Being Zoe
A Novel
James Cortese
Smashwords Edition
©
Copyright 2011 James Cortese
All Rights Reserved
ISBN: 9781453798515
Library of Congress Control Number: 2010933925
No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the author or publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote brief passages in a review.
This book is entirely a work of fiction. The names of real public figures and personalities, both living and dead, are used for satiric purposes, and their presence here in the form of imaginary characters is not meant to assert or infer that their portrayal bears any relation to anything they might have actually said or done.
Also by James Cortese
After Gideon
Freak House
Year of the Slug
Women of the Book
The Very Last Thing
What the Owl Said
For Romana
Sometimes a thousand twangling instruments
Will hum about mine ears; and sometimes voices
That if I then had wak’d after long sleep
Will make me sleep again and then in dreaming
The clouds methought would open and show riches
Ready to drop upon me that when I wak’d
I cried to dream again.
—The Tempest
Contents
—
Foreword
I
am thinking of aurochs and angels…
—Humbert
Humbert
It was never my practice to contribute any sort of commentary to another living writer’s book, but my current circumstances (I am dead) and my great admiration for this particular novel have induced me to break precedent. With literally all the time in the world, I sat down—metaphorically speaking—and composed a few random thoughts that might be of interest to those fortunate enough to have this book in their mortal hands. At the outset, let me state that I will have nothing to say about the special arrangements required to make these thoughts available to living readers, aside from pointing interested parties to the novel itself, where the subject is treated at some length. Those familiar with my own books will undoubtedly recall that I took a particular interest in the interrelationship between the deceased and the living, especially in my intriguing short novel (excuse the plug), Transparent Things. My readers will also remember that I also had a fondness for bogus commentaries, which, to my great amusement, caused not a few people to wonder whether I actually existed or not. Time to set the record straight: I did and I do.
Unfortunately, though everyone seems to agree that I was, not everyone is convinced that I am, including the purblind publishers of this book, who have insisted I put quotation marks around my name. It was a procedure I once advocated for the word “reality,” and so I have no objection and am content to oblige them. In the end, we are all good citizens of our Author’s imagination.
Let us be clear what sort of book this is. It is a book that appears to have no other purpose than to inspire the kind of physiological response that I had hoped my own books might inspire. Whether or not it does so, each reader must decide for himself. As I once—apparently famously—told my students at Cornell:
Although we read with our minds, the seat of artistic delight is between the shoulder blades. That little shiver behind is quite certainly the highest form of emotion that humanity has attained when evolving pure art and pure science. Let us worship the spine and its tingle. Let us be proud of our being vertebrates, for we are vertebrates tipped at the head with a divine flame.
In the end there is no accounting for taste, so I am sure there will be some readers who will experience no such spinal tingle and may feel a less pleasurable sensation further down at the other end of their spine. Back when Lolita first arrived on the scene, not a few good readers, missing the entire point, dismissed it out of hand with such comments as, “There comes a point where the atrophy of moral sense, evident throughout this book, finally leads to dullness, fatuity, and unreality.” I’m pleased to report that Kingsley Amis has since apologized for that remark, and we have become fast friends over the chess board.
The genre of the fictional autobiography was always a favorite of mine, going back to some of my early Russian novels and concluding with my last American ones. I found that the form provided the ideal literary nexus—a point of convergence, very much like zero in this novel, between the finite and the infinite, the real and the imagined, the known and the unknown, the rational and the irrational, the actual and the potential, and, yes, the living and the dead. Let me hasten to add that fiction founded on this grim schematic is inevitably doomed to fail. Successful narratives are built primarily on interesting characters and compelling incidents. However, a narrative that fails to address issues greater than itself will ultimately be condemned to the ignominy of the bestseller lists. (The fact that at least one of my own books spent time on these lists is beside the point: popular opinion, which is usually stupidly wrong, can sometimes be stupidly right.)
When I was writing The Original of Laura—my last and, at the time, unfinished novel—I felt I had largely exhausted the possibilities of the fictional autobiography. That was, I see now, an unwarranted opinion. Being Zoe, I’m happy to say, takes the genre in a number of rather audacious new directions. I was never a proponent of the theory that the fictional characters of a novel are in fact its authors, dictating as it were, their stories to a mere scribe, however non-fictional he might be. To me, the author of a book is the God of his fictional creation. This is not to say that the characters do not partake in some mysterious way of the Divine Essence and contain within themselves a certain amount of autonomy required to make them “live” on the page. As an author, I tended to believe that this so-called autonomy was but a trick of my craft, but my characters very likely had an entirely different opinion on the matter. Having mentioned The Original of Laura, I would like to take this opportunity to express my disappointment that my last emphatic instructions to my son Dmitri that this stillborn manuscript should never be put on display, like some pickled foetus in a jar, no matter how loud the entreaties of the morbid rabble, were ultimately ignored. It is not without a sense of sad irony that I perceive how easy it will be for Dmitri to utterly disregard this latest expression of pique from what appears to be a fictional character.
In the interest of frankness, let me note one of the few things I dislike about Being Zoe is its use of topical materials—real persons and events—things I scrupulously avoided in my own work. That being said, I myself very much enjoyed appearing in these pages, having on more than one occasion made similar appearances in my own fictions, and I very well understand what the author is up to here. However, I was never convinced that such ephemera would add much of value to my work, which strove energetically to avoid the philistinism and meretriciousness of popular culture (a patent oxymoron). It is true that in Being Zoe popular culture is a prime target of the author’s satire, as it was in some of my own books, but I never believed that actual artifacts from that world had to be hauled into one’s fictional universe. There are, after all, degrees of reality. Do we write boring prose to give the reader a “real” sense of boredom? Many writers apparently think so. I’m sorry to disagree with the author on this point, even if he succeeds brilliantly, particularly in the interplay of real and fictional elements, especially toward the end of the book, as the former is gradually transformed into the latter and vice versa; I simply have no interest in topical trash. As I have said elsewhere:
The good reader is aware that the quest for real life, real people, and so forth is a meaningless process when speaking of books. In a book, the reality of a person, or object, or a circumstance depends exclusively on the world of that particular book.
In my own writing I was never an enthusiast of lengthy dialogue, either in Russian, my native tongue, or in English, my adopted tongue. Frankly, writing dialogue requires a sensitivity for spoken language that I never had in great abundance. Nevertheless, I might have made a credible attempt to master this skill had I not always believed that much more could be accomplished through narrative, with its singular ability to address multiple levels of reality at once. Dialogue works best in drama; its inclusion in narrative works best when it is used sparingly. Too many writers resort to dialogue to carry the entire burden of telling a story—as if the novel were no more than a script for a film or stage play. I wish Being Zoe had less dialogue than it has, but I am pleased to see that the author has employed his sensitive ear to advantage and composed scenes that can be unbearably funny, as exemplified by the ingenious dialogue-within-dialogue passage in the confessional scene of the first chapter.
The great surprise and daring of Being Zoe is that the result is not at all the picture one might have expected at the outset. It is a picture, at least in my understanding, of a world outside the narrative, the result of the protagonist’s strenuous, if not heroic, efforts to transcend her condition and arrive at the truth of who she is. In this regard, she is very much like all of us, driven by a desire to make sense of the stories we call our lives.
Much more can be said on this fascinating topic, but I am loath to do so for fear of spoiling the reader’s pleasure of exploring the topic unbiased from any speculative interpretations of mine, which—horrors!—some might be tempted to confuse with those of the author himself. It is not my place to speak with authorial authority, however much one is tempted to do so. But I cannot help but think that the author will have no objection to my passing on one small piece of inside information, namely, that despite the presence of a psychiatrist in these pages, the author has made no attempt to weave a Freudian theme into the warp and woof of his narrative. At long last, the Viennese witchdoctor, it seems, has finally been defrocked and exposed as the pretentious quack he always was. Do not get me started. Vera is calling me to dinner, and I must presently go.
—“Vladimir Nabokov”
Father D.
No
one ever told me I was pretty when I was a little girl. All little
girls should be told they're pretty, even if they aren't.
—Marilyn
Monroe
Already at the age of ten I was in a deep funk. It was 1957—need I say more? Except for the beatniks, this was the Decade of Group Think. My father, as usual, summarized it perfectly. “When the waterholes run dry,” he said, “the herd breaks for the mirage.”
Here’s what I hated. I hated the way you had to be like everyone else. I hated the way you had to pretend to like what you really hated. Basically, I hated having to hate so much. All the clocks in childhood run agonizingly slow, but time in the fifties, like Zeno’s arrow, seemed as though it would never get to the end of the decade. The years kept plodding drearily on, right into the sixties, right up until John Kennedy, war hero, boy president, heartthrob of America, was blown away sitting on top of the world, next to his beautiful young wife in her designer pink suit and pink pillbox hat. So lovely. They said that Zapruder’s film would never be shown. A few years later, there it was—the President’s head exploding, Jackie crawling across the limo’s trunk to get away.
We lived in the Brentwood section of Los Angeles, having moved there from Boston when I was still a baby. My father had gone west to make his fortune, and he had, several times over. Once, when I asked my father if we were rich, he said, “It’s all relative, Zoe. Be glad of the advantages you have,” repeating something along the lines of what was told to Nick Carraway by his father. Years later, I felt a jolt of déjà vu, reading those famous words at the beginning of Fitzgerald’s most famous book. A memorable moment—the first time I began to suspect I was a fictional character.
My father was a well-known psychiatrist with lots of celebrity patients, my mother was a stay-at-home drunk. I was a spoiled-rotten only child. We had more comfort and advantages than we knew what to do with, and, perhaps because of that, we also had our own personal shrinks. From the outside it really did look like the American dream.
As far as I know, all those advantages never did me any good. My mother claimed it was my attitude. She was Irish, a fatalist, a born believer; she believed in everything, anything, including contradictions, which she believed were tests to be overcome in order to believe. I wasn’t like her at all. I hated believing just to believe. I hated it when people said: “This is the way it is. This is what you have to believe.” It wasn’t that I didn’t want to believe, it was just that I wanted to know why. I wanted belief to be so believable that it wouldn’t even enter my head to question it. It didn’t seem like too much to ask. In the Bible passages that we studied at St. Cletus Elementary, the Catholic school my mother insisted I attend, Adam knew Eve. But Eve never got to know Adam. It didn’t seem right, even if I wasn’t too clear about what exactly it is you know when you knew.
My father was not a believer, although he felt it was his civic and parental duty to keep that opinion to himself. A second-generation Italian, he had inherited the Italian male’s paradoxical combination of respect and contempt for the church. If he believed in anything, it was in the absolute necessity of not believing. He was a rationalist and put his faith in the facts. Belief for him was a form of dementia. “Look at your mother,” he would say whenever he wanted to prove a point about crazy convictions.
“That's right, look at me,” my mother would shoot back. My mother loved laughing at his so-called facts. “Look at me! Look at me! He thinks I’m the nut, but look who’s happy!” My mother had a wonderful delusion that she was happy.
My father was mostly away, either at his office battling the epidemic of neurosis then afflicting L.A. glitterati, hanging out with his celebrity pals at famous “watering holes,” or fooling around with some poor talentless showbiz kewpie, beauteous of body, empty of head—the very incarnation of the cliché. I often had the feeling that I was just an endearing appendage to his life.
Once when I complained that he wasn’t paying as much attention to me as my best friend Miranda Finch’s daddy paid to her, he responded by saying I should probably see a professional. “Not all daddies are alike, sweetie. I didn’t like my daddy very much, and I’m sure I’d be a better person today if I could have talked to someone about it when I was a kid.”
“I want to talk to you about it, Daddy.”
“I know you do, sweetie, but Daddy’s just not the right person. It’s not advisable. It’s not, well, professional.”
“Why Daddy?”
“Because in my line of work,” he explained, “professional stuff and family stuff have to be kept separate.”
“What happens if you don’t?”
“They’ll send me to jail, sweetie. You wouldn’t want Daddy to go to jail, would you?”
Just the thought of my being responsible for sending my father to jail was enough to make me break down into a fit of shameful tears. It was a long time before I figured out my father’s penchant for mischievous lying. Of course, he never thought of it as lying. He saw it as just a funny way he had with words, part of his unique sense of humor.
My mother had long gotten over his sense of humor. She came from a wealthy family of famously pious Catholics in Chestnut Hill (friends of the Cardinal, friends of the Papal Nuncio). My parents had met in New York (where my father was doing his residency at Columbia and my mother was visiting her aunt) just after the war at some sort of charity affair, fell in love and were married—all within a few weeks. My mother was a virgin; my father had probably never been a virgin. I came along nine months later, having been conceived, according to my father, in the presidential suite of the Plaza Hotel (my father had a pal working the front desk). Marital bliss ended abruptly for my mother when, shortly after my birth, she discovered one of my father’s affairs.
She was never the same. One night as she got up to bottle feed her new daughter, she passed a mirror in the hallway and saw the Devil staring back at her. The Devil told her it might be a good idea to strangle me. She resisted the suggestion, and later, in the psychiatric hospital where my father had her stay for several months, an angel of the Lord appeared in the form of a glint of light and apprised her of the fact that she was in danger of damnation for having renounced her childhood faith. She decided there was nothing left to do but make an all-out effort to save her soul, and when she returned home, she fell back into the bosom of the Church and became, in my father’s memorable phrase, “a mommy nun.”
To leave no doubt she was a changed woman, she took up important charitable causes—the hungry in Africa, the oppressed in Eastern Europe, the impoverished in Asia. Then she took up with Mother Teresa, went to India, and we didn’t see her for a long while. Mostly I was looked after by nannies—Deirdre, Josephine, Imelda, Maria.
Our relationship was restrained and correct. My mother routinely demanded dutiful kisses on her cool powdery right cheek, but never felt I was owed any in return. In the beginning, before she understood that she had a duty to right the wrongs of the world, she usually kept to her room, spending a good part of the day on her knees, her face having a look of beatific serenity. She explained it simply, telling me one day, “Zoe, the Lord dwells in my heart.”
“Really?” I said, utterly awed. I was about eight years old.
“Yes, really! He comes to me. Just like warm milk filling a glass.”
I looked into her eyes and saw nothing. She wasn’t looking at me, but through me. I was intrigued, maybe even envious. She was so certain. So complete. So contented. As if she were being infused by a divine drug. “How do you get Him to do that?” I asked her.
“You have to make yourself worthy.”
“Can I make myself worthy, too?”
Now her eyes were actually looking at me. “Yes, you can.”
“How, Mother?”
“You must be pure, child. In here”—she pointed to her heart. “Just like God. God is pure and is drawn to pureness.”
“How do I become pure?” I asked, thinking that “pure” had something to do with frequent baths.
“Keep out the world, child. Never let it in. Because then you let Satan in. Evil enters and kills purity. Then you become something detestable, something ugly in the sight of God. Something worthy only of being destroyed.”
“What if I already let the world in?”
“Then you must drive it out!” Her voice rose. “Like I did. Drive out all the reasons, all the vain hopes, all the pride that has been keeping you from seeing the truth.”
“Do you see the truth now?”
“Yes, I do,” she said softly.
“Tell me,” I pleaded. “I want to know. I want to know the truth.”
Tears welled up in her eyes. “Believe,” she said. “Believe with all your heart. Believe no matter what.”
“Tell me what I must believe, Mother. I want to know.”
“It’s so simple, child. So obvious. So easy. Don’t you know?” There was an awful sadness in her eyes.
I shook my head. I felt ashamed. Stupid. Worthy only of being destroyed.
“I’m sorry,” she said, turning away. “I’m so very sorry.”
That night I found myself crying helplessly in my bed. What was wrong with me? Who were these strangers who were my parents? What was going to become of me? Better to be born with a defective heart or a cleft lip or a big nose than this missing piece inside, this critical part of you that made it possible for people to love you, for you to be happy, that made it possible for you to believe.
At some point my father realized his wife had little interest in being a mother to his daughter, and so set out on a sustained effort to make up the difference. One day he showed up in my room and handed me one of his cameras (he liked to think of himself as a serious “amateur photographer”). It was his 1938 Leica III. “This is my favorite,” he said. “I want you to have it.” Then he proceeded to give me a lesson on shutter speeds, f-stops, depth of field, and other photographic arcana. I felt like Eve holding the magic apple. Let’s be as categorical as possible: It was a moment that changed my life.
How had he figured out that I would become so interested in photography? He knew even before I knew. Or was it just my desire to please him as a daughter by taking an interest in a subject I knew he was interested in? Did I really fall in love with photography or did I just think: You’re down to one parent, kid, better watch out you don’t lose the other one too. Or perhaps both—two strands combining into a double helix that would come to define my future.
I remember the very first picture I took with that Leica. It was of my mother, on her knees in the kitchen by the window, bathed in a shaft of early-morning light. I took it from behind, so she wouldn’t see me. I remember spending a good deal of time composing the shot and worrying that my exposure settings might not quite capture that ethereal beam of light. When the camera clicked, she turned abruptly around with a cross look on her face. I felt very strange for having done what I did. Years later, I came across something Diane Arbus had said about photography, and it seemed to fit me exactly: “I always thought of photography as a naughty thing to do. That was one of my favorite things about it, and when I first did it, I felt very perverse.”
After giving me his camera, my father was always available to tutor me on such things as lighting and composition, and when I set up my own darkroom, suggestions on how to manipulate the various chemical baths and use the enlarger. I always looked forward to Saturday afternoons because I knew that no matter what, my father and I would spend several hours together in the darkroom. He wasn’t an affectionate man, nor one who liked to talk about his feelings or inquire about my own—that territory was for me and my shrink to explore—and the subject of our talk was always the business at hand. But in the end all those hundreds of hours we spent huddled together in the dark under a single red light bulb turned out to the happiest of my childhood and defined the direction the rest of my life would take. By the time I reached high school, I had pretty much decided what I was going to do. I would become a world-class photojournalist.
Because the TV said that the family that prays together stays together, we went regularly to St. Cletus Catholic Church in Brentwood. We dressed up in our Sunday best and sat in the same pew on the right-hand side of the nave, specially built so that every word that was said over the PA system was garbled beyond understanding. Every Sunday was the same. My mother went into a kind of holy trance, my father fell asleep. My mother always received communion, my father never. My mother was reluctant to leave after the Mass was over, my father couldn’t wait to get home to his Bloody Mary and his Sunday Times.
As with every other group activity during this period, I hated church and all that went with it—a herd within a herd. And a holier-than-thou herd at that. It represented the opposite of everything I wanted. It was boring and good. I wanted to have fun and be bad. It didn’t help that the whole thing struck me as an elaborate scam. These strange unmarried men in black getting everyone to buy into their con. But since this was the fifties, with a former general in command as president, and I was just a kid at the mercy of adults no matter what crazy ideas they had in their heads, I understood the importance of pretending to believe.
In the summer of 1962, Marilyn Monroe had just died (not far from where we lived), and that was supposed to be a lesson to anyone who thought you could not believe in anything and get away with it. People still believed that nobody got away it. It was all very demoralizing. I was in high school, more precocious than I needed to be, or that was good for me, reading everything I could get my hands on. I read Catcher in the Rye and Howl and Peyton Place, of course, but also The Kinsey Report, and even The Organization Man. But they only made me unhappier because they confirmed everything I hated about where I lived, how I lived, and what everyone expected of me.
I had actually met Marilyn Monroe when I was six or seven. She was at a celebrity wedding we all attended in Hollywood. “What a beautiful little girl!” she said, shaking my hand, her big bright red lips and billows of bottle-blonde hair looming over me like a giant parade balloon. With her giggly laugh, Marilyn seemed like a kid in an adult body. I immediately liked her and thought she would make a great friend, someone you could confide in, take baths with. I wanted to show her my dolls. I wanted to play hopscotch with her. I couldn’t understand what all the fuss was about. Why did men act so strangely when her name was mentioned? The smirks, the bug eyes, the va-va-voom’s. Sitting behind her at the reception in West Hollywood, I overheard her talking to another woman about enemas, then about Joe DiMaggio, the baseball star. She had decided, she said, to go back to him. “Gosh, that big lunk must be the dumbest man alive, but maybe that’s what makes him so darned sweet.”
Little of what she said made much sense. I remember going up to my father, who was talking to Frank Sinatra, one of his pals, a fellow paisan, and asking him what an enema was, and both of them suddenly breaking out in a duet of laughter just as the orchestra cranked up “Sentimental Journey.”
A couple of months later, she was dead.
In retrospect, it was a milestone. Things were changing—we just weren’t aware how profound those changes would be. Suddenly we had Sputnik and pantyhose and enough H-bombs, if need be, to destroy the world. We had a fat easygoing Pope who improbably tried to wake up the church from its deep centuries-old sleep, and then, having accomplished that, he suddenly dropped dead. We had blacks who had come out of nowhere and demanded to be treated like everyone else. And we had Elvis. Elvis was apparently getting away with it. I remember during religious instruction at St. Cletus, when I tried to imagine what God looked like, I imagined that he looked exactly like Elvis. Jesus, I thought, had probably looked like James Dean, Mary like my mother, and Joseph like Monsignor Gigot, the pastor of our church. Even so, it was hard connecting with the people mentioned in the Bible. They were all strivers and believers and self-deniers—people who thought they had a special in with God.
People shouldn’t have special ins with God, I thought. God should be above playing favorites, he should be above wanting people to grovel in front of him. What kind of a God got a kick out of that? Maybe the people who wrote the Bible had gotten it wrong. Supposedly God had spelled it all out. But maybe those ancient scribes weren’t paying close attention. Or maybe they just hadn’t liked what they’d heard and came up with something that people would prefer.
By 1962, I’d pretty much decided that this was not the kind of God I could believe it—a God totally dedicated to everybody’s personal whims, a Fairy Godmother God. A God who gave you bonus points if you were a member of the country club or brushed your teeth twice a day or kept up your pledges to the church. This couldn’t be a real God. A real God, I figured, would have gotten things right from the beginning and long ago stopped making so many people so damn stupid.
Father Dauphinais liked to tell us that God was our friend. I remember I confessed to Father D. that I had doubts that God was my friend. The word “doubt” always got him worked up. Father’s D.’s reply was always the same. All the important answers were “mysteries,” and all the really unpleasant mysteries (like tidal waves that wipe out whole villages and babies dying of cancer) were part of “God’s plan.”
He asked me why I felt this way, his voice soft and sexy—a real waste for a priest, I thought, juiced up on my new teenage hormones, nothing much making sense, my head focused on a single all-encompassing idea: boys. I told him I’d always prayed to God but never had much luck with it. For example, I was constantly tempted by impure thoughts, but no matter how hard I prayed, they just wouldn’t go away. In fact, the harder I prayed, the worse they seemed to get: I’d find myself thinking about the very thing I was trying so hard not to think about. What was going on? Father D. said this was God’s way of testing me.
I didn’t like the idea of being tested. It reminded me of school. Tested for what? If life was like school where I was a star troublemaker, things did not bode well for the future. Was Hell like an eternity in the principal’s office?
I was quite familiar with the principal’s office, since I was constantly being sent there for one act of misbehavior or another. The ultimate punishment was being rapped on your knuckles with a steel ruler wielded by Sister Severina. Early on I made it a point never to cry, the usual response of my classmates to the intense pain, and I think Sister Severina took this as yet another example of my willfulness and unchristian attitude toward chastisement.
“You again!” Sister Severina would say as I was led into her office. “Let’s see if the medicine works this time.”
It never did. They tried everything. They made me sit in the wastebasket in the front of the class, or sometimes on the floor in the well of Sister’s desk. When corporal punishment and shame didn’t work, they resorted to psychology. Once, in the fifth grade, after Sister Aloysius warned my unruly class that the next person to speak out of turn would have their tongues removed with the aid of a special tongue-removing liquid called Andronicus, I immediately said to Jimmy Buongiorno, sitting in front of me, “We should get that bottle and put it on her tongue.”
He turned to look at me and caught sight of my impromptu impression of a tongueless Sister Aloysius trying to speak.
Jimmy tried to contain his laugh but failed. He gave out with a loud snort through his nose, where the thick mucus from a cold exploded onto his desk—a sight that immediately aroused the vocal disgust of Kathleen Reilly, who was sitting in the seat beside him.
Sister Aloysius had an uncanny ability for zeroing in on the source of classroom disruption. “Zoe, up to the front of the class!” she bellowed.
As I stood there, Sister demonstrated the amazing eradicating power of Andronicus by making a few words written in ink disappear from a piece of paper.
“Open up!” she ordered. “Stick out your tongue!”
I did as I was told and remained that way while Sister fulminated, sermonized, procrastinated, and finally had second thoughts. In the end, she decided to be merciful—this time—and sent me back to my seat.
At some point in the seventh grade, I decided it made no sense to keep bucking the system and set about to reform my behavior. It was my first lesson in playing the game, and I became very good at it. From hellion to model student—a St. Cletus success story. I was now everyone’s favorite. The Church loves the idea of redemption. The unfailingly merciful God—its most popular feature.
Father D. was young for a priest. He was our church’s superstar. All the girls giggled and swooned when he smiled and patted them on their heads or shoulders or arms or sometimes, if no one was looking, on their shapely backsides. My best friend Miranda Finch confessed she had a crush on him. Miranda was such a copycat. She’d gotten it from me.
It was true I had a crush on Father D., but I never actually thought it could go anywhere. I knew the score. He was a grown man, and I was a kid. Plus, he was a priest, and priests weren’t supposed to be interested in girls with crushes. Even so, there was always something funny about the way he would sometimes look at me—an intensity in his eyes. What was all that about?
Once, tired of being bored and having just finished Lolita, for some malicious fun I confessed to Father D. that I’d done something forbidden and horribly sinful with a married man.
I thought he would tell me to quit pulling his leg, but he didn’t. He was very serious and wanted to know if the man had taken advantage of me. I had to laugh. No, the whole thing was my idea, I said. The guy was someone I knew, a friend of my father’s. My father knew lots of famous people—many as patients, some as friends, some as both. I didn’t tell Father D. who it was, but like a lot of people in the country, he would have known had I said the name. I told Father D. I’d developed a terrible crush on this man and had decided it was time to see what everyone was talking about.
“Talking about?”
“You know!”
“Ah, yes.”
I explained to Father D. how I called up this man and confessed my interest in him. Turned out he felt the same way about me (not surprising, in retrospect, since he had those same feelings for a lot of girls my age). A few days later, he picked me up as I walked home from school. He had a big blue Mercury convertible, with a push-button radio and wide vinyl seats.
“What were you thinking, my child?” Father said.
I told him I was thinking that I was just like Lolita.
Father sighed. I knew what he thought of Lolita. I’d heard him preach against her. Well, not so much against her as the book about her—that “scandalous” novel, which, but for his condemnation of it, no one would have bothered to read. I know I wouldn’t have.
Father D. was very quiet. I told him how we drove to Malibu and found a deserted beach parking lot—it was a stormy, cold day—no one was there—and how this older man grabbed me passionately in his arms, and—getting as quickly as I could to the main point—how his hands were all over me.
“Where did he touch you, my child?”
I told him. But apparently not detailed enough. He wanted clarification. I clarified. He asked me if I felt this was wrong.
“Yes, it made me feel very wicked, Father. I felt like God was watching me.”
“And so you felt ashamed?”
Not exactly. I tried as best I could to explain how much I enjoyed the feeling of being wicked, sitting in this man’s lap, this man who was married and older and famous, and doing everything I’d imagined Humbert doing to Lolita.
“Did you read this book?” he asked.
I told him I had. I heard him sigh again. He asked me if I knew I was being taken advantage of.
“I didn’t think of it that way, Father. I thought I was taking advantage of him.”
“How so, my child?”
“He was a man, with, you know, those urges.”
“So you encouraged him?”
“Oh, yes, Father. I put my hand in his pants.”
“And you touched him?”
“Yes, Father. He moaned and kind of cringed.”
“So you were reluctant to stimulate him further?”
“Oh, no, Father. He wanted me to stop.”
“So, so—at that point he began to feel the pangs of his conscience?”
“Actually, he wanted to move to the back seat.”
“And you understood the implication of that?”
“He told me right out, Father. He used all the bad words that you possibly could.”
“And it never occurred to you, my child, that you were about to commit a grave sin, risking your immortal soul for a single moment of fleeting pleasure?” His voice seemed to have changed—as if he’d gotten something caught in his throat.
“I just couldn’t think anymore, Father. Whatever he said, I did. I was his slave. And it happened so fast. Suddenly, next thing I know, all our clothes are off and I’m sitting there on his lap facing him, Christmas lights going on everywhere inside my head.”
Father D. was quiet for a couple of minutes. I could hear some rustling of clothing. I assumed he wanted me to go on.
“It was just too much, Father. I could barely stand it. It was like lightning shooting right up through me. And I’m there, ‘no, no, no, no,’ but he wouldn’t listen to me, Father.”
“You had second thoughts and wanted him to stop?” Father D.’s voice was so choked, I could barely understand him.
“Not exactly, Father. I just wanted him to slow down for Pete’s sake. I had the shimmy shakes really bad.”
“I see…yes, I see…go on…”
“But it was too late.”
“What…what was too late, my child?”
“He was going faster and faster. I’m there, ‘oh God, oh God, please don’t stop, please don’t stop,’ and then it’s just too much and I called out to Jesus. I know I shouldn’t have taken the name of the Lord in vain, Father, but I couldn’t help it. I was way out of control, all twitchy and stuff.”
“I see…yes…yes…can’t help it…out of control…”
“I’m screaming my head off, arms flying. Car’s all fogged up, rocking like crazy. And he’s going, ‘yeah, baby…come on, baby…come on…that’s it, baby.’”
Suddenly Father D. said, “My God!”
“His hands on my hips—pumping, pumping. Like the rest of me wasn’t even there.”
“Dear God! Jesus, sweet Lord!”
“He was breathing real hard—almost choking—going, ‘uck, uck, uck,’ his eyes kind of weird, his mouth all twisted. Suddenly—whoa!—he slips out!”
“Sweet, sweet Jesus!”
“Jeepers! And he’s, you know, still going, Father! Like a volcano! And he’s bucking like crazy! So I just grab hold of him with both hands, and he just wouldn’t quit. It was really something.”
Father D. was quiet. Finally, he cleared his throat and said, “Are you—are you sorry, my child? Are you sorry for your sin?”
I said I was. I said I felt ashamed afterward and guilty. I said everything I was supposed to say, including that I would try never to commit that sin again.
Then he gave me my penance and told me to go and “to sin no more.” But I don’t think he really meant it, because this went on for a couple of months. Every confession had some new racy adventure in it. I’m sure he caught on, since my encounters with men—Tommy Skrzypczak’s dad, who was a big shot in the Knights of Columbus, and Brother Herman, a visiting missionary monk—grew more and more improbable. Still, he never called me on it. After a while, people in the other booths picked up what was going on, and someone told Monsignor Gigot. One day, the Monsignor hid in a nearby booth and heard it for himself. I never learned what really happened next, but soon we were told that Father D. was being transferred.
Just before he left, I made a point of running into him after Mass one Sunday outside the rectory. I had my Leica with me and got him to pose for some shots. I was shooting black and white from a crouch so that he towered in the frame, his head surrounded by a glowing nimbus of light from a cloud-veiled sun. There’s one shot where he’s turning away, his ghostly face a near blur against a lowering sky, a forced smile morphing into no smile at all—a man caught in between, a man caught off-guard, ashamed or embarrassed, a man revealed: one of my all-time favorite youthful photos.
Sometime later, we found out that he was sent to do missionary work in South America. Years after that, Miranda told me she’d heard that Father D. had quit the priesthood altogether and hooked up with some tribe who were said to be cannibals. When a group of anthropologists ran into him, he had a rock under his lower lip, his face was painted, and he was wearing only a headband and a necklace made out of human teeth. They said he had several wives and about fifty kids.
Born Again
I
know you are asking today, How long will it take?… I come to say to
you this afternoon, however difficult the moment, however frustrating
the hour, it will not be long.
—Martin
Luther King, Jr.
The powerfully purgative sixties had miraculously cured the chronic case of constipation that the country had suffered since the end of the war. Everywhere you looked there were paradoxes. On TV it was the Beverly Hillbillies and fire fights in Vietnam. On the radio it was Bob Dylan and Perry Como. A lot of people hated Muhammad Ali for having changed his name, but not Archie Leach, Issur Demsky, or Frances Gumm for having changed theirs. Martin Luther King, Jr. was proclaimed a hero, and so was George Wallace. All the rules became obsolete. Square was out, hip was in. Women bared their legs up to their thighs. Men grew beards. Women with bared thighs who once were expected to say no now were expected to say yes—especially to men with beards.
I got into every college I applied to, but chose Berkeley, because it seemed to have the right combination of things I was looking for—the strongest academics with the fewest restraints. My mother had in mind an all-women Catholic school. No way that was going to happen, not with my father, who came to my rescue and said, “It’s her future and her decision. It’s about time she had a say in an important matter.”
“I never had a say!” my mother replied.
“We’re not going to repeat that mistake, are we?” my father said, and that was the end of that.
It was, truthfully, a hard decision leaving L.A., which I had always thought was the best place in the world to live. It was a city in the grandest sense of the word, like no other place on the planet, a megalopolis dedicated to the incessant pursuit of a dream. Perhaps it was, as many people claimed, the world’s capital of wretched excess, but all cities had their jealous detractors. Woody Allen was right to say that it lacked the gravitas of New York. So what? L.A. had the opposite—an airy levity, like the floating city in Gulliver’s Travels, a wonder and a marvel, but also a humbling absurdity—no city has ever really floated in the air. L.A. was both a real place and a mythic place, little understood by people who had never lived there. There was a kind of sinful exuberance about it—a city sitting atop dangerous fault lines that could go off at any minute once God decided he was fed up with so much brash disobedience. Why would anyone want to live anywhere else?
All my friends were heading off to UCLA or USC, but I decided, however much I loved my hometown and my friends, it was important to explore a different experience. L.A. seemed too much like me—a kind of alter ego. We were like sisters that had developed an unhealthy relationship and needed time to sort things out. Four years, I figured, should just about do it.
L.A. was quintessentially Californian, but it wasn’t entirely California, which is the only state to have two world-class cities (and neither as its capital). It was time to see what was going on at the other end of the state, in that other urban phantasm, San Francisco. I was happy finally to be leaving home but a little anxious about having to negotiate life on my own. It helped that my best friend Miranda Finch would be attending Berkeley as well. We signed up as roommates.
At first it was the most wonderful arrangement in the history of childhood friendships, then we argued a lot and said abominable things to each other, and it soon became a daily torture when we realized how fundamentally incompatible we were. We turned out not to be as alike as we had thought. She wanted to study; I thought studying was a waste of time. I disapproved of her boyfriends’ hair styles—crewcuts; and she disapproved of mine—shoulder-length mops. She was determined to earn good grades and get her degree; I couldn’t care less about grades and was seriously thinking about dropping out. She loved her professors, and I hated them: those smug, pompous know-it-alls with weird balding patterns, as if their brains were throwing off more heat than their follicles could handle. I hated the way all that knowledge was cut up and strained and homogenized and spoon fed into you, hated how you had to spit it all back up in blue books so that the professors could see how well you’d managed to digest their point of view. She gobbled up whatever disgusting swill landed on her plate and told them how tasty it was.
Then there was the question of sex, which Miranda pronounced something like “sox.” Miranda believed in saving herself for the right man. I believed in going through as many men as I possibly could. Life was short, your youth was short, and sex was short. QED. So what was the point of saving yourself?
My dedication to scholarship gradually diminished to the point where I was spending more time making the scene on Telegraph Avenue than in the classroom. Nothing seemed groovy. Nothing seemed relevant. Worse, I had no idea what I should look for in grooviness and relevance. One thing was for sure: I was tired of immature college boys whose idea of fun was (1) taking you to play miniature golf and then trying to score you in the back seat of their cars; or (2) taking you to a deafening rock concert to get stoned and then trying to score you in the back seat of their cars. It was becoming harder and harder to resist Timothy Leary’s Prime Directive: turn on, tune in, drop out. By the second semester of 1965, I had fully embraced the first two and was on the brink of going for number three. I now saw myself as less of a student than an amateur activist who wasn’t afraid to admit to her friends that in her heart she was a revolutionary. There was plenty to protest against—an ill-advised (if not patently lunatic) war in Southeast Asia, the capitalist exploitation of the poor, racism and segregation, the pollution of the planet, the repression of women, the hypocritical sexual code, the mistreatment of animals, the proliferation of junk food, etc. There was no end to the demonstrations. I attended as many as I could.
The protests (sit-ins, lie-ins, love-ins) were high-minded, serious revolutionary work, not to mention occasionally dangerous whenever the baton-swinging, tear-gas happy police decided to enter the picture. The upside was what came afterward—the go-for-broke parties: some of the best, uninhibited fun I’d ever had. It was at one of these parties that I met DeVon White, our school’s leader of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, otherwise known as SNCC. I’m not even sure DeVon was a student. A tall, good-looking black man from Oakland, he was a gifted public speaker who spent all of his time in what he liked to call the Movement. Soon I was spending all of my time in the Movement. With school becoming a monstrous irrelevancy, if not a bourgeois hypocrisy, it seemed the right thing to do. It was true that Devon and his friends didn’t think women had much of a role to play in the Movement, aside from cooking their meals, picking up after them, and sleeping in their beds, but I had managed to convince myself that this was an attitude rooted in their oppressed past and something I could change over time. DeVon seemed to agree. “Let’s fix civil rights before we tackle women’s rights,” he said, and, thinking I was deeply in love with him, I believed that jive without a second thought.
The South, then proudly segregated, was where the big battle was shaping up, and DeVon decided that was where we had to be. And so in the blink of an eye (actually a long, tedious bus ride), I went from one of the most enlightened and tolerant cities on the North American continent to one of the most benighted and bigoted—Selma, Alabama.
We arrived in March, just in time to join Martin Luther King’s voter-registration demonstrations. Right away something become very clear—being a revolutionary in Selma was going to be nothing like being a revolutionary in Berkeley. It was the difference between playing cops and robbers in your backyard and going off to fight in the rice paddies of Vietnam. In Berkeley, you could get arrested or expelled; in Selma, you could get killed. Strangely enough, that made the après-riot parties even wilder than ever.
Never before had I been in the presence of so much hate. It was like being in a horror film in which ordinary people had been turned into zombies, rabid with the desire to do you harm. Needless to say it was incredibly intoxicating! Who could have predicted that hate could be such a turn-on? We felt like we were soldiers, engaged in a noble cause, going into battle: it was our sacred duty as mortal beings to live as fully as possible in what might be the few remaining hours of our lives.
When SNCC’s voter registration drive resulted in the death of Jimmie Lee Jackson, Martin and the Reverend Abernathy organized a protest march from Selma to the state capitol in Montgomery. The locals thought all of this was a very bad idea. They especially hated the thought of their once docile blacks joining forces with people like me—“outside agitators,” pointy-headed intellectuals and do-gooders, communist sympathizers, radicals, miscegenators, and assorted free-love, pot-smoking kooks: basically your scum of the earth.
The first march led to the arrest of nearly eight hundred people. Mounted police attacked the second march. Television cameras recorded the state troopers using nightsticks and tear gas on peaceful marchers. They called it Bloody Sunday. A couple of days later, Martin, who had won the Nobel Peace Prize the year before, led fifteen hundred people down Route 80 to Montgomery on another march. They reached and crossed the Edmund Pettus Bridge only to be stopped by a barricade of heavily armed state troopers. Martin made the decision to turn back, but the police, unable to resist the impulse to crack a few more obstinate heads, charged anyway. Jim Reeb, a white minister, ended up getting killed.
The media were on the scene, and that night, there it was on every TV screen across America—official bigotry in action. President Johnson sent in troops, marshals, and FBI agents to protect the protesters. I arrived in the middle of all this, among the twenty-five thousand others who had come to Alabama to join the fight. I brought my camera and shot fifty rolls of film—angry crowds, angry cops, Martin looking serene and confident, knowing, believing, affirming to all who would listen that right makes might.
As we ran a gauntlet of agitated Alabamans screaming insults at us, Martin, who had a soft spot for attractive young women, suddenly noticed me walking next to him and said, “They don’t appear to like us very much, do they?”
“I wonder if they even know why.”
“All they know is what they learned at their mama’s knee.”
“Can they ever change?”
“I’m not worried about that. It will come. I’m just worried what the cost is going to be.”
We finished our march in Montgomery, where Martin tried to submit a petition to Governor Wallace, demanding voting rights for his disenfranchised people—something few white citizens of Alabama thought they needed to have, so the governor never bothered to show up. Feeling strongly that outside agitators were the cause of all their problems, the Ku Klux Klan shot and killed Viola Liuzzo, a Detroit housewife, forty, mother of five.
The marchers disbanded. We had taken casualties but achieved our goal. Some of us stayed in Montgomery, waiting for transportation back to whatever parts of the civilized world we had come from.
I had seen very little of DeVon since we arrived in Alabama, and when I had, he seemed cool and distant in my presence—almost as if he were embarrassed to have me there. And, in fact, that was the case. In Berkeley, it was fine for a black man to have a white girlfriend. In Alabama, it required a lot of detailed explanation—something DeVon was not remotely interested in doing. What he preferred doing was replacing me with a woman of his own race.
The night I caught him with her, we had a huge fight. In our brief screaming match we articulated in gutter language all the things we had resented about each other.
It was my last night in Alabama. A friend of mine named Blaise Shapiro, a sociology major at Sarah Lawrence, and like me a rich man’s daughter, came into my motel room and found me sobbing hysterically.
“A good hour of suicidal self-pity is perfectly fine,” she said. “After that it’s theater. How long have you been crying?”
“All afternoon.”
“Not good. You need to get over it.”
“How do I do that?”
“Let’s go out.”
“Where? This place is dead.”
“Not quite. There’s a revival meeting being held in a big tent at the fairgrounds.”
“I’m not religious.”
“Neither am I. In fact I’m militantly the opposite. But we might never again have an opportunity to experience one of the South’s more exotic social institutions in situ.”
“I’ve had enough of the South’s exotic institutions to last a lifetime.”
“Come on, humor me. It’ll be a kick.”
“Can we smoke some pot first?”
“Absolutely.”
We did that, and then Blaise turned out to have some windowpane acid, so we did that too.
It was early evening. The tent was packed with people sitting on folding chairs. It was hot. There were big fans blowing the hot air around. The wild-haired, movie-star handsome man on the stage screaming into a microphone was the Reverend Bobby Swindell. After a few minutes of knee-jerk skepticism, the pot and acid must have kicked in and I found myself listening intently. I’d brought my camera, thinking I was like Robert Flaherty going off to Hudson Bay to shoot Nanook of the North. But I never took a single shot.
The Reverend came down hard on sin. But he talked up redemption just as hard. Two sides of the same coin. It was all very simple: God punished the wicked and rewarded the righteous. Here was simplicity that suddenly made perfect sense in my drug-addled brain. In a moment of what seemed preternatural revelation, I understood what he was getting at, what I had always missed, and what seemed like the answer to my previous inability to take any of this seriously.