The Road Taken (31 page)

Chapter Thirty-Nine

Disco Joan, swooping through the perilous 1960s, was out nearly every night, part of the youthquake by sheer chance. Here in the decade that was just finding its raucous voice, when no one over thirty was to be trusted according to the baby boomers, when youth was idolized and age considered to have nothing to do with wisdom, Joan was in her mid thirties, passing; and still wild, still hungry, still unsure. During the week she went to work like a normal person, even if she’d had four hours’ sleep, toned herself down a bit although she was still in the vanguard of fashion, and kept her own counsel. She was, after all, an editor, and some people looked up to her. In these current, surprising times, she was taking pills again.

It took her an hour to get ready in the morning, and longer at night, but the ritual was part of the fun. She wore false eyelashes that looked like furry black caterpillars, which she glued on above thick black eyeliner; she wore pale pancake makeup and white lipstick; her hair was teased high. At night she added a voluminous hairpiece that rivaled the best Uncle Hugh had worn to his drag balls. Her little dresses were copies of Courreges, sleeveless, A-line, miniskirted; worn with short white boots, or sexy thigh-high boots, and the pantyhose (sometimes flesh-colored, sometimes made of fishnet) that had come into fashion by necessity because of the tiny skirts. When pantyhose first appeared Joan didn’t know whether to wear her underpants underneath or on top, and by the time she figured it out, like many others she had decided to wear none at all.

Her nephew Peter turned eighteen. The Korean “police action” had not affected the immediate family because no one was the right age, but the war in Vietnam was what they all feared now. When, after a time of great anxiety, the annoying asthma he’d had since childhood got him a medical deferment, they were all deeply relieved. Peter confided to Joan afterward that if he had been classified 1A he would have left the country to live in Canada; he was against the war. Joan knew she was the one to be trusted with such a secret because she was considered the rebel, the iconoclast. She would understand. Markie and Angel thought she was glamorous and Peter thought she was hip. Peggy and Ed talked about her behind her back. She supposed, and hoped, her own mother still defended her.

In the terrible spring of 1968 Martin Luther King and Bobby Kennedy were assassinated. Watching these two deaths, so close to each other, on television, Joan was, for the first time, ashamed to be an American. What must people in Europe think of such barbarians? The death of King sparked major riots in more than fifty U.S. cities, but not New York, where the liberal Republican mayor, John Lindsay, managed to keep the peace.

Between the two murders Andy Warhol was shot, but not killed, by a crazed feminist, founder of the Society to Cut Up Men.
The times they are a changin’.
Bulletproof glass was put up at the stock exchange, and people were afraid to ride the filthy, dangerous subways. Two of the top songs were the double entendred “Yummy, Yummy, Yummy (I’ve got love in my tummy)” and the acid high song “MacArthur Park.”

Hair
was the hit show now, and Joan had seen it twice, owned the album, and knew all the songs. It was a longtime convention that actors in Broadway plays who needed to do something as innocuous as zip up their trousers tactfully turned their backs to the audience first, for there must never be any inference of what was inside that fly, but in the memorable last moments of
Hair
actors and actresses stood singing onstage stark naked, facing the audience, proud.

How extraordinary this new era is, Joan thought, part of it and yet standing aside to watch. It was the Age of Aquarius.
Love your brother.
Unless you were a cop, smashing and teargasing college kids who were demonstrating against the war. Or a kid, burning down your draft board. Or a white person trying to preserve the status quo in the South.
Love one another right now.
Which everyone who could get away with it did, and there was a marked surge of reported cases of venereal disease. If you got gonorrhea you were given penicillin and it went away. It was embarrassing but not a disgrace in Joan’s world.

Her IUD began to make her bleed. The lymph nodes in her groin swelled and hurt, and once a ribbon of blood ran inopportunely down the inside of her thigh while she was in a restaurant on a date. Her doctor took the IUD out then, under general anesthesia in the hospital, discovering it had eaten its way into the lining of her uterus, and gave her birth control pills. Now, with her big and tender breasts, she looked the way she had during her early pregnancy, but, as he assured her, she could make love without fear.

Make love? Joan was beginning to wonder what love had to do with any of this.

Love meant a lot of things, and people talked about love all the time. Threesomes and bisexuality had become interesting variations on dating for quite a few people, although homosexuality—considered a psychological illness and/or a disobedient optional lifestyle—was still something to be hidden from employer and family, even in a place like New York. One night Joan was taken to a straight orgy by a randy date. She refused to participate, but she was fascinated to be an onlooker. She knew some of the men there—they were men she had known from parties and would never have gone out with, so she certainly wasn’t going to have sex with them now—and she wondered if they had given the orgy so they could get laid by girls they otherwise wouldn’t have had any luck with.

The ebullient, “mop top” Beatles were still the favorite musical group, and by now, looking back, their original shocking haircuts seemed clean cut and tame. Everyone, men and women, had long hair, and if you were confused as to which one was the male, then the more fool you, old fogy. Man, and a dog, had orbited the earth, the first moon walk would be coming soon, and the big-eyed model Jean Shrimpton appeared on the cover of a fashion magazine in a space helmet to celebrate the successful travels of astronauts. Another model, Twiggy, twig thin, concave, androgynous, insisting she ate candy bars, turned a generation of young women who idolized her look and did not have her genetic construction into anorexics, bulimics, takers of diet pills that were only speed in an acceptably named form.

Anorexia nervosa was a disease that was rampant but was still unknown, undiscussed. If you didn’t die of starvation you might die of an overdose of drugs, and who would know the difference? You could not be too thin. Drugs made it easy. And as Joan, along with everyone else, had discovered, they also made you able to stay up all night. Except for her hormonally induced big breasts, Joan was thin, but she was not anorexic, and speed was her drug of choice. It made her able to juggle her two worlds. As always, her family disapproved and worried about the “normal” part of her life—an unmarried career girl with no lasting relationship, who wore too much makeup and knew the clubs—suspected a tiny bit of the part that would have shocked them speechless, and had no idea of the extent of it.

Recreational drugs, Joan knew, made you happy, even though they occasionally made you paranoid or permanently deranged. There was pot, and hash, and now there were Tuinals, Valiums, Percocets, Placidils, methadrine, cocaine, mescaline, poppers for sex, and for mind expansion the beloved LSD.
Turn on and drop out.
Or just turn on and fake your life. And there were still the old faithfuls: Although cigarette advertising was now forbidden on television, cigarettes and alcohol continued to be major sources of pleasure to millions.

That year Celia died, trapped in the forgetfulness and confusion of her ripped brain synapses, slipping away in her sleep after a bout of pneumonia in the retirement home. It’s time, Joan thought; if Grandma knew what the world has become it would have killed her anyway.

Joan was ambivalent about it herself. She had grown up with a certain morality even though she had always broken the rules, and by separating herself as an observer while participating at the same time, she was able to adapt. If only I’d chosen a different life, she sometimes thought, with a moment of odd longing, but knew that was stupid. She had chosen this one.

Joan’s favorite discotheque was Arthur, named after George Harrison’s haircut. With the velvet rope outside to keep out the crowd, and only the famous, beautiful, or lucky people let past it, Arthur was the chicest club in New York. It had two little rooms and a band, and was filled with celebrities and stars and intellectuals mingling with hookers and hustlers and the occasional unknown young couple from Queens who were pretty to look at. She was known at Arthur and was allowed in whenever she came. She always brought a friend or two, or a date, and then when Arthur closed for the night she went on to an after-hours club, not always with the friend she had arrived with, but a different one, and stayed until morning.

The after-hours clubs were constantly being closed down by the police, so when you got there they had often vanished, although there would be someone to tell you where a new one was. On the night before Thanksgiving, Joan was at an after-hours club in a dingy little building somewhere on the West Side (she was too stoned and high to be sure where she was) with a gay man she would probably leave later, or he might leave her, if either of them met someone appealing, or just got tired enough to go home.

In this club, as in all of the very late ones she frequented, there was one room for heterosexual couples, which was fairly empty and fairly staid, another room for lesbians, where Joan never went, and a third room for homosexual men, which was the room she liked. Joan always went to the room for the gay men because it was crowded and lively and she had a lot of acquaintances there. She would go to the bar and drink vodka and tonic, smoke, and talk to strangers. Sometimes there were celebrities at the bar, famous men she would never have had the courage to speak to under other circumstances, but who were perfectly charming to her here.

She wasn’t planning to stay long because she had to go to her parents the next day for Thanksgiving dinner, which Rose liked to have early in the afternoon, but as the night wore on Joan decided it didn’t matter if she stayed up late. It was at that moment when she looked across the room and saw what she realized, after a couple of minutes of staring at this oddly familiar person, was Uncle Hugh in drag.

At first she was disbelieving, then bewildered, and then horrified. He was not a pretty sight. She knew about Uncle Hugh, she had figured it out years ago, but she had never seen him this way and certainly not at this age—he was sixty-three, why was he still doing it? He looked like an overdone old matron who had once been very attractive. He wasn’t the oldest drag queen in the room, although close to it, but he was the only one who was her uncle. Joan’s first reaction was to turn away and pretend she hadn’t seen him, and hope he hadn’t seen her.

And where was Teddy? Was Uncle Hugh
cruising?
Were all men pigs? Was she right to think there was no such thing as lasting commitment? Did they too have separate lives? Did Teddy
agree?
She was standing there with her mouth open and her eyes probably bugging out when Uncle Hugh turned and saw her. Even under the heavy makeup she could see he was taken aback. He had never been judgmental about her, how could he be, but seeing her here in this place made the secret part of her life all too real. Not that there was anything wrong with her being here. You saw everyone at the clubs. It was just that she and Hugh were family.

Of course he came over. “Camille,” he said, holding out his hand. “And you must be Joan.”

“What are you doing here?” she hissed. She had meant to be kinder, but it came out all wrong.

“But what are
you
doing here?” he said, kindly. He did not seem surprised anymore.

“It’s my first time,” Joan said.

“Of course. It’s new, I’ve been told.”

“Where’s Teddy?” She knew she sounded like a disappointed child. She had believed in the solidity of Hugh and Teddy and now she didn’t know what to think.

“Home. He’s never felt really comfortable with this aspect of me. Or at least that’s what he says, although I wonder if he isn’t secretly charmed, poor thing. He’s so confused. Aren’t we all? So I hardly ever do it anymore; just in bits and pieces, in the privacy of our residence. And for special occasions, like this one. Tonight was one of my girlfriends’ birthday party, so a group of us finished off here for a nightcap. Would you like to meet my friends?”

Joan shrugged. He must mean the linebacker in sequins over there, she thought, with Porky Pig in the mantilla. Birthday girl. No wonder Teddy isn’t thrilled.

“No? Well, maybe later,” Uncle Hugh/Camille said. “Joan dear, I didn’t think anything could shock you.”

“I’m not shocked.”

“Oh, yes, you are.”

“I just . . . I thought . . . I was afraid you were stepping out on your loved one.”

“And if I were?”

“It’s not my business.”

“Oh, Joan,” Uncle Hugh said, smiling, “do you seriously think a woman my age can find new love so easily?”

“I was thinking more about sex, to tell you the truth,” Joan said.

“Dearie, I’d have to pay for sex.”

“Do you?”

“No. But it’s very rude of you to ask.”

“I guess I’ve seen too much,” Joan said. “I’m feeling burned out.”

“Then maybe you should figure out what you really want in life.”

“Maybe,” Joan said. She was suddenly filled with a grief so heavy and explicit it was as if she had plunged down a well. It’s the vodka, she thought, but she knew it wasn’t. She was so devastated by the pain and blackness of her loneliness that she couldn’t even sigh; she was surprised she was breathing.

“What is it you do want?” Uncle Hugh said.

I want Markie, Joan thought. I want Peggy to respect me and thank me for what I sacrificed to make her happy. I don’t want to be here, an outcast, with Camille and the rest of the outcasts. I’m tired. I want a normal life.

“Well,” Uncle Hugh said when she didn’t answer, “I’m sure you’ll figure it out in due time.”