A Complicated Marriage

by Janice Van Horne

  Now, here she was, sitting on Clem’s and my double bed in our puce bedroom, primed to give her daughter premarital advice. In brief, it covered three salient points: First, marrying someone older can work out very well; you’ll be able to wrap him around your little finger. Second, Jews are very good to their wives, everyone says so. And third, don’t forget, if things don’t work out, you can always come home.

  As she elaborated, my attention wandered. My mother always spoke at length, and always in the clichés of a bygone soap opera. The absurdity of the “finger-wrapping” bit made me think of Clem’s caveat to our marriage—“as long as nothing changes”—with its postscript about an “open marriage.” Funny, on the one hand, it sounded so wholesome, while on the other so ominous. But Clem would never . . . Of course he would never . . . And just as I had suppressed his words before, I quickly suppressed them again. And where in hell had my mother gotten that bit about Jews? I hated to think. And why did everyone keep jamming Jews into a “they” box? As for running home to Mommy, I had heard that one before, when she had dropped me off at college. Except that day she had been crying. Today, she just looked foreboding.

  For her finale, she presented me with her diamond and sapphire Tiffany bracelet. She repeated the oft-told story of how her father had given it to her right before he walked her down the aisle to David, all the while telling her all the reasons he disapproved of the match, summing it up with, “That man never has been, and never will be, good enough for my beautiful girl.” My mother loved that story. I didn’t, for a moment, think she was sending a similar message to me. Not wittingly. Despite her weakness for melodrama, she was an abundantly loving person and mother. Yes, she had let me down on Christmas Eve, but in a few days she would be standing up with me when I married, when it really counted. She wasn’t a fighter, and I could well imagine what she had been putting up with from Harry and her family. I loved her for that. And I loved the bracelet. That night I stowed it, in its little suede pouch, behind De Quincey’s Confessions of an English Opium-Eater. I knew I’d never forget where it was.

  The next day, the day before the wedding, more jewelry. Clem and I went to Cartier and bought a gold beveled ring. No engraving; I would always know it was mine and who had given it to me. I liked it. Right in line with my golf dress. Next stop: Tiffany’s. I wanted to send out wedding announcements. The saleslady, very chignoned and high-toned, suggested that “at-home cards” should be included so people would know where to send gifts. I’d never thought about that. Presents! I couldn’t tell her, “Oh, we don’t know the kind of people who do that. Besides, they know where we are; we’ve been living in sin for four months.” And, wanting to do the right thing by the saleslady, I ordered the cards: “Mr. and Mrs. Greenberg will be at home at 90 Bank Street . . .” The absurdity of it made me cringe. Clem, as usual, said nothing.

  That night, our wedding eve, was just as Clem had ordained, a night like any other. We went to the Blue Mill on Commerce Street, one of our favorites, which served martinis straight up with a “bonus” in a small carafe. Then to bed—books to be read, sleep to be slept, until it was time to roll out of bed and get married.

  Me in my golf ensemble and pearls, too early in the day for diamonds. Clem in his only suit, his “funeral gray,” he called it, with white shirt, tie, gleaming shoes—he treasured his shoe-polishing gear—and gray hat. How fine we looked. How fine the day looked, sunny and warm. Amazing, considering that I hadn’t been able to get anything right. The face that couldn’t decide whether to be blotchy red or white as chalk. The ornery hair that couldn’t decide whether it was straight or curly and that had sprouted a cowlick I had never seen before. And as the coffee pot boiled over, I burned the eggs. Omens everywhere—I was drowning in omens. Clem kept to his day-as-usual schedule; reading at his desk, finishing his second half-cup of coffee, lighting up his first cigarette of the day . . . until I thought I would scream.

  Without a minute to spare, we were in a taxi heading up Eighth Avenue. We weren’t going far, just to Madison Square and the chambers of Judge Breitel. I flashed on the Emerald City, the Wizard who was to marry us at noon emerging from behind a curtain of smoke and mirrors, if the tornado didn’t hit before then. Suddenly Clem had the driver pull over, and he dashed into a florist. I leaned out of the window and yelled, “Wrist!” Regular corsages were what wallflowers wore as they hovered in cloak rooms, gardenias staining their bedraggled taffeta. With any luck, today I would break the curse. Back Clem came with an orchid, which he tied to my wrist. Lovely.

  Our small wedding party had gathered: my mother; Clem’s father, Joe, and brothers, Marty and Sol; Sidney and Gertrude; Friedel Dzubas and his two young children, Hanni and Morgan; and my friend Nancy Spraker. The groom was well attended, the bride’s side of the church rather sparse. The judge was forgettable, the ceremony forgettable, though the large corner room with the sun pouring in was extravagantly leathered and carpeted, as befitted his State Supreme Court almightiness. The words were said and the ring slipped on, before I even had time to think, Oh my God, I’m getting married! Before I had the time to press the moment into my memory book.

  We all taxied up to the Vanderbilt Hotel, where Clem’s father was taking us to lunch. I had met Joe only once in the preceding months. Clem saw him rarely, but it had seemed fitting that we should drop by for introductions. He and Clem’s stepmother, Fan—Clem’s mother had died when he was sixteen—lived at Ninety-sixth Street and Central Park West. Clem never talked much about the past. I knew only that he disliked Fan, that he had been “on the outs” with his father for some time, and that I could expect Joe to turn on the charm, as was his wont when it came to the ladies.

  Our brief visit was stiff and uncomfortable on everybody’s part. Father and son exchanged a few jibes that were meant to be good-natured but weren’t. I could tell I wasn’t making much of an impression. I was a shiksa without even a notable family or money to recommend me. I wasn’t too surprised. Clem had told me that his father still couldn’t figure out why he hadn’t married Helen, who had been blessed with all of life’s advantages and, to ice the cake, came from a German Jewish family. Clem had shrugged it off, adding that this was also the man who had never stopped telling him it was time he made something of himself and got a real job. Joe would live to ninety-six and never did change his tune.

  The visit ended none too soon for all concerned, and though Joe had been cordial, his reputed charm never did beam my way. But here he was, standing up with us, as were Clem’s brothers, and, more, he was hosting a lunch. I recognized clearly that day that the Greenbergs, unlike the feckless bunch I sprang from, did the right thing. More than recognize it, I marveled at it.

  The Vanderbilt was at Thirty-fourth Street and Park Avenue. As we left the bright warmth of the spring day behind us, I could feel the chill of a place whose grandeur was a thing of the past. We made our way into the bowels of the hotel, where we gathered around a long table, Clem at one end, I at the other, marooned in a decor that was more a bastion than a restaurant. Vast and stone and echoing, a space whose dimensions had outlived their function. Only a few tables were occupied.

  Drinks and food were ordered. Toasts were made. Later, more drinks as some split off to go back to their jobs. I went to the ladies’ room. I stared into the gilded full-length mirror. I thought I would see that I was more, or at least different, like the girl who looks in the mirror after having sex for the first time. I hadn’t done that, but this was the big deal, the life-altering, life-determining moment. I said my new name out loud for the first time: “Jenny Greenberg. Mrs. Clement Greenberg.” I liked the sound of it. My name had changed, but all I saw in the mirror was a young girl, as pale as her dress, with a big bite taken out of her. The attrition had started. I wondered what would fill up the emptying spaces.

  After lunch, my “husband” and I ambled uptown to Radio City, where from the smoking section in the loge we looked down across the plush red fields of near-empty seats at The
Swan, with Grace Kelly, Louis Jourdan, and Alec Guinness, all about royalty and marriage. Vaguely apt, but god-awful and as romantic as a chewed-up bone. The Rockettes were the Rockettes. But I had been drawn there by the memory of National Velvet and Christmas shows past. No déjà vu that day, though. Poor Grace Kelly—even her luminous beauty could barely reach the first row.

  But then, the movie wasn’t really the point that day. We were passing time, doing uptown things, the kinds of things we knew we would never do again. So it was that we went around the corner to the Rainbow Room for tea and a drink. All those months at TV Guide, and I’d never made it to the roof. Now I sat by the window, holding hands with my husband. We talked of things to come. In two weeks we were going to Minneapolis, where Clem was to jury a show and give a talk at the fledgling Walker Art Center. A long weekend of dinners and studio visits. Our first trip, our first hotel together, my first experience of Clem as a “figure” in a world outside our milieu. And my first trip in a Stratocruiser, the pioneering luxe plane, a double-decker with cocktail lounges in its huge belly. That would be the real honeymoon.

  Entranced, I stared at the city and the Chrysler Building aflame in the fading sun. Yet I couldn’t shake the chill of the Vanderbilt. I wondered if it had been as dismal as I’d thought, if we had really been in a basement, if there had been flowers on the table, what people had said in their toasts. I couldn’t even remember if there had been champagne. I knew nothing. Somehow I had missed it all. Like Christmas mornings after the presents were torn open and laid bare. The moment was over. Now what? Expectation was the fun. This was all I had wished for. This was a wonderful day. Yes, all that, but . . . And there, on top of the rainbow, I swore to God that I would never, ever get married again.

  Evening had come. We headed downtown to Peter’s Backyard to have dinner with Nancy Smith, my other Nancy from college, and young friends of Clem’s, Bob Staub and Sylvia, his stunning fiancée from India. She had once painted my eyes with kohl and told me how beautiful I looked. Immediately I had bought myself a black eye pencil, but, as hard as I tried, I could never achieve exotic. I asked her if she would do my eyes again.

  In the cramped ladies’ room she applied her magic and added lipstick and rouge and brushed my hair. Her hands were soft and loving. She restored me. I took off the orchid, now wilted. Flowers don’t like to be worn, but there would be no stains on my dress tonight. I hoped someone would look at the orchid by the sink and wonder about the woman who had left it.

  When we got to the Phillipses’ apartment in Murray Hill, people had started to arrive. The place looked beautiful, like it might be a wedding party; the Pollocks had sent masses of white flowers that Gertrude had arranged everywhere. Music, champagne, food, and a genuine, honest-to-God wedding cake. So what if there was no Lester Lanin playing “Hey, There” for the bride and groom’s first dance? So what if there had been no father to give the bride away? Hell, he had already done that. It was that cake that sealed the deal for me. I finally believed it. I was really married. And this was a wedding party. And it was for me. Well, yes, for Clem, too. But it was really for me, because I had been the first to leap off the cliff that day at lunch overlooking Rockefeller Plaza. And then again, when I moved into 90 Bank Street. And today we had leapt off the cliff together when we said, “I do.”

  EAST HAMPTON

  FRIEDEL TURNED from the refrigerator and said, “There’s no jam.” Everyone looked up briefly and then went back to eating, smoking, drinking coffee, and reading the Sunday Times. I stared at him, skinny in his jeans and T-shirt, with his bare feet and stubbly chin. He stared back, his dark eyes glinting: “There’s no jam!”

  I could hear the scream before I felt it. High and full. It lifted my body out of the chair and across the room and to the stairs and to the window between the eaves, where it shot into the hazy heat of the morning sky. The sound was song. The song was singing me.

  Clem looked down at me in the chair in front of the table in front of the window and touched my shoulder. He said, “I wish I could do that.” I wondered why I was upstairs sitting in that chair. I had traveled far and returned. And then I cried for a long time. Clem moved me to the bed. I was so tired and empty and peaceful.

  I didn’t go downstairs until late in the afternoon, when I heard the lawn mower. Clem loved the exertion, the smell of the cut grass under his bare feet, the sweat running down his back. I went out and sat on the front steps. Clem stopped mowing and sat next to me. He was tentative. I thought, He thinks I’m breakable.

  He said, “You’re so strong.”

  That, too.

  Friedel came from around the side of the house with Marisol. He said he was sorry if he had upset me. I laughed. I couldn’t look at him. Marisol said nothing.

  That was the middle of July. After the recurrence of an eating disorder, the end of a friendship, the crash of a marriage, the mashed finger, and the dog attack, and after I had read half of Edith Wharton. And that was before the paranoid breakdown, the fall in the bathroom, Jackson, the death, the murder, and the funeral, and before I polished off Edith Wharton.

  “Everybody gets out of the city in the summer. Everybody knows that.” All the while knowing nothing of the sort about what New Yorkers did, or didn’t do, about anything. But so it was that I talked Clem into spending our first summer in East Hampton in a house too small, too stuffed with too many people. Even though he knew better.

  There were five of us sharing the house in East Hampton. Besides us, there was my college friend Nancy (Spraker), who worked as an assistant to an assistant in the feminine ghetto of Good Housekeeping and was desperate for men and a change of scene. And Clem’s friend Friedel, who agreed as long as it would be cheap and he could bring his current girlfriend, Marisol (Escobar), an aspiring artist who sculpted very large penises. She was inscrutable in a forbidding way. I knew little about her except that she was Venezuelan, beautiful, with gobs of money and gobs of black hair that she wore as a veil, and a sly—or was it cruel?—smile. And when she deigned to speak she growled single, heavily accented words, usually repeated twice. The sheer rarity of her utterances always brought conversation to a halt. “Hungry” was a favorite. All in all, not quite strangers, but certainly a mixed bag. Fine, I thought. How bad could it be?

  Nancy and I went to East Hampton and rented a dollhouse in the shadow of the windmill at the far end of town. Three hundred dollars for the season, it had two small bedrooms and a bath upstairs, one bedroom and bath down, a living room too tiny for human use, and an eat-in kitchen, the only communal room. No porch or outdoor furniture conducive to an alfresco summer. Stretched thin three ways, we could all just manage the rent. The elderly landlords were surly folk, leery of the city aliens. A bit off-putting, given they would be squatting in a bungalow a veritable stone’s throw behind us. The good news: Helen Frankenthaler was going to Europe and lent us her convertible.

  Two weeks before we took possession, I went into a second-guessing frenzy. I blamed Clem. If only he had said no to the whole venture, and meant it. It then came home to me. As convenient as Clem’s passivity about decisions usually had been for me, it also meant that in the future it would be a good idea if I knew what I was doing. At the outset he had clearly said that he had never been away for the summer before and didn’t see why he should start now. But then he had shrugged and, as with so many things, I knew he really didn’t give a damn one way or the other. The result of his diffidence was double-edged; though I would never get a reassuring pat on the head and an “Everything will be fine,” I would never be slapped down with an “I told you so” if my plans failed. Yet another addition to my growing dossier of life-with-Clem lessons.

  Nancy, Clem, and I drove out on in mid-June, the car jammed with a summer’s worth of this and that, and, most important, Clem’s books, my portable typewriter, which he would use while there, a few bottles of booze to get us started, and a radio. I did the driving, as I had when we had gone to the Phillipses’ farm for our mini
-honeymoon. Clem preferred being a passenger, he could read, and I was happy with the job, much less boring. Besides, he was a terrible driver, unengaged and erratic. Thus died yet another of my mother’s treasured myths: “The man always does the driving.”

  Upon our arrival, the landlords scuttled over to greet us with a list of dos and don’ts, while pointing to the hand mower for the lawn, which must be tended to weekly. They gave dire warnings about the sensitive nature of the antique washing machine with a mangle attachment, and then, handing over the keys reluctantly, they retreated to their lookout post. We had a celebratory drink, got into our suits, and headed off to the Coast Guard Beach, the beach. Our summer had begun.

  Our routine was in stone. Monday to Friday nights I was on my own, until August, when Clem would come out full-time. The first four days I would hole up with sandwiches and Fig Newtons and Edith Wharton from the local library, starting with The Age of Innocence and working my way downhill. Fridays, with a jolt, I sprang into guilty housewifery. I marketed, cleaned, shaved my legs, and did the laundry, before meeting the evening train for the arrivals. Weekends were nonstop—Coast Guard, followed by whatever parties were happening. Late nights we often ended up at the Elm Tree Inn, a down-home roadhouse on the Montauk Highway—the Cedar away from home, where everyone stopped by of an evening. Not so much the year-rounders, but for the New York transients it was a good way to end the day. On slow nights there was always a movie on Main Street. Most of the time, wherever we went, we would see the same people we saw in the city, except for the clothes and the sunglasses. For eating out, there wasn’t a lot to choose from. Either the upscale Spring Close House and Chez Labatt or, if we found ourselves west of town, Out of This World, where Clem would invariably remark, “It should be Out of the World. Don’t they know there’s only one world?” That was my adorable pedant, who even proofread the back of my cereal boxes.