The Way Out

could envision a happy childhood. She possessed an assurance and self-confidence that had been given to her when she was a girl; that’s what Ida wanted you to think. In her own interpretation, she was the way she was as a result of the education of a girl adored by a secure and virile father who knew how to treat women and was always present as a protective figure. She spoke of herself in dramatic sequences, the epic of a New York City girl who’d achieved all of her desires and taken charge of her own life and never did what others had told her to do. “I’m not a woman, in the strictest sense,” she said. “But,” she clarified, “I’m not a man either.” She was teasing, trying to get a rise out of me. But her father had died, and her sorrow was that he hadn’t lived to see her triumph. Triumph? “Yes of course, teaching at this university, my father would have loved to know that. In his day women couldn’t even get in here,” she said, as though describing the advances of an army that has successfully conquered an enemy position. She gave a provocative smile; she was the youth who kept on surprising the elders. She was ten years younger than me but seemed even younger. She was at that uncertain age when it’s impossible to tell whether a woman has just left adolescence or is already beginning to grow old.

We changed trains at Junction and went to find the smoking car, which still existed back then. “You don’t see many men smoking in the street,” she said, “fewer and fewer. But women still come out of their offices and light cigarettes even though people look sideways at them; there’s a grace—a gift—in addiction. A weak vice, if you can call it that. Junkies still hide it. It’s no bad thing to hide so as to cultivate your own sins.” She was so beautiful that I had trouble associating this woman with the quick and startling way she spoke. She wore a purple dress, perfectly cut, which revealed the lines of her body so that my eyes strayed to the space between her breasts. Was she wearing a bra? I moved slightly to try to reveal the mystery, and she slid her scarf around her neck with a swift motion. She was attractive, sexy, but she didn’t believe she was beautiful, just as some women believe they are attractive—and may indeed be so—yet it destroys them. To her, this beauty of hers was something superfluous, and she smiled in resignation at gazes that—like mine—attempted to undress her. She used present-tense verbs, and her ironic tone added to her charm. She spoke as though constantly putting certain words between quotation marks, and sometimes she would even hold up two fingers from each hand in hooks to show that she was distancing herself from the things she said.

When we arrived at Penn Station, she wrapped herself in a long tweed coat and put on a wool hat. She looked at herself in her little hand mirror before we got off and touched up the rouge on her lips, and I asked if she wanted to get a drink. We went to Dublin, a pub in upper Manhattan that I’d discovered on my adventures around the city. We sat at the bar and in the mirror could see a dimly lit area in the back, with couples in the semidarkness. She looked around the bar distractedly as if it were a natural landscape, the unkempt garden of an abandoned house. A heavy-faced guy was talking to the bartender about the curse of a woman he couldn’t stay away from. He was drunk, or seemed to be, and spoke about the woman with a mixture of passion and anger. “I can’t leave the house,” he said, “I have a workshop in the basement, and that’s where I spend the best hours of my life.” The bartender nodded with such a slight movement that it could have passed for a blink while he served us whiskey the North American way, with lots of ice in a rather small glass. People who serve drinks in bars could hold an entertaining conversation with a silent partner. Ida took a sip, pensive. When she was doing her doctorate at Berkeley, she shared a room with a black activist on the fringe of the Black Panthers, a beautiful girl from Alabama who’d quickly latched onto all of the revolutions of that era: sexual, feminist, Maoist, racial, and she psychoanalyzed herself, stood up for black identity, took birth control pills; she was doing her thesis on John Brown, the nineteenth-century abolitionist revolutionary, was going out with the black poet LeRoi Jones, and wanted to convert to Islam. She was killed during a demonstration against the Vietnam War when she was nineteen years old. Her name was Assia Morgan, and she’d been planning to change her name to Scheherazade Baraka but ran out of time. Ida had to gather all of her belongings before the police cleared out the dorm room. She didn’t really know what to do with all of it, and when she found a revolver in the bottom of one box, she put it in her handbag and took a taxi to the Panthers’ headquarters in San Francisco. It was a kind of fortified house with little porthole windows and a large iron door. She rang the bell several times until a guard finally appeared, and she gave him the suitcase and the address where the rest of Assia’s things could be found. The man thanked her and gave her a stern look as though she was guilty of being white. That girl, Ida said, made everything she touched beautiful, the girl who died; according to her, she had an innate capacity for life, and she’d told her that she was descended from Egyptian royalty. Sometimes she’d gone with her to speakeasies with