New York, November 9, 1965. Courtesy of AP Photo/Robert Goldberg.
Something has changed since Richard and I got married in December. I’m not sure what. Have you ever looked in the mirror and noticed you are able to cock one eyebrow higher than ever before? I’m happier. I didn’t imagine I would feel this way when I went downstairs to his studio and said, “I think we should get married.” He looked up from his book and said, “Okay.” Was he bemused, half smiling? I can’t remember.
It’s been three and a half months since we met with a judge in the courthouse in Hudson, where we live, and he pronounced us “married people.” Afterward, Richard and I had happy hour drinks on Warren Street with a friend. For the first few weeks, we imagined the marriage dividend was we wouldn’t get on each other’s nerves as much as before. This has proved untrue.
The thing we did was not twisted up with family and property. It’s more a tighter squeezing of the hands as we slip off the surface of the earth. The earth that appears, understandably, to be sloughing off the pesky Homo sapiens species overall. What I’m describing is a party when the power shuts down. The party is us getting married.
I remember such a party in 1965, during the huge power failure in New York City. I was nineteen, and going to Barnard College, and living with a roommate in a small apartment on Broadway and 107th Street. My boyfriend, Bruce, was more or less living with us, and also living in the building were Dave Bromberg and his girlfriend, whom I’ll call Trudy. I think that was actually her name.
Dave Bromberg was a singer and a songwriter, and he was friends with Dylan. Dave would go on to play guitar with Dylan often, and he’d have a huge career as a musician separately. He was lanky and goofy and friendly, and I think Bruce knew him from Columbia College, where Dave went before he dropped out to be an artist. This quality of Dave’s, the artist-making-his-way vibe, outside the institutions of higher education I was so excited to be a part of, this aspect of Dave cast a dangerous and seductive glow.
At nineteen, living in an apartment in New York City, everything is your first time. Your first rambling man. Your first close-up free-spirit artist. Your first spontaneous orgy.
Trudy was a little older than me, and I remember having dinner at their apartment. She prepared stuffed pork chops. I had never cooked pork chops. I didn’t know they could be stuffed. I can smell them, and the other savory and juicy food she served. Probably there were potatoes. In the game they were playing, Trudy definitely had the part of the Earth Mother girl opposite Dave’s boy in the world. He was heading somewhere with that almost-famous aura rising off him. She was bustling, and plump, and kindhearted—a door that said to me, “Do not enter.”
On November 9, 1965, when the power cut off in a massive Northeast blackout, Bruce had to walk to 107th Street from NYU on Eighth Street, where he was going to law school. In those days (and still, honestly) it wasn’t a big deal to walk five miles in the city, except the streets were dark, and there was a magical feeling of carnival reversal, misrule, and anything goes.
That night, we hung out with Trudy and Dave in their apartment. They had candles, and we sat around talking. Maybe Dave played and sang. Maybe Trudy sang harmony. What I remember is they had sex. Did Bruce and I have sex, too, in the same room? I think so. I think we would have thought it was rude to refrain or leave. During this period and in the many days to come before aids, this sort of thing happened. I didn’t smoke pot often or drink hardly at all, so I was someone awake enough to take notes, and the notes I took are what, right now, look like a memory.
When you are nineteen (and still, honestly) you are casting around for ways your life can go. The man-and-wife-like arrangement of Trudy and Dave wasn’t something I wanted, although, at the time, it seemed the only item on the shelves. It was like going to a store in Soviet Russia, where you had to buy the one thing in stock, let’s say a jar of preserved cherries available right after cherry-picking season. This idea of marriage, as the one jar you can buy in the supermarket of life, put me off marriage for seventy-eight years, and then suddenly—I think it was sudden—I didn’t give a fuck about how people saw me with regard to being married. My bigger concern was being seen as female and old. Not a category with a lot of room in it to grow.
A few months after the Northeast blackout of 1965, Bruce and I got married, in order to move into a larger apartment. The building required that my father cosign the lease, and my father required that I marry Bruce, and so I did, with the feeling of a suitcase on a conveyor belt at the airport. We lasted five years. It was the sixties. Five years was a miracle, like the Hanukkah lights lasting eight days. I got married at nineteen to put an end to marriage.
Getting married to Richard at seventy-eight feels, instead, like the start of something. No one likes endings. We only like beginnings. Richard and I met when I was sixty and he was fifty-six. Why are some people a plane you want to jump on? Because they are the ones leaving the airport?
Being married to Richard feels like the name of the pub in Lancashire owned by Richard’s grandparents. It was called the Help Me Through, short for the Help Me Through the World. Our getting married has made other people happy. A look comes over their faces that is made of angora fur. Angora is a kind of rabbit. I don’t often receive looks that are the fur of a rabbit. I try not to lift the lid on why our marriage makes people happy, in case I find a moldy old tea bag left in the pot.
One of the things that felt familiar to us in the other was that we’d both left home for good at seventeen. We weren’t runaways. We didn’t leave our families in anger, and we weren’t kicked out. It was just time to enter the world, we both felt, and see what would happen.
Richard lived in England and had to work. I had money from my parents to go to college and pay for an apartment. I also always worked some kind of job or made things to sell.
Growing up, no one had hovered over us. Where we had lived—both of us outside large cities for the most part—you went out to play the way a dog is let loose to run around and find its way home. You hooked up with kids on the streets or on the beach. You learned early to cultivate a secret life, and it made you creative. You got hurt jumping out of windows in houses under construction, or you walked miles through pastures of sheep and cows because you’d spent your bus fare sharing a sandwich with friends. No one cared. No one knew.
Richard was the favorite of the four children in his family. In the rest of the world, it would be impossible to find that much tenderness and acceptance. For me, the larger world was easier than home, I learned the first summer at sleepaway camp, when I was five. Strangers had no idea who I was and neither did I, because what you learn when you are set free that young is you are not one thing all the time. You’re plastic. You’re another person’s mirror.
Yesterday on Warren Street, Richard and I bumped into our friend Jake. If you are recognized on Warren Street, it answers many questions for the rest of the day. I said to Jake, “I love you.” I said, “Richard and I both love you.” Jake owns a shop and sees you in the way Godot would see you if he ever showed up. No one on Warren Street is waiting for Godot. If anything, we are waiting for Godot to leave. Jake said he had bottles of scented oil and he would give me some. It’s one of those offers You have to weigh to yourself, if you are going to remind him. People can be more generous than they bargain for.
When Richard and I continued walking, he remarked that The Pitt, the doctor show we’ve been watching, is a morality tale, where we’re instructed about how to act in the face of death as well as life. It explained why it’s so much more fun to rewatch The Americans, where there is no possibility of moral certitude. At the end of the series, the FBI agent Stan allows Phillip and Elizabeth, who are spies and assassins, to escape back to Russia.
He likes them. He’s been their neighbor, and he’s felt affection for them grow, day by day and year by year. Phillip doesn’t believe in spying for Russia. Elizabeth is the ideologue, and Phillip will do anything to stay near her. They are married, he keeps explaining to her. After a while, growing near each other, trees don’t know which roots are theirs.
Laurie Stone is the author of six books, most recently Streaming Now: Postcards from the Thing That Is Happening, which was long-listed for the PEN America Diamonstein-Spielvogel Award for the Art of the Essay. She writes the Streaming Now column for LIBER: A Feminist Review, and her Substack is Everything Is Personal.