Self-Made Man (18 page)

I became part of that scheme.

Vergil used to call me to him in church like a dog. Depending on the day and who did or didn't show up for prayers, I'd sometimes sit a seat or two away from him in our row. Once the service had started and he'd seen that the seats between us were going to remain empty, without looking up from his hymnal, he'd motion me to his side with a curt hand gesture that meant “come.” And like a trained subservient, I did come. I'd flip my book open to the right page and he'd point his index finger, again without looking at me, at the right place in the prayer. This was pro forma. I was the pupil, he the master, and in this respect our relationship had a satisfying sharpness to it, clean and by the numbers.

I lost myself a little in this ritual, or Ned did. I can't be sure which or to what extent. I know that Norah flew into her friendship with Vergil—someone who seemed to present a full complement of emotional, intellectual and spiritual stimulation. And flight is not the wrong word. Women often do fly into new friendships with abandon, touching all the points of contact like bells on a tree. Men don't. Especially with other men. And that is where Vergil and I clashed, though I say this with the benefit of hindsight.

In the moment, I simply enjoyed the care that Vergil took with me in services, even if it was his command and my following, because as much as he did it with all his martial affect, he also did it with unfailing kindness and a genuine desire to include me. Standing beside him, close enough to smell his breath, which always smelled of Listerine or Altoids, mixing my voice with his, I smiled to myself out of sheer affection. But among men, especially among men who live together under vows of chastity, where the fear of sexual desire is ubiquitous and powerful, and the boundaries of intimacy strictly drawn at a barge pole's distance, girlish crushes and even pseudo-Platonic exuberances are definitely not okay.

 

“You're falling in love with him,” said Father Jerome.

“Oh, I am not,” I said. “It's not like that.”

“Yes, you are,” he said, “and it is.”

Father Jerome spoke with the voice of experience. He claimed he'd seen this many times before. From the moment I'd met Father Jerome and heard his stereotypically lilting voice, I'd assumed he was gay—by orientation, not in practice—and out to himself, if not by dint of the obvious, out to everyone else as well. That was one of the reasons I'd befriended him.

He was fifty, but looked ten years younger. He was a little on the plump side, with a rounded, acne-scarred face. He had a blindingly white smile with large perfect teeth, which he told me he'd had bleached by his dentist. He was a transfer from a parish somewhere up north, homeless at present, and shacking up at the abbey, perhaps hoping to stay for the duration if they voted him in after a trial period. He had been there for only a week when I arrived, so he didn't know the place much better than I did. He certainly wasn't an insider.

I hopped a ride with him to town on my third day, hoping to be mostly honest about myself with at least one person in the abbey, someone who I thought might have some perspective on the place. I could let my guard down with him, I thought. He was loose and easy. He had the generic gay sense of humor, catty hilarity. We understood each other in that. So much so, that I'd felt comfortable enough to mention it.

“I like you, Father Jerome,” I said.

“Why's that?” he asked.

“Oh, I don't know, you make me laugh.”

“No. Be honest,” he urged. “Why?”

He was fishing.

“Oh,” I hesitated. “I don't think I can be quite that honest, can I?”

“Sure you can. Nothing you could say would bother me.”

“Hmm. Are you sure?” He seemed to know what I was going to say and was encouraging me to say it. It was the kind of dance I'd done with gay people before. You sense you're in the presence of another gay person, but you don't always want to be the first one to say it, in case you're wrong or in case they're not out even to themselves.

“Of course,” he said. “Tell me.”

“Okay,” I said, taking the leap. “Because you're such a queen.”

He looked surprised.

“What's a queen?” he said.

“Oh, come on,” I balked. “You don't know what a queen is?”

“No. What is it?”

I was caught here. No escape in sight. “Well, you know,” I said slowly, “an effeminate gay man.”

I pronounced the words “effeminate” and “gay” haltingly, trying to soften the blow. Could he possibly not know he was gay? Or was it just the terminology he hadn't heard before?

“You think I'm effeminate?” he squeaked in horror.

“Uh, yeah, kind of.”

“You mean like in
The Birdcage
?”

“Well,” I answered, “that was a little exaggerated. I'd say Robin Williams more than Nathan Lane. Lane was a screaming queen. I'd say you're just a queen.”

“Stop saying that,” he snapped. “I hate that word.”

“I'm sorry,” I said. “I've insulted you. Forget I said anything, really. I thought you knew.”

“No. No,” he recovered. “You haven't insulted me.”

There was a heavy silence, then he blurted suddenly, “So you think I'm gay?”

“I know you're gay,” I said. “Or let's just say I'd bet odds on it.”

“But
how
do you know?”

“Well,” I said gingerly, “here's another term for you. ‘Gaydar.' Have you heard of that?”

“No.”

“Well, it sort of means it takes one to know one.”

“So
you're
gay. You've been with men.” His interest was really piqued now.

“Uh, yeah,” I said, scrambling. “I've been with men. And women, too. More women than men.”

He leapt on this. He asked me more about it. What it was like, what did I do sexually with men and why. He spouted the usual abomination line from Leviticus, and added that he thought gay sex was disgusting. He'd been horrified by what he'd seen of it. Yet he was clearly fascinated by it. He'd researched it thoroughly on the Internet, he said, finding the most appalling Web sites. He'd even watched a few episodes of Showtime's gay dramatic series
Queer as Folk,
all purely in rubbernecking horror, you understand, not out of prurient interest.

I asked him about his sexual history, too.

He told me that he was a virgin. He'd entered the religious life at twenty and effectively killed his sexuality there. I didn't know whether to believe that or not, though the few other monks to whom I spoke openly about their sexuality had said something similar. The majority of them had joined the order very young, in their late teens or early twenties, and some, perhaps most, had done so without having had any sexual experiences at all. A couple of them, including Father Jerome, spoke of the inevitable wet dreams and involuntary erections that accompanied puberty, but they did so sketchily and bemusedly, as of something experienced long, long ago and now barely recalled. One of them said simply, “I'm not interested in sex.” He looked very uncomfortable when he said it. The very idea of bodies commingling made him squirm in his seat, as if it were calling up a bad memory.

Vergil, by contrast, had been characteristically funny on the subject, saying: “There's suppression and then there's repression. Let's see now. I'm trying to remember, which one is the bad one? Oh, yes. Repression. That's when you say, ‘I don't have a penis.' That doesn't work. Then there's suppression, which is when you say, ‘Down, boy!'”

Not everyone had such a clear perspective on the matter, but then, unlike Vergil, many of them hadn't lived much of a separate life outside the cloister.

Either way it must have taken superhuman effort or pathological powers of denial for these men to counteract such a strong biological drive. At least Vergil had had the good sense to see that arriving at a chaste existence in this manner, by preemptive force, wasn't likely to work. He'd gone out into the world and, as he'd said, “had a really good time,” and at the end of it all, when he'd reached the bottom of the fun, he'd realized that pure sex wasn't what he wanted. He'd seen that, like the world's counterparts to poverty and obedience—material possessions and limitless freedoms—lust had left him feeling empty and insatiable.

Wanton sex wasn't some eschewed evil for him. It was more like a dish once devoured, found wanting and now passed over, not without occasional pangs, but with a kind of earned laxity. Still, Vergil had serious issues with control, and as Ned would learn, that was still part of the sexual and emotional package and probably always would be, partly because Vergil was just Vergil, but mainly because Vergil had chosen to rejoin a community of men that was all about control, self and otherwise. That's what chastity and obedience meant in the abbey. Nobody there was practicing nonattachment. They were doing it the Western way, discipline, stone cold.

Father Jerome was a classic example. On our trip to town I had come around to telling him about my friendship with Vergil, and that's when, like an old pro, he'd said, “You're falling in love with him.” But how did he know? How could he really know if he wasn't recognizing in me feelings he'd had himself?

“I don't know,” I'd conceded at last. “Maybe I am.”

I honestly didn't know. Feelings got strange in that place, isolated from the neat perspectives of the outside world. I suppose if Ned had really been a boy, any moderately observant person would have been right to assume that he was as gay as a parade and having impure thoughts about Brother Vergil. In comportment, I wasn't bothering to be very butch. I was being me, though purposely less demonstrative than I would have been as myself.

Still, even toned down, as a man, my hallmark female behaviors, my emotive temperament and even my word choice read as gay, or at the very least odd. Jerome, eager to dispel conjecture about his own sexuality, was quick to jump on these cues and stomp them with all the force of his own self-hatred.

In his presence I made the mistake once of referring to one of the other monks as cute—the kind of thing that women say all the time about sweet elderly gentleman like the one to whom I was referring. He was in his nineties, and succumbing to Alzheimer's. Every time you saw him he'd put his hand on your arm, smile at you in the most beatific way and say, “Bless you.” I found it very touching. Though uninventive, “cute” was the word that came to mind over lunch that day, and puppy mush-mush the tone that came with it. But as soon as the offending remark was out of my mouth, Father Jerome pounced on it, sneering.

“He's not cute. You don't call other men cute.”

I made similar mistakes in front of the other monks. One night at dinner I goofed hugely when I told Father Richard the Tall that he looked very good for his age. He did. I couldn't believe he was eighty. As soon as the remark came out of my mouth, everyone at the table stopped eating mid-forkful and looked at me as if I had three heads. Father Richard the Tall said a very suspicious, squint-eyed “thank you,” and looked away, clearly embarrassed.

But the implication from other quarters was clear: “What the hell's wrong with you, kid? Don't you know that properly socialized males don't behave that way with each other?”

Naturally, I didn't, and I was going to get a bigger lesson in that sooner than I knew. I was going to have to learn, as I suspect most boys do by the time they reach puberty, not to be such a Nancy. This was something I had observed, though not yet thoroughly experienced.

I had seen the same thing happening with Bob's son Alex at the bowling alley. By all accounts Alex was a sissy, a mama's boy who needed toughening up. Everybody kicked him around a bit emotionally for that purpose, pushing him off with a sharp remark when he came to us in tears over losing his ball in the alley machinery, or getting gypped out of a game by the desk clerk.

“Don't be such a baby,” Bob would say. “Jesus. Go and get your money back. Or do I have to do it for you?”

In the same spirit, Jim had once had Alex put his hand on the table and hold it there as long as he could while he thwacked his knuckles repeatedly with a plastic ruler. Alex endured it as long as he could, grimacing, but determined not to fail the test. It was all done in jest, and Jim didn't seriously hurt Alex, nor did he intend to. The ruler wasn't that rigid. But the spirit of the thing was there, and the message clear. Thicken your skin, boy.

And so it was for Ned, though the process was far less overt.

It wasn't just the sexual tension of Ned's presumed gayness, and his awkwardly expressed attachment to Vergil, but his seeming ignorance of masculine boundaries.

To some of them I think it became clear fairly quickly that I was the weak man in the platoon, the guy you'd have to break in basic before he got to the front lines and put everyone's life in danger. I didn't understand this dynamic at first. I certainly hadn't expected it in of all places a monastery.