Edie by Jean Stein Page B

The air was filled with an aura of procreation. Not carnal lust, but just breeding in the sense of not only re-creating life but a certain kind of life, a certain elite, a superior race. There was no romance. It was stultifying. I remember Jerry Dwight saying, “I’ve just got to get Pamela the hell out of here.” I never heard Pamela disloyal to her mother or her father, but I think she wanted to escape. Marriage was the way out for her.
    The other aura that seemed to permeate everything was the element of brutality. Great violence! Bobby had his accident when I was there—he fell off a bicycle going down a steep hI’ll and broke his neck. He held on to his head when he got up, which was all that kept his spine from severing. The family was in pandemonium because for a while they didn’t know whether he’d walk again, or even live. The father was on very bad terms with Bobby, and there was a whole ruckus about whether he would even go to the hospital to see him—a lot of yelling behind closed doors. A lot of crying. The mother was stunned. Everybody was shocked.
    SACCIE SEDGWICK  Traction didn’t work, and Bobby’s neck had to be fused. It was a very dangerous operation. Bobby had a dream in which he crawled on his knees down the long corridor to my parents’ bedroom at Goleta and begged them, “Please give me another chance,
please,”
and they told him, “No, you have had your last chance.” When he came out of the hospital, he was in a cage, this huge apparatus, with his hands on the bars and his dark eyes staring out.
    SUSAN WILKINS  We learned that Bobby would be able to walk again, and so that problem was forgotten. It was back to business. Duke appeared for the dress rehearsal with his shirt open to the navel. Afterwards we went swimming. I remember this great red hot sun sinking over the pool, and while we were standing around—some of us were already in the water—he came strutting out in a little blue bikini like a peacock, showing us with his arms spread out how he could ripple his muscles back and forth.
    I can remember Edie at this poolside episode, the father flirting and Edie being angry about it. She stalked off. She was wearing very short shorts, those long legs, and a man’s white shirt, a very thin girl with brown cropped hair, and she said something like “Oh, for God’s sake, Fuzzy!” How old could she have been? Eleven or twelve. She was young and she was disgusted. She was so live then; she glided—I can see how she moved—so thin, and suddenly she zipped off, just
phftt,
like that.
    It certainly didn’t deter him. He would invite us to his studio. It was sort of like the emperor selecting a vestal virgin. We all knew we’d better not go. We all thought that this was against the rules . . . an eighteen-year-old and a fifty-year-old . . . no, no, no.
    Duke was a presence—a
fauve,
a wild beast. I disliked him thoroughly. He sometimes could impress you as one of those militant boot-wearing fags. Did you know he used to wear shoes a size or a size and a half bigger because he thought his feet were too small? There was something
malsain,
a Marquis de Sade undercurrent that thirty years later I can feel in my flesh right now. The way he
looked
at people. He undressed every woman he saw. His eyes, they just would become cold. The way he dealt with women was a kind of brutalization. He thoroughly brutalized his wife. He was tough—very, very tough.
    EMILY FULBRIGHT  The busts in Mr. Sedgwick’s studio made it sort of a rogues’ gallery in the sense that many of them were of his different mistresses. It looked like a trophy room in a funny kind ofway. You had to prove yourself before you were put on a shelf in there. I was stI’ll too young.
    The first time Mr. Sedgwick came to pick me up at my parents’ house, he was driving a little Mercedes sports car. I was terrified because he drove so incredibly fast. Even at that age—I must have been eleven—I realized he was showing