A Complicated Marriage

by Janice Van Horne

  As I tucked the clock into my suitcase, I realized it was the only souvenir I was bringing home. I would put it on our bookshelf in the living room. Maybe it would remind me of what was possible, what I could make happen.

  My friends, the two Nancys, met us at customs and eased our reentry. At Bank Street I was dizzy with feelings. It was too small, it was divine. It was dingy, it was ours. I was sad, I was happy. Exhausted and keyed up, I thought of the last three months as a party that had been a disaster, I thought it had been the party beyond my wildest dreams. Most of all, I thought the party was over and there might never be another.

  Friedel and Herman (Cherry) rang the doorbell. They had heard we would be home that day. Clem was in the kitchen, breaking out stale ice cubes, pouring the Tanqueray, Noilly Prat, and single drop of orange bitters into his small dented shaker. The search across Europe for a perfect martini was over. We toasted our homecoming and turned to our friends. “So, what’s happened since we left?”

  part three

  Together/Separate

  THE SIXTIES

  IN A DAZE of rapture, I sprawled on the bed and drank in the beauty of all I beheld. The windows wide onto a soft spring breeze, the clouds frothing across the bright sky, now and then an airplane darting through them. Late afternoon, a glass of champagne in one hand, the phone receiver in the other, I called everyone I knew to tell them our new phone number. “Imagine, Susquehanna 7—isn’t it wonderful?”

  Clem was in the next room, henceforth known as his “office,” already at his desk, his treasured green-shaded lamp in place, his typewriter table and old Remington upright at the ready. His eyes were torn between the flock of seagulls sunning on the reservoir seventeen floors below and the galleys spread out before him. Art and Culture, the book he had been working on sporadically for two years, was about to be published.

  That May morning in 1960, we had crossed the great divide of Fourteenth Street and moved our bits of furniture, stacks of paintings, and cartons of books from Bank Street to 275 Central Park West at Eighty-eighth Street. It had happened quickly. Only two months before, Clem had received a windfall from his family that we both realized was a life-changing amount of money. After twenty-five years in the Village, Clem opted for a change of scene on the Upper West Side. His guidelines were few: no fancy building, no more than $225 a month, and as long as he didn’t have to do anything. With wings on my feet and visions of light and space and the family that would someday fill it up, I found the apartment that I knew was waiting for us in only two weeks. It faced north and south as far as you could see, with sideways views of the park, two bedrooms, and a dining room that could become whatever it wanted to be.

  I needed only a quick look, before dashing home to tell Clem. Sight unseen, he called the landlord and we went uptown to sign the lease for $220 a month. Giddy with the immensity of what we had undertaken, we headed down Broadway to the Tiptoe Inn and in its midafternoon emptiness toasted our new life with martinis.

  Now it was real. Every now and then Clem and I would stroll through our rooms, discovering gifts at every turn: a wall of bookcases in his office, a stall shower, three walk-in closets in our bedroom, a linen closet for our two sets of sheets, and picture moldings to make my curatorial job easy. Neither of us had ever had such abundance. I could see Clem’s socialist mind whirring; it was like having more shoes than one could possibly wear. But oh, that view of the birds on the water, and that stall shower of his dreams. I knew he would get used to it.

  We stood in the thirty-eight-foot living room—the moving man had paced it out—and laughed at our four chairs, three tables, two lamps, and at the paintings stacked against the walls. And laughed at Clem’s easel, a lonely sentinel in the dining room, and at our double bed, so small in the big bedroom, with only a bureau and two little tables to keep it company. That night as we lay there, I listened to the silence broken only by an occasional rumble far away. Clem said it was the subway. No more air shaft with its weekend drunks, no more trucks on the cobblestones of Hudson Street—never forgotten but never missed. The next day I started hanging the paintings. Glorious. Who needed furniture?

  On December 21, 1961, our first baby was born, lived a minute, and died. She was full term and was designated anencephalic. The death certificate would simply state that Baby Greenberg was “incompatible with life.”

  Seven months earlier, Clem and I had been in his office. To the north the windows were opened wide to the warm May night. To the east was the Triborough Bridge, to the northwest the shimmering necklace of the George Washington Bridge near enough to touch, and just beyond beckoned the fantasy lights of Palisades Amusement Park in New Jersey. Clem reading at his desk; I seated on the narrow yellow armchair that had been my grandmother’s.

  I got his attention and in a small voice told him the news, unsure of his response. I was sure. This was the perfect thing, the perfect time, but for Clem? Well, that might be something else. He was still for a moment, then, “Do you want to have it?” A blow to the gut. Oh, I knew his resistance to having another child at this stage of his life, resistance that was exacerbated by his guilt for having failed Danny as a father. He was also concerned that I wanted a baby only to fill up my life. On that score he was right. Maybe it was a lousy reason. Maybe I didn’t deserve to have a child, but still . . . I couldn’t speak.

  When Clem went to get another drink, I moved to the window behind his desk chair. With those few words, he had defined the baby as mine, not ours—my sole responsibility. Dire scenarios: The baby would be an unwanted appendage, I would pay for my willfulness . . . Tears wet on my face, I listened to the screams from the Cyclone roller coaster across the river. But he and I both knew my answer to his question was yes.

  He had taken a blow to the gut, too. He knew he didn’t have a choice, but he wanted me to understand that I did. That sank in and I was able to thaw the chill of those words over the next months, months that turned out to be so happy for both of us. Clem attached himself to me, my belly, and the baby. A new closeness. This was the way it was supposed to be; for once, our life was the way it was in the movies. People told me how beautiful I was, and for the first time I believed it.

  With the help of Jennifer Gordon I made a maternity dress, black and quasi-chic. My first encounter with a sewing machine since a disastrous two-month home ec course in seventh grade. Now I had actually made something that I could wear. My mother sent down the old white wicker bassinette that my brother and I had slept and cried in as babies. It was like a boat on large wooden wheels. I sewed a cover for the old mattress and wove white satin ribbons through the wicker so that the baby wouldn’t get its fingers stuck. I folded up Clem’s card table and easel and put away his paints, which in our first year at Central Park West he had never used. I bought a daybed and a changing table and knitted until my fingers had calluses. Along with the brightest paintings we had, I hung a seven-foot striped Morris Louis where it would be the first thing baby would see. More radiant than any rainbow, it matched my new scenario of our future. We would be a real family.

  At noon a few days before Christmas, Clem and I took a taxi to Doctors Hospital. The baby had been reluctant to come into the world and labor would be induced. We were scared and happy. An hour later, I was alone on a gurney in a white curtained cubicle with the moans and cries of labor around me. Sedated, I neither moaned nor cried. My doctor bustled in. He leaned into me, his breath on my face, not with kindness or caring but because he thought I did not hear him, was not getting the message. But I did get the message: There would be no baby. I heard him through the sirens in my brain that were so loud my eyes squeezed shut and my heart fisted inside itself.

  She walks into my hospital room with a heaping bunch of white daisies. She takes charge. Orders a large vase to be brought. Tells me how sorry she is for my loss. Comments favorably on the spacious private room, the view of the East River, and how beautiful the day is: “Unseasonably warm for December,” she says. Do I know her? I do
, but I have lost her name. She appraises the other flowers. I see her reading the cards, counting the bouquets as she puts a price tag on each. She singles out an overripe white orchid as being “particularly tasteful.”

  Her words pass through me in icy fragments. I have no appetite for words or much of anything. I take in her tall, lithe frame. She wears clothes as drapery. Her tidiness. Her capped blondness. Skin that betrays no secrets. I wish her dead. I have no body, no hair, no skin. My secrets have been torn out and shredded while I wasn’t looking. While I was in the dark they must have crept up and wrenched out my innocence, along with what had been my joy the last nine months. And thrown its bloody pulp into the garbage.

  She arranges the daisies one at a time. There are thousands of them. Now and then she steps back to assess her handiwork. Why is she here, this sometime acquaintance? I close myself. She does not exist. When Clem returns, I utter a few words. Angry, in a deep voice that is unfamiliar to me, I say, “Don’t tell anyone.”

  That was the first time I confronted the many faces of acute pain that could be emotional as well as physical. I understood that something painful had happened to me, but I was unable to walk into the underbelly of the pain. That would come much later. Meanwhile, in the weeks that followed, I experienced a great deal of physical pain. I could barely walk and when I did, I bent forward, my hands clutching my abdomen as if something more might fall out. I was like the old ladies on Broadway who inch by inch threaded their way to the sanctuary of the benches along the strip of green. And I lived and breathed rage. I blamed the intruder who had moved into my body, who had promised me the gift of life and had eaten the heart out of me instead. I blamed the doctor who had ravaged my insides getting rid of the clinging intruder and who had nothing to say to me after his butchery except, “You’re young. You’ll have another.” As if I were a normal twenty-eight-year-old. He didn’t see the crone. He didn’t see the catatonia. He added, “No sex for six weeks, and don’t get pregnant for six months.” Sex? Pregnant? I stared at him, as vacant as my body.

  My mother, who had come from Cape Cod for the blessed event, said, “You have your whole life ahead of you,” in her “think good thoughts and everything will look better in the morning” way. Clem told me later that when the doctor had updated them on what was happening, she had coquettishly said to him, “You must find it all very interesting, in a scientific way.” Even the Butcher had been too nonplussed to respond.

  As for Clem, he was there, always there. He cried often. And as many times as the doctor told him the cause had been “an accident at conception,” Clem insisted it was his fault. He meant his age, but I knew he meant, too, the damning words he had said that hot spring night when the cries from the Cyclone had shuddered in my tears. Soon he stopped talking about it. Me, I had never found the words to talk about it at all. The days, the weeks, passed. We moved forward, parallel mourners in silence.

  It seemed to me that my pain had been effectively muffled, as out of sight as the bassinette that had been stowed in the basement of our building. Within two weeks, after a cheerless Christmas and New Year, life resumed its customary social flow and on the fifteenth of January we boarded the Broadway Limited for Chicago, where Clem was to give a talk at the Art Institute. Our ten-day trip would include Buffalo for the dedication of the Knox wing of the Albright Museum, a night at Niagara Falls, then on to Toronto for a few nights with the Bushes.

  February disappeared into a fog of parties, some ours, mostly hosted by others, often ending up at a club called Camelot, where we would twist ourselves breathless. I was mad about the twist, which liberated me forever from my self-consciousness with touchy-feely dancing.

  One late afternoon, Peggy Guggenheim stopped by. The renowned collector/art dealer was in from Venice on a rare visit. After the first once-over, she ignored me, and she and her old friend Clem flew into a gossip frenzy. Small, cold, brittle, the woman who had been the first to show the abstract expressionist all-stars delivered her final verdict: One and all, they had failed to fulfill whatever promise they might have had. Besides, “They were ungrateful bastards and if I could do it over again, I would never . . . ” The artists, the pictures, all ashes in her mouth. Later, we went to the Museum of Modern Art, which drove her to new heights of contempt. I had expected an aura of glamour but found a bitter, combustible woman who made Lee look like a daffodil.

  I now look at Clem’s daybook and see the staggering array of activities during those months after the baby’s death: parties at the Motherwells’, the Castellis’, Henry Geldzahler’s; visitors Robert Jacobsen and Miriam Prevot from Paris, the Piero Dorazios from Rome; a dinner at Bernie and Becky Reis’s for Francoise Gillot . . . And I wonder at it, at how the body preens, shows up, joins in revelry night after night, while the mind and the senses sleep. It all happened, but I remembered little except the twist, the fog, and Peggy.

  And my introduction to Pilates, the latest exercise discovery of Marion and Bob Wernick. Ex–Time-Life staffers, the Wernicks were extraordinary racanteurs, drank astonishing amounts of booze, and, to Clem’s delight, provided an inexhaustible flow of juicy gossip. They were also unique in our repertoire of friends. They were professional guests. Unemployed since Time-Life had slipped from cutting edge in the forties to prosaic in the fifties, the Wernicks had carved out their unusual niche and were evidently much in demand. They were like a vaudeville team with a balancing act, she with her bawdy, husky voice and creamy-skinned amplitude, he with his natty, urbane detachment with just a touch of intellectual repartee, not too much, not too little. Now and then the act passed through our living room on their way from one exotic locale to another. It was on one of these visits that they talked about Pilates, the panacea that would change my life. They insisted I come with them and give it a try.

  Up three flights in a musty derelict building on Eighth Avenue between Fifty-eighth and Fifty-ninth Streets was a drab room with a few padded benches, pulleys, monkey bars in the corner, floor mats, and Joseph and Clara Pilates. We left our coats in an alcove, and I waited for the panacea to work its magic. During the months that I went there twice a week, the routine never varied: much hands-on twisting, pushing, and pulling, and a good deal of bending backward over the benches and pulley stretching. Always, Joseph, with his guttural German accent, would tell me, “You have a fine, strong body. We will develop it.” I didn’t feel fine or strong as I hung from the monkey bars. I never was able to swing like the monkey they urged me to be, or like Farley Granger, who could swing across and back in a flash. I’d never been a fan of Granger, but for an actor who seemed so slight on the screen, he was a perfect specimen in the flesh.

  Soon the Wernicks were off to God knows where, but I stayed on, at least for a while. I liked hearing that old German tell me I had a strong body. Since the baby, I needed reminding that I had a body at all. And I liked it when I would come home and slouch in the yellow chair in Clem’s office and hear him tell me that I looked wonderful.

  At the end of February, my grandmother Betty died of a heart attack at age eighty-two. It struck suddenly, between the end of dinner, capped off with the applesauce she loved, and the opening hand of canasta with a friend. I went to my first funeral at Campbell’s on Madison Avenue, around the corner from her apartment. We then drove across the George Washington Bridge to Englewood, where Betty was buried among all the women she had lived her early life with and their husbands, who had had a habit of dying too young for anyone to have ever talked about them or remembered them much at all.

  Then, like magic, our sparsely furnished apartment overflowed with the furniture and bibelots of Betty’s life, surprisingly compatible bedfellows with the dazzling colors and shapes of the modernity that decked our walls. Paintings would come and go, but all that ballast of the lives that preceded mine would remain steadfast.

  The fog must have been thickening, because I had my first visit with an analyst after celebrating my twenty-eighth birthday with Bette Davis in Night of the Ig
uana. I still see the first scene, Bette sitting downstage, a few feet from us, wearing a white shirt open to the waist, in full flesh and fervor. As for the analyst, he’d been recommended by the doctor who had seen Clem through his breakdown in 1954. Any trepidation I might have had about opening my brain to some strange man had faded as I helplessly witnessed my drift into inertia, my days like meals where all the food tasted like cream of wheat without the sugar on top.

  I showed up at the office of Isaiah “Sy” Rochlin for what he said would be a consultation, after which he would make the appropriate referral to someone else. Uncomfortable, I felt I was being measured, but against what I didn’t know, and whatever it was I was sure I would fall short. I relived the panic of my interview with Mr. Snyder, the headmaster of Rye Country Day School, who looked like the Ghost of Christmas Past. At stake was whether I would be accepted into eighth grade after years of public schools. He asked me when Columbus had discovered America and, my mind a black hole, I stuttered 1600-and-whatever. Dripping condescension, he told my cringing mother that I would be tested and most likely held back a grade, that is, if I passed at all. I cried, considered suicide, but hung in. Quaking alone in a classroom on a dripping summer day, I took the test and my life was spared; I was accepted into the eighth grade. Now I was with Sy, the man with the power, asking questions that I answered, trying to hit the right balance between despair and certifiable lunacy. Once again, I must have passed the test, because he decided to take me on as his own patient.