A Complicated Marriage

Table of Contents

 

 

 

 

 

 

For Sarah, Matthew, Clementine, and Roxanna

GREENWICH VILLAGE and the century-old brownstones along West Fourth Street near Eighth Avenue are quiet. The evening is well along. Windows are open to the street to catch the unseasonable Indian-summer warmth of an early-October night. There, at number 32, on the top floor under the eaves, the spill of Miles Davis and Charlie Parker tells us it is 1955 and the symphony of voices tells us that a party is beginning.

Jennifer Gordon, in her impeccable black silk sheath, with her platinum blond hair pulled severely into a chic twist, flutters, high heels clicking, from the front room, with its handkerchief kitchen that used to be a closet, down the narrow hall to the back room, her bedroom. This is her apartment and she is the hostess.

There is a young woman, very young, in fact just twenty-one, seated on the edge of a paisley-draped foam couch in the living room. She crosses and uncrosses her long legs under the midcalf, serviceable gray wool skirt, far too heavy for such a warm night. Made by a local dressmaker and bought at a Bennington College sale for $12, the skirt is so serviceable that for forty-five years it will hang in her closet, rarely if ever worn. Besides the moths, maybe it is her memories it will serve.

She looks down, appraising her sandals, new, from Fred Segal on MacDougal Street, with leather thongs that lace up past her ankles. Too tight, they will leave grooves that will take years to erase, but tonight her only concern is that her exposed feet might look too big, which they are. She smokes a Pall Mall and then another, and holds a glass with a few inches of gin and a dollop of tonic, as if it were her ticket to where the high life might be.

She smiles too much and when she talks, it is of nothing, and when she listens to what is said, she listens not at all. Her nearsighted eyes scan
the room, pretending to see what she well knows she cannot. She does not wear her glasses. One does not wear glasses on special occasions. She is looking for something comforting, but finds nothing. Her New York roommate, Debby, has brought her boyfriend, Norman. They lean against the fireplace on the opposite wall. A couple. She watches them and hates them for their exclusive ease and for the safety net she sees them wrapped in.

She looks down at her hand clenched around an emptying glass and lights another cigarette. Soon she loses sight of Debby and Norman. The room is filling up, smoky and dim; people swooning with booze strain toward each other, confiding, at top shrill, secrets and lies, withholding secrets and truths. She knows this because everyone here knows everyone else, and this is what she suspects sophisticated people do. Whiskey sloshes onto clothes, pooling in the shag rug already busy catching the ashes from a hundred cigarettes.

She looks up toward the hallway. A man enters. He is with a small frenetic woman carrying a small frenetic dog. A dachshund, not a breed the girl fancies. The couple, she assumes they are man and wife, are of an age—old, at least in their forties, maybe older. The dog is what he is. Not long after they arrive, she is startled to see that the man has sat down next to her. As she turns and looks at him there on that paisleyed couch, she falls into the rest of her life.

 

That is how I envision the party where I met Clem. Those are the images, old and familiar, that have taken root in me over the years. Yet as familiar as the images are, there always seems to be something “other” about them. After all, those two could be any girl and any man meeting at a party. A random collision. All so ordinary. Isn't that how so many people first meet? But of course it wasn't ordinary at all, because the images were of me, me and Clem.

Earlier that evening, three of my college friends and I had gone to an opening of Paul Feeley's paintings at the Tibor de Nagy Gallery on the Upper East Side. Paul taught painting at Bennington, and Jennifer Gordon, a dress designer, was an old friend of his. I was a literature major, but in my senior year, through my dorm neighbor Debby Booth, I began
to hang out with her friends in the art department, among them Nancy Smith and Judy Backer. After graduation we all reconnected in New York, and so it was that in October we four showed up at Paul's opening. And I suppose that because it's always nice to have young girls at parties, we were invited to Jennifer's.

When Clem came over to sit next to me that night, he introduced himself, and before even asking me my name, said, “Plattdeutsch.” Seeing my confusion, he explained that, judging from my flat forehead and bridgeless nose—my self-esteem buckled—my heritage was most likely northern German, or Plattdeutsch. I said that all I knew was that I was Dutch for centuries on my father's side and German through and through on my maternal side.

His disappointment at my generalities clearly evident, I then ventured that I thought my grandfather might have come from Emden. He brightened. I had validated my Plattdeutsch
-
ness. While on the German tack, I mentioned his dog.

“Not my dog,” he said.

“But your wife . . . ” I countered.

“Not my wife,” he said, and explained that the woman he had brought to the party was Busch Meier-Graefe, the widow of an art writer he much admired.
Lord
, I thought,
more German
, and wondered if I should launch into the saga of my uncle, the Nazi, but decided that might be a bit off-putting.

In any case, he hadn't finished analyzing my face. It seemed it was unusually symmetrical, my eyebrows and eyes perfectly spaced and level. He capped it off with an admiring gaze into my apparently perfect eyes and added, “
Blauen augen
.” That one, I could figure out. He then asked if I would like a refill. I nodded, and he threaded his way toward the alcove kitchen. As he moved away, I realized he hadn't said a word about himself, but I was curious to know more. I never did see that refill, nor did he return. The party was about to shift gears.

My friend Nancy lost no time taking his place on the couch. “Do you know who that was?”

I shook my head.

As she always did, she told me everything she thought I should know.
“That's Clement Greenberg. He's the most famous, the most important, art critic in the world!” I gave her a blank look. Her eyes dripped with condescension. She would have many occasions to look at me like that. Suddenly we were interrupted by a crash in the kitchen. A big, chubby man—Johnny Meyers, the gallery director, Nancy whispered—ran through the room, waving his arms, screaming in a falsetto, “Clem's crazy! He's crazy! Get him out of here!”

Debby, who was closer to the action, hastened over to tell me that the two guys had gotten into an argument and then the one called Clem had grabbed the other one, shoving him hard against the refrigerator, knocking things over. She said the fat one had been needling Clem about someone called “Helen” and the man she had brought to the party. I instinctively knew who the girl was. The party, maybe like most parties, had a shining center. She was hard to miss. A tall, beautiful magnet of a girl, now with a name—Helen.

The commotion died down. For all the flailing and shouting, no one got thrown out. The party resumed. But it was getting late—we were working girls—and soon my friends and I regrouped to make our departure. It was then that we heard a woman's cries coming from the bedroom. People pushed through the narrow hall to see what was going on. We stayed put but heard Clem's name again, and Helen's. Evidently he had slapped her. Lord, it all seemed an awful lot of goings on in such a short time in such a small apartment.

But this was New York, I thought. Not that these things didn't happen in Rye, no doubt a lot worse. I knew they had happened in my house. But in Rye there was a code of silence and eruptions were muffled by solid walls and acres of well-tended landscaping. It was called privacy. This was drama, like something that might happen in the movies. Truth was, I didn't know what to make of it all. But whatever it was, I was uneasy, and fascinated.

Two things prompted my next move. One, I was having a hard time connecting this drama with the quiet-spoken man who had singled me out earlier, and two, when in doubt I invariably fell back on good manners. After thanking Jennifer Gordon for the “lovely party,” and Paul
Feeley for having invited me, I decided to say good-bye to Clem, the only person I had talked to other than my friends.

I maneuvered my way to the back of the apartment. Clem was on one side of the small bedroom; Helen, surrounded by sympathetic friends, huddled on a chair on the other side. I gave him my best party smile, extended my hand to say good-bye, and said it had been very nice talking to him. He said it would be nice to see me again. I then did something that was not in any book of etiquette, something I had never done before: I asked if he would like to have my phone number.

He said yes. He took out a little navy blue leather book and a fountain pen from his breast pocket and wrote it down. Before I made it to the street, I was quaking with every dire scenario I could imagine:
What have I done, what if he actually calls, what if I see him face-to-face, what will I ever say to him
? I had jump-started my own drama.

 

I was ready for some drama. I had come to New York on Labor Day weekend. My stepfather, Harry, had driven me down from Chatham, Cape Cod, where he and my mother, on their uppers, had moved three years before. We had left at daybreak; Harry was a stickler for “beating the traffic.” I had spent the long silent hours in the car—after nine years, Harry and I had perfected the art of having nothing to say to each other—reveling in the romance of my impending adventure.

My anticipation was spiced with just the right sprinkling of anxiety. I had everything I needed to begin my life: $200 in my pocket—I had yet to acquire such a grown-up accessory as a purse; a typewriter; a suitcase; a few books—T. S. Eliot, James Joyce, a binder of every poem I had ever written; bundles of schoolgirl clothes; a mattress, box spring, and frame strapped to the top of the car; and, across the back seat, a sturdy mahogany bench, the only furniture I had ever bought, $10 at a thrift store, that would serve as cocktail table, desk, dining table, foot stool.

We were headed for 8 Morton Street, right off Bleecker in the Village. Debby had found the one-room, one-closet, midget-bathroom, “Pullman”-kitchen, $80-a-month apartment. Ground-floor rear of an old, very old, tenement, it had two rusted iron-barred windows facing
a concrete, trash-filled, treeless “garden,” and floors that heaved here and there from whatever unspeakable horror was brewing below, as the peeling gray walls ate up whatever light might filter through the jumbled buildings outside. It was heaven.

Harry, wanting to “beat the rush” back to the Cape, didn't linger, and Debby and I called everyone we knew, walked the Village, and planned a “welcome to New York” party. I bought the Sunday
Times
and scanned the want ads just in case the two “promising contacts” I'd gotten from my ex-mentor at Bennington didn't pan out.