A Complicated Marriage (30 page)

After a two-day respite from the animal kingdom, while Clem fulfilled his speaking obligations in Sarasota and we mingled with the museum types and artists in the area, we headed back to Route I. As we homed in on the Keys, I was jerked out of my lethargy by the sight of an elephant tethered to a post by the side of the road. To hell with Nietzsche—Clem had to make friends with that elephant. There was no one around, just the elephant and us.

Clem wanted a picture and told me to stand in front of it for perspective. I obliged, but when he kept saying, “Closer, get closer” until I could
feel the elephant's breath, I refused to budge. Clem's photos took forever and were invariably disasters because he was mechanically hopeless and had never mastered the art of pushing the button while keeping the camera steady. For some reason, that photo came out clear and true. I don't recognize myself. I am so thin, in a brown pinwale skirt I had worn in the tenth grade and a strange sweater I had bought when we married that was block-printed with smoky flowers so that it looks like a furry tapestry. My hair hangs long and limp. I am a young bare-legged girl with an elephant. I, who always smile too much in photos, am not smiling. That was no Dumbo. I was sure that at any moment I would prove to be his last straw. He would take revenge for every tourist who had ever invaded his turf. I could smell his retribution as he dashed me to the ground and pulverized me into dust. I never showed anyone the picture.

From the moment we crossed the first bridge to the Keys, the water turned to a pale jade green and I felt alive and at peace for the first time in months. The first evening, we stopped at a run-down motel on the gulf side of Islamorada, the name honey on the tongue. After dinner we walked to a deserted dock, where we dangled our feet in the water as the sun set. No talk, no nothing—it seemed as if hours passed. The majesty and languor of the sun. How could it get bigger as it disappeared? It did. And the larger it grew, the closer it came toward us, until I thought it would swallow us whole. I held Clem's hand. Later, Clem wrote in his daybook, “Islamorada. Saw sunset on the gulf.” I loved that. For Clem to mention a natural phenomenon came dangerously close to breaking his rule of no editorializing, and reaffirmed how special the moment was.

Most of our trip home slipped by me; evidently, we danced at the Fontainebleau, visited the rocket plant in Cocoa Beach, drove on the beach at Daytona, and, oh yes, visited yet another marine land in St. Augustine. That I do remember. Clem had been searching for a transcendent encounter with a dolphin ever since we had crossed into Florida. Then, at the last opportunity, he hit the jackpot. After the show, Clem stood by the side of the huge tank and willed the dolphins to come to him. And one did. It dove and swam in flirtatious circles but always came back. Their eyes locked again and again. It was love, at least for Clem. He had always adored the water and had briefly been on the swimming team
at Syracuse University, until his ears acted up and he got too busy being highbrow. He had told me that if he could be born as anything else on earth, it would be a dolphin.

In South Carolina we looked up Jasper Johns, who spent part of his time on Edisto Island, outside Charleston. We hung out that day and evening. Clem liked Jasper; I did, too. Besides Jasper's niceness, there was a bond because of their Southernness. About that Southernness, some of the Greenbergs had originally settled in the Norfolk area. Clem would visit them often, spending a month, even a year, there as a child. A keen ear could still pick up a slight accent—words with soft endings, his
g
's elided altogether. I adored that softness. Yet when I noted that we had spent a day revisiting certain streets familiar to him in Portsmouth and Norfolk, I recalled nothing. It saddened me because he talked so little about his childhood, and I had missed that opportunity. Perhaps I was too distracted by navigating the streets—city driving having been my bête noire since Europe—or perhaps my mind was in New York, and
please, please, let us get there soon
. And indeed, once we abandoned the byways we were home in a blink.

Back to the parties, the apartment we loved, the sadness of Franz Kline's funeral, and my analyst. I quickly fell into the twice-a-week routine of walking to that brownstone on West Ninetieth near Riverside. The room was in the back on the ground floor, dark and quiet, made more so by my depression. Once I had prattled off the anecdotal highlights of my history, what was there to say? He resolutely probed: Did I possibly, just possibly, now, or at any other time in my life, have any interest in pursuing any activity or endeavor known to mankind? Every second week or so I would fork up some desultory morsel, lest he throw me out on my ear as a hopeless case. “Maybe I could learn to cook,” or “I suppose I might finally learn French.” But usually I would shrug, and he would talk about the cause and effect of depression. Me, I called it living under water. I had noticed that in that room I would lapse into a monotone, barely audible, my words furry. My ears would stop up, my pulse would slow. He talked about catatonia.

One day I sent him a coded message, a dream. Even better, a recurrent dream. There is a big party. It has started without me. The space is like
a ballroom. The men, there are mostly men, wear dark suits and ties. The women wear black cocktail dresses and pumps. The party is in full swing, noisy, almost raucous. I weave through the people. I know some slightly and nod. I know some well and touch their arms. Mostly they are faces without names. There is one man who appears in every dream, square-jawed, swarthy, heavy-browed, but I don't know his name, or if I ever did. As I move deeper into the room, a litany of names streams though my mind that I desperately try to find matches for, but fail. I keep moving faster. Eyes meet in a flicker; we knock against one another. We are the company we keep, and we are trapped.

I told Sy I always woke up with a start. He called it a sexually based dream. I called it a bad dream. Our codes were different. Then, before he had made a dent in my defenses, or observed a flicker of the much-anticipated transference, along came the next hiatus.

Sam and Jane Kootz offered us their country place in Croton for the month of June while they were in Europe. The house was a modern Shangri-La for two, in the hills north of the reservoir. There was a pool and the use of their white Cadillac convertible with white leather upholstery. “Yes, thank you, yes.” Only drawback: The Kootzes worshipped perfection. For us, who, if we worshipped anything, worshipped comfort, this would be challenging. There I was, with a sterile castle to tend to, an instruction manual the size of
War and Peace
, and a husband who couldn't care less. Add to that the daunting Kootzes, who sat on my shoulder and watched my every move. Sam was wily. He was the guy who right after the war stormed Picasso's inner sanctum by dint of a white Cadillac convertible as a present. Presto! He struck a deal to sell Picassos in New York, and from those acorns grew a mighty gallery. Collectors didn't stand a chance. Bottom line was:
You want that Picasso? Perhaps you might also consider this Hofmann, Gottlieb, Baziotes, . . .
A win-win for everyone.

Me, I never did crack the ice of Jane and Sam. As genial and hospitable as she could be, as lathered with Southern charm and avuncular as he could be, I always felt a chill and retreated behind my own Bird's Eye brand of politeness.

I quickly trained Clem in the art of using coasters and kept an alert
eye on every falling ash, errant Montblanc, and wet towel from the pool. But it was the houseguests that did me in. A first for me. Lord, breakfast, lunch, and dinner. How did normal women do it? Like a queen, I would set off in my white chariot for the supermarket in Yorktown Heights, load up on ingredients I had copied out of an abstruse cookbook, then return to being Cinderella as I pondered what “separate six eggs” meant, or did “clove of garlic” mean the whole thing or just one of those bits inside? For once, Clem was as stupid as I was. My biggest disasters were coq au vin and zabaglione, Clem's favorite. That month put an end to any lingering thought I might have had that cooking anything whatsoever might be enjoyable. Fortunately, most of those weekenders drank like fish and would have settled for dog food. Well, except for the gluttonous Bill Rubin.

The best part was when it was just us. Swimming naked, hanging out at the pool, reading, Clem writing. By the end of our stay Clem had, for the first and only time, grown a full beard and I was pregnant, probably about forty-eight hours' worth. Like the good girl I was, I had waited exactly six months, and bam, there by the pool, two tanned, healthy people created our daughter. This time, there would be no “Do you want to keep it?” questions. No second-guessing. As simple as that.

We must have passed the Kootz test, because a couple of years later, when they pulled up stakes and bought one of those huge piles on Lily Pond Lane in East Hampton, they offered us that Croton house for what Sam called a “basement price” of $100,000. “Thank you, but no.” No hesitation. We already were where we needed and wanted to be. Besides, there were three too many zeros in Sam's basement price; $220 a month rent on Central Park West was already stretching our financial imagination.

The Kootz break would be followed by yet another driving trek to Emma Lake in Saskatchewan, where Clem had been invited to lead a two-week artists' workshop. Our trip would extend, as our trips had a way of doing—to a log cabin in the sparsely settled northern reaches of the province, and far enough west for us to hold hands across the line of the Continental Divide between Alberta and British Columbia. We would walk on a glacier and attempt to water-ski, and Clem made a
rare purchase in Calgary—he hated to buy anything—of a pair of brown suede shoes. And I stood alone at dawn by the pale celadon water of Lake Louise, the mist billowing around my legs, and felt blessed.

On our way home, we were in Ottawa, where Clem was giving a talk at the National Gallery, when we heard of Morris Louis's death. He was fifty-nine. He had always seemed old to me, a spare man, dry, with a grayness about him. In our living room he would take up no air, no space, and he would leave no trace of himself, no conversation, not even a dent in the cushion. I never considered any of the artists I knew a happy bunch, but Morris was downright sad. Maybe because, unlike others, he didn't have any passions on the side. Adolph had sailing, Ken had his “toys” and/or women, Jackson and Franz had their drinking, and Barney had the sound of his own voice. But Morris, as if he'd been zapped at birth, was the most dedicated artist I ever knew.

Holed up in his small dining room/studio in the suburbs of Washington, D.C., he was a nine-to-five artist, his workday sacrosanct. He came to New York only once or twice a year, despite Clem's urging that he needed to see what other artists were up to. Grudgingly he would take the train up, check into the Statler Hotel across from Penn Station—he claimed that only the Statler had a mattress firm enough for his back—come up to our place for dinner, make the rounds of the galleries and museums the next day, and go home that night. And who but Morris would casually mention on one of these visits that Dorothy Miller had recently phoned him, she who was Alfred Barr's eyes and ears for the Museum of Modern Art, the diva doyenne whose attention could mean so much to a struggling, unrecognized artist? She had told him she was heading back to New York but would like to stop by and see his work before she left. And who but Morris would have replied, “It's not convenient—I'm working”? He would make it into the pantheon of American artists doing it his way. But not in his lifetime.

And then it was fall and our routine resumed, along with my analysis and expanding waistline. This time I didn't bloom with baby rapture. I was too apprehensive of what lay ahead to even acknowledge the presence of anything that could be snatched away in the flash of a second. Sy kept me as connected as I could be to the pregnancy, and sometimes
sessions turned to the larger matters of jump-starting my life, but for the most part we gentled through the flotsam of day-to-day feelings and moods and “he saids” and “I saids,” with the occasional dip into our past and its mossy layers of angers and resentments.

Toward the end of March, Clem grabbed the camera and coerced me across the street into the park. He wanted a picture of very pregnant me. I dutifully turned sideways. He clicked, I smiled. I thought of myself and the elephant in Florida, except this time, sausaged into my winter coat with curly black hair all over it, I was the beast—more like a woolly mammoth. I raged. Not about the way I looked—I raged against everything about that moment, especially Clem's blithe assumption that everything would be just fine. I posed, he clicked. “One more, just in case.”
In case what
? I didn't say.
You think I want a picture in case this thing comes out dead
?!

Oh, it wasn't easy being eight months pregnant and pretending nothing was going on, but that was how I was playing it. No plans, no hashing out names, and no preparations. Anyway, wasn't everything stored in the basement, “just in case”?

On April 16, two weeks past my due date, Clem, with his unnerving prescience, brought the bassinette and paraphernalia upstairs, before going to meet Ken Noland at the Guggenheim. Around four o'clock, my back started hurting and by five o'clock, when they came home, Ken pronounced me in labor. With three kids, he was a pro. The pain wasn't much, and the doctor told Clem to come to the hospital in an hour or so. I was surprisingly calm as I sat with Ken at the foot of the bed playing chess, just as we did when we visited him at his house in Vermont. Dear friend—I blessed him, as usual, for putting up with my amateur moves. When it was time, I felt as if I were going to a party, as Ken slowly drove us to the hospital in his open car through the soft April evening.

By midnight, she sat on my stomach like a white moon. Shiny, round, sublime. I breathed through the fire of what they were doing down there to repair her rite of passage. My heat cooled in the placid blue pools of her eyes. She healed me. I knew I would follow her anywhere. How did I get so smart? The next morning, we named her Sarah because we liked
it, and Clem added Dora, the name of his mother, who died when he was sixteen. Sarah Dora Greenberg, as sweet on the tongue as
Islamorada
.