My Husband and My Wives: A Gay Man's Odyssey (13 page)

We ate chicken à la king, the one recipe Mary had learned for her high school pajama-party suppers. It featured chunks of chicken in a white sauce colored with bits of pimiento, served on waffles. The waffles were the essential ingredient because it gave us the chance to show off our waffle iron. We seemed to have eaten a lot of waffles, plain for breakfast, under the sauce for dinner. There was quite a collection of place mats and tablecloths for these events, which was lucky because Mary tended to shove unwashed linens under the bed. She was not prompt nor terribly responsible in most things. For instance, she never wrote a single thank-you note, although her mother begged her almost every day as Mary’s silence grew more and more embarrassing. (“Oh, God, Mary, at least my bridge club. Please, please.”) Our refrigerator was never too full, but there was always an opened jar of pimientos with a growth of mold filling the upper portion. I was alternately mystified and angered by this behavior, mystified because I could not imagine defying the “rules” so brazenly, angered because her indifference to process and procedure guaranteed to me the frightening collapse of order. I was a very fearful person; Mary was not.

Mary’s strongly transgressive spirit was a counterpart to my breaking the rules in my sexual behavior. But I had a well-developed instinct for hypocrisy that compromised my freedom. I think of the night Mary and I went to her friend Harvey’s for dinner, and while we and other friends sat at the kitchen table, one of the couples who lived in the house came home and, after saluting us all, went into their bedroom, which was behind the kitchen, where they began to fuck, not ostentatiously loudly, but not silently either. My shock was great; I could scarcely contain myself. Yet if I had been more honest I might have recollected an occasion of only perhaps a half year earlier when I joined three males in their apartment and took them one by one into the bedroom without closing the door while the other two sat talking in the living room.

I had never known anyone like Mary. She was a “girly” girl—makeup, fingernail polish, attention to clothes, shoes, hair—and we could have girl talk, which I loved, and we learned to cook together. At the same time she was quite a slob. Just when she should have been concentrating on turning herself into a femme fatale, she would be thinking too much. She liked to play with language, always did the crossword, loved puns, was conscious of the prose she read and wrote. I loved her for her belly, which was a round mass in the center of her pear-shaped body, just like the bellies of Renaissance Flemish nudes. Maybe that is why she always seemed stylized when nude, if not in fact stylish. Mary developed diabetes when she had scarlet fever as a child, which destroyed the insulin-making part of her pancreas. She was thereafter a “flawed” person, in the sense that she had to make herself complete with insulin injections, that she was liable to insulin shock if she did not manage her intake of glucose. We had this in common, that we were obviously imperfect, vulnerable, flawed people. What kind of premonitions did she have? Why did she agree to marry me? Impulsive? Adventurer? Life was going nowhere? Like the Methodists she believed in their mantra, “Do no harm.” That made her a tender person. She had a tenderness in sex that I associate with women, and that translates into something like love—not dependency, but a force for cherishing. Mary was cozy; I think of her drinking tea in her bathrobe, neat with the sash tied, or carelessly sitting in it reading with the front open and her breasts spilling out. Mary was a woman in the house reading, a Degas woman in the tub raising her arm to wash it with a sponge, she was the woman with me in an enclosed space, in bed with me talking, offering her body in which one could sink slightly, so unlike the muscle-and-bone resistance of the male body.

Matters that I had been schooled to concern myself with simply did not exist for Mary. Two months after we were married, for instance, she decided to drop out of school. She was in her fifth year as it was, progress hindered by her habit of getting A’s in the courses that interested her and F’s in those that did not. “I have a husband,” she announced breezily to her horrified parents, “and he will take care of me, so why do I need a degree?” She preferred, when not working her half-day job at the hospital, to pad around our teeny space in her rather dirty green corduroy bathrobe. Saturdays she taught me to leave our bed out so that it filled our only room. There we lay reading, eating apples, spilling cigarette ash over the sheets, fucking at random intervals, and chatting comfortably with one another. You could say she had no ambition, vision. Not true, of course. Never had I encountered anyone who lived for the day so defiantly as she. She took my hand in hers and we embarked on life as a dream. It didn’t last, at least not for her, and when she was gone the dream was too.

If she was in many ways a real slob, she never left the house without looking grand. She had a considerable wardrobe. I remember the first time I paid attention as she was taking off a gray tailored suit worn over a blouse with a white background upon which were gray and yellow flowers. Gray suede pumps were an obvious complement to this ensemble, but it was the gray silk brassiere trimmed in a yellow ribbon, and gray underpants, that got to me. “I dress to undress,” she explained with a smile. She almost always wore heels; one of life’s great pleasures was watching her lift up those marvelous legs to pull on her nylons, with her hands covered with cotton mitts to avoid snags, then attach the garters and adjust the garter belt and stockings. I know perfectly well the theory that these are symbols of bondage, just as high heels keep women from moving freely. Too bad; they excited me just as panty hose repels me. I used to love to buy her lingerie. Dressing and undressing my woman was my new erotic sport. I can’t imagine getting too excited about a guy dressing or undressing; with men it’s not the clothes, it’s the man’s body underneath.

In August 1952 we arrived in Cambridge, where I was about to embark on a PhD degree program in classical philology at Harvard. This was certainly one of the most dismal episodes of my life, made palatable only by Mary’s never-ending emotional support of me, along with the infusion of her knowledge. And, of course, she paid the rent with her office job, this same woman who had announced that she had a husband to support her! Most of all, Mary liberated my thinking. I was deep into the study of antiquity, mainly reading ancient texts in Greek and Latin. Trying to master the language of each text through the methods of philology required a careful examination of the etymology and usage of each word in a stately procession through the text. Mary had been schooled in critical theory in the English Department and comparative literature courses. She read to interpret texts. Her questions about the material I was studying challenged me to answers I could not find, and in turn raised further questions that forced me to see ancient literature in another way. My teachers had done things differently. Mary taught me about style, narrative, structure, form, imagery, all the ingredients that make a verbal construct a work of art. She was so bright.

Her other immediate intellectual gift to me was placing the literature of antiquity in a broader context. I had been so narrowly focused—necessarily, since Greek and Roman literatures are so vast—that I was quite ignorant of everything else. For the first time I was hearing about Pound, Eliot, Auden, and the other figures of twentieth-century modernism, not to mention the myriad writers of the English tradition who hardly appeared in the wretched courses that passed for English in my high school. My only contact with the aesthetic and ideology of the twentieth century had been through the foreign films that I had been assiduously watching for the past five or six years at the university art museum. Suddenly an entire world began to take shape for me. The education at home was by far the stronger influence.

Our social life as a married couple first began in Cambridge with our next-door neighbors, who introduced us to friends from their church circle who had no connection with Harvard. We were not the least bit religious, but it was refreshing to meet people who did not have attitude. I mean that there was something about Harvard that worked insidiously to compel one to want to live up to being there all the time.

What began to strike my consciousness was the simple and ironic truth that after seven or eight years of living in a community that knew, whether they liked it or not, that I was gay, I now had to conceal this. I went into the closet, as they say nowadays. Obviously a young married couple moving to a new community will not make friends and find a social circle by advertising the peculiar sexual habit of the husband. Still, it felt odd, this dissimulation. It was not that I wanted to parade the fact of a sexual attraction to males, but for the first time since I was sixteen, those around me did not know me. My homosexuality was common knowledge in Iowa City, for better or for worse. Here I was voluntarily, deliberately concealing a truth about myself, and I often therefore spoke in a way that was dishonest. That could not help but make me feel compromised and corrupted; I wanted to be myself, but I resisted the urge to confess to this truth when I found myself growing close to anyone male or female, if for no other reason than it would not have been fair to Mary.

As I have said, homosexuality is found everywhere in ancient Greece. How ironic that in the classics profession in those days the fact was glossed over and students were uncomfortable with it, whereas I who had lived it could not mention it. From this time forward I was at war with myself, struggling to prevent any inadvertent revelation, and at the same time, working to create a dishonest false public image. It was instinctive and thus unconscious; the humiliation and degradation only registered with me years later when, on a day I will never forget, I was on the crosstown Eighty-sixth Street bus in Manhattan and I idly looked from the window to see a young heterosexual couple freely embracing, kissing, and laughing while looking into each other’s eyes, and a hitherto stifled rage welled up and poured into my brain, almost sending me reeling into a faint. Oh, the anger! Now I understood those madmen who get up and spray a crowd with their gun, or bomb a building. I rode the bus across to Park Avenue in a stupor, walked down to Eighty-fourth to the Catholic Church of St. Ignatius Loyola, which I entered to sit quietly in a pew and suck up the peace of God which passeth all understanding.

The other graduate students lived in some monastic setup, but I had a wife, an apartment reeking of domesticity, and the capacity and desire to entertain just as real grown-ups did. Mary lost no time in establishing a kind of salon to which members of the seminars I attended would gravitate after class for the usual postmortems far into the night. One constant visitor was William Musgrave Calder III, still an undergraduate when he introduced himself to me in Henry Joel Cadbury’s class in New Testament Greek. He talked like a ninety-year-old aristocrat banker even then, so it became easy to play son to his father when in a short time he had taken over the direction of my professional life, such as it was, when he sensed that I was demoralized and floundering. When first I met Bill, I could not resist bringing him home to tea almost as a specimen for Mary’s inspection. She adored him at once, for his quirky language, for his drollery, for the sheer eccentricity of his vast learning (his enemies said he should have been a librarian), and he became a fixture in our lives. He it was who suggested to me—forced me into?—every seminar I took, got me to introduce myself to the man who eventually directed my dissertation. Oddly enough, for one so devoted to antiquity, he had never learned the rudiments of the ancient Greek language properly and needed instruction. In the summer of 1955 I offered him just that, leading him through the grammar and then the text of Plato’s
Apology,
the standard fare back in those days. It has been something of a joke over the years that he introduces me as a former teacher. When he was at Columbia he used to get me invited to their Seminar in Classical Civilization, where I heard some great talks, gave one myself at his suggestion, a lecture that became an article and then a book. My debt to Calder is huge.

Mary’s gatherings, however, went well beyond the offerings of the Classics Department. Other evenings she would entertain women and sometimes their men friends whom she met through her office or on the streets. Mary was a great socializer; she also enjoyed the company of her own sex. This may seem obvious enough except that in the Cambridge of the early fifties there was a distinct trend among women to spend their time exclusively with men so as to lose the taint of their despised femininity. The first stirring of women’s liberation was producing a generation of females whose hatred of their own sex seemed a desperate bid to equal if not outdistance men at their own games. Academic parties of the era found women frantic to avoid other women lest they seem inferior by association. Mary considered it grotesque. She thoroughly enjoyed women, liked to go shopping or out to dinner with a female chum. She made friends at work and saw these women socially, independent of me. Her best friend was an elegant African American woman who worked wrapping packages at a deluxe clothing store because she, as a black woman, could not find work as a physical therapist for which she had trained, nor even work on the floor of the dress shop as a vendeuse. The two of them laughed and shopped (oh, all those heels and with those great legs!) and went to the movies together while I sat at my desk absorbing texts assigned to me.

Janyce reminded me of myself in Iowa City for being unwilling to accept the world’s definition of her, a classic example of the Marked fighting the Unmarked’s imposition of an identity. She was such high drama, so funny, so chic; she would have made a great drag queen. Still and all, she was a nice Cambridge girl, a dutiful daughter, a credit to her church group. Her wide circle of friends, white and black, included many in Roxbury, the principal neighborhood of African Americans at that time, which we would often visit in her company on Saturday nights. Those were the days before the southern migration and the dramatic decline and impoverishment of the area, a time when a white couple would not hesitate to walk the streets late at night returning to Dudley Square for the bus ride to Harvard Square. Many of Janyce’s friends had, like herself, performed in amateur theater, so the Roxbury parties were very spirited. It was there I met her nominal boyfriend. Shortly after our first meeting I journeyed on my own one afternoon to his apartment and into his bed, an adventure assumed and executed without even the slightest verbal exchange except for a telephone call to establish the time and place for the assignation. It was all in the glance. It has always seemed to me that students of feminist theory who specialize in the male gaze ought to study the gay gaze. Its erotic power, how it compels, instructs, and demonstrates, without so much as a sound when perceived by another gay, is astounding, and perhaps tells much of what straight males instinctively seek to achieve in gazing at females. I will never forget my student at Lehman College in the eighties, a straight fellow, in fact, telling me that he knew I was gay because I “held the gaze too long” when looking into the eyes of another male.