Becoming a Man: Half a Life Story

by Paul Monette

  And was it really the next day—or is memory simply trying to deepen the irony of my comeuppance—that Hilgendorf came down to my room with the Idylls file in hand? He'd found it quite by accident in a pile of newspapers on his window seat. I don't know how it got there, left by me or lent to Star, but it's the sort of coincidence that would never fly in a novel—losing the Lancelot study in Lancelot's room. Right up to graduation, those half-done pages mocked me from my desk, twisting the dagger when my thesis came back with a tepid B. The whole incident proving, if nothing else, that the last place I belonged was graduate school.

  So I could barely crack a polite smile when my thesis adviser, having pried from me the news of my snuffing at Stanford, tossed me a life preserver in the form of a slot in the graduate program in English. I'd think about it, I grimaced as I backed out of his office. Then ran across the campus through the drizzling green of May to get back to the real work of finishing Yale: the writing of the Class Poem.

  It was to be my last star turn in the czarist reign of art for art's sake. An official poem to be read in cap and gown on the day before graduation, to the senior class and their guests assembled on the Old Campus. The Poem would follow the Ivy Ode in Latin and precede the Class Oration, the order of such events having been set in stone when Connecticut was still just a colony. I don't know anymore if I applied for the job or had it bestowed like a bay-leaf crown, but I bent to the task in deadly earnest. Poet Laureate at last.

  And found myself quivering with sentimental overkill for the Bright College Years about to end. It suddenly didn't matter how miserable I'd been for the last four years. It was misery on a field of royal blue, shaded by elms that knew no blight, our ties knotted together in a fraternal circle as we passed a silver tankard. In a gush of inspiration I extolled the joys of blood-brotherhood, the hearty embrace and the feelings too deep for words, here at this threshold where boys became men. All the emotional complexity of a greeting card, and serving up the official line of manly comradeship: for God, for country, and for Yale.

  A poem in five sections, it turned out, each a sort of impressionist sketch of one or another of my futile crushes. The fragment about the painter is Cody, and the steeplejack fragment is Sean. All unconscious, though. You would have had to be a real queer to pick up on the homoerotic angle—the breathless pride in being a special friend, the roughhouse games, two loners locking glances. Reality was the last thing in my mind. I let it all be about buddies and the mysteries of friendship, unable to face what I truly wanted from a man, which was nothing so vanilla as friendship.

  Meanwhile I went to all the farewell parties, draping arms and singing in the courtyards, the grass awash in spilled beer. I think I was more or less continuously drunk those last few weeks, but was hardly alone in that. Besides, drunk was the best excuse for covering a sloppy embrace, the only time I would ever hold any of these guys close enough to smell them. In my mawkish heart I forgave the cruel indifference of the ones who'd never understood I loved them. This camaraderie of the last days was better than nothing, after all—a taste of Dionysus, dancing for all I was worth, trying to catch the feel of wild abandon before the tribe dispersed.

  Two days before graduation, exceedingly hung over, I reported to the main library for a ceremony straight out of E. M. Forster: the planting of the Class Ivy. In a cloistered inner courtyard whose walls and Gothic arches were already choked with vines, the Odist and the Poet were each to plant a little pot beneath a brass plaque that said 1967. Nobody took it seriously, great guffaws all around, but what the hell, tradition was tradition. Here and there behind roots as thick as a man's leg you could see the old tarnished plaques from a hundred years ago, when Tennyson was Laureate.

  The Odist planted his ivy first, tossing off some pithy lines in Greek. I remember being surprised that Hilgendorf was there, but as President he probably had to be at every ceremony, however obscure. When it came my turn, I knelt with the trowel where the parched librarian pointed. With the first thrust I struck a rock, the dull clunk of spade against stone reverberating in my tender head. Then Bill was crouched beside me laughing, taking the trowel from my hand and quickly working the rock free. As I bent to lay the ivy in, I suddenly thought I was going to cry, the only one there for whom it had ceased to be a joke. Moved because the two of us were kneeling together, a pair of knights on the brink of the quest, the brotherhood about to disband.

  Next day was Class Day, an audience of some three thousand wilting on folding chairs in the sun. I sat beside Bill on the speakers' platform, a canopy rippling above us, suddenly seized with fear that my poem wasn't veiled enough. They would all pick up on the unrequited sigh of it, and I would stand revealed as a deviant. When the Odist took a seat, I stepped to the podium, laying my pages down with shaky hands. Just then a capricious breeze blew up and scattered my poem across the stage. I started after it helplessly, my face burning as people began to laugh. But Bill had already darted forward to snatch the pages up, a save in the fourth quarter. He handed them back to me with a wink, and then I felt strong enough to bellow it out, daring it to expose me.

  I needn't have worried. It was plenty veiled enough for that dozing crowd just counting the minutes to the buffet lunch. The rest of the day was a round of receptions, everyone's family in tow, and I was flush with pride as various strangers praised my performance. To me it seemed the perfect rebuke to Paul and Jackie for daring to think that writing wasn't a life—though for their part they mostly just beamed. Perhaps because I finally had a future, for the short term anyway. A fellowship to Oxford had dropped from the sky about a week before. I didn't particularly want it—it seemed like the loneliest year imaginable, all nuns and snobs and greasy breakfasts—but at least I had something to answer when everyone asked what next.

  Around midnight I tucked the family in at the Taft and wandered back to the college, grief-stricken that all of it was about to be over and nobody knew me for real. The courtyard rang with raucous singing and drunken laughter, seniors spilling out their windows. Better go find a party quick, I thought, and was trotting across the croquet lawn when I came upon Bill sitting quietly on a bench. Did I say how melancholy he looked sometimes?—though people tended not to see it, since he was the man with everything. I only saw it because of my own. That's how he looked now, grave and still and somehow responsible for all of us, as if he'd just stepped out of the Oval Office into the Rose Garden.

  Bottles crashing about us, we agreed there wouldn't be any sleep in the college tonight. Bill had to be up at dawn to begin the muster of the senior class, which he would be leading in to graduation. "I think I'll go sleep at Elihu," he said. Then, like an afterthought: "You want to?"

  Sure. And as we walked that way—I still trying to match his stride—I realized I was going to tell him I was queer. At the club we signed our names in the guest book, headed up to the dormitory, stripped to our shorts and climbed into facing beds. Bill had his own trepidations, about to leave for Hong Kong and a two-year stint with Yale-in-China. But he kept lobbing the conversation back to me: Where would I be in two years? He was giving me the opening, my last chance to come clean. And I blew it. I talked around and around it—my "problems" with women, how sick I was of being depressed, almost almost saying it—till he finally nodded off.

  I never came half so close again to telling anyone, for another five years. Yet even as I watched him sleep, I promised myself I would write Bill a letter in China and tell him that way. He was the only man I'd ever loved without wanting, and I knew I could trust him not to judge me. Thus did I put off the severing reality of graduation, whose trumpets and battlefield logistics all the next day left hardly a chance to say goodbye. There was no last blood-brother moment, with Bill or anyone else. By mid-afternoon the campus was deserted, picked over by cleanup crews.

  I don't remember ever being as numb as I was driving home with my parents that night, feeling as if college had never happened. Three days later, the Andover draft board turned dow
n my deferral to go to Oxford, and the fellowship was withdrawn. I thought I was losing my mind, and this time not just in order to write a poem about it. Writhing in shame, I tracked down various deans and professors at their summer places, calling in every last favor. I worked days at the local bookstore, $3.50 an hour, reading everything in print about the war, to catch up on it before I got drafted.

  About three weeks later, one of my summering deans came through. I could have a Carnegie Fellowship at Yale for a year, teaching a section of English 15 and taking a couple of courses at the graduate school. I groveled with relief. Then headed down to New Haven for the weekend to sign all the paperwork and get my teaching deferment locked in. The three weeks' panic had kept me from writing my queer declaration to Bill, but in the back of my mind I knew he'd be arriving in Hong Kong in mid-July. Once I got back from New Haven I'd do it, I told myself, beginning to compose the letter in my head. More of an apology than a declaration, but something at least.

  I was staying the weekend in a guest suite at Jonathan Edwards. When I wasn't running around getting my fellowship in place, I'd sit in the courtyard brooding, wishing we never had to graduate at all. I couldn't believe 714 was no longer my room. It was as if I wanted them all to come back at the end of summer and rekindle the brotherhood—which was all in my head to begin with. Sunday morning, I took a mug of coffee and the Times out to the croquet lawn, trying to feel the place was still mine, even as the shuttered quiet mocked me, the dreaming towers indifferent to boys who wouldn't grow up.

  I had to walk past the guard's office to get to the guest suite. The second-string watchman was glued to a baseball game on his portable black-and-white. He'd never have been allowed to goof off like that during term, I remember thinking with a proprietary scowl. Then he jutted his chin at me and said: "When he fell off that mountain, he didn't die. Not for a couple hours."

  I thought he was drunk. "What're you talking about? Who didn't die?"

  "Over there in China. The football player. Hilgendorf."

  And I nodded, as if I already knew. Determined—I don't know why—to show no feeling as I made for the stairs. I would spend the rest of Sunday into Monday calling everyone in the class, bearer of bad tidings. Would tell it over and over: his first day in Hong Kong, a hike up to look at the city. Would go to Wisconsin for the funeral, the runt among the pallbearers. But never really cried, even when I finally got hold of Star in Bangkok, who knew too much already about those two hours he struggled not to die.

  Eventually it got twisted up with a massive dose of self-dramatization, a version of events in which the wrong man had died—or was it that the Poet had survived to tell Lancelot's story? Theatrics instead of feelings. All I knew was, it became another excuse not to tell my own story. As usual, I missed the point of life outside the closet, that you had to seize it and waste no time, because Now was all there was. Instead, I closed another door. But that day in the empty college, when I learned there was no one to tell after all, that was the day of my real graduation. No more brothers in blood, and no more Idylls to sing.

  Six

  I CAN'T BELIEVE IT myself sometimes, how fresh the wounds of the deep past sting, how sharp the dry-eyed tears are even at this distance. The very act of remembering begins to resemble a phobic state—feeding on every missed chance, stuck forever in the place without doors. What's crazy about it is, I forget that I ever got out. For an hour or a day the pain wins. It throws a veil of amnesia over my real life, almost twenty years now since I took my first breath of freedom. And I know better than anyone what I wrestled from the darkness of my dead self: three times I've managed to love another man. My white-knuckle grip on happiness, hoarded against the gloating of my enemies, against the genocide by indifference that has buried alive a generation of my brothers.

  In those lonely years of wrongheaded crushes, I used to ache for someone to know me all the way through, till the terrified boy in the closet was finally laid to rest. I realize now that I can't entirely shake him. His sorrows and his wasted time still ambush me, the old scars bleeding again, sometimes even when I'm laughing in my lover's arms. Or at least that's how it's felt as I've written these pages. Punchy with rage at how unnecessary it all was, the decade of being dead below the belt. Loathing myself for buying the hatemongers' lies and distortions. Queers can't bond, the shrinks informed us. It's not you, said the Romans, it's the act we despise. And you find somebody to love and prove them all wrong at last, and still the fury boils inside you because the liars made you grow up in a cage.

  I understand exactly who I was destined to be, given my frozen state from twelve to twenty-five. Right about now I should be the graying head of an English department in a second-rate boys' school, say, in the Berkshires. The Mr. Chips lessons have long since become automatic, and his classroom patter reeks of ingratiation as he struggles to stay abreast of his post-literate students. Flattering all the Adonises the way Nindle did at Andover. Not that such a career is by definition soul-destroying, but for me the mere fact of the closet would turn it into a job from hell.

  Asexual to a fault, too timid even to sweat. Of course I'd be master in one of the senior dorms—forming "special" friendships with the humpy ones, steeling myself to stay away from backrubs. And their parents would thank me at graduation for turning their boys into men, and I would slouch back to my bachelor quarters, always the one left behind. In the deafening summer silence I'd look out over the deserted campus, the green of the hills beyond, and the silent sobs would heave my shoulders. No relief till the pitch of midnight, and then my fumbling hands would guiltily lift the shoebox from the back of the closet. My stash of muscle porn, mail-ordered to a P.O. Box in Great Barrington. I jerk myself to sleep. The cry I make when I'm coming is like an animal caught in a trap, or a vampire's groan at the first light of day.

  What steered me from the schoolmaster's fate was coming out. Something I couldn't do on my own: I had to meet Roger before I could take the final step. Yet once I opened the door to him, it felt as if I would never have to look back again. I'd shed the deadweight of Little Paul and his shut-up heart, and now all I had to do was love. Except that love turned out to be not simple at all. Or at least it would get more difficult the deeper it got, asking a kind of honesty that a life of hiding had left me unprepared to negotiate. For it turned out there were closets within the closet, and a lingering self-hatred that even the joy of connection couldn't solve. What love gives you is the courage to face the secrets you've kept from yourself, a reason to open the rest of the doors.

  I decided to write this book because so many people told me, after reading Borrowed Time, that Roger and I appeared to have a perfect relationship, seamless and undefended, all the bullshit burned away. Especially when the darkness fell, and we had to fight for our dwindling patch of ground, no room to hedge and make excuses. Roger, being Roger, would have squirmed at the thought of being so idealized, even for love. But he knew as well as I did, holding on to the two of us as the tortures of AIDS came raining fire, that somewhere along the way our hearts had fused.

  "But we're the same person," he announced with teasing delight one morning, half-blind in his second-last hospital bed. "When did that happen?"

  I'm not sure. More remarkable still, how had it happened without either of us feeling smothered or trapped or compromised? And I started to think, if we really got that far and went that deep, then I ought to tell how impossible such happiness looked from the prison of twelve to twenty-five. Convinced I was the most unloved, the most unlovable man who'd ever lived. No window in my cell and no chance of release till I faced the truth that I was queer. That would be my theme, I thought: once I came out, the world was all windows. Suddenly night became day, and I could love like everyone else.

  Well, yes and no. It's true I became a new man, with a vengeance, diving into the tribe and crowing my freedom and rhapsodizing my bond with Roger. But the baggage of the past wouldn't go away. I didn't understand how much of a struggle intimacy w
ould be, that when things got tough, I'd shut down. Long after I thought I'd mastered putting love and fuck in the same sentence, the wild oats I hadn't sowed at twenty came back to mock me. I'd find myself envious of my own lovers, jealous of where they'd been before me, every previous kiss proof I would never catch up. As if I couldn't be happy with what I had now, shut out by my inexperience, my self-esteem too fragile. And I thought if they knew the truth about me—the lonely kid still locked inside, needy and misunderstood—they'd surely run away. When in fact it was I who kept the distance, miles away sometimes without ever leaving the bedroom, and the naked man beside me wondering why the cry I made when I came was so sad.

  I'm better at it now, partly because I understand how much baggage everyone else is carrying. In this Puritan sinkhole of a culture, we don't teach children the uses of pleasure, and so they decide we are fools and go their own way, blindly. If we learned to drive as badly as we learn to make love, the roads would be nothing but wrecks. The erotic can be a window into the deepest core of feeling, but more and more doesn't get you there. It's a patch of ground that has to be reclaimed over and over, as much of a struggle for a ten years' marriage as the fumbling grope of a second date. And with all that, you still have to kiss a lot of frogs before you find a prince.

  But I also see that it's not for everybody, the exalted dream of romance. To some people I'm just a love junkie. What I experience as being known to the core, appetite and aspiration fused, some queers think of as confinement. Doomed to resemble a bourgeois marriage, straight-identified to boot. I suspect there's a certain defensiveness there, a defiant need to be self-sufficient so nobody else can hurt you. Yet I have friends who don't feel alone being single, and I'm not counting those who've had their fill of kissing frogs. In any case I speak only for myself when it comes to love, careful not to insist that everyone belongs in pairs, or indeed that a couple constitutes the highest reach of earthly passion. The last thing I want to impose is the tyranny of an ideal, the way straight shrinks and the churches do, righteously pushing "traditional marriage."