“So that’s what I am now!” Eric cried. “A safe older man, helpless, impotent! Ye gods!” He laughed but squeezed his glass so tightly I feared for his hand. I patted his back gently. “You don’t look old,” I say. And he doesn’t—to me.
Toward the end of the evening, Nina Brumbach, the poet, headed for me. I was fond of her, found her a restful, consoling person to be with when she was in a good frame of mind. She wore her graying black hair long, hanging in her face, and she was terribly thin, too thin by my standards, but then my standards are not the world’s, and my friends all agree with the Duchess of Windsor that there is no such thing as
too
thin. Because she was so thin, clothes clung to her as if they were enamored of her body. She was wearing a sea-green chiffon thingy, belted at the waist with huge gold metal links. She seemed to have no trouble at all in walking in her high, high gold heels. I bit my other cheek.
“Nina! How great you look! Fantastic!”
“Oh, thanks, Hermione,” she said listlessly.
“And congratulations on your poem in
The New Yorker
last week! I loved it—so allusive, so sad. I hope that’s not how you feel.”
She shrugged. “You know how it is.”
Nina regularly said that since her husband, Garson, died she felt only half alive. But Garson died seven years ago.
“I was just talking to Dalton,” she explained.
“Oh.”
“Tim was so great.” Her eyes grew damp. “And he had such promise.”
“Yes,” I said piously. It isn’t that I didn’t agree; but there’s something ghoulish about lingering over a young person’s death. And Tim had been dead for four months.
“Duncan has tested positive, you know.”
“No!” I cried.
She nodded. “Just diagnosed. Last week. He’s fine. For now.”
“Ohh,” I moaned, holding my head.
“Such a talented boy, too. And he’s only in his twenties.”
I wanted to run out the door right then.
“He was supposed to be here tonight; he’s with Armand these days, you know. Well, he was…But Armand says he’s horribly depressed. Well, I know all about that…” Nina’s eyes teared again.
It was not one of Nina’s good nights, but I felt I could not decently walk out on this conversation.
“Has something happened, Nina?”
“No. Not really. It’s just…I was cleaning out a closet today and found Garson’s high school and college stuff—yearbooks, awards, some of his early writing from the
Crimson.
Boxes of this stuff. I don’t know what to do with it. Do you think it should go into an archive?”
Garson Brumbach had written brilliant hard-boiled political essays. I had loved his early work, but by the time I met him, in the late sixties, I couldn’t read him anymore. He’d started out a socialist and ended up a reactionary—antifeminist and arrogantly elitist. Nina, who had a great heart, never seemed to notice his politics. It seemed to me she was always remembering the old Garson, the professor twenty-odd years older than she and married, with whom she’d fallen in love while she was at Vassar. Garson divorced his wife to marry Nina. Of course, once Nina married him, Vassar expelled her. She never finished college. She said it didn’t matter: a poet was educated in a different way, she said.
Garson was seventy-seven when he died. No one could say he didn’t have a great life and a long one. But Nina kept mourning him. I wondered if the Garson she mourned hadn’t died long before he died, like Tim.
“I just sat there on the floor, reading and weeping,” she concluded. “God, I still miss him so much. The conversations we had…”
I tried to remember conversations I’d had with Charles, or even with Mark, who was more recent. I know we had them. I remember laughing and being happy, and I also remember some heated political discussions and lots of arguments. I wondered what Nina’s conversations with Garson could have been like, that she still remembered them with such keenness.
“It must have been a wonderful marriage,” I said piously, wondering if my inner cheek could stand another bite. It was pretty sore. “But you have a great life now, don’t you? You’re writing so much more, publishing so widely. You give readings all across the country. You didn’t do that when Garson was alive.”
“No. He didn’t like me to…I didn’t like to leave him. And I’m glad I didn’t. I’m glad I treasured every moment of our forty-six years together.”
I remembered Garson going off on lecture tours and leaving her alone for months every fall. There were plenty of rumors about him and young women too. My smile was getting stiff.
“But what am I going on like this for?” she said suddenly. “God knows you’ve done your share of suffering; you’ve lost a husband too.”
“Two,” I said in a little voice, feeling fairly sure that being widowed
twice
(not to mention divorced twice) somehow invalidated any claim I might have to martyrdom. I was right: Nina blinked and started. But she’s a good soul. She tried to recover.
“So of course you know!” she exclaimed. “How wonderful it is to have a close relationship! How lonely life is without one! Who should know better than you? So. Tell me. Is there anyone in your life at the moment?”
I looked around furtively. “Actually…” I looked around again. “Actually, yes. Or sort of yes.”
Her whole face lighted up. “Really!”
“Nina,” I whispered, “would you like to have lunch?”
I huddled under the afghan as cool air blew in from the water. My eyes felt heavy. Perhaps this was a solution to my sleeplessness—a party, then meditation out on the porch. I leaned my head back against the couch pillows. Had I really been happier when I was married or in a love affair? I seemed to remember considerable anxiety attached to the love affairs and considerable irritation attached to the marriages, although I could not say why, could not recall actual instances. Well, come to think of it, there was Charles’s habit of throwing his socks on the floor at night. He had particularly smelly feet, and his soiled socks stank up the entire bedroom. He liked his own smells, including that one, so I had to nag to get him to throw them into the bathroom hamper; he often forgot. He’d be snoring away, and I’d be lying there sleepless, with that smell in my nose. But that was such a small thing; wasn’t it? And we had such good times together; didn’t we? Together was certainly better than alone, but not of course with a Jack O’Reilly, or a dying Tim, or that weird Guy Kislik, or Jack Parker or Jim Steiner…Actually, I could think of lots of friends I pitied for their husbands. That night I slept.
A
FTER A RELAXED SUNDAY,
and another good night’s sleep, I was wakened early Monday by the sun, a huge orange egg yolk hanging just over the water, looking as if it were about to spill into the bay. I had neglected to lower the blinds the night before, and light poured into the porch very early. The birds were intensely talkative, far more than usual, it seemed to me. I imagined they were gossiping about my presence on the porch. I lay there for a while—it was too early to get up—gazing out through the screens at the cool greenness that surrounded me, luxuriating in the sweetness and comfort of my life, the life I had been fortunate enough to end up with. I remembered rising in the morning to the smells of baking bread and the knowledge that downstairs waited my mother and her sorrowful silence. I remembered waking in a dark little dormered room, locked in pennilessness with a hostile husband and a screaming baby. I remembered waking to the knowledge of misery, day after day after day.
I lost Delia and gained Bert. We finally had to see each other, because we had to go together for a Wassermann test and to apply for a marriage license. I was home alone when he came to pick me up in his father’s twenty-year-old Packard. He stood in the doorway, pale and bitter-mouthed. He didn’t say hello.
“Ready?”
I nodded. I didn’t invite him in, just went for my coat and bag and left, slamming the door behind me. We walked down the wooden staircase in silence, our steps like out-of-sync mechanical taps. He opened the car door for me. We drove to the doctor’s office and had our blood taken. Then he drove me back home. We didn’t say one word to each other; we never even met each other’s eyes. If the blood test showed we didn’t have syphilis, we could get a marriage license. Then, in three days, we could marry.
Marry. How could we get married if we weren’t even on speaking terms? I determined to be nice to him the next time. A few days later, our Wassermanns having shown negative, he called to say he’d come and pick me up to get the license.
“Sure. How about we go out for lunch?”
“What for?”
“I don’t know. I thought it would be nice.”
“Nice to spend my money?”
“I wasn’t suggesting anything fancy. A sandwich and a beer,” I said, remembering his preferences. “Dutch.”
“Oh, and then get accused of getting you drunk again?”
“If you don’t want to, forget it. I thought we should get to know each other a little. We’re going to be married.”
“Don’t remind me.”
So I was cool and unspeaking when he arrived. But after we filled out the forms, he said, “You wanna get some coffee?”
I just looked at him. A number of cutting responses crowded into my mouth, but I shut my teeth on them and shrugged okay. We went to a smoky, greasy coffee shop near the courthouse and sat in a booth.
“My mother says you’re right,” he began, staring at his coffee and stirring it round and round.
“About what?”
“We should talk.”
His face was pale and hurt. He’d been thin before, but he was skinny now; he looked as if the wind would blow right through him, and his face was pinched. My heart moved over a little for him.
“Look, Bert, I know this has disrupted your life, ruined your plans, put you in a miserable situation. But it’s done the same to me. Even more so. I had a full scholarship to a wonderful college! I even had an allowance from my high school! I’ve lost it all.”
“You’re a girl. It doesn’t matter.”
“What?” I was confused. “Look”—I returned to my prepared speech—“we did something without thinking and now we have to pay for it. There’s no point in your being angry with me or my being angry with you. We both did it, and we’re both suffering now.”
“We’re not both pregnant,” he said.
“What?”
“You’re the one who’s pregnant!”
“And who made me pregnant?” I shouted.
“Shut up! Shut up! You want everyone in the place to hear?”
I glared at him and sipped my Coke.
“You could have had an abortion,” he muttered.
“No I couldn’t!” I screamed. I couldn’t get over the way men were about this. It was easy for him to want me to do something like that. I’d be the one to die, not him. Or I’d be in jail. He’d be rid of me.
He flushed and looked away. I suspected his mother would have been horrified at the thought of an abortion and that he knew it.
We sat in silence for a while, then I stood up. I laid a quarter on the table, for my Coke and a dime tip, and walked out. He leaped up and ran after me.
“Where’re you going?”
“I’ll take the bus home.”
“Don’t be stupid.”
I didn’t answer, just kept walking toward the bus stop. He followed me, his hands in his pockets, his head hangdog, misery spread across his face. “Okay, okay,” he said, “I apologize. What do you want from me? I’m sorry, okay?”
I stopped. “Sorry for what?”
“I don’t know. For everything. All of it. For the beer, for…the beach. For blaming you.”
I looked at him. He was pitiful, I thought, wondering if I looked the same way.
“We’re both in the same boat,” I said.
“I didn’t even go inside you!” he cried.
“You didn’t?”
“Of course not! Couldn’t you tell? Don’t you know…?” He looked at me incredulously, then dropped his gaze.
“I don’t know anything except that I’m pregnant. And that I have to get married. To someone who doesn’t even like me!” I burst into tears.
He faltered, looked teary himself, then patted me lightly. “I don’t not like you; it’s not that. I liked you! I like you! It’s just kind of a shock, you know. It was all so long ago, and then out of nowhere…”
“I know,” I said nasally, wiping my face.
“And I really wanted to be a gym teacher; I wanted to coach track.”
“I know.” I hadn’t known what I wanted to be. “How’s it going, you getting on the cops?”
“I have to take the test. I’m studying. It’s really hard. I’m working days in my pop’s garage and nights at Mario’s. I study when I have time. I have to get some money. We have to get a place to live. My mom doesn’t have room for us. I share a room with my two brothers.”
I was deeply grateful for this fact. The idea that we might be forced to live with the Shiefendorfers was enough to engender thoughts of suicide. But I cursed myself for apathy: I’d been doing nothing but lying in bed and reading Delia’s old movie magazines. “I should get a job.”
“You’re pregnant.”
“Just for a few months! To save up some money.”
His forehead wrinkled. “You wouldn’t go back to Mario’s, would you?”
I stared at him. “Why?”
“I just wondered.”
“I might,” I said.
He looked alarmed. “It’s not a good idea. It’s hard work, waiting table, it’s too heavy for a pregnant girl, you shouldn’t do it.”
“What, have you been bad-mouthing me all over the restaurant?”
He flushed a deep pink. One thing, I thought, he’d never be able to lie to me.
“What a prince you are,” I said, turning away. I continued toward the bus stop. He followed me. I turned back. “Just go back to your rock, toad, okay?”
“Look, I’m sorry.”
“Yeah. Me too.”
We stood together in silence, waiting for the bus. When it came, I mounted the steps and got on it, and he stood on the sidewalk, watching me—just like the old days. “See ya,” he said.
He called me a week later. “My mother found this apartment—well, it’s one room, really, but it’s big and it’s only thirty dollars a month. You want to look at it?”
The apartment was the gabled attic of a neat brick house on a nice street, two blocks from the bus line. This was important, because we would not have a car. It had a decent bathroom (“Great! That’s something you don’t always get in New York City, Elsa!” Susan gushed over the phone, sending me nearly into sobs) and an alcove with a stove and a sink and a little refrigerator. With ingenuity, you could block off areas for sleeping, eating, and sitting. And we could just about afford it. After taxes, Bert averaged thirty-two dollars a week at the restaurant. (It turned out that Mario paid the waiters fifty cents an hour, fifteen cents more than the waitresses. When I heard this, I was outraged.) His father paid him ten dollars a week for working part time. I had found a job as a clerk-receptionist in a roofing-tile company and took home twenty dollars a week. As long as I lived with Jerry and Delia, I could save almost half my wages. Bert was able to save most of his—his mother didn’t charge him rent. But of course, I wouldn’t be able to work once I began to show. Women had to leave office jobs after the third or fourth month of pregnancy; they were considered obscene.