A Complicated Marriage (29 page)

Her words pass through me in icy fragments. I have no appetite for words or much of anything. I take in her tall, lithe frame. She wears clothes as drapery. Her tidiness. Her capped blondness. Skin that betrays no secrets. I wish her dead. I have no body, no hair, no skin. My secrets have been torn out and shredded while I wasn't looking. While I was in the dark they must have crept up and wrenched out my innocence, along with what had been my joy the last nine months. And thrown its bloody pulp into the garbage.

She arranges the daisies one at a time. There are thousands of them. Now and then she steps back to assess her handiwork. Why is she here, this sometime acquaintance? I close myself. She does not exist. When Clem returns, I utter a few words. Angry, in a deep voice that is unfamiliar to me, I say, “Don't tell anyone.”

That was the first time I confronted the many faces of acute pain that could be emotional as well as physical. I understood that something painful had happened to me, but I was unable to walk into the underbelly of the pain. That would come much later. Meanwhile, in the weeks that
followed, I experienced a great deal of physical pain. I could barely walk and when I did, I bent forward, my hands clutching my abdomen as if something more might fall out. I was like the old ladies on Broadway who inch by inch threaded their way to the sanctuary of the benches along the strip of green. And I lived and breathed rage. I blamed the intruder who had moved into my body, who had promised me the gift of life and had eaten the heart out of me instead. I blamed the doctor who had ravaged my insides getting rid of the clinging intruder and who had nothing to say to me after his butchery except, “You're young. You'll have another.” As if I were a normal twenty-eight-year-old. He didn't see the crone. He didn't see the catatonia. He added, “No sex for six weeks, and don't get pregnant for six months.” Sex? Pregnant? I stared at him, as vacant as my body.

My mother, who had come from Cape Cod for the blessed event, said, “You have your whole life ahead of you,” in her “think good thoughts and everything will look better in the morning” way. Clem told me later that when the doctor had updated them on what was happening, she had coquettishly said to him, “You must find it all very interesting, in a scientific way.” Even the Butcher had been too nonplussed to respond.

As for Clem, he was there, always there. He cried often. And as many times as the doctor told him the cause had been “an accident at conception,” Clem insisted it was his fault. He meant his age, but I knew he meant, too, the damning words he had said that hot spring night when the cries from the Cyclone had shuddered in my tears. Soon he stopped talking about it. Me, I had never found the words to talk about it at all. The days, the weeks, passed. We moved forward, parallel mourners in silence.

It seemed to me that my pain had been effectively muffled, as out of sight as the bassinette that had been stowed in the basement of our building. Within two weeks, after a cheerless Christmas and New Year, life resumed its customary social flow and on the fifteenth of January we boarded the Broadway Limited for Chicago, where Clem was to give a talk at the Art Institute. Our ten-day trip would include Buffalo for the dedication of the Knox wing of the Albright Museum, a night at Niagara Falls, then on to Toronto for a few nights with the Bushes.

February disappeared into a fog of parties, some ours, mostly hosted by others, often ending up at a club called Camelot, where we would twist ourselves breathless. I was mad about the twist, which liberated me forever from my self-consciousness with touchy-feely dancing.

One late afternoon, Peggy Guggenheim stopped by. The renowned collector/art dealer was in from Venice on a rare visit. After the first once-over, she ignored me, and she and her old friend Clem flew into a gossip frenzy. Small, cold, brittle, the woman who had been the first to show the abstract expressionist all-stars delivered her final verdict: One and all, they had failed to fulfill whatever promise they might have had. Besides, “They were ungrateful bastards and if I could do it over again, I would never . . . ” The artists, the pictures, all ashes in her mouth. Later, we went to the Museum of Modern Art, which drove her to new heights of contempt. I had expected an aura of glamour but found a bitter, combustible woman who made Lee look like a daffodil.

I now look at Clem's daybook and see the staggering array of activities during those months after the baby's death: parties at the Motherwells', the Castellis', Henry Geldzahler's; visitors Robert Jacobsen and Miriam Prevot from Paris, the Piero Dorazios from Rome; a dinner at Bernie and Becky Reis's for Francoise Gillot . . . And I wonder at it, at how the body preens, shows up, joins in revelry night after night, while the mind and the senses sleep. It all happened, but I remembered little except the twist, the fog, and Peggy.

And my introduction to Pilates, the latest exercise discovery of Marion and Bob Wernick. Ex–Time-Life staffers, the Wernicks were extraordinary racanteurs, drank astonishing amounts of booze, and, to Clem's delight, provided an inexhaustible flow of juicy gossip. They were also unique in our repertoire of friends. They were professional guests. Unemployed since Time-Life had slipped from cutting edge in the forties to prosaic in the fifties, the Wernicks had carved out their unusual niche and were evidently much in demand. They were like a vaudeville team with a balancing act, she with her bawdy, husky voice and creamy-skinned amplitude, he with his natty, urbane detachment with just a touch of intellectual repartee, not too much, not too little. Now and then the act
passed through our living room on their way from one exotic locale to another. It was on one of these visits that they talked about Pilates, the panacea that would change my life. They insisted I come with them and give it a try.

Up three flights in a musty derelict building on Eighth Avenue between Fifty-eighth and Fifty-ninth Streets was a drab room with a few padded benches, pulleys, monkey bars in the corner, floor mats, and Joseph and Clara Pilates. We left our coats in an alcove, and I waited for the panacea to work its magic. During the months that I went there twice a week, the routine never varied: much hands-on twisting, pushing, and pulling, and a good deal of bending backward over the benches and pulley stretching. Always, Joseph, with his guttural German accent, would tell me, “You have a fine, strong body. We will develop it.” I didn't feel fine or strong as I hung from the monkey bars. I never was able to swing like the monkey they urged me to be, or like Farley Granger, who could swing across and back in a flash. I'd never been a fan of Granger, but for an actor who seemed so slight on the screen, he was a perfect specimen in the flesh.

Soon the Wernicks were off to God knows where, but I stayed on, at least for a while. I liked hearing that old German tell me I had a strong body. Since the baby, I needed reminding that I had a body at all. And I liked it when I would come home and slouch in the yellow chair in Clem's office and hear him tell me that I looked wonderful.

At the end of February, my grandmother Betty died of a heart attack at age eighty-two. It struck suddenly, between the end of dinner, capped off with the applesauce she loved, and the opening hand of canasta with a friend. I went to my first funeral at Campbell's on Madison Avenue, around the corner from her apartment. We then drove across the George Washington Bridge to Englewood, where Betty was buried among all the women she had lived her early life with and their husbands, who had had a habit of dying too young for anyone to have ever talked about them or remembered them much at all.

Then, like magic, our sparsely furnished apartment overflowed with the furniture and bibelots of Betty's life, surprisingly compatible bedfellows with the dazzling colors and shapes of the modernity that decked
our walls. Paintings would come and go, but all that ballast of the lives that preceded mine would remain steadfast.

The fog must have been thickening, because I had my first visit with an analyst after celebrating my twenty-eighth birthday with Bette Davis in
Night of the Iguana
. I still see the first scene, Bette sitting downstage, a few feet from us, wearing a white shirt open to the waist, in full flesh and fervor. As for the analyst, he'd been recommended by the doctor who had seen Clem through his breakdown in 1954. Any trepidation I might have had about opening my brain to some strange man had faded as I helplessly witnessed my drift into inertia, my days like meals where all the food tasted like cream of wheat without the sugar on top.

I showed up at the office of Isaiah “Sy” Rochlin for what he said would be a consultation, after which he would make the appropriate referral to someone else. Uncomfortable, I felt I was being measured, but against what I didn't know, and whatever it was I was sure I would fall short. I relived the panic of my interview with Mr. Snyder, the headmaster of Rye Country Day School, who looked like the Ghost of Christmas Past. At stake was whether I would be accepted into eighth grade after years of public schools. He asked me when Columbus had discovered America and, my mind a black hole, I stuttered 1600-and-whatever. Dripping condescension, he told my cringing mother that I would be tested and most likely held back a grade, that is, if I passed at all. I cried, considered suicide, but hung in. Quaking alone in a classroom on a dripping summer day, I took the test and my life was spared; I was accepted into the eighth grade. Now I was with Sy, the man with the power, asking questions that I answered, trying to hit the right balance between despair and certifiable lunacy. Once again, I must have passed the test, because he decided to take me on as his own patient.

But first there would be a hiatus. Clem and I went on the road again, this time to Florida in a car Ken Noland lent us. The drive was Clem's idea, spurred by an invitation to speak at the Ringling Museum in Sarasota. If we talked about it, I don't remember, probably because it didn't matter to me. Anything that passed the time, got me through another day without thinking, was okay by me. It would be a typical Clem drive. Just as we had on a previous drive from Vancouver to Los Angeles, we
would be traveling only on two-lane roads, until we dead-ended at the wharf in Key West.

We stopped to see our friends Anne and Jim Truitt in their house in Georgetown. They threw a small dinner party where we met several Camelot players, among them the Ben Bradleys (
Newsweek
), Philip and Kay Graham (the
Washington Post
), the Jim Angletons (CIA Counterintelligence), and Mary Meyer, an artist and ex-wife of Cord Meyer, also of the CIA. We had gotten to know Mary when she was seeing Ken Noland and had stayed in touch. She was a mesmerizing blond beauty; I adored her straight-talking ease of being in the world and her style. One day she had arrived with Ken wearing a drop-dead beige corduroy polo coat, and I asked if she would mind if I bought one just like it. She was delighted and I cherished it for decades, as if it endowed me with her beautiful spirit. I also adored Anne, who did it all: wife, mother of three, hostess for her
Newsweek
executive husband, and dedicated artist.

Amid this group of friends, the evening flew by in a whirl of banter and camaraderie. Such a high time in Washington, in the whole country, when it seemed that the promise of a better future would actually become a reality. Impossible to imagine that the next year would bring an end to Jack Kennedy and the idyll that bonded this group. Astonishing, too, was that also within the year this golden circle would be tragically sundered by Philip Graham's suicide and the murder of Mary Meyer. Her violent death soon after the assassination would forever be linked to her long affair with Kennedy, and to the long arm of the CIA. Her murder would remain yet another of the obfuscated mysteries associated with those times.

But that night, in homey conviviality, while Anne's new baby, Sam, slept in his crib upstairs, she and I hung out in the kitchen as she demonstrated her failsafe salad dressing: tons of crushed garlic, pepper, lots of salt, and a few shakes of paprika and dried mustard, madly shaken with oil and vinegar. As she mashed, sprinkled, and poured, she confided, in her simple, precise way, how she, too, had experienced the loss of a baby. Anne wasn't the first. Following our loss, several women had written to me about their similar experiences. However, I was unable to be open in return and was wary about hearing more than I wanted to
know. With Anne, I was grateful for her words, probably because she so tacitly expected none from me. I also knew that when I was ready to talk to anyone, it would be to her.

Three days later, our slow journey got even slower when Clem developed a pain in his left shoulder and I had to do all the driving. I knew that he would never malinger. With a pain threshold as high as Everest, he had never complained about anything whatever, so if he said his arm was “bad,” it must have been excruciating. Nonetheless, I came up empty on compassion. I wanted to be a mollycoddled princess, not a damned chauffeur. And I certainly didn't want to be chauffeur to this person, who in between “points of interest” sat there burrowed into Nietzsche while puffing his disgusting cigars.

We stopped at every animal farm, monkey jungle, aquarium, every jerry-rigged roadside stand with a sign out front boasting of snakes, iguanas, monkeys—who pulled my hair until I screamed—tarantulas, crocodiles, or exotic birds and cursing parrots. If it moved and had feathers, fur, or fins, Clem heard its call. To me, walking in the shadow of morbidity, these places were filthy warrens of cages that smelled of slow death. Clem delighted in the infinite variety and checked out each creature with as much intensity as he brought to bear on a piece of art. And he took umbrage with labels that were inadequate or, worse, inaccurate, and would harry the indifferent owners with questions and suggestions for improving the information. A place always got high marks if the creatures had names. After all, if the poor thing had to suffer life in a cage, the least one could do was accord it the dignity of a name. And a dead baby should have a name. And I buried the thought deeper.