About My Life and the Kept Woman

by John Rechy

  “Take off your clothes,” Ginsberg was whispering in my ear.

  Soon after, I had lunch in a pretty restaurant with another writer who had learned I was in San Francisco and contacted me through Don Allen. Albert Stern, a friendly man who seemed to want to know everything about everything, and everything about everyone, had written an article praising City of Night, and I thanked him for it. I admired his books, and told him so.

  We chatted amicably about writing, his, mine—what was he writing next; what was I writing next?

  “… an item in Bert Schwartz’s column; everybody reads him.”

  He was suggesting that this would help me in the campaign to overcome the barriers developing against The Sexual Outlaw.

  I agreed: “But I don’t know Bert Schwartz.”

  “The best approach to him would be to contact his wife; she loves to have famous writers at her gatherings, and you might—”

  My words came automatically, the way one remembers a friend evoked by another: “I do know her. I dated her once in El Paso, years ago.”

  Albert’s fork, poised to bring a piece of chicken salad to his lips, was held there for seconds before he brought it down on his plate, leaving the intended action incomplete, putting the fork down with what sounded to me—when I thought about it later—like a clang!

  “You knew Isabel in El Paso?” He seemed to have abandoned eating.

  Only then did I realize the significance of what I had said. I retreated, trying to erase my clumsy words. “I take it back; I don’t know her. I saw a picture of Mrs. Schwartz in a magazine once, and I remember thinking she looked like the girl I knew.” Why was I so adamantly guarding Isabel’s identity?

  “I’m sure she is someone else,” Albert seemed to allow. “Isabel’s from New Orleans, by way of Spain—Castilian, I think.”

  I needed to end this emphatically. “The woman I knew was Alicia Gonzales, and she was Mexican.” To divert his interest further from Isabel to me, I added, “Like me.”

  “I didn’t know you were Mexican—Mexican-American—John.”

  “I’ve never seen the need to announce it,” I said, more testily than I wanted. “I assume people know, and, if not, it’s irrelevant.”

  “Yes,” Albert said. “Of course.”

  I ran into Albert a few days later at the book fair in the Convention Center. “About Isabel Schwartz,” he said.

  I held my breath. “Yes?”

  “She isn’t the person you thought she was.”

  He had pursued the matter, still sniffing gossip; he had not believed my dismissal. “But I told you she wasn’t.”

  “I saw her at the opera last weekend. She was waiting for Bert to join her. I said I’d had lunch with someone she might recognize, John Rechy—you know, trying to help you get that item in Bert’s column.”

  I felt a trap opening. “I told you I don’t know her.” I checked my impatience; I didn’t want to block the information he clearly wanted to give me.

  “She said, ‘I don’t know anybody by that name.’”

  I was stung. Claiming no knowledge of me even as a writer! More than that—much more—how dare the fucking bitch say she didn’t know me? Fine, then, I would blurt out the whole truth about her. She’d given me the perfect opening, the perfect reason to do it, and so easily, with such a reliable messenger.

  Albert was waiting expectantly.

  “There you are, Albert; you found out what I had told you. I don’t know her and she doesn’t know me.” How quickly my anger at her had dissipated. She had had to deny knowing me if she was to sustain her claimed identity, and I had chosen to be her ally in upholding her camouflage.

  “She did turn white when I mentioned your name, and she walked away,” Albert added.

  Back in Los Angeles, I waited, regretting my inadvertent part in any scandal that might occur. But I heard nothing further about the matter—and surely my sister Olga would know of any dramatic development. I had finally convinced Albert—or he had convinced himself—that there was no connection between Isabel and the girl I had known. I was relieved.

  What did I feel about Isabel Franklin-Schwartz? I could detect no tinge of lingering romance toward the girl I had dated. There was, of course, the fascination that her camouflage evoked. That was not enough. I could not find an answer for my strong feelings about her, my enduring interest in her. All I knew was that with Albert I had felt a sense of protectiveness toward her.

  34

  More time passed.

  I left El Paso permanently, painfully selling my mother’s home. I moved to Los Angeles. I was still determined to remain anonymous. I hunted sex in the shady glens of Griffith Park. Challenging time, at times terrified, I hustled on the new turf along Santa Monica Boulevard. My body survived, kept firm and muscular by rigorous workouts. Every time of conquest affirmed this, and denied that age had encroached.

  Once again I was in San Francisco. The paperback edition of The Sexual Outlaw was also facing problems of censorship. In England a suit was threatened immediately after the publisher announced its publication. Australian customs had confiscated copies. In America, books ordered were returned after complaints from customers. I had stayed in touch with the reporter in San Francisco —she had written a good and sympathetic article about the earlier conflicts over the book. Now she offered to deal in a further article with the present circumstances.

  We met at the Fleur de Lis restaurant, an expensive favorite in San Francisco. The decor seemed to have been inspired by an elaborate circus. A heavy awning—perhaps velvet—hovered like a tent over the barely lit dining room.

  Soon after we had been fussily seated, the reporter, a chic, smart, pretty woman, startled me by saying, casually:

  “There’s Schwartz and his Spanish wife.” A devoted San Franciscan, she had told me during our earlier encounter that it amused her to keep up with talk about the various—“often shaky”—levels of society in San Francisco.

  And there she was, Alicia Gonzales, Isabel Franklin, Isabel Franklin-Schwartz.

  She floated in like a queen into her court, removing a cape that an attendant took just as it was being allowed to slip down from her shoulders; her husband, the San Francisco icon, was at her side, a rotund man wearing expensive clothes that he did not look entirely comfortable in.

  The restaurant staff was at attention. Around the room, sophisticated diners avoided glancing at the famous couple. The maître-d’, bowing periodically, was leading them to their table.

  As she passed us, Isabel nodded at the woman I was with.

  Then her eyes glanced over to me.

  She halted.

  Her head turned toward the entrance, as if she was considering leaving.

  She looked away from me.

  She placed her hand—as if for reassurance—on her husband’s arm, causing him to pause, too.

  Following the maître d’, who had hesitated during the bewildered moments, they walked ahead.

  The maître d’ led them to a desirable table within view of ours. Extending the ceremonial seating, he pulled out a regal chair for her, a chair that would face our table. With a nod, she indicated her preference for another seat, one where she would have her back to me.

  If I had had any doubt that she had recognized me, it was now gone. She was avoiding me, perhaps even hoping—even trying to believe—that I had not recognized her after so many, many years, so many identities assumed and discarded.

  Wait. What was happening?

  She was leaning over to whisper to her husband, who signaled the maître d’, who swooped back to their table. Words were exchanged; the seating was once again ordered to be rearranged. Now she sat facing me, in full view of me—and I was in full view of her. Our eyes connected.

  She was challenging me.

  But what was the challenge? Surely she didn’t think that I—in this arrogant restaurant with everyone aware of everyone else, and especially of her and her husband, and I with a woman well known in S
an Francisco—surely, no, she wouldn’t believe that I might be considering intruding on her and her alerted husband and, by her boldness, her fixed stare, was keeping me in check? No, that wasn’t it. What challenge, then, was there for me to accept, especially in a setting she had managed so carefully to choreograph?

  Then—

  She asked for a cigarette—I saw her husband extending a shimmering case to her. From it she took a cigarette, as carefully as if she were choosing a precious jewel from a box. Although an attendant materialized to light it for her, her husband had already half-risen from his seat to do the honor.

  My concentration was fixed so intently on her that my friend nudged me back to attention—“John, you’re staring. I’m sure she loves that.” My eyes remained fixed on Isabel Franklin-Schwartz.

  With the chosen cigarette in her hand, her lips tilted; there was an inception of a smile—I knew this without actually seeing it from the distance where I watched. As if deciding not to complete the smile, her lips parted to receive the cigarette. She held it there at the verge of brushing her lips before she allowed it to touch in a movement that occurred without transition.

  She inhaled, the barest rise and fall of her breasts, the only indication—I saw that clearly; and this:

  A slender streak of smoke arose, lingered about her before it evaporated. The cigarette remained touching her lips as if reluctant to separate. Then her free hand rose—I knew this was next—and rested lightly on the elbow of the arm whose fingers held the cigarette, and she completed an intricately graceful choreography of movements that extended as she withdrew the cigarette from her lips but kept it close, as if deciding whether to inhale from it again, extending a moment of suspense. Her motions reversed, she rested the cigarette on the edge of an ashtray.

  Now—I knew—she would complete the attempt that had once been foiled in my uncle’s Cadillac, her attempt to imitate the grand kept woman of Augusto de Leon, whom we had both studied, if only for seconds, both in awe, each superbly elegant motion captured in our minds—I knew that, too—as she smoked an ordinary cigarette. I had been the only witness to the failure of the woman I now faced in this ornately luxurious restaurant, the only witness when, years ago, at the Oasis Drive-In, her hands, trembling, had exposed her insecurity and she had dropped the courted cigarette, a catastrophic failure in the test she had set for herself, a failure that must have aroused doubts of her ever leaving behind the poor Mexican girl who was Alicia Gonzales from El Paso, Texas; doubts of ever becoming as grand as the grand kept woman she had attempted unsuccessfully to emulate. Now, from the only person who had witnessed that failure, she could supplant it with her perfect performance.

  She reached for the cigarette that had rested on the ashtray, and, holding my look, demanding that I watch the next graceful move—no demand was necessary—she brought the cigarette to her lips, allowed it to remain there poised. Then the hand with the cigarette drifted away from her face, was lowered, and she touched the tip of the cigarette so lightly to an ashtray that—I was sure of this without being able to see it—the ashes vanished, merely vanished.

  After moments, she reached again for the cigarette on the ashtray and looked up, and she smiled, definitely smiled this time, at me, for me to confirm the triumph of her borrowed identity, its powerful inspiration.

  And I did confirm it, with admiration. I nodded and smiled.

  Suddenly her elbow, as if pulled down by some force beyond her—or, yes, within her—connected with the very edge of the table, and her body swayed clumsily to one side, thrusting the lit cigarette onto her lap.

  With a muffled sob, she pushed it away, onto the floor. The maître d’ uttered a cry that mixed with not-quite smothered giggles about the restaurant. In a flurry, every attendant was rushing to snatch away from the floor the existence of the fatal cigarette.

  I looked away from the tiny, major disaster, this major failure of Alicia Gonzales to be someone she was not.

  In the following days, the memory of that incident persisted, often with sadness. It was as if on that evening in a restaurant with mesmerized candlelight, I had shared Isabel’s humiliation, her symbolic failure—as if I had been her.

  35

  Years passed.

  In my apartment on Los Feliz in Los Angeles, I was working out when the phone rang. A determinedly cheerful voice announced itself to be that of the famous columnist in San Francisco. I assumed he wanted to interview me for an item he would propose.

  After a few moments, not many, of pleasantries exchanged between people who don’t know each other but suspect that one wants something from the other, he said, casually:

  “I understand you knew my wife in El Paso.”

  My instant surprise was not that he would not have known that, or believed it until now, but that it had taken Albert so long to tell him about the conversation I regretted.

  “Who is your wife?” I asked. I wanted to mark time, to discover his real reason for his calling me now.

  “Her name was Isabel Franklin before we married, but it might have been another name when you knew her.”

  I was being ambushed by this startling call and the reason for it. I needed to be careful of what I said. I needed to hear more.

  “My wife—” He was proceeding cautiously, as if he, too, wanted as much unqualified information from me as I now wanted from him. “When I met her—she claimed—she said—she told me she was from New Orleans, her family was from Spain, she was Castilian.”

  Then it was true that he—specializing in gossip—had not known for years that those were lies. Out of the mixture of emotions this irony stirred in me, I laughed. “I’m sorry, I—”

  “But it is funny,” he said. “My wife’s real name is the one you mentioned to Albert—Alicia Gonzales?—and she’s Mexican. I wouldn’t have cared about who she really is or what her background was. I care only that she lied, and now I want to put an end to her lies.”

  “You’re divorcing her.” I understood.

  “Yes.”

  Was this what the call was about? Grounds for a favorable divorce? Considerations of alimony, property? Was he trying to engage me as a witness to the layers of fraudulence he had believed for years and would now use against her?

  “I feel sorry for her,” he said quickly into the telephone. “She doesn’t know who she is.”

  She doesn’t know who she is! I needed no rehearsal for what I said:

  “When I spoke to Albert, I told him I wasn’t sure we were talking about the same woman. And, Mr. Schwartz, I am sure now that we were not. I confused her with a photograph I saw, only that.” My words would not convince him—there were too many links to the easily available evidence he needed about Alicia Gonzales. That didn’t matter to me. Only this mattered:

  I needed to protect her.

  She doesn’t know who she is.

  I had heard those words before. No, I had heard words like them. Do you know who—? Where? When? Why did the memory of the kept woman of Augusto de Leon sweep into my mind with the insistence of something more, much more, nudging the familiar memory? As if deciding not to complete the smile, or because the memory aroused had turned bitter, her scarlet lips parted … I had felt that insistence before, of something more pushing at the cherished memorized details—an intricately graceful choreography of slight movements … a moment of suspense. Yes, I had been aware of the edge of another memory insinuating itself. Aren’t you ashamed? Of what? When? But those times, that hint of something more—Who do you think—? had withdrawn at the point when, in the memory, I had become aware of Isabel Franklin staring at the object of fascination at which I, too, stared in awe, that time when I, when we—I knew this for both of us—when we had clasped within our memories what we saw as a perfect creation, Marisa Guzman, who had escaped the drabness of the life we must have foreseen as our own; and she had brought, if only briefly into our unhappy lives, moments of beauty and possibility, and more, much more, to be discovered only later, much lat
er. Isabel—no, she had been Alicia Gonzales then—Alicia and I had become allied, an allegiance that had extended, if only in our memories, through the years. In defending her, I had been defending myself.

  And suddenly there it was, the full memory of that day, which had lain dormant until now, sprung awake by Schwartz’s words echoing other words, similar words, entirely different words, words always there, waiting to spring at the proper moment.

  That day of my sister’s wedding the spell of the kept woman had been shattered as she sat on the drab couch she transformed into a throne. A harsh, square woman invaded the room, too brashly to have stumbled into it by chance. Like an authoritative guard, she held her hands over her ample bosom as she glowered sternly at the seated regal woman.

  “Tú, mujer! No te da vergüenza que te vean aquí? Pos, quién te cres? Sabes quién eres?”

  For moments, the poised woman seemed neither to see nor to hear the hostile woman who had demanded: “You, woman! Aren’t you ashamed to be seen here? Who do you think you are? Do you know who you are?”

  The kept woman rose from the faded couch. She smoothed her dress, running her hands down it to banish any wrinkle that might linger. She stood. She lifted her hat’s veil entirely from her face. And she said—

  Words that I heard and pushed away, words I wasn’t sure I heard, words I know I heard, words carried away by the sounds of the wedding party in the adjoining room, words kept away in my mind, words returning only now, allowed with the full force of their implied judgment on Alicia Gonzales—and on me—for all our subterfuges and masquerades, words that would now reverberate with full meaning in my own life.

  “I am,” she answered the agitated woman, “Marisa Guzman. You probably know me as the kept woman of Augusto de Leon. No, I am not ashamed of who I am.”