Consenting Adult (22 page)

“Why, Ken, you’d better not say that out loud to anybody.”

“I suppose it’s another subtle sign of male chauvinism.”

“Not so subtle.”

“I didn’t mean it seriously.”

But he had felt it and that was serious enough. Some atavism, doubtless, some insistence that more was expected of a man, that nobler creature. This idiot doctrine he rejected out of hand, but as with the other, there was a residue, intact. Like that time long ago when Nate had been new to them and had said, “You were counting on your fingers and you went up to twelve—what’s twelve letters long?” “Assimilation,” he had answered, and they had laughed, but he still remembered his own struggling not to admit, if only to himself, that he wished Nate were not quite so Jewish a Jew. Now Nate was very nearly the core of the family, and even to remember that old secret wish made him feel iced over with apology or remorse. It had been an unsuspected shred of bigotry, a something he had held abandoned forever. Only when he had finally looked at it square and full had the remnants of it disappeared. As he had said then, you were not doomed to live out your life with every attitude unaltered; you could reprogram yourself if you wanted to enough.

Yet it still seemed impossible to do the same thing about Jeff. He had tried; God knew, he had tried. He certainly was much calmer, much less horrified, much more civilized. But he was always dubious about people who proclaimed how civilized they were, and if he were an outsider looking at the so-called civilized man, Kenneth Baird Lynn, he would be equally dubious now.

But if a total reprogramming were to come about for him, he would welcome it with hosannas. At sixty, though, you knew about possibles and impossibles. He could not emulate Tessa, for example, and make a study of it; he still resisted her when she began to tell him of some book she had read that dealt with homosexuality, nor could he help showing his discomfort, usually in the way she disliked most, by saying nothing at all. Even when there was something in the paper about it, they each reacted so differently. That front page of the Times—

GROWTH OF OVERT HOMOSEXUALITY

His eyes could still feel the impact of those large letters. Never before had that word been printed in large black type on the front page of so august a newspaper, never in his memory. Even now, some two or three years later, in 1965, he could feel again his sharp unwillingness to read phrases about New York having the largest population of homosexuals of any city, his rejection of the idea that family patterns and ill-adjusted parents might have played a part in the causation— Again he felt his insides grinding.

And Tessa I You could have sworn that Tessa had read another story from the one he had read. Tessa was excited by it, exhilarated, she saw a new era in it.

“It’s coming out in the open, Ken,” she had cried in excitement. “It’s not just a ghastly thing or a dirty word. Look what it says here about medical opinion and all the difference of opinion … some of the leading psychiatrists in the country say there should be no laws whatever to punish homosexual conduct between consenting adults, just like that Englishman, Wolfenden.”

Her elation had mystified him. It mystified him still, though he wanted so much to share the swing upward of her mood when this or that story appeared in the press. It was in that same
Times
story that he had first read the new word that was becoming the accepted word for homosexual. “Gay.” It was the word preferred by the homosexual world, it appeared, but it seemed false to his ear, a pretend word. Gay? “Gay” meant lighthearted, happy, blithe, carefree. As so often with a new word, suddenly this “gay” was everywhere; one day you had never heard it and the next day you read it in every paper or magazine, heard it on every celebrity talk show. He tried to accept it for his own.

It came hard. It reminded him of the time he first began to hear the word “black,” also the preferred word, preferred by Negroes themselves. By blacks themselves, rather. It had been hard to switch his vocabulary to accommodate the new demand but he did it. It was the prerogative of the black, surely, to call himself a black, if it pleased him, and there was none who could say him nay. There were so many new trends in the whole surge toward change in race relations, new trends to be adopted by those who were not black because it would have been an impertinence and a callousness to resist, an outsider’s resistance at best, a hostile resistance at worst. In a surprisingly short time, he had come to feel the word “black” easy on his tongue, had come to feel the word “Negro” awkward, old-fashioned, degrading in some vague indescribable way.

Perhaps in time the word “gay” would seem equally the easy word, the right word, the word without criticism in it He wanted that time to come, if that was what Jeff wanted, and people like Jeff. But he had wondered whether he would ever be able to speak it without feeling a falsity in its single small syllable. Gay, when there was so much pain and shame and fear and secrecy connected with it?

I will never believe it, he had thought then. I’ll say it, I’ll want to believe it, maybe I’ll come to think other words are hate words and want to give them up forever, just as I already want to give up phrases like “Jeff and people like Jeff,” lumping them all together, the way bigots lump all Jews together or all blacks together or all cops together or all anybody together. You think you’re through with such loaded nonsense and then you get trapped.

That small word “gay” might be a trap. He would watch out for it, would never resist it. In his mind, the next few times he had seen it in print, he had made himself practice the sound of it Gay, he thought Gay. Gay.

I
N THE END IT
had come down to loneliness, Jeff often thought, had come to the primitive need for another of his own kind. Proximity, closeness, a danger shared and thus halved, a danger shared and thus doubled if the sharer were not to be trusted, an extra risk for those who sought risk, an extra piquancy for those who sought piquancy. He himself sought neither risk nor piquancy, and never had, he saw now as he looked back at the terrible years. What he had sought was completion he could have in no other way, an extra dimension, the sense of his own being, fully his own, not the moralist’s, just his own.

None of it was his because he had chosen it out of a field of possibilities; it was simply his despite his choice. He could see that, now that he was twenty-two and an adult, could see it with the clarity that defied four years or more of analysis. He was not the seeker of this state in which his life was being lived; he would yield all of it for the blessed ordinariness of being usual. But he was not usual. For whatever reasons, and his life seemed awhirl with hypotheses, analytic postulates, causal factors, for whatever reasons, from whatever necessities of character, he sought none of the traditional goals, not even sexual release itself, brilliant and crystal-ringing though that might be. Apart from that first capitulation with Hank in the station wagon, furtive, fearful, driven as he had been then by adolescent ignorance and adolescent necessity, apart from that first starved wildness four years ago, he had almost never sought sex as sex, isolated in the single boiling concentration on orgasm. Rather he had sought what he supposed every young creature of any species always seeks, the warm sense of being wanted, of being liked and approved of, the exchange of love, love in the emotive sense far more than the erotic at certain times, and at others far more in the erotic, an imperative driving thirst that demanded slaking.

For him it had never been easy. It would never be easy. He was not a quick-to-be-captivated person, he never had been, not as a child, not as a boy, not now as a man. The word “love” was rarely spoken by him. The concept “love” was rarely freed by him from his locked store of hidden feelings, held together in some secure and deeply vaulted chamber of his being, guarded there, to be contemplated only rarely in his own awareness of their existence and almost never withdrawn from the vault to be put on display for another’s inspection.

It was, of course, part of the technique one slowly learned, in this world he found himself inhabiting, the technique of self-protection. He could never reckon the weight of that station wagon and Hank in the ultimate balance of his decisions to leave home, to give up Yale, to give up the football hero worship that was the first form of love he had ever known from his peers. Many times he had tried to evaluate that fear-filled and mesmerizing first episode, in relation to his leaving home, to his refusal of tuition for Yale, to all the external and internal changes he had made in the patterns of his life so soon afterward. But all he could be sure of was that the remainder of his time at Placquette, while his eye still scanned every crossroad for that station wagon, he had lived with nightmares of a new intensity, of himself in the Yale Bowl on some future Saturday afternoon, racing down the field in some unexpected winning play, his knees pumping high, his ears filled with his own name from the heaving crowds in the stands, Lynn, Lynn, Lynn … knowing that one of the faces in that crowd was Hank’s face, Hank watching him, Hank planning to come forth from the past, planning God knows what honor of revelation.

Those had remained his nightmares, faithfully reported on the couch, recurring and recurring week after week, month after month, bringing the sweat springing under the collar of his pajamas, wetting the hair on his scalp, running down his chest. They had come at him not only in sleep but also in spasms of daytime imaginings until he had wanted to carve away a section of his brain that held them. He saw now as he looked back, how the knots of that nightmare had twisted into a need to escape all ties, the ties of home as well as all others. The crucial fight with his father might otherwise have been no worse than other rows, to be patched up, to be forgotten as a bad job and dumped in the trash of family messes.

He had chosen solitude instead. Even now he lived the life of a recluse. If it weren’t so heavy a thing, he would have laughed himself sick over his mother’s certainties that he had moved away from Margie and Nate because he was living with a lover. The farce of it. And Dr. Isaacs forever probing into his preference for the life of a loner. Or his rejection of the demands of a shared life. “Perhaps, Jeff, you find it an intolerable thought, that you might enjoy companionship more than solitude?”

That question mark in the voice, that rising inflection, so mild, so unwilling to foist any idea upon an unreceptive mind—it was a trait of both Dr. Dudley and Dr. Isaacs, perhaps of all analysts. He had said so once or twice; the reply, predictably, had been thoughtful, unresentful. “Hostility is part of the process in every analysis.”

He did enjoy companionship, on all levels except that of a shared life. That might come in time. He had friends, lots of friends, but all on a specified level. He knew where the limits were, that was all. Campus friendships, drinking friendships, flicks, that sort of thing—nothing deeper than that, and not even that, once sex was included. The inclusion of sex, for him, was almost at once the exclusion of other possibilities, a sort of reverse process of natural selection. Not that he was driven to any furtive encounters with his sexual partners; one-night stands that started in a bar were not his style. And it had surprised him, once he had begun college in the city, how simple, how uncomplex it was to find partners in the hidden world he inhabited, now known more and more widely as the gay world. Once he had quit the struggle—he had almost thought, the Death Throes—against what he knew his nature to be, once he had in some measure accepted himself as a homosexual, he had been astonished to discover how far from being alone he was. Men just like him, good grades, earnest about their work, responsible fellows who were going to be engineers or lawyers or doctors or professors, and all equally set apart from the great big heterosexual world by whatever mysterious force it was that made you seek not the other sex but the same sex.

That much he would grant analysis. Little else, but that much. In four grueling years and more, he had achieved an intermittent escape from some small part of the self-loathing. In four years he had climbed one inch out of the hell of self-hate. He had stopped blaming some inner rottenness, had stopped blaming mother, father, environment, anything. And he had stopped believing that any happy little therapy existed that could ever transform him into that unattainable golden fellow, the average girl-crazy man. This is it, he had thought one day. This is it for life.

And now he was about to have another Commencement Day, and be through with classrooms and assignments and professors forever. It wasn’t the studying he was glad to escape but the regimentation, the strictures of routine. Actually the four years at C.C.N.Y. had meant one thing: work. Science had become his one abiding interest, all of it, any of it. He wished he could become a physicist and a chemist and a biologist and just about everything going, and had said as much to his Faculty Adviser, expecting to be laughed at, but getting a pretty astute nod of the head instead. The guy knew. Way back there in freshman year he had begun taking physics and the rest partly because it was the big thing to do, what with Gagarin and Shepard and Glenn and the whole new thing of blast-off and telemetry and possible moon shots, but for him there had been hot discovery in it from the start, a new world opening, a necessary world of the positive and the demonstrable. He kept adding and expanding each semester, not alone in physics and math but in chemistry and biology and damn near everything he could jam into a schedule without the faculty putting him down for a madman.

The provable, by God, not just theory, not just hypothesis, not dear Dr. Freud or Dr. Isaacs and their probing and positing, but the blessed realm of the positive, of computation and formulae and fact.

What it was all for, where it would lead, he did not know, not even now at the end of his senior year. When the usual bore put the usual query, “What are you going to be when you graduate?” he’d shrug it off and say he hadn’t a clue. For reasons unfathomable this didn’t raise the hackles of anxiety as so much else in his life did. It would come clear in plenty of time. He could always teach, though the idea sure didn’t send him. He had long ago given up any notion of newspaper work—it just wasn’t there. He could, of course, qualify for some damn good work in one of the big electronic or aerodynamic plants, but they all had government contracts, which meant F.B.I. clearances and CIA profiles. Not in a million years.