A Complicated Marriage (11 page)

But then, the movie wasn't really the point that day. We were passing time, doing uptown things, the kinds of things we knew we would never do again. So it was that we went around the corner to the Rainbow Room for tea and a drink. All those months at
TV Guide
, and I'd never made it to the roof. Now I sat by the window, holding hands with my husband. We talked of things to come. In two weeks we were going to Minneapolis, where Clem was to jury a show and give a talk at the fledgling Walker Art Center. A long weekend of dinners and studio visits. Our first trip, our first hotel together, my first experience of Clem as a “figure” in a world outside our milieu. And my first trip in a Stratocruiser, the pioneering luxe plane, a double-decker with cocktail lounges in its huge belly. That would be the real honeymoon.

Entranced, I stared at the city and the Chrysler Building aflame in the fading sun. Yet I couldn't shake the chill of the Vanderbilt. I wondered if it had been as dismal as I'd thought, if we had really been in a basement, if there had been flowers on the table, what people had said in their toasts. I couldn't even remember if there had been champagne. I knew nothing. Somehow I had missed it all. Like Christmas mornings after the presents were torn open and laid bare. The moment was over. Now what? Expectation was the fun. This was all I had wished for. This was a wonderful day. Yes, all that, but . . . And there, on top of the rainbow, I swore to God that I would never, ever get married again.

Evening had come. We headed downtown to Peter's Backyard to have dinner with Nancy Smith, my other Nancy from college, and young friends of Clem's, Bob Staub and Sylvia, his stunning fiancée from India. She had once painted my eyes with kohl and told me how beautiful I looked. Immediately I had bought myself a black eye pencil, but, as hard as I tried, I could never achieve exotic. I asked her if she would do my eyes again.

In the cramped ladies' room she applied her magic and added lipstick and rouge and brushed my hair. Her hands were soft and loving. She restored me. I took off the orchid, now wilted. Flowers don't like to be
worn, but there would be no stains on my dress tonight. I hoped someone would look at the orchid by the sink and wonder about the woman who had left it.

When we got to the Phillipses' apartment in Murray Hill, people had started to arrive. The place looked beautiful, like it might be a wedding party; the Pollocks had sent masses of white flowers that Gertrude had arranged everywhere. Music, champagne, food, and a genuine, honest-to-God wedding cake. So what if there was no Lester Lanin playing “Hey, There” for the bride and groom's first dance? So what if there had been no father to give the bride away? Hell, he had already done that. It was that cake that sealed the deal for me. I finally believed it. I was really married. And this was a wedding party. And it was for me. Well, yes, for Clem, too. But it was really for me, because I had been the first to leap off the cliff that day at lunch overlooking Rockefeller Plaza. And then again, when I moved into 90 Bank Street. And today we had leapt off the cliff together when we said, “I do.”

FRIEDEL TURNED from the refrigerator and said, “There's no jam.” Everyone looked up briefly and then went back to eating, smoking, drinking coffee, and reading the Sunday
Times
. I stared at him, skinny in his jeans and T-shirt, with his bare feet and stubbly chin. He stared back, his dark eyes glinting: “There's no jam!”

I could hear the scream before I felt it. High and full. It lifted my body out of the chair and across the room and to the stairs and to the window between the eaves, where it shot into the hazy heat of the morning sky. The sound was song. The song was singing me.

Clem looked down at me in the chair in front of the table in front of the window and touched my shoulder. He said, “I wish I could do that.” I wondered why I was upstairs sitting in that chair. I had traveled far and returned. And then I cried for a long time. Clem moved me to the bed. I was so tired and empty and peaceful.

I didn't go downstairs until late in the afternoon, when I heard the lawn mower. Clem loved the exertion, the smell of the cut grass under his bare feet, the sweat running down his back. I went out and sat on the front steps. Clem stopped mowing and sat next to me. He was tentative. I thought,
He thinks I'm breakable
.

He said, “You're so strong.”

That, too
.

Friedel came from around the side of the house with Marisol. He said he was sorry if he had upset me. I laughed. I couldn't look at him. Marisol said nothing.

That was the middle of July. After the recurrence of an eating disorder, the end of a friendship, the crash of a marriage, the mashed finger, and the dog attack, and after I had read half of Edith Wharton. And that
was before the paranoid breakdown, the fall in the bathroom, Jackson, the death, the murder, and the funeral, and before I polished off Edith Wharton.

 

“Everybody gets out of the city in the summer. Everybody knows that.” All the while knowing nothing of the sort about what New Yorkers did, or didn't do, about anything. But so it was that I talked Clem into spending our first summer in East Hampton in a house too small, too stuffed with too many people. Even though he knew better.

There were five of us sharing the house in East Hampton. Besides us, there was my college friend Nancy (Spraker), who worked as an assistant to an assistant in the feminine ghetto of
Good Housekeeping
and was desperate for men and a change of scene. And Clem's friend Friedel, who agreed as long as it would be cheap and he could bring his current girlfriend, Marisol (Escobar), an aspiring artist who sculpted very large penises. She was inscrutable in a forbidding way. I knew little about her except that she was Venezuelan, beautiful, with gobs of money and gobs of black hair that she wore as a veil, and a sly—or was it cruel?—smile. And when she deigned to speak she growled single, heavily accented words, usually repeated twice. The sheer rarity of her utterances always brought conversation to a halt. “Hungry” was a favorite. All in all, not quite strangers, but certainly a mixed bag.
Fine
, I thought.
How bad could it be
?

Nancy and I went to East Hampton and rented a dollhouse in the shadow of the windmill at the far end of town. Three hundred dollars for the season, it had two small bedrooms and a bath upstairs, one bedroom and bath down, a living room too tiny for human use, and an eat-in kitchen, the only communal room. No porch or outdoor furniture conducive to an alfresco summer. Stretched thin three ways, we could all just manage the rent. The elderly landlords were surly folk, leery of the city aliens. A bit off-putting, given they would be squatting in a bungalow a veritable stone's throw behind us. The good news: Helen Frankenthaler was going to Europe and lent us her convertible.

Two weeks before we took possession, I went into a second-guessing frenzy. I blamed Clem. If only he had said no to the whole venture, and
meant it. It then came home to me. As convenient as Clem's passivity about decisions usually had been for me, it also meant that in the future it would be a good idea if I knew what I was doing. At the outset he had clearly said that he had never been away for the summer before and didn't see why he should start now. But then he had shrugged and, as with so many things, I knew he really didn't give a damn one way or the other. The result of his diffidence was double-edged; though I would never get a reassuring pat on the head and an “Everything will be fine,” I would never be slapped down with an “I told you so” if my plans failed. Yet another addition to my growing dossier of life-with-Clem lessons.

Nancy, Clem, and I drove out on in mid-June, the car jammed with a summer's worth of this and that, and, most important, Clem's books, my portable typewriter, which he would use while there, a few bottles of booze to get us started, and a radio. I did the driving, as I had when we had gone to the Phillipses' farm for our mini-honeymoon. Clem preferred being a passenger, he could read, and I was happy with the job, much less boring. Besides, he was a terrible driver, unengaged and erratic. Thus died yet another of my mother's treasured myths: “The man always does the driving.”

Upon our arrival, the landlords scuttled over to greet us with a list of dos and don'ts, while pointing to the hand mower for the lawn, which must be tended to weekly. They gave dire warnings about the sensitive nature of the antique washing machine with a mangle attachment, and then, handing over the keys reluctantly, they retreated to their lookout post. We had a celebratory drink, got into our suits, and headed off to the Coast Guard Beach,
the
beach. Our summer had begun.

Our routine was in stone. Monday to Friday nights I was on my own, until August, when Clem would come out full-time. The first four days I would hole up with sandwiches and Fig Newtons and Edith Wharton from the local library, starting with
The Age of Innocence
and working my way downhill. Fridays, with a jolt, I sprang into guilty housewifery. I marketed, cleaned, shaved my legs, and did the laundry, before meeting the evening train for the arrivals. Weekends were nonstop—Coast Guard, followed by whatever parties were happening. Late nights we often ended up at the Elm Tree Inn, a down-home roadhouse on
the Montauk Highway—the Cedar away from home, where everyone stopped by of an evening. Not so much the year-rounders, but for the New York transients it was a good way to end the day. On slow nights there was always a movie on Main Street. Most of the time, wherever we went, we would see the same people we saw in the city, except for the clothes and the sunglasses. For eating out, there wasn't a lot to choose from. Either the upscale Spring Close House and Chez Labatt or, if we found ourselves west of town, Out of This World, where Clem would invariably remark, “It should be Out of
the
World. Don't they know there's only one world?” That was my adorable pedant, who even proofread the back of my cereal boxes.

For those homesick for a bit of drama, things could sometimes heat up at the Elm Tree. One night the power went out and for some reason two guys started to yell and shove and shove back and in a flash we could hear punches landing and people crashing into tables. Scary stuff in the dark. We headed for the parking lot, where everyone hung around quarterbacking over who had said what to whom and who had thrown the first punch. No one wanted to go home, so someone turned on a car radio at full blast and in the glare of the headlights people danced. A lively free-for-all that got livelier when the cops pulled up. That night, the Elm Tree had the Cedar beat, hands-down.

East Hampton housed a small, very small, art colony. The artists who had year-round houses were spread out, from Montauk in one direction to Watermill in the other. They had migrated slowly after the war, looking for a cheap place to live and work while still being near the city. Even in summer, it was a workaday place. During the week the Coast Guard was nearly deserted. And even when the art circle expanded a bit on weekends and there were more blankets on the beach and a few parties sprang up, the sense of family was a constant. Vacationers like us, who came for the whole summer, were few.

As for the parties, it was always the same gang and the same rhythm: gossip, a lot of grousing, plenty of drinking, a slow build to a climax with a verbal and/or physical slap-and-tickle skirmish, followed by a denouement accompanied by the chorus venting their two cents.

The town itself was a sleepy place with a stodgy, old-time Yankee smell to it. Nothing touristy. Artists were on the fringes, tolerated but not assimilated. Judging by all the mansions lining the road to the beach, East Hampton was unquestionably a town of the rich, a “them” and “us” sort of town. And, like Rye, no cross-pollination. I didn't realize just how small the art community was in East Hampton until, in summers to come, Clem and I would go to Provincetown to stay with Hans and Miz Hofmann over Labor Day weekends. As distant as the Cape was from New York, it was clear that that was where most artists were. Provincetown was an industry town—art, art, every which way art—and had been for years. Not so East Hampton.

Only two weeks passed and we had our first houseguest, Nancy Smith, who wanted to come for the weekend. With nowhere to put her up, I bought a folding canvas cot in the hardware store. That plus a bamboo screen from the living room would have to do. The kitchen now had a sleeping alcove. I figured that the accommodations would effectively discourage people from overstaying their welcomes. No such luck. Nancy could be great fun but she could also wreak havoc, and during her week's stay she managed to disturb our fragile peace. She had taken to drinking more in recent months and wasn't an easy drunk. Loud, belligerent, she hacked away at anyone in her path, but I was her most frequent target. I withdrew but couldn't bring myself to throw her out. Nancy was why I had gone to Jennifer's party and met Clem, why I was in East Hampton at all. And so much more.

As small as Bennington was, students usually didn't drift from one discipline to another. After bowing under the weight of calculus, I had burrowed single-mindedly into literature. Under the tutelage of Howard Nemerov, Francis Golffing, and Stanley Hyman, I was soon up to my eyeballs in the modernists and writing a poem a day. It took me three years to discover that the interesting people were in the art department. I soon drifted away from the girls who thought and looked like me and toward the “others.” I felt as if I had been swept into a hurricane. Dirty feet, sandals, hair down to the ass—this was what Bennington was created for. Soon, getting changed to go wait on table at dinner meant maybe
a clean T-shirt and my hair brushed if it was lucky. A far cry from when my mother had first deposited me at the school with my prim pageboy and saddle shoes.

Nancy Smith was the ringleader and I became a groupie. She knew everything. I had never been to a museum, and my only memorable pictures had hung over my nursery bed: a print of
Blue Boy
and, in a small carved frame, Jesus in flowing robes, hands clasped, looking heavenward. Nancy thought it was time someone introduced me to art, and New York. She took me to the Museum of Modern Art, where I walked up the main stairs headlong into
Guernica
and the impressionists, cubists, and surrealists. Nancy reeled off the artists' names and the movements and what had led into what. All too much. But I had seen things I didn't know existed, never dreaming that they would become old friends.