Wicked Women (33 page)

No, I repeat, I did not find the fact that my father was gay in any way traumatic. Many a man breeds a family before discovering his true sexuality. I am a rational person. For the most part what happens does not distress me: what I am does not depress me; I can see that Fate has dealt me many good cards. It’s just that sometimes what I find myself doing disconcerts me, Miss Jacobs. And I wake too early. I need someone to evaluate what is right and what is wrong. Or, in your terms, to differentiate between healthy behaviour and unhealthy, mature and immature. That’s as pejorative, as judgemental, as you lot are ever likely to get. You’re soft.

I decided to stay in London to continue with my training; I lived with my aunt—who fortunately had a less frugal temperament than my mother—and I was with my father and Bo during the summers. Either I went over to San Francisco or they came to Europe, and we would tour the main cities, living in the best hotels. One meets little prejudice if one sticks to the centres and can spend money. My father’s credit was always good: it was only sometimes he had cash flow problems, when I was happy enough to help out. It was his money, after all.

My Aunt Serena told me I had been conceived just before my father “came out” as gay. When he told my mother she was sickened, angry and horrified; she was after all the child of her generation. She felt the best way to protect me was simply to wipe my father out of her and my life: better to pretend that I was an immaculate conception than the daughter of what she saw as a pervert. My parents had met at a production of a Sondheim musical: it seems my father was trying very hard at the time to confirm his heterosexuality but had in the end failed. However translucent, however ethereal my mother, she was still too female for him. He did his best to honour his responsibilities in relation to both of us; it was my mother who wouldn’t let him. Yes, he left her for Bo.

Why should I not be kind towards this cast of characters, Miss Jacobs? Why should I feel angry? Everyone did the best they could, according to their lights. Even the truck driver who ran down my mother was not to blame for what he did. She all but flung herself under his wheels. That’s why I am so glad I am a dancer; dancing like singing is an activity that can’t possibly do any harm to anyone else. And if I tire my body sufficiently I have no energy left to wonder since everyone I know believes they are good, and does the absolute best they can considering the circumstances they’re in, then why is the world in the mess it is? Which otherwise might exercise my mind considerably. Seven hours a day at the barre, and you have little energy left for cosmic thoughts, thank God.

Last May my father called to say he was coming not with Bo but with Franklin. He had broken with Bo, after sixteen years. I was distressed and told him so. My father said I would love Franklin as he did. Everyone must love Franklin. No, Bo had done nothing wrong: my father just felt it was just time to move on. I felt cheated. Go to college and say “my parents are divorcing” and everyone feels sorry for you: say “my father’s left his boyfriend” and you’ll elicit no sympathy, only at best a prurient curiosity.

A couple of weeks later I had a phone call from Bo; he wept as he talked. I could not bear to think of his lovely eyes puffy and his perfect face swollen and disfigured. I would have preferred him to be composed, not to weep. His evident distress would do nothing to help him win back my father, who could not abide tears, or sulks, or disfigurement. To act blithe and make my father jealous would be much the better way, and I pointed this out to him. But Bo was too upset to listen to what I said. Franklin, Bo claimed, was a cheat and a liar; he would sleep with anyone or anything if it paid him to; he was very charming and very slippery: my father was completely taken in by him. Bo, in fact, spoke like any wife, discarded in favour of a newer, younger model. I could not bear it; I wanted everything to go on as it always had since I’d met them: we three, through the hot summers, in perfect accord and harmony. I told Bo I would do my best to intercede with my father on his behalf, though frankly I hardly knew how to set about it. I only knew I must.

Franklin took it into his head to call me from San Francisco the week before he and my father flew over. I did not like the sound of him at all. You can tell a lot from voices, and his was somehow greasy, as if truth could never get a proper hold of it. He said he did so hope we would get on, he thought he should introduce himself in advance: I was so important in my father’s life, and now would be in his. He was so looking forward to his English holiday: he’d never been to Europe before: he hoped I’d found somewhere quaint and Olde Worlde for us to stay: he’d heard our theatre was fabulous: he looked forward to fitting in a show or two. I saw no reason at all for the phone call, other than that he wanted to check up that I’d made the bookings. In the past Bo had simply trusted me; I booked as I saw fit, and I’d never let them down.

Intimidate other people? Who, me? I don’t think so. In fact I think my trouble is rather at the other end of the spectrum. I am full of self-doubt. I lack assertiveness. I sometimes think I should go to classes. There are lots around.

I cancelled our hotel in Venice; I booked one deep in the English countryside. It was an Olde Worlde hotel near Stratord-on-Avon, expensive, staid, and much favoured by Americans. I got us one double room, one single, and wangled seats for a couple of “shows” through friends. Bo loved Shakespeare; so did my father: I was not so sure that Franklin would: in fact I doubted it. But shows he wanted, shows he’d get. I hoped his knees would twitch with boredom.

I met them at Heathrow; I drove them to the hotel. Franklin was attractive: I could understand why my father doted on him. He had soft, large, childlike blue eyes and a very pink and fleshy, pouty lower lip: soft and weak. He was no older than I was. He made you think of sex. Bo made you think of matters more ethereal. Franklin had a high opinion of himself: he believed he was some kind of blond, well-muscled Adonis; he looked to me like an up-market rent boy. Worst of all was the soft voice which said whatever my father wanted it to say. And my father adored him. Franklin was a coward; we had to walk right round the car park to keep in the shade; he was convinced just a glimmer of sunlight would give him cancer. And he was very pale; the pallor you’d attribute to malnutrition, Miss Jacobs, but is just a particular skin type, like my mother’s, like my own. The opposite end of the spectrum from Bo: perhaps that too was part of the attraction. For my father to have left my mother for black Bo was one thing; to leave Bo for white Franklin was another. This way, it seemed, corruption and self-deception lay. I felt what I had never felt before: that it was safer to be heterosexual; that homosexuality was inherently dangerous; that a love directed towards something familiar, not something apart, could the more easily be replaced by lust, and lust in turn be overtaken by the desire for sexual excess. You had to be careful, or you ended up in the bath house. And that there was indeed such a thing as perversion: conceived by narcissism out of the homoerotic, slithering out to pollute and infect everything around, and that my father was oh some kind of slippery slope that fell away into—what? Hellfire? I had no idea, but I didn’t like it, and I feared for my father, and someone had to rescue him. I had a sudden notion of the existence of Evil, in absolute terms. I had always thought of evil as an adjective; now I could see it was a noun, and a proper one at that, well deserving its capital letter.

The hotel was as stately and staid as I had anticipated. There was a willowed drive, and a Capability Brown garden, plus lake with swans. Franklin fell in love with it at once. The staff were courteous to the point of servility. My father and I put up with it; Franklin revelled in it. It was assumed that Franklin and I, who were of an age, were the couple: that my older father would have the single room. When it turned out otherwise, when the porter was asked to put the men’s luggage into the double room and my small suitcase into the single room, he did so, but hurried away. Pretty soon reception phoned through. Management told us with deep regret that it was against company policy for two men to share a room with a double bed. Management was embarrassed, Management was tactful, but Management was immovable.

Franklin was baffled. My father was aghast. I told them this kind of thing was not unusual outside London; I said the solution was simple. Franklin and I would share the double room: in the night my father and I would swap places. This we agreed to do. It was late, we were tired; the two men had flown a long way; simpler to give in than cry Homophobia! Barbarity! and walk out into the night.

It was hot. Indeed, there was what amounted to a heat wave. Once prolonged good weather sets in over England it tends to stay, week after week. The sky was deceptively hazy, the palest of blues: nothing like the clear bright densely blue Californian sky, of which I admit to not being overly fond. It seems too real, something actual, like a painted, arching ceiling, not the illusion, that accumulation of the next-to-nothingness of atmosphere, which “the sky” actually is.

No, I had no particular feeling about leaving my bed so my father and his lover could share it. I am not hung up about sex. I just don’t do it if I can help it. I focus my sexual feelings into dance as a true priest embraces celibacy the better to realise the intensity of spiritual experience. This, to tell you the truth, is what worries my father about me: he being so much in denial of the possibility of a life not ruled by desire. And he thinks my loveless state must in some way be his fault. That by following his own passions through he has somehow prevented my own from flowering. Obscurely, too, he blames my mother for encouraging me to dance, in his eyes making matters worse. Parents seem to be like that. They blame themselves, or one another. I am prepared to take responsibility for myself. If I can’t sleep, that’s my doing, not theirs.

To continue. No sooner had my father laid his head on the pillow of his narrow bed in his quaint and Olde Worlde single room, complete with false eaves and flower prints on the wall, than he fell asleep, exhausted.

“He isn’t going to wake before morning,” I said to Franklin. “I think we’d just better let him lie there, and ignore the bed-swapping routine. Besides, the air-conditioning in our room is better.”

Franklin agreed. We would share the double bed. It was only sensible. A soft night breeze blew in through the open latticed window, and played over my sleeping father’s face, and refreshed it with all kinds of garden scents: I could detect lavender, and night jasmine, and violets. But Franklin slammed the window shut, and I suppose he was right: moths and mosquitoes came in a-plenty as well as the perfumes of the night. Personally, I never get bitten by mosquitoes, a quality I inherit from my father, but poor Franklin suffered dreadfully; he was allergic to bites, it seemed. We left my father’s room, in haste.

Now it had seemed to me from the occasional sidelong look that Franklin had directed my way during the afternoon that his homosexuality was a decidedly moveable feast. As Bo had indicated, he would do whatever he wanted with anyone, regardless of gender, if only he could get away with it. His soft hand lay frequently in my father’s, but held in itself the potential to stray. I daresay this contributed to my father’s obsession with him: that he loved Franklin a whole lot more than Franklin loved him. A middle-aged man, head over heels in love with a young boy. I didn’t want to see my father as pathetic, I did not want my love for him spoiled by pity. It was obvious to me that my father existed in Franklin’s life to further Franklin’s interests: a leg up (and over) in the theatre world to bring him a fraction nearer to the stars, to yield up the cultural background Franklin knew he needed if he was to go far as a kept man, even in the city down the coast, in Hollywood.

Franklin lay naked in the bed; I lay naked next to him! It was too hot for covers. The window was closed: the air-conditioning hopeless. We both knew what would happen. Franklin of course had no idea of the degree of my calculation, my ill will towards him, my affection for Bo; certainly not the capacity for martyrdom I had inherited from my mother. To lose my virginity thus was the cold brussels sprout; to have kept it for a loving relationship the sweet and tender green pea I, like my mother, could not allow myself. And if I think about it my sleeplessness dates from this night. I have not really slept well since.

We lay thus for some ten minutes. Neither of us was quite prepared to make the first move. In these circumstances one does some instant bonding. And I must acknowledge that what I was about to do was not all that repulsive to me. Franklin did have a really good body. I could identify with my father sufficiently to admire it, to want to have it in sexual attendance on me. I do not want you to feel sorry for me, Miss Jacobs. Sacrifice it was, but to be a sacrificial victim need not be entirely without its pleasures.

I made the first move. I said, “I suppose we ought to do what Management requires of us, in the interest of respectability and what people might think. We ought to fuck.”

At which, within half a second, he was all over me. He was accustomed: I know my anatomy: my hymen had broken when I was fifteen—I remember the occasion: I was at the barre, on points, my right leg stretching. Suddenly—well, there I was, married in essence to The Dance. But I’d known that anyway: certainly that I was betrothed. But now I considered the matter settled. Symbols come along to confirm a conclusion, not to initiate one. So Franklin had no way of telling I was a virgin: I will say that to you now, Miss Jacobs, in all fairness, though of course to my father at the time I had to cry rape: see what Franklin did, and me a virgin! But that was at breakfast, the following morning.

After sex, we slept. Or rather Franklin did. I opened the window and let the mosquitoes in, and moved the sheet away from his body to give them proper access. I sat upright in the bed, knees to chest, and watched the thin, leggy things alight on the soft clammy neck, the nose, under the eyes: with an eager wave of my hand directed them to the softest, most vulnerable places. The head of the penis, the arm-pit. The creatures alighted, settled, drove their poison in, and sucked, and lost their thinness and grew dark red, and Franklin slept, the pure sleep of the jet-lagged; and pink bubbles rose on his skin, even as the hellish bloodsuckers I had summoned up departed, and the bubbles turned to red, tight, miniature volcanoes, and his manicured fingers moved to scratch the swollen tender places in his sleep, and I was glad to see it happen. Franklin was, as he claimed, very sensitive, a mass of allergies. I rejoiced. I laughed in the light of the moon. Once they had served my purpose, I shoved as many flying creatures out of the window as I could; they flew heavily, engorged. I slapped a few others to death. Food slowed them up, more fool they. Then I closed the window, and lay down next to Franklin. I shut my eyes and dreamed of the possibility of love, and permanence, and the blessed ordinariness of an everyday life which could never be mine, but which had seemed to mark my father’s life with Bo, and which I wanted back again, for them.