The old ignorance, the old envy, she had thought. Don’t get smart with him. Play humble. The Little Match Girl.
“Because I need the job, sir, that’s why.”
“How come? Spent all your money on caviar lollypops? What are you really up to, huh? Doing research for some role on being a schmuck of a secretary? Ya know, there’s broads really need these jobs, cutie.”
“I know. And I know they have the skills, too. But I also really need this job. Now, could we please discuss any openings you might be willing to send me on?”
“Nope.”
“Nope?”
“That’s right, nope. No go. Forget it.
“Because I have no skills?”
“Nope. Because you’re you. I won’t play the patsy for whatever ploy you’re up to, cutie. Try somebody dumber at some other agency.”
So, shaking with humiliation, Julian had done that. After three weeks of pavement pounding, being told she should go to secretarial school or “get experience first” (how?), and after three weeks of having nursed a festering desire to get back at Clayburn, she had learned more than any secretarial course could have taught her. So she returned to the seedy Placement Perfect offices on West Forty-second street, filled out a new card, and sat again in front of his desk.
But this time her own skills were being practiced. Clayburn glanced at a card which listed her accomplishments as typing sixty words per minute, rapid-write shorthand, fluent French and German, previous experience three years in executive assistant positions with convincing-sounding small businessess abroad. The signature at the bottom of the card was in an ornate scrawl, but might be deciphered with difficulty to look something like “Janie Purvis.” Clayburn looked up from the card, impressed despite himself. The young woman he saw wore glasses, earrings, and a deep shade of lipstick. A russet scarf wound in a turban covered her hair. She smiled winningly at him. Clayburn never stood a chance, especially when she began to respond to his questions in her boarding-school voice with the faint British pitch—acquired from years of working abroad. He began to comb his files for something “of her class.” Together they chose a distinguished literary agency, the post of executive assistant to the head of the periodicals department. He told her who to call and how to approach them. He wished her the best of luck and in a fatherly way assured her that if this didn’t work out she should come right back to him and he’d be darned if he wouldn’t find something worthy of her sooner or later. It was only after she’d thanked him effusively and was turning to go, job address and personnel contact’s name secure in her purse beyond reclamation, that he glanced again at her signature and called,
“What’s your name again, baby? Janie? Junie?”
—permitting her the supreme moment of turning, whipping off her glasses and scarf, and smiling, “Julian. Julian Travis. And don’t call me cutie. And never call me baby,” before she stalked out of the office.
She had not yet learned that such a triumph warms the victor with a gaudy temporary satisfaction only to smolder in a long-fuse doubt that one has not only failed to educate the person one was trying to impress but has confirmed his prejudices. Nevertheless, that time Julian learned part of the lesson.
And that time she got the job.
Her gamble had been correct: Clayburn was too embarrassed to call and denounce as an imposter someone he would have to admit he himself had sent over. Nor did cautious Julian cite him as a reference. She said that she’d heard about the job as a favor from a (nameless) friend at another placement agency, thus saving both the new boss and herself paying commissions. It had been astonishingly simple. She had called for an appointment and gone looking like herself but lying about her office skills and experience, which she’d scripted this time in a literary direction. Her references weren’t checked. Instead, she was asked if she could start on Monday.
It had been, Julian remembered, what the New Left militants would later call “Another whoops radicalizing experience.” Now she wondered wryly how many radicalizing experiences it took to bring you round full circle into becoming reactionary.
“A Mask of One’s Own,” Notes for a Novel, stared up at her.
But Sister Passenger, who had disappeared off toward the lavatory, could be seen weaving her way down the aisle back to her seat. Julian, afraid the flight attendant’s revelation might inspire a conversation, snapped off her light and settled quickly into a pillow, turning toward the window.
Hypocrite. Playing at sleep. Just as you once played at being a child playing the part of a child. Deliberately played to Laurence, when he appeared miraculously, an honest presence moving crude as a bull through the bric-a-brac china-shop of Sutton Place. Knew somehow that the simplest brown wool sweater should be dug out of the bottom of the drawer, that this was not the time for the pale cashmeres Hope liked to see you in. Knew which was the best facial angle to present to him during long intense talks about art, knew how to sit (cross-legged, not demurely), knew how to pepper your speech with a few four-letter words. All the while longing for him to see through to whomever was looking out of you, desperately wanting what he represented.
Julian saw the reflection of her own smile twisted on the night-backed plane window, as she remembered how with a single gesture—loving Laurence—she had managed both to get away from Hope and to get back at her on every level. To love anyone but Hope at all. To love a man. To love a man twelve years her senior. A man from a working-class background, a man who was born a Christian—and, worse, became an atheist. A man who would never be wealthy.
Age, class, religion, style—Julian had touched almost all the bases. Laurence had been a bargain. Not all Hope’s tears, her screams of betrayal, collapses, threats, warnings, and curses, could halt the inevitable. Laurence had been freedom on every level Julian could conceive. Loving him was the act of Persephone uprooting the aconite so Hades could roar through the split maw of earthcrust and sweep her away to an alien landscape where the beauty of growing things lay not in petaled preciosity but in thick-braided furry roots. Laurence was the region where all rivers began, where the fickle weather of Demeter—her fog, her noon blaze, her sheet lightning—could never prevail. Life with Laurence would be privacy, peace. And it would be defiance.
Beyond the plane window, a fragile membrane stretched against forces of enormous pressure, Julian could see a drift of midwest plains and farmlands. Wide patches of darkness were punctuated by clusters and then larger constellations of lights, as the megalopolis that now stretched from Kansas City to St. Louis distantly approached. Towns spreading into cities, roads widening to streets to avenues to highways to superhighways. The night retained its starless indifference if one looked up, but every downward glance encountered more displaced brightness exhibiting itself: streetlights, roadlights, car headlights, small yellow-lit houses swelling into white-lit buildings. None of the lonely autonomy of stars here, winking at one another across absolute space and silence. No, these dots of brilliance below were proudly artificial, signals of a human vigil, beacons of people clinging together, brittle and brave, risking the appearance of being flashy in their insistence on becoming visible, in their denial of the power of night.
Like Laurence and Julian, she thought: with my rebellion I thee worship, he might have vowed; and with all my worldly resistance I thee endow, she might have responded. A mutual, interlocking defiance. Laurence and Julian, in a conspiracy like that between aircraft and air, an utterly mismatched couple in league against the logic of gravity.
Julian’s reverie was broken by the voice of Cindy, chirping through the plane’s intercom that the movie was about to start and the sound could be located on channel five of your earphones. Julian stirred and glanced at her seatmate. Polly Esther remained immersed in her magazine, unruffled by the announcement.
I’ve got to try, I’ve got to at least try, Julian thought, if not about her then at least about him. Switching her own light back on, she took a fresh piece of paper and began to write:
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br /> It had been a year of barely touching, of talking passionately about art, of meetings in secret and delicious conversations in which he lost contempt for my childhood and came to have compassion for it, in which I lost admiration for his childhood and came to commiserate with it. Each loved each for the dangers each had passed, and each loved each that each did pity them.
I would sneak off to his Chelsea loft to sip instant coffee in a cracked mug without a handle, and watch him work. I loved the simplicity of the loft: light streaming through uncurtained windows, the clean expanse of unstained, unvarnished, uncarpeted wood floor, the double mattress covered with an India print in earth colors, pushed against one wall. There were two rickety chairs, rescued from a street-discard pile, and a paint-spattered stool. On one of these three I always sat, or on the floor itself, avoiding the mattress where he often sprawled and where I fantasized sprawling with him.
Most of all, I loved his sculptures that populated the loft. They were to me classical, romantic, modern—all at once. In those years Laurence had already been forced to sacrifice working in marble, partly because it was too expensive but mostly because no gallery would touch his marbles: too neoclassical, outré. Some of them still stood in corners—nude male torsos twisted in strenuous effort, as if leaping or lifting or straining in orgasm. But through the muscle tension gleamed a lyricism, something of the indomitable human spirit, that took my breath away. He loathed the avant-garde, the rise of Warholism and cynicism. He would say, “If it’s going right, the work sings.”
His current style, a compromise between his private vision and survival in the art world, managed to be arresting, yet to sing. For me, it gave back to my eyes and touch what no external objects had: my own interior landscape.
Because Laurence worked with masks and mirrors.
The masks weren’t derivative of African or Eastern or Native American art; they were wood or plaster faces of ordinary people—subway riders, salespersons, people at checkout counters—but the expressions were stretched in a torsion of extremity, joy or anguish. The eyes were sometimes mirrored, sometimes blank, but always open. Tiny shards of mirror would appear unexpectedly—in the corner of a smile or grimace, or the ears would be totally mirrored, or the lips. In one unforgettable mask of a child’s face, a sharp icicle of mirror was plunged straight down through the top of the head. My favorite was a double mask, a work in layers, where the grinning top face was totally covered with a mirror mosaic except for the blank holes of eyes; this layer was hinged to the face beneath and, when raised, disclosed a bare plaster face, expressionless, with glittering mirror eyes and one mirror teardrop on the left cheek. His gallery had derided this one as “corny,” but that single work pierced my loneliness with what seemed a perception as penetrating as a spear in the childmask brain.
I was impaled. I loved him.
With this person, I decided, I could dare rid myself of my virginity. And I could be proud that I would not merely be receiving some god-knew-what concept of womanhood from him but would at the same moment be bestowing on him some god-knew-what concept of manhood, because, although he had had his share of affairs, he had never bedded a virgin.
And so, after months of agitated plotting and playing to him-on my part, we became lovers. It was after a party at his loft, after the poets and choreographers and painters had drifted off, happily drunk and stoned. I stayed behind to help clean up. He put Dvořák’s “New World Symphony” on his tinny phonograph and began dancing to it, a broom as his partner. I cut in. And then I was at last on the mattress and our clothes were coming off and the ghostly audience of faces dangling from the ceiling gleamed with mirror-flecks of glittering candlelight.
Afterward, he said I had screamed as he felt the hymen break. But I had no memory of that scream. I felt only the triumph of my own rite of passage, which something in me observed as dispassionately as if I too looked down from the loft ceiling. He whispered,
“Did you come?”
“No,” I smiled to the darkness, wanting to reassure him, “but I didn’t expect to, the first time.”
So are all lovers saved from a knowledge that they exchange cliché dialogue by some deeper knowledge that they communicate archetypal messages.
And we entered the affair. It was a physical communication at first innocently unconcerned with its awkwardness, its (surely temporary) lack of a satisfaction I had known with no one anyway. Besides, where brain, spirit, and heart were so engaged, could flesh be far behind?
I didn’t tell Hope for months, until after I’d got my own apartment. We’d been in a state of open warfare anyway, because she disapproved intensely of my working in an office job, knowing it was so I could save money to make the move. We inflicted hideous screaming fights on one another almost every evening. But the crisis came sooner than I’d planned, the day she demanded half of my weekly salary (take-home sixty-two dollars and twenty-seven cents) for “room and board” at Sutton Place. Within forty-eight hours I had found a place of my own—a gloriously squalid six-flight-walkup studio apartment in Yorkville—and moved. Two suitcases, two shopping bags, one carton of books: it could be managed in a single taxi. It was all she’d let me take of my own things. Still, I was free. Loving Laurence had freed me.
I didn’t intend to marry him, nor he me. But neither of us counted on the emotional tide of that summer, the way events in our two lives kept breaking epiphanies over us, drawing us closer to what would be that fateful walk over the Brooklyn Bridge. And neither of us counted on the murderous intensity of Hope’s rage, when I finally did tell her that Laurence and I were lovers. At least we had not expected that the rage would be bent toward such a surprising end: her insistence that he must marry me.
At first Laurence and I laughed about it. It was so Victorian a reaction. Even when she threatened to file a complaint and have him arrested “for impairing the morals of a minor,” it seemed absurd, melodramatic, hilarious.
“But Momma,” I would say, “this is 1961! I just got my own apartment. I want to live in it.”
“How do you know that goddamned pervert didn’t get you pregnant?” she would snarl.
“Because I’m not, that’s how. Because I went and got myself a diaphragm and learned how to use it. That’s how.”
“And what about the first time? It can take a while to notice, you know. Some women go on having periods and don’t even realize that—”
“Because. I was lucky, I guess. But that’s beside the point. Neither of us want to be mar—”
“Lucky,” she spat out bitterly. “Always you’ve been lucky, you don’t know how much. Always you’ve been loved, you don’t know how much. The golden girl. Oh God help me what did I do to have this happen to me? Why did you do this to me, Julian, why?”
“Jesus, Momma, I didn’t do it to you! Can’t you imagine one action I might ever take that isn’t in reaction to you? I did it for me, do you understand? For me. And because I love Laurence. I love his life. What he stands for. His work.”
“What in hell do you know about love? I’ll tell you about love! I loved you more than anything in the world. I gave up my whole life for you. Everything was for you. So you could live and breathe and burst on the world like a flaming meteor. So you could be rich and famous and do whatever you damned wanted. It’s the only way out for a woman, the only way to independence. If you were some little black boy in Harlem maybe you’d have to make it through boxing or something like that. But you’re not. You’re a girl and white and lovely and smart as a whip. You’d never have to marry if you didn’t want to. Or if you wanted to marry you could’ve had anyone. A millionaire. A prince. They always want beautiful actresses. Anyone you wanted. So what do you find yourself? A bohemian. A bastard who can barely make a living because he’s too busy chipping away at pieces of stone. A weakling. He’s weak, Julian, you’ll find that out. A con-man who knows a good thing when he sees it, who thinks he’ll get his hands on your money!”
“What money, Momma? I don�
��t have any of my money! I live in a one-room walk-up and work every day as a secretary because you won’t let me have any of my so-called fortune for myself! All I have left from having worked nonstop since I was two years old is a bunch of scrapbooks you won’t even let me have, and a trained memory that lets me fake not having shorthand by writing down just a few clue words. You wouldn’t even give me money for secretarial school! Christ! My fortune!”
“You wouldn’t know how to handle all that money. Besides, you could move back here tomorrow, give up that ridiculous job—”
“But I don’t want to move back here, Momma. That’s the point. I want my own life. So why are you bent on my marrying Laurence if you hate his guts? He’s not stopping me from living my life, Momma. You are!”
She had never, in all our years of fights, struck me. But now she reached for the nearest thing she could use as a weapon, and her fingers closed round the brass desk clock that sat incongruously on her cardtable. The face she turned toward me was one I had never seen before, the face of a woman maniacly transfixed by hatred. The clock came flying at my head, and I ducked just in time. It hit the doorjamb behind me and took a chunk of wood out as it flew through. I ran from the apartment, but her voice pursued me through the hall and into the elevator:
“He’ll marry you, Julian! By god, he’ll marry you, or I’ll see him dead! I swear to you that you’ll be married to this man!”
She was right—though not because of the reasons she thought. Or perhaps because of them, although it would take years for Laurence or me to suspect that. All we knew then was the sense of promise he said I brought him, the sense of freedom I said he brought me, the adventure.
We came to stand, one rainy autumn evening, before a maverick all-denominational minister who would accept less payment than the two judges we had approached for a civil ceremony. We stood in a small side chapel of the People’s Community Church, decorated only by four candles burning on an otherwise stripped altar. I wore a five-year-old black velvet dress. Larry wore his good suit, which was brown. And so we were married.
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