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Classical music, she said. André Kostelanetz, Morton Gould. Then she crooned the entire lyrics to Nat King Cole’s “Lush Life.”

She wasn’t what I had thought, but as I walked up the four flights to my apartment behind her, I looked at her ass, which was right in front of my face, and said to myself that this at least was real.

There were no preliminaries, no desperate grappling. She began immediately to pull off her clothes, the way an actress pulls off her costume when the play is over. It turned out that she was wearing a girdle. When she took it off, her ass filled my little bedroom. It was like those life preservers that expand when you pull the cord.

When she was naked, she spoke only Spanish. In fact, she never stopped talking. ¡Ay, que rico eres! ¡Que sabroso! ¡Que fuerte! Y su cuerpo tan blanco, and so on.

After that she began to give me instructions. Take me from behind! Harder! Slower! Faster! Wait for me! Don’t come until I tell you!

I felt like I was taking a dance lesson. The drums were not in her belly—they were in her commands. I was so occupied with her exhortations that I never got into the spirit of the thing. I remained detached and, as a result, the business went on for quite a while.

¡Hombre, she said, fenómeno!

After that I couldn’t get rid of her. She would call me up and plead with me on the phone. I’ll wash you; I’ll powder you. I’ll light your cigarettes and bring you a glass of whiskey. She had an interminable list of the things she would do, and none of them interested me. What I had wanted was to cross over into her world, and what she wanted was to enter mine.

15

I first saw Caitlin Thomas at a party given by Maya Deren in her apartment on Morton Street in Greenwich Village. I saw only the bottom half of her, her legs, thighs, and cotton underpants, because she was holding her dress up over her head as if she was pulling it off, or hiding behind it like a child. She was dancing, a sort of elememtary hootchy-kootch that didn’t have much to do with the fast Haitian drum music that filled the room.

Maya was dancing, too, barefoot, with bells on her ankles. She had just come back from Haiti, where she had been studying Haitian dance and mythology. Maya was also an avant-garde filmmaker, an avant-garde everything. Short, stocky, with a dark red, before-its-time Afro, she looked like a Little Orphan Annie who had been kidnapped once again, this time by art.

While Dylan Thomas was the proclaimed guest of honor, Maya was always the real guest of honor at her parties. She had made sure of this with the tapes of Haitian drumming, because none of the poets and literary camp followers she had invited seemed willing to get out on the floor with her.

So it was mano a mano between Maya and Caitlin. I had yet to see Caitlin’s angry, intellectual milkmaid’s face. I hadn’t realized who it was beneath the dress until I asked a slender, elegant young man next to me. That, he said, with an irony that was the chief ingredient of the new American poetry, is Caitlin Thomas.

It was like a war of worlds out there on the floor: the childbearing, cottage-keeping, pub-crawling wife of the Welsh bard against a rising star of Greenwich Village. Caitlin relied on the immemorial argument of bump and grind, while Maya, who wore trousers, danced not exactly to the tapes but to the different drummer of the American art establishment. I wondered who would win and where Dylan was. Was he hiding his face, too?

He was in the bedroom that opened off the studio, in a corner where he was surrounded by slender young men. It was as if they had thrown up a picket fence to protect him, not only from Caitlin but from America, from criticism, from mortality. He was no longer the pretty, pouting cherub of the Augustus John painting, but a man swollen by drink, and by sorrow, perhaps, or poetry. He looked like an inflatable toy that had been overinflated.

You forgot Dylan’s faults when you read his poems or heard him recite, but he was not at his best at parties. To him, an American