“Ah-ah,” Cliff chided, shaking his head. “Let’s get the typing done first. It’s important that it’s typed up in tip-top form.”
I looked at him. “All right,” I said after a short pause, not wanting to start an argument. I understood he’d been blocked for quite a while and was likely letting his excitement get the better of him. And more than anything else I was excited for him. I gathered up the pages of longhand and tapped them into neat alignment on the card table. I checked to make sure the typewriter ribbon was in good shape, rolled a clean sheet of paper into place, and tapped the carriage return lever to move the roller all the way over to the right.
“And off we go!” I said, winking at Cliff. He grinned even wider and took a heavy swig from his mug.
“Eden old girl, it’s too soon to say, but I really think I’ve done it!”
“I can’t tell you how happy I am to hear it, Cliff.”
I began typing. He sat there drinking and watching as I worked. I took my time, typing with painstaking care and reading as I went along. The story was a little disjointed and I couldn’t quite follow the plot. It appeared to be, I realized with a tiny cringe, a novel of self-examination narrated by a young man during his college years. A few times I checked to make sure I’d put the pages in the right order. I knew Cliff’s composition was in its early stages and I didn’t want to discourage him. If, down the road, he wanted my help, I would gladly give it to him. I was proud to realize my job at Bonwright and even my stint at Torchon & Lyle had already sharpened my editorial eye.
“Where did this sudden inspiration come from?” I asked, pausing to roll another sheet of paper into the typewriter.
“My lovely wife,” he said, leaning over my shoulder to kiss the nape of my neck as I resumed typing. “She encourages me.”
“That’s awfully nice of you to say.”
“I tell you, I’m on a tear, Eden! I’ll have this done in a matter of weeks, and then I’m gonna get a book deal, I can taste it!”
He was getting ahead of himself but I didn’t want to say so. I’d seen lots of young writers fall into this trap. Some of them had the imaginary book tour all planned out before they’d even finished the first chapter.
“Say,” Cliff continued, snapping his fingers, “I’m going to talk to Gregg Carns about the amount of the advance he got, just to get an idea of the ballpark I’d be in.”
“Now?” I asked, slightly alarmed to think he was about to go out for the night and leave me to type his pages alone. Gregg Carns was an acquaintance of ours. He was a hipster who lived in the Village and who it was rumored had gotten a sizable advance for a novel about a group of junkies who drive cross-country to Frisco. It had sold very well, and one reviewer called him the voice of our generation. But with every royalty check, the odds of him ever writing a second book slimmed exponentially as he fell deeper and deeper down the bottle.
“No, no,” Cliff said, smiling and kissing me on the cheek. “Don’t be silly. Tonight we’re celebrating, just the two of us. And I want to be here when you finish typing so I can read it over. I’ll find Gregg tomorrow and ask him.”
I typed, Cliff read, and eventually I was able to get a couple of sips of champagne before it was all gone. It was late when we finally went to bed, but we were both full of joy and made love with a voracious, exultant hunger. I woke up exhausted in the morning, looking a little wan as I dressed for the office, but I hardly cared. Cliff was writing and that made him happy, and that was all that mattered.
• • •
When I came home from work the next day, I worried the spell would be broken—that Cliff’s sudden inspiration might turn out to have been a fluke. But I found him very much in the same way as the day before. And just as I had the day before, I gathered up the whirlwind of papers scattered about the floor and set about typing them up, the only difference being Cliff drank beer instead of champagne as he watched me.
After a week or so of this routine, Cliff had accrued a fairly sizable stack of manuscript pages. He was getting restless. The beer gave way to whiskey, and the main topic on Cliff’s mind slipped more and more from writing to getting published.
“Listen, Eden,” he said one Sunday afternoon, “an idea has occurred to me and you’re not going to be on board with it right away, but I want you to hear me out because I think it would be beneficial to both of us, and what’s a marriage about if both people don’t benefit?”
“I’m not sure I understand,” I said. He sat me down and explained his proposition. His father was one of the most literary editors in all of New York, he pointed out, and who else should Cliff work with but an editor exactly like that? The problem was his father was prejudiced against him.
“I’m not sure I can fix that, Cliff,” I said as gently as possible.
“But that’s where you’re wrong, Eden old gal. You can fix it. You can slip My Old Man my manuscript and tell him it’s an anonymous submission. Then, when he goes bananas for it, you can reveal who wrote it. It’s genius!”
“Oh . . .” I said. I demurred. The manuscript, I knew, was not ready. Mr. Nelson would not go bananas for it, but I couldn’t tell Cliff this. It would devastate him, and worse: I knew it would break something between us I knew I would never be able to fix. “I think,” I said hesitantly, “I’d better stay out of this. It might confuse things. And things are awfully confusing as it is . . .”
“You’re just being selfish.”
I blinked. “Selfish?” I repeated, thinking to myself that a selfish girl wouldn’t pay the bills while her husband stayed at home.
“After all, it was my tip about my Old Man that got you the job. I gave you a leg up on the competition; the least you could do is give me the same. It’s not like I’m asking for anything immoral . . . An anonymous submission isn’t a very big favor, at that! You know, you’re awfully high and mighty for a girl who goes around lying about her name. What would My Old Man say if he knew about that, I wonder?”
Hearing this threat, a cold shock of betrayal went through me and my heart skipped a beat. I was speechless.
“I don’t understand why you won’t do this for me, Eden,” he continued. “Do you want to hold me back? You and I both know you lied to get that job, and I haven’t told a soul, have I? No, I’ve been a very good husband to you. I deserve this!”
I stared at him in disbelief. It was terrible, awful: We were having our first true fight. “Let’s not argue,” I started to say, but it was too late. He could see I wasn’t going to do it, and that had thrown him into a state of outrage. Cliff picked up a desk lamp—the only other source of light besides the pathetically dim overheard bulb—and smashed it on the floor. Then he ran out of the apartment and slammed the door with tremendous force.
I picked up the pieces of the lamp and threw them in the rubbish pail. I spent the remainder of the evening reading manuscripts in the eerie quiet that followed in the wake of the sound of the lamp being smashed, the door being slammed. Cliff didn’t come home until four o’clock in the morning. He climbed into bed stinking of booze. We both rolled on our sides and slept with our backs to each other.
36
As angry as I was with Cliff, it was awful tough to remain angry for very long. My inability to hold a grudge had something to do with my overwhelming sympathy, and my sympathy had to do with certain things Cliff had told me about his father. After we made love for the first time, he’d relayed a story from his childhood. It was the middle of the afternoon and we were lying naked on the mattress in his studio, holding each other, breathing in the scent of each other’s skin. Cliff was always funny about his father and, knowing Mr. Nelson, I thought I knew why. But when he told me this particular story, I understood his mixed-up feelings went much deeper than anything I’d previously assumed.
Cliff told the tale in fits and starts. It was obvious it represented a tender spot; I worried if I said anything�
�even just a single word out loud—he wouldn’t continue. So I simply listened, and stroked his arm to reassure him. I had to piece it together in my mind later, smoothing out the rough edges when Cliff left a sentence here and there unfinished, usually because his voice broke up and he needed to collect himself.
I was ultimately able to piece together the following account:
• • •
One day in April when Cliff was eleven years old, he and his friends caught a case of spring fever and decided to play hooky. As young boys enrolled in a private school in Connecticut, playing hooky meant taking the train into Manhattan, sneaking past a doorman, and going upstairs to one of their families’ empty “city apartments” with the idea to raid the liquor cabinet.
The boys had only just arrived in Grand Central and were standing outside, pooling their change for a taxi, when Cliff looked up to see his father striding down the sidewalk. Cliff’s first reaction was one of panic. His frightened brain jumped to the conclusion his father had been alerted to his absence from school and had come down to the station to find and punish him. He dashed behind a newsstand to hide. But as he watched his father turn and duck down the stairs and into a subway station, he realized his father was not looking for him at all. To the contrary, it was clear his father was oblivious to Cliff’s presence.
He couldn’t think of where his father could possibly be going. The only appointments Cliff’s father generally took outside the office were lunches, but it was well past the lunch hour, and his father was not one to take the subway when he could take a taxi. Cliff’s curiosity overcame him, and he decided to pursue the mystery. Cliff’s friends attempted to dissuade him, but Cliff had made up his mind.
Cliff snuck down the subway stairs after his father, hiding behind trash bins and other passengers waiting on the platform. When the train came, Cliff waited for his father to board and then darted into the car behind. He positioned himself so he could make out his father’s shape through the windows between cars, but where his father would be unlikely to glimpse Cliff in return. But as the train rocked along the tracks over the Manhattan Bridge and into Brooklyn, an uneasy feeling came over him. It dawned on him that if his father had a secret, he wasn’t sure he wanted to know it.
When his father finally got off at Twentieth Avenue in Brooklyn, Cliff followed him, and the mystery grew even more perplexing. Trailing at a distance, Cliff crept along as Mr. Nelson made his way to a park where a Little League game was going on. He watched as his father climbed up into the bleachers, took a seat, and proceeded to cheer on the game. Cliff was stumped by this turn of events. Why on earth would his father take the train all the way out to Brooklyn to watch a Little League game? All too soon, he had his answer. The game ended and one of the players—the shortstop who had notably hit the game’s one and only home run—ran off the field and directly up to Cliff’s father. Cliff squinted to get a better look. The boy seemed to be close to Cliff’s own age, but where Cliff was rather small, this boy was rather big. He was tall, with dark hair and olive skin. In fact, everything about the boy’s origins alluded to some kind of Mediterranean tribe, save for a pair of very pale, Nordic-looking eyes.
Cliff continued to watch. Cliff’s father clapped the boy on the shoulder with firm enthusiasm once, twice, and then a third time. They began to descend the bleachers, and it was clear they intended to depart together. Cliff felt nauseated. He wished he hadn’t gotten on the train to Brooklyn; he was convinced his father had taken up some kind of unnatural interest in this young boy. That is, he was convinced this was the case until he drew close enough to hear his father say, “C’mon, son, let’s get you home to your mother.”
At this, Cliff was absolutely perplexed. He followed them. They left the baseball diamond and walked several blocks, turning this way and that, crossing avenues, until they came to a redbrick row house. A woman was standing on the porch, leaning in the open doorway and watching the street as she blithely smoked a cigarette. Cliff ducked behind a cluster of garbage pails left on the curb and observed the woman from afar. She had an ample figure and small waist. A prominent mole on her left breast peeped out from the low neckline of her tight blouse, and she had short black hair. Two perfectly rounded curlicues were plastered to her face, framing a pair of high cheekbones and red-painted lips. There was something beautiful about her, but also common, like an advertisement for cheap cosmetics.
Upon seeing Cliff’s father and the boy from the baseball field approach, she twisted her lips into a sort of sideways smile and called out, “See, Johnny? What’d I tell ya? I told ya he’d be at your game.” The tall dark-haired kid nodded, and his chin jutted out in a proud way. He held back a grin, his face straining to remain manly and stoic. The woman moved out of the doorway to let him pass, and “Johnny” ran inside.
“Well . . . aren’t you a sight for sore eyes, Dolores,” Cliff’s father said. Ascending the stoop that led into the house, he gave her a kiss on the cheek. Looking bored and amused at the same time, she rolled her eyes and winked at him.
“Depends on who’s doing the looking,” she replied. Then, as if remembering something she had forgotten, she straightened up and was all business.
“C’mon inside,” she said, throwing her cigarette down and stamping it out with the toe of her right pump. “I got sauce on the stove.” Cliff’s father went in the house. She followed him in and shut the door.
Cliff rose from his hiding place behind the garbage pails and stood there, bewildered. After several moments passed and no one reemerged, he drew even closer, taking a position near a shrub directly across the street. There, Cliff waited and watched. The row house was two storeys, with a little porch and a bay window. Within the bay window was some kind of dining room and Cliff had a plain view of Dolores, Johnny, and his father all sitting around a cramped table. Dolores set the table with some kind of meal that appeared to consist of spaghetti and green beans. There was something peculiarly intimate about the scene that bothered Cliff. He watched as his father reached over and rumpled Johnny’s hair just as Dolores reached to pull the curtains shut. It felt as though all the air had gone out of Cliff’s lungs. Crouched in the shrubs like an alley cat, his muscles cramped; he didn’t move, he barely breathed. A neighbor parked an old-model Oldsmobile onto a nearby curb and walked right past Cliff, not seeing him. Dusk crept in.
Eventually, the downstairs light was replaced by an upstairs light. Then that, too, clicked off. By that point it was quite late. Birds that had been roosting had fallen silent, disappearing to wherever it is birds go after they roost. The scanty handful of stars bold enough to show their faces in the Brooklyn night sky appeared, crickets chirped, and some distance away on the main streets horns were honking, teenagers were cruising and hollering to one another. After the light on the second floor went out, Cliff waited another hour more.
Finally, Cliff stood up on stiff knees, realizing for the first time he hadn’t a clue how to get all the way back home to Connecticut. With a great sense of dread he realized he would have to phone his mother. He was likely in a lot of hot water. She might even be aware he hadn’t been at school. But funnily enough, at that moment, he wasn’t especially worried about himself or whether he could evade punishment. He was caught in a different predicament. He was worried about his mother’s feelings, about how he would explain what he was doing in Brooklyn, and about how she might react.
He stood outside a phone booth in front of a diner, dancing from one foot to the other and changing his mind several times until a middle-aged woman with a stringy neck and a smoker’s voice leaned out the door of the diner and yelled, “Hey, kid, that ain’t a urinal, so don’t even think about it!” Cliff gave her a look and treated her to his middle finger. Then he promptly entered the booth, lifted the receiver, and placed his call.
His mother drove all the way from Greenwich to pick him up. When he mentioned Brooklyn on the phone, she hadn’t sounded surprised, nor
had she prodded him for an explanation. She simply asked the name of the diner and the intersection where it was located. The family employed a driver named Leonard, but she didn’t mention him and Cliff understood she was making the drive herself and coming alone. Too tired at that point to be surprised anymore, Cliff was merely confused and disappointed by this turn of events. All things considered, he couldn’t really complain; his mother was coming to get him and she hadn’t threatened a punishment for his having played hooky, and that would have to be enough of a comfort for the time being.
It took her a long time to get there. Cliff sat on the curb for hours, hungry from having not eaten all day, smelling the glorious greasy scent of grilled cheese sandwiches, realizing for the first time that day that he hadn’t eaten. Strange emotions overtook him. First he was angry with his father, and then, inexplicably, his anger veered off in the direction of his mother. As the minutes ticked by, he grew angrier and angrier, until eventually he was seething with fury. But his anger vanished the minute she pulled up to the curb. She was dressed in only a housecoat, her thin face drawn and pale, and it was obvious she had applied cold cream to her skin earlier that evening and then wiped it off in order to make the journey. She appeared fragile to Cliff, and for the first time he comprehended the fact of his parents’ mortality in a manner that had evaded him throughout his younger years. She leaned across the bench seat to lift the lock on the passenger door of the Hudson and he climbed in. Wordlessly, they drove back to Greenwich, whereupon she parked the car in the garage, went into the house, and climbed the stairs to go to bed.
“Good night, Clifford” was the sole sentence to escape her lips.
A letter of excuse written in his mother’s impeccable penmanship was waiting for him on the breakfast table the next morning along with his usual soft-boiled egg. It read: “Please excuse Clifford’s absence. He was ill yesterday.” When his friends asked him whether he had dispelled the mystery of what his father was up to, he shrugged and, shaking his head, said, “I lost him.” His friends poked fun at him, calling him a crummy detective. For a few days he became their lackey, until eventually some other boy made a gaffe, and their attentions were drawn to the new victim. Cliff and his mother never spoke about what had happened.
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