Or rather, what I tried and failed to do, kill the thing I loved, which was my love for Darlene and our baby girl. And so I not only permanently wounded Darlene’s heart and Leona’s, I wounded my own as well.
I remembered staying out all night, playing chess for hours with my fellow beatniks at the Zazen Coffee House on Hemenway Street and later telling my troubles to sympathetic women in their apartments—not sleeping with them, at least at first, just talkingand drinking cheap wine and smoking cigarettes and sometimes pot. One of the women was from Colombia, an artist, petite and pretty, who taught at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, and beat me regularly at chess. To my surprise she revealed to me late one night, probably to keep me from coming on to her, that she was a lesbian, and while she thought Darlene was beautiful and sexy, she was not intelligent enough for me. Feeling somehow wronged, I left her apartment and never returned or played chess with her again.
Another was an older, tall, blade-faced woman in her mid-twenties who had a long, thick, roan-colored braid that hung to her waist. She was rumored to be the mistress of Gerry Mulligan, a famous jazzman in his mid-forties, which is why, when she invited me into her bed, I said I couldn’t because I was married.
Then there was an actual consummated love affair with the daughter of a black photographer, who I learned many years later was as famous as Gerry Mulligan, but whom I had not heard of then. She was a gifted pianist studying at the New England Conservatory of Music, and I remembered and told Chase that she had a Steinway baby grand piano in her apartment and played Chopin for me. I had never seen a Steinway or heard Chopin before. It was a sexually fierce affair that briefly overlapped with the weeks before Darlene left with Leona for Florida. The affair continued for months afterward, until the woman abruptly quit school and ran off to Paris with a French art critic who was writing a biography of her father and with whom she had been sleeping whenever she went home to Manhattan on school holidays.
I could not understand why, or quite believe, such women were attracted to me and found me interesting. This was shortly before I met Christine, who was then a theater student at Emerson College. She, too, seemed exotic and rarified, a type of female human being altogether new to me, unlike any woman I had known or loved, or so I then believed. She was from Richmond, Virginia, and, despite her Christian name, Jewish, and with her reckless and carefreeways—leaving her sumptuous Lord & Taylor winter coat in a taxi and showing up the next day with another, skipping her final exams for a road trip to Vermont, springing for meals for her impoverished beatnik friends and fellow students, living in an apartment on Beacon Street instead of a college dorm room—she let me know that her family was rich and she was spoiled. I didn’t care. I may even have been attracted to her because she was rich and spoiled. She wore her long chestnut-brown hair like Joan Baez and played the guitar and sang folk songs from the Weavers’ and Pete Seeger’s songbook. She was not melancholy in the way of folksingers, however. She was loud and had a raucous laugh. With her oval-shaped face held close to her listener’s face, dark brown eyes open wide, eyebrows raised, she spoke in a strangely affected Virginia Tidewater accent colored by long drawn-out vowels and swallowed consonants. She was verbally surprising and vulgar and funny, especially when describing her eccentric southern Jewish family, a mash-up of Aeschylus and Tennessee Williams, Electra meets The Glass Menagerie .
I could not believe that a woman like Christine could be attracted to a man like me. I was poor and by comparison uptight and boring. A very bad bet by anyone’s standards, I was a twenty-year-old divorced dropout and father of an abandoned child, a man who had made a mess of his and
I remembered staying out all night, playing chess for hours with my fellow beatniks at the Zazen Coffee House on Hemenway Street and later telling my troubles to sympathetic women in their apartments—not sleeping with them, at least at first, just talkingand drinking cheap wine and smoking cigarettes and sometimes pot. One of the women was from Colombia, an artist, petite and pretty, who taught at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, and beat me regularly at chess. To my surprise she revealed to me late one night, probably to keep me from coming on to her, that she was a lesbian, and while she thought Darlene was beautiful and sexy, she was not intelligent enough for me. Feeling somehow wronged, I left her apartment and never returned or played chess with her again.
Another was an older, tall, blade-faced woman in her mid-twenties who had a long, thick, roan-colored braid that hung to her waist. She was rumored to be the mistress of Gerry Mulligan, a famous jazzman in his mid-forties, which is why, when she invited me into her bed, I said I couldn’t because I was married.
Then there was an actual consummated love affair with the daughter of a black photographer, who I learned many years later was as famous as Gerry Mulligan, but whom I had not heard of then. She was a gifted pianist studying at the New England Conservatory of Music, and I remembered and told Chase that she had a Steinway baby grand piano in her apartment and played Chopin for me. I had never seen a Steinway or heard Chopin before. It was a sexually fierce affair that briefly overlapped with the weeks before Darlene left with Leona for Florida. The affair continued for months afterward, until the woman abruptly quit school and ran off to Paris with a French art critic who was writing a biography of her father and with whom she had been sleeping whenever she went home to Manhattan on school holidays.
I could not understand why, or quite believe, such women were attracted to me and found me interesting. This was shortly before I met Christine, who was then a theater student at Emerson College. She, too, seemed exotic and rarified, a type of female human being altogether new to me, unlike any woman I had known or loved, or so I then believed. She was from Richmond, Virginia, and, despite her Christian name, Jewish, and with her reckless and carefreeways—leaving her sumptuous Lord & Taylor winter coat in a taxi and showing up the next day with another, skipping her final exams for a road trip to Vermont, springing for meals for her impoverished beatnik friends and fellow students, living in an apartment on Beacon Street instead of a college dorm room—she let me know that her family was rich and she was spoiled. I didn’t care. I may even have been attracted to her because she was rich and spoiled. She wore her long chestnut-brown hair like Joan Baez and played the guitar and sang folk songs from the Weavers’ and Pete Seeger’s songbook. She was not melancholy in the way of folksingers, however. She was loud and had a raucous laugh. With her oval-shaped face held close to her listener’s face, dark brown eyes open wide, eyebrows raised, she spoke in a strangely affected Virginia Tidewater accent colored by long drawn-out vowels and swallowed consonants. She was verbally surprising and vulgar and funny, especially when describing her eccentric southern Jewish family, a mash-up of Aeschylus and Tennessee Williams, Electra meets The Glass Menagerie .
I could not believe that a woman like Christine could be attracted to a man like me. I was poor and by comparison uptight and boring. A very bad bet by anyone’s standards, I was a twenty-year-old divorced dropout and father of an abandoned child, a man who had made a mess of his and
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