A Tragic Honesty (73 page)

Yates was not one to insist on special treatment—if his usual booth was taken, he'd gloomily proceed to the next—but he was clearly a man who wanted looking after, and the waitresses at the Crossroads did their best. At times when he was drinking liquor he liked his Jim Beam served in a particular skinny four-ounce glass with water on the side, but there was only one such glass on the premises; Yates was noticeably crestfallen when it wasn't available. Soon it was set aside as “Dick's glass.” Yates also enjoyed horseradish with the Sunday special—a prime rib sandwich—so a jar was kept behind the bar for the one person who asked for it; when a waitress discovered it empty one Sunday, she ducked across the street to the Marlborough Market in her apron. All of which was part of a larger campaign to cheer the poor man up. At his worst Yates gave the impression of being a uniquely despondent street person: beard matted, raincoat and suit rumpled and stained, muttering and hacking and half mad. (One might add that his button-down shirts were generally clean and pressed no matter what; taking these to the dry cleaner was part of an instinctive routine.) “What're
you
so happy about?” he'd grumble at his waitresses' show of compensatory perkiness; then he'd try to muster a polite smile before putting his head back in his hands and resuming his funk. After he'd gone for his afternoon nap, waitresses would prepare the booth for his return a few hours later, wiping down both sides thoroughly to get all the ashes scattered by his explosive coughing.

One of the few companions who continued to meet Yates over the years was Andre Dubus, who every so often made a point of driving (or being driven) down from Haverhill to drink with his friend at the Crossroads. Dubus's love and admiration for Yates was absolute, though neither man was given to soul-baring intimacies (unless coated in masculine bluster à la “that loneliness shit”), and their talks tended to skim along the well-worn surface of writing and books. Sometimes Dubus would coax his friend to Fenway for a Red Sox game, but Yates was immune to such ancillary enthusiasms and mostly they stayed at the Crossroads. Brodigan noted that the only times he really saw Yates “rowdy”—animated in a happy way—was in Dubus's company (or, later, Dan Wakefield's).

Though he cultivated a certain degree of austerity, Yates hated being so alone in the world. Above all he longed for female companionship, and as one of the greatest living writers in America he was not without opportunity. Any number of women admired his work and wanted to meet him, and generally Yates made a good first impression: modest, courteous, quietly amusing—a gentleman. He also drank too much, got incensed at the least provocation, obliviously raised his voice in public, knocked things over, coughed incessantly, and caused searing embarrassment to himself and others. It didn't require an unusual degree of insight to realize that he couldn't help himself, and most women were willing to be patient up to a point—an inevitable point when, drained, they'd withdraw to a safe (if sympathetic) distance.

Penelope Mortimer was one of these. Writer-in-residence at Boston University when Yates came to the city, she'd admired
The Easter Parade
and found the author a kindred spirit of sorts: Both chain-smoked, both were fed up with teaching (Mortimer, like Yates, emphasized the transience of her duties by keeping her office stripped of adornment or personal effects), and both had tales to tell of long blocked spells that occasionally rendered life all but hopeless. At fifty-eight Mortimer was more mature than Yates usually liked, but she was also handsome and formidable and a wonderful writer. Yates referred to her as a
personage
.

But it wasn't long before she was finding reasons to avoid him: “I'm not calling back just now because I'm sunk and no good for you,” she wrote, and gave the rather lame excuse—“this may seem very trivial”—that she'd failed in her latest attempt to quit smoking and was depressed about it. “Richard I'm sorry to be such a near-dead loss at the moment. That's a real apology, not one of yours which are all needless.” Yates scribbled a draft of his response on the back of this note, which helps put the matter into more definite perspective:

My apologies
aren't
“needless”—this last batch was to have been for my dreary outburst at your mention of Edward Albee's name. I'll probably get over that sort of thing some day, but nobody should be expected to wait. I'm very, very sorry you're so low.… Please bear in mind that you're a lovely … gifted girl, and that I'd rather be [illegible: looks like “quietly” or “quickly”] carried out of your house than welcomed into almost any other I know. Love, Dick

That last statement strongly suggests Yates had already been physically removed from Mortimer's apartment—whether kicking and screaming or calmly supine, one cannot know.
*
What might be surmised from certain other epistolary remarks, though, was that Yates had a fascination with the novelty (c. 1976–77) of Mortimer's answering machine, and tended to leave rambling and probably sodden messages, particularly when she refused to see him. Also, Mortimer was fiercely opinionated but unwilling, it seems, to weather outbursts from Yates as a result of that fact. “While
Revolutionary Road
is a lot better than a lot of Updike,” she wrote him, “it's a lot like a lot of Updike too (don't be MAD at me).” In general she was going through her own bad patch at the time, and while she evidently cared for Yates and empathized only too well with his malaise (she left him her TV after all), such was not the stuff of romance: “Two scared people don't make one brave one, have you noticed?” she wrote.

Around then too he met a middle-aged divorcée named Lynn Meyer at a cocktail party given by Vonnegut's ex-wife. Meyer had read
Revolutionary Road
when it was first published, and was thrilled to meet the “exceptionally courteous” author, to whom she gushed about how much the book had meant to people of their generation. Since she figured Yates was “too shy” to ask for her phone number (emphatic praise of his work tended to make Yates pleased but uncomfortable), she called and invited him to another party a few days later. “It was terrible,” she recalled. “Neither of us knew many people there, and everyone was dressed in these Christmas-colored clothes. It was Martha Stewart's worst nightmare.” But Yates gracefully endured, and afterward made Meyer laugh by deconstructing the “smug, rich, dumb” people at the party.

During the month or so that they dated, Yates didn't appear to be drinking much. He offered to keep a bottle of Scotch in his apartment for Meyer's sake, and assured her it wouldn't tempt him. And while he often corrected her with the same acuity he'd brought to his critique of the “dumb” nouveau riche, he was generally tactful about it, as if it were simply a matter of mutual interest. When she mentioned a visit to the “beauty parlor,” Yates replied, “You don't say ‘beauty parlor.' That's the wrong class. You say ‘hairdresser.'” Also they talked about Meyer's children, both in prep school at the time. Yates was intrigued by the general subject of prep schools, but made it clear he'd rather not meet Meyer's children and bitterly remarked on his mother's “creepy” tendency to expose her boyfriends to him as a child.

The two rarely met other people, and as a change of pace they'd planned to drive to the writer George Garrett's house in Maine for a weekend in January. When they met for dinner that Thursday, though, Yates was jumpy and irritable and coughing more than usual: He explained that, as a result of going off his medication, he'd had a seizure the night before and passed out in a snowdrift.
*
Though he tried to make light of the incident, he was plainly traumatized both mentally and physically; still, he insisted they stick to their weekend plans, and promised to get plenty of rest before their departure two days later.

That Saturday a big snowstorm struck, and Meyer called Yates to cancel the trip. But Yates wanted to talk about something else. Earlier Meyer had mentioned a friend who, when drunk, rode a horse into her house yelling, “The British are coming! The British are coming!”; Meyer had thought it curious how such people became “situational alcoholics”—that is, given to regular benders but otherwise somewhat abstemious. Yates had seemed a touch defensive when the subject first came up, but now he was downright obsessed by it: “Why are you so critical of her?” he snapped on the phone. “I think it's refreshing! I think it's a wonderful gesture!” He went on and on and wouldn't be persuaded to drop it. Finally Meyer told him she was coming over.

She found Yates in very bad shape. “He was drinking and smoking about ten cigarettes at once,” she remembered. “He'd light one, forget about it, and light another. I thought he was going to set himself on fire again.” Yates hadn't eaten (or slept) since their dinner on Thursday, and Meyer coaxed him out of his apartment to get some food. He never stopped talking for a moment—a “grandiose and strange” monologue about the various people who'd betrayed and abandoned him over the years; when Meyer tried to distract him with happier subjects, he'd become angry (
“Why are we talking about this?”
). At last she called her psychiatrist for advice, and was told to stay with Yates until he got exhausted. At the moment it seemed a remote contingency. Yates would begin to lie down, then jump back up and start pacing again, or try to write, all the while lighting cigarettes one after the other and talking, talking. Meyer began to worry that she herself would be the one to get exhausted and wake up in flames.

As night fell, Meyer began to panic. She couldn't hold out much longer, nor could she leave Yates alone like this. “Don't tell my daughters!” he said over and over. The only two people Yates would allow her to call in the Boston area were Mortimer and Dubus, but Meyer couldn't get hold of either. Her psychiatrist advised her to take him “somewhere safe”—that is, the hospital—but Yates frowned on the idea. For hours they went back and forth about it, and finally he relented. “I drove him to the walk-in clinic at Massachusetts General,” said Meyer, “which was run by a couple of four-year-olds. They refused to care for him because he had no insurance. I told them he was a famous writer with plenty of money, but it cut no ice.” Eventually the suggestion was made that Yates be taken to the Bedford VA, but the ambulance was long in coming and meanwhile the exhausted Meyer was enjoined to stay with the patient. By then Yates was coming down at last, mumbling dazed apologies as the terrible awareness began to dawn.

When it was over Meyer was on the edge of collapse herself, and arranged to visit friends in Florida to recuperate. Before she left town, though, she wanted to make sure somebody was looking after Yates. She called Sam Lawrence—whom she knew slightly through her ex-husband—and left a detailed message as to Yates's whereabouts and condition. She called Vonnegut, and listened as the black humorist regaled her with other Yatesian adventures (“like it was all a big lark”). She called George Garrett to cancel their visit. The upshot of Meyer's laudable concern was that the story of the snowdrift and its aftermath became a cornerstone of Yates's legend. “I was impressed by the way he persevered,” said the writer Madison Smartt Bell (who eventually heard the story from Garrett). “After burning down his apartment and falling into that snowdrift, I figured, you know, he'd survived both fire and ice.”

After that, Yates became more of a pariah than ever—particularly in Boston, where he was derided in polite literary circles as a drunken joke. “I used to regard Dick as a test by which to judge others,” said Bill Keough, an old Iowa friend whom Yates occasionally visited in West Townsend. “If someone was an ambitious shit, he wouldn't care about Dick, because his books didn't sell and people thought him odd, a loser. But if you cared about writing, you cared about Dick too.” Very few people in Boston, it seemed, cared about writing, and it soon became apparent to Yates that most people knew the worst
wherever
they happened to live. Shortly after his release from the Bedford VA, he got a long-distance call from his old girlfriend Carolyn Gaiser, who advised him to quit drinking. “I was afraid he'd fly into one of his rages,” Gaiser recalled, “but he thanked me for my concern and said he wasn't ready to do anything that drastic. It was pretty clear he wasn't eager to stay on the phone.”

As for Lynn Meyer, she returned to Boston in February and had lunch with Yates, who was chastened and gentlemanly as ever. When she mentioned that she'd gotten engaged in Florida, he offered warm congratulations and even came to Meyer's farewell party a few months later and met her new husband. Around that time, too, a party was given for Penelope Mortimer before her return to England. John Updike attended with his new wife, but he and Yates appear not to have spoken. In fact Yates mostly sat alone nursing his drink while the others danced (the guest of honor had particularly wanted dancing). Mortimer's final note to Yates was sent from London in June. “
Please
will you understand how important you are and how necessary both as a writer and a person.… I'm sorry if I didn't live up to expectations, but it's a zone I find hard to live in. I'm delighted and honored (American) to know you and to go on knowing you.”

*   *   *

Yates found comfort where he could, but in most cases he accepted the defection of random women with a kind of desolate equanimity. As he sat in the Crossroads smoking and muttering, it was mostly Martha on his mind, or so he'd tell others when the need to confide became overwhelming. The last few ghastly years had made him miss her more than ever—if such were possible—and as late as 1977 he continued to put off divorce in hope of her return. Martha, meanwhile, had moved to Marin County, California, in order to put as many miles as possible between her and Yates. “He couldn't grasp that she'd had it with him,” said Yates's soon-to-be psychiatrist. “He never could see what a burden he put on other people.” Yates blamed himself for the breakup, but the suddenness of it (as he saw it) continued to puzzle him; he could only figure that she'd been taken in by “the Libbers” and what he called “the artsy-fartsy crowd.” “Imagine going to California to make gew-gaws!” he'd say, which was how he'd refer to Martha's dabbling in art. In moments of particular bitterness he'd point out that he always thought her photography and whatnot was a sham, and wondered why anyone would swap taking care of a real artist for making “gew-gaws.” As for what he imagined to be her motives for moving to Marin County, they were the same attributed to Sarah Davenport in
Young Hearts Crying
: “Marin County … had now become well known as a lively and inviting sanctuary for recently divorced young women, many of them mothers—and for swinging, stomping, surprisingly nice young men.” She also taught at a Montessori school there.