Evolution
It was 1965, and Rochelle Libbon was eighteen and ripe for independence when she finally left Brooklyn, and home, for college.
The moment she stepped foot on Bennington’s stone and ivy campus, she was ecstatic: Mabel couldn’t monitor her in Vermont. The old, leafy campus felt like a foreign country to her, so distant was its culture from the city’s. But she gradually adapted, and the lush trees and hills and sweet air came to seem as normal as dark tunnels, grit and the ammonia smell of urine on concrete.
Her roommate was a smart black girl with a shaved head, who wore round tortoiseshell glasses and big silver hoop earrings. Her name was Ann Jameson but she called herself Reebah. She was serious and kind and they got along well from the beginning. Reebah started a group called the Bennington Black Brigade, which met every Wednesday night in their room. The purpose was to raise consciousness, and she invited Rochelle to sit in. Why not? Rochelle believed in consciousness-raising as much as the next person; and besides, it was her room. But after the first meeting, she decided her skin was too phosphorescent white for the group’s dark anger, so she signed up with the school literary magazine, The Benningtonian, which also met on Wednesday nights.
The editor was Scott McNeil, a skinny brown-haired Irish boy who would have resembled a Libbon brother if his nose hadn’t been so straight and pointy. He was a lone wolf at a girls’ school that was on the brink of becoming officially co-ed. Actually, there were three other boys enrolled that year, and during the week they had all those girls to themselves. On weekends competition stiffened when boys from Williams College came to call, but the benefits of being a resident male were undisputable. Until Rochelle came along in his senior year, Scott had managed to date around without going steady.
When Rochelle walked into the classroom/office of The Benningtonian — bosomy in a tight black T-shirt and a denim miniskirt squeezing her hips — Scott leaned back in his chair, clasped his hands over his stomach and tilted back his head the better to look down his long nose at her. Rochelle knew enough about boys to see that he was attracted to her. And she knew enough about society to understand that men didn’t take attractive women seriously. She decided he would take her seriously; she would just have to show him how. He had the sharp handsome look of a young Fitzgerald, and Rochelle thought he could be her first real lover. She saw them sitting on the grass reading Shakespeare to each other, and Dickens, and Yeats, and Whitman, and the Brownings. She smiled. He cleared his throat and grimaced. But he was staring at her breasts, so she thought he’d be easy to break down.
She leaned against the scratched wooden desk, behind which he seemed to feel so important, and picked up a copy of the magazine.
“What are you, a weekly?”
He snorted. “Bi-monthly.”
“I can write a column for you,” she told him. She whipped out a manila envelope containing her Rodney Parker clips. Scott rifled through them.
“You can be an editorial assistant,” he said.
“I write.”
“The kids at Bennington don’t need advice.”
“Wanna bet?”
“Forget it.”
“I’m not giving you an advice column, anyway. I’m giving you a narrative that’s gonna set this fucking school on its ear.”
Scott broke into a wide, crooked-toothed smile. It was the fucking. “What exactly do you propose?”
“You’ll see,” she said. “Just leave one page empty and I’ll fill it in.”
Scott put on his black beret and took her out for coffee. The night trolleyed by in heated conversation. He called her dirty names like “liberationist” and “suffragist bitch” and “commie lesbo” and she called him a “fuckfaced chauvinist pig” and “virgin schoolboy” and they laughed their heads off and when the sun rose they were shocked at the hour and hurried to his room and went to bed. Actually, Rochelle was the virgin. She gave herself to Scott with fanfare.
“This was destined,” she said, pulling off her miniskirt and dragging her T-shirt over her head with such enthusiasm that her breasts jiggled wildly.
“Wow!” He watched her from the bed, where he sat, legs crossed, fully dressed.
“Aren’t you —” But before she could say going to get undressed, he leapt up and disrobed. Naked, he was a pale stalk, hairless, and with a teenage boy’s ready-to-go erection.
He folded down the red woolen blanket and starched white sheet on his single bed, and said, “After you, demoiselle.”
Rochelle’s breasts blushed, which amazed Scott, who recited some poetry to them with his face pressed into her cleavage. “Juliet,” he sighed, and kissed her with a tense, flicking tongue. He lost his erection at the crucial moment, and she comforted him. They rocked like old lovers, not first-time kids, lovers who had read more than done. When the sex finally occurred, Scott lost control and Rochelle lost her virginity so fast they hardly know what had hit them.
He rolled over like an exhausted stud. “Ah, that was great.”
“It was wonderful.”
She was thinking that Rochelle McNeil would look pretty good on a novel, and he was distractedly twirling his finger in her pubic hair, when she lifted her leg to scratch an itch and he saw the bloodstain on the sheet.
“A virgin,” he said. “Wow!”
The Benningtonian gained a column called “Brotherly Love,” which Rochelle filled with juiced-up versions of her and Nathan’s correspondence. Nathan liked the idea so much that his letters started sounding more like erotic tracts than notes to his sister Rochelle. But that was okay, the students liked it, and so did editor/poet/lover/friend Scott. Nothing got people’s ear faster than SEX. And there was just about nothing sexier than the erotic meanderings of a lost soul deadbeat dropout post-Beatnik poet to his little sister.
Nathan was fulfilling their parents’ worst fears; it did not look like he’d ever be a doctor. He was living so far on the edge that even Rochelle was afraid he was going to fall off. For some reason that Nathan kept a mystery, he left Berkeley and gave Rochelle a mailing address care of one Tanya Jones in Haight-Ashbury. Now he was sleeping in the back of a bar, not drinking particularly much — Nathan never liked alcohol — but smoking weed galore and living off the pittance he earned selling hand-scrawled poems to passersby in the street. The next thing Rochelle heard, Nathan was burning his draft card in a big bonfire in San Francisco. A few girls threw their bras into the fire and a revolution started. Rochelle would have liked to have joined it, but she was much more comfortable observing and reporting.
She wrote about her brother’s seamy, exciting, illegal, revolutionary California happenings with such verve that, when a straight-A senior packed her knapsack with a few necessities and hitchhiked west, the school tried to stop the column. Scott geared into action and convinced the school’s weekly newspaper, The Lion, to print the headline BENNINGTONIAN INVOKES FIRST AMENDMENT TO BLOCK SCHOOL CENSORSHIP. An article by Scott McNeil detailed the situation. The administration fought. The Lion printed more pro-first amendment articles. A Burlington paper reported on the disturbance. And by the time The Boston Globe ran its piece, the whole East Coast knew about it. The Globe ran a series on the changing ideological climate on American campuses, focusing one section on the Bennington scandal, and interviewing Rochelle whom they termed “the precocious freshman.” The series was syndicated nationally.
Rochelle, at the age of eighteen, glowed in the limelight. She appeared on television in an orange tie-dyed turtleneck and tight faded hiphugger jeans, with her thick brown shoulder-length hair flying like crazed electric wires around her head, and Reebah and her gang picketing vehemently behind her in their psychedelic African dashikis. Mabel called to say, “You’re killing us, Rochelle Libbon!” and hung up — confirming Rochelle’s suspicion that she was on the right track.
Rochelle got a diaphragm and unofficially moved into Scott’s room. She cleaned it up and draped colorful Indian spreads over his battered wooden furniture. She hung a poster of the Brontë sisters and put peacock feathers in a big bronze vase at the foot of the bed. They made love in the missionary position because it hadn’t occurred to either of them yet that, even though it was the only legal position, it wasn’t the only possible one. Living together was a forbidden concept, especially at school, and Reebah covered for her roommate whenever necessary. Scott gave Rochelle his high school ring, which she wore around her neck in the cleavage of her substantial bosom. Together, they rewrote history. At least for a while.
Scott moved “Brotherly Love” to the front of The Benningtonian with an announcement: BENNINGTONIAN DISCOVERS NATIONAL TREASURE: THE NEWLY SYNDICATED BROTHERLY LOVE. Rochelle’s column appeared in the human interest slots of newspapers around the country. The adult world considered it an amusing sample of American juvenilia. But when Nathan was drafted and chose war over jail, “Brotherly Love” took a turn for the serious. Tales of Vietnam transformed the frolicking mood of the column to one of fearful, confused questioning. Rochelle used her blunt, sexy style to tell Nathan’s stories of sudden fireworks on dark infested rivers, of bodies oozing blood, of bayonet-stuffed babies and raped mothers and ravaged villages and American boys with pricks in their arms and, instead of red stripes and white stars in their eyes, death.
Leo was excluded from the draft for homosexuality. He was perplexed as to how the Army could tell. He lived alone in a studio apartment on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, and worked as a paralegal in a midtown law firm. Granted, he spent his spare time sculpting miniature male lovers in clay; but no one knew, not even Rochelle or Nathan. He dressed conservatively and had a slim mustache. From time to time he took a woman out to dinner. He had no close male friends. But that’s what the Army said — homosexual — and the official tag challenged more than insulted him.
Robby was also exempted from the service, because he was the married father of twin daughters — Leslie and Lisa — and also because he had been appointed Associate Director of Psychiatry at Stanford University.
Earl was single, and though he hadn’t finished his medical degree, seven months after Nathan was drafted, he decided he had no good reason to stay at home and watch. But before enlisting he told Norman, who offered a parental, if distracted, pat on the back. Tall strong eager Earl Libbon made it through boot camp with honors and went to Vietnam to fight. And he fought. And after three weeks, there was an accident, and a veil of darkness fell as if someone had snapped off the light.
The news came on a Tuesday evening. Rochelle and Scott were studying in the room they shared, when there was a knock on the door. Scott jumped up to answer it.
It was Reebah, looking anxious. “Your dad called.”
“Is something wrong?” Rochelle pushed her book aside and sat up on the bed.
“He said it was an emergency. He said to call as soon as you could.”
Rochelle went to the pay phone in the hallway and called home collect. Mabel answered and responded to her daughter’s voice with a moan of despair. There was a long pause before her father came on the line. “Rock, I’m sorry.”
“What happened? Mom’s hysterical.”
“Honey, it’s Earl. He fell on a land mine. We had a visit from the Army this afternoon.” Norman’s voice was heavy with sorrow.
“You mean he’s dead? Earl’s dead?”
In the background, she heard her mother wail, “Why my Earl? Why him and not —”
“No!” Rochelle slammed down the receiver. Scott and Reebah were hovering nearby. When Rochelle began to slump, they caught her and brought her back to the room.
Earl’s sudden death put a halt to time, which up until then had been flying forward. Every moment had been filled with energetic purpose. But now, everything seemed to stop. Earl’s death ended Earl, an unthinkable concept, yet absolute. He was gone. After that, every casualty reported in the news felt personal to Rochelle — she wasn’t alone. Accumulated, all the deaths stunned the American consciousness, glacially shifting the country’s perception of patriotism. Rochelle’s anger exploded into heightened awareness and action — and fear for Nathan, who was still over there.
When she showed up for Earl’s funeral in Brooklyn in a purple and yellow shirtdress, cradling a bouquet of white roses, her protest was misunderstood. Mabel, dressed appropriately in black, snapped, “Show some respect for the dead!” Norman tried to calm his wife with a hand on her shoulder. She jerked away — forward, toward Rochelle — and said, “Do you think this whole world revolves around you?”
“No, Mom, I don’t. I miss Earl. I won’t bury him. I won’t forget him. He shouldn’t have died.”
“But he is dead. He is dead.” Mabel collapsed into Robby’s and Natalie’s arms, and wept inconsolably for her obliterated son.
Leo stood solemnly with Rochelle, tears streaming down their faces. Kneeling, they stuck the roses one by one into the fresh brown earth of Earl’s grave. Norman joined them, and Rochelle gave him the last flower, which he planted with his tired red-rimmed eyes full of tears.
Nathan wrote to Rochelle with the crazy good news that he had had a half-Vietnamese son, called Sun, with a sweet South Vietnamese woman called Le Ly. Rochelle wrote up the news, but before it had a chance to go to press she received the next letter. A Vietcong soldier had buried Sun alive. In her passion, Le Ly killed the soldier by first castrating him with a pair of garden shears and then slowly slicing him down the middle. She was immediately captured and taken by the other side as a prisoner of war. Nathan was sure she was dead, or if not dead, destroyed. Rochelle was shattered by Nathan’s news. She pulled the article; she couldn’t bring herself to expose that much reality. Nathan! He wrote to her, “Oh marry me sister marry me!”
And then his letters stopped coming.
The country was contrite over Nathan Libbon’s silence. He had come to represent the unknown soldier, everybody’s boy, the American son. Rochelle received hundreds of letters asking for news of her brother. She created a form response explaining that he had been sent farther east on a secret mission and would write as soon as he could.
Nathan disappeared in the secret mission of his loster-than-ever soul, and Rochelle joined the antiwar movement, writing and shouting and marching as if her life depended on it — or Nathan’s. It was already too much to have lost Earl to the war, but if there was any chance of bringing Nathan home alive, she had to try. She was a girl, woman, sister driven by love. Rochelle found herself searching for Nathan in the distant pictures on the television screen, which was a pageant of violence and suffering. She knew he could be dead. Readers wrote to ask her why we were in the war. She published an article titled “I Don’t Know!” which began, “It seems that our capacity for violence has caused a national amnesia. We must try to remember. We must STOP THE WAR.”
Too much had happened to remain unchanged. The whole country was erupting in anger, needing revolution, demanding peacelovehappiness, the right to vote, equal pay. Without Nathan’s tales of war to funnel into her column, “Brotherly Love” broadened to take on the world. Rochelle spoke her mind, guided by her readers’ reactions. Her columns were not so much informed by fact as passion. She was almost twenty, a feminist, a liberal, a tie-dyed shouting writing antiwar activist. She felt the glow of power like a sun trapped in her rib cage, boiling her up, pushing her out. She had a voice, and it was loud, and she believed it was her duty to use it.
In light of all this, Scott’s literary aspirations began to seem small. His plan was to spend two years in Iowa, getting his graduate degree at the University’s Writing Workshop, then try for a job at The New Yorker. He wanted her to apply to the Workshop when her time came; he said he’d wait for her in Iowa. But she didn’t want to dicker around with highbrow lit magazines; she wanted to converse directly with the masses.
The moment the dean moved Scott’s black tassel from right to left, Rochelle decided it was over. She sat in the audience on the sunny lawn, hot and bored along with all the other family and friends of the graduates. Scott’s parents were somewhere here, and she was supposed to meet them after the ceremony, but she decided to leave instead. When people stood to applaud, Rochelle, camouflaged in her white cotton springtime dress and flat white shoes, unknitted herself from the crowd. She vowed to write him an epic poem in lieu of saying goodbye.
Reebah had gone to Georgia to work in the civil rights movement. Their room was empty but for the one suitcase Rochelle had packed to tide her over for a few days before going home; most of her things had been sent ahead of her. The plan had been that she would drive to New York with Scott and his parents later that afternoon, and spend a few days with them before he left for his summer job in Iowa. But she felt a hollowness inside, an echo of loneliness, a strange unspecified wanting; and her urge was to search. She wasn’t sure for what, exactly; maybe for an explanation, or maybe for Nathan, or maybe just for some adventure. She definitely didn’t want to go home, and in a flash, as she owned up to her true feelings, she decided to take a trip instead. She had her passport with her, and plenty of cash left from her columns, and if she hurried she could still make the bank in town. There had been talk of some pretty wild things happening in a mountain of caves on Crete, and she decided that Greece would be as good a place to go as any.
She called the consulate to see if she needed a visa; she didn’t. Then she booked herself onto a flight from Burlington to Logan airport in Boston, with a connection to a flight leaving for Athens. There were only two seats left in economy class, and she reserved one. She would say she was a writer if anyone asked, and that she came from Manhattan, and was twenty-five years old (not almost twenty) and had been divorced.
She teased her hair, put on some light pink lipstick and, still in the white dress, headed to town by cab.
She had made small trips on her own before, but never such a long one. She had had no idea the immensity of anxiety that was possible so high and fast in the air. Bright clouds and black sky, then straight into a pink and purple sunrise and the distant uneven grid of Europe below. She squeezed shut her eyes and pressed back into her seat.
The man next to her leaned over and said, “Would you like a drink?”
She was so nervous, she hadn’t taken a really good look at him. Now she did. He was a muscular man in khaki shorts and a red shirt. His arms and legs were covered with curly black hair. The thick black hair on his head was straight and wiry and swirled into an ecstatic cowlick. His eyes were smallish, alert, bright blue. Straddled between his squarish leather-sandaled feet was a black camera bag.
“I’ll take a Tequila Sunrise,” she said.
He waved for the stewardess and ordered the same for himself.
“On vacation?” he asked.
She looked him straight in the eye, and said, “No, I’m here to do a story on some caves.”
“The caves of Matala? That’s where I’m headed, on assignment for Life. You?”
She gathered her forces and said, “UPI.”
“Ah, syndication. I’ve thought of working for the wire, but this thing fell into my lap.” He lowered his table for the drinks. “I’m Tad Crawford.”
“Tad?”
He looked into his pinkish orange drink. “Thaddeus.”
“Funny name.” She laughed. “I’m Rochelle Libbon.” And now he laughed. But somehow she didn’t think it was so funny.
By the time the plane taxied into Athens, in the blazing early afternoon, Rochelle was drunk. Having decided to spend the night in Athens and travel together to Matala the next day, Tad maneuvered Rochelle to the old quarter of the city at the foot of the Parthenon. He parked her at a cafe, ordered her a black coffee, and went looking for a hotel.
They ended up in the Hotel Phadre, in a hot stuffy room with a balcony overlooking a small park filled with flowers and mismatched decorative pillars, reminders of the city’s antiquity. The inside of the room was sparsely furnished and vaguely dirty. Tad sat on one of the twin beds. Rochelle lay down on the other and groaned.
“How old did you say you were?” he asked.
“Twenty-five. I wish we had a better room.”
“Double bed.”
“Clean. Are you broke or something?”
“Rochelle Libbon!” His face lit up. “Wait a minute, I’ve read your stuff.” And he moved to her bed and touched her shoulder. “What ever happened to your brother, anyway?”
“I’ve got to get out of this dress.” She rolled over and sat. “Unzip it, please.”
As the zipper came down, one strong warm hand slid around to her breast.
“How old are you?” she asked.
“Twenty-nine.”
“I think you’re older.”
“I think you’re younger.”
His body was nothing like Scott’s. Tad was muscular, tight, experienced. Most of his body was covered with soft black hair. She realized now that her relationship with Scott had been lustless; she knew this because suddenly she felt charged with sheer sexual desire, and it was a new feeling. Just as Tad was about to roll onto her, she pushed him aside and dashed to the bathroom with her diaphragm. It took a few minutes to insert it correctly. When she came out, striding naked across the room, he snapped her picture repeatedly.
“Hey, why did you do that?” Despite her complaints, though, the attention thrilled her. She lay on one of the beds and gazed into his lens as he continued to shoot.
Matala was three hours from Iraklion in a rented car. Tad drove like a lunatic, speeding along deserted roads, through fields of olive trees, rushing up steep single-lane mountain roads and racing down. There were no barriers on the curvy roads, just a sheer drop down through blue sky into green ocean. Goats perched fearlessly on rocks that jutted out from the edges.
The village of Matala was simple and quiet, with a few small hotels and lantern-lit tavernas off the beach. Nude sunbathers were bronzed from head to toe. Whitewashed buildings were vined with red flowers and gardens were wild with purple and yellow. Rochelle found the place enchanting, and Tad seemed to fine her enchanting, so she figured she’d stick with him until she got bored or left Greece, whichever came first. Anyway, a woman was better off traveling with a man... at least that was what Mabel had always said. They booked themselves into Nikos Hotel, where they got a large clean room with a double bed and a good stiff breeze. Then they went to find the caves.
Facing the ocean, to the right of the beach, was a mountainside pocked with hundreds of caves like gaping toothless mouths. Tad, strung with cameras, navigated them up the craggy mountainside to the first tier of caves. Rochelle was right behind him, in her red and white polka dot bathing suit top and frayed cutoffs.
As he shot the exterior, she went inside, and was startled to find someone living there. Sitting on a stone cot carved into the wall of the cave was a skinny man with hair to his waist and a long grizzly beard. He was wearing a necklace of dried seeds, his eyes were closed, and he was humming.
“There’s someone in there!”
Tad went in and minutes later emerged with a smile. “The guy’s an American! He told me there are people living in a lot of the caves. Let’s go meet them. Where’s your pad? Aren’t you working?”
“I work from memory. My stuff’s on the creative side.”
They climbed from tier to tier, calling into caves and talking to whomever was willing. In one cave lived a family of three: a man and a woman wearing dirty white cotton robes, both with long hair, and a tiny naked baby with a multicolor braided headband on her fuzzy head. He had been a salesman and she a housewife, and they had come to Matala to visit and never left. Everyone had a story. Many were Americans who had fled the war.
Rochelle and Tad were so excited about the caves that when they got back down to the beach they stripped and ran into the water. They came together and made love right there, neck-deep in ocean. After, she stretched naked on the sand to dry in the hot sun. Her mind had begun to drift, when she heard the familiar clickclickclick and opened her eyes to find Tad leaning over her with his camera.
He wanted to take pictures of them in bed together, he said; and though Rochelle felt uneasy about it, she refused to shrink from an experience. So they returned to the room and he arranged his Leica camera on a tripod at the foot of the bed. He ran a long wire with a little plunger on the end, to Rochelle.
“Here,” he said, “press the release at the right moment.”
She held the release in her hand, terrified. She didn’t know when the right moment was. And this time, he frightened her; he was too intense, somehow it was not her he was about to have sex with, but anyone. She didn’t know how to say no to him, lying in bed naked with the camera pointed between her legs, so she played along like a disenfranchised body. He straddled her and plunged in, turned her around, slid under her so she could ride him, whispering “Click, now, now,” and exploding into her and resting in a sweat and then starting again.
Tad Crawford, she decided, was not for her. So she packed before sunrise, left him sleeping alone in bed, and took the rental car back to Iraklion.
She arrived in New York in the evening. When she walked into the Columbia Heights house, four days late, Norman looked up from the newspaper and said, “There you are! We expected you’d want to spend a few extra days with your friend, but honey, next time please call.” Mabel, however, was not as cool as Norman; she was icy, and wouldn’t speak to her daughter for hours. Rochelle was happy to be left alone. She had scared herself by running to Greece like that, and ending up in bed with a pornographer, and then running, of all places, home.
When Rochelle returned to school in the fall, she had a single room and papered the walls and ceiling with tin foil. She melted candles onto every level surface, lit them, took out a pad and a pen and wrote. Not the column, though; this time, she put her pen to fiction. In the spirit of Thomas Wolfe, she wrote of a poetic young man in search of past, present and future. The time was never specified, and the hero contemplated instead of lived and in the end was an antihero who had undone himself by not doing anything. She eked the pages out slowly, and by early spring had an impressively long manuscript in need of typing.
When she arrived home for the summer, she first showed Norman and Mabel her year-end academic reports, all excellent, then took Norman aside and showed him the manuscript. She assured him of its brilliance, and without reading it he concurred. She said she was going to get it published, and he offered to have it professionally typed for her. With a hug and kiss and “Thanks, Dad!” Poetsong was readied for submission.
Rochelle personally escorted the bulky manuscript to the esteemed editorial-ship at Scribner’s. She didn’t know exactly who she was looking for, but she’d know when she found him. She assumed it would be a man. Wearing a tight black turtleneck, an orange and green herringbone miniskirt and thigh-high boots, her hair wound into a knot at the back of her neck, she entered the Scribner’s bookshop, asked a saleswoman for Editorial and was directed to a staircase at the back of the store. The saleswoman grinned at the busty girl with the conspicuous manuscript; she had seen this breed before. Rochelle, too young and arrogant to recognize her own stereotype, assumed herself to be an original, and without thanking the saleswoman she marched away.
At the top of the stairs was an elevator, which she took to the fifth floor. The door opened onto a green-carpeted reception area with an unattended desk. She turned down a long hallway lined with bookcases on one side and glass walls partitioning offices on the other. A few unoccupied offices along, she found a clean-cut man of about thirty bent over a manuscript. He wore a pair of round wire-rimmed glasses low on the bridge of his nose. His door was halfway open. Just as she was about to knock, his eyes wandered to her, then glanced at his wristwatch.
“Come in,” he said.
Whom had he been expecting? She didn’t care. She smiled, walked in, sat down, crossed her legs and rested the manuscript on her bare thigh.
He leaned over his desk and shook her hand, which she extended, without reaching, forcing him to lean even farther. An expression of perturbance crossed his face, as he said, “Sam Roderick. And you are... I’m sorry, I’m no good with names.”
“Rochelle Libbon.”
His eyebrows scrunched; clearly the name rang no bells at all. Seated, he leaned back, steepled his fingers, gazed upon her, waited. Then: “What’s your experience?”
So he thought she had come for a job. She gave him a minute to catch her smile, really absorb it, before saying, “Here.” She heaved Poetsong onto his desk.
“I don’t understand.”
Rochelle leaned forward, grouping her breasts into one impressive mound, and said, “It’s a novel. I wrote it.”
His eyes flickered from her breasts to the manuscript, and he ahh-ed recognition of what had just happened. At that moment, a smartly dressed young woman appeared in the doorway and introduced herself as “Sue Harrison, here to interview for the assistant’s position.”
Sam Roderick nodded. He turned to Rochelle and said, “Are you by any chance —?”
“No,” she said, “I’m strictly a writer. Will you read it? My phone number’s on the cover page.”
“Yes, of course. Thanks for dropping it by.”
Three weeks later she gave up waiting to hear from him and called his office. He said he had just “taken a look at it” and before he had a chance to say anything else, she convinced him to meet with her again in his office. They made an appointment for Friday at five o’clock.
After lunch on Friday, Rochelle put on her jeans and a T-shirt, told Mabel that she was going to meet a friend in Central Park (thus the big shoulder bag, “For a picnic,” she explained), and made a beeline for Bonwits. She bought herself a tight black minidress, black fishnet stockings and black sandals with little pointy heels. She stashed her old clothes in the shoulder bag, and proceeded to Scribner’s.
Friday at nearly five on Fifth Avenue was a crazed rush, with masses of people pressing downtown and masses pressing uptown. Rochelle strolled. It was a gorgeous day and she was on her way to triumph. She felt good, great, beautiful, and knew she was exuding it, because so many of the men who passed took a second look. She knew, at the age of twenty-one in her little black dress and fishnets, that she had it. The thing. The natural aura of sex. She swished through the hazy late afternoon, cool and slow, enjoying every minute. She was sure this must have been some kind of passage: literary or female, she had yet to discover.
On Friday afternoons, publishing slowed to a halt in the middle of the day, and most of the editorial staff at Scribner’s had already left. But Sam Roderick’s light was on; she could see it shining into the hall. She liked that. He was waiting — for her.
She knocked on the door, and asked, “Am I late?”
Hunched over a manuscript, he looked up suddenly, as if surprised to see her. But he said, “No,” casually, and smiled. “You look very nice. Have a seat.”
Rochelle sat across from the desk. She smiled and crossed her legs, letting her hem slip up her thigh.
“I’ve read Poetsong.”
Here it came, the yes it’s a masterpiece and let’s publish it immediately. He cleared his throat, hesitating. “Actually, it’s been a long week. Can we talk about this over a drink?”
“Okay.” She stood.
He opened his desk drawer and withdrew a quart of whiskey.
She sat down again.
“I only have one glass, unfortunately.” He poured an inch of whiskey into the glass and handed it to her. “Excuse me,” he said, and took a swig directly from the bottle.
“I liked Jack in Poetsong.” He peered at her thoughtfully and she noticed the tiny wrinkles just blooming around his brown eyes. “There’s an awful lot that’s good in that novel.” He took another swig.
Rochelle sipped her whiskey and it burned all the way down her throat into her stomach. She took another sip, this one bigger.
“So — you liked it?”
“Let me just ask you something, if you don’t mind.”
“Ask away.”
He cleared his throat and straightened his back. “Would you by any chance be interested in going out with me?”
“I don’t know. Maybe. Would you by any chance want to publish my novel?”
“I want to want to.” His back slumped and he forced a smile, showing his age. Older than thirty, she now thought. Maybe even forty.
“Meaning?”
He capped the whiskey bottle and stowed it back in the drawer. Then he reached over to click off his desk lamp, and stood up. “To be honest, Miss Lib-bon, I’m already overcommitted. My list is full for the next two years. I’m just not in a position to take on another book.”
BULLSHIT was what Rochelle titled her comeback article in The Benningtonian. After seventeen more rejections of Poetsong by publishing houses, she had returned to her old beat, only older now and tougher and louder. She realized where she had gone wrong: she was a woman and had written about a man. What did she know about anything but herself? So she wrote out her raw thoughts and printed them. The syndication wire picked her up again. Vietnam raged and America boiled and finally, finally Nathan wrote to her.
Well, actually, he drew. There were no words on the page, just a picture of a bomb exploding on a tropical horizon. She knew it was from him, not just because of the postmark, but because she recognized the lines, the unsteady hand that drew them. During the course of the next two years, through and beyond her graduation (with honors), she received Nathan’s drawings and told no one. Some were pencil sketches but a few were in full color. Shattered earth. An exploding sun. A man made entirely of intertwined blue veins with a red missile for a head.