FIRST PERSON / MICHAEL NAVA : A Marriage Stripped to Its Essential Elements

Bill Weinberger and I were lovers for almost a decade. Over the years, we experimented with terms less salacious-- significant other, friend, spouse --looking for a word that better described two nice men who pecked each other on the lips before setting off to work in the morning and who held hands beneath the covers at night.

There were two cars in the garage, joint bank accounts, a deed in both our names, shared history, a marriage, a family. Not like the families we had been born into and not like the families we had imagined for ourselves as children.

It was the family we had chosen and in the face of our natal families’ hostility, even though this was what they had taught us to want for ourselves: someone to love and to make a life with. Did it matter that we were both men? Not to us.

One evening, sitting on the porch steps of our house watching Bill work in the garden, I remembered a line from a poem: “He sailed into an extraordinary mildness and anchored in his home.” That’s how I felt about my life with Bill.

*

When I was 14, I believed myself vile and grotesque even as I worked at being the smartest boy in class, the best-behaved. I lived in secret shame. My stepfather was what Victorian novelists call a ne’er-do-well, who spent much of my childhood in one jail or another, leaving my hapless mother to raise six children on handouts from her parents and welfare.

Sometime during that year, I fell in love with David, also 14. I was attracted by his quietness because, unlike my own silence, there was nothing behind his, except contentment. But there wasn’t a place in my world for the feelings I had for David. My classmates were beginning to pair off into boy and girl, and if they were uncertain of how to proceed, they need look no further than the grown-up world of men and women.

That world was closed to me and there was nothing in my experience to teach me what to want with David, much less how to go about getting it. I knew that my feelings for him were sexual, but it was a child’s inchoate sexuality, more about being touched than having sex. What I really wanted was to hold his hand as we walked to Spanish and pass him notes in class like the notes girls passed to their boyfriends, folded into tiny slips, the letters SWAK written across them in red--Sealed With A Kiss.

I knew I’d never have that with him or any boy. I tried to kill myself. I didn’t succeed.

My life went back to normal. Once again I threw myself into the task of being the smartest boy in the world, driven to make up in outside achievement the inner deficiency I felt. The harder I drove myself the more I accomplished until, in 1978 at the age of 23, I found myself at Stanford Law School, an unimaginable stretch for a boy from the slums of Sacramento.

My best friend at Stanford was a straight girl named Susan. She was no more interested in school than I was and we affected Bohemian superiority toward our industrious classmates. One day in Real Property, we devised a contest called, “Find Mr. Stanford.” The point was to identify the one male classmate who epitomized the bourgeois conventions we disdained. We chose a boy from Cleveland, so neat his jeans were creased. Bill Weinberger.

He was friendly and studious and he dated a girl whom Susan and I called “Barbie.” One afternoon, I was sitting at my carrel in the library when Bill came up and said he needed to talk to me.

“Sure,” I said.

He asked, “Can we go someplace else?”

I had no idea what he wanted, but he was nervous, so I suggested a walk. On the steps of the undergraduate library he said to me, “Karen Green told me you were gay.”

“I am,” I told him, wondering what this was leading up to.

“I’m gay, too,” Bill said. “I’m just coming out.”

I would have been less surprised if my ancient Trusts and Estates professor had confided to me that he wore pantyhose. But Bill was waiting for reassurance, so I said, “Congratulations.”

That night at my house, fortified by a couple of pitchers of beer, Bill said suddenly, “This is so easy.” He began to laugh.

“Shh, shh,” I whispered, mindful of my roommates, sitting at their desks struggling with the Rule Against Perpetuities, but soon I was laughing, too. We had found each other, that was the hard part. Everything else would be easy.

I have known Bill now for so many years that it’s hard to remember how I saw him that first night. At six feet, he was four inches taller than I, with fair skin, lean, a frizz of brown hair above a long, narrow face. There is a gap between his two front teeth, which he told me indicates honesty. Honesty is one of his great virtues, along with a total lack of malice and an even temperament that balanced my more mercurial one. As for me, looking at a picture taken at that time, I see that I was a pretty brown-skinned boy with big eyes and a wary mouth. It was May 16, 1980, and we were both 25 years old.

I moved through those warm spring days half-asleep, yawning through my finals. We said to each other, “I love you,” constantly. Behind those words were years of lonely boyhoods, tormenting fantasies, dissatisfactions, confusion and yearning. We were safe at last.

I was not a man who knew how to love. My childhood was not loveless, but I was loved in the way poor people love their children, with pity and guilt; a kind of love that is an admission of helplessness. I knew early that if I was to escape my family’s poverty, I would have to be strong, and love meant weakness. Bill taught me another way of loving, one where tenderness was not incompatible with strength, where needing another person was something normal and not a defect of character, and that love required nothing of me except to receive it.

The teaching wasn’t one sided. I don’t think Bill ever trusted anyone as much as he trusted me. I’d look into his eyes and see someone who was completely unguarded, who had put himself in other’s keeping without doubt or reservation. If, in the years that followed, I wasn’t always equal to his trust, nor he to mine, I was always elevated by it, and I learned that if love does not elevate you, does not force you to be a better person than you thought it was in you to be, then it’s not love.

I moved here after law school to work in the prosecutor’s office. Bill didn’t come until a year later, after finishing a clerkship with a federal judge in Ohio. He went to work at a big, stuffy downtown law firm. We lived in an old, spacious apartment on a street lined with trees.

The first two years were hard. It was the period of adjustment that every married couple goes through, but without the props that married couples count on; we couldn’t call home for advice. Bill’s parents refused to accept that he was gay and blamed me for corrupting him. I had little to do with my family after I left for college. We had friends from school in the city, but rarely saw them. Bill wasn’t out at work because he was afraid he would be fired and my office mates, though sympathetic, were not people to whom I would have turned for personal advice. Nor were there models in the gay world for what we were trying to create together. It was still the frenetic sexual summer that preceded AIDS and the emphasis was on erotic rather than domestic love. We kept our distance.

We got through those first years on our own because the only thing we could count on was each other. It was a relief to come home and close the door, cook dinner, wash dishes, read in bed. There is a kind of animal comfort that comes from the presence of another person, the solid flesh you sleep and wake with, the face you can always pick out in a crowd. It kept us going for a long time.

The middle years of our marriage were the happiest, the period from 1984 to 1988, a time of growing confidence. Bill found a job at a different firm, one where he could be out. We bought a house and planted roses. We made friends, gay and straight. They called us “Michael-and-Bill,” or “Bill-and-Michael” in the same breath. I could never go anywhere alone without someone asking, “Where’s Bill?”

We developed a sense of sureness with each other that gave us the freedom to pursue separate interests. Bill got involved in gay professional and political groups, becoming the president of the gay lawyers’ organization, Lawyers for Human Rights. I referred to myself as the First Laddy and teased him with that glazed look of adoration perfected by Nancy Reagan whenever we were at an LHR function. While he was at board meetings, I finished my first novel. “The Little Death” was published in 1986 and dedicated “To Bill.” We entered our 30s with surprise birthday parties.

Within five years our marriage would be over. We were 25 when we met, still half-formed and completely naive. We grew up together in the nine years of our marriage and at the end we discovered that we had outgrown the promises we had made to each other when we were young. It took us a couple of years to admit it, the years when we “had problems.”

Two years into my 30s, I was forced to admit that I was an alcoholic. It had crept up on me. When Bill was tense, he gardened. When I was tense, I drank. Bill talked to a friend of his who was sober and Larry confirmed his fear but warned him that I would deny it. He was right. It wasn’t until 1987, when I woke up from an epic binge and spent the afternoon throwing up bits of my stomach lining that I was ready to stop for good.

Our other problem was about sex and about being men. Monogamy is not the norm in the gay male community, even in the age of AIDS. While one purpose of heterosexual marriage is to channel and contain straight male sexuality in a socially acceptable form, for gay men the same restraints do not exist. For some gay men, sexual freedom is one of the attractions of the gay world, but sexual freedom and marriage are incompatible whatever the gender of the partners. For us, there were no models of appropriate conduct and we had to make it up as we went along. It’s a touchy subject in the gay community, where any discussion of sexual ethics can be interpreted as an attack on gay sexuality, but I still wish we’d had something to look to beyond the then-prevailing philosophy of “If it feels good, do it.”

We spent our final year together in therapy. It was a last-ditch effort to pull things together, but instead our therapist gently guided us to accept that our differences were, as the divorce statute says, irreconcilable. We both resisted. We had never stopped loving each other and we treasured the easy domesticity of our day-to-day life.

But there was a point I think for both of us when we realized what we wanted out of life would best be achieved if we were on our own. That sounds easy, but it wasn’t, and it wasn’t thoughtless or painless, either. On the other hand, I don’t think either of us regrets the decision we made on that last day, a May afternoon in 1989, when we hugged outside the therapist’s office and said goodby.

So what about families? At some point most of us will choose one, the one we make with another person. A gay marriage is marriage stripped to the essential elements: love, commitment, shared values, common hopes. When it works, for however long it works, the family we create sustains us in a way that, too often, our natal families do not; we learn to love and to be loved. There were many things I didn’t get from my marriage to Bill, but I got that, the miracle of love, the only miracle that most of us can hope for in this life.

Michael Nava’s book “Created Equal: Why Gay Rights Matter to America” with Robert Dawidoff, will be published by St. Martin’s Press in 1994. His fourth novel “Last Days” is upcoming from Putnam next year.