Back Then (12 page)

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.

A.B. (
far right
) in Barnard dance class, 1951.

Anatole accepted nothing at face value, made fun of most objects, people, and institutions I had been trained to venerate, such as the
New York Times;
the Nobel and Pulitzer prizes; the Upper East Side; the work of Rodgers and Hammerstein; best-seller lists; fancy clothes—everything, in fact, admired by most of the city's population. According to Anatole democracy was an unachievable ideal; so it would be better for everyone if smart men were installed in high positions than to have the sorts of elections—catering to emotion and narrow interests—that the United States indulged in. That this was just a notch or two below fascism didn't bother me: Anatole was smart about everything else so how could he be wrong about this?

We rarely broke our dating routine—sex, then meeting up with Milton or another pal, and sitting around talking until midnight—but one night Anatole took me to Delmore Schwartz's place nearby in the Village, where I learned how to shoot craps, with Dwight MacDonald and Anatole as my coaches.

He sent me to a doctor—I suspected from the familiar way he talked about her that I wasn't his first referral—to be fitted with a diaphragm. Embarrassed by the procedure, I forced myself to remain cool while between my spread legs the woman rummaged around my insides. While there, she said, “I suppose you know that it's unwise to have sexual intercourse before you marry.” I interpreted
unwise
to mean
immoral
. I wondered if Anatole knew that along with the diaphragm there came, at no extra charge, instructions on the proper way to behave as a single female. When I reported what the doctor had said, Anatole brushed it off. “She's okay. She just feels she has to take a parental interest. Come over here!”

I made a tactical mistake when I gave my mother the issue of
Partisan Review
in which Anatole had published a piece as intellectually subversive as the Museum of Modern Art's fur teacup, Stravinsky's
The Rite of Spring
, or the Armory Show had been forty years earlier, shaking up the bourgeoisie and forcing people to look at things in a new way. It said, in effect, that members of so-called respectable society were the true vulgarians because they lived in a constricted world, never questioned or fought against the tyranny of the status quo. He said this via the most graceful and startling prose. I thought my mother would be won over by Anatole's brilliance and range, but after reading his essay she said, “I don't want you to see this person anymore. He's a nihilist.” When I told her Anatole had Negro parents, she went nuts. “Do you want to have a black baby?”

I wanted to shock my mother. But I also wanted to be shaken up myself—everything my parents had done until I went off to college had been designed to shield me from the slightest whiff of danger. They had so thoroughly childproofed my world that I had begun to think I lived inside a bubble through which nothing, no germs—real or metaphorical—could penetrate.

The penetrator—Anatole—was an extreme, way off the scale of normal human behavior. He never paid me a compliment or indicated that he enjoyed my company. We had been invited to a party uptown by one of my few friends he hadn't said anything dismissive about. “I'd like to go,” I told him. “Well I wouldn't,” he said. “I'd have to put on a suit and tie, and anyway they'll just sit around being clever.” I told him that in that case I would go by myself, which seemed to surprise him. I showed up at the East Side apartment, where I found a roomful of young people sitting around being clever. Less than an hour after I arrived, the doorbell rang, the hostess went to answer, and who stood on the threshold, in a suit and tie? Anatole. This was the closest he ever came to admitting that I was in any way important to him.

“What
have you got on under that dress?” Anatole said one night as I took my coat off in a loft where a large and noisy party was in progress.

“A panty girdle.”

“It's terrible. Take it off. You should never wear anything like that.” I went into the bathroom and peeled it off. “I was only trying to look thinner,” I said. “You like thin women.” I'd rolled up the girdle and stuck it in my purse.

“You're okay without one of those things,” he said. And this was the closest he ever came to admitting he found me less than repulsive to look at.

One of his former friends, Chandler Brossard, wrote a novel with a pretentious title:
Who Walk in Darkness
. Anatole was reading it in manuscript, dropping each page on the floor as he finished with it, when I showed up at his place for one of our curious dates. “Chandler's publisher sent it to me to read. They're afraid I might sue.” Why would he sue? “This book is largely about me. He implies that I'm a Negro trying to pass as white.”

“Well, aren't you?” This was the first and only time we had ever come close to this porcupine.

“It's not about what I am,” he said ambiguously, veering off. “I just don't want him to turn me into some fictional character.”

I asked him what he was going to do, and he said he was going to threaten the publisher with a lawsuit. “I won't let them publish this garbage.” In the end, Brossard, faced with this lawsuit, changed the main character's unspeakable secret to that of being born to unmarried parents. This was an era when social stigmas were disappearing from the scene as fast as virgins, and the novel as it was published had none of the impact that the original version would have had. Who cared if the hero was born out of wedlock?

During
my senior year the news office at Barnard named me campus correspondent for the
New York Times
. Since I had absolutely no experience as a reporter, hadn't been on the
Barnard Bulletin
, and didn't even know what a lead was, I could only imagine how the hardworking staffers of the
Bulletin
felt about my getting this plum job. I was just a blithe kid, and although I assumed, justifiably, that my being given this job had a lot to do with my mother, Barnard, class of 1913 (and also related to the Sulzberger family), I wasn't fazed by my connections or my ignorance, and was too arrogant to be scared. At least twice a week in the afternoon I took the Broadway subway from 116th Street to Forty-second Street, walked cooly past a phalanx of
Times
delivery truck drivers who whistled, cheered, and yelled smutty things at me, visited Mr.
Garth, the managing editor, who told me how many words he wanted, sat down at my desk in the city room and typed out my little story on three pieces of paper connected at the top. Sometimes, if it was late, a copy boy would be waiting by the desk, plucking the paper out of the machine as I came to the end of a page. No time for revision. During that year the
Times
published at least one Barnard story a week, not because spectacular things were happening on campus but because Iphigene Ochs Sulzberger, wife of the publisher and president of the Times corporation, was a Barnard graduate—the maternal autocrat. And so I profited by two daughterly connections. Anatole made fun of me and my stringer's job, giving me no credit for my snappy leads—“Cries of ‘nike,' Greek for Victory, were heard yesterday for the fiftieth time as the annual Greek Games was held at Barnard College”—or my thoughtful stories, but dismissed the whole enterprise, once again, as a doleful instrument of its middle-brow management and readers.

My
friend Mary said, “You make Anatole sound like a vampire.”

“I'm besotted. I can't help it.”

“Then why don't you marry him?”