My Husband and My Wives: A Gay Man's Odyssey (25 page)

I discovered a new substitute for parenting when I volunteered at the Cambridge City Hospital as an aide in the noninfectious surgical recovery ward Friday through Monday, six a.m. to noon. Once I had satisfied myself that I was not taking a job away from someone who might be paid to do what I did, I was happy to go there, make myself useful, feel wanted, touch other human beings, feed them, bathe them, get my first experience of senility and decrepitude. It was a strange experience, drawing on the memories of early fatherhood twenty-odd years before, when I was washing, powdering, and diapering old ladies. With the demented and the silent you had somehow to intuit. I never got used to insisting upon food for the old lady with the flailing arms pushing the tray away. I still think she should have been allowed to starve herself, but people who knew better said she was not really sending a message. As my younger son said, “Dad, you’re the ward aide, not the doctor.” The experience has made me resolve to do myself in when the time comes that I am failing.

Most patients were severely decayed, except I was surprised at the number of young men in that ward who had been struck by cars while out jogging. Washing one of them was an interesting experience in male-male interaction. He was a relatively young Hispanic getting ready for a visit from his family. His arms and hands were useless to him, strapped as they were on an inflexible frame, so he had not been able to wash up at all. “I stink, I stink,” he kept saying as I was getting the tub of water and clothes and soap ready for his sponge bath, “wash me good.” He stood before me while I knelt with the washing materials and proceeded to scrub him. Of course, the smell was most profound around his genitals and anus. I had no problem cleaning him behind, and took a deep breath and proceeded to take his penis in my hand, pull back the foreskin, and carefully soap and wash him thoroughly there as well. I took my time, was careful, we kept a volume of conversation, and interestingly enough he did not allow himself to become even the least bit engorged in the process. It occurred to me that gay males who have such experience of the naked male body should undertake work of this kind, since they might be more neutral than other caregivers.

As I started work in the Cambridge City Hospital I was winding down another volunteer career of ten or twelve years’ duration: teaching in the medium-security Norfolk State Prison. Boston University offered a degree in liberal arts there, of which I was the classics faculty. The program was limited to long-term inmates, since at the rate they could take courses it was going to be a while before they got their degree. One might wonder why an inmate student would enroll in a classical civilization or a classical literature course. First, because they had to take what was offered. Second, because taking a course was free, and it took a little time off an inmate’s sentence if he completed the semester. Third, it is very boring serving time in prison and something is better than nothing. Fourth, there were intelligent, intellectually curious men in Norfolk who had never had a chance for something like college courses. I found it sometimes frightening, often exhilarating, occasionally stupid and boring, and every so often quite sexy. I discovered that, contrary to my incredibly naïve liberal bias, many men are in prison because they are dangerous, violence-prone, and sometimes clearly psychopathic. Like the other teachers in the program, I declined the protection of a guard to which I was entitled, and never felt fear, even as I walked across the open courtyard big as a football field in which all the men were milling at the time of day I arrived for class. But one day was different when I walked into an empty room by mistake, only to see a man standing before me who advanced slowly and lethally like a leopard, speaking gibberish, and I was, as they say, scared shitless, until he, for whatever reason, stopped his forward movement and fell silent, and I walked out the door. Equally repulsive were the simpleminded and ignorant, who could talk for hours if they got going, and stopping them was difficult. But some guys could cut through my verbiage with quick intelligent questions or comments, often harsh, unyielding, and there were no compromises due to politeness. I had initially started volunteering at Norfolk because I was sick to death of the average Boston University student who appeared in my general education course. These guys were a real inspiration.

The class read a lot of Homeric epic and the tragic dramas. Their take on these pieces was different primarily because almost all of them had killed someone, not a few in the Vietnam War, but others in domestic quarrels or botched robberies. We also had a couple of career killers, who were hardened to their work like anyone in a business, although murdering someone for whatever motive changes a person. The texts we read resonated in ways I had never known before. The men who came back from Vietnam to find their wives had been cheating on them, and beat them up badly, or cut them up, or sometimes killed them, read about Clytemnestra, who was sleeping with Aigisthus while Agamemnon was at Troy. Kill the bitch, was their take. Nothing about how she was exacting some kind of symbolic revenge for Agamemnon’s killing of Iphigenia. I had a student who had killed his wife and two baby daughters in a drug-induced madness and now was a gentle, utterly destroyed fellow living with that knowledge and memory.
Medea
meant something different to him than to other men. (I couldn’t bring myself to introduce Euripides’ play about Herakles and the madness sent him by Hera when he kills his children in a rampage.) Most of the men responded instantly to the weariness Achilles voices in the
Iliad
over the killing, the fundamental emptiness of life. It was not a middle-class conceit with them, something learned in literature classes, and I sometimes felt so inadequate.

When I started teaching at Boston University, the students were what my mother used to call “diamonds in the rough,” that is, exceptional young men and women who were willing to take the risk, make the effort, try out something unknown to their parents called a college education. But over time the demographic became suburban kids of medium or meager talents. What is more nauseating than not overly bright youngsters whose entire lives have been lived between a fake colonial cottage, a 7-Eleven, and a shopping mall? Any prisoner would be more interesting and rewarding than that, I reasoned, and I was not wrong. I also said that the experience could sometimes be sexy, but not really. The men were not good-looking as they are in the films. Prison inmates are generally speaking losers, and losers are not as a rule good-looking, otherwise they would have conned themselves into a better life. The better-looking guys in my class were all the bottoms for the tough guys who protected them. After a while you could spot couples who would never appear so on the outside, because of course they wouldn’t be; physical relationships in a prison are imposed out of desperation. Of course, I maintained a professional aloofness that I assumed was a formidable armor against any identification, and was amused to meet one of the men on the outside when he had been paroled who said casually over coffee, “You know, we thought you’d want some cock off us in there, and there was plenty available for you.” So much for professional dignity!

The divorce decree stipulated that I contribute most of my money to a fund for my children’s education, a demand of Penny’s despite my angry protestations that if they wished they could go to Boston University for free. Like most people in the education business, I have a much less sentimental view of the expensive institutions of higher learning, but Penny won that round. Still, I had enough to maintain the two-family house in Cambridge, an expense pretty much covered by the tenants who rented the downstairs. And I had my broken-down house near the seashore, which may have been shabby, but with two bathrooms, four bedrooms, and the other obvious spaces was big enough for wonderful parties as well as stay-over guests. Between these two dwellings, and, I would say, because of them, I experienced at age forty-five the first serious male romantic relationships I had ever had, other than that one Mediterranean trip with my student fourteen years earlier. One of them lasted a summer, one three years, one two years, and one turned into an on-and-off involvement for a decade. Three of the men were essentially heterosexual, although each in his own way tried out the various physical possibilities of male-male sexual partnership. The fourth was thoroughly gay, and wanted everyone to know it, once he himself had accepted his orientation. Where anyone might find fault with my love life was that at my age I was in love with men in their early twenties, the age of my sons, more or less. Others might think it limited, that so much of our pleasure derived from my fellating my partners and enjoying frottage thereafter on their naked bodies. But this is more often than not an instinctive homosexual behavior. For those who cannot grasp this, think of Léonide Massine, who was resolutely heterosexual and went on to marry, but started as the lover for many years of Sergei Diaghilev, the great ballet impresario. When he was once asked how it was that he could have sex with Diaghilev, he shrugged and said it was Diaghilev’s mouth and his penis, and that he had the warmest regard for the great man.

The first of these four was a young married English fellow, who worked as a taxi driver, spent his time writing poems and novels, took a night course with me, and taught me more about the Sumerian Gilgamesh poems than I had ever known, much to my shame, since I billed myself as an expert in ancient epic poetry. But, as he often points out, he learned what he knew about Homer’s poems in that course, and went on to use that knowledge professionally many, many years later. He lived with his wife and baby son as dorm parents in one of the local colleges. In springtime at the end of term we attended the same poetry reading. I was giving him a ride home afterward and on the way I must have fallen into one of my more sour moods, because as we pulled up in front of the dorm, he turned to me to say, “You must be happy. I don’t like to see you like this.” And with that he leaned across to kiss me on the mouth, slowly, gently, a kiss charged with emotion, or so I received it. He left the car with me in it, completely stunned. The next day I saw him across the way on campus, and when I saw how he averted his gaze when he saw me, I hastened to his side to say reassuringly, “Thank you for the kiss. It bucked me up, and you needn’t be the least bit embarrassed.” It was as neutral as I could manage, and he did indeed smile at me, as though all were to be completely forgotten, or understood as an aberration.

He was off to England for the summer, so I quite put him out of my mind. Therefore I was startled to get his call in September announcing excitedly that he and his wife had just landed at Kennedy. All that emotion, and for what? Three days later he was in my office to tell me of their travels, but there was more. Soon the door was locked and we were lying on the couch. Was I the aggressor, was it mutual? Did he bring himself forward to me? I can’t remember now. Within days we were taking an afternoon drive to the house at the shore, both of us nervous at what could be before us, he especially, since other than the fleeting moment in my office, this was new for him. He was a married man, a romantic lad with a long history of beautiful girlfriends taken and left, a lapsed Catholic with all the baggage that entails. Orphaned of his mother at nine, he was not only bereft but young, he had been my student, he admired my writing, he insisted that we stop at a liquor store so he could get a nip of brandy, for his “cold.” He built a fire in the bedroom that had a window looking out to the sea, we stripped and got under the covers, shivering in the cold and musty air of a shut-up summer house, waiting for the room to warm up. I was ready to fall in love; he needed some kind of daddy figure in bed or out. As he told me later during his summer in London, he had had to watch his father take on a new wife, and at the same time hear himself dismissed as “good for nothing.” If I could say that he appeared at the right moment, he often said the same about me. He was as highly sexed as I, a handsome English lad, emotionally needy, married because of a pregnancy and unhappy with it, confused, at some kind of dead end for which this completely new experience seemed to offer a way out. Illusions all, but they fueled a powerfully romantic afternoon for the both of us then and other afternoons, until it was finally too cold, even with the fireplace as a blazing inferno.

Sex in Cambridge meant dodging my children’s visits, and, curiously enough at this stage of my life, coming out of the shell of a married life, I somehow felt that anyone who saw me and this young man together on the street or walking into my house could tell, just sense the emotions coursing back and forth between us. There was the famous day when I was on the telephone in my office and he walked in, and as I saw him I became dizzy—it was right out of one of the “bodice-ripper” romance narratives—and moments later a colleague of mine entered and almost immediately backed out. Later she excused herself for “barging in.” I protested that there was nothing wrong in that, to which she replied, “Oh, my God, the atmosphere in there. You could cut it with a knife. I was so embarrassed.” She talked as though we were naked on the sofa before her very eyes. She knew nothing about us, and still she had had this sensation.

We could not get enough of each other. He took to inviting me to dinner if only to have more time together, and I stupidly went along with it, just as besotted as he. His wife was a budding academic with whom I could talk seriously, dandling the child on my knee, watching my love out of the corner of my eye preparing dinner, letting my eye pass down over his wonderfully rounded rear end in his tight English corduroy pants. I brought these sinister evening visits to an end after what seemed a blatant hint contained in a dream his wife described. She dreamed that she, her husband, and I were sitting about, just as we were when she recounted it, staring at the fake Persian carpet on the floor. In the dream, she recalled, her husband and I lunged forward from our seats, began to wrestle on the carpet, rolling around and around, panting and groaning, until one of us flung out his leg and hit a tall Chinese vase (a fantasy prop in the dream) standing at the edge of the carpet. It toppled over and shattered into pieces everywhere. She finished this recital with, “And then I dreamt that I asked you to leave because you two were damaging everything.” I have always marveled at the perception of this woman. Was she conscious of what she was intending? Our relationship continued, of course, in other venues. But then it came to its first halt at the end of the winter term when I invited my lover to come with me all expenses paid for a week’s trip to California where I would be giving lectures. After a day thinking it over, he said no; there was a startling anguish in his voice as he explained that he could not face waking up every morning naked in bed with me for what it might mean about his sexuality. His misery made me guilty, which took the zest out of what we were doing. We became listless, started to “talk things over,” the grim prelude to the end. But we stayed celibate friends as we had been to begin with. The romance, for better or worse, started up again much later.