Читать книгу Power Cues - Nick Morgan - Страница 5

A look also forever changed my relationship with my father. And it took place in a nanosecond on Christmas day.

I’d rushed around attempting to buy him a present with my usual lack of success. He was a hard man to buy presents for; he didn’t have many hobbies and divided his life rigorously between work and home. When he was at home, he did DIY projects or played the piano. But he wasn’t the kind of man you’d buy a hammer for; his deep interests were artistic and literary. I couldn’t afford to buy him a second piano, so I was looking for a book.

I finally found E. M. Forster’s posthumously published novel Maurice.² This was the book that revealed his homosexuality, and so had been embargoed until his death. I was dimly aware of this back story, but it wasn’t foremost in my mind.

I chose it, I imagined, because of its literary merit. Glad to have the chore accomplished, I thought no more about it. I wrapped up the book and put it under the Christmas tree.

On Christmas day, when my dad got around to opening it, he tore off the wrappings and gave me a very brief, startled look, before regaining his composure, saying thanks, and moving on to the next present. But in that momentary, startled glance, I saw suddenly, intuitively and finally, that he was gay. It wasn’t a question; it was an answer—to a question I hadn’t realized consciously that I had asked.

Nothing was said out loud, and it was ten more years until my dad came out to me deliberately, but I knew it in that look.

That a whole secret life could be revealed in one glance was astonishing to me. Humans didn’t need words to tell each other things, even very deeply guarded, private things. How could this be? How could his unconscious mind speak to me that way without him being consciously aware of it?