by Paul Monette
I felt drained and defeated, taking the train back to Boston. It was Sunday the third of September, and summer's lease was over. School was starting in four days. I stumbled into my apartment—it was an oven from being sealed during the dog days of the weekend, all my plants expiring. And the phone rang. It was Richard Howard, up from New York for a poetry reading and staying with Rudy Kikel, a young gay poet whom Richard was eager for me to meet. Dead from the journey home, all I wanted to do was crawl under the covers. But I owed a great deal to Richard, who'd been championing my work and getting it noticed. It was Richard in fact who'd said to me the previous autumn, hearing the tangled web of my uncertain sexuality, that it was time to "let go with your masculinity, Paul." I hadn't understood it at the time—let go of it or with it? Whatever, Richard was one of the men I counted on to show me the ropes of the tribe. Of course I was free for dinner.
I quick-showered and took the subway over to Beacon Hill. Rudy lived at 112 Revere Street, barely spitting distance from Robert Lowell's boyhood home at 91. That sort of proximity, the poets' map of Boston, made all us apprentice types feel like larger figures in a diorama. I strolled into Rudy's place, my herder's hat cocked rakishly, ready to do my Byronic thing, a poet if not a lover. And there was Roger. Smiling quietly while Richard and I exchanged florid greetings, waiting his turn as I met Rudy and Rudy's boyfriend Craig. Roger Horwitz, Paul Monette. Say hello to the rest of your life.
Seventeen years ago today, as I write this. Did I understand that I'd found the right one at last? Please—how ready can a body be? Roger didn't stand a chance against my galloping heart. He remained the quiet one among us over dinner, trying to keep up with the poetry gossip. But I made sure I sat beside him in the Chinese restaurant so as to give him a running commentary of who wrote what and who was in or out. In my journal it says he reminded me of Dustin Hoffman, but by evening's end he didn't look like anyone but himself. After dinner we all went back to Rudy's, where Richard read aloud his extravagant poem "Wild-flowers," about the meeting between Whitman and Oscar Wilde. By which time I was antsy to get out of there, catching Roger's blue eye and rolling my own impatiently, a misbehaving Philistine.
When the two of us left together at midnight, scuttling down the stairs and bursting out onto Revere Street, the laugh that erupted between us was unlike anything I'd ever felt. For we were co-conspirators already, bumping shoulders like drunken sailors as we careened down the street to Roger's car, then back to his place in Cambridge. The only time in my life, I think, that I made love all night long. But frantically talking in between kisses, trying to fill in every detail, as if now were the only chance I might get to tell him who I was. And three times during the night he shook his head with the tenderest smile and said, "You're so self-conscious. Relax."
But I couldn't relax, not then. I wanted so bad to make the right impression, to make it last beyond the morning—the only thing that shut me up was falling asleep at dawn. It's a wonder he didn't run away, I kept coming on so strong, I still don't know how we made it stick, except right from the start I was the one pushing for this to be the great love of our lives. Despite the fact that Roger was up to his tits in therapy with a Freudian, the goal of which was to straighten Roger out. Or, as he sighed a few weeks later: "Yes I'm falling in love with you, but Paul, you're a guy." Oh indeed I was. Besides which, Roger was just starting work as a lawyer on the day after Labor Day—terrified they'd all see through him, a late bloomer at thirty-two after years of teaching Comp Lit. Not exactly the ideal week to begin a romance, let alone with a breathless poet.
Myself I don't even remember school beginning, suddenly the very last thing on my mind. Making it work with Roger, seeing the world together, that's what life would be about from here on. Not being alone. It all seems so inevitable in hindsight, meeting the one person who would make those twenty-five years of pain bearable at last. Because if the slightest thing had happened any differently in my checkered life, I wouldn't have been there to meet Roger that Sunday night on Revere Street. That much fate I believe in, the tortuous journey that brings you to love, all the twists and near misses. Somehow it's all had a purpose, once you're finally real.
I only wish my ghosts were happier today, after seventeen years of real life. Not that the moment of our meeting ever loses its shine, or the knowledge that one will never again have to make do with shadows. But the fevers are on me now, the virus mad to ravage my last fifty T cells. It's hard to keep the memory at full dazzle, with so much loss to mock it. Roger gone, Craig gone, César gone, Stevie gone. And this feeling that I'm the last one left, in a world where only the ghosts still laugh. But at least they're the ghosts of full-grown men, proof that all of us got that far, free of the traps and the lies. And from that moment on the brink of summer's end, no one would ever tell me again that men like me couldn't love.
PAUL MONETTE was born in Lawrence, Massachusetts, in 1945. After what he has described as a typical middle-class upbringing, he attended the prestigious Phillips Academy in Andover, Massachusetts, and then Yale University, where he received a B.A. in 1967.
Monette taught English at Milton Academy and Pine Manor College; it was shortly after graduating from Yale that he began his prolific writing career, at first writing only poetry.
In 1974, Monette met Roger Horwitz, who was to become his lover for twelve years. It is the path Monette took from a life of repression—living in the closet—until his meeting of his "beloved friend" Horwitz that he chronicles in his National Book Award-winning autobiography, Becoming a Man (1992).
Monette and Horwitz moved to Los Angeles in 1977. By this time Monette had shifted from poetry to writing what he called "glib and silly little novels" with gay protagonists. These include Taking Care of Mrs. Carroll (1978) and The Gold Diggers (1979). Monette also wrote a number of screenplays and novelizations of films.
When Roger Horwitz was diagnosed with AIDS in the early 1980s, Monette's life was to be irreversibly changed. It would be this defining experience—the two lovers battling against the ravages of AIDS and the homophobia associated with the disease—that would fuel Monette's best-selling, critically acclaimed work of nonfiction, Borrowed Time: An AIDS Memoir, along with a highly praised book of poems, Love Alone: 18 Elegies for Rog (1988).
Now catapulted into the national arena as one of a few openly gay outspoken AIDS activists, Monette went on to write two novels depicting the devastating effects of AIDS (Afterlife and Halfway Home), along with an episode of the TV series thirtysomething, about an advertising executive who learns he has AIDS.
Monette would continue writing (he reportedly wrote his collection of essays Last Watch of the Night while hooked up to three intravenous tubes) until he himself succumbed to AIDS and died in West Hollywood at the age of forty-nine on February 10, 1995.
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1. I am indebted here, as throughout, to Richard Isay's groundbreaking work in Being Homosexual: Gay Men and Their Development, where Wilson is quoted at greater length. Also to Mark Thompson, whose Gay Spirit and subsequent work have dared to envision a unified field theory of essentialist and constructivist.
[2] See Allen Berube, Coming Out Under Fire.
[3]Interview with Dr. Gregory Herek, New York Times, July 10, movable type. 1990.
[4] But where was the Xerox copy, several friends have asked in utter disbelief. Well, the carbon copy was stupidly tucked in the file with the original—failure requires effort. The first copy shop didn't open in New Haven till '68, an innovation comparable in magnitude to movable type.
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