After a brief bout of full-time in the Barnes & Noble children’s department, working under an energetic blond character with a handsome, hawklike face gone red and riotous from adult acne, I’d quit sometime after Valentine’s day.
The largest change, however, is that we got a double bed (at about the same time I left B & N: it was a gift, but from whom I don’t remember), which meant we now slept in the front bedroom.
One reason the bed remains so firmly in mind is because its springs were loose. On one of Marilyn’s last days at Ace, I remember, foggily, her rising and dressing for work, while I dozed on and off. I woke up as Marilyn came to the bed and leaned over. “Okay,” she said, “bye-bye,” and leaned down to give me a kiss.
“Bye …” I said.
As she stood up, I felt a blinding pain. It was complete and total and pure as the white light of death. It left me unable to move or blink or make a sound. Through it, as through a veil of magnesium fire, I saw Marilyn hurry from the room, heard her go through the living room and into the kitchen, and a moment later, close the door behind her.
Somewhere in it I managed to gasp out one breath, gasp in another, trying some movement that — at this point — made me clamp my jaws and eyes.
What had happened (and how I figured it out or how I got loose from it remains at this point a blur) was that one of the springs in the bed had suddenly come loose; the awl-sharp coil had thrust up through the thin mattress pad, the sheet, and jabbed an inch and a half into my left buttock!
By the time Marilyn came home that evening, I was patched up; and the spring had been wired down.
In the living room, the daybed continued to serve as a couch, till it was finally returned (carried on our heads, up Avenue B) to Randy and Donya, who’d now moved down to the East Side too.
17.2. One evening I was to meet Marilyn up at her mother’s apartment for our ritual Friday night dinner. On my way up to the Bronx, when I got off at the 175th Street station, I decided to stop in and see what sort of sexual activity was going on in the subway john there. I’d never gone into that one before, perhaps because I usually came there with Marilyn.
I pushed into the yellow-tiled space, with its dim, caged light-bulbs. There was only one guy at the urinal, a tall workman in greens and scuffed orange construction boots — which had, only in the last year or so, become standard wear for the nation’s laborers. I stood a stall away from him, and we glanced at each other. When I smiled, he turned toward me.
I reached for his penis.
Holding it, I realized something was wrong with it, but, for the moment, couldn’t quite figure what. For its thickness and hardness it was too short. It ended in a kind of flat stump, like a sawed-off dowel, without the collar or taper of glans, making me think he was uncircumcised. Only there was no cuff of skin.
That’s when he said, a little hoarsely, “That’s what there is. If you want it, it’s yours. But that’s it.” And I realized that, either from medical procedure or some other, the first inch or so had been amputated.
He came very fast.
I wanted to talk with him afterward, but he zipped up once we were finished and hurried away. I never saw him again, though I looked for him. But the image stayed, unsettlingly, awhile.
17.3. This happened late June:
Various fragments had been gathering in my head for a few days now. I’d made a few notes in the spiral notebook I always carried with me.
A surge of warmth followed an unseasonable spring coolness. As we neared the end of our first year of marriage, the tensions of the opening months had given way to a kind of calm. Ambling down the Bowery to the narrow stone steps that lead up to the Brooklyn Bridge’s central wooden walkway, Marilyn and I had been discussing the limits of the American “buddy novel” as a template for adventure fiction since we’d left the house. (Writing was something we could always talk about; often we took refuge in it when our more emotional problems threatened to swamp us. In the midst of high ire or deep depression, “Tell me about literature” from either of us was always a sign for truce; and the other would usually try to take up the topic.) As the late afternoon’s first violet understated the clouds over the sounds beyond the intersections of slant and vertical cables, we started across the bridge, talking about the problems of making the “social chronicle novel” as exciting as the “adventure novel” and worrying whether or not this could be done in science fiction.
Among the conclusions we reached that evening, as we strolled or paused at the rail with the cars sweeping by below us, or walked once more, fingers interlocked, cables wheeling above, was that for a novel, SF or otherwise, to show any aesthetic originality in the range of extant American fiction, it must portray, among many other sorts of relationships, at least one strong friendship between two women characters. Also, the major heterosexual relationship would have to involve a woman as active as the man. (Leslie Fiedler was shortly to announce that the proper subject for the novel was “mature heterosexual relations”; and we were too young to realize the phrase itself might just be — in our culture — a contradiction in terms.) Both characters must be developed as human beings, we decided, before they hooked up.
Do you remember the incident with the pockets?
The women friends who dropped by our Lower East Side apartment that year seemed to have only one topic of conversation. Most of them were Marilyn’s university friends, and they were all moving from the world of the university and home to the world of work and self-sufficiency. The most frequent topic of conversation was:
What do you do about jobs that advertised positions as “editors,” “travel agents,” or “stockbrokers” in the women’s classified section of the Times and that closed with the phrase: “Some typing required.” The inclusion of this phrase, all these young women had found out, meant that, regardless of the title of the job, you were going to be somebody’s secretary.
They didn’t want to be secretaries.
They had just completed university.
They wanted to be editors, travel agents, stockbrokers.
I must have sat and listened to hundreds of hours of conversation in which these young women tried to figure out strategies for how to deal with this. Some simply had refused to learn to type. Some refused to admit that they already knew. One strategy that, to me anyway, looked good at first was to respond to such an ad with: “I can type enough for my own correspondence,” which seemed to be putting it on the line: you lie to me, I’ll lie to you, and we both know what we’re talking about. The only problem with that tactic was that the people doing the hiring were not interested in hiring people who could — or who even wanted to — get around their strategies.
They wanted college-trained secretaries whom they could pay two-thirds or less of the salary they would have to pay someone coming out of secretarial school with no college diploma. And mostly they got them.
Yet this was women’s talk — and as such was as outside the official parameters of language as was the sex I indulged in.
What was within language was what appeared in the Times: want ads for women editors, women stockbrokers.
But I no more considered writing about what the women who came to my house were talking about than I would have considered discussing with my mother-in-law, over Friday night’s overdone roast beef, the mutilated cock in the men’s room.
17.31. For weeks before that afternoon, we had discussed what was necessary in fiction to portray characters of both sexes accurately: both male and female characters needed to be presented by purposeful, habitual, and gratuitous actions. With both men and women, the character’s economic anchors to the world of the tale had to be clearly shown. And I had already found out in one novel how hard, starting with these principles, it was to apply them egalitarianly.