Two lesbian women outside their culture and without a community. It risked our love. We fell into dependency that began to tie our individual and unique spirits like knots in lagging muscles. We lived so close and so tight to each other those two years without any other significant persons, without a group of friends or even acquaintances. Then the growth of decay from our strangled affair began, and we didn’t see it until it was too late. We had too many hurts and established too many painful habits of relating that became the system we both wanted to tear down. We returned to the States in the fall of 1972 and went in separate directions. She stayed in a valley community upstate to pursue her career in botany while I enrolled in a San Francisco college to study filmmaking.
San Francisco State University was in a state of administrative repression of student initiative under President S. I. Hayakawa, for fear that another mass strike, similar to the faculty and student protest during 1968–69, might reoccur. Out of curiosity, I went to the Women’s Alliance, a loosely formed group of faculty and students who came together twice monthly to discuss feminist issues. I became involved in an attempt to form a women’s studies department on campus and met with resistance from both faculty and students who didn’t see the need of seeking a base of power, and who feared departmental rigidity and hierarchical authority lines developing. After a semester’s effort of energy-draining, resultless political activity, I withdrew in dismay and exasperation to concentrate on filmmaking. I was still lonely and without a love relationship in my new community.
Her face was round and oval at the same time. Her cheekbones were high like an Indian’s. She had the Danish blush of summer on her cheeks. Her eyes were blue, clear, and twinkly. She was young with humor. Her laughter restored me, for I laughed with her. She was tall and strong and capable, and she was twenty-one. My age bias slipped away. She used her hip like a knuckle bone massaging my pelvis, and the bed spun round, dizzy circles of gibberish and giggles the night through. How fresh and revitalizing. My empty body sucked in nurture. She refilled and made me young and forgetful of myself in our few days together. I skipped when I walked; my classmates found me friendly. My distance shattered. I was as close as two tender blades of grass with her. Then she was gone. Like the sun on a rainy Frisco day, gone. She wasn’t there. And I searched and I asked but the replies were not about me or us but her confused sexuality, her alienation from too many affairs. I was left, an empty whistle.
Far worse was the fight to leave the wedding band of monogamy with Tove. This second love with a woman I kept secret from her. I lied until it was over and then I told her what had happened. She was hurt, her expectation of my honesty blown. I was cruel with her. I yelled my freedom and forgot hers. I was mostly and unfortunately unable to feel love for more than one woman at a time, and when I was with the young lady who could throw a baseball like a bullet I was mean and distant with Tove. How fucked it was! I could rap for days about non-monogamy and be completely and emotionally incapable of generous love.
In Los Angeles, where I had gone in January to settle the affairs of my mother, who had recently died from cancer, I met Pat. I was living alone, and finally as business matters were coming to a close I had a chance to do something for myself. A women’s art gallery was opening in Venice. Without a second thought I was in the car and off. The place was jammed, crowded with women and men obscuring the works of sculpture and painting with their live bodies. A perky red-haired woman with a pixie cut approached me. She was wearing a matching purple outfit and looked the Los Angeles style I had left years ago. She was fascinated by artists. I felt I was the admired and she the admirer. We joined a group for pizza and she mentioned a gay bar over dinner. My alert interest matched hers and we established then and there who we were. After driving through the darkened Hollywood Hills, parking in an unlit alleyway, stepping out of our respective cars, walking to the side entrance, we reached Mandrake’s.
“I’ve been looking for a place like this all week,” I tell her. Pat puts her hand in mine, squeezes it saying, “Oh, Baby, if I’d only known.” Again, I was being rescued and carried into love on a white mare’s charge. The romantic conception was thick with layers of myth, although Pat stood a slight five-two. Those words, that squeeze, satisfied my need. I was lonely, depressed from the trauma death brings in our culture to those who live beside it for a while, and here I was promised a friend. We danced with the changing star-dots of light, mingling with a weird crowd of men and women with dyed hair, an LA scene foreign to my honkeytonk San Francisco.
She mixed me a gin and tonic as I popped out my contacts and ran the water in the shower. One drink now amid the peals of strung-out water drops shooting down my back, and one later placed beside the queen-sized bed, spread and clean sheet pulled back, all ready-like. I was rolling over and feeling the freshness of the linen with the freshness of my body. I changed the radio station to classical music from the crooney notes of the 50s Pat had chosen. I sipped my drink. She came in and lay down and we were carefully pulling each others pubic hairs, exploring. Hers were fine and red, truly beautiful. She made me feel comfortable and at home. She smoothed the discrepancies with gin and a stroke of her hand.
The hairs on my arm stood up. It was as if there were electric friction between the near noticeable pressure of her hand, as soft as a flea, and the unnoticeable, until now, body hairs of mine. We made graceful and wonderful love together for the next four or five days in bed. It was one of those times you don’t want to get up.
By then I was beginning to know that Pat wanted more stability than one night stands in her life, and that I was a possible leading character in the play she wanted to write of settling down and homing it. I told her of my naiveté, my beginnings of exploration in lesbian culture, my curiosities, my belief in non-monogamy. She said something that has never been a compliment by any means in my mind: “I guess you have your wild oats to sow.” Her conception of sex and my own were fields apart. I wanted to believe I was planting and nurturing love among women, not employing the love ’em and leave ’em tactics of a coarse and unfeeling male. With my good intentions feeding me, I called Tove long distance to be honest. The cost of that phone bill attests to the fact that non-monogamy was no easy state for her to accept. Pat would be driving up with me to San Francisco and Tove would come down from the valley and meet her. Sixty dollars later, that was settled.
Tove was waiting outside my sister’s house in Berkeley. She had the look of a cornered hare on her face. She seemed shattered, hostile, and defensive. She refused to come in and join us. Another nasty man had given her hell in her hitchhike down to see us. I couldn’t blame her for her outrage, which had extended to include me and the world by now. She wouldn’t come in and she wouldn’t speak to that woman! Her face was a pout I cajoled and tickled and finally, I kissed. She relented. Pat was rocking in a rocking chair. I introduced them. They rapped. I left them alone, unable to participate in their introductory words. What a goof-up I was. Just what I wanted, two lovers relating, and I was running from the act like a scared fish. This was incredible. I obviously had trouble living my ideals. I was a radical who had lost touch with the physical world; my body was nineteenth century and my ideas were running in lap with the twentieth and twenty-first. Nevertheless, I was determined to try.
That evening the three of us lay out mattresses in the basement where I was spending the last night of rent. We had moved my stuff already, and it was near-empty. We made our bed with sleeping bags unzipped and lay down with me in the middle, Pat to my right, and Tove to my left. The electricity that passed between Pat and me must have freaked Tove, for she crawled out sobbing and went to the next room, where she lay on a half-stuffed laundry bag of dirty clothes and cried. I left the makeshift bed since no one was sleeping or using it for any purpose—and went to comfort Tove. When a sister is crying there is no need larger than her comfort. Slowly I reassured Tove that she wasn’t being replaced by Pat, that she had a special place with me. We went to sleep.
As if I could learn from one night’s experience! The next evening, laying out the mattresses, this time in the new house of feminist therapists, and in the living room, no less, since my new room hadn’t