Becoming a Man: Half a Life Story

by Paul Monette

  There was one steady girl who resisted my charms completely, barely a thin polite smile for all my manic patter and volley of one-liners. Natalie was from Mount Holyoke, pre-law, with a steel-trap mind and a low tolerance for fools. She was also Cody's girlfriend. They'd dated through four years of high school and two at Yale. A starry-eyed shot of them at the prom, peeking through a rose trellis, perched on Cody's desk. Yet for all her independent spirit and braininess—as if every conversation were a moot court proceeding—Natalie's take on Cody was hero worship, same as mine. And three was very definitely a crowd.

  It didn't come to a head that fall, because she and Cody were on the outs. She came down in September and spent the weekend mostly in tears, as Cody snarled and raged at the bourgeois careerism of the architects he studied with. He was thinking of chucking it all and going in for painting, and therefore needed time alone. Natalie couldn't help but take it personally, hearing in his Crisis of Sensitivity a thinly veiled attack on her own careerist dreams. In terms of Cody, she'd always been pre-marriage as much as pre-law. Now she saw she might really lose him; no choice but to give him some latitude.

  Her tears only made him harder. I don't think they saw each other at all till after Christmas, just a weekly exchange of tensions on the phone that made the cords stand out in Cody's neck. Did I gloat at the problems they were having? Not consciously, but I also didn't waste a second stepping into the breach. For I would be his muse if Natalie couldn't be, a fount of understanding and encouragement, demanding nothing in return, self-sacrificing and oh so non-bourgeois. I practically held the canvas for him—a human easel.

  I deluded myself that this vacation he was taking from Natalie was a window that might admit me in a way that was new for both of us. He certainly liked having me around. As he struggled to free himself from the rigid modernism of the A&A, he began to copy paintings out of books, exacting as an old-school academic. For weeks he worked on a replica of the Vermeer portrait of the girl with the pearl earrings. We talked about the light and color of that damned pearl like monks counting the angels on the head of a pin. We consumed whole cartons of Camels, I sitting blissfully more or less at his feet, reading and writing poems. For me those long autumn nights in the studio were my dream fusion of Art and Soul. I didn't need sex. I needed nothing, if this could go on forever.

  Forever? I think I must've been the only person in my class at Yale who didn't hear the tick of reality. It was fall of junior year, time to settle down and plan which way you were going. The pre-med guys were already hip-deep in Biochemistry. The prelaw legions ran practice heats for the law boards a year away. The padding of resumes had begun in earnest. Among other things there was a war out there, and a draft that wasn't kidding. But I took my cue from Cody and spurned the petty politics of careerism. A poet's job was being a poet, and you didn't learn it in graduate school. I made no plans whatever for what would come after Yale. Feeling was what I was majoring in.

  I still had to take all the English requirements—courses in Chaucer, the Victorian novel, American Lit. I didn't especially see myself as an English teacher; it was just that literature was the one thing I was good at. So I steered around the disciplines that might have brought me up against reality. No economics, no political science, the barest grunt requirement in psychology. In the latter I lied on every personality questionnaire they gave us—dreams, phobias, sexual habits—even though the questionnaires were strictly anonymous.

  My coup that year was landing a place in Harold Bloom's seminar on the Romantic poets, for he only took one out of ten who applied. English was the major major in those days, and certain teachers were accorded superstar status. I can't say I understood very much of what the mythic professor said—about poets misreading one another and forging a vision by mistake, what Bloom called "the anxiety of influence." That all went right over my head. But his day-to-day close readings were breathtaking—the Ode to Psyche, Frost at Midnight, A Toccata of Galuppi's. Soundings so deep, you thought he'd never come up for air, and still my favorite poems.

  Poetry was better than reality. The imagination was the only country where a man could truly breathe free. Thus the map of my own misreading, believing I could imagine life instead of living it. I got the A's to prove it, a Ranking Scholar on the dean's list all that year. Somehow it ceased to matter that I was having a silent nervous breakdown at the same time. The suffering ennobled me and would teach me how to sing. While everyone else was arguing about the war in Indochina, reading their meat-and-potato texts on the organizational man and abnormal psych, I dreamed my way through the Idylls of the King, learning the codes of chivalry and of love that was higher than passion.

  The perfect text for me and Cody, longing in our separate ways for a vanished golden age. He'd gone on to copy several Rembrandt drawings and the sibyls from the Sistine Ceiling. Then worked on a series of dark cartoons, New Yorker style, yet more like Goya in feeling. The soul bond between us continued to deepen into the winter, till I felt there was no one who had ever understood me half so well. I wouldn't face it that I was doing all the emotional work for both of us, any more than I'd acknowledge how much he was drinking. The picturesque bottles of Chianti had given over now to gin and tonic—lots of gin, a splash of Schweppe's.

  But then everyone at Yale seemed to drink too much, almost as a badge of honor. Holding your liquor was the mark of a man, but not holding it wasn't such a crime either; it proved a man was still a boy at heart, prone to mischief. I don't know how much I drank myself, a great deal more than I needed, but a small Puritan caution kept me from trying to keep up with Cody, in that at least. Otherwise I was like a mirror of his every word and gesture, increasingly trying to encourage him as his doubts about being an artist made him ever more savagely cynical.

  Seething with that bitterness, he would tear canvases in half, then on a sudden impulse invite Natalie down for a midwinter weekend. I froze when I heard him make the phone call, and pretended to be very busy all the week before, so I wouldn't show how devastated I was. When he stayed overnight with her at the Taft, I sat in the dark staring out at the rainy courtyard, feeling as if I would die from the double paralysis of jealousy and envy. So lost was I in the realms of psych, all those lies on all those questionnaires, I couldn't have even said which of them I ached to be: Natalie, so Cody would love me, or Cody, so I could love a woman. I only knew I would never be happy and no one would ever hold me.

  I can't recall how many more weekends like that there were—maybe once a month, maybe oftener. But I could see, even with my suffering, how at odds the two of them were—Cody drunk and surly, Natalie red-eyed with crying. But the pain between them made me as envious as their laughter, because it was real and expressible, blood-red with passion, and not the invisible pain of a ghost like me. Sometimes my head filled with a scream that went on for hours but was silenced by the dungeon walls of the closet. My face still wearing its social smile fixed in place as if by a stroke.

  Let's go sit with Paul, they all said to their dates in the dinner line. He's so funny.

  Self-pity becomes your oxygen. But you learn to breathe it without a gasp, so nobody even notices you're hurting. The fool continued to entertain. Every afternoon from four to six he could be found at The Elizabethan Club, an improbable anachronism where tea and sandwiches were laid out daily, to the buzz of literary chitchat. In the club's safe were several rare birds, including various Shakespeare quartos and a snip of Byron's hair in a locket. A great fat queen of unbelievable pretensions stood guard by the tea tray, his eyes squinched like a nun who has stitched too many tapestries. Every day as I passed him to get my tea, I'd nod at him and pray, Please don't let me end up like that.

  As for my own resume, it was turning into an extracurricular nightmare. By the spring of junior year I was editing both the Jonathan Edwards newspaper and literary magazine, the aforementioned Spider's Web—jobs nobody wanted, to be sure, but an endless blizzard of paperwork. I had inherited from a mad senior the re
ins of yet another lit-mag, pointedly called The Criterion, as if we were all budding little Eliots. Besides beating the bushes for poems and stories, I had taken over the Yale Arts Festival, a migrainous blur of performances and exhibitions revolving among the twelve residential colleges. My life was a frenzy of getting announcements out, for events that usually drew fewer people than performed in them. All of which felt, even then, like the intellectual equivalent of stringing crepe paper for the school dance.

  And it turned out to have certain benefits, being Art Czar by default. As spring advanced, the big push was to see who got tapped for the Senior Societies. This baroque hymn to elitism involved eight "above-ground" clubs, meaning the ones that had actual temples and castles in which the male-bonding mysteries occurred. Skull and Bones was the ne plus ultra of them all, rumored to be the site of naked wrestling among its members, and the mere mention of whose name in public meant that a member had to leave the room in a huff. But since each club was limited to only fifteen members, all eight had tremendous cachet. Being tapped for a Senior Society was the supreme example of being picked for the team, and a symbol besides of the influence and power that awaited a Yalie in the cozy world outside.

  As each Society assembled a list of desirable juniors, they looked to mix a variety of the crème de la crème—heroic jocks, BMOC's, superbrains. And because they all wanted a token artist or two, my role as poet/impresario put me on the short list. I found myself courted by four of the eight Societies, swept up and taken to lunch by the captain of the hockey team and the editor of the Yale Lit. For one who had always felt like the last of the last to be chosen, it was a heady time, having my dance card full for once, and wooed by the likes of Apollo and Dionysus.

  The only damper on the rush of my excitement came from Cody, who disdained the whole show as "boola-boola," classist nonsense. But even if I had to go against the captain of my soul, and though I muted my enthusiasm in his presence from then on, there was no way I would turn down the chance to be prince for a day. I wanted to belong too much, to be "in" at last. During all those weeks of courtship by the Societies, the wail of loneliness stopped screaming in my head. When pain takes that kind of vacation, you find yourself giddy with possibility.

  In the end I went with Elihu, a club whose quarters were an eighteenth-century former tavern on the Green. Elihu had the reputation of being the most diverse and the least preppy of the Societies, politically correct before its time. Where the others reluctantly tapped a token Jew, girding themselves for the country-club fights to come, Elihu chose four Jews to be my brothers, and a Cuban and an African-American to boot. Quel melting pot. More to the point, they chose three queers as well, though that would never be spoken aloud, even within the sanctum walls. I give them credit nonetheless for the only real stab at diversity I ever saw at Yale. And I accepted it without question that the main agenda for senior year would be my becoming brothers in blood with the fourteen members of my delegation.

  On tap night three men in suits stood silently outside my door, waiting for the stroke of eight to sound in Harkness Tower. When it did, they ran in and tapped my shoulder, and I blurted a breathless yes to the man from Elihu, sending the others darting out into the night to find a backup. I reeled with delight, the phone ringing off the hook with congratulations. I had arrived. And from Cody's room, where he crouched over a pad sketching his gloom in charcoal, came a mutter just loud enough for me to hear: "Welcome to the Mickey Mouse Club, boys and girls."

  On the day of the initiation, I was terrified I would have to wrestle naked. But the mumbo-jumbo was minimal, and the alumni dinner following was about as hearty and banal as a law firm's annual picnic. The old Tory Tavern in the basement had a half-circle of chairs around a stone hearth, the same as when Nathan Hale himself sat there and quaffed a tankard of ale, plotting the Revolution. There was a live-in cook and butler who put out breakfast five days a week and dinner on Thursday and Sundays. Thursday would be our tribal night come autumn, when each of us would be required to present an autobiography to our fourteen brothers. We were given to understand that this would be the most naked night of our lives, wrestling or no.

  I already knew I would lie when I told my story.

  I liked the brethren well enough, fourteen new best friends, and ended the year in a flurry of lunches and dinners, to get to know them all better. I carefully avoided bringing it home to Cody, whose own demons were winning the wrestling match with his soul. Ever quick to rise to the challenge of dysfunction, I only loved him more for the agonizing loss of faith he was feeling over his painting. I've seen a lot of men and women since then who wanted to be artists more than life itself—seen them hit a wall I happen to have slipped through a hole in. I never fail to think of Cody, his fingers numb and palsied-looking as he clutches the chalk that freezes the moment it touches the paper. Dry as a bone and nothing to say. That image of Cody and Yeats's poem, "To a Friend Whose Work Has Come to Nothing."

  I had a second stroke of good fortune that spring. I won a summer traveling fellowship from the college, ostensibly to go to England and read the Tennyson letters at Cambridge. Bloom had convinced me to take on the Victorian Laureate for my senior honors thesis, with a special focus on In Memoriam, the purple sequence of elegies that had occupied the poet for the seventeen years between 1833 and 1850 as he struggled to quench his grief over the loss of his friend Hallam. In order to get the fellowship you had to come up with a scholarly agenda. I convinced the committee that no one had ever compared the poet's letters with the datable sections of the poem. They nodded sententiously, satisfied as to my Higher Purpose, and cut me a check for a thousand bucks.

  Three hundred for the plane ticket left me seven hundred for thirteen weeks in Europe, barely a smidgen over Europe on $5 a Day. I remember the last two weeks of school before summer as a time of delicious anticipation, making plans with classmates to hook up for certain legs of the journey, reading everything I could on the Lake District, Paris, Provence, Tuscany. The names of my long bookish life were about to acquire the quick of life, and I was convinced I'd never be the same once I had tasted the dust of the squares and walked in the steps of ancient gods.

  Still unrequited as ever over Cody, I mooned in his wake and let him set the bad-ass tone of the garret we shared. I hadn't the strength to admit that his surliness toward me was getting unmanageable, almost as if he were punishing me for loving him. All we needed was the summer off, I told myself. We'd already agreed to room together again next year, the path of least resistance. In the meantime I would be seeing all the treasures of Western Civ, the hundred greatest hits of Art, and come back renewed for both of us. Our muses were surely as bonded as ever, even if we seemed increasingly at odds about everything. I still wanted to believe he was Dylan without the guitar, a rebel with cause, his darkness the stuff of vision.

  A year together in 714 had made a most defiant statement, like a kid who paints his room black because the Stones said so. In the middle of our living room was a truck tire full of sand, choked with the butts of ten thousand Camels. In the corner, standing upright, was a plywood coffin, prop from a long-forgotten play, fitted out inside with shelves, as a bar. By year's end, empty gin bottles lined those shelves like a speakeasy. So much did we have invested in boho downtown anti-style. The faux Vermeer hung over the mantel, really rather good, the one thing not torn up in Cody's fits of art destruction. Paperbound outlaws—Plath, Artaud, Genet—were scattered about like amulets.

  I promised to write to Cody from every country, and said he could write me back care of American Express, though I knew he wouldn't. A shrug was all he answered lately. It happened that he was leaving for California the same morning my plane left for London, both from Kennedy, so we took a train down from New Haven together the day before, thinking to browse the museums and look up some friends for dinner. We lunched on a six-pack going down, stowed our summer luggage in lockers at Penn Station, then passed a muzzy afternoon at the Frick. Dinner with friends tur
ned out to be cocktails, and then a party uptown afterwards, from which the friends departed without us, forgetting we were supposed to spend the night with them.

  After that we closed a bar on Third Avenue—I'd switched to 7-Up hours before—and then just walked the humid streets of midtown. Cody didn't seem to need to sleep, and I was feeling the crush of leaving him for three months, suddenly scared it would never be the same between us after, and no way to say it or that I loved him. Then he announced we must make a pilgrimage to the Seagram's Building, a mock-heroic bow to that totem of Utopia. We ran through the East Fifties, whooping and shouting like vandals in a temple.

  When we got there, the fountains were silent. Cody opened his arms and addressed the glass tower. "O Mies," he cried, "we are all unworthy of your genius." Then we bent down together and kissed the pavement, rather like drinking out of the tap in Calcutta. From one of his pockets Cody produced a final beer, and we sat on a stone slab above the Four Seasons, feeling very lordly. I took a sip, and Cody guzzled the rest, and then he was sleeping, his head in my lap. The deep sleep of a drunk, so I could stroke his copper hair without freaking him out. Overwhelmed just then with the wish to protect him and save him from the dark inside. And crying, because I could never tell him what I felt.

  Change me, I whispered, change me.

  But it wasn't Cody I prayed to, or God either. As usual, I was quoting somebody, in this case Randall Jarrell, "The Woman at the Washington Zoo." The poem that became my anthem months before, the day I first read it, the woman's caged heart indistinguishable from mine. She walks among the jungle beasts, a bureaucratic spinster nobody ever sees, never touched by wildness. "Oh, bars of my own body," she cries, "open, open!" Cries to the vulture who comes to scavenge the cages, that he should shed his black wings and step to her like a man. "You see what I am: change me, change me!"