When We Argued All Night (20 page)

—Do you miss teaching? Harold said, after they'd ordered.

—Oh, my friend, it's everything, Artie said, and his face wrinkled as if he would cry. He poured water and tea and drank both. Is that what's bothering your kid? That stuff we went through?

—I don't know what's bothering my kid, Harold says. He says he didn't want to live, but now he does. He makes it sound like nothing much—he didn't want a sandwich but now he does; he didn't want a glass of water.

—Maybe that's what it's like, Artie said. You should have got girls, and I should have got boys. Everybody would have been fine. I don't know what's what with Brenda. Nothing like what you're going through—at least as far as I know. She goes to college, but she doesn't seem interested. He shrugged. A waiter put dishes before them.

Harold felt himself prepare for something, and then Artie said, You still have a lady friend? At last the sun seemed to bother him; he stood and closed a curtain behind Harold, and Harold realized he should have closed the curtain.

When Artie sat down again, Harold said, Yes.

There was a long pause. Maybe it's none of my business, Artie said. I made up my mind I didn't want anything to do with you, the way you live, but maybe it's just none of my goddamn business. What do I know?

—Say what you want to say, Harold said.

—If I'm allowed to say, Artie said, spearing beef slices with his fork (Harold had learned to use chopsticks, eating in little places near Columbia with Austin, but Artie waved his hand at an idea like that). If I'm going to say, then here's what I say. What the hell do you expect your kid to do, knowing his father's treating his mother like that?

—How would he know?

—How would he know? How would he know? I'll bet you twenty Chinese lunches that Nelson knows the whole story.

Harold did not take the bet, and he did not discuss the subject with Nelson, but he made an appointment alone with Nelson's psychiatrist. He said, I thought maybe you should know. I see a woman. Very discreetly.

The doctor asked a few questions, then offered to refer Harold and Myra to a psychiatrist of their own. Do you think it's a good idea? Harold asked. That we see someone?

—For your son's sake? the doctor said. It could be.

—I remembered something, Harold said as he stood and gathered his coat. My wife—well, the summer before last, my wife told me she was in love with someone. The doctor looked up, amused. For months, Harold had thought constantly of what Myra had said, but when Nelson was hurt—and when time passed without anything else from Myra—he had put it to one side, and now it was true that he had not thought about it for many weeks.

The end of term was approaching—Nelson had been in the hospital for a year—and Harold had papers to grade. Over the Christmas holidays, he was determined to make some progress on his neglected dissertation, but he made up his mind that in January he would suggest to Myra that they consult the doctor whose name and telephone number Nelson's psychiatrist had given him. He wondered if he had to tell Myra about Naomi—to have a reason. He tried not to think too hard about what he would say and concentrated on choosing, well in advance, a date on which to speak.

When the time came, an evening in January 1963, Harold cooked dinner—Myra had come in late—then washed the dishes while Paul did arithmetic problems at the kitchen table. Next, Paul watched a little television, but then he went to bed. Harold had chosen a night when Myra didn't have a favorite show, and when he came into the living room, she was lying on the sofa, a stack of magazines on the rug next to her. He knew she was checking out the competition, looking at layouts and design. Her feet were toward the doorway he stood in. If he were to sit down, it would be behind her.

—My, he said. There's something I want to talk about.

—Talk, she said, continuing to turn pages. He sat, but she didn't turn to look at him.

—I think it might help Nelson, he said, and hesitated. He started again. Dr. Fried thinks it might help Nelson for us to speak to a psychiatrist ourselves, together.

—What us? Myra said. You and me? What do you mean, Dr. Fried thinks? How do you know what he thinks?

—I went to see him, he said.

—Without telling me? Are you trying to turn Nelson against me? You visit more than I do, but I can't do anything about that—I can't leave work. I missed so much time when he got sick.

—Yes, I made an appointment and spent a few minutes with Dr. Fried.

—And what right— Myra sat up and wheeled around, her hands on her knees. What right did you have to do that?

—I think either of us has the right to speak to our son's doctor, Harold said. He heard himself sounding rational in a way that would set her off—it always did. He knew with dismay that he was trying to make that happen.

—And what did you say to Dr. Fried, Myra said, that made him decide we should see a psychiatrist, may I ask? What on
earth
did you say to him?

Harold was silent for a long time. There was an answer that would not be the whole truth but might work. He said, I told him what you said.

—What I said?

—At the lake. The summer before last.

At that, Myra laughed, self-consciously and ironically. Oh, so you were listening! I had no idea you were listening. I thought you had some water in your ear and couldn't hear me! You certainly never have taken any interest in that conversation before.

—I was interested, Harold said. I was interested.

—So let me get this straight, Myra said. You walked into Dr. Fried's office and said, My wife says she loves someone, and he said, Better go see a shrink. Is that what happened?

Harold was silent. He felt a great need to take off his shoes. He knew that if he left the room to put on his slippers, he would not come back. He never took his shoes off in the living room. It would feel immodest, outlandish. He stayed where he was. He should have realized that it would not sound likely that he'd walked into Dr. Fried's office and accused his wife, and slowly Harold conceded to himself that to make that claim would not be fair, would not be ethical. Harold wished to be moral—and usually considered himself all but depraved. Yet that was self-indulgent. He was not depraved, he saw, in a dreadful moment of clarity: he was only habitually selfish. He had not been a good person, but possibly he had changed. Maybe he could be less selfish.

—Myra, he said, and it felt, as he spoke, like the first honest thing he'd said to her since the day they met, I want to tell you what I told the doctor.

—I should hope so, said Myra, but her features narrowed, as if she hoped he would not.

—I know this will distress you, he said. I told him I—I have a mistress. A lover. A woman.

Myra jerked her head back and shut her eyes as he spoke. He didn't know whether she was surprised at what he had said or the fact that he'd spoken out loud. She was quiet for a long time, and he waited. He expected crying, screaming, but no.

She stood up. You'd better sleep in Nelson's room, she said.

—What?

—I'm going to bed. I don't think there's much to be said tonight. I want to make some phone calls before we talk again.

—Phone calls? Harold said.

—My father. To recommend a divorce lawyer. And my father, also, come to think of it, about the other thing. I'm getting the cabin. Leaving the magazines scattered on the rug, with their dazzling colors, their photographs of cold, elegant, powerful women, Myra walked into the bedroom. You can get your slippers and pajamas now, she said, turning. And move the rest of your things to Nelson's room when I'm at work tomorrow. You can take a week if you need it to find an apartment. Paul stays here. I stay here. She'd rehearsed this many times in her mind, Harold understood. Maybe she'd even spoken it out loud. She had been waiting for him to say what he had just said. He gave a wild, wordless cry, reaching toward her. Still, it would have been wrong not to say it.

Chapter 6

Wake Me When You Leave

1968–1969

B
renda had believed that land, even when it was called flat, was at least a little bumpy. Driving across the country in the summer of 1968 to a job she'd found while trying to prove she couldn't, she was astonished to discover that land may be flat as floors are flat. In the San Joaquin Valley were peach and apricot trees—on peach and apricot ranches (they were called, hilariously, she told her parents when she finally phoned) where trees stood in straight lines. Brenda the New Yorker had not known peaches and apricots grew on trees. Now she couldn't remember how she had thought they grew—on bushes, on vines? Driving to pick up groceries, cigarettes, wine, and beer, waiting for a light to change in the dazzling heat of an avenue straighter and wider than any street in the East, she decided that everything she'd thought a week earlier had been stupid, except she still loved the music she loved, and she still hated Lyndon Johnson and his war. Maybe she was the only person in this valley who felt that way.

But quiet, cool canals—straight rivers—cut through the town: irrigation canals, built before there were houses. One canal was a block from the house where she'd rented a sparsely furnished apartment made from a remodeled, attached garage. You could walk along the levee.

Working in a New York office after she dropped out of graduate school (after she went to graduate school because she hated working in an office), Brenda had begun participating in peace marches, exhilarated to walk down the middle of streets cleared of cars, among people she agreed with, being cheered and screamed at. Her mind had been on public events for once, that spring: the murder of Martin Luther King, the announcement by Robert Kennedy that he'd run for the presidency (Brenda wore a button for him), Johnson's speech saying he wouldn't run again, Eugene McCarthy's campaign. But after a march, with her own skimpy life waiting for her like a neglected pet, Brenda admitted to herself that she was not one of the truly impassioned. If her thoughts about the war were in black and those about the man she was sleeping with were in red, she had more red thoughts than black thoughts. She enjoyed marching too much for someone who was supposed to be angry. Here in California it might be different. In the absence of a private life, this lonely week before her job began, in the absence of hills and curves and maple trees and her parents—and finding herself, for the first time in her life, in a conservative town—she felt new rage about the war and new grief about the death of Robert Kennedy, who'd been shot as she packed her things in New York.

The man she thought about had been her American literature professor, and she envied his life. One night, as they drank red wine in her East Village kitchen while he rolled a joint, he interrupted her complaints, saying, You could teach in a community college.

—Who'd hire me?

—You have a master's.

She had lasted two years in grad school, studying English (she'd long since given up math) like Harold Abrams, whose book about Henry James sat on her shelf. She had read certain parts several times, though not the whole.

—I hate your smugness, she said. First, you get me so worked up over you I quit grad school, and then you blithely tell me I can get a teaching job. He was married.

—You didn't quit grad school because of me, he said mildly.

—How would you know?

It was intolerable that he should get away with this. He'd spoiled her life—oh, she knew he hadn't
spoiled her life
; she'd never felt at ease in graduate school. But he didn't love her and never had. To prove his suggestion was foolish, she borrowed her father's
World Almanac
and looked up community colleges. Then she wrote letters to forty of them, asking for a job. When she waved the stack of denials in his face, he would apologize and leave his wife, or at least help her figure out something else. But one school wrote back with a job offer, and when she phoned to tell her lover, he broke up with her. So here she was, hired to teach English at a public junior college, on her way to buy groceries in a town with peach ranches. She'd been to the college once and had met the department chairman, who smiled tiredly but said little.

Heat collided with her when she got out of the car. Hot weather here was a three-dimensional object—a box of hot dry air with notches for cars and buildings. Contraptions to bring cool, damp air hung on the side windows of people's cars. By evening the weather would be cool. Whenever she went out, she saw the unexpected: Mennonite women in old-fashioned dresses and white bonnets, their hair scraped away from their faces. Men in cowboy hats and big belt buckles, who walked as if they took themselves seriously but would have been comic performers in New York. The veterinary practice was called a Small Animal Hospital, as if somewhere there was a Large Animal Hospital—for horses and cows? Everyone wore light-colored clothing. Checkout clerks greeted Brenda as if they knew her.

The supermarket was air-conditioned, and she liked to go there. When she was done shopping, she studied a bulletin board: tractors and lawn mowers for sale, free kittens. A kitten would be pathetic—the friendless woman and her kitten. But someone offered recorder lessons—even here! Each evening her father still warbled away his grief at his lost job. She still had her soprano recorder and played easy tunes when she was bored with reading. The notice was in large, friendly handwriting. Maybe Brenda could finally learn the alto or the tricks of the soprano her father had never taught her. She missed competing with her father, fighting with him, or touching his head and ears with teasing tenderness now and then: the head and ears of a man who did love her. To give her trip to the supermarket meaning, Brenda dug a pen out of her purse and wrote down the phone number of the person who gave recorder lessons. As she left, a man with dark hair glanced at her. It took her a moment to understand what made her notice him: his hair was longer than the hair of other men here. He had antiwar hair.

The man with antiwar hair answered the door when Brenda arrived for her first recorder lesson with his wife, Lee. He said, I'm Richie Michaels. She didn't say she'd seen him before. Richie was tall and slightly stout, with wide-open blue eyes and eyebrows that seemed higher than other people's so he looked surprised, or maybe he was surprised. She learned from Lee that he was a builder with three crews, and at present he supervised two construction projects: a large apartment complex and a two-car garage he was building on someone's property.

Lee, who had a tangle of black curls and a pleasantly irregular, thin nose, played the recorder—all sizes—so well, Brenda was ashamed of having learned so little and lied when asked how long she'd been playing. Lee made the recorder seem like an authentic musical instrument, not an embarrassing toy. She was from San Francisco, she told Brenda, as if that explained why she might know how to play the recorder. Richie had grown up here in the valley.

—We met at Berkeley, Lee said. Of course it was different then.

She was probably in her thirties. Brenda knew she meant before the Free Speech Movement and antiwar demonstrations, and she wondered which side Lee was on. Her hair was also long. She found a duet for them to play and talked about Brenda's tonguing and phrasing, and Brenda discovered that she and her father had played a Bach phrase incorrectly thousands of times. Lee had a way of exaggerating the movement of her tongue while explaining, to signal her student what to do, which Brenda found sexy. The supple, large tongue, which Lee stuck out to show her—she was not a woman who'd be expected to stick out her tongue—contrasted with the bony nose. When Brenda left, she was a little heady about her new teacher, feeling—in this desolate new land—the beginnings of the kind of crush she hadn't felt since high school, that idealization of a teacher. She went home and drank two glasses of wine, wondering how she'd buy grass here.

The next time, Richie wasn't present, but at the end of her third lesson, when Brenda came out of the den where Lee taught, he was drinking beer and watching TV in the living room and he offered her a beer. She looked at Lee, who nodded, as if she and Richie had been waiting for the right moment to make friends. The news was on, and Brenda waited edgily. She had seen no evidence of political views in this house, or any views, only some mildly religious embroidered samplers that Lee said her mother had made. She had not seen books—books would tell her what they thought.

Richie said nothing when the war footage was shown, but Lee said, There's a march on the Presidio next month. Want to come with us?

—Protesting the war? Brenda said dully. In San Francisco?

Richie could be sarcastic. No, in Tijuana. What do you think?

She was pleased to be teased. His voice was rough, but Brenda had grown up with rough voices. Sure, she said. She drank two beers with them.

By the time of the march, classes had started, and she was working hard but was excited to leave for a Saturday, riding in the backseat of Richie's white Ford. When they reached San Francisco and found a place to park—the city was unlike anyplace else, with abrupt hills and bright houses—the march had begun, and they joined in where they were. Richie walked along the side, faster than the other marchers, as if he were needed closer to the front. Brenda and Lee followed, Lee holding Brenda's elbow so they wouldn't lose him or each other. The crowd filled the street. Richie looked as if he should be wearing a hard hat, Brenda said to Lee, who smiled uncertainly. She meant that he looked as if he was at work—absorbed, energetic, clearheaded, and wearing dress pants and a button-down shirt, unlike the people around them in patched jeans and T-shirts with messages.

—His cousin died there, Lee said as they hurried behind him.

—
Hey, hey, LBJ, how many kids did you kill today?
the crowd shouted. Brenda found her voice. She felt an unexpected, embarrassing joy: at being where she was, at being with Lee and Richie, who seemed more authentic, less theatrical than the few antiwar teachers she'd met at the junior college. A broad hand gripped her shoulder. Richie had circled back to introduce them to people he knew, and Brenda found herself shaking hands with organizers of the march, who were talking not about the war, the weather, and the size of the crowd, but about which route the police had agreed to, how many speeches they'd be allowed to give at the rally before the crowd would have to disperse, who would be arrested this time. Again, Richie gripped her shoulder, this time to steer her in a different direction. She looked around for Lee. She's coming, Richie said. His big hand tapped the center of her back—one, two, three—as if offering ritual comfort. Then he held her hand for a few seconds before letting it go and leaving her to keep up with him as he settled into the slow steady pace of the other marchers.

She watched little kids with long hair and OshKosh overalls who rode on their fathers' shoulders. People stepped onto the sidewalk to rest, change their babies on a blanket on the ground, breastfeed on wooden porch steps; people hurried to catch up to their friends.
What do we want? Peace! When do we want it? Now! What do we want? Peace! When do we want it? Now!
Someone up ahead asked the questions, and the marchers shouted the answer. The chant grew faster until they were shouting
Peace now, peace now, peace now!

The march both distracted her from the war and reminded her of the war. It was childish to imagine that wearing jeans patched with peace symbols and shouting would make the war end. She felt ugly, out of place, and complicit in a dangerous, destructive world. Children were being napalmed, and that was her fault because she was an American—because she had fun on these marches, because she came only when she had the time, only when she knew she didn't have to be arrested. If she was arrested, she could lose her job. She wouldn't risk even that.

Lee had reappeared with food. Brenda accepted a half sandwich: ham and American cheese. Glad you turned up, Richie said. He might have meant Lee, who had rejoined them after disappearing, but when Richie spoke, Brenda felt Lee become anxious and decided it was a compliment to herself. All at once she felt powerful, free, able to do anything—able to fight the government, required to fight the government, able to be the government that did wrong. She loved these people, this Lee and Richie whom she'd found or invented in what her father insisted on calling the Wilds of California. She was wild too.

F
or a few hours at a time, Harold Abrams forgot he had children. His life after divorce didn't feel like a continuation of his old life but like an alternative one, as if he'd returned to his youth and started over. He lived alone in an ungraceful postwar apartment not far from where he had lived before he was married, in Murray Hill. He prospered: he finished his dissertation and became Doctor Abrams (and wished he had remained Abramovitz because Abrams was someone he didn't know). He got a job, and now he drove over the East River every day to teach at Queens College. His book on Henry James was published by a university press and received respectful reviews but did not change the history of thought, even among his friends. Austin Granger—now teaching in Chicago—sent a short but enthusiastic note.

Harold had forgotten that lives take place in chronological order, that one cannot lose one's past. When something reminded him of Nelson or Paul, a muscle in his chest would clench. It might have been easier if he and Myra had divorced when the children were little, when he could have picked them up on a Saturday and taken them to a museum or the circus. Myra said both boys were old enough to plan their own time, so there was no need for a formal visitation schedule: Harold could see them anytime he and they wished. In 1968 Paul was in his last year of high school, living with Myra but planning to go away to college. He agreed to restaurant meals with his father, and sometimes, after a couple of hours, if the service was slow and the food was good, they talked as they used to. Paul was tall, curly-haired, and confident, a happy kid who excelled at debating and was impersonally polite to his father, as he was polite to the judges of debates all over the city.