Lillian Boxfish Takes a Walk(22)
True, I had been brought up in strict, Victorian style. Reading books and dreaming dreams, drinking chocolate sodas, and spending summers at the broad Atlantic. Mother, in my youth, made me eat my daily stint of Cream of Wheat. Anti hand-holding, pro girlish pride. “Girls should always turn aside,” she’d say, reminding me of the protocol for a boy attempting a kiss. “Anything you love is a joy and a care,” she’d say. And, “Dinosaurs are gone, but fleas persist,” when I spoke of my ambitions—her way of making a point about the dangers of wanting to be too immense.
But I didn’t listen, not really.
Self-taught, I learned how not to hang around the front stoop too long waiting to be properly kissed. Not to say I kissed promiscuously. But some desires could not be commanded.
I had first gone to bed with a boy when I was in college at Goucher: a philosophy student from the University of Maryland. Physically attractive but mentally pedantic, he was forever explaining some pretentious point about Kant. “I Kant stand it when you talk that way!” I said once, but humor was lost on him. He drew out the old saw about puns being the lowest form of humor, which struck me as idiotic. Puns require the minute manipulation of language on its most fundamental level! A pox on John Dryden, or whomever, for saying that in the first place, and a pox on that philosophy student for being so full of received ideas. He and I did not endure. And sleeping with him had not been all pyrotechnics and roses, to be honest, as both of us had been ardent virgins.
But I knew that, like anything I set my will to, I could get better at it. And I did.
In those handful of years between Goucher and Manhattan, I lingered in Washington. Or rather malingered.
A classmate told me of an opening in a publicity firm. Slightly vague as to what publicity actually was, I walked into the office and demanded an interview with the president. The surprise was that I got one, and the following Monday started work. Luck, pure and simple. My first assignment was to make a speech before a group of women I was supposed to organize for a fund-raising drive. I was scared to death, but I ended up being a natural. Plus, I learned by working there the best way to be stylish—stocking seams always straight, nose never shining, lipstick never faded, coiffure always in curl or wave—without being one of those women other women are prone to hate.
I passed three years there, jotting poems in my free time, cherishing with pride a few clippings and the memory of what sweet things the professor in English composition had said about my college themes. My boss was a blowhard who grunted and snorted and stripped his gears over every little thing, but was ultimately harmless.
The next boy I went to bed with was a law student from Georgetown, an assistant to my father. We were involved. For a while. It would have been a match to make my parents proud—someone following my father in his chosen vocation, someone to keep me close to home in Washington—but I couldn’t.
What’s bad in a sweetheart becomes unbearable in a husband.
I’d become so bored that I bored myself. I broke it off with my law student, who quickly found an aspiring housewife to embark on the becalmed seas of the life he desired. Bully for her. At the end of 1925 I at last resolved, above parental protest, to send myself off in my Aunt Sadie’s wake to Manhattan.
Off to the Empire State’s bright diadem. A charming and perceptive woman ready to charm and perceive.
Romantically, I arrived unburdened by propriety, no blushing maid. One could say I was “fast,” but the pace felt right. One could say I was “loose,” but I never felt myself far from the tightest self-control. I would have liked a companion-spouse, maybe. I would have considered that possibility of a mate for life. But they, all of them, to a man—even and maybe especially the ones who fancied themselves urbane, like Dickie, like Abe, or the most rebellious—secretly or not-so-secretly aspired toward a middle-class ménage.
Dickie had decided recently that, in the interest of being chic, he ought to wear cologne. That evening his bedroom smelled like citrus and spice.
“Very nice,” I told him. “What is it?”
He handed me the bottle, and I stood before the vanity, watching him undress me in the dim ochre light of a single lamp. We wanted to see each other, but not to let people outside see in.
“Du Coq?” I said, reading the label and laughing, thinking that I had to tell Helen, who would appreciate that my lover would wear a perfume so aptly named.
“What’s so funny?” said Dickie, kissing my neck; necking was then a popular terme d’art.
“Nothing,” I said. “I just like that your perfume is so cocky.”
I removed the cap and put my nose to the sprayer, finding to my dismay that up close it had an almost urinary note. I felt grateful that Dickie hadn’t chosen to wear it that night.
“It’s not perfume,” said Dickie. “It’s cologne.”
I ignored his concern with being manly and slipped his suit jacket off his rowing-team shoulders and onto the floor.
After we’d finished, I had to hurry home. I was never able to stay overnight. Dickie understood, obviously. Walking me back to the Christian Women’s Hotel, he kept a hand on my elbow. He spoke what might be considered pillow talk, but upright and ambulatory and without the pillows.
“Maybe one day we can stay together longer,” he said. “When you get your own place.”
And that is how that night went, and how all our nights went, until we parted, inevitably, not with enmity, but with incredulity on his part: He, like the rest, could not believe that I really was not on the prowl for permanent union. Or he thought that he would be the one who made me realize that deep down inside, I surreptitiously was.