Maybe—Tomorrow

GAYLORD LE CLAIRE LOVED THE space around him, the furniture, the rug, the etching, all of it. But as he looked around, he longed for something else. Longed for some demonstration to equal the bitter violence he felt within himself. He looked again at the etching and shutting his eyes, wished desperately for something to happen. The time was approaching for him to have a girl and act like a grown man instead of like a timid, adolescent child. Why, why, he cried within himself, can't I be like fellows my age … why can't I feel grown up. He stood still a second longer, a helpless figure in the brightness of the room. Somewhere, somehow, he was certain that in the pattern before him lay the answer to the old conundrum of his life. It was all dim and puzzling, baffling with its secret, and as he sought to understand, it blurred and spun even more before his closed eyes.

For many months he had felt this uneasiness grow. No one he knew was beset with the melancholia, emotional frigidity, or feminine symbolisms he found in himself. And instead of decreasing, as they should, they grew with each passing day. He wanted to fight them, but how? He could not fight things he didn't understand. Why couldn't he understand them. Why couldn't he be at ease among boys his age instead of drawing meekly away. Oh, if only he could. That would at least be one accomplishment.

With a feeling suspended between erotic hunger and intellectual curiosity, he thought of Joe Konarik. Joe Konarik. Big man. A father and only seventeen. His age. He could see Joe's huge physique turning over and over in the slow spiral, moving away from their schoolroom. From time to time one hand held a baby, while the other held the hand of his pregnant wife. The loose dress was at last all he saw of her and then Joe's face came back boyish yet manly in its youthfulness.

The vision left him with an uneasy feeling of being anchorless, adrift on an unknown substance. He did not sob, or weep like ordinary boys. He cried with a despairing stridency, like an animal, bound and helpless, which is being flayed alive with stones and cannot bear its agony.

He thought of Robert Blake. It came out of itself from deep within him. And as he looked admiringly at Blake's clear image, in the back part of his mind there was just a ghost of a suspicion it wasn't quite the proper feeling he should have.

I can't help feeling this way about Bob, he thought hotly. There's nothing wrong in liking him, admiring him. I only wish I were like him.