Sleeping with Cats (32 page)

What I could do was buy her things she wanted. She developed a
passion for shawls, thinking them glamorous. When I was in Florida, I took her to expensive stores she would never enter on her own and bought her the most beautiful shawls I could find. I bought her perfume. I wanted to buy her dresses, but that was too fraught. She was immensely fat, almost totally round, and had been so for years. Then in the late 1970s, she began to shed weight. It was startling. She wasn't trying. “I've just lost my appetite. Nothing tastes good to me.” Every time I saw her, she was thinner. Finally she would let me buy her dresses. However, six months later, she would be a size smaller, and the dresses would hang on her.

I told her things were not going well with Robert. This did not displease her, as she had never liked him. I told her a little about Woody, that we had written a play put on in several theaters, but not that we were involved. I had never explained to her my complicated marriage with Robert. It was not the sort of arrangement she would have believed possible.

Mostly I listened and told her stories that would amuse her, talked about the cats and the garden. A cat, Virgil, lived near them, nominally belonging to a neighbor but spending his time mostly with her. He was a comfort. The next time I was in Florida, I tried to talk my father into having someone come in to clean. The house stank of urine—my father was incontinent—and she could not see well enough to manage. His response was, “What else does she have to do? That's her job.” I said, “Okay, why can't she retire?” He said cleaning was her duty. He was openly contemptuous of her. He was down in Florida living the good life in retirement, just like a middle-class man, and she held him back. She didn't know how to behave. She didn't play bridge. She was useless.

When Robert and I visited them, we stayed in a hotel on the beach, as the house was difficult to endure. We went down regularly, because Robert's mother had moved to an expensive high-rise in North Miami Beach, just across the highway from the ocean. Her apartment was all white with some blue touches—blue imitation flowers, a blue flowered pillow. When we first visited, I went for a walk on the beach, where, without realizing it, I got tar on my bare feet and tracked it onto her white rug. She never forgave me. We slept in a daybed with little privacy.
Robert always got a backache, but he would not consider staying in a motel; she would be insulted. The view from her balcony was superb, facing an inland waterway wide as a lake. Pelicans flew by at balcony level.

One trip to Florida coincided on our return with the enormous snowstorm of the winter of 1978. We got to Boston just as Logan Airport closed. We circled and circled and then were directed away. We landed along with various other big jets in Bangor, Maine, which shortly closed too. There were Lufthansa jets, Air Canada, British Airways, all the American companies. Three feet of snow fell in Boston. People skied on the streets. Cars were abandoned on all major roads. The governor declared martial law and highways were closed. We were stuck in Bangor, Maine, with suitcases of summer clothes.

All the motels and hotels were full. We were sent out to a bleak motel on the edge of town full of potato jobbers and traveling salesmen. By the third day, there were only two items left on the menu. Robert was bored out of his mind, and I was worried sick about the cats. If there was that much snow, was anyone feeding them? I missed Woody desperately. Our ennui united us in resolve.

I found a couple who lived just the other side of the Cape Cod Canal, and I got on the phone. In Provincetown, where we had departed, the storm surge had cracked the runway—and washed over the vehicles there, including our car. But Hyannis was open. Only four inches of snow had fallen on the Cape. I found a local pilot who would fly us all into Hyannis. On the Cape, the governor's proclamation was being quietly ignored.

We had wind damage, boughs down and a couple of fallen trees, but little snow. The cats were frantic. We were tremendously glad to be back. The hardship and adventure brought us together, and we were pleasant to each other. We picked up our car, a Volvo, at Provincetown. It had no finish. All the paint had been sandblasted off down to the undercoat. However, it started. I drove it home, following Robert in our other car.

All through 1978, Robert was around little, working full-time and evenings at the office with his new partner, immersed in their project.
Then the next winter, the roof fell in. The company that had him under contract demanded the software he was supposed to be working on and discovered that contrary to his contract, he had been building hardware. The contract was terminated. They had not been successful with their project, although they built a prototype. He and his friend blamed each other. Robert sank into a terrible depression. He suggested I break off with Woody and we have no more relationships with other people.

I felt strongly committed to Woody. Nor did I trust Robert. I had no sense that this disgust with multiple relationships arose from anything more than that he had been having trouble finding women. He was talking about how boring his work was and how he might stop working altogether for a year or two. He was weary of trying to support interesting work from computer contracts. He wanted to play, he wanted to do only work that fascinated him.

I suggested we go to England together. A couple of my novels that had sold to the Women's Press were being brought out in spring of 1979. I thought it worthwhile to go over and do publicity, to make myself known in England. It was an investment, since they paid few of my expenses, although they did set up various gigs. Since they weren't paying for lodging, we stayed in a grungy bed-and-breakfast off Earl's Court. I hoped that taking Robert as my guest to England would cheer him up, break his depression, give us back some intimacy. I had book signings, TV and radio shows, newspaper interviews, readings—including the University of London, a women's conference, a couple in pubs, where I had to come and go quickly because of the smoke. Nobody in England understood being allergic to cigarette smoke, and they thought me full of myself, a fussy hypochondriac somewhat lower on the social scale than a sanctimonious vegan.

I kept remembering how well our marriage had worked for both of us in the good years, how he had supported me in my writing, how we had enjoyed keeping house, making love, sharing books and ideas, walking, learning about wine and identifying birds and plants. Surely we could recover our joy together. The past of our relationship seemed more vibrant, more real than the pallid present. Robert spent time at the
British Museum, went sightseeing, bought clothes and books. Finally I was done except for a reading on Sunday. That Thursday, we took the train to Exeter, rented a car and set off. Almost immediately, we got into an accident. Robert was not used to driving on the left side of the road. A great big log lorry came at us, and he drove into what he thought was a hedge. Hedgerows in Devon have rocks as their core. Back we went to the rental agency. It did not put Robert in a good mood. Much of the time in England, he was sulking. He disliked the food, the British, London, whatever.

Fortunately, once we got up on Dartmoor, we encountered wild ponies, hawks, curlews, blackface sheep, dun cattle and prehistoric ruins—stone circles, standing stones, hut circles. We walked and walked from one set of ruins to the next, from one copse to a bog to a clapper bridge over a stream, built of stone slabs. We climbed several tors and explored ruins to the horizon. I had gotten sick in London. Air pollution sickens me, and I had been exposed to an unavoidable amount of cigarette smoke. I was coughing from the bottom of my lungs. Dartmoor has pure clear air, and I felt better. Walking is my best exercise. I love Dartmoor. I have been back many times and written about it in
Gone to Soldiers
and various poems. Something in me resonates to its green vastness, its wildness, its antiquities scattered about without signs or protection. We were suddenly good companions again, exploring. This trip would work, I knew it.

The food in Devon was better than we had been able to afford in London: smoked trout, salmon, sole, saltwater lamb. Even the vegetables were good. We stayed at a fisherman's motel built over a rushing stream, the Exe, near an old stone bridge and a seventeenth-century coaching inn where we ate. Then we drove on to Cornwall. We spent the night in St. Mawes in a house where Byron had stayed. The owner was an Eastern European woman who set out an elegant breakfast. I had booked the best room in the house, Byron's room. That night, I managed to seduce Robert, convinced that the spirit of Lord Byron was helping. With this breakthrough, I was sure things would improve. Noisy rooks (I call them noisy, but I confess I like the cries of crows and ravens and rooks)
roosted in the trees outside the white Regency house. It had a circular stairway that was perfect, a frozen song in space.

The next night we arrived at what I shall call Dead Bird Manor. It sounded wonderful in the guidebook, with a cordon bleu chef. It was near Clovelly, set in a valley among wooded hills—a fine Victorian house with a stuffy Victorian spirit. They offered us tea, cookies and a paper when we arrived. We immediately offended them by asking for the wrong paper. “We don't carry that left rag.” It was downhill from there. The parlor was decorated with glass cases of dead and dowdy birds. Upstairs the room was tiny, mattress well used and sagging, plumbing noisy, radiators dripping and gurgling. We could not pass each other getting around the bed.

Supper came. The guests anticipated the meal in silence. They did not speak to each other. Perhaps they were all telepaths, or perhaps they were people at the end of their marriages with nothing more to say—a state I was beginning to fully comprehend. The meal was pretentious: overcooked broccoli with an orange glue they called hollandaise sauce. Tough meat they called veal. Everyone was scraping at it with their knives and no one was talking. I began to giggle. Robert glared at me, but I couldn't stop. It was all silly and inflated and pompous. I giggled my way through the dreadful meal. When we went upstairs, I discovered that Robert had withdrawn again. There were to be no more breakthroughs on the trip.

When we got back to London, it was over ninety degrees. London when it's hot is much like hell. I did the pub reading with several other poets and left, which they thought rude, but I was starting to cough again. We took a train to Leeds. We were due to be picked up by someone in the British equivalent of Science for the People, a family who lived on a farm. We had all our luggage with us. I had done a great deal of media, including TV, and given numerous readings, so I had a lot of clothes in a big suitcase, and my portable typewriter because I was doing revisions on
Vida,
which had just sold. I had all the books I was using in my readings. I was wearing a flowered summer dress in the heat.

The woman supposed to collect us was an hour and fifteen minutes late. We kept calling her house. Finally she turned up. “Oh, I saw you earlier, but I didn't think it could
possibly
be you. I didn't expect you to be dressed
that way,
and you had so much luggage.” She managed to feel superior about my wearing a pretty summer dress. I had been through the puritanical drab butch dressing nonsense in the women's movement in the States, going without a brassiere for two years because that was politically correct—until I realized I was stooping, just as I had before my mother let me wear one. I bought six the next week. I decided a dress code for feminists was ridiculous. Liberation for me is choice.

As a means of bringing us closer, the trip had been a failure. I was reminded of Greece, when I had the impression I was carrying him around on my back, begging him to like something. There is a point in relationships when the way someone chews her breakfast cereal is a clear sign of moral decay. Certainly I'm making myself sound stronger and more single-minded than I was. Sometimes I looked at Robert with a cold eye and considered my options. Sometimes he went at me and reduced me to tears, especially when people were around, as several friends noted. Sometimes he was affectionate and we worked together in the garden or took long walks. There would always be times in any week when we were talking about something interesting, political, natural, and we would communicate well and feel close. That summer we stopped having sex—not that it had been so frequent an occurrence the past year. We still shared a bed, but I found it increasingly hard to sleep with someone who was not interested in me sexually. I had not abandoned hope, but it was abandoning me, gradually, drop by agonizing drop. In the best of times I am not an easy woman to get along with, but when someone is estranged from me, I can be annoying indeed. Everything about me seems too much, too fast, too sure, too loud.

That summer my Norwegian and Danish publishers asked me to come over in September to do publicity. They would pay for a companion. Weekends, we would be responsible for ourselves. Robert was going to Germany shortly after that. His connection with Petrie and Tole was
heating up again. Petrie got him funding. When I thought about taking him along, I felt ill. I knew he would sulk. He would not gladly endure the media fuss. I asked Woody if he wanted to accompany me.

Oslo is a business center, not the world's most glamorous or historically interesting city, but it was new to us, and my publishers were friendly and welcoming. On the weekend, we took a train over the high mountains to Bergen and stopped at a fjord. There were twenty waterfalls visible from our little pension. We made the mistake of asking for a drink when we arrived. The innkeeper nodded solemnly and admitted that sherry was possible. We were taken down to a basement, through a bolted door, to a locked cabinet where exactly one jigger was measured out to each of us, with a stern look. It was as if we had requested a local pretty boy to play with. We drank our bit of sherry and did not ask again. We loved Bergen, running around as tourists. I visited local feminists, who told me drunken domestic abuse was their leading problem. We had a flash of insight into the pension keeper's attitude toward alcohol.