Becoming a Man: Half a Life Story

by Paul Monette

  Writing in my journal at the Casablanca, May eighth:

  Very depressed, very bad. Called Pip 20 minutes ago and told him I couldn't handle it. He sd he wasn't trying to avoid me but he is, and he sd "it" was sexual but couldn't talk about it... What do I want? What do I want? I don't know. Cantwell has been saying all along that it's a bad relationship with Pip. I don't know how to want Ellen, I feel so impotent... And I can't stand to be alone, to be stuck in the middle of it all... The issue is that I don't have any sexuality, that I can't imagine sex being easy or fun, it has always been such a battle with impotence for months now. Am I supposed to be on the floor, on the bottom, and crawl up into a relationship with a woman, deflecting myself from the pain of loving a man, and then get somewhere, allow myself to be loved, and then it falls apart because I can't make demands and then fall back to the distances with a man?

  Late that night Pip called to tell me it was over between us, and I spent the next two days weeping. When I met him so we could take our keys back—in the alley behind Barney's, where Edie had gotten him a job as a cook—he told me I should feel relieved instead of sad. "I thought you understood from the beginning that it was casual," he said, "that it wasn't the point."

  So what was the point? Losing Pip only seemed to intensify my divided nature. I'd spend a day or two with Ellen, pleading for wisdom, trying to stop intellectualizing my feelings. I knew she was a sanctuary, but I couldn't commit, fearful I would be using her. And then for the next couple of nights I'd be cruising at Sporter's, my bar of choice, half the time going home with someone and backing out at the last minute. Because I was as impotent with men now as with women. Or I'd go through the carnal moves with a man and flee, never staying over, running home to grab my journal so I could record the guilt and shame.

  Sally told me I had to get my own place, a move that didn't surprise me. It was painful for us to face one another at breakfast, evidence of how far we'd moved apart. I signed on for another summer running the theater at Andover. That way I'd be out of Concord Avenue by the end of June but still have till the end of summer to find a new apartment—with or without Ellen. I agreed to up my reenlistment at Canton to three courses in the fall, because I wasn't exactly doing a booming business in Day-Glo bedrooms. I didn't care about work anyway, except for the poems pouring out of me about one affair and another.

  But before heading up to Andover, I turned the screw of myself a further twist; I accepted Justin's invitation to spend a few days in Vermont at one of his crashed spaceships. While he laid tile in the house, I built a stone wall along the driveway. The work was profoundly satisfying, the most sweat I'd broken since riding shotgun on the coal trucks. But of course I had gone up-country for only one reason, and that was to get it on with Justin. Was it because I was angry at Sally? Or had I finally decided Justin and I were comrades under the skin, since he was embracing rather than running from his bi instincts? I didn't particularly desire him, but did get into the porno fantasy of a couple of country laborers mingling their sweat. When he fucked me, he didn't understand why I was laughing. Because we'd finally completed the twisted circle, Sally and Alida and Pip and Justin and I, and still none of us seemed to have a clue how to make love work.

  I think what kept Ellen and me together that summer was the Watergate hearings. We were both Nixon haters from way back, that sweaty porkface being the perfect symbol of the lies of a dying empire. From "I am not a crook" to Erlichman's smug assertion that the Constitution was "outdated," we loved the morality play of it all, the stripping of the emperor's polyester. The hearings were replayed every night at eleven, so that after rehearsal I'd race to Newton to watch them at Ellen's house. We crowed to watch the President's men crumple and deflate, Mitchell and Haldeman and the rest. If politics is indeed an aphrodisiac, then it was Nixon's fall that got my dick hard so Ellen and I could make it. Fucking on Nixon's grave.

  In July I also found out that a publisher in Boston had decided to take my manuscript of poems. A fluke of the first order, for the editor had once been a playmate of Sally's. In April he'd come for dinner to Concord Avenue, and I made sure he didn't leave without my poems under his arm. I think Sally may have even given him a wank for old times' sake. Not that my little book couldn't have made it on its own merits eventually, but it seemed entirely fitting that those keenings of sexual doubt should see the light of day because of a panting extramarital liaison. The editor didn't appear to understand a word of my stuff, but I didn't care. Having made it at last was all that mattered.

  So I floated through that summer in a delirium of pride. In mid-July I signed a lease for an apartment at 472 Broadway in Cambridge, just behind the Fogg Museum. It was clear enough to both Ellen and me that we weren't ready to live together, even though we'd managed to achieve a workable relationship, loving and respectful if prey to those windswept distances. Saturday afternoons we'd take off for the country, out to the Berkshires or up to Crane's Beach in Ipswich. That's when we were closest, cavorting in the icy surf and hiking in the hills. We'd both grown up wanting to run away, and sometimes we brought it off, runaways in the wilderness of summer. Making love in out-of-the-way motels, lulled to sleep by the throb of crickets.

  And yet the self-doubt wouldn't disappear, the sense that the love was all performance and held no desire:

  7/27. Thinking about E. I think: well, perhaps I can bring it off after all, our sex life is pretty "normal" now, whatever that means. Not exciting, but that's because I don't believe in myself yet to make it exciting. And thinking: all right, it's a together and complete relationship, but what about my need to be alone, what about my love of the poses and smut and daring of getting a man, what about pure desire....

  It began to seem impossible, this business of trying to change. I'd see the hurt in Ellen's eyes and think I could no longer stand it. I pleaded with Cantwell to let me break up with her. But he was off for his August break and put my hysteria down to fear of shrink abandonment. Keep my life in a holding pattern, he ordered me, and we'll see what happens. I began to understand that he liked me depressed and crazy with doubt, because that way I was more honest, less full of rhetoric.

  For a week over Labor Day, a client of mine let Ellen and me have her house on the dunes in Truro—a haunting fisherman's cottage that had appeared in a slew of Edward Hopper paintings. We had a glorious time there, baking out all day on the nude beach, then hunkering together on the deck to watch the sunset. We'd go nearly the whole day without talking, and yet there were no distances. I remember thinking we could make it work if we could always be on vacation. Then one afternoon, Ellen made friends on the beach with a man in his sixties, a designer from Montreal. I barely nodded hello to him, but heard later that he observed, "Your lover's a homosexual, I believe." Ellen admitted as much, saying that she loved me even though the sex wasn't very good. I was furious with betrayal when she told me this, cut to the heart, and paranoid all over again that I "looked" queer, even with a woman on my arm.

  Yet we persevered, probably against our better judgment. For a while we were both too busy to have it out between us. Ellen was swamped by deadlines at Boston 200, and I was juggling a three-quarter schedule at Canton with the demands of several clients. Now that I had a foot in the door of Poetry, I was eager to cut free of the decorating trade. But I had these lingering commitments to get out of the way, especially my role of lay shrink to various premenopausal suburban wives. Frazzled from all the pressure, I decided I needed to work on my philosophy.

  So I picked up Walden, one of the really glaring lacunae in my formal education. During my free periods at Canton I'd drive out into the Blue Hills, walk a ways into the woods, and strip naked, sitting in a patch of sun while I read Thoreau. I was not unaware of the pure theatricality of the gesture, but then neither was Thoreau, a pastoral drama queen if there ever was one. "I would rather sit on a pumpkin and have it all to myself," he wrote, "than be crowded on a velvet cushion." My sentiments precisely, and I was in the velvet cushi
on business. It would take me a year and a half to finish Walden, so much did I savor and brood over every line. And Thoreau would become my main man, so much so that by the next summer I'd be driving out to Walden Pond itself—to read my daily text on Henry's doorsill, all that was left of the world's most famous cabin.

  Which says something about how literal I am. It also serves as a pretty accurate symbol of where I was headed in the fall of '73. I wanted to call a halt to all the demands being made on me. I was so sick of hearing myself talk about sexuality—hetero, homo, and otherwise. Maybe I was finally willing to do what Cantwell wanted: to stop grabbing at one relationship after another and get to know myself. Nothing felt right, neither my evasions of intimacy with Ellen nor my stiff sentinel pose at Sporter's, where I probably looked so fierce and self-protected that nobody dared to cruise me. I finally had an openly gay friend in Boston, when John moved to Beacon Hill after graduating Yale. But he had a lover who didn't much like me, mostly because I was still so closeted, and somehow I twisted that up into thinking I'd never fit the bourgeois restraints of a gay marriage either.

  It was strange, but after fifteen months of therapy I was growing more and more inarticulate, as if I'd run out of things to say about myself. This was unnerving, but there was relief in it as well, because I was also fresh out of excuses. I only knew I had to change my life, that it wasn't enough to be naked in the woods for an hour here and there, stolen moments. I needed to steal much much more if I was ever going to make up for the years I'd thrown away in the closet.

  During that Watergate summer at Andover I'd met a young poet from Yale who came up to visit some mutual friends. Sandy McClatchy was dauntingly bright, with an encyclopedic recall of everybody's work and the shrewdest analytic brain for what it all meant. I felt like a charlatan beside him, since half the poems I read went right by me. Yet Sandy was neither intimidating nor pretentious, glad to have found a kindred spirit who got off as much as he on lit'ry gossip. What was intimidating was his Black Irish good looks, though he was far too well-bred to trade on them. But I understood he'd been through an upheaval over his sexual nature that wasn't all that different from my own. Sandy was much further along in the process of self-acceptance, though he never faulted me for lagging back.

  Several times during the fall, I drove to New Haven to stay overnight with Sandy, usually when some literary giant was reading at Yale. I always acted like a breathless fan, but Sandy had a capacity for deference that wasn't fawning or self-denying, so the giants tended to treat us as equals. "Well, why don't you have an affair with him?" Cantwell asked bluntly during one of our sessions, when I was waxing eloquent about how simpatico Sandy and I were. Out of the question, I told him. Two poets would only burn one another out. But I wasn't telling the truth, which was that I wanted Sandy yet was afraid of what would happen if it worked. For then I would have to stop this waffling—half straight, half gay, one step out of the closet, two steps back. And I would have to break up with Ellen, a prospect that left me paralyzed with cowardice.

  So I played the same shell game with Sandy that I'd been playing for years with César—bonded like brothers, everything-else-but-sex. And because he was so decent, Sandy never pushed for more, though now nearly twenty years later I wish he had. As if I wouldn't have run the other way. By that point, as I began to have more contact with my gay brethren in the literary world, I was using my bisex ambiguity as a last shield. I'd stiffen at every in-joke and camp irony, fearful that if I so much as laughed, I'd be branded queer. Preferring to come off as oddly sexless, neither here nor there, and always trying to keep the conversation rigorously literary.

  It's no wonder that I suffered all that autumn from a lingering neurasthenia—sleeplessness, fatigue, even hot flashes. The glands in my groin were swollen, and I had a persistent rash at the base of my dick, tiny sores. One night I woke up sweating from a dream in which my dick had come unscrewed like a light bulb, and I couldn't get it back on. My body and my unconscious knew more than I what a crisis of identity I was in. Yet doggedly Ellen and I continued giving it our best shot, driving off for weekends into the red and gold of autumn, talking it out, over and over, where we were going. It was the least I could do to try and say it, but the fact was I didn't know. It was all just words.

  11/26. Heavy talks with E last night and Alida tonight, during both of which I thought I was losing my mind, going crazy, I was so incapable of knowing what to say. So I sd crazy guilt-ridden generalizations and couldn't really own them...

  11/27. My poor rash. Cantwell says that Alida and E have a great deal invested in the old Monette and naturally (with concern, without rancor) want me to act "right" again, and I can't. But I don't know what the new Monette is and have to keep saying "I don't know." I feel fairly calm and together until I have to explain myself at all to anyone ... Sex is more regular with E. That is, I'm not afraid I can't do it anymore, but I can't stand the intimacy of it, can't face being the man in the situation. And yet I think of Bruce on Saturday [a trick] and get pissed thinking how irrelevant I was/am in the passive role. I want to be the man who has me.

  Two days later a doctor finally diagnosed my rash as herpes. No treatment available at that time, and the outbreak could last two years. Worse, no counseling about how not to spread it or even how contagious it was. The doctor spoke as if it was just a minor annoyance, part of the downside risk in the sexual carnival we were all living in. I didn't tell Ellen—never really confronted it till she found the first sore on the inside of her thigh, maybe a month later. It was only then, seeing the cloud of fear and betrayal in her face, that I understood it was a much more dangerous business for women. That the herpes virus might be a co-factor for certain kinds of cancer.

  By then of course it was something of a last straw, proof of how destructive my waffling had been for both of us. We didn't mean to let it go on so long, except there continued to be so many occasions of grace—quiet evenings in one another's arms, the tender expressions of loyalty, and a history now as well. We were doomed, Ellen and I, but we owed some allegiance still to the honesty we managed to elicit from one another. I suppose we were really engaged in a long goodbye of our own, but we seemed determined to do it without any bitterness—to learn from this, so we would be better the next time.

  Ellen decided to join her family in Paris for Christmas. This separation would mark the final divergence of our two paths, but if we knew it going in, we didn't say so. All through December Ellen was under the gun at work, and I was back and forth to Andover because my mother was in the hospital, a cancer scare that turned out to be benign. Thus Ellen and I would only meet in passing, late at night and both of us exhausted. When I left her off at the airport, over drinks in the tower lounge, I remember squeezing her hand and saying things would be different once she got back. Did I mean I would finally find the words to put an end to our misery? In any case I said different, not better.

  Over New Year's I went down to New York to visit a gay couple I'd met through Sandy, a painter and a novelist. Actually I'd met only the painter, a flamboyant wit and self-proclaimed genius who knew everybody in the literary life. He and the novelist had been together for nearly twenty years, traveling all over, summers in the Hamptons, the whole bit. Hearing the stories, the totem names that constituted their circle of friends, I was ravenous for a taste of the high life of art. When Carl, the painter, invited me to come stay with him and Harold in the West Village, to go check out the New Year's parties, I fairly floated down on Amtrak, convinced I'd arrived at last.

  What I neglected to factor in was Harold. Though he and Carl were bound at the hip and deeply loving, they were no longer much good for each other. Too much artist for one apartment. They were engaged in an even longer goodbye than Ellen and I, but they were both looking too. And indeed the excitement was palpable between Harold and me from the moment we met. His craggy intensity and the constant barrage of chainsmoking opinions. Forty-five years old—ancient to me at the time, though now t
hat I'm forty-five myself, I feel like telling Harold, Oh, I get it now. We talked till four in the morning three nights running, and I watched him fall in love with me.

  But wouldn't give it back. He never actually made a pass, though I'd never felt so undressed by somebody's eyes. We tramped the city together, museums and concerts and louche cafes, laughing with giddy delight to be together. I realized this was how it must have felt to Scott when I was his poet-mentor, giving every ounce of myself the way Harold did now. I loved the feel of being taken care of. Then we'd come to the end of the night, after the theater and late supper, and Harold would get too close and talk romantic gush. And I would stiffen and stare into space, my everything-else-but pose.

  "Tadzio," he would call me, clucking with irony, and tease me even harder. "Excuse me, Miss Garbo," he'd say. Or when he got angry the final night, as I turned away from a kiss that was really quite chaste: "You know what your problem is, Paul? You've seen Queen Cristina one too many times."

  I didn't understand how truly smitten he was. To me it was only a playful brief encounter, flattering to my ego but not what I was after. Harold and I weren't in sync—I didn't want to be his boy, and that was all there was to it. Besides, I had to go home and face Ellen, a situation that was crying out for resolution. All day before her plane touched down from Paris, my mind raced: I've got to get out of this, I can't give her what she wants. And then she walked through the gate, sweet and easy and laughing, and I choked with relief to hold her again.

  But in fact the relationship had changed. It wasn't assumed anymore that I would be staying over at her house, though I still did now and then. We no longer planned our weekends together unless at the last minute, if both of us were still free. And there was an unspoken agreement now that Ellen could date whom she liked and I could do my restless cruising, and we didn't have to talk about it. I could sense our lives grow separate, and how mournful it made us both feel, and yet how gently we went about the process of disentangling.