PART 9: LOSS OF INNOCENCE

                                                                   The postgraduate me

 Ambivalence was my way of life, especially where Sue was concerned. And graduation was when push came to shove, and I shoved her, feeling very sad about it but convincing myself that marriage, children, and middle-class domesticity simply represented a less compelling alternative to the life I had planned for myself – even though, in truth, all my instincts were domestic ones. I tended toward serial monogamy; I can count the number of one-night stands I eventually had on the fingers of one hand, with several fingers left over. This was only 1959, and the Sixties of Woodstock and protest rallies fueled by pot and acid and the relaxation or disappearance (depending on your point of view) of sexual mores really didn’t begin until seven or eight years later. I think we would have done what so many couples did ten years after us: we would have had ‘”real” sex shortly after we met, and eventually, after graduation, we would have found an apartment in Manhattan and moved in together. Sue, like me, went to grad school in Manhattan, studying for her CSW at Hunter, inestimably more convenient from the point of view of our relationship than her moving back in with her parents in deepest Brooklyn. There would have been no real reason to get married, but we might sooner or later have done that. My fantasies of a sexual adventure as a bachelor were largely fueled by the fact that I was still technically a virgin; if Sue and I had had intercourse, it would have demystified sex for both of us, along with the stakes.

I had no idea, until I left her, how much I cared about her and depended on her. The whole point of the breakup was to live a different kind of life, the hedonistic, carefree existence of a young bachelor on the loose in New York. But I discovered that I saw everything through the prism of my relationship with Sue; I wanted to share all my experiences with her, even the ones involving other women – which were fairly infrequent during those first few months. I was miserable without her, and feeling guilty about monopolizing her for three years in college when she could have been finding some more conventional nice Jewish boy to settle down with. About a month after I had told her I didn’t want to see her any more, she phoned me. “I can’t accept it,” she said. “I think you’re just doing it because you want to conform to some stupid image you have of yourself. Tell me that you don’t love me and I’ll leave you alone.”

The silence was deafening. Although I’d never told her, in our years together, that I loved her, I found I couldn’t tell her that I didn’t. “You’re just making it harder for both of us,” I came out with.

“The only reason that will make me accept this is that you don’t love me,” she said. I realized that I did in fact love her – but that loving her wasn’t enough. As bright and liberated as she was, her parents had ingrained in her the idea that what you did when you loved someone was marry them. I didn’t know whether I simply disagreed with this notion, or (almost every other guy I knew my age; the sole exception was Jeff) was looking for an excuse to bail. Marriage would bring further commitments; her parents would insist on grandchildren. The thought of being a father was inconceivable at the age of 20 was inconceivable to me.  We’d sort of played house in college, with two big exceptions: we weren’t spending nights together or even brushing our teeth together, and in bed, we were doing everything but.

“I don’t love you,” I lied. “Thank you,” she said, and hung up. It would be thirty years before I spoke to her again.

One detail that I took care of as soon as I could was losing my virginity.. When Sue and I were apart for summers during college, I had done my best to find someone, anyone, who would sleep with me; I didn’t consider this cheating, but a necessary and neglected rite of passage that was much overdue. But I didn’t try hard enough.  Cornell coeds were, for obvious reasons out of bounds; every girl I knew there knew Sue. And to seduce any of my female friends from New York and Fire Island would have seemed incestuous; we’d all known each other since we were eight years old. I had met a Vassar girl who was dating one of my fraternity brothers, and who, while we were sitting next to each other in the back seat of someone’s car, had copped a feel, but when I tracked her down and took her out, she wouldn’t even kiss me. Another tease was a platonic friend of my college friend Jerry, who had transferred from Cornell to Brown, and who, after she left, had written me a mash note – all about how she had lusted after me the whole time we were at school together. Ironically, she lived quite close to Sue in Brooklyn. When she came back from Europe that summer, I called her, met her in the City, and took her home to my apartment in the afternoon when both my parents were out. But she shied away like a frightened horse when I made a move in her direction.

“Hey, hey, hey!” she said. “What are you doing?”

“What you told me in your letter that you wanted me to do,” I answered.

“Oh, that,” she said dismissively. “I say things like that all the time. Didn’t Jerry ever tell you I like to tease? I’m a virgin!”

Then there was Sally (who shared a surname with my mother but nothing else). I met her through Peter Carr, with whom she had been sleeping for a few weeks, along with, it seemed, most of the other guys he knew. All these relationships seemed to end quickly and badly; the only lover she stayed friends with was Peter, and the earliest part of my relationship with her consisted of listening to her complain about the selfish, unfeeling behavior of the others. She came off as incredibly needy; she seemed to expect that everyone she was involved with would take care of her.  Sally was only 19; she had run away from her very straight parents in New Jersey and was living precariously on her own in Manhattan, shuttling to and from the apartments or sofas of boyfriends and girlfriends.

Inevitably, it was my turn. I sense her shifting her sights toward me, like a U-boat captain peering through his periscope at a convoy. She became very flirtatious. Knowing that my mother worked during the day and that I was certain to be home alone studying, she took to dropping in unannounced. It was clear that she was sexually available to me, and she was very good-looking, with long reddish hair and a freckled Irish face.

But I was afraid of getting involved with her; I knew that the quid pro quo of sleeping with her would be her expectation of aid and comfort in tangible form – though I didn’t know exactly what that form would take. Her previous men had been, like Peter, in their mid-twenties or older, most of them established, with their own apartments and jobs; how was I going to take care of the neediest person I’d ever met?

On the other hand, losing my virginity was among my top priorities. I’d wanted to live a bachelor’s life in the big city, and here was, undeniably, an opportunity to do so. One day, she arrived at my front door, marched into my bedroom, took off most of her clothes, and got into my bed. Push had once again come to shove. I went over to her and said, “Sally, I don’t think this is a good idea.”

“But I’ve done everything right!” she insisted, and she had; she wasn’t pushy or bitchy or any of the other things that turn men off. But I knew that if we became a couple, after a very short time she’d find someone who suited her better, and I’d join the ranks of Men Who Had Disappointed Sally. And truthfully, the depth and breadth of her sexual experience scared me; how could I measure up to Peter and those other sophisticated guys when it came to satisfying a woman?

Eventually, she gave up on me and found someone else and we settled into an odd sort of friendship, with me as her confidante. It was like listening to the sound track of an early incarnation of Ses and the City. She was bright and could be very funny of she was in a good mood, though that wasn’t her default setting; she was quite an angry and entitled person. The following year, after I’d left Columbia with my M.A. and was working for a publishing house, her younger sister arrived, and the whole charade was played out again: an attractive, penniless young girl cut off from her family, alone in New York, was making eyes at me. One day she showed up at my office. This was odd; I asked her what she wanted. “I want to sit on your lap,” she said, which I recognized, from my studies, as a perfect example of litotes, the trope of understatement. Obviously, she wanted more than that. But we had nothing in common; she had nothing of her big sister’s wit and savvy. If I had taken her up on her offer, and Sally had  found out that I’d gone to bed with her sister after rejecting her, she’d be furious, and rightly so. So once again, I extricated myself. In later years, a pattern emerged, in consequence of which had many fewer sexual partners (but more sex) than other single guys I knew: with a couple of exceptions, I only slept with women I liked and wanted to have a relationship with. So much for the Man About Town image I’d had of myself in college. But since I always had a steady girlfriend, I always had a playmate. Like married men.

I saw a good deal of Sally for several years. Her fortunes improved; she got a job on a magazine and an apartment of her own – on the Upper West Side. Its address was 16 West 74th Street, and I knew it well; Toby and Bob Rafelson had been living there when I came back to New York, and they too were friendly with Sally, so when they left, she moved in. They’d left her most of their furniture, so visiting her there was just like visiting them; it had been one of her favorite hangouts, because Bob had an obvious crush on her. This is cruel, and an example of hyperbole (you know what that one means) but if I’m right in thinking that he never slept with her, he and I are were possibly the only two men in New York of whom that could be said. I no longer feared that she’d get her hooks into me somehow; she was as self-sufficient as the next twenty-something in those days. But she was still a little nuts; one afternoon I came over to visit her and found her hair, pinned at the top into a two-foot-long pony tail, taped to her front door. She had cut it off herself, on an impulse, she told me.

Eventually, she married Bob’s friend Buck Henry, who was becoming a well-known comedian and actor (you saw him on early Saturday Night Live shows, and you may remember him as the hotel clerk in the film of The Graduate, the screenplay of which he’d co-written. I’d know Buck for years, through the Carr-Rafelson portal, and loved spending time with him. At this period, he was going back and forth to Hollywood with some regularity, and this was a problem for Sally, because she was even more terrified of flying than I was. Of course, there was still a deluxe train in operation, but the problem was that they had a dog, Willy, and one trip on the Super Chief with Willy was enough for her. In order to walk him, she had to wait for the train to stop, which it did infrequently. The conductor would tell her that they were scheduled to take on water at 3:15 A.M., and sh’d set her alarm, get dressed, put Willy’s leash on him, and only then discover they were running two hours late.

The next time she and Willy had to go to California, I was deputized to get them on a plane since Buck was already out there. On the way to the airport, she must have ingested a whole handful of tranquilizers, and Willy had been drugged as well. I half-carried her to airport gate, dragging Willy by his leash on his back behind me, like a small furry mop, because he could no longer walk. I was allowed to take them onto the plane, where I strapped her into her seat, stowing Willy under it in his travel cage. Both were unconscious within seconds. I tiptoed back down the aisle and took a cab home from La Guardia. Just as I got there, the phone rang; it was Sally. The airline had kicked her and Willy off the flight, thinking they were on drugs – which they were. She begged me to come back and help her try again, and I did. By this time the tranquilizers had partially worn off, and, staggering only slightly, she made it once again her seat. “Don’t sleep till you take off!” I warned her, and she nodded blearily. Once again I went home and waited for the phone to ring, but this time she had pulled it off. When she landed at LAX, I learned, Buck had been waiting for her, and when she finally deplaned, it was in a wheelchair, with Willy in her lap. She slept for 18 hours when he got her back to their rented house.

The marriage didn’t last long, and I lost track of Sally, who stayed in California.

But Mary – the daughter of friends of my parents, a year older than I – was different. She wasn’t needy at all. She came from great wealth, and her parents were extremely liberal with her and her siblings from adolescence on. Having serious spending money gave her the means of living an unconventional life, which she embraced. She travelled whenever the whim seized her, and her travels freed her from the strictures and inhibitions of middle-class Jewish life. We spent a good deal of time together during the summer between my junior and senior year, in East Hampton, where my parents were renting a house not too far from the Gatsybyesque mansion in which she lived, and she loved to tell me about her impulsive adventures. She always kept a suitcase packed at the foot of her bed, she said, in case she awakened in the middle of the night seized by a compulsion to visit Istanbul or Bora Bora.

It was clear that she was a girl of considerable sexual experience, and it was also clear that she found me attractive. By midsummer, we were at the snogging and groping stage, but she wouldn’t go farther. “But why?” I kept asking her. She had no concern for her “reputation,” no moral qualms, no psychological hangups; “I love sex,” she told me. “I’m just taking a hiatus.” I wondered if telling her that she would be my first would do the trick, but I was embarrassed. The summer passed, my hymen intact.

During November of the following year, after Sue and I had parted, I bumped into Mary on the Madison Avenue bus. Luckily for me, cabs were scarce; she never took public transportation by choice. By this time, I had made my peace with the breakup, and Mary looked terrific – blonde and zaftig, and unlike Sue, tall. “Let’s go to my place for a drink,” she proposed. Why not? She lived in a five-story town house in the East 80s, with her parents and a large staff. There was an elevator to the top floor, where her bedroom was, but people were always getting stuck in it, so we took the stairs, pausing to liberate a bottle of vodka and two glasses from the bar in the living room. Luther, the butler, was in the house, but Mary told me that no one ever ascended to her private fiefdom.

Her bedroom was huge. I settled into an armchair with a glass of straight, warm vodka and she sat on the bed across the room with her own glass, and while I was wondering where this was going, her phone rang. She answered it, and while she was exchanging inconsequential chat with whoever was on the line (female, I could tell by the timbre), the vodka was doing its work. She looked at me, smiled, and took off one of her earrings. No one had ever sent me as clear a signal as that. Ten minutes after she hung up, the annoying burden of my innocence was gone. I was surprised at how easy it was; no fumbling, no awkwardness, and I actually made it last for a couple of minutes. There was a certain anticlimactic quality to the climax; intercourse wasn’t, after all, a stunning departure from the things that Sue and I had been up to for years. But I knew that there were yet greater pleasures to come, various positions and techniques I’d read about and was eager to try out. In a few minutes, I was more than ready again, but Mary had a dinner date to get ready for, so I left.

We did not become a couple. She was too flighty for me; she never arrived anywhere less than half an hour late, while I, for all my pose of unconventionality, was a dutiful and punctual person. She told me a story to illustrate her unreliability, so that I would know better than to count on her for anything: the previous year, she said, she had been engaged to a Frenchman of good family, and she was flying from Basel to Paris for the wedding, two days away. But typically, she missed her plane. There was another one in two hours, so no harm done, except that she ran into a guy she knew, and he suggested that they repair to the airline’s lounge. They made themselves comfortable, had a couple of drinks, and she missed the next plane, which was the last until the following morning. She did not phone Paris; she was too embarrassed. She and her companion checked into a hotel and spent the night; in the morning, she decided she didn’t really want to get married after all, and, dreading the bother of explanations and recriminations, she simply put the whole thing out of her mind. Whether there were recriminations at a later time, she didn’t say.

Clearly, she was too flaky for me; she never arrived anywhere less than half an hour late, while I – unconventional by the standards of Midwood -- was in fact a dutiful and punctual person. We became instead what came to be known as friends with benefits. She moved into her own brownstone on 95th Street, which gave her even more privacy. We became what were sometimes called fuckbuddies – or friends with benefits, except that implies that we did other things that friends did, but we never went to the movies or out to lunch. We’d call each other up after an absence of two or three months, and if we were both unattached, we’d try out some of those positions I’d been curious about – including ones she knew that I hadn’t heard of and couldn’t have imagined. The relationship was unencumbered by any real emotion; there was a sort of generalized gratitude on my part for the plum that had dropped into my lap, and a mild tenderness for her, but commitment was the last thing either of us was interested in. I had, over the next few years, several serious girlfriends, but in the lulls between these affairs, I resorted to casual sex went with Mary. But over time, our encounters tapered off, and finally ceased altogether.