliver wasn’t bluffing. He didn’t answer me, he didn’t even stop to think, he just stepped off the ledge. I saw him hanging in midair for what seemed like ten seconds, looking at me, his face very calm, peaceful. Then he fell two thousand feet, hit an outcropping, bounced like a dropped doll, and fell the rest of the way to the ground. It had all happened so quickly that I couldn’t begin to comprehend it—the threat, my peevish, snappy response, the jump—one two three. Then it started to sink in. I began to shiver all over. I was screaming like a madman.” For a few minutes, Ned said, he seriously considered jumping also. Then he got himself together some and headed down the mountain path, having a rough time of the descent without Oliver to help him. It took him hours to get down, and by the time he reached ground night had fallen. He had no idea where Oliver’s body was, and there were no state troopers around or telephones or anything, so he hiked a mile and a half out to the main highway and started hitching his way back to school. (Because he didn’t know how to drive then, he had to leave Oliver’s car parked at the foot of the mountain.) “I was in a state of total panic all the way back,” he said. “The people who gave me rides thought I was sick, and one of them wanted to take me to a hospital. The only thing running through my mind was a feeling of guilt, guilt, guilt, guilt for having killed Oliver. I felt as responsible for his death as if I had pushed him.” As before, Ned’s words told me one thing and his expressions were telling me another. “Guilt,” he said out loud, and telepathically I was picking up satisfaction. “Responsible for Oliver’s death,” he said, and underneath he was saying, thrilled that someone would kill himself for love of me. “Panic,” he said, and silently he was boasting, delighted at my success in manipulating people. He went on, “I tried to persuade myself that it hadn’t been my fault, that there wasn’t any reason to have thought Oliver was speaking seriously. But that didn’t work. Oliver was gay, and gay people are by definition unstable, right? Right. And if Oliver said he’d jump, I shouldn’t have virtually dared him to do it, becaus
e that was all he needed to make him go over the edge.” On the verbal level Ned was saying, “I was innocent and foolish,” and below that I received: I was a murderous bitch. He said, “And then I wondered what I was going to tell Julian. Here I had come into their household, I had flirted with them until I had what I wanted, I got between them, and now I had in effect caused Oliver’s death. And here was Julian left all alone, and what was I supposed to do? Offer myself as Oliver’s substitute? Take care of poor Julian forever? Oh, it was a mess, a fearful mess. I got back to the apartment about four in the morning and my hand was shaking so much I could hardly get my key in the lock. I had rehearsed about eight different speeches to deliver to Julian, all kinds of explanations, self-justifications. But as it turned out I didn’t need any of them.”

  “Julian had run away with the janitor,” I suggested.

  “Julian had cut his wrists right after we left on Friday,” Ned said. “I found him in the bathtub. He’d been dead at least half a day. You see, Timothy, I killed them both? Do you see? They loved me and I destroyed them. And I’ve carried the guilt with me ever since.”

  “You feel guilty for not having taken them seriously enough when they threatened to commit suicide?”

  “I feel guilty for getting such a charge out of it when they did,” he said.

  36. Oliver

  Timothy showed up as I was getting ready to go to sleep. He came slouching in, looking surly and sullen, and for an instant I didn’t understand why he was there. “Okay,” he said, flopping down against the wall. “Let’s get it over with fast, huh?”

  “You look angry.”

  “I am. I’m angry about this whole fucking pile of crap I’ve been forced to wallow in.”

  “Don’t take it out on me,” I said.

  “Am I?”

  “That’s not exactly a friendly expression on your face.”

  “I don’t exactly feel friendly, Oliver. I feel like getting the hell out of this place right after breakfast. How long have we been here, anyway? Two weeks, three weeks? Too fucking long, however long it is. Too fucking long.”

  “You knew it was going to take time when you agreed to go into it,” I said. “There was no way that the Trial could have been a quickie deal, four days, in, out. If you pull out of it now you spoil it for the rest of us. And don’t forget that we swore—”

  “We swore, we swore, we swore, we swore! Oh, Christ, Oliver, you’re starting to sound just like Eli now! Scolding me. Nagging me. Reminding me that I swore to something. Oh, Jesus, do I hate this whole crappy routine! It’s like the three of you are holding me prisoner in a boobyhatch.”

  “So you are angry at me.”

  He shrugged. “I’m angry at everyone and everything. Most of all I’m angry at myself, I guess. For getting myself into this. For not having had the sense to tell you to count me out, right at the start. I thought it would be amusing, so I went along for the ride. Amusing! Sheesh!”

  “You still believe it’s nothing but a waste of time?”

  “Don’t you?”

  “I don’t think so,” I told him. “I can feel myself changing day by day. Deepening my control over my body. Extending my range of perceptions. I’m tuning in on something big, Timothy, and Eli and Ned are, too, and there’s no reason why you can’t be doing it also.”

  “Lunatics. Three lunatics.”

  “If you’d try to be a little less uptight about it and actually do some of the meditations and spiritual exercises—”

  “There you go. Nagging me again.”

  “I’m sorry. Forget it, Timothy. Forget the whole bit.” I took a deep breath. Timothy was perhaps my closest friend, maybe my only friend, and yet suddenly I was sick of him, sick of his big beefy face, sick of his close-chopped hair, sick of his arrogance, sick of his money, sick of his ancestors, sick of his contempt for anything beyond the reach of understanding. I said, keeping my voice flat and frosty, “Look, if you don’t like it here, go. Just go. I don’t want you to think I’m the one who’s holding you. You go, if that’s what you want. And don’t worry about me, about the oath, any of that stuff. I can look after myself.”

  “I don’t know what I want to do,” he muttered, and for an instant the cranky scowl left his face. The expression that replaced it was one I couldn’t easily associate with Timothy: a look of confusion, a look of vulnerability. It vanished and he gave me the scowl once more. “Another thing,” he said, sounding cranky again. “Why the crap do I have to tell secrets to anybody?”

  “You don’t have to.”

  “Frater Javier said we should.”

  “What’s that to you? If you don’t want to spill anything, don’t spill it.”

  “It’s part of the ritual,” said Timothy.

  “But you don’t believe in the ritual. Anyway, if you’re leaving here tomorrow, Timothy, you don’t need to do anything Frater Javier says you should do.”

  “Did I say I was leaving?”

  “You said you wanted to.”

  “I said I felt like leaving. I didn’t say I was going to leave. That’s not the same thing. I haven’t made up my mind.”

  “Stay or not, as you please. Confess or not, as you please. But if you aren’t going to do what Frater Javier sent you here to do, I wish you’d go away and let me get some sleep.”

  “Don’t hassle me, Oliver. Don’t start pushing. I can’t move as fast as you want me to.”

  “You’ve had all day to decide whether you’re going to tell me anything or not.”

  He nodded. He bent forward until his head was between his knees and sat like that, silent, for a very long time. My annoyance faded. I could see he was in trouble. This was a whole new Timothy to me. He wanted to unbend, he wanted to get into the skullhouse thing, and yet he despised it all so much that he couldn’t. So I didn’t push him. I let him sit there, and finally he looked up and said, “If I tell you what I have to tell you, what assurance do I have that you won’t repeat it?”

  “Frater Javier instructed us not to repeat anything we hear in these confessions.”

  “Sure, but will you really keep quiet about it?”

  “Don’t you trust me, Timothy?”

  “I don’t trust anybody with this. This could destroy me. The frater wasn’t kidding when he said that each of us must have something locked inside him that he doesn’t dare let out. I’ve done a lot of crappy things, yes indeed, but there’s one thing so crappy that it’s almost holy, almost a sacred sin, it’s so monstrous. People would despise me if they knew about it. You’ll probably despise me.” His face was gray with strain. “I don’t know if I want to talk about it.”

  “If you don’t, then don’t.”

  “I’m supposed to let it out.”

  “Only if you’re committed to the disciplines of the Book of Skulls. And you aren’t.”

  “If I wanted to be, though, I’d have to do as Frater Javier says. I don’t know. I don’t know. You absolutely wouldn’t tell this to Eli or Ned? Or anybody else?”

  “I absolutely wouldn’t,” I said.

  “I wish I could really believe that.”

  “I can’t help you on that score, Timothy. It’s like Eli says: some things you have to take on faith.”

  “Maybe we could make a deal,” he said, sweating, looking desperate. “I’ll tell you my story, and then you tell me your story, and that way we’ll each have leverage. We’ll have something to hold against each other by way of guaranteeing that there’ll be no gossiping.”

  “The person I’m supposed to confess to,” I said, “is Eli. Not you. Eli.”

  “No deal, then?”

  “No deal.”

  He was silent again. An even longer time. At last he looked up. His eyes frightened me. He moistened his lips and moved his jaws, but no words came out. He seemed to be on the edge of panic, and some of his terror was bleeding through to me; I felt tense and jumpy, itchy, uncomfortably aware of the blanket of close, clinging heat.

  Eventually he forced a
few words out. “You’ve met my kid sister,” he said.

  Yes, I had met his sister, several times, when I had gone home with Timothy for Christmas holidays. She was two or three years younger than Timothy, a leggy blonde, quite good-looking but not especially bright: Margo without Margo’s personality, in fact. Timothy’s sister was a Wellesley girl, your stereotyped debutante-Junior- League-charity-tea kind of girl, your tennis-golf-horseback-riding kind of girl. She had a fine body, but otherwise I hadn’t found her attractive at all, because I was turned off by her smugness, her moneyedness, her air of don’t-touch-me virginity. I don’t think virgins are terribly interesting. This one gave a definite impression of being far above such coarse, vulgar things as sex. I could imagine her drawling to her fiance, as the poor freak tried to get his hand into her blouse, “Oh, darling, don’t be so crude!” I doubt that she cared for me very much more than I did for her: my Kansas background marked me as a clodhopper, and my daddy hadn’t belonged to the right clubs and I wasn’t a member of the right church. My total lack of upper-class credentials dumped me into that very large class of male human beings whom girls of that sort simply don’t consider as potential escorts, lovers, or husbands. For her I was just part of the furniture, like a gardener or a stable boy. “Yes,” I said, “I’ve met your kid sister.”