Becoming a Man: Half a Life Story

by Paul Monette

  Carl called at the end of January, to berate me for having left Harold in the lurch. "Don't you understand how he feels about you?" demanded Carl. I dug in and got defensive, said that I'd been too overwrought with my own problems, and anyway it wasn't going to work between me and Harold. But I couldn't deny the flush of self-importance either, to think there was somebody pining for me. If only I didn't have to put out, I remember thinking fretfully, we could have a lovely time together. I don't know why sex was such an obstacle, such a non-negotiable point. Perhaps I felt frightened about having to perform in a situation where I wasn't wild with desire. I'd been in that position too often with Ellen. Or frightened of being loved again so soon. Perhaps I thought I could keep it under control if I withheld what Harold called "erotics." Unwilling to admit where the boundary lay between withholding and cockteasing.

  I started calling Harold regularly, more so as I pulled further away from Ellen. The phone was always the easy part with Harold, making him laugh—a wonderful release for him, who was famous in his circle for the black hole of his chronic depression. And he seemed to love giving me advice about handling the changes with Ellen or pulling the plug on my gasping career as a decorator. I began to appreciate that Harold was the most fully evolved gay man I'd ever met—wise and yet self-mocking, secure in his manhood, a tough and brilliant judge of writing. To Harold everything was first a matter of ethics, and nothing in his life went unexamined.

  Of course I also glamorized his despair, how it gave an almost Greek-tragic fire to his brooding utterances. But since I was the one who could make him laugh, I felt an implicit dare whenever we talked—that if we let it happen between us, both our lives would change forever. A mismatch of two incurable romantics, that's what Harold and I were. He'd arrived at a place in his life where he never expected to be happy again. He had a lot of money from his family which he didn't appear to touch, dressing like a peddler in moth-eaten cardigans and taking his meals in the coffee shops of lower Fifth and Sixth. Now, as we played and flirted over the phone, Harold made it clear there weren't any limits on where it went from here, so hungry was he to keep laughing. We could go to the Bahamas over my spring break, Italy for the summer, whatever struck our fancy. I saw how very taken care of I could be.

  No one had ever pursued me like this. And my life otherwise was dull, in the trough of winding down with Ellen. Cantwell had begun to notice that I'd been isolating myself of late, avoiding my friends so I wouldn't have to declare myself gay or straight. I was cruising at Sporter's two or three nights a week, but mostly going home empty-handed. With my business dead in the water, I was feeling grimly out of money, and dreading the prospect of recommitting to Canton full-time for the following year. More than anything I needed some drama in my life. So why didn't I go give it another shot with Harold? Cantwell practically ordered me to.

  I went down at the end of March, four days when Carl was going to be out of town. Harold was delirious to have me there. Another hurricane schedule of opera and theater and literary parties. None of which mattered to Harold, who would've gladly stayed home trying to coax me to kiss him back. He put on the carnival of events for my sake, treating me like a prince, and even as I raced about laughing on his arm I was thinking how it would be if this were a permanent thing. To be kept by Harold—no more teaching meatbrain kids, no obligations except to be a poet. Wherever we went, running into Harold's friends, I'd see the flush of pride in his face as he showed me off.

  No, that's not right. I did all the showing off myself, no cuing required. I charmed the pants off Harold's brother the art dealer, his best friend the producer, anyone who might tell Harold that I was the best thing to happen to him in years. In public I was all over him, what amounted to a proclamation of being out and glad of it. But when we were alone I'd seize up again, the Queen Cristina stare, and plead that I wasn't ready yet for erotics. A saint of patience, he was content to suck my dick a little and hold me naked while we slept. "Okay, that's enough," I'd say, pushing his head from my crotch before he could really get into it. The last thing I wanted was to come, revealing myself like that. And I never touched him back, for fear he would love me even more.

  It was all confusion and conflict. The more time I spent with him, the more I felt guilty, that I was doing it strictly for the princely arrangements. I suppose I made a lousy golddigger—too much Protestant training about nothing good coming so easily. But I also took a secret pleasure in playing hard to get, a histrionic uncertainty that kept all the focus on me. I needed the seventeen years' difference between us in order to put my trust in his sagacity and worldliness. But I also wanted a man my own age, to discover the world along with me. I couldn't put any of this in words, thus leaving Harold more confused than I was and aching with blue balls besides.

  On the last night of my visit he shook his finger at me like a witch's curse. If I kept working this hard to avoid being loved, said Harold, I would get my wish and never have it at all. I saw how hurt and lost I'd made him. How could I tell him I was looking for the one right man and he wasn't it? Yet I wouldn't let him shut the door either. For all his frustration he sent me back to Boston with an open invitation to accompany him and Carl to Italy for the summer. I said maybe.

  But I knew in my heart I wanted the summer all to myself, to finish the process of coming out—to me if not to everyone else. And to conduct the search in earnest for the one right man. Oddly, the only two people I could say that to were Alida and Ellen, to both of whom 1'd decided to dedicate my book of poems. Alida didn't want to hear it that I'd finally committed to being gay. She'd just come out of an awful relationship with a Jekyll-and-Hyde doctor, and was feeling used and ugly. She decided we talked to each other too much, that we needed to establish some distance. She was thinking seriously about moving back to Texas to go to art school, where at least she might meet a good ol' boy who'd treat her right. I understood it was time for both of us to move on.

  By contrast, Ellen and I somehow managed the slippery transition from lovers to friends. When I got back from New York, I found she'd left me an album of Roberta Flack, with instructions to listen to a Jimmy Webb song called "Do What You Gotta Do." Which finally pricked the tears in me, hurting for what Ellen and I had lost, terrified of the uncertain road that lay ahead. Thank God for AM music. Two nights before, I'd sat at the Met with Harold, dutifully listening to Der Rosenkavalier for five hours, the point of which had gone in one tin ear and out the other. Whereas the pop song went right to my heart as I played it over and over: I've always known you'd go and do what you gotta do, my wild sweet love ... I had my eyes wide open from the very start... You never never never never lied tome... Find that baffled dream of yours and come on back and see me when you can...

  After those tears, a lightness returned to the times we spent together, Ellen and I, meeting for dinner in the Square, shrieking with delight when Nixon's thug tapes were released. It felt like brother and sister now. She'd finally said yes to a guy at work who'd been asking her out for months, and I got to be her confidant as they played the courtship game. I wasn't jealous, just a little wistful, knowing it might be years before I found a man I could love, a love that would be returned in equal measure. Meanwhile, no more falling in love at somebody like Pip, and no more being the passive beloved either, letting somebody get overinvolved, whose feelings I couldn't return. Ellen counseled me to be patient and trust my heart: I finally knew what I wanted, and most people never found out.

  If I had any final doubts about where I was headed, it only needed the sudden arrival of Star to make me sure. She'd been in Asia for six years, writing guidebooks to Bali and Singapore—a million miles away, but we'd always kept up with letters and poems, which sometimes arrived months after being posted. And yet I'd never quite given up that fantasy of making the change to straight before Star got home, so we could be lovers. The frog would finally prove to be a prince. Happily ever after, that old story.

  When I met her at the subway exit in the Sq
uare, lightheaded with anticipation, she was as heartstoppingly beautiful as ever. The six years' contrast was much more disorienting for her; the awkward flinching boy from Yale had vanished completely.

  Not quite frog to prince perhaps, but a full-grown man at last, sexy and sure of himself—or so I appeared to Star at least. We started up again as if in mid-sentence, no walls of any kind, drunk on poems. And when it was time to go to bed that night, we gave it the old college try, a spin at lovemaking. No question about the love, but too much water had gone under the bridge in six years, under my bridge anyway. The last thing either of us wanted was to pretend. We would make better best friends than lovers. And so we slept all that week curled together like spoons, without any lies or expectations. Star couldn't have been more supportive about my search for the laughing man, assuring me that anyone looking as hard as I was was bound to find him.

  The summer arrived, at the end of which I would be returning to Canton full-time, though refusing to live on campus. I dreaded going back, an admission of failure to make my way in the real world, but that only made the summer more urgent, a last run at freedom. To kick it off, I drove with Sandy McClatchy to Sea Island, Georgia, where friends of his had lent him a house on a tidal marsh. It was on that trip that I first began to think about writing a novel, and indeed my first big sex scene would take place there, in the wild preserve at the north end of the island. That was where Rick and David would meet, fucking on the sand before they knew each other's names—my virgin attempt at nondickless writing.

  But that writing was two years away, and it definitely didn't spring from anything between me and Sandy. All the way down in the car, I told myself to go with it, not be afraid. I was beginning to worry that I didn't know how to have sex with someone I liked. That I was falling into the cycle of so many men I'd met at Sporter's, for whom the only hot sex was with strangers, and it never got better the second time. Maybe I hoped the tropics would free both Sandy and me. But it wasn't meant to be. No tension from Sandy's end: he said the relationship could be whatever I wanted. Yet I felt myself back off in fear—not quite Queen Cristina, since Sandy kept everything so unpressured and relaxed. I also felt this hollow dread, that I'd finally meet the laughing man and let him slip away because I didn't really believe I could bring it off. I squirmed, remembering Harold's warning, that I would run away one too many times and never have love at all.

  But that week with Sandy at Sea Island marked a profoundly important advance for me. It was the most I'd ever shared with a man of my own kind. Our being gay was simply a given as Sandy and I explored our hearts and writerly visions. Should we perfect the life or perfect the work, and couldn't one have it both ways? It was the first time I'd ever considered that gay might not just be about whom we slept with but a kind of sensibility, what survived of feeling after all the fears and evasions of the closet. Sandy didn't quite buy that notion; he preferred to think of himself as a writer who happened to be gay rather than as a gay writer. But for me it was a watershed, to begin to think I could tap into that sensibility, however little I understood it yet. Certainly my writing would never be the same, from this point on. My breakthrough to my queer self happened to the writer in me as much as it happened to the man. And it would take both sides working overtime—the poet and the cruiser—to break the final bonds of self-hatred so I could begin to love.

  Returning to Boston, I spent most of the next two months by myself. That is, I made a conscious effort not to fill up the empty space by entertaining my friends and being the perfect weekend guest. Several days a week I'd simply get in the car and drive. To Ipswich, to lie on the beach, reading Proust and working on a poem about Stanley and Livingston, punctuated by forays through the dunes. The latter a hotbed of male carnality, or so I'd always heard, but I must've had the wrong map or the wrong moves, because the few tank-suited beauties I spied seemed to bolt like deer at my approach. On the rare occasions when I did connect—a beachboy kneeling before me in the white glare, servicing my ambivalence—I'd be so terrified of somebody's stumbling upon us that I became my own vice squad, never letting things go too far. The most I'd have to show for one of these quickies was a mess of green-fly bites, the stinging wages of being an outlaw.

  More often, I'd drive out to Concord and walk around Walden Pond to Thoreau's place. It was usually deserted, enough so I could skinny-dip whenever I liked. Sometimes I'd bring a radio, to follow the final crash-and-burn of Nixon, which I naively assumed would be the end of Republicans for a while. Every now and then an intrepid tourist would wander up to pace the foundations of Thoreau's cabin, and I would be there on the stoop with the book in hand, ready to lecture if they looked puzzled. Was I some sort of park ranger, they must've wondered, in my herder's hat and cutoffs? No—more the genius of the place, the very embodiment of the master's words carved on the plaque in the clearing: I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life...

  I was nothing if not deliberate as I went about the business of my freedom summer. It was surely the height of self-importance, to identify myself with the sage of the Concord woods. Especially since I only took my leisure there on sunny afternoons, hurrying home by dusk so I could get ready for another night at Spotter's. In any case it wasn't the pantheism of Walden Pond that got to me, but rather the depth of consciousness. My own deliberate search was for a man—a search Thoreau himself had clearly ducked, letting the woodcutter get away with a mouthful of philosophy instead of a kiss. It was only by seeing it as a quest that I got through so many lonely nights in the bars, or the even lonelier nights of tricking with guys who weren't quite right.

  When July had turned to mid-August and I was still alone, only three weeks of summer to go, I decided to take my quest on the road. I took the Friday ferry to Provincetown, a pilgrimage to Mecca. I had about forty bucks in my backpack and no reservations, determined to shack up with someone who had a room or otherwise sleep on the beach. I drifted about till I stumbled on the Boatslip, then parked myself on the beach below the pool to await a pickup. These are your people, I told myself, but couldn't shake the feel of disorientation, that I didn't fit in. The men all seemed to be in groups, drinking too early and loudly dishing whoever walked by on the beach. I was too self-conscious to go take a swim and thus expose myself to comment. I already had enough self-doubt as to whether I was gay enough or out enough to make it in such a Dionysian environment.

  But I watched it all hungrily, missing no flex of muscles among the demigods of the Boatslip, peering over my Proust with a longing to be one of them. When night fell, I joined the restless back-and-forth among the bars and dancehalls—not quite the Age of Disco yet. At one point I even hooked up with a hot Italian from New York, jet-black hair, a tan as deep as his bones, and a butt like a couple of melons in a wet paper sack. He didn't quite believe that I was a poet but found me charming in a professorial way. Let's go back to your place, he said, rubbing against me shamelessly. A dream delivered on a silver platter, but alas I had no room. He shrugged, gave me a philosophical kiss, and dove back into the sea.

  I ended up at last call with a sad, sad boy who looked as lost as I used to look, but at least he had a room. One of seven kids, all the Catholic hangups, lying there rigid with terror as I tried to make love to him. I spent the whole night talking him out of the guilt, realizing just how far I'd come in my own fumbling journey. The sex was at best perfunctory. I was reeling with frustration to have missed my chance with the melon Italian, but felt it a kind of duty to the tribe to take care of this kid and make it all less frightening.

  I met a man from Berlin on the ferry going home to Boston, and ended up spending the night with him at his Back Bay hotel, feeling very cosmopolitan and deciding I could happily live on room service. But even with Josef's address in my pocket and a fervent invitation to visit him in Germany, I'd come up with nothing lasting from my trip to Mecca, nobody I could see again. Summer was really waning now. I was seized with the s
uperstition that if I didn't find someone before school started, I'd be imprisoned and alone for yet another year. Something to do with growing up in a climate that kept its clothes on. Summer had always been my only chance.

  My tricks accelerated. I wasn't just cruising late at night now, but stalked all afternoon the banks of the Charles, casting pregnant looks at every man with his shirt off. Yet no one I met seemed to want more than an hour's toss in bed, which only left me hungrier. Envelopes of bullshit started arriving in the mail from Canton, the knell of doom. Something had to happen fast. And that was when Harold called, back from two bad months in Italy with Carl, bickering through the Renaissance. We hadn't seen each other since April, and I don't think Harold was really planning to propose we get together. But I made him laugh, and felt once more that burning wish to be taken care of, spirited away from the looming trap of another year at school. Before either of us could raise a caution, he'd invited me down for Labor Day weekend.

  One last fling, it felt like. Harold and I laughed out loud to see each other again, and went back to our old breathless pace, two romantics drunk on the city. We spent an afternoon at the Cloisters, another at the Bronx Zoo, and the pattern was just the same between us. I couldn't stop flirting, and Harold couldn't stop being mesmerized. Over dinner at '21' I leaned over and gave him a lingering tongue kiss, sending waves of outrage through the blue-haired diners on every side. I was playing the kept boy again, but mocking it as I played it, which Harold found irresistible.

  And we ended up in bed, and again I was a million miles away. Nothing had really changed in the Queen Cristina department. Oh, I tried—lying there stiffly while he sucked my dick—but the trying was almost more painful than the distance. I couldn't fake a gasp of pleasure. By Saturday night Harold was pleading with me to tell him where it was going, what did I feel—and I answered coyly because we were safely out in a restaurant. Harold blew up; I started to sob. I just want to be taken care of was all I could say, but I knew I had to get out of this. Harold was letting me hurt him, powerless to avoid being burned again and again by my cold flame. And no amount of earnest trying or laughing in museums was going to make it work.