A Freewheelin' Time (15 page)

After a while I saw a store that seemed the kind of place that would sell a thing such as a towel. When I walked in the door of the shop everyone stopped speaking and turned to look at me. The attention was unexpected but not unfriendly. When I opened my dictionary and showed it to the woman closest to me, she peered at the underlined word.
Asciugamano,
she said and smiled.
Sì, sì.

After a discussion with the other customers, the sales-woman showed me an array of brightly colored striped towels.

I chose one and offered my wallet to her. She took some bills and then gave me change and a neatly wrapped package with my precious towel. I nodded and smiled at everyone and left. I never said a word. I’m sure they thought I was a deaf mute.

The next step was to find a place to buy stamps so I could mail my letter home to Bob.

The letters Bob wrote to me in 1962 during the eight months I was away are letters written by a young writer on the rise who is in love. They are very personal, full of pain, humor, and storytelling. The writing is raw at times yet they are wonderful letters:

Nothing much is happening here I guess—Bob Shelton is waiting for Jean—the dogs are waiting to go out, the thiefs are waiting for an old lady—little kids are waiting for school—the cop is waiting to beat up on someone—them lousey bums are waiting for money—Grove Street is waiting for Bedford Street—the dirty are waiting to be cleaned—Everybody is waiting for cooler weather—and I am just waiting for you—.

I hope I recognized back then how good the letters were, but when you are in love you don’t always notice such things. Noticing the quality of the writing would have required a degree of detachment I couldn’t muster. It was difficult to see beyond the back-and-forth conversation we were having.

He wrote to tell me about what he was doing, where he was going, and who he was seeing:

I saw another great movie—“The Magnificent Seven”—oh I just couldn’t believe it—I hate to say it but I’m Yul Brynner—Gawd am I ever him—I’m a gun man—I cleaned up a Mexican peon town with six other gunmen—I shot Eli Wallach—I thought for a minute I coulda been Eli Wallach but after seeing Yul—I just knew I was him—nobody ever had to tell me—I just knew it right off the bat.

I finally cleaned up the house—I shoved out all the pigs—threw out all the cat shit and shoveled the horse manure out in the hall—it’s cleaner now—.

Some of the words he wrote in the letters became song lyrics, others he put in quotes so I would know they were from a newly written song:

I had another recording session you know—I sang six more songs—you’re in two of them—Bob Dylan’s Blues and Down The Highway (“All you five & ten cent women with nothing in your heads I got a real gal I’m loving and I’ll lover her ’til I’m dead so get away from my door and my window too—right now”). Anyway you’re in those two songs specifically—and another one too—“I’m in the Mood for You”—which is for you but I don’t mention your name….

I wrote a song about that statue we saw in Washington of Tom Jefferson—you’re in it.

The letters and the songs have the same rhythm. He is always recognizable because he writes true to what he feels and sees in the world.

REVELATIONS

While in Italy I read Françoise Gilot’s memoir,
Life with Picasso.
I expected to learn about Picasso, an artist I loved, but instead the book turned into something entirely different. It made me think about Bob. I forgot all about Picasso. I felt I was reading a book of revelations, lessons, warnings. Even though Picasso was a much older man than Bob and had experienced a lot more, their personalities were so similar it was astounding.

Picasso did as he pleased, not worrying about the consequences for the people around him or the effect his actions had on them. He took no responsibility, clarified nothing, came to no decisions and did nothing that would have made it possible or easier for the various women he was involved with to leave him and get on with their lives. He was a magnet, and the force field surrounding him was so strong it was not easy to pull away.

His art was the main function of his life. At the end of his arm was a brush.

I was floored. The same feeling kicked in that I had felt in New York: that men could always have it both ways. They were born into a society that gave them permission to do as they pleased. Women, on the other hand, were sidelined.

And for the male artist (Picasso, Bob) it didn’t matter what others expected or felt or thought of them or their work; they just did it. I could identify with that all I wanted, but at that time I could not live it outright. Permission was not granted. Females were guests, not participants.

In her memoir Gilot wrote about what it meant to be around “genius.” At eighteen, I was not mature enough to understand what it meant to nurture genius. Or rather, I knew what it meant, but I was young and in love with this guy Bob. I didn’t think of him that way—as an abstraction, a genius, someone to handle with care, to treat in some special way. We would nurture each other as needed and as equals.

All the talk in the Village about his incredible talent, his uniqueness—did that mean I should treat him differently? Wouldn’t that be detrimental in the long and short run for both of us, no matter his gifts or the outcome of this love story? More mulling, more confusion only made it harder for me to think straight. I read the book through twice, searching for an arrow to point me somewhere.

When I was away from him all those months, he channeled what he was feeling into a very creative time. He wrote many songs at a fevered clip. He was in white heat. He performed often and well and wrote beautiful songs about many things, including the pain caused by a lover who is far away. A recording from that time of him singing the traditional ballad “Barbara Allen” tears at the heartstrings.

In my youthful confusion I was still struggling for permission to be. All that was offered to a musician’s girlfriend in the early 1960s was a role as her boyfriend’s “chick,” a string on his guitar. And in the case of Bob’s rising fame, I would be a gatekeeper—one step closer to an idol. People would want to know me just to get closer to him. My significance would be based on his greater significance. That idea did not entice.

I tried to sort out the feelings I had as a female in a man’s world, without having any of the vocabulary to do so. I tried to figure out this guy who was calling me to come home to him, writing letters full of love; yet when I was with him, he seemed to take my presence for granted. I was expected just to be there by his side as he went about his business. Women and girls were permitted to sit at the table, where they would be served without any hesitation, but they were not to ask for any more. The concept of equality between men and women was unheard of.

I saw no way to reconcile the larger world I was discovering in Italy and what would be required of me if I went back to New York. So I stayed on in Italy; I tried to explain why to Bob.

I loved him and he loved me, but I had doubts about him, his honesty, and the way life would be. I hadn’t gone to college and in Italy I was living that experience. As soon as I found out there was an art school in Perugia, I enrolled. At the Accademia di Belle Arti and certainly at the University for Foreigners, I was around people my age from different countries: I was learning, learning, learning. There were no dark, smoky clubs like in New York, but there was conversation and music at outdoor cafés and in the piazzas.

I took long walks out into the country with a drawing pad and books of poetry. I sat under ancient olive trees to draw them in their soft, lolling landscape and tried to read French and Italian poetry in the original. I smoked gritty Italian-brand cigarettes that you could purchase a few at a time with a packet of waxy matches and listened to the music of Yves Montand, Jacques Brel, Charles Aznavour, and weird Italian Elvis imitators.

I decided to cut my nearly waist-length hair to a more manageable length. Cutting it was also a reaction to the grown-up stylishness of the Italian and other European women and my desire not to look so obviously foreign.

Bob’s response was:

Yes maybe I wish maybe you didn’t cut your hair—it’s so good—it was the only blond hair that didn’t look like hay—it’ll grow back tho huh? Maybe you won’t cut it no more then….

I think I’ll go out now and get a crew cut—no I won’t—yes I will—who knows—

T
he pastime of the young men in Perugia was to engage the foreign women who paraded by them all summer long in their miniskirts. They were unrelenting and the easiest way to have them leave you alone was to give in to an introduction and an exchange of names. On the ship I had started reading Lawrence Durrell’s
Alexandria Quartet,
and in Perugia I began giving my name to anyone who stopped me as “Justine,” after the title character of the first volume. Somehow I liked the idea and used that name all the time, claiming it was my middle name (it wasn’t). That was that.

I
had a Swiss friend, Rosemarie, who was an outsider like me and also avoided the organized cultural activities the University for Foreigners promoted. She spoke German, French, and English and was now learning Italian. I loved to hear Rosemarie count in German, even though she carefully explained to me that it was Swiss German, not German German. I made her say the number 555 over and over; I found all those “foonfy” sounds strung together hysterically funny. She made me say “thirty-three and a third” in English over and over for all the lispy “th, th, th” sounds.

At the university there was a dignified elderly man who handled the complicated needs of the students, a kind of concierge at a multilingual establishment. He was especially attentive, in a fatherly way, toward me and I repaid him by publicly embarrassing him in front of the crowd of students and instructors who were always hovering around him. I was picking up Italian rapidly and felt more confident every day. And when I was in doubt about a word, I would Italianize an English one. Sometimes it worked well enough. And sometimes it did not, to unfortunate effect.

When this reserved man offered to help me once again with something, I said to him quite audibly in the big room with reverberating acoustics, Ma Signore, Lei non mi deve spoiliare così. When he looked at me oddly and the gaggle of people in the immediate vicinity went silent, I smiled and, thinking he hadn’t heard me, repeated it.

He looked away as Rosemarie yanked my arm and told me to be quiet. Pulling me aside, she explained that
spogliare
meant “to undress” in Italian, and I had said to him, But sir, you mustn’t continue to undress me like that, and not that he mustn’t continue to spoil me.

I was so mortified, I avoided going back to the school for several days, afraid to see him.

D
uring the summer, my friend Janet Kerr came to visit me and stayed awhile in the
pensione
before going on to France. She also was enchanted by Perugia, its dreamlike qualities such an enormous contrast with the way life was lived in New York City.