It’s hard to explain, because there was more to it than that. Of course there was. Being with a girl, a woman, and Natalie was a woman, was exciting. That sounds dumb, and you can make jokes about it if you want, but it’s the right word. Physically, and mentally, and spiritually exciting.
But what I thought, because of what everybody, even Freud, says, was that it must be Love. They all say that sex is the real thing, and Love is what you call it when you are slightly more civilized than a gorilla. Sex isn’t something you do when you’re in love, love is what you call it when you want sex. Just ask the toothpaste commercials and the cigarette ads and the porno movies and the art movies and the pop songs, or Mr. Field. Man, there is one important thing. Just one.
And so the next time we met, it was entirely different. I had decided that I was in love with Natalie. I hadn’t fallen in love with her, please notice that I didn’t say that; I had decided that I was in love with her.
According to some of the people who write about the brain and the mind, and who are interested in the front-back differences rather than the left-right differences, this would be an example of the frontal lobes trying to run the whole show, and fouling up the poor old hind-brain. This is a foul-up intellectuals are liable to. At least, stupid mixed-up intellectuals like me.
It was all right at first, because I was actually very cowardly. I spent the time when I wasn’t with Natalie working on being in love with her. But when I was actually with her, I forgot about all that, and we talked like crazy, just like before.
One thing we talked about was our plans, a fairly natural subject for high school seniors in the last semester. Hers were quite definite. She was going to Tanglewood this summer, mainly to meet people in the East, other musicians, professionals who might help her, and the other kids, the competition as she put it—she craved to meet the competition, to measure herself against them. Then she’d come back home in the fall, and for one year she’d work full time at the music school and giving lessons to save money, and practicing and composing, and taking a class at State in advanced theory and harmony; she said there was one man there who could teach her some things she needed to know; she’d already worked with him some, in summer school last year. Then she’d go to the Eastman School of Music in New York, with her savings and whatever scholarship they’d give her, and study with a couple of composers there “for as long as it’s worthwhile,” she said. This was the same kind of reason why I wanted to go to MIT: there was a man there doing a kind of physiological psychology that was exactly what I was most interested in. We had some really strange conversations, with her explaining what these composers were trying to do and me trying to explain what consciousness was; but it was surprising how often the two completely different things came together and turned out to be related. The neat thing about ideas is the way they keep doing that.
In April the Civic Orchestra was giving a concert at one of the big churches, and three of Natalie’s songs were to be on the program. It was no big deal, she said; it was because she knew the conductor, and when he needed an experienced player to hold his amateur violists together she did it for him; but still, it was a first public performance of her compositions. Composing, she said, is about the worst art of all, because it’s about nine-tenths string-pulling. You have to know people, or you never get played. She was realistic about that, and said she wasn’t going in for the “Charles Ives game.” Ives heard hardly any of his music played at the time he was writing it; he just sat and wrote it and stuck it into a box and worked as an insurance broker or something. She disapproved of that. She said getting it played was part of the job. But she wasn’t very consistent, because her two idols were Schubert, who never heard most of his big works, and Emily Bronte, who never really forgave her sister Charlotte for publishing her poems, or even in fact for reading them. The three songs that were to be performed in April were settings of Emily Bronte poems.
Wuthering Heights was Natalie’s favorite book; and she knew a lot about the Bronte family, these four genius children living in a vicarage in a village on a moor in the middle of Nowhere, England, a hundred and fifty years ago. Talk about being isolated! I read a biography of them she gave me; and I realized that maybe I thought I had been lonely, but my life had been an orgy of sociability, compared to those four. But they did have each other. The kind of frightening thing was that it was the boy, the only son, who couldn’t take it, and cracked up—went on drugs and alcohol, got hooked, and died of it. Because they’d all expected the most of him, because he was the boy. The girls, of whom nothing was expected since they were only girls, went on and wrote Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights. It gives you to think. Maybe I was not so unlucky in having parents who expected less of me than I wanted to give, after all. Maybe also it is not an unmixed blessing to be born male.
What the Bronte kids did for years was write stories and poems about these countries they made up. Maps and wars and adventures and all. Charlotte and Branwell had “Angria,” and Emily and Anne had “Gondal.” Emily burned all her Gondal stories when she realized she was going to die of TB, but by then Charlotte had made her save the poems. They all learned how to write, they practiced at it by writing these long, involved romances about non-existent countries, for years. It came as a shock to me, because between twelve and sixteen I had done sort of the same thing, though I had no sister to show it to.
I had this country called Thorn. I drew maps of it and stuff, but mostly I didn’t write stories about it. Instead I described the flora and fauna, and the landscape and the cities, and figured out the economy and the way they lived, their government and history. It started out as a kingdom when I was twelve, but by the time I was fifteen or sixteen it had become a kind of free socialistic set-up, and so I had to work out all the history of how they got from autocracy to socialism, and also their relationships to other nations. They weren’t at all friendly with Russia, China, or the United States. In fact they traded only with Switzerland, Sweden, and the Republic of San Marino. Thorn was a very small country, on an island in the South Atlantic, only about sixty miles across, and a very long way from anywhere else. The wind blew all the time in Thorn. The coasts were high and rocky. Sailing ships had very seldom been able to land there; the Greeks or Phoenicians had found it once, which gave rise to the myths of Atlantis, but it wasn’t rediscovered until 1810. They had still, intentionally, not built a harbor for big ships, or any kind of landing field for planes. Fortunately it was small enough and poor enough that the Great Powers hadn’t yet bothered to bring it into a sphere of influence and make it into a missile base. They let it alone. I had spent a lot of time on Thorn, for four years. But for over a year I hadn’t been back; it all seemed long ago, kid stuff. Still, when I happened to think about it, I could see the steep cliffs over the sea, and the wind blowing over the long sheep pastures, and the city of Barren on the south coast, my favorite city, built of granite and cedar-wood, looking out over the windy cliffs to the Antarctic Ocean and the South Pole.
I dug out some of the History of Thorn and showed it to Natalie. She really liked it. She said,
“I could write their music. You never talk about their music.”
“It’s all wind instruments,” I said, clowning.
“OK,” she said. “A wind quintet. No clarinets. They’re too sticky for Thorn. Flute, oboe, bassoon… horn? English horn? Trombone? Yes, they’d have trombones…” She wasn’t clowning. She did write a wind quintet for Thorn.
Her definiteness about her plans infected me. It was catching. I began seriously thinking about what I would do if I could. Whether I wanted to go the medical route, or go into biology and work up to the place where bio and psychology interact, or go straight into psychology. They all fascinated me. They were all related, but you couldn’t study them all at once, you’d just flounder. The question was where to start. Where to build up a solid foundation of knowledge on which you could balance ideas. It wasn’t exactly a modest ambition. But what I had learned from Natalie was that you could have a very immodest ambition if you went after it methodically.