We could also, I suggested, go home.
She looked frightened and unhappy. We walked a while more. She made the suggestion again.
“You don’t have any birth control,” I said.
“I just finished my period yesterday,” she explained. She couldn’t possibly, she said, get pregnant now.
I felt sorry for her. Her situation with her mother seemed to me at once awful and impossible. We turned into the park. The sun by now was coming up. In a thicket, she put her arms around me and we began to make out.
While the sun broke fitfully through the summer overcast, we had sex.
She was a great deal happier afterward.
“You know,” I said, as we put our clothing back together, “you really have to go home.”
She sighed and nodded.
Eventually, though, we went to her friend Judy’s house, from which she phoned her mother. (“Hello, Mom …? I stayed over at Judy’s last night. I’m sorry I didn’t phone you. …”) Then I walked her to the subway and saw her onto the train. Fifteen minutes later I was back in the park, sitting on one of the benches, leaning forward with my elbows on the knees of my jeans. I was exhausted. I wondered if the friendship was not getting out of hand. It was the second time we’d actually been to bed in a year, but it was not where I wanted the friendship to be going.
What was I doing?
The previous summer, just before Dad’s death, up at the Breadloaf Writers’ Conference, I’d begun what I’d since planned out as a huge novel. Why wasn’t I working on it? Just who was I? Where was I going? Through my tiredness, questions glimmered.
I was a young black man, light-skinned enough so that four out of five people who met me, of whatever race, assumed I was white. (Some figured I was Italian or possibly Spanish.) I was a homosexual who now knew he could function heterosexually.
And I was a young writer whose early attempts had already gotten him a handful of prizes, a few scholarships — prizes and scholarships, most of which Marilyn had already won for her own writing a year before I had.
I spread my arms out on the back of the bench.
So, I thought, you are neither black nor white.
You are neither male nor female.
And you are that most ambiguous of citizens, the writer.
There was something at once very satisfying and very sad, placing myself at this pivotal suspension. It seemed, in the park at dawn, a kind of revelation — a kind of center, formed of a play of ambiguities, from which I might move in any direction.
A few weeks later, Marilyn told me she had missed her next period. “Should you get a pregnancy test?” I asked her, worried.
“Oh, probably,” she said.
6.8. She went for the test.
A day later on the underground subway platform at 125th Street, she met me in the early afternoon. “Well,” she said. “I’m pregnant.” We talked for an hour, as one subway and another racketed past. (Sitting on the bench at the Forty-second Street subway platform a year before, she’d first read me the poem, two of whose ten-line stanzas I’ve used to head all this, when we’d emerged from some other adolescent adventure, chaste as far as each other was concerned, and firm in our friendship.) Abortions were illegal and generally presumed to be dangerous. I suggested one anyway, though neither of us knew where to go to get one or how to pay for one. For our different reasons she looked frightened and unhappy and I felt frightened and unhappy — convinced I must not let it show.
More trains passed.
I was living at Bob’s, then, and I knew Marilyn desperately wanted to get away from her own home. (She had left twice between the ages of sixteen and eighteen, once having gotten a Lower East Side apartment and a part-time clerical job at NYU. Her mother had had her brought back by the police, her bank account frozen, and her scholarship revoked. Girls could be made wards of the court until age twenty-one for such delinquent behavior in 1961.) We could get married, I suggested, and you could have the baby.
She liked the idea.
But look, I said. You know I am queer. That’s not going to change, I explained.
I’d be very silly if I expected it to, she said.
You’re really up to getting involved with someone like me?
I’m pretty much involved with you already.
You really wouldn’t mind that I’m going to be sleeping with men — probably a lot.
I haven’t minded it up to now, she said.
So we discussed that for another half hour.
By the time we’d left each other that afternoon, we’d decided to get married. My image of the future was something like an apartment with separate bedrooms; a room for each of us to write, with shared housework; and the coming child …
As a fantasy, it produced a worried smile. But the feeling was basically pleasant.
Once we returned to New York after our Detroit wedding at City Hall, however, reality turned out to be that we slept together in a single bed, had sex twice a week or more; most of the housework and much of the cooking fell to me; and writing became more and more difficult for Marilyn and, as it became so, an area of greater and greater resentment.
6.9. Marilyn had two very close young women friends, Judy and Gail. Judy had been a child actress on Broadway and had already danced with James Waring’s avant-garde troupe. Gail was Italian and from New Jersey, with endless enthusiasms for Camus, Kafka, and Hesse. They’d met in the first days of Marilyn’s French class at NYU. Smart and adventurous, they were at times as close, or closer, to Marilyn’s early writing than I was. The three clove together for the whole of her years in college and, now and again with protracted interruptions, throughout their young womanhood.
Twenty years later, when I had run into Judy and was reminiscing about some of those early days, she said, “Chip, when you were seventeen, eighteen, you were simply a dish. You were smart. And you were nice. We knew you were queer — you used to go on to me about it enough — but what did that mean back then? When we were seventeen, the three of us used to spend hours talking about how we were going to get you into bed. Marilyn just won.”
7
7. Three weeks after our marriage, Marilyn’s mother must have worked herself up to coming down to take her daughter back home. Marilyn’s living in some tenement on the Lower East Side was ridiculous. Hilda had to do something about it. So she enlisted her brother. The two of them came down to the Lower East Side.
She must have been very upset, and though I have no way to know for sure, I suspect she may even have been perturbed enough to worry the stolid, older Abe, who, with his wife, Marion, owned a small factory that made sports clothes.
Marilyn was out seeing some friends; I was at home that night, cleaning. With a pail in the middle of the kitchen, I was mopping the bare wood floor when the key in the doorbell was twisted loudly.
Mop in hand, I opened the door. “Hilda,” I said. It was the first time my mother-in-law had come down. “Come on in.”
“Where’s Marilyn?” she said.
Uncle Abe hung back in the hall.
“She’s not here,” I said. “Come on in. I was just mopping — ”
“I don’t want to come in!” she said. “I want Marilyn!”
“She’s not here, now,” I said. “Are you sure you don’t want to — ”
“I think we better go inside,” Abe said, behind his sister.