2. THE GLASS-BOTTOMED BOAT

HIGHER EDUCATION, my mother used to say, is wasted on the young. A zealous autodidact, shamed, in that overachieving meritocracy that was the town in which we lived, by her single year of nursing school, she feasted on literature, history, and politics, first to prove her worthiness, later for the sheer joy of it. And at the beginning, I suppose her enthusiasm must have been infectious, for in high school I professed to be idealistic about learning; I even caused a small uproar one year by writing an editorial for the student paper protesting the English department’s decision to offer SAT Review as an alternative to Shakespeare on the electives roster. And yet, this idealism cannot have been long lasting, for in college I myself never took a Shakespeare course, though I did receive full credit for a seminar called Theory and Practice of Gossip. Moreover, thanks to some convenient Advanced Placement tests in Biology and Calculus that I’d passed in high school, I managed to “A.P. out” of my math and science requirements. What I did study were English Literature and Art History, in part because literature and art were the things I loved most, in part because these were the only subjects in which I felt sure I could get As. Even here, however, my education was full of holes. For example, as a student I never read Dante. I never read Joyce. In the end, thanks to a permissive system of requirements that I managed to manipulate to my advantage (not a single course in American or European History, Philosophy, Economics) I graduated from one of the finest universities in the land without knowing the causes of the First World War, or what Romanticism was, or the meaning of the term “Reformation.” All this has to be admitted. I didn’t go to college to learn; I went to college to achieve.

My troubles started very early in my childhood, when I was given my first I.Q. test. As it happened, I grew up both in the age and the land of the I.Q. test; my elementary school was even named after its inventor, which may explain the almost occult significance with which the adults I knew—teachers and guidance counselors and parents of my friends and friends of my parents—endowed its results. For in our community, flanked on one side by the university where my brother was a student and on the other by the incipient battlements of Microsoft, where my father would eventually go to work, everyone knew his I.Q. by heart, though few people spoke it, out of shame, or modesty, or because they feared lest by its very utterance such a mystical figure—calculated, as in numerology, according to ancient and secret formulae, in the halls of mysterious temples—might lose its potency. I honestly believe that if at that time an incipient Albert Einstein had appeared in our midst, bearing his theory of relativity in one hand and a low test score in the other, the test score would have carried the day.

When I was very small, of course, I understood none of this. Instead my life consisted mostly of play: endless games of crazy eights with my sister, of Candy Land and Chutes and Ladders, Barrel of Monkeys and Pick-Up-Stix, with my peers. Even school was mostly play, a perpetual round of drawing turkeys at Thanksgiving, and snowmen at Christmas, and hearts on Valentine’s Day. Holidays shaped the pleasant year—as soon as one was over we’d start planning for another—until one afternoon (it was the very beginning of second grade) I was taken out of class and sat down in a small room across from a young woman with born-rimmed glasses who spread out a series of blocks that I was supposed to fit one inside the other, and asked me to complete a story about a little boy whose glass of water was half-full, and wanted me to tell her which of four pictures did not belong with the other three. None of this seemed to me worth taking very seriously at the time; after all, back then I had no idea what a test was, much less that the results of one could ramify fatally into my future. Nor had I any reason to believe that in contrast to the thousands of rounds of crazy eights I’d played with my sister, the scores for which we simply tossed away when we grew tired, my score for this game would be carefully notated and preserved in some inner sanctum of the school, where in conjunction with other scores it would be used to determine the course of my education. Yet this was, as it turned out, exactly what happened, as I discovered one morning on the bus when a tiny girl named Jana Scott (she had recently taught me to tie my shoes) asked me whether I was planning to bring my lunch for the field trip or buy a sandwich at the dock. What field trip? I asked. What dock? The one next week, she answered, to ride the glass-bottomed boat into Puget Sound. I blinked. Of this field trip I knew nothing. Yet from Jana Scott, I now learned that all my friends were planning to go.

At recess that morning I asked my teacher about the field trip. Yes, she confirmed, it was to take place the following Wednesday. And was I to be included? She shook her head. No, I was not. Why not? I asked.

Then she rubbed her hands together and in a somber voice explained to me certain facts of which, up until that moment, I had never been apprised: first, that in our state there existed something called the Mentally Gifted Minors, or MGM, Program; second, that according to the terms of this program, for every student who scored above the ninety-eighth percentile on a certain test, the school received money from the state to be spent on special MGM activities, such as the glass-bottomed boat ride; finally, that as I myself was not an MGM, there was no money to pay for me to go on the trip. To put it crudely, unlike Jana Scott, I hadn’t made the cut.

That afternoon I arrived home in a state bordering on hysteria. Because I was not to be allowed to go, the glass-bottomed-boat ride had swollen in my mind to mythic proportions, as if what was to be viewed through the boat’s crystalline floor was not merely the depth of the ocean, but that very realm of intellectual delectation after which even at that young age I felt myself, in some intuitive way, hankering. What outraged me was the perniciousness of a system that granted to a single test the authority not merely to judge intellectual capacity, but actually to dictate the dispensation of rewards. Exclusion was the consequence. How I dreaded the prospect of the upcoming week, during which my friends would no doubt taunt me with their anticipation, not to mention the day of the field trip itself, my solitude at the bus stop, the morning after when I would be regaled with accounts of those pleasures of which, by virtue of my inadequacy, I had been deemed unworthy!

So began a dark and tormented period of my life, one that would last until I graduated from high school, and even then leave its dense residue in my psyche, like the pulp that remains once olives are pressed for oil. Because of the test, for instance, when I entered junior high school I found myself “laned” (such was the vocabulary of the day) in classes the numbers for which, instead of ending with A for “Advanced,” had no letter whatsoever appended to them. No matter that my teachers agreed that these classes were too easy for me: the test overruled. I was not an MGM. And though pleas on the part of my mother eventually led to my being allowed to “change lanes” in two subjects—English and science—nonetheless there would remain in my record forever not only the ineradicable result of the original test, but those of its spawn: the PSAT (which I was due to take the following year), and the SAT, and beyond that other tests, more tests. All of them were designed to quantify the ineffable: in keeping with the American paradigm, not learning, but the “capacity to learn.” A poor score on the PSAT or SAT, I knew, would bar me from the prestigious East Coast education on which I had my heart set, just as my score on the MGM test had barred me from the glass-bottomed-boat ride.

Although I had been writing stories ever since I’d learned how to write—indeed, my desire to invent must have actually predated my acquisition of the skills required to give it issue, for I remember trying to copy letters out of books well before I knew what they meant—it was not until late in my childhood that I first cognized the idea of “being a writer.” In part I was responding to yet another test that my test-happy school had compelled me to take, this one purporting to adjudge “vocational aptitude,” according to the results of which the two careers for which I was best suited were those of (a) hairdresser and (b) forest ranger. Writer wasn’t even an option. Yet from my mother I knew that writers existed. Often I would look at their pictures on the jackets of the novels she checked out from the library. And I had my own writer-heroes, chiefly the theologian C. S. Lewis, a boxed set of whose Chronicles of Narnia my brother had given me as a Christmas present. Writing, at first, was pure imitation for me, an effort to prolong the reliable joy of reading once the last volume of the beloved Chronicles had come to an end. And yet, curiously enough, the more I tried to write like C. S. Lewis, the further I ventured from his Christian vision: writing, it seemed, though it might begin as a way out of the self, finally led one back into it.

Still, the fact that when I wrote, no adjudicators stood between me and the blissfully blank page—not yet, at least—did not free me from their influence in other arenas. For instance, according to my mother, in order to be a writer you still had to have a degree (as she did not) from a prestigious university. More importantly, you had to know the sort of people you were only likely to meet, or at the very least who were only likely to pay attention to you, if you had a degree from a prestigious university. In order to lead a life unencumbered by the test givers, in other words, you had first to placate them. This was the bargain I was offered, and to the compromised terms of which—unnecessarily, as it turned out—I ended up agreeing.

Now, as once I had not taken tests seriously enough, I took them too seriously. Most of my nightmares were about tests. Likewise most days after school, at the local bookstore-cum-coffeehouse, where, under happier circumstances, I might have been discovering stories by Raymond Carver or Grace Paley, I labored for hours on “Test Your Own I.Q.” booklets. Only pride kept me away from those schools the dedicated purpose of which was to “prepare” students for tests that by their professed nature cannot be prepared for. Instead, with my allowance money, I bought a volume of practice PSATs (the letters stood for Preliminary Scholastic Aptitude Test), which I administered to myself with the fervent dedication of a sacristan, in an atmosphere of almost sepulchral gravity: closed up in the kitchen, the oven timer set for twenty minutes, I would try to sharpen my mind to the same pinpoint of exactitude to which I had sharpened my number-two pencil. If I did well, I would reward myself with a moment of repose, a willed cessation of anxiety that by morning would have eroded, unable to withstand the onslaught of worry, which my mind produced as feverishly as a congested nose produces mucus. If I didn’t do well, however—and this was more often the case—then a heated panic would seize me, during which I would go back through my answers, trying to figure out where I’d gone wrong. Sometimes, it was true, I’d been slapdash, or hadn’t known the meaning of a word. More often, though, fear itself waylaid me, provoking me to look for tricks or traps where none existed. Thus, when asked to choose which of four words—liberty, exile, imprisonment, and theft—was the correct antonym for incarceration, I selected exile, because exile meant a state of external imprisonment, whereas incarceration referred to a state of internal imprisonment, i.e. in a jail. The answer, it turned out, was liberty; yet when, in my indignity, I asked my mother whether she wouldn’t have answered the same way, she replied with the clear-eyed fastidiousness of a crossword-puzzle aficionado, “I see your point. Still, I would have put ‘liberty.’” (Unlike me, she was the sort of student of whom standardized testmakers dream: measured, literal, with a mind as precise as an X-Acto knife.)

The day of the actual PSAT neared. A week before, my anxiety pitched over into a kind of apoplexy, after which, in a last-ditch effort to defend itself, my body shut down completely. For two days I stayed at home in a sort of fevered coma, from which I emerged only on the Saturday morning of the test, dry-eyed and eerily calm; bicycling to the school (not my own) where the test was to be given, I even wondered what my mother would have waiting for lunch when I got back. The other side of terror is numbness. Now that I’m an adult, now that I’ve been through psychotherapy and taken serotonin reuptake inhibitors, I recognize the truth in Forster’s pairing of panic with emptiness. I didn’t then. Instead—innocent of Prozac—I locked my bicycle and walked into the cafeteria, where the test was to be given. A guidance counselor checked my name off the fist, making sure first that my parents had paid for this privilege, then assigned me to a desk and handed me a narrow card on which were printed a series of empty circles, each corresponding to one of the four multiple-choice answers to each question. These cards, I knew, would in turn be tabulated by a computer—at the time the very idea of this amazed me—which was why it was very important, the counselor told me, that I use only number-two pencils, never number-one or number-three pencils, which were in the one case too light and in the other too dark for the computer to read.

The hour approached. In preparation, the guidance counselor handed out the test booklets, which we were told not to open until instructed to do so. He had seated us in alphabetical order, which meant that I was behind a girl named Susan Barrett, a very tall and cool girl who had been one of the participants (their names were forever etched on the surface of my memory) in the notorious glass-bottomed-boat ride. Unlike the rest of us, Susan Barrett appeared fairly unruffled by the prospect of the PSAT; indeed, she arrived just as the test was about to begin, out of breath, pushing hair from her eyes. “I overslept,” she whispered as she took her seat.

Then a bell rang. We opened our booklets.

Today, of that test itself, I recall few details—certainly no specific problems or solutions. What I do remember is finding myself, at a certain point, imperiled by a moment of wavering between two possible answers. One or the other, I knew, was correct; yet if I chose what was to me the more obvious of the two, might I not fall into a trap, as I had in the case of incarceration?

Stretching, I glanced at the clock, then allowed my gaze, for a microsecond, to move downward, to the little card on which Susan Barrett—who was already finished with her test and staring dreamily at the blackboard—had written her answers. It all happened so swiftly, it seemed as if I’d done it before I’d even decided to do it; my gimlet eye, the sharpness of which I had never previously tested, zeroed in fleetly on the appropriate line, the circle Susan had filled in. All at once I saw that I had given the wrong answer, the needlessly complicated answer, and with a sudden, silent “Of course!” I quickly corrected myself, my pink eraser alone bearing witness, by the black smudge on its tip, to this criminal act. And meanwhile a sensation of reassurance flooded me that was at once so profound and so pleasant that I could not help but cede to its flow.

So began my career as a cheat—a career to which, like my homosexuality, I would never have admitted even if confronted with the most damning evidence, and about which I felt little compunction for the simple reason that, so long as it remained secret, so long as I never got found out, it had no reality for me. Because cheating was never an activity I planned in advance, but rather fell into spontaneously, little anxiety preceded it; yet because it was also an activity at which I never got caught, no anxiety followed it, either, only the calming certainty that for once I had defied a corrupt system.

From then on, the assurance that if need be I could always cheat became for me an anodyne, an analgesic against the dread that the prospect of, say, a French exam provoked in me. As it happened French and Math were the classes in which I cheated the most, probably because I approached them from the same point of view. French, for example, I looked upon less as a mode of communication and expression than as an aggravatingly inconsistent construct the complexity of which I could never quite master. Years later, when I went to France, I learned the language easily, and by the most natural method possible: by shopping in the grocery store, and falling in love with a French boy, and chatting with the lady who ran the dry cleaning shop on Rue St.-Martin. When I was in high school, however, French was merely a mess of irregular verbs and illogical rules so daunting that every time I opened my textbook a terror would seize me; suddenly it would seem as if I were looking at the page through distorting glasses, or a sheet of tears. Nor could I take these exams any less seriously than the evil PSATs, for I knew that in a high school as competitive as mine, a B in French or Math would significantly lower my chances of getting into the East Coast university, famous for its English department, on which I had set my sights.

I don’t think that my French teacher, Madame Hellier, who was from Nîmes and raised rabbits in her backyard, had any idea of the anguish that her tests provoked in me. She was an affable woman who took little interest in proctoring exams, preferring instead to lead us in dialogues in which one of us would take the role of M. Thibaut, the other of M. Dupont, or to stage scenes from Molière farces and absurdist comedies like Ionesco’s The Bald Soprano, or to host potluck dinners to which we would bring frozen croissants, casseroles filled with some Joy of Cooking version of boeuf bourguignonne, and store-bought “French bread,” and to which Madame Hellier’s own contribution, no doubt intended to appall and amuse us, was invariably something repellent to our sensitive American palates—snails served in their shells with garlic butter, or frogs’ legs, or a stew prepared with one of her adorable rabbits. Still, she had to give the tests; it was part of her job.

Cheating, I should add, was easy in Madame Hellier’s case, as the room in which our class took place was furnished not with ordinary desks, but rather with round tables at which we sat in groups of four. Also, because she was neither savvy nor dictatorial enough to take precautions, but on the contrary often left the room altogether during tests to smoke a cigarette with Frau Blumenfeld, the German teacher, it was a fairly simple matter not only to make sure I was seated across from a boy named Erik, who was half Swiss and had a flair for languages, but also to glance across the table whenever I came to a question that stumped or worried me—not so much, I told myself at the time, in order to steal his answer as to assure myself that my own was not incorrect. And yet, more often than not, Erik would turn out to have eluded some snare into which I had fallen blindly, or to have remembered a subtle kink of grammar that I had failed to pick up on; and once alerted to my own error, how, after all, could I leave the wrong answer on the page?

No one noticed, either, or at least no one said anything, although once, handing back the corrected tests (I had gotten an A), Madame Hellier did remark casually, “I can’t help but notice that you and Erik gave all the same answers—even the wrong ones.”

Cheating, of course, leads to lying: opening my mouth, I affected an expression of indignation that must have been highly convincing, for Madame Hellier immediately retracted her innuendo, apologized, and continued passing out the corrected tests.

After that my cheating became both flagrant and chronic. Always I gave myself pardon, afterward, by reminding myself that my motive was not to pillage the labor of others so much as to obtain a degree of relief for myself. After all, for me the sense of escalating panic that marked the days leading up to a test was nothing compared to the apprehension I felt once the test (if I had not cheated on it) was finished, the sleepless nights during which I would try to recollect every question, to reassess my strategies, to determine, as best I could, how I had done; indeed, I remember waking, too many times, at four in the morning from a dream in which I’d suddenly recognized the wrong turn I’d made in some calculus equation, getting up and going to the kitchen table, where, on one of my mother’s notepads, I’d try to reconstruct both the problem and my solution in the hope (ever waning) that I might turn out, in the end, to have solved it correctly. So lost would I become in this futile, obsessive procedure that often at daybreak, when my father came in for his toast and coffee, I would still be sitting there in my pajamas, surrounded by scraps of paper, under a light as oppressive as the ones used by the police during interrogations.

Now I wonder whether cheating is like taking drugs or gambling; that is to say, whether, as taking a puff from a joint is supposed to lead inexorably to shooting heroin, or putting a quarter in a slot machine to staking your life savings at a roulette table, looking over your shoulder at a friend’s French exam will necessarily lead to one’s graduation into what might be called the major modes of cheating, such as buying answers, or breaking into a professor’s office to steal copies of an exam, or writing crib notes on the inside of your wrist. Which is to say nothing of posteducational cheating: price gouging, insider trading, adultery. In my case, at least in a literal sense, the answer is no; I was neither bold nor clever enough to take such risks. Still, what I lacked in daring I made up for in persistence. Indeed, if I were to add them up, I’d have to say that in addition to the standardized tests that I took, I probably cheated on as many as a hundred exams. And as a result, I got what I wanted. I did well on my SATs. I earned straight As and was admitted to the university from which I was so slavishly determined to graduate. Now, as I finished high school, the future that lay before me was one in the potentialities of which I could revel, for it was a blank page, as yet unsullied by the smudges and erasures, the tom edges and ink blotches, of its own experiencing. And in this future, I told myself, I would never cheat. What would be the need? Cheating had been merely the means by which to attain this much-deserved end, this guarantee of inclusion in a world where cheating would no longer be necessary.

Alas, it was not to be. Indeed, today I’m fairly certain that it was my career as a cheat itself which sowed in me, as its dark legacy, the drive to succeed, the “readiness to pounce on a sure thing” that would despoil the writer’s life of which it had been my hope, through cheating, to assure myself. Yes, if I had it to do over again, I’d do it differently. I’d take German and Physics and Philosophy. I’d study to learn, and I’d learn with joy.

 

I am often startled by the extent to which the public and the private, the life of our times and the life of our days, reflect each other. As an adolescent, I used to like to think of myself as being out of sync with the age in which I was growing up; I saw myself as an iconoclast, at once too urbane and too tender to thrive in the world into which I’d been born, when the truth was that my zeal for success, not to mention my neurotic obsession with tests, made me the perfect citizen (despite my protests to the contrary) of that epoch in which SAT Review was offered as an alternative to Shakespeare; in which the so-called “Back to Basics” movement campaigned for the return both of prayer and corporal punishment to the classroom; in which the parents of a schoolmate of mine promised him a BMW upon graduation, but only if he got into Harvard. (He didn’t.)

This is the public side, the “sociological” side, if you will, of the story; there is a private side too. Today I cannot help but deplore my habit, from very early on, of endowing teachers and institutions with the capacity to validate not only my intelligence, but my right to exist. Why, I ask myself now, did I crave so urgently these tokens of approval? In part, I suspect, because I wanted, by means of them, to distract attention from what I perceived to be the single great blemish on my curriculum vitae—my homosexuality. This was especially true where my parents were concerned. By preceding the inevitable revelation with a catalogue of my successes, I hoped that I might elide their inevitable disapproval and grief. Thus even before I had admitted my homosexuality to myself, I was already gathering my trophies together, building a sort of arsenal against future encroachments.

When I was in college, I used to tell people that given the choice, I’d always take fame over money. (Now, of course, I’ve learned that money is the more valuable of the two commodities, because it can buy you the one thing that fame steals: privacy.) In making such a lofty and ludicrous pronouncement, I thought I was affirming my opposition to the politics of greed that characterized those years, the Reagan years. Yet the assertion reflected equally my faith in fame itself as a real-world equivalent of straight As, less the natural consummation of God-given talent than an advantage obtained through connections and luck. And this was why, though I grew to admire, even to love Stanley Flint during the semester I spent under his tutelage, I also continued to view him not only as a literary genius, but as the holder of some golden key by means of which I might at last gain entry to that magical city from which he arrived by bus every Wednesday, and in the stratosphere of which I too longed to shine. Without admitting it to myself, I nurtured the hope that I might be the next student for whom, on the basis of a single sentence, he obtained a publishing contract, as no doubt did most of my classmates. For though I was now riding on the glass-bottomed boat, of course there are always other glass-bottomed boats, ones with more limpid floors, that drift on richer seas.

At that time my university was going through a brief and peculiar period (one, no doubt, never to be mentioned in its official histories) during which it had a reputation as a “gay school.” This reputation was not merely a matter of undergraduate gossip. On the contrary, it was so widespread as to prompt an article in the New York Times, the author of which titillated her readers with such details as the distinction, in campus lingo, between “lipstick lesbians” and “crunchies”: the former glamour girls who smoked and painted their nails, the latter more likely to wear flannel than Ferragamo, and fond of granola (hence the epithet). And though, in the final analysis, the article was somewhat exaggerated—for instance, it gave the impression that the campus was literally overrun by queers, that boys went to class in drag, that girls sucked marijuana smoke out of each other’s mouths in the library—it was also something of a milestone, in that it represented the first public acknowledgment of open homosexual life at a university where for decades gay men and lesbians had felt obliged to efface themselves. (Later, a simple advertisement in the alumni magazine announcing the formation of a new gay and lesbian alumni group would expose the latent strain of barbarity in the school’s history by provoking an avalanche of outraged letters from graduates threatening to cancel their subscriptions, withdraw their financial contributions, even pull their children out of the school should the offending advertisement not be immediately revoked, denounced, obliterated.)

One result of this new “gay visibility” was that, though I was still deeply closeted at the time I took Stanley Flint’s seminar, nonetheless I’d already met several “out” homosexuals, most notably a group of boys I’d sometimes encounter in the common room outside the dining hall, sitting at the piano and singing a parodic version of the theme from The Patty Duke Show that began: “They’re cousins, they’re lesbian cousins ..." Though they couldn’t have been more than nineteen or twenty, these boys seemed to me incredibly sophisticated, and not entirely as a consequence of the skewed perspective of my own youth, which made a twenty-one-year-old appear to be an “older man.” It was also because they broadcast—intentionally, I suspect—an affect of debauched weariness and ennui the likes of which I’d never previously encountered. For instance, all of them chain-smoked, and dressed in black or gray flannel. Most of the time they wore ties; one, I suspected, wore lipstick. His name was Philip Crenshaw, and he had the caved-in cheeks and kohl-ringed eyes of a vampire. He was very gaunt, with long, spidery fingers, and he talked a bit like Stanley Flint—that is to say, in a deliberately affectless, aristocratic accent that gave away little of his origins, in monologues punctuated with linguistic archaisms, the subject of which was usually the homosexual underworld of New York, to which he and his friends repaired on weekends. “Girls, I was visiting the Mineshaft last Saturday,” he might say, “when I had the most frightful misadventure. I’d just walked away from the glory holes—having discovered, to my horror, that the delectable member I’d only seconds before taken into my mouth had on its underside this alarming little wart—when, strolling by the piss tubs, who should I see receiving the sacrament of fifty streams but my shrink! There he lay, naked as the day he was born, and positively glistening. And the worst part was, our eyes met. Well! You can imagine my anxiety when I arrived the next day for my appointment. ‘And what did you think when you saw me in the piss tub?’ he asked. ‘Did you want to piss on me?”’

Philip’s best friend was a robust, sallow boy of Irish descent called Gerald Wexler. Short and hefty, he had the unlikely combination of blue eyes and black hair (“Black Irish,” he used to say by way of selfpraise), and compensated for his lack of physical stature by projecting himself violently onto every scene in which he was a character. Though his physiognomy was less than appealing (at least to me), he managed, by boasting about the enormity of his penis, to persuade a lot of men (including, much later, myself) to go to bed with him. Even at that early age he was already cultivating the air of jaded, bon vivant languor that in subsequent years, when he lived in Amsterdam, would mature into a veneer of Proustian dissipation, as if at twenty-five he were a retiree from some long career of wantonness and carousal. I remember thinking him spiteful, and rather jealous; for instance, at a party once, long before I admitted my homosexuality, he sidled up to me, and said, “So, Martin, have you come out yet?”

I was so shocked that I didn’t even think to lie. “No,” I replied miserably.

“I thought not,” he answered, and wandered off again to join his friends.

More sympathetic by far than Gerald, Philip, and their cohorts were the lesbians with whom I studied, most evenings, in the rear smoking section of the library. Most of these girls—Gretchen and Schuyler, for example—were, to borrow the blunt terminology of the New York Times, “lipstick lesbians,” or a subvariety thereof; that is to say, they adhered to the chicly austere aesthetic of Manhattan’s East Village, which in those years required of its disciples conformity to a code of strict minimalism. When they spoke—which was rarely—it was with an affectation of listlessness, as if to suggest the attrition of the spirit itself, a sort of psychic anemia. Thus Gretchen, puffing on a cigarette during a break from her interminable thesis, might observe to Schuyler in regard to one of their professors, “He’s really such a low-brow, sweetheart”—stretching out the syllables to the very limits of their capacity for attenuation, as if on the lexical equivalent of a torture rack. All of this convinced me that they were worldly, these girls who had spent semesters in Paris, who smoked Gauloises and carried in their Prada bags little tins filled with lavender-flavored pastilles.

The member of this community with whom I felt the strongest rapport, however, was probably the one who took its tenets of fashion least seriously. This was a prelaw student, a few years older than myself, named Barb Mendenhall. With her spiky blond hair, the pectoral muscles into which her breasts (thanks to a stem program of weightlifting) were gradually disappearing, her unwavering wardrobe of plaid shirts and hiking boots, Barb would have seemed the epitome of the fifties diesel-dyke had it not been for the ironic current of delicacy that blunted her masculine affect, and of which the pair of pearl earrings she wore was only the most explicit emblem. For instance, late one night she arrived in our midst bearing as always her tidy stack of utilitarian economics and political science textbooks (in sharp contrast to the slim volumes of theory, the brutalized yellow Gallimard paperbacks with which Gretchen and Schuyler and their ilk littered the tables). Having first arranged her notebooks and highlighters across from my own mess of story, she sauntered over to the comer and, with a thunderous grunt, hawked a wad of phlegm into the garbage can. “Oh, Jesus, Barb,” Gretchen muttered.

“Thanks for sharing that with us, Barb,” Schuyler added, stubbing out her cigarette in a plastic coffee cup, while Barb herself swaggered back to the table, her thighs as thick as a cowboy’s, a bemused smile playing upon her lips.

Unlike Gretchen and Schuyler, Barb was not a regular fixture in the library. On the contrary, she graced us with her presence only on those occasions when she could find a few hours to spare from her strict regimen of studying, computer work, and the sports to which she was so assiduously devoted: fencing, basketball (she was on the varsity team), even, toward the end of her senior year, boxing. I remember encountering her there one sunny spring morning, at an hour when the rear smoking section was empty except for me, because most of the lesbians were still asleep. Taking the seat across from mine, she pulled from her backpack her stack of morning mail, including a large envelope out of which she proceeded to tear, with great impatience, the latest issue of a magazine called Woman Athlete. “Oh, man,” she said, rolling her eyes and licking her lips in what might have been a parody of masculine slavering, and showed me a photograph in which a sleek German pole-vaulter stood poised to leap. “Hubba-hubba.” She laughed. Yet I was sure I could detect alongside her evident lust a quality of wistfulness in her voice, an intimation of what I might have called, had I read Proust (which I hadn’t), the “tristesse d’Olimpio” of sapphism.

Barb was very beautiful. I remember seeing her from behind one afternoon. Her lustrous blond hair, newly buzz-cut, might have been that of a Roman soldier’s. When she turned around, her eyes—mournful, lucid, deliquescent, cold, and gray (the gray of certain rare mushrooms)—suggested depths of yearning at which her outward air of pragmatism barely hinted. In those eyes one could read not only a childhood marked by unintelligible longings, but the adolescence into which that childhood had segued, and during which those longings had coalesced, as it were, into the idealized image of the woman she desired both to possess and to be. (The conflation of the desire to have and the desire to be—which can lead you to feel simultaneous jealousy and envy toward a cheating lover whose paramour you also find attractive—is probably the aspect of homosexuality with which heterosexuals have the most trouble empathizing.) Their exotic melancholy not only undercut Barb’s macho posturings, it lent to her stony countenance an unexpected shadowing of vulnerability.

The extent of that vulnerability, however, became evident only during the spring of my senior year, after I had finally come out and was helping to organize the university’s annual “Gay and Lesbian Awareness Days,” or GLAD. This was essentially a weeklong series of dances, lectures, panels, and “gay-straight raps,” culminating in an enormous rally during which thousands of balloons emblazoned with pretty pink triangles would be released into the sky.

An aside, now, about that pink triangle: although I was fully aware, then, of its evil origin—that in German concentration camps homosexuals had been forced to wear these pink triangles in the same way that Jews were forced to wear yellow stars—nevertheless its omnipresence, during GLAD week, did not have the intended effect (at least I think it was the intended effect) of making me contemplate the horrors of Nazism. On the contrary, whenever I carried my pink triangle balloon or brandished my pink triangle button, it was my own boldness in making such a display that intoxicated me, so much so that I barely registered the triangle’s implications, which were of course the implications of evil itself. In this way, for my generation, the pink triangle became gradually dislocated from history. The minute it was turned upside down by its designers to signal its new function as an emblem of power and pride, there began a process of degeneration that would eventually reduce it into what it is today, a sort of politically correct fashion accessory, streamlined and natty, like the ubiquitous red AIDS ribbon that in a decade or so would be sprouting on every Hollywood breast, in some cases picked out in rubies.

Today the red AIDS ribbon, like the pink triangle, provokes little reaction in me when I pass someone wearing one on the street; it is neither frightening nor chic because it is not new. And yet in the early eighties, when AIDS was still a vagueness, a rumor on the periphery of things, to carry a pink triangle balloon was to make a daring proclamation. Parading up and down the college walkways, giddy and at the same time frightened, my friends and I would attract stares from boys and girls who loathed us, as well as from those who wanted to but could not quite muster the courage to join us. Theirs was a position I understood well, as it had been mine until the year before; then I’d gone to the gay-straight raps as a straight participant. Now I organized and led them. A surprisingly large number of students always showed up, though curiously, Barb was never among them—not, I suspect, because she was closeted (far from it; she was the most intrepid among us), but because she saw her own ardors as things too fragile, too exalted, to survive the harsh light of a public airing.

Alas, it was at one of these raps that I became the involuntary agent of her downfall. I remember that I was standing near the front of the common room, listening while my “cofacilitator,” an earnest crunchy named Erica, introduced the proceedings, when I noticed among the faces in the crowd that of a sophomore already famous among my friends, as she was considered a likely contender for the Olympic swim team. This sophomore, Tammy Lake, had jet-black hair and a friendly, oblong face. Although I knew her slightly—we lived in the same dormitory—I had no idea at first if she was a lesbian, or had simply come to the rap for the same reasons that other straight girls came to the raps: to prove her open-mindedness, or to expiate some childhood guilt, or because a boy on whom she had a crush had just come out to her. Nor, I think, would I have given the matter any further thought, had some recruitment instinct not compelled me to reappraise certain aspects of her appearance—short hair, muscled body, androgynous preppy garb—in light of their more obvious connotations. Was Tammy Lake, the proto-Olympic swimmer, gay? I found myself wondering. I certainly hoped so, because if she was, then her presence at the big rally on Saturday—that of a bona fide campus celebrity, a future face on the front of a Wheades box—could prove a great boon to us, almost as much of a boon as if the TV star who had enrolled the year before (and of whom I had so far caught only a glimpse) were to give a speech. And yet this TV star, though rumored to be a fixture at the off-campus parties that Gretchen, Schuyler, and their friends threw most weekends, had so far kept a low profile so far as GLAD week was concerned, whether out of discretion or disinterest I hadn’t a clue.

As for Tammy, when the rap ended she made a point of coming up and saying hello to me, much to the annoyance of Erica, who was dying to meet her. Ignoring the importunate glances of my cofacilitator, I mentioned that I would be manning the GLAD information table outside the dining hall the next evening, a remark to which Tammy responded with a smile so open and frank that, emboldened, I went a step further. I asked her if she wanted to help out.

“Sure,” she said. “What do I have to do?”

“Just sit with me there for an hour or so, answer questions, sell buttons and balloons and T-shirts. Oh, and take signatures on our petition to support gay marriage.”

Crossing her arms, Tammy seemed to consider the implications of my offer—but only for a moment. “Okay, why not?” she said. “I think I should be able to handle that.”

After we had agreed to meet in the common room the next day at five, Tammy left. Very swiftly Erica began buttoning her jacket. “By the way,” she said, “I’d appreciate it if in future, when referring to the information tables, you’d use some other verb besides to man. It’s sexist.” And she strode out the door.

The next afternoon found me, as promised, in the common room outside the dining hall, arranging on a folding table all those balloons and buttons and T-shirts and petitions, in what amounted to the leftist equivalent of a bake sale. Indeed, I was just smoothing out the black and purple banner (festooned, of course, with pink triangles) that hung over the edge of the table, when to my mild surprise Barb walked in. This was unusual only insofar as she lived off-campus and almost never ate at the dining hall.

“Hi, Barb,” I said.

Unsmiling, fists curled in her pockets, she bore down on me, her gray eyes wide with an urgency.

“Is something wrong?”

“Tammy can’t come,” she said. Then, in a softer voice: “You shouldn’t have asked her.”

“But she—”

“You shouldn’t have asked her,” Barb repeated. “When she said she’d come, it was only because she felt pressured. Afterwards she had second thoughts. You have to realize, she has her future to consider.”

“I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to step on any toes.”

“Don’t ever ask Tammy to do anything like this again,” Barb went on. “She’s not like other people. And please—don’t tell anyone I came here tonight.”

“Of course not.”

“Thank you.”

Turning around, she left. I sat down in my folding chair. What I was experiencing was not so much surprise as a sense of corroboration: that famous of course that comes when the solution to a murder mystery is finally revealed, and you slap yourself for not having seen it coming. For suddenly I understood not only that Barb and Tammy were having a love affair, but that through her lover Barb was living out that fantasy the long gestation of which I had read, almost from the day I’d met her, in her face. Now, for the first time, much of her behavior made sense to me: her furtiveness, her isolation, the distance she kept from the festivities attending GLAD week. I recognized the masochistic nature of her longing, the sacrificial pleasure she took in this romance of which duty required her never to speak, but rather to cherish in secret, silent in the anonymous stands while by the pool, as the climax to that hallowed ceremony in which love itself forbade Barb from taking any role, a medal was draped around Tammy’s golden neck.

After that, I assumed that Tammy would keep a low profile for the rest of GLAD week, that Barb would make sure she remained sequestered, in some sanctuary of her own devising, at least until the celebrations were over. Instead she was behind me in fine the next evening in the dining hall. “Hi,” she said casually. “Sorry about last night.”

“No problem.”

“Barb just didn’t think it was a good idea. Hope you understand.” “Sure.”

To my slight bewilderment, Tammy suggested that we eat together. At a small banquette on the side of the dining hall she interrogated me for half an hour as to my own history, the lesbian community on campus, the presence (or absence) of gay and lesbian professors on the faculty. Not far away, in the center of the room, Gretchen and Schuyler were having dinner with a friend of theirs, a pretty, pale girl with a dissolute affect who was rumored to have just ended a love affair with the TV star. Stubbing out cigarettes into their largely untouched plates of soy bean casserole (all three were vegetarians), they did not speak, not even to one another; instead they seemed intent on providing for the audience of other diners a tableau vivant of metropolitan boredom, enervation, and glamour.

“Who are those girls?” Tammy asked, indicating their table with her long neck. “I’ve seen them around.”

“The two on the left are named Gretchen and Schuyler. I think Barb knows them.”

“Are they lovers?”

I nodded. “Or at least they used to be.”

“And the other one?”

“I think her name is Lauren.”

“She’s pretty.”

“Yes.”

“Introduce me to her.”

The authority with which Tammy issued this command—and it was a command, not a request—startled and bemused me, even as it made me fear for Barb, whose portrayal of her girlfriend as naive and requiring of protection I now recognized as saying more about Barb’s needs than Tammy’s. So I stood, and led her to the table where the three girls were sitting. Like wakened sleepers, they blinked at us, as if our approach alone had roused them from drowsy stupefaction.

“Hi,” I said. “Mind if we join you?”

“It’s a free country,” Schuyler said.

Pulling up chairs, we sat. “This is Tammy,” I said.

Introductions were made. Between Lauren and Tammy there passed only the vaguest “Hi,” the most fluttering glance across the table and the food; and yet above the hum of conversation I was sure that I heard, as in one of those frequencies beyond the range of the human ear yet audible to dogs, an assignation being agreed upon, to take place later, in the dark, in one of their rooms.

The next day was bright and sunny. Just after lunch I was standing outside the library with some friends of mine, with Erica and Donald Schindler and a few others, all of us holding our pink triangle balloons and enjoying the new sensation, after winter, of sunlight and warmth, when from the direction of the Economics department Barb came striding toward us. “Hi, Barb,” we all said in chorus, smiling, eager to share that good humor the warm weather had brought out in us.

Without so much as a word she yanked the balloon out of my hand and with a powerful fist punched it into smithereens. I jumped. Her breath ragged, she moved toward the stairs that descended into the library.

“Oh for God’s sake, Barb!” Erica shouted. “What’s eating you?”

“Jesus, Barb!” Donald echoed, and turned to me. “Are you okay?”

“I’m fine,” I said, gazing at the shriveled remnants of my balloon. Unlike Donald and Erica, I wasn’t angry, probably because—alone among the witnesses—I understood the reason for Barb’s outburst. No doubt, without much in the way of ceremony, Tammy had just dumped her. And yet at the same time, I remained uncertain as to one detail: had she chosen my balloon at random, because it was the first one to hand? Or was she protesting the role I had played, albeit unwittingly, in the quick decimation of her idyll?

For surely it was the loss of this numinous ideal, more than of Tammy herself, that Barb was mourning that day. Like many young homosexual men and women, she had invested her vast and secret stores of erotic longing not simply in a dream lover but, as it were, in a dream scenario, one in which that longing, instead of terminating in barren solitude as we are taught that it must, finds issue in love. Certainly this was the happy ending for which I hoped; and indeed, if I felt such a strong identification with Barb’s fantasy of lovemaking in the Olympic Village, it was probably because her scenario, though differing from my own in every particular, nonetheless shared with it a common foundation in the desire to be redeemed by an exalted, even sacred passion.

For instance: the other day, browsing in a record store, I happened to hear a fragment of music in response to which—though my mind could remember nothing of it—my body issued a tremolo of adolescent nostalgia the likes of which I hadn’t felt in years. Immediately I asked what the music was, and learned that it was the slow movement from Vivaldi’s Concerto for Guitar and Strings in D; the reason I recognized it, I soon realized, was that it had been part of the soundtrack of a movie I had gone to see over and over again during my senior year in high school, a movie in which a rich American girl, living in Paris with her parents, falls in love with a poor French boy. In the movie an old man (played by Laurence Olivier) tells the pair that according to legend, two lovers who kiss in a gondola beneath the Bridge of Sighs, at sunset, when the bells of the campanile toll, will love each other forever, at which point they decide to run away together to Venice. And though everything about this movie besotted me, what gave me the greatest pleasure were the images it offered of Paris and Venice in the spring, lush and green, and providing such a contrast to the drought-ridden landscape of my adolescence, a landscape in which the greedy soil, when my father aimed his garden hose at it, lapped up the water and was instantly dry again. At home my sister and I had to share bathwater, at school notices thumbtacked above the toilets read, IF IT’S YELLOW, LET IT MELLOW, IF IT’S BROWN, FLUSH IT DOWN, yet in the film water was everywhere: it plashed laxly in Paris fountains, in Venetian canals it flowed with a lassitude from which even the recklessness of the gondola, in the climactic scenes, could not seem to wake it. By contrast, the theater where I went to see the film—that theater with its brown upholstered walls, its acid smell of popcorn—contained only drinking fountains, and these had been shut off by order of the fire commissioner for the duration of the drought.

How that film obsessed me! Soon I had seen it so many times that the old lady who took the tickets started looking at me with suspicion, as if she smelled inside my fervent attendance some unwholesome motive, such as a psychotic crush on one of the teenage stars. She was only partly right. What I desired wasn’t anything so clear-cut as that beautiful American girl, that handsome French boy; instead I wanted somehow to embody the very essence of their romance, to be ... not her, not him, but rather the wood of the boat, the moss on the walls, the tug of the water through which the gondolier’s pole propels them toward the sighing bridge, as bells toll. Thus my own dream scenario was born in a movie theater, as perhaps Barb’s had been, years before, in a high school locker room, where a beautiful runner was toweling off her limbs.

My scenario ran as follows: I would be in Europe, in some rapturous and lovely place—a monastery, say, where monks sang Vespers, or a cathedral where the sunlight refracted through the many-hued stained-glass windows, or one of the museums where I hoped someday actually to see the masterpieces of Italian Renaissance art the titles and locations of which I had memorized, along with Baylor, in the year of Stanley Flint—when across the vastness another pair of eyes would fix upon my own. It almost didn’t matter to whom the eyes belonged; what was important was the chanting, the light in the windows, in essence the noble and benevolent circumstances under which my friend and I would meet, and which we could recount, fifty years later, without compunction.

Needless to say, none of it ever came to pass. Oh, something like it came to pass: that is to say, one summer I did go to Europe, and in a museum (the Brera in Milan, to be exact) I did meet a boy, a very handsome boy named Gianluca, American of Italian extraction, an architecture student at NYU. This Gianluca had thick hair, black eyes, a weak chin darkened by an incipient haze of beard, and I remember thinking: he is the one I have been waiting for. His name is Gianluca. He has a weak chin. It was as if the subject of a portrait for which the background has already been painted, and from which only the sitter himself is missing, had suddenly appeared, and by taking his place before the snaking river and olive groves, proved the foresight of the artist in knowing exactly how to frame a face he had never seen. But in the end nothing happened. I was too shy to make a pass at him, while he must have had bigger fish to fry, for he merely took me on a walk through the courtyard of the Brera, where the statues of the great architects stand, and said, “Someday I intend for my statue to be placed here next to theirs.” I clucked in awe, after which we shook hands and parted. I never saw him again.

When I was young, I used to believe that delving into the past was necessarily like returning to a house in which one has spent the early part of one’s youth, only to be stunned at how much smaller everything seems than it did in childhood. In truth, I have since learned, the emotions rarely respect those laws of perspective that govern memory. Thus, though I’ve gone on to suffer worse humiliations than I did in Milan, just as I’ve had to wait for the results of tests far more consequential than the PSAT (and on which it was impossible to cheat), I won’t begrudge my adolescent self the legitimacy of his suffering. For in the end, all the experiences about which I’ve written here were rehearsals for those later hijackings of the spirit, vaster in extent if not intensity, that awaited me then, and await me still. (How trivial the PSAT seems when one has waited for a PSA!) In other words, “Practice,” as my mother used to tell me, “brings perspective”—the perspective of wisdom, which, while acknowledging the triviality of youth’s preoccupations, also refuses to underestimate its pain: something of which I try to remind myself whenever I recall those weekends when she was awaiting the Monday results of a Friday biopsy, and I the Monday results of a Friday math test, and in my arrogance I believed our anguish to be equal.