makeup that he had so fully developed in Japan.
In the late afternoon we drew up to a parking lot outside the Lancaster County Fair. Evan exclaimed with pleasure at an advertising bill announcing a stage show appearance later that evening by Anna Russell, a singer from New South Wales who made fun of opera. Her condensed account of Th e Ring of the Niebelung, Evan assured me, would have me in stitches. He bought tickets, and fortified with further drinks (no more juleps, but gin and tonics, as I recall), we did indeed laugh lustily at Miss Russell, a buxom woman in her fifties, who played the appreciative crowd like a maestro, polishing us off with a second of her famous set pieces, “How to Write Your Own Gilbert and Sullivan Opera.”
Did I worry about where I would lay my fuzzy blond head that night? What, me worry? I was in no state to ponder the sexual mechanics of lovemaking through Kotexes or to go in for woozy wonderings about my moral condition. Was I a young woman no longer a maiden but still respectable? Or was my moral condition conditional upon my being—or not being—engaged to be married? We stayed, as I recall, in a twee bed-and-breakfast with such a quantity of mattress and bedding that I forgot whether any of it turned pink during the night’s amours. A breakfast of popovers was still being served as we exited around noon the Sunday of this extraordinary trio of days.
Was ever a seduction so drawn out and so hedged about with museum viewings, green fields, and fresh garden-grown salads? I was deposited back at my West Seventy-Fifth Street lodgings sometime after midnight, none the wiser, though maybe an indefinable bit sadder than when I had left them.
My roommate’s head was deep in her pillow on the parlor couch. She had not taken the cover off my bed. I suppose she was convinced by this time that I had gone for the duration of the weekend, if not permanently decamped.
My head did begin to clear after stumbling into the office at ten on Monday morning, glad of Th e New Yorker ’s staggered office hours. But somehow I never did take myself in hand for an examination of my own actions. I thought at the time that it was because I was so fascinated to see what new act of extravagant courtship Evan would come up with. I now think I was so alienated from my own feelings as to have—in the emotional sense—none. Physically, I soon grew out of that initial state of stiffness and soreness, awakening to an entirely new erotic bliss that was as much due to a native “taking to it” on my part, which surprised us both, as to the expertise of my lover. Whenever I was not actually in bed with Evan in those first weeks of summer 1959, I was dreamily contemplating being in bed with him. It was a whole new world, all right.
Th roughout June, July, and August, Evan suggested with gratifying regularity that we lunch together as well as breakfast and dine together. And he seemed to know a bewildering array of Midtown restaurants. Th e two or three specializing in Japanese cuisine were high on his list. He waxed so mystically eloquent about the Japanese broth called miso that I believed I liked it. Similarly, the delights of tempura and dipped sweet potato or turnip and a variety of cold noodles. Fumbling with chopsticks and sitting cross-legged on mats became for me, if not poised accomplishments, at least no longer occasions for general hilarity.
Our nighttime entertainments were dim-lit cocktail lounges all over town. One bar on Fifty-Seventh Street, called the Menemsha, was famous for its feature of a not very convincing storm. Th e room was lined on three sides with sailing-ship dioramas. Every forty minutes or so, the lights would dim, followed by bursts of lightning, claps of thunder, and dangerously rocking tanks full of water, which required all gentlemen present to put their arms around their ladies for safety. As if a tankful of water could—even by bursting—put us at hazard. Every woman in the
In the late afternoon we drew up to a parking lot outside the Lancaster County Fair. Evan exclaimed with pleasure at an advertising bill announcing a stage show appearance later that evening by Anna Russell, a singer from New South Wales who made fun of opera. Her condensed account of Th e Ring of the Niebelung, Evan assured me, would have me in stitches. He bought tickets, and fortified with further drinks (no more juleps, but gin and tonics, as I recall), we did indeed laugh lustily at Miss Russell, a buxom woman in her fifties, who played the appreciative crowd like a maestro, polishing us off with a second of her famous set pieces, “How to Write Your Own Gilbert and Sullivan Opera.”
Did I worry about where I would lay my fuzzy blond head that night? What, me worry? I was in no state to ponder the sexual mechanics of lovemaking through Kotexes or to go in for woozy wonderings about my moral condition. Was I a young woman no longer a maiden but still respectable? Or was my moral condition conditional upon my being—or not being—engaged to be married? We stayed, as I recall, in a twee bed-and-breakfast with such a quantity of mattress and bedding that I forgot whether any of it turned pink during the night’s amours. A breakfast of popovers was still being served as we exited around noon the Sunday of this extraordinary trio of days.
Was ever a seduction so drawn out and so hedged about with museum viewings, green fields, and fresh garden-grown salads? I was deposited back at my West Seventy-Fifth Street lodgings sometime after midnight, none the wiser, though maybe an indefinable bit sadder than when I had left them.
My roommate’s head was deep in her pillow on the parlor couch. She had not taken the cover off my bed. I suppose she was convinced by this time that I had gone for the duration of the weekend, if not permanently decamped.
My head did begin to clear after stumbling into the office at ten on Monday morning, glad of Th e New Yorker ’s staggered office hours. But somehow I never did take myself in hand for an examination of my own actions. I thought at the time that it was because I was so fascinated to see what new act of extravagant courtship Evan would come up with. I now think I was so alienated from my own feelings as to have—in the emotional sense—none. Physically, I soon grew out of that initial state of stiffness and soreness, awakening to an entirely new erotic bliss that was as much due to a native “taking to it” on my part, which surprised us both, as to the expertise of my lover. Whenever I was not actually in bed with Evan in those first weeks of summer 1959, I was dreamily contemplating being in bed with him. It was a whole new world, all right.
Th roughout June, July, and August, Evan suggested with gratifying regularity that we lunch together as well as breakfast and dine together. And he seemed to know a bewildering array of Midtown restaurants. Th e two or three specializing in Japanese cuisine were high on his list. He waxed so mystically eloquent about the Japanese broth called miso that I believed I liked it. Similarly, the delights of tempura and dipped sweet potato or turnip and a variety of cold noodles. Fumbling with chopsticks and sitting cross-legged on mats became for me, if not poised accomplishments, at least no longer occasions for general hilarity.
Our nighttime entertainments were dim-lit cocktail lounges all over town. One bar on Fifty-Seventh Street, called the Menemsha, was famous for its feature of a not very convincing storm. Th e room was lined on three sides with sailing-ship dioramas. Every forty minutes or so, the lights would dim, followed by bursts of lightning, claps of thunder, and dangerously rocking tanks full of water, which required all gentlemen present to put their arms around their ladies for safety. As if a tankful of water could—even by bursting—put us at hazard. Every woman in the
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