I was often quite fond of them, though. For a while, I had a fun affair with a young—very young—Hungarian painter, whom I met at an art exhibition at the Park Avenue Armory. His name was Botond and he was an absolute lamb. I brought him home to my apartment the night I met him, and—right on the brink of sex—he told me that he didn’t need to use a prophylactic because “you are a nice woman, and I’m sure you are clean.” I sat up in bed, turned on the light, and said to this boy who was practically young enough to be my son, “Botond, now listen to me. I am a nice woman. But I need to tell you something important that you must never forget: if a woman is willing to go home and have sex with you after she’s only known you for an hour, she has done it before. Always, always, always use a prophylactic.”
Sweet Botond, with his round cheeks and his terrible haircut!
And then there was Hugh—a quiet, kind-faced widower who came in with his daughter one day to buy her a wedding dress. I found him to be so dear and attractive that after our business was completed, I slipped him my private phone number, saying, “Please call me any time you would like to spend a night together.”
I could tell that I’d embarrassed him, but I didn’t want to let him get away!
About two years later, I received a phone call one Saturday afternoon. It was Hugh! Once he had reintroduced himself—stammering nervously—he clearly had no idea how to continue the conversation. Smiling into the phone, I rescued him as quickly as I could. “Hugh,” I said, “it’s wonderful to hear from you. And you needn’t be embarrassed. I did say any time. Why don’t you come right on over?”
If you’re wondering if any of those men ever fell in love with me—well, sometimes they did. But I always managed to talk them out of it. It’s easy for a man who has just experienced good sex to believe that he is now in love. And I was good at sex, Angela, by this point. I’d certainly had enough practice at it. (As I said once to Marjorie, “The only two things I’ve ever been good at in this world are sex and sewing.” To which she responded: “Well, honey—at least you chose the right one to monetize.”) When men became too dewy-eyed with me, I merely explained to them that they were not in love with me, but with the sexual act itself, and they would usually calm down.
If you’re wondering whether I was ever in any physical danger from my nocturnal encounters with all these strange and unknown men, the only honest answer is yes. But it did not stop me. I was as careful as I could be, but I had nothing to go on but my instincts when choosing my men. Sometimes, I chose wrong. This is bound to happen. There were times, behind closed doors, when things got rougher and more dicey than I might have preferred. Not often, but sometimes. When that happened, I rode it out like an experienced sailor in a bad squall. I don’t know how else to explain it. And while I did have an unpleasant night every so often, I never felt enduringly harmed. Nor did the threat of danger ever deter me. These were risks I was willing to take. It was more important for me to feel free than safe.
And if you’re wondering whether I ever had crises of conscience about my promiscuity, I can honestly tell you: no. I did believe that my behavior made me unusual—because it didn’t seem to match the behavior of other women—but I didn’t believe that it made me bad.
I used to think that I was bad, mind you. During the dry years of the war, I still carried such a burden of shame about the incident with Edna Parker Watson, and the words “dirty little whore” never fully left my consciousness. But by the time the war ended, I was finished with all that. I think it had something to do with my brother being killed, and the painful belief that Walter had died without ever having enjoyed his life. The war had invested me with an understanding that life is both dangerous and fleeting, and thus there is no point in denying yourself pleasure or adventure while you are here.
I could have spent the rest of my life trying to prove that I was a good girl—but that would have been unfaithful to who I really was. I believed that I was a good person, if not a good girl. But my appetites were what they were. So I gave up on the idea of denying myself what I truly wanted. Then I sought ways to delight myself. As long as I stayed away from married men, I felt that I was doing no harm.
Anyway, at some point in a woman’s life, she just gets tired of being ashamed all the time.
After that, she is free to become whoever she truly is.
TWENTY-EIGHT
As for female friends, I had many.
Of course, Marjorie was my best friend, and Peg and Olive would always be my family. But Marjorie and I had a lot of other women around, too.
There was Marty—a doctoral candidate in literature at NYU, brilliant and funny, whom we’d met one day at a free concert on Rutherford Place. There was Karen—a receptionist at the Museum of Modern Art, who wanted to be a painter, and who had attended Parsons with Marjorie. There was Rowan, who was a gynecologist—which we all found terribly impressive, and also useful. There was Susan—a grade-school teacher with a passion for modern dance. There was Callie, who owned the flower shop around the corner. There was Anita, who came from money and never did anything at all—but she did get us a pirated key to Gramercy Park, so we appreciated her forever.
There were more women, too, who came and went out of my life. Sometimes Marjorie and I would lose a friend to marriage; other times we would gain a friend after a divorce. Sometimes a woman would move out of the city, sometimes she would move back. The tides of life came in and out. The circles of friendship grew, then shrank, then grew again.
But the gathering place for us women was always the same—our rooftop on Eighteenth Street, which we could access from the fire escape outside my bedroom window. Marjorie and I dragged a bunch of cheap folding chairs up there, and we would spend our evenings on the roof with our friends, anytime the weather was fine. Summer after summer, our little group of females would sit together under what passes for starlight in New York City, smoking our cigarettes, drinking our rotgut wine, listening to music on a transistor radio, and sharing with each other our big and small concerns of life.
During one brutally airless August heat wave, Marjorie managed to haul a big stand-up fan up onto our roof. This she plugged into my kitchen outlet, using a long industrial extension cord. As far as the rest of us were concerned, this made her a genius at the level of Leonardo da Vinci. We would sit in the artificial breeze of the fan, lifting our shirts to cool our breasts, and pretending that we were at a beach somewhere exotic.
Those are some of my happiest memories of the 1950s.
It was on the rooftop of our little bridal boutique that I learned this truth: when women are gathered together with no men around, they don’t have to be anything in particular; they can just be.
—
Then in 1955, Marjorie got pregnant.
I’d always feared it was going to be me who ended up pregnant—the smart bet would have been on me, obviously—but poor Marjorie was the one who got hit.
The culprit was an old married art professor, with whom she’d been having an affair for years. (Although Marjorie would have said that the culprit was herself, for wasting so much of her life with a married man who kept promising that he would leave his wife for her, if only Marjorie would “stop acting so Jewish.”)