“It’s simpler to be married, actually. When I meet neighbors, they’ll say to give their regards to my husband, and I don’t bother to correct them. There’s no word like ‘husband’ to describe a man you live with. ‘Lover’ doesn’t work. It just means someone you have sex with.
“Barry’s parents know we’re living together, and it’s all quite open between us. They live on Long Island, so we see them a great deal more frequently than my parents. They’re really great; they treat me like a daughter and seem completely cool about our relationship. I don’t know whether they’re more liberal than my folks. It may just be the geographical thing, the proximity, and my parents would be the same way if they lived closer to us. Or it may be a double-standard thing; Barry’s parents might be a little less cool if it was their daughter instead of their son. That’s just a guess. I don’t really know if the double standard is that much a part of their attitude.
“When I think about Les, I don’t have any real regrets. I don’t think I would have been capable of the relationship I now have with Barry if I didn’t have that experience behind me. What scares me, though, is the idea that I could have gotten married to Les if we hadn’t been in a position to live together. If I had stayed in my hometown after graduation and dated a local boy like Les, I’m sure I wouldn’t have lived with him, and we could have jumped straight into an impossible marriage. I would probably be divorced by now. Or I might still be trapped in a rotten marriage, and we might have had kids in the hope of keeping the marriage together, the way so many people do, and... I don’t even like to think about it. I know girls back home in that situation. I know some who are divorced and others who aren’t divorced but should be. What a stupid way to throw your life away.
“Things are changing, though. I knew girls who lived with boys in college, although I never did, and they aren’t making the kind of marriage mistakes other girls are. From what I understand, living together in college is a lot more common now than it was when I was in school. And I know more and more couples are living together not only in cities like New York but also in smaller towns. It’s a major change, and I guess it’s happening a little at a time, faster in some places than in others, but I think it’s going to make for better and more honest relationships all around, and it should do for a lot of people what it did for me; it should tend to keep the wrong people from marrying each other.”
“A friend of mine told me I was the only girl he knew of who was living with a guy without having sex with him. I told him there are lots of other people like that, but they’re married.”
JWW: Sue is distinctly atypical, but nothing could persuade me to leave her out of this chapter. She is twenty-one, fat, freckled, and radiantly cheerful. She graduated a year ago from a junior college not far from her home in the Adirondack region of New York State. She works as a dental receptionist, lives in an incongruously immaculate apartment on a particularly grungy block on the Lower East Side. Her hobbies include designing her own clothes, macramé, decoupage, reading tarot cards, and sex.
“I’ve been told I have a man’s attitude toward sex. In other words, take it where you find it, enjoy it for what it’s worth, and don’t get hung up on heavy romantic scenes. I don’t know why men should have a permanent claim on that attitude. Anyway, I think that’s changing as more and more women get into the lib scene.
“Not that I’m really into it myself. I’m all for it, but I don’t feel any personal need for it. I went to a couple of consciousness raising sessions, and they seemed unreal to me. The girls were all older, some of them were married, and they talked about turning their heads around and avoiding artificial exploitative relationships with men, and it was as if they were just getting into where I’d been all along. I felt embarrassed about mouthing off to these women who were older and more experienced than I was, and I couldn’t see that I could get anything out of a scene like that, so I think it’s good for them, but it has nothing to offer me.
“Actually, I haven’t had all that much sexual experience, and I haven’t been sexually liberated for very long. The college I went to was a quick century behind the times. I mean, they were still into fraternities and sororities and like that. I was an outcast, of course. I’ve always been an outsider, as far back as I can remember. I used to think it was my size. I’ve always been fat. But that’s not it. It’s that my head is different. Some people are basically outsiders; they feel more comfortable living part of their lives inside their own heads. Even here, in New York, I’m very much an outsider. The difference is that you can be an outsider here without feeling uncomfortable about it. I really dig this neighborhood. It’s scummy and rotten, and I love it. Maybe it’s a reaction to growing up middle-class. I suppose I’ll get older and want the same kind of security and creature comforts as everybody else. Not now, though. Right now I like my life the way it is. The only thing that bothers me is the fucking pollution; you can’t get a deep breath in this city. I may quit my job in June and spend the summer in the mountains. Not back home — I have no desire to go back there — but maybe out west somewhere.
“College — I was an outcast there, no sorority rush, no dating popularity. The first year was pretty horrible, but toward the end of that first year I got in with some of the other outcasts. The hippie element. We weren’t very hip by New York standards. But we got into grass and sex a little.
“The first boy I balled, I was convinced I was in love with him. He liked me, but the way I came on scared the hell out of him. I can’t blame him. We were just friends, you know, not even terribly close friends, and we started messing around, and I never even thought about stopping him. I was fantastically passionate. Then I convinced myself I was in love, and it scared him off, and I wanted to kill myself. It’s the only time in my life I really thought about suicide. I wasn’t really that miserable. I didn’t have this great sense of loss, but I guess I was being theatrical and thought suicide was the dramatically correct thing to do in my position. I never tried to do anything about it, just had these thoughts for a couple of days.
“Then I was rapping with another guy, a friend of the one I balled, and he helped me see where everything was at. That sex was a fun thing and all. He was bisexual, which was a horrible hassle around there. He wasn’t a student, but he lived in the town and hung out with the hip element from the college. He was very sensitive and drew things out of me I never knew were there. He made me see that I got into this love bag because I was unwilling to enjoy sex on its own terms. That I was trying to build a fence around my own freedom. He also made me realize that I’m sexually attractive. I had more or less assumed that it was impossible to be attractive and fat at the same time, and I would alternate between starvation diets and food binges, and never get any thinner, and by thinking I was unattractive I made myself unattractive. Since then I’ve found out that being fat doesn’t keep men from wanting to fuck you. As a matter of fact, a lot of men prefer fat women, even though they don’t want to admit it for some reason.”
JWW: I mention an Arab proverb: Thin women for show, fat women for pleasure.
“I never heard that one, but it’s exactly where it’s at. I heard another one. It goes something like, ‘There are three things men like more than they admit: sweet wine, fat women, and the music of Tchaikovsky.’ I don’t know about the wine and the music, but the other is true. But men who aren’t sure of themselves, you know, they’re a little uptight about being seen with a fat girl. They want to be able to wear a fashionable type of chick on their arm the way they wear clothes. Maybe there ought to be a men’s lib scene for dudes like that.”