Becoming a Man: Half a Life Story

by Paul Monette

  But ever unspoken. In my new life in Boston I assumed my secret was as locked as my determination not to act on it. Poet-not-gay was how I self-advertised, oblivious to the fact that other people didn't bother with the distinction. Because most of them, liberated women especially, didn't have a problem with gay in 1971. They gave me chance after chance to talk about it, but if I didn't want to—well hey, that was my choice. Thus not-gay became my own custom-made suit of emperor's new clothes, the cut fooling no one but myself.

  And, having given up the search for the laughing man, convinced I could sublimate my deviance into verse, the sort of relationship that drew me most was the "feeling" sort with women. All Platonic, but no holds barred otherwise. A refinement of the courtier dance I'd been waltzing since junior high, with an existential spin of what's-it-all-about that echoed my long walks on the beach with Star. I was a master of the life sigh, and I knew that women responded to it. Especially those who were waking up to the piggishness of unliberated men, for whom feeling was anathema.

  My deepest confidante was Eleanor, wife of my department chairman, the one to whom I poured my soul if not the whole truth. Eleanor and Hugh were my downstairs neighbors in the drafty mansion—to my mind the effortlessly perfect couple, reeking sophistication like French coffee. Or was I so lavish in praising them because they took me in all the time? Underneath the mantle of the poet I was a stray dog with quivering tail, always out for scraps. I spent hours every day with Eleanor, perched on a stool in her kitchen while she cooked, picking up her kids' toys, anything to keep talking and not be alone. Eleanor was doing a major avoidance number of her own, not finishing her dissertation. I don't recall what we talked about, except she was so encouraging about my destiny as a writer. I was very big on destiny at the time, a latter-day "Beast in the Jungle." Mostly I was grateful not to be asked about the disparity between my swooning passion for Art and my curious celibacy.

  Two afternoons a week I raced up Route 128 to Chestnut Hill, where I had a part-time gig at a women's junior college. This one was in a vast stone house built by a robber baron whose wife had left him soilless. I swear, there's a sermon in every mansion in New England, the vainglory and the failed dream—all that's left of the second-hand castles of men. I met my creative writing classes in the grooms' mahogany parlor above the stables. I remember the young women of Chestnut Hill as achingly lovely, liquid as models when they moved, and shiny-haired, thoroughbreds themselves. They'd come to this marginal finishing school because the only A they'd ever received was for being pretty. To them writing was a decorative hobby like making silk flowers, as they dotted their i's with circles and groped for Hallmark sentiments. Meanwhile they all had serious boyfriends and no time for crushes on poets, treating me as a sort of exotic pet. I rather liked being petted by them, though feeling more than usual like a eunuch in a harem.

  And after those classes in the stable, I'd drive up the street to Myra Golden's house. Myra was the mother of one of the gang-leaders at Sutton Hill, who'd had me down for spring vacation in Florida after the Greg affair exploded. We'd hit it off in her cabana at the Surf Club in Lauderdale, where I became the perfect escort when her husband was on the road. Ash-blond and Vogue stunning, Myra at forty-five had just woken up to an empty nest, her three kids off to college. With the husband always away on business—a traveling girlfriend in tow, it turned out—Myra had no one to share a Chivas with at sundown. Except me, on Tuesdays and Thursdays. She'd bitch about being trapped in a gilded cage in Chestnut Hill, a twenty-eight-room house where no lights burned except in the den and her bedroom. And the scotch would blur with the Valium, till Myra was weeping for her beauty about to crumble, and that was my cue to reassure her that she was still a knockout. Then the maid would serve me dinner on a TV table while Myra went up to take a Seconal, and a half-hour later I'd be summoned up, to hold her while she fell asleep.

  I don't know what the stages were that brought us to such a place—a sort of neurotic intimacy, a torrid affair without the sex. But I felt unbearably worldly, slipping between those Porthault sheets and taking Myra in my arms. She'd purr and whimper against me, telling me I was the only man who—what? Understood her? Made her feel safe? I can't remember the exact terms of our delusion, as Myra slurred into unconsciousness. This was what it must feel like for straight people, I thought, falling asleep in their vast suburban beds. Thus did I try on the role of husband and protector, another new suit for the emperor.

  Eleanor and Myra constituted the poles of my intensities with women. They weren't all so bizarrely co-dependent as Myra, but I clearly had a thing for married ones. Call it an instinct for empathy, which would be my main qualification for my upcoming career change. It was a trait I shared most notably with César, the man who became my first real friend—no, more than that, my blood brother for the next fifteen years. César taught languages at a school about an hour south of Canton, in a sleepy harbor lined with shingle-style palazzos, another enclave of summer millionaires. César had landed there after a dozen years of voyaging—born in Uruguay, lived in France, traveled everywhere. He was fluent in four tongues, and when we started laughing together in the fall of '70 he'd just returned from a four-month trek overland, Paris to China. Sleeping with lepers in railroad stations, outrunning bandits, bribing his way into various Holies of Holies from the Vale of Kashmir to Singapore.

  And then, all through the winter, he dined out on the stories, riveting the tables of the richly divorced and widowed around the harbor—just as I did at Canton, acting the poet. In fact we made a terrific tag-team match when I'd visit overnight, a pair of raconteurs who played off each other wonderfully. César was the single most social animal I ever met, with a Proustian appreciation of the chess moves of a party. In conversation he could keep a dozen balls in the air, his juggling punctuated by irrepressible laughter and gasps of fascination. He made the dreariest people feel sparkling and witty within the magic circle of his charm, and was smooth as a gigolo when it came to drawing out the coquette in an older woman. But somehow never glib or fatuous, too much of an anarchist for that, his noisy opinions too hard-won. He managed to pontificate—especially about the foibles of Americans—without sounding judgmental. He was a travelogue in 3-D, circumnavigating the civilized world, and if you happened to engage his florid attention, then you became a pin on the map of his itinerary. And considered yourself blessed to be part of so momentous an expedition.

  He was smothered with invitations, as students and townspeople jockeyed to be in his company. He used to say he'd have to eat dinner in shifts, three times a night, to accommodate all the demands. Yet he always made time for me alone, dropping all else when I came down to visit. And though we often squared a table together, providing anchor for two widows, César and I never laughed our way into bed. I knew he was queer and could see he knew the same about me, who usually ran at the first suspicion on either side. Yet I wouldn't let us talk about it—my choice definitely, not his, just as it was my decision not to let our friendship flower into love. César would've gone that way in a minute, but staunchly kept his feelings to himself, permitting me to define how far we would go. Not far enough, not soon enough. But at least I had a gay friend now, even if it dared not speak its name out loud.

  Late at night after the parties, after we dished the guests, we'd sit by the fire in his fisherman's shack and trade our pasts. We'd both been the loneliest kids on the block growing up, practically mute from not fitting in, though no one would have known it now to see our extravagant public selves. He told me his deepest secret, that he'd been raped by the gardener when he was six. By the time he lurched into puberty, he weighed more than three hundred pounds, his only moving part the hand that stuffed his face. He never had anything close to a friend, only children who laughed at him. When he was eighteen, he decided he had to go to Europe, and lost a hundred and fifty pounds so they wouldn't laugh at him there. The other César, he called the lost weight, a demon exorcised. He still had the rolls of deflat
ed skin around his torso to prove it, which made him proud rather than embarrassed.

  He also had the largest, most expressive mouth I ever saw, a wind cave of languages. In one eye there was a flaw, a black dot by the iris, which made his gaze more penetrating but also unbearably poignant, like a visible bruise on the soul. And I could do no wrong in those eyes. I felt helpless to give him back the love he needed—deserved—even as I drank in his constant delight and appreciation of me. He settled for the intimacy without the sex, a bargain I would be making all too often in the next few years, as I strung along those who wanted to love me. They could have everything else, but not my body. A fanatical purity that had no higher purpose than fear: if I did it with someone I cared about, I might have to give up the shame and self-hatred, which was the only place I could hide. Besides, how would I ever get out of such an arrangement, once I got in?

  To experience love as claustrophobia. In such a twisted paradigm lies the sick legacy of a lifetime in the closet. I couldn't see myself honestly enough to understand it was the closet making me clutch for air, struggling to breathe, not César's laughing embraces. So I toyed with his great heart, feeling guilty and paralyzed as I stiffly crossed my legs and kept my buttons buttoned. Not that he ever upbraided me for it or held the slightest grudge. Having survived the Benno Blimpie torments of his youth, César had no more time for resentment of his chosen life than he did for self-pity. If I wouldn't be his great love, then he'd just make do with a great friend. It was he who made all the compromises, smoothing the fur of my fear so I wouldn't run away, and teaching me in the process what it meant to love without boundaries.

  And how successful was my commitment to a life without the pleasures of the flesh? For those first two years in Boston the eclipse was nearly total. Sometimes after midnight, wired from writing dickless verse, I'd drive the twenty-five minutes into downtown and browse the one dirty bookstore I knew. Its queer pornucopia didn't represent much of an advance erotically from the under-the-counter stuff I used to buy in New Haven. But now at least I'd half-cruise the other skulking patrons, older men in trenchcoats from the suburbs, who seemed as lost as I.

  Once, though, a burly grinning fellow about my own age found the guilty furtiveness of the place downright silly. He winked and nudged me, pointing to various gaudy members as he flipped the smudgy pages. It was the snicker that drew me more than anything, and before I knew it he'd proposed to follow me home. Where of course my major concern was not to appear inexperienced—a dread that I might not get an A, the self-doubt grading my every performance for years. But he merrily took the lead and soon had me laughing as smutty as he, pouring honey on my dick for lubrication. Leaving me with the messiest sheets since infancy, and making me want to hang them out the window like a banner. He even gave me his number as he lurched off into the night. But my dour and hopeless morning brain couldn't cope, and I let the number lie there on my desk till the fuck-buddy statute of limitations had passed.

  Over New Year's I was in Puerto Rico visiting a family I knew from Sutton Hill—the fifth wheel at every gathering, mournful in the tropics, and not a clue where men went to meet in San Juan. At midnight on the thirty-first, wandering out of a party and standing alone on a terrace above the lights of the old city, I resolved not to run away the next time somebody wanted me. Then, in the crush of flying home the following day, I was bumped to first class, where the man with the cordovan tan beside me set about getting me drunk on champagne. A college administrator at Tufts, Armenian and opulent, with rings on four fingers, he didn't so much as drop a stitch as he bragged about the men he'd done in the islands. No hedging at all: he assumed I was queer the moment I sat down. Which for once didn't send me into twitches of paranoia, my New Year's resolution being so fresh.

  Of course I couldn't keep up with his tally of tricks, but tried to maintain a certain cool unshockability as he reeled off the gritty details. Somewhere over the Carolinas he nodded toward the bathroom beyond the galley: "You ever done it in one of those?" I shook my head, speechless at last, as he spilled the gaudy story. I'd never really heard a gay man strut his satyr's stuff before. I don't recall if he proposed that we do the bathroom thing ourselves, since by then I was woozy and nodding off. Waking up to find he'd put a blanket over both our laps and pulled my dick out of my pants. I was too nonplused to protest as he guided my hand to his own throbbing love muscle. I stared around the cabin with a thrill of terror, sure we would be arrested but too turned on to stop.

  His telephone number I kept, and a few times went to his high-rise in Charles River Park for a wank. I liked his gaudiness and his dirty mouth, but didn't at all appreciate his grilling me about my closeted life. No matter how evasive I was, or how fast I disappeared after I came, he wouldn't let it rest. Who were my gay friends? What bars did I go to? Who knew? Things were turning problematic anyway, since he wanted to fuck me and I stubbornly refused. I think he assumed The Lady Doth Protest Too Much, which was probably true enough, but I only grew more defiant the more he pushed. I'm not that gay, I remember thinking self-righteously, still all mixed up about compromising my manhood if I took it up the bum. The last stand of I'm-just-dabbling-at-this: the sphincter clenched like a rosebud.

  The final time I saw him was in the spring, arriving late on a Saturday night, lured by a shipment of dirty pictures he'd just received. I walked in on the coffee end of a dinner party he hadn't bothered to mention, seven or eight men in their thirties who gave me the laser once-over when I pulled up a chair. They couldn't have been more civilized and welcoming, but I squirmed at the proprietary hovering of my Armenian buddy, who puffed with pride as he showed me off. A couple of his guests rolled their eyes gleefully, as if to congratulate him on his latest conquest. I went icy cold inside, dismissing them all as Boys in the Band, nothing to do with me.

  And when they all left, we had our final go-round—no kissing, no fucking, yeah I guess you can suck it. Perhaps he got off on my playing so hard to get, so accustomed himself to having what he wanted. I never went back, and hung up when he called: I didn't want an older gay brother, however well-intentioned, leading me out of the closeted dark. He continued to send me Christmas cards for years afterwards, big religious jobs with flocking and glitter on the Three Kings' robes. And a scrawl of a note inside about his latest cruise of the islands, always ending with some variation of I hope you're happy. Meaning out.

  Was I happy? Busy at least, surrounded by friends who gave me strokes for being a poet. The squirming shame of Greg began to fade. In 1971 I didn't think of myself as dead inside; I thought of myself as reasonably happy and successful, now that I was writing poetry for real. When the pain and loneliness in my life surfaced, I made contorted images of it, every poem a closet of words. But I have to face honestly the disparity between my experience then and my memory now, because from August '71 on, there's evidence in my own hand—a journal.

  A journal so numbly unconscious, it takes my breath away to reread it today. Not to mention the prose style, which favors sunsets over self-analysis, banal as the silky bouquets of my girls in Chestnut Hill. How fast the Paul of '71 would've run from a man like me, who's a hundred times more insistent about everyone coming out than the Armenian ever was. No, I cannot blame "the other Paul" for keeping his distance, staying out of my reach emotionally, given how harshly I feel toward him now when I read his white-bread pleasantries and chameleon accommodations.

  But before I start challenging the Chronicle, one other memory intrudes from that first year at Canton—a clap of recognition that left me in shudders. School was already out, and the faculty hanging around to do the slopwork of final reports and meetings. The June weather steamed like a sauna, especially under the eaves of Upton House. I was lying naked in a bath of sweat, trying to nap, when suddenly I smelled smoke. I jumped up sniffing, tracking it to the connecting door between my apartment and the north garret, which was occupied by a ghostly bachelor in his sixties. A liver-spotted classicist who'd been there forever
, lips so pursed you figured he had to be fed by IV, and so appalled by the school's new blood that he stared at the ground whenever we crossed paths.

  "Allston," I called, rapping the door between our places. No answer. Terrified of fire, I didn't think, just pushed the door open and stumbled in. The smoke was thicker. I darted about the suite of rooms, then realized the smoke was coming in through an open window, from a barbecue on the ground floor. False alarm. But as I turned to go, I looked at the wall above Allston's bed, and it was covered with photographs in dime-store frames. Allston and his special boys, grinning shoulder to shoulder in tennis whites, some of the pictures cracked and yellow and reaching back to the 40's. So long ago that Allston was my age. On the bedside table, a triple frame with three pictures of the same boy, from puberty to college. Cringing, I realized with a shock that I was naked and ran back into my own place, shutting the door on that sad museum. But the feeling wouldn't go away that I had seen the very face of death-in-life, a melancholy eros that had no expression except the mute longing of self-denial.

  That summer I taught at Andover again, having inherited the theater course. With a troupe of twenty students we put on a high-toned repertory of plays, Lorca to Kopit, the intellectual headiness designed to hide the amateur theatrics. Glad of the break from grading papers, I relished wearing an impresario's cloak. Such a mercurial role let me swing from brooding intensity to high camp without fear of being labeled queer. And the bounded world of summer school itself was not unlike the theater—the sudden family, the backstage politics, the frantic busyness, the in-jokes. I let myself play the free spirit in a near frenzy of acting out, a true character, madly hyper and keeping everyone dancing.