Man in the Dark (17 page)

I remember her hands, the gentleness of her hands when she touched me.

Gentle hands, yes. But strong hands, too. Wise hands. That’s how I used to think of them. Hands that could speak.

Did you live together before you were married?

No, no, that was out of the question. We had to sneak around a lot. It had its exciting aspects, but most of the time it was frustrating. I was still living with my parents in Washington Heights, so I didn’t have a place of my own. And Sonia had her two roommates. We’d go there whenever they were gone, but that didn’t happen often enough to satisfy us.

What about hotels?

Off-limits. Even if we could have afforded them, it was too dangerous. There were laws in New York that made it illegal for unmarried couples to be alone together in the same room. Every hotel had a detective—the house dick—and if he caught you, you’d be thrown in jail.

Lovely.

So what to do? Sonia had lived in Princeton as a child, and she still had friends there. There was one couple—the Gontorskis, I’ll never forget them—a physics professor and his wife, refugees from Poland who loved Sonia and didn’t give a damn about American sexual customs. They let us stay in their guest room on the weekends. And then there was the outdoor sex, the warm-weather sex in fields and meadows outside the city. A large element of risk. Someone finally found us naked in the bushes, and we got cold feet after that and stopped taking chances. Without the Gontorskis, we would have been in hell.

Why didn’t you just get married? Right then, while you were still students.

The draft. The minute I graduated from college, I was going to be called up for my physical, and we figured I’d have to spend two years in the army. Sonia was already singing professionally by my senior year, and what if they shipped me off to West Germany or Greenland or South Korea? I couldn’t have asked her to follow me. It wouldn’t have been fair.

But you never were in the army, were you? Not if you were married in nineteen fifty-seven.

I flunked the exam. A false diagnosis, as it turned out—but no matter, I was free, and a month later we were married. We didn’t have much money, of course, but the situation wasn’t quite desperate. Sonia had dropped out of Juilliard and started her career, and by the time I left college I had already published about a dozen articles and reviews. We sublet a railroad flat in Chelsea, sweated out one New York summer, and then Sonia’s oldest brother, Patrice, a civil engineer, was hired to build a dam somewhere in Africa and offered us his Paris apartment rent-free. We jumped. The minute his telegram arrived, we started packing our bags.

I’m not interested in real estate, and I already know about your careers. I want you to tell me about the important things. What was she like? How did it feel being married to her? How well did you get along? Did you ever fight? The nuts and bolts, Grandpa, not just a string of superficial facts.

All right, let me change gears and think for a moment. What was Sonia like? What did I discover about her after we were married that I hadn’t known before? Contradictions. Complexities. A darkness that revealed itself slowly over time and made me reassess who she was. I loved her madly, Katya, you have to understand that, and I’m not criticizing her for being who she was. It’s just that as I got to know her better, I came to realize how much suffering she carried around inside her. In most ways, your grandmother was an extraordinary person. Tender, kind, loyal, forgiving, full of spirit, with a tremendous capacity for love. But she would drift off every now and then, sometimes right in the middle of a conversation, and start staring into space with this dreamy expression in her eyes, and it was as if she didn’t know me anymore. At first, I imagined she was thinking some profound thought or remembering something that had happened to her, but when I finally asked her what was going through her head at those moments, she smiled at me and said, Nothing. It was as if her whole being would empty out, and she’d lose contact with herself and the world. All her instincts and impulses about other people were deep, uncannily deep, but her relation to herself was strangely shallow. She had a good mind, but essentially she was uneducated, and she had trouble following a train of thought, couldn’t concentrate on anything for very long. Except her music, which was the most important thing in her life. She believed in her talent, but at the same time she knew her limits and refused to tackle pieces she felt were beyond her ability to perform well. I admired her honesty, but there was also something sad about it, as if she thought of herself as second-rate, doomed always to be a notch or two below the best. That’s why she never did any opera. Lieder, ensemble work in choral pieces, undemanding solo cantatas—but she never pushed herself beyond that. Did we fight? Of course we fought. All couples fight, but she was never vicious or cruel when we argued. Most of the time, I have to admit, her criticisms of me were spot-on. For a Frenchwoman, she turned out to be a rather lousy cook, but she liked good food, so we ate in restaurants fairly often. An indifferent housekeeper, absolutely no interest in possessions—I say that as a compliment—and even though she was a beautiful young woman with an adorable body, she didn’t dress very well. She loved clothes, but she never seemed to choose the right ones. To be frank, I sometimes felt lonely with her, lonely in my work, since all my time was spent reading and writing about books, and she didn’t read much, and what she did read she found difficult to talk about.

I’m getting the impression that you felt disappointed.

No, not disappointed. Far from it. Two newlyweds gradually adjusting to each other’s foibles, the revelations of intimacy. All in all, it was a happy time for me, for both of us, with no serious complaints on either side, and then the dam in Africa was finished, and we went back to New York with Sonia three months pregnant.

Where did you live?

I thought you weren’t interested in real estate.

That’s right, I’m not. Question withdrawn.

Several places over the years. But when your mother was born, our apartment was on West Eighty-fourth Street, just off Riverside Drive. One of the windiest streets in the city.

What kind of baby was she?

Easy and difficult. Screaming and laughing. Great fun and a terrible pain in the ass.

In other words, a baby.

No. The baby of babies. Because she was
our
baby, and
our
baby was like no other baby in the world.

How long did Grandma wait until she went back to performing?

She took a year off from traveling, but she was singing in New York again when Miriam was just three months old. You know what a good mother she was—your own mother must have told you that a hundred times—but she also had her work. It was what she was born to do, and I never would have dreamed of trying to hold her back. Still, she had her doubts, especially in the beginning. One day, when Miriam was about six months old, I walked into the bedroom, and there was Sonia on her knees by the bed, hands together, head raised, murmuring to herself in French. My French was quite good by then, and I understood everything she said. To my astonishment, it turned out that she was praying. Dear God, give me a sign and tell me what to do about my little girl. Dear God, fill the emptiness inside me and teach me how to love, to forbear, to give myself to others. She looked and sounded like a child, a small, simpleminded child, and I have to say that I was a little thrown by it—but also moved, deeply, deeply moved. It was as if a door had opened, and I was looking at a new Sonia, a different person from the one I’d known for the past five years. When she realized I was in the room, she turned around and gave me an embarrassed smile. I’m sorry, she said, I didn’t want you to know. I walked over to the bed and sat down. Don’t be sorry, I told her. I’m just a little puzzled, that’s all. We had a long talk after that, at least an hour, the two of us sitting side by side on the bed, discussing the mysteries of her soul. Sonia explained that it started toward the end of her pregnancy, in the middle of the seventh month. She was walking down the street one afternoon on her way home, when all of a sudden a feeling of joy rose up inside her, an inexplicable, overwhelming joy. It was as if the entire universe were rushing into her body, she said, and in that instant she understood that everything was connected to everything else, that everyone in the world was connected to everyone else in the world, and this binding force, this power that held everything and everyone together, was God. That was the only word she could think of. God. Not a Jewish or Christian God, not the God of any religion, but God as the presence that animates all life. She started talking to him after that, she said, convinced that he could hear what she was saying, and these monologues, these prayers, these supplications—whatever you wanted to call them—always comforted her, always put her on an even keel with herself again. It had been going on for months now, but she didn’t want to tell me because she was afraid I would think she was stupid. I was so much smarter than she was, so superior to her when it came to intellectual matters—her words, not mine—and she was worried that I’d burst out laughing at my ignorant wife when she told me that she’d found God. I didn’t laugh. Heathen that I am, I didn’t laugh. Sonia had her own way of thinking and her own way of doing things, and who was I to make fun of her?

I knew her all my life, but she never spoke to me about God, not once.

That’s because she stopped believing. When our marriage broke up, she felt that God had abandoned her. That was a long time ago, angel, long before you were born.

Poor Grandma.

Yes, poor Grandma.

I have a theory about your marriage. Mother and I have talked about it, and she tends to go along with me, but I need confirmation, the inside dope from the horse’s mouth. How would you respond if I said: You and Grandma got divorced because of her career?

My answer would be: Nonsense.

All right, not her career per se. The fact that she traveled so much.

I would say you were getting warmer—but only as an indirect cause, a secondary factor.

Mother says she used to hate it when Grandma went on tour. She’d break down and cry, she’d scream, she’d beg her not to go. Hysterical scenes . . . unadulterated anguish . . . separation after separation . . .

That happened once or twice, but I wouldn’t make too big an issue of it. When Miriam was very young, say from one to six, Sonia never left for more than a week at a time. My mother would move in with us to take care of her, and things went rather smoothly. Your great-grandmother had a knack with little kids, she adored Miriam—who was her only granddaughter—and Miriam couldn’t wait for her to show up. It all comes back to me now . . . the funny things your mother used to do. When she was three or four, she became fascinated by her grandmother’s breasts. They were quite huge, I have to say, since my mother had grown into a fairly chunky broad by then. Sonia was small on top, with little adolescent breasts that filled out only when she was nursing Miriam, but after your mother was weaned, they got even smaller than they’d been before the pregnancy. The contrast was utterly stark, and Miriam couldn’t help noticing. My mother had a voluminous chest, twenty times the size of Sonia’s. One Saturday morning, she and Miriam were sitting on the sofa together watching cartoons. A commercial for pizza came on, which ended with the words: Now, that’s a pizza! A moment later, your mother turned to my mother, clamped her mouth on her grandmother’s right breast, and then came up shouting: Now,
that’s
a pizza! My mother laughed so hard, she let out a fart, a gigantic trumpet blast of a fart. That got Miriam laughing so wildly, she peed in her pants. She jumped off the sofa and started running around the room, yelling at the top of her lungs: Fart-pee, fart-pee,
oui, oui, oui!

You’re making this up.

No, it really happened, I swear it did. The only reason I mention it is to show you that it wasn’t all gloom in the house when Sonia was gone. Miriam didn’t mope around feeling like some neglected Oliver Twist. She was mostly fine.

And what about you?

I learned to live with it.

That sounds like an evasive answer.

There were different periods, different stages, and each one had its own texture. In the beginning, Sonia was relatively unknown. She’d done a little singing in New York before we moved to Paris, but she had to start all over again in France, and then, just when things seemed to be taking off a bit, we came back to America, and she had to make another start. In the end, it all worked to her advantage, since she was known both here and in Europe. But it took time for her to develop a reputation. The turning point came in sixty-seven or sixty-eight, when she signed the contract to make those records with Nonesuch, but until then she didn’t go away that often. I was torn down the middle. On the one hand, I was happy for her whenever she got a booking to perform in a new city. On the other hand—just like your mother—I hated to see her go. The only choice was to learn to live with it. That’s not an evasion, it’s a fact.

You were faithful . . .

Totally.

And when did you start to slip?

Stray
is probably the word to use in this context.

Or
lapse
. There’s a spiritual connotation to it that seems fitting.

All right, lapse. Around nineteen seventy, I suppose. But there was nothing spiritual about it. It was all about sex, sex pure and simple. Summer came, and Sonia went off on a threemonth tour of Europe—with your mother, by the way—and there I was by myself, still just thirty-five years old, hormones roaring at full tilt, womanless in New York. I worked hard every day, but the nights were empty, colorless, stagnant. I began hanging out with a bunch of sportswriters, most of them heavy drinkers, playing poker until three in the morning, going out to bars, not because I especially liked any of them, but it was something to do, and I needed a little company after being alone all day. One night, after another boozy session in a bar, I was walking home from midtown to the Upper West Side, and I spotted a prostitute standing in the doorway of a building. A very attractive girl, as it happened, and I was drunk enough to accept her offer of a good time. Am I upsetting you?