by Marge Piercy
We became very close to Sol and Adrienne Yurick, who had just had a baby girl, and joined their circle of friends. Sol was a brilliant charismatic man with a dark beard, dark intense eyes, smoking incessantly and given to bodybuilding. When I had first met him, he had been unpublished except for a couple of stories—much like me. In the meantime, we had gone through all the excitement and disappointments with him of editors’ flirtations and ultimate rejections. Robert and I read his novels in their various drafts and gave criticism, and he had read my work. Then The Warriors was accepted and there was even movie interest, although nothing came of it till years later. Then Fertig sold. Coover too was beginning to break through. I felt like the only failure in our small group. However, now I had regular contact with other writers and as much stimulation as I could reasonably endure. I felt if I could only find some way of opposing the war I would have all my ducks in a row.
The Brooklyn Botanic Garden was nearby. Many afternoons we walked there with the Yuricks, Adrienne pushing a carriage and then a stroller. We ambled under the allées of cherries in blossom drifting down, later the rose garden trellises arching over, blessing us with a litter of fragrant petals. The Japanese garden reminded me of the one in San Francisco where Sophia and I had spent hours. The Botanic Garden was a necessary relief to crowded dirty streets of brownstones where fires broke out every night and fights spilled into the streets.
Just as important as the Yuricks, on the ground floor were a couple, Felice and James. Felice and I were inseparable. We were both attracted to the burgeoning youth culture and began to dance together. We made friends with a Puerto Rican folksinger and her circle. She was bisexual and flirted with all of us. Felice and I wanted to oppose the war. We went to a demonstration sponsored by SDS in Washington and right afterward, we both joined. Although it was primarily a student organization, it seemed more compatible than anything else we could find. We launched what we called MDS—Movement for a Democratic Society, an adult chapter in Brooklyn. Our MDS became notorious because we started our meetings by eating together. Student meetings never started with food, but with grim speeches in cold church basements.
Felice and I were the same height, both of a body type much admired then. Now we would be urged to diet. We had womanly bodies, with busts and hips, well-defined waists, good muscular legs. We liked the same music—the Beatles and Bob Dylan. Motown, lots of R and B. We loved to dance. We needed something bigger and more political to connect to. Felice was far more seductive and flirtatious than I was—or am—and we were enchanted with each other. She was, I think, already growing bored with her marriage to a tall bearded man who worked in nonprofit radio and reviewed equipment and discs for high-fidelity magazines—as popular then as computer zines now. He had been born in Austria and had what I can only describe as a European sensibility: more formal, more restrained, cooler, with a knowledge of and appreciation for culture other than pop. In some ways, he reminded me of Michel, but he had a deeper understanding of the arts.
The rooms were small and narrow, but I had a study. Robert turned his into a darkroom, as he had become fascinated with photography. He had an office on Thirty-fourth and Seventh Avenue in a big old building where his company had taken a floor. This apartment was perhaps half the size of the Brookline apartment, darker and far noisier, markedly so in the summer. In my study, there was a fan that fit into the window. However, the fan swiveled. Cho-Cho figured out how to turn it, slip out and go down the fire escape. There were two problems with these nocturnal forays. First, she got into fights with neighborhood cats and had to have an abscess treated; second, the Indian couple who lived on the floor between us and James and Felice hated cats and threatened to kill her. She miscounted the floors—most cats can count up to five or so, but not Cho-Cho—and sometimes slipped back into their apartment instead of ours. We had to replace the fan with an air conditioner so that she could no longer sneak out.
The tiny yard was disputed space. A couple in the next building took to barbecuing in the yard, which filled all our apartments with noxious charcoal smoke as well as loud banal cocktail party chatter. To preempt the space, Felice and I started a garden, a few tomato plants, bush beans, marigolds, herbs. It was my first adult garden, the casual beginning of an obsession. We grew moonflowers on the fence, whose rich scent came out only at night. I spent far more time than Felice fiddling around in it, bringing the cats down with me. By now, Felice and I did our laundry together. One or the other cooked, and we all ate up or downstairs. They acquired a stray, a big brown tabby of amiable disposition who got on very well with our cats. Even Arofa cuddled with Sebastian and played with him up and down the narrow rooms and over the furniture. He was the size of both our cats put together, but he never dominated them, deferring to Arofa, who ruled the house.
Robert’s mother had moved into an apartment on Long Island where we saw her every two weeks for supper. The relationship between Robert and his mother was neither easy nor close. He said little about himself in her presence, only mentioning achievements. She was lonely and bitterly unhappy, with a sense that life had betrayed her by taking her husband.
Felice and I were moving cautiously around the edges of what was becoming known as “the movement.” When I look at my daybooks, I see that we had people over, went out to eat, went to hear music or see films or theater or went to meetings six nights out of seven. Often there are three appointments on a given day: lunch with someone, something in the afternoon or early evening, and something after that. No wonder my writing was proceeding slowly. Our social and meeting life ate up the hours.
I went to work for Viet Report, a periodical that covered all the information available on what was really happening in Vietnam. It was rather intellectual, and I was treated as a typist and phone answerer. I felt as invisible there as in much of the rest of my life, although the first-person reports of atrocities filled my head with nightmares. I gave my first poetry readings since college, mostly on the Angry Arts flatbed truck and at colleges, public libraries, wherever. I met Grace Paley at those antiwar readings and Robert Pinsky. At first I was so terrified, I had to memorize my political poems, because my hands shook too much to hold the paper. But delivering poems over hecklers and sometimes violent attacks makes for a performer who can project and emote. It was good training. I began to have a very small reputation and was interviewed by progressive newspapers and magazines. I was meeting other poets, giving readings with them occasionally, and included in anthologies. In 1966, I put together a collection of poems and sent it around. Around this time, I met the editors of Hanging Loose magazine, who were publishing me regularly. Soon those four poets—the editors of the magazine—and I regularly read together.
That winter, Robert was in an accident in Tole’s car. Near the New Jersey office, an oncoming car skidded on ice and hit them head-on. Robert had a mild concussion, sore ribs and a torn ligament in his leg that laid him up for some time. Unfortunately, a couple of days after he had gone to bed sodden with painkillers, a friend was leaving the country. He had a rabbit that Sophia had offered to take. Sophia and her son arrived on Saturday. That evening, she and I went into Manhattan to fetch the rabbit. Once again, I was putting everything ahead of my writing.
When we arrived, I found my lackadaisical friend had neglected to do anything about his cat, Jane. Sophia said she would take care of Jane and the rabbit. We returned with the rabbit and cat to the apartment where Robert was sleeping. Then it started. Parades of animals. Animals on every chair, flights of enraged and frightened cats, pursuit of cats by sex-crazed huge white rabbit, dropping little raisiny turds all over the carpets, all over the floors, in the closets, in my shoes. Yowls and hisses and busy white rabbit, big white rabbit, tireless hippity-hopping white rabbit eating and shitting little raisins everyplace and always after the cats. At one point Robert woke from a deep concussion-shaded sleep and screamed, “There’s a rabbit in my bed!” There was.
Robert’s leg healed slowly. He felt isolated and disconsolate
. He would complain that no one understood his work, that it was too obscure. I reminded him that he made no attempt to explain it. That is never easy for scientists. A friend of mine who won a Nobel Prize in genetics has something of the same habit. When I first met him, I asked him what he did, and he told me he raised fruit flies. Robert had a coy somewhat condescending attitude when asked about his work. He was ambivalent; he enjoyed his work, but he resented it. Every so often he would withdraw from everyone, including me. He would not talk but would shut the door of his room and play the flute. He had an expensive silver flute but played it badly. It was agony for the cats and me, when he withdrew and tootled disconsolately all day. I had ways of trying to break through (food, sex, flattery, confrontation) but none of them worked when he was not ready to let them.
I became friends with a poet who was studying at Iowa, an old friend of Felice’s. His girlfriend had been going to school in England. She had grown up in a colony of once-German Christians—the Christian communist sort of community that shares everything and scorns the state and war and money—now settled in the jungle in Paraguay. She was strongly opposed to the war in Vietnam for religious reasons and had, during a church service in a cathedral, thrown sheep’s blood on the prime minister. She was wanted by Interpol. We hid her for a few months.
Once when she got stir-crazy from being confined to our two apartments, Felice and I took her to the Bronx Zoo, to what we hoped would be a safe and pleasant outing. It was fine in the monkey house. She told us which kinds were good to eat, which seemed callous, for monkeys are too childlike. The danger came when we entered the reptile house. When she saw the big boa constrictors, she broke down and began to weep. Her family captured them as a way of making a living for their colony, and some became pets. Suddenly she was dreadfully homesick and dangerously visible, attracting attention, a tall woman with long blond braids, a bit like Brunhilde, leaning over the pit of somnolent huge boa constrictors, crying her eyes out and calling to them. We had to get her out fast.
That fall, Felice and I shopped for the new minidresses and shortened our old dresses. That is, Felice did the sewing. She was amazing with making over dresses, sewing curtains and covers for our bench. I would start a project, knowing what would happen. She would watch me ineptly poke at the cloth with a needle, stabbing myself and making wild jagged stitches. Then she would take it away from me and finish it, quickly and well. Ah, those were the days. Now if a button needs sewing on, it sits there for six months before I manage it—sloppily.
In December, Felice, James, Robert and I went out to an SDS conference and then to Iowa, where our poet-friend was in graduate school and active in the SDS chapter. We came back through Chicago, where I needed to do on-site research for my next novel. I had thought we would stay with friends of mine from Chicago, but they—both academics, and moving up in their careers—were appalled by the idea of me arriving with two friends to sleep on their floor. This was the first time I alienated old friends with my new movement lifestyle. It was not the last. Basically that year and the next, all my old Ann Arbor and Chicago friends bailed out when I arrived, en masse or just my new hyperpolitical self. I was becoming monomaniacally engaged. Images of the war and of atrocities haunted me. I could not get them out of my mind. I was more impassioned about politics than about my writing. The war had to be stopped, and any moment not devoted to that end produced guilt. Villagers were dying, and in my waking and sleeping mind, they burned alive, soldiers on both sides lay maimed and broken, young men were being drafted and it was all wrong: they were dying for a lie. I could smell bodies burning in my sleep.
Felice and I finally found niches. Felice became involved in the coalition group called generally Mobe, or the Mobilization, that organized big demonstrations in New York. She was suddenly well connected and useful. I had been running to Ann Arbor regularly. As a project of our MDS group, we brought two brilliant committed young men, Mike and Peter, from Ann Arbor to New York. They were going to do power structure research, and I would learn how to do it with them. We had to figure out how our country had gone so far astray as to invade a small poor country where we maintained in power a corrupt and unpopular regime at huge cost to ourselves and far worse cost to the Vietnamese. It was a situation in which the more I learned about what was really going on, the more I needed to try to change it.
Robert was becoming tight friends with an underground filmmaker, Popov, a programmer in the New York office. Because of noise in the apartment—radios, sirens, fights, TV—I began going into Manhattan with Robert and writing in an empty office. I too got to know Popov and through him, a whole network of young people in the underground film scene or the happenings scene. What finished me with happenings was an event where a live chicken was bashed to death two feet from me, so I was splattered with blood.
Popov was always falling in love, then becoming disillusioned and dropping the woman. He went through half my friends in the time I knew him. The woman would never understand, because he didn’t seem a casual seducer. He came on like the love of her life. Then in a week or a month, he woke up, saw she wasn’t the complete answer to his fantasies and vanished. As long as I could put up with this, he was a charming companion. We flirted endlessly and we argued and chatted and told stories. He was a fine raconteur, observant of others, being small, slight of build and something of a con man. He did not like to work too much or too hard, so he had perfected ways of sneaking out of the office while appearing only to be away from his desk. Always work was spread out and his coat on the back of his chair, even when he was off in the Poconos hiking or in some new sweetie’s bed or south of Houston at a shoot of someone’s indie movie. Robert was fascinated by Popov’s life, and we spent a great deal of time with him, Robert more than I. It was interesting for me to watch Sol and Popov together, for everything about them—from their philosophy of life, what was important to how to get it, how to present themselves, how to respond to trouble or danger—was at odds. I called them the champion and the hustler and enjoyed their sparring.
At a party up near Columbia given by an ex-girlfriend of Popov, my relationship with Robert changed permanently and my own sexual life for the next fifteen years as well. I opened the door of a bedroom, looking for the bathroom and found Robert with another woman, the ex-girlfriend whose party it was. Her blouse was off and her small breasts stuck up as he caressed her, the light from the bedside lamp illuminating him. His pants were unzipped. They were not yet having sex but clearly more than halfway there. That night he told me that he wanted an open relationship. He could no longer endure being involved with just me; it was not interesting enough. To remain sexually alive, he needed to have adventures with other women.
It took me a while to formulate a response. I was devastated. He kept insisting the marriage was not over, but he was just making sure it would last by meeting his needs. At that time, men’s hair was growing longer, women’s skirts were growing shorter, rock music pounded everywhere and the world seemed in a springtime of desire, of possibilities opening like new leaves in the ferment of new ways of doing everything. He was fascinated by all the apparently available women he met, especially through the independent filmmaking world. I ran off to Felice to tell her how my life had unraveled. I had not cried with Robert, but I cried in Felice’s arms, and she comforted me. She suggested a positive spin, seeing it as liberation and wondering if she could talk her husband into the same thing. For the rest of that weekend, Robert and I argued without reaching an agreement. Walking in on him shocked me: I had not seen it coming. Actually I had never had the experience before of a man I was involved with going after someone else. I had never been cheated on; but I remembered that my last summer with Michel, when he would not talk about our marriage and I knew it was over, I had entered a relationship with another writer. I felt this was a payback, in that realm of the psyche where old bad deeds gather interest.
Finally I said that if he wanted it, then we would have an open marriage. We sat at the
kitchen table. How many important and devastating scenes in my life have occurred at kitchen or dining room tables. I told him that I would not be interested in one-night stands. “If I make relationships with other people, they will be real relationships, they’ll be loving and committed.” He said, fine. I don’t think he believed that I would become involved with anyone else, not really.
I became even closer to Felice, a conspiracy of two. I had no idea how to respond to what had happened. I don’t remember the young women Robert was involved with that spring and summer. They came and went like movies that play for a week or two, then vanish. I remember only my intense frustration.
A correspondent from a British radical newspaper came to interview me in Brooklyn. I was so thrilled, I made him a sumptuous lunch. First course was an artichoke with hollandaise sauce. Since my original encounter with an artichoke in Paris at the Schiff flat, I had developed a great fondness for them. The Brit had at it without breaking his stream of anecdotes of famous people he had interviewed and scenes he had witnessed. He took a knife and fork, sliced the artichoke and ate it whole, choke and all, before I could say anything.
I realize in looking back that he was interested in me, but I didn’t notice. Although I was presumably open to relationships to balance Robert’s adventures, I was out of practice and probably reluctant. I did not notice half the time if men were interested; when Felice wasn’t there to point them out to me, I would miss the cues. I had thought I was done with all that. Robert’s idea was that we should not even say we were married, as marriage was an inconvenient state if you were looking to pursue other people. He took off his ring. They were handsome rings of white gold over a silver base—what the jeweler who made them for us called a marriage of metals. A sign was carved into the ring that showed oxidized black against the white gold, a Japanese character for love. I still wore my ring, although occasionally friends or lovers in the next years would ask me why: it was a warning that I had a prior commitment, that I was not unattached. I might add commitments, but I was not about to let go of my older ones. I would try to live that way. I thought, when you get a second cat, you don’t stop loving the first. Why shouldn’t it be that way with people? But it was all hypothetical. I had more friends than at any time since Ann Arbor, but usually the men were involved with women I knew or gay or primarily friends of Robert’s and not about to launch an intimate relationship with me.
