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Authors: Vivian Gornick

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“I dreamed I was in Sophie’s house,” my mother says, crossing Fifty-ninth Street. “Frances came in. She had written a book. She asked me to read it. I did, and I wasn’t
so enthusiastic. She became very angry. She screamed at her mother, ‘Never let her come here again.’ I felt so bad! I was sick at heart. I said, ‘Sophie. What is this? You mean after all these years I can’t come here anymore?’” My mother turns to me as we reach the sidewalk and, with a huge smile on her face, says, “But then it was so wonderful! I woke up, and it was only a dream.”
My feet seem to have lead weights in them. I struggle to put one in front of the other. My mother doesn’t notice that I have slowed up. She is absorbed by her own amazing narrative.
“You dreamed this last night, Ma?”
“Yes.”
“After I spoke?”
“Well, yes, of course. Not
right
after. When I got home and went to sleep.”
We enter the park, find a bench, sit down, take out our sandwiches. We do not speak. We have each fallen into reverie. After a while my mother says, “Imagine dreaming about Sophie Schwartzman after all these years.”
 
 
 
 
One night when Stefan and I had been married a little more than a year the phone rang at midnight. I picked up the receiver, said hello, and at the other end Mama’s voice sobbed my name.
“What’s happened, Ma?” I cried. “What is it?”
“Nettie,” my mother wept. “Nettie. She’s dead!”
“Oh, Ma! Omigod.”
“Cancer. She had a cancer in the stomach.”
“I didn’t even know she was sick.”
“Neither did I. It all happened so fast. You know I don’t talk to her, I haven’t been next door in years, I didn’t know anything. She had stomach pains for weeks. Finally they got so bad Richie rang my bell and asked me to call the hospital. So then I went in. She was laying there doubled up, howling like an animal. The ambulance came, they took her away. Three weeks she lasted. She died this afternoon.”
“Did you see her in the hospital?”
“No. I didn’t.”
“Why not?”
“I couldn’t go. I just couldn’t.”
“That lousy pride of yours.”
“Ah-h-h,” she said. I could see her hand cutting the air beside the telephone. “You’re such a child. You understand nothing.”
“I understand you let her die alone with no one beside her except Richie. That I understand very well.”
Silence. At both ends.
“I couldn’t go to her. I just couldn’t.”
More silence.
“She was rotten inside,” Mama said. “Eaten up. All those men, they ate her up.”
“For God’s sake, Ma! Do you really believe that? You think sex gives you cancer?”
“She had a cancer, didn’t she?”
“Oh, Ma.”
“Don’t ‘oh, Ma’ me. I know what I’m talking about.”
I hung up and lay back carefully. A solid weight had settled on my chest. If I moved too quickly, or perhaps at all, I’d have the breath crushed out of me. Stefan was touched by what he had heard. He stroked my face and shoulders and kissed me many times. Then he stroked my breast, my belly, my thighs. Suddenly a violent eroticism was upon us. We made hard love, and I cried. The weight lifted.
For the moment I was released from the pain of Nettie’s death, but not from the shadowy guilt she herself aroused in me. As I lay back for the third time that night, I saw Nettie’s face floating in the dark before me, as always its lips pressed together, its eyes a flat stare of disapproval. Invariably, her recalled image made me feel anxious, and oddly shameful.
In the years between the time she and Mama had quarreled and the time I had married, I hardly thought of Nettie at all. I didn’t have to. Like the apartment, the furniture, the street, she was simply there, even though we rarely saw one another (this quarrel was my first demonstration of the psychological distribution of shared space). After my marriage Nettie seemed continually to be at the edge of my thoughts, especially when Stefan and I made love. Then I felt the force of her presence most acutely and most disapprovingly. She would materialize in the air, as if to say, “For this I wasted my hard-won knowledge on you?”
For a long time, a few years in fact, Stefan and I described the tension between us as intensity. (Tension we knew was in the negative, but intensity—ah, intensity!) Our lovemaking was almost invariably tight and explosive, a
pent-up release from the gloom that marked so many of our days. The atmosphere of our early quarrels had never actually dissipated; bit by bit we had accustomed ourselves to it, as one does to a weight on the heart that constricts freedom of movement but does not preclude mobility: soon enough walking about in the cramped position seems natural. An absence of lightheartedness between us became the daily condition. We could live with it, and unfortunately we did. Not only did we live with it, we fell into the habit of describing our difficulty as a matter of intensity.
The difficulty was chronic, not occasional. Every other day some little thing would set one of us off. There would be an inconsiderate exchange and we would each feel hurt. Instead of airing the hurt quickly and openly, neither of us spoke. Minutes hours days passed in silence. By the end of a week the anxiety was stifling. Each morning we separated in relief, I to the English department across the bay, Stefan to the art school up on the hill. During the day my sense of grievance invariably melted. Overcome with tender affection, I would plan to walk through the door, throw my arms about Stefan, cover his face with kisses, and say, “What is this nonsense?” But when I
did
walk through the door his face seemed made of stone, and the first thing I heard him say was “You left the cap off the toothpaste this morning”; whereupon I’d turn on my heel, walk into the kitchen, make a cup of coffee, and disappear into my study. Sometimes Stefan came into the kitchen while I was preparing the coffee. I would see a thick vein pulsing in his neck as he drank a glass of water, or two white spots standing on his cheeks. But I would not speak and neither would he. I’d leave the room with my coffee as though I had
important work to do. Then I’d carefully leave the door of the study half open. If he passed by he’d see me sitting in the rocking chair, staring into space, a perfect picture of accusation and misery. At last, when the air was so thick we could hardly breathe, one of us would break through. More often than not it was Stefan. He would sink to his knees before the rocking chair, wrap his arms around my legs, and murmur, “What is it? Tell me.” Then I’d burst into tears, cry, “I can’t go on like this! I can’t work! I can’t think!” And we’d go to bed.
It was always “I can’t work! I can’t think!” That was the holy invocation between us, the litany, the chant, the ceremonial admission that eroticized and restored. Either he would rage, “I can’t work!” or I would, and that phrase punctured the compression chamber into which we had sealed ourselves. The inability to work was the only unembarrassed, unafraid admission we could make to one another. In the act of announcing this frailty we reminded ourselves of the superior nature of our common sensitivity and felt safe from the judgment we each feared in the other. To be wretched in the name of work was ultimately to armor ourselves against each other.
Yet those years were a true beginning for me. I did actually try to sit at the desk and think. Mostly, I failed miserably. Mostly, not always. In the second year of my marriage the rectangular space made its first appearance inside me. I was writing an essay, a piece of graduate-student criticism that had flowered without warning into thought, radiant shapely thought. The sentences began pushing up in me, struggling to get out, each one moving swiftly to add itself to the one that preceded it. I realized
suddenly that an image had taken control of me: I saw its shape and its outline clearly. The sentences were trying to fill in the shape. The image was the wholeness of my thought. In that instant I felt myself open wide. My insides cleared out into a rectangle, all clean air and uncluttered space, that began in my forehead and ended in my groin. In the middle of the rectangle only my image, waiting patiently to clarify itself. I experienced a joy then I knew nothing else would ever equal. Not an “I love you” in the world could touch it. Inside that joy I was safe and erotic, excited and at peace, beyond threat or influence. I understood everything I needed to understand in order that I might act, live, be.
Of course I lost it repeatedly. Not only did I lose it, I came to see I was afraid of it. One night at a party in Berkeley I joined a group of people smoking pot. I sat down in the circle and dragged at the joint when it was passed to me. Within seconds I felt the rectangle forming in me, radiating fierce light, shimmering and moving about, not clear and steady as usual. Another minute and the walls began to come together. I knew that when the walls met the breath in my body would be snuffed out, and I would die. I sat there in a roomful of friends and acquaintances, with Stefan there as well, and I said calmly to myself, “You’re all alone. They don’t understand. There’s no way to make them understand. In a few minutes you’ll be dead, and none of them can help you. You’re alone in this, perfectly alone.” I couldn’t speak, I could barely breathe. Just as the walls were about to meet, panic forced me to my feet. “I’m ill,” I announced loudly, “I’m terribly ill. Oh, God, I’m so ill! Help me. I’m ill.” Stefan guided me
home, speaking softly to me all the way. I didn’t smoke pot again for years.
Stefan knew more about work than I did but not, I think, much more. He was tormented by the discrepancy between his painterly ideas and his ability to execute those ideas on the canvas, and he dramatized his torment endlessly. He would crash about in the studio, smoking, cursing, throwing paint on the canvas, but not, I suspect, thinking hard about the problem before him. The knowledge that work is patient, sustained labor—no more, no less—was not a wisdom he had as yet taken in very much better than I had.
One night he stood for a long time in front of three paintings. Then he began kicking them to pieces. “Shit!” he yelled at them. “All shit!” And he slammed out the door. At two in the morning the doorbell sounded. There was Stefan, half dead, in the arms of a painter friend of his. He reeked of vomit and shit, his eyes were closed, his body sagged, pulling his friend down with him. “Goddammit, Stefan!” the painter shouted. “Stand up!” The friend looked at me, rolled his eyes to the ceiling, and said, “He got polluted so fast I never even saw it coming. Suddenly he’s out of the bar and running up the street whooping like an Indian. I tried to stop him, but he’s so quick when he gets like this. He ran up to two men and a woman on the street. Before I could stop him, he had lifted the woman’s dress and bitten her ass. Those guys were out to destroy him. But then I got there …”
I looked at Stefan falling to the floor in our hallway, and I thought, Who is this man? What am I doing here? I don’t think I ever stopped thinking, What am I doing
here? He got drunk and I got depressed. He smoldered and I disapproved. He slashed at his paintings and I felt scorn and amazement.
Once, when the tension between us had been building for a week, Stefan came into the study where I sat pretending to read. He dropped to his knees and wrapped his arms around my legs. I looked down at him, he up at me. “Well?” he said softly. “How long this time?” I put out my hand and pushed back the hair on his forehead. He took my hand and kissed the palm. I rose. We moved in a despairing embrace into the bedroom. I saw Nettie’s face in the air before me, shaking itself back and forth in a motion of disavowal. This is not what I had in mind for you, she was saying. Stefan and I lay down on the bed. “Love me!” he whispered. I pressed myself against him, held him close. “I do, I do,” I whispered back. And it was true: as true as I could make it. I did love him, I did. But only down to a certain point. Beyond that point, something opaque in me, there was no give. I could see the opacity. I could taste it and touch it. Between me and my feeling for Stefan, perhaps for any man, I wasn’t sure, there fell a kind of transparent membrane through which I could whisper “I do” and make the whisper heard but not felt. Nettie hovered in the air. Her image was quick to the touch, warm and alive. I was right up against it, no obstructions, no interference. The thing was, I could imagine her. She was real to me, he was not.
We lived together five years. Then one day Stefan left the house and he didn’t come back. Our marriage was ended. And indeed, why not? We had each wearied of the struggle between us. We each wanted to take a breath in
rooms free of that oppressive tension. We wanted that more than we wanted to be together. I dismantled the flat, sold everything in it, left graduate school (always an abstraction to me), and returned to New York. I was thirty years old, and I was relieved to be alone. I moved into the little tenement apartment on First Avenue and got myself a job writing for a weekly newspaper. I fixed up the apartment. In no time at all the place was cozy. The colors all worked this time: no surprises between the can and the wall. I had a desk built that was just right for me: high enough, slim enough, manageable enough. I worked during the day, and in the evening I lay down on the couch to read. Often, however, I lost the concentration for reading rather quickly, and then I’d find myself lying there for hours on end, staring into space.
These were years when women like myself were being called New, Liberated, Odd (myself I preferred Odd, I still do), and indeed, I was new, liberated, odd during the day when I sat at the desk, but at night when I lay on the couch staring into space my mother materialized in the air before me, as if to say, “Not so fast, my dear. All is not done between us.”
 
 
 
 
We are on Delancey Street, walking toward the Williamsburg Bridge. My mother has surprised me by calling to say, “How about walking across the bridge with me to my old neighborhood?” (Her family had moved to Brooklyn a
few years before she met my father and Williamsburg had been her last neighborhood as an unmarried girl.)
“But, Ma,” I say, “you hate the Lower East Side. You’re always refusing to cross Houston Street.” (When relatives from Israel want to go to Orchard Street she takes them down to Houston, points across six lanes of traffic, and leaves. “I’ve had enough of Orchard Street,” she tells them.)
“Well, to walk across the bridge, I’ll manage the East Side somehow. Besides, I haven’t been on Delancey Street in thirty years. I’m curious.”
As we cross the crowded, filthy, immigrant street, now black and Puerto Rican instead of Jewish and Italian, she marvels at how changed it all is. I tell her nothing has changed, only the color of the people and the language spoken. The hungry, angling busy-ness of Delancey Street—the cheap clothing stores, the jumbled shoe carts, the linens at discount and the furniture on installment, the thousand hole-in-corner shops selling candy and razor blades, shoelaces and cigarettes, flashlights and clotheslines—is all still in place.
We near Essex Street and my mother says, “Remember the Levinsons? I wonder if the store is still here.”
Remember the Levinsons!
“Of course I remember the Levinsons,” I say. “Yes, I think the store is still here.”
“Do any of the boys work in the store? The youngest one—Davey, was it?—if I remember, he refused. You knew him later, didn’t you?”
“Yes, he refused. Yes, I knew him.”
“Do you ever see him anymore?”
Ten years ago on Fourteenth Street a solidly built, half-bald
man wearing a shapeless tweed coat, with soft dark hair curling around a high naked forehead, and dark eyes narrowed behind black-framed glasses, said hesitantly to me, “Is that you?” I stopped and looked hard at the stranger.
“Davey,” I said. “Davey Levinson.”
He smiled at me. “What’re ya doin’ now?”
“I’m a journalist, Davey. I work for newspapers and magazines.”
He peered at me. I was sure he hadn’t understood journalist or newspaper. Then he said, “You like Baudelaire?” and he took Baudelaire out of one tweed pocket. “You like Zen?” he said. “I got Zen, too.” He removed Zen from the other tweed envelope.
Three days later we fell into bed. “There’s a lot of things I can’t do,” Davey said, “but one thing I can do is fuck.” He was as good as his word. We went under together, and stayed under for six months.
I shake my head no, I don’t see Davey anymore.
“What a bunch they were,” my mother laughs as we near the old Levinson clothing store on Essex at the corner of Delancey. “Remember them all? The four boys and Dorothy? And her, the mother? ‘Levinson,’ I used to say to her, ‘take the enema bag off the table before your husband comes home, and the shoes, too.’ But she wouldn’t listen to me. She’d only cry because he didn’t love her. And he? Jake Levinson? He slept with every woman who walked into the store. He never came up to the country to see them the whole summer. Maybe one weekend he came. She’d stand in the kitchen, always in that wet housedress, and cry and cry because he didn’t love her and the children called her imbecile.
“She was so beautiful, poor thing,” my mother says, walking through the blare and garbage of Delancey Street. “Dark and lovely, just like the children. But fat.
Oy
, was she fat. Remember how fat she was? And she got fatter as the years went on. I came to see her once, here, right here”—she points down Essex Street—“in the apartment above the store. Remember? You came with me. I thought, She’s filling up the room. How will she get out, or back in? But good-natured? None more good-natured than she. When you were sick, and I was falling away from exhaustion, she sat up all night with you, putting mustard plasters on your chest. Remember? It was terrible! All she wanted was Jake, and all she got was sitting up nights with sick children.”
Mrs. Levinson sat up with the children for the rest of her life, and worse, infinitely worse, the children sat up with her. They yelled and screamed, pounded their fists, flung themselves at sex and drugs, night school and mar-nage, and not one of them left Essex Street. When Davey and I met up again he had a sixteen-year-old son. He had gotten a girl in the neighborhood pregnant (“I fucked her on the kitchen sink while her parents were listening to the Yiddish radio station in the next room”), and at nineteen he had been a husband and a father, living down the block from his parents. (Davey on family life: “When my son was an infant my wife put him on the bed without any protection. I told her to put pillows around him. She wouldn’t. One night we were watching TV and I heard from the other room a thud to remember for the rest of my life. I went in and he was laying on the floor like an overturned cockroach, stunned. I went back in the living
room. I gave her a shot in the mouth I think she can feel it to this day.”)
We’re nearing the approach to the Williamsburg Bridge. “There’s so much traffic!” my mother cries. “How do we get onto the bridge? I’m confused.” I’m confused myself, the walkway
is
hard to find. I turn and turn, wheeling amid gas fumes and hamburger grease, rock radio and screaming mothers. Suddenly Delancey Street is overpowering. The frantic accumulation, the noise, the urgency are an oppression. I stand there, feeling ill, and I am remembering how loving Davey had become, finally, oppressive in much the same way: all noise and frenzy, a tumult of poverty and helplessness.
When Davey and I were together we went back one summer afternoon to Ben’s Bungalows. The place was sad, silent, dusty, long fallen into disuse and disrepair. On the bus Davey had become moody. “I would say that I’ve had an unhappy life,” he said. “Not only because of what my life has actually been, but because of what life is. I’m disappointed. Not only because I don’t have the creative powers I want. I’m disappointed because the trees don’t talk to me, or the grass or the flowers. I’m disappointed because the flies mistake me for a piece of horseshit.” And when we got to Ben’s, and were tramping about the deserted grounds, he said, “I’m glad we came back here. I’m glad that we came and saw the place abandoned, and destroyed, and the brambles growing over everything. Because that’s the
truth
. I’m glad we came and saw the truth. If we hadn’t we might have always thought that it was just us. That it was just that we didn’t make it but somehow all the others did. That it was just us that missed our connection
somehow, didn’t take the right road, or make the right move.”
Davey always said “us” to me, as though our lives and our destinies were one, and I guess as long as I was sleeping with him he had the right to consider me an honorary Levinson. But I kicked and thrashed against that “us,” and we ended in despair.
When I met him on Fourteenth Street Davey was a social worker, living in the Grand Street housing project and working in the Chinatown welfare office. He did nothing but go to his job and read. He read on the subway going to work, at his desk during his lunch hour, and after supper on his bed, a huge mahogany bedstead propped against the wall of an otherwise empty room. He read Thomas Mann and Herman Wouk, Bernard Malamud and Rod McKuen, Dylan Thomas and Philip Wylie, Marcel Proust and Alan Watts. For Davey, reading was a laser beam—narrow, focused, intent—driving into a vast darkness. In his late twenties, after he had left his wife and son, he discovered therapy, and psychoanalysis became the great drama of his life. He absorbed its language and its insights in much the same way that he read great literature: he grew wise in a vacuum.
He would announce, “Anger is fear,” and observe in three admirably concise paragraphs why this elegant cliché remained worthy of our attention. He would deliver epigrammatic bits of wisdom: “People are like pool balls after the cue ball has shot into them, rolling every which way, continually hitting each other, knocking each other out of the way, full of greed, envy, violence, jealousy.” And he would give me moral instruction: “You must observe without
blame or praise, acceptance or rejection.” These delights of the mind never seemed to go anywhere, or to be seriously related in a way that mattered. His intelligence was like a piece of railroad track severed at either end from the main connection, with a single train car riding it back and forth between stations, imitating motion and journey.
Meanwhile, I couldn’t believe I was sleeping with Davey Levinson. Every time we went to bed I felt both twelve and thirty-five. I hungered for him, burrowed into him, couldn’t get enough of him. I gave without stint and took without stint. We made love around the clock, ate Chinese food at three in the morning, and played the New Yorker’s game of mutual analysis. Later I began to buck and withdraw, turn on him like a snake, be amazed and outraged to find myself there with him (
how did I get back here, how did I get back here
), but for many months whatever we said and did delighted me.
Davey was a recapitulation of my history with men—when I considered him powerful I’d been a clumsy belligerent; when I saw he was weak I became a desirous woman—except that with Davey, for the first time, I saw the configuration whole. I saw my bondage, and I was shamed by my release. How angry and scared I became when I had clear sight! And how pained that it was through Davey I had achieved it. Because I knew Davey. I could imagine him right through to the center. I loved his appetite and I recognized his fears: they were my own. I knew how Davey had gotten to be the way he was, and in his presence I knew better how I had gotten to be the way I was. For a time this openly shared knowledge made us friends. There was between us a mute tenderness for our
common beginning. The way we slept was emblematic of our relationship: we lay curled around ourselves facing each other.
One Monday morning, as he was leaving, Davey said, “I hope your week will be productive, constructive, and creative.” I nodded, flung my arms around him, buried my lips in his neck, and murmured, “Without greed, violence, envy, or jealousy.” His cheeks reddened, he laughed and hugged me closer. But the day was coming when he wouldn’t laugh, and certainly he would not draw me closer.
I had confided my fears and insecurities to him. He took them seriously, as a lover is required to do. He did not take seriously what they signified. I was often away on assignment, he was always waiting for me to come home. It began to dawn on him, I think, not only that my struggle with myself over my work was long-lasting and that work would repeatedly take me away from him, but that he was not similarly engaged and he had nothing to take
him
away.
When we had been together six months Davey disappeared. I didn’t hear from him and I was unable to reach him, either by phone or by mail. Two weeks passed. Then I called one day and he answered the phone. I said hello, and he began speaking in tongues. A strange psychospiritual-metaphysical babble seemed to have taken possession of him. I kept saying, “What are you talking about?” Finally, in a loud, clear voice, he said, “You must exorcise your father’s spirit. Your masculine-feminine natures are pulling at each other. You are not a whole woman. I can only marry a whole woman.”
I received this information in silence. Then I said, “Well … in the meantime … can’t we just fuck?”
The following Saturday we spent an exhausting, obsessed twenty-four hours together. We made love continuously, and he talked endlessly at me. Over and over again he said to me, “I am the universe. You must spread your legs wide, open your womb to me. In me will be united all that you are, all poetry, kindness, tenderness, aggressiveness, all that is vibrant, glowing, alive, beautiful in the universe. If you marry me your children will all be virile, robust, poets, makers of music, full of majesty. If you don’t they will be faggots and lesbians, evil and diseased.” He crooned, hissed, and spat at me. We left the house once to go to a movie. Sitting in the dark, in relation to nothing that was happening on the screen, he gripped my arm and whispered in my ear, “The masculine and the feminine are one. You will not let them be one. In you is both the masculine and the feminine, the light and the dark, the black and the void. Let them come together and you will be one, you will be whole, you will be all, the woman and the man, the universal human.”

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