A Complicated Marriage

by Janice Van Horne

  Besides doing a couple more good plays, The Cherry Orchard and The Skin of Our Teeth, I dipped a toe into TV. I got a three-day bit in The Nurses, a soap opera. All day to say a line or two, oh so boring once the fun of being plastered with makeup and being on camera wore off. But that was nothing compared with the agony of being an extra on a movie shoot at city hall. I showed up at dawn and by midafternoon was still loitering on the streets. When we were told we had to wait on the bus until we were called, I fled to the nearest subway, and that was that. Movie stardom would have to wait.

  Rejections were one thing, but the lowest blow landed when I got fired. Once again, I had been pounced on by a gung-ho director, who thought he had discovered his perfect Eurydice for his production of Cocteau’s Orphée. Problem was, he had an existing company of actors who from the outset resented the intruder. Who could blame them? Difficulties were compounded by the director’s high-concept staging on a cantilevered trampoline-type structure. Tempers flared as we attempted to be suitably tragic while striving to stay upright. The final straw for the cast was when the Times came to do a story before the opening and, instead of running a group shot, chose to run a close-up of me. A good picture—too good, I guess, because it must have led to all-out mutiny. The morning after opening night, the feckless director called and fired me. As miserable as I’d been, dodging bullets from the cast and balancing on that damn trampoline, that was a killer punch.

  And then my two-year lease was up. The area, now hot enough to justify its own name, SoHo, was now hot enough to justify the landlord’s doubling the rent. Too rich for our blood. Part of me was relieved, part not. I certainly would have preferred to leave what had been my first step toward an independent lifestyle on a higher, lighter, note. As it was, I could feel the shadow of depression over my shoulder.

  Though I considered going back to 275, I knew that, feeling as discouraged and unfocused as I did, it would be a bad idea. Instead, sending Mark and Bob off on their way, Sarah and I moved back into the middle-class milieu of a two-bedroom floor-through in a Chelsea brownstone. Circumstances had been spiraling in the wrong direction for some time. Now I felt downsized in every way; my furniture was too big, I was too big. Everyone said, “How charming” and, “Imagine, two fireplaces.” I wanted to scream.

  Soon, all that didn’t matter much. I felt pain in my abdomen and was diagnosed with a fibroid tumor in my uterus and scheduled for a hysterectomy. I curled up, feeling old and withered. I whimpered. I was thirty-eight. It wasn’t fair. Hysterectomies were for crones. I thought about the children, the other beautiful Sarahs, I would never have. I mourned the choice I would never have. And wondered if I would die.

  While waiting, I spent long days at 275 with Clem. I felt safe with him, wanted to sponge up his calm perspective. But he was also uncharacteristically unnerved by the thought of the operation. When Clem was sixteen, his mother had died, and he had always blamed his father. Forget the mastoid infection and blood poisoning that killed her—his father hadn’t made her happy enough. No wonder he had agreed with Cyril Connolly, who once said to him that you could always tell a man’s character by the health of his wife.

  Me, I reverted to my mother’s less convoluted, but even more misguided, mindset about actions and consequences: The cyst was retribution for my having been too happy, too free. And all that sex. What if I had never . . . ? I sat in Clem’s office, the air thick with our misgivings and cigarettes, while Clem worked on “Can Taste Be Objective?” and I blanketed my brain with C. P. Snow novels in an attempt to rekindle our high times in England. And still wondered if I would die.

  Then we were back at Doctors Hospital, that familiar site of previous tragedy and bliss. It was St. Patrick’s Day. The big parade was nearby. I was a few blocks east. Emptied out. Scraped of my core. Cut open by men who had scooped out every reproductive organ in sight as if they were at an all-you-could-eat buffet, and hungry. I was not I. I was a slab of meat on a table. Now rendered genderless. By the time the parade was over, the sated butcher looked down at me and told me I had had a “radical hysterectomy.” He listed the many parts of me that were now garbage.

  “Though the cyst was benign, it was the best way to proceed. You wouldn’t want to have more problems down the road, now would you, young lady?” Terrified at the thought of a replay, I agreed, as he handed me a prescription for Premarin “to keep me shipshape.”

  Clem was there day after day, pouring out his feelings and theories of self-blame, shouldering ownership of it all. His purification rite. After a while, part of me believed him, wanted to unburden myself of the thought that I had brought it on myself. Yes, I give it all to you. Yes, it was all your fault. But I couldn’t. To do that would have left me nothing but the sour dregs of blame and resentment toward him. So on and on he talked his way through his pain, while I looked at the sky sheltering the East River and Queens and the planes slicing through it as they flew in and out of LaGuardia at exact six-minute intervals. I grabbed on to my physical pain as if it were a lifeline. At least it was real. Each throb and thrust told me I had not died. Now I wondered if I would ever walk upright again.

  Three months later, Sarah, Albert, and I were on our way to Hamilton, New York, home of Colgate University. We had been invited by a group of recent graduates to put on a summer production in a 1890s opera house in nearby Earlville. Earlville, home to a few hundred people, consisted of one streetlight and two blocks of abandoned buildings, one of which was the opera house. The Colgate group, having been gifted the property, had set up a nonprofit company to ensure the old theater’s restoration and survival. They were looking to us to provide an event that would raise both money and awareness.

  Our house for the summer would be a tiny tract house: paintings on velvet of matadors and señoritas, furniture cocooned in plastic covers, mustard shag rugs, and gold-flecked linoleum. It was all so perfectly what it was, a museum piece of American 1950s kitsch. Our first morning completed the picture when we awakened to a roar and shudder; the house abutted the end of the runway of the local airport.

  To enter the opera house, we climbed a dubious staircase to a small entryway, then through a door to the theater itself. As if I had stumbled into King Tut’s tomb, I swooned with the beauty of it. Yes, the red plush upholstery and stage curtains were rotted. Yes, the paint was peeling. Yes, the place smelled of God knows what. But what I saw was the hand-carved artistry of the proscenium, the balcony, and the exquisite boxes that framed the stage. I saw the colors, the reds, umbers, and greens. No gilt, no crystal here. This was true elegance, the honest elegance of gifted craftsmen. What I breathed was the gaslight from the original panel of footlights, the greasepaint in the tiny dressing rooms backstage that lingered from the traveling shows when this theater had been “on the circuit.” It was dying, but it wasn’t dead.

  Having been miraculously spared fire and demolition, it was the only extant nineteenth-century opera house in the state. I stood on the stage and envisioned a production of Herne’s Shore Acres. It was as if I had been handed the opportunity to re-create it in a place where it might well have been staged by Herne’s touring company. Hadn’t the play opened in 1892, the very year the opera house had opened? However, as director, Albert had first dibs, and his choice was Victor Hugo’s 1830 swashbuckler, Hernani.

  Albert cast Hernani as I set to work editing the script and learning lines. The first read-through went well. And then, before the project had really begun, it was over. It was as if that derelict, leaking ark of a theater had awakened from her slumbers and said, Not now. It’s all too much, too soon. She may have been a grand old diva, but she was sensible. Her structural needs took precedence over her artistic appetites.

  The Colgate contingent was apologetic about pulling the plug and agreed to cover our expenses through August. One of the group, John Schoonmaker, a film enthusiast, suggested we make a movie. He and Albert sketched the plot of a horror movie, which they preferred to think of as a film noir. Sarah and I woul
d be in it, along with a hunky young local boy. Horror or noir, I was grateful to be doing it. However, still emotionally raw from the operation, I would drift too often out to the swing set in the dry, weedy backyard, my thoughts dark as I listened for the next plane to rev up.

  The simple plot: Mother and daughter in suburban tract house; mother becomes obsessed with young, muscle-bound bagger at the supermarket; various town and rural scenes as relationship sparks; mother rejected for younger girl, sets up meeting, and fatally stabs hunk under a full moon. Albert directing and John on camera got off on the blood and gore of it. Me, it took a bite out of my shaky self-esteem. Here I was, damaged goods, over the hill, rejected, no happy ending, reduced to turning in a cheesy portrayal of a demented Medea/Phaedra.

  I had made another short movie for a guy at the NYU film school, who I had met at the Actors Studio. Shot one midnight in an Upper West Side tenement, dressed in a clingy silk slip Grandmother Ruby had given me for my sixteenth birthday, I gazed across the rooftops and water towers and droned dreary monologues. Backlit, I’m sure I was virtually naked as I moved onto the fire escape, droned and gazed some more until it became clear that hurling myself into the trash cans below was the only way the movie was ever going to put an end to itself. I never did see either movie. I think my instinct told me that ignorance and amnesia were the only ways to play it.

  Time hung heavy that summer, and, with Sarah, I checked out houses for sale in the area. An old habit. For a couple of years before she married Harry, my mother sold real estate to give us “a few extras,” as she put it, although I was sure the situation was closer to the bone. A gutsy move for someone who had never had a job before. Neither tough nor good with numbers, she didn’t have much success, but for the first time, I noticed, she was proud of herself. Sometimes she would take me along to explore empty houses. Fun, but excruciating, because I was convinced we would never live in a real house again. This time, in upstate New York, the looking would be just for fun, or so I told myself.

  Back in New York, the one-year lease in Chelsea would be up in January. I put the furniture in storage, and Sarah and I moved back to 275. This time I didn’t hesitate. Unsure about what to do next, I was at a crossroad. I figured there could be a theater life for me after Earlville, but I was tired and my creative engines had slowed down. In March, when a Norwich realtor called about a house he thought I would like, though the impulse had faded, I drove up for a look.

  On a good day, Norwich is about five hours with a pit stop from the city. It lies between Binghamton and Utica in the Chenango Valley. On that first drive up Route 12 to Hamilton with Sarah and Albert, the very name Chenango had enchanted me—something about the scale of those gentle hills that embraced, rather than imposed themselves on, the broad valleys, hills that allowed just the right proportion between horizon and sky. Dairy country, lush, squeaky clean, and sweet smelling. Broad Street was solid and reassuring, unlike the Main Streets of many upstate New York towns in those years. An Americana dream: the Bon-Ton dress shop, the movie house, the Bluebird Café, the modern library, the county courthouse, the A&P, the Woolworth’s, the manicured town square with its requisite gazebo, the new Howard Johnson Inn that looked like a concrete block jail, and a jail that looked like an inn.

  Fortunately, or unfortunately, the house the realtor showed me was a good fit for us. Nothing suburban, the house was based on a Frank Lloyd Wright design of a low-budget, utilitarian house for the masses. Wright’s master plan had never materialized, but here was an example of it built in the fifties by a student of his. On a sparsely developed strip of Chenango Lake Road, on a hill two miles outside of town, it perched on an escarpment of enormous boulders. The house was modern in the Wright way: varied ceiling heights, slices of surprise windows here and there, indirect lighting, built-in furniture, radiant-hot-water floor heating. On three shallow acres, it had only four small rooms, one and a half baths, an annex for a den and guest bed, a detached garage, and a postage stamp–size lawn, no landscaping or flowers, stripped-down functional, zero maintenance. Far too modern and small for a Norwich family, it was perfect for outlanders like us. Original, yet humble. Price: $35,000.

  Clem, once again, took my word for it and asked only if we could afford it. I said we could put $5,000 down and get a mortgage that the realtor had assured me would be under $200 a month. Debt. That made us both shudder. Neither of us had ever owned anything big or ever owed anything. I was scared. Clem wasn’t, but he wondered if we really needed it, his criterion for most decisions. I told him I didn’t know, but I thought maybe we could give it a try. I was hedging. Of course we didn’t need it, but I was unwilling to admit it.

  Money aside, the most glaring disadvantage of the house—the elephant I refused to acknowledge—was its five-hour distance from the city. Who would use the house? And when? Summers, maybe; certainly not weekends. Would Clem ever go? Would I? I ducked and dodged the drawbacks, and Clem didn’t bring them up. That was the way it was between us. We danced around the hard questions. Small wonder that on the surface we seemed to glide so harmoniously. That seemed to be our priority, whatever the cost.

  During the next month I made a decision that I thought would justify our risky venture. It was time for the next experiment in living. What if Sarah and I moved there, at least for a year? Norwich felt like an answer, though I was unsure what my question was. I did know that nothing was happening as it was supposed to, either out there in a country mired in violence and discord, or in my body, or in my head. Why not a change? Why not ride on the momentum of the sixties and do the bread-baking, return-to-nature thing? We bought the house. Our local Chemical Bank laughed at our lack of credit history and turned us down. The Chenango Bank was more forgiving of our virginity and came through.

  Before our experiment could begin, there would be a brief interlude. Like fairy godparents, Larry Rubin (Bill’s brother) and his wife, Liz, offered us their house in the south of France for July. Yes, thank you. Sarah’s first trip to Europe. We would go to Nice by ship. In August we would take le train bleu to Paris. Sarah would travel in the old way, before those ways disappeared. At the last minute, Clem backed out. I hesitated, but only for a moment.

  So it was that Sarah and I spent the summer in a sumptuous aerie above Saint-Tropez on the terraced slopes of the vineyards. With a swimming pool, a daily housekeeper, and the Rubins’ car, she and I lived in a storybook. By day we lolled and explored and entertained a few visitors. By night we pretended to be grandes dames as we were served delectable dinners on the terrace under the stars, before adjourning to the living room to tackle our confounding jigsaw puzzle of the Eiffel Tower, which we were determined to finish before we left to “do” Paris and visit the real thing. And then, tan and well fed, we flew home.

  The hill up to Chenango Lake Road was so long and steep that in the space of two miles the weather and time would change—rain to snow, snow to ice, sunset to night. Darkness fell like a curtain as the road veered toward the lake. The winter of ’73–’74, the winter of recession in more ways than one. Oil dried up, and so did jobs and prosperity. Daylight saving time was extended through the winter, along with a fifty-mile-per-hour speed limit to conserve energy, and that was only the beginning.

  I bought a wood stove for the annex, just in case, and stacked cords of wood and bags of coal in the garage. I traded in the urban frivolity of our Mustang for a Subaru, a new, exotic name in cars. With its fuel efficiency and front-wheel drive, plus snow tires, shovel, bags of salt and ashes from the fireplace, it would get us up the curved, steep driveway, maybe. Hurricane lamps, stashes of candles and water, a first-aid kit, a wheelbarrow, a rake, a manual mower if spring should ever come, and a chain saw, having failed to gain mastery over the ax. Limits on heating oil, endless lines at the gas pumps, limits on gallons sold, gallon cans in the garage, just in case. In case of what? Mostly the unknown, which for me was country life, and for all of us, the ominous rumblings of the deep recession. In the local paper I rea
d of people hoarding gas and food and taking money out of the banks, and I stopped reading. The whole country was going dark—what more did I need to know?

  Sarah was entering fifth grade and her first public school. In the city, she had attended the progressive Manhattan Country School since she was three. Now, she was at a traditional, rural, white-bread school where she experienced a series of firsts: sitting at a regulation desk (kind of fun), standing each morning for the Pledge of Allegiance (never heard it before), raising her hand to go to the bathroom (hard to remember), learning lessons by rote (not so hot), and, of course, having to figure out how to fit in, make new friends, and deconstruct her wardrobe. Enter our new fashion boutique, the Sears catalog. As it was, my concerns about her adjustment came to naught. I should have known. Cheerfulness was in her nature; when something got her down, she bounced back so fast my heart would spin.

  I settled happily into my own new wardrobe, overalls. As for nesting, it took two minutes. Our loft furniture, always so at odds in the Chelsea apartment, fit perfectly into the new space. I installed two outdoor spotlights that played on the trees and boulders with the two large sculptures that graced them as if they were rooted there—a long, low, stainless-steel Caro and a raw-steel piece, an amalgam worked on by Clem, Tony, and Ken. At night in front of the large windows, Sarah and I sat in the two Eames chairs, put on rock and roll and played Sorry, Submarine, and Backgammon, or moved into the annex to watch the flickering TV screen and fall in love with Happy Days. That fall it was mostly Sarah and me. Except for a stalwart few, my car-less friends never did hazard the trek to Norwich.

  I bungled around on the piano, made bread that smelled luscious but never did taste like much, raked leaves, pruned everything prunable, strung up the loft hammock between two pine trees, tried to make friends with the mice, bats, and snakes, and failed, escaped into Henry James—a step up from my Edith Wharton binge in East Hampton a lifetime ago—looked out the window, and wished there was a view.