New York in the '50s (32 page)

Too bad she was only a
WASP
like me, but I consoled myself with the idea that Sam Astrachan could “christen” her (as I thought of it, in a theological malapropism) as an honorary Jew. The disappointment in her ethnic heritage was softened by the news that she also was an intellectual atheist, one who was far more matter-of-fact about it than I was in my impassioned rebellion against religion.

We embarked on a postcollegiate courtship typical of the time, often double-dating with one of my 92nd Street roommates, Bill Chapman, who was going out with the girl he would marry, Christine
Patton. She was the bright, peppy Wells College grad Bill had met when our apartmentful of guys met the apartmentful of girls on West End Avenue.

My friends were all impressed that Chris, in her first year out of college, wrote
Scholastic
magazine's teenage advice column under the running byline “Gay Head,” named for the cliffs on Martha's Vineyard. The name was used as a
nom de plume
for the succession of young women college grads who did their best to dispense words of wisdom, at a salary of $50 a week, to troubled high school students throughout the land. This was before the days when the likes of Ann Landers—much less Dr. Ruth—could convey factual information about sex on the printed page (the word “pregnant” was banned on television), and Chris was disturbed and frustrated by not having the freedom to deal with real issues.

Chris's already big brown eyes grew larger as she told us of a letter she'd gotten that was scrawled on notebook paper from a teenage girl who said her boyfriend did funny things to her and now her stomach was getting bigger even though she was on a diet. What should she do? These kids who wrote to a magazine columnist were too afraid to ask the adults in their lives, and their own peers didn't know much more than they did.

“But I can't write about it,” Chris lamented. “The ‘big problems' I get to give advice about are questions like, Should I serve pretzels or potato chips when I have the gang over to my house after school?” (Chris also expressed her genuine concern years later, as a much-loved teacher at the Sidwell Friends School in Washington, D.C., and in the book she wrote based on her counseling experience,
America's Runaways.
)

Over beers at Louis' or late night coffee at a Rikers on Broadway, Bill, Emily and I, and our friends moaned and sympathized with Chris, but in truth we were hardly experts on sexual matters ourselves. Our “sentimental educations” prepared us for romance but not sex, the mood but not the mechanics of love. Ours was the last generation for whom foreplay was accepted as an end in itself. Bruce Jay Friedman recalls with amused wonder that at the University of Missouri “we dated the girls at Stephens College. You'd hear someone was a hot kisser, and you'd go out with her and kiss endlessly to no purpose. It was one long second act.”

Emily and I were groping our way into act three but hadn't reached the climax. We were going at it hot and heavy on her living room couch after dates (panting, humping, groaning, and pumping until sometimes I even came in my pants), but the restless warning coughs of her roommate, Jeannie, from bed in the next room stopped us short of going all the way, or perhaps gave us the excuse we somehow wanted or needed not to try what we both in some way feared.

Ardor built to a crescendo the night Emily and I and Bill and Chris went to see
Red Roses for Me
, the play by Sean O'Casey that was running on Broadway. Everything Irish seemed romantic, especially the lilting language of O'Casey, and when he spoke of red roses, the very symbol of love, we were carried away. We took the mood on down to the Village, where we went to our favorite night spot, Marie's Crisis Café, where you could drink and hear good music without cover or minimum, just the price of the drinks (we always had beer, which was cheapest and lasted the longest).

Marie's was in the basement of a townhouse where Thomas Paine had lived on Grove Street, near Sheridan Square, and supposedly it was there he wrote his series of revolutionary pamphlets
The Crisis
. That accounted for part of the nightclub's name, the other part coming from the owner, a large and rather shy Frenchwoman named Marie Dumont. By chance, the popular piano player also had the same first name. Marie Blake was a magnetic Negro woman with a sandpaper voice who sang and joked with the young patrons as she banged out love songs with alternate moods of passion, humor, romance, and lust, from “Love for Sale” to our gang's favorite, “Down in the Depths on the Ninetieth Floor.”

Sometimes late, when there wasn't a crowd and only the loyal regulars were present, Marie Dumont, who planted herself at a table in the back, would consent to sing by popular demand “Two Loves Have I” or “Just Plain Bill” with her marvelous accent and a few chanteuse-like gestures. On other good nights, when the place felt intimate and no loud out-of-towners were clowning it up or demanding that Marie Blake sing “Deep in the Heart of Texas,” a slim blonde in her late thirties who always wore a plain black dress and a string of pearls would perch on the piano and half sing, half talk “Miss Otis Regrets.” It was so sophisticated and ruefully charming
it made us brand-new, wet-behind-the-ears New Yorkers feel jaded and knowing and worldly-wise.

Tangled on the living room couch that night, full of beer and spaghetti and desire, I asked Emily to marry me, which seemed a necessary step leading to sexual intercourse, as crucial as taking off your pants or making sure the roommate was away for the weekend, which luckily was the case. I meant it, of course: this was not just a fast-talking ploy from a slow-moving boy, but a declaration of commitment and intent, even though I'd wrestled with the wisdom of getting married, since I wanted more than anything else in the world to be a writer. “Settling down” didn't seem the way to reach that goal, especially if the usual American accompaniments to matrimony came with it, like a house and car and kids. All that could be worked out, though; it was certainly nothing that had to be decided at that moment as I struggled on top of Emily on the couch.

Emily said yes to my proposal of marriage and also, by her actions, to the more urgent request, yet my own body shrank from it. The stiff rod softened, or in the words of Dylan Thomas, which I couldn't help feel came from painful personal experience, it slunk pouting out from its foul mouse hole. Ugh. We tried another weekend when the roommate was away, and Emily blamed herself for being a virgin and inexperienced. I was just about as inexperienced but not technically a virgin, since I'd managed to somehow wrangle on a Trojan and get myself inside a girl from home in my last year at Columbia. When I told this to Emily, thinking it would give us hope, she burst into tears.

“What's wrong?” I asked in my innocent desperation.

“You must have liked her better than me.”

“No, not near as much. Listen, you're the only girl I ever asked to marry me.”

“She must have been sexier, then.”

“No! I swear to God.”

“But you can't—”

“I can't help it!”

Our arguments got more hysterical and our efforts more frenzied and blighted. This was hell. After a few more episodes of such agony, as I drank more to numb the pain, switching from beer to bourbon, Emily announced she was leaving. Not just me, the country.
She was going to take a job her boss at the magazine told her about in Europe, scouting for a publisher. To make it worse, she told me she loved me and always would.

Nothing had prepared me for this chaos that came from the failure to be doing what supposedly comes naturally. A friend from Indianapolis had hinted at a similar problem when he went to bed with his college girlfriend, saying only “something went wrong.” A guy I knew at Columbia told me, over beers at the West End Bar & Grill, a veiled story that was so metaphorical the only thing I could gather for sure was that he'd encountered difficulties trying to make out with a girl he'd just met. In each case, I was too afraid of betraying my own inexperience and ignorance to inquire further.

I thought of Chris Patton and our talks about the lack of knowledge of those poor teenage kids. But what about graduates of the best colleges? If we were so smart, why weren't we able to satisfy our most basic needs? At least those pregnant high schoolers could “do it” even when they weren't sure what they'd done. I knew guys and girls from my own high school who claimed to enjoy fabulous sex—especially some of the jocks and their cheerleader girlfriends. So what was wrong with me and my tortured buddies and frustrated girlfriends, all of whom had good grades and high IQs?

From novels, movies, plays, and magazines we understood all about candlelight and wine, kisses and love songs, and from the street and the Army most guys knew you were supposed to use rubbers to prevent pregnancy and venereal disease, but beyond that lay a vast sea of ignorance and mountains of misinformation. What little I knew about sex was inadequate or incorrect. Most of it I had learned in high school and college.

“Don't read
The New York Times Magazine,
” our professor told us. “Those full-page advertisements for women's bras, undergarments, and stockings can be very arousing. They may lead you to masturbation.”

I sneaked a look around me, not only to see how the other students were reacting to this information, but also to make sure I was in the right place. The lesson sounded eerily like one I might have heard in my Sunday school class at the Baptist church I attended as a boy in Indianapolis, except the word “masturbation” would not
have been uttered in such a holy setting. But I was sitting in a classroom in Hamilton Hall, at Columbia College in New York City, in 1952.

The course was called Personal Living, and it was taught by a well-meaning fellow who also served as an assistant wrestling coach of the Columbia Lions. The information he conveyed was supposed to prepare young men for life and marriage in the largest and most sophisticated city in the United States of America in the 1950s.

The only other nugget of information I remember from the course concerned the frequency of sex during marriage. Coach said that if you put a bean in a jar for every time you had sex during your first year of marriage, and you took a bean out of the jar for every time you had sex during the remaining years of your entire married life (and this presumed a lifelong marital union), you would never get all the beans out of the jar. He also showed us a documentary film of a baby being born. I got an A-minus in the course.

Some desperate instinct told me there must be another way of understanding all this disturbing stuff, which was still so shrouded in mystery and whispers and taboos, and I suppose I had hoped that such enlightenment would be among the many blessings provided by a Columbia education. When it came to literature, after all, we received the best possible instruction from renowned professors like Van Doren and Trilling. When it came to sex, however, we got Victorian folk wisdom from an assistant wrestling coach.

I suppose I had hoped for some kind of Lionel Trilling of sex education, an urbane and learned man who would explain and illuminate, guide and instruct us out of the darkness of our sexual fears into an understanding of the driving force of our lives, the life force itself. Trilling, of course, taught no such class, but I was impressed and encouraged to find that at least he had written on the subject, in one of the essays in his highly regarded collection,
The Liberal Imagination
.

My hopes soared, for trying to understand the mysteries of sex was a continuous subtext to everything I did (which hardly set me apart from the other young men I knew), looking for clues in novels, poetry, sociology, psychology, plays, movies, even literary criticism. If Trilling could make clear the convolutions and intricacies
of Henry James's
The Princess Casamassima
, might he not be able to provide some helpful insight about sex? I turned eagerly to his essay on the first Kinsey report,
Sexual Behavior in the Human Male
.

The very name Kinsey had become a source of titillation when I heard it as a sophomore in high school in 1948, the year the report was issued following research done at—of all unlikely places—the University of Indiana. It was self-described as simply “an accumulation of scientific fact” (as Jack Webb would say on “Dragnet,” the popular TV cop show of the fifties, “Just the facts, ma'am”), complete with charts, graphs, and tables of data. The foreword said the report was intended primarily for a professional audience of “teachers, social workers, personnel officers, law enforcement groups, and others concerned with the direction of human behavior” (no leering lay people out for excitement, please). The very use of the still-taboo word “sexual” in the title was surely part of the reason it exploded into the country's consciousness like a psychic A-bomb and became a national best seller. The intellectual significance of the report and its reception was signaled by
Partisan Review
's publication of a commentary on it by Trilling, who deemed its appearance “an event of great importance in our culture.”

I was happy to read that Trilling thought the report was therapeutic because of the “permissive effect” it was likely to have by establishing what he called “the community of sexuality.” That meant, in my own interpretation, that the report let people know that not only birds do it, bees do it, but even respectable people do it—and not only in a variety of positions and body orifices with humans of both sexes but also with, yes, animals. Right there in the charts and tables was statistical proof of those seemingly exotic farmland fables involving sheep, goats, cows, and horses we had heard since childhood. As a matter of fact, Trilling noted, the chapter on human-animal relations was the only part of the book “which hints that sex may be touched with tenderness.”

In addition to its therapeutic value, Trilling thought the Kinsey report was also a symptom of our society's need: “Nothing shows more clearly the extent to which modern society has atomized itself than the isolation in sexual ignorance which exists among us.” I was not bold enough to tell Professor Trilling he could find an example of this atomization if he walked down the hall from the office in
which he wrote his essay and monitored the Personal Living class, which the students of his literature courses were required to take.