Then it dawned on me that people—other women—were different than me. They could feel things I couldn’t. And when I started reading books I ran into the words “frigid,” “rejected,” and “lesbian.” I wondered if I was all three of those things.
A man who had kissed me once had said it was very possible I was a lesbian because I apparently had no response to males—meaning him. I didn’t contradict him because I didn’t know what I was. There were times even when I didn’t feel human and times when all I could think of was dying. There was also the sinister fact that a well-made woman had always thrilled me to look at.
Now, having fallen in love, I knew what I was. It wasn’t a lesbian. The world and its excitement over sex didn’t seem crazy. In fact, it didn’t seem crazy enough.
There was only one cloud in my paradise, and it kept growing. At first nothing had mattered to me except my own love. After a few months I began to look at his love. I looked, listened, and looked, and I couldn’t tell myself more than he told me. I couldn’t tell if he really loved me.
He grinned a lot when we were together and kidded me a lot. I knew he liked me and was happy to be with me. But his love didn’t seem anything like mine. Most of his talk to me was a form of criticism. He criticized my mind. He kept pointing out how little I knew and how unaware of life I was. It was sort of true. I tried to know more by reading books. I had a new friend, Natasha Lytess. She was an acting coach and a woman of deep culture. She told me what to read. I read Tolstoy and Turgenev. They excited me, and I couldn’t lay a book down till I’d finished it. And I would go around dreaming of all the characters I’d read and hearing them talk to each other. But I didn’t feel that my mind was improving.
I never complained about his criticism, but it hurt me. His cynicism hurt me, too.
I’d say, “I’ve never felt like this before.”
And he’d answer, “You will, again.”
“I don’t know,” I’d say. “I just know that this is everything.”
He’d answer, “You mustn’t take a few sensations so seriously.” Then he’d ask, “What’s most important in life to you?”
“You are,” I’d say.
“After I’m gone,” he’d smile.
I’d cry.
“You cry too easily,” he’d say. “That’s because your mind isn’t developed. Compared to your breasts it’s embryonic.” I couldn’t contradict him because I had to look up that word in a dictionary. “Your mind is inert,” he’d say. “You never think about life. You just float through it on that pair of water wings you wear.”
Alone, I would lie awake repeating all he’d said. I’d think, “He can’t love me or he wouldn’t be so conscious of my faults. How can he love me if I’m such a goof to him?”
I didn’t mind being a goof if only he loved me. I felt when we were together that I walked in the gutter and he on the sidewalk. All I did was keep looking up to see if there was love in his eyes.
We were in my room one night, and he started talking about our future.
“I’ve thought of us getting married,” he said, “but I’m afraid it’s impossible.”
I didn’t say anything.
“It would be all right for me,” he said, “but I keep thinking of my son. If we were married and anything should happen to me—such as my dropping dead—it would be very bad for him.”
“Why?” I asked.
“It wouldn’t be right for him to be brought up by a woman like you,” he said. “It would be unfair to him.”
After he left, I cried all night, not over what he had said but over what I had to do. I had to leave him.
The moment I thought it, I realized I’d known it for a long time. That’s why I’d been sad—and desperate. That’s why I had tried to make myself more and more beautiful for him, why I had clung to him as if I were half mad. Because I had known it was ending.
He didn’t love me. A man can’t love a woman for whom he feels half contempt. He can’t love her if his mind is ashamed of her.
When I saw him again the next day I said good-bye to him. He stood staring at me while I told him how I felt. I cried, sobbed, and ended up in his arms.
But a week later I said good-bye again. This time I walked out of his house with my head up. Two days later I was back. There were a third and fourth good-bye. But it was like rushing to the edge of a roof to jump off. I stopped each time and didn’t jump, and turned to him and begged him to hold me. It’s hard to do something that hurts your heart, especially when it’s a new heart and you think that one hurt may kill it.
Finally I left him, and two days passed and I was still away. I sat in my room watching myself.
“Stick it out another day,” I’d say. “The hurt’s getting less already.”
It wasn’t, but I stuck it out a third and fourth day. Then he came after me. He knocked on my door. I walked to the door and leaned against it.
“It’s me,” he said.
“I know.”
“Please let me in,” he said.
I didn’t answer. He started banging on the door. When I heard him banging, I knew I was through with my love affair. I knew I was over it. The pain was still there but it would go away.
“Please,” he kept saying, “I want to talk to you.”
“I don’t want to see you,” I said. “Please go away.”
He raised his voice and banged harder.
“But you’re mine,” he cried at me. “You can’t leave me out here.”
The neighbors opened their doors. One of them yelled she’d call the police if he didn’t quit making a disturbance.
He went away.
He came back again—as I had done before. He loved me now. He met me in the street and walked beside me pouring his heart out. But it didn’t mean anything. When his hand gripped my arm, my arm didn’t buzz, my heart didn’t leap.
17
i buy a present
During the time I loved this man, I kept looking for work. I had forgotten about my “career.” I looked for work because I thought he would love me more if I were employed. I felt it made him a little nervous to have me just sitting around and doing nothing but wait for him. A man sometimes gets guilty and angry if you love him too much.
Besides I was broke. I was living on money I could borrow.
Someone I met at a lunch counter told me they were making retakes on a movie called Love Happy and needed a girl for a bit part. Harpo and Groucho Marx were in the movie.
I went on the set and found the producer Lester Cowan in charge. He was a small man with dark, sad eyes. He introduced me to Groucho and Harpo Marx. It was like meeting familiar characters out of Mother Goose. There they were with the same happy, crazy look I had seen on the screen. They both smiled at me as if I were a piece of French pastry.
“This is the young lady for the office bit,” said Mr. Cowan.
Groucho stared thoughtfully at me.
“Can you walk?” he demanded.
I nodded.
“I am not referring to the type of walking my Tante Zippa has mastered,” said Groucho. “This role calls for a young lady who can walk by me in such a manner as to arouse my elderly libido and cause smoke to issue from my ears.”
Harpo honked a horn at the end of his cane and grinned at me.
I walked the way Groucho wanted.
“Exceedingly well done,” he beamed.
Harpo’s horn honked three times, and he stuck his fingers in his mouth and blew a piercing whistle.
“Walk again,” said Mr. Cowan.
I walked up and down in front of the three men. They stood grinning.
“It’s Mae West, Theda Bara, and Bo Peep all rolled into one,” said Groucho. “We shoot the scene tomorrow morning. Come early.”