out of my mind.
Within two years after Parke and June returned to Houston, June was diagnosed as having cancer of the brain, the incurable kind. I thought, when I heard the bad news, of the trope—the human brain; cancer of the brain —I’d used in Lover. I had a nightmare about fiction’s being able to assume an extraliterary life of its own to do things its author never intended.
Not long after June died, I acted like a Manhattanite and went to a psychiatrist. I felt disabled; I felt that I was disappearing, and neither love nor work nor sex was helping me. The psychiatrist was tall, fat, and mid-fortyish with a little-girl hairdo. She was so white she looked like an Easter bunny. Her clothing led me to believe that in her professional opinion dainty pinks-on-pinks was a good cure for what ailed her patients. She wore a lot of showgirl makeup—glitter on her eyelids, lashings of pancake, and fifties-red lipstick, and she had flat feet. She wanted me to hold rocks which she described as “crystals” while I talked; she encouraged me to attend events at which a woman entered a trance and then, in a voice belonging to an Egyptian from the Old Kingdom dynasty, answered questions from the audience: “Should I buy General Motors?” and Cheops would answer, “Go with the flow.” I spent most of my energy during sessions with her trying not to show how thoroughly her mind and body revolted me. In no time, she had me driving her around New York, feeding her cats, and moving her from one apartment to another. I was paying her top dollar; we did not have a bartering arrangement. After a year of this, she urged me to give the little girl inside of me a great big hug. I suggested that she go fuck herself and, at last, departed.
I might have filed a complaint with the psychiatric police, but I couldn’t imagine what nature of complaint I could file against my mother, or Parke and June. I spent the rest of the eighties virtually a recluse, one who cannot be had because she is not available to give herself. I avoided old, genuine friends; I felt contaminated, therefore unworthy of their friendship. It doesn’t surprise me in the least that I’ve been unable to complete the four novels I’ve written since life with Daughters.
By 1975, the year before Lover was published, Parke had given up even the pretense of being a feminist, but June was still avidly talking lesbian-feminist politics. Neither of them had yet gone mad—or, if they had, I was so enchanted by being in service to Daughters, I ignored the symptoms. When others suggested to me that something might be seriously wrong with Parke and June, and therefore with the company, I became their apologist and defender. But after a while even I became aware of some serious contradictions between what June was publicly saying—the politics du jour (the personal is political, etc.) —and what she was privately doing: to me, in particular.
June and Parke were the first wealthy people I’d ever been close to. I thought it exotic, at the very least, that June swore by politics which, if they were successfully put into practice, would be the ruin of the sources of her money. But I didn’t say so. I didn’t want to spoil the loud party, I didn’t want them to be disappointed in me. My mother got a lot of mileage out of telling me how disappointed in me she was. Nonetheless, I did wonder if June had found a solution to that tiresome riddle, the one about how much easier it is for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than it is for a rich man [sic] to enter the kingdom of heaven.
Our closeness, which would end in my near-imprisonment, started when Parke went after Lover, insisting that I sell it to Daughters even though she hadn’t read a word of the manuscript. Parke told me that she had read my first two novels and that she’d been impressed (Parke later brought Confessions of Cherubino, my second novel, back into print). This is how Random House operates, she said; they buy sight unseen too if a writer’s earlier work suits them.
The partners took me to dinner. They were charming, amusing, and warm; every few minutes, Parke would say something hilarious. In the middle of this love feast, June explained that publishing with the “male” houses would brand me as “male-identified;” I would be just another one of those feminists, so-called, who did exactly that with their books. Parke said that Daughters was not a feminist house, that it had no political definition whatsoever beyond “Publishers of Fiction by Women.” June said Daughters was feminist. Then Parke threw her glass at the restaurant wall, and we were asked to leave.
I was delighted. I was finally in the cast of an opera; somebody definitely throws a glass against a wall during La Traviata. In the street, Parke told me to swear that when people asked me why I published with Daughters, I would not tell them it was because Daughters was feminist; I was to say, instead, that I published with Daughters because, like Random House, Daughters gave big advances. I understood her point. Parke was equating feminism with impoverishment; I was ashamed of being poor. I swore to defend big advances to the death.
About ten days later, they took me to dinner again. They explained that what I would get by publishing with Daughters was a guarantee that Lover would never go out of print; none of their titles, they promised, would ever go out of print. No publishing company on earth could offer that guarantee but Daughters.
I more or less fell on my knees and cried, I am thine! Most writers will understand how I felt, though few are as naive as I was. I knew, of course, that Lover wasn’t going to be a bestseller, or even come near bestsellerdom: effeminate aesthetes like me don’t write bestsellers. But I hoped that given time, plenty of time—maybe twenty or thirty years—a first edition might be bought out. Daughters, according to the partners, guaranteed that time. When the euphoria wore off, questions occurred to me. How could Daughters make that promise? If, just for example, the partners died, then what guaranteed the future of the company promising in-print eternity?
Parke and June laughed my questions off. I was too unworldly, they told me; I didn’t understand how businesses operated. They were right. I was unworldly, possibly even other-worldly. Far from understanding how businesses worked, I did arithmetic by counting on my fingers. I was ordered to stop worrying. I decided to stop worrying and become a true believer. I felt safe with June and Parke, as if my time for being a beloved child had at last arrived. I was happy to let them have Lover; I feared that neither Lover nor I was good enough for them.
The only regret I had in publishing Lover with Daughters—and I suppressed it, it seemed audacious—was that Lover would not be reviewed by the New York Times, whose policy then, and for some time to come, was not to review original trade paperbacks. But the physical beauty of the Daughters’ editions was well worth the loss of the Times. The elegantly designed covers and the dimensions (eight and a half by five and a half) of Daughters’ paperbacks have now been adopted by nearly every good publisher—Virago, for example—both here and in Europe, but it was Daughters’ designer, Loretta Li, who created the look.
When I finished Lover, Parke and I had dinner again. I handed over the A&P brown paper bag containing the manuscript and Parke gave me a company check for ten thousand dollars, the same advance, Parke assured me, that Random House gave its authors of third novels. Harcourt, Brace’s Hiram Haydn, in 1969, had given me one thousand, six hundred dollars for my first novel Catching Saradove, and two thousand three years later for my second. I was giddy with the thrill of big bucks at last. Parke suggested we do some drinking and dancing over at Bonnie & Clyde’s, a movement bar on West Third Street, to recover and celebrate. After a few hours, we realized that we didn’t have Lover; one of us had left the only complete copy of the manuscript under the restaurant table. We found our waiter reading it. “Hot stuff,” he said.
I thought Daughters was hot stuff. Parke and June thought Daughters was hot stuff, and with good reason. As far as I know, they were the only women around at that time who were putting so much money where feminism’s mouth was.
I’m extravagant in my affections while they last. Compare me, if you will, to Tosca or to the family dog: I’m the very model of the cheap date. Parke and June led me to believe (that is, they
