My Husband and My Wives: A Gay Man's Odyssey (29 page)

Summer came, he went to special courses at Harvard Summer School, I went off to the house at the beach and the peace of my garden. One day in August when I was up in Cambridge, he stopped by to look at the fence we had built, if for no other reason than to argue that it had not exactly been a joint enterprise no matter what I thought. I asked him in for a beer, whereupon he proceeded to tell me excitedly about the great sex he had been having in the summer school dorm in Cambridge. He had never known anything like this. I reminded him that he was indeed a very sexy young man, and obviously a choice specimen for any collection of women. This was a new idea for him; clearly nothing in his Catholic boyhood and suburban school had prepared him for such a jolly summer of promiscuity. He was clearly intrigued as well as made uneasy as he heard me describe his sexual charms in my own flamboyant style. “You remind me of the newspaper editor back in Denver,” he remarked without specifying, but in saying that he relaxed some kind of guard he had up. At least that was how I sensed it.

When September arrived and he went back to the university, he stopped by my office, and I invited him for the weekend to the house at the shore. On Saturday evening a former student of mine, who had transformed herself at age thirty into a singer, suddenly appeared at the door to announce that she and her rock band were performing nearby. The young man was thrilled to meet this minor celebrity, more so when she asked him to come along and sit onstage during the performance. My other weekend guest was a graduate student, with whom I sat talking of her dissertation until she went to bed and I started doing the dishes. Eventually the young man came back, high from his experience, high from the dope they had all been smoking. He came into the kitchen, gave me a hug, touched his cheek to mine, and returned to the living room and lay down on the sofa, staring up at the ceiling and whistling some of the music he had been hearing. When I had finished the dishes, I came into the living room, and saw that his eyes met mine and stayed with me as I moved toward him. I could not resist dropping to the floor beside him and putting my hand on his chest. He turned to smile, then once again gazed at the ceiling. I moved my hand to his crotch, felt him hard there, and pressed a bit.

“Let’s go upstairs,” I said. And that began three wonderful years of an improbable companionship, ending only when he told me with tears on his cheeks, “Homosexuality is just not for me.”

Waiting in the wings, so to speak, was a young woman with whom he had been working, whose interest in him was so palpable that I was amazed he had not noticed long since. It was the truth, and I had to admit they looked beautiful together, and I tried as best I could to keep a smile on my face watching them walk down the garden path, hand in hand, and stand under the chuppah at their wedding in the summer of the following year. I was often amused when I thought that his two bêtes noires, gay men and Jewish girls, had ended up in his bed one after the other. We had lived together, had fought again and again, just like father and son, on many more building projects, and when we went hiking we were like brothers, exploring the trails of Massachusetts, one of his great passions. In the afternoons when we were in bed together we were lovers, but he did not talk of this except when saying goodbye. Years later he invited me to join him in Mexico to show me all the favorite places that he and his wife visited. (It was the impetus for the many trips I have made there, including one six-week stay when I learned the language.) He was just as great a guy in his forties as he had been early on, and I was so happy that our friendship had progressed to this new stage. We steered clear of anything physical on our trip in Mexico, except at the end when we were saying goodbye in the airport. “Well, this it,” he said, as he prepared to see me go off in the direction of what passes for security there and on to my gate. He took me in his arms, we embraced warmly, and then he kissed me on the lips, for not too long a time, but enough to seal into it all that great emotion and passion of the days gone by.

The saga of the boyfriends ends with the young man who had been the first of the four, the young married Englishman. He returned to my erotic life from time to time in England, in the Norfolk countryside where he was born and in London, then again in New York City off Tompkins Square when he had been divorced. He was always introducing me to another new girlfriend, a habit also of Boyfriend Number Two, and which so clearly unsettled the young ladies. They understood only too well whom they were meeting and how they were being vetted by him. Eventually I myself introduced him to a young woman, who became his second wife. I was best man at their wedding and then their nearby neighbor in Cambridge. And so our affair finally ended, this time forever, as I made clear to his new bride so that she would not have to be uncertain and unhappy when he walked the dog and stopped by for a chat.

SEVEN

SOMEDAY MY PRINCE WILL COME

“With this ring I thee wed,” words spoken before the altar of the Swedenborg Chapel, Cambridge, Massachusetts, May 10, 2008, eighteen years and one hundred forty-four days after we met
(Kent Johnson)

Before the prince arrived, however, I lay around for some time asleep with the apple in my mouth. Which is to say, in the landscape of life I was trudging a lot more down in the valleys than looking out joyously from the peaks. Teaching at Boston University was so disagreeable to me that I grew depressed whenever I had to think about going to the campus, let alone actually entering the place. Imagine my joy, therefore, in the autumn of 1981 when I got a call from the chair at Vassar College, a guy I had met when I was in Athens, inviting me to come to the college for the academic year 1982–83 as the Blegen Professor of Classics. This, he explained, was an endowed chair for scholarly research given annually, in which the holder’s main obligation, apart from being a “presence” on campus, was to give a lecture course in the spring semester. It was only four years after my year at the American School. Some academics would have trouble getting leaves in such close succession, but the administration of Boston University, having tried and failed to get me to resign, evidently saw their next best option was to let me take as many leaves as I liked to get me off campus. So I was off to Poughkeepsie for what turned out to be nothing but fun for nine months. The Blegen Professor was housed in a fully furnished little house on the edge of the campus. (“Rather twee, but it will serve,” was the description of one of the previous holders of the Blegen chair.) The campus itself was a miniature park, elegant in its proportion and its plantings, having been designed by the firm of Frederick Law Olmsted, the designer who cocreated New York’s Central Park. Vassar’s faculty and its president welcomed me so warmly that I felt I was in another universe after the coldness, suspicion, spying, and treachery that was daily fare at Boston University. The faculty meetings were an absolute delight, in which one could step over to a sideboard set out with hors d’oeuvres and wine as the debates and discussions grew long.

As the Blegen Professor I gave an inaugural lecture on Berlioz’s opera
Les Troyens
, which is based on Virgil’s
Aeneid
. Because the Metropolitan Opera was opening its season with
Les Troyens
, and since Berlioz was a fervent Latinist whose opera closely follows Virgil’s text with interesting variations, the topic was a perfect fit for a classicist who wanted to talk to a general audience of educated people. It went over very well, as the discussion that evening and random encounters in the subsequent weeks made clear. Not since my Stanford days had I been able to socialize so easily and well, as one can in a confined population with common interests, incomes, and intellects. The inherent insularity was offset by New York City only an hour and half away on a train line that ran along the wide scope of the Hudson River, endlessly beautiful, intimations of Frederick Church at every turn.

My arrival at Vassar coincided with the publication of my Apollonius book. It was a bittersweet moment for me, since my editor, John Gardner, died in a motorcycle accident on the very day of its publication. That was John, doing the sort of crazy and dangerous thing that matched his brilliance and literary daring. Typically, he had begun the series for Southern Illinois only to showcase his favorite authors, and because it would be fun for him to edit critical works on them. John was a novelist, but also an inventive critic and careful reader. He was also eccentric and a prima donna. Other than our initial lunch meeting the day he proposed the book, we were in contact only through the written word. Because his novel
Jason and Medeia
(1973), was based on the same material used by Apollonius, he had a certain proprietary take on the poem, which sometimes caused us much anguish. But I owe him so much. His initial reaction to what I had written was harsh and dismissive; he objected strongly to the timid, stiff style of academic circumlocution and evasion. I had been guilty of writing as though for Sterling Dow, I realized, wanting to make sure that nothing I said would raise the scholarly eyebrow. Gardner gave me permission—he was the editor, after all—to write what I really meant, go all the way, take risks. It changed me forever, and I could never again write with that scholarly distance. I well remember under his influence describing Augustus Caesar in the Apollonius book as “the man who made the trains run on time,” which seemed like an innocuous way to indicate his affinities with the ruling style of Il Duce, only to have some critic complain, “They did not have trains in ancient Rome.” I wish I had saved the letters from the next two or three years, John’s either berating me for my style or for surrendering to stodginess, mine exasperatedly pointing out where he erred in matters of fact, he apologizing for his angry outbursts, claiming late-night drunkenness, I thanking him for pushing me further. It was a great collaboration, and I grew to love him. But when I arrived at Vassar I was tired, the book was out, and I had postpartum depression and could do little more than lie on the sofa of my twee little cottage and read in a completely desultory fashion various titles that caught my eye in random sweeps of the shelves of the college library. Slowly I began the more concentrated reading that I needed to do for what I wanted to write next, a book on the Apollonian element in Virgil’s
Aeneid
. Sad to say, by the time I retired I had only managed to write four chapters, which I then summarized in a longish essay, “Virgil’s Apollonian
Aeneid
,” which was published in a variorum collection on Virgil.

Into the swamp of my despond came cheery reminders of the good things of life: my younger son, working at the Ritz, had the funniest stories of life in that kitchen; my younger daughter, who had recently spent a year in Kenya and was now studying geology at Boston University, had endless stories of life in the bush alternating with days in Nairobi; a former Stanford student on his way to becoming a major ancient historian sent me a book that he had dedicated to me and Ted Doyle (who had died of a heart attack in 1966); a woman who had been a member of my seminar in Athens wrote to tell me that she was turning her exquisite dissertation on Apollonius into a controversial and interesting book on Apollonius and Callimachus and wanted to dedicate it to me along with her father; another member of that seminar, who was curating the Greek vase collection for the Joslyn Museum in Omaha, invited me to write a contribution for the catalogue she was preparing, and got me a gig at the museum to lecture.

It was about this time when I thought up the idea of taking each one of my children on a trip of their choosing, when we would have the chance in their early maturity to reconnect. For one it was theater in Manhattan, for another restaurants in London and Paris, for the third a week in Maui, and finally the fourth chose geology in Iceland. This kind of concentrated dose makes up as best it can for the geographic separation so endemic to the American family.

In the summer of 1983 I came back to prepare for another academic year; ah, more of the same old dreary same, I reckoned, and metaphorically bent my head, like a peasant heading into a strong rain—at least that is how I would have translated my feelings into art. One drizzly winter day I was stumbling through mounds of broken ice to reach my home, when I slipped and fell—nothing hurt but my dignity, that and sensing right away that I was now wet through. Then I was home and in and out of a hot shower, sitting moodily in front of the fire when the phone rang. It was the head of the classics program at Lehman College, one of the liberal arts colleges that make up the City University of New York, this one being in the Bronx. He was an old friend who had often invited me to lecture in his humanities program at Lehman. His wife and colleague I had known since she was a freshman at Stanford, always recalling the sweet moment when the dear seventeen-year-old had excitedly informed me at the end of her first semester that she was going to major in Latin.

“Charlie,” he demanded in his heavy Bronx accent, “how would you like to get a chair, become Distinguished Professor of Classics out here at Lehman?”