A Complicated Marriage

by Janice Van Horne

  Delaney’s was an old-time Village bar, big and quiet and dark; best of all, it had high wooden booths. It was probably a blessing for my sanity that I didn’t have time to worry about what I would wear or say or . . . I came as I was, and things just took their course. Not that it was easy. This was the first time I’d talked one-on-one with a non-Bennington, non-family, older man.

  There must have been the usual preliminaries, but very soon they gave way to real talk. He told me about his five-year relationship with Helen—she now had a last name, Frankenthaler—that they had never lived together, and that, essentially, it had been over for some time. Was it that night he told me about his mental breakdown the previous spring, that he was seeing an analyst, that for too many years he had been seeing people he didn’t like but was now living in a period of grace, with a new clarity about who was okay for him and who wasn’t, that in his twenties he had been married for six months and had a grown son, Danny? Could he possibly have talked about all that that first night?

  I do know that he told me that since Jennifer’s party, he had sent Helen telegrams asking her to marry him. Not because he wanted her to, but because he felt he owed that to her after so many years. He also said he knew she wouldn’t accept, because she would have been too concerned about losing face after the incident at Jennifer’s party.

  I’m sure I didn’t absorb much of what he was saying, but I was startled by his openness. I also thought he was telling me these things because he wanted me to know them up front. Very Clem-like, as I would come to know. A trait sometimes reassuring, sometimes painful. Most of all, I was taken by his confessional tone. So personal, so intimate, him to me.

  And what did I say to him that night? Besides the utterly forgettable, two moments were decidedly memorable. At one point, Clem came back from getting cigarettes and started to sit down next to me in the booth, rather than across from me. I told him I would prefer that he didn’t, which spoke to how unbearably uncomfortable I was. I felt way over my head. And Clem? He took it in stride. I think he was rather amused.

  The other moment was when, perhaps spurred by his confessional tone, I told him that I was a virgin. Not without much fluster and fuss. To confide such a thing to a man was certainly a first, but I knew it was important. It was clear to me that he expected sex sooner rather than later, and I was definitely not okay with that. At the same time, I was ashamed of my virginity and didn’t want it to come as a surprise somewhere down the road, if there was going to be a road.

  Convinced that my flat-footed disclosure warranted some cushioning, I must have told him about my high-school boyfriend of two years, just to reassure him that I wasn’t irrevocably inexperienced. Did I mention that I hadn’t really dated since my sophomore year in college? Or vapor on about my mother’s hushed urgency as she intoned her oft-repeated incantations against sex, from the obvious, “Men only want one thing” to her more fanciful, “Letting a man touch you ‘down there’ can make you pregnant, and your life will be over.”

  Did I tell Clem how she had balanced all that with wistful, honeyed references to “the sanctity of marriage,” “the beauty of intimacy with the one you love,” and the wedded bliss of “happily ever after”? I hope I didn’t tell him her tale of how she had known when her love was true because she had heard a nightingale sing. But I might have. Clem had set the disclosure bar rather high.

  One thing for sure: I know that once the virginity declaration was made, I capped it off with a Hester Prynne reference when I told him I often felt I had a capital V on my forehead. I had sensed that Clem wasn’t exactly thrilled by the idea of my virginity, that he was probably just looking for a quick walk in the park without any long, drawn-out, push-and-pull skirmishes. And I figured humor would soften the blow. I was right. He laughed long and loud. Somehow, in the throes of my earnest blushes, I thought it was all pretty funny, too. And so, with my cards on Delaney’s table, I glimpsed that it might be okay, might even be fun, to hang out for a while. We were an unlikely pair, but the timing that night was right. Each in our own way, we had suggested that we might be ready for a change.

  And then he didn’t call for two weeks. But this time he called a day in advance. This time he called to ask me to meet him at a painter’s studio. This time it was like an honest-to-God date.

  After work I walked up Sixth Avenue to Central Park South, then into a building and into an elevator. It wasn’t much, nothing special, just an elevator, going up in an elevator. A very small cage, gilt and cherry wood and a tiny red plush seat tucked into a corner in case one felt faint. Just an elevator in a narrow, twelve-story studio building tucked between two hulking apartment houses. I was expected. I liked who I was that evening: a girl on her first date with a “real” man, a girl who was starting out on the next phase of her adventure. I also hated who I was that evening: a girl terrified of starting anything, much less an adventure. Maybe I would faint.

  I towered over the miniature elevator man, in his maroon uniform with matching hat and white gloves. He was so much better turned out than I in my standby Peter Pan number. For this occasion, I had added my grandmother’s single strand of cultured pearls. Maybe cultured, maybe not. One couldn’t be too sure about that grandmother on my father’s side, with her gin-drinking, chain-smoking, card-playing ways and a husband who had dropped dead of a heart attack at a suspiciously young age. No, one could never be too sure of Ruby—grandmother was a word forbidden in her presence. Such were my thoughts that evening in the elevator on my way up.

  René Bouché’s studio was on the top floor. I had never been to a studio before. Was I breathing, smiling, shivering, happy, scared? Yes. The elevator man pulled open the brass gate and released the outer door, and I stepped directly into a small hallway that, in turn, opened into a sitting room overpowered by a vaulted ceiling and an immense domed window that confronted the length of Central Park. Its vastness astonished me. Even though I had grown up only thirty minutes north of the city and had now been living in New York for two months, most of the time I had no idea where I was at all. No one was in sight, but I heard voices, and soon Clem came toward me and drew me into an adjacent room, a cluttered, paint-filled, strange-smelling room. So this was a studio.

  Clem introduced me to Mr. Bouché, and to Paul Wiener and his wife, Ingeborg ten Haeff, who stood by yet another immense window. They nodded, drinks in hand, and turned back to themselves and the view. Clem showed me the portrait of himself that, still incomplete, was on the easel. I couldn’t tell whether he was pleased with it or not. In the large rectangular picture, he sat at a table, contemplative, holding a book in three-quarter profile, his head tilted, resting in his other hand. When I looked closely, I saw a shadow of sadness in his face—not deep, but there.

  Overall, the picture was pretty, pastel-ish, sketchy, the paint brushed on delicately. This, I would come to know, was the Bouché style. Clem was wearing a pink shirt that diffused a soft glow. There was a gentleness, a sweetness, about his face, about the whole picture. I liked it, although, little as I knew Clem, I thought the tone an odd choice. I said nothing. I also thought Clem looked wonderful in the pink shirt. I wanted to reach out and touch his arm as he handed me a drink. I didn’t.

  As Clem and René talked, I watched the couple by the window. How beautiful they looked, framed in that window against the backdrop of the darkening park, both very tall and thin, with the posture of gods. Her hair was everything, shining gold, so rich and thick that, even coiled around her head, it framed her face, her remarkable defiant face, the features large and chiseled, the planes sharply defined. A face painted with high color, the eyes huge and black rimmed, fringed with thick lashes. A face that startled. I suspected that she wasn’t particularly nice. Her clothes were like drapery, layers of exotic colors that flowed around her and served as a deeply vibrant canvas for a pair of pendulous earrings, set with cascading beads and stones that reached to her shoulders, and an enormous necklace of claws and teeth and unfathomable objects tha
t almost reached her waist, the bones clanking as she turned toward me. Paul was impeccably turned out, polished and buffed, elegantly thin, pin-striped, with a remarkable shock of abundant white hair exquisitely pompadoured, and when he smiled, which I imagined he rarely did, he flashed a similarly remarkable mouthful of outsized teeth. A perfect companion piece for Ingeborg.

  That night may have been my first date with Clem, but the night really belonged to Ingeborg. She was the first woman I’d ever seen who so profoundly defined herself, who so clearly presented to the world the self she knew herself to be. Watching Ingeborg, I glimpsed that, as grown-up as I might ever come to be, I would never be so clear, so defined, so sure of who I was that I would dare to expose the fullness of my self to others. I also knew for sure that I would never wear bones and clank with arrogant confidence as I strode toward the world, nor would I cloak myself in the arcane textures of pagan colors, or paint myself as the goddess of my secret desires. That night I had entered a new world, in which Ingeborg would always stand as the priestess at the gate. A world whose code I would never decipher. And even if I did, I suspected that I would never know how to make it my own.

  After Clem and I left the headiness of René’s studio, our date proceeded on a more mundane course. We had dinner nearby at La Potinière. Not fancy, but very French and nice. And then we went back to Clem’s place at 90 Bank Street, not too far from Morton Street. I surprised myself—the girl who hadn’t let the man sit down next to her in the booth two weeks earlier had now agreed to go to his apartment.

  As I entered the living room from the small entryway, the first thing I saw, silhouetted in a rosy glow coming through the windows, was an easel, a thick, wooden easel almost six feet high. Startling, lifelike, a man astride. Clem turned on his green glass desk lamp, and the room revealed itself. Near the easel was a card table weighted with a palette, tubes of paint, turpentine, and a large wooden paint box overflowing with more paints, brushes, rags, and lord knows what. While Clem got drinks, I looked out one of the two windows fronting Hudson Street from the second floor, and there, just to the right, was the source of the rosy light. Jutting out from the building was a long, narrow, perpendicular neon sign: LIQUOR. It didn’t flash, but to cast its spell over the room, it didn’t need to.

  I followed Clem into the kitchen, where he was refilling the ice tray at a sink supported in front by two legs in the old-fashioned way. Long and narrow, the near part of the kitchen was lined with bookcases on one side and rolls of canvas and paintings of all sizes stacked on the other. His paintings, he told me. At the end was a window onto a fire escape. When Clem opened the refrigerator, I saw that it was empty except for a bottle of orange juice, a can of Maxwell House, a box of cigars, and a jar of suppositories.

  Back in the living room, I sat in the only upholstered chair and he turned his Windsor chair around from his desk, a few feet away, to face me. Next to the desk was a small metal typing table topped by a high, office-size typewriter. It made me nervous, those spindly legs thinking they could support that oversized machine. Behind me was a wall of more bookcases. I liked that—a bit of warmth, grounded, substantial. Otherwise, the room struck me as stark and uncomfortable. Not as stark as the contents of the refrigerator, nor as quixotic, but I wondered that someone had lived there for ten years. That I lived in a quasi-basement hellhole didn’t count—I was just passing through. Particularly foreign to me were the paintings that covered the walls, haphazard, small, large, everywhere I looked. “Not painted by me,” he said, painted by others. But then he pointed to the biggest picture—like most of the others, abstract—and added, “Except that one. I painted that one.” I wondered if I should say something about it, but thought better of it. I didn’t know what I thought of those pictures at all, what I could see of them, in the shadows cast by Clem’s green glass lamp.

  That night we didn’t talk about anything dramatic or memorable, like mental breakdowns or the V on my forehead. But we sat there in the rosy glow of LIQUOR until very late. We must have had something to say. And we kissed. And then he walked me home. And at my door we kissed again. I do remember that the next morning, when I opened my eyes to the familiar, sooty grayness of Morton Street, I had liked all that kissing.

  Kissing or no kissing, again it was more than two weeks before Clem called again. To my shame and misery, this time I quickly reverted to being a moony teenager hovering over the telephone at TV Guide, waiting for him to whisk me off into the unknown. Those weeks were endless to an impatient girl who saw a kiss as a promise.

  Eventually he did call, and after that the pattern shifted. To my relief, there would be no more waiting. We were soon seeing each other almost every evening, and I was indeed whisked into a life unknown, much less imagined. Dates, a phone that rang, fancy places to meet, parties, restaurants galore . . . Which is not to say that much of the time my mother’s daughter didn’t cringe; what would I wear, was I too tall, too fat, would I be enough?

  We never did just one thing. An evening was like a fan that slowly opened. Drinks hinged to dinner, hinged to a movie, an opening, a party or, if we were with a group, especially out-of-towners, hinged to the Cedar Bar or the Five Spot. And always, for me, the next day, TV Guide. For a particularly chock-full evening, I referred to Clem’s small leather daybook, the same one in which he had noted my phone number a month earlier. The entry for the evening of November 8: “The Savoy Plaza to fetch Nika Hulton (wife of British publisher Sir Edward Hulton), with Jennie [sic] and her to Whitney Museum opening, Martha Jackson’s, Gallery ‘G,’ dinner with Paul Jenkins (painter), Ken Sawyer (art writer), Jean Garrigue (poet), 10:30 Cedar.”

  The social diet soon sorted itself out; all evenings were not equal. There were good times, okay times, and bad times, usually depending on where we went and sometimes with whom. Very low on my hit parade was any evening that ended at the Cedar Bar.

  Ah, the Cedar. Whether in a city, a neighborhood, a restaurant, a party, a school, an apartment building, I didn’t like being any place that was homogenous. That was the Cedar—wall-to-wall artists. For me, I might as well have been a vegetarian walking into a union meeting of meat packers. For me, it meant washing the smoke out of my hair and brushing the stubborn bits of sawdust off my shoes the next morning.

  We would slowly thread our way past the bar jammed with the regulars and the girls who wanted to hook up with the regulars. Pollock, Kline, de Kooning, Smith, Guston, Held, Cherry, Tworkov, Leslie, Goldberg, Marca-Relli . . . any roster of artists would do. Those who would become big names, and a lot who wouldn’t, they were all at the Cedar one night or another.

  Finally making it to a booth, I would inevitably find myself squeezed into an inside spot. The drinks would arrive, the cigarettes would be lit, and the talk, talk, talk would go on as people drifted by, drawing up chairs, leaning over the seats, then drifting off, only to be replaced by others, everyone half in the bag and bleary, as I smeared condensation from my glass, making endless designs in the ashes on the tabletop, thinking, When can we leave, when can we leave?

  We were also going to a lot of gallery openings. One night, at the Stable Gallery, Clem spotted Helen with her current boyfriend. Words were exchanged, and next thing I knew Clem had pushed the man over a bench. For me, it was a replay of the night we had met. Except then it had been strange and interesting. Now I was with Clem and had begun to meet some of these people, if vaguely, and it was awful. People circling, commotion. I instinctively moved away and stood at the far end of the gallery, clutching my fragile self-esteem. Why was I there at all? Damn Helen! Obviously I meant nothing to Clem. How could he put me in such a position? Suddenly, there was Bob Motherwell, whom I barely knew, standing next to me. He handed me a drink, said soothing things, and gave me a handkerchief for the tears that his kindness had set to flowing.

  Not long after, Clem and I were on the street. Still fraught, I vented my “how could yous.” He stopped and said, “You’re only worried about your face. Someday you’ll get
it that what other people think is bubkes. I’ve learned more from making a fool of myself than by being right.” I never forgot Clem’s life lesson or the kindness of the tall, blond acquaintance, but that night on the street I knew it was the kindness that had gotten me through.

  And then there was dancing, another sure hit for my self-esteem. Clem was partial to a club called Winston’s. He loved to dance. He would jazz it up with lots of fancy footwork, a sort of homegrown swing/jitterbug. I felt inadequate, always had. Dancing rekindled the wallflower mortification of my teens and exacerbated my self-consciousness about my height, the two afflictions hopelessly intertwined. Our forays on the dance floor would invariably end with his muttering that I was trying to lead, and I would mutter that it was just that I was taller—at six feet with shoes, I had two inches on him—and he would mutter, no, it was because I didn’t follow properly . . . I blessed the day when rock and roll and the twist put an end to all the muttering and we could each move to our own drummer.

  On the flip side, some of the best times for me were the nights we would hang out with my friends. Clem enjoyed it, too, and I liked that he liked it. Sometimes he would invite everyone along to an opening or to a party. Sometimes we would double-date with Debby and Norman and go out to dinner or a nightclub. And often, best of all, we were on our own: movies, dinner, usually ending up at his place, talking, and kissing a lot. Then he would walk me across the street to Abington Square to put me into a taxi, always pressing a few dollars in my hand. A block or two away I would tell the driver to let me out, and then walk the rest of the way home. I would defray the twinges of guilt by thinking of the leeway the extra money would afford me the next day.