My Husband and My Wives: A Gay Man's Odyssey (26 page)

Ending the romance was the professional thing to do, I knew; it was ethical, diplomatic, and sensible, but I hated being without him. What I did next was sheer lunacy; I must have been truly deranged at the time. It turned out well, as a matter of fact, but I cannot remember the moment without wondering at myself. The new semester began, and with it new lectures, new students. Three days into the term another young man joined the class of thirty studying something Greek in English translation. He was a slightly older chap, lines were beginning to appear on his face, unusually tall, slim, good looking, with blond hair that hung to his shoulders, presenting a smiling friendly countenance to the world at large. At the end of the hour he approached my desk to ask if it was too late to enroll. It was not, so we went along to my office to get the necessary bureaucracy rolling. As we stood next to each other, he peering over my shoulder to tell me the answers to the questions on the form, the smell of him, tired, faintly unwashed, that powerful man smell, began to overcome me. I turned slightly and asked:

“Have you ever slept with a man?”

Without missing a beat, and keeping his eyes on the form we were filling out, he replied evenly, “Well, yes, once in high school, with one of my teachers.”

“Then, will you come to dinner this evening?”

Thus began my second love affair. The young man was in his last year and a half of college, the product of divorce, alcoholism, the loss of family fortunes, only too ironically aware of old money, American aristocracy, and failure. To support himself he worked on the railroad as a switchman, living randomly here and there, waiting for September when he was to move into a kind of communal home in Cambridge.

For the next two months we were together a great many nights, he broke up with his nominal girlfriend and decided to move with me to the shore for the summer. The sheer pleasure of secure housing I am sure was a major factor in his decision. Gregarious fellow that he was, he introduced me to households of people all around my Cambridge home, young people I never would have known, who have remained friends to this day, all of them, weirdly enough, now somewhere in their fifties and sixties, anguishing over their children’s progress in life. Sexually he was less inhibited than other essentially straight males about the physical possibilities of our lovemaking, a decided plus, but at the same time his relatively low libido (or maybe job-induced fatigue) left me desiring much more from him. Still, he was witty, friendly, attentive, although at first, just as we had made the decision to spend the summer at the shore, he backed out the night we were to move down, and I spent wretched hours on a single bed mattress with him, in the room of the apartment he occupied with friends, first arguing, then crying, then sleeping awkwardly and intermittently. When he had awakened, drunk his coffee, and looked out the window for a bit, he turned to me to announce he had thought it through again and was ready to go to live with me in the house at the shore. I can still remember later that morning his brother saying in a meditative way, “Free room and board? Some guy who will give him head every morning? You don’t get that offer every day.”

His schedule was a killer; the railroad dispatchers called him at any time, day or night, and he fitted his study hours and classroom appearances to that. My role was immediately parental, or so I conceived it, preparing his lunch bucket no matter what hour while he showered, putting a meal on the table when he came home exhausted and dirty. Our days were mostly consumed by our respective tasks, with him taking random naps to catch up on sleep, and we walked on the beach. Mostly we talked and talked; he was a font of ideas on every subject. There were evenings when we both sat reading; he had brought his library of books with him, which I thought was so endearing. Still, we had those mornings when I brought him his coffee and he opened his eyes, yawned, stretched that long, long body, arching his back so that his erection bobbing provocatively before us became the unspoken next item on the agenda.

He had a week’s vacation coming to him and we drove to Virginia, where he had relatives and I had an old friend in Richmond. Nothing illustrates the difference in our generations than his last-minute preparation for driving nonstop as far south from Boston as we could in one day: he smoked a joint, explaining that otherwise he could not have tolerated the boredom of handling the steering wheel hour after hour. It made me wonder about his moving those huge freight trains around. The visit was just as I could have wished. We stayed in the old family plantation, now cut up into apartments and bereft of the fields that once swept all the way to the river, but presided over by the same kind of southern gentry you get in the films; yes, the word “gracious” comes to mind. Their graciousness, I must say, nearly lost a beat when they began to understand in the course of our stay that the dear old professor was having his way with their charming nephew. One evening the uncle, who was my age, sat up with me drinking and talking, and when suddenly he told me that he imagined his nephew was quite a “hot young thing,” I didn’t know what he expected in reply. The visit to my friend in Richmond was more relaxing because more honest. He could not have imagined my traveling with such a handsome young guy for any other than totally carnal reasons.

In September, as planned, my young friend packed up his books and decamped to the commune, where he immediately lost himself in the group life for which he had been planning ever since I met him. Although he was only blocks away from me in Cambridge, he stopped our relationship. Not a word was said, nothing harsh, no scenes, and whenever we met as he was jogging or we collided at the supermarket, he smiled in a distant sort of way. I was sad to see him go, but of course I had to make it into my own drama, and thus insisted to myself how I understood that his shattered childhood had taught him how to move on without a murmur or backward glance, moving from one parent to another, being disowned through death, disappearance, and drunkenness. In another decade we would occasionally meet in New York, where he had begun his career and eventually married, and even more recently I was delighted to lunch with him again in London, where he now lives, and to discover that on the verge of sixty he is as disarmingly sweet and charming and funny as he ever was. More than anything else I learned from him the possibility of an inherent goodness of heart.

And then I managed a third year abroad. It had long been arranged that I was to be appointed the visiting professor at the American School of Classical Studies at Athens for the academic year 1978–79. It could not have come at a better time, since I had had the misfortune to pass three kidney stones in the preceding year, and because they stuck in the ureter and this was in the days before ultrasound, the doctors had to anesthetize me and go inside. A year off was very much needed. Despite all the nasty things I habitually say about the administration at Boston University, I must note here that they granted me another sabbatical a year in advance of the normal seventh year. Parenthetically I will add an astounding detail connected with both the institution and the kidney stones. As I was lying at home recovering yet again from a stone, I heard the front door open and someone ascending the stairs to my room. I had left a note on the door indicating visitors were to do just that. There appeared in the doorway a young man, part of the Texas entourage who came with Dr. Silber, who was scarcely even known to me, since of course I was the “evil” one and was to be shunned. As it was, however, he explained that he knew the departmental secretary’s husband, from whom he had heard of my troubles. With that he approached the bed, pulled down my pajama bottoms, and gave me one of the best blow jobs I had ever had, then just as mysteriously hoped for my good health to return, and left.

At the time of the trip to Athens my sons were grown up and on their own, so only my two daughters and I were to go, along with a school friend of theirs. They had been living with their mother following our divorce, but the court decree gave me permission to take them abroad. The younger went to school for her senior year at an American-style international institution in a posh suburb of Athens with the children of the diplomatic corps and the rest of the
jeunesse dorée d’Athènes.
The older went for her freshman year at an American-style, English-language liberal arts college in Athens. It catered to everyone in Athens who anticipated getting an education in the States and wanted to learn the ropes ahead of time, not to mention the children of Greek Americans whose parents wanted them to have a year in the old country without their missing out on their progress in the American system.

Their school chum was with us for a month-long tour of England, Germany, and Italy, but dropped out in August, thank heaven, before we sailed from Brindisi for Patras. I write “thank heaven” because the emotions of teenage girls are as volatile as their capacity for friendship, and during that month I was always the one who had to pair with whoever was the outcast girl as the relationships shifted day by day. Because we were originally to be four people, the director of the American School allotted us the splendid large marble palace—it almost was—on the school grounds connected to the equally imposing Gennadius Library by a long portico of Ionic columns. Each of my years abroad were lived in a style I never knew at home, making Europe a repository of unrealistic fantasies and memories that I have trouble squaring with demonstrations in the streets and all the other paraphernalia of the modern discontents seen on the television. As in Rome, so here in Athens I brought my own peculiar style to the grand house in which we were to live. It was a shock to the Greeks when I announced that I intended to do the cooking as well as various other domestic tasks. The school sent cleaning women over once a week, but, for instance, I did the laundry, and many is the time that I was hanging the wash out on the line when the school gardeners arrived for work in the morning and dubiously saluted me as I smiled and nodded, my mouth filled with clothespins. Luckily none of these men had to witness me indoors standing at the sink and stove.

The year in Athens was another intellectually challenging time for me; it constitutes the third of the four glorious moments of my career. The American School is a resident academic program for American graduate students who take a year off from their normal program to study in Athens. Principally archaeologists, epigraphists, and numismatists, they represent the so-called hard disciplines, what Dow used to call “solid stuff.” Still there are always a few literati tossed into the mix, and occasionally the visiting professor represents the literary side of things, as I did. The school sends the students out on fabulous tours of the archaeological sites, where everyone aboard the bus must contribute a short paper on some special feature of one selected place. I shall be forever grateful for my participation as a visitor, since the concentrated and intellectually challenging review of the aesthetics and sociology of the architecture I received was mostly new to me. To be learning as a novice deeply and intensely when one is in fact almost fifty is as satisfying as it gets. It was also highly entertaining to be able to study close to hand the differences between the American Academy in Rome and the American School in Athens.

My only obligation during the year was to offer a seminar during the winter season. Given the no-nonsense quality of the students and the staff, I was a little hesitant to do something with Apollonius Rhodius’s
Argonautica
because it was such an offbeat text; as I had gotten to know the students and their projects, an author like Apollonius seemed more and more alien to their training and current research. But I was determined to write a book on the
Argonautica
, so that was my current research interest and that was what they were going to get, like it or not. I could not have misread the students more completely. My seminar was subscribed to the limit, the students were keen to try out something new, they were quite enthusiastic; certainly I got enormously intelligent feedback from them, which helped me no end on the book. They were the very best of the then-current crop of students in U.S. graduate programs in classics; as such they were always prepared, always ready with background reading material, always alert. Plus they were for the most part a witty group, which seems necessary for a good read of the
Argonautica
.

Living with my teenage daughters in our grand palace pretty much put sex out of reach, although hardly the thought of it. Walking about Athens were hordes of nice-looking young soldiers who I knew from previous visits were often ready to sell themselves to supplement their paltry wages. I well remembered one evening in Athens a few years earlier when a cheerful fellow accosted me in Syntagma Square to propose that he would get for me one of the handsome young soldiers,
evzones
, as they are called, who paraded before the Parliament Building and Palace in a kind of kilt. He named a price, insisted that the soldier in question would provide space for us to spend the night, and added the special tourist treat that on the next day he would arrange to have my picture taken with the young man when he was back on duty. I didn’t think such treats would be mine on this trip. However, on the first school bus trip one of the students who boarded introduced himself to me and the older academic with whom I was sitting with every hint that he was gay. He almost said as much, stopping only when he saw, registered on our faces, the rebuff we were mounting psychologically. This was 1978, a decade after Stonewall and all the fallout in aggressive gay action that followed it, but still my seat mate and I, who both knew the other was gay, would never have mentioned it, especially since I was a father living with my daughters there at the school. How perverse it all was, seen in the perspective of history, only a month or so before Harvey Milk was assassinated in San Francisco. Sometime in the winter I ran across this same young man in the library when we had a chance to speak privately. He suggested that he could visit me and I agreed. A day or two later, when I had the house to myself, he came over and stayed for sex. I was beyond horny at this point, to the extent that my penis and orgasm mechanisms were pretty much out of whack. (“Use it or lose it” is not just a cute joke.) He was entirely sympathetic when he said, “You see, you should have come on to me on the bus that first day. This is what we could have been doing all fall.” It took several days to bring me back from the dead, so to speak, all of which was simply a kindness on his part. He had originally suggested the visit simply out of curiosity, and now was willing to continue visits only when his free moments and inclinations coincided.