Lover. Bertha Harris
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point of view on the matter stank of communism.
Okay, I said. I figured they still thought they were dealing with J. Edgar Hoover’s girlfriend, complete with wires. I considered congratulating them on being, as of that moment, completely in the clear with my superiors at the agency. I kept my mouth shut.
The next day June told me she’d asked me to visit because she needed help on her new novel, Baby Houston, hadn’t I understood that? No, but. June handed me the manuscript. I sat down in the extraordinarily decorated living room, which was about one-third the size of the New York Public Library’s main reading room, and got to work. Parke dropped in at regular intervals to collect for the next meal.
I stayed in Houston with Parke and June long enough to urge June repeatedly to replace the pretty writing in Baby Houston (“Baby” was her mother) with the rage she was so far keeping between the lines (“You’re wrong,” she told me), and to experience a representative slice of how they were living their new lives. June spent her days working on Baby Houston, swimming and gardening; Parke watched movies on TV, swam, gardened, worked the Times crossword, and read English novels. They visited with June’s girlhood chums and played a regular bridge game with some of them in the evenings. They shopped a lot at Houston’s glitziest mall; they were compiling new wardrobes of French designer clothing. From the neck down, June looked sleek and chic, but her face looked haggard— stressed and grim, as if, inside, she was grieving. Her face would have more appropriately accessorized sackcloth and ashes. Parke’s threads were as upscale as June’s, but were still in Parke’s favorite understated color, merde. I was still in my basics—basically my only basics, except for the vintage evening dresses I reserved for dates with J. Edgar —which were, then as now, white shirts and black jeans. One night, when we were about to go out to dinner with one of Parke and June’s new friends, June said, “I’m so glad to be here, where I can dress in nice clothes again. It’s hard for me to even look at that New York movement drag any more.” I quickly changed into my basic variation on my basics, white jeans and black shirt.
Houston had grown some lesbians since June’s early life there (when, she once asserted, there weren’t any), but except for one or two, all of June and Parke’s close women friends were heterosexual; the one or two lesbians they hung out with were wealthy. They no longer felt comfortable among people too different from themselves. Too much difference, I surmised, was too little money. They had never felt comfortable among people different from themselves.
The last time Parke asked me to fork over, I made bold to ask if by any chance they needed a loan to tide them over. Parke fearlessly stepped on the irony. She told me that from now on they were keeping every penny strictly for themselves; they’d had enough of getting ripped off by the women’s movement.
I wasn’t the women’s movement. Far from ripping off Daughters, or Parke or June personally, I had, minute by minute, inch by inch, paid my own way during my friendship with them and my time with the company. Parke had insisted on it, down to the last dime, even when I was traveling with the partners on Daughters’ business exclusively. She justified this un-Random House-like exploitation of an employee by impressing on hand-to-mouth me that she had to save up for her old age.
I gave her money for the next meal. I don’t keep score; I’d rather be ripped off. And I was, as ever, afraid of Parke’s barely suppressed anger. Evidently, Parke had either demoted me into the “damn dumb dykes” category, or was possessed by the idea that I was so deeply in her debt (though for what?) that I had to make some recompense by paying for my own food while I was a guest in her house working on June’s novel.
Parke was as uncommonly stingy with money as I am cavalier. Which may go some distance in explaining how she, with June’s knowledge, could break the most fundamental rule of hospitality: but it doesn’t begin to explain the rage that accompanied her demands for money. I’ve finally remembered how I actually felt each time I was faced with both her anger and her open palm: I had been invited to Houston to experience humiliation.
I did what I could with Baby Houston. June thanked me and drove me to the airport. I chalked the monetary and emotional costs of the trip up to being out of my mind.
Within two years after Parke and June returned to Houston, June was diagnosed as having cancer of the brain, the incurable kind. I thought, when I heard the bad news, of the trope—the human brain; cancer of the brain —I’d used in Lover. I had a nightmare about fiction’s being able to assume an extraliterary life of its own to do things its author never intended.
Not long after June died, I acted like a Manhattanite and went to a psychiatrist. I felt disabled; I felt that I was disappearing, and neither love nor work nor sex was helping me. The psychiatrist was tall, fat, and mid-fortyish with a little-girl hairdo. She was so white she looked like an Easter bunny. Her clothing led me to believe that in her professional opinion dainty pinks-on-pinks was a good cure for what ailed her patients. She wore a lot of showgirl makeup—glitter on her eyelids, lashings of pancake, and fifties-red lipstick, and she had flat feet. She wanted me to hold rocks which she described as “crystals” while I talked; she encouraged me to attend events at which a woman entered a trance and then, in a voice belonging to an Egyptian from the Old Kingdom dynasty, answered questions from the audience: “Should I buy General Motors?” and Cheops would answer, “Go with the flow.” I spent most of my energy during sessions with her trying not to show how thoroughly her mind and body revolted me. In no time, she had me driving her around New York, feeding her cats, and moving her from one apartment to another. I was paying her top dollar; we did not have a bartering arrangement. After a year of this, she urged me to give the little girl inside of me a great big hug. I suggested that she go fuck herself and, at last, departed.
I might have filed a complaint with the psychiatric police, but I couldn’t imagine what nature of complaint I could file against my mother, or Parke and June. I spent the rest of the eighties virtually a recluse, one who cannot be had because she is not available to give herself. I avoided old, genuine friends; I felt contaminated, therefore unworthy of their friendship. It doesn’t surprise me in the least that I’ve been unable to complete the four novels I’ve written since life with Daughters.
By 1975, the year before Lover was published, Parke had given up even the pretense of being a feminist, but June was still avidly talking lesbian-feminist politics. Neither of them had yet gone mad—or, if they had, I was so enchanted by being in service to Daughters, I ignored the symptoms. When others suggested to me that something might be seriously wrong with Parke and June, and therefore with the company, I became their apologist and defender. But after a while even I became aware of some serious contradictions between what June was publicly saying—the politics du jour (the personal is political, etc.) —and what she was privately doing: to me, in particular.
June and Parke were the first wealthy people I’d ever been close to. I thought it exotic, at the very least, that June swore by politics which, if they were successfully put into practice, would be the ruin of the sources of her money. But I didn’t say so. I didn’t want to spoil the loud party, I didn’t want them to be disappointed in me. My mother got a lot of mileage out of telling me how disappointed in me she was. Nonetheless, I did wonder if June had found a solution to that tiresome riddle, the one about how much easier it is for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than it is for a rich man [sic] to enter the kingdom of heaven.
Our closeness, which would end in my near-imprisonment, started when Parke went after Lover, insisting that I sell it to Daughters even though she hadn’t read a word of the manuscript. Parke told me that she had read my first two novels and that she’d been impressed (Parke later brought Confessions of Cherubino, my second novel, back into print). This is how Random House operates, she said; they buy sight unseen too if a writer’s earlier work suits them.
The partners took me to dinner. They were charming, amusing, and warm; every few minutes, Parke would say something hilarious. In the middle of this love feast, June explained that publishing with the “male” houses would brand me as “male-identified;” I would be just another one of those feminists, so-called, who did exactly that with their books. Parke said that Daughters was