A Complicated Marriage

by Janice Van Horne

  For those homesick for a bit of drama, things could sometimes heat up at the Elm Tree. One night the power went out and for some reason two guys started to yell and shove and shove back and in a flash we could hear punches landing and people crashing into tables. Scary stuff in the dark. We headed for the parking lot, where everyone hung around quarterbacking over who had said what to whom and who had thrown the first punch. No one wanted to go home, so someone turned on a car radio at full blast and in the glare of the headlights people danced. A lively free-for-all that got livelier when the cops pulled up. That night, the Elm Tree had the Cedar beat, hands-down.

  East Hampton housed a small, very small, art colony. The artists who had year-round houses were spread out, from Montauk in one direction to Watermill in the other. They had migrated slowly after the war, looking for a cheap place to live and work while still being near the city. Even in summer, it was a workaday place. During the week the Coast Guard was nearly deserted. And even when the art circle expanded a bit on weekends and there were more blankets on the beach and a few parties sprang up, the sense of family was a constant. Vacationers like us, who came for the whole summer, were few.

  As for the parties, it was always the same gang and the same rhythm: gossip, a lot of grousing, plenty of drinking, a slow build to a climax with a verbal and/or physical slap-and-tickle skirmish, followed by a denouement accompanied by the chorus venting their two cents.

  The town itself was a sleepy place with a stodgy, old-time Yankee smell to it. Nothing touristy. Artists were on the fringes, tolerated but not assimilated. Judging by all the mansions lining the road to the beach, East Hampton was unquestionably a town of the rich, a “them” and “us” sort of town. And, like Rye, no cross-pollination. I didn’t realize just how small the art community was in East Hampton until, in summers to come, Clem and I would go to Provincetown to stay with Hans and Miz Hofmann over Labor Day weekends. As distant as the Cape was from New York, it was clear that that was where most artists were. Provincetown was an industry town—art, art, every which way art—and had been for years. Not so East Hampton.

  Only two weeks passed and we had our first houseguest, Nancy Smith, who wanted to come for the weekend. With nowhere to put her up, I bought a folding canvas cot in the hardware store. That plus a bamboo screen from the living room would have to do. The kitchen now had a sleeping alcove. I figured that the accommodations would effectively discourage people from overstaying their welcomes. No such luck. Nancy could be great fun but she could also wreak havoc, and during her week’s stay she managed to disturb our fragile peace. She had taken to drinking more in recent months and wasn’t an easy drunk. Loud, belligerent, she hacked away at anyone in her path, but I was her most frequent target. I withdrew but couldn’t bring myself to throw her out. Nancy was why I had gone to Jennifer’s party and met Clem, why I was in East Hampton at all. And so much more.

  As small as Bennington was, students usually didn’t drift from one discipline to another. After bowing under the weight of calculus, I had burrowed single-mindedly into literature. Under the tutelage of Howard Nemerov, Francis Golffing, and Stanley Hyman, I was soon up to my eyeballs in the modernists and writing a poem a day. It took me three years to discover that the interesting people were in the art department. I soon drifted away from the girls who thought and looked like me and toward the “others.” I felt as if I had been swept into a hurricane. Dirty feet, sandals, hair down to the ass—this was what Bennington was created for. Soon, getting changed to go wait on table at dinner meant maybe a clean T-shirt and my hair brushed if it was lucky. A far cry from when my mother had first deposited me at the school with my prim pageboy and saddle shoes.

  Nancy Smith was the ringleader and I became a groupie. She knew everything. I had never been to a museum, and my only memorable pictures had hung over my nursery bed: a print of Blue Boy and, in a small carved frame, Jesus in flowing robes, hands clasped, looking heavenward. Nancy thought it was time someone introduced me to art, and New York. She took me to the Museum of Modern Art, where I walked up the main stairs headlong into Guernica and the impressionists, cubists, and surrealists. Nancy reeled off the artists’ names and the movements and what had led into what. All too much. But I had seen things I didn’t know existed, never dreaming that they would become old friends.

  I knew she was a lesbian and that she loved me. But without a word spoken, we had early on settled into a comfortable friendship. Now, since my marriage, that friendship had become less comfortable for her, and in East Hampton it reached the breaking point. She showed every sign of settling in on that kitchen cot. It wouldn’t do. Then one evening, as we all sat around the table before heading off to some do or other, she threw her drink in my face. That was that. The next day she called her analyst, who had a place in Amagansett, the psychiatrist ghetto, and I dropped her off there. I saw her a few more times, before gradually cutting her off. Not long after, she moved to the West Coast and I didn’t see her for thirty years.

  I lost a friend when I could least afford to. My friends in the city had dwindled to a precious few, but in East Hampton, for the first time, I was awash in isolation. I knew no one well enough to call during the week, and if I did spot someone at the beach, I was too shy to approach them. Even in the house I felt vulnerable, ever since I had come downstairs one day to find the landlady poking around, probably because I had already rendered the washing machine a casualty.

  There was one unexpected respite. At a party at Paul and Mimi Brach’s, I met the painter Perle Fine, a straight talker who seemed interested in what I had to say. Before she left, she asked if I would like to come by for lunch during the week. Yes. I wondered what it would be like to spend time with a painter who was about Clem’s age, just her and me. So far, I’d had nothing I could really call a conversation with anyone I had met.

  Perle was in her big, homey kitchen when I arrived, expertly chopping piles of vegetables, cold cuts, and cheeses. She hoped I liked chef salad. I nodded, not quite sure what that was. I warmed to her as she poured wine and set me to chopping. She talked of her studio and her recent move to Springs with her husband, and then asked me about myself. Things went along fine, but I was getting anxious about the chef salad, all those chunks of raw vegetables in particular.

  During the previous weeks, my throat had started closing up while I was eating. I was okay by myself or with Clem, but in restaurants, or with others, I would sometimes gag on food. This wasn’t new. It had started at age eight when I was in Fort Lauderdale with my mother for her divorce from the Con Man. For three months we lived in a motel and ate mostly in restaurants. One day I choked, the food not going up or down, and my mother pounded my back until I spat it out. Much commotion. I was scared and embarrassed.

  The problem continued over the years, sometimes not at all for long stretches, other times coming on acutely. This was promising to be an acute phase, the first in years. Fortunately, that day at Perle’s I managed to make it through lunch without incident. The visit ended with a tour of the house and studio. Perle spoke about her work as if I might know what she was talking about. Altogether, a good day, a grown-up day, and a welcome break from Edith Wharton.

  On weekends we were seeing a lot of the Pollocks. Often we would pick them up to go to the beach. Clem and Jackson loved the water. Lee, too. A good thing, because she and I, though we had spent a lot of time together, had never found a lot to chat about. I sat on the blanket and watched them. Since I had married, I had become fearful. Not just the choking; there were new fears. The first had surfaced on the Stratocruiser to Minneapolis two weeks after the wedding. I had experienced such stomach-clenching panic that I wouldn’t fly again for five years. This, after having flown routinely to Chicago by myself since age twelve to visit my father. Now, in East Hampton, the ocean that had always been my friend became a threat. I yearned for the abandon I had felt as a child at the Jersey shore when I would go beyond the breakers and swim and float until my face and shoulders
fried. As fast as I was moving forward, I was losing ground. Sometimes during those summer months, I didn’t think I was coming out even.

  After the beach we would head back to the Pollocks’ to hang out, often staying for dinner and TV. They would talk through most of the TV, but I ate up the shows. There was more tension than usual in the house. Jackson was off the wagon, though still clinging to the slippery slope that could lead to all-out bingeing. And there was now talk of a woman he was spending time with. It wasn’t unusual for him to make crude passes if he was drinking, but if his bluff was called, he would bolt in the opposite direction. This was something else—a woman who held his interest. Lee was on the fence between war and peace, and for three weekends the détente held. And then it didn’t. Jackson had crossed the line. He had thrown the woman in Lee’s face by bringing her to his studio for the night while Lee was in the house. The next day Lee went to New York, where she hashed and rehashed the incident with Clem. She tried to let it go, but in the end, couldn’t. She sailed for Europe the week after the Fourth of July for an open-ended stay. The next day the woman, Ruth Kligman, moved into the house. Our weekend routine with Jackson continued, though with less frequency, and now with a new cast member.

  I was hit hard by the whole ugly mess. I wanted to repaint the picture, to dress it up in dainty platitudes: It’s just a fling, Jackson made a mistake and now he’ll do the right thing, they’ll make up and everything will be fine. I knew these thoughts were pathetically naive, but the recent turn of events had rekindled the five-year-old in me. When I was a young teenager, my mother had told me about the “other woman” who had precipitated her divorce. Evidently, a registered nurse my father had been seeing on the sly for some time had left a slipper at the hotel where they had spent the night. The next day the hotel called our house to say that they had found “Mrs. Van Horne’s” slipper. On a silver platter, my mother had been handed the evidence of adultery and the grounds for divorce, and I had been saddled with Marge, the Nurse, for a stepmother.

  I equated the “forgotten” slipper at the hotel with Ruth’s eagerness to cooperate in the ugly scene on Lee’s doorstep. I was proud of Lee for having the courage to leave, but wished she had had the courage to stay. I was angry at Jackson for blowing the roof off his household, yet at the same time wished I could just once see him happy. But the “other woman.” That was still too much for me. I resented her for reconnecting me to that five-year-old who had felt the house tremble under the weight of anger and guilt and sadness.

  On a more realistic level, I don’t think I took Jackson and Ruth’s relationship very seriously. After all, this was Jackson. I knew well that drunks did willfully stupid things. I also knew how passive they could be and how strong the ties were between an acute alcoholic and his caretaker, and vice versa. Surely this would blow over. The question was when. And Europe was awfully far away.

  The switcheroo had been so astonishingly quick and so complete. Abracadabra, behold the polar opposite of Lee: Ruth, only a few years older than I was, dark haired, voluptuous—Elizabeth Taylor, in a faux sort of way, which she played to the hilt—and touchy-feely, a come-hither, good-time girl with brains that didn’t show. Lee was none of the above: no-nonsense, combative, smart. Though far from being a beauty in the usual sense, she was fired with an energy that gave her an attractiveness. She was that rare woman who seemed not to care about her looks. As in most things, Lee defied the rules.

  Though Ruth and Lee had little in common, they shared two qualities—both were willful and ballsy. As for me vis-à-vis Ruth? Well, we were both young women with older men. There was that. Could Jackson have been “inspired” by Clem’s hooking up with me? Lord, I hoped not. And I’m sure I compared myself with Ruth in terms of looks and sexiness, coming up short on both counts. But when it came to behavior, as hard as Ruth tried, she could never get it right.

  Now Lee was only a shadow in the kitchen. Ruth, the lady of the house, sat across the table. I couldn’t shake the feeling that overnight Ruth and Jackson had both become interlopers in Lee’s house. I never would have thought I would have missed Lee’s gruff sourness, but I did. All their “for show” cuddling and canoodling brought out the prissy, righteous, “just married” matron in me. A new self-image that made my skin crawl, but I was stuck with it. The worst, for me, were Ruth’s efforts to impose domestic normalcy on such a profoundly shipwrecked household. She brought a let’s-pretend wifely bustle into the house, despite the fact that she was cooking for someone who couldn’t/wouldn’t eat and smiling at someone who had forgotten how. So like my mother with her alcoholic. Again I was torn. Part of me wanted to throttle them, all the women who didn’t get the futility of it all. Part of me wanted to hug them for trying. I also empathized with Ruth’s nesting impulses. How could I not? I was knee-deep in them myself.

  Hard as it was to cozy up to Ruth, I did my “well-mannered” best, hoping to coast along in the wake of her cheery ways. Sadly, when I looked at Jackson for any reflection of her lusty sparkle, he was as morose and moody as ever. Worse, he was drinking more.

  Sometimes we would join up to go to the beach, ending up at Jackson’s or our place, where I would make a spaghetti-and-meatball dinner for them and our houseful. Ruth always cooked more elaborately, especially for a group. As usual, the men talked and the women listened. Jackson had met Ruth at the Cedar Bar. A girl with art aspirations, of course she listened. I drifted. One night, when it was just the four of us, Clem asked Jackson if he had any plans concerning Lee and her return. Jackson hung his head, Ruth got mad. That ended that evening.

  I knew what had prompted Clem’s question. While deploring the course of events, he had stood by both his friends. His efforts to reconcile them may have failed, but he saw Lee’s departure as temporary, as she herself did. He saw Jackson’s provocation of Lee as an aberration, something that would blow over in time and could be rectified. In the meantime, “A friend doesn’t take sides,” he would say. He supported them both, them and their decisions. And however it worked out, he would continue to support them. To my mind, that was well and good for the long term, but for the day-to-day, I thought the whole situation stank.

  If Jackson had been a plumber, a lawyer, or even a really bad painter, I could have given Ruth some wiggle room. But he wasn’t and I couldn’t. Why was she there? To be in the spotlight, for the high life? There was none of that. Did she think she would be the one to turn his life around, save the genius? Or, equally far-fetched, did she believe that Jackson was in any physical or emotional condition to leave Lee and marry her? She seemed to have no idea of the bond between those two amazing painters, who had stuck it out and grown up together, in a sense. To me and, I think, most people, Ruth was there only because Jackson was big-time. But Ruth, as valiantly as she tried to single-handedly liven up the party, surely must have noticed that the party was over. Oh, there was one exception.

  One warm night, with the moon full, we all broke loose. Jackson, Ruth, Friedel, Nancy, Clem, and I went skinny-dipping in the bay at Barnes Hole. A lot of giggling and horseplay and some modesty. Nancy and I kept our underpants on. A few weeks later, I sometimes thought I must have dreamt that midsummer night’s romp at Barnes Hole.

  With high summer now upon us, disturbances in our own household started piling up. Danny came out every other weekend after Nancy vacated the cot. Previous experience put me on alert. He carried terrible burdens that he could never set down, as if they defined him and he might disappear without them. Unfortunately, the inner discord spilled out every which way. I never saw him walk with a light step or speak in a modulated voice. I tiptoed around him, waiting for the dam to break. Not when others were around, but when it was just us, he would rant and bait until he and his father went at it.

  As usual, the kitchen was the arena for everything that went down that summer. I was surprised that only once did the situation with Danny escalate to combat. A few glasses broke, chairs were knocked over, a lot of shoving, and a few wild punch
es from Danny before it petered out. The visit over, Clem drove him to the evening train. Clem was angry and sad. I hated everything about it and despaired of its ever changing.

  And then there was pain of a different sort. First, Clem’s thumb got mashed when Nancy Spraker slammed the car door on it. We screamed more than Clem did. He was blessed with a high pain threshold. That, and ice and gin, got him through. Though it turned black and ugly, he didn’t lose the nail and it wasn’t broken. It also gave him the opportunity to brag about his astonishing healing powers.

  A few weeks later, he had another opportunity to brag. As we were leaving the Coast Guard, there was a dogfight in full swing in the parking lot. Big dog vs. little dog tearing into each other, a lot of barking and blood. People were standing around at a loss, when, against time-honored wisdom, Clem waded in and tried to break it up. The big dog turned on him and bit his thigh. Badly. Wrapping his leg in towels, we rushed home. But it was beyond disinfectant and a Band-Aid. Marisol kept bleating a barely decipherable, “Lock jaw. Lock jaw.” For once she had a point, and we took him to the clinic. As usual, Clem was the least disturbed and sat reading a book through several stitches and a tetanus shot. He then insisted we continue with our evening plans. Word had gotten out about Clem’s exploit. Reactions were mixed. Most came down against his intervention. In effect, “How could you have been so stupid as to . . . ?” Clem shrugged. “You can’t just do nothing.” I liked that. It spoke volumes.

  And then, the first week in August, it was Friedel’s turn. He woke up one night in agony. By morning he thought he was dying, and Clem drove him to the South Hampton Hospital. He was diagnosed with kidney stones. He stayed a week and was a difficult patient. Heavily medicated, he quickly developed an unremitting paranoia. He swung from euphoric tales of having seen God, who had shown him how to create the greatest masterpiece of all time, to being persecuted by everyone in the hospital. He would call in the middle of the night; he was being poisoned, garroted, guillotined . . . Clem visited every day. I went only once, to reassure myself that he really was insane. And he was, his dark eyes popping out of his head, restless, talking of God, who was now appearing to him as Matisse. The more they sedated him, the loonier he got. Eventually the stones passed. Clem brought him home and Marisol returned from the city to help restore him. But it was slow going. He may have left the stones at the hospital, but the emotional volatility lingered. To complete the effect, he sported a grizzled beard that he would neither tame nor shave for the rest of the summer.