month, plus utilities, every penny had to be accounted for. Subway tokens were twenty cents apiece and I needed ten a week. Robert smoked cigarettes and they were thirty-five cents a pack. My weakness for using the phone booth in the diner was the most problematic. He couldn’t comprehend my deep attachment to my siblings. A handful of coins on the telephone could mean one less meal. My mother sometimes slipped a dollar bill in her cards or letters. This seemingly small gesture represented many coins from her waitress tip jar and it was always appreciated.
We liked to go to the Bowery, examining tattered silk dresses, frayed cashmere overcoats, and used motorcycle jackets. On Orchard Street we would hunt out inexpensive but interesting materials for a new work: sheets of Mylar, wolf skins, obscure hardware. We spent hours at Pearl Paint on Canal Street and then took a subway to Coney Island to walk along the boardwalk and share a Nathan’s hot dog.
My table manners appalled Robert. I could see it in the cast of his eyes, the turn of his head. When I ate with my hands, he thought it drew too much attention, even while he’d be sitting in the booth bare-chested, wearing several beaded necklaces and an embroidered sheepskin vest. Our nitpicking usually evolved into laughter, especially when I’d point out such discrepancies. We continued these diner arguments throughout our long friendship. My manners never got any better but his attire went through some extremely flamboyant changes.
In those days, Brooklyn was very much an outer borough, and seemed far removed from the action in “The City.” Robert loved to go to Manhattan. He felt alive when he crossed the East River, and it was there he later went through rapid transformations, personally and artistically.
I lived in my own world, dreaming about the dead and their vanished centuries. As a young girl I had spent hours copying the elegant script forming the words of the Declaration of Independence. Handwriting had always fascinated me. Now I was able to integrate this obscure skill into my own drawings. I became fascinated with Islamic calligraphy, and sometimes I would take the Persian necklace out of its tissue wrapping and set it before me when I was drawing.
I was promoted at Scribner’s from the phone desk to sales. That year, the big sellers were Adam Smith’s
In my low periods, I wondered what was the point of creating art. For whom? Are we animating God? Are we talking to ourselves? And what was the ultimate goal? To have one’s work caged in art’s great zoos—the Modern, the Met, the Louvre?
I craved honesty, yet found dishonesty in myself. Why commit to art? For self-realization, or for itself? It seemed indulgent to add to the glut unless one offered illumination.
Often I’d sit and try to write or draw, but all of the manic activity in the streets, coupled with the Vietnam War, made my efforts seem meaningless. I could not identify with political movements. In trying to join them I felt overwhelmed by yet another form of bureaucracy. I wondered if anything I did mattered.
Robert had little patience with these introspective bouts of mine. He never seemed to question his artistic drives, and by his example, I understood that what matters is the work: the string of words propelled by God becoming a poem, the weave of color and graphite scrawled upon the sheet that magnifies His motion. To achieve within the work a perfect balance of faith and execution. From this state of mind comes a light, life-charged.
Picasso didn’t crawl in a shell when his beloved Basque country was bombed. He reacted by creating a masterpiece in
That spring, only days before Palm Sunday, Martin Luther King was gunned down at the Lorraine Hotel in Memphis. There was a picture in the paper of Coretta Scott King comforting her young daughter, her face wet with tears behind her widow’s veil. I felt sick at heart, just as I did as a teenage girl watching Jacqueline Kennedy in her flowing black veil, standing with her children as her husband’s body passed in a horse-drawn caisson. I tried to speak of my feelings in a drawing or poem but I couldn’t. It seemed whenever I wanted to express injustice I never had the right lines.
Robert had bought me a white dress for Easter, but he gave it to me on Palm Sunday to assuage my sadness. It was a tattered Victorian tea dress of handkerchief linen. I adored it and wore it in our apartment, a fragile armor against the ominous portents of 1968.
My Easter dress was not suited to wear to the Mapplethorpe family dinner, nor was anything else we had amongst our few pieces of clothing.
I was fairly independent of my parents. I loved them but was not concerned about how they may have felt about my and Robert’s life together. But Robert was not so free. He was still their Catholic son, unable to tell them we were living together out of wedlock. He had been warmly welcomed in my parents’ house but worried I would not be welcome in his.
At first Robert thought it would be best if he slowly introduced me in phone calls to his parents. Then he decided to tell them we had eloped to Aruba and had gotten married. A friend of his was traveling in the Caribbean and Robert wrote his mother a letter, his friend postmarking it from Aruba.
I felt this elaborate deception unnecessary. I thought he should just tell them the truth, really believing they would eventually accept us as we were. “No,” he would say desperately. “They’re strict Catholics.”
It wasn’t until we visited his parents that I understood his concern. His father greeted us with icy silence. I couldn’t comprehend a man not embracing his son.
The entire family was grouped around the dining room table—his older sister and brother and their spouses and his four younger siblings. The table was set, everything in place for a perfect meal. His father barely looked at me, and said nothing to Robert except, “You should cut your hair. You look like a girl.”
Robert’s mother, Joan, did her best to offer some sense of warmth. After dinner, she slipped Robert some money from her apron pocket and took me into her room, where she opened her jewelry box. Looking at my hand, she took out a gold ring. “We didn’t have enough money for a ring,” I said.
“You should wear one on your left ring finger,” she told me, pressing it into my hand.
Robert was very tender toward Joan when Harry wasn’t around. Joan had spirit. She laughed easily, chain- smoked, and obsessively cleaned house. I realized Robert got his sense of order not entirely from the Catholic Church. Joan favored Robert and seemed to have a secret pride in Robert’s chosen path. Robert’s father had wanted him to be a commercial artist, but he refused. He was driven to prove his father wrong.
The family hugged and congratulated us as we left. Harry stood in the background. “I don’t believe they’re married at all,” he was heard to say.
Robert was cutting out sideshow freaks from an oversized paperback on Tod Browning. Hermaphrodites, pinheads, and Siamese twins were scattered everywhere. It threw me, for I couldn’t see a connection between these images and Robert’s recent preoccupation with magic and religion.
As always, I found ways to keep in step with him through my own drawings and poems. I drew circus characters and told stories about them, of Hagen Waker the nocturnal tightrope walker, Balthazar the Donkey- Faced Boy, and Aratha Kelly with his moon-shaped head. Robert had no more explanation of why he was drawn to freaks than I had in creating them.
It was in that spirit that we would go to Coney Island to visit the sideshows. We had looked for Hubert’s on Forty-second Street, which had featured Snake Princess Wago and a flea circus, but it had closed in 1965. We did find a small museum that had body parts and human embryos in specimen jars, and Robert got fixated on the idea to use something of that sort in an assemblage. He asked around where he might find something of that sort, and a friend told him about the ruins of the old City Hospital on Welfare (later Roosevelt) Island.
On a Sunday we traveled there with our friends from Pratt. There were two points on the island that we visited. The first was a sprawling nineteenth-century building that had the aura of a madhouse; it was the Smallpox Hospital, the first place in America to receive victims of contagion. Separated only by barbed wire and broken glass, we imagined dying of leprosy and the plague.
The other ruins were what were left of the old City Hospital, with its forbidding institutional architecture, finally to be demolished in 1994. When we entered it, we were struck by the silence and an odd medicinal smell. We went from room to room and saw shelves of medical specimens in their glass jars. Many were broken, vandalized by
