by Alan Alda
Before her trip to Europe, she hadn’t considered the idea that talking with nonmusicians could be interesting. And fresh from Paris, I was learning how much fun civilians could be. Each of us opened a door to a new world for the other.
I left her parents’ apartment, where she lived, at three in the morning. She gave me some rye bread for the ride home, because we hadn’t eaten since we’d had the cake off the floor. I fell asleep on the train and woke up in Brooklyn at the end of the line. I took the train back to Manhattan, got in around five, and opened a can of beer for breakfast, with a slice of her bread from my pocket.
Her name was Arlene.
I was in love, but I couldn’t pick up the phone and call her. I was so intensely shy and inexperienced, I felt I needed to ask her out on the perfect date or she might say no. Nothing was good enough, and if anything was good enough, I couldn’t afford it. But it couldn’t be a trivial excursion; it had to be cultural and rich with meaning.
Finally, after three agonizing weeks had gone by, I thought I had the perfect choice: an Off Broadway production of Gertrude Stein’s opera, Four Saints in Three Acts. It’s hard to know what a numbing effect this must have had on her as we sat in the last row of the balcony and listened to singers grope their way through two hours of complete and total non sequiturs. Was ever woman, I wonder, in this way wooed?
From then on, we were inseparable. I found out she was smart as well as talented—Phi Beta Kappa, which they don’t give out for negotiating with your teachers. The clarinet was her instrument, but she could also play the piano and was studying the cello. Her parents, born in Poland and Lithuania, had an old-world eye on financial security and were sure she needed something besides music to fall back on, so she was studying for a master’s degree that would allow her to teach music. Sometimes I’d meet her on a corner, where she’d be standing beside a cello almost as big as she was, having lugged it on the subway to a lesson. I was enormously attracted to this woman who could make music on a cello and hike it over a turnstile as well. We spent almost every day together, at the end of which I would ride the subway home, trying not to wake up in Brooklyn. That spring, I would often put my hand in my coat pocket and pull out a stale piece of rye bread that had been in there for a week or two.
We would meet between classes and take walks along the Bronx River where it flowed through the woods behind the university. She had spent her childhood exploring the botanical gardens on the other side of the woods, and she seemed to know the name of every flower we passed. Finally, I couldn’t stand it anymore and started reeling off the names of flowers myself. Mine, of course, were in Latin double-talk, meaningless gibberish, but this only made her laugh. And that only made me love her more.
She was my muse and my salvation. “I can’t believe this,” she said. “You don’t read the newspaper every day? How do you know what’s going on?” I began reading the paper, almost every word, every day. This suggestion of Arlene’s was a refreshing departure for me. I was accustomed to hearing my mother, lonely because I had been studying for hours, knocking on the door of my room and imploring me to come out and watch What’s My Line? with her.
“I can’t, I’m working,” I would say.
Appalled, my mother would say, “But What’s My Line? is on. Don’t you want to know what’s going on in the world?”
I lived with my mother in a penthouse she had rented on Second Avenue and Tenth Street, with a huge walled garden that ran around the perimeter of the building. Until the divorce money ran out, we stayed there during my last year of college. This was where I brought Arlene for lunch one day for her first meeting with my mother. It wasn’t to get my mother’s reaction to Arlene; it was more to let Arlene know what she was getting into. I didn’t know how vivid a demonstration it was going to be.
My mother knew I liked her version of Swedish pancakes, with powdered sugar and cinnamon rolled up inside them, and she was making them for us. The three of us stood in the kitchen, chatting, while my mother mixed the batter. She separated the eggs, put the yolks in a bowl with flour and milk, then beat the whites into a froth and added them. This was her special touch to make the pancakes extra light, and it was at this point that she stopped chatting and looked at Arlene through squinted eyes. “You’re watching this pretty carefully, aren’t you.” Arlene heard the suspicion in her voice but didn’t react to it. She said it looked as though it were going to be delicious. My mother knew when she was being conned. “You’re going to try to steal this, aren’t you.” Arlene tried to answer that she wasn’t, but my mother could smell blood. “You think you can sell this recipe and get rich. I know what you’re doing. This is mine. I invented this.” There must have been at that moment about four million Swedes who knew how to make Swedish pancakes, but she was certain that beating the egg whites was a kind of culinary E = MC2. I managed to change the subject, and we went into the dining room to eat. My mother feigned geniality, even though she was sitting down to a meal with a thief. Within a few minutes, her questions to Arlene became so pointed with hostility that I pushed back my chair and stood up.
“Stop it!” I said.
“Stop what?” my mother said, an innocent little girl.
“You know what you’re doing. Stop it.”
“How dare you speak to me that way? I’m your mother.”
“Cut it out. Right now. Stop it!”
“I will not stop anything. How dare you? You bring people in here to steal from me. I have a right to defend myself. You can’t do this to me. I have a good mind.”
I plucked a thick candle from its holder. “Goddamn it, shut the fuck up!”
I brought the candle down on the edge of the table, smashing it. Bits of gray candle spread out across the table’s surface and onto the floor, like bits of brain shotgunned across a room.
There was silence. My mother stood up and, saying nothing, left the room.
Arlene helped me clean up the scattered wax, and then we left her first lunch with me and my mother.
I thought many times after that day of the feeling that rose in me just before I grabbed the candle. What was it? Where did it come from? It felt like a kind of ecstasy. Once the impulse began, it was its own master. I welcomed it, succumbed to it. But there was really no choice. It owned me. I was trying to learn in those days how to call on my emotions on the stage, but it troubled me that I could be overtaken by anger like this without wanting it. Arlene had been calm when faced with my mother’s madness, and I sensed that somehow she could help me face it, too. But by the summer, it looked for a moment as though our paths might separate.
Leopold Stokowski was conducting the Houston Symphony Orchestra in those days, and Arlene heard he was auditioning musicians in New York. Her year in Germany, studying clarinet and playing on tour, had sharpened her and given her the courage to audition for Stokowski. He hired her, at twenty-three, to play assistant first clarinet and bass clarinet. She would be away in Houston for at least the next year, maybe more. It was too long. This was a time when every male had to register for selective service. I had joined the ROTC, and after graduation I was scheduled to go on active duty for six months, where they would try to teach me how to be an infantry officer.
I called my friend George. We were both scheduled for active duty at the same base, and we got the army to let us trade his tour of duty for mine so I could be at Fort Benning in Georgia while Arlene was in Houston.
We went south, where she started playing Beethoven and I started playing soldier.
As soon as she could, Arlene visited me at Benning, and it was then she realized she was dealing with a dangerous person.
“I’m volunteering for parachute training,” I told her excitedly.
“I’m sorry, what?”
“Parachute training.”
“This is something you volunteer for? You don’t have to do it?”
“Right. It sounds like fun.”
“Jumping out of a plane sounds like fun?”
&nb
sp; “Well, no. Going through the air. Doesn’t that sound like fun?”
“Going through the air. You mean falling to earth. That sounds like fun?”
There was a slight pause. All she had done was ask a few questions, and I was already reconsidering the idea of leaping to my death.
Which is not to say I gave up being reckless. We were only eight hundred miles apart. On a weekend, if I drove fast enough, I could meet her sixteen hours later in Houston, spend eight hours with her, and drive back to Benning in time for reveille on Monday morning. Or we could meet halfway in New Orleans and have a few more hours together. Each weekend, I asked for permission to leave the base. Sometimes they gave it, and sometimes they didn’t. Either way, I went.
Technically, I was away without leave. But when I was a boy watching war movies, going AWOL was something heroes did for love. I was the hero of my own romantic story, and the army would never know, as long as I didn’t do something stupid like crash the car and call attention to myself. So, of course, I crashed the car.
We were driving in Louisiana, after a storm. The bayous had overflowed, and there was a sheet of water on the highway. Suddenly, we were hydroplaning. No matter which way I turned the wheel, the car floated on its own across the thin layer of water. We sailed to the left, into the lane of oncoming traffic, and coming straight at us was a car going about eighty miles an hour. To avoid it, I turned the wheel hard to the left and moved off the side of the road, but the highway was an inch higher than the shoulder, and that inch was enough to tip us over.
In the slow motion our brains use to tell us we may never see another day, the car started to roll. The car coming head-on curved around us and kept going as we rolled over and watched the horizon turn slowly before us. We landed back on the wheels, the door of our little Fiat flew open, and I rolled out of the car for twenty or thirty feet, scuffing my face and arms on the concrete highway. The roof had caved in and the windows had popped out, and Arlene was now in the driver’s seat with a gash above her knee, where the car key had punctured her thigh.
The car wouldn’t move, so we left it and hailed a passing car. A man and his ten-year-old son stopped and picked us up. As we drove, the boy could see we were hurt and shaken. Kneeling on the passenger seat, he faced us, curious and solicitous.
“Are you okay?” he asked.
“We’re fine,” I said.
“What’s your name?” he asked.
I thought of my commanding officer back at Fort Benning, who would not be happy to find out I was more than fifty miles from the base without leave. I hesitated a moment.
“That’s all right,” the man said to his son. “We don’t have to know their names.”
I saw the boy thinking about this, trying to figure out why he shouldn’t know our names. I remembered what it was like at his age being told I shouldn’t know something and not knowing why.
We checked in to a motel, shaking and cold with shock. We slept a few hours, and then Arlene got on a bus for Houston and I got on one headed for Georgia. I got back before they knew I was gone. I made it. I was lucky. I would never go AWOL again.
Not until our honeymoon, three months later.
As soon as my tour of duty was up, Arlene and I got married in Houston. She was Jewish, but she said it was all right with her if we were married in the local Catholic church because I was a nervous wreck about where the pope thought you should get married.
I was less worried, though, about what the army thought of where you spent your honeymoon. I was supposed to go from Fort Benning straight to a reserve unit in New York, but I sent them a pleasant letter letting them know I’d be a little late and would be there as soon as I’d finished my wedding trip.
We could barely afford a wedding trip. We added up her savings and mine, figuring out how much we had to start life with; it came out to six hundred dollars between us. When Arlene had told Stokowski she was getting married, he’d told her she had to take time off for a honeymoon and go to Mexico. He spoke fondly about the town of Xochimilco, with its flower-laden boats. It sounded romantic beyond words.
We took half of all the money we had and got on a bus for Mexico City. It was a country bus, with people carrying live chickens. It made a winding trip through mountain roads, where we stopped in towns with exotic names like Actopan and drank gallons of café con leche. We climbed the pyramids and rode on the flowered boats of Xochimilco, and I had my pocket picked on a bus in Mexico City, so we stayed in the hotel room, broke, for the rest of the trip, strumming a guitar we had bought with our last few pesos. It was romantic beyond words.
Three weeks and three hundred dollars after we had been married, we made our way back to New York, where I put on my dress uniform, went down to my reserve unit in a drab building on Forty-second Street, and told the captain I was reporting for duty. He looked at me in silence for a moment. “Where were you?” he asked politely.
“I sent you a letter,” I said. “I was on my honeymoon. Did you get my letter?”
“Your letter? You sent a letter? I was about to report you to the FBI.”
He was a decent guy and didn’t make a fuss about it, but I never quite got used to the idea that the army isn’t happy just knowing what your plans are. They like to make plans for you.
Arlene and I rented a small room in Manhattan, and I started looking for work as an actor. I was confident that although I had no formal training and very little experience, I was just what they were looking for. It turned out they were looking for someone a little shorter, a little less skinny, a little more muscular, and a lot more experienced.
Arlene, again, was our salvation. When I couldn’t find part-time work, she taught music at Junior High School 136 in Harlem and gave private lessons on the clarinet. But she was my salvation in more ways than helping to feed us. Eventually, she saved me from the fires of hell, and if you’re going to have a muse, this is the kind of thing you’d like her to do.
When we talked about what I had read in the paper and I sounded illogical, she’d question my premises. She encouraged me to make distinctions. She helped me extend my education into the real world, and I began actually using what I had learned in logic class as I got through the day.
I was still going to mass every Sunday, because I believed that if I didn’t, I would take a one-way trip to hell. I was twenty-two, and the nuns’ words from my adolescence still burned in my ears. I envied people like Arlene and her father, Simon, who seemed not to need to believe what someone else told them they had to believe. Simon was a quiet man with a twinkle in his eye and a stomach that showed a strong belief in food. He had a simple rule that covered politicians, clergymen, and insurance salesmen. “They’re all a bunch of fakers,” he would say with a sweep of his hand that gave them the official brush-off.
I couldn’t take the priests so lightly. They had a list of things you could burn for, and once you had heard the word, not believing it was at the top of the list. I didn’t want to burn, and I didn’t want to take the chance in believing there was no such thing as eternal fire. I kept thinking of what William James said in a gallant attempt to be pragmatic about the unprovable: “Faith is a bet you can’t lose.” I supposed he meant that if you get to heaven after a life of belief and you find out it isn’t actually there, well, nothing lost. I turned that over and over in my mind, until I thought: But what if you spend real time doing things you wouldn’t do if there really was no afterlife? What about endless novenas and countless trips to the altar? What about meatless Fridays, and what about people who lock themselves up for life in a monastery? Is that nothing lost?
Still, I was locked in by belief. Every exit was blocked by a sentry in black with a wimple and three nostrils, holding a yardstick.
Then one day, the heavens opened for me.
It was a sunny Sunday morning in spring. I kissed Arlene good-bye and took the train up to Fordham, where there was a little chapel I still went to for mass. There were fifty or sixty people in the pews. We kn
elt, we stood, we sat, we knelt. In the hundreds of masses I had been to, I never could remember when you were supposed to stand and when you were supposed to kneel. I watched and did what the others did. And when I couldn’t figure out which it was they were doing, I put my behind on the seat and my knees on the kneeler and did the all-purpose half kneel.
Then the priest reached the moment when, after consecrating the host and holding it in both hands, he lifts it above his head. I looked at it. I had always looked at it. But this time I noticed that the other people in the chapel were bowing their heads. Maybe I should be bowing my head, I thought. But, no. If you’re not supposed to look at it, why is the priest holding it up? We’re going to be swallowing it in a minute; why can’t we look at it? This led to a train of thought I had never taken before: I wonder how many of these people bowing their heads actually believe that this is the body of Jesus? Do they realize you can’t regard it as just a symbol? And suddenly, in that moment, I remembered what the Jesuits had taught me. “No matter what,” they said, “you have to follow your conscience.” And I thought: I don’t know what these other people believe, but if I’m honest with myself, I do not believe the priest is holding anything but the same piece of unleavened bread that it was a few minutes ago. I was like the boy of fourteen again, refusing to rise from the pew, holding stubbornly to his right to think for himself.
And then I remembered a second thing the Jesuits had taught me: If you don’t believe in transubstantiation, you’re automatically excommunicated.
I’m out, I thought. I didn’t quit; they don’t want me. They let me go. I’m fired.
A ray of sunlight fell across the chapel, just the way it did in The Song of Bernadette.
Arlene had never opposed what I believed. She never did anything more than ask questions. It took a while, but I began to ask questions, too, and when I did I saw that as logical as I had thought I was, it was as if there were parts of my brain operating independently, not even aware of one another. Arlene had brought me closer to facing these parts of myself. She was introducing me to a notion of reality and compassion I had never known before. She was helping me learn to live in a world that had actual people in it and not just a string of audiences. And I fought her every step of the way.