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he advised me against such an unpromising union. “An older girl might look good to you now, Ed, but women don’t age well. If you don’t watch it, you’ll be stuck with an old bag. Better to marry someone seven years younger.” I was offended at his butcher’s way of sizing up a side of beef. But I was amazed that after worrying himself sick over the shameful reality of my homosexuality, he didn’t rejoice in any approximation of heterosexuality I might come up with. The bourgeoisie! I thought indignantly. They don’t really care about the happiness of their children, only about respectability in the eyes of others.
    Although Marilyn and I were planning to spend a summer together (after my junior year) in Chicago—she painting, Iwriting—I was so worried about the consequences of my declaration of love that I went inert. I played dead. I didn’t call her. I didn’t write her. She wrote me two or three letters to which I did not respond. I kept intending to write her a really long, ardent letter, but with every passing day I became more panicked and immobilized. At last she sent me a curt little note saying, “Yours is not like any love I ever heard of. Let’s just skip it and be friends. Anyway, I’ve decided I prefer girls. I’m spending the summer with Miranda.”
    I felt as if I’d somehow missed a crucial beat. Girls? Miranda? I remembered there’d been a beautiful, butchy Texan by that name at Cranbrook, a rich girl from Fort Worth who laughed at all of Marilyn’s jokes. But hadn’t there also been a bearded Jewish painter named Jay from Brooklyn?
    Three years went by, Stan and I had moved to New York, then one day I got a call from Marilyn, who was in tears. She’d just had her heart broken by a wild, fast-driving, heavy-drinking Southern girl named Megan who looked like Anthony Quinn. Marilyn was distraught—what could she do?
    “Move to New York,” I said. “Move in with us. We have a spare room with a little single bed.”
    “Really?”
    “Really,” I said. Stan was nodding on the couch. Later he would claim that I hadn’t warned him Marilyn was bringing her cat along.
    A few days later Marilyn arrived with a single suitcase, her 1911 edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica , and her black cat, Booboo. We were all three very happy, three Midwesterners in the Big City. Of course Stan was moody and suffered over his acting, his future, his strange family, his insecurities. He would take an hour getting dressed to walk to the corner. He’d try on one outfit after another. “Does this blue sweater make my ass look too big?” “Should I roll up these sleeves—or are my arms too hairless?” “Isthis pimple on my nose grotesque—should I stay home today?” Marilyn still cried a lot over Megan. But she found a job at the Encyclopedia Americana and an apartment on the Upper West Side. After two or three months with us she moved out and was living on her own. Stan and I spent all our holidays with her and many weekends. She and I would sit up late over a bottle of wine and argue about politics. She was coldly dismissive of America’s achievements and invariably enthusiastic about what the Soviet Union had accomplished. The motto “From each according to his ability, to each according to his need” made perfect sense to her (and to me). A redistribution of property and an equalization of income seemed only fair to us. If I vaunted American civil liberties, Marilyn insisted that so-called freedoms that were not backed up by economic equality were empty. And anyway, how could we be sure what was going on within Russia? Our only source of news was the hysterical American press, blind with its prejudices and fear.
    Our longest and most recurring discussions were about the role of the arts in an ideal socialist state. If I criticized the well-known censorship practiced in the Soviet Union, Marilyn would say that if she could save a single human life by destroying the Mona Lisa , she would do