expected to pull the missiles out of the air one by one, new
superheroes. The girls were serious and upset. Even those who
didn’t like each other talked quietly and respectful y. There
was one laugh: a joke about the only girl in the school we
46
Cuba 1
were sure was no virgin. She was famous as the school whore,
and she was widely envied though shunned on a normal day,
since she knew the big secret; but on this day, the last day, she
could have been crowned queen, sovereign of the girls. She
represented everything we wanted: she knew how to do it and
how it felt; she knew a lot of boys; she was really pret y and
laughed a lot, even though the other girls would not talk to
her. She had beautiful y curly brown hair and an hourglass
figure, but thin. She was Eve’s true descendant, the symbol of
what it meant to bite the apple. Tomorrow she would go back
to being the local slut, but on the day we were al going to die
she was Cinderel a an hour before midnight. I wished that
I could grow up, but I could not entirely remember why. I
waited with my schoolmates to die.
47
David Smith
He was one of the United States' greatest sculptors, not paid
attention to now but in my high school and college years he
was a giant of an artist. He was especially at ached to
Bennington College, where he had taught and near where he
lived. One night I went to a lecture by art critic Clement
Greenberg, probably the most famous visual arts writer of his
time. Greenberg was a name-dropping guy, and most of his
lecture was about the habits of his bet ers, the artists he
deigned to crown king or prince. At some point during the
lecture, Greenberg said that great sculptors never drew. A
huge man stood up, overshadowing the audience, and in a
deep bass said, “I do. " While Greenberg turned beet red and
apologized, the big guy talked about how important drawing
was, how sensual it was; he gave specifics about how it felt to
draw; he said that drawing taught one how to see and that
drawing was part of a continuous process of making art, like
breathing when you were asleep was part of life. After the
lecture a friend who was a painting student asked if I wanted
to go with her to meet David Smith. “I wouldn't want to
bother him, " I said, not having a clue that the big guy was
48
David Smith
David Smith and he was staying that night in Robert
Frost’s old house, owned by painter Kenneth Noland, rented
by the English sculptor Anthony Caro, who was teaching at
Bennington. We got into my friend’s truck and went. I felt
shielded by my painter friend. The visit was her brazen act,
not mine.
It was my first year at Bennington, and I did not know the
anthropology of the place. Anyone famous who came to
Bennington was provided with one or more Bennington girls;
my college was the archetypical brothel, which may have been
why, the semester before I matriculated, the English seniors
recreated the brothel in Joyce’s Ulys es as a senior project and
for the enjoyment of the professors.
So my friend and I got to the old Robert Frost house. It
was deep in the Vermont countryside, old, simple, painted
white, with hooks from the ceiling on which, I was told, animals
had been hung and salted. There were bookshelves, but they
were mostly empty, with only a few books about Kenneth
Noland, at least in the living room. Mr. Smith was deep in a
bot le of 100-proof Stolichnaya and scat ered like inanimate
dolls were some of my fellow students from Bennington,
each in a black sheath, each awaiting the pleasure of her host,
Anthony Caro, and his guest, David Smith. As happens with
habitually drunk fuckers of women, Smith could not have been
more indif erent to the women who were there for him, and
he wanted to talk to me. I was trying to leave, embarrassed for
49
Heartbreak
my classmates and too shy to talk to Smith. But Smith did not
have to be nice to the women acquired for him, so he wasn’t.
He dismissed my fellow students with a gesture of the hand
and told me and my friend to sit down and drink with him.
He said that he had always wanted to provide Bennington
with a graduate school in art; that his name had been on a
pro-Cuba petition signed by artists and intellectuals; that John
Kennedy had cal ed him up and told him to get his name of
of that petition or he’d never get his graduate school; that
he had removed his name and in so doing he had whored.
“Never whore, ” he said; “it ruins your art. ” He told me never
to tell anyone and until now, with some private exceptions,
I haven’t. He’s been dead a long time, and that puts him
beyond the shame he felt that night. He said that taking his
signature off the pro-Cuba petition had made him a whore
and he couldn’t work anymore because of it. “Work” was
literal - it meant making sculptures; “whore” was a metaphor
- it meant not compromising one’s art. He warned me repeatedly; I only wish he had meant it literally as wel as metaphorical y because I might have listened. Since then - since I was eighteen - I’ve always measured my writing against his admonition: never whore. He also taught me how to drink 100-proof Stoli, my drink of choice until in the late 1970s I switched to
bottled water and the occasional glass of champagne. He was
talking to me, not to my painter friend; I’ve never known
why. I always hoped it was because he saw an artist in me. A
50
David Smith
week and a half later he died, crashing his motorcycle into a
tree, the kind of death police regard as suicide.
51
Contraception
At some point when I was in junior high or high school, my
father gave me the inevitable books on intercourse, more
commonly called “how babies are made. ” He was embarrassed; I rejected the books; he shoved them at me and left the room. I read the books about the sperm and the egg. There
were a few missing moments, including how the sperm got to
the egg before it was inside the vaginal tract, for example,
intercourse, and how not to become pregnant. By the time I
was sixteen, I understood the former but not the lat er. When
I asked my mother, she said that one must never let a man use
a rubber because it decreased his pleasure and the purpose was
to give him pleasure. Always ready to beat a dead horse into
the ground, I elicited from my unwilling mother the fact that
she had never let my father use a condom and that she had