Saint Gloria & The Troll

My second book, Pages from a Cold Island, didn't work because it was so unrelievedly desolate that, despite its humor, I was sure the reader couldn't turn back the final page (allowing he got that far) without wondering whence I'd mustered the will to put together its 480 pages of typescript. And in Ms. Gloria Steinem--and I'd all but leapt from my bed in exaltation when the possibility began to form itself in my mind--I'd seen the metaphor to lift the pages from the gloom in which they wallowed. The book was a reminiscence; and the cold of the title, applied to Singer Island off Palm Beach, Florida, where 90-degree-plus temperatures are not uncommon, apostrophized my being, not the weather. In those pages I'd put down one American's journey through the Sixties and especially his reaction to what historians call "the great events." If I had entered the Sixties more given to dark derogation than to joyous celebration, I'd at least been an articulate, relatively hopeful creature. But I had crawled out of the period on my knees, a simpering, stuttering, drunken and mute mess. The obscene decade had begun with President John F. Kennedy's "Ask not what your country can do for you" and in the late summer and fall of 1969 had ended at Chappaquiddick. At that numbing moment succeeding the assassinations of the brothers Kennedy and Martin Luther King, Jr., when I'd at last come to accept that there existed no desecration left capable of unmanning me, Senator Edward M. "Teddy" Kennedy had fooled me and for nine hours had left the body of Miss Mary Jo Kopechne to float about the back seat of a car among the currents beneath the now famous wooden span at Martha's Vineyard. I'd then gone back to bed, had pulled the sheet above my head, now and again had sneaked out to drink vodka and to put down bleak words and had come at last to lie there with swollen balls and cracked ribs, the results of a stomping I'd received in Nassau, reading about Gloria Steinem in the glossy magazines.

Struck with the parallels of our both having been Depression babies, having come from impoverished homes, having managed to get the semblance of an education, I was intrigued and baffled by what it was in her character that, having been shaped by the same events that had shaped me, had yet allowed her to come out of the putrid years so splendidly, refusing to lead a disappointed life. I wanted to know how she could rise mornings, erect, trim, courageous, unquestionably beautiful, not lacking a kind of nobility, and with an unswervable commitment go forth to do her duty as she saw it, while I'd come out of the years badly whipped, cravenly, running to a quitter's obesity, and had come finally to lie on that bed at the Seaview Hotel on Singer Island at the hot bottom of the world, drinking myself to death, my balls ballooned with life's hurt.

Two days before reading about Steinem I had almost, in fact, and for the second time in my life, committed suicide. Next door at the Beer Barrel I borrowed a buddy's .22 magnum pistol--on what pretext I don't recall. Then I telephoned the poet Jim Dickey in South Carolina and told him I was "taking the deep six." I apologized to Dickey because he had been instrumental in getting me $10,000 from the Rockefeller Foundation and I thought I owed him the courtesy of knowing that neither he nor Mr. Rockefeller was going to see any manuscript for the monies. I said goodbye, so did Jim.

Jim said, "I'll be seein' yuh, boy, yuh heah?"

Then I stepped into my closetlike shower and for perhaps an hour let scalding water cascade over my body, as I did so slowly and painfully removing the tape still clinging to my ribs. When I'd dried myself, I wet the towel thoroughly and in it swaddled my head tightly with a view to making as little mess as possible. I picked up the magnum, stepped back into the shower and closed the glass door behind me. Whether I stood there five minutes or five hours I can't say. Like Charles Dickens, who later in life could never recall how long he'd been in a blacking factory when at 12 he'd been put there to work, I found the experience so traumatic I could not begin to estimate the time.

I do know what saved me. At some point I began to laugh, riotously. Suicide presupposes that something is being eliminated. With a silver-inlaid shotgun, Hemingway blows away the back of his head, and when the world recovers, it finds itself able to remark, "What a man!" But what precisely was being eliminated in my case? Certainly not a man. Whatever I was eliminating was so inconsequential as to make the gesture one of trifling and contemptible ease and I began to think how much more felicitous the act would be if I sobered up, as best I could healed my mind and body, then erased some bone and tissue that at least conspired to resemble the human. Only then, I thought, might the gesture take on a certain flair or style. When I returned to the outer room and seated myself on the white Naugahyde couch, I understood for the first time how close I'd come. Still laughing, I found my hands shaking so severely that I could not for a long time unswaddle the towel and for the next two days I suffered fits of trembling compounded by alternating flashes of extreme heat and cold. Then in stricken absorption I read about Ms. Gloria Steinem in Esquire and in Newsweek.

With Ms. Steinem my overriding desire was to discover who she was apart from her cause. If she consented to talk with me at all, I knew that in my approach I'd have to feign embracing a concern for the movement and I cared not a jot, an iota for women's liberation. With Emerson I held that one speaks to public questions only as a result of a weary cowardice that has so debilitated his own energies he is no longer able to do his own work or rest easy with the painful prospect of articulating his own demons. Over the years I'd read the Mss. Friedan, Millett and Greer and had agreed with almost every tenet they had put forth. Nonetheless, in his Prisoner of Sex, Mailer had been right in taking Millett to task. Of all the women's writings and manifestoes, hers had resounded with a nasty vindictiveness, and though in reading her I hadn't known what had so distressed me until Mailer articulated my concern, he was right in implying that the Millett mentality was incapable of understanding D. H. Lawrence, Genet, Mailer himself and, most of all, Henry Miller, with his joyous, hilarious, rowdy and utter adoration of the cunt. But none of this bickering interested me in the least and I was concerned with nothing less than having Gloria save the manuscript of Pages from a Cold Island, or nothing less than having her help me refind myself.

• • •

Although I'd fucked before, I had my first affair in the summer of 1950, when I was a sophomore at USC. I was 20, had contracted double pneumonia and, after ignoring it for days, was at last taken by ambulance to the Queen of Angels Hospital in Los Angeles. For 72 hours I recall hardly anything but being wakened every three hours to receive a shot in the buttocks, after which I'd roll over and go back into the feverish chatter that had become more or less my condition. When finally I began coming out of it--and I remember having to be told where I was and how long I'd been there--I struck the acquaintance of the nurse on the graveyard shift who gave me my penicillin at midnight, three and six a.m. Her name was Gretchen, she was 30 and married to a top sergeant in the First Marine Division, then fighting in Korea.

I do not know how it started with Gretchen and me. I had been at the brink of the abyss, so to speak, I owned that peculiar and exaggerated affection for life people acquire having just looked into a tear in the heavens and seen nothing, nothing at all, and in brimming desperate gratitude to everything and everybody on earth, my hands started going unctuously out to Gretchen and I touched her on the hands and on the wrists and on the forearms and on the hips and on the waist--there was on my part this terrifying need to make human contact and I felt myself as helpless and cuddly as a piquant retardee. Presently, Gretchen and I were kissing. This led to a more refined and passionate kissing. One night Gretchen grew alarmed at the immediacy of my state and obliged me with a rather bored hand job. From that night on, without any discussion of the matter whatever, Gretchen began obliging me with fellatio, on some nights having to relieve me on the occasions of all three of her penicillin ministrations.

On the day I was discharged from the hospital, Gretchen began a week's vacation at her beach house, a quaint little dump on stilts at Malibu, and she asked me to come along, rest up and make sure I was OK before returning to classes. Gretchen was going to use the week trying to rent the beach house, getting her clothes in shape and packing. She had taken a job at the Tripler Army Hospital in Honolulu, and though she would still be thousands of miles from her Marine sergeant--she called him Dickey--she drew comfort from knowing she'd be at least that much closer to him and I recall her constantly dreaming aloud of being reunited with Dickey in idyllic Hawaii when finally he came back from Korea.

As I say, I'd fucked before, but my partners had invariably been my age and as inexperienced and as inept as I and hence neither the girl nor I had had anything against which to measure the worth of our performances. Worse, this was at the very top of that monstrously oppressive decade that for some reason has now become sentimentalized into the Quaint Fifties, and I remember that all my relations with girls up to this point (continued on page 184)Saint Gloria(continued from page 144) had been furtive, deceitful, disappointing and shoddy. It goes without saying that Gretchen was different. She'd been married to her Marine since she was 19 and still a student nurse. She had had all sorts of other men besides, affairs Dickey condoned when he was off on his various tours of duty. Dickey's only real condition was that he not be subjected to the details.

"Dickey said I could fuck anybody I wanted so long as the guy wasn't military and so long as I spared him the mush."

To say that in 1950, at 20, I wasn't shocked--utterly so--by the worldliness of Gretchen and Dickey's connubial arrangements would be so much nonsense, but as it was I who was now installed in that rickety stilted beach house and the legatee of Dickey's sophistication, copulating with the wonderful impunity of knowing Gretchen had been ordered by good old worldly and heroic Dickey not to bother him with anything as mundane as my name--especially my name!--I couldn't help accepting their relationship as an eminently sensible and fair one and for a week Gretchen and I took her dresses to the cleaners, her skivvies to the laundromat, interviewed people who wanted to rent the beach house, lay on the sand, ate, slept, showered and copulated. It was the first time I'd been to bed with a Woman, with a capital W, and as I badly needed assurance of my manhood and prowess and as Gretchen was wonderfully kind and sexually acute and loved the language of fucking--as opposed to the endearments of what we had in that long-ago time straight-facedly called love--she never ceased giving me that assurance.

To my initial horror, which I soon overcame, falling easily into the deliciously obscene and forbidden language of sex, Gretchen, doubtless having received her training at the hands of a Marine sergeant, said things like "Come back to the beach house and fuck my face" or "Forget about cooking those fucking hamburgers now; get into this bed and diddle my ass off."

Astride Gretchen, breathing like only a 20-year-old still in the drooling masturbatory state and trying to cleanse himself of his pus-infested pimples can breathe, which is to say like a wounded boar, uh, uh, uh, uh, among this awful, adolescent and embarrassing bleating I whistled out frightfully breathless things like "Am I OK?" and "Am all right?" and the wise and wonderful Gretchen assured me I had the most marvelous, unique, adorable prick in Christendom and was besides the greatest--oh, hyperbolically!--she'd ever had.

Alas. On the last night Gretchen and I spent together, we had a long, earnest talk and she set me straight not only as to her generous white lie about my bacchanalian expertise but as to all sorts of sexual matters from which I'd been sheltered. Cautioning me not to take what she had to say wrongly, least of all personally, Gretchen assured me that what she had to tell me would in time future hold me in good stead or post position. She then proceeded to tell me how childlike every man she'd ever had was in his asinine need invariably to seek verbal affidavits as to his genius in bed and how astonishingly little he understood that though atmosphere, penis size and performance all counted for something to a woman, compared with her need to be attracted to her partner all these things fell into some twilighted area out yonder in that land bordering on indifference.

Gretchen said that as a 15-year-old high school sophomore back in Grand Rapids, Michigan, she had lived next door to the star senior fullback. Because his mother had made him do so out of courtesy, he had at every high school dance asked her to dance once and once only, and though the jock had been as indifferent to her as if she'd been an ugly-bugly pain-in-the-ass cousin, Gretchen's attraction to him had been so overwhelming that that single dance had never failed to induce in her such profoundly embarrassing orgasms that she eventually began lining her panties with toilet paper before even starting out for the dance.

"Let me tell you something, Exley. My relationship with Dickey is such that he doesn't even have to touch me. Say, if I go down on him? He comes, I come. Sometimes repeatedly. That's attraction!"

I did not say, "Carrying your thesis to its logical conclusion, Miss Gretchen, I'd guess that if you just thought long enough and hard enough about such activity, the results would be the same," because at 20 I did not preface my remarks with portentousness like "carrying your thesis to its logical conclusion." But in my awkwardly ignorant way I did manage to make my way through to this point.

"But of course, Exley! You're marvelous! Not only could I do so, I have done so. Many times!"

Gretchen paused. Her voice took on an air of furtiveness. "Can I tell you something awful? The first three days you were out here with me, I didn't make love to you, I made love to Dickey. You know what changed all that? It was the day we did all the errands getting ready for my trip, how you did three baskets of laundry for me while I drove to the airport for my ticket, made arrangements to sell my car and picked up my dry cleaning and all. I mean, when we got home and I saw how neatly you'd folded up everything and all, I started thinking what a douche bag I was for using you in this way and from that moment on, I made love to you, not him. I mean, if a guy is nice enough to wash your crumby bloomers for you, you ought to be generous enough to fuck him and not somebody else. You know what I mean, Exley? Let's face it, Errol Flynn you're not, Exley. But that doesn't mean a goddamn thing to a woman. You know what I'm telling you, Exley?"

• • •

If at 20 I had had that week with Gretchen (and parenthetically I here must add not only that I wept profusely on putting Gretchen on the plane to Oahu and her Dickey but that in many ways my quarter century of life since that day has been a pilgrimage in search of some other, some unattached, some Dickeyless Gretchen) and had been the heir of her earthy wisdom, I did not 25 years after the fact need to be told by Masters and Johnson or the ladies of the movement the clitoral function or that a big prick--least of all my rather sorry specimen--was not in the least necessary to their well-being.

If Gretchen had given me nothing else, I was ready to concede a woman the right to employ the pharmaceutical equipage of the good doctors, to take into herself a huge rubberized and pimpled dildo strapped to the crotch of a broad-shouldered bull dyke, to put her pet great Dane Hamlet to work if that's what turned her on or, like Gretchen herself, simply to define mentally the limits of her sexual paradise and by steadily envisioning that Elysium to think herself through to shuddering orgasms. As long as she did not try to tell me she was into something special, as long as she would allow Gretchen and me the right to wet our pants at someone's being kind enough to do our laundry for us, I was buying everything she was telling me.

In my reading of Friedan, Millett, Greer, et al., I'd spent 90 percent of my time nodding my head in a vigorous accord that I was nothing less than the chauvinist pig and the scum to whom and to which they made constant and biting reference. Behind me someplace out there in the republic are two exwives--and I take this occasion to salute them both, wherever they are. Hi, Fran! Hi, Nan! How's it goin'?--who had left me for many of the reasons these women had so corrosively articulated; and for that reason, I bought not only the obvious, boring and neoproletarian tenets like equal pay for equal work and state-sponsored day-care centers for the children of working mothers but even the trickier mental areas like a woman's right to abort herself any goddamn time she chose or her right to eliminate her female function utterly by having her fetus nourished in a bell jar. At least women were thinking in a grandly bold and adventurous way, and though I was sure that it was this kind of boldness that sent men to an early grave, I'd be damned if I'd deny a woman the right to conquer or be vanquished on the epic scale, whether she croaked in the process or not.

No, though I'd have to approach Ms. Steinem as though I really cared a shit about the movement, I was, in fact, so in accord with her that I did not see any hope of getting a middlingly interesting dialog going on a subject that was not only as obvious as damn it to Gloria but equally obvious to me. What I wanted from Ms. Steinem was something quite different. We had, as I say, both been born to the Depression, had gone through the public school system under what one had used to call straitened circumstances, had managed to fake our way through to something resembling a "higher education" and, without any evidence to the contrary, I stood prepared to bet that 99.9 percent of our contemporaries who had managed to escape similar milieus had in reaction to those dark uncomfortable beginnings ended up in Old Greenwich, a member of the Round Hill Club and a devotee of P.T.A. meetings. Well, Steinem had not, and I had not, and other than the obviously metaphorical comparisons of female with male, beauty with beast, dutifulness with hedonism, courage with cravenness, sobriety with drunkenness, and so forth, I thought that if I could look right through that lovely placid mask and understand why Steinem so cared--and, as I've indicated, it made no difference to me whether her cause was women's liberation or the Woman's Christian Temperance Union, only that she cared--I might then introduce her into that pile of desolation I called Pages from a Cold Island and thereby lift the pages into those heady regions I'd feel worthy of offering to my peers.

• • •

On the phone, Steinem had suggested she'd like to know in some detail precisely what I had in mind, and my last gesture before going on the wagon--because I was too drunk to put it in writing--was to talk my ideas onto a 30-minute cassette tape and mail the tape off to her. I was so smashed I don't vividly recall what I said into that recorder, but I remember enough so that even thinking of it in retrospect forces the blood to my face, causes some embarrassed awshucks gulping, and an incipient vertigo takes over. Steinem and Mailer were rumored to be friends. He claims it was she who planted the seeds of his political ambition by asking him to run for mayor of New York City (though how she could reconcile this with her whole philosophical outlook escapes me), and for that reason I thought I'd pull a Norman (which ill behooves me, which ill behooves any of us!) and on the tape I came across almost as full of shit as he is. With great solemnity, I began by setting forth my portfolio (it consisted, after all, of one fucking book!). I gravely related the difficulties I was experiencing with Pages from a Cold Island, and I then really went as batshit as Norman talking about the Proustian-Tolstoyan-Joycean novel he is one day, one day, one day going to lay at the public's feet, leaving all his peers for dead, and told Steinem that the next time I came to Fun City, people would be pointing me out and breathlessly exclaiming, "See that fat gray-haired guy down at the end of the bar? He's one of the best writers in America!"

As it happened, the tape made no difference at all. Steinem was too busy to listen to it--she had one of her lackeys do so and report its contents to her--and at last we agreed to meet on a morning in early December at the Miami airport. In league with Ms. Dorothy Pitman Hughes, a black advocate of state-sponsored children's day-care centers, she was the night before addressing the student body of some rinky-dink-sounding college up in the red-neck country of northern Florida. The following morning she was coming on to Miami for a fund-raising dinner in George McGovern's behalf and she told me if I wanted to meet her plane, she'd give me the time between her arrival and the moment she'd have to take a nap and primp herself for the night's festivities. A Ms. Joanne Edgar, Steinem's secretary, I gathered, assured me it'd be the longest interview Gloria had ever granted.

I said, "Golly."

By that time the dingbats on Beach Court, where I made my home at the Seaview Hotel, had got thoroughly caught up in my zealous yearning to engage Ms. Steinem. What little business I still had with the outside world was conducted over the phone on the back bar. These conversations were invariably overheard and known all over the Court by nightfall, and now that I was once again sober, swimming and taking the sun, and my demeanor had taken on a certain sad-eyed dopey earnestness, the gang, partly out of affection, partly out of lack of anything better to do, began planning the whole outing as though they were planning their prepubescent son's first journey to dancing school. Because she was sure I'd wear what she called my "foul fucking Bermudas," the hotel owner's wife went through some cardboard boxes in my closet and found some white shirts, a pair of gray-wool J. Press slacks and my black wing-tip Florsheims and had the shirts laundered, the slacks pressed and the shoes reshod. Diane Rent-a-Car (we called her that to distinguish her from Diane the day barmaid), one of the cocktail-hour regulars, who managed an automobile-rental service, had read in Leonard Levitt's Esquire piece that Steinem owned all kinds of hang-ups as to what was and wasn't seemly and, in this regard, cited Levitt's saying that in order to receive some corny award or other at Harvard, Gloria had refused to arrive there in anything less than a great long limousine (Gloria later denied this, as well as every other contention of Levitt's) and, for that reason, Diane wouldn't hear of my meeting her in my lime-white beautiful Nova. Because it would take "a fucking week to clean the fucking empty Bud cans" from the car's interior and "the rusty fucking fenders" would doubtless fall off as I was suavely trying to tool Gloria from the airport's parking lot, Diane put at my disposal a chauffeur-driven electric-blue Buick Electra!

My drinking buddy McBride's reaction was the most touching of all. He spent days staring at me over his twitching bandido mustache, shaking his head with heartfelt rue at my abhorrent sobriety, and when he at last came to believe that my mission was what I said it was and was not, as he kept insisting, to show Gloria "the frightful hog," he began stuffing my shirt pockets with $20 bills and telling me to buy Gloria a nice lunch poolside at the Sonesta Beach Hotel on Key Biscayne, where Gloria was putting up. McBride always summed up his notions of a nice lunch with the words: "Champagne, the whole mother-fucking smear!"

The night before the long-awaited meeting, I packed a little overnight bag, quite as solemnly as I'd done a little Gladstone when at 11 my father told me he'd had quite enough and to get ready, as he was taking me to reform school. In it I put my cassette recorder, a half-dozen virginal tapes, the questions I'd prepared neatly typed up on lined yellow paper, the various bibles of the movement I'd reread in preparation for Gloria and a handful of ballpoint pens. I had decided that McBride's poolside champagne lunch would take much too much of my time and in my refrigerator, wrapped snugly in cellophane against their morning's packing, were two of my favorite sandwiches I'd made for Gloria and me, tuna-fish, hard-boiled egg and chopped onion all whipped sumptuously up together with mayonnaise, a dab of mustard and salt and pepper. When I'd taken the ballpoints from my desk, I noticed that I still had the .22 magnum pistol and for a moment I thought of packing that. If my confrontation with Gloria turned into a nasty business (and I had no reason to suspect it might not), I thought I could remove it from the bag, level it at what Gloria herself calls her "old stone face," tell her to disrobe and pull a Henry Miller on her--say, use her for a wheelbarrow by walking her naked body around the suite on her hands while I gripped those creamy-white thighs as the barrow's handles.

The last thing I did before retiring was go down to Zita the Zebra Woman's room. Zita was currently the featured stripper downstairs in the Islander Room of the hotel. I'd known her intimately, as they say, for years, and I asked if before the show started, she wouldn't give me a little fuck to assure my getting a nice comfy sleep. Zita adamantly refused, saying I had spoken nary a word to her in the week she'd been back at the hotel and she could not abide me if this was what I was like when sober. Without any ado whatever, I reared back and with all my might gave Zita a resounding openhanded crack on her left cheek, and instantly we were sinking into the bedding and copulating like madmen.

Zita had once tried to get me to tie her to the bedpost and flail her with wet towels while she hung her weeping head and lisped, "Hurt me, Daddy, hurt me: Zita's been bad, bad girl."

Although I refuse to go that far in the service of anyone's fetish, I had come to see that the one piece of eloquence Zita understood was a fierce boot in the ass and right up until the time there came the knock on the door signifying 15 minutes until show time, Zita and I had a most exemplary, exhausting and animal-like fuck.

I was, of course, testing my wounded balls. If Levitt's implication in Esquire that Gloria's sexual inclinations ran to the rich, the famous and the powerful were true, I thought that by the time we got done with the heady business of Pages from a Cold Island, she'd obviously be able to see that though I was totally unknown now, I'd one day be famous and that during the nap she told me she'd have to have in preparation for the night's festivities, she might be kind and invite me to lie with her, as they say in the Testaments. Who knows? Certainly my homemade sandwiches would show her how domesticated I was and perhaps afterward she'd want to take me back to her New York apartment to "make a nice home" for her, keep the place tidy, handwash her raspberry Levis and, when she came home from a hard day at the office, have ready for her a nice hot dish of lasagna. Better yet, one of the last things I'd done in preparation for Gloria was skim the inaugural issue of Ms., and if nothing were going to come of Pages from a Cold Island, I thought she could add me to the editorial staff and I could sit around on the office floor with the girls in their Levis as the weighty editorial decisions were made and play a sort of devil's advocate, swigging warm beer from the bottle, belching, scratching and farting.

On the editorial page under "what is a ms.?" I'd read, "In practice, Ms. is used [only] with a woman's given name: Ms. Jane Jones, say, or Ms. Jane Wilson Jones. Obviously, it doesn't make sense to say Ms. John Jones: A woman identified only as her husband's wife must remain a Mrs.," and as I had laughingly read this and thought I could have prevented that kind of simplistic lunacy from slipping through, I'd skipped to the back of the magazine, come across a lengthy interview with a lesbian, and the first question and answer my eyes had fallen on were these: "When you first realized that you were possibly getting involved with a woman, were you afraid or upset? No. The strange thing is that the next morning, after I left, I felt a fantastic high. I was bouncing down the street and the sun was shining and I felt tremendously good. My mind was on a super high."

Certainly what was needed here was more than warm-beer swigging, scratching and farting, and in my role of scurvy advocate, I now heard myself saying, "Now, look, girls, let's not get carried away--let's not let this sneak through and make something of it it isn't. These broads are popping each other's nuts, pure and simple. You know what I mean, pure and simple? Look, let me illustrate by telling you the story of Zita the Zebra Woman and me."

It was while dozily daydreaming such heady dreams of glory, with the pungent odors of the Zebra Woman still upon me, that I fell asleep. Presently it was morning and, seated next to my fucking chauffeur, a bespectacled, bepimpled teenaged clod named Jack, I was in my electric-blue Buick Electra wheeling down the Sunshine State Parkway toward my ill-starred meeting with Ms. Gloria Steinem.

• • •

But listen: I fell totally, dizzyingly in love with Ms. Gloria Steinem almost immediately, when she had not been five minutes disembarked from the twinengine Aztec that had brought her down from those heady blue skies of southern Florida, and by the time we had reached the Sonesta Beach Hotel on Key Biscayne, in Tricky Dicky country, I'd settled down to the sad, graceless and pedestrian state of being once again severed from love.

Gloria's hair was coifed in its usual way, flowing black-sepia with those blonde strands that fell over and triangularly framed her lovely cool brow; here were her big round raspberry aviatrix' spectacles resting on those great high cheekbones that seemed somehow so much more striking than other cheekbones; and when she offered her hand, said hello and smiled and I had a glimpse of those big even white teeth, I was visited by angels who whispered to me that something quite like heaven would be to put my tongue in Gloria's mouth and just loll around on her back fillings for about a half hour before even moving up to those marvelous ivory monuments up front.

The gang's having attired me in J. Press slacks and Florsheims proved an egregious error, for Gloria had on a pair of crumby-looking raspberry-suede cyclist's boots, raspberry corduroy Levis and a short-sleeved navy-blue cotton sport shirt that laced up the front in little Xs, Kit Carson style. She carried a floppy old canvas-and-leather grocery bag, ballooning with correspondence and manuscripts, and this together with a somewhat anemic pallor, a real tiredness about the eyes and a sagging untoned thinness reminded me of how incredibly busy she must be. One of the articles had pointed out that Ms. Steinem's penchant for trimness bordered on the pathological in that her cupboards were forever bare and she seldom deigned to eat. As one given to a sloppy self-indulgence, I'd forgiven her that on the theory that any kind of dedicated commitment, which Gloria certainly owned in abundance, must begin with a commitment to one's own person; but looking at her now, I saw that her thinness lacked the toning of exercise, there was a kind of pinched droopiness about it, she looked as sway-backed as a weary but splendid race horse, so vulnerable my heart went immediately out to her and I could hardly wait to feed her one of my tuna-fish, hard-boiled egg and chopped onion sandwiches (later I tried to feed her both of them, but she politely and adamantly demurred, in her forceful way informing me that she'd discovered the war against fat was a war in which one had to be ever-vigilant, pretty much, I gathered, like the one against chauvinists, and though it may have been my paranoia, I thought at this point she gave my tum-tum a rather ironical and scrupulous going over, and I sucked in like a madman!). With some trepidation, I volunteered to carry her grocery bag and Gloria graciously handed it over and smiled wisely, her way of saying that her commitment to liberation did not extend to eliminating the petty little gestures we pigs felt necessary to maintain the lunatic tenor of our machismo.

When we started down to pick up Gloria's suitcase at the baggage station, I stepped onto the escalator first, attempting boldly to lead the way, stumbled rather badly, and when I at last managed to recover myself, I turned to find Gloria standing ramrod straight on the step behind and above me, a queen descending to the nether regions to view her fallen subjects. To account for my stumbling, I said to that incredibly lovely face up there above me, and I was as precious as a cherub at confession, "I'm sorry about my awkwardness. It's just-- (continued on page 192)Saint Gloria(continued from page 188) you know, you know--that I'm so intimidated, you know, being with you and all."

Then, if possible, I became even more nauseating. I smiled with a weakness verging on illness, batted my big baby-brown eyes at her and gave her a helplessly feeble shrug by way of eliciting her utmost in pity. Gloria looked straight down at me and with deadly serious and sympathetic earnestness said, "Don't be." And, oh, Lord, I score that as the moment I fell head over heels in love with Ms. Gloria Steinem!

What can I say of the simple eloquence of that "Don't be"? It said that though she could see how queasy I'd been rendered in the face of her beauty, her regality, her nobility, her grandeur, that though she could certainly appreciate I was one of life's jerk-offs where women were concerned, she was reassuring me she would do nothing immodest to set my blood aflame and send me back to the island, say, with the pimpled clod Jack tooling the electric-blue Buick Electra in the front seat and I doing a savage number on my weary and wounded genitalia in the back seat. For that assurance I gave her a shy smile of heartfelt thanks, then turned away from her. We descended in screaming silence. For some reason, all I could think of was what Gloria would have made of my "becoming male timidity" had she seen me 12 hours earlier knocking Zita the Zebra Woman ass over teakettle onto the bed, then mounting her among the ruined bedding.

By the time we reached the Sonesta Beach Hotel, I had long since given up hope of Gloria's relaxing her right-on posture and had turned to the books I had so diligently reread. Because Gloria and Mailer were said to be friends, I was surprised to learn she hadn't read his Prisoner of Sex. I said, "He does some job on Sister Kate Millett."

"I've heard," Gloria said. "Norman wouldn't have if he'd known her. She's really nice. I mean, Norman likes me and he'd never do anything like that to me."

This remarkable piece of naïveté really took me aback, and I was about to point out that if Mailer's book was without merit otherwise, he had brilliantly documented Millett's embarrassing misreadings, her shoddy scholarship, her facility for lifting lines from context to score points they were never made to score; I was going to say further that had Gloria written Sexual Politics, not only did I doubt that Mailer would have spared her but, friendship or no, she wouldn't have deserved sparing, when abruptly Gloria was laughing in a strangely unsettling and nerve-racking way.

"That's good! That's really good!" Gloria cried.

Turning uneasily to her, I said, "What's good?"

"The Prisoner of Sex! I mean, that title is so classically apt. I mean, Norman really is a prisoner of sex!"

There was something so oddly childlike and gleeful in her tone that I did not know what to say. Bewildered, I said, "Well, I guess we're all a little of that."

"But nobody," Gloria assured me, "to the extent that Norman is."

By then we were at the hotel and gathering our gear from the electric-blue Buick Electra to go up to Gloria's room for our "interview." For the life of me, I don't know why I didn't then and there profess illness, go back to my island, get drunk with Zita and have a ball. I guess I stayed partly out of courtesy, partly because I can't help being a creature of somewhat frayed hopes, partly because I believed my lifestyle with women was a shambles and thought I might yet take something from Gloria to abet me on my farcical journey in search of my destiny or salvation or whatever preposterous thing I imagined myself in search of.

I of course held no brief for Mailer, but one could see that in The Prisoner of Sex his reference to Steinem had been made as one to a friend, and I felt that whereas I was under no constraints to give Norman a few jolly verbal knocks on his pompous noggin, it didn't become Gloria to do so and I had wished her laughter in pointing out Norman's "enslavement" to sex hadn't been so--well, catty. Who the fuck wasn't a prisoner of sex? And once again I found myself thinking of toppling Zita the Zebra Woman onto the bed. Once again I remembered falling asleep to the heady dreams of "lying" with Gloria. And had I not, but a half hour before, been told by no less than the angels that I ought to shove my tongue in Gloria's appetizing mouth and loll around on her fillings for a while? Had my eager tongue got that far, it wouldn't have stayed itself in those acidic backwaters and certainly would have gone on to the more deliciously forbidden areas of that heavenly creature! Were Norman and I the only prisoners? If not certainly with the likes of me, did not Gloria move among other men with an appraising eye, thinking that that one might be OK, that this one was a real drool? Perhaps not, perhaps not, and by the time we got to the room and I'd solemnly set up my tape recorder, I was feeling somewhat catty, too, and with a wooden jollity said, "One of the articles I read about you said you had small boobs. You aren't too grand in the fucking jug department, are you?"

But I could not pursue this nastiness. Quite angry, Gloria tried to come back with the movement's cliché reply. She tried to say, "I wouldn't ask you how big your prick is, would I?" but, oh, Lord, gentle reader, she couldn't bring it off, she stumbled on the word prick, delicately and stutteringly substituted penis, the blood rose becomingly in those lovely cheekbones, and I smiled apologetically and thought, and I was sincere, "I like this girl. I really do like this girl."

• • •

I have the tapes, three hours of them, and I take this opportunity to tell any surly insatiable masturbator out there that if he sends me $500 in care of my publisher, I'll mail them off to him. To their erotic qualities I cannot attest, but my dopily unemotional voice can easily be erased from them and the dedicated joint whacker can use the wonderfully modulated tones of Ms. Gloria to help him, as the crooner says, "make it through the night." Because Gloria and I never finished the "interview," I have never bothered to listen to them. Of course, as I write this, it occurs to me that I have shamelessly teased and provoked the lustful-souled reader into believing there would be a confrontation on The Epic Scale between Gloria Wonderful and Monsieur Frederick.

Such was not the case. Nor do I blame Gloria. She wasn't much on her answers, but then, I was a dreadful interviewer. Confronting each other over a narrow table, weary and enchanted eye to raspberry aviatrix' spectacles, the intimidating hum of the tape recorder between us (something I later learned a trained reporter, realizing how much it discomfits his subject, would never use), Gloria and I were not a happy "mating"; and, in fairness to her, she had every right to expect I'd ask the moronic chauvinist's questions like whether she scorned the new butterscotch and strawberry douches in favor of good old Ivory soap and hot water. But I've already said I cared not a mouse's turd for this nitpicking and had been struck by the similarity of our backgrounds, how much she cared and how little I did. With all my heart I wanted to know why she did, and to understand that, it was essential I discover who she was.

In reading about her, one of the things that had hit me most jarringly was her remarking the similarity of her childhood to that of Augie March. As it happened, and as I have related in A Fan's Notes, Augie March had at a certain time in my life been a bible of mine, a volume I perused until the binding came off and the pages fell out, a novel I identified with to such a terrible and distressing degree that even now I remember everything about Augie's tyrannical Grandma "boarder" Lausch, sitting among her bric-a-brac, her fart-blowing pooch Winnie at her feet; Grandma Lausch lording it over all, with great cunning teaching Augie's simple mama the grave art of conning the charity institutions out of free spectacles, and so forth. And I remember Augie's older brother Simon, even as a teenager secretive, crafty, ballsy, funny, hard as nails, handsome and utterly in thrall to, rhapsodized by The American Dream. And always there was the idiot brother Georgie, who, on reaching his manhood, was on Grandma Lausch's orders institutionalized, after which Grandma had refused to exit from her bedroom to say goodbye to him, to come out and witness "what she had wrought." At the Army-Navy store, Augie bought a little Gladstone bag for Georgie and with the key taught him how to lock and unlock it, "that he might be a master of a little of his own, as he went from place to place" (I quote from fucking memory!). In damp snow Augie and Mama had taken Georgie to the idiot farm on streetcars, changing from car to car in the filthy and melting Chicago slush. At the institution Georgie, for the first time seeing himself among his own kind, "wagging their weak noodles," and realizing that Mama and Augie are leaving him, sets up this tremendous, this overwhelming, this heart-crippling wail until Mama "[took] the bristles of his special head between her hands"--I numbered that scene among the great scenes in American fiction!

Thus it was that on the publication of Herzog, when in order to make "hamper space" for his new baby, Bellow committed infanticide on Augie in an interview in the Sunday Times by implying the book was a youthful and rhetorical indiscretion, I wrote him one of my "mad" letters, furious in composition it was, which, happily (for I regard Bellow as one of our genuine Nobel candidates), I never mailed.

Years later I at last got to meet Bellow at a cocktail party at a chic apartment on Chicago's North Side. As I knew he was going to be there, I was ready for him and was going to do it to him good for that "unforgivable" interview. But the apartment turned out to be on about the 190th floor and it had floor-to-ceiling spotless glass walls, making it seem as if one could take one petite step off the end of the rich wall-to-wall carpeting and come, whooosssssh, face to face with his Maker. An Upstate yokel, and a raving paranoiac into the bargain, I got instantly dizzy and I fled immediately to a couch, where I found myself seated next to Bellow's date. By the time I had a couple of vodkas and with them the courage to maneuver, other guests had begun to crowd Bellow. He looked distraught and uneasy, and when at length I got to him to do my "eloquent" number, I found that all I had to contribute was some idle and horseshit literary gossip.

Be that as it may, I asked Gloria to tell me about the similarity of her childhood to Augie's. I don't recall her answer specifically, but I'll try to suggest the substance of it by drawing an analogy. In my senior year at USC, I was summoned to some phony-baloney's office and told that as an English major, I'd failed to fulfill the second semester of a sophomore survey course covering the romantic poets through Auden and Dylan Thomas (the first semester had, of course, covered Beowulf to Pope). When I explained to the bureaucrat that, as a senior, I'd already had all the material on a considerably more complex and heady level, some of it in graduate-level courses, and that my taking the course would be an extreme waste of time and money, he said, as one always did in those long-dead, tyrannical and good-riddance days, that I either fulfill the university's "requirements" or fail to graduate.

I then went to the professor, an elderly woman who by the students was rumored to have got her Ph.D. by counting the thous and thees in Shakespeare, and asked her if I could, under the circumstances, circumvent the three-cut-per-semester rule and come to her class for examinations only. She said no. So it was that I spent an entire term, on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays at eight o' fucking clock in the morning, listening, dopily and dreamily, to this wan soul talk in ritualistic phrases about material I'd already had presented to me. (Not that I was a good student: I was terrible, taking what I wanted, leaving the rest, and getting my gentleman's Bs and Cs.) The one thing that made the semester memorable was falling madly, utterly, hopelessly in love with an absolutely stunning ash blonde who sat to my immediate left, Miss Diane Disney (for, if my younger reader will credit me, we were seated in alphabetical order, where we'd been seated since kindergarten!), the daughter of none other than the genius Walt! When I discovered this fact, I found that it utterly precluded the son of a lineman approaching her "romantically"; but when a couple of years later I read in the society pages of the New York newspapers that she had married a USC tight end, I smiled sadly and decided that "the poor little rich girl" had no doubt been more accessible than I and about 100 other "haunted" guys at USC had imagined. In any event, I wish now to tell her, across all these years, how much I worshipped her from "afar," notwithstanding that in our close-cramped seats our elbows and toes bumped one another three gloomy mornings a week.

Prior to discovering who Diane was, I had detected that the professor pandered shamelessly to her--And what does Diane think of this? And what does Diane think of this?--and one day, when we were discussing Byron's Prisoner of Chillon, I recall the exchange as something like this. That summer Diane had done her "grand tour" of Europe, the fact of which the professor was some how aware, and she now asked Diane if she'd seen the castle at Chillon on which Byron had based descriptive aspects of his poem. Indeed Diane had. The professor then said something to the effect that in his poem Byron had given either a very scant or a very elaborate description (I always thought Byron an old fraud and hence don't remember the poem) of the castle and then asked Diane to give us her reminiscence of that structure as compared with Byron's. It was a stupid question, unfair to my adored Diane, assuming, as it did, that a stunning 19-year-old coed would run around Europe taking notes to check against the works of famous poets! Diane red-facedly pondered the question for many moments, trying to call back the castle at Chillon, then offered the line that has endeared her to me forever:

"Oh, it was a real castle, all right!"

Lord, dear reader, how I chuckled over and brooded on that line for days afterward, thinking that in fairness to my lovely Diane, and compared with those castles created by her genius daddy, wherein Snow White, Prince Charming, Grumpy, Dopey and all the other guys mucked about, the castle at Chillon had, indeed, been a real castle! And though, as I say, I don't precisely remember Steinem's response to my suggestion that she parallel her life to Augie's, and though I would continue to prompt her and learn that in the Stein-em household there had been embarrassing "boxes of stuff" piled in the hallways or someplace, and that the Steinems had once had a welfare tenant upstairs or downstairs or someplace in their house, a guy who with charming regularity used to get smashed and beat the living shit out of his bride, for whatever reason, I vividly recall that Gloria's initial response to my query summoned up the long-ago Diane and it was as though Gloria had said:

"Oh, I had a real childhood, all right!"

Although we continued to talk and to laugh, to go through the motions, I'd guess that for me the interview ended with something Gloria said a few moments later. The breakups of both my marriages had been dreadful affairs, none of those cool, suave, lightly ironical, New Yorker magazine partings for Exley; and though I get along jolly well with one of my exes now, the situation with the other is still and always will be horrendous, ghastly, man, ghastly, and probably a lot closer to my reader's predicament than that sophisticated horse-shit novelists contrive! In reading about Gloria, I had sensed that no matter how much she "had it together" in most respects, like me she had had difficulties sustaining relationships with the opposite sex. Having been asked in interviews about some of her past partners, she had not been altogether kind. About the famous and brilliant director Mike Nichols she'd been quoted as saying she'd mistaken his "head for a heart," and she now admitted that she had, indeed, said that but that she and Mike were still "close" and that he had, in fact, called her up to sympathize with her over the "cruelty" of that particular piece (not likely, not at all likely, I later learned from a man who knew Nichols well enough to have spent days on his sets watching him make his movies!). I then went through the names of all the other "famous" men with whom Gloria had been "linked," as Louella used to say. There was old "Ken" Galbraith, and "Teddy" Sorensen, and the great alto-sax player Paul Desmond, and Herb Sargent, and Rafer Johnson, and--well, to Gloria they had all been merely "friends," which, it goes without saying, had me gritting my teeth, biting my tongue and repressing a terribly naughty-boy urge to ask Gloria if she fucked her friends.

I was saving one guy, Thomas Guinzburg, who seemed to me such an ideal mate for Queen Gloria and about whom I'd heard many nice things, until last. Guinzburg owned one of the half-dozen most prestigious publishing houses in America: he was wealthy; he was said to number among his friends and entertain at his town-house dinner table the rich and the famous from the theater, the movies, the literati, and so forth; and, above all, and for which one will forgive him, he had thought enough of Gloria to have allowed to be printed, under the Viking imprimatur, her Beach Book. I wanted to know what the problem with Guinzburg had been.

On the morning that President Kennedy had left on his trip to Dallas, Gloria had been in Sorensen's White House office and from the window had watched the President walk across the lawn and board the helicopter that would take him to the airport to Air Force One and to his eventual destiny. Two days later in New York, on learning of his assassination, Gloria apparently went into some kind of catatonic withdrawal, some epitome of grief beyond us lesser Americans, and that was the day she knew she and Guinzburg couldn't hack it. Gloria thought Guinzburg took the assassination too cavalierly. Now Gloria raised her right eyebrow into an ironical arc above her raspberry aviatrix' spectacles, smiled tolerantly and with wry condescension said, "Tom Guinzburg should have been a sports reporter for the Daily News."

Ye fucking gads, dear reader, where could Gloria and I go from there? One must understand that the dream of my life--the dream of my fucking life!--was to be a sports reporter for the Daily News. I'd have a lovely and loving wife named Corinne; three sons named Mike, Toby and Scott; two boxers, Killer and Duchess, with bulging muscles under their fawn coats, black, ferocious masks and, like all boxers, they'd be big drooling slobbering babies who couldn't even sleep when they were denied access to the boys' beds. I'd have a split-level home somewhere on the north shore of the island, say, at Northport; and just at that moment I was up to here with Corinne, the boys, Killer and Duchess, my boss at the sports desk would telephone me and cry, "Hey, Ex, don't forget you got to fly out to the Coast and cover the Mets' five-game stand with the Dodgers." And off I'd wing, to stand in the press box, a paper cup of Coors beer in my hand, the klieg lights dissolving the faces of the crowd into one another, cheering like mad for Seaver and the guys; after which, renewed, I'd fly back to the loving Corinne, Mike, Toby and Scott, Killer and Duchess. A sports reporter for the Daily News? Had Gloria's humble beginnings in that crumby Po-lack section of East Toledo been just a dream on her part, and had she sprung full-blown out of the mists, sitting in her present eminence as she sat before me now, imagining that with all that arm-raised, fist-clenched, "right-on" horseshit she was up to something infinitely grander and more noble than my dream of Corinne, Mike, etc., etc.? From that moment on, though words continued to be spoken, the interview was over.

• • •

Gloria and I had a distinctly uneasy parting from the Sonesta Beach Hotel. We had been talking the better part of four hours into the tape recorder, and as time was running out and Gloria had to take her nap and primp herself for the night's festivities, I was quickly throwing the used questions onto the floor so as to be hurriedly prepared to ask the next one. When she could go on no longer, we rose and she kindly began helping me pick up my notes and get my gear together. We had, as I say, been talking and laughing a long time. The abrupt silence seemed embarrassingly charged, and to fill it I decided to relate something I'd been undergoing the past days.

On the island I had made a friend I will here call Gabrielle. An astonishingly beautiful 22-year-old, Gabrielle was a recent magna cum laude Stanford graduate and a lesbian who was being kept in one of the pads on the Court by a broad-shouldered bull dyke my age. As is the case with almost every homosexual I've known, Gabrielle was miserable and, when the dyke was out working days, had taken to hanging about my place, keeping me company, typing the questions I was preparing for Gloria, hustling us cheeseburgers and coffee and listening to my FM radio and playing my Bru-beck collection on the stereo (though Gabrielle grew to love Brubeck, I can't describe how antiquated I felt when I learned that until then she'd never heard of him). Gabrielle came from a wealthy ranching family out in New Mexico or Idaho or Arizona or some such place, and her father's brother, "good old Uncle Harry," had introduced her to prepubescent sex, having induced her to an oral stimulation of his penis and to the packing of that penis with cow manure (one for Krafft-Ebing!). For motives neither Gabrielle nor I understood--fear, I'd guess--good old Uncle Harry had stopped molesting her when her menstrual cycles began, and though she'd never had anything to do with a man since that time, she found her present predicament every bit as oppressive and degrading as the one with good old Uncle Harry. What should she do?

Without batting an eye, I suggested she immediately move her gear into my closet and take one of the twin beds in my bedroom. I said as I was feeding her most of the day, anyway, I saw it as no extra hardship, and that at 22 she might do well to get her lovely ass into a bikini, lie on the beach for six months getting a tan and determine what direction she wanted her life to take.

"Christ," I said, "look at all the rinky-dinks your age all over the Court. Many of them are as bright and as educated as you. They're just puffing a little of the evil weed, suckin' up some apple wine and waiting for some sign from this ludicrous world we've made for them to live in. You could make friends with them. It wouldn't hurt you a bit to do the same thing for a year, two, three if you're enjoying yourself. Shit, in that scurvy group you'd be queen of the Court."

Gabrielle laughed. "I know. Every time I go next door for breakfast, some of those apes are drooling in my scrambled eggs." Gabrielle then eyed me warily and said, "If I did move in, what about sex?"

To this I laughed, rather scornfully, I'm afraid. "Cut the shit, Gabrielle. My bed is a foot and a half from yours; if you decide you want to try, all you have to do is hop over. But don't let your hot little pussy get nervous worrying about my needs. Any time I pick up a piece of ass, I'll let you know in advance and you'll have to take the couch out here. Any time you want to grab Chick or one of his muscular lifeguards across the street, you let me know and I'll bunk down in here. But look, if you're genuinely serious, I'll be damned if I'll relinquish my bed to a broad, so don't ever bother to ask."

Gabrielle grew very solemn.

"I want it understood that I could never have sex with you."

Well, sir! I knew I had 20 years on Gabrielle, that I was getting gray, chubby and sloppy--but then, never is an awfully long time and I laughed and said, "C'mon, Gabrielle--it's you we're worryin' about! My frightful hog can take care of itself!"

"But that's what I mean," Gabrielle emphasized. "I didn't at all mean it the way it sounded. Seeing some of those girls or whatever they are you hang around with, I'd be afraid to do anything with you--afraid you'd give me some awful disease that'd make my eyebrows fall out."

This was on the evening before I was scheduled to meet Ms. Steinem. Gabrielle and I offered each other eager hands by way of agreement. I promised that the day following my return from the interview I'd help her move her gear and that, if necessary, I'd knock the dyke on her ass in the emotional scene that would almost certainly ensue. We shook hands again, Gabrielle left and I went downstairs to woo Zita the Zebra Woman.

Early the following morning, I was hurriedly shaving--pimply Jack was already leaning on the horn of the electric-blue Buick Electra in the courtyard below--in preparation for meeting Steinem when Gabrielle came in, made me a quick cup of instant coffee and said, "I've changed my mind. I'm going to stay with Sappho."

"I'm sorry," I said. "What happened?"

Gabrielle then pointed out to me (in a Newsweek cover story, one I'd given her to read!) that no less than the girl I was going to interview accepted lesbianism, that our society was reaching the civilized stage where there wasn't going to be any stigma attached to it, and Gabrielle felt she ought to acknowledge being what she was and learn to live with it.

"That's nothing but that New York City liberal horseshit! Every noble soul accepts cancer as a part of life until he himself contracts it."

In very measured tones I pointed out to Gabrielle that Steinem's acceptance did not constitute endorsement, that as far as I knew Steinem herself was quite wonderfully and healthily heterosexual.

"Look, Gabrielle, Steinem's got it all together and that makes it easy for her to be tolerant. People who are happily straight just don't worry about other people's sex life. I mean, I don't care if a guy wants to fuck the exhaust pipe on his Volkswagen, it's nothing to me. And I don't give a shit either if you want to continue in your life, but I don't think you do or you wouldn't have been laying it on me since the day we met. And, incidentally, you know, don't you, that all men don't force little girls to suck their cocks? I'd feel a hell of a lot better if you stuck to our agreement."

Gabrielle adamantly refused. We shook hands. Gabrielle asked if she could continue to hang around and be my pal. I said sure. What the fuck else could I say? Apparently not all that pleased with her own decision, Gabrielle then wept quietly. Then Gabrielle accompanied me down to the car.

When Steinem and I were getting my gear together in the hotel and I was trying to tell her something of this--and as I told her I attempted to put it on a kidding level by accusing her of very possibly beating me out of a luscious piece of ass--I pointed out that she'd reached an eminence and an influence where she ought to consider very carefully what she "accepts."

"But she's a lesbian," Gloria said.

It was terrifying. It was a good deal more unnerving than Steinem's apparently being unable to "see" what I was saying. In her tone there was an overwhelmingly nasty irritation with me that quite honestly made me somewhat afraid, an accusation and a rebuke that I was not man enough to accept aberrations for what they were--I who had spent three years of my life in and out of state mental institutions and knew I'd come to see and tolerate more aberrations than Steinem'll live to see!--and that under no circumstance did I own the sympathy or the necessary zeal either to comprehend or to be a part of her holy cause!

By far the brightest, the most literate, the most articulate, the most tolerant (and the only one with a sense of humor) of these women is Ms. Germaine Greer. Reading the "Newsmakers" section of Newsweek, I laughed uproariously at her admission of having fallen quite hopelessly in love with a "very elegant" man "of some note" and her further admission that if at 33 she could make "a crass fool" of herself "over a tailor's dummy," the movement needed all the help it could get. As I read this, all I could do was entertain suspicions of what Greer would have said had I told her the same thing I tried to tell Gloria and I found myself imagining, "But, my dear chap, you should have removed this Gabrielle's bloomers, given her a superlative fuck and had done with it." And, instead, and against any expectations whatever that it would turn out that way, I left the Sonesta Beach not only distraught at Steinem's pipe-backed stridency but sorry, sad, afraid, hurt.

I was to see Gloria twice again. As it happened, the first time was on a morning when Gabrielle and I were making love. For, as it turned out, Gabrielle did move in with me and we had a lovely, loving idyl for a time until, as I knew she would, she took up with those alienated youth on the hot bright streets beneath me, took up with people more appropriate to her age, her needs and the destiny I so wanted for her. There came an urgent knocking on the door. I called and asked who it was and was told by the kindly lady across the hall that on channel five at that very moment I could see "that women's lib gal you interviewed a few weeks back."

I dismounted, rose, flicked on the TV and, sure enough, there was Steinem with Dinah Shore, she of the chiffon undies and whose paramour is Burt Reynolds, Cosmopolitan's centerfold! Gloria proselytized women's liberation, plugged Ms., did a little soft shoe with Dinah, then stood about in a somewhat awkward sweat as Dinah whipped up a layered and sumptuous-looking ice-cream cake. Gloria was, I thought laughingly, right where she ought to be!

In exasperation, Gabrielle said, "Are you going to watch Steinem or are we going to finish what we started?" I laughed again, flicked off the tube and we finished what we had started.

The next time I saw her she was on Walter Cronkite, loftily excoriating the Democrats' platform and credentials committees. "Oh, dear, dear Gloria, relax, do relax," I thought. "They say your man McGovern is the most decent man in the Senate. I suspect he is, and yet every time you and those disaffected souls he's surrounded himself with open your mouths you bury the poor slob that much deeper. We yokels don't understand your smugness, your certitude, the militant, celerylike curves of your spines, and what we don't understand makes us afraid, turns us off and, worse, will end with that benighted yo-yo Nixon's getting into a position of power. What I'm imploring of you, dear, dear Gloria, is that you help me see your man McGovern as a man for whom I'd interrupt my lovemaking. You won't do so until you and his followers become a lot less brassily strident, until I detect in your demeanors at least a tacit admission that, like Ms. Germaine Greer, you, too, are becomingly vulnerable and might yet find yourselves the victims of love."