The Japanese Lover(77)

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Ever since he could remember, Nathaniel had experienced a mixture of fascination, fear, and desire for those of his own sex, starting with his schoolmates, then for other men, and finally for Lenny, who had been his partner for eight years. He had fought against those feelings, torn between his heart’s desires and the implacable voice of reason. At school, when he was as yet unable to identify what it was he felt, the other boys knew instinctively that he was different, and punished him with beatings, jokes, and ostracism. Those years, constantly menaced by thugs, were the worst of his life.

When he left school, torn between his scruples and the uncontrollable passions of youth, he noticed that his predicament was not as unusual as he had assumed; everywhere he went he met men who looked directly into his eyes, offering either an invitation or a plea. He was initiated by a fellow student at Harvard. He discovered that homosexuality was a parallel world that existed alongside accepted reality. He came to know men from many different backgrounds. At the university they were professors, intellectuals, students, a rabbi, and a football player; out on the street they were sailors, workmen, bureaucrats, politicians, businessmen, and criminals. It was an inclusive world, promiscuous yet still hidden as it came up against a categorical rejection by morality and the law. People who were openly gay were not allowed into hotels, clubs, or churches; often, they would not be served alcohol in bars and could be thrown out of public places, accused—rightly or wrongly—of unruly behavior; the gay clubs and bars belonged to the Mafia. Back in San Francisco, with his lawyer’s diploma in his hand, Nathaniel encountered the first signs of a nascent gay culture, one that would not come out into the open until several years later. When the 1960s social movements came along, including the one for gay rights, Nathaniel was married to Alma and their son, Larry, was ten years old.

“I didn’t marry you to disguise my homosexuality, but out of love and friendship,” he told Alma that night.

Those had been schizophrenic years: an irreproachable and successful public life, and another that was hidden and illicit. He met Lenny Beal in 1976 at a men’s Turkish bath, the ideal place for casual sex, but completely unsuited to the start of a love like theirs.

Nathaniel was about to celebrate his fiftieth birthday and Lenny was six years his junior, as beautiful as a statue of a Roman god. Irreverent, hotheaded, and promiscuous, he was the complete opposite of Nathaniel. The physical attraction was instantaneous. They locked themselves in a cubicle and spent until dawn immersed in pleasure, going at one another like wrestlers and wallowing in the entwined delirium of their bodies. They arranged to meet the next day at a hotel, each arriving separately. Lenny brought marijuana and cocaine, but Nathaniel begged him not to use them; he wanted to be fully aware of the experience. A week later they already knew that the blinding flash of desire had simply been the beginning of an immense love, and they gave in completely to the imperative of living it to the limit. They rented a studio in the city center, where they installed a minimum of furniture and the best sound system, each promising no one else would set foot there.

Nathaniel ended a search begun thirty-five years before, although outwardly nothing altered in his life: he continued to be the model of bourgeois male respectability, without a soul guessing what had happened, or noticing that his office hours and addiction to sports were drastically reduced. On his side, Lenny was transformed by his lover’s influence. For the first time in his turbulent life he paused, and dared substitute the contemplation of his newfound happiness for all the previous noise and insane activity. If he wasn’t with Nathaniel, he was thinking about him. He never went back to the gay baths or clubs, and his friends rarely succeeded in tempting him to parties, since he had lost interest in getting to meet new people. Nathaniel was more than enough; he was the sun around which his days revolved. He basked in the calm of this love with a puritan’s devotion. He adopted Nathaniel’s taste in music, food, and drink, then his cashmere sweaters, camel--hair coat, and aftershave lotion. Nathaniel had a private phone line installed in his office for Lenny’s exclusive use, and they were constantly in touch; they went out sailing together, made trips, and met up in distant cities where no one knew them.



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At first, Nathaniel’s incomprehensible illness did not cloud his relationship with Lenny: the symptoms were so random and sporadic, they came and went apparently without cause or connection. But as Nathaniel began to fade, reduced to a specter of the man he once was, when he had to accept his limitations and ask for help, the fun came to an end. He lost his zest for life, felt that everything around him was pale and faint, and abandoned himself to nostalgia for the past like an old man, regretting some things he had done and the many more he had not managed to achieve. He knew his life would soon be over, and was scared. Lenny did not let him slump into depression; he kept him going with feigned good humor and the constancy of his love, which continued to grow even in such trying circumstances. They met in their little apartment to console one another. Nathaniel lacked the strength and desire to make love, and Lenny did not demand it; he was happy with the moments of intimacy when he could calm Nathaniel if he was shaking with fever, feed him teaspoonfuls of yogurt like a baby, lie by his side listening to music, rub his lesions with balm, hold him upright on the toilet. Toward the end, when Nathaniel could no longer leave home and Alma took over the role of nurse with the same tender persistence as Lenny, her role remained that of his friend and wife, while Lenny was the great love of his life. Or so Alma came to see it during their night of exchanged secrets.