Kid Gloves (28 page)

‘Dad … do you really think something like
that could happen? With Mum sitting next to me and you saying nothing?'

Stiffly, troubled, he said, ‘That's what I
remember.' Perhaps thinking he had revealed more of his own admiration for the sublime Bisset
than was really necessary.

It made sense that the surprises shouldn't only
be on one side. I had another one myself that I was keeping in reserve, not knowing when would
be the best time to disclose it. I was in a relationship. I realized that this would in itself
be bad news from Dad's point of view. Me being in a relationship would make it harder for him to
maintain that I was going through some sort of phase. Naturally that was why I wanted him to
know, so that he could stop clinging to invented doubts and accept my life as it was – as it was
and as it was going to be. At the same time, it seemed obvious that any partner of mine would
come in for an extreme intensity of scrutiny, exceeding anything that would be appropriate for
high-level military security or access to international secrets. No character, however
exemplary, would wring from my father an assent that would cost him so much. In fact anything
that made my lover seem likeable, decent, solid, automatically became suspect and intolerable
for that very reason. Under the eyes of such a judging committee, Prince Charles himself might
have struggled to score a clear round.

His name was Mike Larson, an
American student of architecture attached to (Gonville and) Caius College, though like every
other student he had quickly learned to use the short form of its name and to pronounce it
Keys
. In those days, lacking clairvoyance, my friends and I would sit around in
earnest shock discussing the oppressive madness of the American educational system, thanks to
which Mike would finish his education thirty thousand dollars in debt. My generation had
inherited a fear of debt from the previous one, though the arrival of credit cards in a few
years' time would sweep it away.

Mike was unhysterical about his financial future.
If a great architect like Louis Kahn could die deeply in debt, who was he to be solvent?

Mike was in his early thirties, nearly ten years
older than me, and had a background both provincial and cosmopolitan. His home town was
Watsonville, California, which I seem to remember him describing as the artichoke capital of
America, but this was either a pious fib or else a title that has since been snatched by
Castroville. He had joined the Marines at eighteen and fought in Vietnam, though this was
relatively early in the war. The film shown on board ship the night before his platoon landed
was
Dr Strangelove
. The crew, who wouldn't be going ashore, laughed less anxiously than
the Marines, who would. His experience of combat was strongly charged with emotion. Love was
part of that experience, though never described as such by the parties involved. Someone
important to him was turned into a red mist under mortar fire. I think the name was Dennis
Kovacs. Away from Vietnam, Mike was baffled that his old buddies seemed to dissociate themselves
so easily from that fellowship of fear and intimacy.

Afterwards he had studied at Harvard, where the
climate was uncongenial to a native Californian and (as he said) ‘it
snowed
…
on my body
.' I think it was at Harvard that he learned the word ‘charrette',
meaning a last-minute burst (usually involving sleepless nights) to finish a piece of work. The
phrase derives from the École des Beaux Arts in Paris, where the charrette was a little wagon
pulled through a classroom at the last minute to be filled with students' submissions. Anyone
who failed to get his work in the cart didn't get marked, and plenty were working up to the last
minute, virtually sitting in the cart to add the final touches.

Then he moved back to San Francisco. Mike had
spent plenty of time in a metropolitan sexual culture, and it can't have occurred to him, as he
checked out a meeting at a pub on Rose Crescent, still jet-lagged, that he was more or less
exhausting the gay scene in Cambridge with a single swig of warm beer. If it wasn't the A to Z
of gay life in the town it was certainly the A to E. I don't imagine that he would have hooked
up with me, which he did not quite on a whim but more out of curiosity and good nature than
anything else, if he had known it would be hard to avoid me thereafter without rudeness, in such
a small world.

Was he good-looking? I think so, though he wasn't
so fiercely beautiful that I couldn't make the first move. He had a slight stammer that
prevented him from being intimidating. When a word wouldn't come his head bobbed up and down.
Did he look like a film star? Not quite, though if he had a vague likeness to anyone in that
category it would have to be Harrison Ford, clean-cut and a little grumpy.

He had a trick of starting a sentence with ‘You
see …', but dropping the first word, so that a mild presentation of opinion became
insistent, even abrasive, without him seeming to notice. ‘It turns out' (or ‘Turns out …')
was another typical opening, slightly less dogmatic.

He spent the night in my tiny room on Trinity
Street, but
it was hardly big enough for one. Caius had housed him on
Grange Road, in a house of American students, something that irritated him since he didn't want
to be insulated from the locals. If he'd wanted an American social life he would have stayed in
America – though this was one of the few premises with effective central heating. I stayed there
once or twice, but mainly we slept in our own beds. Somehow he conned me into being part of his
fitness regime, which meant that I would jog over to his place at seven in the morning and then
we would run round Grantchester before breakfast. Often he wasn't ready when I arrived (he
couldn't be expected to take exercise without the first cigarette of the day) so fairly often I
would do the Grantchester circuit on my own. I was slow to realize that Mike's fitness regime,
which I took so much more seriously than he did, was in itself a mild Adam-repellent, a shared
activity that we didn't do together.

One thing Mike owed to his Marine training was
the efficiency of his mornings, and the ability to ‘shit, shower and shave' in ten minutes. We
would meet later for breakfast in Caius and dawdle over coffee afterwards in a café called,
winsomely, the Whim. During the first term of his year in Cambridge Mike hardly attended a
lecture, and we spent most of the day together talking. Sometimes in the afternoons he would
work out at Fenners on Gresham Road, the University sports facility that included a weight room,
though I felt he attended more for the view than the health benefits.

He was a reader, of Isherwood, of Vidal, of John
Fowles and Henry James. His copies of
Down There on a Visit
and
Burr
were
copiously annotated in his architect's energized small capitals. Only with his signature did he
let out a little swooping expressiveness. This script with its implication of load-bearing
capacity, compressive strength, was part of his overwhelming difference from anyone I'd met
before.

In the evenings we often saw
films. It may be that I make the connection with Harrison Ford partly because Mike had seen the
first showing of
Star Wars
in San Francisco, unaffected by the gathering storm of hype,
and had loved it. He couldn't wait for it to arrive in Cambridge (which took a few months) so he
could hear what I made of it. Hmm. Not all that much. It was my first inkling that there was a
big-kid side to this travelled, lightly traumatized man. I had seen George Lucas's first film,
the rather formalist dystopia
THX 1138
, which I much admired, and then in due course
American Graffiti
, which seemed likeable pap. This was pap again, but glossier and not
so likeable.

It was fun to wrangle about our divergent tastes.
We had strong opinions and stubbornness in common, though they were expressed in different
styles. Scorsese was someone we both admired, though Mike had a mental block about his name (and
quite a few others) so that it always came out as ‘Sacuzzi'. Mike was the first person I had met
who cared about the Oscars and the first to use the phrase ‘the economy' in casual
conversation.

In architecture, naturally enough, his tastes
were adventurous. He admired Peter Eisenman's House VI, with the upside-down staircase formally
balancing the functional one, and the obstruction preventing the occupants (the mere clients)
from installing a double bed. In fact there were multiple reasons for sleepless nights. House VI
bankrupted the couple who commissioned it, so that the boot of debt was on the other foot for
once.

Mike also knew every lyric from
A Chorus
Line
, but that didn't come high on the list of qualities that would appeal to Dad.
Military service to his country, crew cut, combat experience, aspiring professional status – a
warm light should be played on these attributes to bring out all their sparkle. Love
of show tunes was a different story, to be kept in the dark as much as
possible. Easier to imagine Dad and Frank Zappa singing doo-wop on the back step than Dad and
Mike duetting on ‘One Hand, One Heart' from
West Side Story
.

If Dad knew what part Mike played in my life, a
thousand individual blind spots would join up into a single massive refusal to acknowledge his
merits. It made sense to introduce the person first and add the label afterwards. A good first
impression might stand up to the revision required by his ideology. So I had asked Mike to stay
in the Anglesey house earlier in the holiday.

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.