Kid Gloves

by Adam Mars-Jones

  Dad had met Prince Charles and liked him, dutiful Welsh small talk and all. Both parents had attended his investiture in 1969, travelling on the special train laid on for the event, and buying the scarlet bentwood chairs, designed by Lord Snowdon, on which they had been seated while the Prince received his insignia, coronet, mantle, sword, gold ring and gold rod. In fact they had bought an extra chair, to match the number of their sons, prudently forestalling any future squabble over heirlooms.

  It seemed extraordinary to me that Dad should at short notice turn the heir to the throne into a latent but finally triumphing heterosexual. According to Dad Prince Charles had lain back and thought of Wales, and I should follow his example. Of course it wasn’t news that Dad had a tendency to tailor reality to the demands of fantasy. Keeping fantasy in check may have been one of the things that a life in the law did for him, by requiring him to finesse the facts rather than setting them aside. If I had suggested any ambiguity about Prince Charles’s sexuality before New Year’s Day 1978, Dad would have been outraged.

  That was his first gambit, the Princely Parallel. There were others over the next few days, the Auntly Ambush, the Bisexual Fork, the Bisset Surprise.

  Auntly Ambush. Dad asked me to find his address book and look up his Aunty Mary’s phone number. I was surprised by this sociable impulse. Were we planning family visits? It hardly seemed the time for that, the air being so strongly charged with tension.

  Aunty Mary, widowed since the 1950s, lived in Denbigh. It was true that we sometimes saw her over the Christmas holidays. She made mince pies, and had a little superstition about them. Each mince pie eaten between Christmas Eve and New Year’s Day guaranteed a lucky month, so it was necessary to get through a dozen to be fully protected, and each mince pie must be paid for with a kiss. Those kisses of hers, bristling and oddly intent, put me off facial hair for a while.

  I asked Dad why he wanted to speak to Aunty Mary. ‘I don’t,’ he said. ‘You’ll be doing the talking. Don’t you think you should tell her what you’ve told me? She’s family, isn’t she? She has a right to know.’ He started to dial the number, confident that I wouldn’t let him finish the process and make the connection.

  I went over to him and pressed down on the prongs of the phone, cutting off the call, and stayed there to prevent him from making another attempt. Dad’s Orson Welles side couldn’t be kept in check indefinitely. He got quite a lot of mileage out of using the telephone as a prop in our family theatricals.

  According to his script, if I had a duty to tell him about my sexuality (this was how I had described my situation), then likewise I must inform the rest of the family, directly. He had chosen Aunty Mary as the most rhetorically effective figure for this line of argument, someone so far removed by age and long-standing widowhood from the urges of the body that I would have to explain basic acts from scratch, pouring unwelcome information into the scandalized funnel of her Welsh-county-town-dwelling, Congregationalist-sermon-saturated ear. I explained that there was no need to explain myself to Aunty Mary because she wasn’t part of my life, while Dad was. This was true in its way, but perhaps he was noticing something else. I might be telling him how important a figure he was in my life, but I was also willing to risk being rejected, which suggested that I could get along without his approval – so how important was he really? If the family divided into two parts, widowed great-aunts kept in the dark about private perversions, and powerless patriarchs presented with deviant lifestyles as facts they had to adjust to, then perhaps Dad had ended up on the wrong wing.

  On 31 December when Dad had tried phoning Mum she had followed my advice and let it ring. After that, they spoke every day, as was their habit, usually last thing at night. These conversations were largely ritualized, and amounted essentially to billing and cooing, or Bill-ing and Sheila-ing perhaps. They seemed to feel the need for an exchange of endearments before bed when they were separated, as of course they often were with Dad on circuit. On occasions when I would be present at Mum’s side of the conversation, I noticed the slight technical difficulties she had with making a proper kissing sound, since after her accident in 1973 medication tended to make her lips dry.

  Now of course those phone calls had an extra layer of meaning to them. The Anglesey house wasn’t big, and though there was an extension in the master bedroom I inhibited telephone intimacy whether I wanted to or not. Usually Dad spoke on the sitting-room phone, without seeking privacy. I imagine Mum had asked lightly, ‘How are you two getting on?’, for Dad to answer with an undertone of weary irony, as he did, ‘We’re having some very interesting discussions. He’s full of surprises.’

  Over the days of wrangling I hoped that Dad would at some point acknowledge that in my own way I was standing up to him, something that dominant personalities are said to admire, though not all the evidence points that way.

  Bisexual Fork. One day Dad’s rhetoric took a startling new tack. ‘You’re right, Adam,’ he said. ‘My generation was brought up with a very simple sense of these things. When I say I’m heterosexual, I only mean that all my past experience has been with women. There’s nothing to stop me from being attracted to a man tomorrow. Wouldn’t you agree?’

  This was so different from his normal patterns of thought and speech that I was stupefied. Was the sly old thespian going to spring a coup de théâtre on me, revealing that he and his rather mousy clerk Mr Cant had been an item – lo, these many years! – that he hadn’t known how to tell me and was relieved to have someone to confide in at last?

  Not quite. I hesitated.

  ‘Don’t you agree?’

  There seemed no way out of it. ‘I suppose so …’

  ‘And by the same token, when you say you are homosexual, all you mean is that your experience to date has been homosexual.’ He pronounced the word, as was the way with his generation, with a long first syllable – even with the sounds we produced we showed we were talking about different things. ‘And just as I could have desires for a man, there’s nothing to stop you having desires for a woman tomorrow, isn’t that so?’ And we were back in Prince Charles territory, contemplating his experiments in self-cure by rutting.

  The Bisset Surprise followed directly on the Bisexual Fork. Dad told me that he knew for a fact that I responded sexually to women. His evidence for this was that when we had been watching a Truffaut film in the cinema, Day for Night, I had played with myself whenever Jacqueline Bisset was on the screen.

  I remembered that evening, which must have been in 1972. I had seen the film already and loved it, and thought it had more than enough charm and humour to qualify as a good choice for a family outing to the cinema. The evening was not a success, I understood that. Dad was seething in some way, though it took a lot of questioning to bring his objections to light. It turned out he had thought the film obscene. Obscene? If anything I thought it was a bit timid, a bit safe. Where was the obscenity? In a gesture made by one of the actresses, looking down at her actor boyfriend as he went off to the studio in the morning. He blew her a kiss, and she made a gesture of crossing her hands demurely below her waist, to signify ‘This is all yours. Yours and no-one else’s.’

  This gesture, according to Dad, was of a corrosive and contaminating obscenity, tainting the whole film. He gave me to understand that I had subjected the party to a measurable dose of corruption by setting up our little visit to Studio One on Oxford Street.

  Now, though, he was asking me to believe that I had laid aroused hands on myself during the film, and that he hadn’t made a comment at the time. Adam, old chap, we all get carried away when there’s a lovely lady on the scre
en – can’t fault your taste, my boy, she’s the most delightful creature – but next time be a bit more discreet, eh? You might give your mother a turn. An unthinkable scenario. Of course he wasn’t asking me to believe anything of the sort, he was asking himself to believe it. He was falling short of the standards of his profession, planting evidence in his own memory to substantiate something he needed to be true. He was tampering with the scene, as if he was one of those bent coppers he was known for hammering.

  ‘Dad … do you really think something like that could happen? With Mum sitting next to me and you saying nothing?’

  Stiffly, troubled, he said, ‘That’s what I remember.’ Perhaps thinking he had revealed more of his own admiration for the sublime Bisset than was really necessary.

  It made sense that the surprises shouldn’t only be on one side. I had another one myself that I was keeping in reserve, not knowing when would be the best time to disclose it. I was in a relationship. I realized that this would in itself be bad news from Dad’s point of view. Me being in a relationship would make it harder for him to maintain that I was going through some sort of phase. Naturally that was why I wanted him to know, so that he could stop clinging to invented doubts and accept my life as it was – as it was and as it was going to be. At the same time, it seemed obvious that any partner of mine would come in for an extreme intensity of scrutiny, exceeding anything that would be appropriate for high-level military security or access to international secrets. No character, however exemplary, would wring from my father an assent that would cost him so much. In fact anything that made my lover seem likeable, decent, solid, automatically became suspect and intolerable for that very reason. Under the eyes of such a judging committee, Prince Charles himself might have struggled to score a clear round.

  His name was Mike Larson, an American student of architecture attached to (Gonville and) Caius College, though like every other student he had quickly learned to use the short form of its name and to pronounce it Keys. In those days, lacking clairvoyance, my friends and I would sit around in earnest shock discussing the oppressive madness of the American educational system, thanks to which Mike would finish his education thirty thousand dollars in debt. My generation had inherited a fear of debt from the previous one, though the arrival of credit cards in a few years’ time would sweep it away.

  Mike was unhysterical about his financial future. If a great architect like Louis Kahn could die deeply in debt, who was he to be solvent?

  Mike was in his early thirties, nearly ten years older than me, and had a background both provincial and cosmopolitan. His home town was Watsonville, California, which I seem to remember him describing as the artichoke capital of America, but this was either a pious fib or else a title that has since been snatched by Castroville. He had joined the Marines at eighteen and fought in Vietnam, though this was relatively early in the war. The film shown on board ship the night before his platoon landed was Dr Strangelove. The crew, who wouldn’t be going ashore, laughed less anxiously than the Marines, who would. His experience of combat was strongly charged with emotion. Love was part of that experience, though never described as such by the parties involved. Someone important to him was turned into a red mist under mortar fire. I think the name was Dennis Kovacs. Away from Vietnam, Mike was baffled that his old buddies seemed to dissociate themselves so easily from that fellowship of fear and intimacy.

  Afterwards he had studied at Harvard, where the climate was uncongenial to a native Californian and (as he said) ‘it snowed … on my body.’ I think it was at Harvard that he learned the word ‘charrette’, meaning a last-minute burst (usually involving sleepless nights) to finish a piece of work. The phrase derives from the École des Beaux Arts in Paris, where the charrette was a little wagon pulled through a classroom at the last minute to be filled with students’ submissions. Anyone who failed to get his work in the cart didn’t get marked, and plenty were working up to the last minute, virtually sitting in the cart to add the final touches.

  Then he moved back to San Francisco. Mike had spent plenty of time in a metropolitan sexual culture, and it can’t have occurred to him, as he checked out a meeting at a pub on Rose Crescent, still jet-lagged, that he was more or less exhausting the gay scene in Cambridge with a single swig of warm beer. If it wasn’t the A to Z of gay life in the town it was certainly the A to E. I don’t imagine that he would have hooked up with me, which he did not quite on a whim but more out of curiosity and good nature than anything else, if he had known it would be hard to avoid me thereafter without rudeness, in such a small world.

  Was he good-looking? I think so, though he wasn’t so fiercely beautiful that I couldn’t make the first move. He had a slight stammer that prevented him from being intimidating. When a word wouldn’t come his head bobbed up and down. Did he look like a film star? Not quite, though if he had a vague likeness to anyone in that category it would have to be Harrison Ford, clean-cut and a little grumpy.

  He had a trick of starting a sentence with ‘You see …’, but dropping the first word, so that a mild presentation of opinion became insistent, even abrasive, without him seeming to notice. ‘It turns out’ (or ‘Turns out …’) was another typical opening, slightly less dogmatic.

  He spent the night in my tiny room on Trinity Street, but it was hardly big enough for one. Caius had housed him on Grange Road, in a house of American students, something that irritated him since he didn’t want to be insulated from the locals. If he’d wanted an American social life he would have stayed in America – though this was one of the few premises with effective central heating. I stayed there once or twice, but mainly we slept in our own beds. Somehow he conned me into being part of his fitness regime, which meant that I would jog over to his place at seven in the morning and then we would run round Grantchester before breakfast. Often he wasn’t ready when I arrived (he couldn’t be expected to take exercise without the first cigarette of the day) so fairly often I would do the Grantchester circuit on my own. I was slow to realize that Mike’s fitness regime, which I took so much more seriously than he did, was in itself a mild Adam-repellent, a shared activity that we didn’t do together.

  One thing Mike owed to his Marine training was the efficiency of his mornings, and the ability to ‘shit, shower and shave’ in ten minutes. We would meet later for breakfast in Caius and dawdle over coffee afterwards in a café called, winsomely, the Whim. During the first term of his year in Cambridge Mike hardly attended a lecture, and we spent most of the day together talking. Sometimes in the afternoons he would work out at Fenners on Gresham Road, the University sports facility that included a weight room, though I felt he attended more for the view than the health benefits.

  He was a reader, of Isherwood, of Vidal, of John Fowles and Henry James. His copies of Down There on a Visit and Burr were copiously annotated in his architect’s energized small capitals. Only with his signature did he let out a little swooping expressiveness. This script with its implication of load-bearing capacity, compressive strength, was part of his overwhelming difference from anyone I’d met before.

  In the evenings we often saw films. It may be that I make the connection with Harrison Ford partly because Mike had seen the first showing of Star Wars in San Francisco, unaffected by the gathering storm of hype, and had loved it. He couldn’t wait for it to arrive in Cambridge (which took a few months) so he could hear what I made of it. Hmm. Not all that much. It was my first inkling that there was a big-kid side to this travelled, lightly traumatized man. I had seen George Lucas’s first film, the rather formalist dystopia THX 1138, which I much admired, and then in due course American Graffiti
, which seemed likeable pap. This was pap again, but glossier and not so likeable.

  It was fun to wrangle about our divergent tastes. We had strong opinions and stubbornness in common, though they were expressed in different styles. Scorsese was someone we both admired, though Mike had a mental block about his name (and quite a few others) so that it always came out as ‘Sacuzzi’. Mike was the first person I had met who cared about the Oscars and the first to use the phrase ‘the economy’ in casual conversation.

  In architecture, naturally enough, his tastes were adventurous. He admired Peter Eisenman’s House VI, with the upside-down staircase formally balancing the functional one, and the obstruction preventing the occupants (the mere clients) from installing a double bed. In fact there were multiple reasons for sleepless nights. House VI bankrupted the couple who commissioned it, so that the boot of debt was on the other foot for once.

  Mike also knew every lyric from A Chorus Line, but that didn’t come high on the list of qualities that would appeal to Dad. Military service to his country, crew cut, combat experience, aspiring professional status – a warm light should be played on these attributes to bring out all their sparkle. Love of show tunes was a different story, to be kept in the dark as much as possible. Easier to imagine Dad and Frank Zappa singing doo-wop on the back step than Dad and Mike duetting on ‘One Hand, One Heart’ from West Side Story.

  If Dad knew what part Mike played in my life, a thousand individual blind spots would join up into a single massive refusal to acknowledge his merits. It made sense to introduce the person first and add the label afterwards. A good first impression might stand up to the revision required by his ideology. So I had asked Mike to stay in the Anglesey house earlier in the holiday.