Lust

By the time that photograph had been developed and posted back to England, it was winter. That summer Michael on the Sacramento River was already history. Michael remembered opening the envelope. There was no letter inside from his father, just photographs, that photograph.

It should have been the moment when Michael learned to love himself. Like every teenager he had been gawky and spotty. It should have been the moment he left doubt behind, and finally accepted that he was beautiful.

Instead, all Michael could do was regret. The beauty, he felt, was a mask. He’d been hiding behind it. It was better now, being ugly. It was closer to the truth. Michael made himself ugly.

The photograph was the last thing he ever had from his father. He knew what his father was saying: this is who you could have been.

Everything changed without Michael noticing at the time. In the summer, he had been determined to be a vet. Now he was a scientist, who experimented on animals.

The summer Michael had enjoyed acting; had been in a drama class for fun, and took the lead role in all the plays. He had a way of conjuring up old ladies, terrified spivs and policemen out of his own body.

In winter, Michael seemed dispossessed of his own body.

This made him mostly harmless. Women liked him; his students liked him. He always kept a distance from them. It was not that he was afraid of women or students, exactly. He was afraid of how he became around them. He knew he could be waywardly funny, exact, truthful. But then something would happen, and power would withdraw from Michael like the tide. Beached and helpless, he would fumble and make mistakes and let himself down. He would forget things, like appointments or his glasses. Uncomfortable, he would grin and grin and grin.

Michael was impotent. If this were symptom or cause he could not distinguish. He didn’t care. Impotency meant that only the most brutal and depersonalized of sexual episodes were safe enough for him. Only parks or toilets or saunas could hide him.

If his partners had no idea who he was, how could they hurt him? If they could hardly see him in the dark and didn’t know his name, there could be no embarrassment when he didn’t get it up. They didn’t care if Michael got it up. They were too terrified of police to notice and too desperate to come quickly. It all stayed hidden and detached.

But it relieved the pressure. It relieved the pressure of living with someone who gave him no sexual satisfaction. It relieved a kind of erotic itch, which he could never satisfy, and had not been satisfied for more than twenty years. Michael was 38 and his very skin crawled with lust.

A quick jerk off in a car park, a slap on the ass in bushes in a park provided cessation and a masturbatory climax but no satisfaction. So he would have to go back again, to a sauna or a cottage. And then, again. This is addiction. Michael was a nice man who was addicted to speedy, functional sex. He kept this shut away from the rest of his life.

In the rest of his life, he offered the world sweetness, integrity and intelligence. He placated life. He worked himself nearly to death.

Michael had a contract to teach biology two afternoons a week. He prepared his lectures and marked papers, just as if he were full-time, only he was paid less.

He joined academic committees and fought for new IT networks. He joined Boards that recruited new teachers and exposed his bitter elders when they said, untruthfully, that a candidate for a post had been fired from her previous position.

Michael lifted weights and read all the journals in his field and did desk research. He became a rising star in his field, producing publishable papers in biology from scanning work in two fields and bringing them together. Somehow this still resulted in very little extra money.

The two fields were neurology and philosophy, the grey area where biology was helping philosophers answer questions such as: do we have a soul? What is the self?

Michael understood how we see. Images are formed from millions of separate stimulations in the brain: one area responds only to vertical lines; others to angles; others to oncoming movement. Others are tickled by symmetry of any kind, or by green or pink. Still others react to shadow; whole other areas bring together the slightly different angles provided by two eyes.

The brain responds to verbs of movement, adjectives of colour, and nouns of space and shape. We spend our first six months learning to read these complex sentences.

Could the grammar of language have its origins in the grammar of sight? If so, then how could people blind from birth learn to talk? What if grammar came before both vision and speech? Michael wrote papers on the subject. They were influential. People were surprised that he was not a professor.

In the spiritual space where ideas were formed, Michael had power. He found power in snatching those ideas out of air and putting them to paper with rattling keystrokes. Michael wrote all weekend long.

In order to answer those people who insisted on modelling the living brain on circuit diagrams, Michael was taking a conversion degree in Computer Science.

So, as if he did not have enough to do, Michael was learning how to program in C and studying how the registers of computer memory worked. He had to turn in programs to a colleague who opposed his views on what networks the students needed.

The programming module alone took ten extra hours a week. When major coursework was due it would be twenty extra hours a week. Having worked all day, he would work all night, and when finally the program worked, he would weep from joy, as if he had climbed Mount Everest. That was the payoff. He had a blazing moment of joy. Two hours later, he crawled out of bed, and it all began again.

Sometimes, Michael saw friends. He would arrive late at their houses, streaming cold air and apologies and feeling awful because he hadn’t been able to organize buying a bottle of wine. His boyfriend Philip would be there waiting for him in worn silence. Perhaps everyone had already begun the first course.

‘Michael’s always late – we told you he would be!’ his hosts would exclaim, laughing and admonishing. Michael’s smile would flick like a switchblade with annoyance. The blade cut both ways: himself and his friends.

Michael spent some of his time in a haze of either petulance, or depressed exhaustion, elated only by his studies and his flashes of inspiration into who we are and how we think. These were brilliant enough and expressed clearly enough to make most guests sit up and listen. They found themselves asking intelligent questions, to which Michael could give simple replies. For the time that they were with him they found themselves in love with learning and with science, and so a little more in love with themselves. Which is why even now, from time to time, Philip’s eyes would shine with pride, if not exactly love. And why, curiously, Michael left the dinner parties even more drained and exhausted than when he arrived. Sometimes he cried without knowing why.

He really couldn’t think why he should be crying. He had a good job, didn’t he? He had a flat in London’s prosperous West End. He had a sensible relationship that had lasted nearly thirteen years. His papers had helped earn his ex-polytechnic a 5 from the Higher Research Board. Who was he, to be unhappy? Who, indeed, was Michael?

So where is Philip? (#ulink_f51334dc-834a-56ce-ae47-44e0fe8917c8)

Out, as always. Michael had no idea where.

It hadn’t always been like that. There was a time when they did things together and regularly cooked meals for each other. There was a time when he and Phil regularly attempted to make love.

They’d met more than twelve years before. Michael had been 26 and had his father’s athletic build. His beard outlined a smooth and doleful face, but in doleful repose it was rather beautiful. His hair, for once, was cut short. Michael at 26 was many people’s cup of tea, if not exactly his own.

They met at First Out, a gay coffee shop. Phil was trying to find copies of the free newspapers. Michael gave him his, and Phil sat next to him in the window.

Phil had been skinny, intense and spotty. His cheeks were pitted, but that only increased the craggy drama of his face. He was all a-quiver, in his first week of art school, nineteen, terrified, anxious, and aggressive, like a stray terrier needing a home. It is perhaps to Michael’s credit that he found this touching, moving and beautiful in a way.

Their attachment was brusque. Halfway through the first lovemaking session, Michael had known it would work. Philip was hot to the touch and his ribcage showed pale and lean. His hands shivered like butterflies. The two men made a shape together – Michael’s bulk against Philip’s fragility – that seemed to tell a coherent story.

On their second date, Michael called Philip ‘my love’. Phil hated his student roommates; they didn’t wash their cutlery or themselves. He needed a place to crash, he said. Michael, full of hope, asked Phil to live with him. There was something suddenly erotic about being the older man, about offering a flat, an income, a routine, a home. Philip moved in two weeks later.

Domestication with its rituals over salt and spoons soothed them both. They took turns with the washing-up and shared expenses, and settled quickly into a life of tidal regularity. There was something soothing, too, about being with someone whom so few people would find attractive.

The age difference helped. Michael could play the role of protector and teacher; and Philip was insecure and young for his age and needed that. For a time it was charming that Philip’s nickname for Michael was ‘Father’. It sounded like an old-fashioned marriage. ‘Hello, Father,’ Philip would call out on Michael’s arrival home, or when Michael showed up at the pub for a crawl.

Early on, before art school got to him, Phil painted Michael’s portrait. This was before Philip stared to glue dirty carpet onto metal poles, so it was a perfectly conventional painting. Philip said that it was designed to fill a niche in the sitting room.

It portrayed Michael as ballast. The jacket, slightly crumpled, looked like a carved stone replica of clothing. The weight of his body was given a granite substance, and he stood feet well apart looking as immovable as the Earth. The painting was called ‘Taurus’. At least in the beginning, Michael was an anchoring point.

Even then the sex didn’t work. But it didn’t work in a strange backward way that they both noted and were proud of. It seemed to confirm they were some kind of perfect match. They would allude to it lightly, discreetly to their very best friends.

Phil hated any male response from his partners at all. For all his fluttering, or perhaps because of it, he would not suck Michael’s cock and found the idea of anal penetration repulsive. Which was just as well, considering Michael could not penetrate whipped cream.

It was no mystery to Michael why Philip was screwed up. A year after they met, Philip finally summoned the nerve to take Michael home to meet his parents. Michael would not have believed Roland and Virginia if he had not met them. They were fake posh. They pretended to be from Surrey, where they now lived. Who in their right mind pretended to be posh these days?

Philip’s father was some kind of retired manager from ICI. He had a worn moustache and some kind of dressing on his hair which rendered it flat and glossy. Roland wore navy blazers without the right to, and shirts whose thick blue stripes were still somehow garish. Virginia’s hair was died orange and piled high like Margaret Thatcher’s, and she had an air of studied, delicate refinement. She talked like an actress in a 1950s film.

They had made cucumber sandwiches. Their teapot had pink curlicues. Michael kept his eyes fixed on it as Philip’s mother made efforts to persuade her son to go back to medical school. They didn’t like the idea of art school at all. Roland was robust. ‘Don’t want people to think you hang around with a bunch of arty-farty people, Philip.’ Arty-farty meant queer. Roland was supposed to have no idea about his son’s sexuality. Only Philip’s mother ‘knew’.

The family had a best room that was kept under wraps, and of which Michael was vouchsafed a glimpse. The furniture was sealed in plastic and the carpets covered with protecting translucent treads. It was as if they wanted people to have safe sex with the sofa. The dresser proudly displayed the Wedgwood china, which was never used. ‘This is for special events,’ said Philip’s mother, communicating with no effort that the first visit of her son’s partner was not special enough.

When Philip’s sister died unexpectedly, his mother rang to ask that Michael not come to the funeral, as it was ‘a family occasion’. In any event, Michael was not ‘to visit quite so often, as it might give rise to questions’.

‘I’ll make it easy,’ said Michael. ‘I won’t go at all.’

‘That’s not what she wants, Michael,’ said Philip, looking anguished.

‘It’s what I want,’ said Michael. ‘I don’t like being treated like the mad aunt in the attic. It’ll be easier for you too. You won’t even have to mention me.’