Graduation from Science that year passed as a happening parenthetical to the rest of my life. I was to receive the school creative writing award, and, with half a dozen other award winners, I refused to be at the graduation assembly to be called up on the stage — and be displayed — accepting my plaque.
For the same reason, my picture was not in the school yearbook. Though I still took my learning seriously, a year of this attitude from the school’s administration made it hard to take seriously anything the school officially said or did about that learning.
I came to school on graduation day, but once the proceedings started, I and a few other school friends who felt much the same — among them my musician friend Dave, and Ian — went off and sat on one of the grassy banks of the playing field across from the school to talk through the afternoon.
Eventually some boys came by, drinking beer. They were from De Witt Clinton High School on the other side of the huge field that was too overgrown for anyone ever to play on it. They too were cutting graduation.
They asked where we were from.
When we said Science, they poured the beer over our heads and half-heartedly tried to start a fight — not with any sense of malicious fun, but with only the tentative boredom of people carrying out a ritual whose purpose had been forgotten, whose origins are obscure. Actually I think it had something to do with the fact that Science’s swimming team, who averaged eighteen months younger and half a head shorter than theirs, still beat theirs consistently. And now they had to endure an added ignominy: since the opening of our new, ten-million-dollar building, our team had to practice over in De Witt Clinton’s pool.
We yelled at them and got shoved and shoved them back and told them to cut it out.
They did — and went away.
The fallout of the day was that I learned beer is sticky when it dries in your hair.
6.66. One of the first things I did during my second term at City College was to stage Perseus with some of our friends: Dave, Esther, and myself in January or February. It had two afternoon performances in the Grand Ballroom of the Student Union.
For the rest of the afternoon, after the first day’s show, I discussed Sappho’s meter with one of the older students from my Greek class, and we rolled Catullus’s onomatopoetic evocation of the sea about in our mouths (… litus ut longe resonante eoa / tunditur unda …), declaiming it loudly in the all-but-empty ballroom beneath its ancient chandeliers, comparing it with Homer’s.
6.67. Before his death my father had already been ill for nearly a year and had spent great blocks of time at home. Since all we seemed to do was argue, through most of my senior year in high school I’d felt the best thing I could do was stay away from the apartment as much as possible. Much of that time I’d spent at the apartment of some older friends of Marilyn’s — Victor (a young man from England, with whom Marilyn had initiated her own adult sexual exploration pleasantly enough a year or so before), Lloyd, Steve, Stewy, and Paul — on Seventy-fourth Street. Later, after he died and I was struggling with college, I hung out with my friend Bob, a year my senior, in his apartment on 113th Street, with all his ham radio equipment. He’d lived in Morningside Gardens and we’d been friends since my family moved there in ’55. Bob had been anxious for me to move in with him as a roommate for some time. Alas, none of this did much to put my mother at ease.
The friendship between Marilyn and me had gone on to include some necking and petting, usually commenced by her. My own feelings about it were uncertain. I knew this was not where, by inclination, my urges went. But I was complimented by her interest. I was also curious if I could function heterosexually.
After my return from Breadloaf, after school began, after my father died, and a month later, I’d finally moved in with Bob, Marilyn came over one afternoon while I was there and Bob was out, and made it clear that we were to go to bed.
What about birth control, I wanted to know. I didn’t have any condoms.
I’ve got a diaphragm, she explained. For the last year or so, she had been involved in a number of affairs with “older men” (twenty-three, twenty-one, twenty-eight), which made her, to me, quite sophisticated.
All right, I said, I’ll give it a try. But I’m not promising anything.
In Bob’s back room I discovered (and was, I confess, pleased about it) I could perform heterosexually — but, while I enjoyed the laughing and the play, as well as the orgasms and the affection, I knew this just wasn’t what I was interested in, save intellectually. There was nothing particularly unpleasant about it. But there was a whole positive aspect, somewhere in the hard-to-define area between the emotions and the physical that I knew from my experiences with other men was missing. (I certainly had no feeling that the experience “cured” me in any way.) As I explained to Marilyn, a man could physically excite me from a distance. I seemed to need actual contact with a woman in order to become excited — and I had to think about men in order to reach a climax.
She seemed to find this interesting.
But I was pleased we emerged from it still friends. And I put it pretty much out of my mind, aware from time to time that Marilyn still wanted physical contact, and not particularly resentful — from time to time — of giving it. But her main sexual interests seemed to lie with other people anyway. I was someone to talk about them with — though sometimes her interest in what I was doing seemed almost oppressive. We still necked and petted. From time to time I wondered if I would ever be able to strike up a friendship with a male as interesting as my friendship with Marilyn, and which would also include sex.
6.671. On my nineteenth birthday, Marilyn gave me a sonnet entitled “Sous l’Arc de Triomphe, 1 April 1961,” about two people who did not manage to meet in Paris that year.
6.68. In spring I restaged Perseus for a second-floor combination coffee shop and art gallery on Tenth Street just east of Third Avenue — called, of course, the Coffee Gallery. Dave’s part was taken by a young actor, Danny (another Science graduate, he). The evening performance was filled out by Marilyn’s presentation of a Browningesque poetic portrait called “Helen” and by my reading a short story that had appeared in Dynamo back in my junior year, “Silent Monologue for Lefty.” Each weekend night (it ran for five weeks), we recited our lines among the small tables (most of which were empty), with their squat candles flickering in the half-dark, put on or removed our makeup in the gallery’s tiny back room (mostly under Danny’s supervision). And as we walked to or from the Tenth Street gallery, Marilyn and I talked of literature and poetry and art.
6.7. One evening in June of ’61, Marilyn showed up with scratches on her face and bruises. She and her mother had gotten in another fight. She did not want to go home. So we spent the evening wandering around the city together, talking about her problems, her affairs (she was juggling a couple of older boyfriends at the time, with whom she’d been sexually involved; the fight may have been about one of them), her poems.
By one, two, three o’clock in the morning, I’d made several attempts to bring the evening to an end, pointing out that she must go home eventually — that I really was out far beyond the time I was comfortable. But her face fell. Once she cried. She did not want to be alone. And she did not want to have to return to her mother’s. My arm around her shoulder, we strolled around Central Park, now inside on the grass-bordered paths, now outside along the stone wall by the benches under the trees, now along Central Park West, and, an hour later, along Fifth Avenue, till finally we reached the Conservatory Gardens, with their vined arcades across from the white, concaved facade of the old Fifth Avenue Hospital. We could go in the park, she suggested, and make love.