Lit (8 page)

To their credit, they all read so much they seem to accept Warren’s poem-making—he’s just starting to publish in journals—as a worthy enterprise despite its fiscal impracticality. Still, they say little about it (and it’s the not saying, I later learn, that matters).

Widener Library? his father asks.

Lamont, Warren says. There’s a recorded poetry archive there.

He’s remastering these great lost recordings, I say. He found one of Tennyson. And these amazing Nabokov lectures.

The arctic wind blows over us again, for my bragging has breached some protocol too delicate for me to understand yet. One does not brag; one does not need to. Mr. Whitbread pours me more wine, a sympathetic gesture that feels—no doubt unintentionally—like a pat on a dog’s head.

Kelley comes in with a vat of asparagus she goes around dishing out.

Mr. Whitbread keeps looking for one of the standard social connection points—to explain who the hell I am, I guess—till Mrs. Whitbread mentions that I’m friends with the writer Geoffrey Wolff, whose memoir of his con-man father had made a splash the year before. One of the few writers of any stature I know, Geoffrey happens to be married to Warren’s first cousin.

It’s a frail link, and Geoffrey’s being Jewish maybe undoes most of its value, but I try to capitalize on it, saying that he and his brother, Toby, taught at my grad school.

Mrs. Whitbread perks up. You went to Princeton? Our son-in-law went there.

Warren explains I hadn’t gone to Princeton but to a hippie school that just went belly-up.

With that in the open, we fall to sawing our food. The cutlery weighs about a pound—a heft that sends some ineffable message.

And what are two young poets reading? Mr. Whitbread asks.

I babble on about the memoirs of Chilean poet Neruda, for ballast throwing in some pretentious French philosophy I’ve never so much as held in my hands.

Mr. Whitbread asks for more asparagus, and Kelley vanishes with the bowl.

How about you, Warren?

Warren—having barely touched his food—dabs his mouth before saying, A biography of Samuel Johnson.

Boswell? Mr. Whitbread says. I loved Boswell. How he described spying on Mr. and Mrs. Johnson through the bedroom keyhole in flagrante delicto
like two walruses
.

Mrs. Whitbread ducks her head, and I try not to snicker, for any talk of sex in those environs seems particularly wanton.

This is by Walter Jackson Bate, Warren says.

Bate’s a campus luminary you can see sashaying through the library stacks wearing a little porkpie hat like Art Carney in
The Honeymooners
.

Kelley returns to say there isn’t any more asparagus, and the cook bellows from the kitchen,
Tell him if he ate like a normal man, there would’ve been enough asparagus
. Which holler blows invisibly through the room. Again Mrs. Whitbread covers her mouth with her napkin, and Warren’s eyes aren’t beaming over at mine. The Whitbread talent for ignoring the ugly obvious is a quality I covet.

Before we leave the table, we’re supposed to give our breakfast requests to the cook via Kelley. Mrs. Whitbread finds it odd that I won’t have at least a poached egg. But in the tract houses I visited as a kid, you declined food, presuming a spare larder made any offering a polite show.

You’ll starve into a little chicken, Mrs. Whitbread says, standing and placing her napkin on the table.

Over port in the library, I manage to sip daintily—having swilled enough wine at dinner to keep pace with Warren’s father—while I flip
through portraits. In the small solitary time I’d had with Warren after tea, I’d tried to drag out some explanation of the house, the family’s history, but he’d dozed by the pool instead.

Sitting in their library, the Whitbreads are only slightly more forthcoming. So I pore over the photo albums like a scholar trying to decipher the rules of the realm. With each flip of the page, I tune in more keenly to what the sloppy shoe box of photos in my homestead holds: Mother’s cousin Henry drunk in Mexico, dressed as a matador; Daddy and his brothers with alligators they’d killed for the hides strung from a tree.

How would the society page editor chronicle my lineage for this historic visit to Fairweather Hall? At that time my family is broke out in the kind of misery common to sharecroppers in Faulkner novels. Just that month Daddy had suffered a stroke. While drinking at the VFW bar, he’d toppled off a bar stool. He’s still alive but paralyzed and speechless, barely aware that Mother’s popping valium like pop-tarts.

But the Whitbreads’ photo album bulges with enough presidents to fill a high school history book. Both Roosevelts practiced in the family firm. Here’s Great-grandfather in the old touring car with McKinley right before he was shot.

Warren gets quiet during the stories. He was bred in quiet and carries quiet in him but elegance also. Even picking burrs out of Tiger’s tail he can pull off with gravitas. But he can also drift far from me into himself. Sitting across from him, I can’t meet his eyes. Maybe he’s patiently irritated with how awed I am by the posh household he’s fleeing. Or maybe I’m breaking rules of comportment subtle enough to resemble the minuscule gaffes you get demerits for in precision diving contests.

Warren’s grandfather—in riding gear circa 1930-something, holding a polo mallet—is Warren’s exact double. Here’s the cover of
The New York Times
that falsely reported his death after a fall. Mr. Whitbread stares into some decades’-old distance, saying, The old man was on a horse again the next morning. Infuriated my mother. People in
New York were sending wreaths to the house, and he was galloping across a field.

Effortless, excellence has to be. Tossed off, reflecting the ease you’re born to, which opposes what little I’ve garnered about comportment. I’m bred for farm work, and for such folk, the only A’s you get come from effort. Strife and strain are all the world can offer, and they temper you into something unbreakable, because Lord knows they’ll try—without letup—to break you. Where I come from, house guests have to know you’ve sweated over a stove, for sweat is how care is shown. At the Whitbreads’, preparations are both slapdash and immaculate. You toss some melba toast on a plate next to a fragrant St. André triple-crème cheese, or on Christmas Eve, half a pound of caviar casually flipped into a silver urn.

It’s taken me so much
effort
just to do as medium-shitty as I’ve heretofore done. Just to drop out of college, stay alive, and have my teeth taken care of.

I take another sip of port, which slides down as if greased. Warren seems thousands of miles away, and why has he kept all this from me?

Here’s Mrs. Whitbread in her dress for Queen Elizabeth’s coronation. Some polo connection? They’ve stopped explaining why they were various places. Here’s Mr. Whitbread flanked by briefcase-carrying aides, striding confidently up the steps of the Supreme Court.

Warren says, I remember sitting behind you, and you pulled out some notecards.

You were there? Mr. Whitbread asks.

Mrs. Whitbread looks exasperated. Of course, darling. I thought they should experience it.

Warren goes on, And your client said,
What are you doing?

Mr. Whitbread tosses some nuts into his mouth, saying, I suppose I told him I was preparing my argument. And he said,
Now?

(Working for
The Washington Post
at the time, Geoffrey Wolff—that frailest of bridges between Warren’s parents and me—later
claimed Mr. Whitbread was the only man he ever saw talk
down
to the Supreme Court.)

At dinner, I’d seen my lover’s fine jaw flex as he studied his plate, and I’d felt the liquid warmth of our time together evaporate as he braced himself for his father’s scrutiny. Now I long for some definitive gesture to free him, to throw my port glass into the fireplace and stalk out with a poor kid’s piety, riding off with him in his Mazda into a life with nary a polo divet to stomp. But the house’s disabling comfort saps resolve.

And by the time we’re in the library, I’ve begun to breathe in the parents’ gentility. The conversation is so adroit—the nonchalance so juicy—I lap it up as Tiger did our fatty scraps, steel bowls rattling on the kitchen tiles. I want to believe I’m at home with these composed individuals. They’re liberal in their politics, after all. From where I sit on the low settee wedged among needlepoint pillows, I can see a whole shelf devoted to the egalitarian writings of Thomas Jefferson. Surely they recognize my native intellect. At some point Mrs. Whitbread says casually, What religion does your family practice, Mary?

Which I take as interest in my strangely compelling history. I think of my mother, who studied every faith and—with her husbands—committed to none.

We’re not anything, really, I say. But I find myself dredging up a few childhood visits to the Presbyterian church, for I know a joke punch line about Episcopalians being Presbyterians with trust funds.

But I catch Mrs. Whitbread’s unmet glance toward Warren, and it dawns on me that had he brought home his classmate Caroline Kennedy, her being a Catholic might have been a mark against her.

In a mind shift, I’m a schoolgirl again in summer, and my half-Indian daddy has just come in the back door at dawn with grime under his nails from a double shift. How carefully he draws five one-dollar bills from his weathered billfold to give Mother for two pairs of school shoes—one for me, one for Lecia. While I wait for her to bring the car around, he slips off his shirt, showing a chest pale as paper
where his worker’s tan runs out. He steps out of his khakis, and jutting through his baggy boxers, his legs are knobby and thin. One thigh’s pronounced hunk of shrapnel is royal blue. The long scar up his right shinbone where a horse he was breaking threw and dragged him looks freshly scabby. He sits down on the bed’s edge, staring at his brown forearms.
Daddy
, I whisper, and that greedy call for him snaps the connection to the past. The voltage drops, and he’s gone, reabsorbed into the shriveled form in my mother’s house, tended days by a male nurse we can’t afford, nights by Mother, who resents it.

In an instant I’m back in the Whitbreads’ library, and Daddy lies uninsured, half paralyzed.

On the mantle, sits a recent Christmas snapshot with all the siblings before the fireplace, glossy-haired and tidy. They actually
match
like the gorgeous silverware. Not resemblance but precise replication. I think,
Tiger One, Tiger Two
…(I’ll come to believe that the WASP genetic code imperially squashes the other parent’s contributing DNA in offspring. My own son, blond and blue-eyed, will bear so little of me that ladies in the park will think I’ve been hired to push his stroller.)

Just as we’re saying good night, Mr. Whitbread inquires whether, as a Texan, my father’s in oil, and I tell him he was, adding—wittily, I think—up to his elbows twelve hours a day. Which fact they take with a preoccupied air. I could speculate on what they thought, but they’re unreadable as granite.

That night, lying in Warren’s narrow bed, where I’ve sneaked from his sister’s flowery boudoir to make love, I ask him, How’d I do?

He cups my face. I love you, he says. Leafy shadows move over us. (How young we were.)

Do you think they heard us just now?

Don’t be silly, he says. I doubt they’d care.

Their room is in another wing, which includes—among other mysteries—Mr. Whitbread’s own dressing room, padlocked from the outside. Not even the maid is allowed to clean in there.

Warren is lying on his back, and his face mesmerizes me—the patrician nose, Germanic jaw.

Do they like me? I say.

You want everybody to like you, he says.

You don’t? I say.

Only you, he says. And Tiger.

Not Sammy?

Sammy’s
common
, Warren says, referring to something his mother said about a cousin’s wife.

I’m common, I say.

I always fancied an affair with a scullery maid, he says. I’m propped on an elbow studying him. He fails to open his eyes, as he says, Aren’t you even a little sleepy?

I’m pouting, I say. Can’t you hear me pouting with your eyes shut?

He reaches up a hand to pinch my pouting mouth with two fingers. Okay, duck lips, he says, rolling over. My father thinks you’re smart and funny—both uncommon virtues. My mother thinks if you keep jogging, you’ll damage your female organs and fail to reproduce.

Do they think I’m cute?

He’s half blind. She wants to dress you in hot pink or lime green.

Tell me they like me and I’ll sneak back to your sister’s room.

As much as they like anybody, he says. Don’t worry about it, sweetie.

The next morning I’m wide-eyed before dawn, half waiting for some Inquisitor to roust me from the ruffled covers of the type Little Bo Peep probably slept in. I bathe with French-milled soap and brush my short hair.

In the library, I find a copy of Matthew Arnold’s poems autographed to some illegible forebear. I’m perusing when a voice from the stair causes Tiger Three to rise shakily on his ancient hips and trot out.
Mr. Whitbread says,
I fail to see why you couldn’t greet them when they arrived, for God’s sake.

Once the front door has opened and shut, Tiger slinks back in and slumps at my feet. After a while I smell coffee and bacon, and a while later, I see a wizened, disheveled old woman balding under her black hairnet. Slippers slide her up the hall across from me to the wet bar. (I’d later find out she’s the cook.) She opens the fridge and draws out a carton of eggnog, pouring herself a small punch cup full. How sweet, I think, they keep eggnog in the summer. Then she unscrews the top of a bottle of dark rum and upends it with both hands. She takes two long draws, then shuffles off.

I
t would’ve been a vintage personal ad.
Scared, provincial girl desperate to escape family insanity seeks quietly witty, literate gorilla. Profound loneliness a must. Belief in poetry must supersede belief in capitalism. She: abrim with self-loathing, incapable of chilly silence. He: won’t yell, wag firearms, or leave
.

Were Warren laboring over this story, I’d no doubt appear drunkenly shrieking; spending every cent I could get my mitts on; alternately crowding his scholar’s home with revelers, then starting to vanish nights into a kind of recovery cult—none of this entirely untrue. I would’ve preferred that my ex vet this manuscript and correct the glaring flaws. Wisely, he balked—I’d have hated to see his version, too.

How to write it without self deceit? I set out to forge a family, but
it fell apart. Know any divorcée who ever stops weighing fault for a marriage’s implosion on some divine scales?

There’s also a psychological phenomenon that messes with my ability to depict our nuptial collapse—the normally crisp film of my memory has, in this period, more mysterious blanks than the Nixon tapes. Maybe the agony of our demise was too harrowing for my head to hold on to, or my maternal psyche is shielding my son from the ugly bits. Or I was too shitfaced at the end.

Whatever the case, those years only filter back through the self I had at the time, when I was most certainly—even by my yardstick then—a certain species of crazy. But inside that was a girl starving for stability and in love with a shy, brilliant man fleeing the aristocracy he was born to.

Decades ago, I trained myself to mistrust that girl’s perceptions. No doubt she projected as many pixels onto the world’s screen as she took in. So while I trust the stories I recall in broad outline, their interpretation through my old self is suspect. Forget reporting the external events right, try judging them when you’re an alumna of custodial care. When I reach to grasp a solid truth from that time, smoke pours through my fingers.

Yet driving east with all my belongings wedged into Warren’s small white car, I feel swept off my feet as any storybook maiden by her champion. It’s Thanksgiving weekend, and the holiday burger taken at a roadside diner is a feast.

We move into a bleached-out neo-ghetto apartment, which we pack with books and our two rickety desks laden with separate typewriters. December, a potted fern going brown gets hung with cardboard angels we cover in foil. On their heads I glue faces torn out of newspaper or off postcards—the Three Stooges, a poet or two, movie stars. On one, I fix Cary Grant, for that’s who Warren is to me—the preoccupied professor in
Bringing Up Baby
, ignorant of how his patrician profile could make Katharine Hepburn trail him down
the street in her convertible, holding her hat on with one kid-gloved hand.

The weak spots in our union are there from the git-go—aren’t they always? But every difference lures me, for if I can yield to Warren’s way of being, his cool certainty can replace my ragtag—intermittently drunken—lurching around.

Like any traveler from a ruined land, I try to adapt to the new customs, part of some ineffable mystery that compromises the man whose photo I carry in my wallet like an amulet against the squalor I was born to. I yearn for transformation, and Warren is its catalyst. What I don’t understand, I try to yield to, though I’m genetically disinclined to follow instruction.

Like we never, ever discuss finances. Some tiny trust pays his half of our meager rent and keeps him bobbing at the poverty level. How much was it? I’d never know.

We keep separate accounts and split bills. I try to absorb his reticence in this as I try to mimic his gargantuan work ethic—how early he rises to write, the number of sit-ups he grunts through at night. Without a paying post at first, he volunteers afternoons in the poetry library with its archive.

For my part, I’m rebuffed from any pseudo-literary job I catch the faintest rumor of—part-time teaching or poets-in-the-schools. Hell, the dudes working the registers in the bookstores have Ph.D.’s. At a chichi restaurant, I take a job busing tables at lunch—a steep fall for the former poet laureate of Minneapolis. On day one, a particularly snide waiter scoffs at my ignorance of a fish knife, along with how sloppy I am at embossing the tiny butter terrines. He’s a waspish guy who—at regular wine tastings for the staff—makes such phony remarks that the other waiters fight back with goofy comments, such as:
Fruity but not screaming;
or
A surly adolescent wine that loiters in your mouth
.

One day I take a double shift, and a famous novelist I’d been pass
ingly introduced to in grad school—the bone-breakingly handsome John Irving—appears as if lowered by butterflies into my station. After filling his water glass once, I hide in the kitchen or bathroom for much of the remaining shift, derangedly imagining he’ll recognize me.

At shift’s end, the manager threatens to fire me for malingering, so I quit, for which gift he pumps my hand like I’ve given him the winning lottery ticket. In the glass window behind him, snow starts down. Soon as he leaves the dining room, I set every single place with knives, one silver blade after another, while through the sliding glass and across the night sky, the wind sends slim white stitches.

The dining room lights dim just as I clock out, and I make out strains of some symphony piped into the bar. My head cants like a blue tick hound’s. Maybe I owe myself a drink.

I’ve been dug in on Warren’s one-or-two-beer policy, part of re-forming myself to fit him. As for doing with so little alcohol, so safely squirreled away do I feel in our book-lined rooms, undergoing my willed overhaul, that I could almost subsist on his breath alone.

In my old life, I never kept liquor in my apartment, for—while I could go without for weeks—I never knew when I’d wind up draining anything around. And around the punk bars where I hung out in grad school, if I got lured into the alley and offered cocaine, I could snuffle up the stuff, but I lacked both the money and the recklessness to be a bona fide cokehead. Only once did I incur a debt, and having to sell a TV to pay it back curbed future coke binges. At a few all night parties, I sat among half-strangers in a screaming sweat on a sagging couch—jaw clenched, eyelids stapled to my forehead—while some leering dealer suggested I go back to his place. A small point of pride: I never said yes. The scene scared me. I scared me.

I wouldn’t call my pre-Warren drinking out of control because I had control. So long as I didn’t leave my apartment, I didn’t drink.

In Cambridge, that person no longer exists. With an invisible eraser, I’m internally rubbing hard at the core of her, and Warren’s
steady, unwavering gaze is lasering away her external edges. Soon she’ll be mist.

I stand at the bar, its tiered bottles like a shiny choir about to burst into song. With only five or six dollars in tips, how much trouble can I get in? Warren will pick me up soon, and the bar’s on the cusp of closing early. At one end, a man in evening clothes with long gray hair swept back sits behind a sherry glass. On the stool next to him, a tipped violin case. Across from him is the despicable waiter, cradling a brandy snifter. His normally pony-tailed hair’s undone. The waiter says, Buy you a farewell cognac?

I say thanks and settle in with coat covering my grease-spattered uniform. The waiter downs his own drink. Standing, he slides spare bills across the bar, adding—before he flips his cashmere scarf around his neck Lautrec-style—At least I’ve helped you to master the fish knife.

I hold the glass globe in my hand as the dim yellow lights slide off its perimeter, and boy, does that drink slide down like scorched sunshine. I’m just draining it when the manager—no doubt eager to see me leaving—flies up and buys me another. And right before Warren comes, I ponder a third. What the hell, right? I’m unemployed, with school loans I can’t pay, an invalid dad whose nursing I need to start chipping in on.

When I lift my index finger, the barman wipes his hands and refills my snifter. I’m the sole customer—the barman having just covered his olives and cherries with cling film—when he nonchalantly slides a white slip of paper to me. I nonchalantly flip it over. The bill comes to twenty dollars.

Hold it, I say, those two bought my other drinks.

I’m well buzzed by then, wavering.

I know, he says. This is for the third one.

I cling to the edge of the bar and say, That cognac was twenty dollars?

He nods.

I drank sixty dollars’ worth of cognac just now?

His nod is stiffer this time. The bar itself starts a slow swim around me, as if on a hydraulic pole. I explain that twenty dollars is approximately one tenth of my rent. The shoes I have on probably cost ten if they were sneakers.

He says, I can go get Patrick if you want to dispute it.

I’m too drunk by this time to dispute anything with anybody. Can’t they take it out of my check? He tells me that he personally has to level out the till.

Even though Warren, who probably has twenty bucks, is en route to pick me up, I instinctively know he’ll cringe at my begging a loan. Before we left on our camping trip, he’d been horrified to find out I had just a few hundred bucks in my account. If I remember right, he’d been ripped off by an alleged pal in a trip across Europe, and his life’s goal involves living sparsely enough never again to be forced to ask his father for money.

So we always split even the smallest breakfast chits. If anything, I have the poor girl’s need to prove solvency that makes me an inveterate check grabber. Age about seventeen, I stopped counting on my parents for rent and food. (I need to go to the dentist, I told Mother once. To which she said, Ask around on campus, I’m sure you’ll find a cheap one. Translation: Shift for yourself.) Among the artists I dated, chivalry seldom figured in.

In Cambridge the barman stacks glasses, glancing up like I’m a shoplifter. Pretty soon Warren comes in wearing a down jacket, looking tall enough to offset my busgirl scumminess.

I draw him aside and explain, perhaps slurrily, why I need a twenty, just till the next day. I want to pay off the glaring barman posthaste.

But Warren stares in disbelief, saying, When Tom and I drink with his friend for four hours, the whole bill isn’t twenty dollars.

By this time the manager has set his coffee cup on the bar alongside his keys.

Warren says, Why didn’t you go to the machine?

I haven’t gotten an ATM card yet, I say.

Where’s your credit card?

I lost it, I lie, for I couldn’t tell him the one I’d used to pay for a hotel once had long since been snipped in half at some cash register. This debt wasn’t just recklessly come by, being due to last-minute plane tickets when Daddy had one stroke after another.

You’re not out of money, are you?

I’m not. Though I’m within a month of it.

Warren opens his wallet and draws out the twenty, handing it over like a radioactive item with tongs. The mild unease I expected is (did I imagine this?) the scrutiny a thief draws. Since our romance started, I’ve gone months devoid of shame, maybe even deceiving myself that I’ve been cleansed of it, till its icy bucket dumps over me from scalp to foot soles.

Outside, we walk a cobbled sidewalk toward his car, the snow spatting on the hood of my parka. Along the curving streets of Cambridge, the silence carries us past the tightly clipped hedges. The colonial houses in white and canary yellow and smoky blue with lacquered black shutters are like magazine houses—clean places I want to disappear into the safe bricks of. When I can’t bear the weight of Warren’s silence anymore, I burst out with, What’s the big deal? I’ll pay you tomorrow.

He shushes me and looks around.

I tug his sleeve so he faces me, but he’s looking over my head for spectators. I say, Who’ll hear us? It’s an empty street.

He takes his arm from me and walks on. At the car door, he says, My cousin owns that restaurant.

Which I’d forgotten.

Nothing deflates a righteous drunk like the pinprick of reality. The air rushes out of me as I climb in the car. He buckles in, and I remind him the cousin doesn’t even know I worked there. The job came through a college pal on the waitstaff. Warren cranks up.

Sitting alongside him, I sense that his finger is fixed to some invis
ible eject button about to vault me from his side. If I close my eyes, I can almost feel myself spinning away, growing smaller and smaller. I shrink like a spider on a coal.

The snow spits on the windows and slides off. Warren’s gloveless fingers, so long and finely shaped, grip the wheel.

What I did, I don’t exactly know. Maybe I reached for his hand. Maybe I gave him shit for being conventional. My methods for clinging to him were varied and pitiful. Eventually, I needed him badly enough that I said whatever I had to, push him away. Counterphobic, a shrink once called it, meaning I run fast toward any event I suspect might be excruciating.

I’m not preppie enough for you, I say.

His silence holds as we drive. I amplify my rhetoric and volume. Maybe I should be wearing a kilt with a fucking gold safety pin, I say.

He parks the car outside our apartment. As he’s locking up, he says—color blazing high on his flared cheekbones—And you quit your job. With your school loans and your father sick. Are you crazy?

This is a buzzword with me, since deep down I know I’m crazy, my chief fear being that everybody’ll find out.

So I do the only thing I can think of: I run. I run onto the sidewalk and drop to my knees, sobbing like a banshee. A bratty move, but Warren takes the bait and comes to help me up. Then a few things happen in an order I can’t recall. He asks me please to go inside. I start to vomit in the snow—three cognacs in those days being a heavy dose. A policeman shows up to check out the seedy scene, and from Warren’s arms, I jabber, I’m fine, Officer, just too much to drink. My boyfriend’s taking me home.

Back in the apartment, I lie in bed next to him, circled by the night’s chaos as if by gnats. Our fight’s antithetical to Warren’s penchant for order and routine—his alphabetical file folders and meticulously typed drafts, the paper clip always in the same spot. (How like
my daddy that was.) If he hates a book on page one, he’ll nonetheless finish it, for he’s made the commitment. And I hope he’ll commit to me that way and be as loath to leave me undone.