with the feminist theoretician Charlotte Bunch, space in the Manhattan loft building June owned and where she and Parke lived on the top floor. After midnight, in late December of 1977, my phone rang. It was June, in one of her classic rages. She shouted into my ear that I had to be off her premises no later than the next day, my lease notwithstanding. The person I was in bed with, she announced, was an FBI agent who was sleeping with me for the sole purpose of gaining access to Daughters in order to destroy the company.
The person I was in bed with had about as much to do with the Federal Bureau of Investigation as I did with professional ice hockey. June’s accusation was so very far off the wall that I wondered for an instant if the time had come, finally, to phone for the guys with the straitjackets. I got my breath back; I told June that it was my distinct impression that whoever went to bed with me—including that time back in 1910 (or was it 1902?) when it was J.Edgar Hoover himself, in full frontal nudity, lusting after me—did so to gain access not to Daughters but to my body, okay?
June told me to start packing. I was gone the next day, as ordered.
After June’s death, Parke would confess that it was she, not June, who’d wanted me out of the building, no holds barred. That made plenty of sense to me, for two reasons: The FBI had had a strong grip on Parke’s imagination for some time before the night I was caught in bed with J. Edgar Hoover. And Parke had been in love with me since the day we met. If she couldn’t have me, nobody could. Rita Mae Brown, with admirable succintness, once described Parke as a femme in butch clothing, and June, vice versa. She was right. June had to evict me on Parke’s behalf because Parke didn’t have the necessary machismo.
After the fiasco of my eviction from June’s building, I never expected to hear from either Parke or June again. But in 1979, June telephoned from Houston and rather warmly told me that she and Parke would love to see me, would I come and visit? I said yes. My nearest and dearest suggested that I was out of my mind to go near Parke and June again. I replied that I was certain that Parke and June must want to apologize, heal old wounds, effect a reconciliation: did that sound like I was out of my mind?
I was out of my mind. June met my plane; Parke waited in the car. June drove and pointed out the sights. Parke sat in stony silence. June told me that they lived in Houston’s most fashionable suburb. It seemed like any fashionable suburb to me—spookily silent, absolutely white-skinned, so rife with self-protection the entire neighborhood seemed to be wedged inside an invisible condom. Their house was hidden behind a locked fence. It was long, low, enormous, and replete with many faux Tijuana-hacienda touches which I recognized because I’m chief of the aesthetics police. Outside, surrounded by a rose garden, there was a swimming pool that passed my inspection.
Parke disappeared in the house. June showed me a guest room approximately one city block’s length from their bedroom, then she disappeared. I hung out in the guest room for a few hours. Then Parke showed up and told me to give her five dollars; she was going out for burgers, five bucks should cover my share. I gave her five dollars.
We sat at a table in a dining room suitable for Kiwanis Club banquets and unwrapped dinner in silence. For some reason I wasn’t hungry, so I decided to make conversation. I introduced the subject of combat women in the military, a controversial topic in the news at the time, and asked whether they thought it was a feminist thing for women to turn themselves into cannon fodder—or did they think that turning women into cannon fodder was just another male plot to get rid of uppity women?
That broke the ice. Instantly, Parke and June flipped from restrained hostility into the active kind: unlike me, they weren’t lily-livered pacifists. They believed in their country. They were one hundred percent behind any war their president cared to wage. Young women as well as young men should be prepared to die for their country, and any other point of view on the matter stank of communism.
Okay, I said. I figured they still thought they were dealing with J. Edgar Hoover’s girlfriend, complete with wires. I considered congratulating them on being, as of that moment, completely in the clear with my superiors at the agency. I kept my mouth shut.
The next day June told me she’d asked me to visit because she needed help on her new novel, Baby Houston, hadn’t I understood that? No, but. June handed me the manuscript. I sat down in the extraordinarily decorated living room, which was about one-third the size of the New York Public Library’s main reading room, and got to work. Parke dropped in at regular intervals to collect for the next meal.
I stayed in Houston with Parke and June long enough to urge June repeatedly to replace the pretty writing in Baby Houston (“Baby” was her mother) with the rage she was so far keeping between the lines (“You’re wrong,” she told me), and to experience a representative slice of how they were living their new lives. June spent her days working on Baby Houston, swimming and gardening; Parke watched movies on TV, swam, gardened, worked the Times crossword, and read English novels. They visited with June’s girlhood chums and played a regular bridge game with some of them in the evenings. They shopped a lot at Houston’s glitziest mall; they were compiling new wardrobes of French designer clothing. From the neck down, June looked sleek and chic, but her face looked haggard— stressed and grim, as if, inside, she was grieving. Her face would have more appropriately accessorized sackcloth and ashes. Parke’s threads were as upscale as June’s, but were still in Parke’s favorite understated color, merde. I was still in my basics—basically my only basics, except for the vintage evening dresses I reserved for dates with J. Edgar —which were, then as now, white shirts and black jeans. One night, when we were about to go out to dinner with one of Parke and June’s new friends, June said, “I’m so glad to be here, where I can dress in nice clothes again. It’s hard for me to even look at that New York movement drag any more.” I quickly changed into my basic variation on my basics, white jeans and black shirt.
Houston had grown some lesbians since June’s early life there (when, she once asserted, there weren’t any), but except for one or two, all of June and Parke’s close women friends were heterosexual; the one or two lesbians they hung out with were wealthy. They no longer felt comfortable among people too different from themselves. Too much difference, I surmised, was too little money. They had never felt comfortable among people different from themselves.
The last time Parke asked me to fork over, I made bold to ask if by any chance they needed a loan to tide them over. Parke fearlessly stepped on the irony. She told me that from now on they were keeping every penny strictly for themselves; they’d had enough of getting ripped off by the women’s movement.
I wasn’t the women’s movement. Far from ripping off Daughters, or Parke or June personally, I had, minute by minute, inch by inch, paid my own way during my friendship with them and my time with the company. Parke had insisted on it, down to the last dime, even when I was traveling with the partners on Daughters’ business exclusively. She justified this un-Random House-like exploitation of an employee by impressing on hand-to-mouth me that she had to save up for her old age.
I gave her money for the next meal. I don’t keep score; I’d rather be ripped off. And I was, as ever, afraid of Parke’s barely suppressed anger. Evidently, Parke had either demoted me into the “damn dumb dykes” category, or was possessed by the idea that I was so deeply in her debt (though for what?) that I had to make some recompense by paying for my own food while I was a guest in her house working on June’s novel.
Parke was as uncommonly stingy with money as I am cavalier. Which may go some distance in explaining how she, with June’s knowledge, could break the most fundamental rule of hospitality: but it doesn’t begin to explain the rage that accompanied her demands for money. I’ve finally remembered how I actually felt each time I was faced with both her anger and her open palm: I had been invited to Houston to experience humiliation.
I did what I could with Baby Houston. June
