by Howard Bloom
This was my introduction to Barbara’s idea of housekeeping.
Nonetheless, we had more important business to transact than sanitary inspections. Barbara’s most elegant piece of furniture, a mattress, was spread out on the floor in one corner. On it Barbara had draped herself, using a pose she’d borrowed from the barge scene in Elizabeth Taylor’s Cleopatra. Barbara was wearing this very open neck, gray, knit wool sweater artfully baring one shoulder. It was a pose no man whose circumcision hasn’t removed an extra organ or two could resist. So we had sex. No skyrockets went off. The earth failed to move. Sure, a couple of bullets bounced off the brick walls outside. And the cockroaches all stopped to watch. But it had been a long time since I’d left the sensual pleasures of California, and, frankly, I wasn’t about to rate these things on a quality index.
When we were finished, Barbara hitched herself up on one elbow again and said, “What are we going to do next September?” It was currently October of 1964, so next September was almost a year away. Continued Barbara, “I’m supposed to go to France for graduate school at the Sorbonne.” I have no idea of what my answer was. I was flabbergasted.
Once again, it took the entire walk home, all forty minutes of it, to get the implications of this latest query straight in my head. First, we weren’t supposed to date because of the gulf of several light years between our ages. Then we were supposed to have sex, even though I hadn’t asked. Next, we were destined to be together for at least the next year. And I was just getting to know this girl. Barbara clearly was a long-range thinker, and she seemed to have my future well mapped out for me. She was simply revealing it to me one small step at a time.
So I went back to my place, perched on the full width of my bed, and did some more deep examining of my life. I had demonstrated that I couldn’t handle a long-term relationship. I had attempted to remedy the problem by filling in the sexual steps that I’d missed out on in adolescence. Despite this regimen, nothing much seemed to have changed. So maybe what I needed was to pick a long-term relationship, any long term relationship at all (and in this case, one seemed to have picked me), and stick with it, go through the hellish parts, endure the panic, the urge to flee, the brain locked up like a Rubik’s cube coated in ebonite, the whole emotional nightmare, and use raw willpower to endure until I could come out on the other side, presumably cured. Then, if I ever wanted to get into some other long-term relationship, I’d at least have gotten my emotional debris out of the way. Perhaps the answer to the perils of intimacy panic was…persistence.
So Barbara’s decision that we were hooking up for an extended run sounded like just what the doctor ordered. Besides that, anti-depressants hadn’t come on the market yet, but she was capable of pulling off the same effect, and she was cuter than a bug in the rug of insects that pulsated across her apartment floor. Maybe I was being sucked into the whirlpool by my heels, but it seemed like a good time for a swim.
BEWARE THE BACKSEATS OF AUTOS
WITHOUT BRAKES
To procure the sexual privileges that Barbara was planning to allot, however, I was going to have to live up to certain conditions. First of all, I’d have to remember to bring my ration coupons. Sex would be handed out on a strictly regimented schedule, since it was apparently in short supply and there was a war going on (in Viet Nam). Second, I could not show up in her apartment until after 11:00 p.m., and I’d have to leave at 6:00 a.m. She didn’t want her daughter’s morals corrupted by seeing a man in the house. A man without a marriage license. This meant, said Barbara, that I should continue dating other women to keep myself busy, but not stay out past curfew. If she was setting up a romance here, she was going to make sure it ran according to the rules. She’d apparently gotten said rules from Mussolini’s handbook on How to Make the Trains Run On Time, Despite the Fact that They’re Driven by Italians.
So I continued my usual dating schedule, though I stopped trying to pet and neck and get to first base. Marching around town with girls and exchanging the intimate details of our lives (minus Barbara, a detail it didn’t seem appropriate to divulge) was pleasant diversion enough. And Barbara and I had our highly-disciplined dole of quick encounters on the mattress. We had sex.
Not that there wasn’t any romance involved, mind you. I’d have Barbara over to my closet on Bleecker Street from time to time, we’d both perch on the railing-like bed, and I’d give her dramatic readings from Dylan Thomas’ Under Milk Wood and—her favorite—performances of stories direct from the Old Testament. Why in Baal’s name would she find readings from the King James Version of the Bible the least bit entertaining, you may ask? Because I did the thing with a Yiddish accent, turning all the dramatis personae into ethnic characters. Barbara frequently tumbled off the bed chuckling uncontrollably, thus becoming lodged in the six-inch crack between the mattress and the dresser. But there was more historical authenticity to this rendition than you might imagine. I mean, the bozos in the Bible were Jewish! So there’s virtually no question whatsoever that King David acted like George Burns. How else could he have gotten young girls to keep him warm in bed when he was in his late seventies?
To add to the intimacy that enlivened our timetable, Barbara would tell me tales from her youth, which she delivered with a vivacity that was riveting. She had grown up, she explained, in Kingston, New York, in a family so poor that it had to borrow money from the local church mice. The ramshackle shed in which she was raised, she recalled with a beaming gusto, was surrounded by bits and pieces of rusting cars and had a barn in the back. Though she never said it explicitly, she gave the distinct impression that her Ma and Pa never wore shoes and that they covered their heads with tattered straw hats, carefully color-coordinated with the long stalks of hay they chewed when they were trying to look thoughtful. Sort of the destitute cousins of the couple in American Gothic.
Then, in a series of episodes that unfolded like the One Thousand and One Arabian Nights, Barbara spoon-fed me tales: the tale of how at the age of six she had handed out the locomotive from her brother’s train set, his most cherished toy, as a gift to another six-year-old she had a crush on. The story of how, as she got older, she’d refined her talents by wrecking her brother’s boat, totaling his automobile, nearly biting off his big toe, and accidentally putting a pitchfork through her sister’s thigh when the two of them were having a rollicking time out in the barn with the horses. Then there was the tragicomedy of how her pet chicken, the runt of the litter, who’d been picked on by every other piece of poultry in the neighborhood and had not a single feather left on its hide, would follow her like a shaven puppy through her parents’ house and into the homes of her neighbors, thus making her persona non grata pretty much everywhere she went, despite the fact that the chicken, believe it or not, was housebroken.
And there were the family’s two horses. Horses, explained Barbara, have a sense of humor. How did she know? One of her horses liked to get hold of the family’s Pekinese, squash it under his hoof until the puppy’s tongue stuck out and its death seemed imminent. Then the horse would give Barbara’s mom a sneaky glance. Said Barbara, the ignoble steed was trying to get a rise out of her mother.
Barbara also told me about how the captain of the football team had fallen in love with her in high school, and how all the future fraternity types had gradually succumbed to her charms. Then, when she had shattered their coronaries, they had formed a “Barbara Lover’s Club” and had moped in unison.
Why had she turned down all these highly desirable young men—future leaders of Kingston’s Elks Club and Chamber of Commerce? It wasn’t that she didn’t care for suitors who aspired to sport antlers. It’s just that she had, for Lord knows what bizarre reason, fallen for this person from the nearby town of Woodstock, a burg that specialized in preserving the remains of embalmed bohemians and their offspring, and which sent said offspring to Kingston’s high school in the hope of mooching small change from nice, wealthy, upper-middle-class girls.
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Xavier Vautour, the teenager to whom Barbara had become attached like a limpet, was 6’3”, had not been in contact with reality since long before he was born, but had an IQ that hovered somewhere above your normal communications satellite, and showed promise of becoming a nationally recognized poet. What’s more, he was handsome, blond, and aside from being totally helpless (a trait that doesn’t reveal its full menace in high school), was an exceedingly pleasant person. In fact, like Barbara, he had one of the most winning smiles on this wrinkled little planet of ours.
Barbara was convinced that there wasn’t a brain located anywhere in her own head, and that her father wasn’t suddenly going to surprise her on her seventeenth birthday with one he’d been hiding in the attic, so she was fascinated by this guy’s knowledge of Ezra Pound, Jean Paul Sartre, Pablo Picasso, and all the other usual intellectual moldy cargo. (Her estimate of her mental powers was a tiny bit off base. She’d later graduate from NYU Phi Beta Kappa.)
What’s more, Xavier’s family background was totally flabbergasting to a girl who had spent her entire life suffocating in the navel lint of a small town. Xavier’s father was an artist who had sailed from Aix-en-Provence to the United States around 1921 or so, had become a highly successful advertising art director in Manhattan in his (and the century’s) roaring twenties, had found a huge Midtown, rent-controlled apartment, had sublet it at a high profit, and had used the proceeds to become a full-time painter.
His work was brilliant (I saw a bunch of it eventually, and it is beyond belief). But it wasn’t bringing in much income, and the stipend from his rent-controlled apartment was not enough to keep him in the manner to which he felt he should be accustomed. So he took advantage of his suave, continental manner and began luring wealthy women to bed, then bleeding them of their fortunes. A financial Dracula.
One of the girls he had seduced—and eventually married—was a scion of the Zeisberger family of Philadelphia, who apparently owned Fort Knox, the State of Pennsylvania, and four hotels on Boardwalk. He whisked the heiress off to Woodstock, fathered two children, among them Xavier, then when the Zeisberger clan realized what was going on and cut off their wayward daughter’s million-dollar-a-year allowance, Xavier’s father decided that he needed to find a new meal ticket and moved on.
However, Xavier’s brood managed to keep up its impeccably bohemian credentials. Xavier’s sister married a poet whose name is far too august for me to mention without being rendered penniless by the lawyers for his estate. She became the official translator for the work of one of the greatest Yiddish writers of all time, despite the fact that she was about as Jewish as a ham sandwich with three kinds of cheese. What’s more, Xavier’s sister’s friends included such notables as Nanette Poulenc, the woman responsible for the subtitles of classic films like Shoot The Piano Player and Jules and Jim. (Barbara’s daughter, Nanette, would eventually be named after Ms. Poulenc.)
Barbara, being your normal teenage girl, was bubbling with hormones and couldn’t figure out what to do with them. Xavier, however, could. So they pooled their lunch money, bought themselves an ancient, fifty-dollar automobile with no brakes, learned to stop the car by sticking their feet out the door, and made ample use of the back seat, which apparently was also brakeless. Barbara would prepare for dates by getting drunk so she could convince herself the next morning that if anything had happened the night before it was the alcohol’s fault. I mean, this was the 1950s, and Barbara’s mother had fainting spells at the merest hint of the word s-e-x. What’s more, though her body craved penile penetration, Barbara’s mind had picked up her mother’s prejudices on the subject.
Eventually, Barbara graduated from high school, and just to prove to her father (who she was sure thought she had Down’s Syndrome) and herself that she wasn’t a mentally deficient duffle bag, got into Skidmore. Xavier plopped with ease into Dartmouth—on a full scholarship, no less. But the onslaught of college classwork did not stop the old hormones in either of this pair from flaring like a bonfire in a rocket factory.
So one holiday weekend, Barbara and Xavier agreed to rendezvous in the old automobile back seat after lubricating Barb’s inhibitions with the requisite quantity of hooch. The result was a permanent amelioration of the hormonal excess and a swelling in the abdominal region.
In those days, nice girls didn’t do things like this, and even when they did, they didn’t have abortions. So Barbara told her mother what was about to happen in seven or eight months and her mother fainted and was put on a heavy diet of sedatives, and, despite the fact that both her parents thought Xavier was about as valuable to humanity as the Poliovirus, they clenched their jaws and planned for a wedding.
Since Xavier had inherited his idea of patrimonial obligations from his father, Barbara was forced to drop out of school, have the baby, get a job as a waitress, diaper the baby, diaper Xavier, take care of the housecleaning, and listen to Xavier’s complaints that the house wasn’t clean enough and the baby was making too much noise and his diaper was getting messy. Xavier’s contribution was to study, to have lively intellectual conversations with his friends in which they concluded unanimously that Barbara was, at best, a “clever peasant,” to ask Barbara for money, and to avoid taking out the garbage, doing the dishes, changing the baby, or in any way performing chores that could be construed as useful. After all, like his father, Xavier was an artist!
One evening, Barbara was overcoming her growing dislike for Xavier by giving him what he wanted: another opportunity to enter her interior using only body parts below the navel and above the knees. But the muscles of her sexual organs were out for revenge. They tightened like a fist around Xavier’s upright organ and refused to let go. After an hour in an involuntary clinch, Barbara and Xavier came to a hideous conclusion. There were only two ways to end their epoxy-like adjoinment at the hip—cut off a tiny bit of Xavier, or go to the hospital and put themselves in the hands of experts. Not that any expert on earth had ever seen this dilemma before. How they put clothes on is something beyond my imagination and outside the range of what Barbara explained. They had well and truly made Shakespeare’s beast with two backs, and now were unable to unmake it. Unfortunately, most socially acceptable wardrobes are designed for beasts with only one back at a time. But they managed to cover themselves with something (a big skirt? a sheet?) and take a cab to the emergency room, where presumably they were shot full of muscle relaxants.
That was it. Wearing the scarlet letter in the town of Kingston, becoming the talk of a town of 50,000, being slathered in shame, being forced out of college and turned into a waitress who tried not to dump bowls of broccoli bisque down the sparkling white shirtfronts of upscale restaurant patrons, and now this.
Barbara concluded that she never wanted to have sex in her life again. In fact, she began to fantasize about severely altering the shape of Xavier’s skull with a cast-iron frying pan, which she hung in a prominent spot on the kitchen wall in the hope that she might lose control of herself some evening. Xavier became aware of this ambition, was afraid to fall asleep with his eyes closed, and started to have stress-induced nosebleeds. He didn’t think his poetry would improve if his brain was flattened like a cutlet of Italian veal.
Finally, Barbara couldn’t take dragging this 6’3” burden around anymore, and after three years left the man. To earn a living, to overcome the feeling that her father felt she was mentally retarded, to eradicate Xavier’s notion that she was a peasant with the conversational skills of a parrot, and to support her daughter Nanette, Barbara figured she’d have to go back to college, where she planned to outwork John Henry on one of his more energetic days punching holes through the granite mountains of the West. So she started school in California, then migrated to NYU, where she majored in the highly lucrative field of French literature.
Living on scholarships, welfare, government surplus spam, a steady diet of books, and a heavy dosage of abuse from her four-year-old—who had di
scovered that Barbara felt so guilty about not being able to bring her up properly, and so traumatized by the whole unplanned-pregnancy-and-Xavier episode, that any kid over the age of two could manipulate her like Silly Putty—was driving Barbara crazy. She was living in total isolation with only a tyrannical, tantrum-throwing tot for company. And it was beginning to warp her mind.
Barbara got the first hints of brain-rot when she was seized by sexual fantasies about her math teacher, a man she’d never spoken to outside of class. These became so obsessive that they blotted out all her other thoughts. Then things got worse: she had sexual fantasies at the sight of fire hydrants. Her sanity was going down for the third time, and she realized that only a desperate maneuver could bring about a rescue.
Just then, an apparently teenage Woody Allen look-alike (me) began hanging around her in the library, blathering about Racine and Montaigne. Gradually, a plan took shape. Her fantasies were telling her that she needed a man. Well, this creature sitting next to her at a long wooden reading table was not exactly a man. In fact, it was not even a boy. It was more like a Muppet from Mars. But at least it came closer to filling the requirements than those oversexed fire plugs.
What’s more, it was willing to talk to her. It looked available. It also appeared to be Jewish—just like her father’s business partner, who had become one of the most cherished adopted members of the family. And it bore a nano-resemblance to the father of Barbara’s best friend when she was a kid, since her best friend was also Jewish. This meant that someday the fly bumbling Francophilically in the region of her web might make a bit of money. He also might come in handy for baby-sitting; and the pressures of parenting were killing her. So she planned a kidnap (with the emphasis, as she saw it, on the word kid). She was convinced I was sixteen. Wrong. I was twenty-one!