A Complicated Marriage (28 page)

While we were in Brussels, Clem decided to spend a day in Bruges, while I, in need of a breather from art and togetherness, opted for another beach town, Ostend. At the racetrack I managed to place bets with touts, and lose. And I managed to feel like a grown-up navigating my day and the buses. I realized how childlike I had become after three months dancing in the lockstep of coupledom. Though we were certainly a couple at home, travel was making the dance untenable.

No more dawdling—we headed south to Paris, our only detour, Vimy Ridge. My skin prickled as we drove down a narrow road through a small forest, the sunny day now dimmed and chill. Leaving the car, we found ourselves alone as we walked through what had been minefields, the craters still there. We walked in the trenches where thousands of men had lived, if they'd been lucky, month after month. Then up a hill to the Canadian war memorial, a long wall with the names of the dead, two pylons rising above it, a somber reminder of the sixty-six thousand Canadians who had died in the Great War, many of them there. I couldn't take it all in. I looked at my feet, somehow ashamed to be standing there, young and alive.

Since we had left England, the specters of war had taken up residence in me: the bombs of Paris, the Menton explosion, and the scars of destruction and deprivation, evident or masked, everywhere I looked. I hadn't anticipated that. The war was past; it belonged to my childhood. That unsafe time of too many fathers, moves, and schools, my mother crying as she listened in the dark every night to Gabriel Heater, who brought the news of the war into the room we shared. Crying about the war? Crying about her life? For me it had all gotten mixed together, and I started listening for the bombs that would surely fall on Blind Brook
Lodge. Hadn't I been trained to listen for sirens and hide under my desk at school? Hadn't my brother made me memorize the insignias of warplanes, ours and the dread Messerschmitts, that I should keep an eye out for? But to get retriggered fourteen years later? Oh, how I yearned to outgrow the past.

And soon we were in Paris. We returned the car. Clem retrieved our maps and guidebooks, of course meticulously annotated by his Montblanc. I left behind my tense shoulders, tired eyes, and fear of getting lost. By ten o'clock that night we were on the boat train to London. This time, no gulls, no rhapsodizing about the white cliffs. Instead, a different kind of rhapsody, lying in Clem's arms, in a berth of a train that was rocking on a boat.

The next morning we were on our way to Liverpool, where we boarded the
Corinthian
. To Clem's delight the ship was small, the weather foul. While most of the passengers took to their cabins or crept around looking green, Clem walked the decks glorying in the high seas, heavy winds, and salt spray. I didn't get seasick, but I much preferred the snugness of our cabin, where I spent afternoons writing in my journal, trying to sort through experiences I wanted to remember and tripping over a lot I would just as soon have forgotten.

I was struck with a new theory: that proximity might well cause more divorces than infidelity. I allowed myself to reopen my dire Amsterdam scenario, to wonder about how close we might have come to splitting up. I knew that I had overreacted, though I still swerved abruptly between thinking it was all my fault and thinking what an insensitive bastard Clem could be. Even mid-Atlantic, between here and there, seeing any middle ground was beyond my grasp. One thing I knew for sure—I had shut down after we hit Germany, where I had felt most isolated and inconsequential. I had been spoiled by the English, who hadn't talked through me but
to
me. So civilized that, unlike Americans, they could even make art talk sound like conversation.

I thought about how complicated travel was for me, because on the one hand, some of the best parts of our journey had been the peaceful amblings and small towns, being on our own. At the same time, that unrelenting togetherness was what had eventually worn me down, especially
in the last weeks. Like the horse that nears the barn, I was anxious to get back to the given, the routine and nourishment of home. At least there, there was variety, and whatever was going on between Clem and me, I had escape hatches every which way. In that damned Simca, well . . .

Sick of insights, my thoughts turned to the party at hand, a costume party. I decided at the eleventh hour to jettison Clem's mandated shipboard protocol of isolation and become a joiner. I was sick of pretending we were alone while corralled with 250 strangers. Besides, I had a great idea.

Cunard ships were infamous for their rolls, served morning, noon, and night; beautiful to behold, small, round, and burnished to a light brown, they were impenetrable with tooth or chisel. In vain, people would crack them on the table, hoping for access to their yeasty secrets. I thought it was time to put those culinary rocks to some use. Borrowing knitting needles and some wool from the covey of grandmas in the lounge, and asking the bewildered steward to bring me four dozen rolls, I set to work. I pounded the needles through the rolls with Clem's shoe and strung them together with the yarn, until there were yards and yards of them. Then, after dinner I wound the rolls around my head into a dome-like crown and let the rest hang down my back. The result was stunning, beautiful really, like nothing I had ever seen. Their color and symmetry; this, I thought, was what they had been created for. And the judges must have agreed, because I won first prize and was awarded a brass clock with the insignia of the ship on it. No, the ship didn't instantaneously burst into all-singing, all-dancing Technicolor with me as the star. But at least I had given my shipboard fantasy a shot.

As I tucked the clock into my suitcase, I realized it was the only souvenir I was bringing home. I would put it on our bookshelf in the living room. Maybe it would remind me of what was possible, what I could make happen.

My friends, the two Nancys, met us at customs and eased our reentry. At Bank Street I was dizzy with feelings. It was too small, it was divine. It was dingy, it was ours. I was sad, I was happy. Exhausted and keyed up, I thought of the last three months as a party that had been a disaster,
I thought it had been the party beyond my wildest dreams. Most of all, I thought the party was over and there might never be another.

Friedel and Herman (Cherry) rang the doorbell. They had heard we would be home that day. Clem was in the kitchen, breaking out stale ice cubes, pouring the Tanqueray, Noilly Prat, and single drop of orange bitters into his small dented shaker. The search across Europe for a perfect martini was over. We toasted our homecoming and turned to our friends. “So, what's happened since we left?”

IN A DAZE of rapture, I sprawled on the bed and drank in the beauty of all I beheld. The windows wide onto a soft spring breeze, the clouds frothing across the bright sky, now and then an airplane darting through them. Late afternoon, a glass of champagne in one hand, the phone receiver in the other, I called everyone I knew to tell them our new phone number. “Imagine, Susquehanna 7—isn't it wonderful?”

Clem was in the next room, henceforth known as his “office,” already at his desk, his treasured green-shaded lamp in place, his typewriter table and old Remington upright at the ready. His eyes were torn between the flock of seagulls sunning on the reservoir seventeen floors below and the galleys spread out before him.
Art and Culture
, the book he had been working on sporadically for two years, was about to be published.

That May morning in 1960, we had crossed the great divide of Fourteenth Street and moved our bits of furniture, stacks of paintings, and cartons of books from Bank Street to 275 Central Park West at Eighty-eighth Street. It had happened quickly. Only two months before, Clem had received a windfall from his family that we both realized was a life-changing amount of money. After twenty-five years in the Village, Clem opted for a change of scene on the Upper West Side. His guidelines were few: no fancy building, no more than $225 a month, and as long as he didn't have to do anything. With wings on my feet and visions of light and space and the family that would someday fill it up, I found the apartment that I knew was waiting for us in only two weeks. It faced north and south as far as you could see, with sideways views of the park, two bedrooms, and a dining room that could become whatever it wanted to be.

I needed only a quick look, before dashing home to tell Clem. Sight
unseen, he called the landlord and we went uptown to sign the lease for $220 a month. Giddy with the immensity of what we had undertaken, we headed down Broadway to the Tiptoe Inn and in its midafternoon emptiness toasted our new life with martinis.

Now it was real. Every now and then Clem and I would stroll through our rooms, discovering gifts at every turn: a wall of bookcases in his office, a stall shower, three walk-in closets in our bedroom, a linen closet for our two sets of sheets, and picture moldings to make my curatorial job easy. Neither of us had ever had such abundance. I could see Clem's socialist mind whirring; it was like having more shoes than one could possibly wear. But oh, that view of the birds on the water, and that stall shower of his dreams. I knew he would get used to it.

We stood in the thirty-eight-foot living room—the moving man had paced it out—and laughed at our four chairs, three tables, two lamps, and at the paintings stacked against the walls. And laughed at Clem's easel, a lonely sentinel in the dining room, and at our double bed, so small in the big bedroom, with only a bureau and two little tables to keep it company. That night as we lay there, I listened to the silence broken only by an occasional rumble far away. Clem said it was the subway. No more air shaft with its weekend drunks, no more trucks on the cobblestones of Hudson Street—never forgotten but never missed. The next day I started hanging the paintings. Glorious. Who needed furniture?

 

On December 21, 1961, our first baby was born, lived a minute, and died. She was full term and was designated anencephalic. The death certificate would simply state that Baby Greenberg was “incompatible with life.”

Seven months earlier, Clem and I had been in his office. To the north the windows were opened wide to the warm May night. To the east was the Triborough Bridge, to the northwest the shimmering necklace of the George Washington Bridge near enough to touch, and just beyond beckoned the fantasy lights of Palisades Amusement Park in New Jersey. Clem reading at his desk; I seated on the narrow yellow armchair that had been my grandmother's.

I got his attention and in a small voice told him the news, unsure of his response. I was sure. This was the perfect thing, the perfect time, but
for Clem? Well, that might be something else. He was still for a moment, then, “Do you want to have it?” A blow to the gut. Oh, I knew his resistance to having another child at this stage of his life, resistance that was exacerbated by his guilt for having failed Danny as a father. He was also concerned that I wanted a baby only to fill up my life. On that score he was right. Maybe it was a lousy reason. Maybe I didn't deserve to have a child, but still . . . I couldn't speak.

When Clem went to get another drink, I moved to the window behind his desk chair. With those few words, he had defined the baby as mine, not ours—my sole responsibility. Dire scenarios: The baby would be an unwanted appendage, I would pay for my willfulness . . . Tears wet on my face, I listened to the screams from the Cyclone roller coaster across the river. But he and I both knew my answer to his question was yes.

He had taken a blow to the gut, too. He knew he didn't have a choice, but he wanted me to understand that I did. That sank in and I was able to thaw the chill of those words over the next months, months that turned out to be so happy for both of us. Clem attached himself to me, my belly, and the baby. A new closeness. This was the way it was supposed to be; for once, our life was the way it was in the movies. People told me how beautiful I was, and for the first time I believed it.

With the help of Jennifer Gordon I made a maternity dress, black and quasi-chic. My first encounter with a sewing machine since a disastrous two-month home ec course in seventh grade. Now I had actually made something that I could wear. My mother sent down the old white wicker bassinette that my brother and I had slept and cried in as babies. It was like a boat on large wooden wheels. I sewed a cover for the old mattress and wove white satin ribbons through the wicker so that the baby wouldn't get its fingers stuck. I folded up Clem's card table and easel and put away his paints, which in our first year at Central Park West he had never used. I bought a daybed and a changing table and knitted until my fingers had calluses. Along with the brightest paintings we had, I hung a seven-foot striped Morris Louis where it would be the first thing baby would see. More radiant than any rainbow, it matched my new scenario of our future. We would be a real family.

At noon a few days before Christmas, Clem and I took a taxi to
Doctors Hospital. The baby had been reluctant to come into the world and labor would be induced. We were scared and happy. An hour later, I was alone on a gurney in a white curtained cubicle with the moans and cries of labor around me. Sedated, I neither moaned nor cried. My doctor bustled in. He leaned into me, his breath on my face, not with kindness or caring but because he thought I did not hear him, was not getting the message. But I did get the message: There would be no baby. I heard him through the sirens in my brain that were so loud my eyes squeezed shut and my heart fisted inside itself.

 

She walks into my hospital room with a heaping bunch of white daisies. She takes charge. Orders a large vase to be brought. Tells me how sorry she is for my loss. Comments favorably on the spacious private room, the view of the East River, and how beautiful the day is: “Unseasonably warm for December,” she says. Do I know her? I do, but I have lost her name. She appraises the other flowers. I see her reading the cards, counting the bouquets as she puts a price tag on each. She singles out an overripe white orchid as being “particularly tasteful.”