“Well, you have imagination, you’ve already guessed the end of the tale. The Emperor walks naked through the streets, all his subjects laugh at him, and the Emperor thinks, ‘What a lot of damned fools the people are.’ Well, of course, two things are to be seen in the story — a secular rebellion against authority, and what Hibbler called the ‘humorous ghetto defense.’ You were certainly aware that the trickster was a little tailor. But what interests me is the use you’ve put the story to, your interesting reversal of it. It was the clothes, of course. You have managed to become invisible inside them!
“What are you, a voyeur? Do you ride piggyback past the girls’ bathhouse? You don’t even blush. Invisible again. Marvelous. Use it. Use it. I see your deference to me. Any other lad your age would already begin to be restless, uneasy at my words. Not you. You hang on each one. I knew I wasn’t wrong about you. What do you get out of it, I wonder? Ah, never mind, you won’t tell me. You couldn’t. Yet I think I can find a way to use you. You see, James Boswell Voyeur, we have a perfect relationship. You bite your lips and stare and I bite my lips and am an exhibitionist. Marvelous. There are things you could do, Boswell. You could be, for example, a great biographer. Magnificent. No, no, I see not. That would put you in the game. Nothing must ruin your splendid non-intervention. How did you get so wise at only seventeen? Ah, you’re a devil, Boswell.
“All right, why not? I have made doctors, scientists, bankers, artists, presidents. Why not a bum? Why not a great bum?”
He was making fun of me, I thought. All his confessions, his disappointment at my age, his talk about what life was all about and about my clothes were his way of deriding me. He was a sport, this old fellow. And he had known his man, all right. He had picked him from the fourth row — to the side. And why? Because he knew that was where I would be standing, would have to be standing. Oh, the great, the great, the wanton great, they kill for their sport. Then I thought, Do you think it’s easy to thrust someone’s fate at him? Do you think all you do is go up to a person and whisper, “Get thee to a nunnery,” “Pull that sword from that rock,” and that’s all there is to it? The boys in the back room know: none of us choose to run. So if they push a little bit, what then? It’s psychology, Boswell, psychology.
“What,” Herlitz said. “What did you say?”
“Nothing.”
“Louder.”
“Nothing. I didn’t say anything.”
He looked at me suspiciously. “Am I wrong about you? Am I?”
“I don’t know,” I said.
“It could be. I’m a man. Only a man. Men make mistakes. Let me look closer. You had something else in mind, then? Something better? Softer? More luxurious? Tell.”
“I don’t know,” I said. “I’m all alone. My mother, father — I have a baby already,” I said.
“Wealth, huh? A dynasty? You want to found a swimming pool and teach your child water safety? Never to point a rifle unless he means to kill? Remount horses which have thrown him? What to do with pits? To make a code of the smaller sanities? Well, Boswell, go somewhere else. I do not make men wealthy. I do not even make them happy. I only make them great.”
“Make me,” I said very quietly.
“Louder. Speak up. You are already invisible. Do not be inaudible too. Leave clues.”
“Make me. Make me great.”
“No,” he said. “I can’t because you are not great. I am no little tailor. There is no magic thread. I can’t make you great because you are not great. Perhaps you are not even very different. You are only a little interesting. You are Sancho Panza, Boswell. The second team. That’s not so bad, hagh?”
“Is that what you mean by a great bum?”
“Stop it. Voyeur! We both know what you are. Stop it! You’re trying to anger me. You’re too young and I’m too old. Boswell, you’re an utzer. You egg people on, hold their coats. I’ve already confessed a murder to you. Don’t be greedy. Now, now, it’s not a bad life. Really.”
It was as though he were trying to talk me into going into some sort of institution.
“Come,” he said. “Hand me my cane.”
I picked up the cane and gave it to him. “Is that all?” I asked.
Some reflex caused him to shudder. Then he straightened, and with the cane began to trace gentle, invisible rings. “Boswell,” he said, “you will grow handsome and straight and tall. You will please many hosts. Rooms will be aired against your arrival, towels fluffed and set across the foot of many beds. Train schedules will be checked, planes met, chauffeurs given instructions.” He advanced toward me, making passes with his cane. “You will sit, my friend, at the captain’s table.”
I could not watch the cane. I was afraid he was going to strike me with it. I looked down and closed my eyes. I could feel the cane stir the tops of my hairs as Dr. Herlitz waved it over me. “You will make a fourth,” he said, “hold rings, kiss brides, name children, have passports, hear confessions, drink saved wines. You will sit beside kings in the concert hall. Boswell. Voyeur, Eye, Ear, you will pull your chair beside the roaring fire. Boswell, Boswell, Go-between, Welcome Guest, Reliable Source, Persona Grata. I weep for you.”
He stopped. I opened my eyes. “What will I do?” I asked.
Herlitz stood before me. He seemed not to have heard me. Stiffly, awkwardly, he looked like someone who had just come out of a trance. He didn’t recognize me. “What will I do with my life?” I asked again.
Suddenly he dropped his cane. It rolled under the desk.
“What shall I do to live?” I pushed the desk out of the way and stooped and retrieved his cane.
“Oh, that,” he said. “Become a strong man.”
II
It was like a room inside a jungle. We moved with steamy abandon inside our glazy bodies, our muscles smoothly piling and meshing like tumblers in a lock. There was in the atmosphere a sort of spermy power, but a power queerly delicate, controlled, something not virginal but prudish, held back. Everywhere the taped wrist, the hygienically bandaged knee joint, the puckered, cottony whiteness of jockstrap gently balancing our straining balls. Even coming to the gym regularly I could never breathe that acidy air, moistened by the body’s poisons, without being struck by the fact that I was in a place of conservation, of a cautious, planned development of the body part, a sort of TVA of the flesh.
A gymnasium is not unlike a church, a bank. It has the same sense of dedication, of a giving over, a surrender to an overriding principle. It’s not God or money — it may not even be health, finally. Probably it’s just the development of the muscle itself, the aggrandizement of limbs and flesh, a cultivation as real and grand and impractical as the raising of any hothouse bulb. I had come to think of my fellows in the gym as one thinks of the members of some spiritual order. Even though I was one of them (you could not distinguish me from them; Herlitz was right), I felt the same mixture of admiration and fear I have felt about young priests.