My Summer With George (26 page)

“I’ll call ya,” he said, and hung up.

August arrived. The green world began to shrivel and dry up. The brilliant pinks and purples and whites of the flowers in my garden turned yellow and brown. The geese began to mass in the fields and flew, evenings, in formation in the sky above my house. At night, they gabbed and quarreled in the fields. So short, summer. August, summer still, foreshadows autumn: it always saddens me.

I lied to everyone who called, saying I was holed up to finish a novel. I could not bear the thought of seeing people, and preferred not to talk to them, either. I swam, read, and perused travel books, making plans for an extended journey to the cities that would figure in the novel I privately called
Odi et Amo.
Of course, that would not be its real title: no one would get it, including, probably, my publisher. No one reads Catullus anymore. But I preferred to think about it from the perspective of its male protagonists rather than from that of the heroine. I knew only too keenly how she felt—like a bug on a pin, legs still twitching. But I didn’t understand them, the men who hate and love, hate and love so strongly. To think I had once prided myself on understanding ambivalence! I was a naïf, I! I should reread Catullus before I began to outline the book. I felt lucky to have a new novel to think about, to have anything to think about. I was lucky to have a trip to plan, and I spoke every few days to my travel agent, revising my itinerary.

But of course, I still had to eat, which meant I still had to market, and one day at the butcher’s, I ran into Nina Brumbach, who with surprise and enthusiasm reminded me that I had asked her to lunch, and where had I been and why hadn’t I called? I was stuck without an excuse. We arranged to meet the following Tuesday.

Nina twirled into Giorgio’s in a flowing pink dress, a red cape, and a broad-brimmed red straw hat. Heads turned, mouths smiled and whispered behind cupped palms: she was a local celebrity, the town eccentric—the latter, simply because of her dress. It doesn’t take much to make one an eccentric on Long Island.

We each ordered one of Giorgio’s little pizzas: prosciutto, peppers, and onions for her; broccoli, mushrooms, and extra cheese for me.

She launched in eagerly. “So tell me all about it!”

I had been dreading this and, before I left the house, had practiced speaking in an expressionless voice. I reached for it now but came up only with a rusty squeak: “Well, it’s really over now. It came to nothing. Of course, I still have fantasies that he will suddenly realize what he’s lost and decide to call me, but I know they are only fantasies.”

“Oh!” Her face fell, bless her. She had really wished me well. She
was
a good soul.

“Do you think he knew how you felt about him?”

I pondered. “No. Not really. Not fully, that is. He had an inkling. But even that inkling terrified him. If he had known how strong my feelings were, he probably would have fled even faster than he did. I think he flirts and acts seductive without being conscious of it. I think he thinks he’s just being friendly, just a friendly country boy, when he’s actually being quite provocative. Then he’s shocked and disgusted when women respond to his seductiveness. He thinks the women are weird. I imagine it’s a pattern in his life.”

“So he’s a cunt tease.” She applied lipstick, blotted her lips, and lighted a cigarette. She was one of my few friends who still smoked. I breathed in deeply: the cigarette smelled wonderful.

“Kind of a willful naïveté,” she continued. “But it’s pretty cruel to other people.”

“Yes. Since he’s totally unconscious of what he’s doing, he’s able to go on feeling he’s a good guy. He’s intelligent—just self-deluded. It’s hard to believe he’s as ignorant as he acts.”

“It sounds as if he really hates women.”

“Umm. That’s what he says.”

“Really? He admits it?”

“I think he’s proud of it.”

Nina was silent at that, regarding me thoughtfully.

“You invested a lot in him.”

“Everything. I planted all the repressed dreams of my sixty years in this guy. Can you believe it? Someone I hardly knew? It shocked me, what I felt. The nature of it, the intensity of it. Felt. Feel. I can’t get past it. All these dreams, these scenarios, these plans, just fermented in my brain, just bubbled up, one after another. I couldn’t sleep…I still have trouble. It’s crazy. I’d say I felt like a teenager, except I never felt this way when I
was
a teenager.”

“Umm. Doesn’t matter. You just had a delayed reaction to what’s been in you all your life. It’s part of our upbringing, all of us, girls and boys, in America.”

“What do you mean?”

“You know, I’ve devoted considerable thought to this stuff. I’ve had to, given the way I feel about Garson. Have discovered I feel about Garson…”

“Discovered?”

“Well, I didn’t
know
I felt this way,” she said, a little testily. “How is a person supposed to know a thing like that? I mean, while he was alive, I was annoyed with him half the time, in a rage with him the other half. Oh, not at first. The first years we were together, we talked talked talked, we never stopped, we couldn’t get enough of each other’s minds; we craved the other’s mind. We talked about poetry and dance—we were wild for Martha Graham in those days—we went to hear Auden read, we screeched together about politics: we were both socialists then, we just didn’t join the party…

“After a few years, I guess we had to get a little distance from each other, and we began to move a bit apart, but everything we did was done with one eye out for how the other would respond to it, what the other would think…

“And the years went by, and we got older. Our bodies got older: I got thinner, he got heavier, he lost his hair. Then it became terribly important to him that it be known that he was still…potent. Or attractive. Or sexy. Something. You remember how he was, how he fooled around—everyone knew. All those young women, one younger than the next. It was utterly humiliating to me. But I had to keep my affairs secret, because it wouldn’t do to damage his manly ego. And then he got so conservative in his old age! It was really hard to talk to him then.”

I gazed at her in shock.

She stared at me with hostility. I thought that for a moment she was seeing Garson, not me. At least, I hoped so. “You look incredulous.”

“I didn’t understand…,” I faltered.

She wiped her hand across her face. “No, I suppose not. I don’t understand, myself.” Her voice thickened, her eyes filled. “It’s just that since he died, all these memories come clamoring back: so many wonderful times we had, such great talk, such magnificent sex…He was the love of my life. Even the anger, even the arguments—they were part of it, part of the passion. When he was dying, we were having a fight, one of our many. An old girlfriend of his wanted to visit, and I didn’t want her to see him in that condition. He wanted her to come, wanted to make her feel sorry for him, wanted to see her cry: I knew him…and I just blasted him. He was such a selfish bastard! I told him he didn’t want to see her to see
her,
because he cared about her—because he didn’t! All he wanted was to milk her of emotion, the way he always did with women, those young ones especially. To squeeze love and adoration out of them, have them pour it over his head, anoint him with it. And I said he was so self-involved, he never really knew what those young girls were feeling or thinking, but a couple of them had come to me—would you believe it? They had. Weeping about him, his selfishness, his denseness. I wasn’t the most sympathetic ear…

“So then I told him. I told him I’d had as many affairs as he, with young men, older men, all kinds. Of course, I didn’t know how many affairs he’d had; I just exaggerated my own. But I recited a whole list—some of his closest friends. Including a priest and a rabbi. That really got him! He was lying there in his hospital bed, he was in a fury, he rose up from the bed, he wanted to kill me, he stretched out his hands to strangle me, but he was too weak to do anything. I laughed. Then he laughed too. Then we both began to cry. We clutched each other’s hands. What a pair!”

Nina began to sob.

People at nearby tables glanced toward us uneasily.

“Too bad you didn’t have children,” I mumbled stupidly. “You might be less depressed.”

“There was no
room
for children!” she shrieked. “There was only us. Us, us, us! Don’t you understand? Everything we did was directed at the other. The affairs, his and mine! His growing conservatism! Conservatism, hell; he became a reactionary! It was a blow at me. A hostile act. Because my work was starting to get known—I had won a couple of prizes, I was being asked to read here and there—and he had become a little…out of date, a little passé. It was after I won the National Book Award that he wrote that really disgusting book about Jews and blacks.”

I laughed.

“It’s funny?” She dropped her anger out of curiosity.

“Well…it was an ironic laugh,” I apologized, although I did in fact find it funny. “Here you two really lived out the great love affair. And it was so…”

“Ugly,” she muttered. “Yes. But it was magnificent too, you know. We were everything to each other. We ranged the entire gamut of emotion—we had the most intense passion for each other and the most bitter hatred, the uttermost craving need and the uttermost flaming resentment.”

I gazed at her with a little animosity and considerable respect. “You have really probed this relationship, plumbed it…Are you going to write a poetry sequence about it? You should.”

“Umm,” she pondered. “Yes. I should. I suppose I have, really. If I just gathered together fifty or so unpublished poems, it might be already written…That’s a good idea, Hermione,” she said, in a cool professional voice from which all passion had suddenly vanished. “You know, come to think of it, it’s our generation. Yours, mine, his—well, he was a generation older. He had it even more.”

“Had what?”

“The myth. The dream. Prince and Princess, True Love, Love Forever, Happily Ever After. And the truth is, we had it. We had it for real. With all the ambivalence, the rage, the betrayals…I’m often surprised we didn’t end up killing each other.”

“I don’t think that’s what most people mean when they talk about True Love and Love Forever.”

“No. But they’re stupid—because that’s what true love, love forever,
is.
It’s not some sweet nice pretty hand-holding valentine. It’s plowing your whole emotional self—which is far from pretty—with one other person. For a lifetime. It’s a bubbling stew, a violent concoction, it’s living inside a pressure cooker. One that explodes regularly, spattering the walls and ceiling with blood.

“Love. Hah! We all want true love, love forever. We’re raised to want it, educated to want it, brainwashed into wanting it. Only most people are too cowardly to accept it…like you.”

Moi!

“Oh, don’t blink your eyes at me, Hermione. How many times have you been married? At the least sign of passion rooting itself in you, you run.”

I wanted to defend myself, to remind her that two of my husbands had died, one had left me, and the first—well, he was utterly impossible. But instead I attacked. “Well, truthfully, Nina, if what you describe is true passion and love forever after, I’ll do without it. It sounds sick to me.”

“Oh, it is, no question,” she said easily. “It’s a neurotic myth. We’d be much better off without it. But we’ve got it, so we either have to live it out or fail to live it out.” She stood up. “I have to go to the loo.”

I paid the bill. I wondered if we’d ever be able to be friends again. I couldn’t figure out what I’d said or done to arouse Nina’s antagonism. I may have been dense, but I’d tried to be amiable. She was a difficult woman to please. I decided to conclude that she was crazy. It was the easiest solution.

Nina reappeared and picked up her cape. “Ready?” She seemed simply to assume that I’d paid the check. Of course, romance novelists earn much more than poets. It was only fair. Or maybe poets don’t think about money at all but take it for granted that they will be kept fed and clothed.

“Right,” I said, rising. We walked out of the restaurant into midday heat and headed for the parking lot. It was far too hot for heavy clothes, but Nina kept her cape wrapped around her. When we reached my car, I stopped and called out, “Well, goodbye, Nina.” She had kept walking, but turned when I called. She walked back to me. Dropping her cape, she grabbed me and hugged me.

“Thanks,” she murmured in my ear. “Thanks so much.” She pushed me away from her, holding me by both arms. “You are a wonder. There’s no one else I could have had this conversation with. No one else would have understood. They would have been shocked, horrified. That I should reveal this stuff about the great Garson Brumbach! But you just accepted it. You saw! Immediately, without argument! I feel so much better! It was a great lunch, Hermione. I’ll never forget it. Or you for asking me. And you gave me a wonderful idea for a book. I’d dedicate it to you if I didn’t have to dedicate it to Garson.” She kissed my cheek. She dropped her arms, picked up her cape, threw it around her, and walked swiftly to her car. I stood, baffled and battered, watching her cape ripple in the little breeze she made by walking. She did not look back.

I meandered, driving home, gazing at the beauty around me, remembering my first apartment in New York, a seedy place with peeling paint on the walls, the tub in the kitchen, and no bathroom sink at all. It was February 1952 when I moved to Manhattan. Lettice was nearly two and already had a sizable vocabulary. I constantly worried she would tell Bert that “Mommy wites.” She jabbered to him, whether he talked to her or not, and she commented on my writing whenever I did it; it fascinated her, and there was no place to hide from her in that apartment.

Jerry had driven us down. He rented a van so he could transport all Lettice’s equipment—crib and high chair and diapers and clothes and toys—as well as some things from the apartment. I didn’t take much—my books, some dishes and pots, linens—just enough to get me started in my new home. I had quite a time packing them up without Bert’s noticing, and that he did not testifies more to his disinterest than to my cleverness. Susan and Merry had found me a fourth-floor walk-up in the East Seventies. It had two bedrooms, a living room, and a kitchen, and was only forty dollars a month.