The Beautiful Room Is Empty by Edmund White

Author:Edmund White [White, Edmund]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi, pdf
ISBN: 978-0-307-76446-1
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2012-04-03T16:00:00+00:00

That summer, Maria flew home to Iowa and my mother went to Europe for two months. She left me twenty-five dollars a week to live on and the key to her apartment. She’d estimated that the allowance was large enough to feed me and small enough to force me into getting a summer job. I did work for a while loading trucks all night. To get the job I had to tell the boss I’d be staying on in the autumn. I’d dropped out of school, I said, and wasn’t seeking just summer employment. But once I started working, the other men drew me aside, one by one, to tell me that I must go back to school. “Don’t get stuck here,” they said. “It’s shit. It’s a dead end.”

In the sweaty Chicago night we’d squat bare-chested inside the holds of semis, stacking cartons. Our sweating hands and arms would leave phantom brown prints on the tan cardboard boxes. My partner, a beer-bellied man whose five-o’clock shadow had deepened to midnight by dawn, never spoke to me; I could imagine marrying him, living in a trailer with him, and cooking him meatloaf. On the third night we worked together he finally opened up. He told me that when he was a teenager his father, a young doctor, had died suddenly of a heart attack. No insurance. My partner had been the oldest boy and had gone to work to support his mother and to send the three younger kids through college. “But I got stuck. Now they’re all in professions with nice homes in the suburbs and they’re ashamed of me, don’t like me coming around. So I’m stuck in this shit job.”

We talked about books. He liked Stefan Zweig and Nelson Algren. And he liked Beethoven, especially the symphonies. When he talked about books and music, his flat Midwestern voice (he pronounced milk as “melk” and wash as “warsh”) warmed up, almost as though through the smoked window of his face I could see a young man approach, smile, then go away.

Two nights later he stopped talking, and when he had to say something he mumbled. Once again every noun was double-decked by “fuckin’ ” or “mother-fuckin’.”

I’d return to my mother’s skyscraper apartment, my face fierce in its warpaint of dirt, my T-shirt clinging to my wet body. The city at last was cool and the streets had run dry of traffic. I’d bow my head under the shower for twenty minutes, scarcely moving, then stand nude in the window and watch the city below slowly constructing itself like coral under incoming tides of light.

My father had told me his father had become a professor so he wouldn’t have to work the fields of his parents’ Texas farm. Now I understood my grandfather perfectly. I felt pride in my strength and shame over my position just as the other men did. No one respected them for their labor in a country where the idea of honorable poverty had vanished. And yet we had done something, we’d loaded transcontinental trucks.

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