Unaccompanied Women Page 5

  “What you read?” she asked.

  “Notes I made for a book I wrote.”

  “You write book?”

  “Yes.”

  “What you write book about?” She pointed at my fist: “Squeeze.”

  “It’s about a woman who sleeps with a lot of men.”

  She was quick to answer. “Oh! You write book about slut!” She pronounced it “srut,” and loudly. The rest of the donors in the room were quick to translate and paused in their reading to do so. My technician made her rounds of the room, saying “Squeeze” to the donors and muttering “slut” beneath her breath. Like all good students she knew that repetition is a key to learning. She was practicing her English.

  Ever the teacher, when she returned, I asked her, “What do you call a man who sleeps with a lot of women?”

  She was silent for a moment, her brow furrowed in thought, and then the light broke: “No such word!” She paused, then exclaimed, “Not fair! Not right!”

  Her orders to us to squeeze were then more militant, so when she returned to my chair, I said, “I’ll give you a word for both men and women.” She was eager. “It’s ‘promiscuous,’” I said.

  “You say again.” I did. “You say slow.”

  “Pro-mis-cu-ous,” I said.

  She placed one hand on my throat: “Now say.” I did. Only a few inches from my face, she stared intently at my mouth as I repeated “Pro-mis-cu-ous.”

  She moved her lips as I did, et voilà! she got it. “Pro-mis-cu-ous,” she said again and again, more and more loudly, her smile broadening with each repetition. And of course by this time everybody in the place was grinning, even me. It was at that moment that I became a sexpert.

  I didn’t know it then, of course; it would take some time before I took on the mantle of sex guru, even longer—even never—before I wore it comfortably. But it was inevitable, I suppose, and now I am not surprised by questions and comments called out as I walk about my neighborhood: “Hey, Jane, know where I can get a dildo?” By the time that question sailed in from across the street, I did know. If you live in the San Francisco Bay Area, go to a store called Good Vibrations on San Pablo Avenue in Berkeley. I have it on good authority they’ve got them there, a wide selection, too.

  But I erred when I offered my Red Cross technician “promiscuous.” I should have qualified it. Not all men and not all women who sleep with a lot of others are promiscuous. “Promiscuous” describes behavior that does not discriminate, that is, sleeping with lots of anyones. That’s not me, nor was it me in November of 2001. I discriminated beginning with The New York Review, a good filter, I believed, for winnowing the creeps from the shafts. So, Miss Pretty Little Technician, if you read this, remember, not all women who have a lot of sex with men not their legally wedded are sluts. Neither are they nymphomaniacs. Nor, despite what some therapists may say, are they necessarily sex addicts. Naming things and people may be necessary for efficiency’s sake, but at the same time naming them tends to limit understanding as well as behavior. Which is why a lot of things get named. As Linnaeus or maybe the Chinese have said, If you name something, you own it.

  I left the Red Cross, uncertain whether my technician was richer or poorer for my language lesson, though I chose to believe richer, for I am a firm believer in the power of words, no matter what they are. My little green book tucked into my purse, I returned once again to the library, to the LMP, the Literary Market Place, and picked out a few agents, all of them in New York, who, I had to believe, would like my book and send it on to a publisher. Taking courage from the knowledge that Thomas Wolfe had submitted Look Homeward, Angel more than fifty times, I forged ahead into the vast and uncharted world of publishing. It might come to pass that I would be not just a writer but an author. A dizzying thought.

  And it happened: My book found an agent, who found a publisher, and I was free to continue (1) tripping to New York and (2) exploring my new career as an author and sexpert.

  It is May of the year 2002, and here I am in New York City, the city that will reclaim itself from the devastation of 9/11 in record time, the best place in the world to be when spring shows up. I am here on business! A bartender will ask me, “Are you here for business or pleasure?” and I will answer with a huge grin, “They’re the same thing.” Indeed they are, for this very evening I will have dinner with Graham, who in his e-mails and phone calls seems to have done what he claimed he would: become his old self again. And as he did so, he resurrected me. In fact, he became more than his old self; he became my muse. “I thought muses were female,” he argued when I announced his new post. “Times have changed,” I said. “Gender has become irrelevant to musedom.”

  Graham became more than an inspiration; he became my backbone, my cheerleader (today men can be cheerleaders, too). “You’re a wonderful writer,” he insisted. “Of course you can write this book; look at your e-mails to me, they’re fine writing, and A Round-Heeled Woman is the perfect title.” I would protest: “It’s too hard; I’m stuck, I can’t, I just can’t!” Often my tears would reduce me to blubbering; then Graham would say, “Read me the last sentence you wrote.” I would, and he would say, “Now, what’s the next one?” Incredibly, I would know, and off I’d go once more to string words together in the best way I knew how.

  Muses not only inspire; they perform miracles, and my muse, Graham, surely the best in all of musedom, was responsible for my transformation into Author and for the joyful excitement that fills me now. I am about to visit my editor.

  Random House has consolidated its offices from around the city into a big, big building at the corner of Broadway and Fifty-fifth. From the outside it’s one more skyscraper, its front almost entirely uglified, like many buildings in New York, by scaffolding. Inside, in the lobby, Oh wow!

  Whoever saw such a fancy lobby, wood-paneled floor to ceiling? With shelves carved out of the walls for books, like the openings you see in the mesas of New Mexico, where I have never been, the walls of the Random House lobby are beautiful. They look like oak, and while I know they do wonders with particleboard these days, I choose to believe this is the real stuff. So the walls are oak. And all up and down, in the niches carved out for them, are books, first editions published by Random House. There must be thousands. I have read them all. Steinbeck, Hemingway, Fitzgerald, the literary lions of my youth. William Faulkner, whose Absalom, Absalom! almost convinced me to drop out of college, so incomprehensible was it to me on first reading (second and third, too, not so on fourth, and hardly at all just the other day). Sinclair Lewis’s Kingsblood Royal took me back to the summer of 1952, to the attic beneath the tin roof of Bald Hill Lodge in New Hampshire, where I sweated out my off-hours as a waitress and survived because also in the attic was everything Lewis wrote.

  There in the lobby of Random House I clasp my hands together and raise them to chin level, in what I suppose must look like prayer. It is a prayer, I suppose, a prayer of thanksgiving because looking at those shelves and those books is like looking at my life and remembering, with deep pleasure and gratitude, the hours those writers have given me, not to mention all the information I ever got about sex. D. H. Lawrence and sex, veiled but there and dark and bloody; Philip Roth and sex, unveiled and wildly funny, though not until 1969, too late for me to enjoy a healthy adolescence. In between Lawrence and Roth, John Cheever taught me about impolite sex in a polite time, John O’Hara showed me the danger of sex between men and women who strayed from their social classes. By the time Philip Roth appeared in my life when I was thirty-four, I was terrified of sex—my reading had taught me it brought ruination upon the people who practiced it, even if they were married, which I was, and miserable. Roth finally made me laugh out loud over sex, although even in Portnoy’s Complaint sex between men and women leads to lots and lots of trouble. Therefore, can there be any doubt that Random House was responsible for my growing up a confused but determined virgin? It would take Grove Press to unloose Henry Miller upon the reading world, and my own t
rip to Europe in 1955, where, banned in this country until 1961, Miller was available to show me, reluctant learner that I was, that sex could be animal rutting, could be had for the pure pleasure of it. My god, the scene in Tropic of Cancer where they do it on the kitchen table—and they weren’t even engaged!—has stayed with me a very long time, fifty years and growing.

  Out of the gutter and into the stars, Camus’s The Stranger would provide the underpinnings of what I would come to believe about life and how I would live it. Boswell’s Life of Johnson, the Random House edition, I will be reading until the lights go finally out. No wonder I stand transfixed in this lobby before this literary edition of my life.

  From the corner of my eye I see a uniformed man, a security guard I would guess, approaching. He is tall, slim, elegant, with snowy-white hair, a gallant, if you will. His badge names him Albert. He bows from the waist and says, “All those books. Have you chosen the ones you want?”

  “I don’t want those books. I want my book to be up there.”

  “Oh, do you have a book?”

  I nod, and he continues, “What’s your book about?”

  Since my experience at the Red Cross I have refined my answer to this question, and I say, “It’s about sex over sixty.”

  He steps away. “How old?”

  “About our age, yours and mine.”

  “What’s the name of your book?” I tell him. “I’m getting me a copy,” he says. Then he looks down at the Random House floor, not nearly so beautiful as its walls, and stammers, “In your book, do you—do you talk about drugs?”

  He sees I don’t understand and tries to clarify. “You know, drugs that help people, older folks, when things don’t . . . don’t work the way they want.”

  I realize he’s talking about Viagra. “Yes, a little,” I say, remembering that Robert took Viagra occasionally, which did indeed allow him to do what he wanted to do, but made him feel queasy. “Do you mean Viagra?” I ask.

  Albert puts a Shhh finger over his mouth and whispers, “Yes, yes, that’s it.” He does a little jig. “Does that medicine work?”

  My sexpertise surfaces. “Sometimes it does,” I tell him, “but some men suffer side effects.”

  “Like what?”

  “Upset stomach sometimes.” I flash once more on Robert claiming dyspepsia as the result of the Viagra, which he decided not to take ever again, or so he said. I have no idea if he told the truth, but, always helpful, I continue my blithesome counsel of Albert. “People need to consult a doctor before they try this sort of thing. Some men do fine with Viagra, some men don’t.” I reek of false confidence. “Here’s my elevator.”

  An hour or so later I descend to the lobby, and here comes Albert. He stops short of me, bows again, looks down at me, and says, “You know, I’ve been working for Random House for a long time, so I’ve seen lots of authors and book people.” He leans down even farther and peers into my face. “You aren’t Dr. Ruth, by any chance, are you?”

  Can’t hide forever. The amazing part of this is that, although I don’t know it then, in little more than a year I will be invited to share the speakers’ platform with Dr. Ruth herself. Just think: I have come from being The Ice Maiden in my adolescence to being One Hot Number in my old age.

  I wish Albert a good evening. He bows his gentlemanly bow and holds the door to the street open for me. Outside, I stand stock-still; people bump into me, the light changes, I don’t move. I am simply astounded at my life.

  Even now I am not entirely at ease, either in my role as a writer, which is as it should be—writers are supposed to stay on edge, so I’ve read—or in my role as a sexpert. Never mind, people talk to me about sex all the time. Not long ago I met Nora, my new best friend, and her best friend, Alicia, in San Francisco, where the two of them had come for a visit. They are both twenty-six years old. They are fans of my book and of martinis, and so I felt free to ask them if they, the two of them, talk about sex. Lord, yes! And before you know it, we are sharing our views on favorite positions and why. Alicia likes to be on top, so we talk about position and power, about physiology and psychology. Nora champions the missionary position: “Hands down, it’s the best.” I loved our conversation. Times, for some of us, have changed for the better.

  What might Meredith’s and my friendship have become if we had read Grove Press books, if we had even heard of Grove Press? What if Erica Jong had written her Fear of Flying in 1943 instead of 1973? What if instead of gossipping about Simone de Beauvoir, Meredith and I had read what she wrote in her book, The Second Sex; after all, Random House had made it available to us way back in 1952. Would we have talked about sex and its importance in our lives, as so many people seem to be doing today? I can imagine that, had we done so, our friendship would have been stronger; I can also imagine that our friendship would have ended even earlier. Alas, speculation of this sort is fruitless. All I can say for certain is that Meredith and I were women of our decade, and you know what they say about that: You can take the girl out of the fifties, but you can’t take the fifties out of the girl. Sometimes, though, you can.

  Write about what you know: the first lesson of writing. Well, I did. Write to find out what you know. I did that, too, and the inhibitions of my past lives fell by the wayside. Freedom, no matter if it comes early or late, feels good. Apparently the same is true for some of my readers.

  On a bright and sunny morning, too beautiful to stay inside, I stroll my neighborhood, happy to be alive and ambulatory and disguised from my public by a baseball cap and dark glasses. Coming toward me is a woman about my age, her dog close behind. I smile as we pass—I believe in smiling at strangers; can’t hurt, and if everybody did it . . .—and suddenly I hear, “Wait! You’re the woman who wrote the book!” I turn, am introduced to the dog, Mike, and listen as words spill from Mike’s owner, who tells me her name is Jenny: “I loved your book, just loved it, and I want to place an ad, not really, but I know what I would write if I did and . . .” She is breathless, her face lit with enjoyment of her own thoughts. I ask her what she would write. She knows at once: “Wanted: A man who is funny and kind and smart and likes to travel.” She pauses. “And who is gay.” Gay? “Yes, gay. No sex. I’m not interested in that. I want somebody like Tony Kushner.” She is thoughtful. “Maybe I’ll include that: ‘A Tony Kushner look-alike.’ He’s darling, don’t you think?” I agree and wish her good luck.

  Our morning has gotten better, don’t you think. In just those very few moments Jenny invented a new and happy life for herself, and I got to witness a lovely woman regain youth and vitality and imagination. Makes me happy to be an author.

  Now if only I could get a date on this side of the continent. Not a gay date either. Being an author has its pleasures, but so does being a woman.

  CHAPTER 5

  getting a date

  It doesn’t matter how many people you talk to during the day if you don’t have someone waiting who cares about you.

  —JEAN ARTHUR in The Devil and Miss Jones

  LEST YOU THINK me picky, inflexible, overly demanding, let me tell you that from the moment I placed my ad I looked behind me, next door to me, down the block, in restaurants and stores for a man or men who lived nearby. Had I met one, even one, I might have given up all thoughts of New York. But I didn’t meet one; I couldn’t find anybody, so off I went. Even though I had met wonderful men there, now I had to face the fact that Robert was in my past for good, and Sidney, John, and, especially, Graham were three thousand miles away. Despite the wonders of telecommunications, they were untouchable. I was almost as bad off as I’d been in the beginning, before I placed the ad. This was humiliating: All that work, all that effort, all that money, and I ached—still—for a man’s touch. So now I had to stop wringing my hands and gnashing my teeth and start over. It was time to get a date. It was past time; it was 2003 and I had just turned seventy.

  A Round-Heeled Woman has not yet been published, but the man who calls me on the telephone tells me he has
read the prepublication edition sent to bookstores and critics. He tells me a friend of his lent it to him. He tells me his name is Gerald and that he lives in Berkeley. He would like to meet me. Yes, I will. When?

  I love Indian food, so I am happy when Gerald suggests we meet at an Indian restaurant on the other side of town. I love the other side of town. I love that restaurant. I plan to love Gerald.

  He is tall. That’s good. He stands outside the restaurant waiting, sort of slumped against the wall, and he says to me as I walk toward him, “You don’t look like the picture on your book jacket.” I sigh, remembering Robert’s initial remark as I stepped from the plane three years earlier: “You don’t look at all like your photograph.” Gerald’s comment does not bode well for our future.