“After all”—David would say, after they’d discussed it for the twentieth time, and David had acquiesced for the evening or not, depending on some standard of decision making known only to David himself—“it’s not as if you invented the taste for leather. It’s not even as if the gay community invented it. Think of the Marquis de Sade.”
James did think of the Marquis de Sade, and that was what bothered him. It was self-evident to him that no completely sane person could read de Sade without repulsion. De Sade loved not just the “bondage and discipline” so favored by the owners of Web sites and specialty stores, he loved pain, real pain, complete with blood and great gashing holes in the skin, holes that would cause scars and sometimes death. Sadism was not “bondage,” and it was not “discipline.” Sadism was not playacting either. It lived not on suburban streets where middle-class couples made videotapes of themselves pretending to be masters and slaves, but in the soundproofed back rooms of skid-row storefronts, where you could buy the literature in the front and everything else you wanted in the back. He had been in a room like that exactly once, during a terrified trip he had taken to New York City while he was still in college. He had known in no time at all that he would never be back, in spite of the fact that it had been the best and most obliterating sex of his life. He was not David, and he would never be David. He would not call himself “gay.” He would not start “coming out” and campaigning for “gay rights.” At the same time he felt he owed it to the whole history of men like himself not to be what the straight world expected of him, and what he’d seen in that back room was far too much what the straight world expected of him. It was the dignity of his position that mattered to him. He had an obligation to preserve it for himself and to maintain it for the sake of everybody else who might want to occupy a similar one.
The second thing James had done after he’d talked to Marta Coelho was to gather up all the leather things from their different places around the apartment. He had been much too nervous about having them to have felt comfortable about keeping them together in one place. They were scattered around in drawers in both the bedroom and the living room. They were hung up in the closets, safely hidden in opaque cleaner’s bags that zipped shut and couldn’t be taken off their hangers without a struggle. He had laid them all out on his dining room table and gone through them withpainstaking concentration to make sure there was nothing on them that could be traced to him. He couldn’t imagine what there could be, but he didn’t put it past David to do something cute, like etch their initials in the soft underside of one of the restraints. There was nothing, and he had realized only at the last minute what a mess he would have been in if somebody had knocked on his door while he was in the middle of checking. Nobody had—but then, nobody had been knocking on anybody’s door much in the last few hours, since noon, when the first news began to trickle back to campus that something far more serious than a drug addiction had been going on with Mark DeAvecca.
He’d put the entire collection into two plain brown grocery bags, bags without so much as a few lines of printing on the sides, anonymous bags that could have come from anywhere. He had gone into Boston and taken them to The South End. He had never understood the lure of stores like the ones he saw there. There was something infinitely sad about the way the lights jumped and hammered, all to take the attention of their viewers away from the fact that there was nothing here but failure and resignation, the natural habitat of men who had given up. He had put the bags in two separate garbage cans, moving aside fast-food wrappers and cigarette butts and used condoms to make sure that his own garbage was not in plain sight of people on the street. He thought about the news stories that appeared from time to time about babies left in Dumpsters, and body parts discovered in antilittering receptacles, the police baffled, the public up in arms. When he got back to Boston proper, he stripped off his gloves and discarded them in the first garbage can he saw. They were good gloves, black leather lined with cashmere, but they had been in too much muck today. He didn’t think he would ever be able to wear them again or to trust them. Then he’d come back to Windsor, feeling infinitely tired. It had started to snow. The campus looked hyped up and jittery. The few people moving around it moved as if they had nothing to do.
He went back to his apartment and got his second-bestgloves from the top drawer of his dresser. He looked around his bedroom and thought with some satisfaction that anybody who entered it would find nothing but the possessions of a man who took himself and literature seriously. There would, of course, be no question about his “sexual orientation,” as they put it these days, but the indications of it would not be shameful, and they would not be stereotypical. Here was a man who liked Proust and Eliot, Dante and Raphael, John Donne and Emily Dickinson.