My Husband and My Wives: A Gay Man's Odyssey (17 page)

Young people nowadays will say to me, “Four children! And so close together! How did you do it?” Well, we drank a lot, for one thing, and then we gave up a lot for them. We were grim, or grimmer than we need have been; eventually the two of us stopped talking to each other when we were alone—what could have been said would not have contributed joy, so silence was the more honorable option. One night not too long ago my husband, Richard, and I set out to watch Leonardo DiCaprio and Kate Winslet in
Revolutionary Road
, and even before the film had reached its halfway point I told him to turn it off. I was almost physically ill with the revulsion that my memory induced. Ah, Penny, it was all so wonderful at the beginning, and then it wasn’t. I suppose if we could have kept up the intense sexuality that brought us together, if we had not become tired, me too tired to perform, if we had not become bored with each other, become two slightly tight drabs who managed the house … if, if, if.… In February 1966 we were with Ted Doyle at the San Francisco airport to see him off on his eight-month sabbatical leave (from which he was not destined to return alive). By this time he had been my colleague at Yale, and later at Stanford, and become father, brother, father confessor, uncle, to ourselves and the children. Now he looked us in the eye, kissed us both, and said so gently and sadly, “Be nice to each other.” His very last words to us.

Domestic life was a list of chores and obligations never quite satisfied. All the time I would remember the sexual life of my teens as though it had happened to another person, seen through a scrim, except when I focused precisely for a masturbatory moment. Our move to Woodbridge, Connecticut, put me on a country lane miles from the university and New Haven, miles away from men on the street. Yale itself was my first experience of an all-male institution since Andover. It was like a high-class locker room, with all its jostling and joking, farting and belching, a place I had never inhabited, although it engaged my erotic imagination. I was initially put off by the dramatic change from my previous teaching position; I was inherently more comfortable talking to the girls.

For the most part the men were amiable, good-looking, well-to-do WASPs. They ran the gamut from specimens resembling the Winklevoss twins to stumblers like G. W. Bush. Clearly Admissions had one criterion: blond gentile. A great number were there because it was the thing to do. I remember talking with a mother who came to consult about her son’s academic failures, a woman who in gesture and looks bore an eerie resemblance to Carole Lombard, who complained to me with a languid and glamorous sigh, “Well, can’t he buy his way through Yale like his father did?” This question shocked me, but was answered, so to speak, by another student who was in danger of failing, who came to me weeks before the final to say that his father wanted me to tutor him so he could pass and was prepared to offer me something like a thousand dollars for the effort. That was a stupendous sum in those days and in my naïveté I could only try to explain to the youngster that I could not conceivably do a tutoring job in so short a time that would warrant the fee, not recognizing until years later that it was a bribe he was offering me.

The boys were sexually attractive, of course, but I was not reacting, until one young fellow so shocked and angered me that I did the unpardonable—had sex with him. Slightly older, he enrolled in Beginning Greek as a requirement for the Episcopal ministry. He was such a stereotypical Episcopalian I could barely repress a laugh: tall, good-looking, preppy, the jaw jutting out ambitiously under slim lips set in a line, the silver-blue eyes with their earnest gaze, the marbles-in-the-mouth Upper East Side way of talking, masculine gentility at its very best. Shortly into the semester he was floundering badly; no extra effort on my part seemed to rouse him to work harder. One evening he invited me around to his club for a drink, where he explained that worry over his diabetic girlfriend had put him off track. The thought of my late wife, whose diabetes surely shortened her life, brought on a whiskey-fueled sympathy. I said I would give him a pass and expect him to make good in the second semester.

But then his effort registered even less, he grew more nonchalant, the girlfriend had disappeared from the scene. I went from puzzled to angry. He must have learned that the “diabetes” angle would get to me. By the end of the term I had stopped being friendly whenever I encountered him. But he was no dummy; his solution was to bring me back to his club “to talk over the situation.” Why did I go? That is the question. How complicit was I in what ensued? I like to think it was because I always hope for the best with students even when their failure is obvious. This time he had another tack, in retrospect I would say something dimly erotic. We sat in a small darkened side room, me in a chair, he perched on a kind of counter, squatting, as soldiers often do, a pose that brought his crotch, very visible and foregrounded by the spread of his thighs, into my direct line of vision. He was ratcheting up the operatics, confessing a kind of desperation, that his “hopes” would soon be “nothing more than laughable dreams” when he failed my course. Since antiquity young handsome males have played their looks to their advantage with their elders, in some cultures with more awareness than others. The fakery of his language, his pose, his careless obviousness—everything said contempt.

As I think back on it, he was doing Marlene Dietrich to my Emil Jannings. He was so sure of himself, sure that he could provoke precisely the response he wanted from me, that is, another sentimental surrender to his need for a passing grade. Suddenly I had to strike back, and probably because I was drunk and horny I impulsively said harshly and coldly to the widespread thighs before me, “I’ll pass you in the course if I can give you a blow job.” He sucked in his breath as though he had been hit, looked me in the eye warily, a boxer ready to ward off any blow that was about to descend upon him. I am sure that this was not what he was bargaining for. There was a long silence, during which time I had a pang of fear: Had I gone too far? Then he said:

“Okay, come over to my room. I live off campus.”

He gave me the address. I told him I would be there midmorning next day, and fled away. The next fifteen or so hours were an agony. It was the first great moral crisis of my teaching career (leave aside the dynamics of my marriage); the guilt was overwhelming, paralyzing me. Still, in the sober cold light of next morning’s day as I started to drive into New Haven, only the lust and contempt remained. But when he opened the door to me, freshly showered, immaculate, standing tall, smiling politely, the very model of a young cleric, I quailed at what I had said to him. As we stood facing each other in the living room, I suddenly burst out, “I can’t do this, I shouldn’t be here.” But I was rooted to the spot; I couldn’t bring myself to leave. “Oh, god, what should I do?” He smiled and suddenly cut short my anguished waffling.

“Look! You work it out, okay? I am going to take my midmorning pee.” He was slowly unzipping his khakis as he spoke, turning abruptly toward the bathroom. Without shutting the door, he began to urinate, I could hear him at it. His obviousness enraged me all over again.

“Okay, we’re going to do it,” I shouted out angrily. He emerged and gestured with his head to the bedroom door. What began as an act of humiliation and revenge changed its character when I got next to this gorgeous body lying naked on the bed. The experience filled me with a profound sense of well-being and joy. Indeed, I was shocked at how truly wonderful I suddenly felt. Years later when I was teaching at Boston University, a student from one of those exclusive suburbs on Long Island or from Connecticut told me that she had taken my course because a family friend had once been my student at Yale and said I was a “brilliant” teacher. And it was he. Had he ever learned Greek, I wondered, at least enough to read the New Testament? Wasn’t that required of all the Divinity School candidates? Or did the passing grade from me give him certification? “Do you remember him at all?” she inquired. “He’s such a great guy. I babysit for them all the time.”

Yale in those days was an old boys’ club into which I was pleased to see that I could fit. The very manner in which I was hired has always amused and gratified me. At the December 1956 Philadelphia meeting of the American Philological Association, Professor Dow had invited me to join his group for dinner at the famous, and expensive, Bookbinders Restaurant in the city, an event charged with hidden significance, since Dow was much too cheap to frequent such places ordinarily. In addition to three or four of his students, Dow had invited Frank Brown, who, as I have mentioned, was the chair of the Yale Classics Department. Fifty years ago when the old-boy network controlled the job process there was no neutral mechanism for those offering jobs and those seeking them. Opportunities were not posted on a public list; young people entering the field had no means for making themselves known other than what their mentors could do for them. Precious little, as you can imagine, for women or Jews or those from obscure institutions. The young men seated at the table in Bookbinders were in a very enviable position, yet as usual I was too naïve to understand this. When I slipped into a seat at the table I did not understand that Dow was setting up a certain one of these students to make himself extremely presentable to Professor Brown, since, as was known to some though not to me, there was an opening at Yale. As it happened, I innocently took a seat next to Brown at the circular table, I am sure to Dow’s consternation, for, as I figured out subsequently, Dow had invited me and some of the others only as filler material so that his candidate intended for Brown’s attention would not be too obvious. It was the same ploy one uses when planning to get a man and woman interested in one another.

Anyone would imagine that I sat next to Brown because I was ambitious, but in fact I was pretty ignorant of academic politics in those days. He did not wear the customary identifying name tag attached to his lapel, which only convention nerds wore in the evening. When I began by asking Brown who he was and where he taught, I sensed a frisson among the other young men, all of whom knew exactly. But it charmed Brown, clearly enough, as did our subsequent argument over the virtues of city and country life; the persiflage we aimed at each other was sharp and peppery, all style and very little substance. The following week I was surprised to receive a note from Brown inviting me to present myself as a candidate for the opening at Yale. Thunderstruck, and very pleasantly surprised, I consulted with Dow, who predictably encouraged me to stay put at Wheaton. My parents-in-law, however, strongly urged me to consider New Haven. The Admiral had finished his career as naval commandant at Yale, and they had made a great circle of friends in the four years they had been there. I went down, made some kind of agreeable impression (I loved it that the classics faculty was startled to discover that so modest a fellow was staying at the posh, posh New Haven Lawn Club, not knowing that my parents-in-law had reserved rooms for me), was offered the job, and so was hired. And I entered the group of eleven young male junior faculty as Brown’s favorite. That automatically disqualified me for attention from the reigning expert on matters literary, the eminent Bernard Knox, who could not stand Brown, as I was told in later years. I have always felt that, more to the point, Knox could not tolerate even the slightest whiff of the pouf, he was so much of the mind-set of the men who fought as he had with the Republican Army in Spain. His classical antiquity, his writing on epic and tragedy, demonstrate a rugged, romantically male view of things—irony was not his thing.

Ted Doyle, who had joined the faculty a year before me, became my closest friend and ally. He was an acute student of the politics and personalities of the department as well as of the major university figures; he was my refresher course in academic maneuvering, which, of course, I first learned from overhearing my mother, the paradigm busybody, gossipy “faculty widow,” but without her bitterness and with his own marvelous deep, deep cynicism. The boys called him Uncle Teddy Boo, and he was indeed the quintessential uncle, coming out for dinner, bouncing the boys on his knee, gently mediating in moments of household Sturm und Drang. Curiously enough, he gave me a key to his apartment in New Haven with the remark that I might want to take a nap someday. I did in fact once take someone there for a sexual matinee, which, as I realized only years later, was probably his purpose for the loan of the key. He left Yale because he had not finished his dissertation by the specified deadline, and took himself and his new PhD to Stanford, where he convinced me to follow in 1960.

In my third and last year at Yale I agreed to an informal tutorial in Homer at the request of an exceedingly bright undergraduate. When a colleague in the Russian Department asked if he could join us, offering his rooms as a meeting place along with a bottle of sherry, we became a seminar of sorts. A half century later I vividly remember the hours of our meetings, as does the young student, who rose to be one of the truly eminent classicists of the late twentieth century. Those tutorials with him were inspiration enough that I was able to write
The “Iliad,” the “Odyssey,” and the Epic Tradition
for Doubleday in 1965 from the notes I began then and refined over the next few years. It was like the paper on Euripides’
Alcestis
that came out of my preparations for bright students in a senior seminar at Harvard: my best writing and thinking are always in dialogue with students. I cannot imagine what it means when a colleague says, “I am a scholar, not a teacher.”

In my last term at Yale I cracked up. One night I laid myself down onto the country lane before our house and wouldn’t get up until Penny called a psychologist friend, who came to take me for a voluntary admission to the psychiatric wing of Grace–New Haven Hospital for two weeks’ stay as a patient with the privilege of leaving in the daytime to teach my courses. The immediate provocation was my drunken groping of a student departing the dinner party we had just given graduating majors in classics. He politely and tactfully rejected my advances as I walked him to his car, but it was the contempt I registered that provoked my despair. Sixty years later I can see the scene, hear the gentle, muted disgust in his “Don’t.”