LIVES AND WIVES OF A GENIUS
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city. She had a passion for putting in order everything she touched,
whether it was an apartment or a lover-a trait she might have
acquired from her mother, an elementary school teacher dedicated
to making a little man out of every furtive schoolboy. Her father
was an alcoholic, terrified of the reprimanding eye of his wife.
When Billie was still in grade school, she and her mother decided
she was going to be a doctor, and at the age of seventeen she was
shipped off, nervous and shining, to the University of Chicago for
her pre-medical degree. Her mother, tightening her voice, said to
her, "Billie, we're counting on you. You have more brains in your
little finger than others girls have in their heads. You can have
everything you want in life, but always remember that sex and
alcohol were meant to be taken in small doses only."
At the University, however, Billie fell in with the campus in–
telligentsia, and she shifted her career from science to art. She was
initiated into the avant-garde world of Rimbaud and Wilhelm Reich,
and through Marx and Lenin she discovered the excitements of
radicalism. She took part in the intellectual revels that reached
far into the smoke-filled night, smelling of cheap whisky and
cigarette butts. Billie did not drink, but in her junior year she had
her first lover, a rich boy with literary ambitions but little talent,
who became the leader of the Young Communist League on the
campus. Billie clung to him until they were separated by gradua–
tion, but she was always a little contemptuous of him because she
suspected that his revolutionary zeal came from a desire to reduce
the rest of the world to his own condition.
Billie was ready for New York. She arrived in September, found
a job as a secretary in a publishing house, and took an apartment
in the Village. By the spring, she had made the rounds of the
literary life, and one evening she met Stanley at a party. Stanley
was at the height of his form, as he expounded a new theory in–
spired by his trip across the country to the college. He explained
that a new American type was emerging, a man who combined
the experience of the city with that of the country by embodying
what he called "the native rhythms of thought and action." At one
point Stanley branched off into a new concept of "guilt by dissocia–
tion from reality," but it was lost in his flaming rhetoric. He then
returned to his American theme, enlarging on it by looking at it
