Consenting Adult (23 page)

So he had no bright little ideas for the future, but that was all right with him. He could always support himself hacking until it did come clear, and without the college load, he could make a real bundle. Even if he weren’t going to say finis to analysis this coming June, he could take over the bills himself.

He had to hand it to his mother on those bills, for the way she had kept on, even giving up at last on the try for interim reports. Whenever they did see each other she stayed off the whole goddamn subject. And if he did feel next fall that he still needed treatment, she would say the same old “Go ahead.”

One of the guys he knew was bitter about not being able to afford analysis. He had tried out some group-therapy clinic, and had left in disgust after a couple of sessions. Listening to him, Jeff felt uncomfortable, about being staked to the thousands of dollars that analysis costs. Not since Placquette and Rex Munson had he known personally of anybody who went that route, but he certainly had heard of some poor devil going into the drug scene in a big way, or becoming an alcoholic, or a drop-out, ending up at some puking job where he prayed to heaven they’d never find out about him.

Well, he thought, don’t we all? Maybe it was that, above all, that was so hateful. The damn secrecy. The closet. Some new idealistic groups at various colleges were advocating open meetings and open membership for gay people; even up here on campus, there were some noble fellows plugging for the idea, and recently there had been enough action to make a story for the papers. Likewise at Columbia and up at Cornell. Out at the University of Colorado there had been another big to-do, close to a riot. None of this was the old Mattachine line of counsel and help; it was more like the civil rights movement out in the open. It did stir a crazy sort of approval in him, but that was like one’s approval of Utopia. A down payment on something a million years off.

For no logical reason he thought again of the bad night he had had at Sarah Lawrence with Sue. The bad night with Sue—what a way to put it. It was in the spring of her freshman year, at that house party she had cared so much about, and he had felt in his bones that he should turn it down. It was his freshman year too, when he was just starting in with Dr. Isaacs and getting from him the same subtle directives about going the hetero route, testing it, giving it a chance—all that and his not wanting to hurt Sue anyway—he had finally accepted. It was still damn near unbearable to remember.

On his next visit to Dr. Isaacs, the words had shot out of him like a hemorrhage: “And then we went out in a car … you know how I love to drive a car … and then she wanted to stop off at this place off the road, and when I said no she got so uptight, sort of insulted as if there was something wrong with
her
and that’s why I said no … anyway we did stop and then—oh God, nothing. Just goddamn to Christ nothing. Anyway, she finally knew. I guess she knew.”

For a year or more they hadn’t seen each other, and then somehow they had met and gone to a flick again. Even now, they still took in a show or a movie once in a while. Among the few straight friends he had, he felt easiest with Sue. In a few weeks she too was getting out of college, Phi Bete and everything, with a job already lined up in, of all things, Peabody Chalmers, the big Wall Street investment house. He really liked Sue, something akin to the way he felt about Margie, and she kept on liking him. Not once had she ever mentioned that house-party disaster, never had made a move toward another attempt, never even asked him to explain anything. He had never tried to explain either. The old rule. You don’t admit it Not for any reason. Not to one soul in the straight world.

Unbelievably enough, apart from whatever it was he had blurted out that first night he had gone over to Margie and Nate’s, he had never yet come out with it even with them. When there was something in the paper about gay people, if they talked about it, neither he nor they ever took that step of connecting it up to him. It wasn’t a business of telling lies, just that the words were never uttered. Even when he had lived with them, they had never said, “Well, are you?” He had never said, “You know I am.” After he had moved out to his own place uptown, it was the same. When analysis was off for the summer, they never said, “Are you changing?” or anything like it. They never seemed to remember why he was in analysis. Not to remember. Brother, that was the real measure.

One night a couple of months ago he had been over there late and they were watching some talk show on the tube where the host was making wisecracks about a famous playwright who couldn’t turn out any more plays “because his wrists are too limp.” Nate snorted in derision. More and more programs these days bandied about a lot of slippery humor on fruit and queens and hairdressers.

“That guy he’s interviewing,” Nate said. “He’s a famous writer too—why the hell doesn’t he nail that smart aleck right on camera?”

“Being a fag himself?” Jeff asked. “Because he can’t ever nail anybody, that’s why. Call him a coward if you want to.”

“I don’t want to.” Nate sank back in his chair. “That was pure rhetoric. I know damn well he can’t.”

“It’s like a red hunt that goes on forever,” Jeff said. “Only this time McCarthy won’t ever die.”

“Don’t be too sure.” Then he added, “God damn it.”

That was Nate for you. And Margie too. They had talked then of McCarthyism in modern dress, the cops and the peaceniks, the cops and the blacks, the civil rights march in Selma last month, the upswing in the draft for Vietnam … It all wove itself together into a good solid evening, the way it always did when he was with them. They had become his real family. Now, when he thought, Home, he thought of Margie and Nate’s. His one-room dump was home, sure, where he lived, but that other place, the one that used to be where his mother and father lived, that had shifted for him forever.

T
HE WEDDING INVITATION LAY
in her lap and Tessa thought, This is only the first, there will be so many more. She ran her fingers lightly over the raised lettering of the vellum paper, as if she were suddenly blind and the message in Braille, this engraved invitation to the approaching wedding of Martha Leggett Wohlmann and Peter Gerville Hill on the eighteenth day of January, One Thousand Nine Hundred and Sixty-six in the chapel at St Bartholomew’s Church.

Pete Hill married, Jeff’s roomie at Placquette, Jeff’s best friend all those years ago, the endless telephone calls, the flicks, the thousand unknowns of adolescent friendship, and still a friend, she knew, through the four years that had separated them, with Pete up at Cornell. Now Pete was to be married, start a family, have children …

A convulsion of the old pain seized her; it had been a long time that she had been free of such sharpness, yet here it was again, a stricture of anguish. This, Jeff would never have, the beginning of that greatest part of life, love and marriage and the unbelievable joy of children growing. This vast human experience he would never know. Just last night, during a visit to Margie, the doorbell had rung, and Lynnie had gone flying to greet Nate, “Daddy, Daddy.” This, Jeff would never know, the beloved child rushing toward him, face alight.

She deleted, as it were, the whole picture of Jeff at an opening door. It was a sentimentality; it was her idea of joy, not necessarily a universal, not necessarily one he would ever miss. In the same moment she thought, But he will never know the other part of it, what it is to fall in love, to be in love, to go to bed with a girl he loves, to seek and make love to her, to be loved by her in return, to have her love him.

And suddenly she saw Jeff sitting alone in a chair in some room in some apartment, alone, with nobody there to talk to, to share life with, no one he knew and loved, alone, alone, and her heart convulsed once more.

Let it not be that for him, she thought. Oh, God, let him know what it is to love and be loved, on his terms, but let him know it. No matter how, no matter in which way, it is love that counts, the ability to love, the ability to give love and to receive love that makes life full and beautiful, with meaning, with renewal. Let him not be denied that forever. Whatever he is, it is not his doing; he did not ask it, he did not arrange it; it happened. It is one of the mysteries of life that some people are drawn to their own sex; all the opinions of all the doctors and theorists seem to point to that. Then let him not be punished in the most fearful way of all, that he should never know the good sweetness of being able to love somebody dear and be loved by that dear one in return.

There is no life without that current running from one to the other and then back to one, the completed circuit, the fullness of giving and receiving and giving. Life is a round. Without that round, life itself is disconnected, a broken thing, a torn zero.

Oh, let it never be that for my son. Not once before had she visualized Jeff sitting so in an empty silent room, and now the longing to spare him that void, that present or future void, was so acute it was nearly insupportable.

She turned back to the wedding invitation and mechanically read it through once more. Pete had graduated from Cornell last June, as Jeff had graduated from C.C.N.Y., except that Jeff had done it with high honors and Pete had barely made it. Pete was already a junior member of the Establishment à la Madison Avenue; he had become a space salesman in his father’s advertising agency. Jeff was, in his words, still “sizing it up,” still on the same self-supporting basis, driving a cab and living in his one-room flat uptown.

Sizing it up. She remembered Jeff saying the words for the first time. It was at one of their rare lunches, arranged by her, “to ask you what you want for a graduation present.”

“Dad and I thought—guess what?” she had said, after he had assured her he had no good ideas at all.

“Dad and you?”

“Of course, Dad and me. Would you believe a car of your own?”

“You don’t really mean that.”

She saw his eyes light up, and she laughed. “I do mean it. It’s practically an American tradition, if the parents can afford it, isn’t it?”

“Well, thanks, it would be terrific,” he said slowly. “But I, but you better not. It’s a terrific idea, though.”

“Why not, Jeff? We
can
afford it, and we both want to.”

“But I couldn’t support a car. Garage and gas and insurance and all that.”

“But you’ll be getting a job.”

“I don’t know about the job yet.” He smiled at her, half regretful, half pugnacious. “I’m sort of sizing things up, measuring all the professions. Don’t think I’m not bowled over at the idea of a car, though.”

“If you change your mind, you can say. There’s no rush.”

“Getting through school is graduation gift enough.”

“Don felt that way, and Margie. I guess everybody does.”

“Sixteen years of books and labs and exams—is that ever enough.” He laughed. “And five years on the couch—that’s enough too.”

“Jeff, really? Have you decided?”

“I thought you knew. Oh yes,
finito.
I announced it to Dr. Isaacs about six months back. I should have told you. I guess I took it for granted Margie or Nate would have passed it on.”

“Never mind. Is it really what you want now?”

“Just what.”

“Then I’m glad.”

Silence had fallen between them then. The old stiff antagonisms had softened in the last years, but in their infrequent encounters, if the subject of therapy arose at all, he still made it all too clear that any mention of it was his to make, his to terminate.

“I’ll come up with an idea sooner or later,” Jeff had said then. “We can just skip it for a while.”

“Of course, there’s one other graduation present that’s even more traditional. Nineteenth-Century Traditional.”

“You’re reaching.” Again he looked at her with a special interest. He was liking the entire conversation, his expression said, and for a moment she felt as if it were old times, he the young Jeff greedy for a birthday gift, greedy to open the Christmas packages.

“The airlines are putting on all sorts of tourist trips to Paris, London, Rome—nothing too plushy, but that was our other idea.”

He had whistled. “The Grand Tour.”

“Nineteenth Century, no? You think about it.” He hadn’t been abroad since he was fourteen, and then he was a boy going along with his family. Now he was a man and would be on his own, the world before him, the time his own, the itinerary his own, his companions and evenings his own. For a moment an envy nipped at her, of the middle-aged watching the young, of a woman nearly fifty saying “Bon Voyage” to a young man setting forth to see the world.

“This is tougher than the car,” he said after a moment. “If s just wrong timing for me, though, but thanks anyhow. I mean it, but right now I just can’t make it.”

He looked wretched. He seemed to be puzzling something out for himself.

“It’s sort of like me being in the lab,” he finally said, “with a half-finished experiment going on and I can’t leave the lab until I know whether it blows the place up or whether it will work out. Does that make any sense?”

“The syntax is terrible, but it makes lots of sense. All right, we’ll wait on the graduation gift till you give us a signal.”

Graduation gifts, wedding gifts, she thought now. He still had given no signal. He still was driving that cab, “hacking it,” “sizing it up.” He still seemed directionless but Ken comforted her on that, setting up an unexpected defense. “He’s always been pretty solid when it comes to work,” Ken said. “School, college, even those summer jobs at Paperbound. Taking his time now is a lot sounder than grabbing at some bore of a job and quitting it in a year.”

True enough. And they had seen him on Christmas Day, again at Margie and Nate’s, and though she might have imagined it, he did not seem as lost or directionless as he had on other Christmases in the past There was indeed something pretty solid about him, as Ken had put it, and not only where work was concerned. Maturity had a hundred ways of showing itself, and with Jeff it had come unevenly, an inevitable corollary to the complexity of his problems. His very rejection of such delectables as a car of his own or a trip to Europe, the discipline that led him to say no to both, could come only from a strength that went deeper than chronological age.