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In college I got it into my head that I should marry Marilyn. I felt that she’d be understanding about my struggle against homosexuality. I told her I loved her and wanted to spend the rest of my life with her. She responded with long, passionate kisses. I was thrilled and frightened, as though I was about to spoil a wonderful friendship or get myself into water far deeper than I could navigate. But then again, I thought I’d been saved. I’d been so afraid of spending the rest of my life as that frightening hippogriff, a homosexual. Now I’d been transformed into an ordinary male, and yet with Marilyn nothing would be banal or conventional. We’d be normal, a happily married couple, but we’d be artists, enraptured by our Puccini.

She drove us everywhere. I could drive, but not well—I preferred her behind the wheel. When she said she never wanted to marry, I took it with a whole box of salt; I knew about women, about their biological drive to marry and procreate. The urge was stronger than they were. Nothing could stop their need to nest and hatch. Though I must say we never spoke of children and I felt no need, not even the slightest passing twinge of desire, to have offspring, to see little Eddies and Marilyns looking up at us with trusting or resentful eyes.

I could scarcely acknowledge to anyone, not even to myself, how relieved I was to be straight. I’d so feared spending my life as a freak, of watching myself become more and more effeminate under my mop of dyed blond curls stiff from a permanent, imprisoned behind a pair of frightened, frozen eyes under painted-brown eyebrows. I’d seen swishy men in their forties and fifties working as waiters in Chicago at little gay restaurants along Rush Street, alternating between icy efficiency and campy self-dramatization, their red-and-white-checked shirt collars turned up over a red silk knotted scarf, the raised collar lightly grazing their peroxided duck’s-ass hairdo.

I was so proud of my escape from this fate that I even bragged to my father that I wanted to marry Marilyn. He didn’t know her, but when he discovered that she was seven years older than me, he advised me against such an unpromising union. “An older girl might look good to you now, Ed, but women don’t age well. If you don’t watch it, you’ll be stuck with an old bag. Better to marry someone seven years younger.” I was offended at his butcher’s way of sizing up a side of beef. But I was amazed that after worrying himself sick over the shameful reality of my homosexuality, he didn’t rejoice in any approximation of heterosexuality I might come up with. The bourgeoisie! I thought indignantly. They don’t really care about the happiness of their children, only about respectability in the eyes of others.

Although Marilyn and I were planning to spend a summer together (after my junior year) in Chicago—she painting, I writing—I was so worried about the consequences of my declaration of love that I went inert. I played dead. I didn’t call her. I didn’t write her. She wrote me two or three letters to which I did not respond. I kept intending to write her a really long, ardent letter, but with every passing day I became more panicked and immobilized. At last she sent me a curt little note saying, “Yours is not like any love I ever heard of. Let’s just skip it and be friends. Anyway, I’ve decided I prefer girls. I’m spending the summer with Miranda.”

I felt as if I’d somehow missed a crucial beat. Girls? Miranda? I remembered there’d been a beautiful, butchy Texan by that name at Cranbrook, a rich girl from Fort Worth who laughed at all of Marilyn’s jokes. But hadn’t there also been a bearded Jewish painter named Jay from Brooklyn?

Three years went by, Stan and I had moved to New York, then one day I got a call from Marilyn, who was in tears. She’d just had her heart broken by a wild, fast-driving, heavy-drinking Southern girl named Megan who looked like Anthony Quinn. Marilyn was distraught—what could she do?

“Move to New York,” I said. “Move in with us. We have a