Moby Dx: A Novel of Silicon Valley - Volume 1 Max Ebb

Chapter 26 Self-Discovery

Max was still youthful-looking and slim in those days. The smart and short brown beard he’d grown gave him the air of a very French psychiatrist, partially masking his slightly feminine good looks. It didn’t hide his vivacious blue eyes. OK, his eyebrows were positively scary when he forgot to have them waxed off to almost imperceptibility, and he was a bit too serious, and his humor was lost on most, but physically, he was very attractive to women, and yet he made himself unattractive to women. Always sure to reinforce everyone’s sense of his own brilliance, as a crack he was for the most part considered deserving of the credit he demanded for himself, even in the rarefied atmosphere of the École Normale. With women though, it was not just that he pumped himself up; he pushed them down. He dismissed them. They noticed. Even Max, not a pioneer of self-awareness, came to recognize that he treated women badly, and that it was a problem for him if he aimed to participate in the French national sport.

It was a long dawn, the awakening of Max’s homosexuality. All those moments of intimacy with Miriam formed layers of resistance that nagging dissatisfaction only slowly dissolved. Never mind whether he could live with himself once he was aware. His mother had left him wanting more of her: more of her unabiding appreciation of him, more wriggling into the slippery slice between her legs, more disappearing from the world and the haunting feelings about a collision with his father. No other girl could give him that, he was learning. What would satisfy him?

At Harvard he had been oblivious to the lesbian cabals of self-discovery, or to the attention certain distinguished faculty showered on the prettier undergraduate boys, or how the leather-shod roughnecks in the Square spent Sundays when they weren’t prinking beside their manicured and chromed rides. In Singapore, homosexuality was as illegal as chewing gum, which of course didn’t mean it wasn’t there, just that it was buried deep in the closets.

In France, sex doesn’t sell, because it’s free! In the Jardin du Luxembourg, at the tables around the Place de la Contrescarpe, in the crowds thronging the Champs-Élysée as the Tour de France charged into the city, and everywhere he went, he began to see public displays of affection between openly gay couples from all walks of life. Gay sex repulsed him. It intrigued him. It scared him that it intrigued him.

In his work, Max had a very low threshold for action. Most people see a problem, and they wait and wait and wait until there is no avoiding doing something about it. They procrastinate. They find excuses. They delay. Max saw a problem and he immediately tried to fix it, and he usually succeeded. He’d go to the library to do the research. He’d call six friends and corral them into spending the weekend at the bench. He’d stay up all night working alone if no one would join him. Almost nothing got in his way.

“Una forza della natura,” said visiting Professoressa Serena Fraguglia.

When it came to sexuality, the great equalizer, Max was stumped. He knew there was a problem, but what to do?