by Marge Piercy
What the change did was bring me into a much closer relationship with Felice and other women friends. I was no longer quite married but sort of semiattached, semidetached. I went through a period of restive insomnia. Somewhere in my mind I felt I must have been asleep not to have noticed what was happening with Robert, so perhaps I was afraid to sleep. Felice and I hung out with her musician friend on the Lower East Side; we went to demonstrations together in New York and in Washington; we went to meetings, we joined groups and worked together; we did all our wifely chores together; we conspired and confided and plotted. We experimented with drugs, cautiously. We attended Marat/Sade and rock concerts. Felice was restless in her marriage, for she complained that her husband was settling prematurely into middle age. She alternated between tremendous energy and the conviction she could accomplish anything and periods of sulking withdrawal and collapse. I learned later that her mother had been diagnosed bipolar, what they called then manic-depressive. I was certainly closer emotionally to Felice than I was to Robert, who was wrapped up in his work and his adventures. Robert and I got along, we did things together, we talked amiably, we made love, although not as often. We had the same frenetic social life we had kept up since moving to Brooklyn. But if I had something intimate to say about my feelings, my desires, my fears, I ran to Felice. I trusted her more than I trusted him. She envied my writing, but I admired her greater facility to get what she wanted from people. I thought her much more competent in daily life than I was.
Slowly I began to emerge a little as a writer. I had a story in the Paris Review and another in an anthology, The Bold New Women. During this Brooklyn period, Arofa became a writer’s cat. She spent hours with me when I wrote, but she no longer interrupted. Sometimes she would sit on my lap while I typed and sometimes she would sit on the window ledge or the desk, watching. She was almost always with me, but unobtrusively, for she knew when I took a break she would get first-class attention. Despairing of the autobiographical novel ever being published, I began a new novel, set during urban renewal and the beginnings of Black Power in Chicago. It was more overtly political and far less feminist than my previous novel, drawing on my political experiences in Chicago. I also used my earlier passion for the blues. It was a different kind of novel than I had written before, in alternating viewpoints, with several important male characters. It progressed slowly because I was involved in so many other things, but it went forward with a kind of surprising authority, because I knew very well the material I was writing about. I gave poetry readings and moved over to a more professional literary agent, whose willingness to try to sell my work lifted my spirits. My situation as a writer no longer felt entirely bleak and without hope. The glacier had moved a bit.
CHO-CHO
At the Animal Disposal League
you reached through the bars
avid to live. Discarded offspring
of Maine coon cat,
your hunger saved you,
fuzzy and fist-sized.
Now you are sunny, opaque,
utterly beyond words, alien
as the dreams of a pine tree.
Sometimes when I look at you
you purr as if stroked.
Outside you turn your head
pretending not to see me
off on business, a rabbit
in the marshgrass, rendezvous
in the briars. In the house
you’re a sponge for love,
a recirculating fountain.
Angry, you sulk way under
a bed till dragged out whining,
you permit yourself to be
captured and saved. You blink
then your goldengreen eyes
purr and collapse on your back
with paws up and your snowy
white belly exposed all curls
to the plume of your tail.
Ravish me, you say, with kisses
and tunafish because I know
how to accept pleasure. I am
your happy longhaired
id, taking the moment as I
do your finger in my mouth
without breaking its skin,
or eviscerating it instantly
like a mouse.
THIRTEEN
MANHATTAN TRANSFER
Peter and Mike from Ann Arbor along with some people already in New York, including me, founded the North American Congress on Latin America—which incidentally is still flourishing. I learned power structure research: who actually owned corporations and banks and ran them; how government and industry and other institutions—universities, foundations—interconnected; how the interests of important industries and corporations influenced government policy—starting with the invasion of the Dominican Republic. NACLA actually had a place for me and real political work I could do. Soon we were busy researching CIA penetration of cultural and educational organizations and feeding that information to sympathetic journalists, one of whom was speedily fired as a result of our work. I was good at power structure research and more important, I could write up our findings so that people in the larger movement could understand them. But this kind of work made me paranoid. I was a little crazy while I was doing it, fanatically political, and I developed an intense hatred for certain powerful people. It was the kind of work that, long term, required someone less emotional and less imaginative than myself, in order to do it well and not become mired in nightmares of the misuse of power and the suffering of millions of those upon whom corporate and governmental decisions were visited.
Felice was increasingly dissatisfied with her marriage and her domestic life. She condemned herself for marrying too young. She felt her husband was insufficiently open, insufficiently political by our new standards, but most important she had lost sexual and romantic interest in him and was fascinated by the radical longhaired young men she was meeting. She wanted out. I was as upset as her husband, because while she was leaving him, she was also leaving me. We would be friends, but we would not live our lives in common in the same daily way, would not eat together, share clothes and our quiet moments, household tasks and late-night mull-overs. I wondered whether, if her husband had been willing to try an open relationship such as I was striving to make work with Robert, she would have stayed. She did not deny she was leaving me as well as James, but insisted she needed more freedom from both of us. I was puzzled and shocked, for I did not see how our friendship confined her. I felt there must be something deeply wrong with me, that first Louise, then Robert and now Felice, the people I had been closest to, all felt the need to withdraw at least partially. She left for Manhattan and took Sebastian with her.
Half the people we knew were in open relationships by now. Those who weren’t were either older married people (and many of them also were trying experimental openness) or had no relationships to be open about. We had contempt for the standard pattern of serial monogamy, discarding one partner when you were attracted to another, and we believed in honesty, not in having clandestine affairs. We believed we were making a new world in every way, on every level. Nothing could be taken for granted. We considered the nuclear family an abomination and a prison, a breeding ground of bad attitudes. We were going to do much better, starting right away.
Felice became involved with a painter active in Angry Arts, an attachment that lasted a few months. I was immersed in NACLA. I worked closely with a woman from the South whom I grew fond of. Call her Ceci. Of course Popov fell in love with her, had a brief affair and dumped her. I was getting sick of this. He was forever finding excuses to touch me, flirted endlessly, once in midnight intensity blurted that he loved only me. I did not for a minute believe him, but I decided he would do for my first outside relationship, as a foot in the waters of affairs. Felice encouraged me. He fled. So much for that. I was everybody’s mama. I cooked for half the people we knew, stayed up all night listening to their problems, held their secrets and their hands, nursed and analyzed and played matchmaker. I was a general resource
for everyone but myself.
Felice and I produced the SDS radio program on the Pacifica station for some months. We discovered at once that we shared a dreadful mannerism: an apologetic feminine giggle that undercut the seriousness of what we were saying. Neither of us had ever been aware of this little laugh that said, don’t take me seriously, don’t mind me, don’t crush me. We both went to work on getting rid of it. I also noticed my voice rose into a meek breathy treble when I was nervous or excited, and I practiced to rid myself of that habit—which improved my reading style. I was working on the Chicago novel, which now had a title, Going Down Fast, but everything else came first, my political work, fussing over friends, taking care of Robert and everyone else. I completed a draft, but revisions crept along.
Then in the summer of 1967, Wesleyan University Press accepted a book of my poetry that became Breaking Camp. They did not bring it out for almost two years, as it made its slow way through the prepublication process. Suddenly I was no longer an unpublished author but a soon-to-be-published poet. Whenever I had a poem accepted by a zine, my bio said that my first book of poetry was coming out from Wesleyan in spring 1969. In the interim, I took out the weaker poems and put in newer, stronger poems. I cannot overstate how much that acceptance meant. I had been calling myself a writer but had no credentials. Now I had them.
Robert told me one morning he wanted to move into Manhattan. Where we were living was becoming untenable. I had gotten along with our neighbors in the Afro-American and Haitian neighborhood until recently, when things got hot and nasty. The racial tension ratcheted up to the breaking point. Walking from the subway to the apartment was navigating a minefield. Guys from the block would slam into me and once knocked me down. Police helicopters hung over the buildings just above roof level, deafening us and making everyone half crazed with the noise. We knew we could not stay.
We had not been apartment hunting long when we stumbled into a big six-room apartment on Ninety-eighth and Broadway, on the fourteenth floor. It was light and just as big as the lamented Brookline apartment. It was forty more a month than we were paying, and we would have to rent a parking space in a garage as well, but I was going to NACLA almost every day, a long subway ride, and spending a lot on cabs coming back to Brooklyn late at night. We took the apartment but before we moved in, sanded years of crud from the parquet floors and refinished them, a hideous job I would never undertake again. Now I lived within easy walking distance of NACLA. Ceci and I, keepers of the database, were only two blocks apart. We did our political work, we danced, we often ate together, we gossiped and commiserated and played with the cats. She was a good friend but never the intimate, quasi-sister of my dreams that Felice had been and sometimes still was.
I worked closely with a tall somber young man, Peter. He was extremely bright, extremely unhappy, lonely. I played an older sister role with him socially, but in researching and writing, we were equals and a powerful and dynamic team. He semi-lived with us, but he was also close to Felice, to the Yuricks. I had never before collaborated with anyone the way Peter and I researched, wrote and presented together. It was electrical. Peter was large boned with dark brown eyes and hair. He was pleasant-looking but did not think so. He was riddled with self-hatred and self-doubt, awkward, a brilliant overgrown miserable boy. He was always being taken under someone’s wing and then feeling betrayed, undervalued. I was sure our relationship would be different.
I can only try to convey what it was like in New York in the movement from 1966 to 1968. Sometimes it was like a medieval fair. Central Park would be filled with people in bright costumes, tiny miniskirts like flags, long dresses of velvet, patchwork, costumes put together of upholstery material or quilts, jugglers, musicians, people dancing, street theater and puppet shows. If you had food, you shared it, often with strangers. “There are no strangers” was our motto, before the Nixon administration made that nonsense by sending infiltrators and agents provocateurs into the movement to help make it nasty and dangerous. People made a big distinction between hippies and politicos, but we overlapped.
Nonetheless, there was danger then from the drugs that freely flowed from hand to hand and burnt out people’s brains or rendered them paranoid. Danger from the police attacks on demonstrators, from being clubbed or gassed. Danger from the real possibility of going to jail for taking action against the war. We were paranoid about having phones tapped, being followed, all of which was real, as I discovered when we took my old desk apart to move it and found a bug in it. Long before that, the Dominican super warned me about a mail cover, about a live tap. Danger from the obscene drawings and death threats from the militia, the armed right, that came in my mail.
I was alone only when I wrote. This was life with the intensity dial turned as high as it could go. Intense friendships, intense sex, intense politics, intense pleasures and intense terrors. It was life lived fully in public. Privacy was a momentary thing. It was community as I have never experienced it before or since. It was living with passion. It was a wild searing hope for a better world that seemed almost within reach if only we worked harder, pushed harder, took more chances. It was the illusion that the world was changing, had changed, that we were everywhere and would prevail. The world was indeed changing, but not in ways we envisioned.
Twiggy might be the official fashion ideal, but R. Crumb’s zaftig women were far more liked by people I knew. There was a general tolerance for different body types. We placed far more emphasis on values (although hardly what’s called family values now), character, courage and trustworthiness. Anybody could get laid, and did. If you were hungry, somebody would feed you. If you needed a place to sleep, somebody would provide a couch or a spot on their floor (often me). If you needed to be kept hidden, you would be. Hitchhiking was as common as taking a bus. We all picked up hitchhikers. (I try to remember when I stopped. Around 1980? I never pick up hitchhikers now. Like every woman I know, I would be afraid to.) It was in so many respects a different world.
Arofa and Cho-Cho liked the new apartment, though they could no longer go out. It was twice the size of the Brooklyn apartment. Off the left of the big foyer was a narrow hall leading to our bedroom and my office, with an elderly black daybed in it for guests. Straight ahead off the foyer were the enormous living room and dining room, connected by a broad arch so that they were almost one room with windows on three sides. The small dark kitchen came off the foyer on the right side. Beyond were a maid’s room, where Robert kept our wine and a guest bed, and a smaller bathroom. There were wide window ledges for the cats to sun on, high ceilings offering places to climb up and leap down, a loop from the living room through the dining room through the kitchen and back to the hall again where they could chase each other, marvelous shiny floors to skid on, myriad places to hide. It was the ultimate cat apartment as well as the ultimate party apartment. I gave a great many parties. At big parties, I liked a mix of political, arty and literary, academic and unclassifiable people with a lot of food and drink and dancing, always dancing. A lot to drink then meant wine and beer. None of the younger people drank what they called booze.
I remember a birthday party Popov threw for me at his Riverside Drive apartment. A rumor had gone through youth culture that smoking banana peels could make you high, so a friend arrived with a case of bananas. We were drying the peels and baking them in the oven so people could smoke them. That left a lot of peeled bananas, so I sent Peter out for rum and started making banana daiquiris. People were soon saying that smoking the bananas was great. Everybody got silly and loose. I realized that the bananas weren’t doing anything, but the daiquiris were. People had so little experience of drinking liquor then that it did not occur to them that they were simply getting drunk.
The cats liked the space, the airiness, the sun. About another change, they each felt differently. Having a big apartment during the late 1960s meant that you put people up. We always had other people living with us: sometimes one person, sometimes a couple, sometimes several people
, together or separately camping in our guest room, the dining room, the living room, my study. Some people stayed a night or two. Some much longer. We had one couple with us for several months, Jeff and Alice who came to New York from Texas to start an alternative newspaper (which I named The Rat). My mama aura grew. Our dining room table had extra leaves, accommodating up to twelve. Usually there were at least eight for dinner. I grew accomplished at stretching food and cooking stews, casseroles, pot roasts, hearty soups. Truly, it didn’t take as much time to feed eight on lamb stew as it did to cook a gourmet meal every night, as I had in Brookline. That was lucky, because I had little time. Robert liked having a crowd always around us, for he never felt lonely and always there was someone to talk with, to go to a movie or a bar or on a walk.
Robert was always a very generous man, generous in giving to me, to others, in sharing whatever we had with friends and people who needed something. It was a wonderful characteristic. He was certainly the most generous man I have ever been with, and I admired that. It was one reason we were able to live in such a wide-open way. He never begrudged what he had that others needed, and he enjoyed sharing. He also had an endearing silly side. I remember once after a bottle of champagne, he was playing cat and crawling around the apartment with Arofa, who was delighted. She showed him all her favorite places and he shared them with her.
