Another day I remember vividly was one day with Suzanne. It was a bright, windy Saturday Spring morning in San Francisco, the end of March. I was already planning on leaving and needed money. I had a few semi-rare books with me and thought to sell them. I tried the bookstores in Berkeley but they didn’t handle such rarities. So I thought a few antiquarian booksellers in San Francisco might be interested. I made a list of shops from the telephone book in the Plough. Suzanne saw me doing this and asked what I was up to and when I told her she asked to come along. My prize was a one volume complete edition of Ovid, 1685, Lipsiae press, pigskin, 900 pages and once owned, with his signature plainly written, by William Rossetti, Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s brother and a famous book collector. I’d purchased it in a small bookshop in Toronto for sixty dollars and knew it was a steal, the owner having no idea what he sold. This was the age before the internet and many treasures were sold cheap, as they were hard to look up in catalogues.
I had six or seven shops on my list to visit, but not the right one, which I found eight years later, a private collector who would have bought it from me for many hundreds of dollars in an instant. But his shop was by appointment only, old and not listed in yellow pages. Still we had a very fine day, traipsing up and down the hilly streets together, almost arm in arm, enjoying the sights and chatting away. I spent one of my last dollars sharing a plate of ‘lo mein’ with her, using chopsticks from a Chinese street vendor, laughing at our clumsiness but no luck with the books. I have the books still, on my shelf. If I’d sold them, the money would have turned into sandwiches and beers in no time, and maybe another night with Suzanne. But the books would be gone, forever.
The other striking memory is of Pat, the girl who gave me the money to make it home. One evening Bones and I paid a rare visit to John Seebach’s small room. We found him there sitting on his bed beside a girl. We were invited in; Bones took the chair and I sat on the other side of the girl. She was about John’s age, five or six years older than us, with long, straight brown hair and pretty when her thick glasses were off. She didn’t say much besides ‘hello’, so us boys got talking excitedly about some current topic for fifteen minutes or so, when all of a sudden I felt her fingers streaming through my long hair, then both her hands on my scalp, stroking my hair over and over. ‘It’s so fine’, she said, leaning over and holding some close to her glasses. ‘I want you to come home with me now’, was her next remark. John and Bones smiled and off we went.
When you’re young and unattached and a strange woman invites you into her bed, it’s amazing how compliant you are. I was led away like a lamb, with no idea where I was being taken and didn’t care. Under the street lights she led me by the hand, smiling.
This was the beginning of a strange week-long affair ending when I boarded the bus she put me on. She had a Spartan room in a house with a mattress on the floor, a few books and a desk, pretty curtains. She had very little money, no job, just an S.S.I. check, I guessed. She wore tight, light-blue jeans and a plaid flannel shirt and sneakers that night, highlighting her curvaceous rear. I suppose she was out for sport that evening. On other days she wore full-length robes and sandals and a denim jacket, whenever we took a stroll up Telegraph avenue. She was taller than me by a few inches and probably my weight. She rarely went out and had no friends that I knew of, except John. I spent most of that week with her. Bones and I were running out of speed so we weren’t giving any away, and our company, except for John and Kim, evanesced. I spent a few days with her, just walking around campus, doing most of the talking, showing her my favorites haunts, Moe’s bookstore and the cafe Med. Other mornings she seemed sad and stayed in her room, while I went my rounds to the Med. and bookstores (as I was soon to leave them for who knows how long), but back to her pad by evening, for dinner, talk and sex.
She came over to see my apartment only once. There was company, two or three guests besides Bones and she sat bolt upright on the couch beside me, smiling but with nothing to say. The one remark she did make that afternoon, while we were on a far different topic, interrupting us just as someone came from the bathroom, was that she could tell what type of character a person had by hearing the sound of his toilet flush. No one replied to that odd statement and we went back to our conversation. She told me quietly one night, lying in bed beside me, almost in a whisper, that she’d done too much LSD and other drugs as a hippy, ten years earlier, hitch-hiking around the country with another girl, her best friend, having crazy adventures, and that she knew it had affected her mind. Then she started weeping. She also told me she wished she was my mother. I replied out of sympathy that night that she’d be a good mother, because she was so nice to me.
They were strange, half-sad hours with her, and I treated her with all the kindness I could muster, doing no speed, drinking tea with her each morning, talking of trivial things, happy to be with her. At other times, after a cheap dinner out of a can, like pea soup or chili, I’d talk to entertain her. I’d describe in detail pieces of my happy childhood, exploring the empty hills and woods with my two friends, Brad and Jim, our tree forts and hammocks, the beautiful Crystal Springs reservoir, swimming in it and getting chased by rangers and escaping them. She loved such stories most of all, as if they were dreams she could enter.
She had to empty her purse to get me home, but she did it out of love. I took it and never saw her again, ‘the kindness of strangers’.
It didn’t have to end that way. I came roaring back into town four months later with a pocket full of money (800$) from ten weeks of work. I should have looked her up and repaid the debt and her kindness with some of my company. But I didn’t. Bones and his new girlfriend May were still at the Plough, about to move out in three weeks but inviting me to stay, and a new whirlwind of events and a new affair put her out of mind. I never looked back in those days, the fast pace of youth precluding it. But now, in solitude, I do.
Do I regret it? Yes, but in an ambivalent way. It might have caused more pain for her, as I could never have stayed with her for long. She was too crippled in mind. Retrospect and memories are full of regrets, until we dissect them.
Can the end of an affair, however brief, ever be pleasant? No final parting happens without remorse, without ‘the horror of the last’. "There are few things in life, not purely evil, of which we can say without some emotion of uneasiness: this is the last". I even feel this now as I’m done with her, the last mention of her name, a letter of which I’ve changed in some convoluted tenderness, as if to protect her. Well this thought of her won’t be the last. Today, as I’m writing this, is the first anniversary of my mother’s death. The subject is fitting.
