7.91. Another clerk at Barnes & Noble was a young woman a few years older than Marilyn and I. Her name was Rose. She had bright red hair and was given to diaphanous blue dresses. She lived a block to the northeast in a building in better condition than ours by several degrees. After I invited her over for dinner one evening, she took on a motherly attitude toward us.
Rose had been taking a Shakespeare class that met evenings at the New School for Social Research. Nothing would do but that we attend the next six-week session. The instructor, a Professor Lewis, was a theatrical and enthusiastic gentleman with a reputation for making “dead topics” come to life. Not that Shakespeare was particularly dead for either Marilyn or me. But this session, the plays to be read were As You Like It, Coriolanus, The Tempest, and King Lear. And I had read the two comedies but not the tragedies.
At the first evening’s gathering that November, on the third floor of the building on Thirteenth Street, Professor Lewis led a truly exciting discussion of Coriolanus — that play of a son with a strong, strong mother, in which the ghosts of the grain riots that perturbed fifteenth-century England are manifested among the lines of Shakespeare’s ancient Romans.
Two weeks later, our first class on Lear began with Professor Lewis sitting on the corner of his desk, reading the opening scene to us, paraphrasing as he went.
In his explication of the scene-one altercation between Lear and Kent, just as Lear is preparing to curse Cordelia, I realized, as Professor Lewis stopped to give an explanation now of this line, now of that one, that he’d interpreted Lear’s interruption of Kent’s petition with line 144 (“The bow is bent and drawn. Make from the shaft”) as “You’ve spoken too long. Get to your point,” i.e., “Your bow is bent and drawn, Kent. Let your arrow fly,” as if, indeed, the line were another version of Gertrude’s exhortation to Polonius in Hamlet, “More matter, with less art.”
In the discussion that followed, I took what I thought was the mildest exception and suggested the line was better interpreted as: “My anger is ready to become action. If you do not move away from it, it will strike you too,” i.e., “My bow is bent and drawn, Kent. Move away from the arrow.” I pointed out that he’d conflated the meanings of “bow” and “shaft” (i.e., “bow” and “arrow”).
I thought I was pointing out the most obvious of mistakes and expected Professor Lewis to say something like, “Oh, of course,” and was quite surprised when he declared that here “shaft” meant “any piece of wood” (I’m sure he was thinking of “staff”) and that the word here, in fact, meant “bow”! My reading was, he explained, obviously and patently wrong. The argument became heated, with Marilyn and me as the chief spokespersons for my reading and the rest of the class on Lewis’s side.
At one point, he actually took a vote — as if the question could be decided in such a manner!
At that point, I decided it was time to get up off it. And did — so as not to interrupt the class further. But poor Rose, a few seats away from us and intuiting that we were correct and that Lewis was wrong (“I know the difference between ‘shaft’ and ‘staff’ perfectly well. And ‘shaft’ means ‘bow’!” he had declared. “I don’t care what it says in your dictionary!”), was the most upset person in the class.
7.92. On two or three evenings, with Marilyn, I searched up an old building on James Street — one of those nineteenth-century wooden tenements with a high stone stoop you could still find occupied back then, here and there in Manhattan. In the back apartment with its metal sink and scratched walls, another Barnes & Noble stock clerk, Billy (“Now don’t get that confused with Saint James Street,” he’d explained carefully. “They run right off each other.”) had invited us for dinner. Not that this was a particularly egalitarian era — still, both Marilyn and I were a bit surprised at the young, dark-haired woman (“This is my girlfriend, Bobbi.”) busily making spaghetti and salad in Billy’s bachelor digs. Other times I remember Billy and Bobbi coming to our apartment on Fifth Street — where I would make spaghetti one night, or chili another.
7.93. One winter’s afternoon, when the enamel sink top was covered with what was to become dinner, I picked up an oddly shaped green pepper, about twice as long as most and rather thinner, with a gently phallic curve — it looked more like a cucumber — Marilyn came up to me and put her hand on my shoulder.
“What’s that?” she asked.
“Green pepper,” I said. Then I nodded to the stove, where, on the bottom of the Dutch oven, in a slather of bacon grease, bits of onion were sautéing like a scatter of translucent rectangular pearls. “Beef stew.”
She nodded at the pepper. “Looks like yours,” she said.
I frowned at it. “So it does,” I said. “Well”—I raised the kitchen knife — “let’s castrate the fucker,” and whacked off the end of the pepper on the small cutting board. Then I whacked off two more pieces —
And glanced at Marilyn, who’d said, “Oh …!”
I saw she’d started to cry. “Oh, hey —!” I said and put my arm around her. “I was only kidding! I’m sorry — ”
“I know,” she said, laughing a little herself, while the tears kept on. “But it was so sweet — ”
By the time the rest of the stew was on to simmer, I think we ended up in bed, her thin arms holding hard around my neck, both of our breaths smelling faintly of green pepper.
7.94. Billy didn’t like many foods. When I invited him over the first time, I’d been going on about one or another of my culinary extravaganzas, but the tall, sunken-chested, Jewish young man, with his square face, frizzy hair, and glasses, said: “Now you just fix something simple for me. If I’m going to come, I just want something simple.”
7.95. Minor infidelities? One newly chill October night, cruising the Williamsburg Bridge walkway ended me up with a tall Midwesterner in jeans and a navy-blue wool shirt. As we walked down Delancey to his studio loft, he told me his name was Jack Smith. I realized he was an experimental filmmaker, whose work I’d read Susan Sontag praise in the Village Voice.
Inside, a low-wattage bulb over the corner cot lit only half the messy bedding and a circle of dark floor boards. We stripped down, and, after a night of crowded sleep, I woke — alone — to gray light falling through the tall windows, left from when the place had been an industrial storeroom.
I pushed up from under the army blankets, looking around. It was six times the size it had seemed when, in the dark, we’d entered.
Still sleepy, but up and dressed, Smith was walking about, pretty much ignoring me.
In another corner, among sets and props and beamed racks leaning against the walls or forming makeshift dividers, an orange and red tasseled print partly curtained an alcove. From behind the skew hanging stepped a quizzical Puerto Rican transvestite in a coral blouse, a worn tan sweater, and wearing a blue and pink head kerchief. While sitting on the cot’s edge, I got my drawers and socks up from the floor, and we began to talk. “Hello, I’m René.” Holding my underpants, I stood up to shake his extended, olive, manicured hand. “René Rivera. Jack’s letting me stay here, between parts. I’m a star.” He showed me his “dressing room,” with brass-steaded bed, vanity, and brightly light-ringed mirror, crowded against a rack of “costumes,” behind the hanging shawl. “Just like in It Happened One Night.” He’d been working under the name Mario Montez: “And I’m thinking of going with it.” Years before I’d seen The Cobra Woman, with his female namesake, on Channel Five afternoon television and grinned at the cleverness. Obviously he was pleased I’d recognized the reference. “I’m the lead in Jack’s next film. Maybe you’ve seen me in the movies already, darling …?” He’d acted in a number of Smith projects. “I’m surprised how many people coming through here have.” René/Montez was affable, chatty, and as considerate of a nineteen-year-old, somewhat befuddled by the morning after, as was possible. On the corner hotplate, he boiled up water for white crock mugs of instant coffee, tinkling semi-clean spoons within their rims, while I got my clothes on. He offered me canned condensed Pet Milk, sugar (“Though that condensed stuff is so sweet, you don’t really need it”), and kept up a pleasant run of early morning small talk, generally evincing a human level of concern — while Smith, on whom I’d laid three loads by dawn and from whom I’d pulled out two, ambled between leaning flats and papier maché scenery, occupied by what creative problem I would never know. Eventually, he rolled a morning joint and, from the studio’s far side, absently asked if I wanted a hit. Once I said no thank you, Smith pretended I wasn’t there.