Oracle Night (28 page)

5
. Tina was John’s second wife. His first marriage had lasted ten years (from 1954 to 1964) and had ended in divorce. He never talked about it in my presence, but Grace had told me that no one in her family had been particularly fond of Eleanor. The Tebbetts had seen her as a stuck-up Bryn Mawr girl from a long line of Massachusetts bluebloods, a ‘cold fish’ who had always looked down her nose at John’s working-class Paterson, New Jersey, family. No matter that Eleanor was a respected painter whose reputation was nearly as important as John’s. They weren’t surprised when the marriage ended, and not one of them was sorry to see her go. The only pity, Grace said, was that John had been forced to remain in contact with her. Not through any desire on his part, but because of the ongoing antics of their troubled, wildly unstable son, Jacob.
    Then he had met Tina Ostrow, a dancer-choreographer twelve years younger than he was, and when he married her in 1966, the Tebbetts clan applauded the decision. They felt confident that John had finally found the woman he deserved, and time proved them right. The small and vibrant Tina was an adorable person, Grace said, and she had loved John (in Grace’s words) ‘to the point of worship.’ The only problem with the marriage was that Tina didn’t live long enough to see her thirty-seventh birthday. Uterine cancer slowly took her from him over the course of eighteen months, and after John buried her, Grace said, he shut down for a long time, ‘just froze up and sort of stopped breathing.’ He moved to Paris for a year, then to Rome, then to a small village on the northern coast of Portugal. When he returned to New York in 1978 and settled into the apartment on Barrow Street, it had been three years since his last novel had been published, and the rumor was that Trause hadn’t written a word since Tina’s death. Four more years had passed since then, and still he hadn’t produced anything – at least not anything he was willing to show anyone. But he was working. I knew he was working. He’d told me as much himself, but I didn’t know what kind of work it was, for the simple reason that I hadn’t found the nerve to ask.

6
. Much of her graphic work was inspired by looking at art, and before my collapse at the beginning of the year, we had often spent our Saturday afternoons wandering in and out of galleries and museums together. In some sense, art had made our marriage possible, and without the intervention of art, I doubt that I would have found the courage to pursue her. It was fortunate that we had met in the neutral surroundings of Holst & McDermott, a so-called work environment. If we had been thrown together in any other way – at a dinner party, for example, or on a bus or a plane – I wouldn’t have been able to contact her again without exposing my intentions, and I instinctively felt that Grace had to be approached with caution. If I tipped my hand too early, I was almost certain I would lose my chance with her forever.
    Luckily, I had an excuse to call. She had been assigned to work on the cover of my book, and under the pretext of having a new idea to discuss with her, I rang up her office two days after our initial meeting and asked if I could come in and see her. ‘Anytime you like,’ she said.
Anytime
proved to be difficult to arrange. I had a regular job then (teaching history at John Jay High School in Brooklyn), and I couldn’t make it to her office before four o’clock. As it happened, Grace’s agenda was clogged with late-afternoon appointments for the rest of the week. When she suggested that we meet the following Monday or Tuesday, I told her I was going out of town to give a reading (which happened to be true, but I probably would have said it even if it wasn’t), so Grace relented and offered to squeeze in some time for me after work on Friday. ‘I have to be somewhere at eight,’ she said, ‘but if we met for an hour or so at five-thirty, it shouldn’t be a problem.’
    I had stolen the title of my book from a 1938 pencil drawing by Willem de Kooning.
Self-Portrait with Imaginary Brother
is a small, delicately rendered piece that depicts two boys standing side by side, one a year or two older than the other, one in long pants, the other in knickers. Much as I admired the drawing, it was the title that interested me, and I had used it not because I wanted to refer to de Kooning but because of the words themselves, which I found highly evocative and which seemed to fit the novel I had written. In Betty Stolowitz’s office earlier that week, I had suggested putting de Kooning’s drawing on the cover. Now I was planning to tell Grace that I thought it was a bad idea – that the pencil strokes were too faint and wouldn’t be visible enough, that the effect would be too muted. But I didn’t really care. If I had argued against the drawing in Betty’s office, I would have been for it now. All I wanted was a chance to see Grace again – and art was my way in, the one subject that wouldn’t compromise my true purpose.
    Her willingness to see me after office hours gave me hope, but at the same time the news that she was going out at eight o’clock all but destroyed that hope. There was little question that she had an appointment with a man (attractive women are always with a man on Friday night), but it was impossible to know how deeply connected she was to him. It could have been a first date, and it could have been a quiet dinner with her fiancé or live-in boyfriend. I knew she wasn’t married (Betty had told me as much after Grace left her office following our first meeting), but the range of other intimacies was boundless. When I asked Betty if Grace was involved with anyone, she said she didn’t know. Grace kept her private life to herself, and no one in the company had the smallest inkling of what she did outside the office. Two or three editors had asked her out since she’d started working there, but she’d turned them all down.
    I quickly learned that Grace was not someone who shared confidences. In the ten months I knew her before we were married, she never once divulged a secret or hinted at any prior entanglements with other men. Nor did I ever ask her to tell me something she didn’t seem willing to talk about. That was the power of Grace’s silence. If you meant to love her in the way she demanded to be loved, then you had to accept the line she’d drawn between herself and words.
    (Once, in an early conversation I had with her about her childhood, she reminisced about a favorite doll her parents had given her when she was seven. She named her Pearl, carried her everywhere for the next four or five years, and considered her to be her best friend. The remarkable thing about Pearl was that she was able to talk and understood everything that was said to her. But Pearl never uttered a word in Grace’s presence. Not because she couldn’t speak, but because she chose not to.)
    There was someone in her life at the time I met her – I’m sure of that – but I never learned his name or how seriously she felt about him. Quite seriously, I would imagine, for the first six months proved to be a tempestuous time for me, and they ended badly, with Grace telling me she wanted to break it off and that I shouldn’t call her anymore. Through all the disappointments of those months, however, all the ephemeral victories and tiny surges of optimism, the rebuffs and capitulations, the nights when she was too busy to see me and the nights when she allowed me to share her bed, through all the ups and downs of that desperate, failed courtship, Grace was always an enchanted being for me, a luminous point of contact between desire and the world, the implacable love. I kept my word and didn’t call her, but six or seven weeks later she contacted me out of the blue and said she had changed her mind. She didn’t offer any explanation, but I gathered that the man who had been my rival was now out of the picture. Not only did she want to start seeing me again, she said, but she wanted us to get married.
Marriage
was the one word I had never spoken in her presence. It had been in my head from the first moment I saw her, but I had never dared to say it, for fear it would frighten her off. Now Grace was proposing to me. I had resigned myself to living out the rest of my life with a shattered heart, and now she was telling me I could live with her instead – in one piece, my whole life in one piece with her.

7
. Kansas City was an arbitrary choice for Bowen’s destination – the first place that popped into my head. Possibly because it was so remote from New York, a town locked in the center of the heartland: Oz in all its glorious strangeness. Once I had Nick on his way to Kansas City, however, I remembered the Hyatt Regency catastrophe, which was a real event that had taken place fourteen months earlier (in July 1981). Close to two thousand people had been gathered in the lobby at the time – an immense open-air atrium of some seventeen thousand square feet. They were all looking up, watching a dance contest that was being held in one of the upstairs walkways (also referred to as ‘floating walkways’ or ‘skyways’), when the wide flange beams supporting the structure broke loose from their moorings and collapsed, crashing down into the lobby four stories below. Twenty-one years later, it is still considered one of the worst hotel disasters in American history.

8
.
The Lid Lifts
by Patrick Gordon-Walker (London, 1945). More recently, the same story was retold by Douglas Botting in
From the
Ruins of the Reich: Germany 1945–1949
(New York: Crown Publishers, 1985), p. 43.
    Just for the record, I should also mention that I happen to own a copy of a 1937/38 Warsaw telephone book. It was given to me by a journalist friend who went to Poland to cover the Solidarity movement in 1981. He apparently found it in a flea market somewhere, and knowing that my paternal grandparents had both been born in Warsaw, he gave it to me as a present after he returned to New York. I called it my
book of ghosts
. At the bottom of page 220, I found a married couple whose address was given as Wejnerta 19 – Janina and Stefan Orlowscy. That was the Polish spelling of my family’s name, and although I wasn’t sure if these people were related to me or not, I felt there was a good chance that they were.

9
. Four years earlier, I had adapted one of the stories from my first book,
Tabula Rasa
, for a young director named Vincent Frank. It was a small, low-budget film about a musician who recovers from a long illness and slowly puts his life together again (a prophetic story, as it turned out), and when the film was released in June 1980, it did fairly well.
Tabula Rasa
played in just a few art houses around the country, but it was perceived as a critical success, and – as Mary was fond of reminding me – it helped bring my name to the attention of a so-called wider public. Sales of my books began to improve somewhat, it’s true, and when I turned in my next novel nine months later,
A Short Dictionary of Human Emotions
, she negotiated a contract with Holst & McDermott worth twice the amount I’d been given for my previous book. That advance, along with the modest sum I’d earned from the screenplay, allowed me to quit my high school teaching job, which had been my bread-and-butter work for the past seven years. Until then, I had been one of those obscure and driven writers who wrote between five and seven in the morning, who wrote at night and on weekends, who never went anywhere on his summer vacation in order to sit at home in a sweltering Brooklyn apartment and make up for lost time. Now, a year and a half after my marriage to Grace, I found myself in the luxurious position of being an independent, self-employed scribbler. We were hardly what could be called well off, but if I continued to produce work at a steady pace, our combined incomes would keep us floating along with our heads above water. Following the release of
Tabula Rasa
, a few offers came in to write more films, but the projects hadn’t interested me, and I’d turned them down to push on with my novel. When Holst & McDermott brought out the book in February 1982, however, I wasn’t aware that it had been published. I had already been in the hospital for five weeks by then, and I wasn’t aware of anything – not even that the doctors thought I would be dead within a matter of days.
   
Tabula Rasa
had been a union production, and in order to be given credit for my screenplay I had been obliged to join the Writers Guild. Membership entailed sending in quarterly dues and turning over a small percentage of your earnings to them, but among the things they gave you in return was a decent health insurance policy. If not for that insurance, my illness would have landed me in debtor’s prison. Most of the costs were covered, but as with all medical plans, there were countless other issues to be reckoned with: deductibles, extra charges for experimental treatments, arcane percentages and sliding-scale calculations for various medicines and disposable implements, a staggering range of bills that had put me in the hole to the tune of thirty-six thousand dollars. That was the burden Grace and I had been saddled with, and the more my strength returned, the more I worried about how to get us out from under this debt. Grace’s father had offered to help, but the judge wasn’t a rich man, and with Grace’s two younger sisters still in college, we couldn’t bring ourselves to accept. Instead, we sent in a small amount every month, trying to chip away at the mountain slowly, but at the rate we were going, we would still be at it when we were senior citizens. Grace worked in publishing, which meant her salary was meager at best, and I had earned nothing now for close to a year. A few microscopic royalties and foreign advances, but that was the extent of it. That explains why I returned Mary’s call immediately after I listened to her message. I hadn’t given any thought to writing more screenplays, but if the price was right for this one, I had no intention of turning down the job.