Sylvia was, I discovered, rarely without a boyfriend. She was seeing Gerhard, a handsome foreign student from Holland. I was taken to meet Gerhard and Leif, his Norwegian friend. The four of us attended foreign films, art exhibits, and concerts. Leif cooked us dinner in his off-campus apartment, where we discussed the superiority of European culture and the greats of Scandinavian literature.
Leif was my height with strong shoulders and straight blonde hair, on the quiet side, very agreeable. We got along, but the sparks weren’t flying. Maybe a kiss would have broken the ice, but Leif left me at the door with a slow smile.
Since Sylvia and Gerhard often left us and disappeared into the night, I assumed they were going to bed together. Sylvia was guarded on the subject, aside from remarking that Gerhard was a good lover. But she kept him at bay and fit him carelessly into her schedule. I couldn’t figure how she could be so cavalier. I could never be that sophisticated. Sylvia was curious about Leif. Were we sleeping together? No? She had a hard time accepting my virginal status—Minnesota was so conventional.
When the exhibit was over, I helped Sylvia collect her paintings from the gallery. We were lugging canvasses down the staircase and discussing Sylvia’s next project. I carried a painting neatly wrapped in a poplin cloth with one arm and two empty frames with the other, trying not to let the protruding hooks brush against my pleated skirt.
“You’ll meet my parents,” Sylvia was saying, adjusting a canvas more tightly under her arm. “And you have to meet Paul, my best friend from high school. He’s a dancer. Won’t they be surprised? I’ve never before had a friend like you.”
“What do you mean—like me?” The frames were slipping and I paused to tighten my grip.
“Well, I mean, someone who is, who is so . . . well . . . common.”
We had reached the landing and I whirled around to face her.
“What do you mean?” I wasn’t sure I had heard right. For the first time I saw her blush.
“Oh, just that you—don’t have—oh, never mind. It’s nothing.”
I stared at her incredulous. “What did you mean by that?”
“Nothing at all.”
When we arrived at her dorm, I placed my bundles on the entry floor and gave her a brief glance. “I have to go,” I said, and stalked out the front door. I felt she had dashed our artistic alliance, that I had been tossed coldly to the other side among the unenlightened. Anger soared through my veins and I didn’t look back.
For the next few days I avoided her, ignored the note she left in my mailbox, and slipped out of the history class we shared without looking in her direction. I hadn’t yet figured out the word common. I had thought we were on the same unique path, crossing the same Elysian field. But finally I had to admit I knew what she meant. Our backgrounds were very different. She grew up in liberal Los Angeles, attended Hollywood High School, a school filled with the children of film stars, and cultivated a serious art talent under the guidance of a high-level art teacher. Her mother worked part time in an antique store and attended local museum acquisition meetings. All I knew about was clothes and parties. I hadn’t even had a real boyfriend. I had done nothing. I was a Minnesota outback, by her standards. Why had she taken me as a friend?
But I knew the answer. We shared a dream of striking out and creating our future. No other friendship in Boulder could match that.
Two weeks after our estrangement, I entered our usual coffeehouse on Main Street and found her sitting in a window booth, bent over a notebook. I slipped in across from her, and we resumed talking as if nothing had happened. The waitress served a warm caramel roll with my cocoa. We didn’t discuss the episode. She understood that I had forgiven her, that the issue was too petty to carry. I did not admit that her words stirred a deep fear that my quietness translated into dullness, and that basically, despite the outfits and privileges, I was boring.
After that we became inseparable. She respected me, and for my part she was my muse. I asked no more.
Sylvia and I talked endlessly about our next move. Clearly, returning to the University of Colorado was out. We would not spend one more year in this rigid enclave dominated by the fraternity system, the heart of the very conformity we resisted. To marry, raise children, and follow the usual route of domesticity was not for us. It was paramount to pull out from under the control of our parents. Sylvia’s drive to form her life in the artistic mold was matched by my determination, at any cost, to break from my past and the smothering direction of my parents and all that was keeping me from following my true bent.
One evening, a few days before the end of school, I lay on the hill beside Sewall Hall arms tucked under my head, watching the low clouds drift by in slow motion as if floating in a blue sea. I felt warmth spread along my skin. I was imbibed with new confidence and no longer felt adrift. It was as if a hardening agent had entered my bloodstream. There were oceans to cross and it was good to be young! There was nothing lacking. I had a place, I was viable.
* * *
I spent the next year in limbo. Our plans to share an apartment in Manhattan did not materialize. That summer Sylvia swept off on a road trip through New Mexico with her parents. I toured New England with Mom and Dad in our new Buick. Our rooms were redecorated: Sylvia’s was transformed into a studio with a standing fireplace, and my twin bedroom set was replaced by a studio couch, coffee table, and two ebony pole lamps, with prints by Rufino Tamayo and Edvard Munch above a low chest. None of this dampened our resolve.
By fall it was clear Sylvia’s parents wouldn’t allow her to quit school. I also had to continue my studies. I applied to and was accepted by New York University but my parents refused to allow me to attend—they considered NYU a hotbed of communism. I couldn’t break away. At the last minute I enrolled at the University of Minnesota for fall quarter. Sylvia scoffed at my vacillations. She was ready to make it on her own and said I was a wuss, and I guess I was. I couldn’t accept the idea of giving up college and striking out penniless with nothing to offer.
Sylvia mailed me a copy of Henry James’ Washington Square. I sent her Santayana’s The Last Puritan.
Back home I took up with no one.
My parents were eager that I sign up winter quarter for sorority rush—a small informal open house without the splash of fall pledging. Yes, I would be compromising my principles, but the truth was, I was lonely, listless, and I also harbored—as I look back—an urge to blot out the lingering curse of failure and achieve what had been denied at UC.
Sylvia was incredulous.
“I suppose you have to do something to keep your sanity,” she said finally.
It was a mistake. I went through the rituals of pledging Delta Gamma like a robot, unable to muster enthusiasm for the parties and communal activities expected of new pledges: the making of party decorations and float banners, the meetings about household maintenance, and the alumnae teas. My heart wasn’t in it. I had vowed that I would avoid living an ordinary life at any cost. My track led elsewhere and I was determined to follow it to the end.
The drive to be somewhere else—anywhere—was consuming. Nothing could compensate for the lack I felt of an environment that supported my ambitions and a friend to share it with.
Between classes I hung out in the student lounge at the Student Union and watched the senate hearings to ferret out communism, watched senator Joseph McCarthy pound the table and grind one American citizen after another into submission with his wild accusations. Students crowded around the television screen, and we stared in outrage at the businessmen, film stars, artists, and officials co-coerced into the spotlight to be driven to their ruin. McCarthy was obviously possessed. And I was becoming a radical.
Me—1954 or 1955.
* * *
Meanwhile, Sylvia cashed some bonds, collected her easel and suitcase, and moved to New York City to enroll in th
e Art Students League. Her small roll of money didn’t carry her very far, and soon her letters were detailing her various scruffy jobs, mostly modeling in clothing manufacturing showrooms, combined with girl-Friday tasks. None of them lasted. The score of itinerant men she took up with didn’t last much longer.
Where she met these men I don’t recall, but she wrote of being wined and dined at the 21 Club by a Hormel heir and pursued with silk Persian scarves by a count from Romania. These men were rich or knew celebrities—one had ushered at Marlon Brando’s wedding. She seemed to expect that through the adoration of a “man of the world” she would be whisked off to some fascinating foreign villa and her troubles would be over. When one of her freaky men stood her up and then appeared at her door at three in the morning, we exchanged harsh words. I wrote asking what she thought she was doing hanging out with such a jerk. She shot back for me to just shut up about him and she meant it. “You don’t know him and have no right to judge!”
Her letters turned morose. “So I learn once again that loneliness is life’s eternal shadow. I do not seem to find anything to be one with. I seem always on the outside.” Echoes of my own voice. A soul mate on the planet and I had found her! With renewed strength, I doubled my efforts to get to her and enter the life I knew I was destined for.
Tingling with anticipation, I landed in New York that very November to spend a long weekend with Sylvia in a city that pulsed with endless novelty. She booked a room for me next to hers at the Y. I tagged along to her painting classes at the Art Students’ League, and we visited out-of-the-way art museums and basement art shops in the Village and stopped for tea at the squalid apartment of a young, male Japanese friend.
I decided to check out the creative arts program at Sarah Lawrence in nearby Bronxville. The college offered just the kind of individualism I was looking for. A small, dark-haired woman at the admissions desk looked me up and down. In my best brown tweed suit and gloves I thought I looked presentable enough, but the woman was immoveable.
“The dean doesn’t see prospective students without an appointment.”
“But I’ve come all the way from Minnesota. I just got off the train. Surely five minutes—”
“I’m afraid you’ll have to make an appointment.”
The woman bent over her typewriter and wiped a tiny brush of white-out over the sheet. Evidently it had to be done by the book, no exceptions. I sat down. The family story of how Dad had broken through the iron gates of Harvard rung in my ears, but I could come up with no clever idea. The secretary was a linebacker and I was a rookie. Maybe I didn’t really believe in dreams, for I stood up and left without another word.
For the next few days we scoured the city, snooping out funky dives and art shops and sitting in Washington Square on white marble benches, dreaming and sharpening our philosophies. We parted with a promise to see one another again soon.
* * *
A letter arrived some months later alerting me that Sylvia had scraped up the money and was coming to Minneapolis. New York was depressing and she badly needed a respite. At last! I could hardly sleep and plotted out all the museums we would visit and the site-seeing trips I would take her on. Sylvia arrived in high spirits—she’d met a new man on the plane and they’d arranged to meet back in Manhattan.
My friend admired our spacious house at 57 Groveland, which took on new energy with her in it. We spent hours in my studio bedroom reading poetry, savoring the perfect sync of our minds, and rehashing our options. Dad treated us to lunch at the Minneapolis Club and Mother to a fashion show at the Women’s Club on Oak Grove Street. Gerhard, Sylvia’s handsome Dutch boyfriend from U.S.C. in town on a long business assignment, was invited to dinner. Sylva had declared she found Gerhard too devoted and boring. Her indifference lasted until he gave up and stopped writing. She would then bombard me with worried questions—could he be losing interest?
When earlier she learned that Gerhard and I had met a few times and that he’d been to the house for dinner, she wrote and suggested I go to bed with him, which neither of us were inclined to do. There was a wide gulf between Sylvia’s sexual standards and my own. She made comments like, “I’m late this month, I’m getting nervous,” and “I’m in the mood for making love.” I didn’t know what to make of this voice of experience with all her sexual partners. It was part of being a free spirit, I supposed, and after all she did hail from Los Angeles.
On the appointed evening, Gerhard showed up looking fresh, trim, and smiling, resembling a tall Edward VIII. I glanced with pride at Sylvia and Gerhard sitting beside me at the dining room table, talking of foreign parts and far-off interests. Here I was sharing a prime-rib dinner with my two best friends in the world and my family. Finally I had something to offer.
Sylvia, Gerhard, me, Mother, Harold, Susan.
My parents were not sure what to make of Sylvia. She was not the norm, by Midwest standards, but they extended a warm welcome. They might even have appreciated her wide range of interests—if they could be sure they approved.
Sylvia’s air of sophistication didn’t impress my brother Harold in the least. This set Sylvia in motion, convinced that her beauty and imaginative artistic flights would turn the head of any healthy male, especially the sheltered ones of Minnesota who hunted and worked hard, and had never met anyone so freewheeling. Harold had an instinctive aversion to what he considered phony. Down to earth, that was his style. He had no use for females who spun fantasies. Sylvia left without this conquest, which she could not comprehend. I thought he was a prig.
As the weeks passed, Sylvia’s letters from New York became more plaintive. She was frazzled and exhausted. She could no longer endure it. She hated the working world, women were mean to her, and no one understood her. The condescending treatment she received at the hands of her supervisor, plus late night dates, were destroying her nerves. The supervisor nagged her unmercifully about trivia. “These accounts aren’t registered properly,” the supervisor chastised. But the tasks were too menial; Sylvia couldn’t keep her mind on them.
“How can I be expected to do math while I’m philosophizing?” she complained. She was at her wit’s end; she couldn’t even paint. Then a new man would materialize and she would revive—temporarily.
That spring a letter arrived from Los Angeles. Sylvia had returned home. And I was on my way to a European fandango.
Chapter 12: Europe Young American Style
Paris!
The photo of the Paris streets on my desk I’d stared at longingly at for so many months had come to life. The square St. Suplice below our hotel window was filled with students drifting to and from the Sorbonne. All day I had thrilled to the sight of the ancient buildings, the dark-framed shops lined along the narrow streets, the heady aroma of French tobacco, and the guttural French of the staff and drivers.
Hotel Select, Place de la Sorbonne, Paris, 1954.
It was July 14, 1954, Bastille Day. French flags hung from every roof in the Latin Quarter. Shopkeepers were busy arranging chairs along the streets for music and dancing and strains of various bands drifted around corners. Margo and I watched from the hotel window as lines of gray Deux Chevaux inched through the intersection, nose to nose, and pedestrians scurried along the sidewalks. The air was alive with expectation, and every nerve in my body was tingling with excitement.
Little did I suspect that I would, within the next two months, meet the boy of my dreams, sneak into enemy territory in the dead of night, and part with my burdensome virginity.
Our group tromped down the stairs of the Hotel Select for an evening on the town, the strains of La Marseilles—“le jour de gloire est arrivé” echoing from the streets. Ian, our English tour guide, herded the twenty-three Golden Bears, mostly students drawn from California and the Twin Cities, to a Latin Quarter restaurant. After a leisurely dinner of coq au vin, green beans in almandine sauce, Camembert and crusty
French bread, the group members were free to go their separate ways. Margo and I wandered down a crooked alley accompanied by the beeping of traffic, strains of string and horn ensembles, and excited voices issuing from open windows.
Rounding a corner we came to a tavern from which party sounds blared into the street. As we pressed our faces to the glass, a few male hands flew up on the inside, beckoning us. We looked at each other. Such an invitation could hardly be ignored.
Inside, a throng of young German boys were laughing and talking over each other in rapid German. They looked blond and clean-cut, despite their state of late-night disarray. One had tuffs of hair sticking up from a Nordic hat. Another was balancing a foamy mug of beer perilously on the edge of a long table. They greeted us enthusiastically, and several boys slid their chairs over to make room for us. Margo and I exchanged glances.
“Come on, have a beer on us,” the boys insisted. Finally we walked over.
“Can we join your party?” asked Margo.
“YEEESSSS!” came a chorus from the table. “YAAAAAA!”
“Where are your girlfriends?” I asked.
My question was greeted by wild laughter. “Back home in Germany!” the reply echoed down the table.
The German boys were, it turned out, on vacation. When we told them it was our first time in Paris there was another uproar and two steins appeared in front of us. We joined in the singing that rang through the bar, lifting our steins with the rest to toast France. They set out to teach us their favorite beer songs:
“En Müchen steht ein Hofbräuhaus, eins, zwei, g’suffa.” (In Hofbrau House in Munich, one, two, bottom’s up.)
A Penny a Kiss Page 19
