My Husband and My Wives: A Gay Man's Odyssey (32 page)

My sixtieth birthday in Paris with Richard, ah, well, it was a dream. He had arranged by letter from the United States a dinner in the three-star restaurant of Michel Rostang, ending in a trolley brought out from the kitchen with a cake on the side of which was written in chocolate
Bon Anniversaire, Charlie.
Sophisticated Parisians in the restaurant collectively drew in a breath of joy, witnessing this sixty-year-old male treated to the loving attention of his beau. Richard was so handsome, gallant, and charming, and I was besotted. At our hotel, when the young man at the front desk asked if everything was all right, I had the temerity to say that as a rule I found the French difficult, but not on this visit, to which he replied with a smile, “You and Monsieur give off such an aura of happiness, how could we in this hotel not respond?” To which I must append that as we sat on a bench at the edge of the Seine and embraced with a long kiss we suddenly heard loud applause, only to discover that we had an enthusiastic audience on the decks of one of the Bateaux Mouches passing by. At Richard’s suggestion we had already gone to rural British Columbia to see my older son perform as Lord Evelyn Oakleigh; in the summer we would set out on a three-thousand-mile drive across the United States, giving Richard a chance to meet up with my past, and before that we went to London for the wedding of Natasha and her beau, our dear friends who had brought us together. To my mind one of the great tests of true love—whatever that word is supposed to mean—is the ease with which the lovers travel together, and over the years we have tested ourselves with high passing grades again and again, from Saint Petersburg to Tokyo.

The details of our twenty-odd years together, which are endlessly fascinating to us both, can easily make our auditors’ eyes glaze over in the telling and retelling. The most significant is certainly the struggle from the beginning for two alpha males to live together in harmony. Richard still laughs over my disinclination to cede him space for his toiletries in my master bedroom bathroom in Cambridge. To this day we both pull out the grocery list when we are off to the market, and until a few years ago there was always a tussle over who would drive. They talk about Ginger Rogers dancing backward in high heels. With alpha males we are dealing with two Fred Astaires. I remember years ago complaining to my children that Richard was a very “controlling, overbearing person” and all four of them hooting, “And you aren’t?” After our flight back from Paris in March when he first slept over in my bed in Cambridge, he ran his hand over the sheets and asked when they had last been washed, to which I replied, “Oh, I don’t know, maybe September,” and ever after he has washed all our personal clothing and the bedding in whatever house we are in every week, always. So fussy, is all I have to say. Over the years Richard’s stern observance of a weekly laundry day has made him seem to be the unofficial “housekeeper” of the ménage, and I sometimes feel that I am playing Joan Fontaine’s second Mrs. de Winter to his version of Judith Anderson’s Mrs. Danvers.

Richard grew up in a working-class family; his father was a carpenter. When Richard was working he used to come home with the attitude of one who puts his lunch bucket down on the table, takes his paper to the living room sofa, and waits for the woman to put the meal on the table. That was his family home, whereas my childhood memory was of one of the kitchen help coming to open the door that separated the dining room from the living room where we were all assembled to announce, “Dinner is served.” Because I was a college professor and Richard a schoolteacher, I was amazed at how hard and long he worked—from early morning until late five days a week, week in and week out. I felt like Marie Antoinette among the citizens of Paris. I had no idea. The result was that for twenty years until he retired I cooked dinner every night, and because I am a good cook, I varied the menu, dreamed up interesting items. He was always tremendously appreciative and mentions it now in his retirement to everyone we meet. A peculiar feature of our relationship is that Richard, who has been completely easy and open with his sexuality from the time he came out in Berlin in 1963, is also the most conventionally masculine gay male I have ever encountered. I did not realize this in the heady days of our early romance; but there he is, not the least bit interested in girly gossip, clothes, decor, oh, the list is endless, and most of all he disdains small talk. My older daughter once sent a comic strip of two dumpy old people on the sofa with the wife saying, “Why don’t we try some witty banter with each other?” to which he stops to ponder, then says, “I like cheese,” and she, reaching for the television control, says, “Never mind, let’s turn on the TV.” She labeled it
Charlie and Richard.

People who want to assign acculturated gender roles to a gay couple will have trouble here. He does the washing, I do the cooking, anybody near the sink washes the dishes, we have a cleaning person for the house, he does the home repair, I do the decorating, we both invite people to dinner, and he often cooks then, he always cooks the fish, I make pies. He served me rusted lettuce without demur the first time he asked me for dinner, and thinks that the sell-by date on packaging is just part of the design, whereas I used to toss the refrigerator leftovers after he had left for work every day. And so it goes. Since I did not grow up in a home where housework was the natural responsibility of any of my family, I have an inclination to let it slide always. Our friend Natasha says she still expects that when she takes off her clothes and drops them on the floor, someone will come by to put them away sooner or later.
Where are the maids of yesteryear?
is sort of my François Villon moment.

When I retired I wanted a project. Richard was willing to go in financially with me on another house in the seashore town where my former house, which I had sold in 1985, was. We planned that the new place would have space for a large garden, and so it has developed over the ten years since we bought it. The property originally had not one single planting. Now there is an elaborate formal Italianate garden of raised beds geometrically arranged and centered on a large fountain. The borders of the property have been planted with a variety of trees, shrubs, and vines, so that one has the sense of complete privacy when sitting out in the yard. Behind the house the previous owners had put in a twenty-by-twenty-foot sandbox with children’s equipment. Richard bricked this over to create a very Italianate terrazzo, and put over it a wooden trellis on which we have trained wisteria, so that in the heat of the summer sun there is constant shade and cool in that lovely spot. He had already built a superb deck on the side of our house in Cambridge. He sometimes crows about his many great projects, although I will not let him lord it over me too much, since I want to say that Mary and I built all our furniture in our first Cambridge apartment even if, I must confess it, we used decorator nails for everything.

Our house is in a town inhabited predominantly by Italian American and Irish American working-class families who tend not to move away. When I lived there before, the various young men in my life were assumed by my neighbors to be nephews or some other family member. Now I was returning with a man who was clearly a “partner,” as the parlance had it, and if it was not clear, then the very gossipy real estate agent would pave the way with the news. I wondered what kind of reception we would get from the people around us. In the very first summer, Richard got out his tools and bought lumber to fix a rotting step in the front porch stairs. Instantly every male in the nearby houses stopped by to comment on his progress, uniformly changing their mode of address to “Richie.” When he set to work on the grand project of the terrazzo behind the house, our next-door neighbor and his buddies would monitor the developments from his side porch, until one day one of the men came over to suggest that Richard might want to install lateral rods to contain the outward pressure of the bricked area. And so we were launched, or at least Richard was, as guy-guys.

This town is extraordinary. When there came the first day on which it was legal for same-sex couples to apply for wedding licenses, there were greeters at the town hall to bestow a rose upon each couple who came up to the counter. The local paper, an enthusiastic supporter of the local Roman Catholic church, the principal religious affiliation of the townspeople, published photos of every one of these couples and added enthusiastic human interest accounts. It was an unexpected development that in fact reminded us of the basic live-and-let-live philosophy of the town, which is, as it should be, the true fallout of the humanistic implications of the Christian religion, rather than shooting employees of abortion clinics and other so-called Christian calls to action.

One day we decided to get married. We were contemplating moving to New Jersey to live in a retirement community and learned that unmarried couples in New Jersey must pay a surtax of 15 percent when inheriting from each other. Forget about love; it’s all about money. When I went to the Cambridge town hall to apply for a wedding license, I thought,
I shall be the thrice-wed Iowa City beauty
, just as they used to style the Baltimore-born Wallis Warfield Simpson when she married King Edward VIII. Once we got interested in the idea of the wedding, our take-charge personalities managed to work up a rather grand wedding day. We arranged to rent the Swedenborg Chapel located on the edge of the Harvard campus, which has a marvelous ersatz Gothic interior. The minister of my older daughter’s church in New Hampshire agreed to come to Boston for the service. I had some hesitation in arranging all this, since only two years before I had suggested to the children that they rent this very same space for their mother’s memorial service. I talked it over with them, and was happy to hear them all agree that time moves on, and so it was thoroughly appropriate for Richard and me to hold our wedding there with the very same minister. Our darling friend Sally put all her time and effort into flowers and other details, and her beautiful daughters poured champagne at the reception, while my wonderful teetotaling son-in-law dramatically popped cork after cork. A friend promised to bring her delicious spanakopita. The night before, Richard and I made bowls of ingredients for sandwiches and other reception treats, which we then assembled before the wedding in the church basement. The space was a little bare, but Sally’s flower arrangements helped immensely. It was very cramped, and that we could not change.

We invited about 140 people, all but two of whom accepted, much to our surprise. But, as someone who came up from New York on the train and afterward went right back because he had so little time remarked, “I could not miss seeing this moment, two men getting married, it is so special.” We had to dissuade parents from bringing their children to watch this “historic occasion,” there just was not room. The minister in her remarks during the service quoted from the preamble to the decision by the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court, words that are an eloquent defense of the human right and need to gather into relationships. She also had interviewed the both of us and quoted from our remarks to her, such as Richard’s saying that “living with Charles is like a perpetual AA meeting.” That brought down the house, plus her words of advice for two alpha males living under the same roof. At the end, when the pastor presented us to the congregation as a married couple, there was not a dry eye in the place, and we received a standing ovation, which, ham that I am, I treasure to this day.

Recently, to mark my eightieth birthday, I told my children and grandchildren that I would pay their airfare, car rentals, hotel bills, and restaurant meals if they would settle on four days or so when they could all assemble at the seashore for a family get-together. We had sold the Cambridge house, given up the idea of New Jersey because of the financial crisis, bought a condo for the winter in Florida instead. But the house at the seashore was, I suppose, to be considered the family manse. We are not a compulsively close family, so this was an undertaking, but on the fourth of August they duly arrived, one after another, and registered at the hotel where the management in an access of goodwill and sympathy had assigned to them rooms overlooking the ocean. For some of the grandchildren this was the first time they’d met. The first night Richard had a barbecue on our terrazzo; the second night I hosted a buffet dinner on a balcony of a restaurant overlooking the beach; and the third night, again on the terrazzo, we made sushi and pizza. There were four children and six grandchildren, some spouses, Richard, and myself—Papa Richard and Papa Charlie, as my younger son’s children call us. Not exactly
Dynasty
or
The Forsyte Saga
, but a family, nonetheless.

Gathered in our garden at Hull, Massachusetts, August 5, 2010. Standing, left to right: my son Howard; his daughter, Jasmine, and son, Jesse; my daughter Gile; her fiancé, Kent; my son Willis; his wife, Sheree, and their son Zachary; my daughter Helen (whose husband could not be there). Seated on the bench are Willis’s daughter Olivia; myself; Richard; and Willis’s daughter Rebekah, with Willis’s son Noah occupying the foreground.
(Howard Beye)