SIX

THE UNWRITEABLE

At Gregori’s, once you’ve paid your twenty dollars and checked your clothes and shoes with the friendly men in the antechamber to the left, you are given a mask—the small black kind, like Zorro’s. Stretch the elastic a little, you’re told, then slip the mask on carefully; there are only enough to go around and they break easily. Once it’s on, you hear your own breathing. The almond-shaped openings restrict the field of vision a little: you look straight ahead, the periphery of your gaze softens in an oval of darkness. Now you’re ready to enter the party.

Gregori has parties every Friday night, with a carefully cultivated guest list of men he’s met online or in clubs, or guys who’ve approached him because they’ve heard about his gatherings. You have to be invited, and the invitation, presumably, is important to the legality of the party—it underscores the fact that this is a private event, held in a private apartment, so this isn’t a business subject to regulation, but simply a gathering. Gregori wants at least to see a photo of you or get a recommendation from someone he knows, but in truth the parties are attended by a wide variety of men: young and lean guys who look like they take yoga classes many times a week, musclemen with their rubbery, steroidal curves, older guys into leather or with a kind of military style, and plenty of men who haven’t seen the inside of a gym lately. The men are predominately white or Latin, a few Asians; the only black guy around is one of Gregori’s beautiful helpers, a six-foot chiseled tower in red briefs who mans—there could be no other verb!—the door.

But the masked party happens once a month only. The masks don’t hide much; were there an acquaintance or a co-worker behind them you wouldn’t have trouble recognizing him. But sometimes a gesture in the direction of anonymity is all that’s required. Gregori says the party draws married and bisexual men, actors, guys on the down-low, who feel, between the dim lighting and the slight veil, free. They pose or rest or couple in the soft light washing down from a video screen hung high up on the walls of the two-story room. (They triple, I want to say, or otherwise multiply, but I need to wash “couple” and “multiply” free of the weight of their heterosexual imagery. Little is limited here to two, and nothing will be conceived but possibility.) The men clothed only in the black fabric framing their eyes look strangely Venetian, as though Tiepolo had made secret frescoes of an eighteenth-century sex party.

How has Gregori found these men? A bisexual pal of his goes to clubs in Manhattan patronized by swinging straight couples, and when one of the guys is clearly attracted to him, he gives him Gregori’s card. Gregori cruises online sites to find the guys who’d be pleased by the prospect of a veil. If the masks, in a few hours, are worn loosely around the neck like collars, or strewn on the floor beside the sofa, left on a tabletop—well, their work is done. They have opened the doors of the evening, have announced an intent, and now they are no longer necessary.

I DREAM, AS I’M SETTING OUT to write this, that I’m walking in a weedy and tangled area in the back of my garden, a part I’ve never really attended to much, when I discover that there’s a neglected path that goes on, opening out farther than I knew, and there are daffodils already sprouting, though it’s still late in the winter, and the rough beds lead right down to the bay. I didn’t know we bordered open water! But I can go farther: up an easy slope out of the garden, where you can see across a valley where sheep are sporting and then the path runs on behind the field to a town I think I recognize, but once I’m there I realize it’s a town I’ve never seen. It’s clear that home is so much larger and more unfamiliar than I knew.

I HAVE BEEN A MASKED MAN—not for a long time, now, but there was a period in my life, in my twenties, when I—how to say it?—lived in hiding, lived a double life, was sexually duplicitous? All problematic terms. I was married to Ruth and having sex with a man. I imagine that I would have been terrified of Gregori’s party, had there been such a thing in Des Moines; I can’t imagine myself then being able to move to that level of unself-consciousness, that degree of abandon. Would that even have been what I wanted? I imagined that one man, one incendiary, generous, open-spirited man, would entrance me, one broad chest would give me a place to lay my head. And, for a time, he did.

Then why on earth was I married?

WHEN I WAS SEVENTEEN, a freshman in college living in my parents’ house, I met Ruth at a poetry reading. She was short, blonde, her body rounded like her vowels; her voice had been forged in central Louisiana and revised in Houston. She was one of a group of grad students reading their work in some anonymous lounge in the student center; her poems were imagistic, fragmented, and to my ear compellingly weird, as if they emerged from some interior cave still wet with the stuff of dream life. I liked Blake and García Lorca, André Breton and Charles Simic, so of course I liked her, and I went up to her after to tell her so, and she exclaimed, “Mark, I’m so glad to see you!” though we’d never met, and I took that as a sign.

A week later I saw her again, at a party at my poetry professor’s beautiful house in the desert. We got drunk on scotch, talked for hours in a state of increasing enrapturement, and made out in my car. “Made out” is deceptively casual. I think it must have felt momentous to me; I must have felt I was doing something I was supposed to do. These statements are speculative because I feel, in some sense, I wasn’t there. I was giving myself up to a current, I wasn’t making a decision; I was being carried in the direction the world intended—did I think then it was the world that meant this life for me? She said, “I feel like an Easter egg.” I loved that. I was seventeen, and to be touched or kissed by anyone was thrilling. I’d had sex exactly twice, in the men’s room in the basement of the Liberal Arts building. My art history class—where we studied slide after slide of classical nudes, and my teacher duly appraised their proportions and poses—was right down the hall, and so I’d go from those perfected marble boys to the intricate graffiti of the stalls, their walls pierced by gloryholes, and the hungry mouths and eyes on the other side. You could see just a single eye, or if the man on the other side sat back and you put your eye to the hole, you might see him stroking an erect cock, the startling trembling fact of it exposed for you there in a public place. I was powerless in the face of my lust, but I was terrified too. Was this the life opening in front of me? My father had warned me about queers, to be wary of men who asked me to go home with them, and this was as much of a conversation as we’d had on the subject. My mother had given vent to her disgust at homosexual intercourse (though it couldn’t really be distinguished from the rage and distaste she seemed to feel for the heterosexual variety, too).

In a month or two I told Ruth I was bisexual, which I may have believed. I was, in fact, “bisexual,” since I was having sex with her and thinking about men, but I don’t think that’s quite what the term is meant to connote. She seemed to experience this information as something absurd, and told me I was mistaken, and then we didn’t talk about it again for years. We were living together by summer, and one day she said, rather petulantly, My friends all want to know when we’re going to get married. I said, October? And that was that. There were maybe thirty guests in our apartment, at the wedding—including my parents and our poetry teacher—and we had champagne and cake on the terrace, popping the corks toward Arizona Mortuary across the street and watching as the bats flew out from the roof at twilight.

JUDITH BUTLER SAYS HETEROSEXUALITY is an inevitable comedy because no one can really fulfill the absurd expectations for the categories defined as “man” and “woman.” Perhaps more accurate to say that all sexuality is a comedy, since we are bound to codes that forever fail to describe quite who we are, and though these externals constitute a portion of our subjectivity (how can I not, to some degree, be the gay man I’m told I am?), they’re never entire, thank goodness, never circumscribe us completely.

It was clear from the beginning that our marriage would be a painful comedy. I drove Ruth to school one day to her afternoon class, and pulled into a gated parking lot so I could take her right up to the steps of the building, and before I could even ask, the attendant said, Oh, do you just want to drop your mother off? I hadn’t understood that’s how we’d be seen. One night I came home late from some place or another, and there was a guy hanging out under a streetlight in front of a bar down the block, a place called the Graduate. I knew it was a gay bar, but just seeing this boy—a hundred yards away perhaps—nobody would have had to tell me: even this far away his school-letter jacket was glowing with desire; he was facing in my direction, we were sending some beam to one another entirely undetectable by any means other than the human body, his white-sleeved jacket a sweet hungry icon. I turned and went into the house. I was eighteen and alive with longing, and I turned and went into the house and lay down beside my sleeping wife.

Which makes me want to say that I was a stupid boy. Smart when it came to reading, to talking about books and films and especially poems, those spells and chants and passageways into the underlife I loved, but about how to live or how to honor my own heart or my own loins I knew nothing at all.

The comedy deepened. Ruth told me she had a son, by her previous marriage, of whom she’d lost custody, and this was the great loss of her life. Where was he? I wanted to know. Living with his grandparents now, in Arkansas. She waited until we were married to tell me she had a son? Because we were moving to Iowa, where she’d gotten a teaching job, we could stop along the way, and I could meet him, which meant that she had to tell me how old he was. I was eighteen, and so was my stepson.

YOU WILL PERHAPS SEE WHY a writer who’s had a good deal to say about other periods of his life has considered this material unwriteable: it seems gothic, ridiculous. To narrate these years seems inevitably to accuse Ruth, and to invite me to offer justifications for my own foolishness in marrying her. We did what we did. It amazes me, it makes me think of Milosz’s unforgettable line about the weight of history: “I ask not out of sorrow, but in wonder.” It is indeed wonder that I feel, that this absurd life took place, and yet it’s true that I can’t return to it without a certain degree of rage, too, and a memory of that ferocious, self-enclosed longing. There was a clock, downtown, on the top of a skyscraper, that flashed its numbers all night long; you could see it from the bedroom of our apartment. 1:27, 1:33 . . . How many nights did I watch those numbers, during the hours when there were only three of them?

WHY WRITE THIS NOW? Because Hank is dead, just this week, of cancer. My wife is years gone, and now him, and thus of the three of us I live to tell the untold tale, what I promised, at least tacitly, I wouldn’t say. And Hank’s wife, maybe she has a story too?

But I get ahead of myself. I met my stepson, on his grandparents’ farm in the Arkansas backcountry. He was exactly the boy I was not: six feet two like me, but while I’d been reading Kenneth Patchen and smoking dope, he’d been playing football and digging potatoes. We played like two big dogs who’ve just met: we swam in the Arkansas, in our cut-off jeans, we wrestled and chased after one another on the bank. With him I was the boy I’d never been, and if what passed between us had nothing of sex in it, it was surely suffused with eros: all body, and entirely apart from his mother. Then Ruth and I drove to Des Moines, where another life commenced.

The elements of this new existence seemed barely to touch one another at all: I worked in a day-care center, and became passionately interested in the education of young children; I wrote poetry, at night and on weekends; in the late hours, privately, I burned for the company of men; I attended English Department functions with my wife. It was at one of these, in the impeccably comfortable apartment of a senior English professor of considerable authority named Dr. Maurice La Belle, that I met a hairdresser from Iowa City—handsome, ten years older than me, sporting the unmistakable new gay look of the day: tightly curled short hair, a dark moustache, a tan, a lean and well-managed form in tightish clothes. We walked onto a terrace together. He kissed me on the mouth. I was instantly erect—he felt my crotch and pushed his tongue farther into my mouth—but I pulled back and said, For God’s sake my wife is in the next room. He insisted on giving me his phone number—well, I guess he didn’t exactly have to talk me into accepting it. He had no card, and I had nothing handy to write it on, so he inscribed it neatly on the back of my Social Security card. Which means I still have it, forty years later. Oh, Jim from Iowa City, what are the chances you’re still alive, or still at that number?

I WAS FLEEING FROM A DOOR that was tumbling open in front of me and, in my less-than-direct way, trying to tug the door open myself. I developed a series of crushes on men who were almost but not quite available: Richard, Hans, guys with a certain vibe of openness or ambiguity who’d become my friends and turn out to be attracted only to women, though they might flirt with me or allow an embrace, even a dry kiss. I’d be spun into dizziness by this, somehow, I thought, satisfied. I had leaned my weight against the door; it hadn’t opened but I could feel some fresh and bracing wind blowing in from the other side.

Then I met the man I’m calling Hank. I need, for reasons that will become clear later on, to becloud some of the circumstances of our encounter. Say we sang in a choir together, lobbied for better funding for social services, sat a few easels away from one another in a drawing class. I remember the pleasure of a long conversation, outdoors, on a cool spring afternoon. We’d started to chat a little, and one joke or story led to another, and soon it became evident, the pleasure we were taking in one another’s company. If you’d stood back and watched us, you’d have seen two men in their twenties, both tall, one more lanky and the other a bit thicker, swaying a little as they spoke, hands in their pockets, heads leaning in toward one another, then stepping back to laugh, the conversation going on into the afternoon, one making as though to leave but then stopping again, talking on, the unmistakable physical language of a connection being formed.

We took to going out for beers, playing pinball, listening to bands. This did not fit into the narrative of my marriage, where I seemed expected to live like a married man, not like a boy in my early twenties; I think Ruth must have seen my nights out as an annoyance but also a kind of safety valve, or a male zone not unlike my Huck Finn and Tom Sawyer wrestling with her son. In between batting the beautiful chrome balls around their playing fields beneath the glass we were talking and talking about common acquaintances, politics, work, drawing closer. Then Hank went somewhere or other, on a longish trip, and came back with slides, and to see them I went to his house one evening, a little rented place on the other side of town.

The best place to view the slides was the bedroom; there was a largish bare wall for a screen, and we could put the carousel projector on the bed, and sprawl on either side of it with a beer while he narrated the images of his journey, and as the pictures progressed our arms and shoulders came closer to one another, and I could feel my own heartbeat, and I was aware, beneath the worn cotton of the tie-dyed T-shirt he wore, of his.

ALL MY LIFE I HAVE LOOKED and looked at the mystery of desire, and I feel no closer to understanding it. Nothing else has so shaped my decisions, my way of life; were one to inventory the costs of sexual difference the total would be enormous, yet I know that I would have paid any price. But what is it that compels us, what is it we want? Touch? Entrance behind the barrier of the skin, to penetrate the boundaries of another body, or be penetrated ourselves, as a remedy for our extreme loneliness, the awful sensation of the singular self in the singular skin? Some narcotic form of forgetfulness, an opiate dispensed by the hands of another? Not orgasm, finally, and only partly pleasure: there are many sorts of pleasure, many forms of satisfaction, but what other has the deep lodestone pull that sex has? And I don’t believe it’s simply biology, the imperative to reproduce—since for me, obviously, there will be no issue from the unions I can’t seem to live without. I want; that is the prima facie thing, the ground of being. But what is it, in a man’s body, in the heat and touch and warm interior, the rush and delay of contact, what is it that I want? Shouldn’t I be able, after a life’s worth of practice, to name that?

So I return to Whitman:

Blind loving wrestling touch! Sheathed hooded sharptoothed touch!

Did it make you ache so, leaving me?

Parting tracked by arriving . . . . perpetual payment of the perpetual loan,

Rich showering rain, and recompense richer afterward.

What is recompense richer? I know that it exists, and I know it resides outside of language, and I know it is not to be denied. We refuse what is originary in ourselves to our peril; what wells up is to be attended to. Blake says, It is better to murder an infant in its cradle than to nurse desires unacted upon. This sounds horrifying until you realize that the infant you’re killing, if you do not allow your desire to emerge into the daylight, is yourself, the person you might become if you move in the direction of fulfillment. (Not to fulfillment, mind you; I no longer believe in that, except as a temporary state, but we need to proceed in satisfaction’s direction.)

I WAS TWENTY-ONE YEARS OLD, and now my real life had started, though I wouldn’t have said it that way then. The next morning I was in the bathroom at home, getting ready for work, and Ruth pointed out to me that I was certainly in a good mood, because I was singing. And it was true; I wanted nothing more than to open my mouth and sing.

Once or twice a week, Hank and I would meet, at his place, for sex. In a while he moved to an old apartment building in a neighborhood nearer to mine, the kind with a rattling cage elevator that cast complicated shadows down the hall, and that’s where I always remember him: the candlelit bedroom, a long horizontal mirror beside the bed he kept curtained until it was needed, a bottle of lotion warming in a tub of hot water, music he liked. His song for me was Phoebe Snow, “Poetry Man,” and that kind of jazz-inflected R & B, or the energetic but plaintive Emmylou Harris, that’s the sort of soundtrack to those nights. Ardent, inquisitive, exploratory nights. I was the first man he’d had sex with; my own sexual encounters with men before him were merely functional; we had no actual knowledge, and there was joy in creating some. How is it that you could take a long cock into your mouth without gagging, and what were the motions of lips or tongue that would create pleasure? And fucking, that wild taboo mystery of penetration? Hank went first, and almost immediately found that discomfort gave way to radical pleasure. I thought I’d never be able to take anything up my ass; I imagined I just wasn’t built that way. But Hank said, Oh no, if I’m going to do this, you’re doing it, too. And after the initial panic and tension—oh, stars! That same kind of involuntary intake of breath when suddenly you see winter stars spread across a black sky in the country—that scale, that sharp air of possibility.

How can these things ever be inscribed, do they forever belong to the realm of the unwriteable? I have the language of pornography, I have the language of anatomy or medicine, I have the language of euphemism, and I’m happy with none of them.

In Nick Flynn’s memoir Another Bullshit Night in Suck City there’s a list, maybe two or three hundred terms, for being drunk. I could make a list like that for fucking and come absolutely no closer to what I want to say; it is as if the transformative bodily experience lives on one side of the veil and language on the other. What can I say? I fucked him, he fucked me, and then we’d go out and get something to eat and then go back and pick up where we left off. Wild nights, wild nights!—pressurized to diamond-light by secrecy for nearly three years. We never spoke of them to anyone, not a single word.

WHEN I DESCRIBED GREGORI’S PARTY, I focused on the experience of the man wearing the mask, the one looking out through those restricting apertures. But something happens, too, to the one who is looking at the man in the mask. Anything veiled is granted the mysterious capacity to hold more than the uncovered; that which we cannot entirely see becomes the repository of the inarticulate need of the viewer, of inchoate desire. In his book Stealing the Mona Lisa, Darian Leader describes how that now-exhausted image became iconic, a pinnacle of Western painting, only after it was stolen from the Louvre, early in the twentieth century; people used to come to view the absence of the picture, gazing into the space where it had hung.

There was a way in which Hank and I partook of this dynamic. I was not, at this point, ready to leave Ruth: a complex web of guilt and shame and misplaced loyalties held me, and Hank shook his head in disbelief at the whole thing but also accepted the situation. And in fact, he did not want to set up housekeeping together: he liked women, too, and began a new relationship while we were still burning up the hours together in our hidden weeknight encampments. He said that he couldn’t live a gay life, didn’t want that stigma; he was from a little Dakota town, and he’d been a freak there all his life, and he’d had judgment enough. How could I judge that, I who’d been wearing my married-man mask for years?

But how open our bodies were to one another! This combination of utter availability and of closed doors—what was his life like when I wasn’t around, or mine without him?—was incendiary; it fueled our passion, it allowed us to love and to want and to need everything we believed might lie behind the mask.

And it meant, too, that when circumstances changed, so did we. My marriage finally foundered. Ruth’s drinking escalated; I’d cover her classes when she was too sick to go, haul the empty bottles back to the state liquor store with increasing horror at their number, watch as she made out with a student on the couch at a party whose theme was the work of Alain Robbe-Grillet. Each guest had been told to arrive at a certain hour—8:16, 9:27—and to dress the part, so Ruth and I had gone in formal wear and small black masks, and I’d carried in one hand a toy silver revolver. I pushed us into therapy; I talked and talked—though never about Hank and our affair, not once—until I could name more of what held me in that house where she raged and wept and passed out nightly. We split apart in a firestorm of rage and recrimination; I went to Kenya for a month, to the great game preserves at Amboseli and Maasai Mara, she to the psych ward, and when I came back I told her it was over and found a cheap little apartment a few blocks away, closer to the university—a dim little place where I cried mightily, and where I soon found I very much liked living.

But Hank? We saw each other a few more times, but it was clear all the terms had shifted. I was too available; he was too interested in the woman he was seeing. I liked him as much as I always had, a sweet thread of friendship stitched us together, but everything felt wrong.

ONCE, BEFORE I WAS A NEWLY FREE MAN, Hank had an accident, on his motor scooter. Nothing was broken but he was bruised and scraped, the skin of his arms and legs and torso battered and scabbed with surface wounds. I went to visit him. He was recovering at a relative’s place—though we were alone that afternoon—and he was lying in a big lounge chair, wearing just a pair of gym shorts, probably a little hazed on painkillers, and so happy to see me. We talked for a while, him narrating the tale of the accident with a grave face, eyes growing wider as he told me how he had been knocked off into the gravel, and how he’d been unconscious for a while, and what he’d woken to. Then I knelt beside him to kiss him, first his mouth and then each of his dark nipples, and a bit of unbroken skin on his belly. Then we eased his gym shorts down, and I took his heavy cock in my mouth until it was hard, and sucked it till he came. He was so grateful for these ministrations, he rested his hand on my head and cried.

Now I understand that his body—beautiful though no gym body of a later decade, a broad chest with a rich swath of hair, the beard pointing downward as though to point to the symmetry of him, the warm total embrace—was one of the doors through which I entered my actual life.

I left town, moving on for job and adventure and to distance myself, once I was ready, from the wreckage of my marriage. He married; I saw him and the sweet and funny and open-hearted woman he married later on, and though we talked about much in the past, we never talked about our nights together, and to this day I have no idea what she knew or knows.

Those involved would probably guess anyway, but out of respect for her I want to leave the externals vague. There’s no one else to protect. Hank died, just this last week; I learned from a mutual friend I hear from now and then. Ruth died a few years ago; how she survived as long as she did is beyond me. Though she spent much of her life professing her weakness and need, she was one of those substance abusers with a constitution of pure tempered metal. If the truth be told, she was something of a pit bull, and we arrived, in time, at the uneasy friendship of people who were married twenty or thirty years ago.

Oh my dears. What would you think, if you saw me at Gregori’s, where I’ve taken on a volunteer job, for one evening, in the clothes-check room, just for the sheer pleasure of helping the desiring, beautiful men out of their street identities and into their nakedness and then into their masks? It gives me so much pleasure, to have this odd social role, to set the men at ease, to usher them into the deeper hours of the night. How would you ever understand the places to which I’ve traveled?