In this story… I Share An Offer I could refuse
The first photos I found online were of an old man - nothing like my recollection of the famous author who made me an offer one night in 1978, unabashedly, with forethought, laid out in full detail.
As a freshman at Northwestern, just seven years earlier, I dressed my 73-pound self in corduroys and turtle neck sweaters from the boys’ department. No self-respecting professor would proposition an asexual waif. When fired from the Corinthian Column Greek Café the next year for not sleeping with the cook, an apparently unspoken job requirement, I was outraged and not the least bit flattered.
Maybe that’s why I was so unprepared, rendered temporarily mute that night while sipping white wine on the patio of Enrique’s in San Francisco’s North Beach, when Ernest Callenbach, author, film critic, editor and, according to Wikipedia, simple living adherent, introduced his idea and burst my bubble. I had read his seminal work Ecotopia when it was first published to critical acclaim in 1975. It promptly joined Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World and George Orwell’s 1984 as a Utopian classic and, like Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring had decades earlier, fueled the growing environmental movement. Ecotopia, a play on ecological utopia, took on consumerism, pollution, the chemicals in our food and the manipulation of advertising – all things that I worried about. Chick Callenbach, as his friends and now I, too, called him, was twenty-five years my senior. He’d been mesmerizing in the live interview I conducted on KSAN radio earlier that evening. When he asked me to join him for a post interview drink, I was tickled that he apparently found me fascinating. This was going to be fun.
Just moments after the waiter delivered our wine, Chick asked if I had a boyfriend. My default was to talk, rapidly, to fill any potentially uncomfortable moments with words, a steady stream of way too many words.
“Well, it’s complicated,” I confessed, and promptly went into detail about the two different guys I was seeing plus the third guy with whom I was having a no strings attached sort of arrangement. He smiled and put his hand on my hand. My antennae flew up, full stop, and for the first time it occurred to me that he may have an agenda that didn’t involve my intellect.
I casually withdrew my hand as he began.
“Since we both live in Berkeley, and I’m attracted to you, I was hoping that we might meet regularly for sex.”
Did he just say that? Oh no. A dispassionate proposition. No coy hinting around. No waiting for a glimpse of mutual attraction. So incredibly awkward. I looked down.
He went on, not even attempting to make eye contact. “I can tell from our conversation all evening that you’re cool, that you’re not someone who plays by a strict set of rules, and I like that. There wouldn’t be any expectations and I don’t see this being a romantic involvement….
What the hell is happening here? I was so flattered by his interest, star struck by his brilliant mind and counterculture fame, that this possibility never even crossed my mind. Am I that naïve? That stupid? He was still fumbling along, overexplaining what he would like to see transpire, when I interrupted, literally taking the upper hand.
Returning my hand from under the table to gently rest on his, I said “Chick, I’m flattered. I have great respect for your work and foolishly thought that you were just interested in talking to me, perhaps becoming friends. My love life is quite full these days and I’m not interested in pursuing a physical relationship with you. I hope you’re not offended.”
He looked down, like a high school boy who’d just been turned down for a prom date. Taking a long sip of his wine, he said, “Well, you can’t blame a guy for trying.”
I drove home that night wondering if his coming right out and proposing an ongoing sexual relationship was showing respect for me as a feminist or not. Was it better that he just put it out there, teeing up the offer for me to respond as I might, or was this a harbinger of a post-romantic future, where sex was something to work out well in advance, a deal, a pact between consenting parties? There was a self-satisfied grin on my face as I drove over the Bay Bridge, pleased that I’d felt confident enough to gently and respectfully turn him down. It didn’t hurt that, at the time, my plate was more than full with the three age appropriate liaisons I was attempting to juggle.