The truth is that telling Koch about my thinking about him wasn't as bad as telling him the details when I was having that affair with the French interpreter at the U.N. What I wanted to say was I'm involved with this French person who works where I do and let it go at that, but it doesn't work that way because you talk about yesterday. Yesterday I did this and I did that, and I thought, I'm making Koch jealous, it's cruel to him to tell him about my being in bed with someone else when that's probably where he wants to be, and he just takes it like he takes everything, yes, go on, and then what happened? God you have to be like God to be an analyst sometimes! He wants me to tell him everything that's on my mind, and if nothing's on my mind, he says well yesterday, what did you do, and we're off and soon I'm talking about Bill.
Bill Acton, I regret to report, is the son of an old friend of my father's from Yale. We met under the worst of circumstances, my parents were throwing a between-Christmas-and-New-Year's party at the house and it's their idea of conviviality to have young people — that's what they call us, young people — invited also, so it's a familylike party. Only what happens is that the parents congregate together getting sloshed and the young people, if they can stand each other, smoke dope in an upstairs room. What struck me about Bill was his shyness. The other fellows who were about my age were all coming on the same way they used to in college, jocks-with-cocks looking for an opening, and Bill just sat there. I don't like wallflowers, female or male, but I happened to ask Bill something and his answer was a quote from Auden. I mean he didn't say it pretentiously, just as if it was the right answer. I guess I was also flattered by the fact that he assumed I'd know, that I wasn't just an opening for his oil rig, I was a person with a brain.
Well, we talked a lot that evening, and when the adults were ready to go home, Bill didn't offer to take me somewhere for a drink, meaning something else of course, he shook hands. Sure there's something terribly square and old-fashioned about that, and I guess all I thought at the time was that Bill was not boring and he's the kind of guy you could bring home if you had to (can you imagine my bringing the Frenchman from the U.N. home? My father'd have had a heart attack!). So when he was leaving I said call me. That's all.
Well, of course he called my home and Mom told him I don't live at home and gave him my phone number, and we got together for the movies, we went on a picnic believe it or not, I found out he liked rock and classical just like me, and then one Saturday we had dinner at Adam's Apple, which I sometimes go to to get away from the U.N. crowd at lunch, and we had no particular plans for afterwards, so we walked downtown and then West, and before you know it, we're in pornsville, and when he realized it, I swear he blushed. The theater right in front of us was playing Behind the Green Door. He asked me did I know what kind of a film it was, and I said yes, Betsy Thorne described it scene by scene to me. The box office was manned by a Puerto-Rican-looking woman. We were about five feet from her, and she was looking Bill right in the eyeball when he said to me, "Let's not."
I could hear the woman whisper "Chicken shit."
Bill walked closer to her cage and said, "What did you say?"
"Nothing," said the woman.
I took Bill by the arm and said, "Let's go." We walked quite a while before he talked. He said he'd seen a couple of films like that some time ago and really didn't care for them, they made sex seem mechanical and impersonal.
"But did you find them exciting?" I asked.
"Sure," he said. "It gets you going and stops you at the same time because it's so crude. Did you ever get a tan from a sunlamp?"
I hadn't.
"Well, I have," Bill said, "and it's not the same as getting it from the sun. It feels artificial. That's what I'm talking about."
I knew all about his ambivalence because I was churning over some of my own. A fellow couldn't be nicer than Bill. Bill was reliable. A friend. A nonthreatening friend. I asked him did he ever lose his temper, and he said he tried to control his temper. I told him about my insomnia, and he looked at me as if I were reporting on outer space. He always slept. It's not that I'm afraid of perfect people. I'm leery of my reaction to them.
Eventually we wound our way back to Bill's car. When we got to my place, I invited him up for a drink, and for a moment I thought he was going to beg off, but I said, "There's a parking place right in front. A New Yorker can't turn down an empty parking place, can he?"
Upstairs he hung his jacket up on a chair. I put a record on and brought out a half-gallon jug of Gallo's Hearty Burgundy and a couple of glasses. Bill did the pouring as if it were his role.
I tried to get him to talk about himself, and finally he told me about his year-long leading-to-marriage kind of thing that broke up. She sounded like a very nice person, a perfect match. She took up with someone Bill described as mean. Isn't that the way the ball bounces?
I asked him if he'd ever smoked dope. He nodded. I wanted to say Good for you. So I went to my stash and brought us a joint. Neither of us was a cigarette smoker, and we had a lot of trouble inhaling. It was a bit comical. He seemed happy that I was sharing the embarrassment as well as the joint. It relaxed him, I could tell, and I felt he was making something erotic out of passing the joint from his lips to my lips, back and forth. Suddenly he excused himself and went to the John. When he came back his breath smelled of toothpaste. I knew Bill was the kind of person who would never use someone else's toothbrush. What did he use, his finger?
When I offered a second joint, Bill volunteered to reimburse me for it and I told him not to be silly.
"It's funny," he said, not looking at me, "before the wine and dope I was wondering what a person like you saw in a person like me, but now I'm feeling pretty good about myself," and he tried to put his arms around me.
"No," I said.