“I have no idea! How could you even think of such a thing?”
On Christmas, I opened the present Bumpa had wrapped several days earlier. It was a Japanese woodcut of two tiny figures in a snowstorm that had belonged to my grandmother, who had once lived in Yokohama. He’d had it framed especially for me.
I took the woodcut upstairs to Bumpa’s bedroom and cried harder than I’d ever cried in my life. His foot roller and a half-empty bottle of liniment were still on the floor of the closet, next to his Converse walking shoes. Before I returned to New York, I said good-bye to my granny boots and dumped them in the trash. Now they were buried too.
Scott and I moved out of our cold-water flat into a one-bedroom on the corner of Bleecker and 10th streets. He composed songs on his upright piano, while I wrote the lyrics. I fantasized that we’d become a famous songwriting team, like Burt Bacharach and Carole Bayer Sager. When we weren’t going to jazz clubs, we’d have dinner with his father and stepmother at dimly lit Third Avenue restaurants with great hamburgers and lots of red wine.
One afternoon in midsummer, we were invited to see their new country home in Dutchess County. A classic white colonial on Quaker Hill, it was across the way from where the globe-trotting journalist Lowell Thomas lived. Thomas had traveled with T. E. Lawrence during World War I and had helped create the legend of Lawrence of Arabia.
Scott’s stepmother had collaborated with her decorator to make the house look artfully quaint, as if generations of one family had lived there and had passed down their prized heirlooms. Though the house was deeded with “lake rights,” the lake commission, in a move Scott’s father attributed to anti-Semitism, rescinded them, and he threatened to file a complaint with the state’s Human Rights Commission. In all the years I’d known Scott, I’d never heard anyone mention Judaism, and his father’s second wife was a Presbyterian. Nevertheless, Scott’s father expected us to go to the lake to “take a stand.” As someone who’d spent her summers at the seashore, I hated lakes, particularly ones in disputed waters.
“I think I’m just going to stay behind,” I told Scott.
“You can’t,” he said. “My father wants everybody there.”
We all piled into the car, including Scott’s nine-year-old stepsister, who was blond and looked just like her mother. Reaching the lake, we put down our blanket on the gravelly sand, while the other families gave us the WASP cold shoulder. Nobody smiled, waved, or even acknowledged our existence. Finally, Scott’s father announced, “Let’s go swimming!” Everybody turned around, and I imagined them saying, “Here come the Jews!” Technically, there were only two Jews, but I immediately felt guilty making that distinction. “Isn’t this great?” Scott’s father said as we mimed having fun. I fantasized that Scott, with his lifesaving certificate, would rescue a little platinum-haired kid, and the family would be so grateful they’d cede the lake rights. But we were the only ones in the water because it wasn’t even 70 degrees outside. There were people on the beach wearing Fair Isle sweaters. When the modest sun slipped behind the trees and I had goose bumps the size of eggs, we finally walked out of the lake, picked up the blanket, and drove back to the house.
“Why would your father want to go to a lake where he wasn’t wanted?” I asked Scott on the way home. He shrugged and turned up the car radio. As usual, his mother had the most succinct answer: “Because the stupid shithead bastard wants to be a WASP.”
The publishing company didn’t have a full-time job for me, and I didn’t want to continue fact-checking travel information, so Scott’s father hired me freelance to write a guidebook for guests staying in high-end hotels. I was hardly an expert in the luxury sector. I’d stayed in only two semi-nice hotels, courtesy of Scott’s father, who’d made the arrangements through a travel publisher. The gay nudist hotel wasn’t his fault. The publisher had sent us to report on a Windjammer Cruise around the Caribbean, but the clipper ship sprang a leak and we wound up at a new resort on the French side of St. Martin.
“Don’t you think it’s weird that everybody’s naked?” I asked, looking around.
“You’re such a prude,” he said.
“But they’re all men.”
“Maybe the women are indoors.”
“This isn’t Saudi Arabia! We’re on a French island. The French are famous for going topless. The only person’s who’s topless is a man, and he’s wearing a nipple ring.”
Scott stripped off his bathing suit and went into the water. I sat on the beach pretending to read. A man walked over to say hello, his uncircumcised, semi-erect penis exactly at eye level.
“Is that your brother?” he asked, pointing to Scott.
I was tempted to say, Oh, yes, my brother and I travel to nudist resorts all over the world so I can help him pick up men. It’s just like Suddenly, Last Summer, and he’s Monty Clift and I’m Elizabeth Taylor.
After that vacation, I told Scott I wasn’t going anywhere if it involved lakes or gay nudist hotels. Unfortunately, I didn’t have the presence of mind to exclude resorts that attracted swinging singles. When the travel publisher asked if we wanted to check out a new hotel in Ocho Rios, Jamaica, we figured why not. While Scott went off to listen to reggae music, where he met one of the many local ganja dealers, I sat by the pool and read Renata Adler’s Speedboat. Perhaps because it had “speed” in the title, a middle-aged man with a large stomach waddled over from his lounge chair and said, “I assume you like to swing. My girlfriend’s a pretty lady. We could have a threesome.”
“I’ve got a boyfriend.”
“Then a foursome.”
“No, thank you.”
“Then what are you doing here?”
“Ask him,” I said, pointing to Scott, who’d gotten high and was wearing a stupid grin.
“Up for a little hanky-panky?” the man said, waving to his significant other. She hoisted herself out of the pool and walked over. She was wearing a bikini with a silver chain connecting the top and bottom, and she had a tattoo of a dagger jutting out from her pubic region.
We spent the rest of the vacation avoiding them. I was so desperate I even agreed to go water rafting with the ganja dealer, who, as it turned out, was a classically trained musician. He wanted to know if we had any connections at Juilliard.
“This is the last time I’m going on one of your father’s stupid vacations,” I told Scott on the way to the airport.
The Kingston airport was jammed with tourists carrying oversize straw baskets and security guards in mirrored aviator sunglasses looking for drug smugglers. As the country’s primary crop, marijuana was routinely brought into the United States, and Scott, with his long curly hair, looked like a prime suspect. I hoped he hadn’t been dumb enough to stick a few joints in his suitcase. Was it my imagination or did he smell of pot? Right then, I saw myself spending the rest of my life in a Jamaican prison cell.
The swinger and his partner were on our flight, carrying several wooden masks and a fertility statue. He was wearing a Bob Marley T-shirt, she a crocheted mini. They smelled of sweat and patchouli. “Hello!” They waved, walking right over to us. “Did you have fun?” The man winked.
A guard motioned us over to a long table, where several customs officials rifled through everybody’s bags. If they caught Scott with anything, I’d pretend I was traveling with the swingers, who were now French-kissing. I’d explain that I was doing a magazine article on “What to Pack for a Swinging Vacation.” I wouldn’t even need to go into much detail, because the guards were already dumping the contents of their suitcases on the table. Out spilled a whip, several dildos, a tube of lubricant, black pasties, and a few other things I couldn’t identify. Convinced one of the dildos contained drugs, the official kept twisting it, until it made a loud vibrating noise. As for the bright pink strap-on, which came with a black leather harness, the officials were so fascinated, they waved us through without checking a thing.
> The trip to Jamaica was the last vacation we took together. We’d fallen out of love, or at least I had, and I suspected he had too. He was spending more time with his musician friends, coming home late at night, and while I always wanted to talk, no matter the hour, he seemed annoyed that he couldn’t sneak in unobserved. Years later, it dawned on me that he might have been seeing someone else, but I never had any proof. I did know one thing: I was stagnating in both my career and my relationship, but I couldn’t imagine breaking up. Falling back on an old acting exercise, I’d walk across Bleecker Street, down Christopher, and try to “feel” what it was like to leave. It felt scary. Where would I live? Who would hire me? How would I pay my rent? Complicating matters was that while I was no longer in love with Scott, I still loved him and that affection ran deep. What if I never saw him again?
I was turning twenty-six that January and decided to use that milestone as my deadline to leave. I bought a pair of T-strap heels as an early birthday present, hoping I’d wear them on exciting job interviews or dates. I was getting myself totally psyched. Of course I planned to leave after my birthday because I couldn’t imagine spending it alone.
The night before my birthday, we had dinner with his father and stepmother at a French restaurant on the Upper East Side. The waiter recommended steak tartare, and not realizing it was raw meat, I ordered it. When it arrived, I thought I was going to be sick, but not wanting to appear unsophisticated, I picked at it, while drinking too much red wine on an empty stomach.
After dinner, Scott dropped me off at the apartment while he went to park the car. Feeling tipsy, I took off my new shoes and ran into the bathroom, slamming my right foot against the door. The pain was excruciating. I looked down at my little toe, which now reared off at a grotesque right angle. I’d remembered reading that a broken toe had to be secured to its “brother,” but all I could find was thick silver automotive tape. I wrapped the toe and kept on going. When Scott returned, he found me writhing on the floor, my entire leg wrapped in silver.
“What the hell happened?” he asked. “Did you break your leg?”
“No, my little toe.”
Scott took me to St. Vincent’s Hospital, which has since closed but was then on Greenwich Avenue. It was after midnight, and the emergency room was filled with the types of people who tend to get into trouble when everyone else is asleep. Some had been stabbed, others shot, a few had OD’d, and one had a tire stuck on his head. Even with my mysterious silver leggings, I was a very low priority. At six A.M., Scott left to get a few hours of sleep before heading off to work.
Two hours later, I was finally brought into an examining room. “Hey, I bet you didn’t expect to be celebrating your birthday in a hospital,” the young doctor said. He looked at the automotive tape. “Were you out partying or something?”
“I broke my toe on the bathroom door.”
“I guess you got carried away with the tape,” he said as he ripped it off. “Wow, that’s a bad break. I don’t think I’ve ever seen such a weird configuration.”
“Don’t I need X-rays? Maybe we should consult a foot surgeon?”
“No, I just need to reset it.”
He pulled out a pencil from a drawer. I figured he was going to take notes, so I began to explain how it happened, but he said, “Shhh . . . close your eyes.” Placing the toe over the pencil, he rebroke it, while I hollered in pain.
“Are you crazy?” I yelled. “Are you even a doctor?”
“Intern,” he said. “I learned the pencil trick in med school, but this is the first time I ever got to do it. That was cool.” He taped the little toe to its “brother” and told me to come back in a month.
When I returned for my checkup, he removed the tape, and my little toe was still sticking out at the same right angle. “Oh, this isn’t good,” he said. Before I could yell, “No, not the pencil!” he whipped it out and broke the toe again.
It was such a bad break I was on crutches off and on for a month. That put a crimp in my plans to leave. I wrote a short story about my experience in the hospital, which I read to Scott. “I don’t like your writing,” he said. “You’re not very funny.”
Despite my encouragement, he was giving up his dream of becoming a musician in favor of going into the business side of music. His father thought it was more practical, and Scott was now talking about opening a recording studio. “You’re a wonderful musician,” I said. “Don’t listen to your father.”
The next day, Scott’s father informed me that I no longer had a job.
“People are talking too much about the affair,” he explained.
“I’d hardly call it an affair. We’ve been together since college.”
“No, the affair with me.”
“But I’m not having an affair with you.”
“That’s what people are saying.”
I didn’t even know how to respond. Scott’s father, who was twice my age, was practically a newlywed. Did he have such a reputation as a stud that it seemed plausible that he’d cheat on his young wife with his son’s even younger girlfriend?
When Scott came home, I told him that his father had fired me because everybody thought we were having an affair.
“Really?”
“Apparently so.” The situation was so ridiculous I started to laugh and couldn’t stop. Tears streamed down my face. “Why would I have an affair with your father?” I said, barely able to get out the words. “He . . . doesn’t . . . even . . . have . . . lake rights.”
“That’s not the slightest bit funny. My father is planning to bring the lake committee before the Human Rights Commission.”
“Maybe I should sue your father for sex discrimination.” At that point, I was practically rolling on the floor, and Scott, disgusted, went into the other room to read his favorite new book—Star-Making Machinery: Inside the Business of Rock and Roll.
A month later, I moved into a small apartment on the Upper West Side and began my new job as an editor of a travel newsletter. I wasn’t crazy about the apartment, and I didn’t like the job, but at least I’d cut my ties to Scott.
10
The Oxford Boys
I’ve always loved oxfords, and as I write this, they’re back in fashion again. Victoria Beckham, of the sky-high stilettos and bountiful Birkins, not only showed them in her most recent collection but was also photographed wearing them. This is very good news for the classic tie shoe that derived from the Oxonian, a style of half-boot that was popular at Oxford University. For years it was associated mainly with college men, lesbians, librarians, and Salvation Army ladies.
I bought my first pair in 1977, after I saw Diane Keaton in Annie Hall. The movie won the Oscar for Best Picture and set off a major trend for menswear on women. While I didn’t adopt the ties or goofy hats, I loved the white shirt buttoned to the neck, the baggy khakis, tweed jacket, and, of course, the oxfords. The shoes elicited interesting reactions from men. “Very few women can pull those off,” said a fellow writer, without adding, “But you can.” Another man called me a dyke on the subway, which made me wonder what was so threatening to men about women co-opting their accessories. Did they think that once women wore oxfords, they’d march into a man’s office, step on his toes, kick him in the balls, and plant their two sturdy feet on his desk?
Luckily, I found two men who loved oxfords and, in different ways, loved me. The first I met through my film school friend, who dragged me to a dinner party on the Upper West Side. Woody was a screenwriter and journalist who kept a sprawling film archive in his Riverside Drive apartment. In addition to 5,000 videotapes that were cataloged alphabetically, the place was totally filled with stacks of newspapers and magazines waiting to be clipped and filed. People who saw the apartment never forgot it, often comparing Woody to the Collyer brothers, the famous Harlem hoarders who lived and died neck-deep in rubble. Woody was an ebullient host. Though three inches shor
ter than I, with oversize glasses and wispy auburn hair, he had a rich baritone voice and sexy, self-confident manner. Tunneling my way through pillars of print, I sat down on a bunch of old Time magazines, while Woody poured wonton soup into mugs. His father had been the chief theoretician of the American Socialist Party, so he was careful to apportion the wontons equally, but when he reached me, he dropped two extra into my mug. I knew I’d be hearing from him.
Woody loved being a mentor, and I badly needed one. The only traveling I did as a travel writer was to the company’s headquarters in suburban Bronxville. On our first date, Woody told me I was wasting my talent. On our second date, I came down with the flu and he brought me chicken soup. On our third date, he invited me to Europe. On our sixth date, we went to JFK.
Woody had managed to rack up an impressive array of magazine assignments that took us to Paris and London. As might be expected of a man who lived in an archive, he did not travel light, lugging forty-three file boxes of research material with him. After we’d loaded everything into a van he’d rented at the Paris airport, we moved into a two-bedroom apartment in the Marais. It belonged to an old friend whose heiress niece had left an Elsa Peretti diamonds-by-the-yard necklace dangling from the pull cord to the toilet. Vedic cosmology charts were taped to an entire wall. There was no refrigerator, so we ate our dinners in neighborhood bistros. Woody was a great mimic, with an incredible ear for accents. Though he knew only a few French phrases, he spoke them like a native.
Waiters were totally confused when after he’d order “steak au poivre, bleu, s’il vous plaît,” they’d ask a question and he’d respond, “Je ne comprend pas,” in perfect-sounding French. Once a taxicab driver talked to him for fifteen minutes after he’d pronounced our street address with such Gallic verve that the driver didn’t seem to notice that the rest of Woody’s conversation consisted of “Oui” and “Bien-sûr.”
One of Woody’s assignments was to interview the great film composer Georges Delerue, who had recently composed the soundtrack for George Cukor’s Rich and Famous. Delerue had scored many of Truffaut’s films, including my favorite—Jules and Jim—about a love triangle between two men and a woman, and I was eager to meet him. We had lunch at one of Delerue’s favorite restaurants, where everyone assumed Woody spoke the language. At that point I think even Woody thought he spoke it. The movie publicist eventually straightened things out and Woody conducted the interview through a translator, but not before receiving multiple compliments on his “beautiful French.”
9 1/2 Narrow Page 12