Becoming a Man: Half a Life Story

by Paul Monette

  I didn't even mind being nowhere, walking an hour in pitch dark and soaking wet, since everything that happened now was in service of Experience. Eventually I came to a village, and slept under a cafe table shivering like a dog. Nobody in the whole world knew where I was, and that suited me fine. So magic was life on the road, in fact, that it surprised me not at all to wake up bleary to the morning sun and staring at a red Triumph convertible, two women laughing and pointing at me. "Americain, n'est-ce pas?" asked the driver, sleek as Claudia Cardinale. Then in quizzical English: "Where do you go from here?"

  "Côte d'Azur," I answered brightly, scrambling out from under the table. They laughed as if this was the funniest thing they'd ever heard, then pointed me into the back seat. So I tumbled in behind them and blew dry as we raced down the Alpine hills into full Provence. They shouted questions at me about the Kennedys and Warren Beatty, and I boomed in answer with my schoolboy French, loving the sound of their laughter, their Hermes scarves whipping before me like pennants as we sailed through fields of lavender.

  By the time we reached the coast, I felt like I'd walked into Jules et Jim, an arrangement in which our every gesture was devastatingly worldly. We pulled into a town called Le Lavandou—no tourists, white powder sand—and had fish-and-garlic soup for lunch with a Provençal rosé. "How come you have no cowboy boots?" Claudia wanted to know, and her friend Monique reassured her, "They're at home with his horse. In Texas." The teasing only made me feel more sexy. After lunch they walked me down the harbor to what looked like a bait shack and turned out to be a drop-dead boutique. They bought me a pearl-buttoned cowboy shirt, the yoke embroidered with lariats, telling me I would need it for the Riviera parties we were going to.

  They left me on the beach and said they'd be back at sundown, after they'd made their obligatory visit to a boring friend's chateau. So I waved them laughing away and walked out onto the beach, stripped to my shorts, and wrote Chapter 1 on the first page of my notebook. In my head I saw myself spending the next month with Claudia and Monique, perhaps becoming the lover of both—undeterred by the fact of never having gotten hard with a woman before. It was the tossing of my life to the winds that would make such things possible. What I wouldn't admit, of course, was that my one real toss of summer fate had already happened, with the U.S. Navy. And if I'd confessed to my virgin status and he'd gone slower to open me up, I might never have left London at all. Might still be there.

  Here in the south of France I was playing a different game. I orchestrated my writer's pose—flung down on the sand with notebook, brooding in a waterfront bar—as if I was creating a character and a camera was always on me. The persona I invented was much more fully fleshed than the pale sticks of characters in Chapter 1. The novel I was writing was really a prop for the novel I was living. An old story, wanting to be a writer more than you want to write, but the pages poured out of me too, so it didn't feel like a pose. I figured I owed it all to the Mediterranean light, that I'd been drawn to an ancient wellspring, like coming home. The truth was more prosaic than even my sunstruck prose: I was furiously reinventing myself as Novelist, to obliterate the memory of being a sex toy. Writing instead of eros would be my passion.

  It didn't matter that Claudia and Monique never came back. I found my own way to those parties, bonfires on the beach where the wine was passed in wickered jugs and goatskins, somebody warbling Pete Seeger and Woody Guthrie and mangling all the place names. If I wasn't the only American in that dot of a town, I felt like it. Hair going blond and my skin like cocoa, I was more than a kid on the beach, I was Other, mysterious (oh how I worked on the mystery), like one of those Hemingway types who sport obscure and glamorous scars.

  A week later and into Chapter 2, I moved on to Nice. Thinking I could live on three dollars a day instead of five if I stayed in the youth hostel there—a dilapidated villa in the hills, chockablock with cots, like a makeshift hospital. I held myself aloof from the student population there, was the last one in when the gates closed at ten. Though I made several visits to the Musée Matisse, getting lost in the cutouts, my writer's schedule for the next three weeks was inviolable. By nine A.M. I'd be on the beach in front of the Negresco Hotel—where somebody told me Isadora stayed the night before she died, the billow of her scarf caught in the spokes of her gigolo's Bugatti.

  And I'd write all day till sundown, though always ready to take a break if anyone stopped to talk. You realize you've been waiting your whole life to answer the question "What are you doing?" with "Writing a novel." Every hour or so, I'd go down to take a swim, though the footing was slippery, stones instead of sand. Afraid to swim out too far, always casting a nervous glance at my stuff on the beach, fearful someone would make off with my precious manuscript.

  The novel of course was about nothing, par for a twenty-year-old. The Beautiful Brick Day, it was called, because the hero's window looked out on a wall. Took place at a grand hotel in New Hampshire, as if my first task as a writer was to improve the truth of the previous summer. The main characters were a pair of college kids, boy and girl, both eccentric loners, who eventually became lovers of sorts. Though the sexual part was misty enough, under the covers, that they might as well have been playing doctor. I have mercifully forgotten the engine of the plot, though an old dull wince in the back of my mind tells me the girl was determined to build herself a lake. I knew as much about engineering a dam as I did about men and women in bed.

  Write what you know, as the first rule has it in Fiction 1. But frankly I only knew what I wanted life to be, not what it was. I knew the blank page of life in the closet, and no way would I ever write about that. But I was free to experiment at will, since no one in Nice was looking over my shoulder. In the evenings I attached myself to groups of French kids, café au lait and movie-talk, for they were delighted to have an American to listen to their speculations about the existential Jerry Lewis. They traveled in packs, giving off a general erotic charge that didn't seem to demand—even seemed to avoid—pairing off boy/girl. No one was ever gay that I could tell, but then I wasn't looking any more. Meanwhile I got to feel sexual without having to prove anything.

  There were nights when I missed the curfew at the hostel and was forced to spend the night on the beach, huddled between cabanas. With all that caffeine I wasn't sleepy anyway, and let my mind race trying to figure how to pull off this lifestyle as a permanent thing. I flirted with exile, sure I could live on practically nothing. I'd lost about twenty pounds since coming to the Continent, but liked the hungry look of me in the mirror, all my babyfat finally burned away. My tan was beyond cordovan, three layers scorched and peeled till I had that blasted post-nuclear look so favored by Europeans. A shipwreck tan, a philosophical tan, Gauguin in Tahiti.

  On Bastille Day I met a trio of American girls who'd been studying French in a convent in Grenoble. I took them on a Pied Piper tour of Nice—the fishing docks and the grittiest onion soup, a vertigo climb to the old Roman road, with cerulean views to Corsica. I described my novel and the Life of Art with boggling pretense, and they ate it up. By the time we got back to the churning holiday crowd in the city, Betsy had staked me out for herself and radared her roommates that it was vamoose time.

  I preened appropriately, and somehow didn't feel threatened to be alone with her in the Bastille crush. She had long black hair and a body taut from a life of tennis, standing nearly as tall as I, and fiercely aggressive after a month of irregular verbs. We made out in the middle of the street, all over each other, and I found her aggression exciting, maybe because I didn't have to steer it into a bed. We danced in a conga line that ran for hours on the Promenade des Anglais, then wandered into somebody's open house for dinner, feeling very daring. We watched the fireworks from the park above the harbor and sang the Marseillaise till we were hoarse.

  We'd long since missed the curfew at the hostel. At three A.M. we sat on the beach in a circle of drunken Frenchmen, kissing and passing the wine. Betsy said she'd always wanted to see Monaco, hav
ing been raised to think of Grace Kelly as the pinnacle of Catholic womanhood. Well, why not? We staggered up to the road and hitched a ride in the back of a pickup, sharing the space with a pair of dogs who loved the wind as much as we did.

  It was after four when we landed in Monaco, nobody on the streets, and since we couldn't find the casino, we headed up to the palace. The guards in the courtyard couldn't have been more courtly, answering all our gushy questions, though they drew the line at pointing out Her Majesty's bedroom. We carved our initials on the root of a plane tree under the battlements, then wandered the streets till we found a baker opening up. He gave us a half-dozen croissants free, because his town on the German border had been liberated by Yanks in '45.

  All day and all night long it had felt like a movie. I liked it being a movie, and the way I seemed to watch myself go through the motions of a twenty-four-hour romance. A movie I could take my grandmother to, unlike my night of carnal overload in Soho. The last scene happened just after dawn, Betsy curled asleep in my lap as we sat on a bus bench, flaked with a sift of crumbs. Just then a convoy of French army trucks came rumbling by, each with a dozen men in fatigues sitting knee-to-knee in the back.

  As the trucks passed, the soldiers caught sight of us, looking so louche and muzzy with love, and they winked and whistled and waved their rifles. To them—to the whole French army, it felt like—I was their stand-in, a boy with a girl. Betsy never woke up. It was all on me, that final shot, puffing with pride as I stroked her hair, winking back and returning salutes, a man among men. As the last truck passed, a barrel-shaped grunt called out to me: "Français?"

  "Bien sûr," I retorted, no trace of the schoolboy in my accent. And the men in the final truck cheered, another score for their side. As the convoy disappeared up the High Corniche, I felt near delirious with what I took to be self-esteem. At that moment it seemed the most important thing in the world, to engineer my life so I'd look the right part, a woman on my arm who would garner the cheers of other men. It had nothing to do with Betsy, of course, whom I can't recall saying goodbye to. Once we'd played to the troops, it was cut and print. But afterwards I could summon up the scene whenever I liked, a loop of porn with the sex drained out, always there to tell me the same comforting lie: how it felt to look like a man.

  Then I had to move on, having promised a friend from Yale that I'd do Italy with him. Time to go anyway, since my torso was on fire with a toxic rash from sun poisoning. Sixty handwritten pages in my duffel bag, and sure now that I'd found myself a vocation. I hooked up with David in Stuttgart, the most decent straight man I ever befriended at Yale, and we hitchhiked to Venice to Florence to Rome, the Greatest Hits of the Renaissance. The novel stayed in my bag, not necessary just then, though I'd lie awake in the hostels and art-direct my dust jacket, or lullaby myself with rave reviews.

  There came a day when the past almost caught me and made me honest. Standing in line at American Express, we met a fellow Yalie who knew my friend Francis from Andover. Francis was finishing up his junior year abroad, and he and the Yalie were on their way south to Pompeii and the Amalfi coast. They had the whole back seat going begging, so David and I decided to tag along. Francis hadn't changed much—still that sacerdotal air from so many years at the organ, but just as wry and flushed with pleasure to see me.

  All I could feel in return was distance, bordering on hostility, for he brought back like a bad dream the loser I'd been in prep school. Worse, I feared to be tainted as queer if I laughed at his jokes—though he wasn't any further out than I and passed for straight depressingly well. In a paroxysm of defensiveness I swamped Francis with my writer's airs and boho exploits, laying it on thick about Betsy.

  I remember this very specific moment when all those guards came down. We'd taken the ferry to Capri, and after the Blue Grotto tour Francis and I found ourselves swimming naked off a rock below the cliffs of Tiberius's villa. As we paddled back and forth in the cobalt water, I suddenly felt an overwhelming need to tell him the truth. Thought I would die of the pretense if I had to endure it a moment longer. Just to say How are you handling being queer, because all I seem to do is fuck it up. It was no secret between us after all, not since the days we'd cracked each Other up on the steps of Harriet's tomb. Francis knew I was struggling to speak, and probably knew in his heart what about. I almost, almost said it. But he was as shy to prod it out of me as I was loath to give up being the mascot of heterosex for the French army. We let the moment go, and I went back to living my life as a book instead of a person.

  Yet senior year at Yale turned out to be very satisfying, I playing the role of Writer Back from Exile to the hilt. Tennyson had become secondary. My senior thesis on him was supposed to occupy half my time, but mostly what I did was pad the dreary notes I'd made in England. I worked on Brick Day instead, revising, ever revising. Though now that I think of it, I worked a lot less than I talked about it—as if I couldn't stop answering Writing a novel, even when nobody asked, oh especially then. More than anything it helped me not prepare for the future. I forgot to send to graduate schools for catalogues, tuned out when everyone else was grappling over Harvard Law versus who knows what. I simply didn't care.

  Ten years later, finally out, I would say that my senior year was a kind of extended nervous breakdown, but the smiling sort of breakdown that people pretend not to notice. I was still rooming with Cody Williams, yet almost from the first day back we hardly spoke. I felt hardened to him—again that weird disdain for the former object of unrequitedness. Not that I didn't keep up a certain exaggerated courtliness around him, if only to brag about my novel, while he and his own demon continued to stare at blank paper. I certainly paid no attention anymore to which girl he was dating. I even stopped the charade of taking part in the weekend ritual, no more blind dates for appearance's sake. It was the closest I'd come so far to being myself alone, reveling in my writerly intensity, an invisible scarf like Isadora's billowing after me as I capered about.

  More by default than not, since everyone else was busy engineering a life after Yale, I was running the whole show art-wise. You couldn't blow your trumpet in public without running it by me first, since I was the cultural gatekeeper. I had at my disposal certain discretionary funds, so I could sponsor a Yale appearance by various troupes on the fringe. I felt like fringe myself, loving the sound of my own opinions, the more outrageous the better.

  That fall I invited Pauline Kael to speak in a lecture series officially funded for art history, preferably embalmed. I got to spend three days as her guide, drinking in all that iconoclasm, learning a whole new vocabulary for the decade of movies about to explode. Sat with her one afternoon watching The Maltese Falcon, just the two of us, and from her droll running commentary the full heat of noir hit me like a blast. All that Hollywood trash I'd grown up on, so irrelevant to the ivied smugness of my education, suddenly had a context. By the time she left, I was ravenous for pop and high kitsch, scorning the good gray syllabus of Eng Lit. Slang was as good as refinement, and if you could somehow put them together—a prose that stretched the limits the way Godard and Dylan did—you could start a fire that burned like a blowtorch.

  I spent as much time as I could at Elihu, getting to know my fourteen blood brothers. Most of them seemed as restless as I for a fresh perspective, dissatisfied after three years of the preppy cliques and moldering tweed of Yale. The reason these senior societies sprang up in the first place was the tacit admission that men, left to their own devices, never made friends below the surface, let alone below the belt. The macho gets in the way, the heartiness, the pride in showing no feelings. Or at least that's how the straight boys all complained, as they took to heart the societal oath, in which feeling and bonding were one. If feeling was what they were looking to learn, writer Monette was ready to show them the way.

  After each Thursday dinner, the fifteen of us tramped upstairs to the meeting room, its cream-painted paneled walls carved with the names of every member since the founding in 1903. A
mace like a caveman's club was placed on the table before the man who was spilling his autobiography that night. I don't really remember the order of events or the incantations, but we took it deadly seriously, for we were about to see into one another's souls. By lot I was chosen to go second—this was about mid-October, just at the cusp of my twenty-first birthday. Tellingly, though my fourteen brothers were to be my collective best friend for the next nine months, the only autobiography I remember is my own.

  Because really, it was the first time I'd ever told the tale to anyone. I almost never talked about my brother, till the unsaid had grown to the size of a mountain. And not until that night had I ever shared the miserable isolation of prep school. I began the proceedings by reading "The Woman at the Washington Zoo." All the pieces were there, laid out on the table before them, the scattershot jigsaw of my heart. I held back only the one truth that made it a picture: being gay. The most I could tell them was that I was depressed.

  But monumentally so, torn up inside, so bad I'd flirted with suicide. I could see how gravely they took this in, their own sorrows paling for the moment in comparison. For my despair came off as systemic, nothing so banal as losing a game or even a woman. And the unspoken subtext: that maybe I was incurable, a fury of self-destruction in my bones that I would struggle with heroically as long as I could, mapping my soul's condition with blood in my pen, till finally it dragged me under.

  Far too much in control of my histrionic rhetoric to let it fall into a whine, which is mostly what it was, I came off like the prince of my own darkness, ever so stylish in black. They didn't know what to say when I finished, my fourteen brothers. They certainly didn't understand how nakedly I was begging them to change me. One of them said, haltingly, he'd never have guessed the turmoil. I always seemed so cocksure and above it all, with my riding-crop wit and my honeyed tongue. Maury, the songwriter from Queens, told me he'd assumed I was raised a landed duke, on account of my arty sophistication. I answered them with a stoical shrug: so much for the deceptiveness of appearances. What they couldn't see was how giddy I was from all the applause, that for me the Thursday autobiography had been a performance piece. Reality was the least of it.