A Boy's Own Story by Edmund White Page A

pensive, well-coiffed women and middle-aged men in Irish knit sweaters with pipes and profiles. Because I knew these books were by living writers I looked down on them; my head was still ringing with the full bravura performance of history in the library-opera house. Those old books either had never owned or had lost their wrappers; the likenesses of their unpictured authors had been re-created within the brown, brittle pages. But these living writers—ah! life struck me as an enfeeblement, a proof of dimmed vitality when compared to the energetic composure of the dead whose busts, all carved beards and sightless, protuberant eyes, I imagined filling the empty niches above the opera doors under a portico, which was now home to sleeping bums and stray cats but once the splendid approach across diamonds of black-and-white-marble pavement to black-and-gilt doors opening on the brilliant assembly, the fans and diamonds and the magic fire circling the sleeping woman.
    At home I heard the muted strains of discordant music. One night my stepmother, hard and purposeful, drove back downtown unexpectedly to my father's office after midnight. Still later I could hear her shouting in her wing of the house; I hid behind a door and listened to my father's patient, explaining drone. The next morning Alice, my colleague, broke down, wept, locked herself in the ladies' room. When she came out, her eyes, usually so lovely and unfocused, narrowed with spite and pain as she muttered a stream of filth about my stepmother and my father (he'd tried to lure her to one of those fleabag hotels). On the following morning I learned she'd been let go, though by that time I knew how to get the endless mailings out on my own. She'd been let go—into what?
    That man's embrace around the waist set me spinning like a dancer across the darkened stage of the city; my turns led me to Fountain Square, the center. After nightfall the downtown was nearly empty. A cab might cruise by. One high office window might glow. The restaurants had closed by eight, but a bar door could swing open to impose on me the silhouette of a man; Shabby city of black stone whitened by starlings, poor earthly progeny of that mystic metal dove poised on the outstretched wrist of the goddess of the fountain.
    Men from across the river sat around the low granite rim of the basin—at least, I guessed they were hillbillies from their accents, a missing tooth, greased-back hair, their way of spitting, of holding a Camel cupped between the thumb and third finger, of walking with a hard, loud, stiff-legged tread across the paved park as though they hoped to ring sparks off the stone. Others sat singly along the metal fence that enclosed the park, an island around which traffic flowed. They perched on the steel rail, legs wide apart, bodies licked by headlights, and looked down, into the slowly circling cars.
    At last a driver would pause before a young man who'd hop down and lean into the open window, listen—and then the young man would either shake his head or spit or, if a deal had been struck, swagger around to the other side and get in. Look at them: the curving windshield whispers down the reflection of a blinking neon sign on two faces, a bald man behind the wheel whose glasses are crazed by streaks of green light from the dashboard below, whose ears are fleshy, whose small mouth is pinched smaller by anxiety or anticipation. Beside him the young man, head thrown back on the seat so that we can see only the strong white parabola of his jaw and the working Adam's apple. He's slumped far down and he's already thinking his way into his job. Or maybe he's embarrassed by so much downtown between fantasy and act.
    They drive off, only the high notes from the car radio reaching me.
    That night, however, I had no comfortable assumptions about who these men were and what they were willing to do. I crossed the street to the island, ascended the two steps onto the stone platform—and sat down