Although I’d fucked before, I had my first affair in the summer of 1950, when I was a sophomore at USC. I was twenty, contracted double pneumonia, and after ignoring it for days was at last taken by ambulance to the Queen of Angels Hospital. For seventy-two hours I recall hardly anything but being wakened every three hours to receive a shot in the buttocks, after which I’d roll over and go back into the feverish chatter that had become more or less my condition. When finally I began coming out of it—and I remember having to be told where I was and how long I’d been there—I struck the acquaintance of the nurse on the grave yard shift who gave me my penicillin at midnight, three and six a.m. Her name was Gretchen, she was thirty and married to a top sergeant in the First Marine Division, then fighting in Korea.
I do not know how it started with Gretchen and me. I had been at the brink of the abyss, so to speak, I owned that peculiar and exaggerated affection for life people acquire having just looked into a tear in the heavens and seen nothing, nothing at all, and in brimming desperate gratitude to everything and everybody on earth my hands started going unctuously out to Gretchen and I touched her on the hands and on the wrists and on the forearms and on the hips and on the waist—there was on my part this terrifying need to make human contact and I felt myself as helpless and cuddly as a bunny rabbit. Presently Gretchen and I were kissing. This led to a more refined and passionate kissing. One night Gretchen grew alarmed at the immediacy of my state and obliged me with a rather bored hand job. From that night on, without any discussion on the matter whatever, Gretchen began obliging me with fellatio, on some nights having to relieve me on the occasions of all three of her penicillin ministrations.
On the day I was discharged from the hospital, Gretchen began a week’s vacation at her beach house, a quaint little dump on stilts at Malibu, and she asked me to come along, rest up, and make sure I was okay before re turning to classes. She was going to use the week trying to rent the beach house, getting her clothes in shape, and packing. She had taken a job at the Tripler Army Hospital in Honolulu, and though she would still be thousands of miles from her Marine sergeant—she called him Dicky—she drew comfort from knowing she’d be at least that much closer to him and I recall her constantly dreaming aloud of being reunited with Dicky in idyllic Hawaii when finally he came back from Korea.
As I say, I’d fucked before but my partners had in variably been my age and as inexperienced and as inept as I and hence neither the girl nor I had anything against which to measure the worth of our performances. Worse, this was at the very top of that monstrously oppressive decade that for some reason has now become sentimentalized into The Quaint Fifties, and I remember that all my relations with girls up until this point had been furtive, deceitful, disappointing and shoddy. It goes without saying that Gretchen was different. Since she was nineteen and still a student nurse, she’d been married to her Marine and had had all sorts of other men besides, affairs Dicky condoned when he was off on his various tours of duty. Dicky’s only real condition was that he not be subjected to the details.
“Dicky said I could fuck anybody I want so long as the guy wasn’t military and so long as I spared him the mush.”
To say that in 1950, at twenty, I wasn’t shocked— utterly so—by the worldliness of Gretchen and Dicky’s connubial arrangements would be so much nonsense, but as it was I who was now installed in that rickety stilted beach house and the legatee of Dicky’s sophistication, copulating with the wonderful impunity of knowing Gretchen had been ordered by good old wordly and heroic Dicky not to bother him with anything as mundane as my name— especially my name!—I couldn’t help accepting their relationship as an eminently sensible and fair one and for a week Gretchen and I took her dresses to the cleaners, her skivvies to the laundromat, interviewed people who wanted to rent the beach house, lay on the sand, ate, slept, showered, and copulated. It was the first time I’d been to bed with a Woman, with a capital W, and as I badly needed assurance of my manhood and prowess and as Gretchen was wonderfully kind and sexually acute and loved the language of fucking—as opposed to the endearments of what we had in that long-ago time straight-facedly called love— she never ceased giving me that assurance.
To my initial horror, which I soon overcame and easily fell into the deliciously obscene and forbidden language of sex, Gretchen, doubtless having received her training at the hands of a Marine sergeant, said things like, “Come back to the beach house and fuck my face,” or, “Forget about cooking those fucking hamburgers now; get into this bed and diddle my ass off.” Astride Gretchen, breathing like only a twenty-year-old still in the drooling masturbatory state and trying to cleanse himself of his pus-infested pimples can breathe, which is to say like a wounded boar, uh, uh, uh, uh, among this awful, adolescent and embarrassing bleating I whistled out frightfully breathless things like “Am I okay?” and “Am I all right?” and the wise and wonderful Gretchen assured me I had the most marvelous, unique, adorable prick in Christendom and was besides the greatest—oh, hyperbolically!—she’d ever had.
Alas. On the last night Gretchen and I spent together we had a long earnest talk and Gretchen set me straight not only as to her generous white lie about my bacchanalian expertise but to all sorts of other sexual matters from which Dong and Mums had sheltered me. Cautioning me not to take what she had to say wrongly, least of all personally, Gretchen assured me that what she had to tell me would in time future hold me in good stead or post position. She then proceeded to tell me how childlike every man she’d ever had was in his asinine need invariably to seek verbal affidavits as to his genius in bed and how astonishingly little he understood that though atmosphere, penis size, and performance all counted for something to a woman, compared with her need to be attracted to her partner all these things fell into some twilighted area out yonder there in that land bordering on indifference.
Gretchen said that as a fifteen-year-old high school sophomore back in Grand Rapids, Michigan, she had lived next-door to the star senior fullback. Because his mother had made him do so out of courtesy, he had at every high school dance asked her to dance once and once only, and that though the jock had been as indifferent to her as if she’d been an ugly-bugly pain-in-the-ass cousin, Gretchen’s attraction to him had been so overwhelming that that single dance had never failed to induce in her such profoundly embarrassing orgasms she eventually began lining her panties with toilet paper before even starting out for the dance.
“Let me tell you something, Exley. My relationship with Dicky is such that he doesn’t even have to touch me. Say, if I go down on him? He comes, I come. Sometimes repeatedly. That’s attraction!”
I did not say, “Carrying your thesis to its logical conclusion, Miss Gretchen, I’d guess that if you just thought long enough and hard enough about such activity the results would be the same” because at twenty I did not preface my remarks with portentousness like “carrying your thesis to its logical conclusion.” Even so, in my awkwardly ignorant way I did manage to make my way through to this point.
“But of course, Exley! You’re marvelous! Not only could I do so, I have done so. Many times!” Gretchen paused. Her voice took on an air of furtiveness. “Can I tell you something awful? The first three days you were out here with me, I didn’t make love to you, I made love to Dicky. You know what changed all that? It was the day we did all the errands getting ready for my trip, how you did three baskets of laundry for me while I drove to the airport for my ticket, made arrangements to sell my car, and picked up my dry cleaning and all. I mean, when we got home and I saw how neatly you’d folded up everything and all, I started thinking what a douche bag I was for using you in this way and from that moment on I made love to you, not him. I mean, if a guy is nice enough to wash your crumby bloomers for you, you ought to be generous enough to fuck him and not somebody else. You know what I mean, Exley? Let’s face it, Errol Flynn you’re not, Exley. But that doesn’t mean a goddam thing to a woman. You know what I’m telling you, Exley?”
 
; I have put all this down by way of saying that if at twelve or thirteen, up in the cow country of Watertown, I had from the suave bemuscled Dong learned all about the button or the man in the boat and how to make a woman go into a death coma and evacuate her bowels, and if at twenty I had had that week with Gretchen (and I here must add not only that I wept profusely on putting Gretchen on the plane to Oahu and her Dicky, but that in many ways my quarter of a century of life since that day had been a pilgrimage in search of some other, some unattached, some Dickyless Gretchen) and been the heir of her earthy wisdom, I did not twenty-five years after the fact need to be told by Masters and Johnson or the ladies of the movement the clitoral function or that a big prick—least of all my rather sorry specimen—was not in the least necessary to their well-being.
If Gretchen had given me nothing else, I was ready to concede a woman the right to employ the pharmaceutical equipage of the good doctors, to take into herself a huge rubberized and pimpled dildo strapped to the crotch of a broad-shouldered bull dyke, to put her pet Great Dane Hamlet to work if that’s what turned her on, or, like Gretchen herself, simply to define mentally the limits of her sexual paradise and by steadily envisioning that Elysium to think herself through to shuddering orgasms. As long as she did not try to tell me she was into something special, as long as she would allow Gretchen and me the right to wet our pants at someone’s being kind enough to do our laundry for us, I was buying everything she was telling me.
In my reading of Friedan, Millett, Greer, et al., I’d spent ninety percent of my time nodding my head in a vigorous accord that I was nothing less than the chauvinist pig and the scum to whom and to which they made constant and biting reference. Behind me someplace out there in the republic are two ex-wives—and I take this occasion to salute them both wherever they are. Hi, Fran! Hi, Nan! How’s it goin’?—who had left me for many of the reasons these women had so corrosively articulated and for that reason I bought not only the obvious, boring and neo-proletarian tenets like equal pay for equal work and state-sponsored day-care centers for the children of working mothers but even the trickier mental areas like a woman’s right to abort herself any bloody time she chose or her right to eliminate her female function utterly by having her fetus nourished in a bell jar. At least women were thinking in a grandly bold and adventurous way, and though I was sure it was this kind of boldness that sent men to an early grave, I’d be damned if I’d deny a woman the right to conquer or be vanquished on the epic scale, whether she croaked in the process or not.
No, though I’d have to approach Ms. Steinem as though I really cared a shit about the movement, I was in fact so in accord with her that I did not see any hope of getting a middlingly interesting dialogue going on a subject that was not only as obvious as dammit to Gloria but equally as obvious to me. What I wanted from Ms. Steinem was something quite else. We had as I say both been born to the Depression, had gone through the public school system under what one used to call straitened circumstances, had managed to fake our way through to something resembling a “higher education” and without any evidence to the contrary I stood prepared to bet that ninety-nine point nine percent of our contemporaries who had managed to escape similar milieus had in reaction to those dark uncomfortable beginnings ended up in Old Greenwich, a member of the Round Hill Club, and a devotee of P.T.A. meetings. Well, Steinem had not, and I had not, and other than the obviously metaphorical comparisons of female with male, beauty with beast, dutifulness with hedonism, courage with cravenliness, sobriety with drunkenness, and so forth, and so forth, I thought if I could look right through that lovely placid mask and understand why Steinem so cared—and as I’ve indicated it made no difference to me whether her cause was Women’s Liberation or the Women’s Christian Temperance Union, only that she cared—I might then intro duce her into the pile of desolation I called Pages from a Cold Island, stacked now as neatly as ever on the dementedly waxed thirty-two-by eighty-inch door, and thereby lift the pages into those heady regions I felt worthy of offering to my peers.
In Newsweek, Dick Boeth had written that Gloria gave freely of her time to the disaffected women of the republic. He said she was scrupulous about answering her mail and had even been known to take women’s long distance calls and to those lonely grief-wrought souls patiently dispense advice over the wires. Dick did not say what kind of advice Gloria was dispensing. In her classic The Female Eunuch, Ms. Germaine Greer had written that one of a woman’s profoundest fears was of discovering she had a twat as big as a horse collar, and I thought that if Gloria were accessible enough to take the time from her busy schedule to assure a lady that this did not make her a “bad person”—that is, if Gloria were all that approachable —I’d just call her up and cry, “Gloria, baby! Fat Freddy Exley here! Listen, O magnificent woman, never mind that nasty Leonard Levitt in Esquire, or even my brilliant acquaintance Dick Boeth in Newsweek, I’m going to put you in a book, yeah, real hardcovers, six ninety-five, the whole smear! You with me—you incredible creature from the ethereal regions?”
If Ms. Gloria Steinem were approachable, she did not prove to be so with me. It did not of course hurt or surprise that she’d never heard of me. Aside from some generous gestures extended by my peers, and a certain limited and somewhat dopey cult following among university students, my royalty statements and present indebtedness told me more than I wanted to know about my following. Still, I could not guess I would be approaching Elizabeth Taylor Burton and in fact honestly believe I could have been through to Mrs. Burton quicker than I got through to Gloria. In my days as a publicist I’d once set out to ask John Wayne a favor regarding a charity we were promoting and in which we’d heard he was interested. Beginning without even a telephone number for him, I was through to him in seventeen minutes (I timed it) and found myself batting the breeze with the Big Duke himself. “Can’t help yuh out with a personal appearance, kid, but if yuh give my little gal here your address, I’ll see yuh get yuhself a check.”
The girls around Gloria in the offices of Ms. were a most formidably haughty crew and said things on the phone like what-is-it-you-want-with-Ms.-Steinem? in a lofty tone that suggested who-are-you-that-you-have-the-audacityto-approach-Queen-Gloria-directly? I of course refused to tell any lackey what I wanted with Ms. Steinem. It was going to be difficult enough explaining to Ms. Steinem what I wanted, I’d be damned if I’d risk an as yet unarticulated notion being further garbled in translation, and on follow-up calls I continued to be informed by the ladies that I’d have to put what I wanted in writing. I was assured that my note would be brought to the attention of the Empress. The girls felt confident that Gloria might even get back to me. Still I refused to put anything on paper, still I continued to make a pest of myself. On my fourth call over a period of days the palace guardess rose up in indignation and went right for my balls. She said that Ms. Steinem had never heard of me, could not imagine what I wanted with her, and unless I complied with her wishes and did as I was told there was not a prayer of our getting together. By this, the last call, I’d become so bored and amused with the whole preposterous charade that when the girl came out with her half-whining, half-nasty but-what-is-it-you-want-with-Ms.-Steinem? I came within a hair’s breadth of employing the vernacular of that long-ago darling Gretchen.
“Oh, I don’t know, my dear. I haven’t as yet decided what I want with Ms. Steinem. It may be as simple as that I’ll want to fuck her face for her.”
On hanging up, I drank a couple more vodkas, then abruptly thought of a new tack. It occurred to me that I knew two or three writers in New York who knew Steinem, if not well at least well enough to act as intermediaries. I called the first guy collect. He was rich and famous, and whenever I know a writer to whom providence has been gentler than it has to me, I always call collect. This particular guy, a prince, never even waits until he learns who’s calling. As soon as the operator identifies the call as a collect one—”Mr. So and so? Would you accept a collect call from …”—he issues a heartfelt gro
an, mumbles an irate shee-it, and to the blameless operator says, “Yeah, I’ll take the goddam thing. It’s either that fucking Exley or that fucking Cecil.” Although I see the guy whenever I’m in the city, and though most of the time I am of course fully cognizant of who that fucking Exley is, I keep forgetting to ask the rich and famous writer who that apparently equally impoverished fucking Cecil is. My friend wasn’t home, and to my red-faced embarrassment his wife accepted the call.
“If that’s that”—that that had rather a bite to it— “Exley, I’ll take the damn thing myself.”
We exchanged pleasantries, threw a couple funnies at one another. She told me the rich and famous writer was in London working on a screenplay, here appended a battery of ironically pointed ha’s—Ha! Ha! Ha!—by which I gathered she meant that among creating epic scenes for The Big Screen she had no doubt the rich and famous writer was getting his spermatozoa drained by Cockney starlets. I then came to the point of my call. As though I’d wrecked her day, she moaned.
“Aw, Exley. Whadda you want to do that for? What happened to Pages from a Cold lsland?”
I explained that the Steinem bit was going to be a part of Pages from a Cold Island; was going to raise the manuscript to new and glorious heights. “Aw, Exley, no it won’t. You won’t like Steinem. she won’t like you. And if you don’t like her, you won’t be kind. Let me tell you something. This chick is not only very nice but vulnerable as hell. For all that worldly crap about her bedding down with all those famous men, she can’t be unaware that she’s carried a great head and a lovely body a hell of a long ways. I mean, it isn’t as though she were Germaine Greer or Mary McCarthy who could fight you toe to toe, son, and kick the shit out of you, now is it?” She paused. With no little wariness she said, “Look. Exley, are you just trying to fuck Steinem or what? I mean, I’d rather do my damnedest to arrange something as grossly unlikely as that mating as anything as manifestly preposterous as you have in mind.”