A Complicated Marriage

by Janice Van Horne

  The Cedar Bar had also whimpered away. Until the early sixties, people had continued to trek to the Cedar in hopes of seeing the art stars, to hang out where it was happening. Of course, most things had already happened. There would be no more slugging it out between the Pollock and De Kooning camps or about who had fucked who the night before. Age had rolled in and the first-generation “boys” were getting richer and had moved on to great airplane hangar studios in the hills or at the shore, out there somewhere. The up-and-comers found new places to hang out. After the Cedar closed, it was Dillons and then Max’s Kansas City, which opened in 1965. But it was different. Max’s was huge. It had to be—the art scene had mushroomed into an art world, and up front, five deep along the bar, the artists blew their horns even louder, while having less to toot about. And now no one listened anyway, except maybe the girls, always the girls.

  And in the back room at Max’s, again jammed into booths, bathed in the fluorescent pall of Dan Flavin’s decor, which made us all look like we had just puked, the free-and-easy give-and-take had been replaced by hard-edged wariness. The stakes had gone up; art was changing fast. “What’s in, what’s out?” “Who do you know?” “How much did you get?” replaced the small-town jibes, the macho who’s-fucking-who bravado, and the angst about the day-to-day making of art. The pop-art guys had moved in and merged uptown and downtown, with their zest for high life. Posh was in, and disco and spectacle, making the first and second generations seem staid. The media was courted, not scorned. The new art was sexy. Drugs over booze. Tinsel and high fashion. A far cry from the twenty-four-hour, nickel-and-dime Automat on Eighth Street, the artists’ home away from home, where it had all begun in the thirties and forties. Max’s was a sandbox for perpetual children. Bitch and camp. For me, Max’s made even the old Cedar smell like a rose. At least it had been real.

  Now that we had a car, getaways became more frequent. Most often we headed up to Ken’s farmhouse in South Shaftsbury. We had been friends for years, and our bond with Ken had grown even stronger after he had moved to New York and then to Vermont. Though the house was only a short distance from Bennington, Ken never taught at the college. He had chosen the area because his Reichian therapist had deemed it as having the purest air quality in New England. Now, the house, replete with a Reichian orgone box, nestled on the side of a slope at the end of a long dirt driveway. Ken had bought it from the Robert Frost family. It had been Frost who had named it the Gulley, and liked to call it his Gulley Gulch. And, yes, there were groves of birches on the hill out back. Dating from the 1780s, it was very small, one floor and an attic, with slanting wide plank floors, low ceilings, heating that was catch as catch can . . . in other words, rustic and charming. Behind the house was a large barn that Ken had converted into a studio. His “targets” had established him as a major art player. Always a master of color, he was now on a creative roll, painting a river of breathtakingly beautiful pictures. As for the air quality, Ken installed a contraption to measure the ion level on top of the hill, just to be sure he was where he was meant to be. Not that there was really any question.

  In the beginning, visitors were mostly close friends, like David Smith, who would drive over from Bolton Landing and Ken’s family, but by 1964 the place was jumping. Ken married Stephanie Gordon, recently graduated from Sarah Lawrence, and it was she who brought decor and creature comforts to the Gulley: a finished attic with two more bedrooms, two more bathrooms, and a swimming pool behind the barn.

  That year also brought Jules and Andy Olitski, and daughters Eve and Lauren, to Bennington. Also joining the faculty was Tony Caro, the sculptor we had met in London in 1959, his wife, Sheila, and their two boys, Timothy and Paul. It always felt like there was a crowd at Ken’s place. If Clem was the New York magnet for visitors from abroad, Ken’s place was the go-to destination out of town. As tiny as the Gulley was, there was always room for one more. And Ken was the ringmaster and game player: cards, backgammon, chess, charades . . . one could always find a game in progress. And invariably a new toy: exotic foreign cars, like his Lotus, which hadn’t imported well and sat like decorative sculptures next to the barn; a tractor to roam the fields in; motorbikes; trout for the stream he had dredged, and fishing rods to catch them. Summers by the pool where Sarah, guided by Stephanie, learned to swim and where Clem cavorted like the dolphin he was. And watching Sarah, an only child who had discovered heaven, toddling stalwartly after Bill and Cady Noland, so tantalizing with their mysterious games and languages, while Lyn, being older, preferred the company of adults. And at night, dancing in the barn, Clem and I demonstrating the latest craze at the Dom. Stephanie, the beautiful star.

  For me, the nucleus in the mid-sixties was Ken, Tony, Jules, and their wives. That was where the best laughter and friendships were forged. Best of all, they were young, all in their late thirties or early forties. It may have been an art scene, but for once it was a family scene. Who would’ve thought that just as I was discovering an extended family in the theater, I would find another where I had least expected to? I shouldn’t have been surprised. Having plunged into my own life, artists and their art talk weren’t as hard to take anymore.

  And what about all that sex? It was the sixties. Sex was everywhere, as if it had just been invented. I don’t know who jumped first. Well, that’s not altogether true. It was Clem who did, but, as shocking as the news was, I so effectively reduced the incident to a non-event that I never did give it much importance. He had taken up with a woman in Los Angeles while on a lecture trip, and there were letters back and forth. That was probably in 1960, right before we moved uptown.

  He had mentioned it as casually as he would mention that someone was dropping by for a drink. I was stunned; I hadn’t seen it coming. Five years had passed since his talk of “open marriage,” a phrase that had faded from my mind. After all, this was the man I called “husband,” he would never . . . I could say that I had felt a sickening emptiness as I tried to suck in everything left in my suddenly diminished world. That I had closed my doors, shut the bolts, and hunkered down, my knees clutched to my chest against the pain of irretrievable loss. I could say that even as I had drawn down the shades of my heart, I knew the worst: This was the start of an altered life and a long journey.

  I don’t know if I actually thought and did those things. I probably did. I do know that before Clem stopped speaking, I screamed, cried, slammed our door—we had only one—beat his desk with my fists, and hammered him with, “How dare you . . . !” If you loved me, you’d never . . . !” “I hate you, I hate you . . . !” And called him every bastard, scumbag , dickshit word in my lexicon.

  It was only then, drained of my fervor, that I took to our bedroom cave and began the slow, methodical process of burying the pain. As a child, I had learned how to soothe myself when socked with something too fearful to think about. Now, once again, I shut my eyes and crept under a blanket of darkness until my body was numb and my mind was a blank. After all, California was a long way off. And hadn’t Clem, who had been stunned by my fury, assured me that it had nothing to do with “us” or his feelings for me, that I would always be “the most important person” in his life? And I asked myself, Can I ever have sex with him again? Do I want to be with this man, stay married to him? And I knew that I could and that I did. And I also knew that if I didn’t pick at it, the scar tissue would gradually scab over and mask the wound.

  After a few weeks, there was no overt rift between us. And soon it didn’t seem to matter at all, as the thrill of our new apartment and the tragedy of our baby’s death pushed it off the front page of our lives.

  But as things happen, it was just a matter of time—three years in fact—until the next shoe would drop. Sarah was crowing robustly in her highchair, her face smeared with yogurt and spinach, two of her favorite things, when Clem once again casually mentioned that he had had a fling with a woman in Paris. This time I did not slam doors; I walked through the doors of the YMHA. A late bloomer, I had opened up m
y life.

  What happened next had inevitability written all over it. It was almost as if sex were an obligation, something I was supposed to experience now that I was growing up. After all, Clem had set up our marital parameters from day one, and my analyst was certainly encouraging me. So it was, that, while looking over my shoulder for anyone who might disapprove and seeing no one who did, except that slice of me that my mother owned, I tiptoed with little grace or ease into my “starter affair.”

  I look with affection at the girl/woman as she was swept away by that combustible encounter on a Cape Cod beach at sunset, by the thrill of afternoon trysts in the gorgeous painter’s Village studio, by the ardor and attention in those dark eyes that looked so deeply into mine. Afterward, on the way home, my thoughts were like a light switch, flipping between the haze of being the object of a man’s desire and the surety that he would never want to see me again. I would paw over every detail: Did I really say that? How could I have been such an idiot?! What did he mean when he said . . . ?

  By the time I got home, I knew I would never call him again. To hell with him. But, of course, I always did. He wouldn’t call me. His rule. Besides his being afraid of Clem’s finding out, I knew I certainly wasn’t his one and only. The secrecy made me squirm. It felt icky. I vowed that never again would I be in a relationship where that was part of the drill. But, ickiness aside, off I would go once a week after my acting class at HB. My starter affair flared hot for a few months, then sputtered on a month or so, until he broke it off. Seemed he had a wedding to go to—his own.

  Overall, I was disappointed with my histrionics, which harkened back to the way I had felt about my boyfriend during the last two years of high school—and we hadn’t even had sex. As for the starter sex, it was exciting, but there was no screaming, full-out passion. I was far too nervous and self-conscious. The all-seeing artist painted a small portrait of me during those months. In my hair, he had added a small blue bow, an acknowledgment of my “innocence.” The picture was destroyed in a fire, but our friendship would survive.

  Early on in analysis, I had discovered that I could want something. Now I knew that I wanted to have it all: to be a wife, a mother, an actress, a lover . . . And that this was the start of what would be a long learning curve. Opportunity was all around me. Whatever theater group or production, there was sex—sometimes a real connection, more often a run-of-the-play deal. Always with no secrets, no lies between Clem and me. It would have been nice if it had been that simple. Sometimes all that free love was fun. Sometimes it didn’t feel so free. And often I wished I was twenty-one again and had only one thought: to be married and be Clem’s one and only.

  I continued to be adrift in ambivalence. On the one hand I felt hesitant, guilty, about intimacy with another man. And on the other hand I talked myself into believing that the intimacy was linked to love, love being the justifying magnet. I was ashamed to think like such a Virgin Bride product of the fifties and my mother’s programming. All that “Men only want one thing,” and “Never let a man touch you down there—you’ll get pregnant.” Now I was answering, But, Ma, what do women want? and, Look, Ma, I’ve got the Pill.

  However I spun it, the reality was that I had somersaulted from the intimacy of love with Clem to the intimacy of casual sex. And if my doubts surfaced, and they often did, I had my analyst to remind me, “No one person can ever be all things to anyone else.” I would nod obediently, even as my thoughts mutinied: But Clem is my husband, part of me; we live life as one, no matter what you yammer on about. The analyst would go, lovers would come and go, but, despite my seemingly confident, freewheeling ways, my ambivalence lingered.

  I would come to accept that for an open marriage to work at all, it would need to be mutual. To my surprise I found that, with the exception of his first dalliance in California, which had blindsided me, I had never felt “betrayed” by Clem. Without the secrets and lies, the suspicions, the sneaking around, the Aha! I caught you!, the word simply didn’t apply. And without that deal-breaking word, I would be okay, and so would the marriage. As for my ambivalence and guilt, my acceptance told me it was time to let them go, and I did.

  However, there was one instance where I found I had limits. Clem’s affairs at the time, like mine, were sporadic and fleeting, and I paid them little mind. However, in the mid-sixties, he began a fraught relationship with a woman in Boston that zigzagged for over two years. Difficult for me because of Clem’s angst and drama, which, in the name of openness, spilled out onto me, and because I found her to be a “nasty piece of work”—as my mother might have said—who darted crafty, smug looks at me when our paths would cross. I learned that the openness in an open marriage can go too far.

  After a while, to my horror, Clem began to regale me with vivid accounts of the intimate details and progress of the affair. Once again, after much slamming of doors and my yelling at him to shut the hell up, he finally got the point and I set ground rules. Namely: There are some things better kept to yourself; if you need a confidant, go to an analyst; and keep the bitch at a distance. Sheepishly, he agreed on all points, including that she was a bitch.

  Fortunately, my own work and fun provided a balance, which would be enhanced when in 1966 I fell for Jimmy, a fellow actor, and started my own two-year relationship. Clem had balance, too. The art world was at full tilt and Clem with it, writing, lecturing, much in demand. So much to do, we both seemed to be always rushing off somewhere.

  For me, there was all that, but at the same time I was doing what mothers do, what wives do: I kept the machinery running; took care of Sarah, her social life, her school life—in 1966 she started nursery school at Manhattan Country School; kept the refrigerator stocked with salami and chopped liver, the ice trays filled, the liquor cabinet full; and did the laundry and sock darning in between. And Clem and I still shared a bed—king-size—and still had sex. And the art world didn’t stop just because I had stepped back from it. I still joined in during the gatherings at home or going places with Clem. Just not all the time. It was now a matter of choice, that million-dollar panacea that all analysts prescribed.

  As for Sy, I was still seeing him twice a week, and would continue until 1968, when I figured I could steer my own ship. How blithe that sounds. It was, in fact, a wrenching split that had been precipitated by my long-term attachment to Jimmy which Sy viewed as just another excursion into “codependence,” a propensity he hoped he had “cured” me of. But there would be no negotiation. I was far too happy. So, not with his blessing, I left. It was messy: Sy sounding like an angry papa; me masking my trepidation with cocksure bravado. I was sorry about that final session. It was the only bad mark I would ever give him.

  And there was always the balance of the theater. In 1967 a new director came on the scene, Albert Takazauckas, and I got a chance to mix it up with a lot of first-class material, such as A Midsummer Night’s Dream, as a Victorian Helena with a Gibson Girl updo romping through the forest of Riverside Church. Finally something more kid-friendly, and Sarah Dora saw her first play. And there was Under Milk Wood, with a chance for me to learn a few chords on a guitar and sing for an audience for the first time—a ditty, only so-so, but it rekindled a passion that had been squelched when I was twelve. I had begged for singing lessons, but my mother had said no, that it was silly to think I would ever be a singer. Poor Ma, she never could just spit it out that we couldn’t afford lessons. But, as with acting, passions have a way of resurfacing.

  While still at HB, I started studying with Graham Bernard, privately and with a group. Twice a week, for years, I experienced the joy of releasing the fullness of my voice for the first time. Some people could scream. I had rarely been able to. But I could sing. And for many years I did, with groups, with teachers, wherever I might be.

  If I ever had a niche, it was Chekhov. I rarely auditioned for a Chekhov part I didn’t get, especially if it was for Yelena in Uncle Vanya or Masha in Three Sisters, each of which I played twice. The drifting, vaporing,
fires-burning-deep women who always felt on the fringes of life were comfort food for me. Having never figured out what I was supposed to do in the role of Clem’s wife, Yelena’s line “As for me, I am just a secondary character” said it all. I would deliver it with a touch of bravado, because Yelena wasn’t a secondary character at all, and by then I was learning that I wasn’t either, to Clem or to myself.

  While in Bill Hickey’s class at HB, I added another forte when he pegged me as a comedienne who could do anything Ina Claire could do. I’d never heard of her, but for months I played sophisticated “comedy of manners” scenes. They were fun and easy, but I yearned for the smolder. I think Bill just enjoyed seeing the old material from the thirties that few in the mostly hippie-dippie class could, or were willing to, attempt.

  Then came a rare moment. Bill was asked to direct a comedy for Broadway called The 101-Year-Old Woman. To rehearse it, he cast students and friends. I was to play the title role, of all inanities. Judd Hirsch was in it; he was wonderful. I was predictably dreadful. Bill was in a show at the time, so rehearsals would start around 11:00 PM at his apartment on Gramercy Park, and sometimes it would be dawn when Judd would drive some of us home. The play did make it to Broadway—of course not with me, but with Zohra Lampert. It lasted a night, and that was that. But Bill felt he owed me, and one day said, “I’ve got a present for you.” The present was Scott Glenn and a steamy scene from Inge’s A Loss of Roses that ended with a passionate embrace. Happily, Scott and I rehearsed like mad for weeks. Soon after, I felt I had gotten all I could get from HB. I guess Scott agreed. As he moved on to Hollywood fame, the time had come for me to move on up, uptown to Lee Strasberg’s Wednesday classes in the Carnegie Hall studio building.