Manhood for Amateurs

Burning Women

The second burning woman was small and dark-haired, pert, buxom, younger than my mother but not as pretty. I had never seen her. As had her predecessor a few months earlier, she sat behind the wheel of her car, an orange AMC Matador parked with the engine off at the end of our driveway, windows rolled down. She sat staring with hollow shock at the Boyfriend’s Mustang, which was in turn parked at the head of our driveway, under the basketball hoop mounted on the edge of the carport.

“Hello,” I said, stooping to retrieve the Post.

“Hello,” said the woman.

It was already hot, the sky cloudless, the air dense and starry with gnats, the sun well up over the trees.

“How are you this morning?” I said.

The woman eyed me skeptically as if I were a consolation prize or parting gift sent out by the Boyfriend, who was at that moment sitting at our kitchen table, eating a large bowl of oatmeal that I had made for him — slightly chunky, slightly chewy, and yet smooth and pleasantly glutinous, which I served with sultana raisins, a dissolving puddle of brown sugar, and a nice thick spiral of half-and-half. One of the ongoing puzzles I posed to myself at the age of fifteen was the gap between the things that I knew or felt and the things that I did. Such as, to cite one example, the lengths to which I would go to please the Boyfriend, whom I loathed, and yet whose rough-edged, racy laugh or few words of praise for my cooking could bring tears to my eyes.

“What’s your name?” said the burning woman. She was actually quite pretty, sloe-eyed and freckled with a snub nose and breasts that registered strongly on my tricorder’s bodacity detection array.

“Mike,” I told her.

“Mike.”

“Michael. It means ‘Who is like unto God?’ It’s a question.”

“Do you spell it with a question mark?”

“No, but maybe I should. That could be cool.”

“Do me a favor, Mike?”

“Tell him that you were here?”

She rummaged a package of Eve cigarettes from her purse and pushed in the dashboard lighter. “Done this before,” she said, “I gather.”

“Yes. Not every day, but.”

My mother was one of a number of attractive women in the city of Columbia, Maryland, who were collectively embarked upon the bold enterprise of having their hearts broken by the Boyfriend, whose movements were like those of a guerrilla leader or rebel commander, never sleeping in the same bed longer than two or three nights running. In the interests of security, the Boyfriend apparently thought nothing of dividing one night between two or more beds. The women who loved the Boyfriend tended, like my mother, to be strangely slow on the uptake when it came to grasping the bitter truth about the man, but once they realized that he had been lying to them and running around town with several other women at once, they tended to go through a period — relatively prolonged in my mother’s case — of following him and tracking his movements. Come to think of it, very much like stealthy operatives of a conquering power bent on crushing insurrection. My mother had the Boyfriend that morning, but I knew that only two nights before, she had crept out of the house at two o’clock in the morning to go and stand in the bushes outside the house of another woman in whose driveway the Boyfriend’s Mustang sat, engine clicking.

My mother was, and remains, a cool customer. Not cold, if by cold you mean unfeeling or remote, heartless, or disengaged. But not unduly given, let’s say, to bursting into flame. Big shows of emotion, tears and drama, shouting, proclamations, bold naked statements of love and hate, braggadocio and stomping around — these are not the arts of her hardheaded, soft-spoken race. The woman is considered. Deliberate. Measured. Unflappable. Skeptical and sharp-eyed. Generous with her time and attention, unstinting with sound advice, and steady in her bestowal of moral support, she has never been your Santa Claus of physical affection with the lap and the cookies and the great big sack full of hugs. Hugs when she’s happy, hugs when you’re sad, hello, goodbye, lunch, breakfast, warm soft armloads of love for everyone: not she.

It was quite unexpected, therefore — the right word might be freakish—when my mother, slowly at first, almost imperceptibly, like a leaf that chances to blow into the bright focus of somebody’s spectacles left out in the sun, set herself on fire for the Boyfriend. In the years since my parents’ separation had become final, she’d dated a lot of men, a zoo’s worth, furry and hairless as mole rats, a kitchen drawer’s worth, sharpened and dull. Line them up and they varied in form, tint, and potency like bottles on the back of a bar. Some had been handsome, fit, deep-voiced, and deep-pocketed. Some had come around too much and given her too many rash presents, and others had been aloof and trifled with her time. Some had paid heed to me and my opinions, enough so that I minted fresh opinions for them at twice my usual rate. Others had felt it wisest to proceed to my mother’s bedroom without taking note of the young man on the stairs, in the horned helmet, posing a pertinent question about runes.

In all that time until the Boyfriend, I never saw my mother fall in love, not even a little. And lest this seem a matter of perception or simple wishful thinking on the part of a son perhaps jealous of his mother’s time and affection, looking to do what he could to drive away the likely candidates or downplay the intensity of his mother’s feelings toward them, there was my mother’s own testimony, repeated over the years with suitable variation, in conversation with her girlfriends or to me alone on a drive somewhere far enough that the conversation had time, with my little brother snoring in the backseat, to turn to her love life: He’s nice enough. A little dull. I don’t think this is really heading anywhere. If he calls, tell him I’m not in.

The truth of the matter is that from the moment the very first suitor turned up — call him Roger, call him mustached and tweedy and festooned with an Isro — and I realized that such a thing was possible, I had been waiting for my mother to fall in love. It was something I wanted to see, something I knew was fully possible, and not just because I knew that even Vulcans went love-amok once every seven years and that, as our World Book encyclopedia informed me, under the ice of Iceland there burned fires of molten steel. No, I had seen proof of my mother’s ardor in black and white. This photograph — take a look.

My mother and father in the summer of 1962 on a blanket in the sun. A grassy slope, a distant tree. My father, shirtless and smooth, holds my mother in his arms; he’s lying right on top of her. Her head is thrown back to expose to his mouth her throat, and her bare shoulders are in a halter top. Her hand, fingers splayed, is pressed against the flesh of his back, keeping him, playing him, holding him there. The first time I came upon this picture tucked between the pages of my father’s Modern Library edition of The Poetry of Blake, I was stunned, transfixed by this evidence that in some remote era there must have once existed, as some part of me had always known there must, a kingdom or a civilization or some kind of lost world known, to scholars of dust, as my parents’ love for each other. It was like seeing at long last some kind of theory or explanation of myself, of how I got here, and almost literally so, for printed in the bottom border of the picture were the words AUGUST 1962, and it was not quite ten months later that there came into the world, squalling and shitting, the author of these lines. And that was the reason, I think, that I wanted to see my mother in love. Not because armed with this proof of their having once loved each other I hoped that in some whistle-while-you-wish Wonderful World of Disney way it would be my father toward whom she once again would kindle her heart, but because something made sense to me, looking at the picture, that had never made sense before. In the absence of the kind of passion, of fire, to which the photograph attested, what was the point of it all? Why else had they done it — built it all up so they could then knock it all down? After a marriage breaks, there is nothing more pointless than the child, to that child, of that marriage.

The lighter popped out, and the second burning woman looked into its radiant coils for a moment, then reached in and poked them with the tip of her finger. I could hear the hiss of her flesh as it singed. Actually, it was not that long since I had conducted the very same experiment with the lighter in our Impala, perhaps out of the same aimless and darkly curious urge. Would I be like her one day? Come to the same dire pass, driving around all night in the pursuit, at once brazen and furtive, of the thing that was hurting me the most? Fervently, I hoped and dreaded that it would be so.

“Ah!” she said. “Ouch.” She held her cigarette to the heat, inhaling a savage puff to get it going, then shook out her fingers as if drying polish on her nails. Then she told me her name, which I no longer remember. “You can tell him I was here, Mike. All right?”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“Miss.”

“Yes, miss.”

“And tell him I had fun last night chasing him all around town.”

“Did you have fun?”

“Not a minute,” said the burning woman, and then she drove off into the flames.

Verging

When I was fifteen, I slept with this woman I knew. I’m not sure how old she was at the time; probably not over thirty-five. She was a friend of my mother’s, and I have never known, then or to this day, what was in it for her. I was a newly thin, undistinguished-looking kid with acne and aviator glasses. My long hair was cut and styled in the “wings” that render hilarious contemporary photographs of Shaun Cassidy and Leif Garrett. Though I was smart, verbal, and took an interest in the world around me — and had recently felt stirrings of some kind of new grasp on the nature of my life to come, derived from reading The World According to Garp and watching Annie Hall—that interest still quickened most keenly in proximity to things like Dune, Jim Starlin’s Warlock, and the stories of H.P. Lovecraft. I have devoted many passing moments over the intervening years to observing interactions between thirty-five-year-old women and fifteen-year-old boys, and I have found that all the mystery in the business lies on the older and wiser side of things.

My mother threw a party, and there was dancing that ran late into the evening, with the tempos slowing as the night wore on until, in the end, my mother and her boyfriend went off someplace to do whatever they did, and I found myself alone in the arms of this woman — divorced, single, sweet-smelling — subject to her languid, teasing conversation, to the pressure of her belly against my hips, and to the tender mercies of Willie Nelson singing “Help Me Make It Through the Night.”

Maybe the solution to all the mystery lies in the title and lyrics of that song — and in the ache of the voice that was singing it. I am certain the woman was pretty drunk.

“Are you a virgin?” she said in an offhand tone.

“No,” I said. I was happy to see that my reply surprised her. It was the truth, and I was hoping it would be enough to persuade her to extend the invitation that I thought she might be contemplating.

“Does your mother know that?”

“Well, I didn’t tell her,” I said. “I don’t think so.”

“I don’t think so, either,” said my mother’s friend.

My virginity had been no particular encumbrance to me, and it had not lingered very long beyond the time that I started hankering to be rid of it. I was in the tenth grade, a year younger than most of my fellow sophomores, and the girl who had done me the favor was a senior: a sophisticate of seventeen, in possession of a keen mind and a tremendous American automobile of the period (an LTD? an Olds ’88?) that she used to drive herself responsibly to museums, film retrospectives, and concerts. She was a serious reader (I still have her paperback copy of The Wreckage of Agathon, and I plan to read it someday), a musician, an artist; an incipient adult, embarked on a history of unfolding adventure, both intellectual and physical, in which I was to rate barely a footnote. Her long-term steady boyfriend, to whose own brilliant incipience, as I was all too aware, I offered nothing in the way of competition, had left for college earlier in the fall with an exchange of vague promises of fidelity. She may have been lonely, missing him, looking for ways to strike back or strike out on her own. I didn’t care in the least. He was the first ex-boyfriend whose shade was ever invoked in the memories and pillow talk of a girl I was fucking, and just as great a fool as all who followed him.

She was not much to look at — raw-cheeked, long-nosed, tall, and deceivingly prim — but that was okay with me. She had as much to forgive as I did, and in any case, I have never found anything more reliably sexy in a woman than a passion for 1) reading difficult novels and 2) me. We had been selected by the casting director of destiny to play Mr. and Mrs. Antrobus in the school production of The Skin of Our Teeth, and in time-honored Dick-and-Liz fashion, one thing led to another. I got her to laugh at something I said, and then she passed me a note in the hallway, ornamented with a star of glitter and glue. After the elapse of a gratifyingly brief interval she brought me home to her bedroom in the basement of her family’s town house, and she bestowed upon me the magic of her permission.

I will try as hard as I can not to exaggerate here: I estimate that I spent merely forty-three minutes of the prolonged episode that followed in conducting a detailed and glorious survey, a USGS mapping expedition, complete with aerial reconnaissance and depth soundings, of the young woman’s vagina. I would not affirm that I was more interested in studying it than in introducing my penis therein, but it was awfully close. I had spent years looking at doubtful (and in the end worthless) photographs of vaginas in scrounged copies of Penthouse and Hustler. In the end these proved to bear as much relation to the wonder of which I found myself that night — the unchallenged and loving custodian — as the portrait of a daube of beef in a cookbook bears to the fragrant, homely, hard-earned stew that presents itself, steaming on a plate, to the nose and eyes of a hungry man.

That was a Saturday night; the next day my mother took my brother and me out to Falls Church, Virginia, to visit our grandmother. I had not showered or washed my hands, and I spent the whole day dreaming over the smell of her on my fingers. I was a traveler returned from a fabled land. I wanted to tell everyone — my brother, my mother, my grandmother — what splendors and vistas I had encountered. The next weekend there was a dance, and my first lover invited me afterward into the great dark wastes of her backseat, where there was no time for science or exploration. And then on Monday she dumped me.

She had done me so many favors — had indulged, with a tenderness that even at the time I recognized as a kind of grace, all my exclamations over and examinations of her body, especially that astonishing evolutionary feat of origami between her legs — and now she did me the final one of being honest. She liked me, she said, and she liked having sex with me, but I was too young for her. I would not talk to her in the hallways of school when my male friends were around; I would not hold hands or hang out on the blacktop or in the cafeteria. In short, I was not comfortable with all the essential ancillaries of having a girlfriend. I could not handle it. I was — somehow she said it without hurting my feelings or inspiring any kind of attempt at denial from me — too immature.

No such compunction or misgiving seemed to trouble my mother’s friend. As in a letter to Penthouse Forum, my mother and brother conveniently left town on the weekend following the late-night party, and I was by myself. My second lover came over around nine that Saturday night, much later than I would have liked, since by the time she arrived, looking pretty and smelling very good and carrying an impossibly adult bottle of wine, I was already wishing, with a fervor that shocked me, to get the whole thing over with.

I led her into the living room, and we sat down on two chairs. I managed to get the wine open, and she drank a little, and I pretended to drink a little, and then with the quenching heat of the wine against my dry throat, I took a long dark swallow. Here I am, I thought, pretending to care for wine, pretending to speak wittily of inconsequential things, pretending to be the kind of kid whose mother’s girlfriends decide to come over and throw him a fuck. I guess at some point we must have started to make out. I employed the careful, phased techniques, starting at the top of one’s partner and working ritualistically down, that I had been taught by my seventeen-year-old ex-non-girlfriend.

“We don’t need to do all that teenager stuff,” said my mother’s friend. “Where should we go?”

I suggested that we do it right there on the floor, on the green-and-blue shag rug, and that was what we did. When it was over, I rolled off and instructed her, in very plain terms, to go home. I felt none of the rapture, the stunned cartographic joy I had felt during and after my first time. Though objectively, she was much better-looking — soft and shapely — I had no desire to make a study of her. I had wanted to get the thing over with, and so I had.

“Go?” she said, and I saw to my horror that I had hurt her feelings. “But I—”

I actually employed the words “I just remembered that I have an appointment,” which is how I know for sure that I was fifteen. “I have to go see a friend.”

“Oh,” she said, and her eyes resumed their customary sly-eyed coolness. “Okay.”

She sat up and pulled on her underpants, rolled her tights back up her white thighs, shivered herself into her wool jumper. I wanted to tell her, to explain to her, that I was not ready, that I was too immature, that I just couldn’t handle it. She stood up and gathered her purse and her coat, and I saw her to the door, where she turned to me, her eyes looking vulnerable again, wondering, maybe asking me to help her make it through the night. And suddenly, with the smell of wine and cunt in the air between us, I wanted to do it again, in a bed, all night and with science and art.

“Good night,” she said. She kissed me in a final kind of way. I stood on the doorstep until she got into her car, started the engine, and drove home, leaving me one regret, one empty house, one night closer to being ready.

Fever

I was standing on Forbes Avenue, across from the laboratory where I had sold my blood plasma to buy irises and halvah for Rebecca, the first great love of my life, waiting for the bus that would take me to her lover’s house. It was one o’clock in the morning. Giddy fireworks of snow exploded over my head in the light from the streetlamp; there were already four inches on the ground. Under my peacoat I wore only a pajama top, and in my haste to get out the door, I’d neglected to put on my overshoes. My gloves I had lost weeks before. I carried my frozen hands in my pockets, the right one jammed in beside a dented Grove Press edition of Illuminations, Rebecca’s favorite book, which, like Rebecca herself, couched everything in terms of torment and ecstasy and moved me strangely without making much sense.

“This is very embarrassing, Mike,” Rebecca’s lover had said over the phone. “But I’m just incredibly fucked up, and I think there might really be something wrong with her. She keeps making this sound.” Alarmed, half asleep, I’d told him I would be there as soon as I could. An hour spent waiting for the 61C, sneakers ankle-deep in a pool of black slush, had given me ample time to wonder why, given the circumstances, I should be the one to rescue Rebecca yet again from the burning-down house of her brain. Let him, the other man, begin to lose nights of his life in emergency rooms and in the lyrical labyrinths of her mysterious fevers and furors.

My anger abated somewhat in the warmth of the bus’s interior and by well past two, when I reached the Squirrel Hill duplex where Rebecca’s lover lived, I had once more donned the full panoply, the ax, tackle, and stouthearted gravity, of a resolute fireman of love. I would save Rebecca if it was not already too late. When her lover opened the door, I thought he was going to tell me that she had died.

“She’s upstairs,” he said. He was willowy, frail, with the smooth cheeks and puffy eyes of a newborn. Like Rebecca, he admired aesthetic suicides and madmen such as van Gogh and Syd Barrett. His health was poor, he wore heavy wool sweaters even in the heat of August, and to counteract the jitters of a stomach so nervous that he threw up just waiting for a DJ to play his request on the radio, he smoked great quantities of marijuana. We had not seen each other since the night two weeks earlier when I learned that he was Rebecca’s lover. I wanted him to look mortified now, chastened by my gallant fireman’s air, but he seemed only stoned and not much put out. He shied away from the blast of cold wind that had followed me like a pack of dogs into the house. “Man, I don’t know what happened to her. She just kind of fell over.”

“Michael?” Rebecca called as I came up the stairs. The house had the old-potato stink of bong water, and the steam heat was turned all the way up. There was a childish note of shame in her voice, and as I came into the sweltering bedroom of her lover and caught her smell of lily of the valley, I felt my heart, like a muscular reflex or spasm, forgive her. “Michael, what are you doing? I’m all right.”

Her forehead was damp, her eyes clouded with fever tears. I stood up. I looked at her lover’s bed. There were shoes in the bedsheets, a Coke bottle, an open jar of cold cream, plates streaked with hardened food. On the nightstand they had built a tiny Stonehenge of pill bottles and bronchial inhalers, and on one slipless pillow sat a porcelain water pipe in the shape of a human skull.

“We’re going home,” I told her. “Come on.”

“Please, Michael.” She looked at her lover reproachfully, I thought. “I don’t want to go outside.”

Couldn’t she see that the house all around her was falling in a shower of sparks and burned beams? Ignoring Rebecca’s protests, I helped her down the stairs, zipped her into her parka, pulled on her red rubber boots, tucked her piano-black hair into her knit beret. I called a taxi that took us back to the apartment on Meyran Avenue, and I gave my last five dollars to the driver. I put her in bed, and told her I loved her, and tried to enfold all her trembling limbs in the warm envelope of my body.

Rebecca moved out two days later and ever since, as far as I know, has been leaping, afire, from high windows that belch black smoke. In all that time, though there have been many other leapers, I have never managed to catch a single one, or learned how to stand back and just watch them fall.

Looking for Trouble

One spring afternoon when I was fifteen years old, a kid who was new to the tenth grade showed up at our front door unannounced, with a backgammon set folded under his arm. I had no talent for backgammon or friend-making. I hated games that, like backgammon or the making of friends, depended in any way on a roll of the dice or a gift for seizing opportunities. I disliked surprises and all changes of plan, even changes for the better — except in retrospect. At the art of retrospection I was a young grandmaster. (If only there were a game whose winning required a gift for the identification of missed opportunities and of things lost and irrecoverable, a knack for the belated recognition of truths, for the exploitation of chances in imagination after it is too late!) True, I might have felt some disposition to like this kid already, but I never would have dared to act upon it. I was an early subscriber to Marxian doctrine as espoused by Woody Allen in Annie Hall, which had been my favorite movie for the last year or so, and the mere fact that this kid wanted to be friends with me at all seemed to impeach his judgment and fitness for the role.

“I thought you seemed like someone who might enjoy backgammon,” said the kid, gravely mistaken.

I stood there at the front door with nothing in particular to do — I think I was reading a book when he knocked, likely some book I had already read — no good friend my age to speak of, no plausible excuse to send him away, though every strand and dendrite of instinct crying out to be left alone to my friendless but well-planned solitude. I think I might have told him that I had homework, or I had to take care of my little brother, or since my mother was at work, we weren’t allowed to have anybody over. I might have tried to be honestly rude and said that I had no interest in backgammon at all. But the confirmed stick-in-the-mud will always fall victim to the interventions of other people acting on impulse, because if habit is his religion, then his Satan is change, and in the end, we are all prey to temptation.

I said he might as well come in, and he wiped the floor with me several times at backgammon until I confessed — armed with fresh evidence — that I hated the game, and we found something else to do. Within a few weeks he had become the best friend, save one, that I have ever had.

In 1992, almost exactly fifteen years after that afternoon, this kid, grown now to a man, called to tell me about this girl, woman, whatever. She shared a Stuyvesant Town apartment on the Lower East Side with his friend Audrey, and she had just been dumped by her boyfriend, among whose numerous flaws, apart from the chief flaw of not appreciating her, were a staunch Catholicism and a lack of Catholicity when it came to practicing a certain act of oral love-making extremely popular among many women who have tried it.

“I told her I knew a Jewish guy who would give her head,” my friend explained, kidding, not kidding at all. He assured me that the young woman in question was smart, attractive, lively, fun to be around. He had taken her out himself once. Though they liked each other, there was no spark.

“A blind date,” I summarized in a doubtful if not faintly nauseated tone when he had finished unfolding the backgammon set of his proposition.

At this epoch, after a period of adventure and modest uproar, my life had resumed, like Larry Talbot after a lycanthropic spree, its true shape: a dull business. I was living in a small carriage-house apartment in the Hudson Valley, two hours north of the city, in the fifth year of trying to finish my second novel: alone with a book again. Nothing to do, nobody to do it with, nothing going on at all. Just the way I liked it, or rather, just the way I always seemed to fall out, whether I did like it that way or not. When it came to the art of living, the only medium susceptible to my genius was inertia. If someone wanted to get married, I would marry her. If she wanted out, then it was time to get a divorce. Otherwise, in either case, I was okay with things the way they were. No, not okay: I longed and suffered and pined with the rest of humanity. Sometimes I was happy enough with the book I was reading or the book I was writing, and the life I was stuck inside felt like a house on a rainy day. But most of the time I was just plain dying to get out. All I needed — all I have ever needed — was someone to challenge me, to serve as a goad, an instigator, a stirrer of the pot. I hated trouble, but I loved troublemakers. I hated chance and uncertainty, but I was drawn to those who showed up on your doorstep with their own pair of dice.

“Suit yourself,” said my old friend when I declined this girl’s number. He was getting ready to hang up on me and my dial tone of a life.

I could feel the familiar sensation as I said goodbye to him, the train pulling away from the platform, the call to adventure fading on the air, the tumult in the blood as the moon tries to fight its way out from behind a cloud and turn a man to a wolfman. Longing for change and fearing it, caught in a tissue woven from dread and regret shot through with purest gold threads of a yearning to get out of my book, my room, my house, my body, my skull, my life.

“All right,” I said, as I had said to him when he bicycled over with his backgammon board. “Just give me her number.”

Not very long afterward, in an ongoing act of surrender to the world beyond my window, with no possibility of knowing what joy or disaster might result, I married her. And since that afternoon in Berkeley, California, standing along the deepest seam of the Hayward Fault — no, since our first date — this woman has dragged, nudged, coaxed, led, stirred, embroiled, mocked, seduced, finagled, or carried me into every last instance of delight or sorrow, every debacle, every success, every brilliant call, and every terrible mistake, that I have known or made. I’m grateful for that, because if it were not for her, I would never go anywhere, never see anything, never meet anyone. It’s too much bother. It’s dangerous, hard work, or expensive. I lost my ticket. I kind of have a headache. They don’t speak English there, it’s too far away, they’re closed for the day, they’re full, they said we can’t, it’s too much bother with children along.

She will have none of that. She is quick, mercurial, intemperate. She has a big mouth, a rash heart, a generous nature (always a liability, in my view), and if my way is always to opt out, to sit in the window seat with a book in my lap, pressing my face against the pane, then her great weakness, indistinguishable from her great strength, is a fatal, manic aptitude for saying yes. She gets herself, and us, and me, into trouble: into noble causes and silly disputes, into pregnancies and terminations, into journeys and strange hotel beds and awkward situations, into putting my money where my mouth is and my name on fund-raising pitch letters for the things that I believe in but otherwise, I don’t know, haven’t gotten around to yet. She is the curse and the wolfman charm in my blood, calling me to shed my flannel shirt and my pressed pants with their sensible belt and lope on all fours into the forest.

Once she and I found ourselves talking about this picture that hangs on the wall of our house. It’s a magnificent Lothar Osterburg photogravure, shadowy and mysterious, of a miniature clipper sailing across a scale-model ocean. This picture seemed to both of us to embody our marriage — I was the sails, and she was the tiller. Or vice versa. Honestly, I can’t quite remember how it seemed at the time. But I know that in considering the image of that great ship in full sail, what we both understood, have always understood, was that whether I am the wind and she is the waves, or she is the rigging and I am the rudder — at this point I have pretty much exhausted my nautical vocabulary — the crucial point for a moral landlubber like me is that we are embarked. I answered the call of adventure; I rolled the dice. I jumped out of the window, holding tightly to her hand. See us, sailing into the blue.

A Woman of Valor

When I was nine years old, I fell in love with a superheroine whose unlikely name — a name that still brings me a wince of lust and embarrassment when I say it — was Barda. Big Barda. I have never recovered, thank God, from my first sight of her in Mister Miracle #8 (September 1972).

The intricate pop-Zoroastrian theology of the comic books that Jack Kirby drew at DC Comics in the early seventies (in which Mister Miracle, “Super Escape Artist,” figured prominently) is wonderful, nutty, and hard to summarize. For now I’ll just say that Big Barda, commander of the Female Fury Battalion, was born and reared for a life of perpetual combat on a world called Apokolips by a Dickensian harridan with the cruel-irony name of Granny Goodness. Barda dressed in elaborate armor of dark blue scale mail with a vaguely pharaonic battle helmet, and she carried a fearsome chunk of hardware (admittedly somewhat ambiguous from the Freudian point of view) called a Mega-Rod. As for her eponymous immensity, it was not merely physical; everything she did partook of the bigness that was the essence of her character. She spoke in exclamations and displayed Rabelaisian appetites for food and drink. She was brusque, sardonic, hot-tempered, and did not endure patiently the doubts and tergiversations of anyone less intelligent or quick to seize the moment than herself. And to my knowledge, she was the first superheroine in the history of comic books whose personal courage, moral integrity, and astute intelligence, though they pervaded all her actions, were most joyfully expressed through her willingness, when necessary, to kick ass.

Say superheroine and most people, I suppose, will think of Wonder Woman. With the possible exception of Supergirl, she is certainly the best known, or maybe it would be more accurate to say the most recognizable of costumed comic-book females. Wonder Woman is strong, and buxom and noble-intentioned, and when necessary she, too, has never hesitated to knock some heads together. When I was a boy, she was, as she remains to this day (because of her ancillary trademark value as a superficially feminist icon), a star in the firmament of DC Comics, far more important than Big Barda could ever hope to be.

Now, I have heard some women say over the years that growing up they liked Wonder Woman (an affection that says less about the character, I think, than about the thirst and adaptability of young girls seeking female heroes in the relative desert of comic books). But she never came anywhere near reconfiguring, like Barda did, the erotic topography of my brain. (Of course, Lynda Carter as Wonder Woman (ABC 1975–76, CBS 1977–79) is another matter entirely.)

Wonder Woman’s story just never added up. It made no narrative sense. Her motivation, her purpose in life, her relations to men and their world had been formulated and reformulated by a succession of writers over the years without ever growing any clearer. We were told that she was an Amazon princess of misty origin, a demigoddess, heiress to Hellenic splendor and daughter of Queen Hippolyta herself, and yet she dressed in a costume that appeared to have been aired previously by a burlesque dancer at the Gayety in Baltimore, Maryland, on the Fourth of July 1933. I learned from my reading of Jules Feiffer’s seminal The Great Comic Book Heroes that the early stories, which I read in cheap reprints, had been accused of promoting low morals, and I had noticed that they did seem to feature a lot of scenes of Wonder Woman tying people up or being tied up herself. But at the age of nine, I didn’t get what that was all about. I still don’t, come to think of it. At any rate, Wonder Woman had abandoned bondage and domination nearly a quarter of a century before, her magic golden lasso of compulsion the only surviving trace of those wild days.

This lasso formed one third of Wonder Woman’s essential toolkit, along with her bullet-scattering bracelets and her invisible airplane. What any of these had to do with Greek mythology, “The Star-Spangled Banner,” or one another, only the late Dr. William Moulton Marston, her creator, knew for sure. A lasso! An invisible airplane! Even her secret identity, Diana Prince, felt gratuitous, unlived — she might have abandoned it at any time without cost to anyone, least of all herself. Rooted in mythology, Wonder Woman never generated any mythology of her own; she contradicted herself without struggling against or embodying those contradictions; in other words, she had no story. Only a narrative — only a woman with a narrative — can truly engage the erotic imagination. Everyone else is just a pinup.

Supergirl, then. She was Superman’s cousin, it may be recalled, Kara El, born and raised in Argo City on the planet Krypton. She was a blonde, well constructed (all superheroines must be well constructed). Always a tad on the perky side, to my way of thinking. She looked nothing like her older cousin; what she looked like was the classic shiksa as envisioned by Jewish men of the day. She had all the classic shiksa accoutrements: a Super-Cat, a Super-Horse, a girlish Super-Room of her own. She hung out with the clean-cut, earnest teenagers of the future — they came from all over the galaxy, and yet they were all goyim — at the thirtieth-century headquarters of the Legion of Superheroes. She wore, one sensed, a formidable brassiere. But Supergirl had more soul than Wonder Woman. It was a sisterly, Laurie Partridge brand of soul: chipper, maybe, but tinged with parental loss. She had the tragic Superman streak, the central existential knowledge that her mighty powers derived from her greatest sorrow.

At the same time, Supergirl constituted a betrayal of one of the key elements of the Superman myth — that he was the sole survivor of a destroyed world, the eternal orphan. Inevitably, perky and ample as she might be, Supergirl cheapened the drama of Superman. She gave off a whiff of exploitation, of endless writers seeking endless variations on a theme. She had the elements of a narrative, but it was largely a borrowed one, an echo of that of her superfamous cousin. She did not possess her own mythology so much as belong to Superman’s, right along with Krypto, and the Phantom Zone, and Bizarro, and the City of Kandor in its bottle. She was, finally, ancillary, inferior, a kid. She was not Super woman—there was apparently no room for a Superwoman. She was all-powerful, yet she did not command.

Across town and in another universe, at Marvel, the pickings were, to be honest, probably worse. It took Marvel Comics years to begin to put together any worthwhile superheroines. To a gal, the first crop was embarrassingly disappointing. They had all the measly powers that fifties and sixties male chauvinism could contrive to bestow on a superwoman. For example, one of these ladies could make herself very, very small. Another could render herself invisible whenever she chose. Several employed witchery or some enhanced form of women’s intuition. One was the black widow type and knew karate. And so on. It was not until a character called the Valkyrie came along in the seventies that a Marvel Comics heroine established herself as entirely her own woman, no one’s wife or sister or daughter or girlfriend, no one’s archenemyess. The Valkryie’s winged horse, Aragorn, you suspected, would have wiped the floor with Supergirl’s fussy, effeminate Comet. A few years after the Valkyrie, a sword-swinging, fiery barbarian named Red Sonja came along, brought to more vivid life than any preceding superheroine by artist Frank Thorne during a glorious eleven-issue run. As I look back, I see that the 1970s were a pretty good time for Amazons.

I guess it was inevitable that comic book writers and artists, looking for source material, would turn now and then to the Amazon. That was the archetype underlying the very first superheroine (though come to think of it, Wonder Woman’s problem all along was that she never lived up to her Amazon billing), and from time to time in the history of comics — though not very often — independent, freebooting heroines like Sheena the Queen of the Jungle popped up: tough and strong but, more important, beholden to no one. Sheena, the Valkyrie, and Red Sonja were unencumbered by any glasses-wearing, steno-pad-carrying secret identity. There was no unwitting, patronizing lunk of a boyfriend or super-date, no repressive cover story to get tangled in. They did not shy from a fight — on the contrary, they relished conflict. And they demanded to be treated as equals, to whatever extent their mostly male writers and artists were willing to grant. As fond as I may be of this type of character, I’m obliged to concede that the Warrior Woman is, in its way, as sexist a cliché as Shrinking Violet (tininess) or Phantom Girl (insubstantiality) or Light Lass (rendering any substance to the condition of fluff).

This is where Big Barda comes in.

Jack Kirby (born Jacob Kurtzberg in New York City in 1917) was a bit of a madman, a cultural magpie, self-taught, movie-crazy. He grew up scrapping on the Lower East Side. He had seen tough service under Patton. The harshness of the world and the wonder of the movies mingled freely in the comics that he drew. As he got older, his vision turned darker and darker, and his sense of the indifference of a hostile universe to human fortune increased. More and more in his work at Marvel during the late sixties, vast primal forces of Good and Evil fought a perpetual war to whose combatants our earth was at most a bystander, at worst a worthless speck of dust. This endless warfare, this broken universe, left a heavy mark in Kirby’s work on human beings. It took strong people to stand up to it. Kirby’s people grew more and more massive, statuesque. They strode across the panels like tragic Shakespearian giants, beset all around by men and creation, crackling with energy bolts. When they slammed into walls and buildings, the walls and buildings fell down. It was out of this late-Kirby world of grandeur and conflict and sorrow over the brokenness of the world that Big Barda came, brandishing her Mega-Rod.

Barda was up to the fight — any fight and then some. The world of fire that she was born into and the way she was raised had obliged her to learn to be strong, vigilant, resourceful, and submissive to no one. But her intelligence told her that conflict is a waste, of life and time and energy, and she regretted it. She had her own narrative — a history of sorrow, hardship, and achievement — and though it constituted only one part of the larger mythology of Kirby’s epic, it was her part; she had earned it. She saw the wrongness, the wickedness, the unreasoning cruelty of the world, and though she had been trained to withstand it, her heart rebelled. Mighty, she used her strength and risked her freedom to help the weak. In time she would mutiny against the might-makes-right strictures of her home and attempt to form a partnership of physical and intellectual equals — with Mister Miracle, her paramour, the love of her life. In his company, in rare moments of quiet, she doffed her armor, laid down her Mega-Rod, and made him a gift — both of them knowing full well its value — of her vulnerability, her sorrow, the pain of her childhood and youth. She was a Valkyrie with a brain and an aching heart.

Kirby biographers and scholars generally agree that in her substantiality, Big Barda was modeled on a nude spread in Playboy of the actress Lainie Kazan; but in her substance, on the late Rosalind Kirby (née Goldberg), Jack’s wife of fifty years.

This brings me to the real subject, or object, of these ruminations. After discovering Big Barda, I could never be happy with the run-of-the-mill heroines I encountered in my life, whether they were Amazons or Violets or wasps or invisible girls. Then one night I met this woman who was not — not at all — Big. Five feet tall, she generally went about unarmed. She had been raised not in the suicide slums and battle orphanages of Apokolips but on the maple-lined streets of Ridgewood, New Jersey. It was tough on her; she had been encouraged, like most girls at the time, to learn to shrink, to be witchy, to turn herself invisible. She was pretty much the proverbial slip of a girl — a size zero — but she had, I saw at once, an inner Bigness. Like Barda, she did not suffer fools gladly. She did not carry a Mega-Rod; she didn’t need one. She had plenty of narrative; sometimes it seemed that she was all narrative, stories and incidents and catastrophes and triumphs, like Churchill’s definition of history, one damn thing after another. From time to time the frenzy of battle came upon her, and then the walls and buildings started to rock and crumble. In short, I had never met anyone more fit to command the Female Fury Battalion. Now that passing time, hard-earned wisdom, four pregnancies, and I have all conspired to free her from the cruel-irony dietary and body-image regimes of the Apokolips in which we raise our young women, I think she would fill out pretty nicely, given the opportunity, whatever mad armor Jack Kirby could dream up.

It’s traditional in Jewish homes on the Sabbath for a husband to chant the poem called Eshes Chayil, “A Woman of Valor.” In ancient biblical language, he praises her, articulating a litany of true womanly virtues: strength of body and mind, compassion, resourcefulness, reliability, artfulness. He praises her costume and her readiness for righteous battle. “She girds her loins in strength,” he says, “and makes her arms strong.” Every week, in every home — traditionally — every husband affirms this central truth to every wife: that she is, as that great Jewish mythographer Jack Kirby understood, his Big Barda. Alas, the chanting of this poem is not, I’m sorry to report, a tradition that my wife and I observe. These words will have to serve instead.