It was my father who handled my sexual education. He did this by taking me to the family doctor, who had an office on Park Avenue with two exposures and an impressive desk. We sat, the three of us, and the doctor began by asking me — he wanted an honest answer, he said — if I played with myself. I did not understand. He then elaborated somewhat. “No,” I said, which was true. He seemed almost disappointed but nevertheless undertook to describe how life was created. The egg, he explained, could not produce a baby chick all by itself. Something else was needed. I sat listening though not certain what he was talking about. He had a rugged face and silvery, Airedale hair. My father — I remember him always as having a comfortable double chin — was dutifully listening too.
The other thing that was necessary, the doctor continued, was a sort of kick to get the process started. He asked me if I knew what delivered this kick. He waited but I had no answer. The rooster, he explained.
With this, for me, improbable picture now in place he proceeded, with great discretion, wearing surgical gloves, as it were, to describe the principle of the kick as it related to humans. I more or less understood but did not find it intriguing.
I don’t recall what my father said as we left. He may have asked me if I had any questions I hadn’t wanted to ask in the office. I am certain my reply would have been no. With that, my father would have felt he had done what was expected of him.
At birthday parties, sitting in a circle, we played spin the bottle. A boy spun it and the girl it pointed to he kissed, usually with embarrassment. I bent awkwardly across towards Regina, the dark-haired daughter of the Greek florist, or Gisela, frail and blonde. The kisses meant nothing. The girls were of an age when only their long hair and instincts distinguished them from us.
In the last year of grammar school, a bright, curly-haired friend one afternoon asked me the same introductory question the family doctor had. This time I lied.
“How many times?” he asked.
Oh, I couldn’t count them, I said, and gave the first figure that came to me, modest but not, I felt, inconsequential, “Twelve or thirteen.” I was rewarded with a stunning revelation. “You know Faith?” he said.
“Yes.”
“I did it with her.”
“You did?”
“In her parents’ apartment,” he said. He added an indelible line, “She spread her legs so nice.”
The brazen courage of it. It was unimaginable. He lived over near Third Avenue. She lived in a great, respectable building on Madison, a fortress. To this day it remains to me a kind of landmark. Over the years the city becomes filled with them, certain side streets, apartment houses on corners, hotels.
What he had done with Faith, though I was amazed at the audacity, did not make me envious. I had no real appreciation of it. I saw its daring but I was unable to imagine its pleasure or even to fill the blank of what had led up to it. How did he happen to be in her apartment? In her room? What had he said to lead her — I could picture only abrupt refusal — to the act?
Months later one noon, looking through the magazines in a cigar store, I came across a pamphlet with blue paper covers. Someone had placed it there, concealed behind a magazine; it was not part of the stock. The provocative title I have forgotten, but as I began to read I underwent a conversion. Within, described straightforwardly, was everything the doctor and my friend had failed to clarify, the method, the exact details, the physical sensation. The door had suddenly opened, barely, to be sure, but my involvement was intense. Holding the booklet down where no one could see it I read the pages again and again, and fairly trembling with discovery, like someone who has found a secret letter, I hid the precious thing where I had found it and left the store. I was going to try certain things, and all that I had read, in time, I found to be true.
Years afterwards, at a luncheon, I sat next to a green-eyed young woman, a poet, who declared loftily that you learned nothing from books, it was life you learned from, passion, experience. The host, a fine old man in his seventies, heard her and disagreed. His hair was white. His voice had the faint shrillness of age. “No, everything I’ve ever learned,” he said, “has come from books. I’d be in darkness without them.”
I didn’t know if he was speaking of Balzac or Strindberg or even John O’Hara, to whom his sister had been married and from whose books one can learn a great deal, much of it unsettling, but in no particular order I tried to think of books that had instructed me, and among them, not insignificant, was the anonymous twenty-page booklet in blue covers that had described the real game of the grown-up world.
—
Then as now, the best weeks of the year were at Christmas. In the corner of the living room was the dark tree beneath which, early in the morning, the presents could be found, unhoped-for things, a green electric train, huge and perfect, with doors to the long passenger cars that could be pushed open and a massive engine exactly like ones dwarfing the people on the platform at Penn Station.
When I was older, thirteen and fourteen, we went to Washington at Christmas. There were the great vaults, filled with icy breath, of Union Station, the stone columns of the long façade, the wide avenues, and the Capitol swimming in light. My older cousin, who was a chess champion, and my uncle, large, broad-featured, and bald, were there to meet us. The house, in a modest neighborhood, was small but it was a house—there was a basement, a yard — which alone made it exciting. Snow was falling, the lawns were white, the brows and shoulders of statues, the roofs of snug homes. Snow was slanting through the air, the snow of the holidays with their many parties, at which I would be the youngest but somehow accepted by being an out-of-town visitor.
Harold, my cousin, was sixteen, a thrilling age: it meant that he could drive. The family car was a Plymouth. Off we went in the night to exciting addresses on streets he knew. We were from ordinary families but his schoolmates were from wealthy ones, some of them at least: boys who would be taken into large family businesses, and ravishing girls. There was one velvet-skirted brunette with whom I was infatuated. Gloria was her name. That first night she smiled at me. I could not believe I was talking to her or that a night or two later she remembered. I finally gave in to my cousin’s taunts and telephoned her. I was meant to ask her out. In a warm voice, No, she couldn’t, she said, she had already been asked, but would I call her again? I was ecstatic. I felt it was a triumph.
There was sledding on a hill near the house, where we fell in with the just-blooming daughter of a Marine officer who lived nearby. Soon we were sharing a sled. I sat behind her, arms around her waist as we sped down to crash in the snowbanks, my hands having moved higher as if by accident and the two of us lying there for a minute before rising to hurry back up. Delirious rides, repeated again and again.
Do you think she …? I asked my cousin uncertainly. Yes, he said, but seduction, despite the plans we made, proved beyond me. Instead, she and I drank hot chocolate in the kitchen, and when it was revealed there was no one else in the house, suddenly become cautious, she fled.
The pleasure one might, all innocent, have had. The bare, chilly bedrooms of those years, the nights of aching in darkness. Was it meant to be otherwise? Not really.
Colored by those Christmases, perhaps, others have all seemed to me exciting, like some glamorous invitation. It is romantic Christmas that seems to reign, Fifth Avenue Christmas with all the stores, faces shining in the cold, office-party Christmas with its abandon, Christmas in Paris in a postage-stamp hotel near Notre Dame, Christmas in Chamonix and the brightly lit casino, all of them somehow descended from the crowded young parties of 1938 and 1939.