Back in the ballroom, Jon was confiding in me.
“JoBeth just found out about you last night, and . . .”—he stretched out the word with dramatic effect—“I hear she had a bit to drink at a small gathering for Jim, and she told everyone there what a wonderful lover you were.”
I have no idea if Jon’s rumor was true, but I do like to remember it just the way he told it to me. I was still blushing and we were all laughing when from behind me I heard, “Al!” I still responded to my guy name. So, I turned to see Jack Rose approaching me at a trot. He was a big man, bigger than me. He’d played Kent to my Lear.
“It’s Kate now.”
“Kate it is!” Jack picked me up in a bear hug. My feet didn’t touch the floor. He swung me in a circle. Part of me felt girlish and delighted. Most of me felt trapped.
“Put. Me. Down.”
To my surprise, that’s what he did, and backed away. Hundreds of people around us had grown quiet, all heads turned to the door. JoBeth Williams had just walked into the room. Her eyes locked on to mine. I turned to Martin, but he and Jon had backed off as well. So had nearly everyone else within twenty or thirty feet of me. JoBeth walked slowly and regally through the crowd, joining me in the open space. We stood eye to eye. JoBeth is tall; I’m slightly taller. That evening, she was wearing heels, a gown of forties noir. I was wearing cowboy boots under the skinny legs of my jeans, and a slightly frilly gingham cowgirl shirt. She was standing in front of me, her hands around my waist. She smelled the same. I was disarmed.
“Are you happy now?” she asked. “Are you finally happy?”
Happy? No, I didn’t think I was happy. But I was looking right into the eyes of my once true love, and I was grinning ear to ear.
“You look beautiful,” she said, and leaned forward and lightly kissed me on the cheek.
I bathed in her compliment. On good days, I looked like a tomboy. Kids in passing cars were beginning to yell “Lesbian!” out the window at me more often than they yelled “Faggot!” So I was more girl in the world than boy. That made me happy.
“Yeah, I’m happier,” I told JoBeth truthfully. “I’m glad to be alive.”
“Oh, Al! I’m glad to hear that. I mean . . . Kate? I’m sorry.”
“It’s okay.”
I wanted her to take my cheeks in her hands and pull me forward into a kiss. I wanted the gathered theater tribe of mine to gasp and clap their hands. I wanted JoBeth to be a lesbian. I was sober, and I wanted another chance. But she was already backing away from me.
“It’s been good to see you . . .” She paused. Would she say Al or Kate? The ring of people around us could not have been more silent.
“. . . hon!” she concluded with a laugh. Her timing had always been perfect. Friends and strangers laughed and cheered for us. She walked off with her friends. I walked off with Jon and Martin.
As with all theatrical parties, the later the hour, the merrier the festivities, and the better the performances. That night, with the encouragement and acceptance of the Brown theater community, I gave one of my finest performances. I played girl better that night than I ever had in my life.
I took the early morning train back to Philly. The cats were standoffish, glaring alternately at me and their empty food bowls. I fed them and sat down at my desk to study the script of Jane Chambers’s Last Summer at Bluefish Cove, the show I was directing with an all-lesbian cast. It was early afternoon, and rehearsal was set for seven that night.
SELF-DISCOVERY
I was surrounded by fashion-conscious people, and I loved their influence on me. I wrapped myself up in an old black oilcloth rain cape that I found on a trip to New York in a Secondhand Rose sort of store in the East Village; I decorated that cape with black tassels removed from an old curtain. I pulled a big, black marauder hat down on my forehead and sauntered off to class, just the way Mrs. Vreeland had Veruschka (that German countess with feet almost as big as mine) photographed as Garbo in the film Queen Christina.
—André Leon Talley (’73 AM)
Senior year I moved into the House of Drinking and Smoking, took the cheap room, almost a pantry. It had a futon, some books, a desk, a chair, a Fold ’N Play record player. I screwed a blue bulb in the ceiling and slept there, mostly alone. I listened to old records and stared at the blue light. I worried I might go crazy, but I also felt on the verge of something important . . . I stayed many hours in that room.
—Milo Burke in The Ask by Sam Lipsyte (’90)
My own epiphany—more like a break, really—occurred senior year of college. I was mid job interview with Quaker Oats, explaining why I wanted to work there (it had something to do with Crunch Berries). Suddenly, I saw myself from a distance. Is this what I’d gone to four years of college for? What happened to my dreams of writing, of public service? I ended up interrupting myself by saying, “I’m sorry, I’ve made a mistake—I actually don’t want to work here.” Then I walked out.
—Pamela Paul (’93)
Sleepwalking at Brown
MEG WOLITZER
The combination of excitement and loneliness that can describe the experience of beginning adulthood can also describe the experience of writing a first novel. The two experiences will always be braided tightly for me, because I wrote my first novel as an undergraduate. Over the thirty-two years since I graduated from Brown, whenever I’ve had reason to go back I’ve felt a familiar, reactive blend of excitement and loneliness, in equal parts. I picture myself at age twenty, alone and walking across the quad wearing one of the very soft thrift-shop flannel shirts that I used to like. (Or that I used to “favor,” as I might have written in my first novel.) In the picture my head is tilted down, my chin tucked in. Maybe I’m thinking about a sentence in progress, silently saying it over and over to myself. In all probability, the sentence has been overly polished, though with a little luck I’ll realize it later, after I’ve typed a few pages and then taken them somewhere, perhaps a local burger joint on Thayer Street, in order to sit with them awhile. Mostly, walking around the Brown campus thinking about writing, or sitting in a diner, or at the quivering blue, blender-loud Smith Corona that I brought with me to Providence, I feel very much alone in my little enterprise, the way any writer does, but I don’t understand yet that such extended aloneness is to be expected, and that there will almost never be a way around it.
I’d transferred to Brown that fall and didn’t know too many other students on campus. In the beginning, all of us transfers continually collected in an odd little heterogeneous flock, the way people on the same floor of a freshman dorm do, except we were older and already knew what college life was like. So we were sort of jaded, too, and those meals we ate together weren’t nervously boisterous, but were instead kind of melancholic: five wary, measured, disparate students poking at eggplant and soft-swirl, then hurrying off in different directions as soon as we could.
I had something I really wanted to hurry off to, and I spent a lot of time in my tiny Pembroke single, writing the novel that I’d begun before I arrived at school. My closest friend there, and really one of the few friends I’d made so far, was obsessed with Virginia Woolf. He was like a one-man Bloomsbury show, doing drop-dead impressions of Duncan Grant and Vita Sackville-West (though how would I know they were drop-dead? How would almost anyone?), and when I haltingly admitted to him that I’d been trying to figure out how to write a novel, he gave me Mrs. Dalloway and To the Lighthouse, both of which I tried to love, though really I was nowhere near ready to love them. Loving Woolf would come later, when I wasn’t trying to pillage every novel I read for potential “writing tips.”
I wonder why I decided that now was the time to do this, when I hadn’t read enough great books yet, and when my tastes were only beginning to form. Maybe it was because my mother, Hilma Wolitzer, a novelist, regretted that she’d begun writing relatively late. She’d started publishing short stories in her midthirties, and her first novel didn’t appear until she was forty-four. Her parents hadn’
t thought it was important for her and her two sisters to attend college, but she’d taken art classes and read a lot, and I’ve always thought of her as an autodidact. Second-wave feminism had altered her life; it had given her the bravery to write, and to go into New York City from our suburb each week and take fiction classes at the New School with the critic Anatole Broyard. I was intensely proud of my mother’s accomplishments, but I also knew she felt she’d lost time as a writer, and I didn’t want to do the same thing.
My novel, I thought, as I straightened up the mass of pages at the end of a day. It was as if the thing itself—and it could barely be considered a thing at that point—had already been finished and published and translated into other languages. Between bouts of writing, I did my course work, reading Victorian novels and Japanese novels and the Romantic poets. I felt as if I were standing under a waterfall of pages, some of them my own, most of them not.
The word ambition, which comes to mind here, tends to have an unpleasant tang to it, which can be unfair. While I do feel that maybe I was in a kind of rush back then, it wasn’t a rush to be famous or rich, but just to be a novelist. Which maybe meant, to me, a rush to be formed, when in fact I felt so unformed. Somehow, I knew that I could treat the university like a laboratory in which writing experiments could be attempted. That first year, I studied with novelist John Hawkes, whose workshops were an inspiration and a comfort. We’d meet each week in the living room of someone’s off-campus house for a couple of hours and talk freely and frankly about one another’s work. Jack, as he was known, was a generous and thoughtful teacher who treated every piece of writing with careful consideration, though most of our work had nothing in common with his deeply experimental writing. There were none of the tense moments that seem to happen in some workshops—moments in which someone suddenly attacks someone else, and there’s a crackle of shock and excitement, as everyone sits back like a literary version of Kitty Genovese’s neighbors and just watches.
Jack’s class was an open, unguarded, and charitable environment. We were a group of twelve sitting around showing each other what we had. And Jack’s comments, in class and on the backs of our submissions, were essential. Once, late in the day, I ran into him when I was leaving the library and, without thinking, I said, “Jack, I just finished a new chapter!” It wasn’t true; I hadn’t finished a chapter but had been struggling with one. “That’s wonderful,” he said. “Bring it in tomorrow.” And then I hurried home and finished the chapter, just so I could bring it to him.
This worked well; as long as Jack expected writing from me, I produced it. But then, in my senior year, Jack was gone, off in Europe on leave, and though I took another workshop it wasn’t nearly the same. I was left by myself at the moment in a book’s development when you have to make the shift from what you originally thought the thing was going to be to what it actually is. I’d moved to an off-campus apartment in Fox Point with two friends, and we’d set up a teetering, makeshift household. All three of us were trying to figure out how to live on our own in a close approximation of adulthood. One day I ironed a shirt by spreading out a towel on the used glass-topped table I’d just bought. Within seconds, the glass split with a shockingly loud crack, as if I’d chopped it with an axe. I hadn’t known any better.
I could hardly live as an adult, but I kept writing my novel, which was itself an adult thing to do. I tried to remember all that Jack had told me; there was something to do with adverbs, I recalled. Something to do with metaphor. Something to do with being truthful. When you start out as a writer, you often write for another person—a mother, a friend, a teacher, or even a metaphorical person—the idea of the dream reader. And this can carry you a very long way. But finally, inevitably, you have to stop caring what that other person thinks and write the way you instinctively feel is best for you. Clearly, Jack Hawkes had done this himself—at least the second part—in his own work.
In my bedroom with its white-painted garage-sale child’s writing desk, near the split-in-half glass table that I hadn’t yet thrown out, I worked seriously on this new, frustrating, slippery part of my novel. Without Jack, I began to treat Brown as if it were a combination university/arts colony. I took all my courses pass/fail so that I wouldn’t have to worry about anything as anxious-making as grades. Brown allowed all of that. The requirements toward my concentration were flexible, and I had time to write fiction and a great deal of time to read it. My advisor didn’t intrude, and a student at Brown in 1980 (and maybe even now, though I wouldn’t know) could decide to use her time there in a way that might be idiosyncratic, but would still fall under the general overhang of a serious undergraduate education.
I wrote a novel at Brown because I wanted to, and because Brown let me, and because Jack had encouraged me. I did it because I was lonely and excited and had an idea: a novel, of course, about college students. Had I really understood that there would be no other time in my life when I’d be allowed just to read (and write papers) and do little else, I might have decided that writing a novel was not what I should do yet. But that first novel, Sleepwalking—not only how it turned out, but what it felt like when I was writing it—retains a strange, small power for me. When I picture myself at twenty walking across campus in an old flannel shirt, my lips maybe moving a little, the image is of someone on her own and vulnerable and single-minded. But really, of course, it’s just who I was. It’s who I was when I was there.
Help Me Help You (Help Me)
LISA BIRNBACH
I hadn’t been at Brown too long before I noticed a clique of really cool kids—the cohesive group of juniors and seniors who comprised the sexually liberal acolytes of Reverend Richard Dannenfelser, a handsome WASP minister, antiwar agitator, and sexuality counselor. In the aftermath of the Vietnam War, Watergate, and the New Curriculum, you couldn’t invent a charismatic figure more perfect for his time than Dick Dannenfelser, Brown’s Presbyterian chaplain (from 1965 to 1980). You just couldn’t. (Although I have a fuzzy memory that perhaps Garry Trudeau tried with his Rev. Scot Sloan.) An outspoken Vietnam veteran, Dannenfelser had studied with the couple from Yale (Philip and Lorna Sarrell) who had studied with Masters and Johnson. Dannenfelser made sexuality sound as important as American history. Fine with me! I mean, we were at Brown University, the most liberal of the Ivy League schools in the midseventies, before the discovery of HIV/AIDS. It was a time of innocence. One feared unwanted pregnancy but not life-threatening disease. We understood our moment as one of very few consequences and a lot of exploration.
Those of you who remember the seventies are probably . . . my classmates. Those of you who don’t—a few highlights: Bonnie Raitt at Spring Weekend. Semiotics. President Jimmy Carter. The bicentennial. The year of “Born to Run.” Off-campus parties at Lupo’s, and the first fancy dressed-up one in Newport. The blizzard of 1978. Martial law in Providence. The corner of the Ratty where the Europeans ate and smoked. (Yes, you could smoke in the Ratty. And almost anywhere else.) You could buy lunch at Big Mother for thirty-five cents. Other than survey courses like Engine 9, “Introduction to Religious Studies 1,” or Champa’s “Nineteenth-Century Art,” classes were fairly intimate. I still recall classes of just six to twelve people as being quite the norm.
Those cool kids had somehow figured out that by taking Dick’s (he was on a nickname basis with them) and Carla Hansen’s team-taught seminar, “Topics in Human Sexuality,” an ungraded, un-S/NCed, uncredited eight-week program, they would be encouraged to talk about sex and sexuality as much as they wanted—at least with other students in the program. To be fair, “Topics” was freighted with values and ethics too, but sex talk was the obvious draw.
The structure was patterned after Masters (a he) and Johnson (a she): the optimal way to conduct these sexuality and gender conversations was to have them led by a man and a woman together. Following weekly presentations, Dick and his partner, Carla, an MSSW, would divide their students into small discussion groups. And here, there was a hierarchy. There was
a “head couple,” whose names were Steve and Wendy. (They were so merged that I thought Wendy’s last name was “Andsteve.” I don’t think I was the only one who did.)
Eventually, perhaps because of my lifelong quest to become cool or at least to be thought of as cool (a struggle that continues to this very day), I wanted in. I signed up to be a “Topics” facilitator. I was paired with a fellow I barely knew, and soon we were deputized to be sexuality discussion leaders.
This was probably 1977. It sounds like the dark ages, and in many ways it was. There was a gay group at Brown at the time, but I was unaware of any other organization to support lesbians or other sexuality and gender preferences. I was hardly a sexual daredevil. I wasn’t really even an adventuress. I was silly and spontaneous enough to be considered fun or “crazy,” at least compared to many of my classmates. I did take everything S/NC, which provided a little audacious swagger, but daredevil? Not by most standards. Still, in my mind, I was an adventuress of a sort. For instance, as a nondriver I sometimes sought rides home and would accept rides from people I didn’t know. I didn’t get, at first, that one should always ask one’s driver whether he or she is planning to drive straight or stoned; I once got a ride from New York to Providence with a driver who had ingested LSD before we got on the FDR.
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