Back Then (14 page)

As for contraception, dispensing diaphragms or advice to unmarried women was illegal for birth-control clinics. Doctors who performed abortions had to be ferreted out on shabby side streets in Hoboken or Jersey City and paid in cash. Males of my age found that buying condoms, officially vendable only as “prophylactics . . . for the prevention of disease,” was both an ordeal, requiring furtive courage, and, in retrospect, once you were out on the street, low comedy. You did not want to be seen or heard asking for condoms at a drugstore counter; you developed a sudden need for cough drops or toothpaste if the salesperson was a woman, or if a woman customer or anyone else, for that matter, stood anywhere nearby. With a show of reluctance, and rather too dramatically for such a modest transaction, the druggist at long last extracted the little flat tin of Trojans, Sheiks, or Ramses (these evocative trade names deserve a history of their own) from a drawer behind the counter and passed it over with a subtextual smirk—“Will these be enough?” The first time I bought condoms I walked a mile or two to a drugstore in Brighton on the other side of the Charles River rather than risk the chance of being seen asking for them at a Harvard Square drugstore.

My brother and I used to watch what we called Hudson River whitefish swimming out of the sewers and floating downstream toward the bay. These pale, dispirited flotillas of used condoms gave an adolescent burdened with homework a piquant notion of how grownups occupied themselves meanwhile—perhaps doing nothing else. If you were walking by the river with a girl you hoped she would not notice a naval parade that could be as embarrassing a sight as the baboons in the Central Park Zoo exhibiting their crimson bottoms. Being responsibly equipped with condoms when the need arose put you in the difficult position of seeming to have assumed too much of your date. You could only say, “Well, you never know,” when in a show of maidenly dismay she asked, “Do you always carry those things with you?”

When
I met her in the course of one of my job-hunting expeditions, Phyllis worked as a secretary at a publishing house. We arranged to meet after work at a bar on Lexington Avenue, where we had a few drinks and then, as if this was the natural thing to do, went on to my apartment. But after this auspicious start we plateaued, permanently as it seemed, at a debate about moral obligation—she was married and, she said, “perfectly happy” with her husband—versus the pleasure and spontaneity principle. That she was married was not of much consequence to me so long as what she might choose to do she did out of free choice. This was New York, after all, I said, not York, Pennsylvania, which was where she came from. Firing off this ammunition seemed to be having no effect, and we had arrived at an apparent stalemate, when, abruptly, she said, “Okay, I'm ready.” Afterward, she asked me to mix us a pitcher of martinis.

During that year, 1953, Phyllis came to my apartment Thursday evenings, when the department stores were open late—shopping was her cover story. Tuesday late afternoons belonged to Edna Lewis, who ran an art school and whom I had met at a dancing party in the Village. She helped me furnish my little apartment on East Thirty-seventh Street in the comme il faut style of the day: unforgiving sling chairs and chairs of molded plywood and plastic, a cushionless Danish Modern sofa covered with itchy wool, a glass and wrought iron coffee table with lethal corners, teakwood nesting tables, nubbly brown rug, café curtains, a Pyrex coffeemaker that looked like a piece of laboratory equipment, brightly colored bowls and plates, and sundry kitchen items from the Museum of Modern Art design collection. Irregular evenings belonged to Laura, once a steady girlfriend, who had taken to showing up unexpectedly, after getting sozzled at cocktail parties; to Naomi, who wasn't sure she wanted to stay married to her husband, whom she had learned was homosexual, and was willing to consider marrying me so long as I changed my last name to something ethnically neutral; and to Janet, who was, quite simply, generous and enthusiastic—she had never had an orgasm, she told me, but there was always hope. I was also dating cool beauties like Mary-Louise Louchheim, a student in Martha Graham's dance company, and the literary scholar Aileen Ward, both of whom I adored but kept a shy distance from: it was satisfaction enough that these glorious creatures even consented to go out with me to dinners, concerts, and parties. Noticing Aileen as we got off the subway on our way to the Bronx Zoo the trainman drew his fingertips toward his mouth and simulated a kiss, an Italian gesture meaning, Perfect!

There were sometimes weeks of sexual famine during which I did desultory reading, went to the movies, visited friends and my brother. Then came periods of plenty, even glut. Like a character in a French bedroom farce, I scurried back to my apartment after work to straighten the living room, make the bed, empty ashtrays, and remove lipstick from glassware. I was too entranced by sex to give much thought to anything else, especially work. Given a moment to reflect and catch my breath, I recalled the Wife of Bath's word for the loose pleasures of her youth: “Jollity.”

Lucy
Thomas, with whom I had an open relationship on and off for about five years, came from Nebraska. She pronounced
cookie
as if it had three
o
s and
rinse
with the
s
sounded like
z
. She explored the givens of life in New York with a boldness and enthusiasm I envied. Most of us stayed put for a while once we had found a place to live, but Lucy was restless and inventive and experimented with offbeat apartments, rented or borrowed. When we first met in the late 1940s she was living off Columbus Avenue just below 110th Street, near the southern border of Harlem. Soon after, she moved on: to a place above a fish restaurant in the west fifties; then, one off MacDougal Street in the Village, around the corner from Minetta Tavern, that was reached more conveniently by the fire escape than by the front door. She was briefly tempted by an apartment on the first floor of a converted funeral parlor in Chelsea—the embalming slab, still fastened to the floor by pipes, drains, and heavy feet, would have served nicely as a kitchen table easy to crumb, sponge, and, as needed, flush. Her place in one of the tenement blocks in the seventies between First and Second Avenues began as two apartments that she made into one: with a sledgehammer and crowbar she took down the nonbearing wall that separated them; a neighbor from the floor below helped her frame a doorway. The new combined apartment had two toilets with overhead tanks side by side.

Lucy had been a doctoral candidate in philosophy at Brown and also studied painting with the Provincetown artist Xavier Gonzales—she told me about the freshwater ponds in the Truro and Wellfleet woods. She had the gumption to buy a used British car, a Morris Minor, and then face down the seller when it turned out to need major repairs. Even after the thing was fixed the windshield wipers died whenever it rained—she drove, and I kept lookout from a side window. For a couple of summers we shared a shack east of the Cherry Grove fringe of settlement on Fire Island. It didn't have electricity or running water, and to reach it from the ferry dock we trudged along the ocean beach carrying food, gin, and a block of ice. We occupied the one bedroom while our visitors, most often
Time
researchers and writers, slept on the parlor floor or aloft in an abandoned Coast Guard tower nearby.

At night we walked back to town for beers at the Cherry Grove Hotel, meeting place of gays and straights in an over-whelmingly tolerant community. Wystan Auden was supposed to have said that even the cats at Cherry Grove were queer. In a silent dialogue that epitomized the anything-goes spirit of the place, one bungalow had a sign that declared FOUR OF A KIND and faced another across the boardwalk, this one replying inside straight. By the Cherry Grove ferry dock we once watched a water ballet in the form of a flower opening to the sun. The performance by a dozen male swimmers was wildly applauded. It celebrated a mock wedding followed by the departure for the mainland of two young men on their honeymoon.

In contrast to Cherry Grove, New York's gay community, though sizable, was unacknowledged and denied for the most part by the general public uptown and had no overt political and collective identity. The word
queer
was offensive, while in common usage
gay
carried no specific sexual meaning: “Gay Blades” was the name of the popular ice skating rink in Madison Square Garden. But in writing and the arts gays were a formidable presence and, to the extent they had coherence and power as a group, were playfully called the Homintern (by analogy with Comintern, the dread Communist International). The Homintern, as I understood it from the sidelines, had an honorary elder statesman (Auden) in New York and a network of influence, patronage, and membership that extended to San Francisco, Rome, Paris, and sunny places like Marrakech, Ischia, Key West, Provincetown, and Cherry Grove. Among the Manhattan power brokers in the mid-1950s were Lincoln Kirstein, patron of George Balanchine and the New York City Ballet; Kirstein's brother-in-law, the painter Paul Cadmus; Monroe Wheeler of the Museum of Modern Art; Wheeler's companion, the novelist Glenway Wescott, a native of Wisconsin; and Leo Lerman, literary editor of
Mademoiselle
. Truman Capote and Gore Vidal were among the Homintern's younger stars, along with Tennessee Williams. The writer and composer Paul Bowles, a resident of Tangier, was its proconsul; his wife, Jane Bowles, its sibyl.

Morris Golde, a generous and unassuming businessman who knew and was adored by everyone in the arts, had a big house toward the eastern end of Fire Island and a powerboat he drove at terrifying speed across Great South Bay, paying little attention to floating logs and even other boats. The composer Ned Rorem, Morris's former lover, had been replaced by a sweet-natured still-life painter, Alvin Ross. In his garden apartment on West Eleventh Street Morris gave exuberant drinking and dancing parties that mixed gays and straights. They featured huge platters of imported Italian salami and appearances by Leonard Bernstein, Aaron Cop-land, Marc Blitzstein, the opera and concert singer Jennie Tourel, and similar celebrities. Larry Rivers, John Ashbery, and Frank O'Hara were often there, so was Anatole Broyard, understood by many Village people to be a light-skinned black man who passed as white uptown, where he worked for an advertising agency. He was said to be irresistible to women. At these free-and-easy parties I was reasonably certain of finding an Edna or Janet to go home with. One evening a group of us witnessed a silent comedy scene: the composer and critic Virgil Thomson struggled to liberate his hippopotamus bulk from one of Morris's chairs, a leather and tubular steel sling that challenged even supple occupants to escape gracefully once they were seated. All the while, in his distress and appeals for help, Thomson waved his cane (or “wand,” as a taxi driver delivering him to Carnegie Hall was supposed to have called it).

Lucy
was a researcher for
Time,
to my mind an enviable and glamorous job. In the magazine's hierarchy the editorial researchers—about fifty of them—were all women, well educated, many of them upper class. Researchers made up the broad base of an editorial pyramid that narrowed toward its apex at the founder, Henry R. Luce. In between were half a dozen and more levels of
Time
editors, about sixty in all, only five of them women; of these five, three held basically administrative and traffic-managing positions. The researchers as a group seemed to accept this caste system as if it were a function of natural law requiring them to be handmaidens to male journalists. Life in the researchers' harem—there was a fair amount of cross-pollination from the writers—was sweetened by generous salaries, frequent performance and seniority raises, paternalistic policies (researchers working after hours were sent home by taxi), free psychotherapy, and, overall, the sense of belonging to a tight-knit elite turning out the world's most successful and powerful newsmagazine. (Lord, how I wanted to be in that number!) Editors and researchers formed an extended family held together by their ability to withstand, even thrive on, intense pressure and short deadlines, a muted opposition to the hard-nosed right-wing policies of their employer, and the assumption, among some of the writers, that they would be doing better things, maybe writing novels, if it weren't for Luce's paycheck. In the early 1950s they could afford to live well—good apartments, good food, entertainment, travel—on the canonical base salary of $10,000 a year and the knowledge of additional money piling up against the future in retirement and profit-sharing programs.

I often heard stories about the magazine's legendary alumni. One was James Agee, novelist, film critic, screenwriter, and author (with Walker Evans) of a classic study of Alabama sharecroppers,
Let Us Now Praise Famous Men
. Agee, who died in 1955, reportedly threw a typewriter out the window toward the end of an office drinking session. In point of notoriety another
Time
editor, Whit-taker Chambers, a confessed Soviet courier, was America's (if not his magazine's) Man of the Year for 1948: he had testified before the House Un-American Activities Committee that Alger Hiss, former State Department adviser and president of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, had spied for the Soviet Union. One
Time
writer, who knew both men, told me that Hiss and Chambers were equally guilty of lying and spying, but Hiss, who went to federal prison for perjury, was at least prettier. Before he became a national figure I had known the name Whittaker Chambers only in his capacity as translator from the German of
Bambi
, Felix Salten's gentle animal story.

Monday nights I sat with Lucy in a bar on the ground floor of the Time-Life Building while she and others waited for word from above that the magazine had finally closed for the week, leaving Tuesday and Wednesday for the staff to recuperate before taking on the next issue. The
Time
calendar set them apart from most of the city's population, and before I started in-house work in book publishing, I adopted this weekend, which had, among its many advantages, escape from the normal crush of people heading out of the city on Friday. I applied several times for job interviews within the Time-Life-Fortune empire, but the closest I could come to being a member of the family was to live the off-pace weekend with Lucy and her friends on the magazine: Douglas Auchincloss, bearer of one of the fancier names in American society, who for reasons I never understood, was
Time
's religion editor; an Australian couple, Essie Lee, who worked
Time
's letters to the editor column, and Alwyn Lee, one of the book reviewers, who told me bawdy and alluring tales about life down under. Lucy and I helped the Lees build a little fieldstone house in the woods at Croton-on-Hudson. Nearby, along Mount Airy Road, lived a community of survivors of the Popular Front, a bygone era of hope and goodwill when the United States and the Soviet Union fought side by side against a common enemy. The children of this community—“red diaper babies”—were now cold war adults.