by Jeffrey Meyers

“Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive.”
—Wordsworth

“You wouldn’t want to see her, and she wouldn’t want you to see her.”  These shocking words brought back a rush of memories.  Berkeley in the Sixties: the elegant avenues, the perfumed campus, the students restless and easily provoked.  Cops bounced them down the steps of Sproul Hall and tear-gassed them from the roof of the student union.  Sexual freedom was in the air—happenings and burning bras—and you could sleep with a girl as soon as you met her.

Connie and her college friend Melissa lived in a guest cottage, wrapped in a lush garden, behind a big Spanish-style house with white walls and a red-tiled roof.  It was high in the hills, with a stunning view of Alcatraz, the Golden Gate and  San Francisco Bay.  Reggie and I, grad students in English, idealized the place as the Bower of Bliss.

Though American, Connie was born far down on the map.  She’d lived most of her life, till her father was sent packing in alcoholic disgrace, in Buenos Aires.  Her dark eyes, her bright teeth, her hair pulled straight back like a ballerina, her skin translucent and luminous.  Her enticing little girl’s mouth had an intriguing expression.  She didn’t say much, but listened intently when others spoke.

Both girls, polished at Stanford, were eager to improve the world.  They were always rooting around in the library, doing research and writing reports for environmental groups.  Connie’s passion was preserving tiger sanctuaries in India, and she planned to see her striped darlings in their natural state.  Reggie—horse-faced and kinky-haired, aristocratic and trust-funded—had discovered Melissa and introduced me to Connie.  A real find: an exotic flower, convent-educated (she had to wear a shift when she bathed), apparently innocent.

I’d just bought an old Triumph sports car, which demanded as much maintenance as Connie.  It was enhanced by my precious consort, who made an old cloche hat with a tight band and pulled it down low on her head.  In those days  I usually wore loafers with jeans or khakis and old tweed jackets.

“This won’t do at all,” she said.  “I’ll have to smarten you up.”

She went to George Goode, a posh men’s store, and bought me a handsome blue tie with regimental stripes.  I wore it with a V-necked, cable-knit tennis sweater, and we tried to cultivate a dashing Scott-and-Zelda image.  I was so excited, the first time I picked her up, that I descended for miles without releasing the brake.  Top down and “Lucia” blasting on the Saturday afternoon radio, we drove to the precipitous Marine Headlands that jutted into the Pacific and fortified the edge of the continent; to the long quiet emptiness and smooth sands of Stinson beach;  and to the flashing fires of the red-winged blackbirds and the high, protective, Arabian dunes of Abbotts Lagoon. Herds of wild elk grazed just beyond that sacred spot as we watched the handsome Matson liners arriving from Hawaii and sailing into the harbor.

At home, using insufficient yeast, we baked bread that was too leaden to eat, but made an excellent door stop.  We used an old wooden tennis racket to drain the spaghetti, some of which slithered onto the floor.  We had lobster races across the slippery linoleum.  As Connie squealed and squirmed, I dropped them into the boiling pot and watched them fade from bright red to pale pink.

I somberly said, “I should have been a pair of ragged claws.”

“Then you wouldn’t be able to caress me.”

“I’d find a way–with the smooth side of the claw.”

“But mammals have a much better sex life than crustaceans.”

“I’ll take your word for it.”

Afterwards we’d settle down to intimate tête-à-têtes.  I’d try to steer the conversation to a suggestive subject by asking “how did you first learn about sex?”

“I was very naïve.  But I didn’t dare ask my strait-laced parents.  My father,  anyway, was too stupefied to speak coherently.”

“So?’

“I had the impression that first you got married, then you got pregnant.”

“But?”

“I was puzzled when I met a girl who had a baby before she married.  I asked my older cousin, ‘Can you get pregnant before marriage?’  She told me: ‘Some dirty sluts can!’ ”

Connie wanted, on a childish whim, to go to the circus, so we drove down to the Cow Palace near the airport.  The place smelled of popcorn and elephant dung.  The bleached-blonde trainer had a jagged scar across his face.  He’d been attacked by a tiger, who took early retirement.  Back in action, the trainer cracked the whip but never touched the animals.  Connie watched the tigers climbing up ladders, charging round the ring and jumping through flaming hoops.  Instead of being outraged by their treatment, she felt these tigers were healthy, intelligent and safe from poachers.

We saw her favorite film, The Third Man, at Pauline Kael’s old theater on Telegraph.  Connie loved the cat tracking Orson Welles and rubbing against his shoe.  She wept at the children poisoned by the contaminated penicillin.  She was shocked when human beings, seen from atop the Ferris wheel, were diminished to expendable specks.  She squeezed my hand during the pursuit through the slimy sewers of Vienna.  I held on tight and kissed her in the flickering shadows.

When she asked me to pull up the zipper of her tennis dress, I said “I’d rather pull it down.”  She delighted me by whispering “later.”  That single suggestive word seemed to hold out infinite promise.  But there was no way of telling how late that “later” would be.  Tennis matches against Melissa and Reggie brought out the best in Connie: her charming costume, her smooth, well-tutored strokes, her long-legged dash across the court.  As the game progressed, her panties worked their way up  and exposed her delicious cheeks.

Back at my flat for lunch, she left the door unlocked as she showered.  My parts were throbbing as I imagined her soft skin under the gentle waterfall.  I was afraid my sudden intrusion might offend her, but decided to risk it.  When I opened the door and called out her name, she didn’t protest.  I followed my pointer inside the cloudy cubicle and noticed her quizzical look—as if asking “how did this ever happen to me?”—while I stared at her naked body.  Her high breasts ended, achingly, with a charming little tube that suggested the extended part of a light bulb or a pear.

After I dried her off, Connie allowed me to paint her body, like a Maori maiden’s,  with watercolors.  But she would not grant what she demurely called “the final favor.”  She was “saving it,” she said, as if interest would be paid on her little nest egg.  Several of my friends found her irresistible and fell in love with her.  I had to fend off their salacious, often boorish inquiries.  They pressed me to reveal, in the crude jargon of the day, if she “put out,” “gave head” or “went all the way.”  Affecting a gentlemanly demeanor, I hinted at imaginary conquests.  Connie was a vivid screen on which I projected all my fantasies.

Freud said the greater the sexual obstacles to be overcome, the more intense the pleasure when it was finally achieved.  Though the impediments were formidable, I was determined to find ways to overcome them.  I was too young to realize that persistent flattery and little continental gestures (picked up from suave heroes in the movies) would have weakened her resolve.  But I discovered one afternoon that she resented the oppressive influence of the Argentine nuns and had a secret blasphemous streak.  Passing an old Spanish mission, we impulsively entered the cool, shadowy, vacant interior.  As the organ swelled tumultuously on the upper tier, I smelled incense, she hellfire.  Squeezing behind the heavy purple curtains of the confessional box, we quietly pleasured each other in the church.

Connie had to fly down to Los Angeles one weekend for her mother’s birthday and asked me to drive her to the airport.  Joking with her, I boldly said “it would be  much easier to get an early start if you spent the night in my flat.”  I was astonished when she casually agreed.  After dinner—chicken and artichoke casserole, my only dish—and a bottle of 13.5% Hungarian Bull’s Blood, she fell into a dreamy state.  I slowly undressed her, frantic with desire but wanting to prolong the delightful moment for as long as possible.  It was like the first step on the moon.  Her lips were as soft as clouds.  Her breasts bubbled out of her bra like the foam of champagne.  I explored every inch of the Promised Land, from her cute curled toes to her well-set ears.  I kissed her bluest veins and was riveted by her thin, silky pubic hair that revealed her cleft part underneath.

The sexual newsreels and coming attractions had been running through my head for months. But the imaginative anticipation was more pleasurable than the actual experience.  I wanted to release her inhibitions and set her on fire, but had to be satisfied with her quiet acquiescence.

I felt like a train steaming into Grand Central Station.  She held back and I urged her to “let go.”

She cried out, “I just can’t.”

“But it’s even better when you help.”

She remained passive, despite my excitement, and making love to her was lonely work.  The next morning I got up early, prepared coffee and watched her sleep for a bit longer before waking her.

Connie didn’t seem closer to me after we spent the night together.  I couldn’t tell if she enjoyed the experience or merely did it, as a lark, to please me.  She seemed preoccupied and withdrawn on the way to the airport.  In those days, you could take a passenger right up to the runway.  Zelda used to tie up the caged elevator with her belt and keep it waiting till she was ready.  In a similar fashion, Connie walked elegantly across the tarmac and up the metal steps to the plane.  Then, before they could close the door, she held up the flight by dashing down the steps and giving me a final farewell kiss.  She seemed pleased when I quoted Byron, “Maid of Athens, ere we part, / Give, oh give me back my heart!”  I could see faces staring out of the plane windows as the hostess waited impatiently for her return.

While at home, Connie’s life suddenly changed and I lost her.  She was driving along a quiet two-lane road when a broken-down yellow bus, owned by an impoverished fundamentalist school, approached her from the opposite direction.  It blew a worn tire,  the driver lost control, and the bus swerved across the road and crashed right into her.  Crushed by the impact, she broke some ribs, her pelvis and both legs.  She should have been well compensated for the accident and awarded enough money to live on for the rest of her life.  But the bus (whose driver escaped injury) was not insured.  The school had no assets and closed down.  She got nothing.

I drove down to see her after she’d spent several months in the hospital.  She was hobbling around the garden on crutches, fussed after by her clubwoman mother.  She had no anger or self-pity, only a kind of stoic resignation.

“There were masses of X-rays,” she told me.  “And they’ve gradually patched me together.  But it will take a long time, perhaps forever, to recover from all this.  I sometimes think it’s more than I can bear.”

“Rotten luck,” I said.

“Can’t be helped.”  She was always a good sport.

When I finally finished my degree and got a teaching job in Boston, Connie and I corresponded for a while and then gradually lost touch.  But I heard about her from Reggie and Melissa, who’d married and remained in the West.  I expected Connie to have a golden life—if not with me, then with someone more promising.  Instead, sad and ruined, she took humble clerical jobs and worked for years as a gardener.  She never married; became bisexual, then lesbian.  Her father left no money. She had to live in modest student flats with her piano, her cat and the lovers who passed briefly though her life.

Wanting to write full time, I retired early from teaching and bought a house in the Berkeley hills. On one of my walks I ran into Connie, much heavier and struggling along with a cane.  Eager to catch up on her news, I took her out to dinner.  As a widower with two grown children, I thought I might even start a new life with her.  She was slightly affronted when I called her Connie, and rather stiffly told me she wanted to be addressed as Constance.

After several bouts of cancer, she grimly reported, “I have nothing more to cut off or cut out.”

She was convinced, she said, that “my disease was caused by the long series of X-rays I had to have. When my bones failed to heal properly after the accident, they had to be broken and re-broken.”

Remembering her lack of response during our one night together, I asked if she was more attracted to men or to women.

“It all depends on who I’m with,” she rather cryptically replied.  She was now sexually hors de combat.  We no longer had anything in common and she didn’t seem terribly keen to continue our friendship.  So I gently withdrew.

A year or so later, Melissa’s college roommate invited us all to dinner when she and Reggie came to Berkeley.  Surprised that Connie wasn’t there, I asked about her.  Her parents and sister had died, she had no money and was dying all alone (no cats allowed) in a grim little hospice.  Despite the warning about not wanting to be seen, I wanted—partly out of morbid interest—to try to distract and comfort her.

The flowers, her favorite pale-lilac cyclamens, seemed to wilt and sadden as soon as I entered her room.  Wearing a turban to cover the ravages of chemotherapy, Constance gave me a weak smile.  As I bent over her bed, she hugged me with surprising tenacity, as if I had the power to pull her back from death.  She was shockingly thin and I could feel her backbone beneath her skin.  The once tall, athletic beauty now appeared, under her gray, mummy-like wrappings, shrunken and withered, as if some vital cord had snapped.  She wanted protection, but was beyond protecting.  Her narrow bed seemed to prepare her for the still more close confinement of the grave. Though her eyes were bleary and unfocused, she was still alert.

“Could we talk about old times?” I asked.  “Would you like that?”  I hoped to bring it all back.  Anything to distract her and cheer her up.

“All right,” she said, wearily resigned to my intrusion.  But everything we talked about provided a painful contrast to her moribund condition.  She politely asked about Reggie and Melissa, and their children, who hadn’t turned out very well.

Trying to understand the girl who’d always managed to elude me, even when I thought I’d “possessed” her, I asked:

“Do you remember when we went out together?  What did you feel then?”

“You were nice, and I liked you.  No more than that.”

“I never could reach your deepest feelings.”

“It wasn’t your fault.  You were only the second man I’d ever slept with.  The first seduced and jilted me.  I never got over that rejection.”

“I never knew about it till now.”

“I was terribly inexperienced.  I didn’t realize that I liked women better than men.  Only with my own kind could I feel safe and let myself go.  I tried hard with you, but didn’t really like it.  I let you do what you wished and hoped I made you happy.”

“I was happy.  And deeply grateful.  It meant a lot to me, and still does.  Do you remember your dramatic moment at the airport?”

“I let myself go then.  Showing off, really.  It was an emotional, not a sexual scene.  Just imagine: ‘Me.  And me now.’ ”

She was clearly in a world of her own, half way between the living and the dead.

I asked, “what about now?  What do you think will happen?  Have you accepted everything?”

“Nobody ever leaves this place alive.  No pleasures left but morphine,” she said, reaching down with a claw-like hand to give herself another shot of the blissful narcotic.

“I don’t see myself wearing a white robe and singing with the angelic choir.  It will, I expect, just be nothingness, a great void.  Perhaps, at last, a final peace.”

She breathed deeply and closed her eyes.  Her last words to me were, “If you can’t save me, at least save the tiger.”  She never made it to India.

She was brave, willing to face the truth: the skull on the desk, the approach of death.  All I could think of, as I quietly closed the door, was the sadness of her life, the waste.

Jeffrey Meyers, FRSL, has published 54 books, including  Thomas Mann’s Artist-Heroes (2014), Robert Lowell in Love (2015) and Resurrections: Authors, Heroes — and a Spy (2018).