room to dance.
After a while I left and went back to our old room at the Chelsea. I sat there and cried, then washed my face using our little sink. It was the first and only time that I felt I had sacrificed something of myself for Robert.
We fell into the pattern of our new life quickly. I stepped from square to square of the chessboard floor of our hallway just as I had in the Chelsea. At first we both slept in the small space as Robert got the larger space situated. The first night I finally slept alone, everything started out fine. Robert let me have the record player and I listened to Piaf and wrote, but I found I could not sleep. No matter what happened, we were used to sleeping in one another’s arms. About three in the morning I gathered my muslin sheet around me and lightly tapped on Robert’s door. He opened it immediately.
“Patti,” he said, “what took you so long?”
I strolled in, trying to appear nonchalant. He had obviously been working all night. I noticed a new drawing, the components for a new construction. A picture of me by his bed.
“I knew you’d come,” he said.
“I had a nightmare, I couldn’t sleep. And I had to go to the bathroom.”
“Did you go to the Chelsea?”
“No,” I said, “I peed in an empty takeout cup.”
“Patti, no.”
It was a long walk to the Chelsea in the middle of the night if you really had to go.
“Come on, China,” he said, “get in here.”
Everything distracted me, but most of all myself. Robert would come over to my side of our loft and scold me. Without his arranging hand, I lived in a state of heightened chaos. I set the typewriter on an orange crate. The floor was littered with pages of onionskin filled with half-written songs, meditations on the death of Mayakovsky, and ruminations about Bob Dylan. The room was strewn with records to review. The wall was tacked with my heroes but my efforts seemed less than heroic. I sat on the floor and tried to write and chopped my hair instead. The things I thought would happen didn’t. Things I never anticipated unfolded.
I went home to visit my family. I had a lot of thinking to do about what direction I should be taking. I wondered if I was doing the right work. Was it all frivolity? It was the nagging sense of guilt I experienced performing on the night the Kent State students were shot. I wanted to be an artist but I wanted my work to matter.
My family sat around the table. My father read us Plato. My mother made meatball sandwiches. As always there was a sense of camaraderie at the family table. In the midst of it I received an unexpected call from Tinkerbelle. She told me abruptly that Robert and David were having an affair. “They’re together right now,” she said, somewhat triumphantly. I simply told her the call was unnecessary, and that I already knew.
I felt stunned as I hung up the phone, yet I had to wonder if she’d merely put into words what I had myself divined. I wasn’t sure why she called me. It wasn’t as if she was doing me a favor. We weren’t that close. I wondered if she was being mean-spirited, or merely a tattletale. There was also the possibility that she wasn’t telling the truth. On the bus ride home, I made the decision to say nothing and give Robert the opportunity to tell me on his own terms.
He had that flustered look, like when he flushed the Blake down the toilet at Brentano’s. He had been to Forty-second Street and saw an interesting new male magazine, but it cost fifteen dollars. He had the money but wanted to be sure it was worth it. As he slipped it out of the cellophane, the owner came back and caught him. He started yelling, demanding Robert pay for it. Robert got upset and threw it at him, and the guy went after him. He ran from the store into the subway and all the way home.
“All that for a goddamn magazine.”
“Was it any good?”
“I don’t know, it looked good, but he made me not want it.”
“You should take your own pictures. They’d be better anyway.”
“I don’t know. I guess it’s a possibility.”
A few days later we were at Sandy’s. Robert casually picked up her Polaroid camera. “Could I borrow this?” he asked.
The Polaroid camera in Robert’s hands. The physical act, a jerk of the wrist. The snapping sound when pulling the shot and the anticipation, sixty seconds to see what he got. The immediacy of the process suited his temperament.
At first he toyed with the camera. He wasn’t totally convinced that it was for him. And film was expensive, ten pictures for about three dollars, a substantial amount in 1971. But it was some steps up from the photo booth, and the pictures developed unsealed.
I was Robert’s first model. He was comfortable with me and he needed time to get his technique down. The mechanics of the camera were simple, but the options were limited. We took countless photographs. At first he had to rein me in. I would try to get him to take pictures like the album cover for
“Too cluttered with crap,” he said. “Just let me take your picture.”
“But I like this stuff,” I said.
“We’re not making an album cover, we’re making art.”
“I hate art!” I yelled, and he took the picture.
He was his own first male subject. No one could question him shooting himself. He had control. He figured out what he wanted to see by seeing himself.
He was pleased with his first images, but the cost of film was so high that he was obliged to set the camera aside, but not for long.
Robert spent a lot of time improving his space and the presentation of his work. But sometimes he gave me a worried look. “Is everything all right?” he would ask. I told him not to worry. Truthfully, I was involved in so many things that the question of Robert’s sexual persuasion was not my immediate concern.
I liked David, Robert was doing exceptional work, and for the first time I was able to express myself as I wished. My room reflected the bright mess of my interior world, part boxcar and part fairyland.
One afternoon Gregory Corso came to visit. He called on Robert first and they had a smoke, so by the time he came to visit me the sun was going down. I was sitting on the floor typing on my Remington. Gregory came in and panned the room slowly. Piss cups and broken toys. “Yeah, this is my kind of place.” I dragged over an old armchair. Gregory lit a cigarette and read from my pile of abandoned poems, drifting off, making a little burn mark on the arm of the chair. I poured some of my Nescafe over it. He awoke and drank the rest. I staked him a few bucks for his most pressing needs. As he was leaving he looked at an old French crucifix hanging over my mat. Beneath the feet of Christ was a skull embellished with the words
When he left, I sat down on my chair and ran my fingers over the cigarette burn, a fresh scar left by one of our greatest poets. He would always spell trouble and might even wreak havoc, yet he gave us a body of work pure as a newborn fawn.
Secrecy was smothering Robert and David. Both thrived on a certain amount of mystery but I think David was too open to keep their relationship from me any longer. Tensions arose between them.
Things came to a head at a party where we double-dated with David and his friend Loulou de la Falaise. The four of us were dancing. I liked Loulou, a charismatic redhead who was the celebrated muse of Yves Saint Laurent, the daughter of a Schiaparelli model and a French count. She wore a heavy African bracelet, and when she unclasped it, there was a red string tied around her tiny wrist, placed there, she said, by Brian Jones.
It seemed that the evening was going well, except that Robert and David kept breaking away, heatedly conferring off to the side. Suddenly David grabbed Loulou’s hand, pulled her off the dance floor, and abruptly left the party.
