My Husband and My Wives: A Gay Man's Odyssey (19 page)

The most amusing experience of this sort was in a small upper-level Latin course with four students and myself sitting around in my office translating a text. The group consisted of one young woman, two fellows evidently a couple (although no one acknowledged it as such), myself, and then, well, this Adonis, a thoroughly unlikely, utterly square, utterly hunky young blond with great skill in the Latin language, hence his presence as a freshman in so advanced a course. He was a shy prep school boy from Connecticut, spoke when spoken to, smiled in a dazzling way, but his great claim to attraction was his introduction into our world of what soon swept the youth of the nation: he wore skintight Levi’s without underwear. When he was in the throes of the work of translating aloud in class, he would slide down on the sofa until the barest tip of his butt was still supporting him on the frame, thus allowing in the long line of his outstretched body the glorious mound of his good-sized genitals to take pride of place, and if we were lucky the outline of the penis and the testicles was clearly evident. Three sets of eyes—I don’t know about the girl—left the Latin text in the book to fasten on delights infinitely greater. It was when our eyes met that we acknowledged our sexual orientation, something I had never done in or out of class at Yale. Homosexuality was beginning to exist in the consciousness of at least the better educated, more sophisticated children of the bourgeoisie. In the same way, the staid proper Boston Brahmin–like stance of San Francisco Jews was being given a shake-up by East Coast Jewish students at Stanford like the young woman from New York who campaigned for student office with the slogan, “Tippecanoe and Super Jew! Vote for Jewdy!”

In the summer of 1962 I went to Europe for the first time, specifically for a month in Greece and a month in Italy, and it was, of course, a major turning point in my life, for the firsthand experience of the remains of antiquity; for the willingness to leave Penny alone with four children, the youngest an eight-month-old baby; for the extraordinary pleasure of traveling with a young male with whom I had a most satisfactory emotional and sexual relationship during the trip; and, perhaps not least, for the psychic disfigurement of the attendant guilt with which I was filled when I beheld my wife and family on my return. Fifty years on I can still feel a tinge of guilt remembering that episode, but also I know that it had to be that way, I had to be free, if only for a brief time.

If I were writing a novel about the experience, I would start the events with a description of the circumstances of the death of my first wife’s mother, who had moved with her husband to the Livermore Valley in 1960 to be near their niece at the same time we had gone to Stanford. I had conscientiously kept up with them, Penny and I had visited them in Iowa, and when they moved their furniture to California they brought along and gave to me the great round mahogany Victorian dining table that they remembered I had loved. All the summer of 1961 she lay dying hideously of stomach cancer in the hospital in Livermore and I drove over as many nights as I could manage to sit and talk with her. It was awful, and I was truly grateful when she died, but if nothing else I understood
pietas
. I brought her husband, now befuddled with grief and age, back to Palo Alto and undertook to go with him on the train along with the coffin back to Ames. It was one gross moment after another until in the very early morning on the train three hours out of Des Moines a porter leaned across me to say something to my father-in-law, and I felt his very hard erection pressing into my upper arm. He moved on and I jumped up and met him as he paused briefly at the entrance to the smoking lounge and men’s toilets at the end of the car. Within seconds he had determined the area was deserted and hustled us into one of the little rooms, pulled down the toilet seat, pushed me down, unzipped his fly, and brought himself out, and I took him into my hands and into my mouth. He came with a muffled moan and a grand explosion. The sheer physicality of this, the energy of our desires—my first experience since the psychiatrist had advised abstention, and to this day memorable as a powerful reaffirmation of my identity—could not have been more erotic, utterly satisfying, reassuring, psychologically validating, putting me at complete peace with myself even before I had myself off after he had scurried out the door. It sparked a peaceful, joyful glow that stayed with me through the next two days, from overseeing the unloading of the coffin in Des Moines until we arrived at the grave site, where my mood of serenity and fulfillment elicited from me out of nowhere the whispered words, “
Requiem aeternam dona eis, Domine, et lux perpetua luceat eis. Requiescant in pace.
” I had done what I must for my mother-in-law and my late wife; now I could leave the old man with his unmarried sister-in-law and take a jet back to the coast.

Our fourth child was born the following November. Penny and I were never able to shed the guilt we felt at her birth, particularly when the infant was born with a condition that prevented her left eye from opening for three months. It seemed a mark of rebuke directed at our reluctant parenthood. We doubled our efforts to be exemplary parents and housekeepers, saved from descending into a truly destructive cycle of grimness by the natural effervescence with which my manic personality is endowed, not to mention the endless resort to good manners and the repression of true feeling that was a legacy of the homes from which we sprang. In order to supplement my meager salary I took a job at a local junior college teaching evening classes. Days were filled. Time set aside for class preparation, office hours, and grading seemed to soak up every empty space on my academic calendar not already blocked out for teaching. I looked nervously at the list of research projects I had set out for myself, knowing that I was not producing as much as a young man should. The moment I walked in the door at home I had three little ones clambering for my attention, eager to show me the results of whatever project they had achieved that day, and now there was a fourth who needed a bottle or there was a diaper to be changed. Penny greeted me with the kind of listless gesture of surrender that said,
They’re all yours for a while, buddy.
At least we had a student helper who put the children to bed and assisted with bedside reading, which gave us two beleaguered adults a quiet moment to have a drink before I had to hit the trail for the night teaching. I set off with a perfunctory kiss and Penny’s warning, “Watch the road,” a reminder of the time that I confessed to having fallen half-asleep at the wheel on the way home from the junior college.

The junior faculty at Stanford, who were all of them just as tired as we were, sought remedy in weekend drinking parties, sometimes with stand-up buffets to temper the effect of all the alcohol. One night we were among twenty or twenty-five standing in the living room of a house just around the corner from us, and then it was eight and no food had appeared, guests took note, sought out the hostess, and it turned out that she had just cracked mentally. In any case, she was sitting at a table in a little room off the kitchen playing solitaire and humming. The other women scurried to turn out the food that was there onto plates, and we all ate in a kind of drunken stupor, or was it a hushed something or other? It was so 1960s Palo Alto–Stanford young marrieds. One night at a cocktail party—and I remember this scene so vividly—I sat in a chair drunkenly staring at the equally intoxicated wife of an English Department colleague who was crawling on all fours under a large table nearby, at which point I blurted out to Ted, who sat next to me, “Penny bores me, Ted.” He took his big fat Irish finger, put it to my lips, and said sweetly and softly, “Don’t say that, don’t think that.” In retrospect it would all have been so much better if I had had a guy on the side. But where to find one? I was too tired even to care.

As winter turned into spring Ted invited me for drinks at a bar with some guy who worked in the library. He was a slim fellow about my age, who proceeded to get as tipsy as myself, as always seemed to happen in a bar with Ted. When I excused myself to go to the men’s room my new friend went with me. We stood side by side pissing away, and as we were finishing I reached over to take his penis in my hand and watched it grow stiff, while he stood there silent and acquiescent. Without a word we repacked our pants and joined Ted, who meanwhile had paid the bill and was heading out to his car. My friend agreed to drive me back to the faculty parking lot for my car. Once there, we began to kiss each other passionately, only interrupted by his moaning whisper, “I didn’t know this was going to happen.” I was so desperate for a man I felt I would explode and fell upon him as though it were a rape. I was out of my mind. Once we had finished, we pulled our clothes together, said a muffled farewell, and each drove off to his respective family.

On the way home I stopped for something Penny wanted in the nearby supermarket. I was still sufficiently drunk that I dropped everything to the floor at least once, and as I knelt to pick things up, I looked at the long aisle, the food products running along the shelves on each side of me, the unforgiving uniform lighting taking definition out of everything in my view, recognizing then a sensation of California that I would read a few years hence in the descriptions of the place by Joan Didion. Unaccountably I heard myself shout out in my brain as though I were Scarlett O’Hara:
As God is my witness, I am going to go to Europe.

Well, someone up there heard me, because on the fifth of August I was on a plane for Athens. Days after my moment in the parking lot five students from my Beginning Greek class asked if I would tutor them through June and July so that they could advance through second year and start the third year in the fall. They were all bright as hell, motivated, each willing to pay me the ten dollars an hour that I asked. At $250 a week for eight weeks, this would give me $2,000, an enormous sum of money in those days. Then another student— indeed, I remembered him well as one of those boys from the Latin class who had gazed ardently at the youth in the tight, tight jeans—asked if I would consider tutoring him in August. When he mentioned that traveling with his father in Europe would prevent his studying with the other five, all I heard was the word “Europe.” Yes, I would tutor him, but we would have our lessons while traveling a month in Greece and a month in Italy. Like every other rich young kid, he had been to those places a million times, but he was happy with the idea of sitting about studying while I viewed the sights, and then having a lesson.

But what about my obligations at home? Our oldest child would celebrate his fifth birthday while I was gone. I encouraged Penny to take the children home to her parents in New Hampshire, but she refused. As a Navy child she had plenty of examples of women left with children while the husband was overseas—her own father during the war, for instance. She insisted that she would be fine. The guilt I feel to this day is mitigated by knowing that, as she confessed later to my daughters, since it was only the lack of money that kept her from walking out, she probably was entirely happy to have a life to herself for two months, to be a parent to her children without Mr. Overbearing Manic around the house.

Imagine being thirty-two years old, taking the first extended vacation since you were fifteen. Imagine having studied intensively the culture and history of ancient Greece and Rome since you were nineteen, having lectured on these subjects for the past seven years, and now you are visiting every major site of these peoples, looking at objects and architecture about which you have an immediate and intuitive understanding. Imagine that the young man with whom you are traveling turns out to be more intelligent than you had imagined, serious about studying the original Greek text of Homer’s
Iliad
and Herodotus’s
Histories
. Imagine spending the cool hours of the morning and the late afternoon visiting sites and museums while spending the midday lying about listening to the young man translate his prepared material and sight-read still further. I have rarely known a student to make such progress in the two months available; such was the agreeable impression made upon me that I can remember these forty-odd years later the passages of Greek that occasioned the most discussion. To this day I will come across marginalia in my
Iliad
text where I have indicated that the idea came from him.

When we first got our hotel room in Athens and were about to take our siesta, each in his underwear across the room from each other in his own bed, almost the first thing out of his mouth was a stammered—what was it? I have to call it a prepared speech—in which he politely rejected anything sexual in the two months ahead. I stifled my disappointment; after all, he was paying the bills, and I was his teacher. Imagine my delight when fifteen minutes later I watched him striding across the room with a tent pole pushing out his shorts. My God, he was so handsome, well built, and bursting with sexual energy. It was almost but not quite a love affair. Certainly it was the most extended, complex, complete physical relationship with another man that I had ever had up to that point. If he was a novice or insecure about many aspects of lovemaking, I was simply lacking in experience, certainly recent experience, so what we were doing each day had a delicious tentative quality, a shared surprise at the pleasure and ecstasy of it all. It was not love because we did not want love with each other; he knew he was not ready for that, and I knew that I was already in enough of a danger zone with my emotions. In every other way it was bliss, not the least being the wicked pleasure every morning of watching the man at the hotel desk react to my young friend’s settling our bill rather than the older fellow he took to be the sugar daddy.

Needless to say, my return to Palo Alto was a shock. The French and Italians have a word for the psychological state; it is called “the reentry,” since it is their custom for the entire country to shut down, so to speak, while everyone takes an extended vacation. For me there was the sheer fright of giving up the young man, returning to all the domestic problems in my relationship with Penny. There was the added guilt that reading Simone de Beauvoir’s
The Second Sex
while overseas brought to me. Being a woman in a patriarchal culture was bad, being the wife of such a demanding person was worse; how could she not be victimized? It made me sick to the stomach and sexually impotent. How could I deal with the guilt of my failure at sex? Did my two impossibly wonderful months with the young man call me home to gayness for once and for always? The months in Greece and Italy made me determined to find a way to spend a year in the Mediterranean lands with my whole family. That would be my redemption. Miraculously enough, it happened. Our departmental secretary showed me a brief mailing that she had tacked onto the office bulletin board. The Archaeological Institute of America announced the Olivia James Traveling Fellowship set up for travel in Greek lands for poets, artists, writers, scholars, anyone with a love of the ancient world.