A Complicated Marriage

by Janice Van Horne

  But there wasn’t. The trees had grown up and taken away what once had been a view “all the way to the Catskills.” So our neighbors Al and Doris Velake said. Al, barrel-chested, ham-fisted, with a face as broad and gnarled as a tree, was a retired steel worker on the railroads that had once brought prosperity to the valley, and even to Earlville. Terse and pragmatic, he lived in the present. I thirsted for the past. Our conversation sputtered and stalled. I explored the ruins of the grand hotel that had once stood on the far side of Chenango Lake, a quarter mile down the road. He said, “You’ll get shot doing things like that.”

  He laughed when I nailed up POSTED signs during hunting season. “People around here shoot where they feel like shooting,” and with sly delight showed me his freezers full of venison and lord knows what. Like David Smith, he liked to swagger and shock “the little lady,” and, as at David’s, I choked on a few mystery pies around their knotty-pine dinette set. Protective and condescending, I appreciated the former when it came to trapping and annihilating the critters that came too close, and put up with the latter. Doris was a bookkeeper at the shoe factory, which was threatening to close. A full-time office worker and a full-time housekeeper. It stirred my feminist hackles, but I knew enough to keep my mouth shut. I kept scratching for common ground and not finding it.

  When Clem came up in October, that changed. Doris—shades of my mother—gussied up to welcome the “new man in the neighborhood.” And Al and Clem forged a lasting bond. They were of an age, each with a robust curiosity about all and sundry. They both liked booze and cigars and the Bible. The Jew and the Catholic—here was the book they both knew well. They talked, argued, and reread it together. The perfect complement: Al educated Clem on nature and the “how-tos” of the arcane world of washing machines, electric stoves, fuse boxes, et al., and Clem introduced Al to the world of art. Wouldn’t you know, Al had a veritable metal junkyard out back and a shed packed with welding equipment. In time the erstwhile philistine who had shaken his head in disapproval (“What will people think?”) when I hung a row of Jack Bush prints along the hallway would turn his hand to the making of sculpture. Over time, Al would come to know all the artists who visited Norwich, especially Ken, Jules, Friedel, and so many more.

  I wished that Clem had been there with us. But he wasn’t. He was a part-timer. There was something about a house that spoke of family to me, a whole family. Living in a New York apartment, I had never thought about it that way. But now the isolation exaggerated our distance and I wanted to be closer to him. I became aware of needing him in a new way. I began to understand what Clem meant when he would so often say, “I love your presence,” a phrase I had always disliked because I saw it as inert, even dismissive. I began to feel the deep resonance of “presence” and what his presence meant to me.

  Fortunately, the more time he spent in the house, the more he liked it. His visits became more frequent, especially after he discovered that Norwich Pharmaceuticals—Norwich’s economy floated on the bounteous pink seas of Pepto-Bismol—ran a commuter service once a day between LaGuardia and the local mini-airport. And, of course, Sarah and I would drive down occasionally for a hit of the city. But, for all that, Clem wasn’t really there.

  In November I reached out to Chris Foster, whom I had met during the Earlville summer. She belonged to the Norwich community theater group and suggested I become a member. I exchanged my overalls for a skirt and attended the next meeting of their membership committee. I answered a few questions, and they then asked me to wait in another room while they made their decision. I flashed on the Criminal Club in the sixth grade when, at Nan Ahern’s house, after we hung out and scarfed food, they told me to stay downstairs while they met in her bedroom to decide whether I would be allowed to remain in the club or not. The coup de grace: “While you’re waiting, wash the dishes.” Deep in soapsuds and tears of humiliation, I obeyed. When my “best friends” came downstairs, they told me I was out. The reason? There were now boy-girl parties, and the boys didn’t like me.

  My flashback was on the button. When Chris emerged from the meeting, she told me that I hadn’t been accepted. Later she called and said they had been threatened by “the New Yorker” who would want to take over. I laughed and told her they were probably right. But more seriously, I added, I had counted on it and needed a connection. Chris had a new plan.

  I would work with the drama department at the high school as a volunteer coach/assistant director/whatever on their productions. I was grateful. That year I assisted with The Music Man and Bells Are Ringing, helping the kids develop their characters and doing scene work. I also initiated a small drama club where we did improvisations and worked on short plays that could be presented at various assemblies and school functions.

  Fine, but not enough. I got together with the Colgate group at the Opera House. The architectural department of Cornell was now on board, and at least the roof was patched for the winter. We tossed around ideas about how to use the one small storefront that was habitable. I suggested a crafts store, which might pay the utilities until spring. I visited the big Veterans Administration home just south of Norwich. Every crocheter, knitter, needlepointer, every egg carton artist and bead stringer—I was in awe of them all. My little consignment store would be their Fifty-seventh Street art gallery.

  Between Thanksgiving and Christmas, I went for a few hours every day, swaddled in my army surplus jacket that I had lived in at Bennington, and nipped brandy from my flask as I waited for my seductively arrayed treasures to fly off the shelves. A good day was $20; a bad day was $5 out of my pocket for whatever I couldn’t live without. A cockamamie idea in a non-town of eight hundred and only the post office across the street to provide “walk-in traffic,” the more disgruntled souls muttering, “The best thing would be if the whole block burned to the ground.” I didn’t care. I knew why I was there. I was paying my respects to the theater I had fallen in love with at first sight.

  And then there were the fossil rocks. I didn’t know what fossils really were until I literally tripped over them while gathering wildflowers along the back roads. My interest shifted quickly to the rocks and their messages of glacial drift. I looked out at the boulders that our house sat on and saw them for what they were, precious gifts from the receding glaciers. My Piscean nature relished living on the erstwhile bottom of the sea, which had left its imprints for me to discover. Soon I was seeking out the abandoned shale pits in the hills. Beer bottles and condoms told of an active nightlife, but during the day they held the chill and stillness of tombs. In this sedimentary Mecca, I sorted out the gems from the dross. The most common were those with traceries of shells and cones and what might have been insects, or not. The best were the stones with the intact shells themselves. The naming of them interested me little, the millions of years they harbored was all. Each trip I gathered as many as I could carry and piled them by the garage. Al scoffed; they were “a dime a dozen, a confounded nuisance.” I saw power and beauty and had a plan. I would build a low wall of them along the front path. My own Stonehenge.

  But the wall would have to wait. Winter closed in one day and would stay to deliver an ice storm on Easter Sunday before it was banished on tax day by a purple crocus outside my kitchen window. In the lowering darkness of a house that was never warm enough, I watched the conclusion of the Watergate saga as the indictments finally fell on Nixon’s inner circle of thugs in their smug suits. I watched Nixon deflate like a balloon as impeachment loomed. I watched the last-ditch maneuvers of the Vietnamese as they tried to clean up the mess we had left them with. I watched as if these events were happening on a distant planet.

  Closer to home, the toilet acted up. I called a plumber, a genial older man, and made him a cup of coffee and sat on the edge of the tub to chat as he prodded and tinkered. Born in Norwich, he had never gone to New York City and never wanted to go. He told me about his wife, who the last few months had taken to sitting at the kitchen table all day. He would leave in the morning
, and when he came home she was still there in her wrapper. He didn’t know what to make of it. I did. I could see the kitchen, the dirty dishes, the tick of the wall clock in the shape of a teapot, the old chenille robe, the blankness of her.

  Those winter days, that dark place was in me, too. I felt its tug sometimes when my restless energy ebbed at the end of the day. The woman, a still life at her kitchen table, had succumbed. I empathized with the plumber, murmuring the bromides that are, or are not, reassuring, and suggested the basic anodynes: a doctor, a priest, a friend who could break her isolation. I ventured to tell him something I had learned from my own experience, that one didn’t have to be isolated to feel isolated.

  The toilet was an easy fix. For the rest, who knew? The plumber’s wife left me with fantasies of the women’s group I would start where we would talk about the problems and solutions of daily life, where we would learn that we had a voice and that we could be heard and know we weren’t alone. My own get-real voice always broke in: Who does that interfering New York bitch think she is, and since when do six years of analysis qualify her to be anything but a certifiable nutcase? My consciousness-raising impulses slunk away in defeat.

  Sometime during that winter, Broad Street slowly lost heart. It was as if enterprise and prosperity had stolen away in the night, leaving dusty storefronts in their wake. So much for my bright and thriving town. Seems a barracks-like shopping center had popped up a mile north. “Progress,” the local paper called it.

  And sometime during that winter, the depression I knew I was experiencing deepened. It was different from the way I had felt the years after we had married when, despite my loss of “self,” I knew I was at the beginning of my life and somehow, some way, the heaviness would lift. Now, my lights had gone out. I had no sense of a future. For the most part, the feelings were masked. I knew too well how to do that. I didn’t get sick or sit at the table all day in my wrapper. I relied on my energy and the beauty around me. But the darkness was there.

  I remembered what an interim analyst, whom I’d seen only twice during the end of my loft days, had told me: “There’s a spine of depression around which life is organized after the loss of a parent before the age of five.” Her words seared my brain as if they were a brand on a carcass of defective meat. In effect she was telling me I was forever scarred because a douche bag daddy couldn’t keep his prick in his pants. Who the hell was this Park Avenue bitch with coiffed hair and polished nails?

  There I’d been, a thirtysomething hippie living in a loft with her daughter and her eighteen-year-old boyfriend, feeling at the end of one life without another in sight. I did the only thing I knew how to do—I slammed the door on the messenger and buried the message. It would have helped if I had also known what would become common knowledge, that the traumatic loss of hormones following a hysterectomy, especially a radical hysterectomy, can cause clinical depression. No one had even told me that, despite the Premarin, I would experience symptoms of menopause, a word barely spoken at the time.

  Spring brought the mud and my ardent affair with my chain saw. I took to walking through the patch of woods below the boulders. Annoyed by the dense underbrush, I decided to clear it out. Starting with loppers, I quickly graduated to the chain saw. I loved the noise, the efficient speed of it, the power it gave me. Master of my domain, I was soon cutting down saplings, anything in my path. The debris piled up. Al, muttering his disapproval, gave me some old oil drums that would do for burning and long hoses that extended from the house to the cans. Just in case. Some days, from the time I dropped Sarah at the bus stop until it was time to pick her up, I would be “working.” I was cleaning that small bit of land as if I were vacuuming the living room. I liked the mindlessness, the physical labor, a new way to use myself up and see the results each day. But of course there were no results. Every day I cleared, and every night nature outpaced me. Until the day the usually sanguine Sarah came home from school, looked down at her chain saw–wielding mother stoking her fires, and said, “When are you going to stop?” As I always did with Sarah, I listened.

  One day after my drama club, I was summoned to the principal’s office for a “word” concerning my “fraternization” with students. Apparently someone had reported seeing student cars parked outside my house. The principal, a nice man, was uncomfortable about mentioning it. I was wide-eyed with innocence and “regrets for any misunderstandings.” We parted amicably. But I wondered if the accusation would have been leveled at me if I’d had a husband in residence. For the mysterious informant, I must have become the femme fatale with the “strange” marriage. As absurd as I thought the incident, I was creeped out. Shades of the rednecks in Woodstock. I also felt I had been slapped down again, as I had been by the community theater.

  But soon there were graver concerns. The town was simmering with the disappearance of a sixteen-year-old high-school student, Wendy Cooper. As days, weeks, passed, murder was in the air. Investigations narrowed, and five seniors, one of whom I knew and liked, were questioned. Steve was the boyfriend of Roberta, who was in my drama group. She and I had become friendly during the year, and as her feelings for Steve deepened and her relationship with her parents deteriorated, I became a confidante. It was the time-old Romeo and Juliet imbroglio engendered by a stern, inflexible father who forbade any contact between them, and a mother who was sympathetic but ineffectual. One place they managed to meet was in the drama group. I got to know them both, and they were wonderful together. Of course, Steve’s being questioned by the police certainly didn’t improve their prospects. But we were confident it would blow over. Surely Wendy had simply run off and would come back. It happened all the time.

  When Clem called to chat one afternoon in early June, I heard myself say, “I’m coming back. I want to get a job, a real job, and earn money.” I heard my clarity. No days of pondering, no weighing of pros and cons. At that moment, I simply knew: It was time. Clem wasn’t surprised. As much as he had come to like the house, he had never thought my experiment in living would last. I asked Clem if he knew anyone who might help. Anyone, that is, outside the art world. For a moment he was stymied, then he said that he had met “a man in commerce” recently. I loved Clem’s “in commerce,” always the precise word at the ready. And it was true; he really didn’t have occasion to know many businesspeople. He said he would invite the man around for a drink so that I could meet him. We continued to talk of other things, all so casual, but I had to sit down because my world had just shifted.

  Almost immediately, I felt a weight lift from me. Sarah’s reaction was mixed. I was surprised. I had assumed she would be happy to be going “home,” but I had underestimated how much she had settled in. We talked it through during the next weeks, and I knew it would be all right. But I realized how much easier it made my life to believe that she felt as I felt. I knew better, but I fell into that parental trap too often and vowed not to make that mistake again. Once again, Sarah was a good teacher. I returned the oil drums to Al, and, as if on cue, my chain saw “disappeared” from the garage. I was certain a handyman who had recently done a few odd jobs had helped himself to it. I considered confronting him, but when I thought of his tumbledown house in town, stuffed with children, I wished him well instead.

  The following week, Clem did pull the man of commerce out of his hat, and I did go down to meet him. Charles Mandel, by name, he sat on our couch, drink in hand, and asked what I would like to do. I said, “Anything at all. I think I would be a good waitress.” Unabashed, he suggested I come to his office at a media company—whatever that was—and we would talk about what I might do there. Saying I would come by in a few weeks after Sarah’s school let out, I took his card and rushed off to the theater. It was as if the details didn’t matter. The decision to move on was all—the rest would follow.

  When I did call him, Charlie told me the media company had folded and he was currently renting an office in an advertising agency and selling space—again, whatever that meant—and he had not
hing to offer me. As if I hadn’t heard him, I said I would drop by when I was next in the city.

  Clem happily settled into the Norwich house for the summer with his portable typewriter, his seersucker short-sleeved shirts and old khakis, his Dopp kit smelling of neat’s-foot oil, his sable shaving brush and wooden bowl of English shaving soap that smelled of the forest, and the OED and sundry books. Clem didn’t have a lot of props, but those he had were choice. In time, he would come to use the place often, staying for longer and longer stretches. It was clear why Norwich worked for him and not for me. He brought his world with him wherever he went. In addition to his props, his work and coterie of attentive and persistent friends were sure to follow. More fundamentally, Clem was complete unto himself. He, like Sarah, was at home in the world—that innate quality that he prized so highly. I was not so fortunate. Too often, I felt like a stranger in a new place, starting from scratch and pasting together a life that would suit me.

  Now I was about to do it again. During that early summer, I had one foot in Norwich and the other in New York. I would drop by Charlie’s “office”: one room, one desk, two chairs, and one secretary outside the door. He would dredge up tasks for me, mostly related to half-hour television shows he was putting together for a friend who owned a cable station on Long Island. My most ambitious effort was a kids’ game show I dreamed up, based on charades, called Be a Where. In a week I put together a format, hired two actor friends to emcee, taped some catchy music, “borrowed” a bunch of ten-year-old summer-school kids, bused them to the studio, fed them at McDonald’s, and taped the “show.” It was tatty, but who would’ve thought—I actually did it. The basics of TV, like the basics of being an electrician and carpenter in the loft, were just common sense. And so another bastion of the arcane hit the dust. But the next day when Charlie asked, “What do you know about harness racing?” I said, “Forget it.”