The Dying Animal Read online

  She was inconsistent in her morality, by the way. I remember that at that time George O'Hearn, the poet, a man married to the same woman all his life, had a girlfriend in Consuela's neighborhood, and he was there, downtown, having breakfast with his girlfriend in a coffee shop, and Consuela saw him and she was upset. She recognized him from the picture on the back of a new book of his then on the table beside my bed, and she knew that I knew him. She came to me that night. "I saw your friend. He was with a girl at eight o'clock in the morning, in a restaurant, and he was kissing her—and he's married." She was so predictably platitudinous in these things while acting independently of all convention in her affair with someone thirty-eight years her senior. Inwardly uncertain and out of her depth some of the time, that had to be; nonetheless, something special was happening to her, a big, ersatz, unforeseen something that flattered her vanity and fed her confidence and, exciting as it was, didn't appear to be turning her (as it was me) inside out.

  Consuela told me, during one of my interrogations, that there was a boyfriend back in high school who used to want passionately to watch her menstruate. Whenever she started to menstruate, she was to call him, and he would come right over, and she would stand there, and he would watch the blood run down her thighs and onto the floor. "You did this for him?" I asked. "Yes." "And your family, what about your traditional family? You were fifteen years old, you couldn't stay out in the summertime after eight P.M., and yet you did this? Your grandmother a duchess," I said, "in love with her rosary, and yet you did this?" "I wasn't fifteen any longer. I was sixteen by then." "Sixteen. I see. That explains it. And how often did you do this?" "Whenever I had my period. Every month," she told me. "Who was the boy? I thought a boy couldn't even be in your room. Who was he? Who is he?"

  A socially acceptable boy. Also Cuban. Carlos Alonso. Very proper, clean-cut kid, she tells me, who picked her up at the door in a suit and a tie, never honked for her at the curb, who would come in and meet her parents and sit with them, a reserved boy from a good family highly conscious of their social status. As in her own family there is lots of respect for the father, everyone is well educated, everyone is easily bilingual, the right schools, the right country club, they read El Diario and the Bergen Record, they love Reagan, love Bush, hate Kennedy, rich New Jersey Cubans to the right of Louis XIV, and Carlos calls her up and says don't menstruate without me.

  Picture it. After school, the bathroom, suburban Bergen County, and the two of them transfixed by the enigma of her discharge as though they are Adam and Eve. Because Carlos is enchanted too. He too knows she is a work of art, the lucky rare woman who is a work of art, classical art, beauty in its classical form, but alive, alive, and the aesthetic response to beauty alive is what, class? Desire. Yes, Carlos is her mirror. Men have always been her mirror. They even want to watch her menstruate. She is the female magic men cannot escape. Dressed culturally in the decorous Cuban past, but her permissions flow from her vanity. Her permissions flow from looking in the mirror and saying, "Someone else must see this."

  "Call me," I told her, "when you begin to menstruate. I want you to come here. I want to watch too."

  Too. That's how unconcealed the jealousy is, how feverish the desire is—and that's how something close to disastrous happened.

  Because I was meanwhile, that year, having an affair with a very attractive, very strong, responsible woman, no disabling wounds, no vices or wild views, a scrutinizing intelligence, reliable in every way, too unironic ever to be lightly witty but a sensual, expert, and attentive lover. Carolyn Lyons. Many years earlier, back in the mid-sixties, she'd been a student of mine as well. In the intervening decades, however, neither of us had gone in search of the other, and so when we accidentally met on the street as Carolyn was walking to work one morning, we embraced and held each other as if it were a cataclysmic event like a world war (rather than her leaving for California to go to law school) that had separated us for the next twenty-four years. We each proclaimed how wonderful the other looked, laughingly recalled the mania of a night in my office when she was nineteen, said all sorts of tender things about the past, and there and then made a date for dinner the next night.

  Carolyn was still beautiful, radiantly big-featured, though beneath the pale gray eyes the biggish sockets were now papery and worn, and not so much, I would think, because of her chronic insomnia but because of that compound of disappointments not uncommon to the biographies of successful professional women in their forties whose evening meals more often than not are delivered to the door of their Manhattan apartments in a plastic bag by an immigrant. And her body took up more space than it used to. Two divorces, no children, a demanding, high-paying job requiring a lot of overseas travel—all that adds up to another thirty-five pounds, and so when we went to bed, she whispered, "I'm not the same," to which I replied, "Do you think I am?" and nothing was said on that score again.

  As an undergraduate, Carolyn had roomed with one of the campus firebrands, a charismatic sixties ringleader, a la Abbie Hoffman, named Janie Wyatt, a kid from Manhasset who wrote an enchanting senior thesis for me entitled "A Hundred Ways to Be Perverse in the Library." I quote the opening sentence: "The blow job in the library is the very essence of it, the sanctified transgression, the campus black mass." Janie weighed maybe a hundred pounds, no more than five feet tall, if that, a little blonde who looked as if you could pick her up and throw her around, and she was the college's dirty diva.

  Carolyn back then was in awe of Janie. Carolyn used to say to me, "She has so many affairs. Simultaneously. You go to somebody's apartment, a graduate student, a young instructor, and there's Janie's underwear hanging out to dry on the handles of the shower faucets." Students who wanted sex, Carolyn would tell me, they'd be walking along the campus, they'd suddenly want sex, and they'd call her. And if she wanted it too, off they went. They'd be walking along, they'd stop in their tracks, they'd say, "I think I'm just going to call Janie," and they never made it to class. A lot of the faculty frowned at the openness of her sexual behavior and equated it with stupidity. Even some of the boys—spoke of her as a slut one moment and then went off to bed with her the next. But she was neither stupid nor a slut. Janie was someone who knew what she was doing. She stood in front of you, small as she was, with her legs slightly apart, planted, lots of freckles, blond short hair, no makeup except bright red lipstick, and her big, open confessional grin: this is what I am, this is what I do, if you don't like it, it's too bad.

  How did Janie astonish me most? Many ways—in the early days of the campus revolt, there were many things to mark her as a new, noteworthy kind of creature. She astonished me, strangely, by doing something that might sound nothing like immoderate now, given the progress in boldness that women have made since, and that didn't necessarily rival the defiant flamboyance of her public stance. She astonished me most by carrying off the shyest man on the campus, our poet. The crossover between faculty and students was exciting not only for being new but for being out in the open, and accounted for more divorces than just my own. The poet was without the skills others possess in advancing their worldly interests. He marshaled his egoism for language alone. Eventually died from drink, relatively young, but, on his own in genial America, only drink could unstring this guy. Married, with two kids, bashful as could be other than up on the platform dazzlingly lecturing on poetry. To lure this man out of the shadows was unimaginable. Except to Janie. At a party. Many students, both boys and girls, wanted to be closer to him. The smart girls all had a crush on him, this romantic stranger from life, but he didn't appear to trust anybody. Until Janie went up to him at a party and took his hand and said, "Let's dance," and the next thing we knew she had him in tow. He seemed to swim right in to trusting her. Little Janie Wyatt: we're all equal, we're all free, we can land anything we want.

  Janie and Carolyn, along with another three or four defiant upper-middle-class kids, comprised a clique calling itself the Gutter Girls. Well, these girls resembled nothing I
'd ever known, and not because they were swathed in gypsy rags and barefoot. They detested innocence. They couldn't bear supervision. They weren't afraid of being conspicuous and they weren't afraid of being clandestine. To rebel against one's condition was everything. They and their adherents may well have been, historically, the first wave of American girls fully implicated in their own desire. No rhetoric, no ideology, just the playing field of pleasure opening out to the bold. The boldness developed as they realized what the possibilities were, when they realized they were no longer being watched, that they were no longer subservient to the old system or under any system of any kind—when they realized they could do anything.

  It was an improvised revolution at first, the sixties revolution; the campus vanguard was tiny, half of one percent, maybe a percent and a half, but that didn't matter because the vibrating faction of society soon followed. Culture is always being led by its narrowest point, among the young women on this campus by Janie's Gutter Girls, the female trailblazers of a completely spontaneous sexual change. Twenty years earlier, in my college days, the campuses had been perfectly managed. Parietal regulations. Unquestioned supervision. The authority came from a distant Kafkaesque source—"the administration"—and the language of the administration could have come from Saint Augustine. You tried to find your wily way around all this control, but until about '64, by and large everyone under surveillance was law-abiding, members in excellent standing of what Hawthorne called "the limit-loving class." Then came the long-delayed explosion, the disreputable assault on postwar normalcy and the cultural consensus. All that was unmanageable came breaking out, and the irreversible transformation of the young had begun.

  Carolyn never achieved Janie's notoriety, nor did she want to. Carolyn partook of the protest, the provocation, the insolent fun but, with characteristic self-discipline, never to the point where insubordination might jeopardize her future. Carolyn as she is now in middle age—entirely of the corporate world, uncomplainingly straight—isn't a surprise to me. Giving offense in the cause of sexual license was never Carolyn's calling. Neither was wholesale waywardness. But Janie—let me digress for a moment to Janie, in her own small-time way a Consuela Castillo's Simón Bolívar. Yes, a great revolutionary leader like the South American Bolívar, whose armies destroyed the power of colonialist Spain—an insurrectionist unafraid of battling superior forces, the libertador pitted against the college's reigning morality who eventually swept its authority away.

  Today, the carefree sexual conduct of the well-bred girls in my class is, as far as they know, warranted by the Declaration of Independence, an entitlement that requires of them little if any courage to utilize and that is in harmony with the pursuit of happiness as conceived of at Philadelphia in 1776. In fact, the uninhibited everything that the Consuelas and the Mirandas nonchalantly take for granted derives from the audacity of the shameless, subversive Janie Wyatts and the amazing victory they achieved in the sixties through the force of atrocious behavior. The coarse dimension of American life previously captured in gangster films, that's what Janie hauled on campus, because that's the intensity it took to undo the upholders of the norms. That's how you carried the quarrel to your keepers—in your ugly language rather than theirs.

  Janie was born in the city, then raised in the suburbs, out on Long Island, in Manhasset. Her mother was a schoolteacher and commuted each day to Queens, which the family had left for Manhasset and where the mother still taught tenth grade. The father commuted in the other direction, the couple of miles to Great Neck, where he was a law partner of Carolyn's father. That's how the girls knew each other. The empty suburban house—it excites every sexual nerve in Janie's body. She comes of sexual age when the music is changing, and so she turns it on. She turns everything on. Janie's cunning was that she realized, when she got there, what the suburbs were for. She was never free in the city as a girl, never on the loose as the boys were. But out in Manhasset she found her frontier. There were next-door neighbors but they weren't as close as they were in the city. She got home from school and the streets were empty. Looked like the towns of the old Wild West. Nobody around. Everybody gone. So till they all came home on the train, she had a little operation, a little sideshow going. Thirty years later, a Janie Wyatt degenerates into an Amy Fisher, slavishly servicing the auto mechanic all on her own, but Janie was bright and a born organizer—unbroken, brazen, a sassy surfer riding the currents of change. The suburbs, where girls, safe from the dangers of the city, didn't have to be kept under tight wraps, where parents weren't too concerned on a moment-by-moment basis, the suburbs were her American finishing school. The suburbs created the agora for this education in the unsanctioned to flourish. The lessening of surveillance, the gradual giving over of space to all these kids who had been endowed by Dr. Spock with the tools of disobedience—and it flourished, all right. It grew out of control.

  That was the transformation Janie wrote about in her thesis. That was the story she told. The Suburbs. The Pill. The Pill that gave parity to the woman. The Music. Little Richard propelling everything. The Pelvic Backbeat. The Car. The kids out there driving together in the Car. The Prosperity. The Commute. The Divorce. A lot of adult distraction. The Grass. Dope. Dr. Spock. All of that's what led to Lord of the Flies U, which was what the Gutter Girls called our college. Janie's was not a revolutionary cell that was blowing things up. Janie wasn't Bernadine Dohrn or Kathy Boudin. Nor were the Betty Friedans speaking to her. The Gutter Girls had no objection to the social or the political argument, but that was the other side of the decade. There were two strains to the turbulence: there was the libertarianism extending orgiastic permission to the individual and opposed to the traditional interests of the community, but with it, often wedded to it, there was the communal righteousness about civil rights and against the war, the disobedience whose moral prestige devolves through Thoreau. And the two strains interconnecting made the orgy difficult to discredit.

  But Janie's was a pleasure cell, not a political cell. And these pleasure cells existed not just on our campus but all over and by the thousands, tie-dyed boys and girls who didn't always smell so good engaging together in reckless behavior. Twist and shout, work it on out—that, not the "Internationale," was their anthem. Salacious, direct music to fuck to. Music to give head by, the people's bebop. Of course, music has always been useful sexually, within the prescribed limitations of the moment. Even Glenn Miller, back when in a song you still had to come at sex through a Tin Pan Alley romance, lubricated the situation as much as it could be. Then young Sinatra. Then the creamy saxophone. But the limitations on the Gutter Girls? They used the music the way they used the marijuana, as a propulsive, as the emblem of their mutiny, the provocation to erotic vandalism. In my adolescence, in the swing band era, there was just the booze to put you in the mood. For them there was an arsenal of all-out anti-inhibitors.

  Having those girls in class was my education: seeing how they got themselves up, watching them jettison their manners and uncover their crudeness, listening to their music with them, smoking with them and listening to Janis Joplin, their Bessie Smith in whiteface, their shouter, their honky-tonk, stoned Judy Garland, listening with them to Jimi Hendrix, their Charlie Parker of the guitar, getting high with them and listening to Hendrix playing the guitar backwards, reversing everything, retarding the beat, accelerating the beat, and Janie chanting, as her doped-out mantra, "Hendrix and sex, Hendrix and sex," and Carolyn, as hers, "A beautiful man with a beautiful voice"—observing the swagger and appetite and excitement of the Janies who were without the biological terror of the erection, without the fear of the phallic transformation of the man.

  The Janie Wyatts of the American sixties knew how to operate around engorged men. They were themselves engorged, so they knew how to transact business with them. The venturous male drive, the male initiative, wasn't a lawless action requiring denunciation and adjudication but a sexual sign that one responds to or not. To control the male impulse and report it? They we
re not educated in that ideological system. They were far too playful to be indoctrinated with animus and resentment and grievance from above. They were educated in the instinctual system. They weren't interested in replacing the old inhibitions and prohibitions and moral instruction with new forms of surveillance and new systems of control and a new set of orthodox beliefs. They knew where the pleasure was to be had, and they knew how to give over to desire without fear. Unafraid of the aggressive impulse, deep in the transforming fracas—and for the first time on American soil since the Pilgrim women of Plymouth Colony were cloistered by an ecclesiastical government against the corruptions of the flesh and the sinfulness of men—a generation drawing their conclusions from their cunts about the nature of experience and the delights of the world.

  Isn't the bolivar the unit of currency in Venezuela? Well, under America's first woman president, I would hope the dollar will become the wyatt. Janie deserves no less. She democratized the entitlement to pleasure.

  Sidelight. The English trading outpost at Merry Mount that so incensed the Plymouth Puritans—know about that? Fur-trading settlement, smaller than Plymouth, about thirty miles northwest of Plymouth. Where Quincy, Mass., is today. Men drinking, selling arms to the Indians, palling around with the Indians. Cavorting with the enemy. Copulating with Indian women, whose custom it was to assume the doggie position and to be taken from behind. A pagan hotbed in Puritan Massachusetts, where the Bible was law. Danced around a maypole in animal masks, worshiped at it every month. Hawthorne based a story on that maypole: Governor Endicott sent the Puritan militia under Miles Standish to cut it down, a pine tree festooned with colored banners and ribbons and antlers and roses and standing eighty feet tall. "Jollity and gloom were contending for an empire"—that's how Hawthorne understood it.