Love Me (9 page)

“I’m exhausted myself,” I said.

“I’m too drunk to drive home,” she said. “Can’t I sleep for a few hours?” I told her no. Drive slowly. But go home. Please.

“That’s not a kind thing to say.”

“I’m not kind. I’m a cruel novelist.”

I managed to stand up, sort of, and I held on to the dresser and handed her her clothes and nodded toward the door. She wanted to meet for lunch. Fine, I said. Call me. She walked out the front door, naked, clutching her clothes and stood on the walk and sang something that sounded like Rodgers and Hammerstein in German, and staggered to her car, bright in the street lamp. She turned and faced my house and held out her arms, dropping her clothes, and shouted,
“Mon ami! Mon amour!”
And climbed in. And her car wouldn’t start.
A naked woman came to the house while you were away, dear
—
she said her car wouldn’t start
—
so I had to start it for her. It needed the gas pedal pumped.
And then it started. She honked twice and waved and drove away. I found a heating pad and fell into bed. I wondered why I was behaving so badly but before I could think about it, I was asleep.

When Iris came home, she found out about the whole thing from the neighbors and suggested that I leave.

And then she held up the underpants. They were pale blue, and the embroidery said “Tuesday.”

“Not mine,” she said. “Did you win them at the coin toss or what?”

“I don’t know whose those are.”

“Well, I do. Whatever woman you had over here while I was gone left her undies. What kinda deal is this, Larry? I mean, to have your girlfriend over to the house while I’m out of town? You’ve got the brains of a boxful of hammers to pull a trick like that.”

“It’s not what you think. We were drunk, it was a silly thing, we got undressed, we kissed and stuff, nothing happened—”

“Don’t lie to me. What about the nurse from the fertility clinic?”

A right hook to the jaw. I’m on the canvas looking up at the sky. Bells ringing. Knockout.

“I don’t go for you messing around with other women,” she said. “I’m not naive but I’m not going to sit back quietly and watch it happen either. I donno. A deal is a deal. Keep your end of the bargain. Simple as that. Either you do or you don’t. And you didn’t. And that’s the last word on the subject.”

I promised that nothing of this sort would ever happen again.

“That’s no good.”

I started to say something and she held up her hand.
Don’t. Don’t even start.

I spent a restless remorseful night in the guest room. And the next morning I took off on the next leg of my book tour. She’d left the house early and written a note.

I went to church that Sunday, and the minister, whose voice sounded like a coffee grinder, preached on the subject of honesty. “Then have done with falsehood and speak the truth to each other, for we belong to one another as parts of one body. If you are angry, do not be led into sin; do not let sunset find you nursing your anger; and give no foothold to the devil” (Ephesians 4:25-27). So I spoke the truth to myself: I’m going to New York because I want to go, and let her do as she pleases. I love her and my home is here and when it’s time to die, I’ll come back. I’ll lie in a green-tiled room with tubes in my arm and wires in my chest, catheterized and sedated, tended by plump nurses from Granite Falls, and I will get up out of my body and find a choir and slip into the bass section like a walleye released into Lake Winnibigosh and we shall sing the perfect
St. Matthew Passion
at last, but meanwhile I am going to New York.

“Well, I can’t stop you,” said Iris. “I can’t keep you from running around with other women or going to New York or anything else. You’re going to do what you want to do, so you may as well do it and get it out of your system.”

“You could come with me.”

“And do what? Sit and polish my nails and wait for Mrs. Rocke- feller to invite me to tea?”

I could have gone into therapy, or read a book about happiness or filled my pockets with rocks and waded into the Mississippi, but I’m an American, so I left town and went to New York. That’s how we do it. We move on.

There was no farewell party for me. Iris kissed me good-bye when she left for work. “Take it easy,” she said. At 9 A.M., the taxi pulled up and honked and I threw my suitcases in the trunk and got in and rode away. Mr. Ziegler watched me from his front porch, a large sad man in yellow shorts. And I went to New York.

There is a restless strain in the Wyler family going back to the Welsh side and our ancestor David Powell, who started out in Pennsylvania, married, moved to Ohio, then Indiana, then to De Kalb, Illinois, and then to Charles City, Iowa, and Missouri. He was a farmer but he had the Powell in him and every few years he had to load his household in the wagon and head west. His children left the nest as the nest moved west and they stayed put in Illinois and Iowa and his wife put her foot down in Missouri. David, after a side trip to the Colorado gold fields, pushed south and joined the Oklahoma land rush of 1889 and put his marker on a claim and sat down under a cottonwood tree with a blanket over him and died there in the heat and the dust. A good death. His long pilgrimage had kept his heart fresh and eager, and he was taken up on angel wing to the alabaster city and set down at the Lord’s Table without an ounce of regret, unlike his bourgeois children, who loved their homes and yards and furniture and cars and took their leave of this earth with great reluctance and fussing with medicine and entertaining false hope, but to David, Ohio, Illinois, Colorado, Oklahoma were only stations on the way to Glory.

And so, in the Powell spirit, I being in good health and of sound mind, walked away from my good life and the plane took off over the magnificent Mississippi and Fort Snelling on the bluff and ascended over Hastings, Red Wing, Wabasha, La Crescent in the summer twilight, the cows resting in their green meadows, chewing and dreaming, grain barges heading downstream, the diligent farmers tilling loam—I headed into the clouds and gallivanted off to New York City.

 

 

 

Life presents us with certain gifts. The fog lifts, the coast is clear, time to be venturesome. You’ve spent fifteen years in the potato fields: try the jazz life for awhile. Some odd experience is available now that might not be later. Put on your walking shoes, put $100 in your pocket, bring an umbrella.

Adventure. It saves us from smugness, the sin of the Midwest: that extra topspin you put on the truth when you know they know you’re right; the vanity of the modest, their reflexive remorsefulness, their humorlessness—a little glorious stupidity can be a tonic.

We are good people and we are mean sons of bitches: we’re fractious, susceptible to envy, suspicious, cruel. We did not fall to earth from a distant galaxy; we arrived via mortal beings with splendid faults, many of which we inherited. Mine is restlessness. I hate boredom. It terrifies me. Good-bye, Minnesota.

I flew into New York LaGuardia and a Lincoln Town Car picked me up and drove me across the Triborough, the towers of Manhattan shining softly in the distance, and through Spanish Harlem into Central Park, crowded with walkers, joggers, skaters, bikers, and I told the driver to let me out at the corner. I got out at 96th and Central Park West and fell in with the crowd flowing south past the ball fields, the Delacorte Theater and Belvedere Castle, around the lake of lovers in green rowboats, the Sheep Meadow, a thousand courtly loafers in the Monet sunshine, and an asphalt rink where roller skaters glided slowly round and round in celestial formations, and up ahead the great wall of hotels and apartment edifices shines along Central Park South. It shone for my countryman Scott Fitzgerald in 1920. It shines for me.

It was 76 degrees in the park at 3:08 P.M., said the sign at Columbus Circle. I half-expected some New Yorker to yell, “Hey! You with the hair! You’re from Minnesota!” as if I were Blimpy the Human Pincushion or Koko the Dog-Faced Boy, but nobody did.

The Bel Noir on Central Park West is twelve stories high with twin towers atop that. The key to 12A was in an envelope at the front desk. The doorman pointed me toward the elevator beside a mural of a procession of pilgrims crossing a long arched bridge to the Golden City. I rode up with a nervous man and a young woman in dark glasses holding a Bonwit Teller bag and a mournful dog. He looked chastened, as if he’d been caught trying to escape and was waiting for his next chance.

The apartment had a sizable terrace looking out over the rooftops, what the agent referred to as a “Parisian view.” The former owner, a guy gone off to Washington to help the Reagan administration stick it to working people, had left his junk out there: busted chairs, boxes of flotsam, curtain rods, crockery—but when I opened the door from the big sun-filled living room and stepped out onto the terrace, a high plateau in the canyons, I felt happy. Enlarged. Ennobled. I don’t need a divorce, just enlargement. To know I could put on a clean shirt and go to a show, and then not go. To have the Statue of Liberty nearby and never see it. To hear the crowd not far away and join it or not join it. This is what I always wanted. The big city life. Home of fabulous restaurants and their proximity makes it all the more luxurious to order shrimp in garlic sauce to be delivered and eat it on the terrace and look at New York.

The apartment was disgusting. No attempt to clean your filth for the next person. Typical of Republicans. But there was a sweet little kitchen like a Pullman galley with stainless steel cupboards and a stainless steel fridge with double glass doors—which thrilled me, echoes of the Silver Zephyr train to Chicago—and a tiny bedroom off the kitchen and a pantry. A long dining room with a hanging lamp at one end and a wall of solid bookshelves. (What would Republicans do with bookshelves? Display their golf trophies?) A southwest-facing living room with fireplace. A guest room, small, dim, facing the airshaft (realtors call it the courtyard). No sense encouraging your guests to put down roots. The master bedroom with bath attached, a green-tiled shower stall and six shower heads to douse you on all sides. And the terrace.

I loved my terrace through sickness and health, in riches and poverty. A magnificent terrace with a windbreak of spruce trees and birches in big cedar planters, and boxes of tall swamp grass, and even on winter days it smelled of the North Woods. Planes flew high overhead, following the Hudson south, descending to make the turn over Staten Island and come in across Brooklyn on their approach into LaGuardia. Every time I flew back to the city, I tried to sit on the left side so I could look down from the sky and see my terrace. On calm sunny days, it felt like Palm Beach. At night, the Pleiades hung overhead and the moon, and the terrace seemed suspended from the heavens. When storms struck, you felt the full force of the wind; the trees bent, the awning flapped. At night when I led my guests out to the terrace, no matter who they were, Minnesota tourists or old West Siders, jaded rich or impressionable youth, they always stopped and took a deep breath. It was like stepping out on the deck of a ship anchored in a harbor of high promontories of lighted facades, the apartments of other cliff dwellers all around, a tableau of domesticity: a man typing in his bedroom, a Hopper woman brushing her hair, a TV set flickering and pajama-clad children running in and out of the room, a long lithe Latin woman reclining naked on a couch, the binoculars trembling in my hands. The leafy darkness of Central Park lay to the east and to the south the lights of midtown glowed like a smeltery, and rising up from the street, the heat and hum of the city, so erotic, an old slow music. I stood and gazed and sat down to supper under the awning, at a glass-topped table with Manhattan for a backdrop, and everyone who ever sat at my table seemed to shine with fresh purpose and gaiety, people wilted and brownish at the close of day sprang to life and clinked glasses and leaned forward, light-hearted and lucid, and gave of the best of themselves. Good lighting goes a long way toward bringing out the best in us, and New York is a grand movie set open to anybody. On summer nights we sat at the table under the awning and ate our salads and were finer people that you could be in St. Paul. Not better. Just finer.

I slept on the terrace that first night, on a busted chaise longue, awoke at 7, showered, dressed, and left, briefcase in hand, and took the C train from 86th Street to Columbus Circle and changed to the B and got out at 42nd and was too wrought up to go directly to the New Yorker office so I walked over to Bryant Park behind the Public Library. A green sward in a bright box canyon of glass and steel. I strolled beside the tulips and irises and found a vacant chair and sat down. The shady side of the park was deserted and this side, the sunny side, was well populated with suits and a few blue collars, punks, old coots, a smattering of tourists, and two or three di sheveled people slumped on benches and grumbling to themselves, and all of us soaking up sun amid the grandeur of New York. Broadway ran a block to the west and on Sixth Avenue and 44th stood the old RCA studio where Elvis recorded and Leonard Bernstein and Chet Atkins, and I thought, “Dear Lord, don’t make me go back home.”