by Janet Groth
We had been seeing each other for several weeks—a lunch, two dinners, and a movie—when Evan said, “Come up to my place for dinner and I’ll show you my Japanese prints.” The joke was he wasn’t kidding.
I walked up to his fourth-floor apartment at 7:30 p.m, on a mild, seventy-degree evening in June. After a good look at his book of Arno drawings and, yes, some Japanese prints, we moved for a second round of Tanqueray martinis to the back porch, where night had fallen; lights were flickering in the buildings across the way, and paper lanterns swung and glowed in the gardens below. Evan prepared two T-bones, medium rare, over a charcoal-burning hibachi, and pulled out of the refrigerator two green salads, which he tossed lightly with vinegar and oil. I put candles inside the hurricane shades and lit them and we settled down to some serious eating. Fred Astaire sang “They Can’t Take That Away from Me,” accompanied by Oscar Peterson. I remember Evan’s saying as we touched glasses, “Here’s to the beautiful children we’ll have together.”
The apartment, the dinner, the cocktails, the love songs, the reference to what beautiful children I could give him, all signified to me, in my misreading of the code we were following, that it was a serious relationship we were about to enter, one that justified the surrender of my hitherto carefully guarded virginity. Soon we were naked on top of one another, in the candlelit confines of Evan’s platform bed, where he tenderly discovered and then set about physically confirming the virginal state of my body. I rode through the experience as if borne along on an ocean wave, taking in the surprising gentleness of Evan’s lovemaking, and appreciating to the depths of my English-major soul the compliment he paid my breasts: “They look like the faces of two young perch.” To my trusting mind, all of this was following a classic pattern. I knew—or thought I knew—that these references to children and this biblical flattery were oblique allusions to a forthcoming proposal of marriage. As a practiced hand at this sort of thing, Evan knew better.
The follow-up was equally irresistible. I was delivered home at sunrise, and after I had slept only a few hours, two dozen long-stemmed red roses—the first ever in my date book—were delivered to my door, impressing the hell out of my British roommate.
It must have been about noon the “morning after.” I had just finished trimming the stems and arranging the roses when Evan called and said he would be picking me up in half an hour. He said he owned a cunning orange Volkswagen and we were going to take a little trip in it to Lancaster County—Pennsylvania Dutch territory in the Brandywine Valley. I put on a black cotton dress, with a wide, swinging skirt and bright pink sprigs of dogwood on it, and some strappy raffia sandals, and by the time I had packed a big straw bag to sling over my shoulder, the buzzer told me he was at the door.
So began a surreal thirty-six hours during which Evan kept up a steady stream of chatter regarding the delights, cultural, ethnic, equine, gustatorial, and architectural, of the terrain toward which we were headed.
We stopped midafternoon in a little tea shop on the outskirts of Amish country, and I had my first mint julep, in a frosty silver tankard with a fresh mint leaf sticking out of the top. All very heady, but my excitement was somewhat tempered by concerns that there was something wrong; I had needed a sanitary pad to stanch bleeding I had no clue about the significance of. Was I damaged goods in some literal sense? Was I jeopardizing my ability to have those “beautiful children” Evan had so seductively dangled before my eyes the night before? Ought I to be recovering from this earthshaking change in my body by twenty-four hours of bed rest in a darkened room instead of swanning about the countryside with cocktail stops on the itinerary?
If I spoke at all, God knows what I said. Certainly nothing to the point. Meanwhile, Evan solicitously plied me with BLTs and a roster of local pleasures that included quilt shops and the Andrew Wyeth gallery. As I was to learn, he never failed to pursue a piece of art or sculpture he admired, and the hyperrealism of the Wyeth country scenes touched that area of his aesthetic makeup that he had so fully developed in Japan.
In the late afternoon we drew up to a parking lot outside the Lancaster County Fair. Evan exclaimed with pleasure at an advertising bill announcing a stage show appearance later that evening by Anna Russell, a singer from New South Wales who made fun of opera. Her condensed account of The Ring of the Niebelung, Evan assured me, would have me in stitches. He bought tickets, and fortified with further drinks (no more juleps, but gin and tonics, as I recall), we did indeed laugh lustily at Miss Russell, a buxom woman in her fifties, who played the appreciative crowd like a maestro, polishing us off with a second of her famous set pieces, “How to Write Your Own Gilbert and Sullivan Opera.”
Did I worry about where I would lay my fuzzy blond head that night? What, me worry? I was in no state to ponder the sexual mechanics of lovemaking through Kotexes or to go in for woozy wonderings about my moral condition. Was I a young woman no longer a maiden but still respectable? Or was my moral condition conditional upon my being—or not being—engaged to be married? We stayed, as I recall, in a twee bed-and-breakfast with such a quantity of mattress and bedding that I forgot whether any of it turned pink during the night’s amours. A breakfast of popovers was still being served as we exited around noon the Sunday of this extraordinary trio of days.
Was ever a seduction so drawn out and so hedged about with museum viewings, green fields, and fresh garden-grown salads? I was deposited back at my West Seventy-Fifth Street lodgings sometime after midnight, none the wiser, though maybe an indefinable bit sadder than when I had left them.
My roommate’s head was deep in her pillow on the parlor couch. She had not taken the cover off my bed. I suppose she was convinced by this time that I had gone for the duration of the weekend, if not permanently decamped.
My head did begin to clear after stumbling into the office at ten on Monday morning, glad of The New Yorker’s staggered office hours. But somehow I never did take myself in hand for an examination of my own actions. I thought at the time that it was because I was so fascinated to see what new act of extravagant courtship Evan would come up with. I now think I was so alienated from my own feelings as to have—in the emotional sense—none. Physically, I soon grew out of that initial state of stiffness and soreness, awakening to an entirely new erotic bliss that was as much due to a native “taking to it” on my part, which surprised us both, as to the expertise of my lover. Whenever I was not actually in bed with Evan in those first weeks of summer 1959, I was dreamily contemplating being in bed with him. It was a whole new world, all right.
Throughout June, July, and August, Evan suggested with gratifying regularity that we lunch together as well as breakfast and dine together. And he seemed to know a bewildering array of Midtown restaurants. The two or three specializing in Japanese cuisine were high on his list. He waxed so mystically eloquent about the Japanese broth called miso that I believed I liked it. Similarly, the delights of tempura and dipped sweet potato or turnip and a variety of cold noodles. Fumbling with chopsticks and sitting cross-legged on mats became for me, if not poised accomplishments, at least no longer occasions for general hilarity.
Our nighttime entertainments were dim-lit cocktail lounges all over town. One bar on Fifty-Seventh Street, called the Menemsha, was famous for its feature of a not very convincing storm. The room was lined on three sides with sailing-ship dioramas. Every forty minutes or so, the lights would dim, followed by bursts of lightning, claps of thunder, and dangerously rocking tanks full of water, which required all gentlemen present to put their arms around their ladies for safety. As if a tankful of water could—even by bursting—put us at hazard. Every woman in the room played along. Pretty clever, the restaurateur who thought that one up.
We checked out Chumley’s and the Cedar and the King Cole and Bemelmans and pretty much all the best-known bars in the city. Dinner, when not Japanese, was often at some other cozy little ethnic restaurant up or down Second Avenue. I began to realize that Evan was spending an awful lot of money, f
or although the places we ate might have been relatively modest, the habits that we indulged were expensive—cover charges and high-priced drinks at every jazz spot in town. We saw and heard Stan Getz and Anita O’Day. We caught Nina Simone at the Village Vanguard, Maynard Ferguson at Birdland, Roy Eldridge at Jimmy Ryan’s, and Bobby Hackett at Eddie Condon’s. The New Yorker cartoonist Lee Lorenz played every Monday down at Marie’s Crisis Café, and we often went down to see him at the bar where Thomas Paine wrote a series of his most inflammatory tracts, called “The American Crisis,” at the window table in the front. We also saw on several memorable occasions at Marie’s a wonderful tap dancer called John Bubbles.
But the place we came back to again and again was the Five Spot in the East Village, to hear Thelonious Monk in what must have been a summer-long gig. Here my education in the stratosphere of jazz piano became complete. The room was always covered in a blue haze of smoke; the crowd was always putting away quantities of scotch. Dewar’s and soda became my drink for its ability to build to a not incapacitating buzz that could be sustained through the four or five drinks that Evan consumed during an average stay. Was I listening? he’d ask. Did I hear that? Did I follow what sophisticated variations the Monk was pulling out of the long-since-abandoned melody? Yes, I was listening. Yes, I heard, and yes, I was caught up in the sense of a musician far, far away inside his own head; but truth to tell, I have never been able to keep hold of a melodic line past the third or fourth variation, and the atonal stuff left me completely at a loss. Never mind, Evan liked it and I was there to learn.
When I got back from the grand tour that separated me from Evan for nearly four weeks—and me from the New Yorker art department forever—it was immediately apparent that something had shifted. Mainly him. He had become shifty eyed. This was unnecessary, since he had seen this coming all along, but perhaps it made him nervous that I had been a virgin. He was used to more experienced partners who were better at the game. He began using a cutting style of mockery, making fun of what he called my “Aw, shucks” manner and attributing it to my “Spamtown upbringing.” I couldn’t seem to stop hunting for relationship clues. Were we engaged or weren’t we? And why, each time I attempted clarification, did Evan turn so mean?
On the first of October, at Evan’s suggestion, I moved down to Jane Street in Greenwich Village to an apartment with no roommate. He said it was more convenient. The places we went to in October were basically the same places we had gone to all summer, but their importance as glamorous lead-ups to bed now seemed a bit threadbare and transparent.
In early November I was heartened when Evan asked me to arrange a long lunch hour in order to view an apartment he wanted me to see, which was for rent and immediate occupancy, on Washington Square. We were welcomed into the bare flat by the landlady, a bright-eyed woman with a curly frizz of salt-and-pepper hair, the leathery, wrinkled skin of a heavy smoker, and the determinedly cheerful demeanor of the businesswoman ready to close a deal.
After she finished showing us through the somewhat dim one-bedroom apartment on the second-floor front of the old brownstone (a matter of a very few minutes), Evan invited me to give him my opinion.
“Well,” I began dubiously, as I peered into the shallow hall cubbyhole that separated the front parlor from the rear bedroom, a hall that also contained what there was of a Pullman kitchen and a bathroom with a two-foot-square shower stall and no tub. “There isn’t much closet space.” “Oh”—the landlady shrugged, jiggling her ring of keys—“putting one of those charming French armoires in the bedroom will take care of that.” Perhaps realizing that she needed to do more in order to enlist me on her side, she gave me a toothy smile and said, “It is so good of you, dear, to come down here with Mr. Simm on your lunch hour to give him, as he put it to me, ‘the woman’s point of view.’ ” Shifting her smile to “Mr. Simm,” she went on, “When was it you said your fiancée would be coming over from Austria? December? I wish I could hold it for that long, but as I mentioned on the phone, I have another party waiting, and if I am to keep it for you, I really have to have a deposit today.”
Evan took my elbow and drew me into the comparative privacy of the bedroom, where he must have been moved by the stricken look on my face as I hissed, “Fiancée? Fiancée?” All he could do was mumble, with a rueful grin, “Oh, what tangled webs we weave, when first we practice to deceive.” I remember thinking, even through the yellowish blue of pain closing down over my eyes and forehead, that it was unbelievable that he could be both so apt and so literary at such a moment.
How I got through the rest of that day, how I got back to the office, took up my chair at my desk, endured the routine of the remaining four hours of the workday, I haven’t a clue—all passed without leaving a trace in my memory.
In December, Evan married.
In January he called and I let him back into my apartment and back into my bed. The rest of that month found me ignorant as ever of my own inner life, yet exploring depths of self-loathing and self-revulsion I hadn’t known existed.
I see that in giving my account of this affair, I have told nothing about my own feelings. Was I even in love with this man I was condemning for having falsely avowed love for me—perhaps without feeling a trace of love for him? I thrilled to his touch—did that mean I was attracted to him physically but not morally or spiritually? Truth to tell, I was not attracted to him at all except as a torso, with legs and a penis of fine proportions. I thought he was funny looking, jug jawed and knobby nosed and ungraceful in stride. How in the world, if I was not attracted to him, did it happen that I thrilled to his touch? Quite surprisingly, these were questions I did not ask.
I did, however, begin keeping notebooks.
Now I am lost. I’m not even sure of my sex any longer. I want to swing from the rafters, to hurl a bottle of ink at a white wall. I loathe that I haven’t the courage to do either of those things. I haven’t the courage to walk into the water as Virginia Woolf did. She weighted her pockets. I would not find it necessary—I can’t swim.
Cover up. Hold tight. Shut up and wait. That’s what I do. But lately I know it is wrong and dangerous. I’ve begun to shout. The wrong words at the wrong people. All the louder because I did not do it when I should have.
But for those notebook entries I might have remained clueless about what was happening to me and thus escaped harm altogether. Yet there was the abyss, waiting to stare me in the face when, on Wednesday, February 3, I narrowly avoided desecrating Evan and Marta’s marriage bed. Evan had insisted we stop at the Ninth Street digs he and Marta had moved into to pick up his “forgotten wallet.” Marta was in St. Vincent’s, where she had been hospitalized with appendicitis. When I refused the offered bed (offered to my horror), Evan accompanied me in a taxi to my place and left me at the curb. Not because his finer feelings surfaced, but because he had to go and fetch Marta, and as he explained to me, my push-back at Ninth Street had cost us valuable adultery time. I got up to my cold, high-ceilinged flat with no conscious participation of my own. Yes, I thought as I opened the door, this is hell. This is where I live now.
That evening I attempted suicide. My life, as I learned later on, had hinged upon a misunderstanding. I knew you were supposed to stuff a rug under the door when gassing yourself. But not having any rugs, I took at face value the notice on my aluminum-plated front door proclaiming it a fire door. Assuming that this meant it was airtight, I blew out the pilot light, turned on the oven, opened all the burners, and went to bed.
I was slapped back into groggy consciousness to find an oxygen mask over my mouth, an intern shaking me, the lights, the damned lights, blazing, the doors and windows wide open, and a mortifying cluster of neighbors and policemen around my bed. The neighbors I could hardly resent. It was their home I had nearly destroyed. True, I had thought the house was empty at the time, but I had given no thought to the inflammatory possibilities of a house with a serious gas leak. Dimly I was aware of Art, the neighbor from downstairs, telling th
e policeman how lucky it was that he and his wife had decided to come back from their country place early, and how he had gotten in by climbing the fire escape and jimmying the badly warped sash on my fire escape window.
Later, in the ambulance, I noticed the intern’s hairy arms as he pressed me close to his starched white jacket, and I saw that he had a nice face as he looked into mine and said something like, “Oh, sweetheart, what have you done? And why have you done it?”
The attendant at Bellevue was much less attractive and not at all nice. She said two things only, “Strip,” and “Shower with this bar of disinfectant.” After that, she handed me a blue two-piece pajama suit and a pair of paper slippers.
The women’s dorm was fairly quiet, if you didn’t count snores, but the likelihood of sleep was sharply reduced by the bare bulbs burning on through what seemed like twelve hours of the night. But that couldn’t have been true, because at 7:00 a.m. we were lined up and taken to a dining hall and given oatmeal and weak coffee—in other words, breakfast.
Dr. Feingold told me, when he saw me sometime later that day, that he was recommending a week of observation, after which, if another evaluation merited release, I would be given the name of a short-term therapist to whom weekly visits would be prescribed.
“I spoke to your parents,” he said.
I opened my eyes wide at that.
“Your mother came on the line. I told her I was a doctor calling from a hospital in New York. I heard your father’s voice in the background asking, ‘Is she pregnant?’ I assured your mother that you were not pregnant and that you were all right.”
“What did you say had happened?” I asked around stiff lips.
“Only that you had been brought in because you had tried to hurt yourself a little.”
“Oh, great,” I replied.
Dr. Feingold seemed very young. A resident psychiatrist probably, sympathetic, but he clearly didn’t have a clue about how to dispel alarm in middle-class parents standing in the kitchen of the living quarters behind their mom-and-pop grocery, trying to make a go of it out in southern Minnesota.