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By Root 499 0

and when she realized my instincts led elsewhere, she sometimes expressed her displeasure in a volatile way. After we resumed our affair, I was in a swimming pool at a big Hollywood party with an old friend from New York, Jeff Brown, a quiet, staid fellow who I think was amazed by the bacchanalian atmosphere, and we were talking while in the pool when suddenly she came over and hit my head with the heel of her shoe. She was drunk and hit me so hard that I grabbed her and pushed her across the pool as far as I could. But my head still hurt, so I ducked underwater to make it feel better. When I came back to the surface, Jeff was looking at me. He had a broken nose. His face looked like a crushed strawberry—a huge, flattened, bloody, crushed strawberry. His mouth was wide open and he was looking at me in astonishment. “What the hell’s the matter with you?” he asked the woman, who said, “Oh, my God, who are you?”

She had recovered quickly after I pushed her, and just as I had ducked underwater, she had hauled off and tried to hit me again, but this time Jeff got it in the nose.

48

IN SOME WAYS I think of my middle age as the Fuck You Years. If I met a man who had a certain kind of overt masculinity, he became my enemy. I would find his weakness, then exploit it. I adopted his manner until I made a fool of him, which often took the form of sleeping with his wife. I used to be very vengeful. I agreed with something that George Santayana said: “To knock a thing down, especially if it is cocked at an arrogant angle, is a deep delight to the blood.”

I have a different attitude now, but during those years I loved the thrill of taking certain risks: it was like rock climbing, scaling the vertical wall of a granite cliff without a safety rope, or jumping out of a plane and waiting until the last moment before pulling the ripcord, unsure that my parachute would open.

As I’ve observed, there was a lot of extracurricular fucking in Hollywood and Beverly Hills during the early sixties. At parties one of the popular pastimes was a variation of the kids’ game of “It.” The hostess turned off the lights and in pairs everybody went into hiding inside the house—and they were usually big houses. If the guests designated as “it” found you in the dark and could identify you by touch, they were no longer “it.” One night I went off with the wife of a songwriter who had a little too much testosterone in his personality for my taste. While hiding with her in the darkness, I started to do what comes naturally, but she said, “No, not here, not here.”

“Why not?” I asked.

“They might turn on the lights.”

“So what?”

She answered, “But I’m married.”

A few days later, she called and told me her husband had gone for a few days to their home in Palm Springs. We were upstairs in bed when we heard a car come up the driveway and then the garage door open and close. We knew it was him, so there wasn’t anything for me to do except climb out the window. I lowered myself over the edge, grabbed some ivy hanging from the wall and tried to descend cat-burglar style to the ground, but I lost my grip and fell about seven feet into a huge bush that broke my fall and stabbed my legs with branches as sharp as spears.

For thirteen years I had an affair with a very attractive Beverly Hills woman. She is still alive, so I’ll call her Lenore. Our kids grew up together, and I knew her and her husband very well. He was a physicist with a medical degree, as well as five or six others, and he owned a lot of patents that made him extremely wealthy. I used to park my car a few blocks from their house in the middle of the night and in my tennis shoes stroll leisurely down the street, vault over their back fence and open the back door, which she left unlatched for me. Her husband was usually asleep upstairs in his room, and I would walk up the back stairs, where she’d be waiting for me, sometimes in the shower. For some reason we conducted a lot of our sex in the bathroom, where she was both athletic and imaginative. Then we’d either go to bed or I’d leave. Being upstairs