BY SUSAN SHAPIRO | Richard was a divorced freelance journalist working on a biography of Bob Dylan. Knowing I was a Dylan fanatic, a friend gave him my number. He invited me for a home-cooked dinner. At 24, no straight guy had offered to cook for me before.
I walked to his Bank St. brownstone that early July evening, wearing a sleeveless sweater and short black skirt. A tall 44-year-old guy, with pepper-and-salt hair to his shoulders, opened the door. He looked like Dylan, in black jeans and a gray silk shirt, silver earring dangling from his left lobe. He was sexy. My mother would hate him.
“Susan. Hi. Right on time,” he said. “Come in.”
“Thanks.”
I regretted not being late.
He led me through the hallway into his living room. It was the nicest Village apartment I’d ever seen, with exposed brick walls, moldings, high ceilings. The built-in shelves were neatly stacked. I spotted Victor Navasky and Bob Woodward; he was mostly nonfiction, all hardcover.
By the time he finished giving me a tour of his elegant railroad flat, I was falling for him. It ended in the dining room, which had lace curtains and a French country table set for two in the corner. Nice seduction method — feed ’em and f— ’em. I might have been from Michigan, but I was an old 24.
“Tell me about your book,” I said, sitting down.
“Tell me about your work,” Richard countered. “I checked out some back issues of Cosmo.”
He uncorked a bottle of red wine: “I loved your friend who just met the man she wanted to father the children she didn’t want to have.”
My first national publication — he’d done his research. He poured wine into a glass, handed it to me to taste, an act wasted on a diet soda doyenne, but I went along, nodding.
“You should try my editor at Vogue,” he said. “Use my name, Susan.”
“Everyone calls me Sue.”
“I’d rather call you Susan,” he said.
“What have you done for Vogue?” I asked.
“A bunch of celebrity interviews.”
He poured dressing on the salad.
“Madonna, Bruce and Mick.”
Worse than name-dropping was first-name-dropping. I wondered if he really knew those famous musicians. There was a door off the kitchen. To the bedroom. Convenient, though I preferred sex on an empty stomach. I felt warm from the wine. I’d never slept with a guy on a first date before.
“Tell me about your book,” I said again.
He ran his fingers through his hair.
“We signed a six-figure deal with Simon & Schuster. My agent’s got the biggest balls in the business.”
I wanted to hear about the intricacies of the lyrics, not the deal.
“An old boyfriend used to send me words to Dylan’s love songs,” I said. “All tortured. I should have taken the hint.”
“His songs don’t even touch the surface.”
“Tell, tell,” I said.
“He makes up stories. You know his famous motorcycle accident?”
I nodded. Of course I knew, I had been obsessed with Dylan since I was 14.
“It didn’t happen,” Richard said. “He was on drugs. His manager sent him away to get clean.”
“Really?” I didn’t believe it. “Tell me more.”
I took out a cigarette. He lit it.
“He drove his first girlfriend mad.”
“The one on the album cover?”
He inched closer, took a cigarette from my pack and lit it ineptly, like someone who only smoked at parties. My hands were sweating.
“She was young. He seduced her, but he was also sleeping with other women.”
He put his arm around me and said, “When she found out the truth, she tried to kill herself. Her name was Suze.”
I put out my cigarette. Only my parents called me Susie.
“How did you find out?”
“She told me,” he said. “I can make people relax and tell me everything. Sometimes I think everyone’s just waiting to spill their secrets.”
“Writers are always selling someone out,” I quoted Joan Didion.
“Two writers,” he smirked. “That means our kids will be doctors.”
I almost choked. He couldn’t know I came from a family of doctors. Why did he think I wanted children?
“That was why my marriage didn’t work. My wife decided she didn’t want kids,” he said. “I
lived with another woman, Sally, for two years, but she couldn’t have any.”
“When did you end it?”
“Two months ago,” he said. “Bad breakup. Sally’s a little crazy.”
A lot of women were going crazy around here. I thought of a friend’s warning: Listen to what a man says about his exes, since he could soon be talking like that about you. She’d also said, “Stay away from biographers. They leech on other people’s lives.”
“Do you want kids?” he asked.
I finished my wine. “I’d rather have books.”
“Can’t you have both, Susan?” He moved closer, stared into my eyes.
“Not before dessert,” I said, feeling tipsy.
He smiled, went back to the kitchen for raspberries and cream. He put on “Blood on the Tracks.” I waited for him to seduce me and dump me like Dylan did to that other Suze.
“Listen, I’m on deadline now,” he said. “I hope you won’t mind making it an early night.”
“Not at all,” I lied, looking at my watch. It was 9:30. I felt rejected. The only guy I’d ever wanted to sleep with on a first date didn’t want to sleep with me.
“Can I walk you home?” Or maybe he did.
“First tell me something juicy,” I said. “What’s Dylan like deep down? A genius or a drifter? Is he just insecure?”
“It’s hard to figure out. He’s created a mythology about his life. There’s a lot of conflicting stories.” Richard picked up a raspberry and fed it to me. Then he moved closer. “A real sociopath,” he whispered.
From Susan Shapiro’s memoir “Five Men Who Broke My Heart” (Delacorte Press, 2004)
