Becoming a Man: Half a Life Story

by Paul Monette

  In the end I had as fine a time as my Yale brethren, even if I never got my rocks off. There's a pattern here as well: straying from the traveled path, finding a woman as different as I. In retrospect the Bahamian girl was surely queer, though the matter was all unspoken. I wish I could say I seized with a savoring heart the adventure of going native, but mostly I mooned and pined for Sean, waiting for him to tire of his blonde and hitchhike home again.

  As spring advanced, I began to detect a certain resistance in Sean and Jake to my constant tail-wagging attention. Which only sent me into overdrive, doing somersaults of fawning. I remember sitting in the window seat one night, jabbering inanely at Jake, when Russell across the room spun around in his desk chair and flung a box of paper clips in my face. "Can you just shut the fuck up for a while?" he hissed, in a spasm of rage that was most un-Confucian.

  There were also the wrestling matches Sean and I somehow fell into, instigated by me, where he'd quickly overpower me and pin me to the floor. Then he'd snap his fingers against my nose, taunting me, till finally I cried uncle through the choke of a nosebleed. Placidly Jake and Russell would watch these predictable fights, bored as Romans watching gladiators. Did any of us understand I was acting out a crash I couldn't name or handle? I think not. The pointless one-way violence had a rationale all its own, a sort of ritual bloodletting to silence the roommate who wouldn't shut up.

  My parents were leery of the California summer idea, especially since I had no job lined up. They were still feeling bruised by my road trip south, but I think they genuinely missed me too, fearing that if I went away in the summers I'd never come home at all. I prevailed by dint of stubbornness, and enlisting Nana Lamb to sing the praises of the Golden State. I knew I'd be on my own, that Sean and Jake had had about enough of my doggy charm, but I had to go and see this other world. Returning to Andover instead, retrieving my apron at Nick's—that would have been backsliding, to the place where I was nobody.

  Somehow a deal was struck with an aerospace drone in New Haven who was moving his family to Orange County. We would drive his VW bus across country, and he'd pay the gas and tolls, but he needed the car by June 7. Since our last exam was the third, we would have to drive straight through. There were four of us—Sean and Jake and I and a basketball dimwit from Monterey—driving in four-hour shifts, no stops except to pee and refuel. The radio wailed with the first Beatles hits. By Nebraska we were punchy and seeing mirages, floating onto the gravel shoulder of the interstate and jerking awake. As romantic adventure it was right up there with Kerouac, though we looked more like the Joads by the time we crossed the Golden Gate, disheveled and unshaven.

  Jake let Sean and me off in Marin, then headed south to L.A.

  Sean's people lived in a big Craftsman bungalow that in memory seems to nestle in a redwood grove, like the house of the Seven Dwarfs. Mrs. Adamson was exquisitely gracious, more so when she picked up the brittle edge of friction in her son, who was kicking himself for bringing home this albatross of a roommate. She even had a job for me, to babysit two kids and three Bouvier hounds in a compound down the road, over-nannied tykes abandoned by their jet-set parents, forlorn and needy as Flora and Miles in Turn of the Screw.

  But nothing could dampen my drunken wonder at this land of orchids and buff-colored hills, a greenhouse in the desert. Around Sean I moped like a spurned amour, but he mostly ignored me and went his own way, disappearing for days at a time to spider up the sides of cliffs. When he was home, he spent all his time with the girl next door, his beloved Amy, to whom he'd been pinned since junior high. My hero worship of Sean, transformed now into an unrequited crush, produced a jealousy of the two of them that was bizarrely intense. I'd lie awake in the bedroom under the eaves, swooning from the jasmine trellised below, and listen for the sound of the garden gate, Sean tiptoeing home from Amy's.

  I reacted with obsessive cunning. By degrees I moved to win over Amy—sunning with her on the back deck while she did watercolors, talking artist to artist, till my courtier presence became indispensable. I wasn't trying to supplant Sean, only to make it impossible for him to shun me. Meanwhile Amy's mother and I got along like a house on fire, sharing a sense of anarchy about suburban pretense and WASP propriety. Sean would come back from climbing rocks and find us all laughing helplessly over barbecue. The subtext being frank defiance on my part: daring him to cut me out.

  Even so he barely tolerated me, and I grabbed at the chance to take a break, in the form of a house party over the Fourth in Napa Valley. A classmate of Sean's from Trimble Prep, Skip Bronner, had invited all the Adamsons to "the ranch," but in the end I went alone. Totally unprepared for wealth on such a scale: thousands of acres of virgin hills, with a ranch house at the summit shaded by ancient live oaks, and a view down the Bay all the way to the Gate bridge. A flock of peacocks strutted past the saltwater pool, with an island sculpture in the middle by Henry Moore. They ate off Picasso plates, were watched over by a wall of Ming horses and jade birds. I was in a state of near hallucination from the moment I set foot there. Rich, where I grew up, meant old polished wood in high-ceilinged houses silent as churches. This was a sybarite's pleasure-dome instead, the California good life raised to the nth degree. A stallion ride before breakfast, oranges right off the trees.

  ("The homes!" I could hear my grandmother gasp as I entered the dreamscape. "They live outside!")

  It wasn't just the layout that turned me into The Man Who Came to Dinner, with a midsummer's lease on the guesthouse. At first sight I fell headlong for Lois Bronner, chatelaine of this whole voluptuous Xanadu. All the women I ever cozied up to before or since, lady or Lady, would be measured against Lois's casual glamour. She had the husky voice and arrogant smolder of Stanwyck in Double Indemnity, tempered by a zany streak of self-deprecation, more like Ball of Fire. She was about to host a three-day bash for seventy-five, including the whole board of the San Francisco Opera, yet within a half hour of my arrival we were sprawled under a sycamore reading Edna Millay, while Lois shooed off the fretting caterers.

  The feeling was clearly mutual, though at the time I couldn't figure what there was in it for her. I only knew I made her happy. In practice, of course, I spent most of my time entertaining the whole family—Skip and his two sisters, the ballerina and the ugly duckling. Also the runny-nosed husband, a zillionaire without a clue despite owning half the natural gas in the civilized world and most of the pipes besides. Even an apolitical sort like me picked up on his wacko Bircher rants, though the rest of the family rigorously ignored him.

  I don't suppose Lois and I spent more than a dozen nightcaps under the stars, but it felt like the life I'd been waiting to live forever. She wasn't the first to know I wanted to be a poet, but she was the first who had to know why. I spilled a thousand banalities in answer. Yet she never made me feel ridiculous; she drank in every word as if no one had ever spoken such raptures before. She must have known I was gay, with all her friends in the arts. So was Skip, for that matter, though years would pass before either of us would admit it. For once, gay was the least of it. With nothing to compare it to, I understood I was having this thing with Lois instead of a summer love affair, and that its soul passion was as good as sex, maybe better. Because somebody found me extraordinary just the way I was, and gave me permission besides to be a poet.

  Of course it had nowhere to go. I wasn't Dustin Hoffman, and she wasn't Mrs. Robinson. At the end of July the Bronners were off to Hawaii, escaping the blast-furnace heat at the ranch, and I headed out for a two-week hike through the High Sierra. The Adamsons took part in a yearly trek with the Sierra Club, this huge production involving a hundred hikers and a mule train of supplies. I called it The Donner Party for short, making a black joke out of that darkest symbol of westward migration, where the snowbound survivors ate their blood kin. Our own high-country holiday managed to avoid the cannibal, though the antagonism between Sean and me was palpable enough. As one of the trip leaders, Sean rode horseback, but I no longer found him
heroic. Fresh from my Cinderella stint with the Bronners, I had nothing but disdain for the Gary Cooper rugged act. All through the long march Sean and I kept our distance, making our beds by separate campfires.

  The problem with secret crushes: in the absence of requital the love turns bitter. Amy was meant to go on the mountain trip with us, but a turned ankle had held her back at the last moment. Sean had another two-week group to lead, and I headed back to the Bronner ranch. I don't remember any consciously twisted motive, but I asked the hobbling Amy to come up for a weekend. Did I trash Sean to her, I wonder, or just put on a saintly smile when she apologized for her boyfriend's petulance toward me? I certainly didn't tell her that I was the one who used to beg him to beat me up. Or try to dissuade her when she admitted with a sigh that their storybook relationship wasn't the same anymore.

  I don't think they actually broke up, but Sean came down from the mountain convinced I had tried to steal his girl. We hardly spoke again, though we still had to room together for another whole year. No more homoerotic wrestling, though, and no more kissing his ass. I had found my own Golden State by then, the long lambent evenings with Lois as the peacocks chirred in the shadows. Day trips into the city to watch the orchestra rehearse, lunch at the Pacific Union Club and supper at the Blue Fox. The boy who was born to talk in restaurants, the breezy style picked up in coffee shops from his grandmother, had grown into a full-fledged gigolo. Or that's how it felt to me anyway, in my California summer: a gigolo whose dick was not required.

  Fantasy being perishable, you can't bring tea and sympathy home. The night before I left the ranch, we went out to see Night of the Iguana—shades of Aunt Grace and Sebastian—and the next day, as I got on the plane, Lois and the girls presented me with a cardboard box containing a foot-long live lizard. The joke didn't travel so well, I'm afraid, and the poor freaked creature ended up in a terrarium at Phillips Academy, rooming with an alligator ten times its size. And I went back to Yale, unable to say exactly what the summer meant, but no longer needing Jake and Sean to prove I was real. In 714 Jonathan Edwards they took the bunk-bed room on the left, and I the single on the right. The hero worship was over.

  Not that I wasn't as screwed up as ever—still so sexless and secretive, I only came in the dark, wiping it off like a dirty necessity. But at least I decided to throw in my lot with the artsy crowd, even if that meant laying myself open to the rolled eyes of my straight-arrow classmates. On weekends I still bearded myself with dates, enduring the drunken revels of toga parties, even going so far as to try to pledge a fraternity, the last bastion of pig superiority at Yale, white boys only please. Happily I was black-balled, and tried out instead for the Yale Dramat, landing a two-line messenger's part in Richard III, otherwise milling about in tights to swell a crowd.

  Ten years later a friend informed me dryly that I was the only queer he'd ever met who became an interior decorator instead of coming out. I was that kind of actor too. I understood from the first rehearsal that I had found the meeting ground of the queers, a motley troupe whose longest-running performance was being in the closet. With the resources of the mainstage costume shed and makeup drawers, a couple of them camped it up even wilder than Alex Anestos, but I don't think anybody self-identified as gay. In those days camp and theatah were a substitute for being out.

  As with Alex, I felt a curious butch superiority over the others, reassured by their nelly antics that my own walls of manhood were in place. Besides, as long as I had no sex with them or any other man, I wasn't "like that" at all. My contempt for the brothers I wouldn't embrace was just self-hatred masquerading as narcissism—like people of color buying into the oppressor's code, the higher status of the lighter skinned. But I took it a step further. I developed a backstage friendship with Messenger #1, a burly foulmouthed junior from Kansas City who couldn't stop boasting about his women. More determined even than I to distance himself from the drama fags.

  As we waited in the wings together, listening for our cue to run on and tell Richard the war was lost, Doug would fall into an exaggerated sissy act, tittering as he goosed me and wetly smooched my face. And I would reply in kind, just as I had with Jake, hoping to hide my own invert state by flinging a burlesque version in people's faces. As a black man wears blackface, putting on a veritable minstrel show of self-loathing. What was even weirder, the other gay folk in the cast thought we were a riot. At the cast party we did a whole fag parody of Shakespeare, to the appreciative hoots and whistles of the troupe.

  For a time after the play, Doug and I were inseparable, even double-dating now and then. When he continued the sissy stuff in private, sweeping me up in a sudden mad waltz or humping my leg like a dog, I tried to laugh it off. But I knew he wanted to push it, was daring me to make the first move that wasn't a joke. Which only repelled me, because even though I found him very sexy, I couldn't figure how we'd ever get out of it once we got in. If I broke my celibate record, I'd be lost.

  Last year I had a letter from him, to tell me how sorry he was about my losses in the holocaust. Then a fond and sheepish account of his wife and beaming kids, the lawyerly job in Missouri, still the occasional turn at "little" theater. So I guess he was bi back there at Yale, dipping a toe in the pool of illicit thrills. I've never quite understood the double Janus face of bi—Janus, the Roman god of gates and doors, especially closets. I've met too many who kept the truth from their women and used their men like hookers: Now that I know how to waltz myself, I try not to be gayer-than-thou about bi. Mostly I fail. But I still wish I'd done the wild thing with Doug, even at the risk of being left for a woman.

  Instead I did plays, working with semi-pros from the Drama School, just on the cusp of the Brustein years when Yale was where it was happening. I'd long since given up the Tony aspirations of Landy Monet. I wasn't good and knew it, especially when I was onstage with the genuine article. Once I played the Pope in Galileo, on a raked disk of a stage, this to show how the scientist had turned the universe upside down. Our Galileo was brilliant, every line a matter of life and death—and I in my popish robes beside him reduced to fifth business. I think I stuck with it because I loved the boho sophistication of the theater crowd, the double-espresso brooding over Brecht's intentions. Also the little cosmos that every production becomes, the bonding fierce as summer camp.

  As for poetry, I took the two-semester course in the moderns, Cleanth Brooks in the fall and John Hollander in the spring. These luminous divines could hardly have been more different from one another in approach—Brooks the brilliant exemplar of New Criticism; Hollander a working poet in the flesh, mad eyes and the tongue of a fallen angel when he read.

  Though I was never much of a scholar in my studies, I discovered with growing confidence a capacity to walk through the walls of a poem. The hardest stuff made sense to me—the Voyages of Hart Crane, the Pisan Cantos, Notes Toward A Supreme Fiction. I liked being adrift in symbols, beauty for beauty's sake. When Hollander said the subject of the poem was the poem, I was dazzled. Perhaps after all one could live in the temple of art, feeding on air like an orchid.

  Yet I came under a much more worldly influence that year, in the way of inspiration. For my scholarship job I'd graduated out of the scullery, and started working in the Master's Office at Jonathan Edwards. The Master himself was a musicologist and bon vivant, impeccably droll, who oversaw a constant round of receptions and soirees for visiting divas and string quartets. His administrative secretary issued more invitations than your average palace, which I rushed around delivering like the White Rabbit. When the RSVP's were low, I cadged last-minute invitations for myself, the proverbial extra man. I'm afraid I went to the concerts more for the deviled eggs and brie that followed, but a little culture no doubt seeped in.

  As for the Master's secretary, Jeannette Nichols, she became my vital link to poetry and self. She'd learned how to write on her own, without benefit of academic credentials, and now she was waiting for her first book to come out. A beehive of industry when it c
ame to submitting to magazines, Jan would triumphantly flip open Saturday Review or Tri-Quarterly to show off her latest appearance in print. She didn't have much patience with the temple-of-art mind-set, or with the filigreed abstractions of Stevens's "invented world." Poetry was lifeblood to her, and her subject more often than not was the blood lust of her sexuality.

  Till then, no one had ever managed to show me how a poem could emerge shimmering from the quotidian. Jan took poetry out of the realm of the exalted, making me see that the beautiful didn't have to be pretty, or language high-flown. Every week for the next three years she'd submit to harrowing scrutiny the current crop of verse in the New Yorker, demanding why this or that was a poem at all. She kept me relentlessly on my toes, and it wasn't an accident that her mentor was Dudley Fitts, whom she'd met one summer at Bread Loaf. But Jan was sui generis all the way, gloriously opinionated, and not afraid to be jealous of work that knocked her out.

  She was the one who prevailed on me to nominate Fitts to be a Fellow of Jonathan Edwards. He had a serious Yale connection, after all, as editor of the Yale Younger Poets. Somehow Jan and I railroaded it through the right committee, an Honorary Fellowship that was hardly worth the scroll it wasn't engraved on. But with that in hand, we convinced Fitts to drive down from Andover in his hand-powered VW to give a reading at the college. I busted my buttons with pride the night I introduced him—an impresario's coup, and a chance to tell him over the deviled eggs that I'd started to write some poems myself. Has anyone ever needed so much permission to be an artist?