“I imagine him as being very-you know-sort of a cross between Laurence Olivier in Hamlet and Humphrey Bogart in Beat the Devil-with very savage white teeth, and an absolutely fantastic body-sort of like the Discobolus.” She indicated her own rather well-upholstered belly.

“What are you wearing?” I asked.

“I see it as a sort of-you know-medieval wedding. I have this pointed white hat with a chiffon veil floating from it-and a red velvet dress-maybe wine-and very pointed shoes.” She drew the shoes for me with her black-inked Rapidograph pen. Then she drew the whole outfit-an empire-waisted gown with a very low neck and long tight sleeves. It was being modeled by a gorgeous creature whose cleavage swelled up out of the gown voluptuously. (At the time, Pia herself was overweight but flat-chested.)

“I see the whole thing as taking place in the Cloisters,” she went on. “I’m sure you could rent the Cloisters if you knew the right people.”

“Where would you live?”

“Well, I see this really weird old house in Vermont-an abandoned monastery or abbey or something…” (Neither of us questioned the fact that there were abandoned monasteries and abbeys in Vermont.) “… With these extremely rustic floorboards and a skylight built into the roof. It would be sort of one big room which would be a studio and a bedroom with a big round bed under the skylight-and black satin sheets. And we’d have lots of Siamese cats-named things like John Donne and Maud Gonne and Dylan-you know.”

I did, or at least I thought I did.

“Anyway…” she continued, “… I see myself sort of as a cross between Gina Lollobrigida and Sophia Loren…” (Pia had dark hair.) “… What do you think?” She swept her greasy brown hair up on her head and held it there as she sucked in her cheeks and widened her large blue eyes at me.

“I sort of think you’re more the Anna Magnani type,” I said, “earthy and basic, but terribly sensual.”

“Maybe…” she said thoughtfully. She was posing in front of the mirror.

“Oh, it’s disgusting,” she said after a while. “We never meet anyone the least bit worthy of us.” And she made a hideous face.

During our senior year at Music and Art, Pia and I opened our hostile minority of two to include a few other selected misfits. That was the closest we ever came to having a crowd. The group included a bosomy girl named Nina Non-off whose claims to distinction were her necrophiliac passion for the ghost of Dylan Thomas, her supposed knowledge of Chinese and Japanese profanities, and her “contact” with a real Yalie (visions of football weekends for us all-but unfortunately the “contact” turned out to be a friend of a friend of an acquaintance of her brother’s). Nina’s mother also had a huge collection of “sex books” among which we included Coming of Age in Samoa and Sex and Temperament; any book with the word puberty in it was OK. And finally there was the sheer class of Nina’s father having created the Blue Wasp Series for radio in the 1940s. Jill Siegel, on the other hand, was a member of the group not so much for class as out of charity. She had little to contribute in the way of sophistication, but made up for this by means of her blind loyalty to us and the flattering way in which she aped our most florid affectations. An on-and-off member was Grace Baratto-a music major whose intellect we did not respect but who told fantastic stories about her sexual exploits. Though she denied it, we secretly told each other that she had probably “gone all the way.” “At the very least, she’s a demi-vierge,” Pia said. I nodded knowingly. Later I looked it up.

There were only two boys who were allowed into the group, and we treated them as scornfully as possible to make sure they understood they were only there on sufferance. Since they were our classmates and not “college men,” we wanted it clear that we would only consider them as “pla-tonic” friends. John Stock was the son of old friends of my parents. He was chubby and blond and wrote short stories. His favorite phrase was “paroxysms of passion.” It cropped up at least once every story he wrote. Ron Perkoff (whom we, of course, called Jerkoff) was in love with me. Tall, skinny, with a huge hooked nose and a truly incredible assortment of blackheads and pimples (which I longed to squeeze), he was an Anglophile. He subscribed to Punch and the airmail edition of the Manchester Guardian, carried a tightly rolled umbrella (in all kinds of weather), pronounced “banal” (one of his favorite words) with the accent on the second syllable, and peppered his speech with phrases like “bloody rotter” and “mucking about.”

After the agony of college boards and waiting for letters of acceptance was over, the six of us mucked about chiefly in my parents’ apartment as we whiled away the long idle spring term waiting impatiently for graduation. Sitting on the floor of the living room, we consumed tons of fruit, cheese, peanut-butter sandwiches and cookies, listened to Frank Sinatra albums, and wrote communal epics which we tried to make as pornographic as our limited experience would allow. We composed on my portable Olivetti which we passed around from lap to lap. Whenever John was there, paroxysms of passion were the order of the day.

Not many of these communal creations survived, but recently I came across a fragment which more or less conveys the spirit of all those other lost masterpieces. It was our habit to plunge into the action with as few preliminaries as possible, so the texture of the narrative was always somewhat choppy. One of the rules was that each author was allowed three minutes before having to pass the typewriter along to the next person, and this naturally increased the spastic quality of the prose. Since Pia usually started, she was the one who had the privilege of sketching the outlines of the character we would all have to tolerate:

Dorian Fairchester Faddington IV was a promiscuous poetaster of whom even his best friends declared that he “went from bed to verse.” Though he was sexually omnivorous and on occasion preferred camels, like nine out of ten doctors, ordinarily his taste ran to women. Hermione Fingerforth was a woman-or so she liked to assume-and whenever she ran into Dorian it was not long before their lips met in a succession of interesting poses.

“The skin is the largest organ of the body,” she once nonchalantly remarked to him as they were sunbathing in the nude together on the terrace of her penthouse in Flatbush.

“Speak for yourself,” he declared, leaping on top of her in a sudden paroxysm of passion.

“Out, out of my damned twat!” she yelled, pushing him away and shielding her much-vaunted virginity with a silver-foil sun reflector.

“I take it you want me to reflect on what I’m doing,” he quipped.

“Jesus Christ,” she said crossly, “men are only interested in women in spurts.”

At the time, we all thought this was the funniest piece of prose ever written. There was a continuation of this dialogue, too-something about a traffic observation helicopter with two radio announcers appearing on the roof and the whole scene turning into an orgy-but this has not survived. The fragment, however, does convey something of the mood of that period in our lives. Beneath the wise-ass cynicism and pseudo-sophistication was the soupiest romanticism since Edward Fitzgerald impersonated Omar Khayyam. Pia and I both wanted someone to sing in the wilderness with, and we knew that John Stock and Ron Perkoff were not exactly what we had in mind.

We were both bookworms, and when life disappointed us we turned to literature-or at least to the movie version. We saw ourselves as heroines and couldn’t understand what had become of all the heroes. They were in books. They were in movies. They were conspicuously absent from our lives.