Mother's Disgrace

by Robert Dessaix

  When I saw real men I felt the anguish and so the desire. A little ambiguity, a little confusion over the signs, could make the anguish grow even more lushly. Jean-Paul Belmondo, for example, whose smooth skin made his manliness all the more piquant. Or a young Moroccan (not a sailor in a bar, where meanings are quite clear) in a flowing, pale-blue jelaba, say, or speaking knowledgeably about the Roman ruins at Volubilis, or even affectionately about his wife. Or a Bulgarian wrestler (I once spent a night on a train in Bulgaria locked in a compartment with five Bulgarian wrestlers, three stripped to the waist)—not in a head-lock, but more ambiguously engaged in self-display or horse-play with his rippling mates. In these sorts of situations, while I was married, I had no desire to penetrate or to be penetrated, I wanted to absorb in some way, merge with, fade into the penetrating masculinity. I would become a mirror, a kind of zero, reflecting back whatever would keep the display of masculinity flowing to feed my desire. But once the object of desire had moved away, the mirror was blank again. Nothing had been absorbed. And so the anguish would abate—until I saw another billboard, another Italian movie, another waiter, bus-driver, surfer or whatever. In Canberra you might see one such man a fornight. In Paris, on the other hand, there seemed to be at least half a dozen in every carriage on the metro.

  I made no serious attempt to assuage the anguish until the marriage broke up, which it did dramatically and painfully at exactly four o’clock one Sunday afternoon. In my experience all life’s major tragedies happen on a Sunday afternoon. On this particular Sunday afternoon I was sitting in a hotel room in Wellington, New Zealand, with my back to the room, peacefully writing a letter. It was a beautiful afternoon in late summer, the bay outside was gleaming in the sun and life was full of promise. Elizabeth was there to take up her first diplomatic posting at the High Commission just across the water, it was university vacation and I was spending a week or two with her, helping her settle in, buy a car, find her feet. I had to go back to Canberra the following morning because classes were about to start, but I expected to rejoin her there for longer later in the year. We were a modern couple. Living apart for a few months would be an adventure.

  So there we were in the hotel room, with the light from the water dancing on the wall I was facing at my desk and Elizabeth (I thought) reading quietly on the bed behind me. Suddenly the silence was broken with words I’ll never forget. ‘When you leave tomorrow morning,’ Elizabeth said, with the mixture of gentleness and brittleness her family is very good at, ‘I don’t want you to come back again.’ I’d have been less shocked if she’d machine-gunned me.

  It took about five years to recover fully from that sentence. It wasn’t just the suddenness (although that was brutal), it wasn’t just the awfulness of having to go to the airport the next morning and say goodbye forever, which was like dying and made me cringe for months at the mere sound of aircraft engines overhead, it wasn’t even just the loss of the sun in the middle of my firmament, which went black and silent and seemed infinitely dead. No, as much as anything it was having to face the fact that I’d failed at being a man. I’d failed humiliatingly for all to see at the single most important task a man has to perform: being married. I’d been taken on approval—not ‘for better or for worse, until death do us part’, as I had thought—and sent back. Faulty goods. Not sexually faulty so much, actually, in case you’re wondering, but not right for a husband. She’d found a better prospect.

  At first, not being married was like waking up alone in Bolivia one morning without any Spanish. It wasn’t just that I felt unhappy—I felt I did not exist. Once, during a failing attempt to patch things together again in New Zealand, I was driving in deep misery along a country road and suddenly realised that with a jerk of the driving wheel I could crash into something and die. All I had to do was jerk the wheel a fraction to the left or right. I was completely free to do this. So I jerked it and careered into a telegraph pole, snapping it off in the middle and plunging the entire town of Coromandel into darkness. Eventually a jolly policeman arrived, alerted by the power failure. He took one look at the mangled car and one look at me and said: ‘Well, you’re not a Maori and you’re not drunk, so I think we might just forget all about it!’ I walked stiffly, brokenly, across the road and caught a bus to the city. I felt cheap.

  To piece together a new self I needed a City. In the City you can try on many different masks and no one minds. In the City you’re dazzled with choices, you can go mad with them. In the City you can refashion yourself, reclothe yourself, lose yourself and no one’s outraged, no one finds you too foul or too askew or even too pure. There everything is permitted. Everything is not permitted in Canberra. When I went to see the bank manager at the university in Canberra to talk about letting my house while I experimented with Sydney, he was outraged. ‘Experiment!? Experiment!?’ He was seething. ‘No, you’ll have to sell up if that’s what you want to do. Why would you want to experiment?’ I muttered something about being a bit bored in Canberra, now I was … well, single, so to speak. ‘Bored!’ he spat. ‘Look, I’m so bored I could chew the leg off this table! But I don’t go gallivanting around the country experimenting, do I?’ I sold the house as quickly as I could, farewelling and thanking every room as I always do when I leave a house (taking what Germaine Greer would call ‘spiritual precautions’), and left for Sydney post haste. It was 1978.

  Sydney in 1978 seemed to me to be the most voluptuously exciting city on earth. Paris was too stuffy and narcissistic, forever admiring its own reflection, New York was full of feral dangers and people who talked about their mental health ad nauseam, Tunis and Tangiers were too penetratingly male, too easy to misread, and all of them, to an Australian (and I know I must be careful how I put this) were strangely provincial. Huge, of course, in the case of Paris and New York, but impenetrably self-absorbed. They thought they were the mothers of civilisation.

  Sydney had fewer illusions about itself, was less caught up in its own little rituals of decorum, was more raffish, unpredictable and friendly. It was certainly the best place in Australia to experiment with being what people now called ‘gay’. I didn’t think of myself as ‘gay’ when I arrived. I thought of myself as sexually attracted to both women and men—certain women and certain men, although men were certainly more erotically arousing to me. It’s hard to explain why. Perhaps, as I can’t help suspecting, it’s as deeply rooted as genetic makeup, perhaps my brain didn’t get the required number of hormone washes (not everyone’s does, after all), but I talked to myself about it differently. When I tried to explain it to myself rationally (the Gallic gene in the ascendant), I was inclined to think in terms of (homosexual) men being more excitingly ambiguous, perverse, disruptive of expectations, polymorphous, at least with other men. A man, I found, indeed lots of men, could be John Wayne, Liza Minnelli, John Travolta and Sandra Dee all in the space of half an hour. Quite a diapason. And if I could learn to loosen up a bit and stop playing a sort of virginal Ben Kingsley every time to all these leads, the combinations could be quite astonishing, although John Wayne was only ever a distant possibility for me, I must admit. There was, too, to be frank, a tendency amongst some Australian males, which I suppose Asian men and women in Australia are only too aware of, to assume that if you were smallish, neatly put together and smooth-skinned, your pleasure must climax in being spreadeagled and impaled, not always deftly. If this tendency asserted itself too abruptly, you had to work quickly to bring out the Sandra Dee dimension in your partner.

  All things considered, admitting that there may be many exceptions to the rule, I didn’t find that women invited the same diversity of sexual responses. Heterosexual relations appeared to me much more unidirectional in their basic thrust, much less tolerant of a range of sexual personae and much more fixated on the sexual bond. It may appear paradoxical, but for all the emphasis on sexual desirability and indeed on performance in the gay world, in my experience homosexuality actually shifts at least the moral weight off sexual bonding and onto
other equally if not more important things. In our kind of basically Christian society, morality is almost a synonym for sexual morality. To be moral means, above all, to be sexually moral: that is, to copulate indefinitely with only one person, under contract, a person you have fine feelings for. Such is the moral weight imposed on the sexual bond that in some societies, including supposedly Christian ones, murder is seen as a lesser crime than breaking this sexual bond. Personally, I think slitting one pig’s throat is infinitely more immoral than a pleasant evening’s copulation with a friend or pick-up. Slitting the pig’s throat, however, disrupts no social structures at all, whereas random couplings always have that potential. Gayness, whether it means to or not, undermines this tedious sexual basis to ‘morality’. In the end it allows you to concentrate more on what the Church would see as spiritual qualities—selflessness, consideration, affection, friendship, loyalty, constancy, love, intelligence, tolerance, patience—than on sexual bonding. That, at least, has been my experience.

  In Sydney in 1978, and for the next four or five years, it was easy for a man or woman wanting to experiment with his or her gayness to do so. Gayness, as I found, is not the same as homosexuality. Tangiers, for example, is stiff with homosexuality—it’s offered on the beach, around hotel swimming pools, in the alleys of the casbah, at bus-stations, in cafés and in restaurants. Waiters offer it, streetboys offer it, merchants, guides, bellboys, schoolteachers out for a stroll, half the male population offers it, all you’ve got to do is stand still for thirty seconds. But Tangiers is completely devoid of gayness, except for the odd watering-place where Europeans gather. Sydney, on the other hand, or at least the Annandale to Bondi belt, was defiantly gay. There were homosexuals dotted about in other parts of the city as well, of course, and homosexual acts, we must presume, were committed all over the place from 1788 onwards (and, needless to say, before 1788, but we’re talking about the city). But gayness as such was an inner-city phenomenon, the Annandale to Bondi belt was the hive the bees clustered around, performing their rituals and establishing a culture, which is what gayness is all about. A kind of gay culture, under a different name, had existed in the Eastern suburbs for almost a hundred years, only half-concealed, but by 1978 it was blossoming lushly around Darlinghurst and Paddington. A stroll up Oxford Street in those days revealed a flourishing subculture, not just homosexuals on the prowl. To the out-of-towner it was confrontingly clear that in these seedy, down-at-heel streets and lanes and in the nearby suburbs people were experimenting with a new set of rituals and rites, new value-systems, new readings of history and new political agendas, and they were talking to each other about them in their own newspapers and books and in their own cafés and pubs. Homosexuality was being positively celebrated, as well as practised and theorised about. To a confused young man from Canberra it was a heady experience.

  The gay subculture in Sydney also provided a number of examples of that most civilised, most erotically efficient of institutions: the bathhouse. Whereas you might go to a Cairo hammam or for that matter to a Moscow banya principally to clean out the clogged pores, to take your ease and, of course, to socialise, you would go to a gay bathhouse for all those reasons as well as to divert yourself sexually in a variety of ways. In a highly ritualised way, at the bar, in dimly lit mazes, at the pool table, in the whirlpool—but rarely in the toilets or under the showers, the traditional sites for repressed sexuality to reveal itself—whirlwind courtships (half an hour, five minutes, ten seconds sometimes) were engaged upon, and sometimes consummated, week-long, month-long, even lifelong friendships were begun, affairs took wings, fantasies were lived out, desire was given its head. To those outside on the street—perhaps even to those who might sometimes go inside—this was an illicit zone. But once inside you found the ‘illicit’ had become magically the norm. These clubs did an enormous amount to subvert the preposterous notion that sex must be accompanied by certain sentiments (love, loyalty and so on) in order to be legitimate. As a social control mechanism this notion works reasonably well and quite often in favour of a controlling class which has nothing but disdain for the morality involved, but that’s about all that can be said for it, surely. As a character in Dennis Altman’s novel The Comfort of Men says, ‘I’ve always felt it was fine to be able to separate sex from emotion. The real perversity is to assume the two always go together.’

  Still, it was in none of these cabarets, cafés or bathhouses that, in the end, I met Peter. I met train-drivers and professors of philosophy, wheat-farmers, German tourists, jewellers, gardeners, schoolteachers, telephonists, actors, doctors, a plethora of solicitors, Maltese migrants, a Chinese financier or two, ballroom-dancing instructors, theological students, at least two Aboriginal activists, painters, no dockers, but social workers, physiotherapists, at least one nationally known RSL official, a pilot or two, dozens of New Zealanders, fathers of four, rabid Christians, car-mechanics—truly a colourful cross-section of the middle and lower classes, people more often than not that I would be unlikely to talk to intimately, let alone become attached to, in any other context. But no one I wanted to link up with indefinitely or who wanted to link up indefinitely with me. It took another quantum leap for that to happen.

  It was five o’clock one December afternoon in Paddington and I was at the end of my tether. December is a cruel month for the emotionally insecure. At six o’clock D. was going to drop in—I’d been infatuated with him for a year and a half, our Rorschachs always sliding past each other, gripping just enough to make bliss seem possible, then inching on again—and something told me that today at six, this being December, he would say something to hurry up the process of grinding past each other. I remember sitting upstairs in the stuffy back bedroom of my minuscule Paddington terrace (tourists buses used to stop outside for Japanese tourists to point and laugh and take photographs), gazing out over the swooning city, saying to myself out loud: ‘Do something! Do something! Don’t just be a chequer on someone else’s chequer-board.’ Or words to that effect—my psychiatrist had told me to refuse to be a doormat, but I had lots of other metaphors at the ready. I really only had half an hour or so to act on my own advice. The mail was cleared at 5.30 and then and there I decided to place a Personal Advertisement. Ever since Nation Review had first startled me with its blunt announcements of sexual availability (‘Slim male, forty-two, into raunchy times, dining-out, seeks non-smoking …’ or ‘Well-hung bi guy, clean-shaven, own pad, wants … No fatties or fems’) I’d been aware of this option, but it had seemed dangerous, desperate and doomed to failure. In other words, exciting but vulgar. What would happen if you placed an ad and were then plagued by wizened perverts wanting to tie you up and eat spaghetti out of your armpits? Or, worse, tie you to the bed and then set fire to your house (which happened to a friend of a friend of mine)? Or, if you answered someone else’s anonymous ad, what if he turned out to be someone you knew well in an impossibly different capacity? What if, now armed with your telephone number or address, he turned out to be a psychopath or an amiable bore who wouldn’t go away? The possibilities for humiliation seemed endless. But I took pen in hand, wrote out a scrupulously honest ad, pretending to be nothing I wasn’t and emphasising a liking for a sense of humour, and dashed down to the post with it right on 5.30. I had acted. I had opened up a window in the wall.

  The conversation at six did go badly, but in January replies to my ad started to trickle in. One of them was from someone I knew, as I discovered on entering the coffee-shop we’d agreed to meet in, one of them was from a tedious Irish comic, but I quickly learnt the drill. Never arrange to have dinner—it leaves the evening too open-ended, always make a date for lunch or coffee with another appointment looming, never expect anything. ‘Blessed is he who expecteth little,’ as Tom used to say, ‘for he generally getteth it.’ Then he’d laugh. In fact, I seemed to hit the jackpot. I got a charming, witty letter from a P.T. in Potts Point, he invited me to a tasteful lunch (ratatouille) in one of those huge old terraces in Victori
a Street, with views out over the city, the Opera House and the bridge, we decided neither of us was physically quite the other’s living fantasy and then started slowly to fall in love. With all sorts of things about each other that I suppose neither of us now, after all these years, can imagine living without. Dynamic knitting was the key. After two weeks or so, Peter said in that thought-through, deeply felt but unemotional way he has sometimes: ‘If we keep seeing each other, I will fall in love with you and stay with you for good.’ This was thrillingly disconcerting. Two weeks became three, three weeks became three months and then three years and now much longer. Marriage seems to me a messy, dishonest arrangement by comparison.

  Seven years later, on the balcony at Manly, Yvonne could not have sensed the layers of story—the interweaving sub-plots, the disruptions—behind lunch with her son and his friend in a middle-class suburban house with tasteful wallpaper, a Baluchi on the floor, a Salvatore Zofrea on the wall, Sepik drums on the stairs and a vegetable garden and banana palm out the back. Only when she reads these lines with you will the picture acquire some depth. Not all of it will please or comfort her. It’s not the whole truth, of course, but it’s one way of trying to tell it.

  6.

  Full Circle

  ‘What on earth do you want to bring that up for?’ grandmother said when eventually, some months after Yvonne and I first met, Yvonne dared mention my name to Mother. ‘Have the girls said anything to you? Because if they have I’ll really take them to task.’ (‘The girls’, you might remember, must be in their seventies.) In my mind’s eye the heavy cedar sideboard is glinting in the half-dark behind them. It was as if Yvonne had been tastelessly harping on the subject for days, but, as you know, she hadn’t raised it for nearly half a century. No one had.