Consenting Adult (29 page)

Then why the exception with Jeff? Why this flashing vision of him in his hours of sex? It was as if she permitted herself a spying that would be unthinkable, had always been unthinkable, not only with the other children, but, come to think of it, with herself and Ken. She never thought back to their own sexuality in the first insistent years, never dwelt on precise images of Ken in the act of penetrating—even now she shied away from it.

To have sex, to live sex, to luxuriate in sex, yes, yes, in your own acts of sex. But to envision somebody else in the act of having sex, there was something prurient in it, a Peeping Tom-ish vicarious nastiness.

Then what was this recurrent vision of the two young male bodies? Why the exception, as if she had an inherent right to make an exception? It was a monstrous mistake, a self-delusion that “this is different,” generated perhaps by the world’s old self-delusion that it had some vested rights in the sex behavior of others. If ever there was a sexual aberration, here it was, her own. If ever there was an obsession with specifics, here it was, her own once more.

She leaped back from the idea, but it pursued her. It is so, it is so, face it, accept it. You never saw it before, but now you do see it and you can finish with it. It
is
a question of privacy, Jeff’s as much as anybody else’s. It is a matter of good taste, of a decent decorum,
your
taste, your decorum. Remember it, and you need never see that vision again.

A fine elation seized her. Here too was a threshold and she had just crossed it.

The first time they did send airplane fare for a visit home was not until Christmas of 1968. It had been a year of fearful violence, topping nearly a decade of mounting violence, a boiling up within the nation, an eruption of activism, of confrontation, of militancy. “Hell No, I Won’t Go” was heard from one end of the land to the other from students denouncing the war in Vietnam, cities flamed from Newark to Watts, the nonviolence of the civil rights movement was constantly clawed apart by people crying “Black Power” and separatism, this very year had seen two assassinations, one of Martin Luther King, the other of Bobby Kennedy, that sent shock waves through the memories of everyone who had watched through the horror-stricken days in November five years earlier when another Kennedy had been shot down. …

It was Ken who was the first to remark, during Jeff’s two weeks at home—not literally at home, for he had elected to stay with Margie and Nate, and had prepared them for this beforehand-Ken who had said, “It all has slid right off his back, this whole year. Have you noticed?”

“He identifies with young people. All young people do.”

“Don’t trust anybody over thirty. Yes, I know. But it’s more than that, Tessa. He doesn’t give a damn, except about medicine, except about his own troubles. He lives off there in that sunny cocoon of Southern California, basking in the sun, and he’s peeled off the whole damn world.”

“Ken, I don’t really think that’s it—he never did get worked up over politics, any kind of politics.”

Ken ignored the point, though he nodded at the words. “He’s peeled off all his family too; even while we were out there, he never fixed it so we’d meet one of his neighbors, one of his friends.”

“He’s always been an intensely private person.”

“It’s something beyond that. I just got this image of his peeling himself free, like somebody on a beach, stripping down for sunbathing or a swim, and it rings truer to me than any other way of looking at it.”

“Maybe he has to. To survive.”

This time Ken fell silent. He looked tired, saddened, and Tessa knew that this sight of Jeff in his old surroundings had reawakened in Ken some of his old misery about his son, misery that Ken had done so much to throw off, to disown, but whose vestigial traces could still freshen with a vigor which he himself detested.

Jeff had changed in the nearly two and a half years since he had left for the West. He was in his middle twenties and looked indefinably older, but externally he had changed as well. It was in part what Margie called “the California look,” the permanent deepening of his tan, as if it were laid down to the bone, the thorough bleaching of his light hair, his eyebrows nearly vanished against the brown forehead. He looked different in other ways, as all young people were looking different, and in that he was a conformist, Tessa reflected, but only to herself, as Nate was, as Don was, as all the “nonconforming young” actually were. He wore his hair longer, touching the collar of his shirt in back, his earlobes on the sides, with sideburns loose and full along his jaws. It was becoming, casual and at the same time rather courtly, as if he were a man of an earlier century as well as of his own.

He seemed pleased to be “home again,” though when he used the phrase himself a note of protest arose within Tessa’s mind, a note she did not utter. Even to Ken she refused to say that she was hurt at his decision to stay with Margie and Nate on this first visit home, that it had come at her as a small insult. Jeff hadn’t recognized it as such, most probably because he had never considered it as it might seem to anybody but himself. To consider one’s parents? Square, man, square.

That hated concept, “parentship.” Here again, she thought, was a new test they had to face, a test neither Don nor Margie had ever made them face. With each of them, the time had come so naturally to let go, to evolve into the new relationship presented by a new family forming, outside of the old family, though with luck and affection, linked to it. Linked in a lesser degree as with Don, or a greater degree as with Margie. But strongly linked still.

Where there was no new family, there was an imprecision about the cutoff date for legitimate parentship, but the estate of parenthood could not be ended by fiat, even of a grown son; to be a parent, to feel what a parent feels was a natural force too, like the sex drive and so many other instinctual forces. It was the tightness of the bonds that could be regulated by good sense, by a proper understanding of the need for independence. But on the parents’ side, at least when there was love, the connective tissue would always hold.

Well, she thought, say nothing, show nothing, value this period of calmness. It’s a surface calmness maybe, distance-induced, distance-protected, underwritten by separation; don’t take chances with it. That idea about asking the Wisters over for dinner, asking Sue as well—don’t do it. It might work out in some unexpected way you would regret and feel responsible for. That idea of asking Pete Hill and his wife for drinks—wrong too. If Jeff wants to see them, he will see them himself. That idea of asking Jeff over to Quales and Park to see her new office, symbol of her latest promotion, again, no. Some unsuspected raw place might be touched in him by this overt sign of her continuing success.

Once she had thought, Life is a round. Now she found herself thinking, Love is a round, not romantic love alone, not sexual love, but family love, compassionate love, insight, empathy. Whatever was the essence behind those words was what she meant, those fashionable words, as overworked now in thélate Sixties as “charisma” had been in the Kennedy years, “charisma” and “Camelot.” The ability to feel for oneself the needs of another was what she meant, to wince with the twinge another felt, to feel elated and proud over another’s achievement, victory small or great.

Perhaps Jeff could and did feel this kind of love for others, for those others in his own life. She had hoped often enough that he could and did, hoped it for his sake, for his own fullness. But she had come to feel the conviction that there was little of this compassion or affection in him when it came to his private stance toward his father or toward her.

The calmness and goodwill and merry laughter of this visit home—all under the roof of Margie and Nate—all of it was welcome indeed. But there was a heaviness in it too. This too she refused to say to Ken, and then thought, It’s so easy to go from being excluded to excluding. Late that same night she opened her mind to him without constraint, turning to him in her own seeking after fullness.

And this time it was Ken who finally pointed out to her that perhaps there was a necessity even Jeff could not name. “Maybe he has to, Tessa. To survive.”

The night before he was to fly back to California, Jeff seemed reluctant to go off to bed. Even when Margie finally said, “You two can sit here, but I’m beat, so good night,” he merely waved her a gesture of farewell and said to Nate, “How’s for one more beer?”

“Sure, I’ll grab me one more Bourbon.”

They drank in silence. In the fireplace two nearly burnt-out logs collapsed, flinging bright sparks upward in a fan of light. Jeff thought, It’s like watching the waves curl and roll over, and wondered why the image seemed familiar and right. Aloud he said, “Margie showed me the series you wrote about the two-week shutdown at Columbia. The pieces really were swell.”

“It was the assignment that was swell. You get hold of something you can get your teeth into, you come up with a series the boss gives you by-lines on.”

“Yeah, well. But you wrote the pants off it. There have been student uprisings other places, and I never read much below the headlines.”

“This was full of dynamite, start to finish.”

“Okay, go be modest.” He looked again at the fireplace, concentrating on it. The embers were blue-purple now, the crackling muted. “Nate, do you still play around with that old notion you used to have, you know, a big piece about gay people?”

“When something happens and I have five minutes to think with.”

“What about your managing editor’s reaction? Any more amenable than he used to be?”

“He hasn’t changed too much,” Nate said. “But then I haven’t either.”

“If you ever do write anything big, a series like this Columbia stuff or anything, you won’t let any of it be the kind of liberal crap that does get printed—that’s for sure.”

“Crap like what?”

“The usual bighearted tolerance stuff. ‘Look how broad-minded I am.’“

Nate glanced at him with heightened attention. “What’s eating you, Jeff?”

“Or the other kind of crap about how talented all gays are, look at all the gay playwrights and the gay novelists and artists. Not to speak of the famous old Greek fags like Plato and Leonardo and dear old Michelangelo.”

Nate said caustically, “You mean, like what great athletes all blacks are.”

“Right”

“Hell, I know some blacks that can’t hit a ball and some that can. And I know some gay people that are full of talent and some that haven’t a bean’s worth.”

“Good. I hope you get that across when you get writing that series on gays, that and lots more.”

“You sound as if you’re sure I won’t.”

“Nothing like that, no. If s just that there’s never yet been anything written by a straight guy that said the right things. I’ve read them all.”

“Let me in on it, Jeff, go ahead. What’s wrong with what they write? I’ve read them all too, or a lot of them, anyway.”

Jeff looked unwilling to go on. He turned his can of beer in his fingers, studying the label. He looked at the fire; it was more somber than before, its life sinking.

“What are the wrong things?” Nate said again.

“Look, man, those guys that get the crap in, they’re not gay. They’re straight, and anything they hear about the gay world, they hear through the static of their own straightness. Anything they see, they see through the filter of their straightness. That’s why it’s all phony, or all distorted,”

“And you think I’ll have the same static and the same filter.”

“Christ, no.” There was silence. Nate waited, and finally Jeff said, “There’s something gets in the way, if you
try
to talk to anybody straight. That’s why gay people never even try. You have to be gay to
get
it”

For the first time, Nate felt his gorge rise at something Jeff had said. He stood up suddenly, moved closer to the chair Jeff sat in and looked down at him.

“Listen, man, don’t dump on me,” he said. “Don’t you give me
that
crap either. That’s like telling me I can’t read a book by Eldridge Cleaver or Malcolm X, or write a review of it, or
feel
it. That’s racist crap, and this that you’re dishing out is sexist crap.”

“Damn it, it’s not. Every goddamn straight that says anything or writes anything or even thinks anything about being gay, is sure as hell hanging on to his straight identity while he does it.”

“Should he give up his straight identity, for God’s sake? Do I ask any gay to give up his gay identity?”

“You may not.”

“What the hell is this attack on straights because they can’t molt their straightness, like birds molting their feathers, before they’re considered fit to write something?”

Suddenly Jeff laughed. “That’s funny, ‘molting their feathers.’ ”Nate did not laugh with him and he grew serious again, even ill at ease. “It’s not funny and I know it. Nobody wants you to molt anything. There’s a friend of mine out in L.A. who belongs to a new group, not sub rosa the way the old groups were—”

“Don’t tell me about him if you’re listening for my static.”

“Come on, Nate.”

“Sure, ‘come on, Nate.’ You’ve got to clear out some static yourself, mister. This is a two-way street, everything’s a two-way street when it comes to hang-ups and shoveling guilt onto people.”

“I know that.”

“Don’t load it off on somebody who happens to be straight, don’t prejudge him as a phony liberal with built-in stereotypes.”

“Good God, man, I don’t.”

“Don’t be so sure you don’t. You know goddamn well what I feel about people who prejudge anybody who happens to be gay.”

Now it was Jeff who felt his gorge rise. This was the first fight he had ever had with Nate; he hated it. But Nate was talking the way the old man talked, the way his mother used to talk, and still would talk, if he didn’t head her off each time she started one of her heart-to-hearts.

“Christ, even if I did prejudge you,” he shouted at Nate, “you wouldn’t lose your job tomorrow, your mother’s goddamn heart wouldn’t break, you wouldn’t be kept off a hospital staff.”

Nate fell back a step. His face changed. He looked across the room, past Jeff’s chair. All he said was “Right. None of that would happen.”