A Complicated Marriage (9 page)

There were also the quiet evenings with Clem's closest friends, one of whom was the painter Friedel Dzubas. Wiry, dark, a lingering German accent that on Friedel, even to my German-phobic ears, sounded charming. A dedicated womanizer, he seemed to be wrapped around a different dazzler every week. I liked him. He was fun and lively.

Clem's other close friend was Sidney Phillips. Clem had met him in 1938 within weeks of moving into the city from Brooklyn, where Clem had been living with his family. Thanks to a $30-a-week government job at the Customs House, he had finally been able to afford a place of his
own, a room with a bath down the hall for $25 a month. Sidney was in publishing, first at Scribner's, then at Dial, and by the time I met him, he and his wife, Gertrude, had founded Criterion Books. We saw them often, usually for dinner at their place. Talk was about books, a relief for me, and sometimes we would dance to Belafonte records. For Clem, Sidney was that soul-mate confidant, that touchstone of common sense who was always there for him. They were a perfect choice to be witnesses at our wedding. In turn, they asked if we would like a party afterward. Yes. And if we would like to use their farmhouse in Great Meadows, New Jersey, for a weekend honeymoon. Yes, again. They even offered the use of their car.

My new geography was now sliced into two parts. Downtown was jazz, poetry, artists, studios, seedy bars, cheap restaurants, Bon Soir, hot singers and comics, Levi's, sandals, and tatty sweaters. Uptown was openings, sedate bars, cocktail parties, restaurants with soft lighting and softer carpeting, my black dress, pearls, pumps, and purse. The division was unequivocal, as if the Great Wall of China had sprung up across Fourteenth Street. Actually, Fourteenth Street itself was still on the “right side.” Hofmann, Kline, and Gottlieb, among others, lived or had studios there.

The demarcation was brought home to me one day when a high-school friend called—that very friend behind whose country house I had first been kissed. Not having been in touch since we'd gone off to college, I was excited to hear from her and suggested she come visit me. “I never go below Fourteenth Street,” she said. I could feel the ice pass through the wire. She didn't come, and I never saw her again. Not because she was a snob, though she was a bit, but because she had a point. I had “crossed over.” It was as finite as that.

Even with my college friends, lines were being drawn, though of a different kind. It became a time of gradual sorting out and diminution. I had imagined that now that I was an almost-wife of leisure, I would have “lunches with the girls.” I tried. One friend now lived with her new husband in an apartment on lower Fifth Avenue and, though she was downtown, the doorman, fancy building, and talk of redecorating and babies in the imminent future soon squeezed our friendship dry.

I really hit bottom with another friend. I knew her well. We had both gone to Rye Country Day School, as well as Bennington. She now lived in Forest Hills and had recently had a baby. She sat with jars of baby food and the TV tuned to soap operas while she complained about her young banker husband, who left too early and came home too late. Her tale was as dull and drab as her surroundings, the air oppressed. In high school, from afar, I had wanted to be her, even more than Debbie Reynolds. She was the brightest light, the “most likely to” girl, wherever she was, was where I wanted to be. In college I had adored her as we sat under a tree, she reading Baudelaire in her flawlessly accented French. Now, pushing her carriage as she walked me to the subway, we passed through streets that screamed “suburbia” and “Rye” while she talked of what she was going to make the banker for dinner.

I was dismayed that she had fallen into the very sinkhole we had so recently rejoiced at escaping. I said nothing. Her lights had gone out. Her quick wit and sense of irony had shut down, and I knew we wouldn't be able to share the joke of it all. Her sadness tracked me home, lifting only when I got below Fourteenth Street. She and her handsome husband came to Bank Street a few weeks later and we went to dinner and the Five Spot. Afterward, Clem summed her up as “dowdy” and mentioned her bad breath. There was no follow-up, and I didn't see her again. In her forties, she would asphyxiate herself in the garage of the Westchester house they had moved to as her husband got richer and, I guess, she got sadder.

My attempts to keep my friends came up empty, with the exception of my tried-and-true Village cronies. The rest were tourists, while I had become a tourist in their worlds. I didn't know how to talk to any of them anymore, to confide in them. How could they possibly understand how scared I was that in Clem's world I might forever feel like a fish out of water, how scared I was of the feelings of boredom and deadness that would sometimes wash through me? How dare I complain about my new life, which seemed to them to be so interesting, even glamorous? Besides, wasn't I supposed to be happy because I was getting married? Sadly, I was closing the door at the time when I most needed to be close to girlfriends who could remind me of who the real Jenny was. Changes
were happening so fast, no matter what Clem had said that day of our engagement.

It turned out Clem had a wish list. First, I should be his barber. Reluctantly, I gave it a try. He was bald on top
.
How hard could it be? Shears in hand, I gingerly picked up bits of his superfine, silky hair and trimmed around the bottom of the fringe, while Clem grumbled that, like a real barber, I should use a comb rather than my fingers. I became defensive in my “take it or leave it” way. And he, being wary, no doubt, of a temperamental barber wielding a sharper instrument than mashed potatoes, suppressed further criticism. Layering the hair on the sides was trickier, and I invariably exposed a spot or two of scalp. But on the whole I rather enjoyed the process, the intimacy of it, and I thought I was pretty good at it. Clem was overjoyed; he'd always wanted to be shaved with a straightedge. He had seen Carole Lombard shave her husband in some thirties movie and, I guess, had found it a turn-on. I said no, with a look that brooked no argument.

Clem's second wish was that I would be, in effect, his amanuensis. In addition to typing, he wanted me to read what he wrote and tell him what I thought. Though I could touch-type, which was what had impressed him initially, I was slow and inaccurate when under scrutiny. Fact was, with his own, half-assed method, he had me beat. As well, he was an exacting writer, paring and refining, subjecting each word and comma to repeated editing until he was satisfied that each piece conveyed his precise intent in the least possible words. Over the years, Clem would lecture far and wide. Invariably, during the Q & A period, some hapless person would attempt to paraphrase something he had written. Clem's response: “If you had read more carefully, you would know that what I said was . . . ”

Letter writing, though much less painstaking, presented a different hazard. By the time I had erased and corrected the original and the carbon, the letter could have been halfway to Mars. His dream that I would relieve him of his onerous chores was gradually laid to rest. A few years later I would take speedwriting classes—shorthand for dummies—again in an attempt to be a helpmate. I enjoyed it, and it would serve me well over the years. As for being an in-house reader of his pieces, it was an
appealing idea but obviously impossible in practice. In any case, Clem's writing was Clem's writing, and, whether letters or manuscripts, it stayed his own, from first draft to last, exactly as it was meant to be.

His third wish, that I should be his banker, was easier. I loved numbers, had even entered college as a math major. I paid bills as they arrived and balanced the checkbook. New to me, I'd never had a bank account. And so simple: rent, utilities, that was about it. Until the windfall.

One afternoon, on the way to some MGM extravaganza at Loew's Sheridan, I picked up the mail. In the dark I opened a letter from my rarely glimpsed Philadelphia aunt, my father's sister. Out fell a check for what I thought was $25 but that, on closer look, turned out to be $250. A bloody fortune, and mine. A wedding present. Someone in my family had at last done the right thing.

When I got home I proudly waved the check at Clem. He grunted, stowed it in the checkbook and, before returning to his book, mentioned that Danny would soon be coming by. Danny was Clem's twenty-year-old son. He was at Georgetown University, not his first or last college, and I had barely seen him since first hearing about him at Delaney's bar. Tall and thin, his bones jutted through his clothes. Ashen skin stretched taut across the sharp planes of his face. He walked with small, urgent steps, hunched forward like an old and desperate man. His hair, already receding from his high forehead, was thin and light brown, his eyes a blazing blue. He chain-smoked, his body never still, no eye contact. He spoke in a monotone, rat-a-tat, fast and angry, an incessant bark. He couldn't listen; he could only challenge. When he did come over, he came for money. He came for much more from his father than that, but there was no bridge, never had been. The other times I had seen him there had been other people over, and he had managed to squeak by socially. But that afternoon the gloves were off.

As the light faded, we sat in semidarkness. Danny needled and goaded Clem until they fell to shouting and almost came to blows. I was frightened. I had never seen or heard anything like it. I wanted to shut them up, throw Danny out, scream at them, cry for them, all at once. I pitied Danny. I wanted to mother him, make him whole, make him smile. I wanted him to like me. I wanted to like him. But he made it impossible.
Just as he always slammed doors instead of shutting them, early on he had slammed the door on me.

Eventually, somehow, they calmed down, and Clem reached for the checkbook. Checks to Danny, whether mailed or by hand, he always wrote out himself. He then turned to me and, holding out my aunt's check, asked me to endorse it over to Danny. I froze. Did I say something like, “But it's mine,” or did my face say it all? Either way, Clem said very quietly, very simply, “There is no me-um, tu-um between us.” The lesson was swift and harsh. I'm sure there were tears as I signed. There I was, like a ten-year-old, crying over the check, knowing that I wanted it both ways: to be taken care of and to keep the bounty that had fallen into my lap. Fortunately, later that night, the quasi-adult in me surfaced and the rightness of what Clem had said and its real import became clear. We were partners. The thought had never occurred to me.

Money was a hot zone for me. I had grown up feeling the pinch that had started after my mother's two-year marriage to the Con Man when I was six. He had stripped her of all available assets and, thereafter, my mother lived on the income of a trust fund set up by her father. Not large to begin with, its value diminished over the years. There was no alimony from the Adulterer; child support was $50 a month.

I first felt the squeeze at Christmas time. Later, the effects became more pervasive. My mother would take us to doctors down back alleys in New Rochelle and to an ancient orthodontist, who never did get my brother's or my teeth straight. Rock bottom for me was when, instead of buying clothes, she would take me to a dressmaker, an old woman who didn't speak much English and who lived in an apartment building that smelled so bad I held my breath. The woman made me school dresses out of scratchy fabrics that didn't fit right and looked too old for me. I would stand before her mirror, she on her knees with pins in her mouth, and when she looked up at me, I tried to smile. I felt so sorry for her that I could never say anything. Even when she concocted her worst, a maroon wool number with pleated skirt and “bolero” jacket. I looked like a blood sausage, and my stomach would turn when I saw it in the closet.

Never would my mother explain the reason for her economies or what I could and could not expect. And knowing what to expect—after two
fathers and four schools before the fifth grade—was a gift I most yearned for. Further skewing my financial perspective, my brother had been left a large bequest that he would inherit at twenty-one. I had been born after The Great White Hunter's death, and my mother had reinforced her son's sole entitlement as the man-child. Girls, as she would always say, would marry—an eventuality that, to her mind, also eliminated the necessity of such things as reading books, learning to drive, and going to college. Meanwhile, as we slipped down the financial ladder, she would always say with a forbearing smile, “Money doesn't grow on trees, dear.” And I would always want to kick her and tell her to hurry up and figure out where it did grow.

Now I was going to marry, and thanks to Clem I was in a “partnership.” On some occasions the partnership took a curious turn. There was a vaudeville routine Clem sometimes launched into when people came by for the first time. I was the straight guy, and it went like this. While Clem went to get drinks, the visitor would perhaps remark on the weather, or on the difficulty of finding our place, all the while taking in the art. Soon would come the by-now-familiar “Do you paint?” At this juncture, with perfect comic timing, Clem would re-enter and cheerfully assure the guest, “Jenny has no interest in art.” Following it up with, “She loves me for my eyes.” He might even hammer it home with, “Jenny doesn't even like art.” At which, feeling like a half-wit, I would flush and murmur some protest. Problem was, it was partly true. With all the openings I went to and painters I was meeting, I rarely took in the art. It was still too much and too soon to even think about such things.

But I had a lot of time to think about Clem and me. How had we ever gotten to where we were? And so fast. Just six months earlier, in the flick of an eyelash, I could have been just another girl among the terse entries in his confirmed bachelor's daybook. That would have been the logical outcome. It certainly would have made more sense to all those people who thought our marriage was a bad idea. Yet somehow, all the negativity had opened me up to how much we belonged together. We coexisted in our own sort of harmony. And because the bond kept getting stronger, I knew it was for the long haul.