‘Dad … do you really think something like that could happen? With Mum sitting next to me and you saying nothing?’
Stiffly, troubled, he said, ‘That’s what I remember.’ Perhaps thinking he had revealed more of his own admiration for the sublime Bisset than was really necessary.
It made sense that the surprises shouldn’t only be on one side. I had another one myself that I was keeping in reserve, not knowing when would be the best time to disclose it. I was in a relationship. I realized that this would in itself be bad news from Dad’s point of view. Me being in a relationship would make it harder for him to maintain that I was going through some sort of phase. Naturally that was why I wanted him to know, so that he could stop clinging to invented doubts and accept my life as it was — as it was and as it was going to be. At the same time, it seemed obvious that any partner of mine would come in for an extreme intensity of scrutiny, exceeding anything that would be appropriate for high-level military security or access to international secrets. No character, however exemplary, would wring from my father an assent that would cost him so much. In fact anything that made my lover seem likeable, decent, solid, automatically became suspect and intolerable for that very reason. Under the eyes of such a judging committee, Prince Charles himself might have struggled to score a clear round.
His name was Mike Larson, an American student of architecture attached to (Gonville and) Caius College, though like every other student he had quickly learned to use the short form of its name and to pronounce it Keys. In those days, lacking clairvoyance, my friends and I would sit around in earnest shock discussing the oppressive madness of the American educational system, thanks to which Mike would finish his education thirty thousand dollars in debt. My generation had inherited a fear of debt from the previous one, though the arrival of credit cards in a few years’ time would sweep it away.
Mike was unhysterical about his financial future. If a great architect like Louis Kahn could die deeply in debt, who was he to be solvent?
Mike was in his early thirties, nearly ten years older than me, and had a background both provincial and cosmopolitan. His home town was Watsonville, California, which I seem to remember him describing as the artichoke capital of America, but this was either a pious fib or else a title that has since been snatched by Castroville. He had joined the Marines at eighteen and fought in Vietnam, though this was relatively early in the war. The film shown on board ship the night before his platoon landed was Dr Strangelove. The crew, who wouldn’t be going ashore, laughed less anxiously than the Marines, who would. His experience of combat was strongly charged with emotion. Love was part of that experience, though never described as such by the parties involved. Someone important to him was turned into a red mist under mortar fire. I think the name was Dennis Kovacs. Away from Vietnam, Mike was baffled that his old buddies seemed to dissociate themselves so easily from that fellowship of fear and intimacy.
Afterwards he had studied at Harvard, where the climate was uncongenial to a native Californian and (as he said) ‘it snowed … on my body.’ I think it was at Harvard that he learned the word ‘charrette’, meaning a last-minute burst (usually involving sleepless nights) to finish a piece of work. The phrase derives from the École des Beaux Arts in Paris, where the charrette was a little wagon pulled through a classroom at the last minute to be filled with students’ submissions. Anyone who failed to get his work in the cart didn’t get marked, and plenty were working up to the last minute, virtually sitting in the cart to add the final touches.
Then he moved back to San Francisco. Mike had spent plenty of time in a metropolitan sexual culture, and it can’t have occurred to him, as he checked out a meeting at a pub on Rose Crescent, still jet-lagged, that he was more or less exhausting the gay scene in Cambridge with a single swig of warm beer. If it wasn’t the A to Z of gay life in the town it was certainly the A to E. I don’t imagine that he would have hooked up with me, which he did not quite on a whim but more out of curiosity and good nature than anything else, if he had known it would be hard to avoid me thereafter without rudeness, in such a small world.
Was he good-looking? I think so, though he wasn’t so fiercely beautiful that I couldn’t make the first move. He had a slight stammer that prevented him from being intimidating. When a word wouldn’t come his head bobbed up and down. Did he look like a film star? Not quite, though if he had a vague likeness to anyone in that category it would have to be Harrison Ford, clean-cut and a little grumpy.
He had a trick of starting a sentence with ‘You see …’, but dropping the first word, so that a mild presentation of opinion became insistent, even abrasive, without him seeming to notice. ‘It turns out’ (or ‘Turns out …’) was another typical opening, slightly less dogmatic.
He spent the night in my tiny room on Trinity Street, but it was hardly big enough for one. Caius had housed him on Grange Road, in a house of American students, something that irritated him since he didn’t want to be insulated from the locals. If he’d wanted an American social life he would have stayed in America — though this was one of the few premises with effective central heating. I stayed there once or twice, but mainly we slept in our own beds. Somehow he conned me into being part of his fitness regime, which meant that I would jog over to his place at seven in the morning and then we would run round Grantchester before breakfast. Often he wasn’t ready when I arrived (he couldn’t be expected to take exercise without the first cigarette of the day) so fairly often I would do the Grantchester circuit on my own. I was slow to realize that Mike’s fitness regime, which I took so much more seriously than he did, was in itself a mild Adam-repellent, a shared activity that we didn’t do together.
One thing Mike owed to his Marine training was the efficiency of his mornings, and the ability to ‘shit, shower and shave’ in ten minutes. We would meet later for breakfast in Caius and dawdle over coffee afterwards in a café called, winsomely, the Whim. During the first term of his year in Cambridge Mike hardly attended a lecture, and we spent most of the day together talking. Sometimes in the afternoons he would work out at Fenners on Gresham Road, the University sports facility that included a weight room, though I felt he attended more for the view than the health benefits.
He was a reader, of Isherwood, of Vidal, of John Fowles and Henry James. His copies of Down There on a Visit and Burr were copiously annotated in his architect’s energized small capitals. Only with his signature did he let out a little swooping expressiveness. This script with its implication of load-bearing capacity, compressive strength, was part of his overwhelming difference from anyone I’d met before.
In the evenings we often saw films. It may be that I make the connection with Harrison Ford partly because Mike had seen the first showing of Star Wars in San Francisco, unaffected by the gathering storm of hype, and had loved it. He couldn’t wait for it to arrive in Cambridge (which took a few months) so he could hear what I made of it. Hmm. Not all that much. It was my first inkling that there was a big-kid side to this travelled, lightly traumatized man. I had seen George Lucas’s first film, the rather formalist dystopia THX 1138, which I much admired, and then in due course American Graffiti, which seemed likeable pap. This was pap again, but glossier and not so likeable.