An Excerpt from 1974: A Personal History by Francine Prose
San Francisco, winter 1974. There was less traffic then. At ten on a weekday night, Tony could take his ten-year- old putty-colored Buick up to fifty-five and slam-bounce up and down the hills along Taylor Street.
Maybe Tony thought that someone was following him. He certainly thought so later. Maybe he was right all along. He kept checking his rearview mirror. He’d make sharp U-turns and veer into alleys. He had every reason to suspect that he was under surveillance, and he drove like someone trying to elude whoever was pursuing him.
He said that we were right to be afraid. He said that he was living proof of what could happen if you pissed off the wrong people. Actually, the right people: the government and the military, the criminals and the liars. He said they’d been working against us for years and that it would take courage and determination to defeat them. He said that if we told the truth, if we tried to talk about what happened, they called us paranoid.
He said that he was living proof of what could happen if you pissed off the wrong people.
That was more or less what I thought, and I liked hearing him say it.
I was always looking for things we had in common, maybe because on the surface we must have seemed so different. He was Southern. I’d grown up in New York. He was an aerospace engineer turned radical activist. I’d published a novel and was about to publish another. I was in my twenties. He was ten years older. I had long dark hair. He was bald with a shoulder-length fringe. I was at the beginning of my career as a writer, and he was beginning to think that his career was over.
We both cared about politics. We both liked stories. We both liked to laugh. We were both less easygoing than we tried to appear.
We often talked about books. It turned out that Gravity’s Rainbow was one of our favorite novels. It spoke to our belief that history and the forces that shaped it were in every way more sinister than the most evil scenarios we could imagine.
Tony said we were right to worry. The impulse to destroy is as deep as the desire to create. When he was a kid in Virginia, he had a rogue history teacher who told his class that the reason humans are the only species that kills its own kind was because of some evil Egyptian poison in the apple that Eve gave Adam. Word got out, and the teacher was fired. Tony’s science teacher told his students that wasn’t true. He wasn’t going to touch Adam and Eve, but he said that many animals are as bad or worse than humans when it comes to brutalizing their own kind. Lions, bears. Primates. Kangaroos. Meerkats.
I said, “Probably we’re the only species that makes money from killing one another.”
“Exactly,” said Tony. “Precisely. That’s our meerkat nature. So it will happen again. Stronger countries invading weaker countries, larger countries swallowing smaller ones, as long as there’s a profit to be made, as long as it inflates some psycho dictator’s ego. But we shouldn’t be afraid. Because we are going to win. The war in Vietnam will end. Things are going to change.”
“For the better,” I said.
“For the better,” said Tony.
It was a chilly, rainy winter, maybe no colder or wetter than any San Francisco winter, but it seemed that way to me. I had thought that California was warm year-round. The weather felt like a personal insult. I’d moved out West wearing flip-flops, and I refused to admit my mistake and buy a pair of shoes. My feet were always freezing. The heater in Tony’s car barely functioned, and dampness seeped up through a hole in the floor.
We rode with the windows shut. The car smelled like cigarette smoke, like the wet dog that neither of us had, like woolen coats in a grade school cloakroom. As we headed west through Outer Sunset and circling back along the avenues of Outer Richmond, bright streaks of neon signage dripped down the windshield onto the glistening streets.
I had no idea where we were going or where we would end up. I liked not knowing, not caring, not having to decide.
I was twenty-six. I liked feeling free, alive and on edge, even a little afraid. So what if my feet were cold? They wouldn’t be cold forever.
I wanted to feel like an outlaw. So did everyone I knew. Bonnie and Clyde were our Romeo and Juliet. I still have a photograph of the leaders of the Barrow gang, the Depression-era bank-robber lovebirds. In heels and a long dark dress with a knitted top, Bonnie pokes a rifle and one finger into Clyde’s chest, his immaculate white shirt. Slightly slumped, his hat pushed back, Clyde is looking at her, half amused, half besotted.
Played by Faye Dunaway and Warren Beatty in the 1967 film, the couple couldn’t have been more beautiful or languidly stylish. They were our outlaw-lover superstars, hotter than Seberg and Belmondo. That Clyde was apparently impotent made their love all the more tragic, chaste and operatic. I can still see their mustard-colored 1934 Ford sedan death car bucking and jumping as the hail of bullets pierced it or bounced off.
I didn’t want that, obviously. But I wanted the rush. I had just recovered from two bouts of what the early desert saints called the pain of the distance from God. The fogginess, the loneliness, the lack of direction or purpose. They called it spiritual aridity: the inability to be touched or consoled by prayer. Though I didn’t believe in God, I understood what they meant. I was better now, or mostly. I wanted to stay that way.
I wanted to feel the thrill of not knowing or caring where I was going or what I was supposed to be doing. The dreamlike unreality of those high-speed drives was nerve-racking but weirdly relaxing. Nothing was expected of me. I didn’t have to think. I hardly had to speak. All I had to do was listen.
From 1972 until 1975, I lived, for months at a time, in San Francisco. There was no reason for me to be in California, except that I liked it there, and because it was across a continent from Cambridge, Massachusetts, where I had left my husband and dropped out of school and never wanted to return. In those years, I often chose a place to live because it was as far as possible from the place I was escaping.
I lived in the Inner Sunset district, not far from Buena Vista Park, in a sunny apartment with two roommates, a couple I’ll call Henry and Grace.
California might have felt like a long vacation in limbo if I hadn’t begun to think of myself as a writer. One perk of being a writer was that I could tell myself that I was working even when I wasn’t. I liked thinking that my job description was to watch and try to understand who people were, to intuit what they’d been through, what they revealed or tried to hide, what they said versus what they meant. The challenge was to find the right sentences, the right words, the right punctuation to get it down on the page.
Meanwhile I was at that stage when time and the body are signaling the unconscious: If you are going to make stupid mistakes, you should probably make them now. Everything seemed like a matter of life and death and simultaneously inconsequential. Everything broken could be fixed. Everything that was incomplete could be finished, or anyway, so I hoped.
I knew that my life and the world around me were changing, that something was ending and something else beginning, but I was too close—too inside of it—to have any idea what it was.
In December 1971, two years before I met Tony, he and Daniel Ellsberg were indicted, under the Espionage Act, for leaking information—a secret seven-thousand- page report known as the Pentagon Papers—that, according to the authorities, could jeopardize national security and endanger our soldiers in Southeast Asia. The two had met at the RAND Corporation, in Santa Monica, a think tank with close ties to the US military. Locating their headquarters out West, the company hoped to preserve some independence from Washington, though how much autonomy could they expect when they were funded by the government? The “Orwellian” (Tony’s word) organization of analysts, strategists, and economists helped orchestrate the war in Vietnam.
Daniel Ellsberg and Tony Russo photocopied the documents that Ellsberg smuggled, in sections, from the RAND files. Commissioned by Defense Secretary Robert McNamara, the study proved that the executive branch of our government had been lying for decades to Congress and to the American people about our involvement in Vietnam.
In 1974, Tony was still known, at least among activists, as an anti–Vietnam War whistleblower and free speech hero. By then, he had spent forty-seven days in jail for refusing to testify against Ellsberg or to appear before the grand jury unless the session was open to the public so he could use it to talk about why we were in Asia. His hope was that the publicity generated by the trial might reach people who were still unaware of what the Pentagon Papers had shown. Despite the growing evidence that the release of the Pentagon Papers wouldn’t significantly alter the political landscape, Tony still believed, or tried to believe, that the truths they revealed and the lies they exposed would blow the country apart.
That was the winter when Patty Hearst was kidnapped from the Berkeley apartment where she lived with her graduate student boyfriend, the former math teacher at her high school. That was the winter when she was held captive by the Symbionese Liberation Army, which demanded, in exchange for her release, two million dollars’ worth of free food be distributed to the poor. That was the winter when the food giveaway in West Oakland degenerated into a riot. That was the winter when the SLA decided to hold onto their captive princess until they figured out what to do next.
The April 15 bank robbery that turned Patty Hearst into a gun-slinging, fuzzed-out poster girl happened at the Hibernia Bank branch very near our apartment. The house where she would be arrested was also nearby. My roommates and I knew about the robbery but not yet about the safe house.
The story about the kidnapped heiress and the cult led by a formerly incarcerated Black man—Donald DeFreeze, now code-named Field Marshal Cinque—was media gold. A white-girl disappearance (always newsworthy) was spun as a conclusive I-told- you- so about the hippies, radicals, and Black activists who had tried to make America feel guilty about racism, inequality, and the war.
Grace and Henry advised me not to mention Patty Hearst to their friend Tony Russo, who was coming over to play poker. I appreciated the warning. The abduction was very much in the news. Strangers chatted about it in line at the supermarket. Apparently Henry had made an offhand remark about the kidnapping, and Tony said, with real venom, “I don’t want to hear another word of that bullshit.” It was puzzling because normally, Grace said, Tony was so good-natured and polite. It turned out that Tony believed that our neighborhood was crawling with FBI agents searching for Patty Hearst. When they found her or quit looking for her, they would go back to following and harassing him, if they’d ever stopped.
Grace and Henry told me that Tony was having a hard time. As far as they knew, he was unemployed. He’d been doing community outreach and civil rights organizing in Los Angeles, where he’d worked for the Los Angeles County Probation Department. But he’d lost his job there after he’d gone to prison. No one understood why he’d moved to San Francisco, nor how he paid the rent. Henry said the Black Panthers had raised money for Tony’s legal team, and that his young, pretty, radical ex-wife sold sandwiches in the courthouse lobby, during the trial, to dramatize his need for help paying his lawyers.
I recognized Tony immediately. I had seen him in newspaper photos and on TV, surrounded by journalists. He always stood just behind Daniel Ellsberg’s shoulder, waiting his turn at the mike. I’d noticed him partly because, in his butcher boy cap, shaggy sideburns, rumpled jacket and tie, he looked so unlike Ellsberg in his elegant suit and good haircut. I’d noticed Tony partly because he always seemed so calm and contained, even a little amused, while the frenetic reporters shouted questions and thrust their microphones in his face.
When Henry introduced us, Tony looked at me a beat too long, maintaining a thin but acceptable margin between friendliness and appraisal. By 1974, most of the men I knew had learned better than to look at women that way.
I wanted him to notice me. He was a famous antiwar hero. He’d done what we all should have done. He’d lived the way we all should have lived, suffered as we might have suffered if things had gone as badly for us as they had for him. I wanted to think that I would have had the courage to do what he did, to help leak a secret report about Vietnam that my work-friend happened to be lugging around in his briefcase. To go to jail, if necessary.
I wanted him to notice me. He was a famous antiwar hero. He’d done what we all should have done.
Tony said, “It’s a pleasure to meet you.”
He had a Southern accent and a low musical voice. His voice and his delivery were among his most attractive qualities. He wasn’t conventionally handsome, but he was interesting-looking. He had the slightly pudgy, appealing face of a good-tempered hypermasculine baby. He chain-smoked unfiltered cigarettes and didn’t look entirely healthy, yet there was something radiant about him: the inner light of a zealot. His metal-framed eyeglasses glittered. He was soft-spoken, quick-witted, and extremely smart.
Tony was very funny, though when you say that about a person, you can’t think of one funny thing they said, just as you can describe someone as charming without being able to begin to explain what charm is, exactly.
The poker games at Henry and Grace’s were penny-ante, in no way serious, and the games got less and less serious as the players smoked more and more weed. No one cared about winning or losing. The whole point, for Henry and Grace, was using the stylish vintage wooden wheel that spun on casters and held slotted stacks of Bakelite poker chips. They’d bought it at a yard sale.
I watched Tony as I shuffled and dealt, put down and picked up the cards. I looked at him until he looked back. I could tell that he noticed, that the famous antiwar hero was watching me too, and that his focus wasn’t that of a player trying to psych out an opponent’s hand.
Tony mentioned, in passing, that he and his coworkers in Saigon had played a lot of poker. After that he was silent for a long time. At one point he said that there were two different types of experience, two different kinds of knowledge. Both had to do with time. The first kind of knowledge comes back, even after a long lapse, like riding a bicycle. The second kind was use it or lose it. Forget and you never remember. He said that poker was an experience of the second kind. By then, we’d smoked quite a lot of weed. It didn’t matter that no one understood what he meant.
When he spoke, he was speaking to me. Henry and Grace noticed too. At some point it became clear, without anything having been said, that I would be going home with Tony when he left.
Tony wasn’t a great poker player, or so it seemed. I wondered if he was losing to me on purpose, which was flattering in one way and not in another.
Henry and Grace must have told him that my first book had done well—well, that is, for a literary debut novel published in 1973, which meant that it got good reviews and was perceived as a success. My second novel was coming out, and I was (supposedly) working on a third.
During a break from the game, Tony congratulated me on my book, and on the forthcoming one. He told me that he thought my being a novelist was amazing. Maybe that was true, or partly true. But it was also the kind of thing that men had recently learned to say if they wanted to get laid.
Also, in an amazing coincidence, he too was writing a book. He’d come to San Francisco to work on it, because it was less distracting here than in LA, where the postal deliverers and the trash collectors were still losing his letters and strewing his garbage around the alley behind his house. It was disturbing, not just because it made life harder, but because he’d imagined that those guys would be on his side. They and their sons were the ones being sent off to fight in the war that Tony had tried to end.
All that time he’d studied engineering and government, he said, he’d dreamed of becoming a writer. He said, “I wrote all the time in jail, when I could, until the guards took my journal away, and then beat me up for objecting. After that I wrote in my head. Maybe you could take a look at some of the stuff I’m writing. Just a couple of pages. It’s not really . . . literary. I’m not aiming to write a masterpiece. I’m just trying to get it down, what happened in Vietnam, what I saw there . . .”
I didn’t know what to say. It occurred to me that we’d started off talking about me and ended by talking about Tony. I was just starting out as a writer. I had no idea what I was doing, no more or less than I ever had, no more or less than I do now. I had no advice to give, but already people were asking me to read their novels. I tried to find excuses that wouldn’t hurt anyone’s feelings.
And yet I was flattered that Tony wanted me to read his book. That a hero was asking for my help meant there was something I could do, that there was a way I could contribute to the work for which Tony had sacrificed so much. I could show him how to line-edit if he thought it might be useful. I wondered if the invitation to look at his writing was code-speak for sex, but I couldn’t tell with Tony, and for the moment it didn’t matter.
High, I played a tighter and more focused game, even as my friends’ attention drifted. I wasn’t a great poker player, but neither did I need the order of the hands written out for me or the rules of the specialty games explained. I depended more on luck than players who knew what they were doing. That night I drew some unpromising hands, but I thought ahead and watched and won. I took it as a sign that I was doing something right—and that it was a good idea to leave with Tony when the evening ended. As far as I knew, neither of us had romantic commitments that would complicate things.
We settled our debts. Tony had lost thirty dollars, twenty of them to me. For some reason this seemed funny and like a secret between us. How could that have been secret? Our friends were right there, stacking the poker chips. Nor was it a secret that Tony and I were leaving together.
When Tony’s back was turned, Grace shook her head at me and mouthed Don’t!, a twitch of warning that only I saw and that I pretended not to notice.
Tony and I got our coats. We both wore black leather jackets, another thing that seemed funny. Tony helped me into mine. My arms missed the sleeves, which caused a bit of awkward flailing around. We laughed and tried again.
“Button up,” Tony said. “Or is it zip up?”
He looked at my jacket. “I was right the first time.”
I said, “San Francisco is always colder than I expected.” “Tell me about it,” said Tony. “I can’t get used to it.” That was how we established that neither of us was from there, nor did we plan to stay.
He asked if I minded riding around in the car for a while.
I said I liked it, which was true. Riding around a city, any city, has always been one of my favorite things to do. I loved seeing San Francisco through the window of a moving car. I had never stopped being thrilled by how you could turn a corner and a slice of the blue Pacific might flash up like a dolphin. I loved the wooden housefronts faded salmon gray by the weather. I loved how the city’s residents took civic pride in the days when fog enveloped the neighborhoods like a giant furry cocoon.
All during the card game Tony had been wry, low-key, and amused, but now, with just the two of us in the car, he seemed tense and preoccupied. As he sped off toward Judah Street, his glance kept tracking toward the rearview mirror.
After a while he turned on the radio to the same station Henry and Grace listened to in their cars. The Chi-Lites, the Delfonics, the O’Jays, the Stylistics, Harold Melvin and the Blue Notes. I was pleased and relieved. Music meant a lot—maybe too much—to me. In college, I’d been lonely because none of the people I met during my first weeks had ever heard of James Brown. I’d slept with guys just because they liked the same songs I did.
I liked it that the station Tony had on played the so-called Philadelphia sound. If loving you is wrong, I don’t want to be right? Didn’t I blow your mind this time? You, you make me feel brand-new. Me and Mrs. Jones, we got a thing goin’ on. So many of the songs were about hopeless, passionate, adulterous sex, about the love you could die for, die from, the love that keeps reminding you that you will never understand it. It’s the kind of music that makes you wish you were in love, the kind that makes you long to fall in love.
I told myself, Don’t. Seriously, don’t. Don’t let the music touch you. I’d read somewhere that love comes in through the eyes, so I tried not to look too directly at Tony. It was easy, sitting side by side in the car. The Buick had no console between us, so we could have sat very close. We could have touched. But we didn’t.
“If you don’t know me by now, you will never, never, never know me,” Tony sang along. Prophetically, as it turned out.
He hit all the falsetto notes.
“You can sing,” I said.
“Once a choir boy, always a choir boy,” he said.
Eventually Tony turned off the radio, and then it was just silence and the protests of an old car being pushed too hard. He hit the gas and drove the avenues fast, without speaking, out through the Sunset, then across the park and back through the Outer Richmond, without speaking, then around and out Parnassus, without speaking, past Henry and Grace’s apartment. When we passed their house for the third time, my roommates’ bedroom light was out, and only then did I realize how late it was.
He said, “I know it’s not a great idea to just drive for the hell of it. I know about the gas crisis. I know that the so-called crisis is the usual bullshit designed to make more money for OPEC. The gas isn’t going to run out. It’s just going to get more expensive. In case you’re wondering, I have two license plates, one with an odd number, one with an even, so I can fill up wherever I want. I just have to remember not to go to the same gas station two days in a row.”
“How did you get two license plates?” I asked.
“That’s classified information.” Tony waited a beat, then laughed.
I’d assumed that we would be going to Tony’s apartment. But it was becoming clear that we weren’t, at least not yet. I didn’t care. Whatever happened was fine. It wasn’t as if I was in the grip of crazy lust or as if I imagined that Tony was going to be the love of my life.
I suppose I already had the kind of crush on him that can begin when you want to be the focus of someone’s attention, and then you are. Especially when you are young and that person is important or famous. Not only was Tony a hero, an antiwar celebrity, but he had said all the right things that night, hit the right marks about my being a writer. I still believed that you could decide to let love happen or not.
I still believed that you could decide to let love happen or not.
I had just escaped a marriage that had been a mistake. The last thing I wanted was a “relationship.” I couldn’t think of the word without imagining it between ironic quotes. I couldn’t picture myself settling down and having children, though that was precisely what I would do four years later.
I didn’t want a serious love, certainly not with Tony. From the beginning I sensed that something about him was . . . the word I decided on was troubled. Everyone has troubles. Certainly I had. An aura of unease surrounded him, the faint distressing buzz of an electrical panel with a burnt fuse and some wires pulled loose. I didn’t want to adopt his demons or share his resentments and regrets. What did Nelson Algren say? Never eat at a place called Mom’s. Never play cards with a guy named Doc. Never sleep with someone (he said “a woman”) who has more problems than you do.
Of course life is never as simple as Algren’s wise-guy rules of avoidance. Tony was charismatic. He was brave. He’d been to Vietnam. He’d interviewed prisoners, peasants, scooter drivers. He’d seen the horrors of war. He’d help steal the Pentagon Papers. He’d gone to jail. And now he wanted me to listen, to hear what he had been through. He seemed to think I could help. He’d come to San Francisco to write a book, and I was a writer.
Neon signs flashed past. A Russian restaurant, a laundromat, a motel, a massage parlor. Brightly colored letters wobbled in the mist. I was still pretty high. I liked everything I saw. I liked it that Tony didn’t care about anything scenic or touristic: views of the Golden Gate Bridge, Chinatown, Lombard Street. Nothing like that. All that mattered was speed and minimal traffic, hitting the waves of green lights and running the red ones. If Tony stopped, it was only to open a new pack of cigarettes.
I wasn’t required to admire anything. I didn’t have to say, How beautiful! I didn’t have to speak. What I wanted to say was, Watch out! You’re going to kill someone! But I didn’t say that either.
I was too busy paying attention, trying to focus on what Tony was telling me. To remember it word for word. Not to write about it. Not then. But because it seemed important.
I held onto the edge of my seat as the car hit a pothole, levitated, and slammed down on the blacktop. Neither of us spoke, but I felt as if we were chattering wordlessly into the silence.
It had begun to drizzle. The light from the streetlamps striped the windshield. I imagined the light bar on the Xerox machine on which Tony and Ellsberg copied the Pentagon papers, the glowing tube swinging back and forth, back and forth. The work must have been tedious, but that’s how copies were made then. Page by page. Slap the paper down on the glass, lower the flap, wait for the light to make its double turn, lift the flap, remove the page, repeat twenty-one thousand times. Forty-seven thick bound volumes. The equivalent of Moby-Dick single-spaced on typing paper and stacked up fourteen times over.
I said, “Copying all those pages must have been like a fairy tale, like something Rumpelstiltskin makes you do so he won’t steal your baby. How much time did it take, how much paper, how many ink cartridges did you go through, how many machines broke down? Copy machines are temperamental. They break all the time. They—”
I made myself stop. I sounded like a girl I knew in college whose social anxiety made her go on and on about her uncle’s dachshund’s hip dysplasia. What could be more boring than talking about copy machines?
Tony turned toward me and smiled a slow Cheshire Cat grin. He’d smiled like that at the poker game, when I’d bluffed and won. But he hadn’t smiled since we’d been in the car.
He said, “If it’s okay with you, I am really really really tired of talking about Xerox machines.” The smile was to reassure me that he didn’t mean to hurt my feelings.
“I’m sorry,” I said.
“Please don’t be sorry,” he said. “Asking about the Xeroxing is the first thing everyone does.”
I didn’t want him to see me as the kind of person who did the first thing that everyone does, but I’d already done it. He drove in silence until he pulled up to a curb and stopped. I’d lost track of where we were. It was too dark to see.
We got out. I heard the ocean. The air was soggy, and the rain had sharpened into cold spiky needles. I chafed my arms. It occurred to me that Tony hadn’t touched me all evening, not once, not even brushing my fingers by accident as we’d dealt and picked up our cards.
We stood on the edge of a drop-off. There was just enough moonlight filtering through the clouds to see the dark stone pools below us, the cracked basins full of muck. Beyond the ruins were the beach and fog and the black waves rolling in.
The clouds broke, and the moon floated in one of the stone pools like a huge soggy Communion wafer.
“Do you know where we are?” he said.
“The Sutro Baths,” I said.
“Good one,” Tony said.
Everyone knows that when you’re attracted to someone, the discovery of a shared passion can seem like proof that you’re meant to be together. You like the full moon? Amazing! I like the full moon too! You like beer? Me too! Friendships can take a similar leap. Maybe we just love the voice—the whisper—telling us that we’re not alone.
I loved the Sutro Baths: their beauty, their desolation, their mystery. So did Tony, it seemed.
We stood on a rise above the pools, watching shafts of moonlight sweep across the crumbling walls as clouds drifted across the night sky. The baths were how I imagined Pompeii or Hadrian’s Villa.
Tony said, “It’s like every ruin. Somebody’s empire didn’t work out. Or it did until it didn’t.” We fell silent. The only sound was the slap of the waves. There was no one else around. We stood there—close but not touching— on the edge of a cliff, in the dead of night.
Looking back, I’m a little frightened for that girl hanging out with a semi-famous, possibly unbalanced friend of a friend, looking down into a stone pool into which a person could be thrown and no one would ever find them.
But I wasn’t scared then. Tony was one of the good guys. I knew he’d had a rough few years. Anyone would be rattled. It seemed interesting to be driven out there to hover above an abyss.
Maybe I was a little afraid. My family and friends were very far away. Were they even thinking of me? Henry and Grace knew who I’d left the house with, but not where we’d gone.
Tony wasn’t going to hurt me.
A year ago I’d sat on a ledge, halfway up a Mayan pyramid, in Palenque. I didn’t want to think about that now. I didn’t want to wish I was there.
Tony said, “There were these magnificent fourth-century Hindu temples in central Vietnam that we will never see because we bombed them into baby powder on some bullshit tip-off that the so-called Viet Cong were sheltering there. You know what a US Army colonel told me? He said, ‘The problem with those temples is that Ho Chi Minh is stewing his fucking disgusting chicken feet in the inner sanctum.’ ”
I laughed the isn’t-that- horrible laugh that isn’t a real laugh. It was strange that he’d mentioned Hindu temples because I’d been thinking not just about Pompeii but also about how the Sutro Baths reminded me of the ruins at Sarnath, where the Buddha preached his first sermon. I had been there a few years before, in what seemed like another life.
What was Tony saying? For an instant I’d thought of Sarnath and forgotten him and lost track.
He said, “Have you ever seen Rossellini’s Voyage to Italy?”
There was just enough moonlight for him to see me shake my head no.
“The best bad-marriage film ever. Ingrid Bergman and George Sanders spend the movie ripping each other apart. He’s a stuffy Brit ice cube, and she’s whiny and bitchy, but pretty, there’s that. Here’s why I mention it. The ruins.
“He finally tells her, That’s it. They’re getting a divorce. But just then their Italian archeologist friend shows up to take them to Pompeii. They meet up with an excavation team, and bingo, the archeologists unearth a perfectly preserved man and a woman. Maybe the couple died together. Maybe they were husband and wife.
“Ingrid Bergman is practically in tears, but Sanders is still his chilly-old- bastard self. Soon they’re walking down Main Street Pompeii, fighting about some marital bullshit. Look around, you upper-middle- class white Continental shitheads! You’re stumbling through a ruined world, the apocalypse is over, the planet has been destroyed, and you’re squabbling about your marriage?”
I hadn’t said that the Sutro Baths were how I imagined Pompeii. How did Tony know? Perhaps it didn’t require a giant leap of the imagination. Another sign of attraction: thinking the person can read your mind.
Tony picked up a stone and threw it down the hill. It bounced off the walls of the pool and dropped into the water. Plink, plink, plop. The soundtrack of a horror film just before the scream.
He said, “Look at you. You’re shivering.”
Only now did I notice how cold I was: My feet had never been so numb.
We got back in the car. Tony turned up the heater, which blew some cold air around, then quit.
He said, “Is it okay with you if we park here for a while?”
“Sure. What happens to them?” Self-consciousness made my voice crack.
“What happens to whom?”
“The couple in the film.”
“Oh, right. They get stuck in a religious procession in Naples or somewhere. The mob comes barreling down the street. It’s too packed for them to move the car, so they ditch it. They leave it there! She runs off and gets swept away by the crowd until he wades into the stampede and saves her. Long clinch. Passionate embrace. The crowd divides around them. They decide to stay together.”
“Good luck to them,” I said.
“Exactly. Marriage is the stupidest way the state has come up with for controlling our lives.”
“You were married, right?”
“For about five minutes.” He laughed. “It was her idea. She was pretty and young and smart, and she seemed to be up for everything, but I was misled. She’s very radical, supposedly, but really she wanted to party with liberal Hollywood stars. She’s since become a follower of the thirteen-year- old guru. Sometimes I wonder if she was an undercover FBI plant. In which case she should get a medal for distinguished service above and beyond the call of duty. You know why I thought she might be an agent? Her first and last names were the first and last names of a woman in a Hemingway novel. Some Yale English graduate FBI asshole’s idea of a joke.”
“Did you really think she was working for the FBI?”
“Everybody might be.” He shrugged.
I said, “I was married too. Also for about five minutes.” Why had I said that? My marriage had lasted three years, from my final semester at college through two years of graduate school and a year of travel. “Nothing about it was that dramatic. I’m pretty sure my husband wasn’t working for the FBI.”
“You don’t know,” Tony said. “You never know who has a secret life and who doesn’t.”
Tony pulled out of the parking spot and headed toward the Embarcadero. I was expecting another long silence when he said, “In the garden of one of those temples there was a six-foot stone dick sticking straight up out of the ground. We’ll never see it now. It’s gone. Bombed out of existence.”
He laughed, and then he was crying. It was the first time I’d seen him cry. He wept silently, staring ahead. I didn’t look at him, but I felt the air move, the way tears can change the atmosphere. When he turned toward me, his face was wet. He shrugged and smiled.
He said, “I don’t want you thinking I’m the kind of guy who weeps over a six-foot granite hard-on. It’s just that it’s all so sad.”
The pathetic fallacy: The sky was crying too. Within moments the rain intensified until it was almost car wash heavy.
“You need to turn on the window wipers,” I said. “Really, Tony. You need to do it now.”
“So I do,” said Tony. “Thank you, ma’am. Everyone needs a copilot.” He switched on the wipers.
I didn’t like how much it pleased me when he’d called me his copilot. The last of the weed was wearing off, and my blood sugar was dropping.
“Are you hungry?” He got points for sensing it. Points for knowing I was there. For asking.
Minus points for not waiting for me to answer.
“Me too,” he said. “I’m starving.”
Excerpt from 1974: A Personal History, copyright © 2024 by Francine Prose, on sale from Harper June 18th 2024.
