I've been going through boxes and looking for ghosts from my past. I found the journals Levin gave me, and I've spent nights sighing over them. It's odd--- I have so few photos of Levin. I have her pencil and pen-and-ink sketches in the Pentalic journals, and she did lovely self-portraits. What I regret, though, is not taking photos of her.
That's always been a regret for me. There are really no photos of me, let alone any of me with lovely young companions. I've always avoided being photographed. I can think of only two that I know exist. One is of me at my brother's wedding. The other is me standing outside the house where I'd rented rooms while I finished my doctorate. One of me in a tuxedo, one of me in black blazer and black long-sleeved tee. Two existing photos in all these years. I suspect you can guess the reasons. I'm not fond of my body or my face. And to be photographed next to a lovely young companion would only emphasize how I don't belong there next to her.
The first time I went to Europe, I flatly refused to bring a camera. A camera, I thought, would mark me as a mere tourist, a rube from the provinces. And so I have no record of my life in Vienna. A year of my life might as well not exist. I feel the same way now about photos of girls I've been with, girls I've loved. I've no clue if any of them contrived to get photos of me, or if they managed to get photos of the two of us together-- though I know that I didn't get any. Back in the day, I'd have been terrified of being photographed, terrified that any photo of me with a lover would be a kind of mockery of the stories my young companions and I told ourselves about who and what we were. I'd have been terrified that her friends would see photos of me and feel only disdain and contempt.
Levin and Liberty were able to be muses for older lovers. Miss Ginny in Montreal, too. They were all of them proud of being someone's muse. For Levin that was the painting professor, the man who did that nude portrait of her. For Liberty it would've been the gallery owner in Santa Fe. And for Miss Ginny, it was an aging Russian emigre who played chess with her, taught her to do vodka shots, laughed at her obsession with Swinging London and the early Sixties, and gave her a couple of cartons filled with old issues of Cahiers du Cinema. I'm sure they each had other older lovers for whom they were muses and inspirations, but I keep thinking of that portrait above Levin's bed and about Miss Ginny sitting on the floor of her rooms near McGill, going through articles about half-forgotten French and East European films. Or of Liberty in just a man's shirt, being taught how to paint desert light.
Liberty told me about her mysterious journal with its "My Older Lovers" chapter, about the entries she'd been making since she was sixteen about the things she'd learned about older men and about how to manage older lovers. I never asked to see it, of course. I certainly never asked her what she said about me--- or if I was in her entries at all. But I do have visions of Liberty sitting cross-legged on a sofa in just a pair of faded, cut-off denim short shorts, brushing that mass of red-gold hair off her face and reading from her notebook on older lovers. I always loved her voice, and I can imagine her doing a kind of podcast, telling her stories out over the aether. Liberty was always very direct and straightforward, always very earnest. It's easy to imagine her reading out her guide to older lovers not as regrets or even as erotica, but just as a clear set of memories--- an operator's manual with clear descriptions of procedure.
Miss Ginny claimed to have something similar, by the way--- written in French, like a good Montreal girl, and bits of her father's Polish ---with lists of books and films older admirers had told her about. Miss Ginny, though, would have focused on the books and films. She wanted, she told me, to sleep with at least one famous academic and one rare book dealer. She wanted the lists, she said, wanted to have a bibliography, an annotated bibliography, to go with her life and experiences.
There are boxes somewhere in rooms wherever Liberty and Miss Ginny and Levin are tonight. I have to believe that they still have boxes, that they've kept journals and notebooks all these years, that they treasure the stories and the lists they made. All three girls told me that they set out very deliberately to find adventures and experiences, that they spent their late teens and early twenties keeping notes and lists, finding raw material for the art and the books they wanted to create.
I miss them. I miss that attitude. I miss the way each of them saw my age as a positive thing, the way each of them set out to design a world for herself, the way each of them kept notebooks and lists.
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