by Janet Capron
“Yes, how are you going to do that?”
“Let me show you how,” I said.
He poured a couple of grams of methedrine into a glycine envelope and handed it to me.
“Come here,” I said.
“No, you come here,” he said.
I went over to him. He started to kiss me, and I let him, soul kisses, while he ran his rough hands over my body. He was angry. He held on to me and looked me in the eye.
“Let’s get this over with,” he said.
A few afternoons later, Gunther dropped by. Joey and I were working that day. Without any banter, without so much as a nod at Felicity, he said to me, “C’mon, then,” and we were back in the same bedroom. This time was different. At first his stroke seemed almost tentative, like a blind man feeling my face. I remember thinking when he was inside, ‘This one fits. I have to have him. I want to marry him.’ But I had said that kind of thing to myself before, whenever I got carried away, and I tried to ignore it. In spite of all my efforts, good sex and marriage—sex and true love—were still inextricably linked somewhere in a hermetic recess of my mind.
Back Gunther came on Friday, and the following Monday, and he kept on coming. Felicity just chuckled and let us use a room. By this time she was madly in love herself with Lionel the horn player, so she was in the mood.
“I guess I’m running a matchmaking outfit,” she said.
But Felicity only knew the half of it; that is, she only knew about my daytime love life. At night, after a short nap, I headed down to Slim’s Wide Missouri. There I stopped at the bar on the first floor just to check out that still iridescent, outrageous scene. Slim had hung his by now (more often than not) famous patrons’ work, most of it huge canvases, all over the long, narrow room with its high ceilings. The paintings represented his profits, because Slim could never resist running a tab for the artists who hung out at his bar, both before and after they made it. As a result, he was driving his business into the ground. And he could not bear to sell those paintings, even though it would have saved Slim’s if he had. He looked to me like an underground freedom fighter with his hooked nose and fierce eyes partially obscured by a shock of hair. He had a way of stooping over (he was tall) to listen to whoever was talking, as if he were really interested, which betrayed his naturally kind nature. In the petty, mean-spirited, nickel-and-dime world that is the restaurant business, Slim’s largesse stood out. He seemed to have banished the very notion of lunacy, treating his most psychotic regulars with the same respect Sardi showed for his Broadway stage luminaries. Like his customers, Slim lived for posterity. He wanted to be remembered as a patron, not as a saloon proprietor. His real dream had been to attract the writers away from Irene’s uptown, but instead, he drew artists and then rock ‘n’ roll stars, and that was the end of it. The bourgeois literati were not about to mix with imbecilic rock ‘n’ rollers.
So Slim resigned himself and hired Michael to turn the upstairs into a showcase for new music, what would come to be known as “New Wave,” later renamed “punk” by the mainstream press. It began right there at Slim’s, with a band of heterosexual cross-dressers who called themselves the Starlets; with Letty Jones, the brilliant poet-turned–rock ’n’ roll musician, and her backup band, Channel Eleven; and the Dumb Generation, a wonderful dysfunctional group that heralded the nihilism to come. Michael booked them all regularly.
But the pièce de résistance of Slim’s was the crowd with a penchant for fame that had put the saloon on the map. It gathered every night in a room downstairs at the back. The habitués there belonged to the most celebrated cadre of gay men and fag hags since Oscar Wilde: this was Andy Warhol’s crowd. They yelled across the room at each other, calling each other every kind of fanciful, obscene name, and gave each other blow jobs underneath the large, cafeteria-style tables. Once in a while, someone who also hung out upstairs would invite me into the back room. I had always felt sad and rejected by handsome young gay men. My impulse was to try to seduce them, but knowing I could never convert them, it hardly seemed worth it. What was wrong with vaginas? I longed to ask. Admittedly, heterosexuality seemed tame by comparison, and this troubled me. I couldn’t really defend it. I would have loved to attach myself to such a theatrical scene, but I felt like an insignificant, dull-feathered heterosexual in their midst.
After the occasional obligatory look at the downstairs, I went up to be with Michael. Recently, the East Village chapter of the Lucifers had become regulars. The Lucifers was a motorcycle gang whose local leader had dropped acid with Allen Ginsberg and then disarmed his followers, turning them into peace-loving outlaws. In the process, this leader, Hank was his name, had taught the other gang members to be archaically polite. They were gallant, pulling out chairs and opening doors for the ladies. Hank was about to marry one of Slim’s more illustrious painters’ daughter. The approaching wedding inspired so much speculation, it sounded more like the Junior League some nights.
The rest of the upstairs crowd comprised the local tattoo artist; a few downtown drug dealers; a whole array of stoned musicians and the hangers-on who wrote about them; very often music-industry moguls and their scouts; bartender friends of Michael’s, and a larger-than-ever coterie of waiting women. The energy of the music and the serenity of the surroundings made it feel as though we were flying at thirty thousand feet.
In spite of all that was going on, Michael was loyal to me. Except on those dreaded nights when he went home to Roseanna and the baby (but really, I used to tell myself, that was only to crash), he stayed close. The Lucifers with their own supply of methedrine; the musicians and the rich record company moguls with lots of good Peruvian flake, not to mention the dealers themselves: all of these factions cut severely into Michael’s draw. But a few of the more marginal types still responded to his waning charisma. I served as his hostess whenever he did condescend to invite a Starlet groupie or a rejected dealer’s moll to go home with him. On these occasions, he loved to take the young woman back to my sumptuous apartment, which he showed off as if it were his. Usually, though, when we were together, it was just the two of us. We spent many early mornings by ourselves, feeling as if we were the only two people left awake on the island of Manhattan. Michael took turns settling (naked) into one or the other of Whitney’s mother’s chintz-covered club chairs, or sometimes he would just lie on my thick pile carpet with his back against the bed and stroke the pile around him with admiration.
Alone a lot, and possibly a little bored, we turned ever more playful. Our format evolved. Michael discovered he liked to watch. We were explorers, marveling over the mysteries of the vagina. In particular, its elasticity impressed us. We experimented by seeing how many vibrators I could comfortably stick up there, along with his penis, which took its place next to the hard plastic versions inside me like an unspoiled little brother shoved to the edge of the bed. I can still see his face bathed in reverence as, squatting and stuffed with hardware, I smugly held the pose. But in spite of our best efforts, our sex life, burdened with all its paraphernalia—the dildos, vibrators, and recent addition of handcuffs and ropes—was getting perfunctory. Michael, so accessible now, with his potbelly, his gripes about his job, the hair that was beginning to peek out of his nose, had become too real.
In public I was peaking, enjoying a little fuss upstairs at Slim’s because, partly thanks to my speed-fueled lectures on the subject, hooking had achieved stature in that circle. Right after New Year’s, Felicity and Ginger had declared 1974 to be the Year of the Whore. They were planning a big gala in the spring, and I had given Michael one of their posters, which was a drawing of an elegant forefinger on a clitoris. Below it a caption read, “Ball in the Year of the Whore: We Want Everybody to Come.” Michael hung it proudly next to the bar. But in the midst of the hoopla, this brave cultural scene, I often found myself feeling despondent, because my obsession was losing its hold. Brute reality was busting my old dream, and I felt like a fool. I felt deflated, particularly on those nights when
Michael chose to go home to Roseanna.
On a weekend afternoon around Valentine’s Day, Michael and I decided to celebrate by taking in one of those classic underground blue movies that were being made in the seventies. We thought several of these were pure art. We cabbed it to the Universe, the theater that featured all the most intelligent porn films. This one was called The Opening of Misty Beethoven, and as good art is supposed to do, it triggered an important revelation. The movie turned out to be cathartic. A takeoff on the Pygmalion story, it featured a world-class sexologist (played by a future legit movie actor) and a Pigalle whore. The story went like this: One night, the sexologist and a friend, dressed in tuxes, are sailing through the Pigalle district in their limo when the hero makes a wager that he can turn any one of the mangy streetwalkers outside the tinted window into a high-class call girl. The friend takes the bet, and they pull some poor, unwitting slut out of the gutter into their magnificent car. The sexologist teaches her not only how to talk, walk, and dress, as in the more pallid version, but also how to fuck, suck, and cater to, in one memorable scene, four men at once. All the while, the whore has been in love with her mentor, who continues to ignore her, until the last scene, when both are dressed for a ball and suddenly he realizes how beautiful she is. Then he gently undresses her and they make love.
The catharsis comes when we see the stark contrast between the irrelevant jerk-off sex that has preceded it and the tender, intimate lovemaking itself, which is the opposite of performance. In fact, the man barely seems to move inside the woman. A private connection, so private even the camera could not invade it, was happening before our eyes. Besides being intensely romantic, the movie delivered a powerful message, especially to me that day. I sat there in the dark next to Michael, surrounded by the other men with their hats on their laps, and I recognized in that final scene Gunther and myself.
“Oh, so that’s lovemaking,” I thought at the time, quite overcome with the realization. I was recalling how much Gunther thrilled to be inside of me, how much my every quiver reverberated through him. It was love then. Unlike what I felt for Michael, my attachment to Gunther seemed to spring from a different chakra, from the heart rather than the head. With Michael, things were loose. Our partnership had come to be characterized in those days by an absence of feeling, a painlessness, which suited us both. And I still felt the lingering presence of the mystic whenever we were together. I thought maybe he felt it, too. But Gunther’s passion was the lure of the earth. His warmth made me hungry and it fed me, filled me up. I was curious to see where this mortal thrall would lead.
Even so, I refrained from admitting to myself that Gunther was eclipsing Michael. It would be like admitting Michael wasn’t really my other half, or like choosing Dionysus over Apollo. And yet by this time Gunther had won the supreme place in my thoughts with no more than the uncomplicated power of kisses and hugs. After the first strained encounter, Gunther and I began to open up to each other and were talking and laughing. Before long, our meetings took on the intensity of rapture: with openmouthed kisses we sucked in the breath of our mutual adoration and exhaled it into the rarified air fragrant with sex. Our feelings were in charge, and we both knew it, although as yet no words to that effect had been spoken. Gunther turned out to be exactly the opposite of the icy Aryan I had thought he was—generous with his affection and warmth—hugging me, covering me with kisses, and spooning me in bed afterward. This was unfamiliar behavior—it did not feel at all like that groove of pain I thought of as love but I managed to withstand it. Felicity wanted to know why our affair hadn’t progressed to my house. I gave him my home number, but still, Gunther resisted. The whorehouse served as a kind of shelter for him.
On a slow Monday afternoon, Gunther swung me in his arms around the disheveled whorehouse bedroom to the strains of violins emanating from his favorite Moody Blues album. When the heartrending operatic chorus came on, “But I love you...oh, how I love you!” he dipped me back as if I were the most precious bit of cargo and cover my bared neck with kisses. Ecstasy.
On Tuesday, I proposed.
“Gunther, do you need a green card?”
It was snowing outside, the last snowfall of the year. The street was dead quiet. The house was empty—no customers. He lay there on his back staring at the ceiling without answering me. I had the eerie sensation of not knowing where I was or what I was doing there, in this strange big room, not my home, with this strange man, not even my man. We were players on a stage. Nothing mattered.
“Gunther, I asked you: Do you need a green card?”
“I heard you. Why are you asking?”
“Because if you did, then I’d be more than willing to marry you for nothing. I’d do it for nothing,” I said.
“My mother is American. I don’t need a green card,” he said.
I turned on my side and faced him as he lay there, his eyes still fixed on the ceiling.
“Oh, well, how about this. In less than four years, I’m coming into around forty thousand dollars from a trust fund. Will you marry me?” I asked.
Nothing.
“Think about it, OK?”
Ever since Corinne told me no decent man ever marries a whore, I had been plotting, on a subterranean level, to get married. I didn’t at all like other people assigning me a permanent place outside the pale. I refused to be branded. I was a nice girl no matter what, and it was my birthright to marry a nice boy if I wanted and settle down—any time I wanted. Nothing bothered me more than the idea that society still defines a woman by experience. Once she sins, there is no redemption. In other words, I was supposed to submit to being condemned and ostracized for life. No different from biblical times, was it? I did not have the same freedom to change, to rise above my past, to learn from experience as a man did. Only if I were willing to disown it, keep silent, live a lie, perhaps then I could reenter society. This is what Corinne meant by “no decent man would ever marry me.” I detested that notion.
But also, I asked Gunther to marry me because I had fallen in love. The gravity of what I had done impressed me. I had never proposed to anybody before.
“So, just think about it,” I said.
“Hello, Janet?”
“Gunther, is that you? You’re calling me at home. This is my house, you know that?”
“Yes, yes, I know that. Are you alone?”
“I was on my way out, but I’m alone now.”
“Please, I’ve got to come over. The DEA is on my case. They busted everybody, my partner, everybody. They are coming after me. I need someplace to go for a little while where they can’t call me anymore. I’m sick to death of the calling, calling. May I come?”
“Of course,” I said.
When he got there, Gunther found me changed into an oyster-colored satin negligee, an item of clothing I have never been able to afford since, but there I was in it, smelling of Chanel No. 19. He took one look around my fancy digs, at the glittering bridge outside my window, and then at me, and he did a classic double take.
“Janet, what a woman you are,” Gunther said, closing in on me.
We didn’t get out of bed for three days, except to go to the door when food was delivered. In the middle of it somewhere he said, “The answer to your question is yes.”
A Short Engagement
Married? I didn’t want to get married. What had I been thinking? I would lose Michael forever! And he had promised to take me to Felicity and Ginger’s Hookers’ Ball, a night I had been anticipating like a high school girl for months. Now it would never happen. And the illustrious Tommy Shelter had been coming around lately, minus his bodyguard. He had actually phoned me once or twice. And the Life! How was I supposed to leave the Life? I surprised myself when I realized I didn’t want to leave it, just as Corinne and everyone else had predicted.
The first thing I did, even before Gunther had left to retrieve his clothes, was call Corinne. She was amused.
“Remember, let him decide who to vote for. You just take th
e checks. Get a joint account,” she said.
Gunther and I giggled. As if anybody voted. As if anybody had any checks. But we did have some cash, and that happened to be a good thing, because his business was through. He was too hot now. And I was never to work at my trade ever again. My romantic husband-to-be was rescuing me from all that.
I took Gunther up the Hudson to Cobb’s Wharf to meet Rayfield and his fourth wife, Betsy. When my father saw how Gunther doted on me, he approved, as did Betsy. By this time, Gunther loved me openly with abandon. I hadn’t expected it, but once we got engaged, a torrent of love worthy of Schubert lieder rained down on me. He couldn’t keep his eyes or his hands to himself.
“He loves you so much,” Betsy said to me, sounding a bit wistful I thought. Rayfield’s idea of affection was a pat on the head, a gesture he also lavished most democratically on his horse, the dog, and their three Siamese.
The second time we went up to Cobb’s Wharf, my father sat us down in his slightly shabby Yankee-WASP-style living room in front of the big stone fireplace. The walls were lined with musty books, and the room itself was dotted with ancient American antiques, nothing but family hand-me-downs, really, which were teetering under back issues of Car and Driver. The whole house smelled vaguely of cat piss and pine needles. It was banked with towering old trees in front and a full acre of sloping lawn in the back. You could see the river from the rear windows. Ever since Highcrest brought my father and I together, I used to love to take the train up to this house once in a while for Sunday dinner. I would just sit by the hour, listening to the grandfather clock and watching the crows fly. The ambience suggested a hard-won, unruffled peace.
Rayfield said nothing for a minute or two. He stood by the fire and poked a few logs around. Betsy sat with her long, elegant legs crossed on a modest-sized club chair. Gunther and I were perched side by side at the edge of the stiff Duncan Phyfe Edwardian sofa, facing my father.