Back Then Page 8
That summer, only five years after the end of the war, I went to Europe with my friend Patsy Fitzsimmons. Her boat tickets back and forth were paid for by my parents. They had been young during a time when rich folk regularly made the trip across the Atlantic on luxurious ocean liners to absorb the art and artifacts of a culture deemed superior to that of raw America. Wherever Patsy and I went we let guys pick us up, drive us around in sporty cars, take us places, buy us things—bathing suits, and four-course meals—and try some innocent kissing. Once an Italian man twice my age nearly raped me while his pal, under orders, had left the car with Patsy and gone deep into some nearby woods to engage in God knows what games. We ended our tour in late August by visiting Ian’s ancestral home on a loch in Strachur on the west coast of Scotland. He shared this castle with Dodo, the aunt related to Victoria, and Ian’s sister and her two small children, all of them peaches-and-cream beautiful and elegant. Patsy and I went rigid with the cold. Chilly in August in any year, the house, made of stone and uncarpeted, was unheated. The home-front effects of the war, only five years over, persisted like a doubt. There were no napkins—cloth or paper—no red meat, very little soap, stiff toilet paper, half cups of coffee in the morning; meals were tiny, greens from the garden predominating. It wasn’t until I stayed with Ian and his family for two weeks that I had any understanding of what the English had put up with since the war started for them in September 1939.
In Scotland, Ian was barely recognizable. Could this remote presence be his evil twin brother? And, if so, what had he done with the Ian I loved? While in New York he was boyish, on his own turf, at Strachur, he was lord of the manor, distantly polite, imperious. It was as if he had been given a fierce purge that had flushed out the young and free spirit, leaving behind a middle-aged reactionary nearly as frosty as the house he lived in. Ian wasn’t fun anymore; Patsy couldn’t understand what I saw in him, refusing to believe me when I assured her that there were two Ians—one American the other British. Constantly hungry, I suggested one day that we get a snack from the kitchen. “We don’t go in there,” Ian said. I needed to know why. “It isn’t done. That’s Cook’s place.” I asked him if he had ever raided the icebox, and he looked as if I had accused him of stealing from the collection plate. He seemed to enjoy telling me that all the married men he knew slept in their so-called dressing rooms. Pressing him for clarity I discovered to my astonishment that men of his class prefer not to sleep next to their wives.
That was the year I transferred to Barnard. Although I went out with other men, I yearned for Ian. We exchanged letters. He invited me to Strachur again and again I accepted, this time alone—and armed with two thick sweaters and some heavy-duty survival rations. If I had hopes that Ian had somehow dropped the mantle of the laird, the fact that I was wrong—along with the fact that I had gone back—only proved how little room I allowed reality. Ian was the same only more so. He wanted to teach me to sail. For once the day was warm, and so I put on a pair of shorts before we set out on the choppy waters of the loch in a small, swift boat. Within a few minutes, Ian began the lesson, the naming of parts—“sheet,” “boom,” “jib,” and so on. Having neither pencil nor paper, I figured I was supposed to memorize this rapidly issued vocabulary, and also to remember to duck my head whenever we changed directions (“came about”), which seemed to be happening every few minutes. Ian told me to tighten something; I did something else. Without hesitating, he whacked me smartly across my thigh with the end of a rope (“sheet”). “So you’ll get it right next time,” he said. Where the rope landed lay a pink snake of pain.
We went shooting for small woodland creatures. He handed me a shotgun and showed me how to carry it while walking across the lumpy moor behind the house, which lay below us, starkly splendid in a medieval sort of way. We didn’t talk much as we trudged over gorse and brush. “I think I see a rabbit,” I said, darting ahead of him on the overgrown path. “Get back here, you damned idiot,” he shouted. I froze. “Didn’t I tell you never to get in front of someone carrying a loaded gun?” I tried to apologize but nothing came out. He said “damned idiot” again.
The ten sexless days (since he had told me many times how adorable I was, why hadn’t he tried to ravish me?) at Ian’s house in Scotland that summer were enough to start the process of breaking up and dispersing the particles that formed my attachment to this man who was so loose when abroad, so taut at home. Along about December an envelope addressed in Ian’s ornamental hand arrived. I tore it open and found inside an announcement of Ian’s upcoming marriage to Miss H. B., daughter of Brigadier and Mrs. So-and-so. There was a note to me from Ian. “She’s a lovely girl—I’m sure you’ll like her.” The dispersal was complete.
By late fall I still couldn’t say Ian’s name without beginning to tear away the scab that had formed over the wound of his marrying someone else. But neither was I quite ready to take the veil.
What did my friend Patsy have in mind when she decided I should meet her boyfriend Milton’s chum, Anatole Broyard? However fond of me she was, it didn’t take me more than a minute to realize there might be an element of mischief in her wanting to bring us together; I think she read my parents’ correctly: ostensibly liberal, they were emotionally conservative and maybe even as xenophobic as the generation that preceded them. White girls did not date dark-skinned men unless they didn’t care if they were ostracized. Patsy told me that Anatole’s mother and father were Negroes. “You don’t object to that, do you? He doesn’t look it, you know. His hair is straighter than yours and his skin is white.”
Patsy and I met during the summer of 1945, when I was about to turn fifteen. We were both at a music camp on Cape Cod; all the students except Patsy and me were prodigiously gifted. Patsy explained her being there by saying her mother needed a summer off. As for me, my mother believed—erroneously—that I had the makings of a pianist—or maybe a singer. The camp’s directors, apparently persuaded that the ability to perform on an instrument is the natural companion of emotional maturity, left us, when we weren’t busy with music, to our own feral devices. The camp issued no rules, and I learned, during those two summer months, as much as I needed to know about the art of kissing, the craft of petting. My parents never suspected the wilder side of the camp they had blithely entrusted me to. It turned out to be a memorable summer in other respects, including, as it did, a fire that threatened to devour the camp, flames leaping and roaring over a nearby tree line and turning the sky orange, the dropping of atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and Japan’s surrender to the Allies.
After that, Patsy and I spent a lot of time together over the next five years, although we went to different schools and graduated from different colleges. Patsy was so smart you had to watch your step with her, always careful not to say anything stupid because she would let you know whenever you did. She was ash blond and brown-eyed, courted risk, and draped herself in an attitude that my parents—who nevertheless liked her—assured me was a cynicism unsuited to someone so young. My parents had paid Patsy’s passage to Europe; every so often she punctuated her conversation with a reminder to me about how rich, compared with hers, my family was. This made me uneasy, but I didn’t say so, partly because I was afraid of her sharpness and partly because I didn’t know what to say. To apologize for being rich is one of the more stupid verbal gestures; it only lands you in even hotter water.
Patsy and her mother (her father had split when Patsy was an infant and her mother had not remarried) rented the top floor of someone else’s four-storey house in the Village, a skylit apartment I visited frequently and where we lay on the floor listening over and over to her long-playing record of “Songs of the Auvergne,” music that managed to be ethereal and sensuous at the same time and that ignited buried feelings. Patsy and her mother worked uptown, Mrs. Fitzsimmons as a publishing executive and Patsy as a junior copywriter at an advertising agency, a job she loathed. Her heart belonged below Fourteenth Street. Patsy assured me that Anatole and I would g
et along just fine.
1950 Greenwich Village was still coasting on its reputation as the hub of bohemia, although the word was now almost obsolete, having given way to beat or hip, and with this, a fixed conviction that almost anything goes. One of my Barnard classmates had posed nude for e. e. cummings in his Washington Mews studio. Drugs emerged into the open. Delmore Schwartz lived there, and Franz Kline, Ad Reinhardt, and Dwight MacDonald. But the area was dangerous only if you were threatened by uncertainty.
On the night we had agreed that I would meet Patsy, Milton, and Anatole, I put on a gray wool skirt and a pink Brooks Brothers button-down shirt (styled for women), told my parents I was going out and ignored my mother’s “when will you be back?” I took the East Side IRT subway to Eighth Street, then walked west to Louis’ Tavern, a bar three steps below sidewalk level. Dusky, thick with cigarette smoke, and noisy as a subway tunnel, Louis’ was stuffed with so many people I had trouble pushing open the front door. Patsy waved at me from a table. “This is Anatole,” she said as I came over to them. Was that a smirk on her face?
I held out my hand, which Anatole shook firmly, while greeting me with a remark so muted I couldn’t hear what it was. Patsy hadn’t prepared me for a man who seemed to have stepped off the stage of a melodrama, an erotic villain who caresses his victims before sucking all their blood, leaving little more than a husk. Anatole, whom I guessed to be in his middle thirties, at least a dozen years older than I, had a round head, great black eyes, strongly lashed, ebony hair cropped so short it looked like a cap, an interesting nose, and a mouth that would have looked perfectly fine on a woman. Patsy stared at us; Milton, a man almost grotesquely ugly, with an enormous, shiny nose and a low hair-line—physically Anatole’s opposite—asked me if I would like a beer. “I’ll get it,” Anatole said, bounding up. He loped away on elastic legs, elbowing his way to the bar.
He came back with the glass of draft beer, which he put on the table without looking at me. Within a few minutes I found myself in a state of nervousness, excitement transforming itself into desire. Ignoring Patsy and me, Milton and Anatole carried on a conversation more theoretical than concrete, about a French author I had neither read nor heard of. There was plenty of time to try to size him up—was he showing off or did they do this all the time? Was he deliberately ignoring me in order to make the prize seem more valuable? If so, he shouldn’t have bothered. Does a healthy fire need gasoline thrown on it? After a while Patsy suggested we go to the ladies’ room.
A.B. and Anatole Broyard, 1952.
“What do you think of Anatole?” she said, taking out her comb and running it through her short yellow hair without looking at the cracked mirror above the sink.
“He’s sexy.”
“You know how some people refer to him—-a giant penis with almost as large a brain.”
I asked her how come she wanted me to meet him if he had that kind of reputation. “I thought you’d hit it off,” she said. “He does these pieces for Partisan Review,” she said, naming a journal of ideas and art, a sort of bible of the avant-garde. “Milton says he can write rings around anybody.” She told me that Anatole had a job writing copy at an ad agency uptown but didn’t like to talk about his work, which he considered beneath his dignity. “I told you he was a Negro, didn’t I?”
Anatole was a prize, but I wasn’t at all certain what I would do with it if I won it. Like one of those rococo silver cups won for athletic brilliance, did it get passed from one woman to the next on a regular basis?
“He scares me,” I said.
“You can handle it,” she said. “You’ve been around.” I told her I felt like a child next to Anatole.
Back at the table, Anatole turned to me briefly and said something unflattering but clever about Barnard, something about hens, a remark I swallowed with a smile. He was not a person who carried with him a biographical checklist for a potential girlfriend—“Where did you grow up?” “Where did you go to school?” “Do you have any brothers and sisters?” “What kind of music (movies, books, food) do you like?”—preferring instead to obtain bits and pieces of the life indirectly or with a jerk on the hook. In fact, Anatole wasn’t like anyone I had ever known; everything he said challenged the prevailing temper of the culture. Broadway was a sellout; the press and broadcasting and television were the creatures of government; there was only one good publishing house—and that one was in France. This wholesale skepticism appeared to be Anatole’s gospel. His attitude not only did not discourage me, but like a shower with antibacterial soap, it also invigorated me. How refreshing to get rid of those germs my parents infected me with, such debatable certainties as: “If you’re not sure what to do, call in an expert”; “Don’t get matey with the help—they won’t understand”; “If you read it in the New York Times it must be true”; sister to “If a play lands on Broadway it must be good”; “If you can’t see, smell, feel, hear, or taste it, it’s not worth a plugged nickel”; “If no one will publish it, it can’t be any good”; “Religion is practiced only by dopes.”
Anatole turned to me once or twice and alluded to something about me—my great uncle, my father—that he could only have known about via Patsy. It occurred to me that Patsy, a girl whose curiosity had, in the past, been known to swamp her scruples, was waiting, along with Milton, to see what would happen to this Jewish princess out of East Sixty-third Street and the Brearley School, at the hands of the city’s preeminent stud. I sensed what was happening to me in the way you know it when someone is about to lose their temper and whatever you do won’t make the slightest difference.
Milton and Patsy got up and left for Milton’s place on Horatio Street, presumably for a night of dope—something I was too timid to try—and screwing. Anatole asked me if I’d like to go back to his apartment for another beer. Don’t go! I could hear this as clearly as if my mother had been standing behind me, shouting, pulling at my arm. Having been pelted with warnings from earliest childhood, I knew what she would tell me: that Anatole was too handsome, men as handsome as he was were toxic to women; he would use me and throw me away like an empty container; he was a Negro—I didn’t want a black baby, did I?
My mother as conscience was not powerful enough; Anatole drew me gently out of Louis’, around the corner to Christopher Street, up four flights through a dark, narrow, rank-smelling stairwell to his apartment, two rooms with a stamped tin ceiling, a double bed, a refrigerator at least thirty years old, and a wooden kitchen table that seemed too large for the room it was in. Within minutes, Anatole had me naked on this table, flat on my back where, unlike the reticent Ian, he wasted no time in introducing me to the act of sex in a way unlike I had known before; it was as if, like Dorothy, I had emerged from a black-and-white world into one bursting with vibrating colors. The act was accomplished in almost total silence—a slow-moving, well-oiled pantomime whose choreography I seemed to know beforehand. Although my body seemed to know the ropes, I realized that I had about as much common sense as a newly hatched egg. This man was a stranger; I had allowed an exotic stranger to lure me into the forest. As soon as I had put on my proper outfit again, Anatole escorted me down the stairs and out to Sheridan Square. “Have you got enough money for a cab?” I nodded. “I’ll find one for you,” he said, and loped off to get me a taxi. After stowing me in the backseat, he asked me my address and repeated it to the driver, who sped off, leaving Anatole standing on the sidewalk looking around as if for some late-night action.
The stranger had not only seduced me but had peeled away twenty years of uncertainty. Although touched with guilt (I still thought of myself as a “good” girl whose chastity was high on her list of things to keep) I no longer gave a damn about what my mother might say or how my father might frown. In one electric moment, Anatole had turned me into “me.” I believed myself in love with him even as I recognized how hard and cold he was. In the fairy tale, the sleeping beauty is kissed by the prince, whose gift of love brings her back to life. In my case, though no beauty
, I had been asleep, and just my luck, the person who brought me to life had not had the same gifts used on himself.
“What’s happened to you, Anne?” Two days later this question was lobbed at me by Marian Strang, the modern dance teacher at Barnard, during a workout in the gymnasium. A member of Martha Graham’s original company, Strang was an elegant, muscular woman who drilled her girls like a sergeant in the spasmlike motions invented by her guru. She had an active curiosity, few inhibitions. I suppose I blushed and said, “Nothing.” But it must have been visible, some kind of liberation had taken place on Anatole’s kitchen table (the first time I had indulged in sex for almost five years) then found its way into my arms and legs, my torso, releasing them and at the same time endowing them with absolute control. “Look at Anne, girls, she’s flying!”
The most unsettling thing about Anatole was that you never knew where you stood with him, and I was far too shy to ask. For two years—until my shrink pronounced him a demonic influence and an obstacle to mental health—I saw Anatole once or twice a week, mostly on his terrain. I would eat dinner at home, sometimes with my parents, other times alone, then take the subway to his place, where we engaged in wordless, somewhat sepulchral sex and then go to Louis’ to drink beer with his friends. I never knew—and had reason to suspect, from remarks dropped by Patsy or Milton—whether or not he met another girl after he put me in a cab and sent it uptown. Soon after we met, he moved from Christopher Street to a place near Washington Square (not far from the house my parents were living in when I was born), one enormous room in a loft he had underfurnished, stripping his living quarters the way he had stripped his life of anything that did not directly have to do with feeding his sexual hunger or his brain. He had no hobbies, played no games, rarely went to the movies, hated live theater, ballet, and nightclubs. It was books galore. He presented me with a reading list and expected me to comply by going out and buying copies, reading, and preparing myself to talk about them whenever we paused between bouts of wordless sex. His list included Aubrey’s Brief Lives, the short stories of D. H. Lawrence, Seven Types of Ambiguity, by William Empson, and the work of several kinky French writers. Up until then I had believed I had been decently educated.