Passing Stranger
By Mihangel
9. Pretended friend
An open foe may prove a curse,
But a pretended friend is worse.
John Gay, Fables
We listened companionably to In Dulce Jubilo, the crashing finale to Praetorius' mass, which is guaranteed to bring a smile to any face. When it was over he looked at my CDs again.
"Oh, you've got the Bach cello suites. I've never heard them right through. Would you put them on, please? Like Leon did with Andrew."
For a few minutes of Bach, Jonathan was pensive. Then, "M, I am going to tell you that quote. About me and my vices. The one you so rudely interrupted. 'The gods are just, and of our pleasant vices make instruments to plague us.' My gayness doesn't plague me. But my shyness . . . some people think shyness is rather sweet, but mine's so overpowering it's a constant plague."
"But that's not a vice at all, J. Even less than Jammie Dodgers are."
"Well, OK. But it is a weakness. A failing. It's what bugs me all the time."
"Me too, J. All my life. Still does. It's something Hilary can't really understand. She recognises it, I think, but she can't understand it. She's the complete opposite. She'll accost total strangers, while I cringe. However often we passed each other in the street, we could never have started talking, could we?"
He shook his head. "No way. And even if we had met at that Christmas party, well, we might have talked, politely, but we could never have got to know each other. And as for telling people you're gay . . . you need to know them sooooo well to do that. And how do you get to know them well enough, when you're so shy?"
"I don't know. I'm in just the same boat. Even with Hilary . . . I know her far better than I know anyone, but unbuttoning myself to her was the hardest thing I've ever done. I'll tell you about that some time. But that's a special case, anyway. Our real problem's breaking the ice in the first place, isn't it? Getting started."
"And how."
"But our salvation - you and me, countless other people - has been the internet, hasn't it? It can start one off so painlessly. Well, relatively painlessly. And once you've got going it's quite easy. Almost too easy."
"Yes, it's less impossible to talk to people if you haven't got a face. Or a real address. Maybe not even a real name. You're . . . an indefinite distance away from them."
"That's right. And without the net, I'd never have known there were such things as gay stories, let alone written them and found somewhere to post them."
"And I'd never have known about you. And without email, I'd never have dreamed of getting in touch with you. But it let me do it safely. And unbottle safely. But you'd still have been an indefinite distance away - you could have been in New Zealand for all it mattered. A virtual friend, not a real-life one. You only became real when we met. But that's just a huge coincidence, that we live almost next door. If you'd lived in New Zealand we'd never have met."
"Yes, we owe the internet a lot. You're lucky, being young at the right time, but the pity for me is that it came so late. If it had been around when I was a boy I'd surely have used it and looked for like-minded people. And my life could have been very different. Still, better late than never. At least it's put me in touch with like-minded people now. Well, some, like you. But there are others who . . . well, sometimes I wish the net had never been invented."
Jonathan's eyes were worried. "M, you're unhappy about something, aren't you? Bitter, even. Is it that person who let you down?"
That was a bull's-eye. But I hesitated. I was reluctant to wash my dirty linen in front of him. Even Hilary did not know the whole problem. She deliberately does not intrude into my life on the net. Not that she disapproves, but because she is trusting and generous and wants that to be my private space. For the most part I keep her abreast of what is going on, if it is of any interest. I had told her something of this trouble, the parts which anyone of sensibility could see were hurtful, and she had agreed and sympathised. But I had not told her much about the parts where the worst pain lay. I was not sure that, as a woman, she would understand. This was a male area, I felt. A gay male area. My own gay male area, peculiar to the odd creature called Michael and his particular needs and values.
So I hesitated to spill out my troubles to this lad. It was my problem, not his. And I did not want to seem unfair in his eyes. My doubts must have showed, for I looked up to see him watching me with sympathetic patience. The doubts instantly vanished. Was not this precisely why he had sought me out, why we were here together now? For two-way talk, in total trust, with no barriers up, except that there were some confidences other people had entrusted to me which I could not reveal even to him. And if I was being unfair, I knew he would tell me so, and why.
I took a deep breath. "All right then, J. You've asked and I'll tell you. And you tell me if I'm being a thin-skinned wimp. Or being unfair. There are two halves to this story.
"One of them's fairly clear-cut, and it's the background to the other. You see, a year ago I joined this gay message board. It started off being very good, and talking with people on it persuaded me to come out to Hilary. That's the best move I ever made, apart from marrying her in the first place.
"Anyway, about the same time, quite coincidentally, things began to go wrong on the board. There was an ugly row, a quite unnecessary one. It hurt, because I'd trusted the place and felt let down. I left, and several others left too, some of the best. But someone begged us to go back, and we did, though most of the others didn't stay for long. Then it happened all over again. Twice. Twice more I left, and twice the same person persuaded me back. The last time was only a couple of weeks ago. Oh dear . . .
"I know the board does a lot of people a lot of good. There are some lovely and sensitive people on it - I correspond privately with some of them - and they survive there because they're thicker-skinned than me. But there are types who're so insensitive that they can't understand that they hurt the sensitive. I'm just not at home in that place - I've long since grown out of it. There's a discussion going on at the moment, for instance, which makes you wonder what part of their anatomy some people reason with."
"I know. I saw your reply yesterday."
I gaped. "Good God! You go there!"
"I only lurk. I'd never post."
"What do you think of it?"
"Much the same as you. Yes, there aresome good and gentle people. But there's so much that doesn't appeal to me. Bad temper. Arrogance. Sanctimoniousness - is that the right word? Exhibitionism. Plain silliness, like in the current thread."
"Why do you lurk, then?"
"Well . . . " He seemed embarrassed, and I waited.
"Well, from reading your stories I thought I could trust you. I wanted to see if you looked trustworthy there too. I noticed when you left, and it was pretty obvious why. Which encouraged me. And when you came back last time I took the plunge."
It touched me, the thought of a lonely boy listening, assessing, screwing up his courage to contact a stranger. I had listened and assessed too, screwing up my own courage to join the board. But I was a grown man.
"Then I'm glad you did lurk. But have I got a chip on my shoulder about it all?"
"No. At least, if you have, so do I. But the people who get under our skin . . . some of them have got great big chips. But look, if they're happy, good luck to them. I'm not saying they're wrong. Just different from us. With different values. Incompatible with ours . . . M, it isn't your scene. You know it isn't. Why did you go back? Why do you stay there?"
Pablo Casals was now well into Suite No. 3, and I thought for a few bars.
"Well . . . that brings us on to the second part. This new bloke joined the board, not long after I did. He sounded as if he was my sort. I emailed him, and we struck up a friendship. A very good friendship, it seemed. He was articulate. Highly intelligent. Vulnerable, like me. For a few months I really thought he was the answer to my prayer. Someone at last I could talk to, about anything. And he said he liked me, and he encouraged me. So I told him all kinds of things about me, things I'd never told anyone, not even Hilary.
"And then everything started going pear-shaped. He'd talked about himself as well, and I took it for granted it was all true. But I began to notice inconsistencies. They puzzled me, and I challenged him. Several times he promised he was being honest, and I had to believe him. But in the end he admitted straight out that it was all a pretence.
"What he said in that email is seared on my soul: 'I give each person what they want.' Like a rent-boy, pandering to his clients' tastes."
I paused to let the pain subside. "What he meant, of course, was that he gave people what he thought they wanted. And in my case he couldn't have got it more wrong. He'd given me the last thing I wanted. I'd bared the real Michael to him, warts and all, and told him so. He pretended he was showing me his real self too. But he was actually showing me a mask ... tailored to what he thought I'd like. A face that wasn't his.
"I was shattered. More hurt than I've ever been in my life. An hour or so after that email arrived, I had a heart attack. Only a minor one, thank God, but it frightened me. The doc said it was stress-induced. I told him about it - told my friend, I mean - and what had caused it, but he never even said sorry. He didn't show the slightest sign of understanding how much he'd hurt.
"God knows I've agonised over all this. Looking back, I reckon he's self-righteous. If our opinions differ, fine by me. But not by him - he tells me to stop lecturing him. It's all one-sided. He can't accept that alternative views can be valid. In that way, he's almost a fundamentalist. Or perhaps he's afraid of spoiling the pretty sanitised image of himself he wants to project. Or both. And though he pretends he's as modest as they come, in the end I realised he's actually got a very high opinion of himself. Maybe it's subconscious, but he hasto be right. He hasto be admired. For what he is. And if necessary for what he isn't.
"Well, I've been struggling ever since to keep the friendship alive, but it's getting more and more bogged down. He's the one who's been plugging away at me to make my peace with the board and go back. Against my better judgement. But if I leave again it'll only cause more friction with him.
"It isn't all his fault, of course. It's partly mine. I've expected too much of him. I've got too involved. I've invested far more trust in him than he has in me. He's clever, I've just been naïve and uncritical."
I had addressed all this to the carpet, and looked up to find Jonathan's eyes fixed on me. He had not interrupted once. "Hence my advice to you," I ended, "to be careful in dishing out trust. Thank goodness you didn't take it. You've been generous with your trust, J, and I'm returning it. So there you are. That's why I'm unhappy and bitter. Yes, you're right, I am. But am I being totally unfair? Tell me what you think. Please. What you honestly think."
He got up and put his hand on my bald pate. "Don't worry, M. Nothing but honesty from me. You've mentioned these types in your stories, haven't you? Very discreetly. In Orogeny, about trying to please by telling fibs. And in Clouds, about control freaks who have to be right."
"Yes." As I have said, he could have passed an exam on my stories.
"Thought so. I didn't understand what you were getting at. Not then, but I do now. Right. I need to think."
He went to the window and stood gazing out. I thought too, my head in my hands. Whatever he said, I would accept it. He took his time. Casals finished Suite No. 3, and I put on the next CD. It was ten minutes before Jonathan came back and knelt in front of me, his hands on my knees.
"M, I think you've taken the wrong tack." I braced myself. "I think you're being dishonest with yourself. You're pretending, too. That this friendship can be repaired. It can't. You should have dropped him straight away, as soon as he told you he'd led you up the garden path. Once he'd admitted that, the whole basis had gone. It's one thing to hold back things he didn't want to tell. He'd every right to do that. But it's quite another to deceive deliberately. You gave him your trust in good faith, and he didn't return it. A friend who's dishonest is a pretend friend, not really a friend at all. I'm not surprised things have been so sticky since. That's the way I see it.
"So no, you aren't a thin-skinned wimp. You've every reason to feel hurt. You say he's vulnerable himself, but he's too selfish to see that you're vulnerable too. He doesn't see trust in the same way as you do. You aren't being unfair. Not by your standards. Or mine. But he's obviously got different ones, and they aren't compatible with yours. Which means you aren't cut out to be friends.
"You aren't thinking straight, M. Do you remember what you said in that email to me, early on? Something like 'are you ready to trust me simply because you're desperate and have nobody else to trust?' You didn't ask yourself that, did you? You were desperate, and you fell under this bloke's spell. You're still under it, aren't you, even now? You're still desperate, and you can't bring yourself to let go of him, even though he's let you down so badly. So of course it still hurts. And the message board still hurts too - it's exactly the same thing there. Incompatible values.
"M, why keep up with them at all? Break the spell. Drop them both. Start again, with a clean sheet. That's my advice."
I looked at him for what must have been a full minute while it sank in. I recognised the clarity of his thought and how he expressed it. Fifty years ago, had I had occasion, I might have argued in just that way. My mind had been sharper then. Now it had grown wuzzy with sentiment and desperation and perhaps with age. Through my adolescence and far beyond, I had been supported by my imaginary Jonathan. I had lost that image and had failed to recapture it. Now another Jonathan had returned to guide and strengthen me again with wisdom and compassion and trust. This boy was speaking gentle sense to a gullible old fool who had been seduced by siren songs.
"Yes," I said slowly. "Yes, you're right. I've been woolly-minded. Blind. Yes, I was under a spell. Bewitched. Infatuated. Yes, I'll drop them. Not the other people I keep up with - they're good. But I'll drop the things that hurt." I sighed a huge sigh of relief and gratitude. "Thank you, J. Thank you very much indeed. I've learned my lesson now. He may have let me down, but I know you won't."
"I won't. But I do see why you were so cagey about trusting me . . . Hey! Is that the theme for a story? Being let down and having to rebuild trust from scratch?"
I thought. "Hmmm. Yes. That's got possibilities." I reached for my pad and scribbled, with much inserting and crossing out. I was back in gear again.
"How about this? 'A tale of implicit trust incautiously bestowed, of bleak desolation when it proves misplaced, and of painfully rebuilding it in maturer form for worthier recipients.' Something like that?"
So Those Old Gods was conceived.
But I noticed the clock. "Lord! D'you know it's half past one? We deserve some lunch. And do you realise, young man, that we only met three hours ago and you've already sorted out my life for me?"
As we went to the kitchen to find food, I felt a lightness in my step. Never once, in the eight months since then, have I visited the message board. Never once (with an exception to be recounted in its place) have I contacted my pretend friend, nor he me. Never once have I missed either.
*
Jonathan saw yesterday's paper lying on the kitchen table. We do not take a Sunday paper: it is hard enough finding time to read the weekday ones. He pounced on it.
"Oh, you get the Guardian! Auntie gets the Mail, which is loathsome. May I look?"
"Help yourself. I'll dig out some food. We'll have a proper meal this evening, but are you happy with bread and cheese and things now?"
"Mmmm, fine," he mumbled vaguely. He was already deep in the front page which was dominated, of course, by news from Iraq. The Guardian was almost the only national paper which disapproved of the war, just as the LibDems were the only political party to be officially against it. I laid out the food and waited for him to surface.
"Oh my God! This is great! Not the news, I mean. But the approach. The only sense I see is on Channel 4 news. The Mail's line makes me sick - the official Bush and Blair line. Iraq's a threat to the west and a threat to its neighbours. It's got weapons of mass destruction. Blix was fooled. It's linked to al-Qaida. Blah blah blah. OK, Saddam's a bastard, but where's the evidence for the rest?"
"Where indeed? Instead we've got Iraqis remarkably reluctant to be liberated. And more of them being killed than Saddam would bump off in a decade. Not to mention allied troops. And I smell trouble in the rest of the Muslim world. More terrorism, not less. And Bush trampled on the UN. And on Chirac and Schröder when they objected - I wish Blair had had their balls. I reckon the war's not really about liberation. It's about oil."
"Yes. It's a . . . a shoddy war. Dishonest."
"The world's becoming a lunatic asylum run by lunatics."
"That's good. Is that you, or a quote?"
"Not me, I'm afraid. Lloyd George."
"But it's more or less what the paper's saying." He tapped it. "This is good. There's real meat there. Not like the scandal and sensation and scaremongering you get in the Mail. Have you always read the Guardian?"
"All my adult life. My parents were dyed-in-the-wool Tories, so I grew up on the Telegraph. Rather like you and the Mail. Then at school I graduated to the Times, which was much better then - it was still politically independent. A friend and I had a standing order for it. Pretentious brats, we also had a standing order for the Beano, which the newsagent discreetly tucked inside the Times every Thursday. But towards the end of my school days I discovered the Guardian - it was still the Manchester Guardian then - and I've been with it ever since."
"Well, you're obviously not Tory, and with your views on Blair I guess you're not Labour. So you've got to be like me. LibDem."
"That's right. To the core. Always have been, almost, even when they seemed a lost cause. I remember the 1950 election when I was, um, eleven. Official blue Tory poster in the downstairs window, home-made yellow Liberal poster in my bedroom window immediately above."
He chuckled. "Did your parents mind?"
"Oh no. Didn't even ask why. Just laughed at me."
"That's given me an idea. My room's above the front room too, where Auntie puts up Tory posters. And the local elections are coming up, aren't they? Where could I get a LibDem poster?"
"Oh, I'll get you one. No problem. We belong to the local party. Deliver election bumph for them."
"Wheee! Can I help? Do you do it round here?"
"Yes, just the streets between Water End and the railway. Where exactly do you live?"
"Skelton Court." A modern maisonette development barely two hundred yards away.
"Ho! Then I've pushed things through your letterbox, not knowing."
That got us on to the coincidence of our meeting. Statistically, we reckoned, it was not particularly surprising, by itself, that we both lived in York, given the size of the place and the amount of UK feedback I got. But the fact that we already knew each other by sight? We reckoned there might be five hundred sixteen-year-old boys in York, a fair proportion of whom I saw in the street as they left the local schools. Not hugely surprising either, by itself. Putting the two together, much more so. As for being on nodding terms already . . .
"M, when we first met in the street, when we first looked at each other, what did you see in me?"
"Pain, and loneliness, and thoughtfulness. Have you seen Hedwig and the Angry Inch?
I could swear by your expression
That the pain down in your soul
Was the same as the one down in mine.
Something clicked."
"Same here. Something clicked. Is that what they call gaydar? I've never met it before."
"Nor've I. But is it really gaydar? As I understand it, that just tells you the other bloke is gay. No more than that. But your eyes told me you were shy and lonely. Like me. Not that you were gay. No suggestion you were my other half or anything like that. No hint of eros, but every possibility of philia."
I cocked an eyebrow to make sure he was with me over those Greek words -- philia, love as between close friends, and eros, sexual love -- and Aristophanes' allegory in the Symposium that we are originally a whole, are then split in two, and have to search for our other half to be reunited in heavenly love. But I need not have bothered. It is all explained in The Scholar's Tale which he knew inside out, and he nodded almost impatiently.
"Yes. That's what I felt too. And what I felt when I read your stories. The philia was there for the asking, if only I took the plunge. But what about eros? How do you find your other half?"
"Well . . . " We had finished eating, so I suggested we take our coffee to the study, where we put on Haydn's horn concertos and I lit my pipe. But I had little opportunity to keep it going.
"Well," I resumed. "I've got a theory. That there are three ways of going about it. You can actively search, which means you're expecting or hoping to find someone. It's rather like wanting a picture, say, to hang in your room and live with, and you rush from shop to shop looking for something suitable. It puts you in danger of saying 'That's it!' -- or even 'That'll have to do!' -- only to find that it isn't really right after all. Is that why so many love affairs come unstuck? Are people in too much of a hurry and persuade themselves they've got it right when they haven't?
"Then the middle way is not to search, but just to keep your eyes open. You might be walking past a shop window thinking about something totally different when you see a picture out of the corner of your eye. You turn on your heel and look at it more closely, and realise 'That's exactly what I want!' Or, of course, that it isn't right after all.
"Or you can positively -- or do I mean negatively? -- convince yourself that you don't want a picture. Or that the right picture just doesn't exist. You never even look. But even here the unexpected can happen. It's what happened to me. I'd been looking for my bloke so long that I decided he didn't exist. Then one day, right there in front of me, was this girl. Well, this woman. I'd never been interested in women at all. Not my scene. But, bingo, there she was, and before long I was head over heels. So it all makes me feel Aristophanes was right and your other half is out there somewhere. You may not look for it, you may never find it, but if your paths do happen to cross, you'll both know you've found the right one. Maybe not in the least what you expected. Maybe not even the gender you expected."
J had been following intently. "M, you said you'd been looking for your bloke so long . . . you mean you never found a bloke at all? You've never . . . ?"
I remembered that he had already revealed far more of himself to me than I had to him. It looked as if I was in for another bout of self-exposure. Fair enough.
"J, don't believe my stories. They're wishful thinking. I've never had sex with a male. I've never been anywhere near a gay love affair. With that one exception which I wish had never happened, I've never known a male well enough to even talk about these things. In that way, my whole life's been a blank. You see . . . "
It took the whole of the afternoon for it to spill out, the high points and the depths alike, in disconnected dribs and drabs, not in the relatively organised form of the previous pages. He listened with sympathetic interest, breaking in with frequent questions especially where my experiences matched his own. I ended by telling him quite a bit about Hilary which is hardly relevant here.
"I do want to meet her. How long's she away for?"
"A fortnight. She's in China."
He blinked. His world experience, after all, was still limited. More explanations were necessary.
"But she gets back the day after tomorrow. You'll meet her then."
"Oh good! Meanwhile, if you'll pardon my mentioning it" -- he was always meticulously polite, except when he was being mischievous -- "do you know what the time is?"
I looked at the clock. It was already eight. "Good God! Where's the day gone? I'm sorry, you must be starving. So'm I, come to think of it. I feel like the Duke of Wellington."
"Uh?"
"Nearly reduced to a skellington."
He smiled. "You're a skellington already. You're as thin as a rake. And as tall as one. How tall are you?"
"Six foot three. Or I was. Probably shrinking now. But my waistline's one of the few things I'm proud of. I've never had a weight problem. Nor've you, by the look of it."
No time for anything grand. I retrieved some of Hilary's incomparable home-made bolognese sauce from the freezer, heated it up, boiled a pile of spaghetti, and made a salad. I got out the Cinzano which I always have as a snifter, and cocked an eyebrow at Jonathan.
"Well, I've never had any alcohol. Auntie doesn't drink, and before her I was too young."
"Well, I'm going to have my dose -- damned if I'm going to abstain just for you." I leered at him. "You'll be hard-pushed to steer clear of it at university. But it's up to you. You're welcome to suck it and see. No problem if you don't want to. Or you don't like it."
"Let me try a sip of yours."
He took a sip and screwed his nose up. "Yuck!"
"Never mind. Cinzano's an acquired taste. Try some wine instead."
We usually get our wine in boxes, and a new one needed opening. He had not seen one before and watched intrigued as I broke the perforations, opened the flap, and fumbled inside to pull out the tap.
"Just like fishing your willy out of your flies," he observed.
Great minds, again . . . precisely the image I always had, though I would have hesitated to use it to him. I tapped a dribble for him, a good fruity red. That went down well, so I gave him a whole glass.
"Hey, not too fast! It's not Ribena! And best stick to one glass for tonight. We don't want you under the table!"
His eyes flickered upwards. "And steep my senses in forgetfulness? I could have done with that often enough in the past, to drown the pain." He said that very soberly, and I knew the feeling. "But not today. I don't need to get into ... "
He paused, and a gleam came to his eye. "Hey, M, what do you call a Buddhist temple that's leaning over?"
"Uh? What's that got to do with it? Dunno."
"A drunken stupa!"
A bit of my spaghetti went down the wrong way. When I had recovered, he asked when we had introduced our kids to alcohol.
"Oh, quite early on, in sips from our glass. Their own glass when they were perhaps fifteen."
"And when did you start?"
"Well, when I was nine or ten we went to a cousin's wedding. Mum offered me a sip of her champagne and foolishly looked away. When she looked back she had an empty glass and a happy son. Then when I was, oh, sixteen I went on a school trip to Greece and was properly introduced."
"Didn't the teachers mind?"
"Lord no, they trusted us. That's what school trips were for. Educational in the broadest sense. Home was pretty dry, though. Booze came out only on the highest of high days and holidays. Though later Dad threw over the traces and started making his own wine. But university was another matter. I held a party and got properly drunk, for the first and last time. I survived the party, just, but threw up in the middle of the night and was in hell next day. Never again. Best lesson possible. But that's what university's for, to learn one's capacity."
We talked university for a while, till it was time for him to go.
"I hope I go to Cambridge. Like you."
"So do I. Would Auntie approve?"
"If the finances run to it, I think she would."
"But I don't think Auntie would approve if you went home stinking like a wine bar. Let's smell your breath . . . Yes, you do. Does she expect a dutiful kiss?"
He wrinkled his nose. "Yes."
I lent him my brush and paste to clean his teeth, and then smelt again. "Hmmm. Better. But don't breathe out when you kiss her."
He put on his jacket and, without a word, gave me a big hug. No kiss, of course. Blokes don't kiss blokes unless . . . but that was not the name of the game, not with us. I walked him back. I did not have to. He would have been perfectly safe by himself. But I wanted to. I did not want to make polite conversation with Auntie, though, not tonight, so I stayed in the shadows as he stood on the doorstep. Before letting himself in he breathed hard in and out and gave me a big grin. Once the door had closed behind him, I walked home on air.
Twelve hours had changed my life. After fifty years I had found my real someone, my real male, to commune with. He had already lifted the worst of my burden, he was already filling my remaining void, I was beginning to feel complete at last. I looked forward to telling Hilary, for she would be glad for me. Over in Skelton Court there were similar thoughts, but he had nobody to tell. Except me. When I got in, a simple email was already waiting in the inbox.
M. I've never spent a happier day in my life. There's no pain in my soul any more. You don't know what you've done for me. Thank you. J.
I replied,
I do know, J, very well. Because you've done the same for me, and more. Thank you. Sleep well. M.
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