A Complicated Marriage (7 page)

No grand exit. No slamming door. Unlike Christmas Eve, there is no elevator down to the street. No taxi to Clem and the rest of my life. I'm stuck until morning with my rage and humiliation. Once again I am deemed to be of no value; bigotry has won out. If possible, my father's tirade is more virulent than my uncle's. If possible, I feel even more jumped in the dark and punched out. The silent cipher has sprung to life, like a monster in a horror movie. Above all, that night in Chicago the stakes have been higher, and sadder. This is my father who has now thrown me away. Twice.

That first time. He must have left in the dark. He must have; otherwise, I would have heard him go out the front door. Did he carry a suitcase? He must have, at least one. My mother must have packed the rest, the suits and ties and underwear. Those things must have all left the house while I was at kindergarten at Mademoiselle Hupert's house, two roads away and around many bends. His things must have left quickly, because they left no smell or even a mote of dust. Not a stray sock.

My mother must have cried as she packed up the Adulterer's things. She must have lingered over this shirt or that monogrammed handkerchief. She must have sat down now and then, overcome by shock, and bewilderment, and terrible pain. I knew nothing. I was never told anything. Not even that he had gone. But I knew he must have left in the dark. And, like the obedient child that I was, I erased all images of him from my mind. My memories of him had been tucked into those suitcases, and I never saw them again.

The next morning, Marge corrals me for a tête-à-tête, reeling off a
Ladies' Home Journal
list of reasons to think twice: cultural differences, children raised in a different faith, when you're forty he'll be sixty-five, he'll die when you're still young . . . I look at her blankly, at her flat, pan face. The outlandish image of Clem in a yarmulke drifts across the room.
She hasn't a clue about who I am, who Clem is. And it doesn't matter. My father is a no-show. No good-byes. Once again, no good-byes. How could there be? There has never been anything “good” between us.

 

In Denver, things ran true to form. I knew my brother: hail-fellow, cocky, always with his eye on the next big deal, happiest with a rifle or fishing rod in hand, and tight with a buck. There was no racist rant from Norden. But no commiseration with me over my Chicago tale, either. In fact, he was taken aback by my mass alienation of our family. That they were the ones who had alienated themselves from me never penetrated. In his fatherly/brotherly way, he offered his advice. The gist, to mix platitudes: Sit on the fence, and you'll never burn your bridges. And, consistent as always, he didn't burn his bridge with me. That would happen a year later, when he and Clem met. They quickly developed, on their own personal terms, a mutual dislike that deepened over time and that in turn intensified my own, already hefty dossier of resentments toward my brother.

On that visit, though Norden didn't provide the huggy, warm reassurance that I craved, he did his best and I enjoyed my time with him. He threw a birthday party for me. We went skiing—well, let's say I tried. I met and liked his girlfriend, Lou, whom he would soon marry. And one day, armed with leftover cans of house paint and fat brushes, I painted an abstract mural in his basement rec room. My way of thumbing my nose at all the full-of-themselves artists I was meeting—
hell, anyone can do this!
—even as I danced with exhilaration at the sheer fun of it. I don't think I told Clem. It was a one-shot and it was all mine. I even spent a snowed-in night in a mountain lodge with a forgettable friend of Norden's. I had an irrepressible urge to see, just once, what another penis looked like before I disappeared forever into monogamy. I didn't tell Clem about that, either.

I flew home the next day. I had visited the two men I had been dealt at birth. Though both had fallen short in demonstrating their love in the past, I had harbored the wish that they would have stepped up now. Perhaps, hearing the final call of Electra, I had wanted them to be jealous of this man who was snatching away their only daughter and sister.
I had wanted to hear the words “Come live with me, I will take care of you.” Not that I would have ever done that, but I wanted to hear the words, or something like them, simply because I never had. Instead, in a raging blizzard, Norden waved me a breezy good-bye, and I flew to LaGuardia, landing after midnight in yet another blizzard. I spent the night in the airport, before a bus made it through and took me to New York, and Bank Street, and Clem.

To celebrate my return and, belatedly, my birthday, Clem had gotten tickets for
The Pajama Game
for the following night. He had also, in an adorable spurt of domesticity, bought new sheets at Gimbels. The die was cast. And to the buoyant strains of “Hey there, you with the stars in your eyes”—our official favorite song—I assumed my new role: Wedding Planner.

THE HOW AND WHERE we would get married mattered little to me. But the when, that was important. Somehow, May struck me as the perfect month, neither too soon nor too far off. And the fourth, the first Friday, would be the ideal weekday, workaday kind of day to suit Clem's no-big-deal parameters. And so it would be.

Meanwhile, our social life of drop-ins—whoever called during the day would be invited to come by for a drink around six—and parties rolled on much as before. On everyone's schedule were the gallery prowls, usually the first Tuesday night of the month for openings and Saturday afternoons for seeing everything else. We would start on Fifty-seventh Street, then wander north on Madison, winding up at, say, Tibor de Nagy or Martha Jackson's, who could be counted on to be serving drinks. These nights were like parties, meeting, as one did, friends along the way and ending up around large tables at some low-end bar or restaurant. More often than not, we would then head back downtown to the Five Spot or the Cedar.

In a matter of months, the pace seemed to speed up. More galleries, more openings, more painters from abroad, more new faces passing through our eighteen-by-eighteen-foot living room. Artists who weren't selling at their galleries now sneered louder at other artists who they said were “selling out” to the newly roused media. For years, Jackson Pollock had been the prime whipping boy, ever since his spread in
Life
, which, as skeptical as the tenor of the piece was, had turned a national spotlight on him and the “new” abstract expressionist painting. Now, everyone was fair game. In unison, artists took to task the Johnny-come-lately museum directors and craven collectors who were limping warily onto the belatedly perceived bandwagon, buying a bit of this and that
on spec, before hastily retreating uptown in their big cars with uniforms at the wheel.

While I was still swooning over movie star sightings, celebrities were beginning to swoon over the artists. In 1956, the flamboyantly rich Ben Sonnenberg, the so-called “father of public relations,” had heard the bandwagon loud and clear and contacted Clem. There were drinks, a few lunches, sometimes including me, sometimes not, always unsparingly charming. One day Clem and I were walking down Madison Avenue, when a Rolls-Royce touring car from the thirties pulled up. Of course it was Ben, inviting us to join him. In a castle on wheels, we seemed to float high above the street, the crystal flower vases by the windows, a rose in each. When Ben got out at his destination, he told the driver to take us home. I held Clem's hand and resisted waving at the peasants as we sailed down Fifth Avenue. Surely it was the most exotic and grandest of all the rich people's cars that ever had or ever would pull up outside 90 Bank Street.

Soon Ben began inviting us to his lavish parties in his mansion on the south side of Gramercy Park. Number 19 comprised two elegant townhouses melded into one. Oh, that house, with its seductive excess, replete with circular staircase, ballroom, art of the Masters, and plushness of the rich. And brass, Ben's signature touch, was everywhere, as art or decoration. As he did with all his passions, he indulged in brass beyond measure, all floors fairly ablaze with it and polished by a special “brass polisher,” as if to vie with the sun, as if to put gold to shame.

For all his worldly persona, Ben was an ardent family man, oozing with gemütlichkeit. It took a few intimate visits to get to see that his heart belonged to his wife, Hilda, whom I met only twice and who rarely attended the parties. It was in the midst of one of those soirees that Ben asked if Clem would go have a chat with his son and gave us directions to his room. The sounds of the party faded as we passed through a labyrinth of dark corridors, eventually knocking at a door of a small room dominated by a tall young man who, though shy, seemed to take our visit in stride. Clem drew him out about his interests. They talked of art and writing. Not a chip off the old block, he might as well have been a student in a garret in the Village. I thought,
Like mother, like son
. I knew
that Hilda, too, had chosen to absent herself from Ben's world and spent most of her time in their house in Provincetown. The notion of Hilda and Ben's marriage of intimate distance intrigued me. It was new to me. I wondered if Clem's world would ever get so big that it would take forty rooms to hold us in harmony.

Ben understood that the fun of a party was in the collision of worlds. Nothing random, everything about Ben was contrived. Most people were there because they were interesting, beautiful, very rich, or famous. In my fanciest duds—I had now graduated from Peter Pan to an off-the-shoulder black number—I devoured from afar the likes of Kirk Douglas, Montgomery Clift, and Maureen O'Hara.

One night, Clem and I found ourselves pressed close to Janet Gaynor and her husband, Adrian, the fabled costume designer of the thirties. By now, I had come to accept the diminutiveness of movie folk, but those two were the tweeniest of them all, and between the din and their soft-spokenness, I almost had to squat to hear them. They were way before my time, but I was slightly reassured when Ben whispered that Gaynor had won the first Academy Award in 1928. Then suddenly the star blazed with excitement as she cried out, “It's him. It's really him!” I turned, expecting Jesus, and saw only Bill de Kooning coming toward us. We introduced them and left them to their twittering awe.

I was even more taken aback when, at another party, a few months later, this one given by theatrical lawyer Bill Feitelson, I watched Rosalind Russell and Gloria Swanson close in on Clem, foot-long eyelashes fluttering as they cooed about art. I wondered what planet I was on. I think Clem wondered, too.

The art rush was on. The cash registers were beginning to
ka-ching
. As bemused as I was by the fervor of it all, I was also aware of how long it had been in coming. I knew that since the late thirties, Clem had been writing about abstract expressionism and these artists, heralding their work as the best new art being produced anywhere. Here, Paris, anywhere. What was it about his lovely hazel eyes that they were able to see what others couldn't?

That art scene was becoming mine, at least insofar as that was where I spent most of my time. If someone had made a movie about that world,
I would have been a nameless bit player, the girl who stood off to the side of one of the leads. As the novelty wore off, I grew accustomed to that bit part and, not knowing how to change it, succumbed to it. More unsettling were my behind-the-scenes, unstructured days. There had always been school, a job. Now, for hours, I read and thought about poems that I would never write. I hadn't the words. Soon I stopped thinking about it.

I was amazed by how insular the art world was. Not that I knew anything about culture “worlds,” but I figured it was because the New York scene was so relatively new and small. I was particularly disappointed that there was so little interaction between artists and writers. Clem, associated with all the avant-garde magazines, from his
Partisan Review
days on, had always moved in both circles, but, unfortunately for me, the literary people had turned out to be the social casualties after his breakdown. As he had told me that first night at Delaney's, he had pretty much made a clean sweep. True to his word, there would be only a few forays into the literary crowd, during our first months together, and then none.

Yet even as I prepared myself for total art immersion, an exception presented itself, a party at Lionel and Diana Trilling's where I met Mary McCarthy. She outranked any movie star, thanks to her sexy, cut-to-the-chase short stories in
The Company She Keeps
, which I had gobbled up at school. Fabulously beautiful, with her pale delicacy, she had all the litheness of a swan and, with her gleaming dark hair, all the sly sleekness of a panther. I even managed an exchange with Jessica Mitford, who so flustered me with her cool British-ness that while gushing and blushing about how much I loved her books I made a senseless hash of titles and characters, none of which she had written. She rewarded me with a smile of ill-disguised pity for which I was abjectly grateful.

More sustaining were the parties given by Oscar Williams, the poet and anthologist, and his poet wife, Gene Derwood. Oscar, almost leaping out of his shoes with the joy of life. I was glad he had escaped Clem's clean sweep. Oscar lived on top of a small industrial building on Water Street near the fish market. Dark, not a soul to be seen except the poets climbing those rickety steps to the promise of spending an evening with
writers who wrote. One night, I stood on the roof next to Saul Bellow, looking at Brooklyn and its beloved bridge. We talked about the Dodgers and I told him how, as a child, my older brother, a fanatic Giants fan, had for years made me memorize all the Giant lineups in order to impress his friends. Saul smiled and said, “Not a bad thing to know.” I remember thinking,
This is a moment
.

And then there was a quintessential New York moment. Rush hour, pouring rain, no umbrella, not a bus in sight. I had just come out of Macy's, having had a lousy haircut on the cheap, when a taxi from nowhere appeared. As I reached for the handle, another hand covered mine. She smiled fiercely and growled, “Mind if we share?” Somehow, between 34th Street and Bank Street, we warmed to each other, exchanged names, and I almost fainted. My new best friend was Jean Stafford, the woman who couldn't write a bad short story if her life depended on it and whose novels
The Boston Adventure
and
The Catherine Wheel
had opened my eyes to what it might be like to write from the inside out.