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Amana couple wanted to get married, it became a cause for regret, since the elders thought it was tragic to bring more children into the world. Accordingly, the betrothed pair were first separated for a long time to see if they would still want to persist in their folly.
    Marilyn had retained none of these beliefs, but her zeal in defending her brand of socialism (and later feminism) struck me as extreme. Now she’d say that I was exaggerating the violence of her opinions of that period. Although Marilyn liked the “sophisticated” side of New York (the songs of Bobby Short and Mabel Mercer, the chic black singers at the Café Carlyle), she was less susceptible than I to the rush toward celebrity, the push to be famous in thearts that dominated New York life in that period. I was obsessed with being famous—not rich, which held no interest for me, but famous among the top echelons of the cultural elite. Marilyn found my ambition incomprehensible—and laughable. She was “down-to-earth,” to use a favorite American phrase that always puzzles my European friends. I have never stopped being influenced by her sensible, de-dramatizing way of looking at the world, though by nature I am overwrought and desperate for recognition.
    She was enamored of passionate Puccini arias, and she and I would listen over and over to Manon Lescaut . She was esepcially fond of the great passionate Swedish tenor Jussi Björling and, after seeing him at the Chicago Lyric, reported back that he was short and corseted and elderly—a real dumpling. She liked that his youthful heartrending voice didn’t go with his looks at all. She was also a big fan of the Italian soprano Renata Tebaldi. In those days everyone was either for Tebaldi or Maria Callas (as so often happens, the runner-up, Tebaldi, is less often mentioned now).
    In college I got it into my head that I should marry Marilyn. I felt that she’d be understanding about my struggle against homosexuality. I told her I loved her and wanted to spend the rest of my life with her. She responded with long, passionate kisses. I was thrilled and frightened, as though I was about to spoil a wonderful friendship or get myself into water far deeper than I could navigate. But then again, I thought I’d been saved. I’d been so afraid of spending the rest of my life as that frightening hippogriff, a homosexual. Now I’d been transformed into an ordinary male, and yet with Marilyn nothing would be banal or conventional. We’d be normal, a happily married couple, but we’d be artists, enraptured by our Puccini.
    She drove us everywhere. I could drive, but not well—I preferred her behind the wheel. When she said she never wanted to marry, I took it with a whole box of salt; I knew about women, about theirbiological drive to marry and procreate. The urge was stronger than they were. Nothing could stop their need to nest and hatch. Though I must say we never spoke of children and I felt no need, not even the slightest passing twinge of desire, to have offspring, to see little Eddies and Marilyns looking up at us with trusting or resentful eyes.
    I could scarcely acknowledge to anyone, not even to myself, how relieved I was to be straight. I’d so feared spending my life as a freak, of watching myself become more and more effeminate under my mop of dyed blond curls stiff from a permanent, imprisoned behind a pair of frightened, frozen eyes under painted-brown eyebrows. I’d seen swishy men in their forties and fifties working as waiters in Chicago at little gay restaurants along Rush Street, alternating between icy efficiency and campy self-dramatization, their red-and-white-checked shirt collars turned up over a red silk knotted scarf, the raised collar lightly grazing their peroxided duck’s-ass hairdo.
    I was so proud of my escape from this fate that I even bragged to my father that I wanted to marry Marilyn. He didn’t know her, but when he discovered that she was seven years older than me,