Back Then (13 page)

“He hasn't asked me,” I said.

For months after I stopped seeing Anatole, having been told by my shrink that he'd be forced to discontinue the treatment if I didn't, I walked around like an addict who's gone cold turkey. He was, in fact, very like a drug, and my trancelike state only underscored my need for shoring up from the outside. For this I focused on men, looking for someone like Anatole.

I
met Bernie Wolfe at a party in the Village. He was sixteen years older than me and looked even older, his skin thick and wrinkled.
Bernie earned his living as ghostwriter for Billy Rose, a former songwriter, nightclub owner, and theater producer. Rose had maneuvered himself among so many Broadway-connected enterprises that he was identified as a
showman
, a word used to characterize someone who can't quite make up his mind which of his assorted skills he wants to use at any one moment. Among other things, Rose had staged a swimming extravaganza at the 1939–1940 World's Fair known as the Aquacade—a couple of dozen gorgeous girls in swimsuits performing water ballet to music. Rose, born William Samuel Rosenberg, was so popular and ubiquitous that a nationally syndicated column called “Pitching Horseshoes” appeared regularly under his byline. It was written by Bernie. In “Horseshoes,” Bernie, disguised as Rose, spread showbiz opinions and dispensed news of the theater and its people.

Bernie's best-known novel was
Really the Blues
, a fat, sassy book about jazz trumpeter Mezz Mezzrow. Published by Random House, it hadn't sold very well, but people who knew the subject assured me it was the best book about jazz ever written. Bernie told me stories: how he had been one of Leon Trotsky's bodyguards in Mexico, where Trotsky lived as an exile after his life was threatened by Stalin. Whenever Trotsky went to the movies, his several bodyguards went with him; instead of looking at the screen they continually scanned the audience for potential assassins, one of whom eventually managed to break into Trotsky's house and kill him with an ice axe. Bernie was short and not fat but squat, as if pushed in from both ends. He looked a little like the movie star Edward G. Robinson and, like Robinson, smoked cigars; he always smelled like sweetened smoke. I wasn't in love with him, and he seemed to love me with a sort of avuncular warmth, aware that I wouldn't sleep with him and having the tact and kindness not to scare me off by insisting we have sex. I was still getting over Anatole.

Bernie lived in the murky two-room basement apartment of a brownstone on Tenth Street a few steps east of Sixth Avenue. He was a Village regular, knew everyone, and was one of the few people I've ever known about whom I never heard a nasty, snide, or envious remark. He kept an office-size typewriter on his desk, and next to the typewriter he maintained a neat pile of assorted candy bars, five or six of them—Milky Ways, Baby Ruths, Hershey bars. He told me he ate them as he wrote, converting sucrose into words. The Billy Rose columns helped pay his rent and his mother's, who lived in Brooklyn and came by occasionally to clean his apartment. She was there one afternoon when I arrived; she was wearing a kerchief that covered her hair completely and had trouble speaking English. I thought she was the cleaning lady until Bernie introduced us. Bernie chafed at having to do the Rose columns; he wanted to write nothing but fiction. I spent a few months seeing Bernie several evenings a week, coming back late at night to the house on Sixty-third Street, where I still lived with my parents. He was so affable and reasonable that sometimes I wished he would chew me out for being a tease, an epithet I had heard a couple of times before and that made me feel as if I had no heart. But he never did; he always asked me what I wanted to do, where we should eat, did I want to go to a certain party—Anatole might be there. Anatole was there one night, and, when he saw who I was with, told me that Bernie was one of the best people he knew.

Bernie was a buffer between my recent past and the rest of my life. We broke up when he realized that I wasn't in love with him and probably never would be.

CHAPTER 4

Before coming to a party,
I'd circle the block several times, stop by the front door, light another cigarette, and set off on another round of postponing the inevitable. Disgust with timidity eventually took over. I'd straighten my necktie once again, head for the elevator, enter a room full of strangers, and, I expected, pass through them unnoticed, like a specter. Parties had been different back in Cambridge. They tended to be placid and predictable, populated by academics, junior and senior, who gabbled in departmental gossip, literary tags, and vacation plans. If not baby talk it was at least parochial. But now, at the age of twenty
one, I was in adult territory, a corner of a world I had known about only from reading and hearsay.

At a cocktail party in the East Fifty-sixth Street apartment of Louis Posner, a lawyer and collector of Dickens first editions, I met Somerset Maugham, the prince of cats among popular storytellers of the postwar era. Highbrows like Edmund Wilson called Maugham's work “a tissue of clichés” informed by “bogus motivations”—“I've settled that fellow's hash,” Wilson boasted. But I was awed nevertheless, mainly because Maugham had written a wickedly funny novel about literary biography,
Cakes and Ale
, as well as
Ashenden
, a thriller in the line of E. Phillips Oppenheim and John Buchan. Maugham had based
Ashenden
on his service in British intelligence in World War I, but it was hard to believe that this “Old Party” (as he liked to call himself), bridge partner of dowagers, had once carried a revolver, feared for his life, and trafficked with spies.

Guest of honor, the great man was in his seventies, with yellow pouches under lizard eyes and a neck wattled and retractile like a tortoise's. (To fight off impotence and mortality he was rumored to be submitting his buttocks to massive injections of cells from fetal sheep. The inventor of this sheep-cell therapy, a Swiss, Doctor Paul Niehans, was also treating Pope Pius XII and the duke of Windsor.) Maugham rotated his head slowly, one degree at a time, to peer at me, briefly, but appraisingly enough to make me uneasy. Our host's handsome son, my college friend David, who had invited me to this party, was Maugham's young lover and had been ever since he was a student at Lawrenceville. Although notoriously stingy, Maugham had helped pay David's Harvard tuition in return for sexual services rendered. The woman standing with Maugham announced herself, in the fluttery style of Margaret Dumont, as La Duchesse de Clermont-Tonnerre. She added, considerately—“To make it easy for you Americans”—that her name was pronounced as in “clear mountain air.” Apart from a few polite words and Maugham's stammered “how-do-you-do,” these exotics might as well have been stuffed animals, for all the content of my encounter with them. I had a brief colloquy, at another party, with Dame Edith Sitwell, garbed like a Druid priestess in a flowing black dress, on her head a shapeless hat and on her feet shoes from the men's department at Macy's. She said Walt Whitman was a great poet, “wholly unappreciated by you Americans,” and then, having delivered this judgment, turned her back on me and attended to her brother, Sir Osbert. Rubbing feathers with such rare birds, although uneventful, was all very well for the thrill and anecdotal value, but for me this was not what parties were about, nor what New York was about either.

The irreducible essence of parties in New York was romantic, erotic. There was always the possibility, heightened by shyness, adrenaline, and anticipation, of adventure, meeting someone who would change my life. New York was about career, but it was also about women, their mystery, their capacity for affection and surprise. Growing up in an all-male family after my mother's death I had missed these tender aspects of the creation, even despite the mitigating affection of our housekeeper Georgia Edwards, a woman from St. Kitts who had been with us since I was an infant. In time I left home to enter the relatively monkish confines of Harvard College. This was before “combined instruction” with Radcliffe, a measure forced on a shorthanded Harvard faculty by the war, brought young men and women together in the same classroom. The first weeks of combined instruction in Longfellow Hall on Appian Way, strictly Radcliffe territory until then, I felt like Adam in the Garden waking from deep sleep. The Radcliffe Eves were clearly undecided whether they should dress up or dress down for the occasion—some were defiantly unkempt and wore what must have been their old bathrobes—and whether the presence of males on the premises was a desirable accommodation or heralded another rape of the Sabine women. For my part, I lacked the courage to talk to any of the girls, but scanned the hall and fell in love every fifteen minutes. On one occasion early in the new era of combined instruction the English department lecturer turned up the sexual heat by spelling out references to orgasm and sexual exhaustion in William Wycherley's Restoration comedy
The Country Wife
.

Even
in the freedom and exuberance of the postwar era, language and manners remained relatively demure. In elementary school I had once been isolated in an empty classroom for an entire day as punishment for saying “go to hell.” Since then the constraints on “blasphemy” and “obscenity” had loosened only a little. The shock value of “smutty language” was as powerful as an air raid siren. The salt, pepper, and ketchup of G.I. speech, the word
fuck,
supremely adaptable as verb, noun, adjective, adverb, expletive, and “infix” (inserted within another word), hadn't been demobilized. Even three years after V-J Day Norman Mailer's publisher made him adopt a transparent substitute,
fug,
in
The Naked and the Dead
. (This evasion gave the original word an added prominence and supposedly provoked Dorothy Parker to remark, “So you're the man who can't spell
fuck
.”) James Jones's
From Here to Eternity
, like Mailer's novel an attempt to show the way soldiers really talked, managed to get away with
fuck
in 1951, but, along with some other indispensable words, it was banned from normal conversation and supposedly worldly magazines like
The New Yorker
. Well-brought-up girls were shocked when they heard it—or pretended to be. An “obscenity,” the word remained officially taboo in print until the end of the decade, when D. H. Lawrence's unabridged
Lady Chatterley's Lover
was admitted to the company of permissible books. Before then, we packed our copies of
Lady Chatterley
, John Cleland's
Fanny Hill, or the Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure
, and Henry Miller's
Tropic of Cancer
in our bags of dirty laundry, a harmless charade for the entertainment of U.S. Customs inspectors. The movies we saw—even
On the Waterfront
and
The Bridge on the River Kwai
—were governed by the inflexible Motion Picture Production Code that banned exclamations like “God,” “Jesus Christ,” and “hell,” and, in westerns,
buzzard
, because it might be taken for
bastard.
The movie (1953) of
From Here to Eternity
featured a scene in which Burt Lancaster and Deborah Kerr appeared to be having sex on the sand while lapped by the Hawaiian surf. But with a few such spectacular exceptions most popular movies were almost as innocent of explicit carnal content as
Little Women
. Movie babies came from central casting.

Sex before marriage remained vaguely illicit for members of my generation. This gave it an extra thrill—the thrill of “sneaky sex.” We were cat burglars of pleasure. Even at the end of the decade “facts of life” manuals (for example,
What Girls Want to Know About Boys
, by Arthur Unger and Carmel Berman) were warning young people that “illicit relationships” were “sordid. At home, someone may walk in at any time; at a motel it's necessary to give false names and addresses; and police may be patrolling the local lover's lane,” all this in addition to the risk of pregnancy, forced marriage, and venereal disease. But the reality, as we learned from Alfred Kinsey's reports (1948, 1953) on human male and female sexual behavior, was quite different. As a species we behaved like rabbits but knew not much more than rabbits did about sexual physiology. In the 1950s the Freudian ideal of the vaginal orgasm was still the gold standard. The clitoris hadn't yet been publicly “discovered” but merely “detected” (as Oscar Wilde said about America), even though nowhere else, with the exception of Jerusalem's Temple Mount, could be found such a concentration of nerve endings and perturbations in such a small place.

Harvard's parietal rules forbade undergraduates to “have”—the ambiguity was unintentional—women in their rooms after 5 P.M. Before 5 P.M., once you signed in your guest, there was ample opportunity for “having,” but also the danger of discovery by a tutor, checking on the sign-in register, who noticed that your door was closed when it was supposed to have been left ajar. In aggravated cases, the punishment for fornication under the Harvard roof could be expulsion from the House. By contrast, drinking yourself stuporous was countenanced as a private matter unless, before passing out, you became a threat to public order. In addition to quelling Yard riots, which went out with the war, one function of Harvard's tiny constabulary, armed only with furled umbrellas, was to rescue intoxicated students from the clutches of the Cambridge police. (One night the Harvard constables, unable to beat a large rat to death with their umbrellas, had to ask the local police to shoot it.)

Sex was easier in New York, although not without the peril of the transgressive when one was discovered. Caroline's parents were watching
Victory at Sea
on the television set in their Park Avenue living room. From our bed in Caroline's room down the hall we could dimly hear the billowing cadences of Richard Rodgers's score as American warships and warplanes sent the Japanese foe to the bottom. Finally noticing our absence, her parents pounded on Caroline's bedroom door. A week later she moved to her own apartment, a walk-up off Second Avenue. Nicki's mother was prepared to be more tolerant than Caroline's. Finding us lying together, quite chastely, with our shoes off (this was a hot summer night), she tickled my feet and told me I had beautiful insteps. The notion that she had begun to fancy me as a potential son-in-law was reason enough to go no further.