Sleeping with Cats (18 page)

I was utterly infatuated with San Francisco. I had never experienced anything like the light, the pastel houses marching up the steep hills, the grid pattern imposed on the rugged landscape. I was never looking straight ahead as in the Midwest, but I was forever looking up or down or into a far vista. I loved to watch the fog sweep in under the Golden Gate Bridge, the best view being from the roof where I hung my laundry. There was a lightness to the architecture, not just the carpenter Gothic
one-story houses that seemed wooden jokes, enough froufrou on them to furnish out a three-story mansion, but the pastels of the buildings. Even the common use of gray on wood or stucco was a pale pastel gray, rather than the stone gray of Paris. The greenery felt to me at once manicured and lush—often trimmed to fit a narrow space but overflowing and ready to fill any vacant spot of ground.

Unlike the months in Cambridge, when everything I remember is with Robert, in San Francisco, most of my memories are with friends, artists I was modeling for, acquaintances I made as I explored the city. I saw far more of Sophia than of Robert. This was my first taste of middle-class life: enough to eat, wine to drink, a reasonably furnished clean apartment. I had never lived in such a place. It was tiny but modern, with plumbing that worked, no bugs, floors that did not sag or have holes in them, electricity that seemed to function very well indeed. I had an American Express credit card: I had never had a credit card. It seemed magical. Soon I had a couple of charge accounts at department stores.

I did not rush out and begin buying things madly, but we had come intending to stay only two or three months, and we ended up living there almost a year. We both needed clothes. I wore the first coat I ever bought new, an intense blue wool. If I wanted a book or a pair of gloves, I could buy them. I cannot overstate how incredible this felt, how luxurious, how delightful. I did not become a clotheshorse or a mad consumer, but I enjoyed my enablement. I did not mind the work I was doing, for ten dollars an hour seemed to me great pay and I was vain about my body. Modesty had eluded me. At that age, I was quite ready to drop my clothes and show off. It was, after all, the thing about me that had been most admired. I had plenty of time to write, and I did.

Mostly in trying to describe how it felt to have crept into the middle class I want you to understand that I felt free. Poverty is immensely constricting. If you feel a pain, the first thing that comes to mind is how much is it going to cost. There is no information available about options. If you go to a clinic, you lose an entire day waiting around, and often nothing happens. You never see the same doctor twice. So probably you
don't do anything about the pain except take a cheap painkiller or get drunk. Dentistry options are worse, more demeaning, more painful.

If you need something, you do without something else. You are always trading off getting a winter coat against new boots or against paying an electric bill or eating sufficiently for a while. Nothing is ever simple and nothing is ever quick, except random violence. What you want, you will probably not get. If you do get it, it will be secondhand or cracked or an inferior rip-off that falls apart. The first twenty-five years of my life were unremittingly boxed in poverty. I liked being middle-class, I appreciated being middle-class, although I did not necessarily expect that it would last.

The apartment had a garage on the ground floor, but since it was rented out, Robert kept the Porsche on the street. One night a car slammed into the Porsche at the curb, smashing it up. Robert had it repaired, but he did not like the way it handled, so he sold it. He bought a Peugeot, in reaction. He had endured two accidents with the Porsche, and each had been expensive. He felt this family car, the Peugeot, was more appropriate. It was rather sedate, although it had a sunroof—which leaked whenever it rained, as it does rather a lot in San Francisco. I took driving lessons, so I could help drive back across country. I never became much of a driver. Learning to drive on the hills of San Francisco was a quixotic endeavor with a teacher from Texas who would keep saying when I made a mistake, “Your husband isn't going to like that,” but I did finally get my license by some miracle of bureaucratic largesse.

My father stopped to see us on his way up to Redding, where he was working on a Westinghouse dam project for a couple of months. Near the end of his time in Redding, Mother flew out to Grant and Lilly in L.A., who then drove up to San Francisco with her. They stayed only briefly, but my mother and then both my parents remained for a week. I had not been around them much in a few years. I was struck by their relationship, how little interest they took one in the other. They seldom looked at each other. My father put down my mother and she was irritated by him. They had the habit of talking to me or to Robert at once
about two different subjects, as if they had become so practiced at not hearing the other, they genuinely did not know when their spouse was speaking.

The apartment house was entered by unlocking a grill—like a gate that filled the space—instead of the sort of door I was used to in the East. It was built around a narrow open courtyard, apartments to the back and front. Ours faced the street, with the bedroom window on the courtyard. Next to the apartment house was a vacant lot where I noticed local people scavenging with baskets or bags, so I went exploring. Wild fennel grew in abundance. I took to gathering it and using it in my freshman cooking. Soon after we moved in, we began to be visited by a male Siamese who lived upstairs with a hairdresser. He would sometimes crawl in our screenless window that opened onto a fire escape, but mostly he would come to the door that opened to the courtyard stairs. He liked to climb in my lap while I wrote at the typewriter. He ate most any leftovers and always seemed to be hungry. He was, I would guess, two or three years old. He was a very passionate and demonstrative cat.

He started to show up at all hours. He was not in love with his owner but fell in love with us, as cats do. He was a seal point, lean, athletic in appearance and extremely affectionate. His owner called him some fake Chinese name like Foo Chow but we called him Oscar because he had demonstrated his fondness for King Oscar sardines when he came in the window during lunch. His wanting to be with us had nothing to do with feeding him, since usually I didn't, but his owner accused me of luring him away with tuna fish. The truth was, he just wanted affection and attention. Oscar had an unusually deep baritone. Further, the courtyard amplified his voice when his wishes were not granted. If he could not enter via the window, then he stood and bellowed in the hall until we let him in. His need to be with me was desperate.

Things went on in this way for a couple of months. The hairdresser was getting angrier and Oscar was getting more insistent on being with us. Finally I went upstairs with a checkbook and tried to buy him. The hairdresser quoted a ridiculous price, something like six hundred dollars. That was more than we had in our account. So we had to shut Oscar
out, because we could not take him with us. I tried to work out a way to kidnap him and hide him at Sophia's, but the hairdresser knew we were leaving and locked Oscar inside, where he cried pitifully all day while the man was at work.

A phone call came from Henry. He was publishing the last issue of his little magazine and he had a space exactly 4200 words long that could contain something of mine. He had part of the novel I was working on and he said he would publish an excerpt if I could put one together in the next four days and send it. I did so. He called. He did not like the excerpt (it was later published elsewhere). He put together an excerpt of his own. He began to read it to me. I felt it was disjointed and gave a false impression of the protagonist and the book. He sent it off to me, I read it and thought the same. I produced another excerpt and sent it off special delivery. He did not like that one either. He accused me of lacking respect for him. Everyone in Chicago, he said, thought
his
excerpt splendid. I said, forget it. He said if I did not agree to his publishing the excerpt he had put together out of my novel, he would never speak to me again. I said,
so be it
. Robert became upset, because Henry was one of his best friends. Finally, I capitulated, telling myself it was a very small zine and almost nobody would read it. This was the last time I ever made such a compromise, and I regretted it intensely. I began to feel that Robert would always sacrifice me to a friend.

I had a decision to make. I did not know if I should go back east with Robert. I had made a life of my own in San Francisco. I could always work as an artist's model and I had lots of friends in the arts, far more interesting to me than the computer professionals we dealt with in Boston. There were men interested in me, although I had never let them express it. I had several close female friends. One was the wife of a painter I had sat for, not for money but because he wanted to paint my portrait. She wrote—another Iowa graduate—and we shared our work and our ambitions. Another was a woman I had known at Michigan in radical politics, now living in Berkeley. I liked Berkeley, but I liked my seedy hodgepodge neighborhood in San Francisco better. Robert and I were visiting her during the Cuban missile crisis, when we all were
convinced we were on the verge of nuclear annihilation. She served a calf's brain cooked very nicely but served whole and cold, au vinaigrette, and I simply could not eat it. I have never been able to eat brains since, although when I was extremely poor in Chicago, I consumed all organ meats, whatever was cheapest. The calf's brain looked like a human brain to me, and I was too death haunted.

Staying would have meant breaking up with Robert. Our relationship was not particularly close. He had been brusque after I was injured in the automobile accident. My body was almost entirely healed, but I was a little dubious about the relationship long-term. It was not that any of the men tempted me. At that time in my life, I did not give a great deal of precedence to finding a man; they seemed to come along regularly as buses. What tempted me most was the idea of an independent life as myself, not as Mrs. Anything. I felt I had vanished into wifehood in my first marriage, driven into anonymity, and I feared the same thing would happen in my second in a more subtle way.

Still, the idea of being twice divorced by twenty-six was appalling. I felt I should give it another hard try. I loved him, I even liked him, in spite of not feeling close at the moment. In many ways we meshed well. The sex, when he was interested, was vigorous and frequent. He was very bright and we could communicate. He liked food and wine and he was vaguely political. He let me write. Yes, he enabled my writing. He understood how important that was to me. He was not interested in having children. We both had a way of getting fascinated with something and researching it together that was great fun. It meant we were always learning new things. I pondered my decision without discussing it with anyone, least of all with Robert. There are certain critical turning points in a life. I do not know what would have happened to me if I had stayed in San Francisco, but my life would have been entirely different. I would be someone else. I would have spent my life with other people than I did and written other novels and poems and been active in different causes and groups. I considered and considered, marching up and down Russian and Telegraph Hills, savoring my favorite staircases and my favorite
vistas. I did not want to leave this place. I did not want to leave the life I had made for myself. Still, I told myself, if things don't work out with Robert, I can come back next year. I took having married Robert seriously, and I had not yet given it my full try. I quietly decided I would stay with him and return east. I would make the marriage work. I would show to my friends and myself that I could be married and make it good. It was important to me not to fail again. I was still feeling guilty about Michel, and I didn't need more angst. Surely I could manage to succeed as a wife.

In the meantime, his boss, Tom, who owned a male and a female Siamese, offered us a kitten from their first litter. We accepted at once. If we could not have Oscar, we would have a little Siamese female. She was waiting for us in a Boston suburb. Tom sent us a photo of the threesome, father, mother and our kitten. She looked almost pure white and extremely tiny.

I made one more attempt to carry off Oscar, who jumped up into my arms and clung to me, but I got caught by his owner as I was trying to sneak him down to Sophia's waiting car. It was hideously embarrassing. He threatened to call the police if I attempted again to steal his cat. After that I never saw Oscar outside. I felt very bad, as if I had seduced and abandoned him, but I could see no way to run away with him. He stayed and we drove across the States, to Boston.

In the livingroom you are someplace else like a cat.

You go fathoms down into abstraction

where the pressure and the cold would squeeze the juice from my tissues.

The diving bell of your head descends.

You cut the murk and peer at luminous razorthin creatures who peer back,

creatures with eyes and ears sticking out of their backsides

lit up like skyscrapers or planes taking off.

You are at home, you nod, you take notes and pictures.

You surface with a matter-of-fact pout,

obscene and full of questions and shouting for supper.

You talk to me and I get the bends.

Your eyes are bright and curious as robins

and your hands and your chest where I lay my head are warm.

I
have a lot of photographs,
some in albums, a lot of them loose and fraying—one of those tasks I put on my computer's To Do list perhaps twenty times a year, to sort and put safely away. Several of the men I have been involved with took photographs of me, some compulsively, and Robert and I shot our cats often and friends and scenery. I sometimes use the camera for visual note taking when doing research for novels—for
Going Down Fast,
for instance, I shot many Chicago sites that figured in that novel. I also photographed some favorite spots that produced poems, like the Getty Tomb and the Sullivan buildings that are the basis for “Visiting a dead man on the summer day.” I also used film to record scenes I needed for
City of Darkness, City of Light
and for
Gone to Soldiers
(England and France). Twice I have photographed Prague, the first time when I was there in 1968 on my way back from Cuba just ahead of the Soviet tanks; the second time when I was writing
He, She and It
.

When I was with Robert I took many photographs and also shared in the darkroom work. When he left, he took the equipment, and I never tried to develop or print again. Mostly I take photographs on research trips or when Ira needs publicity pictures. But I also photograph him for pleasure, and the garden, and the cats.

I hate to be photographed. For one thing, I do not photograph well.
The camera spreads out my face, emphasizing the peasant in me. I am not natural before a camera. I usually wear an expression that indicates how uncomfortable and how pestered I am. That is not endearing. Yet I treasure many photographs of others, especially those of my parents when they were young or when they were not so young but I was. I have written poems about some of these photographs. Whenever I look at the few pictures of my mother in her youth that I possess, my sense of how she was cheated of her potential, how she was stymied and stifled and starved of affection and pleasure and knowledge, cuts through me. I mourn her death but I also mourn her stunted and unfulfilled life.

I resemble my mother more as I age than I did when I was younger. Sometimes when I see a particular photograph now, that resemblance will startle and touch me. Then there is the throb of pity and nostalgic loss that lances through me when I look at photos of dead friends—Peter, who took his own life; Teddy, blown up in the town house explosion; friends dead of various accidents and cancers and AIDS, ripped away in youth or midlife. Then the album is a walk through a cemetery like those Italian ones I remember with the photos of the dead under glass in the headstones.

Photos are disconcerting to me because they appear to capture a moment but don't. There are photos of me with people arm in arm whom I cannot name and would not recognize as familiar if I saw them in the street, yet there I am chummy with them, as I am in other photos with friends who turned into betrayers. I feel there should be some miasma floating in the shot, some shadow falling over us, but no, we bear idiotic grins. There are photos in which I appear delighted, when I know I was in misery. There are photos with lovers that look like ads for the joy of heterosexual coupling, when I remember that we were engaged in a terminal quarrel. There are people who were and sometimes still are vitally important in my life, and yet I have no photos of them at all.

Yet for all the lies they tell, I would not do without them, for they do jog memory and they do transport me sometimes into the past. A song from a particular year will bring back the emotions of that year, flooding like alcohol into the brain. A photo doesn't do that, but it can be a way of
entering the past, how we looked then, what we wore, how we carried ourselves. In photos of the 1960s, unless they were publicity shots, I am never alone. I am always in a group, a circle, a crowd, a youthful army.

There is a certain snapshot of Ira when we were first involved with each other but still also with other people, and I have only to look at it to remember how hopelessly and helplessly I loved then, never imagining we would be able ultimately to be together as we are. I remember love like the flu in my gut. My love for him now is calmer and surer and stronger, but it is not uninteresting to remember how I felt when our relationship was new and raw.

I have many pictures of my cats Arofa and Cho-Cho, who were both photogenic and early accustomed to posing for the camera. Jim Beam, who was close to psychotic, was also handsome. There are far more photos of him than of his sister Colette, who was my familiar, because he liked to be photographed. He viewed it as appropriate homage, whereas Colette hated the camera as much as I do—as much as I like the result of turning it on others.

I feel often we let our media come between us and experience. People who take too many photos on their travels may not have time and receptivity to experience fully what's in front of them when they are actually present. I encounter people for whom what is recorded on videotape is more real than what simply goes on. Sometimes when I am giving a reading or taking part in an event, I will be annoyed that the video crew and their lights and devices get in the way between the audience and my performance. The record of the event becomes preeminent, while the actual living event is shunted aside. Sometimes we seem to believe what the camera tells us before we believe what we ourselves experience.

I never want to be like that. I do not want even these snapshots to slip between me and my memory and impose what the camera saw for what I felt. So I am sharing some of these photos with you, but take them all with a pinch of skepticism. I am the storyteller. The camera is just a bystander to my life.

We believe strongly in the importance of surfaces. If someone has an almost perfect surface, they must be better than someone with pitted skin
or a weak chin or bulbous nose. I do not love primarily with my eyes. I have had lovers who were gorgeous and lovers who were plain, who were skinny and neurasthenic, who were bulky and overweight. I have cared far more for how each of them treated me than for my eyes' pleasure.

I remember a poet I became involved with suddenly, after we had been friends for years. He saved me in a demonstration when I was about to be busted. I believe I used that in
Vida
. Afterward, we went back to the office of the zine we were both working on and fell into each other on the old couch there. It was the best sex we ever had with each other. He was a thick bearish man who liked to make love lying on his side, which was not a good position for me, and I became aware he liked thin very young women, so I gradually withdrew. We remained friends. But what I felt for him that day we made it on the couch could never be captured by any camera. So much of sex happens with the eyes closed and the flesh wide open.