Rich Rewards

More and more I have come to credit first impressions. People I have been crazy about on sight—Agatha, and in a different, much more violent way, Jean-Paul—I seem to love permanently. When I start with distrust or dislike, getting a whiff of right-wing politics, racism, arrogance, stinginess, to name a few unlovable qualities, I generally come back to that first view. I believe too that first events in a new place are significant, the way a city receives you, so to speak. If it rains, unseasonably cold, on your first week in London, you might as well push on to Paris. However, had I followed that rule and given up on San Francisco right away, I would never again have seen Jean-Paul.

My first week in San Francisco, then, was crazy and menacing enough to tell me that I might have done better to leave. Except that, like most people who come to that spoiled and lovely city, I had come partly for negative reasons: I was almost out of other places to go, and I was running away from a bad love affair in Boston. More positively, I was “doing” a house for Agatha (I am a decorator, of sorts), who had just mysteriously inherited all that money from the General, her father.

The arrangement with Agatha was that I should live in
her house, more or less camping out there, while I was doing it. In that way she would not be bothered with carpenters, carpet-layers, all those noisy people; I would cope with all that, rent-free, while she continued her diligent doctor’s life—she is a pediatrician, specializing in infant lung problems—from the modest apartment on California Street, near Polk, where she had lived for years. Her new house was in Pacific Heights, one of the city’s most expensive, conservative, peaceful, fog-ridden and beautiful neighborhoods—a curious choice for Agatha, the Episcopalian-radical, but she had fallen in love with the barny old house. I loved it too, although my stay there was strange and difficult from the start.

The first thing that happened, on my second day there, was that my garbage can was stolen. I had tidily taken garbage out the night before, leavings from my unpacking, and I had wondered why the can was so near the front porch, then remembered that there was no kitchen entrance: I would have to build a deck. And the next morning when I went out with more trash, there was no garbage can.

At first, I thought that it must be a San Francisco system of garbage collection with which I was unfamiliar, picking up the can along with the garbage. But this seemed impractical, and then I remembered the early Sixties, in New York, when people kept saying, “My God, they’re stealing our garbage cans, what next?” Well, what came to be called “urban violence” was next. Anyway, there in San Francisco, my second day in town, my garbage can was stolen.

The next thing that happened, two days later, was the murder of a man, two blocks away from where I lived. Out walking his dog, one night, with his wife, and a car drove past, slowed up; someone stuck a gun out the window and fired two shots. A “random killing”—the dead man could have been anyone, or they could have hit his wife, or the dog.
I had gone out for dinner with Agatha that night, and so I didn’t hear the shots, as I might have, or an ambulance, anything. I only read about it in the next day’s morning paper, and although living in New York and spending time in Boston with my lover could have hardened me to murders, it had not; I was chilled, and terrified.

Going about my work that day, mainly walking slowly through large empty rooms and trying to envision something there—as I did that, I thought a lot about the wife of the murdered man. Married eighteen years, the paper said. If they had married in their twenties, she was probably about my age, around forty, maybe a little older. Had she liked her husband? Suppose it had been me, out for a walk with Derek, the Boston lover whom I had come West to escape? There was a sense in which I hated Derek, and not without cause, but would I have been relieved if he had been shot? Suppose that woman had really cared about her husband? And I wondered how she now felt about her dog, the innocent and unscathed cause of the walk.

And I wondered how long it would be before San Francisco more and more closely resembled New York. “Manhattanization” was a word I had already picked up from the papers, although I gathered that it referred to high-rise buildings, not to murder.

The third thing that happened was that Jean-Paul reentered my life—curiously, by way of the Sunday paper.

I was sitting at the table that I had set up in the middle of the kitchen, my island of order in what would increasingly be the chaos of remodeling, and I was doing several things at once: reading the paper (although I hated it, I was already addicted), drinking coffee and thinking about just
where the deck should go, which window to enlarge into a door. The farthest southwest corner, I decided, the one that looked out to a tall clump of eucalyptus trees.

One advantage the Sunday paper has over the daily ones is that there are more of the good, nationally syndicated columnists; the daily papers tend to be incredibly
local.
I was reading such a columnist, a man whom I usually agree with and like, as he described a recent visit to France, and what he had gathered there concerning Euro-Communism, and Euro-Socialism. The most interesting, impressive man that he had spoken to, he said, was Jean-Paul ——, an economic theorist, professor, editor, who had said …

And so Jean-Paul, in that unlikely way, rushed back full-force into my life—or, rather, into my heart and blood—from across almost twenty years.

Where to start? I remembered everything about him all at once, an avalanche of vivid memories, under which I was suddenly buried: I saw our last parting, standing between trains, our eyes and our hands straining toward each other. I saw our crazy first night, the night we met, in the Club Méphisto. And I saw the beautiful unforgettable shape of his cock, and felt its taste.

To begin with that last, his sex: I had never seen an uncircumcised penis before, nor had that ever occurred to me as a place for kissing, for tongues. I know, unimaginative; but I was about twenty then, and the men I had made love with so far, including Marshall, my then husband, seemed not to go in for oral sex either, or perhaps not with nice girls like me. Anyway, Jean-Paul had a lovely cock, young and fresh and pink and delicately blue-veined, delicious.

Now, this is curious: all the greatest loves of my life, the four—or is it five?—have been uncircumcised. Even Jacob,
who was Jewish: he explained that his liberated parents didn’t believe in it—quite right, I think. What is strange is that this fact, foreskin or not, could not be known or even guessed at ahead of time, ahead of love. Also, there have been uncircumcised men whom I have not fallen in love with, just fucked—I mean, I don’t automatically flip out at the sight of a foreskin. Just sometimes. I have wondered about my father: was he, as the French say,
entier
? No way to know; my mother would not have remembered, and anyway how could I have asked her? But actually I don’t want to know about my father, whom after all I hardly knew, he died so young. I would prefer to believe that in some curiously effective way I was “imprinted” by Jean-Paul, phallus-wise, and such indeed would seem to be the case.

But I suppose I should tell about Jean-Paul in a logical way—causally, as it were.

In the middle Fifties I was living in London, in Kensington. With Marshall, to whom I had been married for less than a year, and with whom I was already not getting along. Marshall had money from home; he was studying at the London School, and I, doing nothing, was entirely dependent on him for money. In early November I persuaded him that a weekend in Paris would do us both good—and how right I was, although not in the way that I had imagined.

We found a cheap hotel on the Rue de Tournon. Marshall hated it—dusty, impractically shaped; I was crazy about it. In fact I loved everything in Paris on sight, especially those small, then quiet Left Bank streets, the gray façLades of buildings, lovely scrolled balconies. If I believed in such things, I would think that I had lived there in another life, that I was recognizing my spiritual home; of course I don’t believe that, but that is how it felt. I experienced a sort of euphoria, just
walking around, crossing those beautiful stone bridges and stopping to stare down into the dark quiet river.

Small wonder that I should fall in love.

We had dinner in a cheap student restaurant, on Rue Benoit, and we responded predictably: I with enthusiasm, Marshall sourly. In fact our marriage was a typical Fifties error: I imagined that being married would rescue me from what had begun to seem a chronically turbulent sexual life—too many, too chaotic affairs—and Marshall thought a regular sexual life, in his case “intercourse” once a week, would free him for work. And in 1955, when we married, neither of those ideas would have sounded mad.

After dinner we went to a nightclub that someone in London had told us about—the Méphisto, on the Rue de Seine. And there was a tall, square-faced young man standing at the bar, with fresh fair skin and slightly slant blue eyes. A friendly smile. Jean-Paul.

He watched me as Marshall and I danced, he smiled as we sat down. He came over and asked if he could buy us a drink: had we yet tried Pernod? We hadn’t, and he ordered some for us, a nice French host to visiting young Americans. He was about ten years older than we were, in his early thirties; an economist, he and some friends (“comrades”) were just starting a magazine of political commentary. Most of this was for Marshall’s benefit, I knew; he was waiting to ask me to dance, which he did, as soon as there was something slow, some oldy from the Forties. He maneuvered me out of Marshall’s view, and we pressed together, barely moving. It was surely an instant, explosive attraction between us, but I was a little wary; I had had a few too many of those since marriage to Marshall—not acting on any of them, not yet, but still I was scared. Something must be wrong with me; I knew that marriage was not supposed to affect people in that way.