by Selina Meyer
Somewhere a door slammed. And then, a moment later, framed in the light of the open door to the outside, there he was. Howard Biddle. The man of my dreams. He was swaying gently from side to side like a stately oak in the breeze. He must have been asleep at Sarah’s and was still groggy after having been awakened by the couple arguing.
He hesitated at the top of a small staircase and I rushed over to him. “Here,” I said. “Let me help.”
As it turned out, Howard and I did not end up having much of a romance. We spent that first night together after I had roused Wendy and asked her to sleep at the student union, and then he would return every so often, usually late in the evening, drawn, as it were, like a moth to a flame. He would throw handfuls of gravel at my window or just shout until I came down to let him in. It was beautiful and pure and very special in a way. Yes, I cried and pleaded and begged for more—what woman wouldn’t? But I also slept soundly in his arms, soothed by the sweet lullaby of his snores every few weeks and that, surely, was something I had and no one else did.
The word “sophomore” is derived from the Ancient Greek words for “knowing” and “more.” Your average college sophomore, whether today, or when I was in college, or back in Ancient Greece, thinks they know or “soph” more than they actually do. Although I was uncommonly poised for my age and wise well beyond my years, I, too, had things to learn.
Although the wild romance of my relationship with Howard brought me great joy and considerably enhanced sexual skills, it also left me with quite a bit of spare time. I knew that this was due to Howard’s respect for me and desire that I devote myself to my studies in preparation for our life together in which I would be expected to make clever and amusing conversation with his family, friends, business associates, and the international jet set. But it did also give me time to think and, in my experience, thinking is almost always bad.
And so it was that one day while I was sitting and thinking on a sunny patch of Chapin Lawn, Fate’s Fickle Frisbee flew out of nowhere and struck me on the head. The flinger of said Frisbee was lean and freckled, with a tousled mane of ginger red hair that was, as my father would have said, “Much in need of the attentions of a good barber.”
“Are you okay?” the redheaded boy asked. “Sorry, we’re pretty baked. This Nepalese hash completely f-cks with your balance.”
After standing up and dusting myself off, I assured him that I was fine and started to go. He stuck out his hand and introduced himself. “I’m Ziggy.”
It turned out that his real name was Thomas Howe IV, and he was a sophomore at nearby Hampshire College, the acknowledged “bad boy” among the institutions of higher learning in the general vicinity of Smith. He was at Smith to play at a party with his Grateful Dead cover band, Eyes of the World. He invited me to come see him perform that night, and somewhat to my own surprise, I did.
All through his set, he was looking at me, smiling and laughing and singing particular lyrics, as it were, directly to me. When it came time for their finale, “Fire on the Mountain” into “Bertha” into “One More Saturday Night,” he said huskily into the microphone, “This one is for pretty Selina.”
Afterward, Ziggy invited me back to his friend Desi’s apartment and, again surprising myself, I accepted. Now, apart from prescription sleeping pills, I have never been much of a drug person. I smoked an occasional cigarette, to be sure, partly in the belief passed down from my mother that cigarettes were slimming and that a woman’s hand looked especially attractive while holding one. I had tried pot once or twice and found the experience pleasant, if unremarkable. But I was not prepared when Ziggy unwrapped a large block of greasy black hashish with “epal” stamped on it (he had already smoked the “N”), broke off a sizable lump, put it in a pipe, lit it, inhaled deeply, and then passed it to me.
The next thing I knew, bright sunlight was streaming in a window and I was lying on a futon in Desi’s apartment in just my panties and an Andover T-shirt. Ziggy was next to me, and when he saw that I was awake he rolled over and stroked my cheek with the back of his hand and said, “You’re beautiful, Selina. I love you.”
The year I spent with Ziggy on tour with Eyes of the World was a happy one. Gone were the tensions associated with my pursuit of Howard. Ziggy was warm and loving and easygoing, and he openly worshipped me, unlike Howard’s more reserved form of worshipping me. We traveled all over New England in Ziggy’s Plymouth Barracuda, smoking cigarettes and singing along to Dead bootleg tapes. We smoked the “e” of the hash block, then the “p,” and then the “a,” and finally the “l.” We smoked enormous Cheech & Chong reefers rolled from the earliest strains of sinsemilla marijuana that hippie botanists had begun growing out West. We took LSD. We ate mushrooms and vomited peyote.
I tell you all this not in the interest of making a tawdry confession but rather to make it clear that when it comes to discussing drug policy in America, I know whereof I speak (more about cocaine and crack later), and I do not judge anyone. I should stress that throughout this Bohemian phase, Wendy kept my grades up and Ziggy, who was a pure math major, remained at the top of his class, eventually graduating summa cum laude and going to work on Wall Street, where he made billions developing the complex derivative algorithms that caused the 2008 financial collapse.
In the end it was Wendy who would bring this idyllic, long, strange, but lovely trip to an abrupt end. During an extended stay back in the Northampton area for a series of gigs at Smith, Amherst, and elsewhere, I had made the colossal mistake of introducing Wendy to Buzz, who played the electric organ and sometimes the melodica in Ziggy’s band. We all took a lot of acid, sure. Everybody did. But Buzz took more than the rest of us combined, and Wendy, given the weakness of her personality, proved highly susceptible to hallucinogens. One night Buzz took her to a Dead show at the Centrum in Worcester and put a small square of blotter acid decorated with a picture of Mickey Mouse on her tongue, whereupon she disappeared, only to turn up four months later pregnant with Bob Weir’s baby.
I tell you these boring details to make clear the cause of the crisis that ensued. Without Wendy to handle my mundane academic chores, I was obliged to begin attending classes, reading textbooks, and writing papers, something I was never good at and for which what little skill I had had utterly atrophied. As much as I wanted to keep touring with Eyes, I was petrified of flunking out and having to return to what now seemed like the hopelessly humdrum and provincial life of the Baltimore suburbs.
But there was to be a silver lining to the dark cloud of renewed collegiate drudgery, in the person of Professor Olara Emeku.
Born Derrick Jones in Paterson, New Jersey, Professor Emeku had rebranded himself as every rich liberal’s favorite Marxist intellectual, fond of quoting Burke and Hegel alongside Marcus Garvey and Malcolm X. An arrest (and eventual acquittal) for involvement in a plot to bomb the Jefferson Memorial gave him both street cred and an alluring aura of danger. Eager to lure him from Columbia, Smith had created an Institute for the Study of the Culture of Race and installed him at the head of it in addition to making him a full professor at age thirty-one. The ISCR was beloved by Smith undergraduates for its course offerings in which one was graded more for professing commitment to class struggle and decrying the thought crimes of one’s own bourgeois cohort than for garden-variety academic excellence per se.
He was, to put it mildly, a superstar. And the first time I saw him, I knew I wanted to f-ck him.
In order to manage her double course load, Wendy had signed me up for Professor Emeku’s History of Jazz course, primarily because it was scheduled on Saturday mornings, when few other classes were held. With my lifestyle at the time, Saturday mornings were not exactly when I was at my sharpest, and I arrived at my first class (it was officially the third class, but Wendy had attended the first two before she bailed on me) about 15 minutes late. Professor Emeku was in the middle of an extended scat performance of a Miles Davis solo from Bitches Brew. He stopped abruptly when I entered and coldly a
sked for my name. He then told me to come and speak to him during his office hours. Instead of continuing with Miles Davis, he launched into a lengthy diatribe against white entitlement, which seemed to have little to do with jazz but everything to do with me and my late entrance.
The professor’s office hours were held on Saturday afternoons at his house rather than, as was customary, in his actual offices. When I got there at about 4:30, he greeted me at the door of his perfectly restored colonial rectory in the town square with two glasses of Lynch-Bages, one of his beloved expensive Bordeaux, and wearing a loose light cotton robe made from a fabric with a vaguely African pattern on it. He invited me into his cozy, book-lined study, where a fire was burning on the hearth, and then proceeded, as per my plan, to f-ck my brains out for the next eleven hours.
In the weeks that followed, Olara set about reeducating me—or, as he might have described it, “educating” me—in all manner of subjects. Given his broad-ranging intellect, some deficiency or jejune opinion of mine in one area would inevitably lead him to another area in which I would also be found lacking. Our marathon Saturday afternoon sex sessions would end with an early Sunday morning walk of shame, laden with a stack of books and a lengthy reading list.
In class he often singled me out for abuse as the embodiment of a particular sort of unconscious, patronizing prejudice masked as interest and enthusiasm that he found all around him, most especially in college towns and other liberal enclaves. We quickly discovered that the more extreme the public humiliation, the more intense our private pleasure became. Now, most former presidents probably wouldn’t admit this, but when I was younger I often found being insulted and humiliated, especially when the treatment is witnessed by others, to be a potent aphrodisiac. As I have gotten older, I have found the reverse to be increasingly true: that attacking someone else, especially without justification, can often be a prelude to a deeply passionate sexual encounter. This is, I suppose, a sign of maturity.
Professor Emeku dumped me in a manner fully befitting the entire arc of our relationship: by giving me an “F” on my term paper (“Toward a Metaphysics of Subjugation: A New Synthesis”), an “F” on my final exam, and an “F” in his course. When I arrived at his office hours to ask him why, I saw, through a window, him lecturing another coed in front of the fire while wearing his tribal bathrobe. Relentless doorbell ringing and the hurling of a flower pot through the window brought nothing more than an eventual restraining order. Assuming that the restraining order was a coy effort to play hard-to-get, very much in keeping with the heretofore playful nature of our relationship, led to several arrests, which required a significant intervention on the part of my parents with the college. The Eaton Faculty Gymnasium at Smith still bears mute witness to this difficult time in my life.
After a summer spent hiking in Europe in the vicinity of a wonderful Swiss sanitarium, I returned to Smith for my senior year still somewhat adrift, feeling as though perhaps I had not accomplished as much in my first three years of college as I would have liked. I found some small measure of solace in finally applying myself to my studies and discovering, as so many had before me, that if one avoids the hard sciences, college is pretty easy.
I first met Andrew Meyer in Hasselmeyer’s, a long-defunct upscale coffee shop just off campus. This was the pre-Starbucks era, a difficult time in the coffee world, as storefronts which had thrived for a generation as beatnik-style coffeehouses, began to make the painful transition to a new marketplace in which espresso and cappuccino called the tune. In some respects, establishments that catered to college students were better equipped to handle this metamorphosis than other, more mainstream coffee shops and diners, since their customers had long been on the adventurous vanguard of hot beverage consumption, beginning with the arrival of herbal teas as other than a strictly ethnic product sometime in the late ’70s. College students were in the main early adopters of new types of coffee and coffee accoutrements, and in this respect I was a typical college student.
And yet, looking back, it is easy to see why Hasselmeyer’s did not become Starbucks and why America is now home to tens of thousands of Starbucks franchises as opposed to tens of thousands of Hasselmeyer franchises. The problem was that Hasselmeyer’s chose an Old Vienna theme that fell between the stools of the studied informality of what I will call the “Starbucks style” and the formal service of a white tablecloth restaurant. In any case, given what I have told you about Hasselmeyer’s, it is easy to see how I might have found myself there on a rainy Wednesday afternoon treating myself to a piece of depression strudel and a kaffee mit schlag as part of the overeating therapy I had successfully employed as part of a multiphase recovery from my badly broken heart.
Ironically, Andrew was there on a first date, though not with me. He had chosen Hasselmeyer’s, he later told me, as well as the particular time of day (mid-afternoon) in a complex hedging of bets that I think illustrates the workings of Andrew’s particularly brilliant mind. On the one hand, he wanted to impress a girl he had been told was sophisticated and intelligent—though to me she looked like the standard hairy-armpitted poetry magazine assistant editor type—but didn’t want to spend too much money. If one ordered carefully, Hasselemeyer’s seemed more expensive than it actually was, and the waiters in their black vests and bow ties and floor-length white aprons tied around their waists added a note of Old World je ne sais quoi. The afternoon menu also consisted mostly of pastries and some small salads, as opposed to the far more costly goulashes and Wiener schnitzels that became available after 6 p.m. If, Andrew had reasoned, he liked the girl and felt her worth the investment, he could ask her to stay for dinner. If not, he could cut his losses with a café liégeois and some profiteroles.
As things turned out, she didn’t even get those.
Andrew and the girl, we’ll call her “Deirdre” since that was her name, were seated a few tables away from me. The restaurant was mostly unoccupied, in a foreshadowing of its imminent failure and indeed the impending discrediting of the entire Hasselmeyer’s concept. As soon as he sat down, Andrew began stealing glances at me, which soon turned into brazen staring as his date droned on about this or that. Before she could even order, he stood up, came over to me, and asked if the extra chair at my table was taken. I told him that it wasn’t and that he could take it but was surprised when, instead of taking it over to his table, he sat down at mine. I must have looked confused, because he quickly explained that he had made a mistake in asking the other girl out because she was boring him and he liked me more. When, after a moment, she came over to ask him what was going on, he told her the exact same thing.
Deirdre left in tears, which we both agreed was unfortunate and we wish hadn’t happened but also that she was at least partly to blame because she had not made more of an effort to be amusing and appealing. That got us talking, and soon we were laughing and the next thing you know we were dating.
My father never much liked Andrew. No doubt Andrew got off on the wrong foot by asking my father to invest in some scheme of his before my father could ask Andrew the same thing. But my mother always liked him, if only for the very obvious flattery that he showered upon her. Andrew always brought flowers and always told her she looked as though she had lost weight and that he loved her new hairstyle. He never became fully integrated into my social circle, but he mixed well with both the country club crowd and the working stiffs, even if his small talk always remained very small.
The one thing Andrew had that really drew me to him was a simmering ambition both for himself and for me. He always believed, from the beginning, that I could do great things and that one of his duties as a boyfriend, and eventually my husband, was to keep me motivated and focused. It was Andrew who suggested that I apply to law school—and not just any law school, but to Yale Law School, then, as now, considered to be one of the nation’s finest. He coached me through my LSATs, edited and reedited my application, and strategized endlessly about which of my parents’ friends to enlist to
write letters. In the end, whatever he did worked, and I was admitted, but to this day I still believe that Andrew could have become a brilliant lawyer himself if he had devoted as much energy to practicing the law as he did to evading it.
That fall we moved into an apartment in a house in a somewhat sketchy neighborhood in New Haven (where virtually every neighborhood is somewhat sketchy). I studied and attended classes while Andrew attempted to get his restaurant delivery business off the ground. His company, 2 Good 2 Go, was a forerunner of Postmates and Uber Eats and other delivery services and really seemed for a while like it was going to succeed. It really did.
This was the first time in my life when I had lived with a boyfriend and, to put it mildly, it took some getting used to. Neither of us are what you would call “neatniks” or even “neat.” This is not to say that we liked living in mess and squalor; neither of us wanted that, either. We both just wanted the other to clean. Andrew felt I should do it because I was a woman, and I felt he should do it since he made most of the mess and seemed to have a great deal of free time. In the end, the solution was so obvious that afterward we both wondered why we had not seen it sooner. We hired Maria, a hard-working immigrant from somewhere in Latin America, to come in three times a week and clean and prepare our dinners in advance. I have always believed that immigration is the lifeblood of our country, and it was deeply satisfying to put those beliefs into practice.
The three years at Yale flew by as I learned the law and Andrew honed his skill for business by starting one company after another. Although some of the passion between us had faded into comfortable domesticity, we were generally happy together, and I discovered that by applying the energy and ingenuity I had devoted to hopeless relationships to my studies, I actually could learn something. Warm and nurturing at home, Andrew retained his gregarious manner outside the house, and the large number of female undergraduates he employed for his business ventures—which seemed unable to support a payroll of more than one and maybe not even that—was the only recurrent source of tension in our relationship.