• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

Back to Mickey and his wives. Louise, as I said, was the first, and lasted the usual seven years. By then it was the height of the sexual revolution, and Mickey wanted his share, which was not all that hard for a professor to pick up, and so then there was Marilyn Kaplan, the eternal grad student. By this time Mickey had a couple of kids and a dog in his big Scarsdale house, and so it cost him a bundle to slake his lust for Marilyn. Of the three wives, Marilyn is the most classically beautiful: big black eyes, glossy long chestnut hair, and the great American girl body, long legs, thin waist, cannonball breasts. She was a staunch feminist of the high 1970s school, utterly contemptuous of the male gaze, while attracting it without cease, and waxing great upon the advantages it conferred. She produced another child, and after some three years vanished with a fellow from, I think, Berkeley, an epicene bisexual of flawless politics, or so I gathered. As Mickey explained it, the problem was largely intellectual: he simply was not on her level with respect to literary theory. This was something nearly as important to her as sex, at which, according to Mickey, she was the dominant partner and of boundless energy and inventiveness.

I heard her lecture once. Mickey took me, a lecture called something like “Privileging the Text in the Late Comedies: Speech Act Theory and Discursive Formation in Shakespeare.” I did not understand one single word of it, and told Mickey so, and he tried to explain to me about Foucault and Althusser and Derrida and the revolution in the study of literature of which Marilyn was an ornament, but I could see that his heart was not in it. Mickey’s problem, I gathered, was that while he could talk the current critical talk, and did it surpassing well, his heart was not really in it, for he loved Shakespeare, and loving anything was apparently a bourgeois affectation concealing the machinations of the oppressive patriarchy. Marilyn thought she could change him, thought she could blow some fresh air into his paternalistic, bourgeois view of literature, but no. And he had never made her come, not like Gerald-from-Berkeley could, or so she told him. She left him the kid, though.

Number three was, or is, Dierdre, who was his editor at Putnam, a Kevlar and piano-wire item, who pursues perfection in all things. She is now (we are back on our drive) the main subject of complaint, for Dierdre is à la mode to the max. For Dierdre to have the wrong refrigerator, attend the wrong party, appear at the wrong club or resort, or have the wrong sort of house in the Hamptons, would be a kind of social cancer, and she now wishes to produce a perfect child, at which Mickey is rather balking, having three already. He told me a long anecdote about…

You know, I forget what it was about. Tiles? A German appliance? Conception strategies? Who gives a shit, but the point was that she was costing him a bundle, as was the first wife and the first set of kids, and the boy from Marilyn (Jason) was acting up, and he was spending a fortune in special schools and psychiatrist bills, and because of the market and the too numerous fastener heirs, he was seriously pinched. (I offered a loan, got laughed at, ha-ha, it’s not that bad yet.) Such bitch sessions are a normal part of my friendship with Mickey. I suppose he’s listened enough to mine, although I have had only the one wife. The peculiar thing, though, about Mickey’s wives is that, by chance, I have fucked each of them, although not ever during the period in which they were married to him. I would never do that.

Louise and I had a single long afternoon about two weeks before she got married. She said she loved him and wanted to have his children, but simply could not bear the thought of never doing it with another man and she said she always had a sneaker for me (her word) and wanted to see what it was like before the gate clanged shut. She was a somewhat nervous lover, and it was clear that Mickey had not proceeded past the introductory course,