A Complicated Marriage (2 page)

Roger Straus, at Farrar, Straus, was gracious, if a bit lordly, and drop-dead handsome. Was that a cravat he was wearing? He had much advice, which included improving my typing and learning shorthand. Then, after describing all the drawbacks of working in publishing, which was all I had ever imagined myself doing, he finished by saying with a dazzling smile, “Now, young lady, you don't really want to work here, do you?” A superb interview-stopper, at least to me, as unversed in self-salesmanship as I was versed in being a nice girl who never disagreed with her elders. It was only after I hit the street that I realized we had never sat down. Oh, he had read me like a book.

As it happened, I had a social run-in with Roger only three months later, at a party the Strauses threw for Alec Waugh. Heady stuff. Roger didn't remember my interview and, as often as we would be introduced and reintroduced, he would never remember me from one time to the next. I never took it personally. He was so what he was, and had very selective radar. But hadn't escaped my radar. Even as I had stood in his office that day, I had seen it as a life-determining moment. I would wonder whether, if I had started out in publishing, I would have stuck with it and had a “career,” rather than an “interesting life.” Interesting is fine, but a career would have been a whole lot simpler. And, an even more provocative thought—maybe I wouldn't have been so quick out of the gate to get married.

My second strikeout for a job was at Time-Life. Nothing charming about that interview, though at least we were seated. I had once again girded myself with garter belt, stockings, black pumps, and my all-occasion black dress with white Peter Pan collar—reversible to blue, to
fool people into thinking I had two dresses—topped off with a headband which I thought gave me a suitably “finished” look, though “outsized grade-school girl” might have more accurately described my effect. The woman was polite, I was polite. The interview was short and concluded with, “I don't think you are Time-Life material.”

This time I couldn't agree with her more, and sincerely meant it. The endless corridors of windowless cubicles, and was that linoleum on the floor? I left gasping for air, thinking longingly of the sumptuous, heel-swallowing pile of Roger Straus's carpet. A friend told me that I might have stood a better chance if I had worn white gloves and a hat. Good Bennington girl that I was, I was too ashamed to admit that I
had
worn white gloves. But a hat! I hadn't worn a hat since I was confirmed a Presbyterian at age twelve.

My anxiety spiked in the second week; my “contacts” were dust and my money was dwindling fast. I turned to the
New York Times
in earnest. My first, and last, job interview was at
TV Guide
, with a nice distracted man in shirtsleeves with receding hair who sat half-buried behind a chaotic desk in the corner of a small, bare-bones room high up in 30 Rockefeller Center. I knew right away this wasn't going to be a formal interview. I think what got me the job on the spot was that I said I was a poet. That tickled him. I would complete his literary pantheon.

Of the three other editorial assistants, all scruffy guys in their twenties, Arthur was a playwright, Neil a novelist, and Jay a screenwriter. We comprised the New York editorial office. Each major TV market had its own, usually staffed with only two or three people, while the publishing hub was in Radnor, Pennsylvania. As was the norm, the two offices in the back of the room housed the manager types and blocked off the air and light, but I didn't care. This was my style, a bit wacky and off the cuff. I envisioned a day when I might even risk knee-socks and loafers, or, dare I think it, bare legs and sandals.

My daily routine had begun. Up at seven thirty; scrub the night's soot off my face—the rattling windows, open or not, let in whatever detritus was wafting through the courtyard—grab my clothes and, always on the lookout for cockroaches, give them a good shake; followed by bread, jam, and orange juice from the mini-fridge—the only roach-free
zone—while trying not to breathe the smell of gas leaking from the stove; then a swipe at my hair, a smear of lipstick, and I was on my way down Bleecker, up Sixth, to the Waverly movie house and the West Fourth Street station to catch the D train.

It was a breeze. I had somewhere to go and they paid me $45 a week before taxes to go there. Lunch was one of two choices: milk and a cream cheese sandwich without the jelly—five cents extra—at Whelan's lunch counter on the corner of Sixth and Fiftieth, or a hot dog with everything from a vendor at the skating rink. I watched the twirlers and the stumblers and felt very grown-up as I thought of the skating palace at Play Land in Rye, where I had gotten my own white figure skates when I was six, and how I had worn them to bed the first night, slicing the sheets to ribbons. My first, and only, athletic passion.

At night Debby and I hung out with friends, drank cheap gin—Mr. Boston's—cut with grapefruit juice, ate cheese and Ritz crackers, and laughed a lot.

Because I was the new guy, my job revolved around sorting press releases looking for new programming and, most important, the care and feeding of the teletype machine. Huge, black, and belching, the machine took up half the wall ten feet from my desk. Every time a shrill bell sounded, it would go into a frenzy of shaking and clattering and I, like Pavlov's dog, would dash over, push a button to silence the bell, then watch the latest national programming magically appear on a scroll of paper. Like a player piano's, the keys had a life of their own. I'd tear off the paper and cut it into strips to pass on to the other editors.

Daytime TV—what little there was of it—was my turf. I would condense the chunks into two lines of type and wait for the next jolt of the bell. One day the routine was briefly interrupted when some bigwigs in suits from Radnor burst in. They announced that the magazine, in only two years, had hit a million circulation, and that in January we would be moving to a new location. With that, they poured champagne into the water cooler and beat a retreat. The trickle-down effect would be that I would be blessedly unleashed from the teletype machine, get a small raise, and . . .

After Jennifer's party, two days passed before Clem called. And when he did, it wasn't at all what I expected. It was late, around ten. Did I want to meet him for a drink? No one had ever asked me to meet him for a drink. What was that about? Of course I said yes. He told me to meet him nearby at Delaney's bar, at the foot of Sheridan Square.

Delaney's was an old-time Village bar, big and quiet and dark; best of all, it had high wooden booths. It was probably a blessing for my sanity that I didn't have time to worry about what I would wear or say or . . . I came as I was, and things just took their course. Not that it was easy. This was the first time I'd talked one-on-one with a non-Bennington, non-family, older man.

There must have been the usual preliminaries, but very soon they gave way to real talk. He told me about his five-year relationship with Helen—she now had a last name, Frankenthaler—that they had never lived together, and that, essentially, it had been over for some time. Was it that night he told me about his mental breakdown the previous spring, that he was seeing an analyst, that for too many years he had been seeing people he didn't like but was now living in a period of grace, with a new clarity about who was okay for him and who wasn't, that in his twenties he had been married for six months and had a grown son, Danny? Could he possibly have talked about all that that first night?

I do know that he told me that since Jennifer's party, he had sent Helen telegrams asking her to marry him. Not because he wanted her to, but because he felt he owed that to her after so many years. He also said he knew she wouldn't accept, because she would have been too concerned about losing face after the incident at Jennifer's party.

I'm sure I didn't absorb much of what he was saying, but I was startled by his openness. I also thought he was telling me these things because he wanted me to know them up front. Very Clem-like, as I would come to know. A trait sometimes reassuring, sometimes painful. Most of all, I was taken by his confessional tone. So personal, so intimate, him to me.

And what did I say to him that night? Besides the utterly forgettable, two moments were decidedly memorable. At one point, Clem came back from getting cigarettes and started to sit down next to me in the booth, rather than across from me. I told him I would prefer that he didn't,
which spoke to how unbearably uncomfortable I was. I felt way over my head. And Clem? He took it in stride. I think he was rather amused.

The other moment was when, perhaps spurred by his confessional tone, I told him that I was a virgin. Not without much fluster and fuss. To confide such a thing to a man was certainly a first, but I knew it was important. It was clear to me that he expected sex sooner rather than later, and I was definitely not okay with that. At the same time, I was ashamed of my virginity and didn't want it to come as a surprise somewhere down the road, if there was going to be a road.

Convinced that my flat-footed disclosure warranted some cushioning, I must have told him about my high-school boyfriend of two years, just to reassure him that I wasn't irrevocably inexperienced. Did I mention that I hadn't really dated since my sophomore year in college? Or vapor on about my mother's hushed urgency as she intoned her oft-repeated incantations against sex, from the obvious, “Men only want one thing” to her more fanciful, “Letting a man touch you ‘down there' can make you pregnant, and your life will be over.”

Did I tell Clem how she had balanced all that with wistful, honeyed references to “the sanctity of marriage,” “the beauty of intimacy with the one you love,” and the wedded bliss of “happily ever after”? I hope I didn't tell him her tale of how she had known when her love was true because she had heard a nightingale sing. But I might have. Clem had set the disclosure bar rather high.

One thing for sure: I know that once the virginity declaration was made, I capped it off with a Hester Prynne reference when I told him I often felt I had a capital
V
on my forehead. I had sensed that Clem wasn't exactly thrilled by the idea of my virginity, that he was probably just looking for a quick walk in the park without any long, drawn-out, push-and-pull skirmishes. And I figured humor would soften the blow. I was right. He laughed long and loud. Somehow, in the throes of my earnest blushes, I thought it was all pretty funny, too. And so, with my cards on Delaney's table, I glimpsed that it might be okay, might even be fun, to hang out for a while. We were an unlikely pair, but the timing that night was right. Each in our own way, we had suggested that we might be ready for a change.

And then he didn't call for two weeks. But this time he called a day in advance. This time he called to ask me to meet him at a painter's studio. This time it was like an honest-to-God date.

After work I walked up Sixth Avenue to Central Park South, then into a building and into an elevator. It wasn't much, nothing special, just an elevator, going up in an elevator. A very small cage, gilt and cherry wood and a tiny red plush seat tucked into a corner in case one felt faint. Just an elevator in a narrow, twelve-story studio building tucked between two hulking apartment houses. I was expected. I liked who I was that evening: a girl on her first date with a “real” man, a girl who was starting out on the next phase of her adventure. I also hated who I was that evening: a girl terrified of starting anything, much less an adventure. Maybe I
would
faint.

I towered over the miniature elevator man, in his maroon uniform with matching hat and white gloves. He was so much better turned out than I in my standby Peter Pan number. For this occasion, I had added my grandmother's single strand of cultured pearls. Maybe cultured, maybe not. One couldn't be too sure about that grandmother on my father's side, with her gin-drinking, chain-smoking, card-playing ways and a husband who had dropped dead of a heart attack at a suspiciously young age. No, one could never be too sure of Ruby—
grandmother
was a word forbidden in her presence. Such were my thoughts that evening in the elevator on my way up.

René Bouché's studio was on the top floor. I had never been to a studio before. Was I breathing, smiling, shivering, happy, scared? Yes. The elevator man pulled open the brass gate and released the outer door, and I stepped directly into a small hallway that, in turn, opened into a sitting room overpowered by a vaulted ceiling and an immense domed window that confronted the length of Central Park. Its vastness astonished me. Even though I had grown up only thirty minutes north of the city and had now been living in New York for two months, most of the time I had no idea where I was at all. No one was in sight, but I heard voices, and soon Clem came toward me and drew me into an adjacent room, a cluttered, paint-filled, strange-smelling room. So this was a studio.

Clem introduced me to Mr. Bouché, and to Paul Wiener and his wife,
Ingeborg ten Haeff, who stood by yet another immense window. They nodded, drinks in hand, and turned back to themselves and the view. Clem showed me the portrait of himself that, still incomplete, was on the easel. I couldn't tell whether he was pleased with it or not. In the large rectangular picture, he sat at a table, contemplative, holding a book in three-quarter profile, his head tilted, resting in his other hand. When I looked closely, I saw a shadow of sadness in his face—not deep, but there.

Overall, the picture was pretty, pastel-ish, sketchy, the paint brushed on delicately. This, I would come to know, was the Bouché style. Clem was wearing a pink shirt that diffused a soft glow. There was a gentleness, a sweetness, about his face, about the whole picture. I liked it, although, little as I knew Clem, I thought the tone an odd choice. I said nothing. I also thought Clem looked wonderful in the pink shirt. I wanted to reach out and touch his arm as he handed me a drink. I didn't.