Kid Gloves Read online

  I had no way of judging our viability as a couple, never having been part of one before. I could measure the success of one day against another, but not the vitality of the whole. We didn’t seem to be a very vibrant combination, but how was I to know?

  Just as his hesitation in speech took the edge off what might otherwise have been an over-insistent manner, so there were little complications in his world view which saved him from dismissing other people’s altogether. He was a thoroughgoing atheist, for instance, who had had a mystical experience. It hadn’t overturned his assumptions, but he was too honest to pretend it hadn’t happened.

  It was when he was seventeen, doing farm work one summer. The job involved fetching water from a well, and one day the water in the bucket mysteriously became alive as he carried it. He became aware, gradually at first, then overwhelmingly, of the water in its entangled essence. This was a drug experience without benefit of drugs. It lasted less than a full hour but more than half of one, and all that time he was aware of the water as an activity rather than a substance. He was carrying a bucket of particles in motion. He wasn’t just a spectator of the molecular traffic, he was fully involved in its tingle. And after that, he couldn’t in all honesty rule out the possibility of a transcendent reality, though he was no keener on the idea than he had been before.

  Mike didn’t seem to want to touch me or sleep with me, but still there was some strong connection. He told me that if I wanted sex I should just say so. It was no big deal. He used the phrase ‘goodnight handshake’ for such friendly helping out. He was always telling me that I had a moral backbone, that I was a person of integrity. These rather alienating compliments seemed to confirm that I was someone who would not be asking for a goodnight handshake any time soon.

  It made sense that we started from different assumptions. Mike came from a strongly sexualized milieu. At a time when the Castro area of San Francisco was many gay men’s spiritual home, it was actually his normal address. He worked out in a ‘clothing-optional’ gym – a nude gym. His normal place to see films was the Castro Cinema, where straight people fell into the category of tourists, sightseers as much as moviegoers. It was routine for him to start the day at a breakfast place called Welcome Home, where the coffee-pot was toted and the order for steak and eggs taken by a slightly sulky cowboy, whose reflex of raunchy backchat was only the local dialect of waitstaff banter worldwide. Mike was either past the stage of wanting a boyfriend, or not yet ready for it.

  Our relationship meant different things to us, which usually means that the relationship doesn’t actually exist. If two people have divergent ideas about the part they play in each other’s lives then they are in two asymmetrical relationships rather than a single one. They overlap in a space they don’t share. The axioms of an emotional logic are not held in common.

  There was plenty of goodwill involved, though, and I hope Mike didn’t regard the responsibility of presenting himself to the family as my partner to be oppressive. There was a Christmas meal planned by his Cambridge housemates, but perhaps he enjoyed having made other connections and being in demand. They might be insular but he was not.

  I was helping him out financially, too, till he could get money matters arranged, since at that time it wasn’t easy for non-citizens to set up bank accounts. Obviously he was good for his debts, but he may have felt that he was in some way defraying the imaginary interest on my little loans by accepting the role of designated boyfriend in the family drama. A walk-on who might well be booed, but with luck only after he had left the stage. Mike would be back in Cambridge by the time Dad read the small print in the programme (‘and introducing Mike Larson as the surprise love interest …’).

  This was the man in my corner when I entered the ring to slug it out with Dad. Positive images and role models, though, didn’t really do the trick in his case. When liberal commentators set out to break the link between homosexuality and degradation the laugh was on them, really. The link was too strong in his mind, not to be casually broken. When Penelope Gilliatt, John Schlesinger and Peter Finch (with help from Glenda Jackson, Murray Head and let’s not forget Bessie Love as the answering service lady) got together to make Sunday Bloody Sunday in 1971, showing how ordinary, not to mention unthreatening and pitiable, the life of a gay doctor in London really was – and this was years after Ronald Waterhouse had tried to tell Dad that he had a bee in his bonnet on precisely this subject – well, really they might just as well not have bothered. Dad missed the point without even trying. He was shocked by the film (as he told me while we were driving round the equestrian statue by Holborn Viaduct) and its sordid load of prejudice. The nastiness he detected lay in the film’s suggestion that a Jewish doctor could be a homosexual. This was plain anti-Semitism, as he saw it, possibly also a libel on the standing of the medical profession, though it was the religious slur that preoccupied him.

  Well-meaning cultural intervention could not raise the status of homosexuality in his eyes any more than an anvil could take to the air with the help of a few party balloons.

  Mike had obvious merits as a house guest, from Mum and Dad’s point of view. He didn’t stammer noticeably more or less in their company than he did in mine. It was natural to his generation of Americans to address their seniors as ‘Sir’ and ‘Ma’am’, forms of speech that would have seemed self-abasing or actively satirical on the lips of their British equivalents.

  That suited Dad, who didn’t at all mind being truckled to. He was even indulgent towards over-truckling, seeing it as a fault in the right direction, a badge of good-heartedness, not to be penalized. It was under-truckling he didn’t care for, any sort of reverence shortfall.

  Mum wasn’t so certain, since she always suspected deferential manners of insincerity or secret mockery. She seemed to be straining to detect an element of the sardonic in his use of ‘Ma’am’. Had this complicated stranger, perhaps slightly too good to be true, mistaken her for the Queen?

  Mothers are apt to be sceptical about a son’s choice of partner. Perhaps she could see nude gym written all over him.

  There were less harmonious aspects to his manner. Mike responded to quite small surprises in conversation with the exclamation ‘Jesus!’, a mannerism which drew a flinch and a blink from Dad the first time it happened, and a frown whenever it was repeated.

  Mum and Dad weren’t hopelessly provincial. They knew that if a dinner guest cut his food up methodically, then transferred the fork to his right hand for the purpose of conveying nourishment to his mouth, there was no cause for alarm. These were standard American manners, deeply embodied aspects of culture.

  Mike, though, may have been slightly thrown by grace before meals said in Welsh. There was the ‘long Welsh grace’, itself very short, and the ‘short Welsh grace’, lasting barely five seconds and in favour when food was late or appetites keen. Mike will have been exposed to strings of exotic sound, timeless Celtic phonemes reaching his eardrums as either ‘Dee olch itty, dirion Da, um der dunneer, rothion ra, row innee er wen ai thlon, ara boo-id sith ger-ein bron. Amen’ or else ‘Ben deeth yan boo-id, oth yew. Amen’. The only bits he could reasonably be expected to join in were those ‘Amens’.

  Family meals could be a bit of a minefield – for all of us – and Mike had the disadvantage of not having been issued with a map. For instance, Tim might choose to steer the conversation towards the subject of punk rock, not just to get Dad’s goat but as part of a more multifarious agenda, hinting at the ‘sex pistol’ primed and ready to fire. He enjoyed setting up a complex conversational turbulence, while I tried to steer the talk towards calmer water, or (in emergencies) bailed the
bilges frantically and hid my fear of being swamped by the forces I had set in motion.

  There was no hiding from Mike that Anglesey in winter bore no resemblance to California at any season. The Irish Sea was not a marine body double for the Pacific, not even if you half-closed your eyes to help it out. The village of Rhosneigr could boast the Premier Garage and the Bali-Hi Fish Bar but was not twinned with San Francisco. What did we have to offer that the Bay Area couldn’t match? Perhaps Barclodiad y Gawres, the ancient monument on the next headland along, towards Aberffraw, a Neolithic burial chamber (technically a cruciform passage grave), if he felt like peering through railings at decorated stones, their zigzags, spirals and chevrons latent in the gloom. The interior was a little more accessible than the holy of holies in Kafka’s parable ‘Before the Law’, being open two whole days a year. (The name means ‘apronful of the giantess’, though Dad always translated it as ‘breadcrumbs’ instead – but then he admitted that his Welsh got rusty from his conversing in it so little, and he found it mortifying to make mistakes in the hearing of more eloquent users of his mother tongue.) Or we could walk round the Maelog Lake, at least most of the way round, while Mike huddled incredulous in his windbreaker, until brambles and mud made the going too difficult.

  Tim and Mike clashed enjoyably over architecture, playing the game of Lloyd Wright / Le Corbusier / Mies van der Rohe, rituals of ranking that can seem to outsiders so much like rounds of rock-paper-scissors.

  Mike used a number of Americanisms that I sensed were already obsolescent, calling things not only ‘cute’ but ‘neat’. It was refreshing, even intoxicating, to be told that, say, ‘C-corb’ had designed ‘a bunch of stuff’ that was ‘just gorgeous’. It seems a safe bet that Tim, who didn’t have many people with whom to discuss architecture, found Mike both stimulating and baffling in his lack of intellectual airs.

  Mike’s verdict on Tim, meanwhile, was ‘I don’t know whether to fight him or fuck him’, which suggested that the holiday wasn’t a complete failure from his point of view.

  Mike’s word for the men he found attractive was ‘Munchkin’, though the beings by that name in The Wizard of Oz weren’t in fact, as I discovered when I saw the film at last, young and beefy. I had imagined a sort of junior league of bodybuilders. In the coffee shops of Cambridge Mike would point out casualties of British self-sabotage, handsome undergraduates hunching in apology for their good looks. America would have encouraged them to revel in their studliness. It wasn’t too late, even now, if they played their cards right.

  There were some exceptions to his typecasting – the elderly Einstein sticking out his tongue in a famous photograph somehow qualified as a Munchkin – but I certainly wasn’t a Munchkin, and Tim didn’t come significantly closer to that ideal.

  It occurs to me now that Mike, as an admirer of Iris Murdoch’s fiction, may have felt that her deepest intuitions about British life were being confirmed in this welcoming environment laced with threat. In theory my father was the target of the machinations – but would Mike really have been surprised if my elegant, quietly anxious mother had entered the guest bedroom one morning bearing not a cup of tea but a samurai sword, like Honor Klein in A Severed Head (his favourite Murdoch novel, and his favourite moment in it), to banish all obliqueness of dealing and force a resolution of some kind? Perhaps not.

  It made sense of a Murdochian sort, the warrior being offered as a sacrificial victim, exposed to danger and enchantment beyond anything the Viet Cong could devise (though his tour of duty pre-dated the worst of the war) by the shores of a bleak sea.

  Even without weaponry, Mum can’t have been an entirely relaxing hostess. Part of her concern was to do with whether the two of us were well matched – and if so, whether it even mattered, bearing in mind that Mike was returning in a matter of months to his city and his career, his real life outside the parenthesis of Cambridge. She was also bound to be anticipating the impact on her family of the little piece of psychodrama I had set in motion.

  So after I had made my sexual declaration to Dad as best I could (having so little to declare), I told him about Mike. He put on a fair show of neutrality, not exploding at the deceit and immorality involved in smuggling my bit of fluff (a very sturdy bit of fluff, admittedly) into the family home. He played the waiting game, knowing that sooner or later I would have to ask him for his verdict on Mike. I had given him back some power, I suppose, by showing that I cared what he thought.

  Eventually he produced his assessment. ‘Small beer,’ he said.

  I felt we were making progress here. Who would have thought that Dad was capable of dismissing the same-sex partner of one of his sons with such a light touch? No reference to the Bible or the vileness of physical acts. It was never on the cards that he would say, ‘You two seem to be good together,’ and I wouldn’t have believed him if he had, since it didn’t seem particularly true. But it had to be encouraging that Dad huffed the threat of Mike away like so much thistledown.

  As Dad understood homosexuality, there was always an abusive seduction at the root of it. A person of power or glamour cast a spell on an insecure male, then turned fascination into sordid exploitation. In a strange way, the earlier in life this atrocity was perpetrated the better, since then there could be no question of meaningful consent, let alone desire. Ideally, from his point of view, I would have been turned, even sexually assaulted, by a scoutmaster in full make-up. This Vietnam-vet-architect scenario was far less easily rewritten as pathology. Still, if Dad had wanted me to be corrupted over mugs of cocoa round a campfire, he might at least have sent me to Scouts.

  Male bonding had hardly begun to work its magic on the culture in those early days of 1978, and a father–son sojourn had an artificial, self-conscious feel even when there were urgent matters of sexual dissidence to be thrashed out. In the aftermath of all those disputes over princes, great-aunts and actresses we were probably both relieved when it was time to go back to London, with a more or less satisfactory deadlock in place. In the car Dad expressed a lowered tension by sucking – then wolfishly crunching – Tunes, his preferred courtroom lozenge and vocal lubricant, rather than the gnawed twin stems of his disused pipe.

  It’s standard practice when dealing with people implacably opposed to homosexuality to propose that they are themselves in denial. It always seems a cheap manoeuvre, not just cheap but dull, to insist that homophobes are sitting on top of a volcano of disavowed desire. If Dad had a man-loving component it was easily bought off, with male social company (endlessly on tap in Gray’s Inn) and the ritual worship given to Welsh rugby players, colossal of thigh.

  Dad summed up the whole of homosexual life with the phrase ‘wallowing in faeces’, and I wonder what made him think in those terms – what made his disgust take that particular form. I’m not saying Dad had more knowledge of anal intercourse than I did, but he can’t have had less, since I had none.

  With Mike I was embarrassed about my defective sexual experience, almost as embarrassed as I was of never having seen The Wizard of Oz. I lived in my body very approximately. Sensuality was one more thing I experienced mainly through books.

  My childish body was strangely tuned. I remember soothing myself to sleep (aged four? five?) by playing with my right nipple, an action that transmitted a high feathery tickling to the roof of my mouth, referred pleasure like referred pain, experienced in a different place from where it was generated. This was the high-water mark of my self-awareness before latency dragged me back down into the dark.

  As for my awareness of other bodies, I had known from an early age that I was different from my brothers. This wasn’t existentia
l angst but statement of fact. They made wee-wee from a different thing. They did a stream but I did a spray and sometimes I felt sore. My part was different from theirs, looked different, was different. (How I made the comparison I don’t exactly remember, but bathtime was the obvious opportunity for playing spot-the-difference.) When I was transfixed by an infantile erection aged six or seven I went down on my knees, my plump and dimpled knees, to give thanks to the God who had clearly intervened with a miracle to correct the anomaly, but my willy looked no different afterwards.

  Our parents hadn’t had a policy about circumcision but asked for professional advice as each son was born. The experts at the Welbeck Nursing Home, where we were all brought into being, gave their opinion. A ‘snip’ was felt to be necessary for Tim and then for Matthew, but not for me. No thought had been given to the possibility that a cavalier among roundheads (to use a jaunty slang I know only from books) might feel disagreeably set apart.

  Technically I was intact while they had been wounded, but being the odd man out has in itself some of the quality of a wound. Then persistent infections of the foreskin showed that medical advice wasn’t infallible, and I was circumcised at the age of eight or nine. I got a proper wound of my own, and riding my bicycle was something of a penance for a time. Memory tells me that it was actually a sort of tractor-tricycle with a bucket seat and satisfying deep treads on the tyres, but I’m hoping memory has got it wrong. Poorly co-ordinated or not, I was old enough to be riding a bike and a bike it shall be.

  A year or two later I learned the facts of life from a Latin play – a statement that makes me seem even more the tragic casualty of an expensive education than I feel the evidence supports. Westminster School had a tradition (recent, I dare say, and probably emulating another school) of putting on a Latin play in the original, not every year but at regular intervals, usually with one gimmicky touch, such as a character arriving in a car – a Mini driven through the Abbey cloisters. When I was still at the Under School, and so perhaps eleven or twelve, I attended a performance. The transition between the Under School and what we called the Great School was smooth. In Latin lessons at the Under School, Mr Young (pink and white colouring, wet of lip, Bill Haley cowlick innocent of any pop-culture reference) would wince at blunders and say, ‘Don’t let Mr Moylan catch you doing that.’ In turn Mr Moylan, when he took over (a being without moisture, fastidious, invariably making a dog-leg across Little Dean’s Yard to avoid exposing his leather soles to the wear-factor of gravel), would say, ‘I hate to think what Mr Young would say about that.’