The Lost Diary of M

by Paul Wolfe

  JULY 20

  I am navigating lovers, the fate of a woman who has traded marriage’s ritualized boredom for the madness of love unsanctioned by the state.

  I have dismissed C. There was nothing further to explore, no deeper erotic upheaval to uncover, and I enshrine our encounters as a permanent exhibit in the Mary Museum of Flesh.

  Kenneth Noland remains a lover, appropriate for a teacher and mentor. I consume his essence both bodily and intellectually, and our relationship takes shape in the shapes I conjure on canvas.

  Stewart Z remains an occasional occasional. He is a funny writer, I laugh at his twists of words, but I am unaccustomed to men who do not take charge. Easy to say when the president is your lover. I have never been accused of being old-fashioned, but as willful and prone to adventure as I am, I do not want to lead a man, so Stewart will probably become even less occasional. I will miss the humor. I once went off on the threat of nuclear annihilation as we kissed, and since that night he has referred to me as “Apocalips.”

  As for Jack, he remains a walled garden of the heart. He is a future that dangles ever out of reach, but he is the north star in all my imaginings. It is his face that smiles when I imagine companionship.

  It has been a while. You have no rights when you’re a mistress. To a married man. Who is president of the United States. And I have been diverted by an atmosphere of threat, and the revelations of V, none of which I can share with Jack, so even my hidden life has a hidden life. But Kenny called me last night. Jack wanted to see me. I told him I was devouring The Group, I was obsessed by this novel about Vassar girls just like me—well, sort of just like me—and Kenny said there was no one just like me. I laughed and told him I would put down the novel for an evening, but Jack better make it worth my while.

  At the White House, Kenny said Jack wanted me to meet him at the swimming pool. I told him I didn’t know there was a swimming pool, and he said FDR had had it installed by a terrace off the west wing. “Polio.”

  Jack was alone, sitting in a deck chair by the pool, surrounded by a glass pavilion and a long arcade of half-round windows.

  “You miss me?” He grinned, blowing out some cigar smoke.

  “How can I miss you? I see you on the cover of the newspaper every day.”

  “How do I look?”

  “You look better here. You’re a little flat in newspapers.”

  I sat down on his lap, and our lips joined. I am tired of wondering if this love will become more than sporadic flashes of desire, each event ignoring the chasms between.

  “Let’s go for a swim,” he said, ripping off his robe and bathing suit. In the half-light, his body was still remarkably boyish and thin. He climbed the ladder carefully down into the pool as I dropped my clothes onto the cement, not caring where they landed. Then I did a massive cannonball into the water as we did as kids at Grey Towers, sending a tidal wave that submerged him for a moment.

  I asked Jack how he could bear being in water after what he’d gone through.

  “You mean being on the Harvard swim team?” He grinned, and I pushed his head underwater. He came bobbing up, held me in his arms, and with a surprising burst of strength, threw me several feet. I sank like a boulder. When I resurfaced, I splashed him, and he splashed me back.

  “I meant during the war,” I said. He said that after swimming for hours through a Pacific Ocean crawling with Japanese boats, all the while dragging his mate Patrick behind him, the White House pool presented no great challenge.

  I enveloped him. I wrapped my legs around him and kissed him, kissed the Irish teeth, kissed the weird mix of cigar smoke and chlorine that hit my nostrils. There’s just no elegant way to be romantic in a pool. We rocked in the water, and then he reached between my legs and began fingering me. I wondered if the chlorine irritates private parts. Then he tried getting inside me. It was impossible. Then he lost his erection. “This is worse than the Pacific,” he said, and I answered, “You weren’t trying to do this with Patrick in the Pacific, were you?” He tried coming into me again, jamming his cock against my bush, but it was soft, so I began rubbing him.

  “I am not going to dive down and use my mouth for this,” I said. “It won’t work. I’m just too buoyant.”

  “Yes, Mary, you’ve always been too buoyant,” he said, and we laughed and splashed and I said I would take care of him when we got back upstairs. Which I did.

  That is a kind of status report on love. A progress report. Or a regress report. A Pinchot on the playing field of love. Only sister Tony has found happiness in marriage.

  AUGUST 31

  Bobby Kennedy invited me to an end-of-summer party at Hickory Hill, and I brought Kenneth Noland along as my date. Bobby made his usual whirlwind appearance in the middle of the evening. He gave every person an overenergized hello, as if it were one more campaign rally, except there were no more campaign rallies; they had won. Bobby always gives the impression he has desperately pulled himself away from something monumental in order to acknowledge your presence, and perhaps he has. He further gives the impression that he would like nothing better than to help you attain whatever it is you need, if he had but the time. So different from Jack, Jack who always seems removed from the hurly-burly of life, while Bobby seems commander in chief of the hurly-burly. The seventh or eighth kid in an Irish family, scrapping desperately to make it with his older brothers.

  Jackie appeared, greeted the guests graciously, shaking hands with Kenneth as if she were welcoming Picasso himself. Having come from a similar breeding ground, I am fully aware of the code instilled in girls like us: at each moment, whoever is in front of you is the most important person in your life.

  Ethel has stopped drinking; she’s sober and out of rehab for a month now, and she tells us LSD therapy has cured her alcoholism. It seems to have been a small dose, but potent enough to give her the distance on the levers of addiction. I felt like telling her addictions are delusions, tedious configurations of loss, rejection, and inadequacy frozen into us as children and carried thereafter to the grave. But I didn’t. I congratulated her, saying I too have had experience with psychedelic chemicals and am more aware of the miracle of life every day. She seemed uncomfortable with that sentiment, old starry-eyed Mary once again introducing her voodoo, so instead of sharing the magnitude of my ambitions for world peace through LSD, I joked that she should turn Bobby on to acid. She laughed at the ridiculousness of the notion. She would leave that job to me, she said—she has a hard enough time getting him to come to dinner with the children.

  I felt like circulating. I ride energies and sometimes, I can be a charm boat at parties, but I am accustomed to being alone, and when you’re alone you are free. Even if you are lonely, you are free. But at Bobby’s party I felt anchored down by Kenneth Noland. Like many artists who attain comfort only in a world controlled and created by themselves, he is awkward in social gatherings. His discipline and methodical nature have helped make him a painter of renown, though no one in this crowd cares the slightest about his renown, but I suddenly saw him as a bit of a bore. The night had a starry magnificence, liquor flowed, Peter Duchin’s band played the songs that defined the century and my youth—“Jeepers Creepers”!—and I had the urge to soar. But I felt responsible for handling Kenneth, and I’m sick of handling. Let the world handle itself.

  So I peeled off my clothes and jumped into Bobby’s pool, utterly naked. I called out for everyone to strip and join me, and I could hear Kenneth in the background screaming, demanding I get out of the pool and put my clothes back on. Daddy Amos, your daughter is naked in the pool of the attorney general of the United States and has just been ordered to behave by a pioneer of abstract art! You have raised an interesting daughter.

  “This is how it all started!” I shouted, and started splashing water in Kenneth’s direction. “We came into this world naked and in water. I wasn’t born in tights and peasant blouses!” Kenneth yelled that I was embarrassing him, and I shouted back: “You mean, I�
�m bare-assing you!” Others leaped into the pool to join me, many becoming as unhinged as I in the childhood freedom of water, but whether they took their clothes off or not, I don’t know. Kenneth stormed out of Hickory Hill and left me there alone.

  SEPTEMBER 2

  We buried the incident. That’s what humans do, isn’t it? . . . bury the dead and go on. But Kenneth Noland remains a glum presence in my life. Had he not been an artist I revered and indispensable to my development as a painter, I would have sent him the way of Cord and C.

  Kenneth always says the paint will reveal what it wants you to do, so I have been listening closely. The paint has whispered “circle” to me, and I have begun working with circular shapes and circular canvases. A circle is infinite. Such a simple shape, yet so perfect. I cooked dinner last night for Kenneth and told him I have a new set of paintings. They are circular. He said he was not interested in seeing them. A pain arose in my midsection, and tears fell into the sink as I turned my back to him. The latest in a chain of men who are not there for me, who do not honor my devotion and what I consider my childlike sincerity.

  My happiness is not dependent on Kenneth Noland, I reminded myself. I breathed deeply and set a plate of pasta down in front of him. My happiness is not dependent on Jack either, I reminded myself, is not dependent on any man. Obvious yet impossible to apply when the pain of need has overtaken your body. Such a declaration of independence from men would be a radical thought for the girls I grew up with, and an occasion for ridicule from women I know now. Am I suffering for them so that one day they will not have to suffer?

  SEPTEMBER 16

  Hot autumn is purely magical in Manhattan, the rough decay of New York covered over in a warm yellow light. I needed release from threat. I needed to walk streets unknown and unwatched, in a city where possession of knowledge was not grounds for a funeral. So I traveled to New York.

  Anne Truitt is back from Japan for a month, readjusting from Tokyo, or what she calls Mars with tea, so she joined me. We went to see one of the most important exhibits of 1963: Ad Reinhardt’s black paintings at the Museum of Modern Art.

  On the way to the museum, we stopped off at a restaurant called Max’s Kansas City, where artists were said to congregate. There apparently is no Max and no Kansas City, but the steaks were excellent. A rather effeminate young man wearing large sunglasses held court at the table next to us. Anne asked if he was an artist—she is forthcoming, whereas I would never bother a stranger—and he said he was a painter and his name was Andy. When I asked what he painted, he said soup cans. Beside him was a man named Roushenburg or some such Jewish-sounding name. He answered the same question quite philosophically. “What is the separation between art and life? There’s no reason not to consider the world as one gigantic painting.” He said he is experimenting with placing junk and random objects on his canvases. Is he a sculptor or a painter?

  Sitting beside him was a striking blond woman who appeared upset with the others. Isolated in her own mood, she paid no attention to us, working her way through a large steak and a strangely colored cocktail. Anne persevered and asked if she was an artist too, and the blonde mumbled in a deep, smoky voice shaped by a heavy German accent. All I could gather was that she was a model, and that Andy was urging her to sing in a band.

  We took a taxi up to the Museum of Modern Art and the city was ablaze with sunlight, a radical contrast to what we would soon encounter in Ad Reinhardt’s black works. I was so moved. They seem like nothing more than canvases of black paint until you look closely, until you look not at what you think is there but what is actually there. A moment comes when the invisible becomes visible. You gaze at a field of black, and suddenly you’re not seeing a field of black, you’re seeing ten distinct squares of color, each a different shade of black. They have been there all along, but your seeing didn’t see it. “These are the last paintings anybody can paint,” Reinhardt wrote in the program.

  OCTOBER 2

  Jack is going to Dallas. I didn’t want to hear it. I told him not to go. You can feel these things. There is a blast furnace of hatred directed at him now, smoldering most intensely in the South.

  Jack laughs when I talk this way and I suddenly see him as some kind of stubborn, naive fool, come of age on fairy tales of heroism. But really, are there heroes? I have a sudden urge to kiss him, to protect him—for a thousandth of a second I even pretend he is my husband—but I leave him be, he prefers not being touched, and I let him keep smiling. Untouched but knowing that I love him, he says gently that he is president of the entire country and must act accordingly. I tell him too many people have left me, and I couldn’t live if I lost him too.

  He puffed on his cigar, and I sat down on his lap. I looked up at an oil painting of James Madison. Someday, I thought, we will be gone, and new people will occupy the White House, as indifferent to us as we are to James Madison. “You’re now at the seat of power,” he said, as I shuffled my ass on his lap.

  OCTOBER 4

  After Dallas, Jackie will be going to Paris. Jack wants us to vanish someplace together when she is away, to Cape Cod perhaps, but I told him I don’t want to talk about what happens after Dallas, I want to live right now. I told him our minds are curiously designed to keep living in the future, even though we never reach it. “We spend our lives right here, but we’re never here.”

  Jack says: “Mary, you’re giving me a headache.”

  Jack says: “Mary, you’re the most philosophical blonde in the United States. What if we met at Camp David? What would Ike think of that?” He is unrelenting. I tell him I don’t want to be hustled out of Washington to hide in the country at some government compound.

  “In fact,” I say, “I don’t need to follow someone wherever they go, even you. Otherwise, I’m living their life, not mine.”

  Jack says he is not accustomed to being told no, and I tell him it’s good for him to hear the word.

  “Well, Mary”—he smiles—“maybe I have been missing out on the value of hearing the word no, or maybe you should be more loving after all we’ve been through together.”

  I have grown tense. As if I must end the Cold War before it ends me.

  OCTOBER 7

  Roxanne Arcturis speaks about the Divine Feminine in the Aquarian Age. She says: “Venus is opening portals for us to receive transmissions directly from her. We will enter a period called Venus in Retrograde. Retrograde will make Venus appear to be traveling backward in the heavens, but this stretch of time will bestow on women a revelation of our ability to heal the entire planet.”

  Venus in retrograde. It seems more a summation of an age that is ending than a future we are living into. Why have we been in retrograde for so long? Someone conceived this arrangement eons ago in some forest as a means to facilitate war. And we have agreed to bear children in retrograde, prepare meals in retrograde, devise fashionable hairstyles in retrograde, laugh at the foolishness of men—all in retrograde.

  I am in retrograde. Is it my destiny to be up to my neck in the final realm of the Cold War and fade to my forgotten end along with it?

  OCTOBER 15

  My birthday. Joe Alsop phoned and wished me love and a life filled with beauty and champagne for a hundred years. Then he said he had a surprise for me.

  “Diamonds?” I asked, we both knowing I care nothing for rocks and metal on my skin.

  “Bigger,” he said.

  “A Jaguar?” I asked, we both knowing I love my little Studebaker and see cars much the way eternity does: as boxes of metal with wheels, rusting their way to oblivion.

  “More powerful.”

  “I’m tired of playing,” I finally told him, and he said: “Be here seven sharp tonight, and don’t be tired of playing when you get here.”

  “Maybe I’ll get a second wind,” I said.

  So I arrived at seven, expecting a party, expecting the regulars and certainly Ben and my sister, figuring I would feign surprise when they sang “Happy Birthday,” a song I loathe, but wh
en I opened the door there was no one there. Joe came up and hugged me. “Ready for your surprise?”

  “I’m already surprised,” I said.

  “Close your eyes, my dear, close your eyes,” and the next thing I knew he was blindfolding me, he was tying a piece of silk across my eyes as gracefully as if it were routine: “Trust, my dear, just trust and all will be well.”

  He held my arm and led me gently through the house. I had no idea where I was, and then we walked through a door.

  “I will leave you now,” he said, and pulled off the blindfold as he exited through the door behind me. When I came to my senses, Jack was sitting there. I don’t think human smiles get more joyous, more enveloping, his or mine. I was stunned, I fell into his arms and kissed him deeply. Surely this is what was meant by love.

  “They let you out!” I said into his eyes.

  “Kenny gives me one night off a year for good behavior.”

  “We’re all alone!”

  “All alone except for Joe Alsop, and he has orders from the commander in chief to stay on his side of the house or face charges of treason.”

  Why isn’t life like this always? I thought, my mind already trying to possess, to hold on, to freeze the moment. Why can’t we live like this forever?

  We fell together on the couch, like teenagers in their parents’ house alone for the first time and hungry beyond hunger for each other. I don’t think he stopped smiling, I don’t think his back ached or his stomach or his endocrine system or any of the other problems that normally ailed him.

  I didn’t know if he was coming into me or I was coming into him.

  It was that kind of night.

  It was my forty-third birthday.

  NOVEMBER 27

  I was painting. It’s really all I know how to do. I was in my studio when I heard. When Anne Truitt called me with the news. It was a week ago. I don’t know what I’ve done for a week. I’m not sure I want to write this. I’m writing on empty. There is no desire expressed in these words. I’m not even sure why I bother. The diary doesn’t concern me now. He is gone. It occurs to me every few hours and then it leaves me every few hours, it is a dream and I am quite ready to wake up. I have watched the proceedings on Anne’s TV, they keep replaying the ceremony of flags and sadness, they keep replaying the fat gangster shooting Lee Harvey Oswald, they keep replaying John John saluting, and who can bear it?