A Complicated Marriage (24 page)

As startled as I was by the look of her, I was completely unprepared for the sharpness of her tongue, which she proceeded to hone on me as the meal progressed. I had hoped that I had slipped under her radar, but she knew who I was and prodded me with questions about Clem, myself, and art. I didn't hold up well on any score, and at some personal jab or other over dessert, I felt my eyes start to tear. I excused myself, sweet tooth notwithstanding, and escaped into the bathroom, never to return to the table.

Lee had been talking to Clem and said she would like to have a tête-à-tête—some new drama, no doubt. So, without much ado, we left the party and went back to Lee's place. With us was Lee's nephew, Ronnie. Lee and Clem went up the few stairs to her bedroom off the living room while Ronnie and I perched on a window seat, the room lit only by a street lamp. We had little to say. He was strumming a guitar. It all seemed like a stage set where all the action was offstage, with the audience's attention drawn to the sliver of light coming from the open door. The only sound was the steady flow of voices, on and on, accompanied downstage by the soft sounds of the guitar. I was torn between waiting and taking a cab home, but I was overcome with inertia. Maybe it was exhaustion. Two divas in one night.

That was my last interlude with Lee. Other than the inevitable casual acknowledgments in crowded places, we never spoke again. Lee died in 1984, at age seventy-five. Though her last years had been difficult, plagued as she was by severe arthritis, she had achieved success as an artist.

I HEAR his graveled voice that at times could be so honeyed and soft that it sounded ingratiating, even condescending. When he talked about art he talked straight out. And when he got angry, the gravel thundered and grated. I see his big ears that, once I noticed them, were hard to avoid staring at. I feel his dark bushy mustache that was harsh, too harsh, against my skin when we would greet or part from each other. I see his large head and the bulk of his torso, which made people think he was a towering man, much bigger than he actually was. At a distance he would seem to loom, but face-to-face we were about the same height. But that heft was mighty. When he arrived at Bank Street, he filled the doorway side to side.

We saw a lot of David when he would come into town for a hit of the city after his long periods of seclusion upstate. In the early forties he had built his house and studio in Bolton Landing near Lake George and had lived and worked there ever since. David and his wife, Jeanne, whom I had met in New York a few times and liked a lot, had recently separated. She had taken their two baby girls and moved back to Washington, D.C., her hometown. Now he lived in Bolton Landing alone. When he would come down from his mountain, there he would be at our door, tweedy, rough-hewn, smelling of cigars, and ready for an art infusion and some high life. A hardy man, homespun. At least, that was how he appeared. Sometimes, if David went overboard on the woodsman talk, Clem would remind him he was just a middle-class city boy from the Midwest.

We would hang out, go to galleries and openings, and always ended up at the Five Spot or the Half Note. Like most artists, David loved jazz, traveling in troops. He was all go-go, do-do. That was how it was in New York. Bolton Landing was something else. And it was there,
after I had been married about two years, that I first got to know David one-on-one.

It was fall, and as we drove north it got darker and colder. I had never been to Lake George. There was someone else with us. I don't remember who, but it was someone with a car, because we couldn't have afforded to rent one. The smell of the impending wilderness seeped through the windows. Driving through the night, I wondered if this was the farthest north I had ever been. But no, there was an earlier time when in 1942 my mother, my brother, Norden, and I drove to Saranac Lake. Behind the wheel that day was her current boyfriend, who had the implausible and unforgettable name Colby Dam. He himself would be utterly forgettable and, like so many of his predecessors, would soon be out of our lives.

It was my eighth summer, and for two weeks we stayed on the lake in a log cabin with a forbidding outhouse and a scratchy wooden seat. Afraid to sit, I would hover over it, terrified of what might come up through that black hole to nowhere. Colby and my brother fished—girls not allowed—while I wrote stories about being eaten by wolves and bears and snakes and, of course, fish. I illustrated the stories, bound them together with yarn, and called them books. Meanwhile, my mother swatted and whacked at all the crawling, flying creatures and smeared us head to toe with calamine.

After dark, she and Colby would tear off to whatever nightlife there was to be found and I would lie in bed, rigid, listening to the caterwauling of nature on a hot summer's night, a sentry armed against the fearsome hordes that were massing to storm the cabin. I would wait for my mother and the man to return, wait for the whispers and laughter to die down, wait for their silence before I slept.

Clem pointed out Lake George on our left, but it was too dark and I saw nothing except motels, mostly closed, it being off-season. The winding road continued for miles. I kept expecting to see a town; there had to be a town. But it was not to be. We turned up a hill, away from the lake, up a steep rutted road off of which was David's place marked with his sign, TERMINAL IRON WORKS.
Ominous
, I thought. And indeed, the house was not welcoming, built as it was of exposed cinder blocks, raw to the eye and touch inside and out. My spirits sank. The main room
was rough and ready, like David. The place seemed full of musty, dim corners, the furniture unyielding. I saw no sign of a woman's touch. I was surprised. How could Jeanne have been so quickly and completely erased? This was a man's house, and I didn't know what to do with that. My mind whirled:
Where will I sit, is there any food, where will we sleep
? I was already counting hours until we could leave. But when that would be, I didn't know. The men were happy, pouring the Scotch and lighting up the cigars. I considered the advantages of getting drunk and decided to join in.

At last there was some murmuring about dinner. My stomach rumbled. At least, until I heard David in his mountain-man way going on at length about the deer he recently shot. It had been hanging from a tree and now, suitably bloodless and hacked up, it was to be on tonight's menu. He reminded me of my brother, a hunter of a different sort, who as a small boy with a BB gun quickly graduated to more lethal weapons and bloodier venues than Westchester County. Norden would shoot his way through North America, Africa, and the mountainous reaches of Nepal and Russia, decking the walls of his conservative suburban Denver house with his glassy-eyed trophies. Even before I was a teenager, our freezer was often filled with suspicious hunks of this and that. But, though teased unmercifully for being a sissy, I succeeded in never swallowing a bite.

As David threw the slabs of venison over the fire, I asked if I could help. He gave me some onions and garlic to chop. As I started to peel the garlic, he grabbed the cloves and with a loud
thwack
of his massive fist decimated them and shoveled them into a frying pan of sizzling butter. He suggested I might set the table. Humbled, I beat a retreat, wondering if this time I would be able to avoid swallowing and, more important, whether there would be any bread, a more comforting sop for my hunger. Somehow I did manage, and there was bread. The Scotch helped. And I was grateful to that deer. I had heard the stories about David's pies that he would concoct for guests out of chipmunks, groundhogs, and any other furry critter that might get in the crosshairs of his rifle.

Later, as the men settled in for more talk and cigars, my real job became clear—I was to play the woman's part and clean up. At least I knew how to do that. I was at the sink, washing the dishes, when David suddenly
appeared behind me. He startled me with his closeness and anger. That graveled voice boomed: “Where do you think you are? Have you ever heard of a well? Do you think the world is made of water?” I heard the unspoken message:
You good-for-nothing stupid bitch
! He pushed me aside, turned off the water, grabbed a dishpan out of thin air, slammed it into the sink, and started doing the dishes as he and God intended. He flung me a dishtowel. I wanted to scream, punch him, hang him from a tree. I didn't. I wanted Clem to punch him. He didn't.

David was silent, intent and efficient at his task. I meekly started drying. Soon after, I went to bed. It would be hours before Clem turned in. I curled up in the corner of the bed, facing the concrete blocks. I counted them. I memorized the grainy map of them and stroked their coarse cold surface.

Most of the next day was spent in David's studio, a large structure down the drive from the house. Clem said David could build a complement of tanks there; it was that big and that filled with steel and hoists and welding equipment. I liked the feel of it. It was what a sculpture factory should be like. The possibilities—anything could materialize. The men were so happy there, and now and then we went out into the fields to look at the finished pieces mounted on their concrete slabs.

Everything was warmed and softened with the sunlight. I was at ease. I now knew that we would be leaving today. I also knew that plans didn't always count for much. I saw those steel pieces, some delicately filigreed and soaring, some as hefty as David, soldiering as they caught the sun and threw their shadows across that large field that sloped away from the cinder block house. This morning there were no wolves and even the house looked almost inviting. Could concrete look pink in the sun? This morning I liked where I was.

When we finally left the compound, it was dark again. I never did see the town or the lake. Maybe we stopped at a diner along the way, maybe I ordered the soul food of childhood, meat loaf and mashed potatoes.

The feelings evoked by that visit to David were not unique. During those early years, I invariably felt at a loss when visiting Clem's friends out of town. If I found artists difficult, artists without wives or girlfriends were my nadir. Writers were easier; they enjoyed batting the
conversational ball, had a wider curiosity and laughed more, and enjoyed their creature comforts. But writers were a rarity in Clem's life. And the women? Well, they softened my landings, softened the edges. Sometimes, not always.

Not that I hadn't any experience being in a man's place. After all, Clem had been living alone at Bank Street for some ten years when we met. But there was an important difference between David's or any other artist's place, and Clem's: I was wanted at Clem's. With the others, it wasn't that I was
not
wanted; it was simply that they were indifferent to my presence. Though I was certainly aware that my feelings of inadequacy and unease contributed to the problem, I was as yet unable to resolve them. I also knew that my interactions would have been eased if I had been able to merge the artists with their work that gave me so much pleasure. That would be harder for me to do. The indelible imprint of the men themselves—the sound, smell, feel of them—remained separate from the mastery of their art.

Biographies and documentaries were routinely based on the assumption that the sum of the artist's character lies in his work. Many artists would have agreed. After all, wasn't art the through-line of their life? Some might have even agreed that they had been fated to play out the Faustian drama: The greater their renown, the more difficult their lives. David must have agreed. He was quoted as saying, “Art is a luxury for which the artist pays.” He might well have added that those around the artist pay as well.

After that first visit to Bolton Landing, I became familiar with the many facets of David. He was often kind and generous and well-mannered. He adored his little girls. He could also be angry and blusteringly full of himself. At times he was depressed and sad. And he could drink a lot. In other words, he was human. For my part, even though I grew up a bit and gained confidence, I nonetheless knew that David and I weren't a good fit. And though he played an intimate part in our lives and we saw him often both in Bolton and in New York, I kept my emotional distance.

My relationship with David, as well as with other artists, would soon become more relaxed. I stopped asking myself the questions of an insecure child.
Will they accept me, maybe even like me
?
Will they make me
cry, or just bore me to tears
?
Or will they not notice me at all
? And I came to accept that, in their insular world, I would have little conversational entrée, at least while Clem was in the room. And I always remained open to the art. Art was everywhere I went. And at home I was surrounded by it, literally tripped over it in the kitchen. It was simply there, the stock in the soup of my life.

As my perceptions slowly expanded, it was inevitable that I would develop preferences between this artist and that, this picture and that. And more and more, I warmed to sculpture. Particularly the living with it. I enjoyed the way it never stopped exerting its presence, unlike paintings, which my eye could in time skim over, unseeing. A piece of sculpture commanded interaction; I would walk around it, bark my shins on it, dust it, and creatively find space for it. And since my first morning at Bolton, I had delighted in the way sculptures hurled their shadows, arrogantly enlarging their turf. I would always place sculptures near windows, and I became convinced that the images cast by David's pieces had been endowed with a spirit of their own. In my heart, David finally did merge with his glorious art. I came to love him for having created those pieces and then for allowing them to become part of my life. But that was later. By then he had died in 1965 as a result of an accident in his truck.

I AM ABLE to be precise about the details of this trip because, starting in 1950, Clem recorded his activities in a pocket-size daybook. Every night, at his desk, with the last drink of the day, he would fill in the day's entry. Scrupulously noting the names of people and places, he would cram those small blue pages with his perversely broad-nibbed Montblanc. He chronicled the facts—no editorializing, ever. What a gift. Order out of the chaos of memory.