Fierce Attachments

by Vivian Gornick

  My own behavior seemed perfectly reasonable to me. Stefan’s was perplexing. Stubborn and dug-in, I thought. On Sundays especially. Sundays Stefan spent the entire day in his studio (first at the school, then later at home). “But Sunday,” I protested. “That’s the day we’re supposed to spend together.” What else did I get married for? I was thinking. “This I cannot bargain with,” he said. “I must spend the day in my studio. I stare at the canvas, I study the work, I am restored. I cannot go on with the week unless I have this day to myself. Try to understand.” “How about part of the day?” I wheedled. “Work in the morning and walk with me in the afternoon.” He looked at me, his blue eyes cold and unreadable. “No,” he said. “I need the whole day.” Then he said, “Why don’t you work, too?” It was my turn to look blank. “But it’s Sunday,” I repeated. The coldness gave way to mockery. “Only a bourgeois must go walking on Sunday,” he said, “not an artist.” At that I’d slam out the door.

  On the Friday morning when we were to begin work on Stefan’s studio we quarreled openly, over what I no longer recall, but I was deeply stung by the exchange. Instead of going off with him to plaster and paint (as he had done with me in my study, and in every other room in the house), I retreated into a dark depression from which I could not rouse myself. For three days I was unable to respond, very nearly unable to speak. I wandered aimlessly about the apartment or walked the city streets. Stefan went to the studio by himself. Whenever I left the apartment or returned to it, I looked straight down the central hall into the open doorway where I could see him working hour after hour in lonely silence, high up on a ladder, scraping at the tops of the tall window frames in that round room suffused with light. I was flooded with regret. I longed to be extricated from my own tightness, cajoled into reconciliation. Only later did I realize how enraged Stefan must have been by my refusal to work on his room when he would never have refused, no matter how he felt, to work on mine. He did not speak. I did not speak.

  On Monday I recovered the power of speech and began to work alongside him in the studio, but we did not clear out inside. We were polite to one another at dinner, and even for an hour afterward in the living room. Then he went to bed and I stayed up reading. When I lay down beside him, he was either asleep or pretending to be asleep. In the days that followed, the awful politeness gave way to a kind of strained considerateness. The strain, like low-grade infection, was bearable. We accustomed ourselves to an atmosphere of domestic tension I thought would dissipate momentarily. I’d wake up and say to myself: “Today. Today it comes to an end.” But then I’d get out of bed and the air would start filling up with that mild molecular misery.

  I sat in the rocking chair staring into space. Stefan came into the room and suggested we go for a walk. I lifted the book from my lap and said no, I had to finish the chapter. The next night he suggested a movie. No, I said, I was too tired. The third night there was a party at the school. “You go,” I said, “I’m really not in the mood.” He stood in the doorway and looked at me for a long moment. Then he began to shout.

  “Whatever I offer, it’s not right! Or maybe it’s just that I’m not right. Eh? Is that it? No matter what I do it can’t be right because I’m not the right one. Isn’t that so? That’s what you make me feel. All the time. Not just now. All the time. You’re always dissatisfied, always disappointed. With everything. You don’t work to make things better, you just sit in that damned rocking chair looking disappointed.”

  My mother and I are walking past the Plaza Hotel at noon, on our way to eat lunch in the park. Gathered around the fountain in front of the hotel a swarm of people: sitting, standing, strolling out to the sidewalk to buy shish kebab, soda, pretzels, falafel, egg roll, and hot dogs. They are eating out of tinfoil, drinking out of plastic, being entertained by street performers who pass the hat: break dancers, mimes, string quartets. One of the street performers not passing the hat is a fundamentalist preacher pacing back and forth in front of the fountain, thundering at individual people: “You are going straight to hell! Not tomorrow, not tonight, right now!” He makes the mistake of stopping my mother. She dismisses him with a brusque “What’s your problem?” (she can’t spare the time for this one), and keeps walking.

  I laugh. I’m exhilarated today. Today I’m a street performer. I’ve always admired the guts, the skill, the command of the one who plays successfully to the passing New York crowd. Last night I spoke at a large public meeting in the city: on the barricades for radical feminism, also not passing the hat. I spoke easily and well, and I had the crowd in my hand. Sometimes I don’t, but last night I did. Last night all the skill I’ve acquired at this sort of thing was there at my command, and I knew it. It was the knowing it that made me clear-headed, lucid, expansive and expressive. The crowd was being stirred. I felt it, and then I had confirmed what I felt.

  My mother was in the audience. I didn’t see her afterward, because I was surrounded and carried off. Today, right now, is our first meeting since I walked onstage last night. She is smiling at me now, laughing with me at the pleasure of the day, the crowd, New York acting out all over the place. I am properly expectant. She is about to tell me how wonderful I was last night. She opens her mouth to speak.

  “Guess who I dreamed about last night,” she says to me. “Sophie Schwartzman!”

  I am startled, taken off balance. This I had not expected. “Sophie Schwartzman?” I say. But beneath my surprise a kernel of dread begins growing in the bright bright day.

  Sophie Schwartzman had lived in our building for some years, and she and Mama had been friends. After the Schwartzmans moved to another neighborhood in the Bronx our two families had continued to meet because the women liked each other. The Schwartzmans had three children: Seymour, Miriam, and Frances. Seymour became a famous composer who changed his name to Malcolm Wood. Miriam grew up to become her mother. Frances, a pretty girl with “ambitions,” married a rich man. Sophie has been dead a good ten years now. I haven’t seen any of her children in more than twenty years.

  “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 ou
t 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.