A Complicated Marriage (32 page)

Again at New Dramatists, I did a Richard Foreman ensemble piece, a rat-a-tat dialogue of gibberish wherein actors had to rely on cues memorized by sound and brute luck, and one miscue was like causing a pileup on a highway. The friends I made at New Dramatists were older, more experienced actors. They were also my first connection to Lee Strasberg and the Actors Studio, a connection that would eventually lead me in more new directions.

Meanwhile, performances, rehearsals, classes, and home life all required an intricate schedule and a lot of hustling from one part of the city to another. To ease the crunch, in the fall of 1964, the year the Mustang debuted, we bought our first car. For once, Clem participated. Of course it had to be a convertible, but the color? At the dealership we were taken to an upper level the size of Grand Central, filled with a rainbow of cars, unprecedented at that time, when black, white, and gray ruled. An intoxicating palette for Clem. As I veered toward the blues, Clem stood apart and deliberated, his eye intently scanning tone after tone, until, with absolute surety, he moved to a green car. A medium green tinged with gray, and a dash of yellow, with an innovative metallic sheen that promised to glisten in the sun. Hands down, it was “the” color. Years later I passed some small bronzes at the Met and stopped. Their rich patina, that was it—that was the color.

The Mustang was the first car either of us had ever owned. And oh, my first day in that car. The top down, my hair streaming, Columbus Circle,
and the guy leaning out of his window whistling and yelling, “Mustang Sally.” I had started to let my hair grow long—me and the rest of the world—and I highlighted it to look like a tawny mane, or so I liked to think. I had slowly begun to like the way I looked. It may have been a wonderful decade for theater. It was also a wonderful decade to learn to love oneself in.

Setting the pace those years was the Pied Piper throb of rock and roll. On the radio, on the street, in cars and bars and clubs, the city breathed it in, moved faster, and lightened up. Gone was Clem's old record player; we bought a stereo and our first LPs, the Beatles, of course. The night of their first appearance on
The Ed Sullivan Show
, we were at a party at Alex and Tatiana Liberman's to celebrate the invasion of the new cultural phenomenon. TVs had been set up throughout the townhouse, lest any of the polished, perfumed, boozed-up East Side crowd miss the band's debut.

How a few minutes on television could become a “where were you when . . . ” moment always amazed me, but since the assassination, that was the way it was. Clem and I may not have grasped that we were hearing the anthems of music's future as we swayed and sloshed martinis to “I Want to Hold Your Hand,” “She Loves You,” et al., but that night we knew we had heard something new, and we knew we were hooked. It was as if we had been waiting for the galvanizing energy of those cocky boys with their hammering beat.

No more hunching over bars, no more jazz. Dancing was all. Most late nights on the town Clem and I ended up at the Dom on St. Mark's Place. One of the first incarnations of the disco, the Dom was improbably situated in the basement of the erstwhile Polish National Hall. In that sweaty, steamy, smoky, low-ceilinged dance dive that never stopped smelling like the basement it was and that made the old Cedar look like a palace, we would hook up with fellow rock-addict regulars to gyrate the night away. In awe of the black dancers there, Clem soon eased off the gyrating and devoted himself to perfecting “cool.” He would barely move; all it took was a twitch this way or that as he worked his way through the Twist, the Mashed Potato, the Swim, the Frug, whatever.
Just a twitch. Me, I was feeling too good to be “cool.” I discovered my hips—hell, my whole body. Sadly, the days of the Dom were numbered. Two years later Warhol's Electric Circus opened in the soaring main space of the building, a place where the maestro's extravaganza of pink-strobe, gay, high glitz reigned in the center ring and where dancing was relegated to a sideshow. The disco era was spawning. The Dom whimpered away, leaving the basement to its silence.

The Cedar Bar had also whimpered away. Until the early sixties, people had continued to trek to the Cedar in hopes of seeing the art stars, to hang out where it was happening. Of course, most things had already happened. There would be no more slugging it out between the Pollock and De Kooning camps or about who had fucked who the night before. Age had rolled in and the first-generation “boys” were getting richer and had moved on to great airplane hangar studios in the hills or at the shore, out there somewhere. The up-and-comers found new places to hang out. After the Cedar closed, it was Dillons and then Max's Kansas City, which opened in 1965. But it was different. Max's was huge. It had to be—the art scene had mushroomed into an art world, and up front, five deep along the bar, the artists blew their horns even louder, while having less to toot about. And now no one listened anyway, except maybe the girls, always the girls.

And in the back room at Max's, again jammed into booths, bathed in the fluorescent pall of Dan Flavin's decor, which made us all look like we had just puked, the free-and-easy give-and-take had been replaced by hard-edged wariness. The stakes had gone up; art was changing fast. “What's in, what's out?” “Who do you know?” “How much did you get?” replaced the small-town jibes, the macho who's-fucking-who bravado, and the angst about the day-to-day making of art. The pop-art guys had moved in and merged uptown and downtown, with their zest for high life. Posh was in, and disco and spectacle, making the first and second generations seem staid. The media was courted, not scorned. The new art was sexy. Drugs over booze. Tinsel and high fashion. A far cry from the twenty-four-hour, nickel-and-dime Automat on Eighth Street, the artists' home away from home, where it had all begun in the
thirties and forties. Max's was a sandbox for perpetual children. Bitch and camp. For me, Max's made even the old Cedar smell like a rose. At least it had been real.

 

Now that we had a car, getaways became more frequent. Most often we headed up to Ken's farmhouse in South Shaftsbury. We had been friends for years, and our bond with Ken had grown even stronger after he had moved to New York and then to Vermont. Though the house was only a short distance from Bennington, Ken never taught at the college. He had chosen the area because his Reichian therapist had deemed it as having the purest air quality in New England. Now, the house, replete with a Reichian orgone box, nestled on the side of a slope at the end of a long dirt driveway. Ken had bought it from the Robert Frost family. It had been Frost who had named it the Gulley, and liked to call it his Gulley Gulch. And, yes, there were groves of birches on the hill out back. Dating from the 1780s, it was very small, one floor and an attic, with slanting wide plank floors, low ceilings, heating that was catch as catch can . . . in other words, rustic and charming. Behind the house was a large barn that Ken had converted into a studio. His “targets” had established him as a major art player. Always a master of color, he was now on a creative roll, painting a river of breathtakingly beautiful pictures. As for the air quality, Ken installed a contraption to measure the ion level on top of the hill, just to be sure he was where he was meant to be. Not that there was really any question.

In the beginning, visitors were mostly close friends, like David Smith, who would drive over from Bolton Landing and Ken's family, but by 1964 the place was jumping. Ken married Stephanie Gordon, recently graduated from Sarah Lawrence, and it was she who brought decor and creature comforts to the Gulley: a finished attic with two more bedrooms, two more bathrooms, and a swimming pool behind the barn.

That year also brought Jules and Andy Olitski, and daughters Eve and Lauren, to Bennington. Also joining the faculty was Tony Caro, the sculptor we had met in London in 1959, his wife, Sheila, and their two boys, Timothy and Paul. It always felt like there was a crowd at Ken's place. If Clem was the New York magnet for visitors from abroad, Ken's place
was the go-to destination out of town. As tiny as the Gulley was, there was always room for one more. And Ken was the ringmaster and game player: cards, backgammon, chess, charades . . . one could always find a game in progress. And invariably a new toy: exotic foreign cars, like his Lotus, which hadn't imported well and sat like decorative sculptures next to the barn; a tractor to roam the fields in; motorbikes; trout for the stream he had dredged, and fishing rods to catch them. Summers by the pool where Sarah, guided by Stephanie, learned to swim and where Clem cavorted like the dolphin he was. And watching Sarah, an only child who had discovered heaven, toddling stalwartly after Bill and Cady Noland, so tantalizing with their mysterious games and languages, while Lyn, being older, preferred the company of adults. And at night, dancing in the barn, Clem and I demonstrating the latest craze at the Dom. Stephanie, the beautiful star.

For me, the nucleus in the mid-sixties was Ken, Tony, Jules, and their wives. That was where the best laughter and friendships were forged. Best of all, they were young, all in their late thirties or early forties. It may have been an art scene, but for once it was a family scene. Who would've thought that just as I was discovering an extended family in the theater, I would find another where I had least expected to? I shouldn't have been surprised. Having plunged into my own life, artists and their art talk weren't as hard to take anymore.

 

And what about all that sex? It was the sixties. Sex was everywhere, as if it had just been invented. I don't know who jumped first. Well, that's not altogether true. It was Clem who did, but, as shocking as the news was, I so effectively reduced the incident to a non-event that I never did give it much importance. He had taken up with a woman in Los Angeles while on a lecture trip, and there were letters back and forth. That was probably in 1960, right before we moved uptown.

He had mentioned it as casually as he would mention that someone was dropping by for a drink. I was stunned; I hadn't seen it coming. Five years had passed since his talk of “open marriage,” a phrase that had faded from my mind. After all, this was the man I called “husband,” he would never . . . I could say that I had felt a sickening emptiness as I tried
to suck in everything left in my suddenly diminished world. That I had closed my doors, shut the bolts, and hunkered down, my knees clutched to my chest against the pain of irretrievable loss. I could say that even as I had drawn down the shades of my heart, I knew the worst: This was the start of an altered life and a long journey.

I don't know if I actually thought and did those things. I probably did. I do know that before Clem stopped speaking, I screamed, cried, slammed our door—we had only one—beat his desk with my fists, and hammered him with, “How dare you . . . !” If you loved me, you'd never . . . !” “I hate you, I hate you . . . !” And called him every
bastard
,
scumbag
,
dickshit
word in my lexicon.

It was only then, drained of my fervor, that I took to our bedroom cave and began the slow, methodical process of burying the pain. As a child, I had learned how to soothe myself when socked with something too fearful to think about. Now, once again, I shut my eyes and crept under a blanket of darkness until my body was numb and my mind was a blank. After all, California was a long way off. And hadn't Clem, who had been stunned by my fury, assured me that it had nothing to do with “us” or his feelings for me, that I would always be “the most important person” in his life? And I asked myself,
Can I ever have sex with him again? Do I want to be with this man, stay married to him
? And I knew that I could and that I did. And I also knew that if I didn't pick at it, the scar tissue would gradually scab over and mask the wound.

After a few weeks, there was no overt rift between us. And soon it didn't seem to matter at all, as the thrill of our new apartment and the tragedy of our baby's death pushed it off the front page of our lives.

But as things happen, it was just a matter of time—three years in fact—until the next shoe would drop. Sarah was crowing robustly in her highchair, her face smeared with yogurt and spinach, two of her favorite things, when Clem once again casually mentioned that he had had a fling with a woman in Paris. This time I did not slam doors; I walked through the doors of the YMHA. A late bloomer, I had opened up my life.

What happened next had
inevitability
written all over it. It was almost as if sex were an obligation, something I was supposed to experience now that I was growing up. After all, Clem had set up our marital parameters
from day one, and my analyst was certainly encouraging me. So it was, that, while looking over my shoulder for anyone who might disapprove and seeing no one who did, except that slice of me that my mother owned, I tiptoed with little grace or ease into my “starter affair.”

I look with affection at the girl/woman as she was swept away by that combustible encounter on a Cape Cod beach at sunset, by the thrill of afternoon trysts in the gorgeous painter's Village studio, by the ardor and attention in those dark eyes that looked so deeply into mine. Afterward, on the way home, my thoughts were like a light switch, flipping between the haze of being the object of a man's desire and the surety that he would never want to see me again. I would paw over every detail:
Did I really say that
?
How could I have been such an idiot
?!
What did he mean when he said
. . . ?

By the time I got home, I knew I would never call him again. To hell with him. But, of course, I always did. He wouldn't call me. His rule. Besides his being afraid of Clem's finding out, I knew I certainly wasn't his one and only. The secrecy made me squirm. It felt icky. I vowed that never again would I be in a relationship where that was part of the drill. But, ickiness aside, off I would go once a week after my acting class at HB. My starter affair flared hot for a few months, then sputtered on a month or so, until he broke it off. Seemed he had a wedding to go to—his own.