by Joan Silber
I wear slacks, I wrote.
Okinawa was subtropical and never got below fifty. Ted claimed to miss the snow but I didn’t believe him.
Well into my thirties, people thought I looked much younger. Ruthie’s kids called me Aunt LouLou, as if I were a cartoon auntie. They loved coming to my apartment—much bigger than the last, with blue-painted floors and Guernica replaced by a Matisse—but they could never believe I lived alone. No one else here, really? I wasn’t just making up a story?
What I didn’t like, actually, was when Mick showed up out of nowhere without letting me know in advance. “I have rules,” I said, but he ignored them. I was always glad for the sight of him, so I gave way, but it leaked out in other ways, my sense of injustice. We’d quarrel over how much hamburger to buy or which store was a rip-off or who was really a very self-centered person.
Once I had to announce to him that Ted, my husband, was showing up again in August. Ted only came back to the States every few years and he stayed with me when he did. It was, as they say, a given. And Mick had to know to keep away. How difficult was that?
“I think you’re telling me to go jump in the lake,” Mick said. “Very friendly.”
One remarkable thing about Ted was that he never seemed any different, no matter how much time went by. Oh, there was always a moment when I was surprised at how old he looked, and he’d start in about things I’d totally forgotten from his last visit, but we got used to each other at once. We’d hop into bed right away (the same bed, with the maple headboard), and then we’d lie around having a conversation we might have begun only the day before. He’d hold my hand and stroke my fingers. “Hey, Louise,” he’d say. “What’s up?” It was all very sentimental.
Ruthie was always asking me, “Does he just think he owns you?”
She knew I’d been brought up with much talk about property—property is theft, it’s the exploitation of the weak by the strong. “What you really mean,” I said, “is that I should exert my ownership rights on him. Reel him back in, make him mine.”
“You could.” Maybe.
“For freedom there is no substitute, there can be no substitute,” I said. It was an old quote from Rudolf Rocker, an anarcho-syndicalist my father loved. I didn’t think it was all that interesting or true—it was a slogan!—but it had become true for me. Or true sometimes. My mother would’ve cringed at that qualifier. I used to always tell my parents I was not an idealogue. “So what are you?” my mother would say.
“Not a hypocrite.”
“That’s minimal,” my mother said. “That’s not an answer.” But I thought it was. I liked how I’d turned out. Through trial and error.
When I was close to forty, I had a major quarrel with Mick, about the usual. He wanted me to fly out to see him in St. Louis for a four-day weekend. “I happen to be employed,” I said. “I can’t just take off.”
“I’m paying, darlin’,” he said. “It’s on me.”
“So? Please. Not the point.”
“You know what it is?” he said. “I’m the one you don’t take seriously.”
A man I saw five or six times a year was talking about serious?
“If your hubby wagged his finger to invite you to Japan, you’d hop on a plane and go.”
“I don’t want to go to Japan! I don’t!” I mostly didn’t, not anymore.
“St. Louis is a great town. Got the Arch, got the Cardinals. Only needs you.”
And I went for those four days, to placate him. St. Louis was fine, but right away he pestered me about staying an extra day, and I got indignant about the sneakiness of that. Why would I neglect my newsletter for him? It was not a good trip, and Mick started to call less often after that.
But Mick didn’t disappear altogether. In the middle of the night he’d need to talk to me, or I’d let him slip over when he was in town. So I wasn’t entirely single. My solitude had a flavor to it, a tint of distant admiration. It wasn’t bad getting those phone calls out of nowhere, kisses on the line. Then I’d stay up late, reading in bed, with his company in the air around me but a pure silence in the room. My room.
Ted was not really that old when he decided to sort of “retire” from his teaching career in Okinawa and set himself up over there as a private tutor of English. He could make a decent amount by the hour and he was looking forward, he said, to living in Japan in a different way. It was really not that expensive for an American to get by, and he would continue sending money home, but less money.
He didn’t exactly ask what I thought. Really, the amount he mailed had not changed much over the years and was by now pretty puny. My own salary had moved forward by the usual decent increments, so the change wouldn’t break me, would it? My mother was hotly outraged and would’ve sued him if she’d believed in governments. She actually said, “He owes you more.”
Ted was moving into the town and out of the gated and guarded base (which my mother always said sounded like a prison). I sent him a set of curtains for his new house, a very sharp geometric print I thought he would like. I didn’t entirely know what he liked anymore but I knew something.
Afterward I worried that I’d picked the wrong fabric. “You are so weird,” Ruthie said. “Go buy yourself a new sofa instead.”
We were on the phone at the time, and I looked around at my apartment. I liked everything in it, from the floor I had painted a clever shade of blue to the chrome lamp to the bowl of oranges glowing on the table. I was secretly enchanted with my own cruddy décor and its history. What did I need? Nothing wrong with my sofa, which had been in my parents’ living room. My stubborn dear parents. You don’t know what you’re going to be faithful to in this world, do you? It was true I didn’t have what other people had, I knew that, and yet I couldn’t think of a single other life I envied—no, I couldn’t—though I knew better than to try to get anyone to believe it.
Better
Marcus kept thinking the memoir would make a great movie. He was reading a faded hardback, printed in 1952, with pages that cracked if you dog-eared them, but he couldn’t keep away from it. He was lying in a hammock in the yard of his friends’ house near Woodstock, and he had found the book on a living room shelf, where it had probably been for the last sixty years. The house had been in Casey’s family since forever.
The book was called Village Days and Nights and was about radicals and anarchists in Manhattan in the twenties and thirties arguing their brains out and fucking each other’s wives. The writing had hokey spots, but Marcus was into it. What a mix of poignant overconfidence (the revolution of the future! the inevitable death of capitalism!—not phrases you heard much in the twenty-first century) and truly sneaky hanky-panky. The author’s snarky wife was a great part for somebody.
Marcus agreed with most of what the author said—property was theft—but in the same way he believed that Jesus was God Incarnate, which he actually did believe, sort of. These ideas took up a separate sacred space in the mind. Living them out was a bloody mess, you could see from history. That was the problem, wasn’t it? He liked the book’s company and stayed with it for hours.
When he came in for dinner, he told Casey and Carol, his friends, that he’d found a sure way to make a million bucks. “Uh-oh,” Casey said. “I hear next year’s bankruptcy talking.”
“Gimme a wad and I’ll make you rich in Hollywood,” Marcus said. He showed them the book, said, “Big biopic,” and they knew he was kidding. No more fortunes in the faded glamour of the Left. Too bad. They were all lawyers, and not of the high-revenue kind. Marcus did tenant law, and Casey and Carol (man and wife) worked in immigration law.
And maybe he didn’t want to share the book with the world. He was happy with it showing exclusively in the theater of his head. People wouldn’t get it, they’d laugh in the wrong spots. His ex-boyfriend had accused Marcus of thinking that about everything: that he was the only one who understood. Also of being withdrawn and emotionally stingy. Marcus was still furious at the injustice of that,
which didn’t keep him from wanting Nico back.
Casey and Carol had been especially nice to him this weekend—sometimes too nice—to console him for Nico’s defection. Tonight they were barbecuing corn and beautifully marinated chicken and slices of watermelon, which they claimed was good grilled, to distract Marcus from his sorrow. He ate heartily but without what you would call feeling. They sat near the glow of the briquettes, swatting away mosquitoes and watching the fireflies, as darkness fell, and then he was glad to slip away to his room and go back inside Village Days and Nights.
He’d reached a point in the book where the narrator suspected his wife, Betsy, was sleeping with one of the men in the big group-apartment they shared on Greenwich Avenue. Was she fooling around with Richard (“a Jew from Cincinnati”—the author was not above bigotry) or with Joe (“bland and married and always a cipher”)? The author, in his suffering, resorted to taking his hard-to-please wife to a local speakeasy and staying out late, to avoid coming back to the apartment. His wife was lively there and showed enthusiasm for these nights out and he began to see some hope.
The flaw in this plan was that it was draining his meager budget. The author was a badly paid journalist for what now would be called the alternate press. He borrowed money from any friends he could, including Richard and Joe, his suspected cuckolders. And when he was down to nothing, the bar owner let him run a tab, for months and months. The narrator was not proud of this. “Money was its usual false friend to me. How gay my wife was, quaffing her cocktails and smiling at all and sundry.”
Marcus was always startled to read gay in its old meaning of carefree. This could only strike him with irony at the moment. “My darling Betsy was becoming something of a gold-digger,” the author wrote, “though she may not have known it herself. Gandhi said, ‘Earth provides enough to satisfy every man’s need, but not every man’s greed.’”
Gandhi? How did Gandhi get in there? Marcus was amused to think of the Mahatma hanging out in some saloon on Bleecker Street. In fact, he would have been getting ready to lead the great Salt March in India at the time. Marcus was a big Gandhi fan. Could the author have been reading him as early as that? Maybe. Marcus imagined the wounded young husband bolstered by the words of one skinny, bald, half-toothless guy from Gujarat who hadn’t had sex with his wife for decades (even then). It made him want to take up Gandhi again himself.
Marcus got up very early the next morning and actually checked the living room bookshelves for Gandhi. The Story of My Experiments with Truth, wasn’t that here somewhere? In between old Agatha Christie paperbacks and Steal This Book by Abbie Hoffman? It was not. Casey’s great-uncle had been a painter—the house was full of his splashy landscapes—but the remnants of everyone who’d been here were pretty random.
And now people were saying maybe Gandhi had been in love with a man, a Jewish architect in South Africa. Or at least vice versa. One or both of them had languished in the same sorrow Marcus was getting to know so well. Maybe. Marcus didn’t quite buy it. Gandhi had been so busy creating other forms of suffering for himself. Fasting beyond endurance, marching, getting jailed. With such fixity of purpose. But the Great Soul might have had room for everything.
In college, where Marcus was one of a very small group of African-American students, he’d been known as a really crappy athlete and a mediocre dancer. Casey, his roommate freshman year, liked to call him the Living Anti-Cliché. What he’d been good at was playing poker. He could keep numbers and visual stuff in his head. He might’ve become a banker, easily—Casey told him—if he’d had a completely different character. These days Marcus had to stop himself from playing games of solitaire over and over on his cell phone. Solitaire—talk about clichés of the lonely lover. No! He wasn’t doing that.
At breakfast, Casey said, “Wanna swim today? Swimming will do you good.”
Casey drove too sloppily on the curving mountain roads, and then they all had to clamber through brambles and probably poison ivy, but Marcus stopped being grouchy once they got down to the glinting creek. The place had a dappled stillness, even with clusters of shrieking, splashing kids. It was fringed with ferns and dark tiers of rocks, with an elegant little waterfall you could stand under. The water was deeper in one spot than Marcus had thought, and he entered the shocking coolness of it, paddling and kicking and darting in circles.
He was fine for the rest of the day too. Anyone seeing him, at the pizza place for lunch, at the farm stand buying corn, on the back road taking a little stroll with Casey and Carol, whom he loved, would have thought he was fine, and would not have guessed for a minute that part of him was wallowing in despair and was only waiting to be alone and get back to his book.
The book, which he managed to open before supper, had the narrator (someone named Norman F. Remsen, who had never become famous) going to consult his dear friend Dorothy Day. (Marcus knew who she was, though she was apparently unfamous at this point, way before she started the Catholic Worker.) The narrator was sure Dorothy would never blab anything she happened to know about who Betsy was sleeping with, but he hoped she might slip. Dorothy was having a hard winter, living alone with her kid, who was almost three, in dark, narrow “housekeeping rooms” on Fourteenth Street. She gave the narrator a cup of tea. “After I dutifully admired her rather serious little daughter, I said, ‘Betsy meant to come with me but couldn’t. She’s come before, yes?’ Betsy had told me this more than once—I didn’t believe her—and I was driven to see if Dorothy would feel she had to cover for her. Women are always loyal to each other. But Dorothy was not one to lie. In fact, she failed to reply—she bustled about fetching crackers and jam for us, and then little Tamar had to be helped with her snack.” The episode ended with Norman behaving churlishly—condescending to Dorothy and complaining viciously about the politics of his friends. But when he went home, he couldn’t help thinking that Dorothy had acted on principle, leaving her baby’s father for her beliefs, and that she had avoided making a fool of herself for love, as he was so busy doing.
At dinner that night, Marcus tried to tell his friends about the book. “He’s a politico whose wife is running around on him. This part is like a mystery where you guess who the dickhead is.”
“Memoirs are so weird,” Carol said. “He probably made it all up.”
“He’s howling about his heartbreak right now,” Marcus said. “On the page it’s touching but in real life he was probably unbearable to be around.”
“People can be unbearable if they want,” Carol said.
“A little moaning is fine,” Casey said.
“I think he’s going to punch his wife,” Marcus said. “I can’t wait. Is that totally wrong of me?”
“Yes,” Carol said.
Marcus had been with Nico for five years, which was really not such a long time. Probably Nico had always wanted someone more glamorous. Their Brooklyn apartment—half a brownstone in Cobble Hill, with a little yard in the back—was now Nico’s, and Marcus was in a bare, silly studio in downtown Brooklyn. When would he stop hating his life? Sometimes he caught sight of himself in the mirror and he thought, That sucker looks so pathetic. The wincing eyes, the clamped jaw. And that was his public face. In the dark he probably looked like ashes and dirt. When he woke up out of his sleep, he was a naked bag of bones too familiar to himself. He’d never believed it would last forever with Nico, but the thought of that only compounded his suffering.
It was not, of course, the only suffering in the world. Marcus knew what the world was. Every day he read the news, with its war atrocities and massacres of civilians, rape camps, drug murders, nuclear disaster. Year after year he filed papers for clients who lived with rats, leaking sewage, lead paint, guns in the elevator. He’d spent time in India, seen the streets of Mumbai. He wasn’t a sap.
Marcus did not rush off to read after dinner. He did the dishes, he heard Carol tell a funny story about deer getting into their garden. He and Casey played a ridiculous game of Frisbee in the dark, running and ju
mping for the phantom disk, and horsing around as if they weren’t both in their late thirties already. He was properly tired when he went back to his room. He’d had a full day and was ready to be fast asleep in his sweet, musty garret on the top floor. He didn’t think he would read tonight, but he did.
The author was having a peevish argument with his wife Betsy. She made fun of his household economies—he saved string from packages, he tried to get her to darn socks and turn his collars, to cook variety meats. “Cheapness is a moral virtue to you,” she said.
“It is,” he said. “That’s how we manage to live without selling ourselves.”
Betsy laughed at him. He had never seen her do this before—her face was full of merry scorn—and he began shouting at her. “I have mercifully forgotten the words I shouted, but I know that I had to keep myself from striking her. I was a young man with a good opinion of myself; every thought I had was against violence and domination, and it was a dreadful shock to find myself thus. I had my hand in the air, ready to strike at her face, and Betsy screeched in fear.”
Marcus sort of liked the smart-ass Betsy, whose revolutionary spirit had probably been a matter of disposition more than politics. She was too much for the author, that was clear.
The poor husband’s apologies put an end to the fight, but Marcus could tell more was in store. Early in the morning, just past dawn, he read the rest. Terrified of losing Betsy, the repentant husband turned to the desperate strategy of buying her a string of glass beads—in red, her favorite color—to make amends. In hock to all his friends, he could only think to ask Joe’s wife, Vera, for a loan, though he had never stooped to borrowing from a woman before. Vera was apparently an eager, mousy, vain person, easily persuaded. Betsy was delighted with the necklace and thanked him afterward with hugs and kisses and other things not quite mentioned on the page.
Just as the author was sure his suspicions of her had been unfair, Betsy spilled the beans. She was leaving him for the man who ran the speakeasy. What man? Marcus had guessed nothing and was angry at the writer for failing to give clues. Not playing fair with the reader.