Becoming a Man: Half a Life Story

by Paul Monette

  Listening to Judy at Carnegie Hall the whole afternoon, from the overture through three curtain calls: I'll sing 'em all and we'll stay all night! Without any notion that this recent prize acquisition of mine was a gay icon, more telling proof than all the Tomorrow's Men in the world that I was bent. I lip-synced along like a junior Jim Bailey. And at last got the call around dusk that Bobby was out of the woods and in Recovery. So I tramped up to school in time for the victory bonfire, then joined the boisterous crowd for the Saturday movie in George Washington Hall, telling no one my brother had almost died.

  Or was just going into the woods. A few days later one of his kidneys stopped functioning. He was running very high fevers, a post-op infection in the urinary tract. Two doctors on the case started butting heads—one of them adamant that the bad kidney had to come out, the other arguing wait-and-see. My parents were treading deep water, not knowing which way to go as they watched their kid sink. The doctor arguing urgency must have prevailed, for Bobby found himself being prepped for surgery, still woozy from the last.

  He was on a gurney and waiting at the threshold of the operating theater, when an ambulance came shrieking up to Emergency with somebody even closer to the brink. Bobby's doctors had to yield the theater and reschedule, and in the intervening hours his moribund kidney kicked in again. By now, my parents' nerves were fried. They just wanted him out of there—beginning to have that queasy paranoid feeling that the medical system was more lethal than whatever the body was fighting.

  Sorry. Catch-22: hospital policy didn't allow a patient to be released with a fever. So my brother lay there in a kind of prison, days turning into weeks as his temp persisted, unresponsive to a dwindling arsenal of antibiotics. He thinks he must've been in a couple of months, though time starts to lose its borders at a hundred and six degrees. Bedsores bloomed at his hips. I don't know what the last straw was, but a quarter century later my mother still had fire in her eyes recalling the day she stamped her foot.

  Enough. They may have been bringing him home to die, but at least it wouldn't be lonely and indifferent. The next part is family legend. My brother home in bed, his fever showed no sign of abating, and the day came when it peaked on our drugstore thermometer at 108. That meant it was off the graph, for 108 was as far as the mercury went. He should've been having convulsions now, but somehow he rode it out. Nothing to do but old-wives' remedies, alcohol baths and icepacks.

  And then one day the fever broke and didn't come back. All the red lights stopped flashing. I don't know how easy it was for my parents to unclench their white-knuckle grip on the emergency switch. But we went ahead with Christmas, turkey and mince the same as always, me decorating the top half of the tree, my brother the bottom. Here I'm counting on Bobby's disjointed memory of the crisis and its passing, since on this episode I am more amnesiac than usual. Other than the Deerfield afternoon and the figure 108, I draw an absolute blank. It's stayed suppressed through two courses of therapy and five years of dredging. No further detail yielded up from my brother's duel with the Shadow.

  But at least I know why I became unhinged, a quarter century later, as I took Roger's temperature over and over before he crash-landed with AIDS. Ninety-nine point three, day after day, a whisper of something monstrous I had witnessed long before, a single burning match about to conflagrate the world. And the blood-chilling fear of hospitals that I shared with my mother, as well as her bitter fatalism that two medical opinions will always cancel each other out. We are issued our curious armor and toothless weapons by the memories we have blocked, whose traumas seem hardly more real when the details finally do get filled in. Even now this recollection is only the movie of my brother almost dying. The actuality remains the same: a black hole.

  No wonder the picture-postcard flow of seasons at school, the yellowing elms and the first snowfall, felt like a different plane of reality than mine. No wonder I was such a loner, processing all the terrors of home. The only connection I could make with the system was aesthetic. In junior year we were allowed a minor elective in art history, a damn sight more nurturing for the soul than the mandatory Bible minor of sophomore year. We were lectured to with a million slides by a teaching fellow from Yale, Mr. Paoletti. He was wonderfully urbane as he roller-coastered us from the pyramids to Picasso, the greatest hits of the West. It was the first time I ever took in the romance of Europe as a place apart, layer upon layer of civilization.

  It happened that right on campus we had an amazing resource, the Addison Gallery of American Art. A marble-floored treasure house that was almost always deserted, with one old duffer of a custodian who mostly dozed on his mop. The museum became my private study hall, even more removed from things than Harriet's grave. Especially a faded horse-hair sofa on the second floor that faced Eight Bells of Winslow Homer, the collection's most famous painting. But I came to know several others too by a sort of osmosis—Copley, Eakins, Hassam—the silent music of masterpieces surrounding me as I crammed for tests. Downstairs was a whole room of Paul Revere's silver, buffed to a mirror shine. And I remember a special exhibit of modern art, bewilderingly and thrillingly abstract, that I walked through every day it was up. I knew I couldn't be truly sophisticated till I'd figured out why all this stuff was beautiful.

  It was there among the moderns that I witnessed a pair of the Dionysus boys horsing around, snickering at the Malevich White on White as they made their grudging notes for a paper. Suddenly one of them blocked the other with his shoulder, sending him staggering backward. A flailing arm knocked against a Calder, a swirling knot of black steel rods with teetering mobile wings and fingers. The whole of which fell crashing off its pedestal—setting off no alarm, but the noise brought curator and staff scurrying. The guilty philistines had already vanished.

  I watched the staff pick up the sculpture tenderly, cradling it like a big wounded bird, all the while fretting in anguish that it might have sustained some damage. Of course it was fine—that tempered steel could've survived a bomb blast. But I was enthralled by the urgency of their reaction, as if the Calder were a kind of holy object for them. I would be spending a lot of time in museums in the years ahead, consoling myself by means of connoisseurship for the bitter solitude of my life. The lesson of that tenderness, the Calder being restored to its pedestal, stayed with me as I took solace in beautiful things. At least I could feel for art what the laws of desire and my own self-hatred prevented me from feeling for another man.

  The temple wasn't inviolate. Some years later, the Aladdin's cave of silver was stolen by overnight thieves, who scarcely had to break a window, security being as lax as the dozing custodian. The museum paid a ransom, recovered the loot and rearranged it in the same creaky glass cases. Two months later it was stolen again, foiling the stubborn New England belief that lightning would never strike twice in the same place. This time all the exquisite objects were melted down for the silver. Insurance is far too high nowadays to permit such masterworks as the Homer to hang unguarded. They are locked in sunless vaults. So I figure I had the last chance to use the Addison as a private gallery, all its glories untarnished. The site where art first came to seem sacred, as fragile and inexplicable as faith.

  Not that the watery aesthete was anything like an artist. Already there were two or three guys in my class who were having whole exhibitions of their own, grabbing up the art prizes with wild assemblages and blood-red paintings. We had a fiery actor who dazzled us in Macbeth, a commanding bohemian presence clearly destined for Gielgud heights. Then I had a shy acquaintance with a witheringly well-read boy named Terry: burning blue eyes circled by wire-rims, a cascade of blond curls, and a scarf that swept about him like Isadora. He carboned me a copy of his poem, "yes I'm cumming cors I'm late," a stunning pastiche of arcana that I could barely follow, parodies of poets I'd never heard of.

  More daunting than anything was the fierce self-confidence, the raw and brazen energy. At sixteen they exulted in being artists, impatient to throw off the bonds of school. Needless
to say, I didn't show Terry my own verse, with its wince-making rhymes and Arcadian locutions. I knew I wasn't anywhere near as good as the three or four writers in my class who regularly published in The Mirror. But somehow that didn't stop me dabbling.

  I decided that if I wasn't a genius in any one art, then I would get to know them all.

  Thus I attended every recital the music department sponsored, despite being born with the tinniest of ears. I took parts in plays at the furthest remove from the glamorous pair of main-stage shows, the winter Shakespeare and the spring musical. In my plays, the cast almost always outnumbered the audience, usually a single performance in a drafty rehearsal hall. I signed up for every Sunday museum outing to Boston, once just the teacher and I in the school's blue van, an afternoon of Van Gogh that left me open-mouthed and pounding with excitement. I would've turned the whole world into art if I could, and all the rest of the time my nose was in a book. Anything but reality.

  Yet I wasn't a social outcast, even so. My off-off-Broadway career mixed me up with girls from Abbot, rekindling the old courtier skills from seventh grade. I didn't dream of dating them, but they laughed in all the right places. Now it happened that I was friendly that year with a studious boy from Salem, Philip, whose family went back to Columbus. Philip was as nerdy as I, not a trace of Apollo or Dionysus, except he was straight. Because of his lineage he was being heavily tapped to escort girls in the debutante cotillions of the North Shore, though he couldn't have been less of a preppy snob. It turned out that one of the Abbot girls I'd acted with, a girl weighed down with Cabot and Lowell forebears, was making her debut at the winter cotillion in Salem. As she required a pair of escorts, Philip asked if I would come along.

  Was that my first tuxedo? I suspect it was, a rented After Six that I didn't quite have the shoes to match, but it fit me all too well. By the time I arrived at the Cabot mansion, I felt as if I were being hummed by Cole Porter. A butler ushered me into the parlor and asked what I was drinking. A dry martini, I told him, straight up. I who had never drunk so much as a swallow of beer before, who'd learned how to drink from reading Ian Fleming. I was drunk on my ass by the time we went in to dinner, seated in the place of honor on Missy Cabot's right. Except for giving a toast that struck me a good deal funnier than it did those thin-lipped Brahmins, I didn't do anything dire. Missy appeared to find me most refreshing.

  At the cotillion itself I danced with a lady from England—I mean a Lady lady. I charmed the bloomers off the assembled Cabot grandmothers and great-aunts, decked out in their old China trade silks and cameos. A late supper was served after midnight, pheasant and eggs on Rose Medallion. If dining out at Howard Johnson's with Nana made me feel sophisticated, this high-born world in black tie and ball gowns was an earthly paradise indeed. I remember thinking, as I lay in bed at Philip's house, too excited to sleep, how easily one could bring off a life like this if only sex didn't have to come into it.

  One night of finery, and already I was trying to figure how to make a dry marriage. What closeted WASPS had been doing ever since they trundled off the Mayflower: a sociable match with a proper lady, passion kept to a minimum, and lots of gin martinis as they pored over their Greek vases, fantasizing about the coachman. If you played your cards right, you could even marry up—snare an heiress with banter and cocktail chitchat, as long as you made a good appearance at the club. All you had to give up was your dick.

  It would be a while yet before I could spot one of those shuttered unions across a dance floor. The dumpy wife with her gray ponytail, like an old little girl, the smile on her face as strained and pale as the sherry in her glass. The husband a bit too natty in his plaids, his bloodless charm on automatic, and one eye hungering after the barman. Yet even a decade later, foiled at finding a man to love me back, I was still weighing the devil's bargain. Still debating if this woman or that would have me above the waist, and then we could both eat pheasant till it came out of our ears.

  The closet is all about compartments. I had grown accustomed now to the nightly parade of Apollo, obsessively narrowed down to a team of six or eight who drove me wild. The ritual jerkoff was my safety valve, a way to put sex behind me. Now that

  I had a growing cache of visual aids—a full-color glossy called Muscleboy, purchased in terror at North Station while on one of those art field trips—I had everything I needed to keep it to myself. I didn't even feel any longing to incorporate sex into life. The idea was as inconceivable as one of the athlete gods slipping into my bed. I was proud of the little dark corner I came in—nobody's business.

  And woe to the faggot who tried to turn the light on. Philip had a roommate from Ohio, rich but nouveau and preppier-than-thou, down to the tassels on his loafers. Charles had a wicked tongue, and he took delight in imitating the various oddballs in our class. He was tall and rangy, impeccably turned out, and always working double-time to be chummy with the local gods. We laughed at his cruel pantomimes, which often took special contemptuous aim at the "lower" classes—scholarship boys with one-suit wardrobes, the sideshow crew of Commons workers. Yet I never walked away from one of Charles's scathing performances without thinking I would be next to be skewered. He was Dionysus with a mean streak, and enough sweaters to outfit a polar expedition.

  Between classes, I spent a lot of time in his and Philip's room, one of the few places among the boarders where I could hang out. It was late afternoon in the spring, the windows wide open. From the lawn below rose the martial sounds of boys playing catch and three-man lacrosse. I was studying lines for a Sean O'Casey one-acter, trying to pull off an Irish brogue. Charles had just come in from tennis, all the right white-boy's togs and a racket that cost an arm and a leg. Suddenly he came prancing out of the bedroom, doing a riff on the games mistress at Abott.

  Wearing a jock and nothing else. He pounced on me and wrestled me out of the armchair, still in character sort of, the infamous Miss Beale. "Girls, girls, girls," he trumpeted like a sergeant, dragging me onto the floor, then on top of him. "I want you to play fair and play hard. And I want you to run your panties off." He was hard himself and grinding his hips against me.

  "No," I whined, then more insistent, scrambling away. In a wounded huff I hissed at him: "That's not who I am." And grabbed my books and beat it out of there, leaving him sprawled on the floor, shot down.

  What layer of virginity was I still trying to protect? I don't know if I would have said no so quickly to every boy at school. Temptation by the dimpled goalie would surely have been too much to resist. But Charles was no slouch—attractive and interesting both. Even a brief and glancing affair would have moved me forward, releasing sex from the dark room of my nightly worship. Instead the pattern was set: from now on I would bolt at the slightest come-on, especially from a peer. A full-blown case of homosexual panic, at the mere suggestion of putting together friendship and carnal intimacy. I couldn't stomach the thought that another queer had found me out.

  But if that wasn't who I was, I would have to be content with staying no one. All through the following summer I worked nearly every day with flaming Alex, unthreatened by his wall-to-wall camping and vamping. At night we'd go bowling or kick back at his house or mine, putting away whole quarts of Nick's ice cream while we listened to Broadway show tunes. As gay as our hips were wide, but as long as he didn't put the make on me, our friendship pushed no homophobic buttons. Sex would have spoiled everything.

  Twice that summer I visited Philip at the Cape, where his grandparents kept an ancient cottage on a private island called Oyster Harbors, with its own bridge over the marshes and a gatehouse. Mellons and Coolidges on every side, for whom sailing was next to religion, glutting their days like the bluefish they ate every night because dammit, the season was so short.

  These were the black-tie kids from the cotillions, wearing their summer mufti from L. L. Bean, khaki for days. And here I was inside the compound rather than out, no longer peeking over fences, and the good life looked even better. The Brahmins seemed
to worry about nothing and have no secrets, and already appeared peacefully destined to become the lawyers and coupon clippers their fathers were, or their mothers idly arranging flowers and good marriages.

  I got it wrong supposing they were happy in a world that left them no wiggle room. But I was right on the money to understand there were places granted by birth, where I could never be more than an overnight guest. My want of name and pedigree would set off the clang of trespass at the gatehouse. I had years of cotillions ahead of me, as well as a spate of white-glove ushering at weddings and being the extra man to fill a table at various brain-dead dinners. Always the invisible radar of the Brahmin aristocrats made me feel like a coal miner's kid who couldn't quite get the grime off. Separate and unequal. Yet in the end it was those very walls, unscalable and glacial, that helped me pack it in and go with being different.

  Even for Apollo and Dionysus, senior year at Andover was a forbidding prospect. All of us were required to take American History, the boot-camp course par excellence, five classes a week and a grueling twenty hours of homework on top of that. It had its own wing of the library, as well as a monthly exam intended to reduce near-grown men to jelly. We were proudly told no college course would crush our gonads quite so finely—not an exaggeration. College itself being the other prong that goaded us through the year. The clamor of SATs, mass interviews with the Ivy League, the pumping up of resumes. Out of a class of some two hundred and twenty, we would be sending fifty-five to Harvard and forty-three to Yale. Big lifeboats, but you still had to claw for a place.

  All of that was secondary, though, when I lucked into Dudley Fitts's English IV. He was the one true Olympian on the faculty. The Sophocles we used in class had been translated by him and Robert Fitzgerald, a feat of erudition that seemed almost Biblical to us. To hear Mr. Fitts talk about Greek theater, how the chorus moved, how it sounded—you were there. The prodigious learning was tempered by a rollicking wit, delivered in an absent-minded drawl, half to himself so you had to crane to listen. Yet more than anything it was the humanness of the questions he asked of a line of poetry, bringing to bear feelings we hadn't dreamed of naming.