The apartment was rich in overall space, but each room was comparatively small. The problem this presented was Stefan’s studio. We had agreed when we married that, to consolidate our life and to save us money, he would give up the spacious basement studio he’d been living in and make his studio in the apartment. A towerlike room with windows all around at the farthest end of the flat had seemed ideal. Now suddenly we realized how little floor space the tower room actually contained. Oh well, we’d take the matter under consideration when we got to it. Meanwhile, we decided we would start in the kitchen right near the front door and steadily work our way through the place. That, I said, was the logical thing to do. Yes, Stefan agreed, that
was
the logical thing to do. When I think back on it: room by room we carved out the distance, measured the drift, implemented the loss.
It was a large old-fashioned working kitchen with three tall windows, a wide shallow basin set high in a wooden counter, and a built-in bench and table. We plastered and painted and laid linoleum. When the room was finished, and the table and bench gleaming white, Stefan painted a broad band of orange around the rim of the table. That orange. On the most painful of days that orange, hard and brilliant, lifted my heart, cleared my spirit. Often, when I remember the apartment, it’s the orange band around the kitchen table I see first. Then the murk comes crowding in.
The kitchen was where I first began to grasp the meaning
of the word wife. Here we were, a pair of twenty-four-year-olds: one day we’re a graduate student and a working artist, the next day we’re a wife and a husband. Before, we had always put the rude meals we ate on the table together. Now, suddenly, Stefan was in his studio each evening drawing or reading, and I was in the kitchen struggling to prepare and serve a meal we both thought should be proper. I remember taking an hour and a half to prepare some godawful casserole dish out of a woman’s magazine, the two of us wolfing it down in ten minutes, then me taking an hour to clean up the mess, staring into the sink thinking, Is this it for the next forty years?
I discovered that I loathed cooking: could not absorb its social value, puzzled endlessly over why it should fall to me to provide this service we both required equally, and remained willfully inept for a much longer time than was necessary. Yet, one morning three months after we’d been married, Stefan said to me, “You make the lousiest coffee,” and I was stricken. Neither of us had ever cared before about good coffee, or about who had provided the coffee, good or otherwise. Now, suddenly, the bad coffee on the table was a deficiency of mine. Driven to correct this stated failure, I walked into an Italian café down the block and said mournfully to the retired men hanging out, “My husband says I make lousy coffee.” They gathered around me immediately. One said it was the packaged coffee, one said it was the pot, one said it was the water. I bought a drip pot, unground coffee beans, bottled water. Still, the coffee was lousy. Too weak, too strong, too mild, too bitter: sometimes interesting never delicious. One night at a party a painter twice my age said tiredly to me, “It’s
all in the measurements. Just measure accurately and I guarantee it will come out fine.” He was right. I learned to measure, and the coffee misery ended as suddenly as it had begun: as though I had driven through a patch of fog on a night when visibility is already low.
It was a measure of youth and ignorance that we swallowed whole these clichéd responses to the words husband and wife. Our own fantasies of normality did not tend in this direction. As we moved from bedroom to living room to study and studio, we felt more and more acutely the real difficulty of the course we had set ourselves on, the magic that getting married was meant to perform. We saw ourselves primarily as people ardent about creative work. The redone apartment was to be a declaration of intent; it was to mirror our high-minded solidarity. But somehow the place refused to come together. We couldn’t figure out why. Each completed room seemed to hang in space, remain distinctly separate, without flow or intimacy. We puzzled—I know Stefan did as much as I—over what was going wrong, but we were in no position to do more than puzzle. We kept drifting up and down that central hallway, in and around those many-windowed rooms, in search of an elusive integration we must have felt we had mislaid somewhere.
Nearly all graduate-student apartments were filled with Mexican pottery, straw rugs, madras spreads. I suggested we avoid all that. The bedroom, for instance, I said, should be cool and refreshing, a place of retreat and recovery. (From what, I now wonder.) “Let’s paint the walls light gray,” I said, “trim the windows in white, and cover the bed with a blue-gray cotton spread.” Stefan thought that
original and promptly set to work with me to realize the scheme, but when we were done something didn’t sit right. The room was not a pleasant place to enter. Again, we puzzled. Every single thing in it was indeed so pretty. That it was a room in which nightly we re-enacted our failure to connect, that the light-gray walls were sprayed with loneliness and the blue-gray cotton spread never wrinkled by spontaneity, those were thoughts for which we literally had no sentences.
It was the same with my study. We bought an old wooden table I thought would make a good desk, and a slatted chair to go with it. We built bookshelves, nailed up a bulletin board, put a rocking chair near the window, and again chose a color for the room I thought quiet but lively. Now, we both said, now I would work. But the table was too high and too thick, the chair felt clumsy and rigid, the bulletin board remained oddly naked, and the color made me anxious: a beige that had been warm in the can turned aloof on the wall. Then there was the matter of the books. Stefan had suggested we integrate our books, and to my own amazement I heard myself say, “No. I want to keep my books separate.” He had flushed deeply, and gone silent. I saw that I had hurt him and my first impulse was to take back what I had said, but the impulse was not whole and I did not act on it. The books in the study remained mine alone, but I no longer took pleasure in looking at them. When I sat in the rocking chair, my eye scanning the shelves for something to read, I felt a dull pain remembering how hard Stefan had worked to put the shelves together and help me arrange the books. The pain made it difficult to read, or even to think, in this room.
The living room was a holding action. I think we both knew that even then. Here we put down a straw rug, stuck paper flowers in clay pots, tossed a brightly striped covering on the daybed-couch. The only original touch in the room was not functional. We found a glass coffee table in a Goodwill store. The glass was discolored, the wooden base badly nicked. Stefan sanded down the wood. He poured a thick stream of sienna paint onto the glass top, and another stream of white. Then he sat down beside the table with a brush in his hand and began to direct the two streams of paint in circular motions, like a conductor with an orchestra, laughing delightedly but working with concentration (any application of paint deserved serious attention). The result was a vibrant abstraction sitting horizontally in the middle of the room. The paint was so wonderfully encrusted no coffee cup had a sliding chance.
The painted table, like the orange band, was a spot of brightness that made vivid the unhappy gloom mounting up in those oddly shaped rooms with the light pouring in from fifteen windows. In principle we agreed on everything, but in the dailiness of life we never seemed to want the same thing at the same time. We each came to think of ourselves as always making do or giving in. Invariably, one of us felt pushed out of shape. All I want is a normal life! I cried to myself. Why is everything so hard? Why are we always angry or intense? in hurt disagreement over this, that, or the other?
My own behavior seemed perfectly reasonable to me. Stefan’s was perplexing. Stubborn and dug-in, I thought. On Sundays especially. Sundays Stefan spent the entire day in his studio (first at the school, then later at home).
“But Sunday,” I protested. “That’s the day we’re supposed to spend together.” What else did I get married for? I was thinking. “This I cannot bargain with,” he said. “I must spend the day in my studio. I stare at the canvas, I study the work, I am restored. I cannot go on with the week unless I have this day to myself. Try to understand.” “How about part of the day?” I wheedled. “Work in the morning and walk with me in the afternoon.” He looked at me, his blue eyes cold and unreadable. “No,” he said. “I need the whole day.” Then he said, “Why don’t you work, too?” It was my turn to look blank. “But it’s Sunday,” I repeated. The coldness gave way to mockery. “Only a bourgeois must go walking on Sunday,” he said, “not an artist.” At that I’d slam out the door.
On the Friday morning when we were to begin work on Stefan’s studio we quarreled openly, over what I no longer recall, but I was deeply stung by the exchange. Instead of going off with him to plaster and paint (as he had done with me in my study, and in every other room in the house), I retreated into a dark depression from which I could not rouse myself. For three days I was unable to respond, very nearly unable to speak. I wandered aimlessly about the apartment or walked the city streets. Stefan went to the studio by himself. Whenever I left the apartment or returned to it, I looked straight down the central hall into the open doorway where I could see him working hour after hour in lonely silence, high up on a ladder, scraping at the tops of the tall window frames in that round room suffused with light. I was flooded with regret. I longed to be extricated from my own tightness, cajoled into reconciliation. Only later did I realize how enraged Stefan must
have been by my refusal to work on his room when he would never have refused, no matter how he felt, to work on mine. He did not speak. I did not speak.
On Monday I recovered the power of speech and began to work alongside him in the studio, but we did not clear out inside. We were polite to one another at dinner, and even for an hour afterward in the living room. Then he went to bed and I stayed up reading. When I lay down beside him, he was either asleep or pretending to be asleep. In the days that followed, the awful politeness gave way to a kind of strained considerateness. The strain, like low-grade infection, was bearable. We accustomed ourselves to an atmosphere of domestic tension I thought would dissipate momentarily. I’d wake up and say to myself: “Today. Today it comes to an end.” But then I’d get out of bed and the air would start filling up with that mild molecular misery.
I sat in the rocking chair staring into space. Stefan came into the room and suggested we go for a walk. I lifted the book from my lap and said no, I had to finish the chapter. The next night he suggested a movie. No, I said, I was too tired. The third night there was a party at the school. “You go,” I said, “I’m really not in the mood.” He stood in the doorway and looked at me for a long moment. Then he began to shout.
“Whatever I offer, it’s not right! Or maybe it’s just that I’m not right. Eh? Is that it? No matter what I do it can’t be right because I’m not the right one. Isn’t that so? That’s what you make me feel. All the time. Not just now. All the time. You’re always dissatisfied, always disappointed. With everything. You don’t work to make things better,
you just sit in that damned rocking chair looking disappointed.”
My mother and I are walking past the Plaza Hotel at noon, on our way to eat lunch in the park. Gathered around the fountain in front of the hotel a swarm of people: sitting, standing, strolling out to the sidewalk to buy shish kebab, soda, pretzels, falafel, egg roll, and hot dogs. They are eating out of tinfoil, drinking out of plastic, being entertained by street performers who pass the hat: break dancers, mimes, string quartets. One of the street performers not passing the hat is a fundamentalist preacher pacing back and forth in front of the fountain, thundering at individual people: “You are going straight to hell! Not tomorrow, not tonight,
right now
!” He makes the mistake of stopping my mother. She dismisses him with a brusque “What’s your problem?” (she can’t spare the time for this one), and keeps walking.
I laugh. I’m exhilarated today. Today
I’m
a street performer. I’ve always admired the guts, the skill, the command of the one who plays successfully to the passing New York crowd. Last night I spoke at a large public meeting in the city: on the barricades for radical feminism, also not passing the hat. I spoke easily and well, and I had the crowd in my hand. Sometimes I don’t, but last night I did. Last night all the skill I’ve acquired at this sort of thing was there at my command, and I knew it. It was the knowing
it that made me clear-headed, lucid, expansive and expressive. The crowd was being stirred. I felt it, and then I had confirmed what I felt.
My mother was in the audience. I didn’t see her afterward, because I was surrounded and carried off. Today, right now, is our first meeting since I walked onstage last night. She is smiling at me now, laughing with me at the pleasure of the day, the crowd, New York acting out all over the place. I am properly expectant. She is about to tell me how wonderful I was last night. She opens her mouth to speak.
“Guess who I dreamed about last night,” she says to me. “Sophie Schwartzman!”
I am startled, taken off balance. This I had not expected. “Sophie Schwartzman?” I say. But beneath my surprise a kernel of dread begins growing in the bright bright day.
Sophie Schwartzman had lived in our building for some years, and she and Mama had been friends. After the Schwartzmans moved to another neighborhood in the Bronx our two families had continued to meet because the women liked each other. The Schwartzmans had three children: Seymour, Miriam, and Frances. Seymour became a famous composer who changed his name to Malcolm Wood. Miriam grew up to become her mother. Frances, a pretty girl with “ambitions,” married a rich man. Sophie has been dead a good ten years now. I haven’t seen any of her children in more than twenty years.