Fierce Attachments

by Vivian Gornick

  The men were able to retreat from anxiety into a ready-made identity. They got their Ph.D.’s, married Joan, and went off to walk the carefully prepared road that had been assigned them. The women had no such luck. Who were they to identify with? Where were they to go? At Berkeley I know where they went. They fell into affairs with married professors, black activists, antisocial mathematicians; or they hung out at the bars on the other side of Shattuck Avenue (Berkeley’s social divider), where one met adventurers rather than graduate students: bartenders, painters, poetic drifters, fishermen down from Alaska, pot growers in from Oregon. Their lives were fractured. By day they were absorbed by Renaissance poetry and the life of the English department; by night they slept with men who crossed Shattuck Avenue on a twenty-four-hour visa. Sexual adventure was an event that only rarely converted into experience. In some important way these women remained as innocent of life, of their own lives, as did Mark and Joan whiling the years away in one remote university town or another.

  I need hardly say among which group I took my own uneasy place. I had come to Berkeley also trailing a list of “inappropriate” attachments. I already knew I had hopeless trouble with the Marks of this world, trouble I thought originated in their insecurities, their fears, their defenses. Me, I was ready. It was they who didn’t want a wife who talked back, they who were afraid of a woman like me. The contempt poured into those words “afraid of a woman like me.” Such fear was low, cunning, perverse, scurvy and wormlike. A man who was afraid of a woman like me deserved the kind of tongue-lashing that would leave him paralyzed from the waist down.

  I didn’t hang out on the other side of Shattuck Avenue, but I managed often enough to find the men with that combination of weakness and strength required to release sexual attraction. Real satisfaction, of course, was never achieved. Something was always wrong with these liaisons. Mary McCarthy had written of the men her own fictional surrogate fell in love with: If they were clever they were funny-looking, if they were virile they were stupid. That equation read like hard-won wisdom to me, and to many of my friends. We quoted McCarthy at one another triumphantly. Her elegant phrasing elevated our condition from the level of complaint to that of fixed truth.

  What I could not register was this: In each of these affairs a necessary element of control devolved on me. If a man was short or stupid or uneducated or foreign, I felt sufficiently superior to risk tenderness. I might be socially uncomfortable but I was freed up. Love was a swamp of overwhelming proportion. It covered the ground once I stepped off the solid territory of miserable, blessed loneliness. To sleep with a man was to start drowning in need. An equalizer was an absolute, not a relative an absolute necessity.

  Stefan was neither stupid nor uneducated, but he was short and foreign and an artist. He groped for words, his English was not fluent, he did work I could not evaluate but could nonetheless be skeptical of. He was also a lapsed Catholic endowed with a missionary zeal for painting that appealed strongly to my own burning moralism. This tipped the balance toward marriage. We met one night at a party in North Beach, not far from the art school where he was a student, and immediately began to discuss the significance of Art, the privilege of being allowed to serve, the promise and the glory, the meaning and the transcendence. The conversation mesmerized us. We met repeatedly to hear ourselves speak the magic words again and again. Very quickly I began to image a life together, intense and high-minded, devoted to the idea of the Great Work.

  And he? What did he want from me? The same, the very same. I, apparently, fitted perfectly into the landscape of his imagined life. I was a graduate student in literature: that was good. I was a fierce moralizing Jewess: that was better. I worshipped at the shrine of Art: that was best. We told each other that with the stability of a life together we would each do the large work we knew we were meant to do. It was a marriage born of spiritual fantasizing. We did not want each other, chemically or romantically. The misery that had to be lived out before that simple knowledge was ours.

  I called home and announced I was getting married. At the other end of the phone my mother was speechless. When she found her tongue it was to revile me for bringing her a goy. But, Ma! We were communists! She calmed down, asked me when I was coming back to New York and what kind of a wedding I wanted. Homemade, I laughed. Thanks, Ma.

  I came back and she gripped me in a hard, angry embrace. She did try, but repeatedly her head filled with blood, over what, I think she hardly knew … oh yes, I was marrying a goy. I was elated. I began to feel embattled. Now I wanted to marry Stefan more, I thought, than I would ever again want anything. I must fight for the integrity of my opposed love, fight her to the death. But each day at noon I was overcome by a wave of nausea, and chaos beat inside my head. What was I doing? Why was I getting married? Why was I marrying him? Who was he? I was going to stand up before a judge and swear, call this man husband, take his name … I felt myself plunging … Don’t think about it, it’s too late now, all too late. If she wins this one you are lost.

  An immense activity overtook our kitchen the day before the wedding. Everyone pitched in: Sarah, Mrs. Zimmerman, Marilyn and her mother, cleaning, cooking, laughing, talking. When I think back on it, the only spontaneous fun occurred the day before, in the kitchen, preparing for the festivity. That is, they, the other women, had fun. Not me and Mama. Mama’s face was a mask of tension. She worked hard and well, was helpful to everyone, answered when spoken to, but a cloud of depression surrounded her. The live, warm presence of my mother had disappeared. In its place stood this remoteness posing as Mama. Her anxiety was unbearable to me. It made me crazy. I needed her to respond, to be there with me. I needed it. Not getting what I needed, I fell into an anxiety of my own that rendered me nearly speechless. Sick with fear and panic, I wandered about the room smiling wanly: trying so hard, I thought. We became a pair of matched performers in the kitchen. The other women gave us a wide berth, speaking carefully to each of us, as one does to the potentially unbalanced. Enraged, I thought, This bitch is spoiling everything for everyone. But then I saw that the conversation of the others was as lightheartedly crude, as briskly outrageous as ever. Only I was being brought down. Only I was responding to Mama’s mean misery with an even meaner one of my own.

  In the late afternoon we suddenly ran out of flour and sugar. Mama pulled off her apron and said she needed air, she would go to the grocery store. I couldn’t let her out of my sight. “I’ll come with you,” I said. She nodded wordlessly, as though she had expected no less.

  We left the house and trudged up the block. It was late August. I was wearing a thin dress that was one summer too old. The hem had come down that very morning and I had pinned it up. Now as we walked a mild breeze rippled the dress, exposing the pins. My mother said sharply, “What is that?” I followed her gaze. “The hem came down this morning.” I shrugged. “I couldn’t find the sewing box.” Right then and there, on the street, halfway between the house and the grocery store, she lost her mind.

  “You are disgusting!” she yelled at me. “Disgusting! Look at you. Just look at you. You’re a mess! That’s what you are. A mess! When will you ever learn? You think you’ll learn? You won’t learn.” People began to turn around. She didn’t notice. Suddenly her body trembled. Her skin lost its color. She pushed her face at mine. “He’ll never marry you,” she hissed.

  The pain in my chest cracked open, and an angry frightened excitement ran quickly into the cleared space. She was jealous, great God, she was jealous. It wasn’t just that I was getting married, it was that the glamorous goy was taking me out into the world. I could see it in her eyes. We stood there, immobilized. I felt my face going gray like hers. Without another word, we turned away from each other and continued on to the grocery store.

  From the cake to the music to the clothes, the wedding was indeed homemade. We pushed the furniture into the bedrooms, threw open the glass doors between the two middle rooms, set up a table of food at one end, a friend who played the accord
ion at the other, and in between a mob of people ate, drank, and danced, whooping with ceremonial high spirits. Very quickly, the atmosphere generated warmth, intimacy, filial affection. The only strangers at the wedding were Stefan and I. We stood together on an island in the middle of the room. On this island each of us was alone. He didn’t have a friend in sight, and all the Yiddish made him horribly uncomfortable. I did have a friend in sight, but the strain in his face separated me from my friends. What had drawn us together and urged us into this moment had suddenly become a desperate abstraction. We could neither join nor counteract the power of the inherited ritual being acted out on our behalf. Completing my isolation was the sight of Mama in continual food-supplying motion, her eyes grim, on her mouth a fixed smile, her hand out palm up warding off congratulations.

  Stefan and I returned to California and set about making a home out of a five-room flat in North Beach. The place was a shambles (crumbling walls, flaking ceilings, broken floors), but the rooms were shapely and the light transforming, and I think we thought at the end of that project we would be real married people. We set to work with hearts that were actually lightened by the prospect of the work ahead of us, hearts made heavy now each day and each night as we tried to negotiate the terrifying reality to which an errant impulse had joined us. For the first time we saw how foreign we were to one another. I had not a bohemian bone in my body, he had not an unrebellious one in his. I could not bear incoherence in the physical surround, he could not bear a room that seemed finished. I cherished clarity of thought, he was drawn to mystic revelation. Each day brought long moments of unhappiness it took hours to recover from. Each night we took to bed our confusion, our longing, our paralyzing intensity. Only rarely did our bodies give us relief, and then but for an hour. It was my first experience of sexual love as catharsis, wherein one is left as lonely in the morning as one had been the evening before.

  The apartment was rich in overall space, but each room was comparatively small. The problem this presented was Stefan’s studio. We had agreed when we married that, to consolidate our life and to save us money, he would give up the spacious basement studio he’d been living in and make his studio in the apartment. A towerlike room with windows all around at the farthest end of the flat had seemed ideal. Now suddenly we realized how little floor space the tower room actually contained. Oh well, we’d take the matter under consideration when we got to it. Meanwhile, we decided we would start in the kitchen right near the front door and steadily work our way through the place. That, I said, was the logical thing to do. Yes, Stefan agreed, that was the logical thing to do. When I think back on it: room by room we carved out the distance, measured the drift, implemented the loss.

  It was a large old-fashioned working kitchen with three tall windows, a wide shallow basin set high in a wooden counter, and a built-in bench and table. We plastered and painted and laid linoleum. When the room was finished, and the table and bench gleaming white, Stefan painted a broad band of orange around the rim of the table. That orange. On the most painful of days that orange, hard and brilliant, lifted my heart, cleared my spirit. Often, when I remember the apartment, it’s the orange band around the kitchen table I see first. Then the murk comes crowding in.

  The kitchen was where I first began to grasp the meaning of the word wife. Here we were, a pair of twenty-four-year-olds: one day we’re a graduate student and a working artist, the next day we’re a wife and a husband. Before, we had always put the rude meals we ate on the table together. Now, suddenly, Stefan was in his studio each evening drawing or reading, and I was in the kitchen struggling to prepare and serve a meal we both thought should be proper. I remember taking an hour and a half to prepare some godawful casserole dish out of a woman’s magazine, the two of us wolfing it down in ten minutes, then me taking an hour to clean up the mess, staring into the sink thinking, Is this it for the next forty years?

  I discovered that I loathed cooking: could not absorb its social value, puzzled endlessly over why it should fall to me to provide this service we both required equally, and remained willfully inept for a much longer time than was necessary. Yet, one morning three months after we’d been married, Stefan said to me, “You make the lousiest coffee,” and I was stricken. Neither of us had ever cared before about good coffee, or about who had provided the coffee, good or otherwise. Now, suddenly, the bad coffee on the table was a deficiency of mine. Driven to correct this stated failure, I walked into an Italian café down the block and said mournfully to the retired men hanging out, “My husband says I make lousy coffee.” They gathered around me immediately. One said it was the packaged coffee, one said it was the pot, one said it was the water. I bought a drip pot, unground coffee beans, bottled water. Still, the coffee was lousy. Too weak, too strong, too mild, too bitter: sometimes interesting never delicious. One night at a party a painter twice my age said tiredly to me, “It’s all in the measurements. Just measure accurately and I guarantee it will come out fine.” He was right. I learned to measure, and the coffee misery ended as suddenly as it had begun: as though I had driven through a patch of fog on a night when visibility is already low.

  It was a measure of youth and ignorance that we swallowed whole these clichéd responses to the words husband and wife. Our own fantasies of normality did not tend in this direction. As we moved from bedroom to living room to study and studio, we felt more and more acutely the real difficulty of the course we had set ourselves on, the magic that getting married was meant to perform. We saw ourselves primarily as people ardent about creative work. The redone apartment was to be a declaration of intent; it was to mirror our high-minded solidarity. But somehow the place refused to come together. We couldn’t figure out why. Each completed room seemed to hang in space, remain distinctly separate, without flow or intimacy. We puzzled—I know Stefan did as much as I—over what was going wrong, but we were in no position to do more than puzzle. We kept drifting up and down that central hallway, in and around those many-windowed rooms, in search of an elusive integration we must have felt we had mislaid somewhere.

  Nearly all graduate-student apartments were filled with Mexican pottery, straw rugs, madras spreads. I suggested we avoid all that. The bedroom, for instance, I said, should be cool and refreshing, a place of retreat and recovery. (From what, I now wonder.) “Let’s paint the walls light gray,” I said, “trim the windows in white, and cover the bed with a blue-gray cotton spread.” Stefan thought that original and promptly set to work with me to realize the scheme, but when we were done something didn’t sit right. The room was not a pleasant place to enter. Again, we puzzled. Every single thing in it was indeed so pretty. That it was a room in which nightly we re-enacted our failure to connect, that the light-gray walls were sprayed with loneliness and the blue-gray cotton spread never wrinkled by spontaneity, those were thoughts for which we literally had no sentences.

  It was the same with my study. We bought an old wooden table I thought would make a good desk, and a slatted chair to go with it. We built bookshelves, nailed up a bulletin board, put a rocking chair near the window, and again chose a color for the room I thought quiet but lively. Now, we both said, now I would work. But the table was too high and too thick, the chair felt clumsy and rigid, the bulletin board remained oddly naked, and the color made me anxious: a beige that had been warm in the can turned aloof on the wall. Then there was the matter of the books. Stefan had suggested we integrate our books, and to my own amazement I heard myself say, “No. I want to keep my books separate.” He had flushed deeply, and gone silent. I saw that I had hurt him and my first impulse was to take back what I had said, but the impulse was not whole and I did not act on it. The books in the study remained mine alone, but I no longer took pleasure in looking at them. When I sat in the rocking chair, my eye scanning the shelves for something to read, I felt a dull pain remembering how hard Stefan had worked to put the shelves together and help me arrange the books. The pain made it difficult to read, or even to think, in this room.
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  The living room was a holding action. I think we both knew that even then. Here we put down a straw rug, stuck paper flowers in clay pots, tossed a brightly striped covering on the daybed-couch. The only original touch in the room was not functional. We found a glass coffee table in a Goodwill store. The glass was discolored, the wooden base badly nicked. Stefan sanded down the wood. He poured a thick stream of sienna paint onto the glass top, and another stream of white. Then he sat down beside the table with a brush in his hand and began to direct the two streams of paint in circular motions, like a conductor with an orchestra, laughing delightedly but working with concentration (any application of paint deserved serious attention). The result was a vibrant abstraction sitting horizontally in the middle of the room. The paint was so wonderfully encrusted no coffee cup had a sliding chance.

  The painted table, like the orange band, was a spot of brightness that made vivid the unhappy gloom mounting up in those oddly shaped rooms with the light pouring in from fifteen windows. In principle we agreed on everything, but in the dailiness of life we never seemed to want the same thing at the same time. We each came to think of ourselves as always making do or giving in. Invariably, one of us felt pushed out of shape. All I want is a normal life! I cried to myself. Why is everything so hard? Why are we always angry or intense? in hurt disagreement over this, that, or the other?