My Husband and My Wives: A Gay Man's Odyssey (27 page)

My older daughter began dating a fellow student from her college. He was a young Greek Cypriot who came from Khartoum, where his family had been merchants for three generations. On the first date she met him somewhere out in the street, but for the second she agreed that he would come to the front door. It was so amusing, right out of those Hollywood films of the thirties and forties. I opened the door to the young man, we introduced ourselves, I brought him into the living room, where he sat nervously on the very edge of his chair, waiting for my daughter to descend from her bedroom. Our conversation was the usual nonsense between father and suitor, except that I found his Mediterranean good looks most appealing and so was certainly not prepared to barricade the palace, as the traditional jealous father is supposed to do. A month later she asked if she could move in with him in the apartment his father maintained in Athens for his business trips. I hesitated only a bit, enthusiastic, I guess, because of my own fantasies of nights with this young man. Still, I thought that when one is young and sex is so good and the protagonists are both good-looking, kindly, and amusing people, why not? Who knows what is to come? But I took him aside to tell him that he must remember that we were Americans, I would not tolerate my daughter being his servant, as I assumed Greek women generally were. He laughed and reminded me that in Khartoum he had been going to an American school and hanging out with Americans since he was in kindergarten, so he had a pretty good idea of the amount of cleaning and washing and cooking he would be doing. As it was, he had already come to our palace for dinner several times and watched me, the
megálos kathigitís
, the “great professor” (my joke title among friends), cook up and serve.

When winter set in, the tours ended, and it was time for me to teach my seminar on Apollonius’s
Argonautica.
There is no reason to drag my reader through the thicket of exposition and interpretation, but the professor in me wants to say a few words about the poem in order to make a point about my changing attitude toward classical antiquity that began at this point and continued through the next decade. It is, I think, tied to my expanding awareness of what it means to be a gay person. So here follows my little lecture.

There is a variety of styles in ancient Greek literature, of which most moderns will have heard of tragedy, comedy, and epic. The Greeks had a strong sense of tradition and expected each style or genre, as we say, to conform to the convention.
Argonautica
is an epic poem, and the reader could expect a story of a valiant male leader and battles. Epic also traditionally portrays male bonding; think of Achilles and Patroklos, or, going back earlier, Gilgamesh and Enkidu in the Sumerian epic tale. The subordinate figure in each pairing corresponds to the sidekick of our own buddy stories, for instance Batman and Robin, except that in these ancient stories the bond is sundered by the death of the sidekick. Apollonius begins his story with a brief description of the traditional hero Herakles, who is also on board the good ship
Argo
with his boy toy Hylas, whom the poet says Herakles snatched from his father’s farm. Gruff, tough Herakles is the good ol’ boy hero, the pederast hero, an expression of the conservative Greek notion of valor. In the initial scenes of the poem Apollonius sets up beautiful teenage Jason as a counterpart, describing him having sex with Queen Hypsipyle and impregnating her. Enter the new aggressively heterosexual love hero into epic poetry.

Because the story of Jason and his band of Argonauts doing magical battle for the Golden Fleece with the help of the Princess Medea and her subsequent abduction would be known to the reader, the expectation would be that the story would follow the fairy tale pattern of the prince who performs a magic act with the help of an adoring princess and wins the prize—sometimes a treasure, sometimes the maiden herself. Apollonius has radically made Jason a timid and unsure man instead of the bold, decisive hero of tradition; he uses fawning and seduction to get what he wants from Medea, who more than once provides the direction. Half the poem describes the duo traveling after getting the fleece. As the shape of a traveling buddy narrative develops, the ancient reader, who naturally valorized males, would expect to slot Medea into the sidekick role. Well, you can see where this is going. As the poem progresses Jason takes backseat to Medea, the roles are reversed, and the poem delivers a witty shock. I only bring the matter up because I think that my interpretation reflects my own growing awareness of my gay self as opposed to the consciousness with which I wrote my earlier critical works. I began my career writing about the
Iliad
and the
Odyssey,
which feature two self-obsessed, aggressive, brutal, testosterone-charged males. That is the heroic tradition. I would not repudiate what I wrote, but I grew to feel somewhat remote from the ideal of the hero in the form of Achilles or Odysseus, just as in real life I found myself more and more estranged from the Arnold Schwarzenegger type of male, if I may use an example so extreme as to verge on caricature. What interested me in the
Argonautica
was that the narrator had managed to describe Jason, who formally is meant to resemble these earlier figures, in ways that poke fun at him and thus undercut his essential “heroism.” The other intriguing maneuver is the introduction and enlargement of the character of Medea. This reversal is a shock to the epic system, irreverent, and funny. Needless to say, the major Apollonian scholars will have none of it. (As one put it, “We must not laugh at Jason,” to which I say,
Why not? The narrator makes him laughable
.) I am not sure why they oppose this interpretation, although perhaps it is because the reversal I have suggested puts the hegemonic heterosexual epic hero at risk, to use the wonderful blather of postmodern criticism, vulnerable in a significant way to a woman. When you think about it from the historical perspective, there was the
Argonautica
—let’s put it in the last few decades of the third century
B.C.E.
at a time when we are seeing a new emphasis upon the female, as in the emergence of female nude statuary, the new importance of the love goddess Aphrodite—in Egypt, seat of the Ptolemies, a dynasty known for its strong female royals. And, as we know, along comes Cleopatra VII, who certainly ran circles around Julius Caesar and Mark Antony at the end of the first century
B.C.E
. I know, I know, all the professionals are rolling their eyes, but since no one knows anything one way or the other, I prefer to go with this. It’s all in my
Epic and Romance in the “Argonautica” of Apollonius
, published in 1982 by the Southern Illinois University Press.

That year in Athens a variety of friends and relatives took advantage of our great house on the hill to pay a visit, most important of all my former mother-in-law, Mary Pendleton. She was a sweetheart who gave me the money to buy a Volkswagen Golf while we were in Greece (with the proviso that I bring it back and hand it on to Penny upon my return). I had written a couple of times suggesting the idea of a visit, and one day she called from New Hampshire to say that she was on her way. Indomitable, eighty years old, she arrived on her own, and she has from that moment on been an inspiration in my own aging. Within days of her arrival she was prepared to walk across Athens and up to the Acropolis, dressed to the nines in an elegant blue tweed suit with a fur collar, and in her high-top Keds, which my son had once given her as a joke when she was out picking blueberries, but which she knew were perfect for walking across the uneven marble. As she moved briskly past the Parthenon to the other end of the summit, she seemed driven by a special urgency, and I marveled at how the experience of Greece was overwhelming her, when suddenly she cried out, pointing off into the distance. “There it is! There it is!”

“What, Mary?”

“The Hilton, where I stayed last time I was in Athens.”

My daughters and I returned from our year in Athens; they were off to college, I to resume my miserable teaching job. I met the young man who was to become the third Mr. Right in the first years of my bachelorhood. He had been a student several years earlier, someone whose brilliance was as thrilling as his evident eccentricities. He was a first-rate artist, gifted at oil painting particularly; his acting talent was obvious from the many roles he had taken in theater, and was coupled with a masterful manner of theater criticism. But then, his writing in general was always first-rate. All his papers were memorable, but I will never forget the last, if only for the way he brought it to me. He was late with the paper, something I have always been harsh about, yet because of his great gifts, I had been lenient, telling him to bring it by midday following the assigned date. I opened my office door to his knock, and found him holding a cafeteria tray, which he handed me without a word and left. On the tray was a plate surrounded by three milkshakes, one strawberry, one vanilla, one blueberry, obviously a patriotic theme celebrating the coming bicentennial. (It was 1976.) On the plate was a hamburger bun, and inside, folded into the dimensions of an average hamburger patty, was the paper. It was, of course, another extraordinary piece of work.

After the close of the school year, when he learned that I had bought a house in a seashore town near his childhood home, he made a date to meet me at my house on the morning of the Fourth of July. In one of those chronological complexities that novelists tend to avoid, I had spent the night of the third in Cambridge, following the angry quarrel with the young man who had suddenly decided not to move with me to the shore, a night of sleeping fitfully on a mattress, as I have described. If that was not enough, I was due back in Cambridge in the early evening of the Fourth for a grand dinner party celebrating the bicentennial while watching the Boston Esplanade fireworks from a balcony across the Charles. It was the Fourth of July, traffic was light, and I set out to drive to the shore, after assuring myself that indeed my young man would be moving in after spending his day driving train engines around at the station. Tired as I was, I was interested to meet again this strange youngster, to uncover some new facet of the rather peculiar personality who had given me his term paper in a hamburger bun. The meeting, as I might have imagined, had its weirdnesses. He was physically a handsome lad, but he had tics—the most obvious was forever stroking his beard and mustache. There was a certain hesitation in his manner of speaking, although the choice of words showed his vast reading. He could be sullen, as though he were being forced to reveal more than he wished or ought. I had a feeling that he was gay, and that he wanted to reveal this to me. It was a common enough theme of timid young men wanting my confidence. I did not advertise my own sexual preference, naturally; I was a professor, this was 1976, I was only recently divorced, and I was the father of four children. But as the popular culture began to embrace gayness, more people noticed it in themselves at an ever earlier age.

Our meeting was almost as peculiar as the presentation of the paper, although far sadder. He got to the point very soon, although rapidly stroking his facial hair and stammering more than usual. Since his youth, he told me, his father had warned him especially against homosexuality. I thought that this was indeed odd; it is not to my mind a subject that needs bringing up with children, who not only know next to nothing about sexual desire and its manifestation, but at best certainly can only imagine the heterosexual paradigm. The result of this indoctrination, he continued, was that he had a morbid fear of homosexuality, and, what is more, a profound physical aversion at the very idea of homoerotic activity. He circled and approached his destination: for several years he was convinced that he was gay, but he could not even imagine what he would do about it. I told him that if he thought this, then his only chance for any happiness or at least psychological fulfillment was to find a male lover. With many a stammer, he conceded that he had in fact reached this conclusion himself; still, his basic aversion was so powerful that he was unable to act. He looked over at me, then asked if I myself was not capable of sex with males. Not that he was implying that I was homosexual, he quickly added, no, what it was he wished to know was whether I could act out something physical with another male. It was so strange a conversation, the two of us in the bright July sun at the seaside. Finally I could not tolerate the tension and indirection. I told him that I wanted to get naked with him in bed; with an enormous sigh of relief he silently followed me upstairs and into my bedroom. There ensued a painful half hour of fumbling and groping. Clearly enough he was excited, ready to reach out and hold me, willing to accept my physical gestures designed to arouse and satisfy him. He was lavish with his kissing, but he maintained himself rigid as a scientist might who was in a lab coat ready with his pen to note down data. At last I was the only one to reach an orgasm, after which we moved apart, got up, washed ourselves, and he took his leave after first shaking my hand and thanking me with complete seriousness.

So there upon my return from Athens was the future third Mr. Right in my local deli. At his announcement that he had recently moved to Cambridge, I invited him to dinner. He arrived washed, combed, and dressed as though he had made a definite effort to showcase how attractive he was, so I wondered what he had in mind besides food and conversation. Of course, we made it to bed later in the evening. This was the first of many nights together, frustrating, sad episodes in which he tried to satisfy his painful erection but was seriously inhibited. We kept at it, however, I selfishly pleasuring myself mightily the entire time, until finally, maybe the whole of a month later, he did achieve an orgasm. One hears all the time of women being so inhibited, but I did not imagine that the more or less automatic reaction of a male to stimulation could be so blocked. I have since learned that an orgasm requires the cooperation of the brain and the penis. Here was a young man whose father had initially made him demented, brainwashing him with those strange injunctions. That first night of success his spasms were so grand that at first I was afraid for him, then almost cried myself as I watched him sobbing with joy and relief.