Unaccompanied Women Read online

  The National Review, a journal by and for neoconservatives, felt sorry for me, too. In an article that appeared shortly after my book came out, the writer expressed her sorrow that, in the end, I will have no one to cut my grass. Let me tell you, if I had any grass, there would be no shortage of volunteers to cut it.

  In The New York Times, none other than the op-ed columnist, the estimable David Brooks, took my “lifestyle,” if that’s what you want to call it, to task: Although he didn’t address me directly in his column “The Power of Marriage,” he warned me and others like me of “spiritual suicide.” He announced that anyone who has “several sexual partners in a year” is in trouble, and warned against finding oneself “in an assembly line of selfish sensations,” which translated, I’m guessing, means multiple orgasms. Way to go, David. This way of thinking, this certainty, this absoluteness, is something I had believed Mr. Brooks too smart to be a victim of. But I have found that all too often intellect shuts off when people talk about sex and marriage; suddenly their childhoods kick in, their Sunday schools, their parents’ finger-wagging; suddenly, according to Mr. Brooks, it’s trouble for anyone who has “several sexual partners in a year.” What he offers is a formula for all of us: One man plus one woman equals one marriage forever and ever, amen. I am, therefore, behaving in a manner certain to bring a self-induced end to my spiritual self. Again, I wonder what his wife might have to say. I think Mrs. Brooks would agree with her husband; he’s so cute.

  “Oh, Mr. Epstein!” I cried near the end of our conversation. “Don’t put me in a box!” A box with a lid on it. I won’t go. Let me tell you: “Selfish sensations,” when ignored, are a deathblow. “Selfish sensations”—that pleasure most profound and most natural of two people together, the pleasure called sex—when resisted, when denied, lead to spiritual—and sometimes virtual—suicide and murder. Messrs. Epstein and Brooks would offer marriage as a solution, as the only solution, despite the gloomy statistic that more than half of all marriages in this country fail. Still, in the absence of a more workable substitute we cling to marriage as our strongest institution for holding back social chaos.

  Shall we think for a moment about fundamentalist Islam? Where virgins are promised on the other side as the reward for murder and mayhem committed by young men on this side? What if we gave them female companionship on this side? Remember the Berlin airlift of 1948 and ’49, where, from our Douglas C-47 Dakota airplanes we dropped the necessities of life into a city sealed off by Communist Russia and became heroes to the rest of the world? Well, if sex isn’t a necessity of life, what is it? I believe that the deprivation of “selfish sensations” in the name of religion is responsible for most of the upheaval that has been a sordid part of human history. By some accounts, throughout history Christians, in the name of rectitude, have been responsible for as many as one hundred million deaths. Let’s put an end to this. Let’s give young men of Christ and Allah a way of venting frustration and bloodlust before it reaches explosive dimensions; let’s offer them women, or, better yet, let women offer themselves. Couldn’t young men be encouraged just to date? Walking side by side along the river or on a street—a man and a woman together—cannot be a bad thing. How simply the urge to violence could be dispelled.

  In the meantime, all you fundamentalists of whatever stripe you are, stay out of my life. I plan to read your books just to keep track of your wrong-headedness, but you don’t have to read mine.

  On the other hand a lot of people liked A Round-Heeled Woman. They called me on the phone, they wrote me letters, they crowded into the bookstores where I did readings and signed books. They cheered what they called my courage and thanked me for restoring hope.

  “DO YOU THINK you’re a nymphomaniac?” So began A Round-Heeled Woman. Bill, at sixty-one, good-looking, attentive, and outspoken, was the speaker of that first sentence. He had not read my book, for it was yet to be written; unwittingly, however, he had begun it. I tucked his question away for use another day: Midnight, sitting close together, didn’t seem to be the time or place to bring up my writing plans. But he had heard about me, and my ad, from my friend Ilse, and now he seemed interested in me. In the weeks following he sent flowers; he brought me books; for Valentine’s Day he gave me my own subscription to The New York Review. He invited me to bed.

  The last sentence of the book is “Paint your wagon, I’m coming.” It was said to me before I had any intention of writing a book. It came from Graham, tall, slim, funny, kind, terribly bright, and thirty-two years old. His letter in response to my ad in The New York Review was the last letter I answered. “Not quite Harold and Maude,” he wrote of what the two of us might become, “but close.” Full of qualms and curiosity, I answered, and a few months later we met. He was damned near perfect. “Do you agree that Melville’s ‘Bartleby’ is the most perfect story ever written?” he asked. I did. “Tell me the name of your favorite poem.” I did, and he recited The General Prologue of “The Canterbury Tales,” of course in Middle English. “Why is it,” he asked rhetorically, “that on a Chinese menu you have to get to at least number fifteen before anything gets interesting?” And very late, in a room high above Central Park, “Why are you wearing all those clothes?” And then I wasn’t. He was my heart’s delight, and I was his. But before Graham there was Meredith. And there was loss.

  Friendships among women are tricky things. We are inclined to take them for granted since they happen so naturally, since they are born of common interests, since, unlike friendships with men, they seem easy to come by and easy to live with. Or so we believe. My long friendship with Meredith would prove me wrong, would show me that tact, understanding, and nurturing were as essential to women’s friendships as to any relationship I might have with a man. I took Meredith for granted and paid the price.

  In the summer of 1999, some few months before I conceived the notion of placing an ad, Meredith and I spent a fine week at a lake edged with tall pines, a lake reflecting snowcapped mountains. Meredith and I had a lovely lot of talk, much laughter. We went to the county fair, we enjoyed each other’s company. Why not do it again the following summer? Yes, we agreed, we would.

  But then came Graham. I chose the coward’s way to tell Meredith: e-mail.

  Dear Meredith,

  I feel absolutely terrible about this, but I am going to do it anyway. I have to disinvite you to the lake. On a whim, I invited Graham, believing that of course he wouldn’t come. But he’s coming, and I want to see him. I don’t expect you to accept my apologies or do anything but be angry with me. But I will continue to hope for forgiveness sometime.

  Meredith and I became friends in 1955, a long, long time ago, in San Francisco. Me from Ohio, Meredith from Detroit, we followed the rule: gloves and heels in downtown San Francisco. Hats were voluntary by this time, though women our mothers’ ages still wore them in Union Square. For Christmas, Meredith and I gave each other elbow-length leather gloves and compacts, pretty and round and containing face powder I never knew where to put or how much, so I didn’t. Still, I tried to be a lady, or at least ladylike. Meredith, tall and slim as a model, did much better. As ladies, we never talked about sex, especially our own.

  It is our generation—Meredith’s and mine—the one that grew up in the fifties, that is silent about sex. Like girls of our time, we never even mentioned sex except obliquely, and Meredith was very good at oblique. She was a great literary gossip: She knew all the dirt of the literati, such as that Simone de Beauvoir shacked up with Nelson Algren in Chicago, then returned to her celibate life with Sartre. And she did it more than once, sort of like going to camp in the summer. I listened intently as Meredith told me that on his wedding night John Ruskin screamed in horror at the sight of his wife’s naked body, and that Dante Gabriel Rossetti dug up his wife’s body to reclaim the poems he had put into her coffin on her death. And that Tennessee Williams was gay. “He is not,” I said. “Look at all those manly men in his plays, look at Stanley Kowalski!” “Oh, Jane,” sighed M
eredith, exasperated over my stubborn naïveté, “only a writer in love with other men could create those characters.” We giggled over the gossip and the people who lived in it, but we were careful never ever to connect anything they did to our own lives; we never explored what they did, we just guessed and kept our guesses to ourselves. For Meredith and me it was as if we weren’t having sex, though both of us were, Meredith with a married man, I with Jack, both relationships headed for disaster. Not talking about certain things ensured our friendship; we understood the taboos against intimacy of all sorts; we honored our mothers’ code.

  One time, our mothers notwithstanding, sex interfered. It reared its ugly head and would not go away. Before the pill, before Roe v. Wade, pregnancy loomed at every turn. Birth control was available by way of a diaphragm, that little round thing that, once inserted, popped open and screened (almost always) the sperm. Meredith and I never talked about the diaphragm, whether or not we used one or where to get one if we wanted to or how to get the damn thing in or out if we got one. Meredith clearly did not get one. She got pregnant by way of a man who, as a husband and a father of two, could not marry her. So in order to keep her job, she needed an abortion. Unwed mothers then were fired if their disreputable state became known, and pregnancy being what it is, it could remain hidden only for so long. So Meredith needed an abortion, illegal and dangerous though it was, and Tijuana was where others we had heard of went to do the dastardly deed. At the time Meredith had no money, so I gave her money, some mine, the rest borrowed from friends, and off she went, the father of the unborn child along with her, no doubt to make sure the job got done. Meredith returned, the father went to jail for nonpayment of child support, and I listened to Meredith recount the bloody tale of pain and humiliation she’d endured south of the border. Twenty minutes of a real-life story was enough for us. We were relieved to return to ignorance and the safety thereof.

  Meredith went on to spend her nights at law school; I spent mine in North Beach. I was fascinated by the 1950s’ renegades, the girls who went to Greenwich Village in New York or North Beach in San Francisco and became beatniks, which meant, at least to me, that they had a lot of sex. When I wasn’t wearing gloves and heels on my way to lunch with Meredith, I tried to become a beatnik. I grew my hair long, and hung out in bars. But I never had sex. I never even got asked to have sex. The closest I got was one night at a bar called The Place on Grant Street in North Beach. The Place was small, dark, and probably dirty, though there was never enough light to find out for sure. The one waitress in The Place—Sheila was her name—appeared magically out of the darkness, holding pitchers and trays handed to her by some sorcerer in the alley out back. No bartender was ever seen. Every Monday night was Blabbermouth Night: Anyone who wanted to could take the grungy little stage and harangue or sing or recite their poems or do magic tricks, whatever they felt like, the only requirement being a sincere attempt at being outrageous. No girls went up there, of course; we sat in the back and drank beer and wished we hadn’t worn kneesocks and sneakers.

  One night Dirty-Talking Charles, as he was known to all of North Beach, strode up—“weaved” is more accurate—to the stage, turned to the audience, and began to chant, “Sex is the answer, sex is the answer.” On he went, never varying, never pausing, never ever ending, it seemed to me. Finally, many beers within me, I called out, “So what is the question?” Dirty-Talking Charles, without missing a beat, said, “Will you?” In 1956 that was a showstopper.

  That’s as close as I ever got to talking about sex or having some for far too many years to follow. I also failed to become a beatnik; I could never figure out what to wear on my feet, and the long braid I wore down my back gave me headaches.

  Meredith stayed away from The Place and the other hangouts in North Beach, earning her law degree in record time. My yearnings remained mine alone, unspoken to anyone, rumbling around my insides like those steel balls in a pinball machine.

  Sexism was not a word then, only a practice. The boys and men who read their poetry on the stage of The Place and up and down the California coast, in bars and on street corners, claimed the company of women to serve them food, admiration, and sex. I suppose I should have been grateful to be excluded, but I wasn’t. I wanted like anything to go with them, to do whatever they asked just for the adventure, the fabulousness of it all. But there were no takers. I needed to be bolder, to ask outrageous questions, to offer clever answers; I needed to be prettier, but all I was was afraid, and so I went back to work as a secretary to wait for the right man to come along. The waiting seemed endless. Always available for witty conversation, much of it about books, never about sex, Meredith was a friend indeed. Together we avoided the unmentionable; we were a team.

  Now, some forty years later, I hoped she would understand that I could not pass up an opportunity to make love in the afternoon, evening, morning, noon, night with this wonderful man. Surely she would understand eventually that this was unusual, a onetime thing, likely never to happen again. She didn’t. She wrote back, “It is my belief that e-mail is a poor way to communicate anything important.” What the hell did that mean? So I called her on the telephone. “I am so sorry, but I’ve told you about Graham. How . . . can you . . . ?” Click.

  Graham came to the lake, and we went to bed. Before and after, we canoed, went to the county fair, talked endlessly about everything, and Graham skipped stones—one, two, three, four, five, fifteen! skips—far out into the lake. He wore a sarong. “It’s from Kenya,” he explained. “It slips off rather easily.” Afterward he read Proust aloud to me while outside our window the sun went down into the lake far away on the other side. Sometimes I lay on my side and just looked at him. The sunset paled.

  In October, some six weeks after Graham’s visit, Meredith phoned and said, “Let’s have lunch and get this elephant out of the living room.” I agreed.

  I was early. And I was anxious. I did wrong. Yes, I did. Did I do wrong and right? I didn’t know. Yes, I probably did them both and at the same time. One thing I was certain of was this: I was being called to account and I was scared. I have always avoided confrontation. My mind grows fuzzy at the mere thought of it, although, my long life having provided extensive experience in heartbreak and healing, I am better at it than when I was twenty-five or even twenty-six. I am more capable of standing outside my feelings, my feelings are not as vulnerable to hurt. Who was I kidding?

  Café Claude in San Francisco was Meredith’s and my favorite restaurant. It is in a little alley in downtown San Francisco; you have to know about it to find it, or be French, because French people run it and, I’m sure, French people cook the food. “’Allo, ’allo,” says the maîtred’.

  No longer burdened with gloves and heels, Meredith and I were dressed much more casually, but at sixty-six Meredith was as elegant as she was when we first met, perhaps more so. She made more money, for one thing, and lived alone in a three-story Queen Anne in Noe Valley, one of San Francisco’s most desirable neighborhoods. When she heard I had sold my house in Orinda and was moving into a cottage sans washer and dryer, that I would wheel my dirty clothes to the laundromat in a little cart in public, she inhaled sharply and said, “Just don’t do it when I’m around.” Indeed, she never saw my cottage. Safer that way. To irritate her for the hell of it, when I visited her in her Queen Anne, I would wear my Birkenstocks. Once, in a department store, she caught me in them and said, “I’m going up to Better Shoes, please don’t follow me.” We both laughed, hers more of a sputter.

  But it was true: Her shoes and clothes were expensive; she bought nothing on sale. She had never entered a discount store; a mall was her idea of hell. Wary of Macy’s appeal to the common herd, she had never been to its first floor, where cosmetics promise new life to the bourgeoisie. Instead she entered on Geary Street and took the elevator directly to the designer floors. Once she was there her eyes narrowed and her focus became as intense as that of any athlete about to take the field. She would raise her head, sniff
delicately the air around her, and glide among the racks and tables, smoothing her hand along the fabrics as she did. She would find what she had come for. She had no use for the new look, tight-fitting industrial fabrics stretched over bodies meant to be hidden, not flaunted. Like the rest of the country, San Francisco has exchanged elegance for discomfort and show. Style now is loud. Meredith’s style was as appropriate, as beautiful, in the year 2000 as it was in 1955. It is Ralph Lauren with imagination. Whoever dyed her hair should have gotten an award.

  There she was, earlier even than I, seated at a corner table, back to the wall so that she could look me over as I entered, her hair a gleaming black, pulled back sleek into a chignon suitable for every century. I don’t remember what I was wearing, something that made me wish October weren’t so warm, that instead an autumnal chill had settled in, calling for a cover-up, like a coat, full-length.