Becoming a Man: Half a Life Story

by Paul Monette

  The teacher who most fascinated me for extracurricular reasons was Mr. Nindle in French. A bachelor who drove a Thunderbird, Timothy Nindle was decked from head to toe in the spiffiest tweeds from the Andover Shop. Forty years old, he was master in one of the senior dorms on the main quadrangle, facing the clock tower on Samuel Phillips Hall. He also coached the Romans in soccer, the fiercest of the intramural teams; the Romans always walked away with the victor's cup. At school concerts and Saturday teas at Alumni House, he'd always have on his arm one of the younger teachers from Abbot Academy, our sister school down the street—a tightly smiling woman in an A-line corduroy jumper, with bobbed hair and a Peter Pan collar. Tim Nindle was so eligible he must've made their teeth ache.

  But I knew what was really going on, because I'd watch him fawn on his beauties: always a little coterie of Apollos at his table in Commons, as tweedy as he. Or he'd drive a couple of his favorites into town, the top down on the T-Bird, laughing in the wind. His manner with them, even in class, was ripe with flirtatious irony. Nothing overt, very clubby and man-to-man. Was I the only one who noticed the overeagerness, what the shield of his gentleman's wardrobe couldn't hide?

  Or was it just weird coincidence that revealed the Nindle subtext of desire? For it happened that the objects of his charm were the very men who haunted me at night—the tennis prince from Lauderdale, the dimpled goalie from JV hockey. If only I could've made them laugh as Nindle did—but flustered lockjaw seized me in their presence. At least I knew the French master's secret, subtle as the twists of an irregular verb. But it left me feeling more impotent than usual, my inability to play either part in the courting dance. Nindle never looked at me. He couldn't stand it when I lingered after class with a grammar question, butting into his private banter with the gods.

  Could I have been Apollo myself for a week, I would've seduced him. Not that Nindle appealed to me remotely, but I'd think sometimes what it would be like to have the kind of body and raw power that made him reel. What it would be like to lure him onto the shoals of desire. I wanted to be a mantrap like Liz in Butterfield 8. A dark and twisted desire to be sure, and one that was of no use whatever to Nindle or me, since it got neither of us any closer to a night of mad abandon with the goalie. But as long as I couldn't have that, second-best would be to destroy the French master for looking through me as if I didn't exist. And for being a grownup version of me, the overheated voyeur in the locker room.

  I don't pretend this baroque tangle of urge and revenge was very conscious—no more than the straight Adonises were conscious of flirting back with a man like Nindle. I only know there were times when I'd be pacing like a trapped thing in the sealed room of the closet, waiting for the slightest rustle at the door, daring someone to knock. So I tuned right in when the sad-eyed man with the wild gray hair came into Nick's one Sunday too often, browsing aimlessly before he bought cigars. He couldn't take his eyes off me, which both disconcerted and thrilled me. From the first I knew the power was mine, for I'd watched it from the sidelines up at school, the fly on Nindle's wall.

  As Sunday followed Sunday, we'd chat for a glancing moment while I made change. He was a portrait painter by trade, lifeless full-length studies of women of a certain age, the features slightly cheated, as if by a skilled embalmer. He was called Raf—a fragment of the mouthful of Russian syllables in his name, but sufficient to mark his paintings. Sixty, I suppose, though so battle-worn and unkempt, all I could see was old. Four grown sons, he told me, which meant he lived alone with his wife in the big yellow clapboard house at the bottom of Central Street by the river.

  Yes, I knew the house. Yes, I'd like to see his paintings sometime—except I was awfully busy with school. I put him off coyly week after week, amazed at his shameless tenacity, coldly enjoying the power of my casual indifference. Afraid too, but not wanting to give that too much rein, lest I never do anything.

  "So when are you coming to see my studio?" asked the Russian. And before I could put up a wall of homework, he added, "You're on vacation, aren't you?"

  Spring break, it must have been. I showed up at the appointed hour on the following Saturday, carefully dressed in tie and blazer. I'd had this running fantasy about what I would say if he asked to paint me naked. I decided I'd reluctantly agree if he promised not to touch me. The painting took on an erotic charge more illicit than sex, even if I ran the risk that he'd use it some day to blackmail me. Too many Ava Gardner movies.

  He answered the door himself, looking more disheveled than usual and deeply agitated. I held back, thinking I'd interrupted him in the fury of creation, but he ushered me in impatiently and led me right upstairs. Two flights to the attic, passing silent shadowy rooms with heavy armoires. He let me precede him up the attic stairs, and the first sight of the atelier was reassuringly authentic. Several canvases perched on easels, in various stages of completion, done from photographs tacked in the corner of the frame. The smell of art was overpowering, coffee cans jammed with spattered brushes. The atmosphere was bohemian enough to help me overlook the paint-by-number flatness of the work.

  I turned to ask a question—and he was on me, fumbling a hand to unbutton my shirt and reaching to paw inside. I recoiled, but didn't run, and now he'd dropped to his knees, fiddling to open my belt. I looked down at his sweaty head, the wild damp strands barely covering his bald spot. He gasped as he released my dick from my pants, then pushed me back into a ragged armchair, hunkered between my legs to take me in his mouth.

  I couldn't bear the whimper of his excitement, or the sight of him groveling at my feet. But I got hard anyway and let him continue, too polite, too cowed to put a stop to it. I lolled my head to the side and stared out the attic window. Below, on the hack slope, was an arbor black with leafless vines, then the winter-beaten field leading down to the sluggish, swollen river. I remember thinking So this is it, with a desolate sense of anticlimax. The naughty excitement of boyish sex with Kite and Richie was long gone. In its place was only grim endurance of the old man's desperate, mauling need.

  I came without a sound, gritting my teeth as he gulped me like an elixir. I wouldn't meet his eyes as I stood to pull my pants back on, tucking in my shirttail, relieved at least that he hadn't bared his own geriatric organ. Another minute and I'd be out of there. Then he said, "How much?" I looked at him, confused. "How much do you charge?"

  "Nothing," I retorted in a choked whisper, then turned and practically bolted down the stairs. In one of the upstairs bedrooms a shadow moved—the wife? One of the sons? For appearance's sake I let the old man catch up, thanking him volubly for the art tour as we descended to the front door. I gave him a proper handshake, smiling glassily, then escaped.

  Hurrying to make it home before dark. Wondering how I had lost the power. Days later, I thought of Liz, counting the curl of bills on the bedside table. What should I have asked for—twenty-five? Would the power have come back if I'd come out on top cash-wise? For months afterwards I berated myself for leaving empty-handed. I never saw Raf again, even at Nick's. He must have found someplace else to buy his cigars.

  So Nothing was all I had to say—the answer I gave to my mother about Kite, the answer she gave to my brother the day the street toughs called me queer. With a shudder of revulsion I shut the final door, keeping sex between me and my hand, letting no one touch me for the next five years. I was sure I could live without it. Never, never would I become the ravenous creature who did me in the attic.

  I grew more invisible every day. I buried myself in books—remember reading Franny and Zooey with a physical pang of longing, wishing I had a Zooey to tell it to, an older brother dispensing advice from the bathtub. I sat on a radiator in the library stacks combing through forty years of a magazine called Theatre Arts, which printed a new play every month, with pictures of the New York cast. I'd think about becoming a Broadway star, unimpeded by the fact that I'd never acted. I revealed to Francis one day, still my only friend at school, that my stage name would be Landy Monet—the t s
ilent in the French manner, Landy a streamline of Landry, my middle name. A crowd of dazzled fans at the stage door. My Tony acceptance speech already written in my head.

  On Wednesday and Saturday afternoons I'd always drop in at the Andover Bookstore, in a white-painted barn off Main Street. This oasis of urbanity was owned and run by Jerry Cross, my father's boss at the coal company—started as something of a hobby but quickly growing till it was known all over New England as a book lover's paradise. There was a fireplace with chairs drawn up, coffee and sweets on a table nearby. Ethel Cross oversaw the staff and did the ordering of new books. It's the place where I first understood that books had currency, and Ethel was the first person I ever talked authors with outside school. It was liberating in the same way that having lunch with my grandmother was—nobody watching my moves to see if I was a sissy.

  I ended sophomore year by making a brief and very minor splash. The school had a number of obscure prizes in classics—the best essay on a Homeric subject written in Greek, the best lyric poem in Latin, Victorian honors handed down through generations. The classics department was very old school, kindly as Mr. Chips but slightly out of it like Mr. Magoo. I don't recall who encouraged me, but I prepared a text to recite in the Latin Declamation Contest. No memory at all of the text itself, a letter I think describing a battle, maybe Caesar himself. But I declaimed it like a house on fire, gesticulating wildly to the assembled dons. And won hands down.

  Ten bucks, a real gyp. The Greek essay prize was a cool five hundred. But at least I had finally done something, instead of the making do and squeaking through that had so far characterized my worm's progress through the ivied halls. At a place like Andover they encouraged the bejesus out of you, once they've figured out what you can do. So in six months I would find myself starring in the Latin play—five hundred lines of Plautus to memorize, and two hours of leering stage business. Not exactly the matinee idol Landy Monet was shooting for. A buffoon was what the part demanded, half Zero Mostel, half Groucho. My comic timing was generally a mile early or late—but, then, the sleepy audience was composed entirely of Latin students, forced to attend by class assignment, so they just wanted it over with.

  I know it's not written down anywhere, even in the shade of the Washington elm, how far you're supposed to have gone at the halfway point of high school. But nowhere is how my halfway point felt. The given of being straight was the only road up the mountain, murderously steep in an all-boys' school. So what if their women were mostly fictitious? The girl at home, with the blue flowered stationery. Or the girl met at a tea dance, trapped in a boarding school of her own, monogrammed notecards from Shreve's. Even the occasional girl from town, encountered by chance in a coffee shop, the class difference oddly compelling, like a duke trying to nail a barmaid.

  Necessary fictions, to be sure, since the boys were stuck with each other eight months a year. All their real life was compressed into summer romances, sailing in Maine and the Vineyard. But at least they were in it together—blowing off carnal steam on the ballfield, brazenly teasing one another about their masturbatory feats, then comrades in the hunt as the buses dropped them off for the dances at Dana Hall and Miss Porter's. They may not have got much action, this being the last gasp of the Age of Virginity, but the bond of commiseration kept them going forward. The quest for a girl was a team sport.

  It wasn't sex I couldn't keep up with, being gay and invisible—it was self. Hiding the truth would require ever more elaborate stratagems: decoy romances and aimless dates. Relations with women would soon take on the hue of the Big Lie. But the hardest part was having no one to bond with, no comrade-in-arms. I was fifteen years old, and nobody knew the half of me. Was I depressed? Shell-shocked rather, dug into a hole, my small and stunted experience of passion indistinguishable from the guilt of being the son who could walk. Betrayal and violation were all I had taken home, so far, from the struggle of love.

  Yet what I wish in retrospect is not that I had had a great first love at fifteen. Too much to hope for, given the thickness of the walls I built. Besides, it would take me the better part of growing up to understand that intimacy, more than sex or even sexual orientation, was the universal battleground, and no easier for straight than gay. But I wish I could have shared the state of being loveless with Francis and Gene, instead of that patter of improvised camp so ignorant of its heritage, from Oscar Wilde to Joan Crawford. Camp without a country. I like to think we could have made a first crude sketch of the men we dreamed of loving, because otherwise the dream was as locked up as we were—a closet within the closet. Talking it all out loud, we might have come to see that being different was about something more than just our dicks.

  Or as Harry Hay once put it, needling like a gadfly, the only thing that's the same about gay and straight people is what they do in bed. Thus what I wish for the Gay/Straight Alliance at Andover is more than a sex-positive affirmation of self, wherever they make their beds. Let them all come out, of course—bottom line. But after that I wish them the comradeship of differentness, above and beyond the carnal. Or arm in arm with it anyway, as they march down the field butched up in soccer drag and accessorized to the teeth, pearls and boas rampant. Whatever works to keep them from digging a hole. Go, team!

  For several summers now the Monettes had been taking their last two weeks in July at a rental cottage on Rye Harbor. Along the narrow wedge of New Hampshire seacoast that lies between the Puritan colony of Massachusetts and the untamed wilds of Maine. Mostly I sat on the stone jetty reading Agatha Christie, my swimming in the ice-cube water limited to shrieking thirty-second dunks with my father and uncles. But I loved the rocky coast with its lobster shacks and salt marshes, not yet sucked up by landfill and cluttered with time-share condos. Twice Nana and I took the day-boat from Portsmouth out to the Isles of Shoals, jigsaw crags of weatherbeaten granite carpeted in July with wildflowers. And a swaybacked Edwardian hotel where chowder was served by kerchiefed women as gaunt as Shakers, and island blueberries for dessert.

  Rye was the first place I ever thought about telling stories, though I never wrote them down. Shipwreck stories and pirate coves, the curses of one-eyed sailors. My imagination was pre-adolescent, a boy's garden of tales out of Treasure Island, some small midsummer relief from the crazed voyeurism of the locker room. I was thrilled therefore to learn that Jerry Cross had given my father his house at Rye for the whole summer of '61. A big white-shingle cottage right on the water, on a jut of land where the coast road crooked like an elbow. The place had once belonged to Ogden Nash the poet, who to my undiscerning ear was right up there with Robert Frost.

  I took the third-floor front room in the gable, the lighthouse view. And decided, on no evidence at all, that this must have been the poet's aerie. Late at night I'd sit on the windowsill and write verse by moonlight, nary a line of which has survived, mercifully. I didn't write much in any case, seized as I was by the dilemma of having to choose whether to be a Broadway star or a deathless poet. When the uncles asked, I still said dentist or lawyer, but that was just a smoke screen now so I could float away and daydream.

  Beyond the crook, the beach road swept around a crescent bay lined with the sprawling summer houses of millionaires. Acres of lawn in front were clipped as close as golf greens, not a dandelion to mar the tailored view to the bluff. I'd spend whole afternoons walking up and down the service roads in back, catching a glimpse of the very blond as they crossed in their whites to the tennis court or stalked toward the stables in boots and jodhpurs. I had this drowsy notion, as I peered through the rambling roses and over the fences, that people so rich did only what they liked, no secrets and no shame. I could scarcely have been more wrong about that, but a voyeur is so possessed by what he sees that he doesn't reason. The world is all blinding surfaces.

  That summer I started amassing a guilty stash of stroke books. The magazine rack at Nick's was determinedly macho, Strength and Health coming about as close as it got to male erotica, assuming steroids turned y
ou on. But recently the distributor had started sending two copies every month of a pocket-size photo mag called Tomorrow's Man. Black-and-white pictures of young guys in their twenties, either striking heroic poses on their own or paired with another in a wrestling clench. The studio backdrops were heavy on the satin drapery, with maybe a Greek column to lean against. But what seized the gaze was the state of undress: a pouch of cloth that barely covered the genitals, held in place by an invisible string about the waist, what's called in the trade a "posing strap."

  Impossible to describe the hypnotic charge for a fifteen-year-old whose porno diet was heretofore limited to the Parr of Arizona underwear ads in the back pages of Esquire. It wasn't just the beauty of the specimens, ripe but not overmuscled, squeaky clean as surfers. It was an attitude of showing off, a sassy wink of something I'd never seen before. When they were shot from the back, they shucked the strap and posed butt-naked, sometimes almost shaking it in your face. I was staring at men who wanted to be admired. And who clearly got down and did it as soon as the shutter stopped clicking.

  It was the first clue I ever had that being queer existed out there in the world, with men as real as the shower parade at school. I don't think we ever sold a copy of Tomorrow’s Man over the counter. One left the store with me, tucked in the pages of Modem Screen. The other was surely filched by Alex, Nikos's flaming son, whose feel for the outrageous was so far out as to be beyond ridicule. To call him queer hardly did him justice. He danced through the store with cheerleader pompoms, streaked his hair with Clorox, greeted customers in voices that stretched from Daffy Duck to Mae West. All to the horror of his father, who muttered darkly in Greek and shook his fist at the sky. I thought Alex was a scream. In addition to which, beside him I felt as butch as a first-string fullback.

  My brother went into the hospital in October, just shy of his tenth birthday. By then he'd been to Shriner's several times, but this was serious business, bladder surgery at Mass. General. I remember the day of the surgery vividly, a flawless blue and gold Saturday afternoon, with a home game at school against Deerfield. Bobby was under the knife for seven or eight hours, while I stayed home and waited for a call from my parents to say it was over.