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By Root 1112 0

easygoing woman and a handsome athlete with the square-jawed face of the young Hemingway. Eventually, when we were all safely back in New York, we did try a three-way, and he and I later had a two-way, but I was always puzzled by their interest in me and by their sexual virtuosity. They were too beautiful for me. In those days we always assumed that a bisexual (especially, for some reason, a bisexual man) was really a homosexual in the closet. We would wait with amused smiles till he eventually declared his true colors, which we naturally assumed would be pink and mauve. But as I learned a decade later in Paris, the world is full of genuine bisexuals, though most of them keep a low profile, not because they’re ashamed but because everyone distrusts and fears them. Tribes have only two ways of treating interstitial members; they either make them into gods or banish them. Yet as a trend if not a reality, androgyny and bisexuality were at the time being treated by the Sunday supplements as the taste of the moment. Articles and gossip columns were full of descriptions of just such young people, but I’d never been sure they really existed.

When the Saturday Review went under and I returned to New York after less than a year, I felt that I’d missed out on the best parts of California by not driving out of town on the weekends to camp under the redwoods, or beside the hot sulfur-water pools near the Russian River, or in the Zen monastery an hour away. I’d wasted my time smoking in bars and complaining because San Francisco didn’t enjoy exactly the same advantages as New York. Older, more secure people can take pleasure almost anywhere they go, but young people like us—especially recent converts to New York—had to justify our strange, demanding, and by no means obviously rewarding religion by rejecting all other cults and sacred sites.

But God I was happy to be back in New York! I liked being able to find people on the street at two and three in the morning. I liked calling up all my friends and talking for hours on the phone. I liked the feeling that everything in New York was being observed. If I saw something strange on the street, it would end up in a cartoon in the New Yorker the following week. If the subway stalled, an article about it would be in the New York Times the next morning—and after all it was a national newspaper. If I got up in a restaurant and passed four tables on the way to the loo, there would be at least three conversations I’d be dying to join. The slightly glaucous narcissism of San Francisco had been replaced by the rabid egotism of New York.

Soon I’d stumbled into a part-time job back in New York as an editor and staff writer for the venerable hardcover quarterly Horizon. We had to think up articles of general cultural interest, but ones that wouldn’t be dated by the time they finally came out after three months of lead time. It was a good job for me, given my wide-ranging reading, but I suddenly had much less authority than before and the editors were much more hesitant before committing themselves to a story idea. With Horizon, the illustrations were as important as the text and we usually started with them. An idea could be nixed out of hand if it didn’t promise sufficient visual richness.

The most interesting story idea I thought up was to have Jan Morris write about Ibn Battuta, the late-medieval Arab traveler who traversed the whole Muslim world from Spain to China, from Turkey to Egypt and on into sub-Saharan Africa. Ibn Battuta made the trip twice—once when that world was still unified and then again decades later when it was beginning to fall apart. I knew that Jan Morris, in her earlier gender incarnation as a man, James Morris, a celebrated travel writer, had made the same trip herself.

Morris had just had her sex-change operation and published her autobiography, Conundrum. She came in to discuss the Ibn Battuta assignment, a hearty, middle-aged woman in a wool skirt and sensible shoes. Apparently she was back in Wales with her wife, and the two women were living together as sisters. Just