Becoming a Man: Half a Life Story

by Paul Monette

  In that heightened atmosphere every friendship had the quality of a shipboard romance. I spent most of my time in groups, playing the jester, and made no move to single anyone out. But found myself more and more in the company of a brainy young woman just out of Smith, the teaching assistant in the painting course, whose studios happened to abut on the main stage. Alida was a dusky redhead from an old Mississippi plantation family, the latter long gone with the wind. She had the ripe curves of a Rubens Diana and floated when she walked, a curious paradox of earthy laughter and a fragility like spun glass. As passionate about painting as I was about poetry, and struggling as much as I to stop getting A's and do something new.

  Alida seemed to understand the rules—that I wasn't available for serious boy/girl stuff, that I'd staked a ground above all that. Thus we would keep it in the realm of loftier feelings and claim our intensity there, poet and painter equally matched.

  I was the only one who bought this bullshit, and didn't notice Alida's growing infatuation. Besides, she seemed so self-possessed and self-sufficient—but that was a screen too, thrown up so I wouldn't run away.

  Not that the psychodynamics were clear to us at the time. Mostly we laughed the summer away, grasshoppers rather than ants, no threat to each other and wildly productive. When Alida heard that I stole a couple of hours every day to sit under a chestnut tree and write, she asked if she could bring her easel and join me—then asked if she could paint me. Or maybe I was the one who asked, since my narcissism was operating at full volume that summer. In a folie à deux it's always hard to reconstruct how the maze gets built. Before you stop to think, you've taken so many turns through so many hedges that everywhere you look is green, and anyway there's no going back.

  So Alida painted my portrait under the tree while I scribbled lines on a pad beside me. We couldn't stop talking either—how to live a life that worked and still be an artist, how not to compromise. Alida was going to Princeton in the fall, to start the slog through a Ph.D. in art history, somehow trapped by all her A's into having no other choice. Now she realized how angry she was at the spinster academics at Smith, how they'd pushed her out of the studio and into the library. You can paint on the side, they told her patronizingly, wincing at her work because it was so... figurative. Color-field maybe they would've allowed, even Pop, but the human figure just wouldn't do.

  This touched a chord in me that hadn't stopped echoing since the day I stumbled into Allston's room and stared at his wall of boys. "I have to get out of teaching," I blurted out, "or I'll asphyxiate."

  How did we get from there to starting a business together? It seemed more idle than anything, playing out our fantasies of where we wanted to be instead, like tracing faces in the summer clouds. Alida said she'd always wanted to be an interior decorator: to spend other people's money on beautiful things, plundering the antiquaries of Europe, putting it all together like a stage set and then walking away. The walking away was very important; that was the whole point of the life of the high Bohemian, dabbling in bourgeois pleasures without getting caught. Taking the fat commissions and buying that idyllic farm in Provence with a barn for a studio, thus beating the swords of the rich into ploughshares.

  There was a flaw in this logic a mile wide, the assumption that one could keep one's hands from getting dirty in the process. If you help to construct the suburban hell, you may forfeit the road map out. But at the time all I wanted to do was encourage Alida, praising her for her taste and sophistication, sure she could make a go of it. My own participation seemed hardly more than a playful afterthought. "I love old houses," I said, "and old things. Maybe I could do consulting work for you. Like for restorations—you know, the structural stuff."

  The butch stuff, I guess I meant. It makes no more sense now than it did then, the balmiest decision of my life based on nothing. I had not in fact ever pulled apart an old house or restored a blessed thing. I couldn't have told you the difference between Greek Revival and Regency—still can't. But Alida jumped at my offer, envisioning us as a company of the highest class, bringing old beauty out of the ruins, working with ancient craftsmen. Reality played no part in our speculations. We awarded ourselves the White House contract, the Williamsburg account. No job too grand.

  In other words, the sort of pipe-dreaming that dies with the summer light as the days grow shorter. It was too late for Alida to pull out of Princeton, the first semester already paid in advance, and I had my double teaching job to go back to in September. Even so, we left it that we were open for business if anything dropped in our laps, and I started telling friends I was a part-time designer now. It was a company without so much as a pencil to its name, but why get hung up on the details? Though various jaws dropped when I made the announcement, my friends all hastened to support me. In retrospect, I think that so many of them were waiting for me to get it over with and come out, they hoped this new persona would help me blow the hinges on the closet door.

  It had everything to do with the closet, that much is clear. Somewhere inside me I was clutching at the thought of finding a place where gay was acceptable, where it didn't have to hide itself in lies and vicarious longing. To leave the world of furtiveness and go where the laughing men were, and maybe find one of my own at last. The only thing I knew about decorating was that it was populated with queers. In the end my self-hatred foiled me even there, for once I got into the party, I clutched. I felt smothered by the effeteness and the naked cruising looks, which only made me stick closer to Alida. Putting out the vibe that we were a couple so the queers would leave me alone.

  But all that self-sabotage came later. At the end of August, when the journal begins, I'm on my way to Paris for a two-week soak in art. A trip that turned out to ravage me with loneliness, as I trekked from museum to museum, jotting my earnest bon mots. I couldn't understand why I was so depressed. Getting back to Paris had been my fondest dream for years, to see it at last through a grownup's eyes. But everyone seemed to be in pairs, filling ashtrays in the cafes and leaning over the balustrades above the Seine, wrapped about each other. As for me, I hadn't any better idea in Paris than I did in Boston where the men of my kind gathered. All I knew how to do was museums and monuments, eating by myself in bleak self-service dives to save money, squirreling images of the glamorous world that passed by, figuring it would make a lovely poem anyway. A poet's depression, I finally decided, which somehow made it nobler.

  Now I see my Paris sorrow was trying to tell me something about the self I couldn't run from anymore, whose lies and evasions made every relationship false and desperate. But I wrote a poem instead of confronting the truth, and came barreling back to the new school year in a state of breathless manic cheer. Seven classes to teach between Canton and Chestnut Hill, two or three hours every night writing poems, and endless cups of coffee with my team of feeling women. Most of whom were thrilled to hear that I was contemplating a change of career, since they knew how stultifying I found the life of a schoolmaster. I basked in their approval, hearing it as permission to be gay.

  And yet I know they all thought I was having an affair with Alida, whom I mentioned in every second breath. Two or three times a month I seemed to be driving down to Princeton to visit—that is, if Alida wasn't coming up to Boston. We slept on one another's sofas, virginal as a monk and a nun, but nobody knew that or would've believed it. For we were a dazzling team at a party, two hyper types who knew how to charm and could talk about anything. Not so different from César and me—and my denial was just as acute, my refusal to think about what Alida really wanted.

  We studied antiques and visited every old house we could find, memorizing styles with a fervid determination to get an A. We had business cards made, our two names linked, with an office in Canton and another in Houston. The latter was a total cheat, being Alida's mother's address, but we thought two offices made us sound more legitimate and cosmopolitan. Interiors and Restorations. I'd still never held a swatch of fabric in my hand or ordered a stick of furniture.
Had no credit anywhere. It was still only part-time after all, no irrevocable decisions.

  Then around Thanksgiving Alida decided to drop out of Princeton after the first semester, so she could move to Boston and get going on this enterprise of ours in earnest. I remember being thrown by her suddenness, but my deepest anxiety had to do with her expectations of me sexually. I had it out with her one night, stumbling and red-faced, explaining that I was sexually confused and couldn't perform. "Are you gay?" she asked me gently, but I couldn't bear such honesty. Not exactly, I said evasively, just terribly ambiguous and fucked up. I made it sound like one of those obscure war wounds in Hemingway. When Alida swore she had no expectations at all, that she was just glad of what we had, a friendship unlike any other, I was so wilted with relief that I would've opened a used-car lot with her. Unhappily she wasn't being honest herself, still believing deep inside that she could change me if she was patient and loving enough. We were caught in a double bind of hoping for the best and not wanting to hurt each other.

  I flew to Houston over Christmas. A strange week with Alida's family, during which I couldn't shake the feeling that I was being "looked over" as husband material. And I did nothing to counter that perception—on the contrary, did somersaults to win their approval. Alida and I were a couple, because it was far too complicated to explain what we were instead. Besides, right away we found ourselves too busy to linger over the proper pose to strike. We suddenly had a client—a plastic surgeon and his wife who lived in a bloated tract-house Tara in River Oaks, Houston's whitest precinct. Though they had already uglied up most of the house in a sort of barbecue-baroque, they wanted a music room so their squeaky little girls could give recitals.

  Not my style. I couldn't wait to get out of there, glad to turn it over to Alida. Meanwhile back in Boston, another job fell in our laps—a woman who wanted to build a room around a bunch of deadly Early American portraits. None of this was what I'd had in mind, especially not the fawning or the winging it. But checks were actually coming in, so I just had to do it. I picked an upholsterer blind from the Yellow Pages; sold forty yards of fabric wrong side up. I remember one bewildered evening: Alida and I sprawled on the floor with my brother on Stratford Road, trying to learn how to keep books and do sales tax.

  To Bob this whole designing enterprise had seemed from the first a crazy aberration, but then so was being a poet. I kept saying how happy I was to be changing careers, and he took me at my word. He sparked to Alida immediately, and thought we might as well give it a go if we were having as much fun as the laughter we gave off. He didn't know a hysterical laugh when he heard it. He also thought that Alida and I were a couple. Even recalls asking me point-blank if she and I were sleeping together, and my squirming retort that it wasn't really possible because my dick didn't work. However vague and tragic I tried to make it sound—gored by a bull in Pamplona—he understood it as an admission that I was gay. While I thought I was still protecting my secret.

  Now I read the frenetic itinerary of that winter, how I ping-ponged between my two teaching jobs and raced into Boston during free periods to order ten yards of damask. Out with Alida three or four nights a week, dinner with every marginal rich person we knew, drowning in banalities as we tried to drum up business. And I pick up the casual reference here and there to what was really going on outside the distracting circus of my life. "Scott dropped by," it says between bites of paella and lists of errands. Back and forth to Alida's new apartment in Brookline as she and I addressed our official announcement to everyone we'd ever met—"and Scott came along for the ride."

  One of the senior editors on the school paper, Scott was an exhaustingly bright kid who never stopped interviewing the world at large. So cocky, he'd known for years that he'd have his pick of the Ivy League. Not my type at all, scrawny and kind of an ugly duckling. But that was how I fooled myself as the whirlwind gathered through the winter: since I didn't want him sexually, I had no fear of repeating the obsessive pattern with Greg. Besides, Scott was after something else entirely: he wanted to be a writer. Worse—a poet, just like me.

  I started out flattered and charmed, answering his thousand questions and parsing his little verses for him. I told myself I could actually do something altruistic before I phased out of teaching, helping Scott write his own way and not like a parrot. My special tutorial with Scott was just the sort of one-on-one Canton took such pride in. Nothing to hide, unlike the dark business with Greg. It was all on the run anyway, since I had to be in three different places at once on any given day. I didn't even hear the warning when I wrote it down myself. Sunday, January 30:

  I had library duty this afternoon, saw S briefly and found out he has a tryst tonight and might be late coming over here to work on lines. This disappoints me, I hope for innocent reasons. I hope I'm not jealous of the tryst. That is an ache I would beg off right now.

  Words to walk into a propeller by. By mid-March the poet-talk with Scott has clearly become the center of my day, and I will rearrange and juggle everything else in order to leave us an hour free. Though I hadn't the analytic skills to know it then, I'd already begun the process of "de-selfing"—my own word for the craziness that's turned my life into a minefield, this wanting to be somebody else instead of me. Such projection may be every bit as sexual as desiring someone's body, but it felt bodiless and annihilating. For months I romanticized Scott and me as a relationship of near Athenian purity, the ephebe and the master. But I got to like Scott's life better than mine—especially his easy heterosexuality, and the puppydog eagerness with which he faced a future uncompromised by secrets.

  During my two-weeks' spring vacation Alida and I returned to Houston, where I began the slow dissolving into breakdown. All of our leads on new clients evaporated, horrible cups of coffee with Stepford Wives whose style was confined to the tuna surprise in Family Circle. We still had a major presentation to do for Dr. Plastic and his wife, but I just wandered through while Alida did the sketches and bids. I spent most of my time in bed, ostensibly fighting a neurasthenic flu, but in fact I was writing a poem to Scott. A set of rules, mock-didactic, on how to become a poet.

  The tension and uncertainty were palpable now between Alida and me, as we wondered if we were really suited to the decorating trade. Neither of us liked the clients we'd met so far, nor the endless coddling required. And as I read her the stanzas of Scott's poem fresh from my overheated brain, she must've understood better than anyone that I was writing a love letter. But there was no turning back. Alida had burned the bridge of Princeton, and I'd given notice to both my schools. We had to make the business work—if only because we'd told everybody. Bailing out now would've been like canceling a wedding. A metaphor chillingly close to the bone, since Alida had finally begun to see that my heart knew what it wanted even if I refused to listen to it. And that she definitely wasn't the one.

  One morning she came in to wake me in the guest room, to tell me she and her mother had been bothered all night by a crank caller. A surly drunk who identified himself as Greg from Sutton Hill, demanding to talk to me. I was in bed, Alida told him, I had the flu. She was clearly rattled and frightened, editing out the obscenities he must've spewed in my direction. I wept and told her what I could about the curse that seemed determined to pursue me, the shame that wouldn't heal. I don't know how Greg tracked me down in Houston, and it never happened again, but at the moment I thought he wouldn't stop until he destroyed me. Alida held me close and swore I would leave all that behind once I got out of teaching, at the same time reaffirming her commitment to our glorious enterprise. Neither of us mentioned Scott.

  So I returned to Boston and careened through the final term on a manic-depressive rollercoaster. For my senior spring elective I offered a seminar on the poems of Wallace Stevens—an exercise in counting angels on pinheads which drew a group of Canton's brightest. Stevens was the ideal mandarin text for my perorations about the primacy of Art, the palm tree at the end of the mind from which you could pluck the tru
th like coconuts. I was practically speaking in tongues by then, so focused was I on the private hours I spent with Scott, often after the seminar broke. To the group I preached with a kind of desperation, exhorting them to seek the poem more perfect than life. It was all displacement of course, trying to build a temple of Art around my relationship with Scott so I wouldn't have to call it by its name. An obsession that kept digging deeper the hole in myself.

  But the students ate it up. Stevens under their arm, they walked about the campus and waxed pretentious, a last fling at being high-school literati. Four or five of them trailed after me like ducklings, hoping for scraps of wisdom, in the process providing a certain cover for my hypnotic fixation on Scott. He'd finally decided on Yale over Harvard, which choked me with joy to think he would have the happy time there that had eluded me. I swore to myself I'd be content to send him off to a life of triumph from which my secret barred me. He could write about anything, after all, while I had to couch everything in code. So in the end it was Scott who would make it as a writer, and I would be lucky to occupy the footnote of having been his mentor. This was what it meant to be selfless, I thought, as I nailed myself to a wall more melancholy than Allston's.

  Somehow I kept all the balls in the air. I took on a new project in Cambridge to redo the conference rooms in a hotel. The prospect filled me with hopeless dread as I felt more and more trapped in a business that made no sense. Another horror was the finish of school in June, when Scott would graduate and the long Platonic sessions of poetry end. By now I was under a bell jar of suffocating despair, hearing the mocking echo of all my chatter and laughter, ventriloquizing like mad so no one would guess I was coming apart. Only when I sat to write my poems did the madness vent—in twisted paranoid images, swarms of ravenous bees, a gunman blowing away the locks and lunging in at me. These fever charts of misery were the closest I could come to a cry for help, and yet the pain sits prettily in neat, fussy, decorative stanzas. When each poem was finished, I made my dutiful copies and passed them around as usual, hearing the technique praised and what a marvelous wordsmith I was. No one asked me if I was going crazy for real.