Like People in History (18 page)

"You would?" I guess I was both pleased and surprised.

"Jimmy was right. You're good people. Easy to get along with. No hassles."

It turned out Michelle had been living in other people's places for the past year, ever since she'd left the city to go across country and check out various arts and crafts scenes she'd heard about. She wanted to remain here long enough to do some work to show around and sell when she went out on the road again. Meanwhile, she'd stay in my guest room, pay the share of rent we'd agreed on, and not get in my space.

"You've got your life. I've got mine," she concluded.

She was wrong: I'd had nothing even vaguely like a life and had she been around during the evenings and weekends, she would have found that out herself. As for her life, I guessed it must include Leighton, and I didn't much care about that.

Michelle let out a bit more information. Her family came from coastal Massachusetts, and she'd be visiting her grandmother up there soon, partly to see her, partly to learn from her some specific New England stitchings Michelle was interested in, and partly to get money.

The only other information I discovered about her family was that it was "weird yet somehow boring at the same time." During a later, somewhat briefer tea together, it came out that Michelle was on the outs with her parents, like so many of my coevals, and that, far more surprisingly, she was on the lookout for a specific male—get this!—to father a child on her.

"Not that I want to get married, or do any of that conventional trip, you understand. I don't even want to live with the guy. Just conceive with him. I'll bring up the kid myself. This psychic astrologer and I worked out the best times to conceive and the best signs of guys to do it with."

This idea struck me as just about the height of cool, and I was feeling that altogether Michelle was completely out of my league—not to mention Little Jimmy's—when she said, "What's your birthdate anyway?" and when I told her, she said, "Well, you seem to fit. But so does Leighton." The guy she was seeing. Which somewhat explained why she was sleeping with him—since nothing else could explain it to me.

The next few weeks were odd. If Michelle had been a guy, indeed if she had been almost anyone else other than who she was, I would have been content to be paid some rent for a room I wasn't using. As it was, whenever she was in the apartment, I was always very aware of her presence, no matter if she were alone, working, which was most common, or if she were on the phone or—much more rarely—there with someone else, a woman friend, sometimes Leighton before they went out for the night.

This was undoubtedly my own fault. Michelle's presence had brought into high relief my own problems. Which could be summed up as follows: it had been two years since I'd been in a relationship with a woman, and that one had been a mistake. Well, maybe not a mistake so much as a failure. After close to a full year of dates, most of which had ended with kisses at her apartment door, or at rare times necking on the sofa while her roommate was on the phone, we'd still not gotten down to the nitty-gritty. It wasn't that I was afraid, or even that I was inexperienced. I simply wasn't that interested in screwing Janet. I wanted a relationship that might come to include sex eventually but that wasn't totally wrapped around it. However, that was not what Janet wanted. Or rather, what she wanted was her own idea of how it was all mixed up.

This had all come to a head one evening when we were necking and petting heavily on her sofa, our clothing all a mess, and she finally pulled me up and panted, "The bedroom," and when I protested, "What about Helena?" she said, "Helena's not here." Well, I was horny and we more or less made love, but it was no surprise to Janet that my ardor had cooled somewhat from what it had been before, on the sofa.

Afterward, Janet said, between puffs on her mentholated Kent, "It must be me. You were hotter than a pistol before."

"It's not you," I admitted. "It's me. I'm not sure we should be doing this."

"Why shouldn't we? Everyone else is. Even... Helena is."

"I know. But I feel like it's... I don't know... some sort of commitment I'm not ready to make."

"I'm not asking for any commitment," Janet quickly said. Then, "Who am I kidding? I'd love one. But I know now it's not going to be with you."

That ended our conversation, and a pall fell on our relationship after that. I called once or twice more to make a date to go out. Janet put me off twice—enough so I got the hint and stopped phoning. I halfheartedly thought Janet wasn't right for me, that I needed someone else. But I also harbored other, darker, different thoughts. What if I really didn't like girls at all? Sure, I could get erect with her, but I was young, I got erect when a dog barked, when a train whistle blew, hell, when the wind blew with a certain force. What if I weren't heterosexual at all, like everyone around me, but instead...

I didn't go that far. Yet I knew that when I'd come back from visiting my cousins in California, I'd gone right to my encyclopedia, right to the dictionary, and then to the local library to look up the word "homosexual" and read everything I could find about it. It wasn't much, and it was consistently negative, and I knew this couldn't be me, simply couldn't. On the other hand, everything I read, every word, had excited me unlike anything I'd ever read about regular man-woman sex—short, that is, of descriptions of actual intercourse, which I found to be exciting no matter who did it or how it was presented.

No, the real problem was that I didn't believe any of these writers. At least not until I came to the introduction of the 1949
Kinsey Report,
which I read in the reference section of the library, and which seemed to conclude more or less what I'd heard from Alistair's surfing buddies: that all sorts of guys had some sort of sexual contact with one another, and it didn't necessarily mean anything. Leastways not that you were queer yourself. None of Jewel's boys at the Topanga beach house had had as much contact with girls as they had with one another, according to Jewel herself, Judy, and Alistair, and none of them were... I couldn't even bring myself to say the word.

That was how one of my arguments went. Its exact opposite said that none of this meant anything at all; I'd simply not found a young woman I loved, and when I did find her, none of this would make any difference: I'd want to screw her day in and day out, and I'd never again think about those surfer boys, or about how much other young men attracted me.

Now, it seemed, Fate had sent just such a young woman directly into my life; indeed, directly into my apartment. All I had to do now was take advantage of the fact. Because if I didn't, well, who knew what awful future awaited me? The way it turned out, none of it was up to me after all. Fate was at work, and everyone around me had some part to play.

Including Debbie. The very night Debbie had given me advice about work, she phoned me later. I'd done food shopping and had barely gotten in the door, when Debbie asked if I'd been listening to the radio.

"No, why?" I asked, wondering what new disaster in these years of terrible political disasters had happened now.

"Well, they're talking about all these rock groups that are getting together somewhere upstate New York this weekend to play a big outdoor concert," she said. "It sounds like everyone's going to be there. Don't you know anything about it?"

I didn't. Phone calls to our friends from work elicited more or less the same response. Maria had heard somewhat more. "They're saying everyone's going to show up: the Mamas and the Papas, Janis Joplin. Even the Beatles!"

"It might be a cool place to go," Carl said. "They were selling tickets through the mail, but they couldn't have sold them all."

So the concert upstate became known to me. But once we tried to make plans for getting there, it seemed pretty impossible to manage, especially without a car.

That night, I attended a party given by a friend of a friend of a friend and had a bad and boring and weird time, and I ended up pretty stoned and drunk. I crashed hard, naturally in my own bed, naturally alone, and awoke twice during the night needing a drink of water. The third time I got up, the bathroom was locked. I heard the shower running. Michelle must have come home. Sure enough, it was six
A.M.

The kitchen was lighter. I got my drink there but avoided the brighter living room windows. I was back in bed, asleep again in a minute.

At first I wasn't sure whether it was a dream or not; too many of my dreams began this same deceptive way: I'm in bed, in my own bedroom, then... But I was awake, or somewhat awake. No, I must have been. After all, I felt warm, though I was naked, the top sheet twisted barely across the middle of my body. And there was Michelle, standing in the bedroom doorway, leaning against one side of it, her arms raised above her head, drying her hair with a towel. One hip shifted her weight to that side, and suddenly every angle softly flowed into another. She was wearing a pair of the palest blue panties and nothing else.

"You home?" I asked stupidly, my voice slurred despite all the water.

"Been out late?" she asked back. Her voice also sounded furred.

I said something I didn't remember as I finished saying it, and she answered something else I failed to grasp, then she said something I didn't understand even after a few seconds of silence. "Well, that looks interesting," she said, looking at my erection barely contained in the sheet. I found myself looking at it too, somewhat objectively, asking myself what it was doing there, then she was standing closer, no longer toweling off her hair, then somehow I was handing my erection over to her, and she was touching it, saying something in a low voice. Suddenly she was on the bed, straddled across my body, my erection inside her, and her hair was all over my face and chest and we were rocking together and apart and acting like I don't know, those ponies in that animated Russian fairy tale I used to see on TV all the time when I was a kid, so white and elegant and untamed, romping together in perfect synchronicity through snow-whitened pastures and huge iced fields.

"I figured it was okay, since you were within my list of possible birth signs," Michelle explained after the trumpeting orgasm which confirmed for me that the incident, though dreamlike, wasn't a dream. Her explanation, in all its prosaicness, was further proof, if any were needed.

"I better get dressed," I said, hoping she'd try to stop me. "I've got to go to work."

"That's a bummer." Michelle sat up and turned half aside, holding one breast as though testing a change in its mass as a consequence of intercourse. "I thought maybe you'd want to go upstate to this weekend thing."

"The concert they've been talking about on the radio? Sure! How?"

She and I pooled our resources: not much—renting a car was out of the question. I could take the afternoon off from work as sick leave. This was officially frowned on—it being a sunny Friday afternoon in the summer—but not impossible.

More important than any mere logistics was the stunning fact that I'd just been laid for the first time in months. This alone would, I was certain, significantly alter anyone's thinking. It went without saying that I was now certain I was in love with Michelle and she with me. We simply had to be together from now on. So I thought, okay, we'll follow her plan, even though it does seem kind of naive and mostly unworkable.

She and I were to meet back at the apartment, pack overnight bags— a blanket, towel, thermos of water, snacks, change of underwear—and take the Seventh Avenue IRT subway uptown, switch there to the Jerome Avenue line and take that train to its penultimate stop at the northernmost end of the Bronx. Michelle had done this before; she knew it was close to a major highway headed upstate. From there all we had to do was hitch a ride. If this concert was as big as everyone said it was and if it was being attended by as many hip people as the FM broadcasters assured us it was, we should have no trouble hitching a ride.

I'd briefly thought to tell my friends at work about our plan. But the truth was I wanted to be with Michelle, to have her to myself, partly because I was now able to, and partly because I still didn't myself believe in this sudden new relationship—I wanted to check it out for myself. So I didn't tell Debbie and Maria I was going; I did mention to Carl that I might be picked up by some friends of friends later that night or next morning, but I worked to make even that sound as unsubstantial as the plans we'd all ended up making the night before on the phone. Most important, I told no one I was planning to leave work "ill" that afternoon. Their surprise would help make it look more legitimate, should Kovacs ask where I was.

Michelle was packed when I got home, and even more enthusiastic for us to take off right away: she'd been listening to FM station reports all morning, and she regaled me with these facts: people had already begun to gather at the concert grounds; Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young, Joan Baez, Joni Mitchell, Dr. John, Janis Joplin, and the Jefferson Airplane all had agreed to be part of the concert. Dylan might still appear at the last minute; still no word on the Fab Four, but it looked like just about everyone else in rock or folk music would be there.

I changed out of my work clothes and into my denims and T-shirt to get into the mood. By noon the temperature outdoors was already in the mid-eighties, but I knew what mountain nights could be like and I packed my big Bolivian wool sweater. As for Michelle, besides her enthusiasm for our journey, I couldn't for the life of me figure out what else she was feeling— say, for example, about me, about us. This was crucial: because of what had happened last night, I'd put my entire future into Michelle's hands.

The subway trip seemed endless, even on the express train. We were the last passengers in our or any other car we could see. Equally empty once we arrived was the amazingly clean, white-tiled station at Mosholu Parkway, smelling heavily of recently used disinfectant. We trudged up out of dim tunnel lighting into broad daylight.

It was 2
P.M
., and we were in the middle of nowhere. The subway station stairway sat surreally within grass and trees upon a broad, flat area of the northern Bronx dominated by a virtually untrafficked avenue. Across the street was another subway station as Dadaistically set amid suburban grass and trees. In the distance, we could make out a neighborhood of cottages cloistered by tall trees, enclosed by thick bushes, all loosely wrapped in hurricane fencing. In the opposite direction, low brick buildings were barely visible along a strip of such magnificent green I swore it had to be a golf course.