A Complicated Marriage (4 page)

And then, during those first months, there were a few unforgettable parties. Like the one at André Emmerich's apartment-gallery on the parlor floor of a brownstone in the East Seventies. At that time André was a private art dealer, handling mostly pre-Columbian work. The main room was large and packed with a crowd that even I could recognize as the usual assortment of artists and collectors. But there, dead center, feet away from me, were Janet Leigh and Tony Curtis. This was my first movie-star-in-the-flesh moment. How perfect. And young—well, within a decade of me—in the full blush of their power couple-ness. And here was André introducing them to us, as if they were real people. Clem hadn't a clue who they were, but I was a junkie.

That night I might as well have been twelve, cutting out pictures of
Rory Calhoun and Guy Madison from
Photoplay
and Scotch-taping them to the wall next to my bed. For some reason, right there with the hunks was the prince of the snarly bad boys, Richard Widmark, who never got a girl to kiss but who I thought was sex walking. And the girls? Jane Powell and Debbie Reynolds, because I wanted to sing and dance and be five feet tall and, like Nancy Drew, have dead mothers and adoring fathers who were handsome and doting, thus fulfilling my Electra dreams. But that night at André's I was thrilled to make do with the movie stars at hand. Quite content to have no conversation, I just stared and stared at Tony's curly black hair and headlight teeth and at Janet's enormous breasts and tiny waist. They were perfection in miniature. Clem would gauge the world by me. “She's even taller than Jenny,” he would say, not that the opportunity came up often. The stars would already be divorced in a few years, but, blissfully ignorant of the reality ahead, I feasted on the fantasy at hand until I'd had my fill.

Later that evening, I confessed to Clem how ashamed I was for being such a starstruck idiot. And he told me that he had had his own starstruck moment when he was in his twenties. He had been in Hollywood for a job interview and one night had gone to the Pasadena Playhouse. During intermission he found himself standing near Marlene Dietrich. As she pulled out a cigarette, he leaned toward her with a match. As she exhaled, she looked at him with those eyes and said, “Thank you, darling,” with that voice. He said his knees had buckled. “Not the kind of thing you forget.” I felt warm all over and no longer like an idiot.

Most of the big parties had a way of clashing with reality. The glamour soon wore thin, as thin as my meager wardrobe and Alice in Wonderland headband. Most awkward for me were the big fancy Upper East Side parties in the big fancy townhouses. Whether at the “Skinny” Iselins', so upper-drawer—with that name, how could they not be?—where even Clem didn't know that many people. Or at the Alex Libermans', who gave huge parties for the downtown art crowd that Clem found tedious because he knew everyone and their cousins—the Libermans didn't believe in cross-fertilizing their circles. Or at the Bernard Reises', the artists' accountant of the day, who amassed a large collection in lieu of fees and who, like the Libermans, also believed in giving what Clem
called “A-list” and “B-list” parties. Or perhaps at Mary Lasker's, where people of every nationality and color stood about, no one seeming to know anyone else, all silhouetted in her all-white house, from the walls, floors, and furniture to the smallest petal on the smallest flower, and where I drank vodka lest I spill a drop, and never dared sit down on the pillows plumped just so. Those were the high-life times that had a way of promising so much and would end by turning my insides to stone.

That fall was a time of having nothing to say and of routinely being asked, “Do you paint?” I would stand by Clem's side after being introduced to whomever and try to listen to what was being said, and wonder if I would ever have something to add. But the conversations were about people, places, and things I had never heard of. On the rare occasion that someone expressed curiosity about me and what I did, I would venture a few words about being interested in poetry, perhaps mentioning Bennington or that I worked at
TV Guide
. No, I hadn't published anything. Yes, Bennington was an interesting college. Yes, the most expensive in the country, quickly adding that I had had a small scholarship. And what was
TV Guide
? they would ask. A new magazine that started up two years ago. How interesting, and what do you do there? I write some of the blurbs that tell about what shows are on. I was definitely not moving in a television crowd. Most people, including Clem and me, didn't have sets, and those that did, claimed they didn't watch them. I soon dropped
TV Guide
from my already impoverished repertoire.

And there was always the top-ten favorite: How did you and Clem meet? By this time I could swear I could hear the underlying incredulity, more like: How on earth did you two ever meet? We met at a party for Paul Feeley. Who? Paul Feeley, the painter. Poor Paul—he wasn't then, nor would he ever become, a household name, even in the small art-world household of the fifties. Very soon I dropped Paul from the how-we-met story, and the severely truncated version that I stuck with for decades became a shrug accompanied by, “Oh, at a party.” What was I going to say? “We met at a party. You must have heard about it. The party where Clem slugged Johnny Meyers and slapped Helen. But it was hunky-dory for me, because he told me I had
blauen augen
.”

All to say, these few attempts to find a conversational bridge quickly
petered out. There was never a connection. I had entered Clem's world without knowing the language and without any credentials. The people and places slipped through me so fast, and most I never saw again.

Then one night in early December, there was that first party at Helen's. I hadn't wanted to go/I was dying to go. So curious to see Clem's longtime girlfriend up close, where she lived, who her friends were . . . One thought that never occurred to me was that she might be curious about me, or be pissed at Clem's new girlfriend. Why would she give a thought to the nobody from nowhere who was going out with her dumped ex on the rebound?

That evening I ran headlong into the trap of comparing myself with her. Helen wasn't an Ingeborg or a Janet Leigh or a Nika Hulton, women whose lives and looks were light-years from anything within my realm of comparison. But here was Helen—young, a graduate from Bennington five years before me, and, even though she was beautiful, rich, and a talented painter, she was vaguely on my planet. And accessible enough that I could indulge in envy and self-pity and tears.

When we arrived, did she greet us and immediately turn to Clem in her intense, focused way and engage him in talk of things and people I knew nothing about? Was her exclusion of me intentional? I hope not. Did I, out of my own insecurity, read into her behavior more than was there? Maybe so. Whatever, the start was rocky, and got rockier when, later, she put on dance music. Sinatra, her favorite. Clem and I danced, I more self-conscious and awkward than usual. Then Helen danced, beautifully danced, with Clem. That did it. I notched up from envy to envy and jealousy. Dancing! She would never know what a nerve she had struck. I just made it to the bathroom before the tears flowed. When I did return, my insides like a soft mango, I stiff-upper-lipped it through the rest of the party. Even that night I knew that this was not going to be a rare occasion, that our paths would continue to cross.

Two months after we had met, Clem called and asked if I wanted to have lunch. Another first. Clem, who worked half days at
Commentary
as an editor, was a breakfast-and-dinner guy. But for whatever reason he had decided to take the day off. He suggested we meet at Louis XIV, just across the rink from 30 Rock. There were a lot of “kingly” restaurants
in New York in those days, and the higher the Roman numerals, the more posh. And what a place it was: huge, creamy and beige, carpeted and chandeliered, and so quiet I could hear myself chew. Through the large window we looked out on the tree lights and all the pizzazz of pre-Christmas Rockefeller Center. We had a drink, probably two, and soon, habituated to my Whelan's routine, I was lightheaded and delighted as a child to see that every time I blinked the lights on the tree fused into a wall of color.

As we sat there, somehow, sometime, the subject of Christmas came up. And a present, and . . . All I know for certain is that after lunch we strolled west on Forty-seventh Street, headlong into the diamond district, and into a hole-in-the-wall store. We looked at the rings in the cases. I tried a few on. We asked the prices, which I'm sure didn't exceed $100, or else I, and no doubt Clem, would have fled. My clearest recall was of the small dingy store and the bored dingy salesman, who, when the purchase was finalized, disappeared behind a curtain with the small diamond ring to “polish” it. He returned, I put the ring on, and we left. Outside, I took my first real look at it and wondered why it didn't look shinier. I figured maybe the guy had pulled some sort of switcheroo on us. And what kind of yokels had we been to think we were buying a diamond for $100, fortune though that was? As we walked arm in arm down the street, the thoughts disappeared. I felt as if I'd landed on the moon. Clem walked me back to my office and then headed down to
Commentary
.

Giddy, I displayed the ring to my cohorts, until everyone knew a hundred times over that I was “engaged!” Oh, that word! Probably a dazed hour passed before the thought struck me: But does Clem know? I called him at the magazine and without preamble blurted out, “Does this mean we're engaged?” Silence. And then Clem said something in the vague direction of a yes. Did I dare to breathe? I said, “Really yes?” And he said, “Yes.” And I breathed. That evening Clem said, as he would say often as the years passed, that when I asked that question he had felt a warm glow inside and there was no doubt in his mind. I thought of Delaney's and his talking about his breakdown or, as he now called it, his “breakthrough” to clarity and to his instincts about who and what were right for him. A state of grace.

But the engagement day was not over. That night was another of those multi-tiered evenings: a party, a late dinner, and then, very late, Bon Soir, a stinger, or two, on the rocks, and just us. One of our favorite acts was on, Tony and Eddie, two comics who lip-synched songs, parodying the lyrics until the audience went limp with laughter. Their star turn was “Hey there, you with the stars in your eyes,” from
The Pajama Game
. The swish camp of them. We loved it. We sang it to each other as Clem walked me home, and it became our song. A few weeks later, as a Christmas present joke, I gave Clem a picture of me at age three, wide-eyed in a garden, holding the ears of a stuffed bunny. I inscribed it with the song's opening line. He kept it in his middle desk drawer until he died.

Over the next days, we talked a bit, a tiny bit, about getting married. There wasn't really much to talk about. Clem's scenario was very clear: no big deal, roll out of bed one morning, a civil ceremony, and that was that. Considering we had never been to bed together, I found that rolling-out-of-bed part a bit off-putting. But for the rest, I had never been the kind of girl who mooned over wedding fantasies, and the notion of Clem in a rented tuxedo in front of an altar seemed rather far-fetched. In fact, we both laughed at the notion.

At some point he moved on to the future: “As long as nothing changes.” The remark was so vague that, if it registered at all, I would have thought,
Yeah, right
. After all, change was exactly what I had in mind. What could be more changing than being married? In fact, Clem's words were by way of being a preface to his next, rather offhand remark that our marriage should be an “open marriage.” Did that mean what I thought it meant? Christ, we were back to sex again. Clem went on to talk about having lived his whole life as a free agent, and realistically he didn't see that changing, and how a good marriage was one where two people who loved each other would also be free to make choices . . .

I heard, but didn't hear. I was too busy sweeping the notion into a far corner of my mind. Whatever an open marriage really meant, it would never happen to us. After all, he would have me. So much for that December's communication and miscommunication. Anyway, much more top of mind for me was the more immediate sex thing. I didn't have a precise timetable for losing the scarlet
V
on my forehead, but I knew I had better
get a diaphragm, because it wouldn't be long before I tumbled into Clem's double bed. Christmas was coming, maybe . . .

 

There is another elevator, similar to the one at René Bouché's. The paneling is as fruited, the velvet bench to catch me when I might faint is as red, and the elevator man is as short and immaculately uniformed and white gloved. However, this elevator is at 1155 Park Avenue at Ninety-first Street, and I will ascend only as far as the fourth floor. This time I know very well where I am. I have been riding in this elevator since I was in my mother's womb. This is where my aunt Elfrida, my mother's younger sister, my uncle Rolf, and my two cousins, Fred (Manfred), two years older, and Marlene, three years younger than I, live.

I hadn't planned to be in that elevator, but my aunt had called me twice that day to please, please come. When my aunt wanted her way, which was always, she would screw up her face and squeak like a baby badly in need of a good swat. She layered on the honey along with the misery I would cause our “Darling Betty,” how much she would miss her “Sweet Jenny.” Like my paternal grandmother, this grandmother didn't acknowledge the word
grandmother
either. And what about “Poor Lolly,” aka my mother, Vera? Poor Lolly was always said as one word, always crooned with crocodile sympathy. “Poor Lolly, all the way from Cape Cod, and without her Jenny for Christmas Eve,” and on and on.