A Tragic Honesty (77 page)

Their circuits go out one after another, and they must fill silence and darkness with commitment and relationship and identity and sharing and coping and space and meaningful … and this-level and that-level and feelings and feelings and feelings and feelings—this spastic paralysis can go on for hours until somebody manages to change the fuse; only then do things come back to life and allow a girl to say “love” again.

So I am forever grateful that Laura M— is an extraordinary girl. Her circuits never go out. Her “no” and her “too old” may hurt like whips, but they are words a man can trust.

One can fill in a lot of blanks based on these pages; suffice to say, the basic trajectory of the romance seems to have been pretty much the same as all the others in Yates's life, if perhaps mitigated by a bit more humor and mutual appreciation than usual. “When Laura said she didn't like my story I shouted ugly stuff for about two hours and made her cry,” he wrote. “Since that night, I have been unable to discuss my work with Laura at all except in postures of arrogance or apology.” That Yates would have found other reasons to shout at her (and surely did) is beyond doubt, but once she saw fit to criticize his work, however innocently, the die was cast. Indeed, most of Yates's “Notes” seem the product of his creative brooding on that subject, as when he imagined Laura considering one of his stories for the
Atlantic
:

She reads it through with an open mind, blinking now and then at the soft-edged and idealized parts; then she prepares an inter-office memo to Richard Todd [an editor at the magazine].

Dick: (And Laura, bless her heart, hasn't yet gotten over a sweet, secret thrill at calling Mr. Todd by his first name) This new R. Yates story leaves much, I think, to be desired.…

A few days later she receives Todd's reply:

Laura: I couldn't agree more. Soft-edged, idealized and boring, boring, boring.… Reject this piece. Trash it. Wipe it out. We will, I think, be doing the wretched man a favor.…

The diamond-bright precision of Todd's intelligence is just the tonic Laura needs to help her compose her letter to me, which reads like this:

Dear Richard Yates: Like most of your previous thirty-four submissions, this one came close.…

I'm afraid I can't meet you for a drink on Friday, as promised; something has come up. Try me later in the month, okay?

Kisses, L.…

*   *   *

Whenever I say ugly stuff in restaurants, Laura goes into the ladies' room and cries. This helps her to put me in perspective.… I make frequent use of mens' rooms, too, in various bleak and melancholy ways, but Laura doesn't known anything about that.…

*   *   *

This is a multiple-choice question. If Laura is the nicest girl I have ever known … then how come I shout ugly stuff at her all the time?

A. Because I want to disappoint her and drive her away like the harsh and terrible old man I am afraid of becoming.

B. Because I am like Doctor Jack-O'-Lantern in having to show I don't need anybody's kindness while dying for it.

C. Because I drink too much beer.

The best answer wavers somewhere between
B
and
C,
though the ramifications of
C
are everywhere in evidence, and help to explain another item:

I am pretty sure Laura thought pushing me over the hedge was funny, but she didn't laugh at the time because that would have spoiled her sense of outrage. In much the same way, she seldom allows outrage to spoil her sense of what's funny, even on being teased about such matters as vegetarianism and cultivated body hair.

Fair to assume that Laura pushed (and Yates fell) because he was exasperatingly drunk again, and then the fact that she cultivated body hair and vegetarianism would seem to push the whole opposites-attract principle beyond the generational pale. Other problems apparently included her admiration for the brilliance of David Milch (who'd taught her at Yale), her frequent fraternizing with friends her own age (“this madcap shuttling between Somerville and Harvard and Jamaica Plain”), and the fact that, finally, she'd begun to avoid Yates entirely except for the odd weekday lunch. “I love Laura M—,” the “Notes” sadly conclude. “I will love Laura M—until the day I push aside my Jello and scratch at the window of my oxygen tent for the last time.”

A month or so later, Laura took a job with Random House and moved to New York. “She's offered ample assurance that we'll still be ‘friends,' but I've never really believed in stuff like that,” Yates wrote the Arkansas woman named Booghie that December. “Still, I've been familiar with loneliness before, many times, and know I'll survive it. If I can't exactly welcome it like an old comrade, at least it's no worse than putting up with some tiresome old acquaintance of mine.” In the meantime he wondered if he might address his present correspondent as Margaret: “Because while ‘Booge' is certainly a cute and kicky name—Don't get me wrong—I think I'd prefer the idea of a lovely, forever unattainable girl named Margaret, down there in Arkansas, to whom I can write letters once in a while—on the hopeful assumption that she might once in a while write back.” But he must have decided that Arkansas was too far away, or that a married woman named Booghie really was too unattainable, or that confessing his loneliness to a relative stranger was unseemly, or perhaps the letter got lost amid the roach droppings and other refuse. In any case it was never sent.

*   *   *

Yates had a horror of being pitied (at least by non-intimates), and as his health declined and the sadness of his life became obvious, he took more frequent refuge in a gruff, though by no means humorless, persona. “Ahh, mind your own goddamn business!” he'd snap, coughing, when solicitous strangers would advise him to quit smoking. “You guys ever going to start wearing grownup clothes?” he said to Dubus and Jim Crumley, indicating their cowboy boots and jeans. In such a mood he particularly relished the chance to squelch anything smacking of pretension or phoniness. “I just love your work, Mr. Yates,” said a critic from the
Boston Globe
. “And I can see why Flaubert is such an influence. Really, there's no great novel that
isn't
about adultery.” Yates looked the man up and down, then laughed in his face: “You're out of your mind!” At the same time Yates became all the more sympathetic toward what he perceived as real suffering. The writer John Casey had gotten on Yates's bad side some fifteen years before in Iowa (by seeming overprivileged and picking on Bob Lehrman), but when the two met in 1980 at their mutual friend Bill Keough's house, Yates was strikingly kind. “Yates really likes you,” Keough told Casey afterward, and it occurred to the latter that he'd endeared himself by having had the “worst year of [his] life”: “My dog and father had died, my wife had left me, and my best friend had just killed himself. I'd been kicked to shit, and now I was a real human being in Dick's eyes.” When Casey went on to win the National Book Award, Yates wrote him a warm letter of congratulation.

Early that summer Dan Wakefield returned to Boston after three years in Los Angeles, and immediately got in touch with Yates. “I was in terrible condition, drinking way too much,” said Wakefield, “and I knew Dick would be a good person to drink with.” That he was, though a proper venue was crucial. Yates became paranoid in upscale establishments such as the Hampshire House, and would argue with waiters who'd slighted him in some way, real or imagined, whereupon he'd be cut off at the bar. It was largely a self-fulfilling prophecy: Because he felt scrutinized he drank more to lessen his anxiety, which naturally resulted in scrutiny-provoking behavior. One night at the Newbury Steak House he lit his beard on fire and sat flapping his hands at his face.

After that, he and Wakefield stuck to the Crossroads, where their Friday night “ritual dinner” was the only regular event on Yates's social calendar. “He was a wonderful source of solace, encouragement, and literary friendship and support,” Wakefield noted. “I loved hearing him put down the ‘phonies' and the overrated novels whose style was not really up to snuff … as he waved his long, bony finger and smiled knowingly above his beard.” Lest one get the impression Yates had mellowed with age—full of benign, finger-wagging wisdom about the perennial rise and fall of literary pretenders—rest assured the reality was a good deal more raucous.
“What a crock of shit!”
was the constant punch line when Yates discussed writers he despised. “Wakefield,” he'd rasp, “every seven or eight years a book comes out by
some fucking phony
and gets reviewed on the front page of the
Times
and everybody
loves
it and it's not worth
shit
.” The current paradigm was John Irving's
The World According to Garp
—“What a crock of shit!”—or anything by Joseph Heller or Saul Bellow (the friends agreed with Tom Wolfe's definition of hell: A bus ride across America with nothing to read but
Mr. Sammler's Planet
). After six months of such boozy commiseration, Wakefield startled his friend one night by ordering a Diet Coke; while Yates sat stunned and indignant, Wakefield sheepishly admitted that he'd decided to go on the wagon. “A Diet Coke!” Yates roared every time thereafter. “Yeah, and then he's gonna go home and play with his paper dolls!”

Wakefield remembers Yates as a “charming, witty man” whose ugly side only surfaced when he was very drunk or disturbed or both, but the ugly side was all Martha saw after the divorce. On the phone he was usually fine: They'd talk briefly about Gina, and only seldom would he try to lure her into more intimate territory. “But in person,” said Martha, “he
invariably
became nasty; seeing me triggered bad feelings in Dick.” In the fall he visited Gina in Durango, and the three went out to dinner together. It may have been that Yates resented Martha's insinuating herself into these outings in a vaguely custodial role; in any event he began tipsily baiting her with an off-color story that struck her as inappropriate in the presence of the eight-year-old Gina. The more she warned Yates to stop, the more smirkingly nasty he became, until finally she threw a quiche at him. Affecting high delight, he laughed as they were ejected from the restaurant. In the parking lot Martha asked Gina if she were coming home with her, but the child loyally refused to leave her father. (“I
really
tried to avoid being involved in Dick's visits after that,” said Martha.) Gina vividly remembers how Yates, distrait, drank so much beer at breakfast the next day that their waitress politely insisted he have coffee before ordering more.

One night Wakefield got a call from Yates, who said he was sick and had run out of food. Wakefield brought a bag of groceries to Yates's apartment, which “reminded [him] of something out of Dostoyevsky”: It was almost completely dark inside (Yates hadn't ventured out in a long time, apparently, and the lightbulb had expired), except for the blue glow of the stove burners, which were turned up against the cold. When Yates called his friend a second time, he was frantic and incoherent. Rather panicked himself, Wakefield called Monica Yates and told her something was terribly wrong with her father, but she didn't seem particularly shaken. “Here he goes again,” she said, and tried to reassure the man (“Don't get too upset; it happens a lot”). She suggested he take Yates to the nearest emergency room, where they'd arrange to transfer him to the VA.

The frequency of Yates's breakdowns increased as he became more solitary and miserable. Again and again he'd drink too much and stop eating, subsisting on coffee, cigarettes, and alcohol until he became ill and disoriented. At first Wakefield was a little startled that Yates's daughters didn't seem more concerned, though by then they'd learned the hard way that it didn't pay to meddle. “Ahh, Wakefield's just a damn busybody!” Yates would snap, if Sharon or Monica admitted over the phone that his friend was worried about him (hence the call). Except in states of desperate paranoia or physical distress, Yates would refrain from contacting people and simply lie low in his apartment brooding over some particular delusion. If one of his daughters happened to get him on the phone, he'd interrogate her in a coy, tentative way: “So … do you think I did something
terrible
to Gina?” (when in most cases he hadn't seen the girl in months)—whereupon they'd usually call an ambulance or get in touch with Winthrop Burr (“Dad's on the blink again”), who'd authorize hospitalization on the legal grounds that Yates was unable to care for himself. Within a few days—sober, medicated, and somewhat lucid again—Yates would be up in arms with whoever had hospitalized him. “He'd call me
stupid
and say I was missing the point,” Burr remembered. “That I harped on his drinking when that wasn't the problem. ‘Useless,' ‘worthless'… I heard that a lot.” Generally Yates would discharge himself at the first opportunity—one nurse reported seeing him leave (or try to) “with tubes hanging out of every orifice”—and angrily vow that he'd
never
go back, that he
refused
to “sit around watching TV and eating ice cream with a bunch of crazies.”

Deeply humiliated afterward, Yates seemed to blame others for having seen him at his worst, and the more one tried to help, the more culpable one became. “How did you know? Who told you? Who called the doctor?” he'd grill his daughters after his latest breakdown. He was never contrite, certainly never grateful, and inevitably even the kindest people learned to keep their distance. Joan Norris had remained fond of Yates over the years, but beyond a point she refused to meet him unless Wakefield went with her. “What the hell did you get me up to Boston for, you bitch?” Yates would turn on her. “You're just a groupie!” That he was unwell didn't make such attacks any less stunning. “They were so weird and sudden,” said Norris, “like a splash of cold water. There was no trigger, it just happened.” Even the tolerant Wakefield began to stay away, though he liked and admired and finally pitied Yates too much to drop him entirely. Yates in turn tended to treat Wakefield with the respect due a fellow writer and dear man, but he would bristle at any suggestion, no matter how meek, that he take better care of himself. “It just got too painful,” said Wakefield. “He went on doing the same things over and over.”