The Beautiful Room Is Empty Read Online Free PDF Page B

table? But if I can be famous and lonely with you, I’ll give it a whirl.”
    Because I admired Maria, I wanted to be like her—or like the image of me she cherished. She said that I liked everyone so much and entered into everything so readily that life became more exciting around me. “How dull my life seems when you’re away,” she’d complain. But what she considered my enthusiasm for everything was really nothing but my love for her. To woo her I would inject color and motion into accounts of insipid events and sluggish thoughts. Since she was so intellectual, I too led the life of the mind—but with conviction only when I was with her.
    Alone, back in my dormitory room, I’d become distracted by the small changes percolating through my body (an itch crystallizing on my knee, a cough scrabbling to get out ofmy chest, advancing and retreating armies of impatience and lassitude) and I’d toss aside Bergson’s Metaphysics or Santayana’s The Sense of Beauty , neither of which seemed likely to become an after-dinner story or a how-to book. My sense of guilt was too pressing to leave me the calm needed to contemplate the sense of beauty. With Maria I could take up such a question, perhaps, because my urge to keep her entertained led me to juggle with whatever I was handed by circumstance. The glamour of intellectual effort was on me. I pictured a dim study in a German town and could almost smell the hard, shaved face and touch the manicured, spatulate fingers of the great thinker as he sat in the glow penetrating the green glass shade of his desk lamp … But the second I was alone, this phantasm faded, the great thinker scratched his leg, longed to be somewhere he’d feel less tense, less empty. I liked to think I was a Buddhist disillusioned with the world, but I was caught in Maya’s strong silk cords. I never doubted the world could make me happy, if only it would give in.
    To make it relent, I was refining all the seducer’s skills—his ready sympathy, his tight focus on the prey, his anxiety to entertain, his ulterior mission to lead every conversation toward surrender and conquest. The seducer grows ardent only in pursuit. Left to his own devices he feels shabby, the half-mask cast aside and worthless at dawn, even though last night it had flattered the face it had concealed. In conversation I took my cue from every smile or flicker of exasperation I read in Maria’s face; alone, trying to reconstruct my warmth on the page, I’d turn stupid, lumpish.
    Maria laughed at herself, teased me, and liked it when I made jokes at my own expense. The sudden shift of perspective that the long shot of humor required became habitual to me, something I’ve kept, though with less satisfaction than the practice is supposed to bring.
    That summer, Maria went to Solitaire, an artists’ colony in the Michigan woods, and in August my father let me join her for a week.
    All of June and July I’d worked as a stockboy for my father’s haberdasher—boxing and mailing garments, waiting on customers when things got busy, making deliveries, and endlessly repolishing showcases and restacking shirts and stockings. Now riding a train by myself through the hot, flat countryside seemed a rare freedom. I was free to eat, read, and doze when I wanted, to watch the afternoon light burn on silver grain elevators, to swoop past airless fields of luxuriant green and gaunt farmhouses or dilapidated barns painted long ago with now-faded Bull Durham chewing tobacco signs. The train hurtled through towns where cars waited at the crossing and a collie peered down its long nose at an alley cat and the sun found over there a single small window to dazzle—just as I imagined God, if He existed, might find in a whole crowd only one soul turned at the right angle to reflect His glory. And there, bordering that two-lane highway, was planted a row of signs that, word by word, asked a question, gave the joking answer, and ended with the name of a