For a time, her letters to Ted took an explicit turn—not toward him but about herself. “I want it more than both ways—I want it all ways. I only want a dick because boys look at me more than girls do and it seems a shame to go around empty-handed.”* She writes of lovers, but never love. She writes of fucking so frankly, it seems she’d shrugged off her upbringing in the ST like an old coat. If these letters are to be trusted, she seems to have spent an incredible amount of time pursuing sex, having sex, planning new pursuits of sex. In one twenty-four-hour period she had a trio of threesomes with five different people. Why? A compulsion, a fit, a need to outweigh all the dying with warm bodies, maybe. Living in the shadow of her friends’ deaths, she catapulted herself from bed to bed.

Often X made the argument that our supposedly liberal society was illogically puritanical about age differences in romantic partners, that “some” fourteen-year-olds were more mature and capable than adults well over twice their age. I agreed this was a possibility, but it seemed sagacious teens were in shorter supply than lecherous adults, and lust itself has a transfiguring effect, a way of taking action and justifying it later. I’d once had a professor who’d pursued me while I was his student, and though I was technically and legally mature enough to consent, the imbalance of power seemed to me a warning. To this, X groaned: Didn’t I know that personal experience blurred the truth? And furthermore, she said, the professor obviously hadn’t been appealing enough to me, so it wasn’t an adequate example. I did not bring up the fact I’d been quite attracted to him, as I never mentioned any attractions I’d had in the past; I even found it difficult, in her presence, to remember them clearly, so completely my sense of desire and sexuality seemed to rest in her hands. We never reached a conclusion to this disagreement; we simply concluded and re-concluded that there was no use bickering over abstractions, though abstractions continued to be the sole subject of our bickering.

The same year as her Morning Show performance, Gene Deitch invited Connie to perform at his salon, a regular event he held and recorded in his Greenwich Village apartment. Connie arrived in a long shapeless dress, leading someone to quip that she’d “just come in from milking the cows,” to which she retorted, “I’ll milk you,” then took up her guitar and began to play.† She impressed the crowd that night, though they still found her strange and old-fashioned. The problem, perhaps, was that Connie had all the qualities a male folk musician was allowed to have in the 1950s and none of what was expected of a female singer. She was bewildering when she should have been seductive, rugged when she should have been glamorous. Her songs were about steely women when they should have been about powerful men. Her voice had a stilted, pedantic quality—the sort of irregularity celebrated in Bob Dylan—instead of the nostalgic, mellifluous tone of a woman. A booking agent told her she needed to buy some lipstick and high heels before he could get her gigs. Shades of equality could be seen elsewhere in the Northern Territory, but stages and spotlights still demanded a beautiful docility. At the time, few noticed or cared about correcting the prejudices in an industry seen as ultimately frivolous.

This sort of gesture—to force someone into feeling what they wanted to avoid—was something X did all her life to anyone she felt she had the right to change. It seems that the more she loved someone, the more pain she wanted to dredge up, the more demanding she became, no matter the cost, no matter the damage. [...]

Tim Holt, a book editor X befriended that year, was the only Big Bar regular who didn’t quite belong. He arrived each Friday at five to attend to his customary three martinis as he read through a stack of book submissions. The bar was nearly empty at that time—quiet enough to read for an hour, then busy enough to distract him from all those desperate pages. Holt noticed the cheap paperbacks X kept in her back pocket and started bringing her books from New Directions, his employer, gifts she countered with shaking larger drinks, the runoff served in a tumbler on the side. I spoke to Holt by phone, as he’d retired and moved to the Western Territory.*

Over the next few weeks, Waits practiced piano at Grove Street so often that X gave him a key. In a diary, X wrote that she knew she could respect him because unlike so many other musicians, he understood that “the importance of succeeding in life is a noose. It’s nothing but a noose.”† The admiration was mutual; Waits soon invited her to Electric Lady Studios, where he’d been gifted some time that winter. (“She was like a broken toy that works better than before it was broken,”‡‡ Waits told Mr. Smith.) Of course, no one at Electric Lady had ever heard of any “Bee Converse,” but there was no need to ask for her qualifications or which records she’d worked on. Arriving with Waits was credential enough.

Once I theorized aloud that X’s circadian rhythms might have been abnormal, that they might have worked differently from those of the average person, but she asked me to explain how, precisely, circadian rhythms “worked” in this supposedly “average person.” What did I know definitively about such rhythms, and could I cite any reputable studies, and was my understanding of this so-called biological process up-to-date? Of course, I had no such information at hand and had to cede the discussion to her; that is, I had to stop talking.

This happened not infrequently—this realization of how little I actually knew and how much I repeated or relied upon information about things of which I had no direct understanding. Though such probing of someone’s ignorance may seem hostile, even controlling, I did not experience it as such. Instead, it had the result of deepening my understanding of everything, of relying less upon shorthand, and though I did eventually read extensively about circadian rhythms, there were not, at that time, enough credible studies on jet lag to convince X of its existence.

The prospect of having to repeat myself felt all at once sobering and sad; Gioia must have noticed the change in my expression because she bounced from her seat and went to a sideboard, where she mixed us two drinks, handing me one without asking. She possessed a kind of ageless nonchalance, one I felt was not uncommon among Italian women, as if time itself could not touch her, as if the years may pass if they so choose, but those passing years would have no ill effect upon her. After all, what was time but a series of afternoons, evenings, seasons—something to sprawl over and enjoy, something to possess?

“And yes, I know that Martina wasn’t a real person—though I was late to hear about that exhibition and everything, and quite frankly I didn’t get it—but I never met X. I only knew Martina. Maybe it’s dumb to think my conversations with Martina were real, that she was actually my friend, but, I don’t know—she was … She treated me like I was her equal. It’s hard to imagine I would have stayed in this industry if it weren’t for her. Sometimes she called me on Sunday mornings because I lived near a church and there were these bells and we’d just sit there, not talking, just listening to the bells together …

A few of these friends repeated the same dull anecdotes about the group crashing parties at Warhol’s factory, but the most commonly told story was how Cassandra scandalized them all by turning down Warren Beatty’s advances. The two apparently met at a dinner party, and when he’d asked her to have a drink with him the next night she said she wasn’t free, and when he’d asked her to tell him when she was free she told him she was free all the time, free every moment of her life, that she was simply too free to go around with a man like him. This apparently enraged Oleg.