In the fall of 1960 I gave a series of concerts with various folk and country groups, mostly in colleges—Radcliffe, Trinity, Wheaton, Yale—in halls seating two to five hundred. On the fifth of November I gave my first solo concert, in New York City at the 92nd Street Y, and filled the eight hundred seats without a problem. After a concert at Bennington College, Michael and I packed our hi-fi into a new Corvair and left Harvard Square, his school, and my music career. Manny cried when I explained to him that we needed to live on the West Coast for a while. I was staving back a flood of my own tears and got annoyed with him for nagging me about my career. We still had our handshake agreement, I reminded him brusquely, and I would come back to do concerts, and he could see if there was anything on the West Coast for me. I didn’t tell my parents about the move. The plan was to write them from halfway across the country, giving them time to adjust to the fact that Joanie was officially living in sin (the part that concerned my father) with an unemployed college dropout (the part that concerned my mother and father) on Joanie’s money (the part that concerned everybody except me).
My record came out in time for Christmas, just as Michael and I arrived in California. I watched in amazement as Joan Baez soared to number three on the top 100 best-selling albums in the country. Michael watched with a jaundiced eye but held his tongue, as my music was our bread and butter.
We settled in a one-room house just off the highway in Carmel Highlands, just south of Carmel, California. Michael began to write a book; I kept house. We collected dogs and cats and a totally unique community of new friends whom we met through one of Michael’s Harvard schoolmates and who took us in and looked after us with a warmth we both relished. The Williams household, which included their own children as well as wandering souls of the early sixties like ourselves, was directly across the street. The old man of the mountain and his wife, Don and Rosa Doner, legendary Russian Jewish immigrants, lived just above us in the highlands. Don tried to teach me how to cook. I kept a two-burner hot plate illegally in a cubbyhole we called a kitchen. Cynthia Williams, the mom and Realtor Extraordinaire, found jobs for Michael working on houses. We were accepted by our marvelous new friends as a young, offbeat couple, our neediness no doubt appealing to their own battered vulnerability, kindness, and generosity.
Our living situation was hardly a nurturing one for my music, but I really had no choice. I felt a part of Michael the same way Cathy feels in Wuthering Heights when she realizes that Heathcliff, the stable boy, is running off in a storm, and in a great clap of thunder her eyes grow big with realization, and in answer to the question “Do you love Heathcliff?” she says, “I am Heathcliff!” We were inseparable and couldn’t imagine each other with anybody else. Michael was my poet, my suffering artist whose genius lay undiscovered. He played Ping-Pong and discussed books and philosophy in French with Don Doner, who found him lazy but delightful. He danced to steel-drum music and my Brazilian carnival records, his eyes continued to sparkle like no one else’s, and we made love often. When he didn’t despise me he adored me, and he was tender toward my insecurities, and I remained his virgin whore for four ambiguous years.
While at home in the highlands, my social-political conscience and my music were obscured by my chaotic lifestyle and determination to stay with Michael. He had little regard for social action of any kind, especially if it was something which involved me, and looked upon my infatuation with nonviolence as airy-fairy and unrealistic. The only overt public action I’d been involved in since I’d known him was a forum on nuclear disarmament sponsored by SANE in the Boston Arena where Erich Fromm was hit in the face by two flying eggs.
Almost as soon as we had settled into our house in the highlands I was off to the East Coast for concerts. For that entire year I Ping-Ponged back and forth from home to the road. In the summer I made another album, and in the late fall did a much anticipated solo concert in New York’s Town Hall. I remember reading a clip from Billboard or Variety which said, “JOAN BAEZ S.R.O. TOWN HALL NYC.” I pondered over the “S.R.O.” and finally figured it must mean Sold Right Out, because that’s exactly what had happened. (I learned later that it meant Standing Room Only, but it was the same general idea.) I gave twenty concerts in 1961, and could have done two hundred, or so Manny told me. I made heaps of money, which was fun, I suppose, but confusing. I could have made heaps more, but was not interested. I was offered fifty thousand dollars to do a Coca-Cola ad (“Come all ye fair and tender ladies, drink Coca Cola, it’s the best . . . !”) and I know Manny was torn as to how to counsel me, but there was no issue anyway, because, “Manny,” I said, “I don’t even drink Coke.” (In 1965 when I was traveling with the Beatles, someone brought a vending machine into their dressing room because they couldn’t go out into the hall, the security was so tight. The machine had been rigged so it didn’t need any coins; you just pushed a button and got a free soft drink. By that time, the Beatles must have been millionaires several times over, but in their minds they were still working-class Liverpudlians, and couldn’t get over the thrill of having free drinks.)
I had a mini-version of that same identity confusion when Michael and I moved to Big Sur later that year. For thirty-five dollars a month, we rented a cabin consisting of one bedroom (doubling as a living-dining room), a tiny bathroom, no closets, and a kitchen. We had four dogs and many cats. One afternoon in Monterey we went to buy a flashlight, and finding the hardware store closed for lunch, wandered around the corner to look at the British Motors display window. We ended up writing out a check for six thousand dollars and driving back to Big Sur in a silver Jaguar XKE. I lived in blue jeans when I got dressed, and a granny gown when I didn’t, and the house was a pigsty. We owned one pair of sheets and when they were dirty, I washed them out by hand and hung them on the porch railing until they dried in sunburst designs from hand scrubbing. There was no phone in our house, so when Manny called to try to schedule concerts, I had to run down to the lodge in the rain, sleet, mud, and ocean mist. I bought condensed milk that you mix with two parts water to save money, and at the same time thought nothing of buying silk blouses and cars for friends. When my mother said, “Gosh, honey, what can we get for Christmas for the girl who has everything?” I said, “How ’bout some sheets and pillowcases and a frying pan?”
In the East, I gave concerts with Lester Flatt and Earl Scruggs, at the time the best-known bluegrass performers to come up from the South. Our collaboration was unprecedented, and caused a slightly humorous reaction among the urban hillbillies and college intellectuals who made up the audience. Flatt and Scruggs and I took the contrast of our mutual publics good-naturedly and chalked it up as one more phenomenon in the rapidly expanding and changing folk scene. One reporter said that I sang to “troubled intellectuals.” I saw the review and said to Manny, “But I’m not an intellectual.” My mere existence as a rebellious, barefooted, antiestablishment young girl functioning almost totally out of the context of commercial music and attaining such widespread notoriety designated me a counterculture heroine, whether or not I understood the full import of the position.
Back home I doubled up on psychiatry sessions, sometimes driving into Carmel four times a week to try to sort out the mounting pressures. Was I really a devoted wife-out-of-wedlock, darning socks for my beloved who was building a boat on my money so that we could float off to the island where no one worked? By now I knew that I would not go with him if he sailed.
It was autumn. One evening someone called us to come outside. The sky was a blazing orange-reddening-to-crimson blanket far up over our heads, and the ocean reflected it back like a mirror. Two tiny boats were approaching each other on the horizon, and on the shore we joined our neighbors and shook our heads in amazement at the closing of this day, the burning of the sky aglow in each other’s faces, the boats seeming to merge into one and stop moving for a few minutes.
Christmas came; the new year came, and from our porch we could see the whales heading south, spouting glorious geysers into the air. Somewhere within me a resolution began to form that I could not express, but with it came moments of calm. I was able to tell Michael that I needed to stay in the States for my concerts, and that if the boat ever sailed I would not be on it. Michael saw that I was growing more and more independent, and reacted by tightening his hold on me. My doctor suggested that Michael “get some help.” Michael was outraged: I was the sick one; not he.
But now, when I went on the road, I was an established “star,” a little less afraid of my profession as I gained control in it. I preached a tiny bit more in each concert, and in the dressing room afterwards was treated as a kind of sage, usually speaking of nonviolence and Gandhi. When Michael accompanied me, I spoke less freely or not at all.
We decided to take a trip to Mexico in the summer, something which I dreaded for the same reason I dreaded sailing. If you went to Mexico, you eventually ate the wrong combination of persistent little bacteria and had to throw them up. In July we packed up the XKE and headed south. My only time in Mexico not fraught with fear was when we stayed on the beach, two hundred yards from the most expensive and vulgar hotels in Acapulco. For $1.50 a day, we had hammocks, a blanket, and all the fresh shrimp, homemade tortillas, and Coca-Cola we could consume. I watched the shrimp come in from the boat and go into the pan, and watched the tortillas being pounded, then cooked until there was no way any germ could have survived, and I ate them and drank the Coke (which I supposedly never touched) in peace. The rest of the trip was a kind of nightmare, and I lost a lot of weight. I discovered that my records were known to the art circles and upper-middle-class intellectuals of Mexico.
Upon our return to the United States I became very ill. During a concert somewhere in a tent, during a storm, I thought the sky would split with the sound of the thunder, and I wished it would, and that an angel in white robes would come and gather me up and bathe my forehead in cool water and sing me to sleep. I was feverish, my stomach was in spasms, and I seemed to be living on a diminishing reserve of raw nerves. At that exact moment, with my second record out and doing better than the first, Time decided to do a cover story on me. Between dizzy spells I posed for a portrait in oil; I felt like death and was depicted accurately. Back home trying to finish interviews with Time, I ended up in the hospital diagnosed as malnourished, dehydrated, and hosting a variety of viruses in my ears, nose, throat, lungs, and stomach. The nurse left me standing in my hospital gown, so I weighed myself, made a note of 102 pounds, and crawled between the embracing cool sheets, shoving the kidney-shaped basin under the bed and out of sight.
Michael, along with everyone else, was forbidden to see me, and after a visit and instructions from my doctor, I was blissfully alone, bathed and asleep. The bed was the angel in robes I had so longed for. Michael’s phone call got past the nurses’ desk and his voice broke into my indescribable peace, nervous and agitated and demanding to know what was going on. I truly wished he was dead.
When I felt better, I went around visiting people. I met an extraordinary little girl named Raylene. She had black hair and black eyes with long lashes, was very pale, and smiled at me as though she and I had been sisters in a previous life. She was in critical condition with a kidney problem, and her mother thought she was going to die. She didn’t behave like a little girl at all, but rather like a wise old woman. She told me she had heard the doctors whispering and that she didn’t have much of a chance, and then she shrugged her shoulders and blinked sleepily and smiled an indescribable smile. She seemed all-knowing, and she was apparently not afraid of death. (She did not die, and I remained friends with her and her family for years. Recently, she found my address from someone and stopped by with her two kids. She was more beautiful than ever, hair to her waist now, no makeup. While her kids played with Gabe’s long-forgotten mountain of Legos, we discussed marriage and divorce and children and how life then goes on, and she shrugged, and blinked and smiled exactly the same way she had twenty-five years ago . . . or was it a hundred?)
One day a nurse handed me a bizarre note and explained that it was from a very odd girl dressed in ripped cutoffs and a T-shirt and a strange hat. The note requested permission to wash my car. I supposed it was from a fan. The next day there was another note, and the nurse said the odd girl was out in the hall. I said I’d be happy to see her.
A girl blew in, fresh, tan, skittery, ragged, shy, rebellious. She had superb cheekbones, a fine nose, and managed to hide her eyes under spikes of blond hair mashed down on her forehead by a grey, pillbox-shaped knitted hat. Occasionally, her eyes darted a glance from behind the scraggly hair spikes, but she was terrifically shy and laughed nervously and blushed, trying to cover her discomfort by waving her hands in the air and telling me stories. All I gathered from that first visit was that she was not happy at home, adored her father, rode horses, slept on the beach, stole steaks and toilet paper and other basic necessities, and could surf for hours without a break. She was seventeen and her name was Kim.
I felt a cheerful lightness after she left, and when Michael came by and put his feet up on the bed in a confrontational manner, it barely fazed me. After two weeks, when I got out of the hospital, I went to group therapy and told everyone that I was scared I would lose Michael. My own words put me into a panic. Instead of practicing guitar and singing, I wept and watched Michael furtively and anxiously, working myself into such a state that all the healing done in the hospital was nearly undone.
The pilot for the “Hootenanny Show” was being filmed in Rochester and Manny wanted me nearby in case ABC gave in and invited Pete Seeger, who had been banned for his political beliefs. Relieved to get on the road, I packed up to go on tour. My mom joined me and we went east.
Unlike mine, Pete Seeger’s music, lifestyle, social concerns, and personality were well integrated. I found the blacklisting of the daddy of folk music ludicrous and refused to appear unless he, too, was invited. Pete and I sang in Hartford, where we were picketed by the Veterans of Foreign Wars. Unfortunately, I arrived in a limousine, and felt very out of place and embarrassed when the old men drew up to the windows in a fury, yelling and waving their fists. I got out and tried to talk to them, but Manny was afraid, and ushered me to a dressing room. After the show, the local police offered me an escort, which I declined (the limousine was bad enough), but they ignored me, and raced us through and out of town with motorcycles fore and aft, sirens blaring. I felt flattered by all the attention, though I knew that the police simply had instructions to make sure that if I was hurt, it was not to be on city property.
I ran into an old boyfriend who looked terrific. He listened to my story of the tumultuous four years since last I’d seen him and took me to dinner and bought me a lovely little jewel hanging on a gold chain.
Back at the Foremans’ house on Riverside Drive, in the middle of the tour, I sat on Clark and Mairi’s grey couch and looked out across the Hudson at the SPRY sign. As though on a whim I took some of Mairi’s stationery and sat down to write a letter to Michael. I felt nothing except that after four years a goodbye should really take up more than a page, but I couldn’t conjure up much more than “Put the dogs in the kennel, give the cats away, pay so-and-so to clean the place up, and pay the rent. I’m not coming back,” though I added a P.S. about his lovely eyes and how wonderful the first three months had been. When I had finished I felt light as silk, and I wrote a letter to Kim. Something about her eyes, too, I think.
I felt as if I’d been hit on the forehead with a big stick called “brand-new.” I met the old boyfriend who had given me the necklace, and we walked around New York in the freezing cold, looking for a nice place to eat dinner, and ended up in the 21 Club.
We spent the night in his apartment. Sometime in the night I moved over to the couch. There was something about a new maleness that I found unbearable. New arms, new legs, new hairs on a new chest. Being courted was like drinking from a well after a long drought. Instant intimacy was like being pushed into the well. I needed air, and went home to the Foremans’ and wrote another letter to Kim.
Soon after, I was in a hotel in Champaign, Illinois, with my mom, brushing my hair at the bathroom mirror, watching how the little necklace jewel sparkled on its chain, and how nicely it rested on the lace yoke of my dress. In fact, I was having a good indulgent stare at the whole picture. All those little muscles just under the surface of the skin which had been tied up in angry little knots for so long had undone themselves like so many pretty ribbons. I was even a little bit pleased with the brown serious face in the mirror, which, if I tilted it back and got the lighting just right, was actually quite romantic and . . . well, not exactly pretty, but “attractive,” and the new word I’d heard so much recently, “charismatic” . . . There was a knock at the door. I opened it and looked smack into the face of a very sickly Michael. I was shocked at his appearance and at how little I felt for him. My response to “We have to talk” was “After the concert,” and “You’re telling me that three thousand people you’ve never met are more important than me?” got a simple “Yes.” I had an attack of nerves just before going onstage, and had to shoo everyone out of the ladies’ room and curl up on the floor. Mom and I ended up laughing, because I knew I was sick from the shock of seeing Michael, and I still couldn’t stop it. After the concert I spent the night with Michael, in his room, trying to say goodbye. He, contrite and apologetic and full of promises and shaky and overtired and smelling of stale cigarettes; me sitting up in bed in my slip, trying to keep my thoughts from flying out the window, fingering my pretty necklace and thinking that it would somehow hurt him less if I just stayed a few more hours.
Back home in California I had no place to live, so I checked into a hotel called the Carmel River Inn, which had cottages. I rounded up my stereo and records, some cooking utensils and clothes.
Kim burst back into my life like a sun ray. I offered her the tiny room in the back of the cabin, and she holed up there like a wild animal, handling her psychiatrist appointments by sleeping through them in her new hideout with her goofy hat down over her eyes. We listened to Fauré’s Requiem, E. Power Biggs playing Bach, Glenn Gould’s recordings of the Goldberg Variations, and my collection of rock and roll hits from the mid-fifties to the present.
“You know what?” I said to my psychiatrist.
“No, what?”
“I’m having daydreams about this girl, Kim.”
“Okay.”
And three days later:
“‘Member those daydreams I told you about? Well, I stopped them, and now I’m having night dreams.”
“Yeah, well you better stop them, too.”
And a week later:
“Well, I stopped the daydreams, and then I stopped the night dreams, and now I think I’m gonna have an affair.”
This was 1962.
“Well,” he said after a while, “don’t hold hands in public.”
There are pools which run deep, bathing pools for ladies only. In those cool and private places we can go undefended. In the quiet and nonresistant waters and on the warm shores beside them we can go and let out a lifelong sigh of relief and know that we are understood at last. We have white underbellies of softness which we expose only to the gentlest touch. Along the shores is an unspoken alliance of “us against the world” which purges resentments innate in us, resentments we have inherited from centuries of myth.
I tried to watch Kim and me from a distance, but distance became harder and harder to maintain when I thought of, or watched, the divine softness of Kim. I was not confused about what I was feeling, which seemed very clear to me, but rather about what to do about what I was feeling. What I wanted to do was lie down with her in a field of daisies and hold her and let her hold me, and then probably kiss. That was as far as my fantasies went. My confusion came mainly from what everybody else would think.
Kim coped with her own confusion by calling up her surfing boyfriend and challenging him to down a six-pack of beer with her when he came to pick her up. She would put on a stack of 45’s and turn up the volume to an unbearable pitch, and bolt back and forth in front of him in our tiny cottage like a colt in a training paddock, forcing him into conversation over the sound of rock and roll, guzzling bottles of beer, and becoming generally hysterical. When she was thoroughly buzzed, she’d say “Okay, c’mon,” and lead the poor, submissive young fellow, who was infatuated with her, out to his car. I was amazed at my agitation when she was with him. They would no doubt have a roll in the hay. I couldn’t understand why she wasted her time with him.
In the afternoon we would lie on the bed barely touching hands, listening to music. Once, while she slept, I lay there next to her, and at the end of Fauré’s Requiem, when it sounds like angels ascending into the heavens, I felt as if raindrops of pure gold were falling all around us, and I cried tears of gratitude.
We bought bottles of Aqua Velva and Bay Rum and drenched ourselves in them. She took long showers behind a locked bathroom door and came out in a huge cloud of steam, clean and sweet and fresh in T-shirt and cutoffs. Inspired by her wardrobe, I began to dress more and more outrageously. One day I showed up in group therapy wearing hiking boots, knee-high socks, cutoffs, several layers of T-shirts under a pair of rainbow-colored suspenders, and a headband. The doctor asked everyone what they thought I looked like. One of them said “artistic,” one said “happy,” one said “like a hippie,” and he said “I think she looks like a crazy person.” They were all right.
One night we kissed, ever so lightly and briefly in the privacy of our little motel cottage. All my puritanical lineage loomed up in my face, wagging a finger of disapproval. I looked into Kim’s eyes.
“Um. Do you know what we’re doing?” I said softly.
“What are you talking about!?”
“Well, I mean, you’re so young and sometimes I feel as if I’m leading you into something over your head—”
“Leading me into what?” She bolted up, and cramming her hat halfway over her eyes, charged toward the door crying out in a heartbreaking voice, “That’s filthy! You’re filthy! I don’t get this, I just don’t get it.”
For the next fifteen minutes she stormed up and down the wooded driveways of the cottages, furiously brushing tears from her eyes and sniffing and shaking her head in disbelief and terror. After two or three “Don’t touch me”s, she consented to be driven to the beach, where we walked up and down in the healing salt air—or rather, she charged and I walked. I would talk to her, and she would bolt away from me, but never farther than a few yards, and by dawn, like the child that she was, she had put the wound out of her mind. In a matter of hours she managed to block it out as if it had never happened, and I knew that if I never referred to it again, neither would she. It took me longer than that to stop feeling like a dirty old lech, but that was entirely my problem.
When Kimmie and I did finally make love, it was superb and utterly natural. It made me wonder what all the fuss was about, both society’s and my own.
I hired an architect to build me a home in the hills of Carmel Valley, and he drew up plans. Kim went everywhere with me, and in public, we still tried to pass as buddies. I bought Kimmie a motorcycle, and we each got a Doberman pinscher. Mine was puny and needed constant care, and I carried her around in a wastebasket on a heating pad, which I would plug in wherever we went. Kim’s was a stud.
When a good friend of mine was killed in a car accident, Kimmie and I hung out at the hospital wondering how his wife, whom we both loved, was really feeling, with a broken clavicle, broken ribs, numerous fractures, and a broken heart. A nurse said she wanted to see me, and we spent the next two weeks going to and from the hospital. Kimmie would dart in and out of the room, and Colleen would laugh at us. I think she was the only friend I could be honest with, even if all the others knew anyway.
Kimmie and I decided to do something special for Colleen, so we started by going to I. Magnin’s to look for a pretty bathrobe, because her hospital gown was depressing. Dressed in our usual costume of cutoffs, T-shirts, headbands, and bare feet, we began plowing through the intimate apparel racks and, at the same moment, spotted a mannequin draped in a turquoise-blue Indian silk floor-length robe embroidered with gold thread.
“That one is two hundred dollars,” said a whiskey tenor from under a seven-inch-high platinum beehive. “Perhaps you’d like to have a look at this rack over here. These are in a little bit more accessible price range.”
“But ma’am, they are all ugly,” I said, “and we like the pretty one that costs two hundred dollars.” And before she gift-wrapped it, I asked her to remove the Magnin’s label because it was too pretentious.
Colleen loved the robe, and she sat up in bed like a queen, talking about how insane everything was, and how she had no idea what to do with her life, and now didn’t even have a car. Kimmie and I glanced at each other, and when we left the hospital, tore off to find a blue car. It was not the most intelligent way to shop, but it was certainly the most fun, and we bought a bright blue Falcon, cash on the line. Letting her three kids in on the secret, we all met at the hospital, urged our heartbroken queen out of bed to take a walk, something the hospital staff had not yet been able to accomplish, and lured her toward the stairs. I remember her floating along in her regal silk, wondering why we had all lost our minds at the same time.
At the top of the stairs, we said, “Okay, now go over to the main door,” and her son folded the keys of the Falcon into her hand. She figured it out looking through the glass entranceway to where the shiny blue thing was parked illegally at the curb. We grabbed her hands and dragged her out and danced around her like jesters and puppies, pointing out the car’s extra features, all of us babbling at once. She hadn’t worn any makeup since her husband had died, and she was so ghostly and quiet and beautiful, laughing at us and crying and shaking her head and thinking, I assumed, as she would for the rest of her life, “I wish Dick were here.”
Two months went by and Kimmie and I rented a house in the Carmel highlands. It was made of glass and owned by Brett Weston, of the family of brilliant photographers, and one of the world’s oldest living teenagers. My house in the valley was being built. Mimi and her writer husband, Richard Farina, moved in close by, and we saw a lot of each other. Kimmie’s motorcycle fell apart and I bought her another one. We had a closet full of T-shirts, cutoffs, sandals, tennis shoes, and boots. My sister argued with Dick that Kimmie and I were just friends. My father and mother weren’t around much, and when they were my father didn’t seem to notice, and my mother couldn’t have cared less. We threw dinner parties, and I took a couple of courses at Monterey Junior College to try to overcome a recurring nightmare I had of being late to class, flunking an important test, and forgetting the combination to my locker.
I bought her an Austin Healey; we became a two-car family. When it came time to tour again, we decided that she would come with me and take a correspondence course to get her high school diploma, and keep my records and receipts. This was during the time period when I wouldn’t fly, and we had marvelous romantic sojourns on long-distance Pullmans, and long wild rides through deserts in rented cars. We would insist on a room with two beds, sleep in one, and then jump up and down on the other to muss it up. I’m sure we fooled no one.
That summer I gave a series of concerts at black colleges in the South. Somewhere on that tour things began to fall apart with Kimmie. When we were home for a break, I was easily distracted by one male or another, especially by a six-foot blond loner who appeared each day at our favorite outdoor breakfast spot, driving a black motorcycle with a sidecar. In the sidecar rode a ferocious-looking Doberman pinscher and a black cat. The very attractive blond never glanced my way, which intrigued me no end, and so one morning as he was putting on his black gloves, preparing to leave, I sauntered up and said it was a gorgeous Doberman he had there, and could I pat him? He mumbled an instruction to the dog, whose name was Satan. Satan, having been instructed to be nice—that is to say, not to kill me—bowed his head sheepishly and allowed me to pat him.
“And the cat?” I inquired.
“That’s Satin. I’m Zack, and I know who you are.”
It was decided that he would take me for a ride and to dinner, and Kimmie responded to the good news by breaking everything in the bedroom.
“And don’t get pregnant!” she spat out en route to the front door, stopping for a moment to lean toward me and deliver the words.
“I won’t, Kim,” I said, feeling the sinking in my chest which signified the beginning of the end of our wild and good times together. She stormed back in the house and said she wanted to drive the Jag. I said no, that I thought the Healey was quite adequate. I heard her shifting gears furiously as she rode up and down the hills, never venturing far from home, and I knew how vulnerable she was, and how careful I wanted to be. And I went to dinner with the mysterious stranger, and shelved any further involvement.
Back on the road we had a fight about her driver’s license. It had been revoked for the final time, for a series of minor traffic violations, and now she wanted me to sign something illegal to get her a New York license, and I said no. She accused me of never doing anything for her, and in response to a slew of insults, I gave her a stinging slap across the face. When she left the room (somewhat triumphant at having made me lose my temper), I thought for a long time. Then I went to her and told her straight out that it was time to end the affair because it had run its course, and if we didn’t do too much damage to each other we could be friends later on. Kim was magnificent: she had great pride, and preferring to take her heartbreak with dignity she packed her things and left at once. I’m not sure where she was headed, but she said to friends, and I gave her some money. We embraced for a long moment in the cold gusty wind on the corner of Ninety-seventh Street and Riverside Drive. I remember her, in a big coat, leaning over the dirty New York sidewalk to retrieve something . . . just a little piece of paper or a ticket that kept escaping a few inches at a time in the wind, until she trapped it under her boot, snatched it up, swiped her nose with her cuff, and was gone.
In 1972 I was talking with a young reporter from a Berkeley paper. He asked me if I was heterosexual. I said simply that if the affair I’d had ten years ago counted, then I was bisexual. I didn’t realize what a catch he had when he left my house and tore back up the coast to print his story. To give him credit, he printed the other matters we’d discussed, and put the sexuality issue in context.
The next morning, Gail, a good friend who had helped me at Gabe’s birth and was staying with me at the time, helping with Gabe after David and I had split up, poked her head into the bedroom and said, “There’s a guy here from the press. Did you tell someone you were a lesbian?”
“Tell him to bugger off,” was my response.
Half an hour later Gail reappeared and said, “There’s one of them in the living room and another one in the hedge.”
I sighed and got dressed. Just my luck to have a woman greet them at the door in her nightgown.
What I said to them then, and what I would say now if asked the same questions, is the following:
I had an affair with a girl when I was twenty-two. It was wonderful. It happened, I assume, after an overdose of unhappiness at the end of an affair with a man, when I had a need for softness and understanding. I assume that the homosexuality within me, which people love to say is in all of us, made itself felt at that time, and saved me from becoming cold and bitter toward everyone. I slowly mended, and since the affair with Kimmie have not had another affair with a woman nor the conscious desire to.
But what of my daydreams? Someone who can dance a waltz, the samba, the swing, and the tango picks me up in a limo and takes me to a great old-fashioned tea dance. I am dressed in my black velvet V-neck evening dress, wearing clip-on rhinestone earrings, a rhinestone choke necklace and my silver dancing shoes. We make intelligent conversation about world affairs, speaking half French and half English (though English will do). Then we dance splendidly for many dances, breaking in between for sips of tea. When the dance is over, he takes me home, and while he tells me about his wife in Paris, I amuse myself looking at the white gloves on the steering wheel and dark eyes of the limousine driver in the rearview mirror.