Who, Me?

by Who, Me- A Memoir (retail) (epub)

  So what did I care if my parents had a little sex-life in the bedroom and left me alone with Rachmaninoff and Beethoven, Vaughan-Williams and Debussy? What did I know about sex anyhow?

  I guess most little boys do something with their private parts when they’re growing up. But for me it was if I didn’t have any private parts. Or only one private part: my brain.

  So what did I know about their going into the bedroom and coming out much happier another hour later? I was all God the Father, the Son, the Holy Ghost and the Virgin Mary, St. Augustine and St. Francis of Assisi, St. Ignatius Loyola and all the rest of the army of Catholic saints . . .

  Of course I got a little curious (intellectual curiosity) about what they were.

  And all those little secret packages my father would bring home . . .

  Was it so strange that eventually, when they were out, and I was a little older, able to be left alone without my grandmother baby-sitting me, was it so strange that I eventually went into my mother’s dresser and looked at what was there? All the black silk stockings and garter belts, corsets with the area around the nipples cut out, stretch lace slips, black lace gloves, all sorts of black leather straps . . .

  I’d been trained to be a girl, hadn’t I?

  So I’d start putting the things on, go into the closet and find a pair of black suede pumps (with ankle straps, of course), parade around in front of the mirror. Even found blonde wigs in the closet, tried them on. A nice sweet “Hello!” to my other self in the elaborate mirror attached to the closet door.

  But nothing venereal as such, that was the amazing part. Clothes as clothes. Period. Another me as another me. Period.

  No sexual experience whatsoever until I was engaged and in my twenties.

  I remember one time when I was going into my mother’s things, starting to pull on some black silk stockings, my grandmother (who lived next door, next to my father’s office and, of course, had a key) coming in and catching me in the act.

  “What are you doing fooling around with all that crap?! Take it all off: now. Now!” The voice of sanity. “And then come into the kitchen, I’m going to make some sauerkraut and dumplings, some nice roast pork . . .”

  Roast pork. The big un-kosher sin. Like this very Jewish friend of mine who’d go to the buffet in the fanciest restaurant we’d go to together and make a bee-line right for the shrimp: more un-kosher sinful bliss.

  My mother was fine with me as long as I was her little boy-girl, totally in tow, totally under her feminizing control. Only when I started growing up, my voice changed, I got a little too old for Madame Metzger’s All Children’s Grand Opera, started going out on dates, started thinking about my own career, doing things my way, she more and more became my enemy, until we got to that final death-bed holographic will when she disowned me and willed everything to my cousin Judy.

  My father was a Mr. (oops, Dr.) Artsy, too, but summers he’d always get me these super-tough jobs that had nothing at all to do with balletic-artsy me.

  Like he had this one patient-friend, a Mr. O’Malley, who owned the O’Malley Construction Company in Chicago.

  He talked to O’Malley and got me a job one summer digging ditches.

  Imagine the Chicago heat and humidity. By the lake it was OK, but go inland a couple of miles and it’d be pure tropics. Most of the workers were Italian immigrants. Lots of Sicilians. Milanese. They couldn’t talk to each other in Italian because their versions of Italian were so different.

  Got along fine with the Italians. Learned a lot of Italian, all variations and varieties.

  When I took my Graduate Record Exam when I finished college I got 99.9% in linguistic ability, one of the highest in the country for that year. 20% in scientific ability. And I had been pushed into pre-med and medical school.

  But when I came time to learn languages, I was 100% at home.

  So the Italians loved me and I loved them. They’d bring me Daggo Red, their own homemade wine. Which I loved. My father had taken a pledge to never drink anything when he’d made his Confirmation, but what did that have to do with me?

  To me wine was sacramental.

  The wine and the host were the blood and body of Christ, nicht wahr?

  So I’d drink a little on the job, bring a bottle home now and then. Which didn’t seem to bother my mother. But my father would always make a big deal out of it.

  “Just put it in the cupboard somewhere so I don’t have to see it.”

  What was he from, a family of alcoholics?

  That’s what I always suspected, that my Irish grandfathers were both drunks.

  There was one Irishman ditch-digger on the job who would buy a six-pack of quarts of beer every day and drink all day long, always finishing the six-pack and then some by quitting time. No one gave a crap as long as he dug his ditches.

  Can’t you just see me in my work clothes, all tanned and grubby, filled with dirt, carrying my shovel home every night with me on the streetcars and subways. A car? Forget it! I borrowed my father’s car for dates, but that was it.

  I got all muscular and tough-looking, and worked for two months, then took a month off and went to Europe.

  Obviously I wasn’t working for the money but for the “toughening up.”

  Age 20.

  Was all set to start medical school in September and the trip to Europe was a little “reward.”

  But what a geek I was!

  Like on the ship going over to Europe (NY to Southampton, England) there was this Dutch woman I met, Mees Schreeder. From Amsterdam.

  Sitting on the deck on day watching her play tennis.

  Nice legs. When she finished she came over and got her clothes off the chair next to me, we got talking.

  “Great little tennis player!”

  “Well, I try.”

  “What’s the accent?”

  “Dutch.”

  “Können Sie auch Deutsch sprechen?” (Can you speak German, too?)

  “Etwas.” (Something.)

  “Ich habe Deutsch gelernt im Universität.” (I learned German at the University.)

  “I’m impressed. Now I can teach you Dutch. Let’s go have something to drink, I’m dying of thrist.”

  So we went into the bar and had a couple of beers and made a date for that night. Had dinner together, a couple of whiskey sours, then at midnight ended up on the deck outside the crew’s quarters, starting to kiss, her putting my hand down between her legs. I didn’t know what to do so she pulled aside her panties, put my finger on her clitoris and told me, “Massage it. You’ll see.”

  I massaged it, she went into her purse, got out a little jar of cold cream and creamed up my finger, put it back down on the clitoris, and when I started massaging it this time she went crazy.

  “Wonderful! Wonderful! Don’t stop . . .”

  I didn’t stop and she went on for an hour.

  She didn’t try anything on me. Maybe I was supposed to put her hand down on my groin, unzip myself and get going. But I didn’t do anything and the fun was all hers.

  What was I, an asexual geek or something?

  Too much St. Augustine’s Confessions and Civitas Dei (The City of God). Too much St. Ignatius and St. Thomas Aquinas. Something to do with my polio?

  You would have thought something would have happened; I would have gotten a hard-on or something, right?

  Well, it almost happened later when I was in Paris.

  I was on this “tour” in Europe. Not just me but this gang of students from places like Smith College and Harvard, Yale....who snubbed me full-time because I was from the slobsville Midwest no less. And from a Jesuit college!

  Well, in Paris the tour part ended and I was on my own for about three weeks until I had to go back to Rotterdam and catch my boat back to New York.

  Three weeks in Paris alone.

  The first day (!) I was totally alone I was walking around on the Left Bank pretending I was Hemingway or Anais Nin or Rimbaud or Satie, my head full, full, full of l’histo
ire. I mean by age twenty I’d read everything there was to read about the Left Bank: French painting, music, architecture, Americans in Paris in the 1920’s . . .

  And there was this beautiful chalky-skinned black-haired woman sitting by herself at a cafe table.

  I stopped.

  “Je peut voir que vous etes totalmente seul, e . . .”

  My French great in the classroom, but here in le vrai monde?

  Only instead of answering me in French, she came back with a strongly Scotch-burred. “By all means, join me.”

  I sat down and ordered a coffee and some chocolate cheesecake.

  “I’m Elizabeth Trochee,” she said, shaking hands. And a tiny little paw she had, more like a teddy bear than a grown woman. Nice thin body though, cute little baseball-sawed-in-half breasts.

  “Hugh Fox. From Chicago.”

  “I’m originally from Glascow. I’m a veterinarian. My husband just left me for an American blonde. But I won’t hold your being a Yankee gringo dog against you . . .” Smiling this gorgeous Pekinese smile.

  “We should go to the ballet tonight. I was just reading in the paper—”

  “OK,” she answered immediately, no hesitation, “whatever. I need something—anything—to keep my thoughts away from having been dumped. And for a Yankee blonde no less.”

  “Well, we’ve all been dumped . . . dumped and dumped on . . .”

  Trying to console here. Although I never had been dumped, had I?

  So we ended up going out together that night. First dinner, then the ballet, something very sexy, all skin-tight leotards and tights, all smoochy-woochy, always just on the edge of fucking. I guessed. Not that I knew what fucking was really like. Of course I had comparative anatomy and studied the sex organs of fish, frogs, dogs, cats, salamanders, toads, but I’d never seen a pornographic anything, had no real idea of what the real dynamics of the thing were all about.

  In fact, when I finally did get married a few years later I came back home from my honeymoon without ever having consummated the marriage. More about that later.

  After the ballet, all that onstage sensuousness, she invited me back to her place, warning me “It’s not very fancy at all. Rather sad, really. I’ll be going back to Scotland soon, I guess. Although, I love it here, no matter how ‘poor’ it may be . . .”

  I didn’t find it poor at all. A little hotel/rooming-house on the Ile San Luis, facing the Seine. The island right behind Notre Dame.

  In fact there was a chapel on the island, the church of San Luis itself, that was duplicated in Chicago at Quigley, the seminary for the diocese of Chicago. I’d been there a couple of times, beautiful, all stained glass, an exact replica of the San Luis chapel on the Isle San Luis.

  Up to her room in this quaint old elevator that clanked and rattled as it went up.

  Nice little place. A little untidy, but . . .

  She gave me a glass of wine.

  “Nothing fancy, just some Sauvignon.”

  Not sweet enough for me. I didn’t like dry wines. Nothing “dry” about them as far as I was concerned. Should have called them simply “sour” instead of “dry.”

  Then she got up and turned out the lights, and I heard some shuffling and softish noises in the dark and the next thing I knew, there she was in my arms . . . naked.

  Naked.

  Open mouthed. We kissed and kissed, and she started to bring my hand down to her groin, when I pulled back.

  “I’m sorry, fornication is a mortal sin and I’m not prepared for any more mortal sins on this trip. I’m sorry, truly sorry . . .”

  And out the door I went, into the Paris night.

  Early September already, a little coldish, but the trees along the Seine, Notre Dame itself, all the old, old houses and apartment buildings, all the people out, the lights, benches, restaurants; it should have been heaven for me. I was Igor Stravinsky, Aldous Huxley, Puccini, Hemingway, right where I should have been: magical, enchanted Paris.

  Part of me was in heaven, the smell of bread and coffee in the air, the light breeze, the sounds of the trees and the cars, taxis, this was life, life, life, life . . . but another part of me was in pure hell, the voices in me straining to speak , weirdo, creep, non-participant, anti-experimental, anti-experiential, and she was such a doll, so wunderbar, open, loving, now hurt, isn’t that sin, too, to treat people like shit? So why not sin? Sin seems to be where LIFE is, why not just BE instead of making it all control, control, control . . . forget St. Augustine’s Confessions for a while, go back, back, back . . .

  The streets all starting to twist and turn into grotesque monster-faces, hissing and growling out of the sky. Like I’d smoked the wrong stuff, had gotten the wrong shot, bad trip, man . . .

  Turned and went back to her place, the front door ajar, up in the elevator, knocked on her door.

  “Who is it?”

  “Me.”

  She opened up and I went in. Lights on, robe on, such beautiful legs and such a sea-nymphish face, reaching out to me.

  And then I had to say it.

  “I’ve decided to sin.”

  “Decided to sin?! What the fuck are you talking about?,” all of a sudden furious, turning into a mad dog, pushing me away, “Get the fuck

  out of here, get lost. Pervert. Weirdo. Go fuck the Seine, go fuck Notre Dame!”

  And there I was out in hall again, the door slammed on my face.

  “I—I . . .”

  Weakly trying to start to say something. But what?

  Giving up and going back to my hotel, trying to sleep. Not masturbating. No idea what masturbation was. Just stretched out there for hours, slept a bit, and then the next day went back to her building, found the landlady and asked.

  “Je suis un tourist sans chambre. Vous avez possiblement quelque chose ici?” (I’m a tourist without a room. Might you possibly have something here?)

  “Aleman?” (German?)

  “Americain.”

  And if I had been a German would she have hit me with a big NO?

  I paid whatever she asked. Good price. Then went back to my fancy hotel on Mount Parnasse, checked out, got my bags, and moved into my new room on the Isle San Luis, went and knocked on Elizabeth’s door.

  “Oui?” (Yes?)

  “It’s me . . .”

  “Jesus . . .” hesitated, then opened the door, “Come on in.” A little sofa over by the window facing the river, “Sit down. So what’s up?”

  “I just moved in downstairs. I’ve got about three weeks more. I thought we might be friends, maybe we could go to Mass together in the mornings, just be friends. Love doesn’t have to be—”

  “Don’t say the word ‘sinful.’ Anything but that!” she interrupted me.

  “Love doesn’t have to be PHYSICAL, it can be spiritual . . .”

  “For you, maybe, not for me.”

  “You love your parents, don’t you? And, hopefully, you don’t have sex with them.”

  “Oh, God, the TV is stuck, I can’t change channels.”

  “Let’s go have some lunch.”

  “Well . . .”

  She was more subdued today: just ordinary brown pantyhose, everything a dark burgundy knit, flat shoes, a little knit jacket. Didn’t radiate high sexuality but autumnal comfort.

  “I love you, you know that,” I said as we walked out the door and in the elevator I gave her a little hug, little kiss. Which she accepted. A little teary-eyed, me thinking of just how lonely she was, walked out on by her husband, must have been low on money, a vet without any practice (at least here), “Are you thinking about going back to Scotland?”

  “Glascow isn’t that bad. It’s funny, I think Glascow and I think . . . I don’t know, all kinds of boring row-houses and the cold, holiday kilts and the smell of cheese, mold . . .” taking me in her arms, holding on to me, “You wouldn’t take me back to Chicago with you, would you?”

  Out into the streets. Even more fallish. The leaves just starting to turn, every building, sidewalk, brid
ge, spire whispering history, history, history . . .

  “Well, I’m just starting medical school. In a couple of years—”

  “In a couple of years. My God, I look in the mirror every morning and night and I’m getting obsessed with ‘a couple of years.’ Whatever I have I won’t have it long.”

  “You’re a real beauty, what are you talking about?”

  “About Virginia Woolf and the Queen of Sheba, Cleopatra and Queen Elizabeth the First . . .”

  Her arm inside my coat, around my waist.

  I was the happiest that I had been for years.

  “That’s the whole point of Catholicism.”

  Her first impulse was to pull her arm out, but she stopped, let it alone.

  “So, OK, Father Fox, I’ll listen.”

  And I went on with one of my favorite sermons, all about the transience of this life, here today, gone tomorrow, life in a twinkling, versus All Eternity in Heaven with the Trinity, beatitude, being filled with joy full time, no ups and downs, but all up, per omnia saecula saeculorum—for all time, forever . . .

  Two weeks with her like that.

  Sometimes we’d even sleep some hours together at night, fully clothed, nothing sexual.

  I got her to come to Mass with me in the mornings.

  Sometimes someone practicing on the organ (who I later on found out was the composer Messien, not practicing but composing).

  A great place to begin the day, Notre Dame.

  She got to like the spires and stained-glass windows, the whole upward-spiraling sense of the place, as if we were really in touch with The Divine, The Divine coming down and encircling and enriching us.

  The day I left she came to the airport with me, back to Rotterdam, to catch my boat back to the U.S. Cried and cried.

  “I’ve never felt closer to anyone in my life. Except maybe my grandmother. We were very close. Just like you and yours . . . what happens now?”

  “Well, we’ll be in touch . . . I love you, you know that . . .”

  I got on the plane, got to Rotterdam, took my ship back to New York, plane to Chicago, and within a week there I was, a freshman at the Stritch School of Medicine, Loyola University.