Dry Your Smile (42 page)

What a detour. This must be what tranquilizers do for you. Relax your brain so much it toddles off in any direction toward which you give it the slightest nudge. Thank god this is a private journal. At last, to begin keeping a journal with the certainty no one will look into it unless at my specific request! This in itself is a great leap forward. Why did it have to wait until I'd left Larry?

Left Larry—how odd that sounds. Unreal. (What else is new?) I sat in that damned movie theater, watching another damned pair of damned failing lovers, and crying like Niobe. I also kept getting up and phoning Ginny every fifteen minutes or so until she returned home. The ideal host, Ginny, for someone like me: literary agent, friend, someone who would sympathize but not moralize, leap to no major conclusions, neither pry nor psychologize, be discreet, leave me alone, and let me spend the night. At last she answered the phone. I had found a refuge.

Now, this morning: resentful, worried, yet strangely relieved. I can't believe the separation is other than a trial one, can't believe that Larry and I won't still “come through.” My face is bloated from crying. My body aches. I feel like I used to after big fights with Hope—needing to sleep, to heal, for days afterward.

I have actually left Laurence.

I can't help being stunned that things have gone this far—for
us
, who were going to be different.

But I have hope.

Why
do
I have hope? (And definitely with a
lower-case
“h.”)

Because there's nothing else for me to have.

March 27, 1983. At Charlotte's.

Well, the keeping of a daily journal seems one resolution already gone down the tube, along with my home of almost twenty-two years and the idea of a rapid reconciliation. So much for what I think was secretly in the back of my mind when I wrote the first entry in this blank book: Julian's one night of running away from home.

I stayed at Ginny's for four days, but couldn't impose myself any longer, not that she made me feel as if I were an imposition. But with only one bedroom and her insistence on sleeping on the couch, it was absurd. So I returned to the loft, ostensibly to pick up some clothes. I had been living in the same jeans, shirt, sweater, and boots during the interim—a condition which brooks no excuses for not washing one's underwear and sox
every single
night. Actually I returned to the loft hoping that L. and I might exchange one look and fall into each other's arms, music up, slow fade-out. This did not happen. I was met by his physical absence but his psychic presence, in the form of one of those chilling notes laid on top of a pile of my mail, reading: “Please attend to rent payment which was due on 15th unless you wish me thrown out into the gutter along with your books and manuscripts which I'm sure mean more to you than I do.”

So much for imminent reconciliation. Picked up mail and a few changes of clothes; made some calls giving Ginny's phone as the one for leaving messages in case of free-lance work. Hung around getting tearful over the cats. Started to water the plants, but he'd done that. Secretly hoped he'd walk in and we'd take one look, fall into each other's etc. Gazed longingly at my study, desk, typewriter. Gathered up a few file folders and the draft of the current chapter in the middle of which I supposedly am. Felt silly and dazed. Left again.

But one of the calls I made was to Athena, and when I said to leave messages with Ginny, may the angels forever bless her soul Charlotte instantly put one and one together and did not come up with two. She came up with one separated from one. She casually asked—making no production of it—whether by chance I could use a place to stay for a while “to get some work done in quiet.” Why good heavens yes however did you guess my dear, said I. She then said that she and Zach were going away for two weeks (she on vacation now that the spring list is out of the nest and to accompany him to a shrinks' convention in Europe, and then a holiday) and it would be a terrific favor to
her
if I'd apartment-sit and poodle-sit. Charlotte, thought I, never mind your publishing all the Maxine Duncan Brewers in the world: you got class, kid.

So here I am at Charlotte and Zach's. Which is eerie, considering how often I've been here as a dinner guest; rather like getting to go backstage and see the workings of a particular production you've viewed many times from out front. But it's lovely having a large, comfortable apartment all to myself, even unto two dogs who try but fail to play cat-surrogate for the much-missed-by-me loft cats.

I had one out-of-town-overnight, a speaking date in Chicago, but came back here and have almost another whole week to go. After that, I'm not sure. Some stubborn part of me trusts that by then L. and I will have worked it out—whatever that means. Some vigilant part of me worries that we
will
, but only by patching a Band-Aid over a festering wound. Other parts of me are engaged in excitement at the prospect of being truly on my own, in (premature?) mourning for our marriage, in rage (against him, me, us, history, and patriarchy), and in (very large part of me occupied with this one:) panic.

Iliana has been an incredible friend. She immediately offered her place to me—on not one but two careful counts: she reminded me that her sofa opened up into a bed, and said we could set up a cardtable as a makeshift desk, so that the living-room could become “my space”; she
also
offered to go and stay with friends so I could have her apartment to myself in “privacy.” Stunningly generous. But I told her I wouldn't think of evicting her from her own hard-won turf, that I was set for the moment at least. Everything is up in the air. It's dizzying to realize that I have no idea where I'll be a week from now.

No savings account, of course. Nor can I suddenly cease paying the loft bills; it is, after all, my home. Besides, Laurence has no income right now, how would he survive? Furthermore, I may be back there in some resolved manner by next week. This time everything is unreal for real.

I've seen Iliana every day, except when I was out of town. She's loaned me cash, made me eat, even made me forget all this misery for a moment or two and laugh at the madness of it. She's never bad-mouthed Laurence, yet she's managed to be a remarkably strengthening presence. Never a reference to any sexual matter between us; in fact, a flat refusal to discuss the subject when I've tried to raise or clarify it. I have a dread of seeming to “lead her on” but she keeps waving all such discussions aside with one of her wise crone “I know what I say” dismissals.

This evening, at dinner, we arranged to go together tomorrow and attempt the first siege on Hope's apartment. It can't be put off any longer. In fact, somewhere in the midst of my own vagrancy, I've got to make the time and find the stamina to face disposition of that co-op, as well as proceed with the nursing-home odyssey.

Good god. Doctors, lawyers, Laurence, bills, no roost of my own, more speaking dates coming up but little money now and it's always a four-to-six-week lag between the date and the college actually sending the check. My papers and files for the current book sitting in my study at the loft. Hope in the hospital, staring straight ahead of her whenever I go to visit, which has been every day except for when I was in Chicago. Not knowing whether she's deliberately un-seeing me or if that's part of her condition; suspecting the former.

I sit at the side of her hospital bed and study her. All that power, that archetypal numinousity—now so enfeebled. Lavender veins prominent in her chalky, flaccid skin; the bones of her skeleton already beginning to flirt through her surfaces—in the grimace of teeth, the claw of a hand. Her skull hints its contours more boldly through the lifeless strands of gray white hair. Sometimes she sneaks a glance at me, but mostly she won't even look in my direction.

I still fear her.
Damn
. This moronic
fear
in me—of what? She's far too weak to hurt me physically. She's even incontinent. Parkinson's, strokes, the cast on her hip, dehydration, the ever-present danger of pneumonia in a patient so bedridden—what more do I want? She's powerless. How can she possibly hurt me now?

She does have power. She has the power to not love me.

Is that where it all begins? The power to withhold love, the primal cause of all violence? She never did actually withhold it (I
think)
. But she must have used the threat of doing that in a manner so subtle and effective as to have created in me this gaggingly desperate approval-search, this supposed devotion to “selflessness” that literally, as Iliana points out, means a lack of self. Making waves everywhere but in my own private life. “Supporting” as the only way I know how to express love. Even turning at-first independent people like Laurence into dependent ones, so I can play the indispensable martyr-mother. Not for nothing was my nickname for her “Little Momma” when I was only four years old.

So now what? I guess just go on. Here we go again, but more so: one step at a time, put your little foot … I keep bursting into tears at the oddest times—in the shower, on the bus, in the plane's lavatory, standing at a curb. Waiting for the light to change. And always in bed at night, crying as I try to fall asleep.

Then there's a blissful split-second in the morning, on awakening, when I haven't yet remembered what's happened, where I am and where I'm not, what I must face in general and on that particular day. Then the wake-up tears start.

Still. I'm fortunate, I tell myself, given the circumstances. Thank the universe for Ginny, for Charlotte, for the women who want me to come and lecture at their schools. Thank the universe for Iliana de Costa.

March 28, 1983

I've been to Hope's apartment. I literally don't know what I would have done had Iliana not been with me. No words for it.

Flimsy approximations: squalor, chaos, filth, jetsam of a life, madness. The condition it was in when I was last permitted inside has worsened to a state I couldn't have imagined. If I were ever to put such a scene into a story, I'd have to reduce it, bring the details down into some border-reality, or everyone would think I had a wildly exaggerative runaway mind. She had become a total recluse. Her mail—including a few puny stock-dividend checks, millions of stockholder-meeting proxy notices, appeals for donations to various synagogues and Jewish hospitals and children's homes—is heaped in piles all over the place, unopened for months. Layers of dust blanketing everything, plaster peeling from the ceiling, windows opaque with grime. Cockroach metropolis in the slimehole of a kitchen. Green mold scumming whatever used to be food in the refrigerator; just to open the fridge door could knock you over with the stench.

She must somehow have got it together to scribble a few checks each month for Mrs. Washington to mail—the co-op maintenance, telephone and utilities, Washington herself. But Mrs. W. tells me she hasn't been paid for a month, so I sent her my own check for what was owed her; what else could I do? It'll take weeks to sort out what's left of Hope's “financial affairs.” Meanwhile, the notion of attacking that apartment, cleaning it up, and getting it on the market as fast as possible so there's money for the nursing home—it's overwhelming.

I vomited up the light lunch Iliana made me eat before going there. I stood in Hope's shit-streaked bathroom, leaning over the sink heaving and weeping—because it was there she fell, it was from there she'd started her creep toward the phone. Iliana cleared a space on the sofa with one efficient sweep of her arm, sat me down, plonked herself beside me, sighed, and announced that if Hercules could manage the Augean stables alone, then two women ought to be able to handle this together, since the jobs were about on the same level.

How can you not laugh through your tears at the preposterousness of this situation? How can you not love a friend like that?

I'm too wasted to write more now. I think I'm even beat enough to fall asleep without the usual Thinking About Everything first, which would be a blessing. Tomorrow we start the clean-up. And tomorrow I find out if I can stay at Ginny's again; she'll let me know for sure if she's decided to go to the West Coast Book Fair. And tomorrow I have to call Laurence and let him know that I need to make another loft-raid, for some work-clothes in
which
to approach Hope's Augean stables. Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow …

April Fool's Day, 1983.

I can go to Ginny's, thank god. Excellent timing, because Charlotte and Zach return on the 4th and that's when Ginny will be taking off for California. So I'll apartment-sit and plantsit there for five days. That takes me to the 9th. Then what?

The irony is that if I didn't have to sell Hope's co-op in such a rush, all the work to clean it up could have yielded a more permanent-temporary place to stay. Hello irony, old friend.

We certainly have started cleaning it up.

First there were the huge plastic trash bags we'd brought with us, into which we threw the contents of the fridge and the pantry cupboards, the old magazines and newspapers and circulars and junk mail, the gummy stuff in the medicine cabinet and on the bathroom shelves, and the barely touchable stinking bed linen. Then there were more huge trash bags, which we filled with old clothing of hers that she hadn't worn in years—high-heeled platform shoes, moth-eaten fur hats, holey-fingered gloves, the works—to be donated to the hospital thrift shop.
Then
there were the plastic bags for the Julian Travis Shrine in the bedroom: in went the doll collection, the 1950's Teresa Brewer-Pat Nixon-style dresses, all the wee pastel-dyed slippers—also destined for the thrift shop. Iliana refused to let me throw out the photographs or awards; she thinks I'll write about all this someday and they might be useful to jog my memory. Hilarious thought: that I could ever write about this, and that my memory—which wants nothing more now than amnesia—would need jogging. But she insisted, so those went into the “for storage” pile. (Arguing with Iliana when one is feeling strong is a job in itself; in my state, forget it.)