The Facts: A Novelist's Autobiography (12 page)

Four months after we’d met Josie discovered she was pregnant. I couldn’t understand how it had happened, since even when she claimed it was a safe time of the month and saw no need for contraception, I insisted on her using a diaphragm. We were both stunned, but the doctor, an idealistic young neighborhood GP who had been treating Josie at very modest rates, came around to her apartment to confirm it. Sitting gloomily over coffee with him in the kitchen, I asked if there was any way to abort the pregnancy. He said that all he could do was try a drug that at this stage sometimes induced heavy bleeding that then required hospitalization for a D&C. The chances were slim that it would work—but astoundingly it did; in a matter of days Josie began to hemorrhage, and I took her to the hospital for the scraping. When she was back in her room later in the day I returned to visit, bearing a bunch of flowers and a bottle of domestic champagne. I found her in bed, as contented-looking as a woman who had given birth to a perfect child and talking brightly to a middle-aged man who turned out to be not a member of the medical staff but a rabbi who served as one of the hospital chaplains. After he and I exchanged pleasantries, the rabbi left her bedside so that Josie and I could be alone. I said to her suspiciously, “What was he doing here?” Perfectly innocently she replied, “He came to see me.” “Why you?” “On the admissions form,” she said, “under religion, I wrote ‘Jewish.’” “But you’re not Jewish.” She shrugged, and in the circumstances I didn’t know what more to say. I was perplexed by what seemed to me her screwy mix of dreaminess and calculation, yet still so relieved that we were out of trouble that I dropped the interrogation, got some glasses, and we drank to our great good luck.

Two years later she turned up pregnant again. By then we no longer had anything resembling a love affair, only a running feud focused on my character flaws and from which I was finding it impossible to escape no matter how far I fled. I had spent the summer of 1958 traveling by myself in Europe and, instead of returning to Chicago, had quit my job and moved to Manhattan. I had found an inexpensive basement apartment on the Lower East Side and was living off the first payment of the $7,500 fellowship Houghton Mifflin had just awarded me for the manuscript of
Goodbye, Columbus,
which they were to publish in the spring of 1959. I had left Chicago for good in May after a year in which the deterioration of trust between Josie and me had elicited the most grueling, draining, bewildering quarrels: her adjective “wicked” did not sound so alluring when it began to be used to describe me. Except for unavoidable encounters around the university neighborhood, half of the time we didn’t see each other at all, and for a while, after we had seemingly separated for good, I became enamored of a stylish Radcliffe graduate, Susan Glassman, who was living with her prosperous family on the North Shore and taking graduate classes in English at Chicago. She was a beautiful young woman who seemed to me all the more desirable for being a little elusive, though actually I didn’t like too much that I couldn’t entirely seem to claim her attention. One afternoon I dealt the final blow to whatever chances I had with Susan by asking her to come along with me to hear Saul Bellow speak at the Hillel House. Josie happened to have taken the afternoon off from work and to my dismay was in the audience too; but as Bellow was one of my literary enthusiasms that she’d come to share, neither of us should really have been as surprised as we appeared to be by the other’s presence. After the talk, Susan went off to introduce herself to Bellow; they had met once through mutual friends at Bard, and, as it turned out, in those few minutes a connection was reestablished that would lead in a couple of years to her becoming Bellow’s third wife. Josie, who’d come to the Hillel House on her own, superciliously looked my way while Susan was standing and talking to Bellow; when I came over to say hello, she muttered, with a sharp little laugh, “Well, if
that’s
what you like—!” There was nothing to say to that, and so I just walked off again and waited to take Susan out for a drink with the Solotaroffs. Later in the evening, when I got back to my apartment, I found a scribbled note in my mailbox, tellingly succinct—and not even signed—to the effect that a rich and spoiled Jewish clotheshorse was exactly what I deserved.

What I discovered when I returned from Europe in September 1958 was that, having spent July and August working in New York for
Esquire,
Josie had decided against returning to Chicago and her secretarial job at the university. She’d enjoyed Manhattan and her position at the fringe of the literary life and had decided to stay on “in publishing,” for which she had no qualifications aside from the little experience at
Esquire.
But if I was Jewish she was Jewish, if I lived in Manhattan she lived in Manhattan, if I was a writer she was a writer, or would at least “work” with writers. It turned out that during the summer she had let on to some of the magazine people she’d met that she had “edited” my stories that had begun to appear in
Commentary
and the
Paris Review.
When I corrected her and said that though she certainly read them and told me what she thought, that was not what was meant by “editing,” she was affronted: “But it is—I am your editor!”

The quarreling started immediately. Because of her desperation at finding herself purposeless in New York and unwanted by me, the exchanges were charged with language so venomous that afterward I would sometimes wind up out on the street wandering around alone for hours as though it were
my
life that had hit bottom. She located an apartment to sublet, moved in, and then mysteriously the apartment was lost; she found a job, turned up for work—or said she did—and then mysteriously there was no job. Her little reserve of money was running out, she had nowhere permanent to live, and none of her job interviews seemed ever to yield anything real. Repeatedly she would get on the wrong subway and call from phone booths in Queens or Brooklyn, panting and incoherent, begging me to come get her.

I didn’t know what to do or whom to turn to. I was new to New York myself, and the only person I could have confided in was my brother. After all, it was in the paperback books that he brought home on weekends from Pratt Institute when he was an art student there that I had got my first glimpse of serious modern fiction. What’s more, when I was fourteen and fifteen, and he was filling his student sketchbooks with slices of urban landscape and rapid portraits of seedy city dwellers, his determination to seek an artistic vocation wasn’t without its inspiring effect. His diligent example established in my own mind the understanding that an insurance man’s son had the right—if he had the talent and industry—to pursue something other than a conventional career in business or the professions. Why my father never seriously questioned Sandy’s decision or tried in any serious way to alter his course—or to interfere later with my aspirations—may have something to do with the example of my mother’s brother, Mickey, if one can even speak of the influence of a mild, mordantly humorous loner who would never have presumed to advocate his way of life to anyone, least of all to my brother, to whom he passed on some of his cherished old anatomy books but whom he dryly warned of the impossibility of being a good artist, let alone making a living as one. Nonetheless, the precedent that our Uncle Mickey furnished made painting seem to the family not so much a curiosity as a real line of work; whether it was a desirable line of work was something else—Mickey’s shabby, comfortless existence in his small Philadelphia studio would intermittently arouse my father’s ire, and he would harangue our poor mother at dinner about how her brother ought at least to go out and find himself a girl to marry. The freedom that Sandy and I felt in experimenting with work so far outside the local cultural orbit probably had also to do with the fact that our father, lacking a real education himself, was, luckily for us, deficient in specific ideas about what vocations his sons might best aspire to. He wanted mainly for us not to be wanting, and that we could accomplish by hard work.

Though Sandy and I sometimes
felt
as though we had a lot to say to each other, in the years after I came out of the Army, we began to be drawn apart by the sentiments and interests predictably associated with our work, his as a commercial artist at an advertising agency and mine as a college instructor and novice writer. When we were together I did my best to suppress my disdain (not inconsiderable in my twenties and the Eisenhower fifties) for the advertising man’s point of view; but he was hardly less aware of it than I was of his uneasiness around university types and highbrow intellectuals or of the provocation that he sensed in what he took to be their pretensions. This was not, of course, a major concern of his, and it unsettled his general equilibrium as little as the agenda of J. Walter Thompson Co. seriously interfered with how I lived; still, a suspicious undercurrent between us, fostered by strong professional polarities, made for self-consciousness and even shyness when we met or telephoned. On top of that, Josie and Sandy’s wife, Trudy, couldn’t stand each other, and so we had no more reason to go out and socialize as couples than to sit down together and talk intimately—“like brothers,” as my father would have advised. Because Sandy was embarked on a marriage and a career pointing him in a more conventional direction than mine, planning the sort of life that looked to me to have more obviously evolved from the background I’d put behind me, it didn’t seem to me that he would have had the wherewithal—“morally,” as I would have been quick to say then—to help me through my predicament or, if he did, that it was possible for
me
with
my values,
to solicit his assistance. This was hubris, pure and simple, the arrogance of a young literary mentality absolutely assured of its superior wisdom, as well as the pride of a raw recruit of a man, vigorously intent on being independent, who could not confess to an older, seemingly less adventurous brother that he was being dragged beyond his depth and needed someone strong to save him.

Besides, I was the strong one, was I not? I still believed that, and not entirely without reason: these were the most triumphant months of my life. Less than five years out of college, I was about to have a first book published, and my editors at Houghton Mifflin, George Starbuck and Paul Brooks, were tremendously encouraging; on the basis of a few published stories, I had already established a small reputation in New York, and through new friendships with Martin Greenberg at
Commentary,
Robert Silvers at
Harper’s,
George Plimpton at the
Paris Review,
Rust Hills at
Esquire,
and Aaron Asher at Meridian Books, I was meeting other writers and beginning to enjoy feeling like a writer myself instead of like a freshman-composition teacher who’d written a few short stories on the side. This spent love affair with Josie, a shambles for nearly a year now, couldn’t possibly bring down someone on my trajectory. It wasn’t marriage I was worried about, marriage was inconceivable: I just didn’t want her to have a breakdown and, though I couldn’t believe she would do it, I dreaded the possibility that she might kill herself. She had begun to talk about throwing herself in front of a subway car—and what seemed to have exacerbated her hopelessness was my new literary recognition. “It isn’t fair!” she cried. “You have everything and I have nothing, and now you think you can dump me!”

Whether appropriately or not, I felt responsible for her having come to New York that summer. The temporary
Esquire
opening was as a reader for Gene Lichtenstein and Rust Hills, the magazine’s fiction editors; when Josie had heard of the job and expressed interest in it, I had assured Gene and Rust she could do it—I figured that if she got it, it might help, if only temporarily, to quiet her complaint about going nowhere in life. I suppose I thought of this as the last thing I would try to help her out with before I disappeared completely. Later she was to claim that if Rust Hills hadn’t promised her that the job would become permanent after the summer she would never have left Chicago; she would also have returned to Chicago if I hadn’t implied, in letters that I’d written her from Europe, that I wanted her to stay on after I got back to New York. Rust Hills and I had both misled her, and when she turned up at the dock to meet my boat at the end of August 1958, it was because
she
knew that’s what I’d wanted. Waving excitedly from the pier in a white summer dress, she looked very like a bride. Maybe that was the idea.

We spent a couple of endurable evenings during the following weeks with a young English architect whom I’d met on the boat and his English girlfriend, who was working in New York for
Vogue
at just the kind of job Josie wanted but couldn’t seem to get. One of those nights we attempted to make love in my basement apartment; that I was pretty obviously without desire put her into a rage about “all the girls you screwed in Europe.” I didn’t deny that I hadn’t been chaste while I was traveling—“Why should I have been?” I asked—thus making things predictably worse. By November she was wandering around New York with no money and nowhere of her own to live, and eventually, when she wound up one cold morning standing with her suitcase at the foot of the cracked concrete stairs leading down to my apartment and demanding that I summon up just one iota of compassion and give her a place to stay, it occurred to me to abandon the apartment to her—forget my records and my books and the few hundred dollars’ worth of secondhand furniture, and disappear with what remained of my Houghton Mifflin money. But there was a two-year lease on the $80-a-month apartment to which I’d signed my name, there were my parents in New Jersey, whom I spoke to on the phone weekly and who were delighted that I appeared to be permanently settled back East—and there was the promise of my new life in Manhattan. There was also my refusal to run away. Fleeing and hiding were repugnant to me: I still believed that there were certain character traits distinguishing me from the
truly
wicked bastards out of her past. “You and Rust Hills and my father!” she shouted, weeping outside the doorway at the bottom of that dark well—“You’re all exactly the same!” It was the craziest assertion I had ever heard, and yet, as though I had no choice but to take the accusation seriously and prove myself otherwise, instead of running I stayed. So did she. With me.