Self-Made Man

by Norah Vincent

  I was, after all, the one among them who had committed the greatest transgression, and in forgiving Ned so readily and completely, not only had Father Fat shown me the clarity of mind and heart that emotional self-discipline at its best could give to any man or woman able to stand up to it, he had shown me the rigors of insight that Ned had yet to find in himself.

  After my confession with Father Fat I knew I needed to talk to Vergil, so on my second-to-last night I arranged to meet him for some private time together. We decided to take a walk around the grounds. It took a fair amount of preliminary chatter before we got down to the real subject. Vergil was uncomfortable with what he sensed was coming, but by this time I wasn’t hiding anything anymore, and finally I just cut through.

  “So,” I said, “what happened between us a while back? One day we were friends, and the next it was as if you hardly knew me. Did I do something to make you angry? Did I disappoint you in some way?”

  He deflected calmly.

  “No, not at all. I don’t know what you mean.”

  “Oh, come on, Vergil, you do, too. I didn’t imagine this. Something changed radically after the first week, and I’d like to know why.”

  We went back and forth on this for a few minutes, with Vergil claiming to have been busy and preoccupied with his coming profession and a whole host of other things unrelated to me. They were plausible explanations, but there was more to tell and Vergil was too honest at heart to hide this very well, even in his disclaimers.

  Then in frustration I said, “Look, just tell me the truth, even if it hurts my feelings. I’d really like to know. I promise, if you’re thinking what I think you’re thinking about me, you’re wrong.”

  Vergil didn’t reply, so I went further and said the obvious. “I know everybody here thinks I’m gay. But I need you to know something, and you’re just going to have to take my word for it. I’m not sexually attracted to you.”

  He interrupted here. “See, the fact that you would even feel the need to say that—that that would even enter your mind…”

  “I know, I know. You think, like everybody else, that I’m in denial. The more I protest, the truer it must be. But you’re just wrong. Believe me.”

  I could tell he wasn’t really buying it, but he didn’t press me, so I said, “Never mind that for now. Tell me what it was that bothered you about me.”

  “Oh, all right,” he said, relenting at last. He sighed. “You were too clingy. You were like this thing I just couldn’t get off me.” He pronounced the last four words slowly with emphasis, shaking his right hand in a flicking downward motion, as if it were covered in muck.

  “I could see it happening,” he went on. “I recognized the signs.”

  As Jerome had said, Vergil had felt me developing an affection for him, had assumed it to be homosexual in nature and had taken steps to squelch it.

  “So I was right,” I said. “You did back away purposely.”

  “Yes,” he conceded. “But look,” he added, “I think you’ve had a good influence on this community. You’ve brought emotional awareness and the possibility of change. You’re not a follower. We need that.”

  Coming from Vergil this was a great compliment indeed, and it confirmed for me what I hoped had been the case—that however much of an intrusion I had been in their lives, and however poorly I might have handled myself at times among them, I had touched these men in some way. After he said this, I felt momentarily overwhelmed by a sense of healing and possibility, a sense that for all their stoic showing, these men were warm at the center, and breathing—crippled, perhaps, but not nearly dead, and by no means without some hidden ability to affect me, and for the better.

  I knew then that the time was right to tell Vergil the truth about me.

  “Vergil,” I said trepidatiously. “I’ve got a confession to make.”

  “Okay,” he said with complete composure. “What is it?”

  “There’s something about me that I haven’t told you.”

  “Oh?”

  “Yeah. Something important.”

  We walked a little farther in silence, and then I turned to him. At this point, since I was on the verge of leaving anyway, I wasn’t wearing my beard anymore. I hadn’t been wearing it for several days. To me it should have seemed obvious that something wasn’t quite right. But this was the test of perception that continually arose with Ned. People saw in him what I had conditioned them to see. When I removed the beard, they saw nothing but a shaved boy. But I wanted to press Vergil on the point. He was perceptive and I wanted him to see. Could wanting to reveal myself reveal me as surely as wanting to disguise myself had disguised me? Did the suggestion work both ways?

  “Do you have any idea what it is?” I asked.

  He thought for a minute, then ventured something he’d obviously been thinking for a while.

  “You’re not Catholic,” he said.

  This was typical Vergil. He would see heresy in a microbe before he’d see the transvestite staring him in the face. He was hard-core about his doctrine, though being his sardonic self he couldn’t refrain from making a crack or two on the subject now and then. I remembered how once while we were looking through the monastery bookshelves together for some appropriate reading for Ned, and had come across the work of So-and-So, S.J., he had reshelved it immediately, saying, “No, that won’t do.”

  “Why not?” I’d said.

  “I have serious doubts about whether Jesuits are even Catholic,” he said.

  I loved him for that. He was a crank and he knew it.

  I’d given enough of my unbelief away in theological argument over the last three weeks that Vergil’s question didn’t surprise me in the least.

  “No,” I said. “I’m Catholic, all right, or I was, though you’re right that I’m not anymore, or at least I’m not insofar as you can ever cease to be Catholic.”

  Vergil glared at me over this last remark, as if I’d poked him with a stick, which of course I had. This was part of our game, when it was on, part of what had bonded us to each other all along.

  “Guess again,” I said.

  “Hmm. Let’s see. You’re an escapee from a mental institution.”

  “Nope. Not technically, though being a New Yorker surely counts.”

  The monks had all been tickled by the fact that I made my home in a neighborhood called Hell’s Kitchen. To them, the freak show of New York City was about as far from their home as you could get. To me it was and it wasn’t.

  At this point, I stopped Vergil on the path, stood facing him and said, “Look at me. It’s right in front of you. Can’t you see it?”

  “What?” He looked into my face. “I see a guy with graying hair.”

  “No, that’s not it,” I said. “Look closer.” I took off my glasses.

  “I don’t know,” he said, perusing me again. “What is it?”

  He was blank. Puzzled.

  We both turned and kept walking. I tried one last thing.

  “I’m not what I appear to be.”

  This sank in as we rounded the corner of the footpath by the carpentry shop and began the last stretch back to the cloister. Suddenly he turned to me, the moment of revelation having come at last with full force.

  “You’re a woman.”

  “Yes,” I said with relief.

  By now we were in front of the abbey. A discovery of this magnitude was going to require at least one more loop around the grounds. We kept walking. Vergil was quietly registering this information. I was watching his face. He was stealing looks at my chest.

  “I do have them,” I said, catching him midglance. “They’re just under a tight sports bra. I’m not a transsexual. I’m a woman in disguise.”

  This seemed to answer the first question in his mind. I went on with the rest of the explanation.

  “I’m also a lesbian,” I said, “which, you will now understand, is why Ned couldn’t possibly be gay and why I never wanted to sleep with you. You see?”

&nb
sp; He nodded. He seemed both disappointed and relieved. I had expected the relief, but not the disappointment. There was something more to this.

  I told him about the book. He wasn’t pleased at first, for all the reasons you might expect, feeling betrayed and lied to and used. His orthodox strain kicked in, as expected, but not in the punitive way I had thought it might. I had broken the seal of the cloister, and that, he reminded me, was a fairly serious breach of canon law. He suggested I go to confession on the matter. I told him that I already had, with Father Fat, and that my decision to tell him was part of my penance.

  Vergil accepted this on some level as right and proper, but to my great surprise his reaction then turned personal, something I hadn’t really seen in Vergil before.

  “Why me?” he asked. Why had I chosen him, singled him out for special attention?

  This was a question that only my female dates had ever asked me before.

  “Because I was there?” he asked, hurt, it seemed, just as the others had been, to think that my interest in him hadn’t been genuine.

  “Well, yes, and no,” I answered truthfully, as I had answered all the others. “That’s why I chose to speak to you initially—because you were there. But the feelings I developed later were real. I couldn’t have faked those. No way. This may sound like a con to you, but it’s not. Very real and profound things can happen—and for me have happened—under the cover of a falsehood. That has been the whole point of this experiment. The truths I’ve learned and experienced would not have revealed themselves otherwise.”

  He agreed, it seemed, though he said nothing. He was calm, his head inclined in conference. I went on.

  “Vergil,” I said, “I care a lot. That’s why I’m telling you all of this. And I’m truly sorry for the lie. I hope you can forgive me.”

  We talked on, going over the particulars, and to his credit, Vergil made it very easy for me. He was receptive, understanding, immediately forgiving, just as Father Fat had been. He showed every aspect of his best and wisest self though he had every reason not to, and I was both admiring and grateful.

  “Now I can tell you,” I said finally. “This is a really hard place to be a woman.”

  “Well, it’s supposed to be,” he laughed. And so did I, though I did so with an underlying sense of puzzlement. I have thought often of that comment in retrospect, and, whether this is fair or not, it does, in a sense, confirm a lot of what I’d felt about the defeminizing of Ned—and Crispin, too—in that environment. It was an odd answer on the face of it. In theory, living together amicably as men didn’t necessitate creating an atmosphere that was hostile to women or even to femininity. But that is what the monks had done, and according to Vergil, they had done so by design. Ned’s hazing hadn’t been imaginary, and this consolidated masculinity that reigned so heavily in the monastery wasn’t, it seemed, just the natural result of men living together without women. It was the result of men actively working to squelch any creeping womanly tendencies in themselves and their brothers.

  But why? Why this need for such a macho atmosphere? Granted, this was workhorse machismo of a particularly tight-lipped, straight-backed and, as Felix had said, Germanic variety. It wasn’t rugby and beer. But it was machismo all the same in its need to obviate its opposite. And that seemed entirely superfluous in a world where the soul was ostensibly God’s instrument.

  So why? Why the cultural misogyny? The answer, when it came to me, was not at all mysterious. A cliché, in fact. Felix himself had said it. They took refuge in machismo because they feared inappropriate intimacies between men. A feminized man is a gay man, or so the stereotype goes. A feminized man is a weak man, and a weak man who allows intimacies is prey to the assertions of chaos and his libido.

  It seemed painfully obvious in my own particular case. The jokes, the paranoia, the shutting out.

  The thought that Vergil might be gay had crossed my mind before, but I hadn’t been at all sure about my instincts on the matter, not nearly as sure as I had been about Jerome. But now Vergil and I were confessing to each other, so I decided to take the risk that he might be honest if only I asked him the right way. I remembered him talking about his time away from the monastery, about how he’d said he’d had “a really good time,” as if he’d done his sinning all at once at a big party. But he had been carefully non–sex specific about it. I remembered another cryptic remark he had made at the time that now made a lot more sense to me: “We are all God’s creatures and love is love and sex is sex and they are not the same thing.”

  In other words: Lord, make me straight but not now.

  I decided I had to ask, but I didn’t want to make him use the word gay. He was uncomfortable with it, I sensed. This wasn’t an interrogation. So I just asked him, as if in passing, if the people he’d had relationships with during his time away from the monastery had been men.

  The lines were open between us now. Maybe knowing I was a woman had taken away some of his fears, enough to know that I wasn’t a threat to him anymore. His physical attraction, if it had been there, would presumably have died with my disclosure, the temptation removed.

  He didn’t resist the admission. He nodded his assent.

  “So you’ve never slept with a woman?” I asked, more boldly.

  He looked at me archly. “Not that I know of.”

  Vergil was a comic to the last and, like Father Fat, in his lack of umbrage he was a credit to his order. When it counted most, when he was sorely deceived, he was true to his commandments: to love, to forgive and not to judge.

  He was also a soft touch. He’d let me off easy and I was grateful.

  I’m sure that part of him was relieved, too, and that made it easier for him to greet my news so forgivingly. When Ned became a woman the gay problem disappeared and with it the transgressive masculinity he embodied, as well as the inappropriate intimacy he had provoked. In this context a woman must have felt like a gift, especially since I was leaving anyway. A female was far more acceptable than a fag. She could be held at bay, her needs and emotive untidiness satisfactorily explained, then set aside. But in a man those qualities were far more troubling. They could get inside, infiltrate, threaten and, worst of all, seduce. The odd man out was dangerous, like the slightest touch at a pressure point that could bring the whole edifice down. It was a crisis they were well rid of.

  Vergil and I parted on newly intimate terms, awake to another potential in ourselves and each other. He assured me that I had a brother in him if I needed one, and I knew that he meant it. A brother to a sister. Easy. Normal. Good.

  We promised to write.

  Aside from Vergil and Father Fat, Felix was the only other person I wanted to visit before I left. I wanted to tell him about me and I wanted to apologize. I saw him in the rec room and told him that I was leaving the next morning. I thanked him for our time together. Before I could say anything about my true identity, he threw his arms around me and hugged me tightly, very tightly, squeezing me with intense gratitude and immediacy. It was obvious from the way he gave it, that this was a hug he had been longing to give—but hadn’t given—for a very long time, because there had been no one willing or able to receive it. In that hug I could feel all that was locked up in Felix and by proxy in Claude and Vergil and in so many other men I had yet to meet outside the abbey.

  When we pulled apart I told him that I had something to tell him. I sat him down and abruptly spilled the news. He sat for a second, looking at me with a shock that he was, out of politeness, trying desperately to disguise. I could tell he was uncomfortable. But I could also tell that our friendship was undamaged. The bond that we had established was sexless, and what Felix said next con-firmed this.

  “Well, this doesn’t really change anything, does it?”

  He said this more as a statement than a question and I agreed. It didn’t. And this made him the only person in my entire career as Ned who didn’t change his attitude toward me when he learned that I was a woman. We hugged again to say
good-bye, and the hug was the same hug. He hadn’t needed to know that I was a woman in order to give it to me the first time, and he didn’t change its aspect when he gave it to me the second time, knowing full well that I was a woman. It was a small, but to me remarkable, moment and the perfect parting gift.

  I left the abbey the next morning feeling renewed and positive about the real affections I had shared there.

  Thinking back on it now, I don’t pretend that the abbey was a normal place to go looking for male experience, the kind of place you’d expect to find prototypical guy-guys milling around in their element—a sports bar, say, or a bowling alley. The vast majority of American men never come within miles of a monastery, nor do they willingly relinquish their sex lives, autoerotic or otherwise. But as I said at the outset of this chapter, that is part of why I went there, to see what happens to men when they are out of their element, when they are without the company of women.

  And what I found there should not, I suppose, have surprised me. But it did. In all its reductive simplicity, it did. Most American men may not be monks, but the monks I knew were certainly American men, or to modify an old adage, I found that you can take the man out of his element but you cannot very often take the element out of the man. At the abbey I expected to find a breed concerned primarily with spiritual matters, a place where one’s style or quality of manhood was irrelevant, where the artificial socialized boundaries that stymied male intimacy in the outside world would have long since fallen away, and where locker room fears of homosexuality would be so far beneath the radar as to be inconceivable. But instead I found a community steeped in commonplace masculine angst.

  I found masculinity distilled, unmitigated by feminine influences, and therefore observable in a concentrated state. These men were suffering together in silence under a hurt they could barely acknowledge, let alone address. The cause of their distress and dysfunction mostly eluded them, yet to an outsider it was perfectly clear. Or at least it was to an outsider like me who had lived a woman’s life, and then had been subjected to their treatment as a boy. I lived in the cloister among them, as one of them, yet I remained myself, and from that peculiar point of view I could see them both from the inside and the outside at once. The contrast was stark.