The Hazardous Life

         For the past several years, the Academy had not offered a fourth year of French. Three years of a foreign language were required for graduation, and that’s as far as most of the students wanted to go. The one or two who occasionally opted for a fourth year were allowed to take an evening course at the Extension School down in Cambridge, for which the Academy gave them credit.

         What a pity to send the students elsewhere, Mason Chastain always thought. As the Academy’s senior French teacher, he knew these kids so well, knew what they needed, not only with regard to their studies but also in terms of their emotional growth. Their spiritual growth, he was tempted to say though he suspected that sounded old-fashioned. As so often, his favorite poet, Rimbaud, had expressed it perfectly: “I would have liked to show children these sunfish, the fish of gold, the singing fish on the blue tide.” Mason doubted that the students the Academy sent to the Extension School would be shown those golden, singing fish. They’d be treated like mere adult learners rather than the intense, eager, romantic young people they were.

         Then, in the final year of his forty-three-year career, a surprise occurred. Six students, the minimum needed to justify offering the class at the Academy, signed up for French IV, and the dean of studies asked Mason if he would teach the course. It would mean, he said, that Mason would have to give up one of his sections of second-year in order to teach the seniors. Not a fan of the dean, Mason said he’d need a few days to think about it. Let him sweat it out, Mason thought. But when he drove home that afternoon, he was already putting together a reading list. The blue tide was swelling.

***

As he circled the Back Bay looking for a parking spot, Mason knew it was petty to keep the dean in suspense, but there was something about Tony Krikorian that just rubbed him the wrong way. From the moment, six years ago, that Krikorian arrived as the new dean of studies, he had grated on Mason. It wasn’t any one thing, but the whole package: Krikorian’s youth (he was thirty-five), his good looks, his privileged Ivy-League education. The guy wore his lucky breaks — good genes, good breeding, good schools — with irritating self-assurance. He had an easy way with the kids, an easy way with the faculty. Mason had turned sixty that year. Krikorian’s arrival had put him on guard.

         The coup de grâce came three years ago when Krikorian, who was straight, volunteered to be the faculty advisor to the Gay-Straight Alliance. The previous faculty advisor had moved to Seattle with her wife and Krikorian stepped in to fill the vacancy. In another one of his countless irritating moves, he renamed the club the LGBTQIA+ Discussion Group.

         The damn know-it-all, Mason thought as he circled the blocks around Commonwealth Avenue, looking for a parking space. Krikorian prided himself on being so au courant, so right-up-to-the-minute on all the latest, politically-correct views. Fifty years ago, when he, Mason, was in high school, it was just gays and straights — simple as that — with an occasional nod to the bisexuals, who no one really believed were bisexual at all. Now… my God, being gay was as humdrum as coq au vin. LGBTQIA+ indeed!

         It was the middle of April and the magnolias on the sunny side of Commonwealth Avenue were in glorious full bloom. If the weather held, these blowzy, delicate pink blossoms would be resplendent for a week or so. Every year since he and Mary had lived in the Back Bay, Mason looked forward to the appearance of the magnolias. And it saddened him to contemplate how soon they would disappear. Recently, he had been feeling the poignancy of disappearing things ever more acutely.

         There were no parking spaces on Commonwealth. He turned left on Fairfield — none there either — and then right onto Marlborough. His daily circle around the neighborhood in search of a place to park. Every year it got worse.

         Before Krikorian had taken over the Gay-Straight Alliance, the Academy’s headmaster had approached Mason about assuming the role of faculty advisor. After all, the headmaster said, Mason was a senior member of the faculty, had relatively small numbers of students, and had in the past led other clubs — French Club, Opera Club, the Spring Trip to Europe. Besides, the only gay member of the faculty now, Frank Fidby, the obvious candidate, was already teaching an extra section of chemistry and had no time. The headmaster thought that since it was a Gay-Straight Alliance, the group should occasionally be advised by a straight “ally.”

         How extraordinary, Mason thought. The Academy had certainly changed since the day when he first arrived, a young French teacher right out of the University of New Hampshire. Forty-three years ago, there had been no Gay-Straight Alliance. There had certainly been no teachers who would have declared themselves gay or lesbian. But now, everyone wanted to get in on the act. The woman who had previously run the GSA had even invited her students to her wedding when she married her wife. And Frank Fidby always brought his husband to soccer games and dances, when it was his turn to chaperone.

         Even more remarkable, students at the Academy were now openly identifying themselves as gay and lesbian. And, it seemed, as every other variation along that rainbow spectrum — bisexual, transgender, non-binary, gender-fluid, genderqueer. The categories bewildered Mason. He suspected that many of them, certainly the younger students, weren’t even sexually active. The labels they gave themselves described what were still, he assumed, just abstract concepts for them, hardly lived experiences.

         There were no spaces on Marlborough Street either. Mason circled the block again.

He thought back to his own teenage years. In the eighth grade, his best friend had been a boy named Gordie Henderson, whose hobby was photography. One day, Gordie gave Mason a tour of his basement darkroom: the enlarger, the developing trays, the dim, film-safe red lightbulb. Then he pulled out his collection of photo magazines. Leafing through them under that dim red light, Gordie pointed out the various articles, which were full of technical information on things like lenses, composition, film speeds. Each issue always included a suite of art photographs. Mason remembered one such spread in particular: it featured a wholesome, rosy-cheeked young woman kneeling in an outdoor setting. Her arms were raised above her head in order to keep a wide-brimmed hat (the only article of clothing she wore) from blowing off in the wind, a pose that thrust out her ample breasts in fulsome, robust vitality.

         Gordie told Mason that these were “artistic” shots, taken by a highly regarded professional photographer, but the next time they got together — it was always on Tuesday afternoons after Confraternity of Christian Doctrine classes — Gordie started rubbing his crotch, exclaiming how much the girls in these beefcake spreads turned him on.

         “Yeah,” Mason agreed, wanting desperately to feel what Gordie was feeling.

For the rest of the winter of their eighth-grade year, he and Gordie spent each Tuesday afternoon in the darkroom masturbating to the magazines. Mason’s eyes always strayed from the photographs to Gordie’s cock, ready at a moment’s notice to shift back to the photo spread in case Gordie noticed that his friend’s attention had drifted. Mason liked the tight quarters of the darkroom, which meant that his body — his arms and hips — often touched Gordie’s body while the two of them indulged in their separate bouts of self-pleasuring.

         The car behind him honked. Mason looked up and saw that the stoplight was green. He turned onto Newbury Street. A block down, he spotted a parking space, pulled up, and eased into it. A lucky break on a Friday afternoon. And now the car could stay there all weekend without his having to move it. Unbuckling the seatbelt, he grabbed his briefcase and headed off to the little market down the block. The street was crowded with end-of-the-week shoppers and café patrons.

         And, for an hour, I fell into the hubbub of a Baghdad street.

         He’d been reading Rimbaud again, fiddling in his spare time with translations that he hoped would capture some of the astounding lyricism of that boy genius. The older he got, the more Mason found himself drawn to Rimbaud, to the beauty of his words, the outrageousness of his vision, a wild but perfect harmony. How astonishing that Rimbaud had produced most of his greatest work when he was still a teenager. Younger even than the seniors he would teach next year!

         The weather was warm enough that a few guys — Back Bay gym rats — were jogging down the street, their lean, beautiful bodies another declaration, like the magnolias, that the dash and brio of springtime had returned. Ah, yes, Mason thought, buttoned-up Boston was throwing off its winter tweeds. Let the hubbub begin!

         By May of that eighth-grade year, Mason was in love with Gordie. He loved the intimate playfulness of their darkroom antics, the physical closeness, Gordie’s happy-go-lucky attitude toward sex. He tried to imagine more with Gordie — what would that be? Maybe they’d go on vacations together, just the two of them, without their parents. Or end up roommates at the same college. As he and Gordie wacked off in the darkroom, Mason imagined an entire life with his friend. Then one day, watching Gordie panting in pre-climax excitement, Mason leaned over and tried to plant a kiss on Gordie’s cheek. Gordie recoiled. “Fuck, man, what are you doing?” he barked. “Gross!” Mason was never invited back again.

***

The little Newbury Street market was crowded. Everyone there seemed to have the same idea on this beautiful springtime afternoon: prepare a nice meal, drink some wine, be with the ones you loved. Mason recognized at least one gay couple whom he often saw at the market. One was holding the grocery basket while the other picked items off the shelves — fresh pasta, a couple of artichokes, a quart of strawberries. Mason wondered what it would be like to feed a strawberry to another man, holding it to his lips, feeling his tongue touching his fingers.

         The fall he entered high school, he and Gordie were blessedly not in the same classes. From the sidelines, Mason watched Gordie become quite the ladies’ man, while he, in turn, buried himself, and his shame, in his studies. French — so foreign, so romantic, so beautiful — became his favorite subject. More than that, it became his refuge. He managed to stop mooning over Gordie, though he could not help having secret crushes on other boys, none of which he dared to act on. Senior year, his French teacher assigned them Gide’s Symphonie pastorale. The other students in the class weren’t as proficient as Mason, and they labored over the book for months. Mason was bored out of his mind — with the story, with the pace, with their teacher’s tedious droning on and on. This story of a secret, unrequited heterosexual love was not the story he needed to read.

         That final year of high school French had been so bad that Mason almost didn’t take another French course when he got to college. But his advisor at the University of New Hampshire told him his French preparation had been so strong — and his Achievement Test so high — that he could pass into upper-level courses if he wanted to.  Mason thought he’d give it a try. The poetry course he took turned out to be excellent. As did the other French course he took that year, “Proust and His World.” By June, he’d declared himself a French major. It was the first time in his life that he was absolutely sure he’d made the right choice.

         He was less sanguine about his decision to join a fraternity, but fraternities were the way to go back then and so he did it. At his first boozy frat party, Mason got drunk and then never again. He was afraid of what he might do if he let his guard down. At other parties, when his fraternity brothers told jokes about fags and homos, he responded with fainthearted smiles. The guys began to see him as the goody two-shoes of their house. They nicknamed him Chastity Chastain. “Chastity, isn’t it about time you got banged in Boston?” they teased. By junior year, Mason was secretly wishing he could drop out of the fraternity. And then he met Mary.

         She was five years older than he, a graduate student and teaching fellow in the course he took that year in abnormal psychology. Often after class, he’d linger to ask her questions. At first, she gave him only a minute or two of her time before she went off to do more research at the library. But one day, she invited him to join her for coffee. With guarded casualness, Mason brought up that week’s topic: the recent decision by the American Psychiatric Association to depathologize homosexuality. With equally guarded casualness, Mary acknowledged that it was a “landmark readjustment,” one that would have profound consequences for how gay people — he had already noticed how she preferred that word over “homosexual” — how gay people would think about themselves from now on. “Lesbians, too,” she added. He remembered how she had looked down at her coffee cup and then back up at him, fishing for a reaction.

         The next Saturday, they went to the White Mountains with the hiking club. It turned out that Mary was an outdoor enthusiast. Though she was a few inches shorter than he, Mary had a rugged, boyishly-athletic body, and could hike at quite the clip. Mason had never been on a hike before, and had a hard time keeping up with her, but he enjoyed talking to Mary about psychology and French and their similar blue-collar backgrounds. When the weather got too cold for hikes, they did other things together — concerts, plays, trips into Boston for the museums (his choices); basketball games, skiing, bird watching (her choices).

         One day — it was the spring semester and she was no longer his teacher — Mary told him her story: married at twenty-one, a child (now three years old), and a divorce about to be finalized. “I’m not sure there was ever much of a spark there,” she told Mason. “Bob and I were just two people, much too young to get married, who happened to share a passion for psychology. Not enough reason to keep a marriage alive.”

         “What do you think does keep a marriage alive?” he asked.

         She gave him another one of her sober, direct looks. “Well, for starters, the courage to make a go of it together, I’d say. I think in the end, Bob and I just couldn’t muster that kind of courage.”

Those sounded like such beautiful words — courage, making a go of it. He thought about what it would be like to share a long life with another person: keeping a house, raising a child, working side-by-side at the dining room table after supper, bandying ideas back and forth, taking trips to Europe. When he tried to imagine sex with Mary, he thought he could give that a try, too. Two weeks later, they slept together. He’d forgotten to bring a condom and Mary said she was not on the pill. So they just slept together, and this seemed fine with both of them.

         “I think I’m a lesbian,” she told him halfway through that night.

         “I think I’m a gay man,” he told her. Though tenuous, it was the first declaration of his sexuality he had ever made to anyone.

         In the market’s wine section, Mason picked up two bottles, a Merlot for himself, a Chardonnay for Mary, her favorite. Then he put the red back on the shelf. Otherwise, he knew he’d drink the entire bottle over the course of the evening, and probably finish Mary’s bottle of white. He was doing that a lot lately. He thought he should probably slow down.

         A month after he graduated — by then Mary’s divorce had been finalized — they got married. It was a crazy decision, and yet it wasn’t. He couldn’t imagine another person who would ever know him — and accept him — as well as Mary did. They had grown fond of each other, enough to embark on an outwardly conventional partnership in a quietly unconventional way. Mary said that they were forging “a common front” against everything they hated — shame, theories of abnormality, the frat boys. Remarkably, they had been making a go of it together ever since. Mason’s fiftieth high school reunion was coming up next year. He wondered if Gordie would be there and what he would say when Mason showed up with a wife.

         Just before he got into the checkout line, he added a bouquet of tulips and a quart of strawberries to his basket.

​

The rest of this story is available in Volume 5, Issue 3 of Night Picnic.