Free The Beautiful Room Is Empty by Edmund White

above crisp white ribbed athletic socks. A silence like a storm cloud gathered over the room, blocking out the hall noises. He tapped his foot slightly; I tapped mine. Then two taps, matched by two of mine. Three and three.
    And without further prelude, he sank to his knees shoving his brown thighs and white groin under the partition, and I also knelt to feast on his erection, inhaling the clean smell of soap, my hands exploring the lichee-size testicles, then traveling up smooth skin. I’d dreamed about this moment so long that now I wanted to freeze the frame.
    In my anthropology class I was learning that although man had started off as an animal subject to natural selection, he had soon begun to evolve in a direction determined purely by culture. Human beings stood upright to free their hands, they needed their hands to hold tools, the tool-and-weapon-wielding parts of their brains developed to accommodate their newly prehensile grasp, language was enabled by tool-wielding—but now, if culture were yanked out from under us, we’d be destroyed, like one of those cartoon cats who scamper off a branch and tread thin air until sudden awareness makes them plummet.
    Here, under my gaze, was this creature half-natural but half-invented by himself. The tan line suggested poolside swimsuit, frosted glass, sunglasses—everything as symbolic as the life pictured by advertisements. But the hickory-hard straining of this cock upward spelled animal—a straight line of ascent inflating slightly as the balls rose and tightened for blast-off, a thrust that propelled life upward. The cleanness, however, the feathery lightness of the blond hairs, the neatness of the circumcision were all preppy, while the heavy hamstrings (and now the jets of semen filling my mouth) were primate.
    For an instant I stayed attached to him, though hereI was on a dirty tile floor on hands and knees before a stranger I’d seen only from the waist down but whom I remember to this day because he’d presented himself so fearlessly, because his body, at least the half of it I knew, seemed ideal, and because his desire was so strong it was as expressive as words or deeds, the things that normally define individuals.
    Then he was gone. His exit was so hasty I couldn’t see him, just a flash of blond hair and white shirt collar through the narrow vertical slit of my sentry box. I waited patiently for someone else.
    I was alone with my sexuality, since none of these men spoke to me, nor did I even know their faces, much less their names. Their most intimate tender parts were thrust under the stone partitions, like meals for prisoners, but if I poked my head under the partition and glanced up at them, they’d hide their faces with their hands as a movie star wards off a flash. I’d rush from one toilet to another between classes. Sometimes all four stalls in Main Hall or all eight in the union would be occupied, full house. I’d wait for someone to emerge, but if no one did I would realize I was spoiling their fun and leave. Perhaps my presence was interrupting an orgy that would resume the second I left and even now eight doors concealed eight erect penises.
    Someone with a convict’s patience had drilled a dime-size hole in one of the marble slabs in Main Hall. I’d sit on the toilet, suddenly remember the hole was here, between this stall and the next, look up and see a black pupil glossy, quivering. If the eye persisted in its liquid restlessness, at once thoroughly anonymous and shockingly vulnerable, I’d look back toward this live camera, this unseen seer. I stood up to expose my erection. I posed a bit self-consciously, turning halfway toward my audience while still keeping my feetforward in the usual position so as not to arouse suspicion in anyone outside glancing at the floor.
    His lashes squeezed shut for a second as he blinked. The effect through the judas was of a carnivorous plant swallowing a black, trembling life. The soul and intelligence