A Complicated Marriage (3 page)

As Clem and René talked, I watched the couple by the window. How beautiful they looked, framed in that window against the backdrop of the darkening park, both very tall and thin, with the posture of gods. Her hair was everything, shining gold, so rich and thick that, even coiled around her head, it framed her face, her remarkable defiant face, the features large and chiseled, the planes sharply defined. A face painted with high color, the eyes huge and black rimmed, fringed with thick lashes. A face that startled. I suspected that she wasn't particularly nice. Her clothes were like drapery, layers of exotic colors that flowed around her and served as a deeply vibrant canvas for a pair of pendulous earrings, set with cascading beads and stones that reached to her shoulders, and an enormous necklace of claws and teeth and unfathomable objects that almost reached her waist, the bones clanking as she turned toward me. Paul was impeccably turned out, polished and buffed, elegantly thin, pin-striped, with a remarkable shock of abundant white hair exquisitely pompadoured, and when he smiled, which I imagined he rarely did, he flashed a similarly remarkable mouthful of outsized teeth. A perfect companion piece for Ingeborg.

That night may have been my first date with Clem, but the night really belonged to Ingeborg. She was the first woman I'd ever seen who
so profoundly defined herself, who so clearly presented to the world the self she knew herself to be. Watching Ingeborg, I glimpsed that, as grown-up as I might ever come to be, I would never be so clear, so defined, so sure of who I was that I would dare to expose the fullness of my self to others. I also knew for sure that I would never wear bones and clank with arrogant confidence as I strode toward the world, nor would I cloak myself in the arcane textures of pagan colors, or paint myself as the goddess of my secret desires. That night I had entered a new world, in which Ingeborg would always stand as the priestess at the gate. A world whose code I would never decipher. And even if I did, I suspected that I would never know how to make it my own.

After Clem and I left the headiness of René's studio, our date proceeded on a more mundane course. We had dinner nearby at La Potinière. Not fancy, but very French and nice. And then we went back to Clem's place at 90 Bank Street, not too far from Morton Street. I surprised myself—the girl who hadn't let the man sit down next to her in the booth two weeks earlier had now agreed to go to his apartment.

As I entered the living room from the small entryway, the first thing I saw, silhouetted in a rosy glow coming through the windows, was an easel, a thick, wooden easel almost six feet high. Startling, lifelike, a man astride. Clem turned on his green glass desk lamp, and the room revealed itself. Near the easel was a card table weighted with a palette, tubes of paint, turpentine, and a large wooden paint box overflowing with more paints, brushes, rags, and lord knows what. While Clem got drinks, I looked out one of the two windows fronting Hudson Street from the second floor, and there, just to the right, was the source of the rosy light. Jutting out from the building was a long, narrow, perpendicular neon sign: LIQUOR. It didn't flash, but to cast its spell over the room, it didn't need to.

I followed Clem into the kitchen, where he was refilling the ice tray at a sink supported in front by two legs in the old-fashioned way. Long and narrow, the near part of the kitchen was lined with bookcases on one side and rolls of canvas and paintings of all sizes stacked on the other. His paintings, he told me. At the end was a window onto a fire escape. When Clem opened the refrigerator, I saw that it was empty except for
a bottle of orange juice, a can of Maxwell House, a box of cigars, and a jar of suppositories.

Back in the living room, I sat in the only upholstered chair and he turned his Windsor chair around from his desk, a few feet away, to face me. Next to the desk was a small metal typing table topped by a high, office-size typewriter. It made me nervous, those spindly legs thinking they could support that oversized machine. Behind me was a wall of more bookcases. I liked that—a bit of warmth, grounded, substantial. Otherwise, the room struck me as stark and uncomfortable. Not as stark as the contents of the refrigerator, nor as quixotic, but I wondered that someone had lived there for ten years. That I lived in a quasi-basement hellhole didn't count—I was just passing through. Particularly foreign to me were the paintings that covered the walls, haphazard, small, large, everywhere I looked. “Not painted by me,” he said, painted by others. But then he pointed to the biggest picture—like most of the others, abstract—and added, “Except that one. I painted that one.” I wondered if I should say something about it, but thought better of it. I didn't know what I thought of those pictures at all, what I could see of them, in the shadows cast by Clem's green glass lamp.

That night we didn't talk about anything dramatic or memorable, like mental breakdowns or the
V
on my forehead. But we sat there in the rosy glow of LIQUOR until very late. We must have had something to say. And we kissed. And then he walked me home. And at my door we kissed again. I do remember that the next morning, when I opened my eyes to the familiar, sooty grayness of Morton Street, I had liked all that kissing.

Kissing or no kissing, again it was more than two weeks before Clem called again. To my shame and misery, this time I quickly reverted to being a moony teenager hovering over the telephone at
TV Guide
, waiting for him to whisk me off into the unknown. Those weeks were endless to an impatient girl who saw a kiss as a promise.

Eventually he did call, and after that the pattern shifted. To my relief, there would be no more waiting. We were soon seeing each other almost every evening, and I was indeed whisked into a life unknown, much less imagined. Dates, a phone that rang, fancy places to meet, parties,
restaurants galore . . . Which is not to say that much of the time my mother's daughter didn't cringe; what would I wear, was I too tall, too fat, would I be enough?

We never did just one thing. An evening was like a fan that slowly opened. Drinks hinged to dinner, hinged to a movie, an opening, a party or, if we were with a group, especially out-of-towners, hinged to the Cedar Bar or the Five Spot. And always, for me, the next day,
TV Guide
. For a particularly chock-full evening, I referred to Clem's small leather daybook, the same one in which he had noted my phone number a month earlier. The entry for the evening of November 8: “The Savoy Plaza to fetch Nika Hulton (wife of British publisher Sir Edward Hulton), with Jennie [
sic
] and her to Whitney Museum opening, Martha Jackson's, Gallery ‘G,' dinner with Paul Jenkins (painter), Ken Sawyer (art writer), Jean Garrigue (poet), 10:30 Cedar.”

The social diet soon sorted itself out; all evenings were not equal. There were good times, okay times, and bad times, usually depending on where we went and sometimes with whom. Very low on my hit parade was any evening that ended at the Cedar Bar.

Ah, the Cedar. Whether in a city, a neighborhood, a restaurant, a party, a school, an apartment building, I didn't like being any place that was homogenous. That was the Cedar—wall-to-wall artists. For me, I might as well have been a vegetarian walking into a union meeting of meat packers. For me, it meant washing the smoke out of my hair and brushing the stubborn bits of sawdust off my shoes the next morning.

We would slowly thread our way past the bar jammed with the regulars and the girls who wanted to hook up with the regulars. Pollock, Kline, de Kooning, Smith, Guston, Held, Cherry, Tworkov, Leslie, Goldberg, Marca-Relli . . . any roster of artists would do. Those who would become big names, and a lot who wouldn't, they were all at the Cedar one night or another.

Finally making it to a booth, I would inevitably find myself squeezed into an inside spot. The drinks would arrive, the cigarettes would be lit, and the talk, talk, talk would go on as people drifted by, drawing up chairs, leaning over the seats, then drifting off, only to be replaced by others, everyone half in the bag and bleary, as I smeared condensation
from my glass, making endless designs in the ashes on the tabletop, thinking,
When can we leave, when can we leave?

We were also going to a lot of gallery openings. One night, at the Stable Gallery, Clem spotted Helen with her current boyfriend. Words were exchanged, and next thing I knew Clem had pushed the man over a bench. For me, it was a replay of the night we had met. Except then it had been strange and interesting. Now I was with Clem and had begun to meet some of these people, if vaguely, and it was awful. People circling, commotion. I instinctively moved away and stood at the far end of the gallery, clutching my fragile self-esteem. Why was I there at all? Damn Helen! Obviously I meant nothing to Clem. How could he put me in such a position? Suddenly, there was Bob Motherwell, whom I barely knew, standing next to me. He handed me a drink, said soothing things, and gave me a handkerchief for the tears that his kindness had set to flowing.

Not long after, Clem and I were on the street. Still fraught, I vented my “how could yous.” He stopped and said, “You're only worried about your face. Someday you'll get it that what other people think is bubkes. I've learned more from making a fool of myself than by being right.” I never forgot Clem's life lesson or the kindness of the tall, blond acquaintance, but that night on the street I knew it was the kindness that had gotten me through.

And then there was dancing, another sure hit for my self-esteem. Clem was partial to a club called Winston's. He loved to dance. He would jazz it up with lots of fancy footwork, a sort of homegrown swing/jitterbug. I felt inadequate, always had. Dancing rekindled the wallflower mortification of my teens and exacerbated my self-consciousness about my height, the two afflictions hopelessly intertwined. Our forays on the dance floor would invariably end with his muttering that I was trying to lead, and I would mutter that it was just that I was taller—at six feet with shoes, I had two inches on him—and he would mutter, no, it was because I didn't follow properly . . . I blessed the day when rock and roll and the twist put an end to all the muttering and we could each move to our own drummer.

On the flip side, some of the best times for me were the nights we
would hang out with my friends. Clem enjoyed it, too, and I liked that he liked it. Sometimes he would invite everyone along to an opening or to a party. Sometimes we would double-date with Debby and Norman and go out to dinner or a nightclub. And often, best of all, we were on our own: movies, dinner, usually ending up at his place, talking, and kissing a lot. Then he would walk me across the street to Abington Square to put me into a taxi, always pressing a few dollars in my hand. A block or two away I would tell the driver to let me out, and then walk the rest of the way home. I would defray the twinges of guilt by thinking of the leeway the extra money would afford me the next day.

But far and away my favorite late-night destination was Bon Soir, a basement nightclub—no dancing, thank God—dark and dank, deep in a catacomb under the madness that was Eighth Street. There, Clem introduced me to stingers on the rocks and the best singers and comics around: Kaye Ballard, Larry Storch, Mabel Mercer, Felicia Sanders, Phil Leeds, Ethel Waters, and the club's anchor, Tiger Haynes and his combo, who always gave the regulars, like us, a wave and a grin.

It was Felicia Sanders who knocked us out when she introduced us to “Fly Me to the Moon.” And Phil Leeds who one night told a joke that had Clem laughing so hard he choked. It went like this: “A father comes into the living room and sees his son reading a comic book. ‘What do you think you're doing? Why don't you get a job?'

“The boy looks up. ‘But Pop, I'm only twelve.'

“The father sneers, ‘When I was your age, I was sixteen.'”

It became Clem's all-time favorite joke, and it was one of the few times I saw him—never one for more than a chuckle or two, at best—give over to all-out, gut-splitting laughter. The only other guy who made Clem laugh like that was Lenny Bruce. He was too far out for Bon Soir, so we would head to the Village Gate, the Vanguard, or wherever we could find him—one night it was a lesbian club in a basement off Seventh Avenue. We'd sit through show after show, leaving only when he did. And even then, reluctantly. He made me blush and feel like a grown-up, all at the same time.

Always the standout singer for us at Bon Soir was Barbra Streisand, a mere eighteen when we first saw her, and even then as extraordinary
as she would ever become, sitting in a skirt and blouse like a schoolgirl on that stool, singing “Sleeping Bee.” Clem whispered, “She's got something.” In Clem-talk, high praise. A clumsy girl, tripping on the mic cord—part of her act? And endearing, because she couldn't seem to get anything right until she was on that stool, in a pin spot, singing. We felt that we had discovered her.

That was the way it was at Bon Soir. I was enthralled. Ever since I had seen
Carousel
on my eleventh birthday, I had harbored a secret yearning to be a singer. After hearing Barbra, I found the courage to go through the curtain leading behind the small stage. To a man standing there, I said I wanted to talk to her. He said no, and that he was her manager. I said I wanted to sing, and who was her teacher? He said, no teacher, she just knew. I retreated. Somehow I wasn't surprised by what he said. Years later I heard her say, when asked about how she achieved her amazing sound, that if she could hear the sound in her mind, she could sing it. By then I had achieved my dream, and I almost cried because she had put into such simple words what I had instinctively come to believe was true.

Bon Soir was not a place where an entertainer stood elegantly in front of a mic, delivering some patter or a song, like at the Blue Angel, or #1 Fifth Avenue, or the uptown hotel nightspots. At Bon Soir the audience felt like insiders, performers ribbed each other and us, it was theater, it was family.