Out of the Corner, by Jennifer Grey
Continued from Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5, Part 6, Part 7, Part 8, Part 9, Part 10, Part 11, Part 12, Part 13, Part 14, Part 15, Part 16, Part 17, Part 18, Part 19, Part 20, Part 21 and Part 22.
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Chapter 22, titled "Unbridled", tells about events into 2021, when she and her husband Clark Gregg divorced.
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The chapter title "Unbridled" is a pun on the two words "bride" and "bridle". 1) Since she has divorced, she no longer is a bride. 2) She was freed like a horse whose bridle has been removed.
In her book she writes only positively about Gregg. He had not pressured her to marry him -- to become his bride. On the contrary, she had become pregnant deliberately and then pressured him to marry her. She does not insinuate that he "bridled" her -- in the sense of controlling her. She does not tell the cause of the divorce.
Marrying Clark gave me the opportunity to experience what it is to start a family of my own. Because of him, I got to become a mother to a child who is now a woman, an experience that has far exceeded my wildest dreams.
Clark and I were together for twenty years, married for nineteen, and are partners in raising our incredible daughter. Pretty extraordinary for two people who had been rolling solo for the first thirty-eight and forty years of our lives, respectively.
The good news is our marriage was something we both had needed to let go of. We knew that it had served its purpose. The three of us will always be a family.
I perceived some clues, however, that Grey left her marriage in order to live in a romantic relationship with a woman named Tracy, who has been her "best friend for decades".
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In her book's Chapter 7, titled "Gypsies, Tramps and Sleaze", Grey told how she became friends separately with two high-school girls, Maggie Wheeler and Tracy. (Grey writes Maggie's full name and even Maggie's parents' full names, but never writes Tracey's last name.)
The Grey family had moved from California to New York in late 1974, when Jennifer was 14, because Joel Grey had been hired to star in the Broadway musical Goodtime Charley. Jennifer attended Manhattan's Dalton High School. Very soon, she became friends with Maggie, who had transferred from Dalton to another school but still hung around Dalton.
Maggie and Jennifer misbehaved together. They smoked cigarettes and marijuana, frequented a bar that served alcohol to minors, and watched adults-only movies.
Grey writes that they snuck into a movie theater to watch the soft-porn movie Emmanuelle, which featured a lot of lesbian scenes.
The actresses were all small-breasted European beauties. The film made quite an impression on us. Emmanuelle was hot, and women from all over the city were lining up around the block, snaking around Bergdorf Goodman to get into The Paris movie theater for their fix of something they might be turned on by. ...
After getting our first taste of sexy magic, Maggie dragged me along to check out one of those hard-core porn movies in Times Square ....
We were two uptown teenagers who had gone to great lengths to try to pass for grown women, but could've just as easily been mistaken for young prostitutes. ...
That time we found ourselves in that seedy porn house, she lost one of her diamond earrings, dropped down the drain of the grimy bathroom sink. Was it The Devil and Miss Jones or Behind the Green Door?
Once we took our seats and our eyes adjusted to the darkness, we were shocked to realize we were the only females in the sparsely attended showing. We had crashed a party that clearly had not been thrown with us in mind. It was tailored to suit the needs of these shadowy men with overcoats covering their laps. As the opening credits rolled, all I could think was, "This is not where my parents would want me to be," and I wanted out. Maggie made me stay a bit longer, but I eventually got us the fuck outta there.
Right after writing about that incident, Grey writes her attraction toward homosexual men.
When I was fourteen, I developed a killer crush on Mark Baker, the twenty-five-year-old playing the title role of Candide on Broadway. .... I got to go backstage with my dad to meet the cast. ... Meeting Mark Baker in his dressing room triggered this phenomenon of craving, whetting my whistle for more. I repurposed that access and returned repeatedly to see the show with Maggie. ...
For me, my aggressive pursuit had a built-in safety net. There was no risk because there was no chance of anything happening between us. I was much more powerfully drawn to him than to any straight boy my age. ... Were gay men what I was programmed to be attracted to for some unconscious reason?
Maggie was my partner in crime for all things intense, dark and gay. She and I were like two stage-door Jennies, basically stalkers, inviting ourselves to join in whatever after-show festivities Mark Baker was up to. As it turned out, this charismatic young actor was up to all kinds of underground shenanigans. ...
Maggie and I followed him everywhere he went, to every skanky venue, and more than once to the sketchy Bowery neighborhood to see his good pal from back in Baltimore, Divine, in Women Behind Bars. At fifteen and fourteen, Maggie and I were more than willing to cavort with drag queens, fascinated and feeling very grown-up to be able to hold our own in this particularly adult underbelly of New York in the seventies. ....
I would introduce Maggie to the Broadway gay boys so I could share with her the torment of crushing on on the impossible-to-attain but super charismatic who felt infinitely more interesting and somehow safer than the heterosexual rich boys we had easy access to. And Maggie, more than game, gave me courage. ....
Because I felt distinctly different from girls my age, more highly awake sexually, I identified with the way openly gay guys expressed their sexual feelings and horny crushes. The soundtrack of my budding sexuality was in tune with their anthem. ... My erotic feelings didn't necessarily go hand in hand with having a boyfriend or being in love. ....
In "girl sexuality" as I saw it ... the goal seemed to be to get a boyfriend. ... For other girls, randiness begat getting a boyfriend. .... I felt alone and perplexed about why my relationship to desire felt so different.
Beyond that point of the book, Grey does not write any more about Maggie. I assume that they broke up. I speculate that Jennifer wanted that friendship to become a lesbian affair, but Maggie refused to go that way.
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Jennifer's friendship with Tracy likewise involved alcohol:
.... she was without question one of the prettiest girls in the school. .... This angel ... and I sat nursing our Heinekens on the front porch, laughing our asses off. ....
They told each other that they did not want boyfriends.
.... in all the heavy-petting action currently in full swing, we were the only two outcasts left standing in this high school make-out game of musical chairs. ... There wasn't anyone [male] there that either of us were into. Or at least that's what we told ourselves. I remember the palpable shift in perspective, that fortuitous moment when I knew I was not alone. ....
Like me, Tracy wanted to be an actress, and we shared a similar sense of humor, liked the same food, and were both Jewish.
Her family conveniently lived in a Park Avenue apartment building down the block from school, so we went there for our free periods or after school to study and do homework. ... Tracy became my best friend at Dalton [high school], like a sister to me.
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| Jennifer and Tracy in high school |
The above descriptions of Jennifer's adolescent friendships with Maggie and Tracy were in the book's Chapter 7. Now I will return to its Chapter 22, which ultimately addresses the divorce in 2021, when Grey was 61 years old.
Grey begins Chapter 22 by writing that, from a young age, she was obsessed secretly with erotic female beauty.
I was a weird kid, knew I wasn't typical, and that was how I liked it.
I had a secret file, a manila envelope, where I kept a stash of photographs, slyly excised from my mother's Vogue magazines. Avedon's black-and-white editorial closeup of a soaking wet form of a woman on the beach .... Her back arched, head thrown back, in a fully unbuttoned black bodysuit, with one bared breast, mit nipple, the sunlight bouncing off her shiny goose bumps. This was the kind of artsy, feminine erotica that fascinated me. I collected images of sexy women not because I wanted to date one or one day marry one, but because I wanted to feel the way they looked. That was what resonated with me. ...
It appealed to me to be doing something subversive and forbidden, something considered grown-up and somehow naughty, and I took a certain guilty pride in my secret stash of sexy. I'd sequester myself inside a fort I'd fashioned by stretching an Indian print bedspread between my high brass bed and built-in Formica countertop desk. In the light filtered through the colorful pattern. I'd take out my oversized manila envelope, the color of muddy sunshine, from its hiding-in-plain-sight spot inside one of the desk cupboards, and I'd pore over these gorgeous images, appreciating my keen, curatorial eye, like a nerd gazing in wonderment at their glorious stamp collection.
Jennifer and Tracy developed a petting "routine", which they continued into their adult years.
When I was in high school, my best friend. Tracy, and I had a routine we probably started when we were in ninth grade, and even though we might have looked like we were too old for such childish games , we continued it well into adulthood.
It was a form of prayer, or wish fulfillment .... Usually when just hanging around, maybe bored, one of us would instigate with a request, "Fantasize me?" ...
The physical piece that accompanied this fantasizing hobby involved the age-old girls' pastime of arm tickling. The one receiving the fantasy would lie back, after making sure her sleeve was rolled, or pushed up well above the crease of the inner elbow, exposing the soft underside of her inner arm ... She'd close her eyes, completely relax, and submit, as one donates blood.
The other one, all business, settling into a comfortable seated position at her friend's side, would begin tracing the softest possible tracks with her fingertips, maybe a hint of fingernails, rhythmically dragging up and down the tarmac of this most vulnerable of real estate ...
Tracy and I were able to conjure and make believe far bigger, wilder happily-ever-afters for each other than for ourselves, freed from whatever sensible constraints kept the lid on our own dreams, which were somehow kept in obeyance, more muted, humble, and mindful to never be too outlandish. The highlights of the friend's offering would always involve a very exciting and robust career as an actress, a vision that never failed to quickly, almost immediately shift gears into marriage and family. ....
It seemed that once we were. married off and had begun the business of bearing children, it would be our husbands who would continue with thrilling, artistically rewarding careers. We would be happy and content to have finally found what we were looking for, having landed in frothy and sumptuous domestic bliss. The end.
During these petting routines, they foretold heterosexual relationships to each other -- not lesbian relationships.
I was "boy crazy". ... From the moment my brain could figure out how to obsess over some boy, that's exactly what I did. My body was made to be with boy bodies. ... we want to have a baby ...
Motherhood did -- astonishingly -- happen for me. The aftershocks of that are what this episode is about.
I interpret that last remark to mean that after Grey's motherhood years had passed -- after her daughter turned twenty -- her "boy crazy" years also had passed. The later passing caused "the aftershocks" that caused her divorce -- which she calls "this episode".
Chapter 22 contains only one photograph, which I assume shows Tracy and Jennifer walking arm-in-arm during their young years. The photograph -- on the chapter's third page -- is not explained. The photograph is placed right before the passage that describes their petting ritual.
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| Tracy and Jennifer |
Grey writes about her divorce only in two of the chapter's last three paragraphs. I quoted most of that passage above ("Marrying Clark gave me the opportunity ...")
In the chapter's last three sentences, she describes her post-divorce life as wild and as fulfilling her fantasies:
It's the Wild West, baby! With no illusion of "the known, the plan the way it's supposed to look, or be." And my excitement about the adventure, along with my limitless ability to "fantasize myself", is now officially unbridled.
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Continued in Part 24
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