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By Root 1211 0

that no one had any possible motive for unmasking a flatterer. One of my favorite writers of the time was the eighteenth-century cynic Lord Chesterfield, who in his letters to his illegitimate son taught him the amoral arts of the courtier (how to curry favor, how to coerce others to yield up their secrets while remaining discreet oneself, how to make oneself amusing and indispensable to the powerful). I remember one particularly repulsive passage in which Chesterfield’s poor witless illegitimate son is counseled to endear himself to a French hostess by stamping his foot prettily and insisting that some onerous task is his duty and his alone and that he refuses to share it with any of her other cavaliers servants. Chesterfield thought this kind of pretend petulance was particularly charming and attractive.

I knew several girls at work and two from Ann Arbor who’d moved to New York at the same time. Stan knew two or three girls with whom he rehearsed for the Berghof scene-study classes. Otherwise after work we lived in an entirely male world. It wasn’t that we were misogynists, though we were probably a bit scared of women and felt some lingering, irrational guilt around them since we had silently, surreptitiously excluded ourselves from the ranks of their potential suitors. I didn’t think of women as horny but as needy. I attributed to all women the loneliness and desperation of my divorced mother. In college I’d dated two or three girls. They were there partly for therapeutic reasons, since I hoped to go straight (slowly) and to get married (eventually), but they were also in my life because they were good bohemian women, physically generous, cozy pot-smokers, artistic—and above all tolerant.

The one woman who spanned all these years, from 1956 when I met her till now, more than half a century later, was Marilyn Schaefer, whom I’ve written about again and again (often under the name of Maria) from my first published story (“Goldfish and Olives” in 1962, published in New Campus Writing). She was six or seven years older than me, which now means nothing (she looks much younger than I do), but at the time was of some consequence. I’d met her when I was at Cranbrook, a boy’s boarding school outside Detroit, Michigan. She was a painting student next door at the art academy, one of the five schools that made up the Cranbrook complex at that time.

She was so far from any of my received ideas about women that I found her to be at once disconcerting and reassuring. Unlike Marilyn, most women in the fifties devoted considerable energy and ingenuity to dramatizing gender differences. That was the era of crinolines puffing up skirts, of carefully coiffed hair, of subtle pink lipsticks and painted-on all-over Pan-Cake makeup, of tightly cinched-in waists and stupid poodle decals in felt blazoned across the front of a skirt. Women simpered and blushed and pouted; as in Orwell’s discussion of working-class penny dreadfuls, they went directly from being a Honeymooner (all curves and ditsy innocence) to being Mom (prettily outraged fists planted on ample hips under a tailored skirt below a perfectly pressed blouse). From soprano to contralto. The older version of womanhood was best enacted by Lucille Ball, the mindless, eye-batting redhead, always adorably confused by the world’s complexities and endlessly hatching another harebrained scheme.

Marilyn had pretty, small features and was slim and nearly flat-chested. She had a tiny wen on the lower lid of her right eye, which gave her gaze an intriguing asymmetry, as if it were an artfully placed beauty patch. She never wore makeup at all and had a well-scrubbed look, a bit like the actress Nicole Stéphane, the sister in Cocteau’s (and Melville’s) Les Enfants Terribles. Marilyn’s parents were German-Americans who’d been born in the reclusive Iowa religious colony of Amana. They’d moved away from the colony when they were young soon after they were married, but they’d imparted to their children an idea of the possibility of being different from other people. Marilyn’s older brother Dick