LOVE NOTE Chapter 3: December 1987.

After Estelle’s two sorries I avoided drugs and love play for more than a month. I also, though not by design, avoided my typewriter, as I mostly had since leaving Jamesville October 3. About 3 P.M. December 10 I smoked and did a line; I meant to write about my sexual summer, but had no idea how to begin. I moved to my typewriter, rolled in a fresh sheet of paper, stared at the blank page for a minute, and started to type.
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Vincent was my roommate my first year (1959-60) at Columbia College. He was better educated and more sophisticated than I, had read all of Dickens before he was eleven and been a whiz-kid on a radio show featuring the ultra-smart. My family was unreligious Episcopalian, his unreligious Jewish, and we were confidently atheistic. God wasn't dead; God wasn't, never had been, never would. We knew. My father was a newspaper editor, Vincent's a geneticist; my mother a newswoman turned housewife turned school teacher, his a professional repertory actress. I was six one, 155 pounds, and had blue eyes and crew-cut light brown hair. Vincent was a few inches shorter, twenty pounds heavier, and had parted black hair and black eye brows that met above his nose. His best sport was swimming and he would swim the butterfly for the freshman team. I would play fifth and sometimes fourth singles on the freshman tennis team. When my mother (Florence) said to me I was not as smart as Vincent but was, she guessed, a better person, I thought it a motherism. I was in love with him the day I met him, though I didn't call what I felt love and never lusted after him. He liked me and excited me.

I had wanted a girlfriend from the time I was three years old--at three my unrequited love had been for Jobie, who was four. When as a 10-year-old I thought of rape, and I did, it was a sexual act, not one of violence. I wondered at fourteen whether I wasn't available to absolutely any girl. I imagined a short fat ugly girl ("But looks don't matter, it's what's inside that counts, who a person is, respect everyone," I argued) at whose beck and call I might find myself were she to kiss me or let me touch her. Girls I met in college told me I was different, meaning I didn't just want sex. I didn't just want it, but I wanted it desperately. I still in college fell in love anew at each rare kiss; staying in it was soon enough to prove a problem.

Thanksgiving 1959 I visited Vincent's family in Cleveland Heights. I kissed and fell in love with his younger sister Jeannie, and after I left we exchanged passionate letters. One Sunday night in December after Vincent and I were each in bed, about to sleep, he talked about having slept with a brilliant City girl he'd just met Friday night. She wanted to meet me, he said. Lying listening in the dark six feet across the room, I was erect. I didn't come or try to make myself come or think that if I tried I would. I didn't know that most male 18-year-olds masturbated or that when they did they ejaculated. I had had wet dreams but my ignorance, even for a young American intellectual in that repressed and sexually ignorant year, was unusually complete.

I returned to Cleveland Heights after Christmas but Jeannie's ardor had cooled. As we parted in the upstairs hall at 1 A.M. New Year's Day I awkwardly and shyly touched her breast. We were fully clothed, as always when with one another, but I'd never touched a girl's breast as openly before, not hiding that I knew what I was doing. I don't think it had yet occurred to me that my caresses might, allowed, come to give her pleasure and excite her, so focused was I on attaining the forbidden contact for myself. She moved my hand away and said good night.

My Christmas visit had not been reassuring, but I was still in love with Jeannie after returning to New York; I continued to write but her letters stopped. After she had been unresponsive for six weeks I pleaded that she answer and she wrote back that Vincent had told her I had taken to staying late every night at the West End Bar, returning to the dorm only after the bar had closed. She wrote that she didn't want to be involved with a boy like the troubled boy whom he described. I wrote her a hurt righteous letter saying I saw the last six weeks differently than I gathered Vincent did and suggesting that if I really were in trouble she should have thought to help me, not just dropped me. Exit Jeannie. In May, Vincent told me he didn't want to live with me come September. I'd known we weren't getting along as well as we had and thought the decision he'd made good for both of us. I tried to conceal that his rejection hurt but knew he knew.
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As a sophomore I lived alone in John Jay Hall on the Columbia campus. I missed Vincent but didn't pine and grew particularly close to Buddy, one of fifty-five boys from the Bronx High School of Science in our class of 700. Buddy's girlfriend Emma was a freshman at Antioch, the Ohio college that was one of the few in 1960 with a politically active student body. Anne was Emma's best friend and roommate.

I met Anne in February 1961, I 19, she 18, when she and Emma came to New York to picket a ceremony at which the conservative Barry Goldwater was to receive an award from HUAC, the red-baiting House Un-American Activities Committee. Though interested in politics and a committed HUAC-hater, I picketed that night for the first (and I think last) time in my life because I wanted to meet Anne. She was five feet nine and about my weight; her hair was light brown and long; her eyes deep set, one brown, one green; her mouth generous and her voice low. She dressed as carelessly and casually as I.

In hours we were in love, though I remained a virgin until I went to Ohio a month later. The first time we made love was mildly disappointing but very far from only disappointing, and afterwards I was more in love than ever. Then one fine morning the first week of May, as I was walking in front of Butler Library on the Columbia campus, I knew that I was not in love.

I was stunned. Why had this happened? How? Nothing Anne had said or done explained or justified my change of heart. There were two explanations for my betrayal of our love that I could not be sure were groundless, much as I hoped they were. The first was that I was rejecting Anne because I was seeing her through Vincent's eyes. He had never said a word against her but he had not seemed particularly to like her, either, and his lack of comment when I confided that my feelings had flip-flopped--he and I were close again, would live with one another and a third Columbia junior (Richard) our first semester junior year--I interpreted as the silence of a man who thought what had happened both unsurprising and for the best. I hoped I was a better person than would turn his back on love because of the opinion of others but I wondered. A time would come when I would think that citing Vincent's hypothetical attitude was my way of externalizing an ambivalent attitude that was, against my wishes and in violation of my self-image, my own. More dismaying still, and not altogether separate, was the possibility that I was rejecting Anne because she was not conventionally pretty. I denied each explanation, but my denials lacked conviction in the face of the truth that I could not deny: I did not love Anne.

By late May 1961, unwilling to lie, I'd confessed my feelings to her; she was devastated and we ended our relationship, but in less than a year we were sleeping with each other again. After I was hurt and she was dead I would come to wonder whether, had I had another lover just one night, I might have let her be. Then, I thought the answer yes.
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In February and March 1962 Anne and I lived together with Richard on Ninetieth Street off Central Park West in Richard's grandmother's apartment--two big rooms, bathroom, kitchen, and hallway--while his grandmother was visiting his parents. (Vincent, with whom we had lived first semester, had married.) Richard whole-heartedly liked and approved Anne. I wanted to love her and was by no means sure I didn't, but I was careful not to say I did. One day in early March I was trudging along Ninetieth Street in the snow on my way to Lexington Avenue to buy condoms. As long as I could remember I had craved intellectual excellence and a willing lover. I was writing better than I ever had, reading better, caught up in class, exhilarated by reading Shakespeare and hearing Andrew Chiappe talk about him, reading Hesse’s lesser known novels on my own time, and I'd made love with Anne for ten nights running.

How could it be that I did not feel better than I did? Was I in love? Was she in love and I not? What else could she do to please me? If she were pregnant, I'd marry her, I thought. Did she want to get pregnant? Hadn't she seemed last night to want to make love again even though we had no more condoms? I thought so and knew I didn't want to be a father soon.

Anne left New York City in early April 1962 to return to Antioch. I walked her to the subway station on Central Park West below Ninetieth Street and watched from the corner as she disappeared down the stairs. To the last I'd thought I might ask her to stay. I wasn't irresponsible with her lightly but clumsily, along for the ride, influencing it where I could
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We next saw one another the following August. She and her parents, who had never met me, were in New Jersey to attend her older brother's wedding and were staying at his fiancée's house an hour's drive from Godwin. She snuck away at 10 P. M. and ran to join me where I'd parked a few houses up the street. I'd bought a 3-pack of condoms on my way to our rendezvous. I didn't know how to keep a rubber on but I knew to use one. I'd not discovered oral sex, would not, with her; I was a sorry and unimaginative very enthusiastic young lover. Anne wasn't nothing but sex to me. Were she, I knew that in the next 48 hours I would ask her to live with me in New York for the upcoming year. She sat beside me in my parents' Volkswagen camper as we looked for a place to park and make love; we wanted to be outside, not in the camper. The first spot we picked felt wrong and we found a second; when the leaves on which we lay hurt her, we covered them with the double sleeping bag I had in the camper. The condoms I'd bought were lubricated--I'd not known such things existed--and the one I tried to use came off as soon as I moved in her.

Our love-making had been hurried and clumsy, and back in the Volks neither of us felt good, but we remained good-willed. We talked. I'd already rented my apartment for the school year, scheduled to begin in three weeks, and I'd imagined us together in it. I knew she'd love it. It was on Ninety-First Street between West End and Broadway, the fourth floor of a 3-story walk-up, and had a small living room, smaller bedroom, and very small kitchen off which was a very very small bathroom. The roof was easily accessible and would be our private porch. I didn't describe it to her. We left it that in September or October she might come east to join me but would probably go west, to San Francisco, to enroll at San Francisco State and get on with her life. I was relieved driving home because I knew that I'd done the right thing not asking her to stay.

Nights that October, reading, writing, I would hear the door four stories below open and close and listen for her footsteps on the stairs. It was not usually an overtly sexual fantasy though I did sometimes masturbate, with the usual frustrated dry result. I often didn't go to bed till dawn, studying some, reading and writing some, but above all waiting, imagining, listening for the sounds that might mean she'd arrived.

She went west to California, but before I knew that she had done so Buddy told me that she had returned to her parents' in Chicago to have a grapefruit-sized cyst removed from her uterus. To my dismay I found myself relieved that she'd not come to me. The fact of the cyst repulsed me, as though it were a proof of her unlovableness. How could I be so base? I'd no desire to tend and reassure her and ease her fears. I wished her well. I wished her only well! How could I feel like this? What was I? (I didn’t answer that I was a 21-year-old American male in 1962, nor, to my credit, would I have accepted it as an explanation if I had.) My fantasies of her footsteps ceased. She recovered and returned to San Francisco.
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Walking alone in Riverside Park on an unseasonably warm night in January 1963 I realized I would go to Anne after graduation. Before I left, thinking about it, I knew it likely a mistake, but I felt compelled and liked the feeling; I told no one what I had decided. Later that January there was a week when I again spent long nights listening for her footsteps. In March I called her but said nothing of what I intended. She wrote me. She'd fallen in love and wasn't hurting over me anymore, and I was happy for her. I'd never wanted to hurt her and had, and had again, despite my pedantic avoidance of the word love--and I knew I was going to risk doing it at least one more time.

We crashed in the Nevada desert and she died just before sunrise August 25, 1963. I was flown from Nevada to begin rehabilitation in New York September 25. I wouldn't be Gatched (bent at the waist) till February 25 or lifted out of bed into a wheelchair until March 25. I was discharged from the rehab unit June 25, 1964.

I'd been hurt in an accident. Statistically, some of us are. It seemed foolishness to think oneself exempt from a particular random happening. Breaking one's neck is unlikely, but it happens, so why not to me? I took aesthetic atheistic pleasure in suffering intelligently, but of course suffer I did, and there was a night in November 1963 when I vowed never to forget that what I was going through was too much and could not be recompensed by any future; whatever might come, however I might prosper, these days that I was living now were too high a price to have paid.

Unless? I couldn't remember not having wanted to be a writer, by which, by high school, I meant a novelist. If breaking my neck had released my genius and there had been no other way, wasn't it arguably better that Anne had died and I had been paralyzed? I knew the proposition flawed. Her death, my suffering, were absolutes. Nor could I know what I might have written had I not been paralyzed. What I could and did know was that I still could write, and I intended to. I had thought even as I waited in the desert before Anne and I were found that our failed and ultimately fatal relationship could begin or end a novel very well. And if my effort was futile and my writing failed and continued to fail, were not futility and failure quintessentially human? I could write about that.
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I'd been back in Tucson nine weeks and for the first time in more than a month lay in front of my mirror, legs spread, hands to my sides, penis tumescent but unlifted, glasses on. I could see my vast belly clearly. As I lay feeling I saw the background tatter and my body blur and soften until only its diffuse undetailed pregnant-looking outline remained. My vision cleared and I again saw detail. I stretched my scrotum over my stiffened penis and held it with my hand against my abdomen; I felt my penis jump against the stretched sack like a frightened animal trapped in a net.

My vision again grew diffuse. Emerging from between my legs I seemed to see a baby's red and wrinkled head. I pushed as though to expel the baby's body and closed my eyes and let my balls fall and my penis leap as it would, pressed the sides of my belly with my hands and moaned aloud in the empty house. My head lolled to the right. I panted. The love astonished me. I could describe what I was feeling. I could say everything. Writing of my play would further it and guide its evolution. "Please God," I said. I said it over and over and over again, belieflessly pleading.

I lay, eyes closed. The whole, I imagined, loves its parts, the parts the whole, the parts' connection a force like magnetism or gravity. Parts? The part is the whole, parts inseparable except by limited assumptions. I wasn't thinking, wasn't reasoning. One idea revealed the next, and I literally felt each revelation genitally. Gravity was the urge of parts to unite with the whole, as a whole. The feeling surged. The urge to oneness love? I came.
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