My Husband and My Wives: A Gay Man’s Odyssey
by Charles Rowan Beye
Farrar Straus & Giroux
256 pages, $26.
CHARLES BEYE’S MEMOIR begins like a l9th-century novel: the narrator’s second wife, to whom he has not spoken in years, is dying, and his children are begging him to visit her. Not only does he refuse, but when she dies he suspects that she willed herself to expire just to avoid his visit.
Given the opening, it’s no surprise that the memoir that follows “is in one way or another addressed to her … a woman with whom I had what I remember as a delirious sexual relationship and who bore me four wonderful children, two boys and two girls,” though “I never stopped having the strongest possible desire for males of about my age, a desire I tried to realize whenever I could. Now that the whole thing is nearly over—I’m more than eighty—I ask myself, What was that all about?”
Before the reader can wonder the same thing, we go back to the author’s childhood in Iowa City, an idyllic life ruined by the death of his surgeon-father when the narrator was still a boy. Life after that is one of socioeconomic decline, though his mother is strong and the children are all taught to be amusing and good conversationalists at the dinner table. It’s a Booth Tarkington novel with blow jobs, until sophomore year, when the priest tells Beye’s mother that dreadful things have been written about her son on lavatory walls. Fortunately, the shrink to whom she sends him simply recommends he be more discreet. After that, there’s no stopping him. The narrator eventually perceives that “the church, where evil homophobic do-gooders, where desperate cruel and empty people with no real life or dreams or hope for themselves find their pleasure in inflicting cruelties on defenseless victims,” cannot harm him anymore. Quick-witted, handsome, and “highly sexed,” our hero goes on to seduce what seems to be half his class, followed by the bad boys from the wrong side of the tracks. But then, in college, he meets an original young woman and proposes to her on their first date. How could a man who loved feeling “the thrust” of a cock inside him propose to a woman he has just met, and then, nine months after she dies, marry another woman by whom he has four children? It’s appropriate that Beye was a classics professor—a career that supplies as much interest in his book as his sex life—since the ancient world had no problem with this; though the ancient world was strict about one thing: a man was always the inserter, and Beye was the insertee as well. No matter. His discovery of ancient Greek and Latin was as much a coup de foudre as meeting his first wife. The classics gave him not only a career but a cultural tradition with which to reject the prudery of Christianity—which is helpful, since “it was the gay thing” that dominated his life. This life begins in the pre-Stonewall world that George Chauncey has described in his history of New York, when American men were not divided into homos and heteros but belonged to a single tribe whose members could go back and forth like Mexican farm workers before there was a fence on the border. Beye seems to have had an awful lot of sex—with the male half of double dates after the women have been dropped off, fellow academics, grad students. My Husband and My Wives with its campy, high-spirited title, is a triumph of the pagan—not to mention the Midwestern Sensible. When Beye and his second wife stop having sex, he encourages her to take a lover, whom ideally he would like to sleep with as well. If this sounds like Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice or the suburbs that Updike wrote about in Couples, it also brings to mind a darker version of that milieu, the one found in the work of novelist Richard Yates. Beye admits he could not watch the movie of Yates’ Revolutionary Road (with its portrait of a suffocating suburban marriage) because it was too close to home—which indicates depths of misery that are not gone into here. Beye was not exactly in the closet for most of his life—he informed both of his wives of his desire for men—but he wasn’t out either. As a married man he liked to subvert his Italian neighbors’ notions of sex roles by hanging his laundry on the terrace of the fabulous apartment he got during his sabbatical in Rome. He had already decided while living in New York as a young man that the games people play in gay bars are a waste of time. Yet his life outside the gay ghetto seems to have been much more sexually abundant than the one he might have had inside of it. Having a wife never interfered with sex with other men. We’re never quite sure what sinks his second marriage. At one point he refers to “my over-the-top personality, cheerfulness, feigned or real, and relentless verbosity” (of which his second wife “had had enough”). But when he and his wife separate, it’s as mysterious to the reader as it is to their four children. “And then I became ‘gay,’” is all Beye writes in reference to his change of category: “this was in the seventies, as I remember.” Once that happens, however, Beye, like so many married men who come out in middle or late middle age, is faced with a form of culture shock: When I used to find myself in a gay ghetto I always felt like one of those women in a Helen Hokinson cartoon—the heavyset body, bad hairdo, shapeless dress, bulky thick purse, sensible shoes with thick legs thrust into them; in short, a matron from the Midwest. Just not enough chic for a gay ghetto, that’s my problem. I don’t see myself in Lycra on Rollerblades flashing through South Beach: I have been there, seen the gorgeous young men wheeling down Collins Avenue, and I always say to myself, I just can’t do gay. My Husband and My Wives is about a man who is neither straight nor comfortable as the sort of homosexual male Gore Vidal insisted did not exist. But Beye seems to equate gay life with its clichés: It was what they used to call a “lifestyle,” and made me feel just as much the country rube that coming from Iowa had branded me in Manhattan. I wasn’t quite clear what ”gay” implied and what were my responsibilities to the title. I’d never been to Fire Island, Provincetown bored me, San Francisco’s Castro overwhelmed and alienated me. The bar scene for someone over twenty, well, it was not for me, at least. I loved opera off and on, but rarely noticed vocal technique. Judy Garland and Barbra Streisand—could not stand either one of them. As for his life as a married man, that wasn’t a perfect fit either. “I’m not sure what love is,” Beye says of his first wife. “Did I love her?” he asks of his second. He answer is enigmatic: “Looking back, at eighty, I would say that this was the deepest, most complicated relationship of my life.” After he and his wife break up, the children seem to survive quite well, the ex-wife goes on to have the career she dreamed of as an architect, and the narrator marries a man his age—who appears beside him in a photograph in which Beye the paterfamilias sits surrounded by his progeny. But while there is so much intelligence in this book that one could quote from any page with pleasure, there are few insights into any of this—aside from an allusion to the Greeks’ tragic view of life—which means the reader has to read between the lines. My Husband and My Wives does not generalize, nor does it answer any questions about sexual orientation, or sex itself. “My belief,” he writes, “is that sexual intercourse is either a love-filled experience designed to bind two people closer together or it is more in the nature of a bowel movement. As the latter, it need not be commented upon or even mentioned, for that matter.” Yet this book is full of sex that falls somewhere between these two poles. My Husband and My Wives mocks in its very title the notion of sexual categories. Most of us know men who have come out after years of marriage with children, and one seldom asks them for the details. (As for the problem of performance, if Cecil Beaton can sleep with Garbo, what’s impossible?) Gay men’s stories, to paraphrase Tolstoy, are all alike, but each man who sleeps with both sexes does so in his own way. Beye makes no statements about the division of men into homo- and heterosexual. Indeed, his own case leaves the reader mystified. How did he do it? Why did he do it? Maureen Corrigan, reviewing this book for NPR’s Fresh Air, liked the fact that in this memoir things are not explained, and lessons are not drawn from anecdotes, which I understand, though that does not keep me from wondering: then what’s a book for? The sheer entertainment value of a story, I guess. “I would be grateful,” Beye writes, “if the reader took from this book a better understanding of the obstacles and shoals the gay male must navigate just to grow up and assume the responsibilities of adulthood.” But in the end Beye’s memoir is sui generis. It’s the story of a good-looking, highly sexed, classics professor who talked his way out of trouble all his life and is still talking. His memoir and voice remind one in an odd way of the life of Edward Tanner, aka Patrick Dennis, the author of Auntie Mame. This professor would probably have been lots of fun to study under; he lived life with great vivacity and seems to think it not worth the attempt to “explain” any of it. But the deathbed scene that opens the book remains an example of all that is not gone into in this memoir: the Revolutionary Road he could not watch. For illumination into the ways in which people juggle sexual categories, one will have to look elsewhere; unless there really is no explanation. The bargains individual men make with sexual orientation and social expectations may simply be private in the end. This book is hard to put down, but the moment it’s over, and the voice ceases, for all its intelligence and candor, one wonders, along with the author: what was that all about?
