Kid Gloves (30 page)

The play was Terence's
Eunuchus
. I
imagine female roles were played by girls borrowed from other schools, Westminster being
single-sex then. However backward in such matters, I feel sure I would have noticed if the women
were boys cross-dressed.

The plot isn't what anyone, even Frankie Howerd,
could call sophisticated. A young man obsessed with a beautiful woman poses as a eunuch so that
he can be taken on as part of her domestic staff, presenting no danger because he lacks the
wherewithal to take advantage of her. Once alone with his mistress (though offstage) he
brandishes the wherewithal and takes advantage. Coming onstage after the act, he's exhilarated
and grins all over his face.
Good heavens
, I thought –
it's supposed to be
fun!
This had not been mentioned in the sex talk given by the headmaster of the Under
School, Mr Kelly, whose admirably brisk opening words had been ‘The penis is a splendid
dual-purpose instrument.' I recoiled from such frankness. As far as I was concerned, one purpose
was more than enough.

I got my sex education where
I could. The later novels of Kurt Vonnegut wouldn't normally qualify for instructive status in
this area, being so droll and sardonic, but my need for education was great. I read his
Breakfast of Champions
soon after it came out (which was in 1973, so I was nineteen or
so), and was intrigued by one of the crude drawings, the author's own work, which illustrated an
‘asshole' – the body part rather than the term of abuse. The drawing was essentially of an
asterisk. I asked myself if the anus could possibly look like that, and the answer was that I
had no idea. I knew my digestive system ended at a certain point, and I was willing to accept as
a technicality of physical life that I possessed an anus, or I would have exploded long ago. But
I had no visual information on the subject. Did it seem likely that my anus resembled a piece of
punctuation? No it didn't, but I had no counter-theory with which to contest it.

I'm reminded of the very touching moment in
Tarkovsky's
Solaris
(perhaps it goes back to Stanislaw Lem's source novel) when the
hero is reunited with his dead wife, Hari, on a space station, thanks to the intervention of the
sentient planet below him. They start foreplay, and he tries to take her dress off, going round
the back to unfasten it. There's no zip. There are no buttons. The dress is impossible to take
off, just as it was impossible to put on. This new Hari has been made directly out of his
memories, and though he remembered the dress he didn't have a specific memory of the back of the
dress and how it fastened. He has to get some scissors to help with the task of undressing her.
Tenderly he vandalizes the dress he remembered only as a mystical whole.

At the age of around twenty I lived in a thinly
imagined replica of my own body, and the orifice Dad took for granted as the central focus of
homosexual desire was like the zip on Hari's dress. It wasn't on my map. I had to crouch and use
a
mirror to inform myself of the accuracy of Kurt Vonnegut's drawing,
showing a little more diligence than Dad did when checking the underside of his Audi estate for
explosive devices. It did look rather like an asterisk! I couldn't have been more surprised if
the folds of this unimagined tissue had formed an ampersand or a treble clef.

If Dad ever blamed Mum for the way I had turned
out, he was sensible enough to do it out of my hearing. The surprising thing was how little
changed. My role as family peacemaker and lightning-rod was intact. It hadn't been displaced by
revelation of my apostasy, and there were still altogether too many late-night conversations
started by Dad with the formal opening, ‘I'm very worried about Tim / Matthew …' Where is
he going, what is he doing with his life?

It would fall to me to set out the case for the
defence, in front of a presiding judge who would often simply set aside the evidence and give me
his ruling on the facts of the case. We were all failing to live up to Dad's expectations, and
logically my own falling short should have secured me some sort of exemption from
generational-spokesman duties. I wouldn't have minded a sick note that excused me from going in
to bat for the brotherhood, but I was returning to Gray's Inn from Cambridge on a regular basis,
and the others were based elsewhere, so perhaps it was partly how I paid the rent.

My Cambridge rhythms with Mike altered after
Christmas, though not (I don't think) because of the stresses and strains of his stalking-horse
duties. He was starting to work. The Mike Larson I had known in his first term had hardly
attended a lecture, spending most of the day with me in coffee shops or cinemas. He claimed that
this was his real Cambridge education, and though I take flattery well it may also be that he
thought the architecture faculty a little underpowered, compared with what he was used to. Now
he buckled down, and
mighty were the charrettes. Architecture even gave him
an indirect way of describing our relationship. This was the ‘creative use of interstitial
space'. The phrase made sense, since he was just passing through Cambridge on his way to a life
and a career, though it didn't make my heart leap.

The subject Mike chose for his dissertation was
‘James Stirling and the Art of Rudeness'. It anatomised Stirling's famous V-shaped History
Faculty building, which Mike saw as a V-sign offered to the university and its traditions. He
asked me to help him with spelling and grammar, which I did very happily. It didn't occur to me
that he might be dyslexic, though the way he ran at language was all his own. In those days
dyslexia was an all-or-nothing category, and Mike could clearly make his way in the world of the
written, though there was still a certain amount that I could tidy up.

By June his money had come through at last. He
paid his debts, and even took me and Mum out to dinner and a show, Tom Stoppard's
Every Good
Boy Deserves Favour
at the Mermaid Theatre.

He had a farewell gift for me too, an inscribed
hardback of John Fowles's
Daniel Martin
. The inscription compared me to Henry James's
Maria Gostrey and speculated that one day I might try a novel about an Englishman and an
American. I have to admit that I didn't get very far with
Daniel Martin
. Come to that,
I've never read
The Ambassadors
, though I know that Maria Gostrey introduces Lambert
Strether to the Louvre and the Comédie Française and is generally a civilizing force.

Another memento he left with me was an item of
clothing, which I had always liked on him, a cotton sweater of multicoloured stripes. Just as
British body language can seem unmasculine to the American eye, particularly the habit of
sitting with the legs crossed and the knees close together, closing up the crotch (a posture
known in some US circles as
‘gin and tonic'), so this item of clothing
stood out as rather too-too in a society not yet indoctrinated with the dress code known as
‘preppy'. Perhaps Mike left it with me because it had fallen short of the desired effect when he
had worn it in Cambridge. A raised eyebrow can do a lot of damage.

In one of our first conversations post-Christmas
I had let slip Dad's verdict on him – the passing comment (
obiter dictum
is the
technical term, when a judge's casual remarks, not binding in law, are being referred to) about
his being ‘small beer'.
Let slip
gives the wrong impression. I passed on the
information without hesitation, confident that Mike would find Dad's blindness as comical as I
did. It never occurred to me that this well-defended man might want to be approved of, even by
people who didn't matter to him in any real way. He was mortified, and in all the years of
intermittent contact since then the phrase has never been properly exorcised.

By this time I had decided that spending time in
America would do me good. I applied for a Harkness Fellowship, a sort of contraflow Rhodes
scholarship enabling British students to attach themselves to American academic institutions.
The protocol was for applicants to approach their university of choice directly to arrange
possible admission, and the obvious place to go was the University of Virginia, where Alderman
Library had a major collection of Faulkneriana, Faulkner being the subject of my supposed PhD.

Geography is hardly my strong suit, but I
realized that Virginia was not close to California and to Mike. Obviously I hoped to see him
again. I also felt that exposure to a more energetic set of manners would be good for me.

The Harkness selectors turned me down, I imagine
because my proposal was rather feeble. American Literature was a paper I had done well on at
Cambridge (where it had only recently been introduced), perhaps because it was a literature, at
least
in the nineteenth century, unconfident about its relationship with
the English canon. As a refugee from Classics, lacking an English A-level, I shared that
unconfidence. Faulkner was not by a long chalk my favourite American writer, but at least his
output wasn't conclusively ranked, as Melville's and Hawthorne's were, with
Moby-Dick
and
The Scarlet Letter
making their other work seem inconsequential. There was work to
be done. How was I to know that at the time more American PhDs were undertaken on Faulkner than
on Shakespeare?

My acceptance letter from U. Va arrived weeks
after my rejection from Harkness. I showed it to Dad in a spirit of wry amusement, but he told
me I should take it up anyway. He would supplement the little stipend I was given by the
Department of Education and Science. I tried to make clear that this acceptance was not the
accolade he assumed, what with American universities being businesses in a way alien to our
domestic assumptions, but he repeated his offer. And I accepted it.

I don't think for a moment that he was treating
me as a remittance man, to use the traditional word for the unrespectable family member who is
paid to keep a suitable distance from those he might embarrass. I was a functional part of the
Gray's Inn household, someone he could rely on to be cheerful company for Mum while he was away
on circuit, as he so often was.

Virginia was the first place where I was able to
present myself as gay from the outset. Charlottesville was symmetrically Anglophilic and
homophobic (Alcoholic Beverages Commission statutes made it illegal for gay people and other
prohibited groups to be served alcohol), so some people had a silly prejudice in my favour and
others had a silly prejudice against me. I made women friends, which was intoxicating, and much
easier with any ambiguity dispelled. I involved
myself in the Gay Student
Union but didn't have a sex life to speak of. Gay students tended to drive to D.C. at the
weekend for their pleasures, and the bicycle was my only means of transport. There was an
underworld, but I didn't explore it. I remember a graduate student saying, after the sauna at
the University gym was destroyed in a fire, that on the whole he would rather that the Parthenon
had fallen down. I knew nothing of that.

I went to Alderman Library, which unlike the
University Library at Cambridge had open stacks – meaning that you could find things you didn't
know you wanted. I read Martin Amis, Ian McEwan, Craig Raine, Michel Tournier, Mario Mieli's
Elementi di Critica Omosessuale
, and other books in the same run of shelves such as
Tearoom Trade
and
Nos ancêtres les pervers
. I never even entered the room
where the Faulkneriana was stored. Instead I Xeroxed
The
Times
crossword from the copies of the paper which arrived in batches every few weeks,
and solved the puzzle over a bottomless cup of coffee (meaning it would be refilled as often as
you wanted) in the Virginian restaurant ‘on the corner' – the designation of a particular
stretch of street facing the university. At the bookshop on the corner I bought
The World
According to Garp
,
Gay American History
and C. A. Tripp's
The Homosexual
Matrix
. I ‘audited' a creative writing class, meaning that I attended without being
assessed, since I wasn't studying for an American degree. My surroundings suited me, and I
managed to get a little writing fellowship (the Hoyns) for the next year, and taught writing at
the modest 250 level in the year after that. By then I had a contract with Faber for
Lantern
Lecture
, and Dad's attitude towards me changed decisively. No doubt I had changed too.
Meeting me after my first year in the States, Tim thought I had grown taller – unlikely – and
much louder, which was certainly true, since I had learned to hold my own in a more raucous
conversational tradition than the one I had been used to. Americans used to
say that Brits weren't ‘self-starting', that they waited with pretended diffidence for the
invitation to shine. I was now officially self-starting.

It took Mike a little longer to get his career
started. His big break was winning the design competition for California's Vietnam War Memorial.
This was a major enterprise, since one casualty in ten came from the state, the largest single
loss. Partly for this reason there were issues of cultural politics involved in the project.

Maya Ying Lin's National Monument in Washington
had been controversial from the moment her name was announced as responsible for the winning
design. She was of Chinese descent, and she was female. She was also still an undergraduate at
the time. (The competition was judged blind, with entries identified only by number, and she
stood out in a field of more than a thousand.) Her outsider status might be an advantage in some
quarters, but grief is territorial. Did she have a right to voice the national pain?