Fierce Attachments: A Memoir (15 page)
Read Fierce Attachments: A Memoir Online
Authors: Vivian Gornick
I began leaving home at nineteen and kept leaving until I was married in the living room at twenty-four in a noisy act of faith that announced the matter accomplished. My husband was small (my size); blond (“insignificant-looking,” as Mama put it); foreign (he couldn’t defend himself in English). We were drawn to each other by a common love
of the arts, but he was a visionary painter and in me literature had aroused the critical faculty. He was wordless, I was all words. In him repression was demonic, in me explosive. Most of the time he brooded, twice a year he drank himself into a stupor. I remained sober and a scornful tongue was my constant companion. All the differences were negotiable except one: I talked better than he did and I used words like a weapon. That knocked us hopelessly off balance. I opened my mouth and power was mine: I could slice, cut, and pin; thrust, batter, and storm. He was helpless before the amazing siege. To the very largest degree that must have been how I wanted it, although certainly I could not then see this simple reality driving me on in all my attachments to men. The course I had followed to lead me to this man and this marriage was not difficult to trace (any child analysand could have delivered a creditable description of the psychological terrain), but I remained deep in the woods a quarter of a mile from the road.
of the arts, but he was a visionary painter and in me literature had aroused the critical faculty. He was wordless, I was all words. In him repression was demonic, in me explosive. Most of the time he brooded, twice a year he drank himself into a stupor. I remained sober and a scornful tongue was my constant companion. All the differences were negotiable except one: I talked better than he did and I used words like a weapon. That knocked us hopelessly off balance. I opened my mouth and power was mine: I could slice, cut, and pin; thrust, batter, and storm. He was helpless before the amazing siege. To the very largest degree that must have been how I wanted it, although certainly I could not then see this simple reality driving me on in all my attachments to men. The course I had followed to lead me to this man and this marriage was not difficult to trace (any child analysand could have delivered a creditable description of the psychological terrain), but I remained deep in the woods a quarter of a mile from the road.
A woman in the movement once said, “We were all either stars or groupies.” By groupies she meant the women who had swum in the orbit of the ordinarily accomplishing men they had married and stayed married to. By stars she meant the rest of us: those who bucked and kicked against the allotted destiny, could neither make a proper marriage nor walk away from marriage altogether. I remember entering graduate school at Berkeley and being confronted for the first time by the two kinds of women who conformed to this model. Later I realized it was all there, in that small tight world, relations between the sexes as I would ever know them.
The English department at Berkeley was itself a model for human relations in the world. There were those in power: the brilliant, famous, full professors, and those seeking power: the brilliant young men ready to become the disciple, the protégé, the son and intellectual companion. Together, professor and protégé formed the interlocking links in the chain of civilized cronyism that ensured the ongoingness of the enterprise being served: English literature in the university.
Side by side with the young men were the women students. Most of them came from the Midwest, wore Peter Pan collars, were choked silent with intensity, and in the third year at school became engaged to one of the promising young men. Many of these women were also brilliant: one wrote intellectual poetry, another psychoanalyzed Henry James, a third reinterpreted
The Faerie Queen
. It was interesting to observe how people in the department spoke of such a woman once she became one half of the future academic couple. Before she had not really been spoken of at all. Now she was referred to in muted tones, as though the conversants were in a sickroom speaking of an invalid, and inevitably one heard one of them saying, “Poor Joan. Gifted girl, really. Of course it’s unthinkable that she not marry Mark, who is, after all, brilliant and will carry her into the only life worth having; but what she could have done.” The mixture of ritual and relief in the speaker’s voice was both peculiar and palpable.
The Faerie Queen
. It was interesting to observe how people in the department spoke of such a woman once she became one half of the future academic couple. Before she had not really been spoken of at all. Now she was referred to in muted tones, as though the conversants were in a sickroom speaking of an invalid, and inevitably one heard one of them saying, “Poor Joan. Gifted girl, really. Of course it’s unthinkable that she not marry Mark, who is, after all, brilliant and will carry her into the only life worth having; but what she could have done.” The mixture of ritual and relief in the speaker’s voice was both peculiar and palpable.
Then there were the other women students. Intense in an altogether different way. Brash, difficult, “gypsy-dark” (meaning Jewish from New York), the intelligence strong
not subtle, the sensibility aggressive not demure, the manner startling in its overdirectness, without grace or modesty, disorienting. These women did not fall in love with Mark, who sat next to them in Medieval Lit 101. They studied with him, argued with him, sometimes slept with him, but they did not marry him. Or he them. To Mark these women were exotics, a temporary stimulation to be indulged before one got down to real life. To the women Mark was an ambitious drone, clever but cautious, wanting adoration without an argument. In short, these hungry young people feared, despised, and excited one another. Secretly, I think, most of them yearned to make connection. But the secret remained a well-kept one.
not subtle, the sensibility aggressive not demure, the manner startling in its overdirectness, without grace or modesty, disorienting. These women did not fall in love with Mark, who sat next to them in Medieval Lit 101. They studied with him, argued with him, sometimes slept with him, but they did not marry him. Or he them. To Mark these women were exotics, a temporary stimulation to be indulged before one got down to real life. To the women Mark was an ambitious drone, clever but cautious, wanting adoration without an argument. In short, these hungry young people feared, despised, and excited one another. Secretly, I think, most of them yearned to make connection. But the secret remained a well-kept one.
The men were able to retreat from anxiety into a ready-made identity. They got their Ph.D.’s, married Joan, and went off to walk the carefully prepared road that had been assigned them. The women had no such luck. Who were they to identify with? Where were they to go? At Berkeley I know where they went. They fell into affairs with married professors, black activists, antisocial mathematicians; or they hung out at the bars on the other side of Shattuck Avenue (Berkeley’s social divider), where one met adventurers rather than graduate students: bartenders, painters, poetic drifters, fishermen down from Alaska, pot growers in from Oregon. Their lives were fractured. By day they were absorbed by Renaissance poetry and the life of the English department; by night they slept with men who crossed Shattuck Avenue on a twenty-four-hour visa. Sexual adventure was an event that only rarely converted into experience. In some important way these women remained as innocent of life, of their own lives, as did Mark
and Joan whiling the years away in one remote university town or another.
and Joan whiling the years away in one remote university town or another.
I need hardly say among which group I took my own uneasy place. I had come to Berkeley also trailing a list of “inappropriate” attachments. I already knew I had hopeless trouble with the Marks of this world, trouble I thought originated in their insecurities, their fears, their defenses. Me, I was ready. It was they who didn’t want a wife who talked back, they who were afraid of a woman like me. The contempt poured into those words “afraid of a woman like me.” Such fear was low, cunning, perverse, scurvy and wormlike. A man who was afraid of a woman like me deserved the kind of tongue-lashing that would leave him paralyzed from the waist down.
I didn’t hang out on the other side of Shattuck Avenue, but I managed often enough to find the men with that combination of weakness and strength required to release sexual attraction. Real satisfaction, of course, was never achieved. Something was always wrong with these liaisons. Mary McCarthy had written of the men her own fictional surrogate fell in love with: If they were clever they were funny-looking, if they were virile they were stupid. That equation read like hard-won wisdom to me, and to many of my friends. We quoted McCarthy at one another triumphantly. Her elegant phrasing elevated our condition from the level of complaint to that of fixed truth.
What I could not register was this: In each of these affairs a necessary element of control devolved on me. If a man was short or stupid or uneducated or foreign, I felt sufficiently superior to risk tenderness. I might be socially
uncomfortable but I was freed up. Love was a swamp of overwhelming proportion. It covered the ground once I stepped off the solid territory of miserable, blessed loneliness. To sleep with a man was to start drowning in need. An equalizer was an absolute, not a relative an absolute necessity.
uncomfortable but I was freed up. Love was a swamp of overwhelming proportion. It covered the ground once I stepped off the solid territory of miserable, blessed loneliness. To sleep with a man was to start drowning in need. An equalizer was an absolute, not a relative an absolute necessity.
Stefan was neither stupid nor uneducated, but he was short and foreign and an artist. He groped for words, his English was not fluent, he did work I could not evaluate but could nonetheless be skeptical of. He was also a lapsed Catholic endowed with a missionary zeal for painting that appealed strongly to my own burning moralism. This tipped the balance toward marriage. We met one night at a party in North Beach, not far from the art school where he was a student, and immediately began to discuss the significance of Art, the privilege of being allowed to serve, the promise and the glory, the meaning and the transcendence. The conversation mesmerized us. We met repeatedly to hear ourselves speak the magic words again and again. Very quickly I began to image a life together, intense and high-minded, devoted to the idea of the Great Work.
And he? What did he want from me? The same, the very same. I, apparently, fitted perfectly into the landscape of
his
imagined life. I was a graduate student in literature: that was good. I was a fierce moralizing Jewess: that was better. I worshipped at the shrine of Art: that was best. We told each other that with the stability of a life together we would each do the large work we knew we were meant to do. It was a marriage born of spiritual fantasizing. We did
not want each other, chemically or romantically. The misery that had to be lived out before that simple knowledge was ours.
his
imagined life. I was a graduate student in literature: that was good. I was a fierce moralizing Jewess: that was better. I worshipped at the shrine of Art: that was best. We told each other that with the stability of a life together we would each do the large work we knew we were meant to do. It was a marriage born of spiritual fantasizing. We did
not want each other, chemically or romantically. The misery that had to be lived out before that simple knowledge was ours.
I called home and announced I was getting married. At the other end of the phone my mother was speechless. When she found her tongue it was to revile me for bringing her a goy.
But, Ma! We were communists
! She calmed down, asked me when I was coming back to New York and what kind of a wedding I wanted. Homemade, I laughed.
Thanks, Ma.
But, Ma! We were communists
! She calmed down, asked me when I was coming back to New York and what kind of a wedding I wanted. Homemade, I laughed.
Thanks, Ma.
I came back and she gripped me in a hard, angry embrace. She
did
try, but repeatedly her head filled with blood, over what, I think she hardly knew … oh yes, I was marrying a goy. I was elated. I began to feel embattled. Now I wanted to marry Stefan more, I thought, than I would ever again want anything. I must fight for the integrity of my opposed love, fight her to the death. But each day at noon I was overcome by a wave of nausea, and chaos beat inside
my
head. What was I doing? Why was I getting married? Why was I marrying
him
? Who was
he
? I was going to stand up before a judge and swear, call this man husband, take his name … I felt myself plunging … Don’t think about it, it’s too late now, all too late. If she wins this one you are lost.
did
try, but repeatedly her head filled with blood, over what, I think she hardly knew … oh yes, I was marrying a goy. I was elated. I began to feel embattled. Now I wanted to marry Stefan more, I thought, than I would ever again want anything. I must fight for the integrity of my opposed love, fight her to the death. But each day at noon I was overcome by a wave of nausea, and chaos beat inside
my
head. What was I doing? Why was I getting married? Why was I marrying
him
? Who was
he
? I was going to stand up before a judge and swear, call this man husband, take his name … I felt myself plunging … Don’t think about it, it’s too late now, all too late. If she wins this one you are lost.
An immense activity overtook our kitchen the day before the wedding. Everyone pitched in: Sarah, Mrs. Zimmerman, Marilyn and her mother, cleaning, cooking, laughing, talking. When I think back on it, the only spontaneous fun occurred the day before, in the kitchen, preparing for the festivity. That is,
they
, the other women,
had fun. Not me and Mama. Mama’s face was a mask of tension. She worked hard and well, was helpful to everyone, answered when spoken to, but a cloud of depression surrounded her. The live, warm presence of my mother had disappeared. In its place stood this remoteness posing as Mama. Her anxiety was unbearable to me. It made me crazy. I needed her to respond, to be there with me. I
needed
it. Not getting what I needed, I fell into an anxiety of my own that rendered me nearly speechless. Sick with fear and panic, I wandered about the room smiling wanly: trying so
hard
, I thought. We became a pair of matched performers in the kitchen. The other women gave us a wide berth, speaking carefully to each of us, as one does to the potentially unbalanced. Enraged, I thought, This bitch is spoiling everything for everyone. But then I saw that the conversation of the others was as lightheartedly crude, as briskly outrageous as ever. Only I was being brought down. Only I was responding to Mama’s mean misery with an even meaner one of my own.
they
, the other women,
had fun. Not me and Mama. Mama’s face was a mask of tension. She worked hard and well, was helpful to everyone, answered when spoken to, but a cloud of depression surrounded her. The live, warm presence of my mother had disappeared. In its place stood this remoteness posing as Mama. Her anxiety was unbearable to me. It made me crazy. I needed her to respond, to be there with me. I
needed
it. Not getting what I needed, I fell into an anxiety of my own that rendered me nearly speechless. Sick with fear and panic, I wandered about the room smiling wanly: trying so
hard
, I thought. We became a pair of matched performers in the kitchen. The other women gave us a wide berth, speaking carefully to each of us, as one does to the potentially unbalanced. Enraged, I thought, This bitch is spoiling everything for everyone. But then I saw that the conversation of the others was as lightheartedly crude, as briskly outrageous as ever. Only I was being brought down. Only I was responding to Mama’s mean misery with an even meaner one of my own.
In the late afternoon we suddenly ran out of flour and sugar. Mama pulled off her apron and said she needed air, she would go to the grocery store. I couldn’t let her out of my sight. “I’ll come with you,” I said. She nodded wordlessly, as though she had expected no less.
We left the house and trudged up the block. It was late August. I was wearing a thin dress that was one summer too old. The hem had come down that very morning and I had pinned it up. Now as we walked a mild breeze rippled the dress, exposing the pins. My mother said sharply, “What
is
that?” I followed her gaze. “The hem came down
this morning.” I shrugged. “I couldn’t find the sewing box.” Right then and there, on the street, halfway between the house and the grocery store, she lost her mind.
is
that?” I followed her gaze. “The hem came down
this morning.” I shrugged. “I couldn’t find the sewing box.” Right then and there, on the street, halfway between the house and the grocery store, she lost her mind.
“You are disgusting!” she yelled at me. “Disgusting! Look at you. Just look at you. You’re a mess! That’s what you are. A mess! When will you ever learn? You think you’ll learn? You won’t learn.” People began to turn around. She didn’t notice. Suddenly her body trembled. Her skin lost its color. She pushed her face at mine. “He’ll never marry you,” she hissed.
The pain in my chest cracked open, and an angry frightened excitement ran quickly into the cleared space. She was jealous, great God, she was jealous. It wasn’t just that I was getting married, it was that the glamorous goy was taking me out into the world. I could see it in her eyes. We stood there, immobilized. I felt my face going gray like hers. Without another word, we turned away from each other and continued on to the grocery store.
From the cake to the music to the clothes, the wedding was indeed homemade. We pushed the furniture into the bedrooms, threw open the glass doors between the two middle rooms, set up a table of food at one end, a friend who played the accordion at the other, and in between a mob of people ate, drank, and danced, whooping with ceremonial high spirits. Very quickly, the atmosphere generated warmth, intimacy, filial affection. The only strangers at the wedding were Stefan and I. We stood together on an island in the middle of the room. On this island each of us was alone. He didn’t have a friend in sight, and all the Yiddish made him horribly uncomfortable. I did have
a friend in sight, but the strain in his face separated me from my friends. What had drawn us together and urged us into this moment had suddenly become a desperate abstraction. We could neither join nor counteract the power of the inherited ritual being acted out on our behalf. Completing my isolation was the sight of Mama in continual food-supplying motion, her eyes grim, on her mouth a fixed smile, her hand out palm up warding off congratulations.
a friend in sight, but the strain in his face separated me from my friends. What had drawn us together and urged us into this moment had suddenly become a desperate abstraction. We could neither join nor counteract the power of the inherited ritual being acted out on our behalf. Completing my isolation was the sight of Mama in continual food-supplying motion, her eyes grim, on her mouth a fixed smile, her hand out palm up warding off congratulations.
Stefan and I returned to California and set about making a home out of a five-room flat in North Beach. The place was a shambles (crumbling walls, flaking ceilings, broken floors), but the rooms were shapely and the light transforming, and I think we thought at the end of that project we would be real married people. We set to work with hearts that were actually lightened by the prospect of the work ahead of us, hearts made heavy now each day and each night as we tried to negotiate the terrifying reality to which an errant impulse had joined us. For the first time we saw how foreign we were to one another. I had not a bohemian bone in my body, he had not an unrebellious one in his. I could not bear incoherence in the physical surround, he could not bear a room that seemed finished. I cherished clarity of thought, he was drawn to mystic revelation. Each day brought long moments of unhappiness it took hours to recover from. Each night we took to bed our confusion, our longing, our paralyzing intensity. Only rarely did our bodies give us relief, and then but for an
hour. It was my first experience of sexual love as catharsis, wherein one is left as lonely in the morning as one had been the evening before.
hour. It was my first experience of sexual love as catharsis, wherein one is left as lonely in the morning as one had been the evening before.
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