Fierce Attachments: A Memoir (19 page)

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Authors: Vivian Gornick

BOOK: Fierce Attachments: A Memoir
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We occupied a universe composed of one room in one season: my bedroom on weekday afternoons. As time went on, we occupied this universe more and more fully. Hunger multiplied on hunger, desire on desire. We couldn’t get enough. Because we didn’t get enough. I was always wanting more. “Not more,” a friend said evenly. “Enough. You want enough.” In a year or two I realized that it wasn’t exactly more I wanted, or even enough. It was a larger
world for our feelings to walk about in. Life requires space as well as air and light, room for exploration and self-discovery. The limits of exploration on the life of our feelings were set by Joe’s marriage, and those limits were close in. However deeply we might feel, our love could not make laws or map territory. There was no country of experience for it to cross, no coast to reach, no center to penetrate. We were in possession of a small interior space somewhere in the midst of a fertile region of unknown proportion. Around this space stood boundaries of rigid stability. Love might intensify, but it could never expand to occupy a territory made in its own shape. The reality of the predetermined limit bit into me.
At about this same time I realized that the rectangle inside of which my thoughts lived or died was also a small interior space into which my working life had crammed itself, rather than that the work had carved out of the larger body of a free self the shape and extent of the territory it needed to occupy.
For a moment I backed off from myself. I saw that I was suspended inside my own life. Only a small part of it contained substance, I was daydreaming the rest. Joe, and the time I spent at the desk, were equal efforts at manifest destiny. I backed off even farther and saw that I could not imagine how I would begin to take possession of the larger territory, either in love or in work.
 
 
So then, in my late thirties I led a fantasy life in work and in love: rich, dreamy, girlish, a necessary complement to the impoverished reality. The twin nature of this compulsive
daydreaming led me to a discovery of some consequence.
One week in summer when Joe and I had been together two years I found myself working unusually well. I sat at the desk and I concentrated. I didn’t glaze over looking at the words, or stumble about in my chair reeling with fog and fatigue. Rather, I sat down each morning with a clear mind and hour after hour I worked. The rectangle had opened wide and remained open: in the middle stood an idea. A great excitement formed itself around this idea, and took hold of me. I began fantasizing over the idea, rushing ahead of it, envisioning its full and particular strength and power long before it had clarified. Out of this fantasizing came images, and out of the images a wholeness of thought and language that amazed me each time it repeated itself. At the end of the week I had a large amount of manuscript on my desk. On Friday afternoon I put away the work. On Monday morning I looked at it, and I saw that the pages contained merit but the idea was ill-conceived. It didn’t work at all. I’d have to abandon all that I had done. I felt deflated. The period of inspired labor was at an end. The murk and the vapor closed in on me again, the rectangle shriveled and I was back to eking out painfully small moments of clarity, as usual and as always. Still, it was absorbing to remember the hours I had put in while under the spell of my vision. I felt strengthened by the sustained effort of work the fantasizing had led to.
During this same period of time Joe and I achieved a new level of intensity. Every afternoon at four we burned and we drowned. It seemed during those dangerous days
as though we were moving toward a climactic moment. In the evening, after he had left me, I would walk in the sweet hours of final daylight, fantasizing about us. Us together now, us together in the future, us walking, us in bed, us larking about. Us. It came sweeping up in me that week, all nervous excitement, melancholy sweetness, open longing. Then one evening I felt stricken and bereft, frightened to be walking the streets alone, dreaming a life in my head about a man who was off elsewhere, and would always be off elsewhere. I shivered, and felt sick. My stomach ached. I went to bed early that night and woke out of a fitful sleep to find myself once again on the empty landscape. The deep wave of dreamy suggestiveness around which my body had curled all week turned into a bag of worms eating at my insides. Oh, I thought, this is dis-
gust
-ing.
I got up and wrote in my journal: “Love is a function of the passive feeling life, dependent on an ideal other for satisfactory resolution: the primitive position into which we are born. Work is a function of the active expressive life, and if it comes to nothing, one is still left with the strengthening knowledge of the acting self. Only when access to the imaginative life is denied does one go in for love in a big way.”
I sat at my desk at four o’clock in the morning looking at the blotter, the bookshelves, the orderly comfort of the place in which I worked, and I thought: Mama worships at the shrine of Love but that lifelong boredom of hers is a dead giveaway.
I went back to bed. In the morning I would struggle on. It was always in the morning I would struggle on. Never
right now. Not with work, not with Joe. I could not see that each was a means of escape from the other. With Joe I blissed out, avoided the pure pain of sustained labor. With work I hardened myself against the “intrusion” of love: a married man was just fine. For years I said: In the morning. Which, of course, never came.
 
 
Joe was the most socialized man I have ever known. His sense of life was generic: at any given moment any one of twenty-five people could fill the spot for the wife, the lover, the friend. He considered it childish to think human happiness devolved on a particularity of attachment or circumstance. He said the point is to make as much world as possible in whatever small clearing is allotted one. He did not feel the bite of our confinement as I did. Rather he said to himself, “This is what we have to work with, let’s see how well we can do with what we’ve got,” and he pitched in.
He never stopped delivering life to me, at me, for me. He was forever creating amenities and pleasures that gave spark and dimension to our exchange. We had champagne in bed, oysters in midtown, surprise trips to the ocean. He brought me books I needed, sent me clippings daily, arranged to stay overnight when I least expected it and made breakfast in the morning. Our emotional life was an absorbing subject for me, and became one for him as well. He delighted in the extensive nature of the discussion, entered into it without fear or defensiveness, and soon had me hooked on the regular feeding such talk provided me with.
I watched with tender amusement as he bent over backward not only to be reliable and loving each day but also to be continually thinking of how we might have more. Joe never felt he didn’t have enough, but he too wanted more and he was always conniving to get it. I didn’t think much about the conniving. It seemed natural that I simply let myself be carried along on the wave of bounty it delivered up to both of us.
One day, in the autumn of our third year, Joe told me that a friend of his had a boat he was thinking of buying. The boat was berthed in the Caribbean and Joe was flying down in two weeks to see it. “Come with me,” he said. “It’ll be great. We’ll have two or three days together, maybe longer.” I was free, and the proposal came as an unexpected gift. I kissed him all over. What a lovely man, I thought. Always on the lookout.
We flew down to the Caribbean on a Tuesday afternoon. That night we ate dinner on a terrace that hung out over a blue-green bay and made love in a whitewashed room with the night air coming through open shutters, soft and sweet. Bliss. Tuesday night bliss. Wednesday all day bliss. Thursday also bliss. On Friday morning we prepared to leave for New York. We packed up, checked out, and drove our rented car out to the airport. Suddenly I couldn’t bear the thought of going back. I laid my hand on Joe’s arm and pleaded, “Let’s stay over the weekend. Call your wife and tell her you need another day or two for the boat.”
Joe turned his head halfway toward me. I saw the frown forming on his forehead, and I saw his eyes narrow. “Sweetie,
I’m
not going back with you,” he said. “My wife is coming down this evening.”
It was the tone of his voice I never forgot. The slightly puzzled irritation in it. As though he had, of course, already given me this information and he couldn’t understand how it was I had forgotten it. I remember afterward thinking: gaslight.
“What?” I said. “What did you say?”
“I said my wife’s coming down tonight. I
told
you that. I’m sure I did.”
“How dare you,” I said. “How the fuck dare you.”
He nearly went off the road. Instead, he pulled over and put his head in his hands. I stared out into the bleak tropical morning shimmering with heat and haze.
“I must have forgotten,” Joe said. “Forgive me. It was a useful slip of memory, I’m sure. I forgot because I thought it would spoil our time here if you knew.”
“That’s despicable.”
“Why?” he cried. “What’s so despicable? I wanted us to have a good time. I didn’t think we would if you knew we weren’t going back together. So what’s so terrible? We had a lovely time, didn’t we?”
“You manipulated me. You held back information. Decided on your own it was more important we have a good time than that I know everything there was to know. The situation was more important to you than I was.”
“That’s not true,” he said.
But it was true. For Joe, the situation was always more important than anyone in it. Because we spent our lives in the bedroom, I’d not had a chance until now to feel in the flesh what I had long known in the intellect.
 
 
 
 
My mother was glad I had someone to love. At first she came down on me as hard as she had with Stefan, harder—“So how does it feel to steal another woman’s husband?”—but she was quicker now to recover from her confused rages over me and men. As I slammed out the door I heard her calling, “Come back! Come back! I didn’t mean that.”
And she didn’t. Within minutes, it seemed, she had accepted the conditions of our affair and welcomed Joe to her house; was eager, in fact, that he should come. For her, Joe was a glamorous and worldly figure, a man of strength, purpose, and daring. Shivering with coquettish delight, she said admiringly, “The chutzpah of that man!”
She couldn’t stop herself from gossiping to the family. When the aunts and uncles asked for me, she said, “Don’t ask,” in a voice of such juicy insinuation she instantly had their full attention, and then proceeded to inform them that I had become a principal in a tale of high romantic tragedy. The relatives, of course, lost no time in patronizing her with their moral alarm: a married man, a shock and a scandal, no one in the family had ever. Mama got miffed (this wasn’t in the script) and announced haughtily that there were aspects of the case she was not free to discuss. They could decide for themselves whether Joe’s wife was mad or syphilitic or in a lingering state of something-or-other.
Joe’s wife was a problem. Once Mama had given her allegiance to us, her conviction that we were victimizing his wife became a source of tormenting conflict. She solved the conflict by dreaming repeatedly that “the wife” stood in my doorway with a gun in her hand, shooting point-blank at me.
Mama knew that Joe was a man of appetite and will. She saw the way he dominated conversation, took up more than his share of the room, politicked relentlessly to get what he wanted, but she didn’t think it worthwhile to “stand on principle” over this less than attractive character trait. She considered the exertion of will on me small potatoes. Men, she shrugged. What difference did it make. He loves you? He’s good to you? So he wants to act like a man. So let him. It does you no harm, it means nothing.
In the fourth year Joe’s wife became violently ill with a suddenness that alarmed. It was thought she was going to die. Joe walked around stunned. He had a great affection for his wife, would never leave her while she lived, and feared for her now that she might be dying. Yet his thoughts were confused and his feelings divided. Not a word was spoken about the potential meaning this turn of events held for us, but we were all expectant. Horrified but expectant, and without acknowledging our behavior we began to act as though Joe and I would soon be married.
One afternoon during this time Mama and Sarah dropped by for coffee. The two sisters were always together, and always bickering. Ordinary conversation between them was an entertaining aggression. “A boy fell down in the street,” Sarah might say. “The eyes rolled up in the head, the arms and legs going in all directions. First time I saw an epileptic fit.” To which Mama would retort, “What are you talking? You know what you’re talking? That was a drug addict you saw. You know what means drug addict?” Whereupon Sarah would shake her head. “Your mother. She thinks because onions don’t grow on top of her head
she’s the rabbi’s wife.” I always enjoyed a visit from the two of them.
At four-thirty Joe barged in. “Sorry,” he said, smiling. “Hope I’m not interrupting anything, but I had a piece of good luck this morning, signed a contract we’ve been fighting over for months. I thought we’d celebrate.” He took a bottle of wine out of a paper bag and moved quickly about the room talking nonstop while he arranged four wineglasses on the coffee table, opened the bottle, and poured the wine.

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