A setting you recall

Laurie
A setting you recall
Starbucks, February 9, 2009


After Bruce and I separated, I lived on Charles Street in a small townhouse, distinctive for its Tudor facing. It was a few blocks south of the White Horse Tavern, the bar where Dylan Thomas drank himself to his final death. Each month I handed a rent check for $200 to the friendly antiques dealer who owned the building and lived in a posh duplex in the basement and ground floors. Upstairs was an older couple who gave off a messed-hair, black-leather glamor; when I had a mouse in my place the man would help me catch it. Next door to the couple lived a gay hooker whose clients were up and down the stairs. No one minded, as long as people pulled the door shut after being buzzed in.

One night I went to meet George Dennison at the White Horse. He was a writer, a little famous for The Lives of Children, a chronicle of his experiences teaching poor kids in the free-school movement. He wrote fiction, too, and in the fall of 1972, at the memorial gathering for Paul Goodman, he evoked his teacher and friend with poignance and flair. They’d worked shoulder to shoulder in education reform, and in letters to Dennison Goodman confided his ambitions for his writing and fears about consumer culture. I was at the memorial with a man I taught with at Hunter College who would ask me to interesting events. He’d known Goodman, too, and after the memorial we went to a party in a large Village apartment thronged with artists and intellectuals who looked worldly and weathered. That’s where I spoke to George, who was good looking and charismatic. Bruce, my husband, had already met the woman he would marry next, and I was on my own in the tiny flat where only a mattress could fit on the wide planked bedroom floor. The apartment needed work, but I was in love with the tightrope feeling of my life. I was twenty-four and earned just enough money for food and rent from teaching two sections of English lit. I was keeping a journal but hadn’t published much of anything. I must have given my number to George.

My friend from Hunter seemed attracted to me, although he also had relationships with men. It wasn’t the first time I had met a man open to both sexes, and as I traveled on my own I was realizing how unpredictable people could be. I liked this, although it was unnerving. I didn’t know why I was so curious about sex. I still don’t know. But when I reflect on that time—the sexual revolution meets radical feminism—I see a wave of girls trying to claim for themselves whatever boys had considered theirs alone.

At Barnard I studied with Kate Millett, who invited me to join the women’s movement in 1966, when it was bubbling forth with abortion rights activism and bra burning antics. We were out on the streets as much as we could manage. We were attending consciousness raising groups to examine our relationships and the ways we conspired to stay small. But the world of artists and intellectuals I also gravitated to, the Village where I lived was still colored by the Beats and other strains of old Bohemia where feminism was unheard or resisted. It wasn’t so much whether you were gay or straight, vanilla or Boho that determined your openness to women’s equality. It was, for the most part, whether or not you had a penis.

Having read neither Goodman nor Dennison at the time of Goodman’s memorial—I’d only hopped on for the ride—I didn’t know the ways their ideas either supported or opposed the revolutions I was helping to make. I was in agreement with them about ending the war in Vietnam and championing equal justice for the poor, but it was possible then as it still is in some quarters to consider yourself progressive while disreguarding—and in some cases militating against—the rights of women.

Ironically, I would discover, Goodman advanced precisely this view in his most influential book, Growing up Absurd, where he dismissed girls from consideration: “The problems I want to discuss in this book belong primarily, in our society, to the boy: how to be useful and to make something of oneself. A girl does not have to, she is not expected to ‘make something’ of herself. Her career does not have to be self-justifying, for she will have children, which is absolutely self-justifying, like any other natural and creative act. With this background, it is less important, for instance, what job an average young woman works at till she is married. The quest for the glamour jobs is given at least a little substance by its relation to a ‘better’ marriage (1960, p. 13).”

For Goodman, an out homosexual, the goal of education is to make boys virile. He is saying, in a sense, that virility has to be constructed—while also saying that femaleness (about which he has no interest) is biologically determined. Michael Herr, in a conversation with Robert Stone quoted by John Leland in his book about Jack Kerouac, says something similar about the construction of maleness: “There are two kinds of things guys like to do: the things we do because we read Kerouac and the things we do because we read Hemingway.” (Growing up Kerouac, p. 5)

When I moved into my apartment, I pried up layers of smelly old linoleum from the bathroom and kitchen floors and laid down clean, black and white squares. I bought handmade ceramic tiles and set them in front of the fireplace I fed with packing crates scavenged from the streets. The wood floors were stained and uneven. My three windows faced north, and I built shelves on them for plants. Outside was sleepy Charles Street and across the way a wooden house set on a tiny triangular lot, a little country cottage with a fence and garden smack in the heart of the West Village. This was the setting for the life I wanted to lead.

It’s after eleven, and I’m already in bed when George Dennison calls me to come out. He’s sexy, a success, and more than two decades older than me. Maybe I say another time. Maybe he says please come now. I push back the covers, run to the bathroom mirror, and smile. I look at my feet on the bare floor, checking for water bugs, which I can’t get rid of no matter how much I clean. It doesn’t cross my mind to be insulted, or if it does I weigh it against what I want. At the White Horse, I order Campari with a twist. I don’t know how to drink and do not learn. We talk about writing. I’m good at reviewing books and plays, and that’s what I do when I begin to publish, but I’m not there yet. I’m working on my dissertation at Columbia, contriving essays about Charlotte Brontë, whom I love, although I do not want to practice the solemn, measured style of academic prose. George drinks Scotch. We sit at the bar, and his sleeves are rolled up, and we’re in this place suffused with literary history. Maybe he feels attached to the Dylan Thomas mystique, the world of men drinking themselves to tortured ends. I don’t see myself here. George wants to come to my apartment, and maybe he does. Maybe we kiss, but I don’t think more than that. That’s not what I want from him. I want him to show me how to become him, and he does a little. He pays attention to me, and he’s kind and not dismissive, and maybe we have a conversation about the women’s movement and other things I care about. I’m happy on my stool, sipping my red drink, feeling I’m inching toward something.

When I think about Charles Street and the other places I lived in the Village, I see the streets. It is one big neighborhood, stretching from 14th street to Soho, from the East Village to the Hudson River. I walk the streets day and night, and I know every bar and restaurant and shop and handkerchief-sized patch of green. It’s the streets that make me happy to remember, for I was anxious and hungry then, same as now. It was exciting to be published a few years after meeting George and to feel, finally, I belonged here.