My Husband and My Wives: A Gay Man's Odyssey (24 page)

The plane crash was certainly the image for our reunion. The first knotty problem was Penny’s lover, who was very much determined to remain on the scene. He was a man in his forties with whom Penny had had dealings as a client of her firm, who promptly complained of marital boredom and moved into her bed while nominally remaining husband-in-residence for his wife. He took to coming over, and as he was a pleasant enough, if dull fellow, I would invite him to dinner. A major problem was his wife, who evidently went berserk when he stayed out all night. She was enough aware of the situation that she knew Penny’s name, and, I guess, that she lived at home again. More than once, just when I was busy turning out breakfast treats for my children, I would get these frantic calls from her wanting to know where the guilty twosome was, and I would have to say I did not know and did not care, for which response I was treated to a shrill tirade on the perversity of a male who did not want to track his spouse. Oy!, as we used to say in Brookline. He was good with his hands, and I well remember him one evening resewing all the big leather buttons on my leather greatcoat, no small feat of manual dexterity. One evening as he sat waiting for Penny to return from work he hesitantly explored with me the possibility of his moving in with us, living together with Penny in her bedroom, and otherwise appearing as a roomer in the household. It would all be quite discreet, he claimed, because we had our suite of rooms on the floor above the children. I told him that I would find it impossibly frustrating because I found him sexually attractive, and such an arrangement would only work if he were to sleep with me as well from time to time. This man was as conventional as you could get, so I was surprised that he would even listen to such a suggestion, but he did, and he pondered, and then he said that he would have to try it out. Of course, I had quite forgotten my wife’s competitive streak. When he told her what we had discussed, she went into a frenzy of rage, so that was the end of that scheme and almost the end of the poor guy’s relationship with her.

Penny in the fifteen or sixteen years of our marriage had always been repressed, demonstrative and overtly angry only when she had had enough to drink. Suddenly now that she was back in the house she grew openly sarcastic, frequently nasty. What bothered me was that she would lash out at me in front of the children. We had almost never before displayed animosity in front of them. This was a worrisome and ugly turn that I did not know how to stop or control. It is sad too that the memory of us as a couple the children retain is this ugly one based on these last two years, which is really only a small fraction of our married life. Someone might say that the fundamental truth of the emotion of that final period was so compelling that everything else was naturally blotted out, yet I have to remember that when directly after my return from Rome we told the children that we planned to separate they were astounded, unable to imagine that we were even in disagreement, let alone marital shambles. Years later I decided that what made this mild-mannered, repressed, and basically decent woman behave that way was a fierce determination not to be, as she would see it, bullied by my over-the-top personality, cheerfulness, feigned or real, and relentless verbosity. She had had enough of that, no more Charlie center stage all the time. I have always thought it is a telling insight into her competitiveness that after her terrible accident she pursued a relationship with the man who had been with her in the wreck. He was a high school friend of mine, one of those many athletes with whom I’d both had sex and double-dated, who by chance had a business appointment in the Boston area, which was what brought him to our house for dinner and a chance to meet again as middle-aged men. Naturally, nothing was said, but I would imagine Penny intuited readily enough his and my relationship. He told me years later that Penny was determined to have a relationship with him—God knows he was a gorgeous wreck of his younger self—and more than once flew to the city where he lived to meet. He was clearly puzzled that he should be so attractive to her, but I am sure that the lure was that he had been with me so many times as a teenager.

The continuing furor of our lives led me to suggest finally that we go to a marriage counselor. If asking Penny to move back home had been a mistake, this was certainly a very positive idea. Penny and I went to a therapist every Monday for two hours over the next two years. He had said at the beginning that while he hoped to be impartial, he was disposed to keeping a marriage together rather than see its dissolution. I thought him remarkably fair, Penny thought he was biased toward the male. I loved it that there was a third party to hear our replies to each other’s questions, and who was able to note more or less objectively when we were openly contradicting previous assertions, or even in the same session suddenly adopting opposite views. I was frightened to discover how angry Penny was, because I never felt that deep anger before, awed that her anger had been there and I was oblivious, guilty about how she felt I had undermined her, had betrayed her in the deepest emotional way. I thought I had been true to her in whatever way I could. I was always there, I was devoted to the family, to the household; my heart was in my home. She could never forgive me my sexual proclivities. I did not consider that negotiable. It was a given of me from the day we met. She blamed it for my loss of sexual interest in her, even though she was surrounded by middle-aged men who confided to her the same situation in their homes. She was in fact having an affair with a man her age who both could not leave his wife and could not stand her anymore. In the last six months of the second year of counseling she began to repeat herself frequently with the statement that I had “ruined” her life, and that I “must therefore pay.” At last I said, “For the sake of argument, all right, I have ruined your life. Now it is ruined, it cannot be unruined, so what am I to do?” “You must pay,” was all she could say, again and again. The awful truth was that she loved me, loved me in a way that I did not, could not, never had loved her, that she loved me at the beginning, and that her love went on even when she found the strength to feel contempt for me. When her mother said to me after we were divorced, “You took your laughter away,” she was talking of something else whether she understood or not.

In the end I think Penny and I both paid with that dreadful inky black all-enveloping cloud of failure that covered us whenever we had to think of our shared past. The therapy eventually ran its course, when the doctor said to us, “I always vote for marriage and against divorce. But, I am sad to say, I don’t think this marriage can be saved.” The sense of failure was crushing, but somehow it was as though a priest had given us absolution, even perhaps his benediction.
Go forth, my son and daughter, and find lives for yourselves.
I went down to a little seaside town south of Boston and bought an old ramshackle house where I could get away from whatever the house in Brookline held for us. It was 1975. I was forty-five, Penny was forty-four, our children were eighteen, seventeen, fifteen, and fourteen. As we were packing up the house for our separate moves, she held up a mah-jongg set her mother had brought back from China and said with a shy and wistful little smile, “I suppose when we’re old we’ll end up playing mah-jongg together.” Whenever we met in later years, when finally we were civil and sensitive to one another, there was always that feeling of peering out across the wreckage of the crashed aircraft to see dimly that, yes, there was another survivor sitting there, dazed but still alive.

The end of our marriage proved to be good for Penny. When she was fifty she met a handsome virile man of thirty-two who was so smitten with her that he could not leave her side, despite her insistence that he keep some distance, since once snared she would never again be entrapped in marriage. She was eventually the first woman to become an associate of a major Boston architectural firm; at her memorial service a young woman from that place described most fondly her mentoring of the junior females employed there. It was then I learned from another speaker of her strenuous efforts to promote female faculty at the aggressively and notoriously sexist Harvard University.

SIX

AND THEN I WAS GAY

Detail of the fresco from the so-called Tomb of the Diver, Paestum, Italy, circa 470
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A common motif of ancient Greek art was the symposium scene in which an older (bearded) male reclines next to a youth (beardless) on the banquet couch and engages him in flirtatious erotic banter. The Greeks of the classical period much valued the amatory relationship between men and boys in their late teens, which they considered to be a cornerstone of a cohesive society and the basis of a strong military posture.
(Rita Willaert)

Within a year Penny and I had divorced and sold the house. She moved with the girls to an apartment in Brookline and they continued to go to Brookline High School. The older boy, who had rejected college and gone to work in a restaurant, moved to Canada, where the children had once gone to a summer camp, and in a short time married the daughter of the owners, resuming a teenage crush on a serious basis. In a few years he had landed-immigrant status and had become a father. His brother followed in his footsteps in abandoning education and going into the restaurant business, but in his case the marvelous instinct for cooking led him through a chain of experience eventually into the kitchen of the Ritz-Carlton as a first step to a career as a chef. The girls went off with me to Athens for the school year 1978–79. I was delighted to have this one year with them when I could create a semblance of a family again. I liked there to be people around, having grown up in a house with ten or more wandering about. Apparently I had begun to experience the empty nest syndrome, unless that is nothing more than a journalist’s invention.

After cooking meals and running a household for several years, I was alone, and I noticed it. With my share of the sale of the Brookline house, I contributed, as the court demanded, to a fund for my children’s education, and kept out enough to make a down payment on a two-family house in Cambridge. Penny and I had such a different attitude toward real estate. She was the heir to an ancestral farm of many hundreds of acres, but had spent her childhood living in rented rooms as her father moved the family from one Navy base to another. The war years sent her and her family into an exaggerated spin of dwellings, until finally she found root in a boarding school, and then in her dormitory room at Radcliffe, and finally in the apartment building where Mary and I lived on the top floor. When I met her she had never cooked a meal in her life. Domestic life, housekeeping, these were not skills she learned at home. When we divorced she lived in rented rooms for the rest of her life. I, on the other hand, who had grown up in a large and comfortable house, living at the same address until I was sixteen, yearned for that permanence again. I thought it would be the great house in Brookline, and well remember the day I left it forever with the real estate agent, who held my hand as I sat in her car sobbing.

My return to Cambridge was inevitable. I was single. I was hungry for emotion and sex. I wanted males. I wanted the sophistication of Cambridge. But I also remembered a life there with Mary and with Penny, and my memory told me we were young and jolly. I wanted that back again. The two-family house I bought was traditional for the neighborhood, with one apartment upstairs and one below. My neighbors in the other two-family houses were all elderly Irish Catholic working people, who nodded but were not overly friendly. I did not present myself as gay, and when young men lived with me, local storekeepers would sometimes refer to them quite innocently as nephews. At other times the front bedroom in my new house was inhabited by various children at different stages of their growing up into adulthood, my second son before he joined a group of friends to rent out a giant apartment, my younger daughter when she needed a place to stay on vacation when she went off to college.

I kept a low profile, and on one occasion was ingenious in protecting my image. An old acquaintance from graduate school days, more recently in my life when I was a visiting professor at Vassar, had suffered a stroke that left him slightly demented from the medication he was taking. I made the great mistake of telling him to drop by if ever he came to Cambridge, and weeks later he arrived to stay for a week, not at all what I’d had in mind. He was an enormously fat, chain-smoking alcoholic of incredible genius and with the hideous ill temper that often accompanies such gifts. He had recently decided that he was gay, and was making a great drama of coming out. This consisted largely in discovering gay Irish drinking songs, which, since he himself claimed Irish blood, was to be part of his new character. I did not allow smoking in my house, so he sat on my upstairs porch drinking and smoking most of the day while tossing the butts down to the sidewalk below. As he smoked and drank he bellowed out a tune off-key, the main refrain of which was repeated again and again: “I’m a-goin’ to suck your cock, my boy.” I kept hoping he was not audible from the street but discovered one day as I was sweeping up the butts that you could hear him loud and clear, and as I was making this discovery along came one of my formidable, stout old lady neighbors, who was looking up sternly in disbelief at the source of the sound on my balcony. I had the presence of mind to say quickly, “My friend, Father O’Neill, I had to remove him from his parish, poor old fellow,” shaking my head and lowering my eyes in sadness, to which my good neighbor replied passionately as she squeezed my arm, “Oh, Lord, Mr. Beye, you are a saint.”