Free The Beautiful Room Is Empty by Edmund White Page A

usually attributed to the eyes had been annulled by this extreme close-up: nothing left but motility. “The quick,” I thought, as in the phrase, “The quick and the dead.”
    Then I exploded, he flushed and shot out of his booth, the door to the hall sighed shut behind him, and I was alone with the faintly blue light filtering down through overhead frosted glass onto white porcelain and with the sound of the leaking toilet and a paw full of come, which I licked clean and swallowed like a savage or a cat. If I’d had the courage, I would have advised my anthropology class that primitive man believes in the conservation of energy through the recycling of bodily fluids.
    I was a Buddhist, or would have been if I could have given up this hankering after a penis attached to two furry legs below and one Cyclopean eye above, as black and wobbly as black-currant jelly. Because of my Buddhist longing for peace, I’d decided to study Chinese. Wherever I went—fraternity house, dorm room, student union, dinner party, toilet—I had my handmade flashcards with me. Chinese character on one side, on the other its pronunciation and correct tone above the definition, or rather dated definitions, since meanings shifted over the centuries.
    We were just a handful of students clustering three nights a week around our conversation teacher in the one lit classroom in an otherwise dark building. The stairs creaked. Our teacher, an ageless Chinese woman in a dark blue lusterlesssilk dress, asked me in Mandarin to run out and see if it was a strange “nose person” (bi ren) —and in that instant we kids, all Caucasian, learned that’s what the Chinese called us because of our big noses. Our teacher clapped a hand over her mouth under her own suitably snub nose and blushed.
    We called her the “straight lady,” because she could have been drawn entirely in straight lines, her pageboy and bangs, her eye slits and thin wrists, her breastless body. She was quite proud of her up-to-date attitudes (she was both a Methodist and a lifetime member of the YWCA), but she retained odd scraps of folk wisdom (and the Chinese inability in English to distinguish between he and she ). She said to me, “You look tired” (pronounced “tod”), “very, very tod. Me too, I always tod. One day I look at my dog and say, ‘Why he never tod? She never tod.’ Then I realize he never tod ’cause she sleep all the time. Now I sleep all the time too. When I have moment between class or food cook, I sleep. I sleep all the time. I never tod.”
    Through her and a Chinese social club I met a large group of students from Taiwan and Singapore. Two girls, Betty and Kay, invited me and other friends to an enormous dinner served Chinese-style with no tea (“Tea is for every time of the day except mealtime,” they explained) and dozens of tiny plates flying through the air, and, in the center of the table, big bowls of soup and steamed rice.
    Somehow I’d imagined Chinese women would be—well, Japanese, that is, modest, self-effacing, tittering. But, in fact, Kay, who wore her black hair held back by a wide pink band, was strong enough to defy her family’s insistence that she study medicine or law. All her Chinese friends had an artistic bent, but she alone had the courage to pursue a music degree (she played Chopin études for us on her overly live upright). And she and all her friends loved to tease, not titter, andeven played rough practical jokes on one another. Her roommate Betty, women’s tennis champ of Hong Kong, was minuscule and looked no older than fifteen, though she was finishing a doctorate in chemistry. She was wound too tight and kept gaining time; obsessively efficient, she was able all at once to run up a dress, jot down a stream of formulae, practice her backhand, bicycle to the lab, and plan an elaborate evening of amateur theatricals to spoof several friends.
    At the dinner, Kay decided to test how gullible and distracted a friend of hers,