Chapter 10 - Falling in Love Inappropriately

You would think that graduating from college with high honors, as I did that summer of 1967, would mean that I was mature and smart. I did have a head full of knowledge and a heart full of the desire to be an excellent high school teacher. I also had a job in September at a high school in a well-to-do neighborhood where I expected to find ambitious dedicated students.
Okay, we’ve already established that books aren’t everything, but I was so inspired, so bursting with the beauty of language and literature and the cosmic connections between human history, art, music, and language, that I felt as if I had swallowed the Milky Way. My excitement beamed from me. I was incandescent. We didn’t know “Emotional IQ.” Mine was probably about equal to that of a sixteen year old.
And that’s who I hung out with that summer after college ended and before I started teaching, sixteen year olds. My brother Robert had a new friend, Luke, who was attracted by the drums that Bobby banged away on in the basement next to the washing machine and dryer. Luke looked like a Liverpool, England boy with dark blond hair fringing his handsome face. He was a naturally smart kid, but destined for blue-collar physical labor. Many a woman’s life has probably been derailed by an inappropriate love interest. Not a new story, but for someone who was supposedly headed out into the wide adult world, it can bring progress to a screeching halt, make you want to stay in the moment. That June I spent many hours talking to Luke while we sat in my turquoise Chevy Impala convertible at the end of my parent’s street, watching the planes take off and land. We talked about what we wanted and what we believed, but it was really all about attraction, hormones, pheromones; chemistry. I don’t know what Luke felt, I never asked. I assumed the pleasure he took in my company was not purely intellectual, was visceral and chemical, like mine. I think the attraction must be mutual for it to generate this much energy. I waited all day for the evenings in the car watching the smoky blue lights that lined the runways and feeling pretty smoky blue myself.
That June I was only alive when we were together and I was oblivious to social embarrassment, parental disapproval, all of it. It was all pretty innocent after all. In spite of my obsession I was passive, waiting for the first move to come from Luke. All we did was talk.
In July Luke suggested that I could get an apartment with his sister Lena, who was ready to move away from her parents and needed a roommate. I liked her, she was alive, somewhat witty, and so full of self-confident energy that she was positively loaded with an earthy charisma. She had not gone to college and she had already been married and divorced. Even so she was younger than me. She also had blonde hair, and a full, sensual face and figure. There were whispers that she was a “homosexual”. I was incredulous, never having given a thought to such a predilection. (I didn’t even know about Rock Hudson.) I decided it was just small town gossip. I hated gossip. It was like those tacky “True Confessions” magazines we all passed around in our teens that recounted the tales of the million ways an unsuspecting girl could lose her reputation. “My Baby’s Father Beats Me”, My Baby’s Father is My Father” and other horrific permutations of the victimization of women by men. It never dawned on me that a woman could be victimized by another woman. That’s how sheltered my beginnings were.
So the adventure began. We moved into the “city,” the same city my family had left thirteen years earlier. The city had a university, so it had a university neighborhood. How hip. The apartment was at the top of an older apartment building that had five other apartments. It was a gray clapboard structure and the apartment was not awful, a one bedroom with a nice porch off the living. The rooms were good sized, there were lots of windows. I felt good about it. Then Lena introduced me to her girlfriend, Ivy, and I understood that the rumors were true. I would be tolerant, I decided. I wanted to experience everything life had to offer and I wanted a place to visit with Luke away from prying eyes. It would be good to learn about lesbians. It shouldn’t make any difference who we love. I didn’t want to have a “lesbian experience” of my own, but this should not be a problem. Lena was obviously in love with Ivy, who was a thin, shy likeable young black woman. Luke would be around a lot too after all, and school would keep me very busy.
It was a disaster. Lesbianism was the tip of Lena’s unconventionality iceberg. She did not have any serious career plans. She did sort of want to play house with Ivy, but that did not mean she wanted to make curtains, or buy knickknacks. They were always in the car off to somewhere, usually Lena’s mom’s house. I wasn’t really clear about why she left her mother’s house to begin with. I guess it was because sleepovers weren’t allowed. Lena was also into drugs. She smoked cigarettes, of course, but she also smoked marijuana. She had some kind of menial job, at a potato chip factory or something. When she got home, she got high while she waited for Ivy and then took off. Sometimes Luke would come over with his boys and they would also get high. I puffed my cigarettes, but I would not smoke marijuana.
Lena, it turned out, was an expert at abuse and manipulation. She knew how to take a weakness and tweak it. If you had an insecurity, she knew how to use it to her advantage. God help you if she wanted something from you and you were unwilling to give it. She was ruthless in her pursuit of absolute personal satisfaction.
Fortunately for me, she didn’t concentrate on me. She had Ivy. Ivy was not “out”. Her family had no idea of her inclinations. She had some big bruiser brothers who would not be happy. They even daunted Lena. This did not keep her, however, from exploiting Ivy’s fears of discovery in order to keep Ivy at heel. Ivy was very unhappy. Lena was way more than she bargained for, noisy, aggressive, not at all into nesting. I think Ivy wanted to settle down, come home from a day of nursing, put up her feet, and bask in the glow of someone who loved her. Lena loved her possessively and assertively, but had no immediate interest in settling down.
They fought constantly, Ivy quietly and stubbornly, Lena raging off into the night. Before the summer was even over I had had it. I told Lena I was moving out. I found an ad in the paper. Some girls in a flat needed a roommate. I went for an interview. Beautiful old flat on a tree-lined street right outside of a green city park with a big pool and a rose garden. The middle bedroom was empty. The living room had a fireplace, the kitchen a breakfast nook. There was a deep front porch along the front of the house. Two local girls who worked for downtown stockbrokers lived there already. We all liked each other. I could move in at the end of the month. Lena and I had a month-to-month rental so I did not have to worry about breaking a lease. Once Lena and Ivy broke up, Lena didn’t mind moving back home again.
I had to go to my roommate’s wedding on Long Island. Lena wanted to see her ex-husband and her uncle in New York City. She wanted to get some money from her uncle and her ex. Luke would go too, they would stay with their uncle while I went to the wedding. Lena and I still got along. This was OK with me. I liked to be anywhere Luke was. I just didn’t want to live with Lena.
Her ex-husband had decided that he was a musician. He was so hip he was scary. Thin, with spiky black hair and a leather jacket, he did reveal a continuing fondness for Lena. He lived in a disgusting apartment on Avenue C in the Village, crawling with cockroaches, with a dirty bathtub in the kitchen. A lot of joints were smoked, but there was no money here to spare. We went uptown to Uncle Chet. He lived in a rent-controlled building on Lexington. The elevator smelled like strawberries, it smelled like patchouli everywhere else. He was Lena’s gay uncle and his place was beautifully decorated in a toned-down mod style. He was an educated and amusing man, just nearing middle age, living on his own at the moment. He was “somebody” and he knew “people”.
It was hard to contain Lena’s energy in such an upholstered space but her uncle was genuinely fond of her and indulgent. I left to go to my exotic roommate’s wedding.
From all this immense culture shock I took enormous, although not uncomplicated, pleasure.
The paradoxes in my life totally parallel the extremes in this trip to New York City, from sleazy, to artsy, to upscale, my life would run the gamut. After the “moseltov” at the wedding I found myself at a huge banquet restaurant in Rockaway, mingling with Long Islanders in long dresses and their best coiffures at table after table of hor’d’oeuvres. These appetizers, which I thought to be the whole wedding spread, proved to be a prelude to a luxurious sit-down dinner followed by a dessert cart from nirvana. We danced the Hora, I saw all my old friends from college, and the beautiful bride who never married the Kentucky boyfriend at all, but ended up marrying a podiatrist from Chicago.
I did not crave her life, or think about hanging on in Long Island. Of course I had my teaching job to go back to, but you would think, given my big dreams in life, I would have tried to hitch my star to these winners. Never gave it a thought. Their background was too different from mine. This was their world. I was off back to mine. I couldn’t wait to begin. I was scared to death to begin. Summer was over. I had a new place to live. I was out from under the cloud of Lena (I thought) and could just enjoy the energy of Lena. I was ready to go. I still didn’t inhale.