Fierce Attachments: A Memoir (18 page)

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Authors: Vivian Gornick

BOOK: Fierce Attachments: A Memoir
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On Tuesday of the following week I left New York on a journalistic assignment. An hour before I was to go, Davey called.
“Don’t respond,” he hissed at me. “Simply listen to what I say. Let it all flow through your mind as I’ve taught you. Let it flow through, right through. Then you will think about it.”
I coughed.
“Don’t respond, I say!”
Silence. Long silence. Then: “Your father was a witch, he bewitched you, left you guilty, that’s why you feel like a shmuck and inferior. That’s your true mission as a reporter.
You’re traveling around to find your father, or whatever it is he represents. When you find it you’ll stop traveling. Take the picture of your father in your bedroom down off the wall. That’s the witch in you that keeps it up there. Take it down and turn it to the wall. Take it down. And remember. Talk to no one. Not to your mother or to your friends. No one. Only to God.” He stopped speaking. I dared not open my mouth. Then he said, “Goodbye. I love you. When you’re ready we’ll have babies, and you’ll be transformed into the Queen of Israel.”
Within a month Davey had made his way to Orthodox Judaism. Overnight he became an eighteenth-century Jew wearing black clothes, sidelocks, and a huge gray-black beard. We met once more. He leaned across the table in a filthy ultra-kosher restaurant on East Broadway to warn me that I must become a good Jewish wife or my soul was lost forever. His breath on my face was hot and sour. At last, I felt his panic and his terrible longing. Within myself, I shrank from him, repelled. This is the last, I thought, absolutely the last.
“There’s a policeman,” my mother is saying. “Ask him how we get onto the bridge.”
We walk over to the cop standing in the middle of the traffic island, cars sweeping past us in all directions.
“How do we get onto the bridge?” I ask.
The cop stares at me. “Why?” he asks.
“We’d like to walk across it.”
“You’re kidding me.”
“No, I’m not. Why?”
“Lady, every week three to seven people get mugged on
this bridge. What chance do you think you two will have? I definitely recommend you forget the whole thing.”
“So,” my mother says dully. “Nothing’s changed on Delancey Street, has it?”
“Come on, Ma. We’ll take the subway.”
 
 
 
 
I sat at the desk and I struggled to think. That’s how I liked to put it. For years I said, “I’m struggling to think.” Just as my mother said she was struggling to live. Mama thought she deserved a medal for swinging her legs over the side of the bed in the morning, and I guess I did, too, just for sitting at the desk.
In the little tenement apartment on First Avenue the fog came rolling in the window. Vapor thickened the air, and mist filled the room. I sat with my eyelids nailed open against the fog, the vapor, the mist, straining to see through to my thoughts, trapped inside the murk. Once every few weeks the air cleared for half a second, and quick! I’d get down two paragraphs of readable prose. Time passed. Much time. Much dead time. Finally, a page. Then two pages. When there were ten pages I rushed to print. I looked at my paragraphs in print: really looked at them. How small, I thought. How small it all is. I’ve been sitting here so long with these pages, and they’re so small. A man said to me, “Good insight. Pity you didn’t have time to develop it.” A woman said, “What you could do if you didn’t have
to meet journalistic deadlines. A shame there’s no government subsidy.” I started to speak. Misery dissolved in my mouth, glued my lips shut. What would I say if I could speak? And to whom would I say it?
I “struggled” on.
 
 
Two years after I left Davey Levinson sitting in the restaurant on East Broadway I interviewed Joe Durbin for a story I was writing on a rent strike. He was a labor organizer on the left, and a throwback to the romantic figures of my earliest life. The union movement was Joe’s passion. He had been an official in the CIO, known every labor leader from John L. Lewis to Walter Reuther, and had organized all over the historical map: California in the thirties, Michigan in the forties, New York in the fifties. He was twenty years older than me, and he was married. The age difference gave me my control. A week after the interview he called to suggest dinner. We were together six years.
The connection was immediate and primary. Without discussion or analysis we moved directly into the heart of the feeling. In a single fluid motion we had achieved both peace and excitement. “Home,” my body said to me, “I’m home.”
I did not think to ask what Joe’s body was saying to him; it seemed unnecessary. He visited me nearly every day, called when he said he’d call, came when he said he’d come. He was, I knew, even more devoted than I to maintaining the swiftly moving current of infatuation. Insecurity was not going to slow us down. Joe was as good an organizer in love as in politics: next to the labor movement
he most adored women. That is, he adored feeling alive through the act of love, and was possessed of great tenderness for the agent of renewed vitality.
I realized it was not me he was adoring, I knew it was the hungriness that had awakened in him, yet I lay back on the bed smiling secretly to myself, exactly as though what I knew to be true wasn’t true at all. You would have thought I was Nettie. “It’s not me he loves,” I said to myself as he bent over me, “it’s the sensation I arouse in him”—and then didn’t believe what I told myself at all. I couldn’t. No one under the influence can. And in some ways it was not so farfetched that I not believe myself. With Joe I was learning better something I already knew: that sex buys time. I saw that whenever we went to bed we were drawn into an exchange of feeling that repeatedly took us by surprise. The surprise kept us coming back for more. Thus, we remained locked in an embrace that caused each of us to look on occasion into the face of the other.
He had a million war stories and he never stopped telling them. A tall noisy man whose voice dominated the room, Joe was endlessly absorbed by his own effort to make sense of things. I think each time he told one of his old stories he expected to find something new in it that would, explain things better than it had the time before. In his late fifties, the man did not know the meaning of mental repose. Engagement was the need of his soul: he responded to everything. If the terms of an argument were foreign to him, or the circumstance he found himself in confusing, or a set of gestures unintelligible, he rapidly translated the terms, puzzled out the circumstance, made an interpretation that persuaded him he understood what
was going on. He found it unbearable to live in a world he could not make sense of. If he couldn’t make sense of things he couldn’t act, and to act was his necessity.
In this respect we were wonderfully matched. I had been uncertain all my life about how to act, but I, too, could not live a minute an hour a day except in a state of indiscriminate verbal responsiveness: I had a position on everything. What’s more, my anxiety over an absence of response in others was monumental. In the face of silence I talked rapidly and at overwhelming length to fill what I experienced as the void, exhausting myself and those who had brought down on me the punishing need to speak words, words, words. With Joe it was heaven. We had a built-in mechanism for release and replenishment. We talked ourselves to a frenzy, then made fierce and dreamy love, then uncoupled and went on talking.
Our exchange was not exactly conversation. Carried on at a high level of speed and noise, it consisted of a series of rapid-motion confrontations. Assertion, denial, defense was the way we understood talking. And the more urgent the facedown—that is, the more volatile and explosive—the more stimulated and reassured, I think, each of us was. This appetite we had for arguing the point right down to the ground was a measure of how fundamental a weapon we both conceived the articulating intelligence to be. If we could each persuade the other to see the truth as we saw it, the world would somehow turn on its axis and all that thwarted us would be emptied out into harmless space.
We paid no real attention to the fact that we quarreled continuously. We laughed about what a social cliché we were: the feminist and the leftist locked together in erotic
battle. We thought because we were always talking we were connecting. In truth, we connected only in bed. On our feet we defended positions. Given such tumult, it seems remarkable now that the surprises kept coming.
One day, when we had been together six or eight months, we went for a walk and met a school friend of mine. She suggested a cup of coffee. Joe, thinking to be socially responsible and to charm my friend, took over the conversation. That is, he did not allow conversation to develop. If one of us said, “There’s a banana peel on the sidewalk,” Joe said, “Speaking of banana peels, that reminds me of the time in Flint, Michigan, when …” and he was off on a twenty-minute labor story. My friend looked puzzled. Joe did not notice. In a few minutes he repeated the performance. If we had been alone I would have exploded at him. As it was, I kept my mouth shut and watched. I began to see him through my friend’s eyes. I heard him as I thought she heard him. I imagined her thinking: Here’s an overbearing blusterer one doesn’t engage with, one simply walks away from, too exhausting to try to make terms here.
Suddenly I felt lonely, terribly lonely. “Let’s go back to the house,” I said when we had parted from my friend, “I don’t feel well.” Joe put his hand up for a cab. Once inside the apartment I tore my clothes off and dragged him into bed.
“I thought you don’t feel well,” he said.
“I’ll feel better if we make love,” I explained.
But I didn’t. I still felt lonely. Joe didn’t notice. He was propped against the pillows, his legs extended on the bed, chattering on, adding to the Flint, Michigan, story, caressing
me steadily, mindlessly, as he spoke. I lay against his chest feeling more and more isolated.
“Oh, stop!” I cried. “Please stop. Stop!”
Joe’s mouth closed in the middle of a sentence. His head pulled back. His eyes searched mine. “What is it, darling?” he said. He’d never heard me sound this note before.
“Listen to me,” I pleaded, “just listen to me.” He nodded at me, not taking his eyes from mine. “You don’t know me at all,” I said. “You think I’m this hot-shot loudmouthed liberated woman, as brash and self-confident as you, ready to walk across the world just like you, and that’s not who I am at all. It’s making me lonely now to make love with you, and you not know what my life is about.” He nodded again.
I told him then how I had hungered for a life like his but that I hadn’t ever had it, that I’d always felt marginal, buried alive in obscurity, and that all the talk I manufactured couldn’t dissolve out the isolation. I told him how sometimes I wake spontaneously in the night and I sit up in bed and I’m alone in the middle of the world. “Where is everybody?” I say out loud, and I have to calm myself with “Mama’s in Chelsea, Marilyn’s on Seventy-third Street, my brother’s in Baltimore.” The list, I told him, is pathetic.
I talked and talked. On and on I went, without pause or interruption. When I stopped I felt relieved (alone now but not lonely) and, very quickly, embarrassed. He was so silent. Oh, I thought, what a fool you are to have said these things. He doesn’t like any of this, not a bit of it, he doesn’t even know what you’re talking about. Then Joe
said, “Darling, what a rich inner life you have.” My eyes widened. I took in the words. I laughed with delight. That he had such a sentence in him! That he had spoken the sentence he had in him. I loved him then. For the first time I loved
him
.
 
 
“What about his wife,” my mother said. “What about you,” my friends said. I ran into an acquaintance on the street. She wore silver earrings and curly gray hair, her eyes danced with interest, her smile was warm and knowing. “You’ll need a lot of stamina and a lot of self-control,” she said. This woman understood the issues better.
It was assumed by everyone I knew that Joe’s wife was the wife, and I the other woman, and Joe the prize slated to fall to one or the other of us, but such was not the case. Why, I thought, would I want him to leave his wife? What would I do then? Take him into my apartment? It’s too small. Besides, I may not like sleeping alone, but I like waking up alone. Yes, it’s painful when he leaves, but it’s not that painful. The situation suits me. And then again, it’s interesting.
Joe’s wife was an abstraction to me. I felt neither guilt nor jealousy toward her. This because I did not feel jealous of Joe, whose gifts for life (gifts he made use of in union organizing as well as in love affairs) included thoroughgoing reliability and a remarkable constancy of mood. A man of immense appetite and energy, Joe had quality time for all. When he was there he was so thoroughly and unreservedly there I felt neither deprived nor possessive when
he wasn’t. For the first time, what a lover did when he was not with me was of no real concern; in fact, it was none of my business. This was an experience.
Imagine. I was living entirely in the moment, with no formal assurance beyond tomorrow morning’s telephone call, and I found myself interested; not sad tearful frightened or resentful, only interested. Here, I reasoned, is a circumstance where you clearly cannot make terms. The truth is, one never makes terms. This affair is only the bare, unfiltered truth. Can you take it in or will you founder on the absence of illusion? Indeed, it was stamina and self-control that were required to answer the question. I rose to the task. I began to grasp the idea of living without a future: we had few moments to waste on bad behavior. I saw errant impulses die before they could make trouble. I saw reflexive anger give way to analytic understanding. I saw petty indulgence stifle itself and a kind of rough emotional justice prevail. All this I saw, and all this I was pleased to see. Then a day came when I also saw that learning to live without a future is a sterile exercise: what looks like life within a walled garden is really life inside a renovated prison yard. Joe’s wife remained an abstraction, but Joe’s marriage became a stunning confinement.

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