Lucking Out - James Wolcott [11]
On the inside looking out, I managed to become a minor fixture in the aquarium, part of the sandy grit at the bottom of the Voice’s ecosystem. I dated a co-worker, though dating isn’t exactly what we did. I’m not sure what it was we did, recalling only the prison heat of her five-floor walk-up on Eighth Street—a street as unpicturesque today as it was then—where she once chucked her shoes at me as I exited following a minor spat in which it had been determined I was in the wrong. This being the seventies, it wasn’t standard-issue footwear she was hurling but chunky platform shoes worthy of Carmen Miranda or a member of the New York Dolls, real clompers that, her aim slightly awry, landed against the door with a murderous thud. I’m not even sure her firetrap of a studio had a bed, since I recall the two of us spending a lot of time on the floor listening to the jazz station on the radio. She was a luscious string bean, the woman I’ll call Leanna, an Italian-American tempest with a raucous, dirty laugh and chocolate eyes who enjoyed a smattering of rough sex, the bruisier the better. In this area, as in so many other areas where she and her mattress were concerned, I was frustratingly half-measured, reluctant to close the gap between a light open-hand slap and a closed hard fist. Once she accused me of trying to choke her after we came out of a Robert Altman movie called California Split over whose merits we differed, she finding it completely sucky and me being somewhat more judiciously appreciative. Our disagreement escalated until my hands floated into a choke position around her throat without actually touching. “But the other night you wanted me to choke you,” I said after she had let out a yelp on the street, to which she replied: “Yeah, and of course you wouldn’t—you never want to do things when I want to, only when you want to.” It was soon clear that I wasn’t the considerate brute she was craving. Months after our brief office non-affair ended without having established enough traction for a genuine breakup, Leanna, playing show-and-tell after work, lifted her loose blouse here and there to display purple-blue nebula-like bruises bestowed by her latest beau, a member of the NYPD. It was as if—no “as if” about it—she were taunting me about finding someone macho enough to give her what she wanted, a real man who didn’t putter around and hide behind some nice-guy bullshit. Leanna later moved to Los Angeles, where she lived with a well-known character actor who, during one cocaine fugue, chased her around the lawn with hedge clippers, threatening to cut off her nipples. “You have a lawn?” I said, and she laughed. Despite my allegiance to Norman Mailer and Peckinpah movies, I had too much altar boy in me to seize the bitch goddess of success by her ponytail and bugger the Zeitgeist with my throbbing baguette. That just wasn’t me. I was so unmacho I couldn’t even pronounce the word properly, giving it a hard c until someone in the circulation department corrected me so that I wouldn’t embarrass myself further.
When one of the receptionists ducked out for lunch or to run an errand, I would pinch-hit at the front desk, seated in the cockpit, as it were, and afforded a wide-angle view of University Place. Once or twice Anaïs Nin majestically floated by, her face powdered like a geisha’s, a blue cape trailing behind her in the Kodak sunlight. Anaïs Nin—her name carried a music-box lilt then, seldom heard now, her cult fame a peacock feather that literary fashion has left behind. In the seventies, however, she was a prefeminist upright odalisque idol and a milky apparition of Paris past, her diaries with their familiar covers clutched and carried everywhere by young women whose