Becoming a Man: Half a Life Story

by Paul Monette

  So we went for it, swearing we wouldn't become too involved. Thus did I juggle affairs, proudly sharing it all with Sally, for she was now my mentor and love adviser as well as my main squeeze. As for Scott, he detoured through Cambridge at either end of his Christmas vacation, spending the night on Sally's sofa while she and I shared the bedroom. I strutted with pride at being able to show off to Scott a woman of my own, and Sally in turn showered him with affection, giving him pointers on how to get laid at Yale.

  I thought I had everything now, running from tryst to tryst. I tried not to notice Emma's sadness as she took off for college after New Year's, clearly not as certain as I that it had done us both good to devirginalize our relationship. Or did she pick up, in me, an impatience to have it over with, an arrogant calculation in my New Man's equation that a few rolls in the hay over Christmas was all we were worth anyway? I shrank even more from the restless sorrow in Alida's eyes when I'd leave in the morning, not free to see her again till the end of the week. I didn't think of myself as controlling, had always assumed my outsize presence was enough, since I prided myself on having learned to live completely in the moment. For the space of an evening, a couple of hours' loving, we enacted a kind of poem. Who needed a day-to-day commitment when we were blessed instead with the spirit of High Romance?

  Cantwell heard me out on all these florid theories, the litany of my galloping, rampant manhood. I assured him I barely felt the homo side at all anymore. Cantwell cut to the chase: my approval mechanism sprang from my desire to recover the relationship I'd lost with my mother the day she found me with Kite. I see now how tenaciously he was questioning my whole commitment to straighthood, what an evasion it was of confronting the unreason of my shame at being queer. I nodded agreeably but ducked the analysis. Since starting therapy, I'd become more and more distant from my parents, finally breaking the pattern of weekly visits to Andover, laundry in hand. I'd told them, with some defiance, to leave me alone to work out my life. So who needed approval?

  Besides, Sally had just invited me to share the apartment on Concord Avenue. She must've been fairly convinced I was making a life for myself by then, or perhaps she had some thought that we could reconfigure our relationship and just be roommates. I know she'd finally told a couple of girlfriends about our affair, and they weren't amused at all. They told her she'd end up losing Justin. I don't know quite how I envisioned our living together, but I remember thinking that if things went well, we could end up married. I moved in mid-January, taking the tiny second bedroom, a mattress on the floor amid vertiginous piles of my books. But I slept in Sally's bed, alone if she was spending the night with Justin, otherwise wrapped about her. As far as I was concerned, I'd achieved a level of heterosex completion beyond my wildest imaginings.

  Two weeks later, early one Saturday morning, Sally came back from Justin's. I woke up to find her packing a bag so they could go off to Vermont for the night. She climbed into bed to kiss me, let it grow more and more passionate, then pulled away shakingher head. It had to stop between us, she said, because she couldn't handle the cheating anymore. Justin had promised to be more committed—something he did periodically, usually when he found he had the clap, the reason Sally eventually gave him the nickname "disease du jour." I bit my tongue to keep from protesting I love you better than he does.

  But I cried. I bawled. A wail of grief that went on and on, shrugging off the comfort of Sally's embrace. Mostly it was a tantrum of self-pity, but the loss and the hurt and the dread came down to a single immutable certainty: I would never be straight. The whole elaborate drama of my interlocking affairs seemed to fall in a heap at my feet. You're gay, you're gay, throbbed a voice in my head, you'll never get out of it now. Sally wanted to call Cantwell, but I said no, I needed to feel this pain all the way through.

  It was a crossroads in my heart, though you never would've known it to see us later in the apartment on Concord Avenue. For Sally's resolve lasted about three days, and then we were back to doing it whenever we had a night free. It was different though, because I understood she wouldn't be leaving Justin for me. I even understood that she needed him to punish herself, and that she had to come out of it on her own. Which was more than I understood about myself, as I raced around trying to fill the gaps in my dance card. Within two weeks I'd found another pair of players, and this time one was a man.

  But first came Edie, a blazingly colorful presence in the Square, feathers in her hair and her eyes made up in Day-Glo and sequins. She was a part-time cook in the cafe of the moment, classically trained in voice and ballet but preferring instead the spontaneous song-and-dance that erupted in the coffeehouses of Cambridge. She was also a Mayflower blue blood, a fact of pedigree that cracked her up. Edie seemed to live as fast as I did, juggling as many amours. We found ourselves bored at the same parties and finally split from one of them together, ducking into Barney's for coffee. There she was a sort of resident diva, popping into the kitchen to fix me eggs, embracing all her regulars at the bar. She collected artists, she told me point-blank.

  Okay, I thought, so collect me. Edie seemed to love having me around, though she had intimacy problems in bed. Sometimes scared like a little girl, sometimes terribly melancholy, crying into my neck. So I went slow and treated her as gently as I could, moved as always by anyone else's sexual fears and traumas. The only thing I found odd about Edie was that she never ate in my presence—though she was always cooking for me, merrily waltzing naked around her kitchen as she boiled up pasta or baked a pie. She was neither thin nor fat, and never talked about dieting. She just preferred to eat by herself.

  I liked her eccentricities—the bizarre late hours, the glitter clothes, the singing in the streets. She also didn't judge me for having met Pip. Of course I was bisexual, Edie declared cheerfully, prodding me to have it both ways. Well, as long as somebody gave me permission. I'd met Pip at a party at Justin's, where he was sipping Jack Daniels out of the bottle and plunking jazz on a flat piano. He was an architect too, though mostly unemployed. A strapping boy from Minnesota, Swedish and big-boned, with always three days' growth of beard to give a rough edge to his cherub's dimples. What César used to call an ange tombé.

  I'd taken him home to bed that very evening, knowing I was playing with fire—the first man I'd slept with in months, the first ever who wasn't more or less anonymous. After we came, we sat up half the night talking about what "bi" meant. We both decided that our overriding instinct was for the normal thing with women. Having it on with men was a minor variation, a chance to reexperience adolescent comradeship, but mostly just for play.

  Two men could never reach the depth of feeling available to a man and a woman, because a woman led the way when it came to feelings. As usual I went along with all these half-baked stereotypes, not wanting to come across less of a man than Pip. And careful not to show that I was ready to fall in love with him, the last thing he was looking for.

  So for a couple of weeks I had the experience of loving both Sally and Pip, but not telling either one for fear I'd lose them. They in turn seemed to think the main event in my life was Edie, whom I did see every day, but with the increasing sense that we made a better couple at Barney's than by ourselves. Cantwell warned me that Pip appeared to have more guilt over his gay side than even I, and if I really wanted a man, I had to find one who took joy in it. He was equally uncertain what I was still doing with Sally, who'd told me I would never be first. I countered stubbornly that I liked the free-floating arrangement. What better way to find out how bi I was than to have one of each?

  On the last weekend in February, Edie and I drove through a blizzard to my friend's place at the Cape, picking up groceries on the way for a house party that was meant to be eight of us. But nobody showed up on account of the storm, and by nightfall we were snowbound. The idea of being stranded appealed mightily to my romantic nature, but Edie promptly cracked at the seams.

  While I was making a snowman, she locked herself in the bathroom and plucked o
ut first her eyebrows, then all her eyelashes, then her pubic hair. She emerged, frantic with anxiety, admitting she had a food problem and warning me to fasten my seatbelt. Then she proceeded to cook and eat six bags of groceries—a ten-pound roast, a turkey, two pounds of bacon, on and on, all night long. Every half hour or so she'd go in the bathroom and throw it all up. She was curiously polite about all this, apologizing, even making jokes about it. But I swear she would've come after me with a butcher knife if I'd tried to get between her and any of that food.

  The plow didn't come to dig us out till noon the next day, and we drove home in stunned silence, stopping every ten miles so Edie could eat in a coffee shop. When I left her off at her place in Cambridge, she said with rueful understatement, "I don't think I'm quite ready for a relationship."

  The terrors and dysfunctions, the self-battering and self-hatred. The more I experienced the struggles of intimacy, the more troubled and lonely I found almost everyone. Of course it may have had something to do with the people I chose, drawn like a magnet to hearts as damaged as mine—but I don't think so. At twenty-seven I thought I was uniquely fucked-up for having choked so long in the closet. But my belated journey through the minefields of the bedroom gave me abundant proof that the fear of connection and openness crossed all borders—men and women, gay and straight. And just getting into bed with somebody wasn't the magic solution, because people could hide their terrors in pure technique—depersonalizing so completely the body embraced that they felt nothing at all.

  Yet it was all still so new to me that I kept believing passion would save everyone in the end. I even would've continued seeing Edie, since she'd tapped into something protective in me. Anyway, after so many years of being a chameleon, I was nothing if not accommodating. Other people's pain never made me run the other way. But Edie had revealed too much, and couldn't look me in the eye anymore when I'd drop in at Barney's. So I redoubled my one-way commitments to Sally and Pip, who for all their problems of self-esteem seemed positively sane after Edie in the blizzard.

  For a little while we kept a precarious balance, acting as if the incestuous relations among us were the height of bohemian freedom. One long Sunday, Sally and Pip and I lay sprawled on her bed in our underwear, passing a bowl of out-of-season cherries as we laughed our way through the papers. We'd take baths together, the three of us lined up in the claw-footed tub washing each other's hair. But the camaraderie couldn't mask the fact that when Pip and I finally crawled into bed on my narrow mattress, he wanted it over quick and without any love talk. Mostly just frottage, and almost a phobia about kissing. Once the sex was done, he'd happily laugh and talk all night, and I'd pretend the half-measure of passion hadn't left me hungry.

  And Sally didn't really like having a queer relationship in the next room. It reminded her too much of what she was struggling against with Justin. "Are you in love with Pip?" she asked me abruptly one morning at breakfast. No, I demurred. Then, two mornings later, as if she'd been thinking about it ever since: "If you're not in love with him, why are you acting this way?"

  What way? Lovesick, I guess. Putting up too much of a breezy front when Pip and I were together, then moping when he didn't call. Sally fixed him up a couple of times with girlfriends of hers, which I found pretty hostile but didn't express it aloud. Somewhere in there, Justin was over at Concord Avenue for the night, and he and Sally invited me to share their bed. Justin's idea, not Sally's, and not much fun either. I made love to Sally while she sucked Justin off. The mechanics worked okay, but there was a desperate undercurrent as Sally worked frantically to keep Justin and me from touching each other. She needn't have feared: Justin was the last person I wanted to touch.

  But the moping got worse, as I felt increasingly estranged from Sally and angry at her debasement at Justin's hands. To complete the circle of deceit, Justin had started secretly seeing Alida, who'd been smart enough to end the blurred affair with me but whose sense of being left out overrode her better judgment. It was beginning to feel like a hothouse, clammy and claustrophobic, being Alida's confidant about Justin and having to keep Sally in the dark. For me the only positive thing to come out of this round-robin of musical beds was Scott's thin-lipped disapproval of me and Pip. At last I was able to shed the lingering tentacles of that obsession, deciding he could go sit on it if he didn't like it. One less approval sought.

  I was seeing Pip maybe twice a week, and one of those times he'd usually be drunk on his ass. He reminded me then of Cody, my roommate at Yale—the same unfinished projects on his drafting table, the same chaos of dirty laundry and unopened mail. If I visited him over at his place, a commune in Brookline that Sally called the Addams Family, he'd sit in the drafty solarium two-fingering the upright piano. Please don't go, he'd tell me. But please don't make him talk either. So I curled up in a ratty overstuffed chair and worked on a poem while Pip made lonely music.

  I thought we needed to get away, so we drove to Provincetown for an overnight. But all he wanted to do was drift from bar to bar, drinking boilermakers, and it ended with us sleeping in the attic of a guesthouse, rain beating down on the roof a foot from my head. I watched him sleep and thought, This isn't the one. Not that I had the strength to say so and pull out of it, but I knew I was angrier now than anything else. Tired of his pontificating about building a real life with a woman, sick of coming up short because Pip was straighter than I.

  Then I met Ellen. It was a dinner reunion for several of us who'd taught together at Andover, but I don't remember anyone else who was there. Ellen was the roommate of the hostess, not really there for the party, passing through to get herself a cup of tea. We locked eyes and smiled, and right away all other bets were off. Her thick chestnut hair was down, tumbling nearly to her waist and rustling when she walked. Her beauty had nothing to do with pretty; mysterious was the main thing. A wide brow that hooded her probing eyes, the smolder of her dark skin, a haunted smile. Otherworldly, and something about her that beckoned you there.

  We talked on the stairs for an hour, halfway between the party I no longer cared about and the sanctuary of her bedroom, where she repaired to recover herself after a week in the trenches. She worked at City Hall in Boston, writing the script for the city's two-hundredth birthday, two years away and already a nightmare of logistics. But none of that mattered to Ellen, now that spring was coming on. She couldn't bear the hibernation of New England winters, and bloomed in the sun more than anyone I ever met. Three mornings a week, she went to the Zen center in Cambridge to chant. She had a mystical passion for things Native American, and was always reading the speeches and prayers of some holy chief, when she wasn't devouring Joseph Campbell.

  Depths upon depths she suggested, and I was ready to dive before the evening was done, hating to let her go upstairs alone. In my journal I cautioned myself not to be so precipitous, to try to figure out first what I wanted. But I think all I wanted was life to happen without any figuring from me. I'd been honest with Ellen, spilling the tale of my tightrope walk between gay and straight, especially my upheaval over Pip. She was at the lingering end of a wrong-headed relationship herself, the long goodbye, so she didn't seem so ready to jump herself. I let ten days go by before I called her, an eternity for me.

  Pip was delighted to hear I'd met a woman; that gave him license to talk about Barbara, his on-again-off-again girlfriend who sounded, if possible, more co-dependent than I. Pip said he drank less when he was with me, so he must've been nearly comatose with her. But I never said no when he called and asked to come over, even if it felt more and more like walking on eggs. We didn't have sex unless he proposed it, because I was afraid of scaring him off. We'd lie in bed with a sort of invisible sword between us, Pip bemoaning the confusion of his life, berating himself for being afraid of making a commitment to Barbara. Not a word about him and me. Then he'd turn the light off, and I'd wait to see if he moved to touch me.

  Cantwell suggested bluntly that I not see Pip anymore. He thought I needed to face being alo
ne and let the despair of that wash over me, and then we would see what I really wanted. But I waffled all through April, waiting for someone else to make an irrevocable move. Sally and I fought over stupid little roommate things, and more than once she snapped that Pip and I were "counter-productive." Then I'd spend the weekend at Ellen's, hoping the bi confusion would go away. I loved her exotic intensity and her willingness to talk for hours about emotions. I wasn't exactly afraid to make love to her, or even especially impotent, but I couldn't shake the feeling that I was faking it.

  Notes from a session with Cantwell, first of May:

  No goals, Monette, no purpose, therefore no commitment, no self-command, no self-respect. Started from getting no direction or goals from parents. And the relationship with Pip is therefore directionless.

  A note from Ellen, May third:

  My friend, what I fear from you is the response from my soul to greet you, aching and surging and loving the moorings below where life is in one sense complete, even then rising up to laugh in the joy we meet again and again. Never before has such communion in energy been unmirrored and respectfully separate... I need you, yet I am in flashing tremors panicked by the space between us that I feel powerless to enlighten. You do not know why I do not force myself upon you? Then I shall say it again. Because I am afraid I will grow to love you more than I love myself and because I fear you believe you don't know what commitment is. You do know, you are given, but your mind etches splendid diagrams of warning, distrust and invalidation, so that while conscious you are still not responsible. The understanding I have for you, windswept and alone as I am in a dark core, is recognition of and sorrowing with you over your own spaces, the intellectualized emotions baited for withdrawal. And yet these are darkening my own, even as you fill me with life.