Her Mother's Daughter (27 page)

And at Sunday school too, the nuns were all women, a fact it took me some time to understand. They were not like schoolteachers, though; they were forbidding and harsh and had thin grim mouths. But Sister John the Baptist liked me, I knew she did, although I was a little intimidated by her. But even she, the one nun with a man's name, bowed down all the way to the floor the day Father Burke opened our classroom door and came in. I was horrified. I wanted to leap out of my seat and pull her up from the ground and tell her she mustn't, mustn't ever bow to. anyone. I didn't like bowing even to God, if he was really there inside the altar, another thing I had trouble comprehending. But for Sister John the Baptist to bow to Father Burke! A contemptible little man who broke into Mass sometimes to announce in a thick brogue that unless people gave more in the collection, there would be no heat in the church that winter! When he drove around in a Cadillac, and most of the men in our neighborhood were out of work! He came into the classroom with a similar message, threatening that none of us would make our First Communion if more money weren't given on Sundays.

And my own mother. Whenever Dr. MacVeaney came to take care of us, she would be so deferential I couldn't recognize her, her submissive manner distorted her into a different person. And one day we were walking on the Boulevard, my sister, Mommy, and I, in brand-new pinafores of flowered pink chintz, all the same, that Mommy had made us, and suddenly she grabbed us, one by each hand, and ran us across the Boulevard against the traffic, and I looked back, and there was a great gross man with a big belly and a red face stumbling along the sidewalk, and I knew my mother was frightened of encountering him.

And from the time I was about eleven, I had horrible nightmares in which I was chased by men, and I was humiliated because I had no clothes on, or no underpants, and the men were all around me, grabbing at me, and I tried to fly and did, but I'd have trouble getting enough altitude and one of them would grab my foot or ankle, and I'd be overcome by terror and wake up shaking, dripping wet.

So when I was being brazen, smoking with the boys, listening to their scatological jokes (which young boys' jokes tend to be), I was acting in the face of my fear, not trying to understand or overcome it, but to pretend I didn't feel it, to get rid of it by (I thought) confronting it. And what I learned to do was act as if I didn't feel it, but the fear didn't really go away.

When I went to college, the campus was filled with returned GIs, older, more poised and surer of themselves than the boys my age. And oh, how they appealed to me! They were trim, muscled, and they walked with a kind of quiet space around them, and looked around as if they could go click click with their minds and take in the entire scene, understand all the mysteries. Now I know that what I thought they understood was relations of power, and since I felt I didn't know anything about that, I felt terribly vulnerable to them. I wasn't drawn to all of them, of course, only the ones who seemed surest, the kind who were always surrounded by a couple of buddies who seemed lords-in-waiting to a king or prince, who hung on him, were ruled by him. And I thought if I went with one of those men I'd be like his men, only I'd be a lady-in-waiting, servant to a sovereign.

A number of these guys came on to me, and I was so drawn, oh, some of them were so beautiful, but I'd always be flip and wary with them. I wanted them, but I wanted to be equal to them, and I felt that I wasn't—being too young to be equal—and that if I were once drawn in, I'd fall into an utter subjection I could never escape from. They acted as if they knew exactly what women wanted and how to give it to them. I dated a few of them a few times. I remember one, Teddy Massa, whom I'd seen at the debating society and who had intense golden-brown eyes. My heart flipped when he asked me out, and then he took me on a real date, I mean, to dinner—something the younger boys couldn't afford—and I felt I was being treated as someone sophisticated, grown up. But then, afterward, necking in his car, he was insistent about going further and when I was equally insistent that we not go further, he looked at me lasciviously and said, “I'll get you yet, young lady.” He said that each time we went out—five or six times in all—until I told him I didn't want to see him anymore. Because each time he said it, my stomach would curl into a tight ball, and I felt that if I lost control, I'd scratch his eyes out. I couldn't stand the way he said that, as if I were a
thing
and he could
get
me, the way you get a puppy and domesticate it. Well, he never
got
me, and neither did any of the other knowing, sophisticated guys. And I had strangely mixed feelings about that. Because on the one hand, I felt I'd triumphed over them, I hadn't succumbed, been vanquished, been “made” by them; but on the other hand, I felt diminished. I knew I was too cowardly to risk them, and had to settle for something less dangerous.

But I did have fun settling. I loved the awkward shy sweet boys who didn't pretend they knew all about sex, who were as fumbling and giggling as I was, and who, when things worked out, were as elated as I was. Brad was one of these boys, but he was special because he didn't fit into the world in any way at all. He wasn't good at studies, or at sports, although he liked to toss basketballs with the guys—or me, if there was no one else. But he was brilliant at the saxophone, and he was much loved. Because he'd retreated somehow. He didn't try to compete in most things, he just wouldn't. He'd turn serious discussions into silliness, and conflict into joke. He'd go off into his private space—you could see his eyes blank out whatever was around him and I knew he was hearing complicated progressions of music in his head. During a late-night Serious Discussion of Mahler with a bunch of our friends, he suddenly broke into song, offering, in a beautiful falsetto, “Voi che sapete.” He interrupted a political discussion around a cafeteria table by imitating Harry Truman chastising a reviewer for criticizing Margaret's singing—and then offered a sample of what he imagined Margaret's singing sounded like. Everything changed for me when I met Brad in the middle of my sophomore year at college. I entered what I thought of as his world, but he said it hadn't existed before he met me. Wherever we were in the evening, he'd grow restless and find or call someone with a car to come and get us and drive us to one of the dinky roadhouses that used to dot Long Island, to listen to some jazz, and maybe he'd sit in, and we'd listen and smoke pot outside between sets with the guys in the band and feel like cynical worldly bohemians. We'd stay out all night, turning up after dawn at my house with a crowd of guys and make bacon and eggs and coffee, and then we'd play cards until we couldn't keep our eyes open. Naturally, we'd skip school that day, sleep the day away, and go out again at night, to another club. It felt enchanted to me, like life suspended on a high plane in which you did only what you wanted to do, and spent the weeks laughing, listening to music, and holding, oh closely holding, that dear body.

That body was tall and skinny, but with broad shoulders and chest, something that has always turned me on, and long slender fingers and feet. Brad had smoky eyes, sometimes blue, sometimes grey, and always a bit cloudy in color except when he was making music or making love: then they turned a dark grey-blue, clear and vivid. At first we had trouble finding a way to be together. He had no car, and of course neither did I and I felt uncomfortable at the thought of waiting until my mother went to bed—she went up late—then lying together on the living room floor (the couch was too short). But one day, when I went to finish painting the detail on a backdrop for
As You Like It,
I realized there was a lock on the inside of the Green Room door, and also that there was rarely anyone in it until three in the afternoon. My eyes felt as if they were electric when I ran to find Brad to tell him this news, and his turned on the same way. We ran together, giggling like fools, and slammed in and fell back against the door and turned the lock and just slid into each other's arms, as if that were our natural state, and separateness a punishment.

I still believe it was.

After a while, when we could bear to pull our bodies apart, we searched for a place to lie down. The Green Room doubled as a storage room for props, and was cluttered with tables and chairs and couches and lamps, unpaired sneakers, old rags, a ratty fur coat used in the last production of
The Man Who Came to Dinner,
some cheap china and imitation silver pieces that looked fancy when seen from afar—all the odds and ends of real living, like a parodic inventory of The American Home. We found a couch heaped with dusty veiling—god knows what show that was used in—and sneezed as we lifted it and piled it on an overstuffed armchair with innards escaping from its side. We threw the rest of the junk that covered the couch on the floor, and brushed it off as best we could, and then we just stood there looking at each other. We couldn't, in those days, look at each other for very long without sliding into each other, and as soon as that happened, our bodies just as naturally slid onto the couch.

Oh how I loved him then. He was damp and smelled like dew and his thin arms felt strong around me, encompassed me, and mine encompassed him. His heart was beating even faster than mine, and when we'd taken off our tops and put our chests together, Brad began to hum and pop, making a complicated syncopated rhythmic progression out of our double heartbeats, and I piped in and then laughed and nuzzled him, god he was sweet.

After that, we appropriated the Green Room just about every other day, even on weekends. We tried to be careful—Brad brought condoms. But of course we hadn't had a condom that first luscious time, and that was all it took, although six weeks went by before we knew that. Still, I was never able to regret what we did, the wildness of our hunger for each other, the tenderness with which we felt it, the completeness, the insatiability of our passion. It felt like Truth, a thing I hadn't before believed in. I didn't know then that time can obliterate even the most ecstatic of experiences; and wouldn't have believed it. Neither would he, then. Then, I didn't feel cowardly anymore, or diminished, or afraid. I was blazing with pride and joy.

Even the discovery that I was pregnant didn't really penetrate the gorgeous world we had created. We talked idly about abortion, but neither of us really wanted to abort the baby. Not because we wanted the baby—we were babies ourselves, and had no idea what to do with another one—but because we couldn't bear the idea of something so beautiful ending in a dirty dark alley, a furtive visit, possibly filthy instruments, in squalid death. We talked, and we put off Decision. We continued to spend our time as we had, taking off from school on a weekday when Brad didn't have to prepare for an evening performance, and going into Manhattan and walking. We'd choose a particular area each time we went and walk in circles through and around it. We'd get tickets for Mozart operas and sit up high in the old Met, using opera glasses. Some Sundays we'd go to Nick's in the Village, where jazz musicians used to hang around in the afternoons. We'd drink Coke and listen to them play and I'd urge Brad to go ask them if he could sit in, but he was too intimidated by great names. He knew each one on sight. They were a grungy-looking lot, Brad's heroes, down and out, ravaged-looking, tired. They should have stood as a warning to me, but they didn't. Because when they picked up their instruments to play, their music was so sweet and poignant that it seemed then that whatever they had suffered had been worth it. Saturday nights I'd get a ride with somebody and go out to wherever Brad was playing and nurse a rye and soda and listen, surrounded by his friends—his and mine.

We stayed in our bubble, but my mind, at least, was working. Brad hated school and was there only because his father insisted he needed a degree. All he wanted in life was to play jazz. I was bored with school, even with the painting course: the teacher was rigid and expected his students to paint like him. I wouldn't, so he snubbed me. In return, I cut classes. The only classes I would miss if I left were William Hull's, and that was because he was a poet and spoke and thought like a poet. I spent half my time in the cafeteria with my friends, and the other half backstage painting sets. I read a great deal—at least I had before I met Brad—but little of my reading concerned Modern European History, Biology 2, or Conversational French. Before I reached college, I had read my way through most of the great nineteenth-century English novelists and had begun on the twentieth century. Even my English classes were dull: we'd be assigned one Hawthorne story, but I'd read all of Hawthorne, and then sit utterly paralyzed with boredom as the professor explained in detail the symbolism of “The Birthmark.” I was an arrogant kid, I always thought I knew more than my teachers, and they didn't help matters because they acted as if they thought the same thing. As I look back now, I think the truth was that I didn't know more than they but I knew things in a different way. For me, knowledge lay in the passions and any other sort was useless.

So why shouldn't we both quit school and go be artists together? I pictured some sort of life: I saw us married, living in a rented room in the Village under the eye of a benevolent landlady (Mother?) who would always be available for baby-sitting and who would take care of us too while she was at it. Brad would play in some club or other and every night I'd go to hear him and sketch the seamy side of New York à la Reginald Marsh, and then we'd have something to eat and go back together, arms around each other, to a room where we could lie in a proper bed and be together legally, and make love. Sometimes the baby made its way into my daydreams, as we mounted a bus, with assorted bags and baby, to Podunk, where Brad had a gig and where I would find new material for my art. I was sure we would be happy all the time. Why not? We didn't need much to make us happy in those days, Brad and I.