Becoming a Man: Half a Life Story

by Paul Monette

  To most people I seemed a little more excited than usual, with a slight consumptive flush to my cheeks that was entirely appropriate to a poet mining his battered heart. When I was by myself, I was blank, staring into the middle distance. All I could do was try to save my energy—clutching my wounds like an animal losing blood—and make my appearance at every graduation function. Swinging into overdrive, talking so fast I thought I would burst, but still enough social skills to keep everyone laughing.

  I don't blame Scott for keeping some distance at the end. He was valedictorian, after all, and had copped the literary prize to boot, the latter awarded by me. Flush with his own successes, he did what he could to keep open a daily slot of private time with me. Upbeat and breezy, always some new poet to ask about. But he'd also started the process of separation from Canton, ready to put it away with childish things. I felt abandoned but not betrayed, since the disintegration of Paul Monette was all my own fault. Meanwhile the obsession throbbed like a brain fever, as I wondered minute by minute what Scott was doing.

  Thursday, June 15. I don't know what this journal is for anymore. I can't even accurately write down the crippled times, what it's like to just stare at the clock.

  He stayed on for a week after graduation, bunking with friends in Cambridge, so the final smashup kept getting put off. We'd meet in Harvard Square for coffee, or walk by the river reading Lowell and Berryman. In those brief hours I would act as if nothing was wrong, like Garbo laughing to hide the cough at the end of Camille. The rest of the time I stumbled around like a zombie, knowing I needed help but paralyzed to find it. I remember dropping Scott off at the airport, the most casual of goodbyes, then heading up to Andover, knuckles white as I gripped the steering wheel. I'd promised my parents I'd stay with Bob while they took off for a week's vacation.

  And that's where I hit bottom—in the very room I'd grown up in, or stopped growing up in. The room where I hid my first porno and jerked to the nightly frieze of my jock classmates at Andover. All that week I bumped around the house on Stratford Road, reading Between the Acts, wondering who would self-destruct first, Mrs. Woolf or I. My brother only recalls that I was subdued—odd for one usually so voluble, but nothing more remarkable than that. He was pissed at our parents for bringing me home to babysit, since he could damn well take care of himself. At twenty he'd finally taken charge of his own life, having just completed a year of junior college and about to start a four-year business course in the fall. A long way from the factory job that had seemed his only option after high school, two dead-end years of putting widgets together till his brain was nearly as atrophied as his legs. Now he was so happy, he had to pinch himself to believe it, out with Brenda every evening in the Falcon, beginning to plan a life together for real, marriage and all.

  I remember thinking that I mustn't cloud his joy with my pathetic problems. There was nothing he could do anyway, nothing anyone could do. Yet I tried to stay in contact with people, especially my feeling women, pleading for direction, finally letting them broach the subject of therapy. "You can't go on like this," they told me. "Nobody has to live in this kind of pain." I took down the names of their shrinks and promised I'd call, then froze at the telephone. Wrestling with the terror of turning myself in, thinking I would rather die than tell my shameful story. Finally a girl I knew—a social worker who said I was starting to "look like a suicide"—called a friend and begged him to see me, because she didn't want my blood on her hands.

  His name was Cantwell. Mid-twenties, a preppie jock with a brush mustache, relentlessly straight in demeanor and groomed to the teeth. I think I was one of his first private clients—twenty dollars a session, as I remember. I sat there rigid with terror, responding in monosyllables. "I gather you've been depressed," he said.

  "I'm a homosexual. Why wouldn't I be depressed?"

  "You sound bitter. Tell me about that."

  And it poured out in a torrent—Greg and Scott, the search for the laughing man who didn't exist, the polar swings from celibacy to obsession. I couldn't stand it anymore, fitting in nowhere, always feeling less than. But wait—did I think there was something wrong with being gay? I squirmed, guardedly admitting it seemed to work for other people. But I'd never met one like me, or one who wanted me back. I was a misfit among misfits. And I didn't especially want to learn how to function better at something that made me feel so wretched.

  "What do you want?" he asked. I blinked, and he repeated it.

  It seemed to be some kind of trap. He persisted. "What would you like your life to be?"

  I snorted with contempt. "That's easy—I'd like to be straight. So what?"

  He nodded. "So let's work on that." He didn't seem to notice my look of stupefaction. Very businesslike, he proposed we see each other once a week for the next six months. I remember feeling offended, that he made it sound so easy. Did he really think he could undo in six months the lies and desires of twenty-six years? In my deepest heart I resisted the deal I was being asked to sign—a first stirring of pride perhaps, or just a stubborn anchor in reality. How would I ever teach myself not to eroticize men? It was as deeply rooted in me as the fact of gender itself.

  Yet under that flutter of indignation was a hunger to believe him. My being queer was inextricable from the depression that was destroying me. But maybe my certainty that I couldn't change was only the sickness talking. Besides, Cantwell's startling challenge had a seductive appeal to my intellect: that we could take this bundle of neuroses and understand it to death. It was like enrolling in a graduate course in self—with a reading list and deadlines, as well as a chance to recite and show off in class to an approving teacher. Another shot at another A.

  I walked out of that first session convinced I was a new man already, intoxicated with the will to change. I didn't even feel so oppressed by the continuing obsession with Scott, since that represented in a nutshell the self-destruction of my disease. So taken was I with the thrill of change that I handled without panic Alida's decision, a few days later, to drop out of the business. She'd had enough of my falling apart, was sick of hiding her own feelings and playing the saintly nurturer. Very well, I would make the business succeed without her. I was broke and had no certain income, but liked the feel of being free to make my own mistakes. Meanwhile my department chairman at Canton offered me a part-time job for the fall—only two courses, I'd be out of there by noon. I knew I could live on the half-salary—five grand—as long as I found a cheap place to live in the city.

  Then I fell into the perfect situation. A Harvard professor and his wife, whose daughter I'd taught at Andover, were on their way to China, Nixon just having opened the door. They had a beautiful place on Winthrop Street in Cambridge, a stone's throw from Harvard Square, surrounded on three sides by the red-brick bastions of Harvard's residential houses. By contrast, the professor's house was a nineteenth-century throwback, a farmhouse really, with a split-rail fence around the yard and an apple tree that made a shady courtyard by the kitchen door. They asked if I'd like to housesit for them till Christmas, sharing the place with their oldest daughter, a nurse who kept a hatchet by her bed because of the constant stream of burglars.

  It was like moving into a ready-made bohemian life, glamorously funky, burglars and all. The daughters' friends were always hanging out on Winthrop Street—a ragtag bunch of dancers and rock musicians and body-painters, people who didn't go anywhere without a tambourine and a couple chips of hash wrapped in tinfoil. They were glad to have a poet around. And I had the exhilarated feeling of starting over every day, the post-hippie street life of the Square being the perfect surroundings for making everything new. I remember walking barefoot to Ninni's Corner to buy the morning paper, checking the kiosks for poetry readings, dozing on the riverbank as I read my way through Forster. If I still thought of myself as paralyzed with depression, I must've had to work at it.

  In fact I was working hard on my therapy. From the day I started with Cantwell I couldn't stop talking about it, prac
tically collaring strangers on the street to announce that I was coming back from a nervous breakdown. For someone whose every feeling had been masked since puberty, I was compensating in spades, conducting a public airing of dirty laundry in all the cafes of Cambridge. I poured out the truth to any friend who'd listen. I'd been the perfect ear for so many women for so long, they owed me one. Besides, it was part of the urban chic of the times, in Cambridge anyway, to talk about the progress of one's therapy. We were presumably sitting on the same mythic café chairs where Sexton and Plath traded razor scars and overdoses.

  But my agenda wasn't madness now, it was going straight. In Cantwell's office I went after the usual suspects, raging at my parents for the body shame that entered the house when my brother was born, the feeling that our seed was cursed and that maybe we deserved it. I might be afraid of sex with women, but that didn't mean I didn't want it. Once I was able to grasp that in theory, I was wild with impatience to test it out, to play it through with an actual woman—and the obvious choice was Emma.

  She'd graduated from Canton in June, in Scott's class, and though never a student of mine, had always hovered at the edges of the literary crowd, smiling enigmatically at my noisy opinions. Emma lived in the Blue Hills south of Canton, at the end of a dirt road through rolling fields, by a black pond at the foot of a meadow—the perfect place for a changeling to live. She had a long elegant face and the saddest eyes, being unaware of her own considerable sensuality, and liable to start like a deer at any sudden move. I don't know what drew us together, but I suspect it was a shared sense of being out of step. Her father had died of cancer, pointlessly and abruptly, a couple of years past, and the wound at the center of things was still raw. We fell into spending time together while I was still packing up to leave the garret in Upton House. We had no expectations going in, either of us, just a willingness to give one another permission to be sad.

  But as soon as I understood I might be a closet heterosexual, every encounter with Emma became freighted with the possibility of romance. I was tentative as a twelve-year-old, terrified and thrilled to get as far as a dry-lipped kiss. We went camping in Maine with her older brother, Emma and I holding hands between our two sleeping bags, shyly skinny-dipping in the iceberg waters off Winter Harbor. She felt like my first girlfriend. It was for me a reaching backward to reclaim an innocence my tortured youth had never tasted. Emma was infinitely patient and undemanding, fascinated by the twists and turns of my psyche as I got shrunk. Her own blue-nosed New England upbringing had ranked the expression of feelings somewhere below dancing on Sundays, a thing that was Simply Not Done. She had repressions of her own to peel away, and to her I was a veritable circus of acting out and getting in touch.

  Of course I'd still see men on the streets of Cambridge whose beauty would stop my heart, throwing the whole matter of my sex change into question. Dutifully I would tell myself I wanted to be that guy, not have him. That was what I should try to visualize, said Cantwell: not fucking the men I lusted after but becoming one of their own. I'm putting this idea in Cantwell's mouth, but I'm not sure. For if there was any theme that recurred with dismaying frequency in our sessions, it was my ravenous need for approval. So extreme, that I would say anything to be liked, take on any persona if I thought it would ingratiate me. I think he was trying to tell me that 1'd decided to be straight because that's what I figured everyone wanted of me, Cantwell especially. By then, of course, I was checking out every woman I knew as a possible relationship. Have I got it right yet, doctor? How about this one?

  Yet it was Scott's approval that mattered most. I'd call him once a week, he at a phone booth outside a drugstore in Jerkwater, Michigan, where his family spent their summers. I'd narrate the breathless tale of my struggle to overcome my sexual dysfunction, while he steered the conversation to books and poets. By now it was only a reflex of good manners keeping him in touch with me. He was cool and distracted, counting the seconds till he could hang up. I didn't care. Wait till I showed him I was as straight as he was.

  Emma and I never made it to bed, but we did the best we could with a chaste romance, delicate and courtly as figures in a tapestry. We managed to end the summer tenderly disposed, neither of us bruised, as if we had prepped one another for a greater love waiting just around the bend. I'd gotten what I needed from the experience—a chance to be vulnerable, a taste of intimacy without the fear of being asked to perform. Not that all this attenuated eroticism served to blunt my baser needs. Though repeating my mantra to be and not possess the humpy numbers who crossed my path, every now and then I'd let one follow me barefoot home for a quick blow job. And berate myself as I watched them disappear down Winthrop Street—as if it had all been a lab experiment to prove the virtue of my higher goal. And of course a chance to rack myself with guilt in Cantwell's office for having fallen off the wagon.

  September, and Emma was off to Sarah Lawrence. Scott came through Boston on his way to Yale, stopping long enough for a couple of rhapsodic walks along the river. The words that passed between us were so carefully composed, we might have been speaking in blank verse. I experienced again the Platonic heights of the previous spring, convinced that we could bond like Wordsworth and Coleridge—or was it Byron and Shelley?—now that I was on the road to sexual normalcy. Around this time, Cantwell broke his therapist's silence to call me on my delusion that I wasn't turned on carnally by Scott. Blundy he warned me to beware of the self-destruction here, not to dress it up in lofty sentiments.

  Oh, all right. Deep down I knew I could show Cantwell that I could have it both ways, the princely soul-passion of poets and the earthly physicality of a man and a woman. Which was where Julia came in. I suppose it must have been my friend John at Yale who put us back in touch—he of the White Album suckfest—having first introduced us four years before in Chicago. Julia had settled in Washington, working "Style" for the Post—sassy and gorgeous, quick to be bored, and utterly certain she'd win on her own terms, no matter how much of a men's club journalism was. John sent her some poems of mine, but more to the point he passed on to Julia the eye-rolling gossip that Paul had decided to go straight.

  She called me in Cambridge and said she had to come up to Boston for a story. Which may have been an excuse, but she couldn't have been less coy about her motives. "I never really thought you were gay," she informed me, "because gay men don't turn me on, and you always did." The perfect mix of dare and flattery. Sure, we could see each other while she was in Boston. Whatever trepidation I had was mitigated by knowing she lived five hundred miles away. I expected her on Friday; she showed up two days early. Knocked on the door of Winthrop Street, her bags beside her on the stoop, the friend she'd vaguely been planning to stay with having fallen through.

  For the next four days, we were up half the night talking, me spilling every detail of Greg and Scott and whatever else I could think of, because Julia couldn't get enough. We slept in the same bed, curled together, Julia insisting that we not move too fast with the sex. Fine with me, whatever she said. I let her take my hand to explore her body, seeing how it turned her on that I was a virgin in these matters. She told me I had a beautiful dick, which got a blip of a rise from it. We made out for hours on end, read poems aloud in the bathtub, and she'd waltz naked around the bedroom singing Carole King songs.

  I was mesmerized by her, and not even scared when she warned me, before taking off on Sunday, that she was falling in love with me. All I knew was, I'd just spent four days not thinking every other minute about Scott. And the calls poured in all week from friends who'd seen us together, whom Julia had dazzled as much as she'd dazzled me. It was the most heterosexual I'd ever felt—the luxurious pride of having a fox on my arm, as smart as she was beautiful and doting on me shamelessly. "We look good together, don't we?" she'd ask whenever we passed a mirror. And checking myself out in mirrors was crucial to this heterosexual process, Narcissus needing to see what he looked like arm in arm with a woman.

  I begged her to come back t
he next weekend. A few nights later I was walking in the Square and saw one of my half-hour tricks riding toward me on a bicycle. I tried to look away, but he stopped anyway. To inform me he had VD, and I'd better go get checked. With a cheery smile he was on his way, and I stood there hardly breathing, racked with shame and hating the pull of men. I thought Julia would refuse to see me anymore, but she couldn't have been more supportive. "That's all in the past," she assured me, insisting on coming with me when I went to be poked and swabbed at the clinic. Of course we couldn't have real sex now for a couple of weeks, but Julia didn't mind. It would do us good, she said, to let the anticipation build.

  When she left on Sunday night, I declared in my journal that I loved her—a feeling I'd never experienced before without pain, and for once there wasn't any pain. Yet four days later, I'm grappling with it like Jekyll and Hyde, still trying to balance love and obsession:

  We are the lucky, Julia says. And this is what it's like to be happy. But I'm so much in the middle, fearing that in loving them both I am playing both ends against the middle, that it's surely not possible to complete the possibility of Julia with the way I feel about Scott.

  Saying the truth, however, didn't make me face it. When Julia arrived for the third weekend in a row, I told her that though I loved her, my manhood felt trumped up, artificial. I feared I was using her to compete with Scott, trying to mimic Scott's libido because I had none of my own. She shook her head fondly. Didn't I understand yet that she loved me not in spite of my confusion but because of it? "I even love the faggot in you," she said. "I don't think he's anything to be ashamed of. I just think he's becoming superfluous."