One Hundred Names for Love: A Memoir (2 page)

What had vanished? RAF days on the Isle of Man, when he and his pals had flown to London for lunch, and kept mum about Prince Philip’s night flights to visit a bevy of girlfriends? Our Floridian sojourns? The model airplanes of his boyhood, with which he single-handedly won the war? Would he remember his own books? His sister? Our history?

CHAPTER 2

W
E HAD FALLEN IN LOVE AT PENN STATE, IN THE EARLY
1970s, when I was a flower-child undergraduate and he a professor with yards of education, wavy brown hair, and a classy English accent. Somehow, though just a sophomore, I’d signed up for his graduate Contemporary British Literature course. There I perched in a back corner, surrounded by the familiar last-row smells of sweaty overcoats, chalky erasers, smoky-caramel leather-bounds, musty old paperbacks and cloth-bounds redolent with mildew and book lice, tart newly inked fare, more acidic editions printed on European papers. A few students had deckle-edged novels, whose virgin pages forced a reader to muscle in and possess them, slicing pages open with worldly-wise aplomb. Fascinated by the discussions, I rarely said a word, since I felt completely out of my depths. But Paul and I talked gamely about literature and life during his office hours, and he responded well to my poetry. For several semesters afterward, I kept bumping into him on campus or in town. On our first real date, we had drinks at his house, talking nonstop until dawn—and I stayed for forty years.

Some said we had absolutely nothing in common. Paul and I came from distinctly different cultures, generations, and ethnic backgrounds. We flew to different nations when we dreamt—mine were anxiously American, his were a fabulist’s rural England. American culture was the backdrop I grew up with, but because Paul discovered it as an adult, he never took its oddities (such as eating corn on the cob) for granted. Eighteen years older than I, he grew up in an English village during WWII, listened to swing music, and had memories of being bombed. I was a baby boomer, steeped in Beatles-era rock ’n’ roll. My father owned a McDonald’s. When it came to literary style, we both preferred the opulent to the sparse. We prized books brimming with poetic descriptions, offbeat characters, and picturesque ideas. But our taste in other things varied. He relished bold and flamboyant designs; I preferred the intricate, ambiguous, delicate.

Paul patrolled the darker recesses of the night—writing in a semi-trance, or watching tapes of cricket matches—until retreating to slumber at last at 5 or 6 a.m. Songbirds migrate at night, and in my imagination I twinned his restlessness with their lunar flights. I, on the other hand, was bewitched by daylight. I woke at dawn and greeted him with a gentle
tag, you’re it
hand slap before he climbed into bed. He always waited for me to wake before he went to sleep, so that he could kiss me good morning and good night. He called our relay “the Changing of the Guard,” and did a fair (if nakedly dangling) imitation of the Queen’s stiff-legged soldiers in tall black hats and red jackets marching in front of Buckingham Palace.

Drowsily heading into the kitchen to make a cup of tea, I knew I’d find a little hand-scrawled love note awaiting me, a gung-ho welcome to the world again after a nighttime away, which he’d attached to the refrigerator door by a magnetic bat, alligator, whale, lion, wolf, flower, or airplane, depending on his mood. A new note appeared almost every day for decades. Instead of signing his notes, he would draw himself with curly hair, svelte shape, pointed feet, full-stop eyes, and delirious smile. It was his version of a cartouche or a royal seal, meant to keep me company until he awoke at noon. Sometimes I accused him of being a maggoty-headed misanthrope, who haunted the wee hours to avoid having a social life. But I supposed his circadian rhythms were simply off-kilter because he had been a night owl since childhood.

Working from home meant we could vary snack and coffee breaks, change our desks or view, goof off, drink on the job, even spend the day in pajamas, and often meet to gossip or share ideas. On the other hand, we bossed ourselves around, set impossible goals, and demanded longer hours than office jobs usually entail. It was the ultimate “flextime,” in that it depended on how flexible we felt each day, given deadlines, distractions, and workaholic crescendos.

Our studies offered a good example of our essential natures. Paul’s was a pack rat’s haven: balsa airplanes; eight pairs of cheap, dusty sunglasses (all aviator style); a windup miniature skull; a plastic six-shooter; his father’s WWI medals, framed; a do-it-yourself Egyptian mummy-making kit; a Cockney rhyming dictionary; a collage he’d made that blended paint with flattened wads of green chewing gum, used matchsticks, and labels from a box of La Tropical cigars; boxes of crayons and colored pencils; a never-used soap lion; a blue and white Amazonian mask; classical CDs stacked unevenly, like geological strata, on every free ledge; a gray filing cabinet full of old clothes he hated to part with; crumpled manila folders fat with letters; tall heaps of books, papers, research materials—all the curious
accumulata
of a bustling novelist’s life. One needed a guide dog and map to navigate the room. Possibly it reminded him of the craggy English moors.

In the cork-lined alcove where he typed, there were no windows to usher in the outside world, no daylight. “I don’t need nature,” he once told me. “I can create it.” He never touched a computer. On an old blue-and-gray Smith Corona—a classic, leaden typewriter with long strike arms, noisy carriage, and well-worn, begrimed keys—he furnished one lavish fictive world after another and inhabited them with a cavalcade of engagingly kooky people, producing dozens of books during our years together. When he was dubbed a Chevalier of the Order of Arts and Letters by the French government, I pronounced him “Chevy,” which became one of his nicknames.

My study, on the other hand, was all windows festooned with bright floral drapery. Stained-glass magnolias framed a bay window, beyond which a large old real magnolia swelled. A tall curiosity cabinet of shelves held pottery “storyteller” dolls from Indian pueblos, the “Oldest Bird House on Earth” built from local fossils, framed photographs of family and friends, a miniature Frank Lloyd Wright window, carved jade monkeys and flowers I inherited from my mother, and a mannequin hand, whose pose I often changed. A computer with a large sleek monitor presided over the desk, and a laptop waited in the bay window. Tattered, faded, ripped-out newspaper and magazine clippings filled a series of wooden filing cabinets and overflowing three-ring binders I affectionately called my “portable universe,” a repository of things I found curious. The walls had been painted the yellow of spring light in the forest, and oriental area rugs softened an oatmeal-colored wooden floor. Photos of monk seals, bats, and other endangered animals I’d worked with graced the walls. I worshipped nature, roamed the world of nonfiction, biked most days, and shmoozed a lot with friends. Paul could easily accommodate violence and evil into his imagination, work, and sensibility. I couldn’t; I didn’t even like movies to end unhappily.

Paul had a different kind of memory from mine, an almost perfect recall—his dark past (wars, poverty, early marriage, years of turmoil) was a country he could homestead. I preferred Zen’s idea of living mindfully in the moment. I was more concerned with social issues than he, and felt drawn to volunteer work in the community. His sense of community wasn’t local; it spanned seas and eras.

In our writing lives, Paul was a born phrasemaker, and I loved phrases, too; but we didn’t construct them in the same way. His were more flamboyant and allusive, such as describing Oxford dons as “noetic pharaohs” and old bread as “sprouting its beard.” To a large extent he searched for arresting images as fishhooks to pull up all sorts of thrashing memories. I used imagery more for defining experience. Indeed, that’s one key way in which our creative processes differed.

He was without exception the most deliciously quirky person I’d ever met, a classic British eccentric of myth and legend, right out of a P. G. Wodehouse novel. He wouldn’t touch or be near fresh fruit, beets, cucumbers, or tomatoes. He didn’t leave the house much; instead he was abundantly happy to talk with friends in letters or on the phone. He hated wind, rain, snow—truly, any weather if not sunny and mild. He didn’t like wearing clothes, and cheerily strolled around the house and yard like one of Dubuffet’s naked pink men. Because society requires clothes he did make concessions: in the summer he wore swim shorts and a blue short-sleeved shirt when we went out, and in the winter he wore a velour jogging suit in unvarying shades of black, gray, or blue. But never, ever socks. At least once he flew home to England lugging a ream of typing paper, which he sat on, “to soften it up.”

One day, when we were out driving, he asked me rather urgently to close the sunroof.

“Why?” I asked.

“I don’t like space above me,” he said. I smiled. This was a new one.

“You know, dear,” I replied as evenly as possible, “if you’re very lucky, you’re going to have space above you for a long time on this planet.” Then I closed the sunroof anyway.

I found his eccentricities novel and amusing, in part because they weren’t an affectation but grew naturally, like crystals, in the cave of his personality. They sprang unconsciously from a childhood in an English coal-mining town; early absorption of its customs and values; and a deeply eccentric family, in which it was typical to pay a call on relatives only to find aunts, uncles, and cousins all napping naked in the living room with open books covering their privates. The unique society of his brain cells was more than a little different from my own mental colony, but we granted one another most-favored nation status.

When asked about the secret to our decades-long duet, I sometimes teased that we stayed together for the sake of the children—each was the other’s child. And we were both wordsmiths, cuddle-mad, and extremely playful. But who can say why two people become a couple, that small principality of mutual protection and regard? Couples are jigsaw puzzles that hang together by touching in just enough points. They’re never total fits or misfits. In time, a pair invents its own commonwealth, complete with anthems, rituals, and lingos—a cult of two with fallible gods. All couples play kissy games they don’t want other people to know about, and all regress to infants from time to time, since, though we marry as adults, we don’t marry adults. We marry children who have grown up and still rejoice in being children, especially if we’re creative. Imaginative people fidget with ideas, including the idea of a relationship. If they’re wordsmiths like us, they fidget a lot in words.

So our household had been saturated in wordplay. We relaxed with “Cheater’s Scrabble,” in which we combined several sets, didn’t feel confined by the edges of the board; accepted puns, phrases, and foreign terms; and played not to win but to tie. It seemed more cordial that way. “RareJaponesquedstool” morphed into “RareJaponesquedstoolpigeon.” Every day we did the Word Jumble in the newspaper. Puns littered our idle chatter. Paul never spoke my given name. Instead, he made up pet names for me, which evolved. “Pi” became “pilot” became “pilotpoet.” The full menagerie of our animal love included kissel panther and lion, camel and bewilderbeast, roseate spoonbill and bush-kitten, bunny and swan, among many other passionate critters.

A lifelong aficionado of classical music, Paul had the habit of extemporizing operettas about me throughout the day, singing in his rich baritone such ad hoc ditties as: “She has a lovely little smile, / dark brown eyes like chocolate drops, / into which I plunnnge, and Cliffs of Dover whiteness to her teeth, / above and beneeeeath.” I’d be washing the dishes, Paul would be on his way to the garage, and he’d idly start singing—barely loud enough for me to hear—“She washes the dishes, / rub-a-dub-dub, / soaps up the pots, / la, la-la, la, la . . .” launching into an improvisatory song about the glories of sudsy domesticity. One spring day, when we were going out and I decided I didn’t need a sweater after all, he trilled:

Please leave your sweaters at home,

if you are driven to roam.

You can wear a bikini

and eat some linguini,

but please leave your sweaters at home!

Well, that was all the invitation I needed, and as we drove down the little asphalt road to the farm store, we piled on more lunatic verses involving kimonos, tuxedos, and flamingos.

Writing mainly in different genres, we thought it best to have separate agents and publishers, and our books rarely appeared at the same time. In our household, whenever possible, we didn’t allow the other to read reviews that were hatchet jobs or poisonously ad hominem. We had both received both and knew it was easy enough to inadvertently push someone’s button and be bombed to smithereens.

On those blessedly rare occasions, we offered comfort and hope from someone who had walked a mile in his shoes and fully understood the other’s hurt. Reading each other’s manuscripts first and last, we served an important role as ally, editor, critic, and advisor. I tended to be kind to a fault; Paul had a mercurial temper and didn’t suffer fools.