A Complicated Marriage (13 page)

One late afternoon, while Friedel was still in the hospital, Nancy Smith dropped by. I was alone. She seemed to be in a mellow mood, but nonetheless I wondered if Edith Wharton wouldn't be better company. We were sitting on the front steps, when Jackson pulled up. He was at loose ends. Ruth, after three weeks of residency, had gone to New York for a
breather. She would be back on the weekend. I brought out some beers and we sat around in an end-of-the-day kind of way. How the subject of toenails came up, I have no idea, but next thing I knew we had carried kitchen chairs out to a patch of grass by the side of the house. There, shadowed by unruly hedges, armed with a few more beers, Clem's nail clippers, and my barber shears, Nancy and I were poised to clip, trim, and prune Jackson.

On his chair, a towel around his neck, he looked as delighted as any pasha on a throne, surrounded by his harem. I was worried about only two things: the long-eyed landlady and whether I would be up to the job. I warned him that I was a novice barber with only one client. But he didn't care; what was good enough for Clem was good enough for him. I figured less was more, and cautiously trimmed the shaggy edges, staying clear of an all-over cut. It wasn't so hard. He and Clem had the same top-of-the-head baldness, though Clem's was more advanced. And Jackson's hair was coarser, easier to handle. Nancy proceeded with her nail clipping. It was peaceful there in the hot stillness, with only the sound of scissors and the whirr of insects. I moved on to his ears and eyebrows, and as a final touch, I neatened up his beard. When I had done my best and had brushed him off, I stretched out on the grass to admire my handiwork. I watched Nancy as she tried to art-talk him, and wished she would shut up.

Later we went to the Coast Guard for a stroll and a look at the ocean, then back to Jackson's favorite bar in town, near the station. We sat in a booth and he talked about the impressionists and how important Monet was to him, and as he talked, I watched the interplay of excitement and sadness on his face. That evening, for the first time, I liked his face, the sound of his voice. Maybe because he seemed at ease. I knew for sure it was the first time I had felt at ease in his presence. His drunken prophecy of my doomed marriage-to-be at the Bank Street party faded. I was happy that what I thought of as a “connection” had been made. We lingered awhile, then I drove him back to his car and off he went.

August 11 was a Saturday. Everyone in the household was in situ for the weekend, Danny as well. We all spent the afternoon at the beach, except for Friedel, who was still too weak. After dinner, Nancy went off
on a date and Clem and I geared up for a benefit piano concert at the Creeks, the estate of the painter-collector Alfonso Ossorio. In the late afternoon, Jackson started calling. Yes, he would meet us at Alfonso's. Then no, he didn't want to go. No surprise. Big splashy gatherings weren't much of a draw for him those days, or any day. Then the third call—yes, he would see us there. I figured Ruth had cajoled him into an outing.

That night, Danny and Friedel stayed home, and with Marisol in tow, we arrived at Alfonso's around nine. A clear, balmy night, most of the people we knew, and then some, were gathered in the rosy glow of Japanese lanterns on the terrace and lawn that stretched to the moon-sliced water of Georgica Pond. This was definitely not the usual East Hampton art party. It was all very classy, everyone on their best behavior and dressed to the nines.

A far cry from a few weeks earlier when Alfonso and his partner Ted Dragon had invited Clem, Jackson, and me for dinner. A small group: just us, Betty Parsons—Jackson's ex–art dealer—and her girlfriend. As we walked into the grand entrance hall, Betty and her friend were arguing loudly and tussling at the top of the curved staircase, and down they tumbled, landing in a heap. They got up, greeted us, and the evening proceeded without a word, as if nothing had happened. In fact, I was probably the only one who even remembered it by the time we had downed the first drink. I figured the time would come when I, too, would stop noticing and remembering. Maybe when I grew more accustomed to this world, where the unexpected was all part of life as usual.

Now, here we all were, paragons of civility, strolling in the light of the moon to chairs sprinkled across the grass. Jackson hadn't shown up. He must have changed his mind once again. Clem and I sat under a whispering tree, the piano music, the flicker of fireflies, floating around us. Through the window, I could see Jackson's
Lavender Mist
—the sublime
Lavender Mist
—illuminated by candles. I reached for Clem's hand and slipped into a reverie. The moment, so complete, so utterly beautiful. A time of peace such as I could never have imagined.

At intermission I reluctantly rejoined the world. We made our way to the terrace for a drink. A few minutes later, maybe not even that long, Alfonso hurried over to Clem, drew him aside, and quietly told him that
Conrad Marca-Relli—the painter, and neighbor of Jackson—had called. Jackson was dead in a car accident on Fireplace Road not far from his house.

Alfonso, Clem, Marisol, and I drove immediately to the site. The road was blocked off. Lights flashed from police cars and an ambulance. People were milling around. We pulled up a short distance away and walked down the road. Before reaching the police cars I stopped, saying I would wait there. I didn't know what there was to be seen, but I knew that whatever it was, I didn't want to see it. I don't know how long I stood there. I was a stone. I thought that the ambulance might mean that he was alive after all. I don't know if I thought about Ruth. At some point I returned to our car. I watched the people silhouetted in the streams of lights. I wondered why there wasn't more noise. Shouldn't there be shouts and screams? I had never known anyone who had died.

Eventually, Clem and Marisol came back. I turned the car around and we headed back to our place. He said that Jackson had been thrown from the open convertible and had hit a tree and had died instantly. He said that Ruth, too, had been thrown but was okay; they were taking her to the hospital. And then he said there had been a second girl and she had clung to the car and had been pinned under it and was dead.

We got to the house. Marisol went to the bedroom to tell Friedel, and Clem immediately left again to go to the Pollock house to make sure it was secure for the night. When he got back he called Sande, the brother Jackson was closest to and who lived the nearest. He wasn't home. He then called Charles, another brother. They talked at length, and Charles said he would call his three brothers. They agreed that Stella, Jackson's mother, who lived with Sande, shouldn't be told until the morning.

Locating Lee would prove to be difficult. Clem had thought he would be able to reach her at Peggy Guggenheim's in Venice, where Lee had been going to see the Biennale. Peggy explained that she had changed her mind about putting Lee up, and, unable to book a hotel room, Lee had decided not to come to Venice. Just another of the peevish hassles that seemed to abound in the backbiting art family. Peggy would call later to fully explain “her side” of the incident, as well as to vent at length her caustic thoughts on Jackson's death.

But the question remained, where was Lee? Clem knew that she had planned to look up the painter Paul Jenkins, who was then living in Paris; maybe he knew something. But first Friedel needed calming down. He had been awakened from a drug-induced sleep and was now up and roaming the house, wild-eyed and wailing about the hand of God. While Clem tried to get him back to bed, I took on the task of putting in a call to Paul in Paris. The comedy began. Somewhere between my pathetic French pronunciation, the overseas operator, and the Paris operator, the phone number prefix
LEC
became
Elysées
. And so it went, with waits in between.

Finally, somewhere in the middle of the Atlantic, a lightbulb went off, and so it was that around three o'clock in the morning I heard Paul's voice. I shouted for Clem. He told Paul what had happened, and, miracle of miracles, Lee was right there. She had been staying with them for a few days, and at last the person who most needed to know knew.

We never did sleep that night. The phone kept ringing. I thought about Lee. Clem had said he could hear her hysterically laughing and screaming before he had even told Paul what had happened. It made sense to me. She knew. In some way she had been waiting.

Late the next morning our exhausted group huddled around the kitchen table. Nancy had gone into town for the Sunday
Times
. There was the story, on the front page. I glanced at it but couldn't read it. I was struck by the inanity of reading about what I already knew; I wasn't ready for the secondhand-ness of those deaths. Marisol's eyes lit up, “Peectures? Peectures?” She, who had stood transfixed over the body, now wanted pictures. I wanted to stuff the paper down her throat.

Soon after, Clem and I headed over to the Pollock house. Sande had arrived. A few people had come by and were walking around, talking and shaking their heads at each other. Like an intruder, I crept upstairs to join some of Lee's women friends, who were gathering up Ruth's belongings. With great care they combed the bedroom, guestroom, bathroom, and Lee's studio. Everything must be exactly as it had been when Lee left. The women were like mothering birds cleaning the nest, hovering, sanitizing. Until Ruth never existed. I grasped the importance of what they were doing, but wondered if anything could ease Lee's reentry into
this house that she had left under such painful duress. And that bed. Would she sleep in that bed? The women were smoothing on fresh linens as if for a bride, not a widow. I couldn't even look at that bed, much less touch it. I quickly left and went the few steps down the hall to the guestroom to help Charlotte Brooks, who had started to pack up Edith Metzger's things. That was her name, Edith Metzger, the girl crushed to death under the car.

And then, in the top drawer of the small bureau, I saw the diaphragm case. I was flooded with anger. The expectations. She had come hoping. For what? An adventure, a party, maybe a man, maybe even a painter, maybe the chance to show off a new dress, to go to the beach, to get some sun? All reasonable hopes for an August weekend in East Hampton. And her anticipation must have been building on the early-morning train ride out with her friend Ruth, who would have fired her up with talk about her lover, the great painter who would meet them at the station.
Yeah, some adventure.
The little room was hot and stuffy. I couldn't get the window open. And there on the bureau was the damn diaphragm, pale and powdered in its case. I had looked. Just like that, I had looked. I disgusted myself. My prying was prurient and ugly. But there was no taking it back.

I tried to imagine what Edith had looked like, what she was like as a person, this person who had so carefully sprinkled powder on her diaphragm, something I never bothered to do. Was she beautiful? Other than her name, all I knew that afternoon was that only a few hours before she had been an innocent bystander, a victim, and that she had died screaming. She had to have been screaming in fear, because Clem had told me that she had been the only one who had clung to the car when it had flipped over.

I may not have known Edith, but I knew what her last day must have been like. I had spent enough time in that house, holed up around that scarred kitchen table. But at least then there had been Lee to spark the energy and mask the emptiness. Yesterday there would have been only Jackson, holding on, if barely, and two girls waiting for him to say, “C'mon, let's get the fuck outta here,” or to say anything at all. From the years with my stepfather, I knew what it was like to watch a drunk
get drunk. Clem had told me about the time he had gone to a bullfight in Spain. He said he had never before experienced such an excruciating combination of boredom and fear as when he had watched men repeatedly invite their own deaths. He never went to a bullfight again. To me, watching Jackson during those weekends in Springs had seemed awfully similar.

Sparse details about Edith Metzger surfaced in the following weeks, and they varied. Was she a receptionist or a manicurist; was she a petite blond or brunette; one article spells her name with an
s
; was she twenty-four or twenty-five; did she come from Queens or the Bronx? I wished she had been a rocket scientist. Maybe then people would have been paying more attention to who this hopeful, fastidious, fearful girl was, other than the nobody with the cracked spine in the great painter's car. But, things being what they were, the spotlight was quickly sucked up by the superstar, the grieving widow, and the miraculously surviving mistress. Ruth would become known as “the girl in the death car,” as if there had been only one girl.

I heard later that Edith's family hired a lawyer to get compensation for her death. Evidently not a very good lawyer, because he came to the Pollock house and left with nothing, except perhaps an experience to talk about. Later, a civil case was brought, and Edith's family and Ruth were each awarded the token sum of $10,000 from the widow. Ruth testified that Jackson had not been drunk and had driven slowly on the way home. She also said that Edith had not been screaming. Why would she say those things? Why would she whitewash the tragedy? Whatever her reason, she sold her friend out.

I was amazed at the heat of my emotions and at how they stayed with me. I knew I was identifying with Edith and her expectations of a good time, fueled, no doubt, by my own disappointment with what I had hoped would be a happy honeymoon summer with Clem. Edith and I had both wanted some high life and some time by the seashore. But at least Clem and I would have a lot of years to fumble around, trying to get things right. Edith had run out of chances.

The weight of Edith's death lay heavily on Clem, as well. Those first
days,
killed
was the word he used. Not
the girl who died
. Or he would say, when he could bear to utter the words, “the girl Jackson murdered.” Clem was so angry at Jackson, not just for having succumbed to his demons but for having taken someone else with him.