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I loved the awkwardness of these girls. There were times when it broke my heart. Afraid to take any sort of initiative, they hovered and fumbled, loitered and digressed. This awkwardness was, for me, a kind of sublime, an unconscious statement of their innocence. I remember a girl whose awkwardness took the form of stepping in dog shit in the street when we were on the way to my apartment. It happened three or four times and I asked her, Don’t you see where you’re going? But that was precisely what she didn’t want to do. She didn’t want to see. Stepping in dog shit was like retreating all the way back to the pregenital. It was a proof of her inadvertence, her sublimity.

One girl in particular sums up that time for me. She was a perfect example of what I mean when I say that sex used to be more individual, more personally marked, than it is now. She stands out beyond the others not because she was more original than they were, but because a combination of circumstances allowed her to spin out her idiosyncracy, to find what it needed.

Her name was Virginia and she was a rich girl who had come to New York to study art—not to paint or sculpt, but study, to be with art, to live near it. When she arrived in the Village, she made a great hit because she had high cheekbones. In 1947, high cheekbones were the best thing a girl could have, better than big breasts or great legs. Cubism had reached the human face and people in the Village liked to talk about bone structure.

What impressed me almost as much as her cheekbones was a remark Virginia made the first time we talked. She had told me that she was from a coastal town in New England and, trying to imagine the circumstances of her life, I asked her how close her house was to the water.

Quite close, she said. Close enough so that when I lay in bed at night with the windows open I can distinguish the sound of the water lapping against the hull of my boat from that of the other boats. I thought this quite a fine distinction, like a piece of aquatic literary criticism. She had a low voice and a clipped, toothy way of talking.

On the strength of her cheekbones and that remark, I took her out. But her conversation was so polite, so relentlessly general, that I couldn’t get up the necessary momentum, couldn’t set in motion the kind of rhetoric that would have made it possible to ask her to come home with me. It was not until the fourth time we went out that I asked her. I gave up any idea of leading up to it and just asked. I hadn’t even touched her, but I said, I want you to stay with me tonight.

Without appearing to hear what I said she told me that she had to exercise her dog. She had a saluki, a very fast and elegant breed that had to be run every day. I thought this meant taking the dog to Washington Square and throwing a stick, but Virginia had more style than that. We got into her MG, one of the early, rakish models, and the dog leapt gracefully onto the folded canvas top.

We drove to West Street, along the Hudson under the West Side Drive. In those days West Street was deserted at night. When Virginia stopped the car, the dog jumped out and sat on the cobblestones, waiting for a signal. Then, as we headed south, he loped easily alongside. The car was so low that his head was on a level with mine. He grinned as he ran and I noticed that he had high cheekbones, too.

I remember that there was a hugh garbage compactor on the dock at the foot of Twelfth Street and its smell mingled with the milder reek of the river, which we could glimpse between the rotting wharves. The MG was stiffly sprung and made a lot of noise drumming over the cobblestones. Virginia held her hands at three and nine o’clock on the polished wooden steering wheel.

West Street at night was the kind of place that makes you pensive. The ruined docks seemed to say that there would be no more steamer trunks and champagne in first-class cabins, or friends coming down to the dock to see you off to Europe. To take Virginia home with me would be like sailing from