A Complicated Marriage (53 page)

As it always did after Labor Day, the city stirred to life and the phone rang more often. Some called with timid voices, as if fearing to hear the worst. Others showered me with dire tales based on their experiences or gave me lists of things I should and shouldn't do. One woman ventured to tell me I was “in denial.” As for the chirpy “everything will be fine” and “take care, now” people, I froze them out. As for Clem, even when it was an old friend, he wouldn't speak to them.

But one day Friedel called. His hold on reality had been slipping away, and I figured,
Now or never
, and handed Clem the phone. I listened in on the frail voices talking past each other and tried to assure Friedel that, yes, he was really talking to Clem. Then I hung up and left them to it. I heard the echoes of those two friends, who had bickered and made up for fifty years. Clem, the bully: “Stop fooling around and get to work”; Friedel, good-natured, putting up with it, even liking it. That was when I had first met Friedel, fondly referred to as “the painter who didn't paint.” But age had now brought the “boys” to an unbridgeable impasse. Eventually, Clem gave up trying to penetrate Friedel's fog. “Fuck him,” he said as he handed me the receiver and picked up his book.

 

The VIPs had continued to meet intermittently throughout the summer and fall. Our agenda focused almost exclusively on an eventual civil suit
to attach Powers's assets. To that end, we set about drafting an agreement concerning the eventual dispersal of the assets vis-à-vis the amounts of individual losses. “Assets? What assets?” I ventured to say, reminding them of the negligible findings of the DA's office and our investigator. But no one wanted to believe that, and I shut up. Most discouraging for me was that the tenor of the meetings, which had initially been so “one for all, all for one” now became divisive. We spent hours wrangling over the wording and terms that delineated who would be entitled to get what percentage of the putative assets. The document also included a pledge that any suit against Powers would be a group action. In the event, the agreement would prove to be irrelevant.

As the year drew to a close, the group splintered as two people moved away, another chose to close the door on the whole sorry mess, and a few others were distanced by the vicissitudes of work and illness. Though I knew that I didn't have the will or the wherewithal to take any future legal action, as a support group the VIPs had been invaluable to me, and I continued to attend meetings, if only to remember that I was not alone.

That was the ongoing status of the embezzlement aftermath. Emotionally, especially at the end of the day, it was another matter. Many nights during the months following the imposition of the tax liens, I would pull out that A–L volume of the OED and extract the gray envelope behind it. I would dim the light, close the blinds—not that anyone could be looking in, but one never knew. With a mix of trepidation and a need for reassurance, I would check and recheck the contents. I despised myself for those secret, craven indulgences, but I was unable to stop.

The weeks passed and Clem, when motivated, was able to stand long enough in the bathroom to wash and shave. He also became more amenable to having visitors, and even when he wasn't, I would often invite those who called to come by. I divided them between bedroom people—our “family” friends—and living-room people, who were everyone else. The latter involved a good deal of preparation. Though I had finally made friends with the catheter and found easier ways of dressing Clem without endangering the apparatus, I was still leery of strapping the bag to his oh-so-skinny leg because of the possible effect on his circulation.

After I had hooked him up to the oxygen tubing that would stretch to the living room, he would make his grand entrance on his walker. However, these efforts meant an expenditure of precious air, and most days motivation went on hiatus. On one such afternoon, our painter friend Jeanne Wilkinson dropped by. Clem lolled on the bed. We drew up chairs and chatted. Jeanne asked Clem if he would mind if she did a sketch of him. As a lifelong charcoal sketcher himself, he was pleased. As she took out her pad, Clem matter-of-factly asked, “Do you want me nude?” After much mirth, not shared by Clem, he kept his nightshirt on.

A far less pleasant visit was that of a Harvard professor and his graduate students. Seduced by his fancy titles, the polite formality of our preliminary exchanges, his solicitude in regard to Clem's health, and of course the aegis of Harvard, we agreed to a two-hour “field trip.” Clem had no objections—after all, art talk, students, just his thing. The group arrived, a bit larger than I had anticipated, but everything seemed in order.

Assuming all would go well, I went off for an hour or so to an Al-Anon meeting. I returned to a scene out of
Animal House
: all the lights on, overflowing ashtrays in every room, everyone boozing, and in the smoke-filled bedroom, Clem, bleary on Scotch, surrounded by students, sucking oxygen. Outraged, I ordered them to open every window, put the glasses, bottles, and ashtrays in the kitchen, replace the furniture where it had been, and get the hell out.

Yes, this sort of thing was run of the mill. Yes, I behaved once again “like a wife.” But this was an indignity on a scale that was incomprehensible to me. As for the students, I was sure they had much to chortle about. And the smarmy professor? I was sure he would slither his way to the heights of academe.

During the fall, Clem had routinely put off speaking requests, but there was one engagement that had been on the calendar for some time and that he was reluctant to cancel. The New York Public Library had a special series of appearances by “distinguished authors.” The venue was compelling; for Clem, as for all aspiring New York intellectuals, the Forty-second Street Library was where he had been nourished. Joining the ever-resilient
Art and Culture
, the last of Clem's four volumes of
collected essays and criticism had been published in 1993. Now his life's work was available to all and he would be honored, not only as an art writer in an art context, but as an author. But, as with Paris—though now because of more stringent health problems—it was not to be.

For the most part we inched forward, the waters uncharted. We had never been so encapsulated, our life together having always been such a crowded place. The only other occasions had been those dread driving trips, especially the three-month European odyssey closeted in the mini-Simca, as Clem searched for art gold and came up empty and I searched for togetherness and found loneliness.

Now, we had taken on the coloration of an old married couple. As he had done since the day he had been fired from
Commentary
, Clem continued to do only what he wanted to do. In recent years, when people had asked about his writing, he would say, “I suffer from inertia.” Now, should someone ask, he would just shrug. But no one really asked. As for me, I tended to his needs, anticipated disasters, and fretted about every coughing spell and wheeze. And, like any tired, old married woman, I continued to get grumpy and nag when he forgot to take the pills I put out or he got tangled in the catheter tube. Then, like any old, long-suffering husband, he would take the high road of forbearance, leaving me to bite the dust in shame. Only once, when I had raged long and loud, did he raise his voice: “Don't yell at me!” And I shut up, relieved to know there was a limit to what he could bear.

At night we sat on the love seat in the TV room, watching sitcoms, and I thought about when our love was new and we would lie on the bed at night in our deplorable lingerie-puce bedroom on Bank Street and watch boxing and Sid Caesar and Jack Paar. Now I introduced Clem to the vast menu of TV, and he quickly espoused PBS and the History Channel. In fact, any documentary would do, preferably one about nature. But his favorite was
Frasier
. The runner-up was
Seinfeld
. Always the critic, he would mutter, “Too Jewish” and, “They push too hard for a laugh.” I also introduced him to the wonder of the remote control, which I came to regret. Congenitally incapable of operating anything with buttons or knobs, his plaintive “Jenny” calls notched up as he fell into TV limbo. One morning he reported that he'd found a porn site but then had been
unable to find it again. Unfortunately, I couldn't help him there. And a few minutes later he mused, “All those years, all those girls . . . I would have been better off masturbating.”

One night, as we watched a PBS show about birds, Clem mentioned the nightingale and that he had never heard its song. As if I had heard a clarion call, I sprang into action. Surely, here was something special I could do for him. The bird of poets and fairy tales and even my mother. She who had lived in perpetual innocence and had sent me into my dreams and nightmares with her ramblings of buttercups and nightingales. I had found buttercups, but, like Clem, I never had heard a nightingale. Had she? Had Keats, Yeats, Eliot, or Matthew Arnold? Or did its mystique lie in its elusiveness, a bird that sings in the dark and never sings the same song twice, as if to tantalize and confound?

I headed to the Colony Record store, that mecca of all things musical, where as a singer in the sixties I had combed the racks for the moony torch songs of sad ladies of the twenties and thirties, the more obscure, the better. My songs. Just as two decades later, still in their thrall, those songbirds would become the gritty core of my bittersweet comedic plays. At the Colony, the clerks were intrigued with my quest for the nightingale. They scoured their storeroom, computer records, sourcebooks. The store became an aviary as we listened to records and tapes, just to be sure the elusive diva was not hiding among the sparrows. But all in vain. Until the maturity of the Internet, its mystique would remain intact.

Soon after, I noticed Clem, uncharacteristically without a book, without pen or paper, lying still on his bed. I asked him if he wanted anything. He said, “No, I'm reviewing my life.” I wondered if, in his reverie, he was thinking of the young intellectual who had yearned to be a poet. Was that his link with the nightingale? The poet he had never become, the song he had never heard. Yeats, the poet we both loved, and the bird that sat “ . . . upon a golden bough to sing / to lords and ladies of Byzantium / of what is past, or passing, or to come.”

During the night I would check on Clem. Was the room too hot, too cold? I would adjust the blanket and touch him. Sometimes he would remember in the morning and be pleased. Though I liked hearing that, I preferred being unobserved. Deep down I was afraid that he would
expect more and more tender care and I would either fall short or be eaten alive. I say
deep down
because I knew well the sad, entangled roots of that thought. And also knew that nothing of that sort would ever happen with Clem. He expected nothing of a practical nature from others, and therefore had lived a life free of disappointment and free to enjoy the gifts of the unexpected.

My own expectations in regard to my work went through a sea change at this time. There was a flurry of interest in my plays from directors who submitted them to the McCarter Theater, the Manhattan Theater Club, and the Skirball Theater; they were all rejected. I watched myself open the letters and trash them with indifference. In only a year, my joy of writing had evaporated. The reason was only too clear: The cold hand of reality had left no room in me for the “let's pretend” world of theater.

One afternoon, when two women painter friends of Clem's asked to come by, I once again grabbed the opportunity and joined an out-of-town friend on a jaunt to the Cloisters. Believing as I always had in the gentleness of women, I felt that Clem would be in good hands. I readied him in the living room and, tethered to his tubes, I left him to a few hours of art chat. At the Cloisters I was drawn to a small wood-paneled painting of Jesus,
The Man of Sorrows
. The tears of blood, the suffering. And the Woman of Sorrows, where was she? Who stood for the widows, the mothers of dead children? The Madonna, of course, but she was only in evidence serenely suckling her babe. Alas, the Cloisters may have given me a change of scene, but it was hardly the best feel-good choice at that time.

When I came home, it was a replay of Harvard—the place reeking of cigarettes, all three woozy on Scotch—and I lost it. I threw the Harpies out, opened the windows, and got Clem back to bed. I despised the women, who purportedly loved and esteemed Clem, for their stupidity, and Clem for his complicity, and myself for fighting battles that drained me and bored me and that I knew I could never win. I wouldn't make that mistake again. But those were the moments when another part of me wanted to throw in the towel and move on to the sorrowing widow scenario.

December was a good month for us. Clem's condition remained steady,
enough so, that several times his friends suggested a wheelchair tour of the Met on a day when the museum was closed to the public. Clem would always say yes and then, at the last moment, say no. Even for art, Clem would not be lured from home.

And then it was celebration time. As we always did, Sarah and I staged a bang-up Christmas: a huge tree, proclaimed, as always, “the most magnificent ever,” mounds of presents, and a gathering of friends for Chinese food, Clem's favorite. Clem tottered around on his cane, pleased with the glitz of it all. And after months of interim jobs, Sarah was celebrating her directorship of the new gallery Black+Greenberg on Grand Street. She would be living in an apartment in the back. And more good news: Our tax liens were finally lifted. No more money orders, no more fear of marshals at the door. We could have a bank account and I could trash the worn gray envelope. The OED could rest in peace.

The only sadness was Jennifer's death. She had fought her breast cancer with every fiber in her, but no amount of courage would save her. She had been housebound the last months, seen to by a series of live-in aides who never lasted long, given that they received the brunt of her fierce rage against what was happening to her. I could understand that rage, and would listen and nod. But she barely knew I was there, so completely had she crusted over and moved inside herself. It wasn't long before she was rushed to the hospital. When I arrived there later that morning, there was only an empty bed. I was told she was in the morgue. The word made me shiver, as did the knowledge that she had died alone.