In bed with her again, the blinds drawn, the blankets hastily thrown back, Jamie learned that she had yet another personality in her multilingual fold, outdoing the schizophrenic Eve by at least one — so far. (Had Mandelbaum discovered over the course of the past several months what Jamie was discovering in a scant four days? He doubted it.) This personality, and the voice accompanying it, emerged only when she was totally relaxed and unguarded, as she seemed to be now. If any of the voices was authentic, if any of the personalities truly reflected the real Joanna (whoever that might have been, lost in the facelessness of the crowd she was), Jamie considered this to be the one. He dared not label her. She was, simply enough, Joanna.
It was this Joanna who emerged when she told him about the untimely death of her mother, so soon after her return from Rome. It was this Joanna who told him about her first sexual experience, terrifying in that her bedmate (or more appropriately her carmate, since the seduction had taken place in the back seat of a Pontiac convertible) had been a member of the enemy camp, a goy from the tips of his toes to the very ends of his flaming red tresses, worn long in that year of 1961, when Joanna was seventeen and a senior at Fieldston-Riverdale. “My mother, aleha ha-shalom, would have died right then if she’d known,” Joanna said. “Thank God, she never found out.”
David Boyle, for such was the young seducer’s name, had fumbled below her waist for almost an hour and a half before achieving penetration. By that time, Joanna was sore in both senses of the word, feeling pain whenever he thrust his less-than-massive (she later realized) penis against her, and angry as hell besides, her ardor diminishing with each new rigorous assault. Her initiation into the mysteries of poke and probe was not helped a whit by the fact that young David (“How’d an Irish mick get a nize Jush name like David?” she asked, reverting to her Joanna Jewish voice) wasn’t wearing a condom and came all over her the moment he succeeded in parting her reluctant portals. She had him drive her posthaste to the nearest open grocery store, where she purchased a bottle of Coca-Cola and improvised an on-the-spot Pontiac douche, but she worried for the better part of a month that she would have to tell her mother she’d gotten pregnant by a goy. Boyle was almost as worried as she was. On Christmas Day, when Joanna got her period at last, she called him at home and — because both her parents were within earshot of her end of the conversation — asked, “What goes with green for a merry Christmas?”
Boyle didn’t know what the hell she meant. “Huh?” he said.
“Red,” she said.
“Does that mean...?”
“Yes, I got it,” she said.
“Phew,” he said.
When she hung up, her mother asked, “Who was that?”
“A boy named David Fein,” Joanna said.
“What is it you got?” her father asked.
“He sent me a little Chanukah gift.”
Her father went back to reading his copy of Variety. Her mother glanced at her a moment longer, and then continued knitting a sweater she’d been working on since July.
Technically no longer a virgin, Joanna nonetheless had to wait till the summer after her graduation for her first true sexual experience. She had accompanied her father to Rome for his conferences on the Cleopatra score (a job he’d never got), and then had prevailed upon him to let her stay behind for a few weeks after he went back home. She was, after all, eighteen years old now, and her father had many friends there who would take good care of her. One friend who took extremely good care of her was a man named Emmanuel Epstein who, after a champagne dinner in his room at the Hassler, humped her royally and later spanked her “little bottom,” as he’d called it, for betraying the trust of her father — “my very best friend in the whole world.” Epstein was five inches shorter than she was, a man of fifty-eight, going slightly bald, with a wife and two children in Scarsdale; he was doing publicity work for Fox in Rome. He was, as Joanna recalled, somewhat better hung than young Boyle had been, but she was nonetheless turned off the moment he achieved a second, almost immediate orgasm while spanking her.
It was Epstein who introduced her to the other two men with whom she spent a profligate month — she had promised her father only two weeks — in various bedrooms around the city. One of the men was married; the other was a young Italian auto worker from Turin, who was employed as a spear-carrying extra on the film. His thirty-second scene was later cut from the final print, much to Joanna’s dismay; she had gone to the movie when it was released, hoping to see what Antonio would look like on the screen. It was Antonio who’d given her the gold-link top she’d been wearing when Jamie met her on the Vineyard. Her other gentleman friend, the married one, gave her a variety of other things: an elephant-hair bracelet he had purchased on the Via Condotti, a hand-tooled, leatherbound edition of Dante’s Inferno — and gonorrhea.
She did not realize she was carrying this (“Ahem, social disease,” Professor Berkowitz said in a sudden excursion from Joanna’s genuine voice) until she had already enrolled at Juilliard that fall. Her ailment, once discovered and properly diagnosed, was treated promptly and effectively but not before, she was certain, she had unwittingly infected a piano student named Vladimir Potemkin (Vlad the Impaler, as she familiarly called him) who was devoted to practicing twelve hours a day and who, she was equally certain had strayed from his piano bench only once that fall, and then only to pick up a dose. She sent him one of her doctor’s cards, unsigned, but with the inscription, “Dear Vlad, please have a checkup!” He was now doing quite well on the concert circuit, making guest appearances with both the Boston and the Cleveland symphonies. He did not look particularly disease-ridden in his press photos, so Joanna guessed he’d taken her advice.
It was her genuine self who began talking about love that Saturday afternoon.
The only man she’d ever loved, she said, had been Harrison Masters, the aging poet from Indiana. She had met him at an April party given for the composer of a piece for string quartet which had been premiered at the Y on Ninety-second Street. She’d been invited to the event and the party following it by one of the fiddlers, who also played with her at the State Theater. Harrison had met the composer the summer before at Spoleto, where Menotti had arranged to have one of his poems set to harpsichord and lute, an experiment that failed because Harrison had insisted on reading the poem himself, and his rather frail voice had been drowned out by even such delicate instruments. There was a young girl on his arm when he arrived at the private party shortly after midnight. Joanna noticed them both the moment they came in.
He was a man with the gangling height of a giraffe, an eagle-like beak that was due to his part-Siouan heritage, and a leonine head of flowing white hair. “A walking menagerie,” Joanna said, “but I couldn’t take my eyes off him.” Hoping against hope that the girl on his arm was his daughter, dismayed to learn that she was instead one of his students, Joanna nonetheless sashayed across the room in the black wool knit dress she was wearing (“Basic black, dollink, mit pearls,” Joanna Jewish interjected), boldly intruded upon the conversation Harrison was having with the young composer of the work, and promptly and to the bewilderment of the hayseed student from Elephant Breath, Indiana, gained Harrison’s complete and rapt attention as she told him about her own side excursion to Spoleto during the summer of her Roman adventure. The student later went home with the cello player who’d performed brilliantly that night, playing Landscapes or Interiors or whatever the hell it was called as though it were the Haydn String Quartet in G. Joanna took Harrison home with her — to this house, to this bedroom, and on this bed they made love together for the first time.