Seana is a jewel, as you know—multi-faceted, sharp-edged, and with a quirky brilliance—a luminosity—that rises from deep within, and whenever and wherever you are now, it is my hope that you and she are, and will remain, friends. There’s nothing that gives more comfort than to imagine this is so. As to why you might be friends, the only answer, as ever (cf. Montaigne): because you are you, and she is she.
So: how did you save my life (and your own)?
The quick answer: by falling, and trusting I would catch you and save you from hurt.
How it happened: I had begun drinking even before your mother left us—evenings, afternoons, mornings. On a daily basis, the numbing of senses—along with the resultant dizziness, fogged mind, and clogged sleep—got me through. I’d pour a bit of Scotch (Dewar’s) into my coffee at the start of the day; while receiving students in my office, I’d fill and refill a mug with Dewar’s from a flask I kept in my bottom-right desk drawer; and when I arrived home I’d treat myself to the drink I told myself I was entitled to after a long day’s work. On teaching days I left you in a nursery school, three blocks away, run by two Smith College faculty wives, both of whom were members of the synagogue, and both of whom, on random occasions, without, as far as I know, their sharing confidences, I plowed royally, despite or because of the alcohol that had me working hard not to call them, in the throes, by one another’s names.
But what your mother called her ‘dalliances’—and what a colleague who’d been one of those favored by her generosity called her ‘open-legs policy,’ a policy that favored at least two other department colleagues (a ‘most favored nations policy’?), along with perhaps three of my male graduate students, and two female undergraduate honors students (to her credit, she did not discriminate on the basis of age, gender, or race)—utterly destroyed me. In her presence, hoping to get some purchase on what seemed an increasingly fragile world—an apology perhaps, a vow to reform and start over, an acknowledgment of the effect of her actions on me, a suggestion that we sign up for couples counseling—I was all fumbling and trembling. The only thing I wanted was to save our marriage and family, to make her stop having lovers, and to have her love me again.
But I do love you, she would say. And really, Max, why the surprise? Haven’t you always said that the great thing in life was to remain open to possibility (a phrase I had, to my chagrin, used frequently during our courtship, especially when in pursuit of specific physical attentions)?
Didn’t I agree, given our mutual love of sensuality—of polymorphous perversity—that the prospect of making love with one person and one person only for the next half-century was absurd? Didn’t I see that her act had been a gift, and would enable us, dans le style français, to remain together for the duration? Didn’t we both adore the French movie, L’Ordonnance, and declare it our very favorite? (In the movie’s opening scenes, a newly married couple go to their family doctor because the woman has, beginning on the day of her wedding, become severely depressed. The doctor talks with her, nods sagely, and announces the sole logical, and very French, remedy: Elle doit prendre un amant, after which he writes out a prescription—‘for one lover’—which the young woman and her husband bring to the local pharmacy.) Moreover, your mother declared, what she did when she was not at home was her private life, and hadn’t I, in at least two essays about the decline of the novel from its cultural centrality, linked this decline to the parallel (and lamentable) decline in our valuation of privacy?
Her words—the news, the facts—fell on tender ears, and on a sensibility—and ego—too blue and bruised to bear them. I was a failure—as husband, father, man—and would never recover from what everyone would surely see as well-earned punishment. Her arguments, such as they were (to her credit, she never attempted to convince me of anything), though I could acknowledge their merits, passed me by.
What did not pass by was the knowledge that I had turned out to be much more a man of my generation and upbringing than I had acknowledged—‘distressingly conventional,’ was your mother’s judgment—for I had clearly (and mistakenly) believed that if vows of love and marriage were exchanged, like the bodily intimacies that were their physical manifestations, they were intended to be honored eternally. Although your mother and I (she was two years older) were born of the same generation, she had somehow escaped—evolved from?—values of fidelity I, and most people I grew up with, had pledged obedience to.
In this, she would seem not unlike our dear Seana, though there are notable differences. To my knowledge, Seana, never married, has never, therefore, had the opportunity, in such matters, to violate a contract she has been party to; nor, without children, has she had the option (foul word of our time—and how I abhorred your mother’s use of it to rationalize indulgence) of abandoning them. Seana has also never, to my knowledge, put much stock in romantic notions of love. Nor is she, as your mother was, a devotee of women who openly celebrated their sexual appetites and exploits—e.g., Mae West, who, you may recall, makes a cameo appearance in Prizefighter, and who, in real life (as in my novel) would hang out at Stillman’s gym on West 57th Street, watching the boxers spar, then choosing one or several to take home with her for the afternoon.
Although Seana knows I thought seriously of suicide, she does not know that I thought of doing away with you. Despite (or because of) the easy way she has always seemed to have, in and out of her fictions, about relations with men and women, she has never judged the behavior of others—their moral and ethical positions, so to speak—by her own. She has seemed, when not herself depressed, to truly believe in the priority of pleasure, and that pleasure and morality do not necessarily, as she once put it, have dibs one on the other. Pleasure—and love—seem to exist for her, I’ve sometimes thought, in the same way that good stories do: because they are. When once upon a time I asked her about such matters, she shrugged, and replied with what seemed to her an incontrovertible fact. ‘You can refute Hegel,’ she said, quoting Yeats, ‘but not the Song of Sixpence.’
Because of a story she submitted in the third week of her first workshop, I came, early on, to understand something of her views. In the story, a young woman discovers that her boyfriend is sleeping with the young woman’s best friend—a commonplace of both life and fiction, I recall her remarking in class, into which—the challenge she’d set herself—she’d hoped to breathe a bit of new life. The class had loved the story—adultery and betrayal were, of course, ancient themes with endless possible variations and permutations, I commented, while, in my best teacherly manner referring the class to Stendahl (On Love) and de Rougemont (Love in the Western World)—but I suggested that Seana’s story, for all its vividness and narrative felicity, remained somewhat derivative and familiar.
When, in conference, I repeated my reservations, and added that I’d wondered about the young woman in the tale, and if—I trusted I wasn’t out of line—there were some autobiographical basis for the woman’s distress that had compromised her imaginative freedom, Seana had laughed in the most disarmingly open way.
‘Oh, Professor Eisner,’ she said, ‘Not at all. I mean, I like getting laid as much as the next girl.’
Without missing a beat, I suggested she consider giving this sentiment to her heroine, and that it might lend a particularity to the tale that would do the job she’d hoped to do. In fiction, as in life, I noted in my genially ponderous way, predictability was the enemy of all that was of more than passing interest, and if she let us see that her heroine thought this way—if she provided her with a bit of her own irreverent way of seeing life—it might do wonders for the story.
But back to your fall, son, and to my wrecked and wretched condition, which was its cause. The basics: I couldn’t bear knowing that what your mother gave to me, she bestowed freely (happily?) on others. In me, I discovered, jealousy easily trumped rationality, even though I knew—could proclaim—that jealousy was itself merely the illusion of possession.
But oh my, the power of that illusion in my imagination! At first, a
ll I wanted was to win her back—for her to forgive me, for me to forgive her, for her to forgive me for my difficulty in forgiving her, et cetera et cetera. But when—to test me?—she suggested we have her favorite graduate student (not the busboy, but another) move in with us—he could, she argued, help with you, Charlie, and with chores (feedings, diapers, babysitting, lawn mowing), and help us renew what clearly, to judge from my upset, was in need of renewal. When I said no—no, never, jamais, mai, nunca, nunquam, over my dead body—genug!—she simply smiled, said I could have things my way, and left. I didn’t see her for the next four days or nights, and these were the first evenings, and mornings, when my closest friend became Dewar’s. In fact, on the fifth morning after her absence, she found me on the bathroom floor, lying in my puke while you wailed away in your crib.
‘Though you’re pitiable,’ she said (she used the French pénible, a deft touch, thereby connoting both pitiable and pathetic, and helping the dagger of her betrayal penetrate more easily), ‘I don’t pity you, and I certainly don’t want to listen to that little lump of flesh and diarrhea’ (a reference to you, son) ‘crying all day. So I’m out of here, Max.’
I managed to get to my feet and wash my face, and she smiled at me with what seemed genuine kindness: ‘We gave it our best,’ she said. ‘I believe we really did. But it’s not for me, this marriage-mommy thing, and better that we know it sooner than later, wouldn’t you agree?’
I agreed, of course. ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘Oh sure. Of course. Bien sûr. Whatever you say. Whatever you want…!’ And then we were two, and I picked you up, set you down on the changing table, changed your diaper, and rocked you in my arms, and thought—this was, of course, nearly a dozen years before Seana arrived—were this a story, what suggestion could I make that would lend it credibility, or, better still, sympathy for its protagonist? And as soon as I asked, the answer was there—the old writer’s standby, courtesy of Messrs. Twain and Faulkner: You must kill your darlings.
The fantasy, along with drink, did, as I said earlier, help get me through. What part of me believed, you see, was that the best and only way to get back at her and hurt her badly was to hurt you (her son, after all). But no Medea, moi—and give thanks to whatever gods that be, no Greek tragedy in the House of Eisner either. At the time I didn’t think through the idea of doing away with us, or believe in it—it seemed, simply, the only solution to ending the pain, which dragged with it a thunderous noise that had taken to traveling in a continual, merciless loop through the marrow of my bones.
In truth, I don’t think I believed much of anything that year, which may be why it seems missing. And it has always seemed missing, obviously, because I was missing—in action, and in in-action. Although I try now and then to summon up memories—à la recherche, Max, I cry out silently; à la recherche!—I recall few details: I slept, I ate, I taught, I shaved, I pissed, I shat, and I drank; I shopped, I cooked, I put you to sleep, I took you to nursery school, I picked you up from nursery school, I took you to the doctor, I talked to you, I talked with you, I bought you clothes, I dressed you, I fed you, I changed your diapers, I toilet-trained you, I helped you learn to walk and to ride a tricycle, and I probably took some delight in your development. You were the best and brightest of them all, the nursery school ladies told me, as did a coterie of grad student babysitters (several of whom offered to stay the night, invitations I wisely, though not without ambivalence, declined): before you were fifteen months old, you could play simple games of cards (War, Go-Fish), pick out favorite CDs, sing songs on-key and hold to your part in rounds, ice-skate on double runners on Paradise Pond, and laugh at jokes. You were also enormously responsive, affectionate, and trusting, though given our circumstances, who can figure why.
A for-instance: Once, putting you to bed at night, a glass of Jim Beam in hand (seven and a half months following your mother’s departure, in a decision I considered to be a mark of incipient maturity, I had switched, a month or two before, from Scotch to bourbon), you asked for a taste, and I dipped my finger in, let you lick it.
‘So what’s your Daddy’s favorite drink?’ I asked, and when you looked puzzled, I gave you the answer: ‘Why, the next one, of course!’
You cracked up—a bubbling belly laugh that had you clapping your hands and rolling around in your crib. Did you understand the joke? Were you just being silly? Were you reacting to the way I was laughing at my own joke? Were you laughing because you thought laughing would please me…?
Six weeks and two days after your first birthday, I received papers from a lawyer, informing me that your mother wanted nothing from me except my agreement to a divorce, and to be able to retrieve some personal possessions. In this, I suppose, her behavior was admirable. If I agreed not to contest the divorce, retained a lawyer of my own, and signed relevant papers, we could take legal and permanent leave of each other within ninety days, with no monies or properties exchanged or owed.
It was done, and the finality of documents and signatures, once processed and approved by a court, went a long way in helping to thicken the heavy, sooty fog in which I lived.
Holden Caulfield—a character I was somewhat alone at that time in not finding worthy of the loving attention he received (he seemed merely a somewhat confused shlemiel of a preppy to me, without, other than his sentimental love for his lost family, any significant redeeming qualities)—did come to mind whenever I thought I was ready to do the deed, for I kept thinking of what he said when he contemplated jumping from a window, and how he would have done it if not for the thought of all the strangers who would come around afterwards to gawk at his corpse.
I had similar inhibitions: not merely, What will people—strangers!—think?—but, What would she think?—and when the latter thought arrived, it served mainly to enhance my insecurity and immobility, sorry soul that I was, and to convince me she’d been right to ditch and humiliate me.
Still there was the blackness in which I lived, Charlie, and it was terribly real and dark, and no matter what words I or anyone put on it, let me tell you: there is nothing as awful as feeling so deeply sad that to leave the world seems not only, in prospect, a relief, but just ! How much better life would be for everyone else were I gone! What a gift to the world my absence would be! But if I did it solo, I feared, she would get you, or, if she demurred re motherhood, the courts would get you, and such thoughts also held me back.
And there was also time—the passage of time, more exactly. At some point in the thirteenth month of my sorrows, the beast inside mind and body seemed to be tiring of me (out of boredom, I hypothesized), and I noticed, too, that I was taking occasional pleasure from simple things—eating, sleeping, holding your hand on walks, watching you eat, or sleep, or play with your toy cars and building blocks—and I began to have a distaste, not for bourbon—never, never, never—but for the foggy dizziness it induced. Then you fell.
I was, as usual, moderately sloshed, and it was your bedtime, and I had a stack of papers to grade, a few rolled and tucked snugly under my left arm, and I was very upset with you because you’d soiled yourself. Why? Why were you doing this to me? You’d been toilet-trained for six or seven weeks (precocious as ever, you had accomplished this feat a full four months before your second birthday), we’d both taken pride in the achievement, and you’d graduated from your crib to a bed—the top half of the old hi-riser that had served as my childhood bed in Brooklyn. Why now? Had I not been paying you enough attention? Were you angry with me? Were you missing your mother, or one of our babysitters (you’d taken an especial shine to a vixenish young woman named Robyn Hayes Henderson, who, by infiltrating your affections, was determined to have your father infiltrate her moist, secret places), or…
Who knew? What I do know is that when I smelled the presence of the foul deed, and asked if you had done it, I was already too angry for anyone’s good, and when you grinned with what seemed a fiendish look of feigned innocence, and said, ‘I don’t know, Daddy,’ I lost it.
So
I did what I did sometimes: I let loose with words as if I were battering a punching bag with them—How many times have I told you this or that, and What’s the matter with you, you un grateful little schmuck, and When the fuck are you going to grow up, and I have no patience left for you, you bird-brained momzer, and additional choice and self-pitying gabble about having to do everything, everything, everything by myself. Give me a break, you little shit-head, you and your shit-filled pants! I screamed. Just give me a fucking break, you stupid lump of clumped, rotten turds! In my fury, and without at first letting go of the student papers, I grabbed you—snatched you—and carried you in the crook of my right arm up the stairs and into your room, where I tried to hoist you up onto the changing table. But the flight of stairs had made the bourbon produce a major shimmer of nausea—Hey, I wanted to shout to the world: Look at the noble, dead-drunk dumb daddy doing his goddamned dumb daddy thing!—and as I lifted you with the intent of slamming you down on the table—smashing you!—you slipped out of my grasp, and for an instant, as in the memory of car crashes, all went into sickly slow motion: I saw you falling, and I saw that your head had turned upside down, and that the exposed and sharp iron corner of your bed was in perfect position to receive your skull—and yet you smiled at me with the most loving, trusting smile I had ever seen or ever expect to see again.
You showed no fear, Charlie. You seemed to believe that if I were taking care of you, no harm could come your way. How ever, ever forget your sublime calm—the loving trust in your eyes?
I dropped the student papers, scooped you up before you hit the bed’s flanged corner (‘A fumble recovered, folks!’ I heard an announcer proclaim), cleaned you up, and dressed you in freshly laundered pajamas. ‘Sorry, Daddy,’ you said and, when you noticed the glimmering film in my eyes, you asked if I’d hurt myself.
‘Not at all,’ I said. ‘Not at all.’
I stopped drinking the next morning. The glooms retreated, defeated by your trust in me, which was, in that moment, certainly greater than my trust in me. Three weeks later, I received galleys for Prizefighter, and you and I celebrated by driving to Maine for lunch (clam rolls became your favorite food well into your teens). I waded into revisions with gusto, and within a year I married again—Inez Palenco, a sweet, bright woman four years younger than I (a social worker at an agency in Holyoke, a competent oboist, and a master gardener), whom you may remember only through photos, for within seventeen months of our marriage (we went to Glacier National Park, we three, for a ten-day honeymoon), she was done in by that cunning variety of breast cancer that can sneak in and take over between regular check-ups.
The Other Side of the World Page 21