The young girls he knew and was occasionally allowed to speak to were different from these women. Once he touched his finger to the finger of a neighbor’s daughter, older than he was, and he felt a sudden tingling rush to his groin, and he withdrew his hand quickly. These young girls, the ones his age, their skin was milk, not cream, and their scent was floral, without the metallic aftertaste that made the sweetness sharp, that made the sweetness burn him to the heart. At night, in bed, he kissed the skin of his own forearm, imagining he was kissing one of the women his father knew.
In his dreams, as now in his fever, the women came to him, held him in their arms. He was never apart from them. When he sat in church or ran across the schoolyard with the other boys, he knew at every minute where they stood and whether or not they were watching him.
He never spoke of it. He never talked to his brother, or his father. He knew they knew. He knew that when his mother read the long passages from the Bible which they suffered through every night and morning, he knew that his father and his brother knew as well as he what the stories were really about.
They were about how the world began with one man’s hunger for one woman, how the serpent’s venom ran through every man’s veins so that he could not forget himself in work or sleep, but only in a woman’s arms.
Lust. It was about lust, and lust was his sin, and hell would be his natural home forever. His manners were perfect; his demeanor was calm and dignified; his longings were painful beyond endurance.
At fifteen, he would bite his pillow in the dark and silent house, and scream his muffled lust until his throat hurt. His hands were tired from groping, and eight or ten times a day he would find his hands inside his pants, his pants around his ankles, his thin hips thrusting into his fist. Afterward, more times than not, he would feel the sharp stab of his mother’s needle. A pain so severe that sweat would break out on his forehead, his hands grow clammy and the small of his back damp. It was a pain that ran upward from his groin through every vein in his body, like the first sting of the nettles. And the more it happened, the more he hated God.
After that first time, he never touched a girl. He felt that the violence of his desire, the rotted malevolence of his lust would kill any woman he touched. He believed it literally, and his belief did not waver. He felt he was dying of some disease that had no symptoms and that he could not name, but he knew it would kill others as well as himself as sure as typhoid, as sure as a knife to the heart.
He was born wicked. He would die wicked. Sometimes a woman would touch him by accident, would sit with him on a step, for instance, with a thigh brushing his thigh, and he knew that this woman would die, and he would move his leg, would move away until he found himself alone in a quiet room, his pants around his ankles, the pleasure followed by the serpent’s certain fang.
His father was a man. His father had touched his mother and had not died or killed. Still, he knew what he knew.
Everywhere he turned he saw evidence and heard gross rumors that what would surely happen to him was already happening to others. Women ripped out their insides with knitting needles. Men spat in their wives’ faces and dropped dead of heart attacks. People photographed their dead babies in tiny coffins; the black silk dresses were stiff as dead flesh. Lust was a sin and sin was death and he was not alone, but he was in pain, constant pain, and there was no one to tell.
He was mistaken, of course, although he knew it only years later. Almost anyone could have told him he was wrong, if he had found a way to describe to anyone the terror he felt. If he had found someone to tell. But there were no words for it at the time, the sure and deadly mark of that serpent’s bite.
He grew tall and handsome. His father was rich, and this he learned not from his mother or father, but from the taunting of other boys in the schoolyard, in the fact that all the boys he knew had fathers who worked for his father. As strict as mothers in the town were, any mother would have sold her daughter to Ralph Truitt for a dollar.
His mother prayed over him. His father read to him from the Morte D’Arthur, the old stories of the round table and the Grail, and wanted him to be educated in the city. His sweet brother had neither the head nor the blood for business, and his father demanded that the empire he was building every day must last after his death. Ralph understood he was marked for the inheritance.
Ralph didn’t long for his father’s life. He longed for the life of Lancelot du Lac, who woke from a sleep to find four queens under four silk parasols gazing down upon him. Lancelot’s mother, the Lady of the Lake, sending him into the world to be a knight, letting him go though she loved him and feared for his soul, explained the difference between the virtues of the heart and the virtues of the body. The virtues of the body are reserved for those who are fair of face and strong of body, but the virtues of the heart, being goodness and kindness and compassion, are available to anybody.
Such is the sweetness of boys that Ralph believed these words with all his heart, even as he believed the virtues of goodness would always be denied to him, and that he would never be tall or handsome or wanted. He felt displaced in his body, homeless in his heart.
And so, Lancelot left his mother and ventured into the world, where he was strong and brave and utterly helpless in the face of women. His purity and his strength and beauty and courage were doomed to end in failure and corruption. He would never see the Holy Grail. Lancelot’s helpless lust destroyed the world, not his strength, and Ralph understood all this as his father read to him. Ralph felt the hot tears in his eyes.
Lust and luxury. In the end, the virtues of the body came easily to Ralph. Believe what he might, he was tall, and good-looking and strong and rich. The virtues of the heart were unknown to him, and through his mother’s incessant prayer, he knew, whatever they were, he would never have them. She sat in a bare church on a plain wooden bench and saw heaven. He sat next to her and thought of nothing but naked women and rich surroundings, silk parasols and fine carriages and endless pleasure.
His love of women, and his fear of them, of his death and theirs, grew into a hatred that never abated. It took away the sweet and left only the sharp. His childhood was desire and nightmare mixed inextricably.
He went to Chicago, to university. Away from his mother’s tireless harangue, he was free to spend his days and nights in the pursuit of pleasure. He learned easily. He was popular. He despised himself when he was alone, so he rarely was. He developed a taste for champagne and the sight of naked women in hotel rooms. He saw each of these women only once; afraid of the infections his desire was seeding in them. They would have laughed at him with their cynical, musical voices. If they had known. He gave dinner parties in restaurants. He bought velvet sofas. He bought ancient paintings of naked saints, pierced by arrows. He had a tailor.
He was one of those men whose good looks are illuminated by their unawareness of them, a kind of ruddy shyness. He engaged in sex as though avoiding his reflection in a mirror, all hands and mouth, no eyes, and women found this endearing. His hungers were insatiable, his mouth sucking forward into his desire like a man’s in the desert dying of thirst.
His mother never wrote and he never went home. He played cards. He read the writings of philosophers. He read French poetry aloud to uncomprehending whores. He studied charts that predicted how money grows into wealth, and he studied the tout sheets at racetracks that predicted how bloodlines could turn into a nose across a wire.
His father sent money, what seemed an infinite amount of money. Ralph stopped writing his dutiful notes to his father, stopped going to university altogether for months at a time, until he would wake, one morning, with the taste of champagne in his mouth and long for the quiet of the scholastic life, the dusty library, the drone of professors’ voices. And despite this silence, every month, the same enormous amount of money would arrive in his checking account. His bankers would cluck and look at him with envy and hatred, but he was never denied a single penny.