Becoming a Man: Half a Life Story

by Paul Monette

  Sounded good to me. And of course I had all kinds of backup to reinforce me now. I was servicing four or five clients in the suburbs, women who couldn't wait for the next installment of the Monette soap opera. The business had shifted since Alida left, away from draperies and the acquisition of things. Now I was installing lurid supergraphics, turning previously white rooms into "color environments." These migraine-making experiments in hot pink and four-foot polka dots were all the rage for a while—my signature. I don't know how anyone ever slept in one of those color-field bedrooms, but it seemed to make the bankers and their wives feel very Pop/Op hip. Especially because I did all the painting myself, a sort of latter-day Renaissance fresco maker. Tossing off lines of poetry as I worked, while my client ladies held the ladder and brought me coffee. Then I'd regale them with every grisly detail of my dick that didn't work, and they'd root for me and Julia.

  Twice I went down to Washington to see her, enjoying the feel of reciprocation as Julia showed me off to all her friends. More confident now, I was boyishly eager to get to the fucking part, but still Julia cautioned that we shouldn't go too fast. When I champed at the bit, she sighed and clucked that I was beginning to act like every other man. She also didn't seem to want to spend as much time naked, preferring that we go out carousing with her friends in the bars. I began to think she kissed me more when we were out in public than when we were by ourselves. But I tried not to push—afraid that it was all so fragile, and that I'd lose my grip on straightness if I lost her.

  Then I'd stop off in New Haven for a couple of hours on the way back to Boston, to goose the Platonic delusion with Scott. Of course I wanted his body, even as I bragged about my new life as a het. I'd arrive back in Boston confused and schizophrenic, and Cantwell would hammer at me that I couldn't have it two ways, or at least not the way I was doing it. If I wanted to be bisexual, fine, but the male half needed to be workable and satisfying, not tortured and self-denying the way I was with Scott. Anyway, when was I going to stop thinking so much about my dick and more about relationships? He seemed to feel I was losing something in this heterosexualizing marathon. Did he mean the same thing Julia did, that I was turning into "every other man"? But that was the point of it all, wasn't it? Cantwell wouldn't commit himself, except to say that I needed to stop living my life like a novel.

  I resisted this notion mightily. I was finally living my life, and the drama helped me feel the tang of it. I had no idea how to turn the volume down. On October 19, I drove to New Haven—three days after I turned twenty-seven—ostensibly to consult with John on some graphic design, but of course it was only an excuse to see Scott. I called him and proposed we go see a play at the Long Wharf Theater. Driving out the turnpike, we were just going to make the curtain, and I was in my usual manic state with Scott, shaking the palm at the end of the mind. We stopped at a red light near the theater, an eighteen-wheeler in the lane to my left. I was talking so intensely I didn't notice the light go green—or the truck start turning right across our path.

  The driver never saw us. Hooked out my window into the underbelly of the semi and realized that the huge rear wheels were about to crush us. I tried to wrench the Opel over the curb, but wasn't fast enough. The big tire flattened my side of the car, exploding the window and spraying me with glass. I screamed and pushed away from the door, so that my hand caught the full force of the wheel's battering progress. Then it was over. I knew I'd broken some bones, but dismissed the pain with an airy wave of the injured hand, more concerned just then with how annoyed and embarrassed Scott appeared to be.

  How loud does fate have to shriek in your face before you pay attention? Still not loud enough for me. At the emergency room they told me I'd broken two bones in my left wrist, my writing hand. Fine, fine—no problem. It must've been shock, but I acted as if nothing at all had happened. Apologizing profusely, I made Scott leave and go back to the college. John collected me and next day took the bus to Boston with me, Julia meeting us at the station with blood-red roses and a shower of kisses. And as I remember, even that night I wanted another lesson in heterosex, so driven was I not to lose any more time, or think about how self-destruction worked.

  For the next month the journal is mercifully silent, because I couldn't even hold a pen. Except for two loose-leaf pages tucked in at the back, covered with one-finger typing, run-on without any caps. The first page is a flat account of the accident and the days that followed, Julia smothering me with tenderness. If I'd thought she was cooling off to me, my broken wing changed all that. Now she just wanted us cocooning together, everyone else be damned. If in fact there are no accidents, maybe that's really what I was after—pay more attention to me and my terrible need to go straight.

  The second typed page is back at fever pitch, recounting the first weekend in November. A friend from Canton had given us the keys to his house on Cape Cod, and Julia and I spent three days there, she putting me through my midterm exam in love-making. Working at it in deadly earnest, outwitting my uncooperative member by waking up in the middle of the night, going at it before I had time to be scared. I was doing the wild thing at last—the normal thing. I strutted around all day in a swoon of self-satisfaction. Didn't even balk when Julia announced that she might move up to Boston. Was I ready for that? Well, sure—could we fuck again now?

  The memory of those days in the house on the salt marsh is a strange blur of ecstasy and pain. My throbbing wrist in its clumsy cast lying frozen on the pillow as we gasped with passion, swimming in tandem at last. If Cantwell had asked his question then—"What would you like your life to be?"—the answer couldn't have been more self-evident. This right here, islanded with the woman I loved, the torments of the past behind me. A real man at last, with the notches on my gun to prove it. Let's stay like this forever.

  When the journal starts up again, on November 17, you can see the handwriting's shaky and distorted, as if I'm starting from scratch. By then I'm sleeping with another woman, though it has to remain a secret because she's practically engaged to a friend of mine. Julia and I have not quite broken up, but it's just a matter of one of us getting the gumption up to say it. Scott is staying over at the house on Winthrop Street, telling me he's decided he's more of a novelist than a poet. Something we must discuss to death for another month while I try not to stare at his pants.

  And how am I? Oh I'm fine, couldn't be better. Happier than I've ever been. And the crippled hand that writes all this is completely unaware of how it will look nearly twenty years later, the jagged crooked letters a Rorschach of denial. A young man—well, not so young, just not grown up—living his life like a novel with too much plot. Running as fast as he can to stay in one place where everyone can see him, applauding their approval. Not quite like other men, but getting there.

  Eight

  I HAVE TO KEEP MY LATER SELF on a short leash as I negotiate those hurricanes of feeling that propelled my time with women. From the vantage of life outside the closet it's too easy to scathe and ridicule. I see the manic posturing and the agonized self-doubt as I tried to cram myself into a straight man's suit of armor. Every move I made seems driven by that engine of approval-seeking. Therefore I'm as tough and cynical as any of the Boys in the Band as I fling aside the journal of my sex change: Girl, when are you gonna get real and find yourself some dick? I have to force myself to remember that it wasn't just more wasted time, loving those women. That they were the ones who finally broke the ice skin that sealed me among the living dead. That I couldn't have ever opened myself to Roger or any other man if the women of '72 and '73 hadn't been there first. Unjudging and tender, taking their own risks in the open country of the heart, no kiss ever a waste of time.

  I don't know how things would've gone differently for Julia and me if we hadn't had to contend with those five hundred miles. I grew impatient with the weeks that separated our visits. The long commute, cadging rides like students on a road trip because neither of us could afford the shuttle, was taking its toll in nerves. We
continued to look terrific together, never missing a literary party, and for me at least our lovemaking grew wilder and more anchoring. But Monday to Friday would leave me prey to emptiness and doubt, as if we were doing it all with mirrors.

  Somehow I couldn't fall back on the old Platonic talking relationships with women—that seemed bogus now and neutered, a repression of my new-found maleness. I'd had enough of talking—I wanted action. Even at the risk of preening like a satyr, of putting sex before everything else. I wanted my due at last in male entitlement.

  The summer I moved to Cambridge, an old friend from Yale had split with his wife in Vermont and taken a place in Back Bay. Justin was a radical architect determined to put the world under a dome and power it with solar panels. His work had so far been confined to ski houses that looked like crashed spaceships, as beautiful as they were strange, stubbornly avoiding all bourgeois compromise. His bathrooms were as pared down as outhouses. Justin was noisy and pushy in his opinions, growling and pulling his mad Tchaikovsky hair if anyone said anything stupid. He drank heavily, was built like a bear, and lived on practically nothing a month to defy the egregious riches of his parents. Relentlessly, raucously straight—or so I'd always thought. Because we courted different muses, we constituted no threat to each other as artists, and so hung out together, trashing pretense and easy art.

  Sometimes I'd spend the evening hunkered in Justin's window seat looking out on the somber facades of Marlborough Street, working over a poem as Justin tinkered at his models and elevations. But more often than not I'd be waiting to have a laugh with Sally, who breezed in around eleven to spend the night with Justin. The most electric woman I'd ever encountered, with a smutty mouth that loved to shock, seeing everything in sexual terms. Sally had everyone's number, but most of her jokes were self-directed—a formerly fat girl who'd learned to bury the hurt by being one of the guys. Her brazenness was all the more startling because she looked so demure and vulnerable, with the peaches-and-cream skin and honey-soft hair of the Breck girl. To me she seemed the most sensuous of creatures, her fingers grazing the hair on my arm as she talked, her voice a low thrill perfect for secrets. And so urban-hip and self-assured, a cross between Holly Golightly and her namesake, Sally Bowles. I was weak-kneed with envy of Justin.

  "Monette, you're not getting laid enough," clucked Sally when she heard about my weekend arrangement with Julia. She promised to find me something steadier and closer to home among her own girlfriends. To that end she set up a couple of exploratory lunches with one and another, but it was Sally I couldn't stop looking at, and she knew it. I'd also begun to bristle at the hardball toughness that passed for banter between her and Justin. Digs and sneering and jokes that left invisible scars, all on the pretext of a certain liberated openness. From where I stood, Sally had signed on to be treated like shit by a petulant artist—where being an artist excused cavalier self-importance, not to mention the flight from commitment.

  I don't know who seduced whom. But when Sally told me fretfully that Justin was now demanding a couple of evenings a week for "independent development," meaning so he could go out and get laid, I leaped at the chance to be gallant and protect her. Within a few days we'd begun our own independent development, Sally and I, and it was weeks before I even caught my breath. She ate up the challenge of my newly minted heterosex identity, turning me on in ways that nobody ever had. And I made up for the caring too many men had withheld from Sally. Two wounds healing, that's how I thought of us.

  She knew how to conduct an affair at true soap-opera pitch—appearing suddenly at one of my classes at Canton, dragging me off to make love in the woods. She left me notes on the apple tree on Winthrop Street, or raced over from work for a quickie at lunch, or woke me with a spray of pebbles at my window, wanting in for a night in my arms. Sally was the first secret I ever had that made me happy instead of ashamed. A secret she kept much better, probably, than I, who spilled it to my client ladies as the next installment of my cliff-hanger life. I even told Julia—or at least she figured it out, since I couldn't stop recounting Sally's bawdy lines. Oh, and we were terribly grown-up about it, Julia and I, convinced it was just what I needed to tide me over. Sportsex, with no entangling alliances. Besides, I announced proudly, having a weekday paramour left me no time to think about men.

  The four of us actually had dinner when Julia was next in Boston. A bizarre evening of Rashomon dimensions, nobody quite knowing who knew what, but all of us acting devastatingly worldly. "I'm not jealous of her," observed Julia as we drove home, following up with a few quick razor slashes on the subject of Sally's looks. "But you do know that Justin's gay, don't you?"

  I didn't. But if that was the drift of Justin's evenings out—leaving Sally for other men—then I was only more determined to be the "good" lover. I was doing the opposite, rejecting the self-defeating hunger for men in order to be with these women, no backsliding and no regrets. I certainly thought I could keep things going with Julia—indeed, was convinced that having my sexual education doubled would only make our relationship deeper. Besides, Julia seemed to quicken to the challenge of not being jealous, more playful in bed as she teased about whether her moves were as deft as Sally the hooker's.

  I like to think they were both too smart to be used. Or at least I've always taken comfort in knowing that neither of them has any regrets, that they remember the whirlwind days in Cambridge only with fondness and laughter. That I managed to be, for both of them, some kind of anchor in painful times. But I was barely conscious at the time, running so fast between bedrooms that my life began to feel like a French farce. I guess I counted on the scale of my emotions to get us all through, the running monologue of my fear and uncertainty, my eagerness to talk all night if it made me learn to love a little better. And, with that, a compulsion to know everything they were feeling, as if all our lives depended on nothing remaining unsaid.

  Over Thanksgiving I went to Washington, four nights at Julia's place. We seemed to be happier than ever, and once more tossed around the notion of Julia's moving to Boston. We argued only once, when she accused me of not taking her writing seriously. I was stung, having read the chapters of her novel over and over, thrilled by their passion, bragging about them to friends. It was something else, less tangible, a clash of writerly egos, a certain self-satisfaction I couldn't hide about the higher calling of poetry. I never meant to use it as a wedge between us, but it must have felt isolating when I walled myself in my notebook for an hour's fixation on a line or two.

  I certainly didn't think we were anywhere near to breaking up. I returned to Boston, and Sally and I resumed our surreptitious romance, spending her two nights off from Justin at her apartment on Concord Avenue. The Harvard prof and his wife had arrived back from China, and I took another house-sitting job, this time just for a month. But I was hardly ever there except to feed the cat, my boxes never unpacked. When she finally reached me, Julia said she'd been calling for days without an answer—this was before answering machines, when all you had to do not to be caught in the wrong conversation was not be there. Effusively I apologized, swearing I hadn't been trying to avoid her—

  "It's all right, Paul. It's just over, that's all." She couldn't have sounded less upset. I tried to pump up the volume, genuinely shocked. "We're too strong for each other," Julia declared. "We both want the same things, so one of us would have to win." I understood none of this. Julia seemed so far advanced in deconstructing the psychology of it all. I was already scrambling to think how I could see more of Sally to fill the void. "Breaking up is usually the part that sucks, believe me," Julia said. "Someday you'll see how lucky we were, because we knew when to say goodbye."

  Sure felt painless to me. I didn't take a minute to be angry or sad; I was out of there in a flash, trotting through the snowy alleys to Sally's place, snuggling in under her covers so I wouldn't have to be alone. I may even have been so dimwitted as to announce that I could be with her full-time now. Never having truly gauged how deep her ne
ed for Justin was, or how complicated the game she'd been playing to hurt him for running out on her. The next morning, I saw the trapped look in Sally's eyes, so I bent over backwards to let her know how glad I was to be free to play the field. I had to convince her I wasn't needy, because otherwise she wouldn't let me love her.

  So I dated with abandon, living on cappuccino and cigarettes at the Blue Parrot and Cafe Pamplona. I would read my poems aloud to an audience of one, then segue into the tale of my brave quest to go straight. As a line of seduction it had a certain uniqueness, pleading rather than aggressive, and promising miles of foreplay. I wasn't afraid anymore, knowing the naked intimacy would satisfy the two of us even if my peter wasn't stiff as a tuning fork. Meanwhile I couldn't wait for Emma to come home for Christmas vacation, so we could finally consummate our summer of tender feelings. Making love began to seem the simplest thing in the world. At the back of my mind I even played with the shadowy notion that when Star returned at last from Asia, I'd be ready to be her lover.

  Such a liberating idea, to transform by passion relationships that had heretofore been ambiguous and problematic. Or so I must have presented the case to Alida, who'd been having a lonely time of it in the dating department, admitting at last that she'd never stopped being in love with me. Great, I said enthusiastically, then why didn't we have an affair? All through the playful negotiation that followed, Alida was the one who kept wondering aloud how we would ever get out of it once we got in. An argument I dismissed out of hand; that was precisely the sort of logic that had kept my heart in chains so long. We'd worry about goodbye when we got there, I assured her.