Old Neighborhood (8 page)

“We’ve all been talking about our sex lives.”

“What part?”

“Steve, why don’t you stop probing?”

“I’d like to know. I don’t talk about these things with the people in my office. I’d like to know what you’re talking about in your group.”

“Well, how often we do it, and what I like that I don’t get, and what you like that I don’t like, and why we do, and why we don’t, and my orgasms, and how long you last.”

I must have looked like it was taking about ten minutes for the information to be recorded by my brain.

“I’m going to faint,” I said.

“You shouldn’t have asked.”

“I’m going inside to take a shower now. There’s a very strong chance I will never come out.”

We survived Beverly’s consciousness-raising group. The group lasted for six months, which Beverly said was the normal life span. When it was over, Beverly wanted more for herself than modest household gains. Encouraged by the others, she had chosen to assert herself in her career as she had not done before.

“I want to make my work as important to
me
as your work is to
you.
”

“You should, Bev.”

“Are you just saying that, or do you mean it?”

“No, I mean it. So long as we don’t go Swedish and
I
have to stay home.”

It was all very sophisticated and modern and egalitarian. And now we were to have
two
ambitious careerists in the family.

B
EVERLY’S IDEA WAS BRILLIANT.
She conceived an art school for children, a preschool program for tots and an after-school program for older children. The uniqueness of Beverly’s idea was that she did not organize this in a traditional way, making it an arts-and-crafts group with a whimsical name like “Tiny Tots’ Glue Fun.” She created a program identical in its fundamentals to a college-level art program—art history, theory, painting, sculpture, but adjusted for a child’s comprehension. “Children, these cutouts are just like the things you’ll be able to do here,” I heard her telling a class. “They were made by a very nice man named Mr. Matisse.” The atmosphere was kind, loving but never condescending. The children loved her, she was gentle and patient, and the parents respected her. To the upper middle class of Long Island, here was day care without guilt. The children of suburbia were occupied with Culture.

She called her school “The Nassau Institute of Children’s Art.” We worked together in the beginning, I helped write copy for mailing pieces and for ads that appeared in local newspapers. We placed posters on community bulletin boards, on lampposts in shopping malls, in merchants’ store windows. Along with the encouragement I offered, that was the extent of my contribution. The school became successful because of Beverly’s ingenuity and personality.

She went out at night to people’s homes, talking to them about her program. She permitted children to visit the school for trial classes, and they usually chose to return. She tried to find new ways to expand upon her premise, to make the school a center for children’s art education. She made contacts with local artists and invited them to speak at the Institute, and the children visited the artists’ studios. She arranged Saturday bus trips to New York City and took the children on museum and gallery tours. She organized one-man shows with the children as the artists: “April 9–15, Jennifer Rodnick, Age 10, Watercolors.” Beverly expanded into other areas, devising an art therapy program for exceptional children and art classes for senior citizens. Then she arranged to receive state subsidies for these programs.

Beverly had begun with rented space in a store, and by working long hours, nights, weekends, and by being resourceful, she had developed the Institute into an enterprise that now required a two-story building, which she leased—and she employed a staff of four full-time teachers, a bookkeeper and a secretary.

In my career, the agency had grown from a “creative boutique,” as people in large agencies were fond of calling upstarts, to a small-to-medium-sized agency in 1977 with a good reputation in the field. I was still primarily involved in the creative side of the agency, but I was obliged to spend much of my day in meetings. Under pressure as the president of the agency, I was drinking more than I should have. I had a system with a waiter at my regular restaurant. He was under instructions to keep my glass filled with white-wine spritzers. I never had to ask for a drink, so it would not seem as though I was drinking to excess. I also had the rationale that the wine was diluted with club soda, but after a two-hour lunch, I might have had the equivalent of a bottle of wine for myself. At night, if I worked late, I opened a cabinet bar in my office and moved on to hard liquor. I gained weight, I seldom did any exercise on weekends, occasional yard work, my bicycle had long since rusted. At forty-three I had the beginnings, or a stage beyond that, of middle-aged paunch.

Tolchin kept himself in far better condition than I by swimming at a health club and by having continuous liaisons with young women, who seemed to decrease in age as we got older. He advised me to have an affair.

“Keeps you in shape,” he said.

“Why would a man with a wife who looks like Bevvy have an affair?”

“I’ve got a few answers for that.”

“I don’t think I want to hear them.”

“Well, I guess you’re lucky, having Bevvy. But you’re also getting fat.”

Why would a man with a wife who looks like Bevvy … but our sex life was not out of a gothic romance. We made love usually on Saturday nights, sometimes on a Friday. In a typical week, Beverly was exhausted and ready for sleep at ten-thirty, the bed cluttered with last-minute notes and papers, while I was making a final check of the work I had brought home. We were very busy people. My forty-third birthday was celebrated four days late, first I had to attend a trade convention in Chicago, then Beverly had to participate in an art teachers’ seminar in Washington. We went to a French restaurant on Long Island. It was like a business meeting. Beverly brought me up to date on the latest developments in her work, and I did the same for my work. We spent a few minutes in token social conversation, talking about the children, and then, having exhausted the main topics of conversation, we sat in silence. We found a few minutes more of discussion on real estate, Beverly’s parents had advised us to build a swimming pool on our property, “A swimming pool increases your land values, boy.” I was opposed, since it was George’s suggestion. I also thought it would cheapen the appearance of the property. So Beverly and I discussed the pool, then we went home and made love, it was Saturday night and on the agenda.

We were a picture couple, disregarding my paunch. Beverly looked even more beautiful than when she was younger, she had an aura that came with her success. When we went to industry dinners to see our agency win its customary creative awards, she looked outstanding. And when I stood with a forced smile at the community events Beverly was obliged to attend, people deferred to me, my name and sometimes my picture appeared in the business pages of
The New York Times.
And I always wore good suits, no longer gray-gray from Brooks, imported tailoring from Andre Oliver. We were two local stars, but we were evolving to a relationship that was less a marriage than it was a corporation.

In the middle of a night I awoke with deep feelings of anxiety and I shook Beverly, who was asleep, and I said desperately:

“Bevvy, what’s happening to us?”

“I don’t know.”

“What can we do?”

“I don’t know.”

We held each other and we fell back asleep again, and in the morning, like a nightmare, the problems of our relationship were ignored, and we went back to the busy life of two professional people, as we tried not to notice that we were drifting away from each other.

For Christmas 1978 I received from my family a gas-fired barbecue grill, a chef’s hat and an apron that said, “Get ’em while they’re hot.” The grill was, in part, a serious gift. I had insisted that one night a week we had a dinner together, as a family, in our home. Long past was our custom of taking family vacations, the children had been going to sleepaway camps and during the year they were involved with their social lives. Beverly and I were preoccupied with our careers. In our house, a conversation between any two people on a subject or a feeling, as opposed to a logistical problem or a monetary request, was a unique event. Monday night was the time chosen for the family, and for that meal, which I prepared, we were all obliged to remain at the table until dessert and remind each other that we all still lived there.

Sarah, seventeen, was a high school senior and was stunning. Tall, graceful, with long blond hair, she read
Vogue
and was more sophisticated than her years. Boys collected at the doorstep like dust. Amy, fifteen, was working against her sister’s type and was wholesome rather than chic. She kept her blond hair short, and she was animated, whereas Sarah preferred to be cool. Sarah had been a Vietnam protester, her current cause seemed to be her personal appearance. Amy passed through causes the way Sarah passed through romances.

“Some of us are going over to Shoreham on Saturday,” Amy announced.

“Be careful,” I said.

“It’s just a march.”

“Daddy, don’t you think you can come up with something better than ‘Stop Nuclear Proliferation’?” Sarah asked, indicating a button Amy was wearing.

“But I’m sure Daddy is in favor, right, Daddy? You’re a corporation man, you work for corporations and Corporate America wants nuclear power plants,” Amy said.

“I’m not necessarily in favor.”

“Advertising is the tool of the Corporate Megalopolis,” she declared.

“The what? I think you’ve got your labels a little mixed up there.”

We finished the meal with small talk and as everyone was about to scatter, I said to Amy:

“Whatever you think of your corporate father, I can do better than ‘Stop Nuclear Proliferation.’ It is, after all, what I do.”

“Go ahead then.”

“Nuclear Energy’s a Bomb.”

“Not bad,” she said. “I mean—pretty good.” And I managed to gain a grudging smile from her.

Beverly’s local stature earned more dinner invitations than we could accept from people in community organizations and the parents of children who attended the Institute. We were greatly admired as a couple, people wanted us gracing their tables like salt and pepper shakers.

Because of the demands on our time, we established priorities in our domestic life—we became specialists at that—and appeared in public together only after determining that we both needed to go. “I need you for the Lamberts’ dinner party,” Beverly might say, and I would attend, fielding the inevitable discussions about advertising—people often had a favorite commercial they had seen. I would be moderately charming and get moderately sloshed.

We were constantly busy with our obligations. Beverly was out several nights a week, I worked late at the office, we both traveled. Days could pass before we would catch up with each other with both of us not too exhausted to talk for more than a few minutes. We reached a point where our secretaries spoke to one another to remind us of any social commitments we may have had together. We did not like the idea, our secretaries as surrogates, but we did not resist, since it happened to be efficient.

My first boss, Colby, had once said when he found me working late in the office, “They don’t pay you something for nothing.” As the president of an advertising agency, and with Beverly the head of a children’s art center, we were living at a high level of achievement, but also of pressure and responsibility.

I always kept a pad near my bed in case I thought of a copy idea before I fell asleep. One night I jumped out of bed to write down “We never stop working for you,” to be the basis for a commercial for a brokerage firm with our agency. The commercial would show a broker bolting out of bed, jotting down an idea.

Beverly’s pressures were similar. She was busy administering the school’s activities, working on curriculum, teaching the children, reading books and reports on art education and child psychology, making speaking engagements, dealing with parents. Then she thought of a concept for an enterprise that became nearly as profitable as the Institute itself—a summer camp. She rented unused space behind the Institute, added play equipment, a swimming pool, developed a summer curriculum, hired counselors who were art teachers, and the Nassau Institute of Children’s Art Day Camp was established.

Leisure time had to be scheduled on the calendar. We planned a Saturday of antiquing in Connecticut, which was postponed three times before we were able to go. At an antiques shop, Beverly saw a landscape that she liked by an unknown primitive artist. The painting was too primitive for my taste and too expensive at $400.

“I just don’t like it,” I said.

“I do. I’ll buy it for my office.” And she paid for it out of her business checkbook.

At another antiques shop I found something I liked that she did not, an old-fashioned soda-parlor jar for straws.

“Where would it go?” she said.

“In the kitchen.”

“There’s no room.”

“I’ll put it in
my
office then.”

I was having difficult days at the agency, Tolchin and I were arguing bitterly. He was in favor of chasing every account on Madison Avenue that was having second thoughts about its advertising agency, so our company was spending inordinate time on new business presentations. Since a main selling point for our agency was my creative participation, I had begun to feel as if I were a machine, cranking out copy.

Many of the new accounts Tolchin had been pursuing were the type who jumped from agency to agency, taking an agency’s best ideas, then dropping the agency for the next. I was opposed to working for these manipulators, and I also was intent on keeping our client list strong in products with competitive advantages. I had weakened against my partner’s pressure and we took on a soft drink which was a blatant copy of 7-Up. This was the kind of account I had always objected to, a product that had no competitive advantage and nothing specific to promote.