A Complicated Marriage

by Janice Van Horne

  Daylight and an overdose of coffee warmed my bones and restored the house to its generically benign self. Soon, our old friends Elaine Grove and Dan Christensen came by from their place down the road. Before we left to visit their studios, Elaine took pictures of Clem and me sitting outside at the back of the house. The photo she sent a few weeks later moved me with its simplicity and openness. It reminded me of a photo I had seen of Milton and Sally Avery that I had been drawn to because of their serene oneness. Now I see Clem and me: We look at each other; our hands touch. A tender moment that captures the depth of our connection. Wary, skeptic that I was, it had taken a lifetime to acknowledge, to fully own, that connection. Clem, who loathed the thought of family pictures on display, didn’t protest when I put the framed photo in the living room.

  On December 10, Clem and I left for Tokyo, where he had been invited to speak at Musashino University and participate in a seminar at the Metropolitan Museum. A routine jaunt for Clem, who had been to Japan several times, but it was my first visit to the Far East. It was also our first trip together in many years. Although Clem had often asked me if I wanted to accompany him on his many trips abroad, I had always demurred. Perhaps the memories of our earlier travels still flashed uneasy signals. But Clem found an intrepid travel companion in Sarah; starting at age twelve, she had accompanied him to South Africa, Israel, Russia, China, and, of course, Europe. Now, older and maybe wiser, I was sure Japan would be fine. After all, this would be a short trip, a week in Tokyo and then a few days in Kyoto, a special place for Clem and one he wanted to revisit with me.

  West meets East. So many surprises, even in those first hours. Though first class, the seats were hard and narrow, at least for a hulking American. I hated to think what coach would have been like. And the interpreter—the pilot spoke for fifteen minutes, the interpreter for fifteen seconds, an imbalance that would continue throughout our stay. As would the gender imbalance; except for me, all the passengers were men. Clem and I didn’t sit together; he was in the euphemistically designated smoking section. To my dismay, the dividing line was not front and rear, but right and left. On the plus side were the meals: symphonies of lobster, gray caviar, and morsels of exotic origin. By far the loveliest part of the journey was keeping pace with time. We had left at dusk and never lost the faint rosy glow across the horizon. And there was the inscrutable Arctic, its vast humps of glaciers embraced by the arc of the earth and a sky of pale blue silver. As the passengers slept, whenever I looked back at Clem I saw him reading, haloed in his solitary pinpoint of smoky light.

  Eighteen hours or so later, we were finally in our hotel room in Kokubunji, on the far outskirts of Tokyo. Clem slept, I couldn’t. I was still seething. As planned, we had been met at the airport by Teruo Fujieda, our host, and another university professor. The twist was, we would then be taking a train. Any other transport was impossible, they explained, what with traffic, etc. So it was that a short-of-breath, eighty-three-year-old man and an exceedingly pissed middle-aged woman had been force-marched through crowded corridors and tunnels in search of a train they seemed unable to locate.

  As I lay in our hotel room, I thought of our friend, the New York painter Kikuo Saito, who had assured me before we left what a fine time we would have: “Clem is a national treasure there.” More than once in the coming days I would think of those words, not to mention Japan’s renown for respecting its elders. Even the unflappable Clem was taken aback by the cavalier reception. After breakfast, he suggested we call Sarah, who, having just returned to New York from her term in London, had planned to join us for some sightseeing. We told her it didn’t look like that kind of trip and she should cancel her reservations.

  Late that afternoon we were taken to the university to meet our hosts before a special dinner at a country inn. As we left, Clem tripped on a shallow step and hit his forehead. A deep gash. The blood poured as I did my best to stanch it. He was unsteady, and it took three of us to get him into a taxi to a clinic. There, in a small house on a residential street, I held his hand as they gave him an anesthetic, covered his face with a white cloth, cut a hole in it, and worked through that. Then the stitches, the dressing. So quick, so gentle. To everyone’s surprise, and against all reason, Clem insisted on continuing with the dinner plan.

  Twelve or more sat around a low rectangular table in a private room. Clem and I were much the worse for wear, but I marveled that, as uncomfortable as he was sitting on the floor, he managed to get through the prolonged ten-course banquet. Though Clem ate little, I was in gastronomic heaven, as delicacy followed delicacy. I blessed Russ for our macrobiotic years and for my proficiency with chopsticks. It was also a feast of academics. I was reminded of an evening at Cambridge with Tony Caro. He had been invited to dinner at one of the schools and had asked if I would accompany him. So similar: the elitist air, the exclusion of women, the spurts of boyish banter and inside jokes, and, of course, the arcane ceremonies of the table. The big difference: At the inn there was no lively discussion. Girdled by formality, no one engaged Clem, except the university president, who asked a few ho-hum questions. Waves of merriment crested over us now and then from other rooms, but, sadly, none echoed back from ours.

  Then, as if there had been a signal, we were told, “It is over,” and in a flash, I was hauling Clem to his feet and we were at the exit, putting on our shoes. The interpreter had told me about a special garden, and for just a moment I took a detour. Fires blazing in ceramic pots over a path of moist stones; a pool alive with red-and-white-striped carp; the scent of citrus and spice; a water wheel creating a cascade in harmony with the music of chimes and clapping wood; and, conspiring above, an almost full moon. To the side were the dining rooms, where, outside each sliding paper door, there knelt a traditionally dressed and coiffed serving girl waiting to be summoned. I had found a treasure to take home.

  The next day when I changed Clem’s bandage, the wound looked fine and he was quite himself. His vaunted healing powers had served him well once again. During the day, which was sprinkled with media interviews, Clem asked Teruo, as he had before, to see the art of the students, something he reveled in and which he assumed would be part of the university visit. Again Teruo put him off: “There’s nothing worth seeing.” It had become clear that Clem had been invited solely for the pleasure of the faculty. Similarly, when I plaintively asked once again—like Chekhov’s Three Sisters, yearning for Moscow—if I might see something of Tokyo, perhaps some theater, I was put off with a vague “perhaps tomorrow,” as they firmly ushered Clem off to the hotel’s bleak cave of a bar and I headed out to wander the crowded, charmless streets of Kokubunji.

  At last, the day of Clem’s lecture. He had chosen to speak about morality in art as it related to art’s autonomy. Clem had asked earlier what I thought of it, and I had said it was fine, although they were probably hoping to hear about the art scene in New York. As it was, though the interpreter struggled at times, the audience was rapt and the Q & A went on for over an hour. I was drawn to the delicate beauty of the students’ faces and their spikes of hair reaching for the sky. And to my amazement, beyond a wall of windows, there was Mount Fuji, with its lopped crown, as if it had been decapitated by an angry samurai. And on its cusp teetered a crimson sun. Another perfect moment.

  Afterward, Clem was rushed by students with books to sign. A rock star. At the reception, we sat surrounded by faculty. Only a few students had been invited, and none was included in the circle. Again Clem asked to meet them; again it was simply not to be. That night, our last night in the outpost, Clem was again corralled into the bar by Teruo et al., this time until 4:00 AM. During our visit I had watched Clem get sucked dry by our hosts, his words swallowed by tape recorders. Teruo would get miles of publishing material from these sessions, as well as, I was sure, miles of conversation about “the nights I spent in the bars with Clem.” All the while, I was being sucked into my outrage.

  Early the next morning, we were driven to our hotel in downtown Tok
yo. Indeed, Teruo had been right; it did take hours. Clem would speak on a panel at the Metropolitan Museum, Tokyo’s museum of contemporary art. The next day we would be leaving. We had already canceled plans for Kyoto; Clem was drained, as was I. But for that one day, a weight lifted. I was in a city, and cities were my home. What a strange interlude Kokubunji had been, rather like someone coming to the United States for the first time and being held hostage in Newark. While Clem holed up in the bar with a new band of acolytes, I went off to a museum to see Japan’s traditional art.

  Later, the symposium went smoothly, Clem in good form despite his late-night debauchery. After a ceremonial tea for the participants, we dashed back to the hotel to meet Susumo Yamamoto, the director of the Fuji Art Gallery. An urbane, delightful antidote to academia, conversation sparkled rather than droned. How it came up, I don’t know, but it turned out we shared a birthday—same year, same day. A true shining knight, he took us on a tour of the Ginza and early the next morning sent his car and lovely assistant to take us to the airport. She shepherded us right to the gate. Sayonara.

  Nothing like a thirteen-hour flight to reflect on hard lessons. I may not have learned much about Japan in my week there, but I was disturbed about what I had learned about myself. I had been aware that Clem’s ability to physically handle alcohol had deteriorated over the years, but I was confident that I would be able to handle whatever might come. While in New York that was true, however, closeted as we had been in Japan, in a heartbeat I had become a battle ax prison guard, or, as Clem would so often say about other women, I had been “acting like a wife.” My codependency, that awful buzzword, had overpowered me; I had shown my need to control Clem in the name of protecting him, my inflexibility and inability to step back. Clem was used to the travel drill. I was out of practice, and the experience opened up feelings I hadn’t confronted in decades. I realized the extent of my anger, at Clem’s passivity and self-destructiveness and at myself for my lack of detachment. Teruo had become the target of my anger, but in fact he was just one more in a long string of insensitive, exploitive guys who wanted to score points. That, plus our isolation, had pushed Clem and me to our limits, each in our own way.

  Back in New York, we restored ourselves. I knew we would be fine, but I also knew that twenty years had passed since we had shared the day-to-day for any length of time, and I had been naive to think that I could pick up the threads and expect them to mesh seamlessly. I resolved to step up my meetings at Al-Anon, a program for family and friends of alcoholics. In November I had gone to my first few meetings and had felt instantly at home. The groups were mostly women. Daughters, wives, grandmothers of addicts—in every story there were pieces of my own. I came to think of this fellowship as one of intimate strangers, loving strangers. The anonymity opened me to a deeper level of self-honesty. Late in the day as it was for me, I wanted to learn how to live with an alcoholic and not lose my self, the self I had worked hard on for decades and didn’t want to risk losing now. I had managed to maintain detachment in L.A. with Russ when he drank, but this would be tougher. The weaving between Clem and me was dense and knotted over time.

  The first weeks of 1993 slipped by as I settled deeper into my routine: work on my “murder play,” frequent workshops, singing lessons, Al-Anon meetings, and domesticity and social life with Clem. I particularly relished the cold early-morning walks along the park to my sanctuary. At my desk, I lost myself in the grays, blacks, and whites of the winter landscape. Never once did I miss the Technicolor of L.A.

  However, in mid-February I did return for a staged reading of Legacy , one of the earlier plays I had written there. The days passed with rehearsals and seeing friends, the best of times. The reading evoked good response, and two directors interested in productions contacted me. Yet overall I felt out of touch, like the visitor I now was. As it happened, I left earlier than planned. Sarah had called; Clem was having breathing problems.

  Two days after my return I took Clem to the Lenox Hill emergency room. He, of the invincible Greenberg constitution, was admitted to the hospital by Robert Kutnick, a pulmonary doctor who had been recommended to us. Clem was put on oxygen, an IV of antibiotics, nebulizer treatments, and prednisone. He had all the tests; his heart was fine, his pulmonary function very low. Amazingly, even his liver was fine. For his age, he was in fine shape except for those damn lungs.

  Those few days in the hospital were calm, Clem dozing, reading The Life of Jesus. He talked about how scared he had been when he had awakened. “I was suffocating,” he said simply, but with an air of incredulity. Since I had known him, he had never been sick enough to take to his bed. Now I felt he was replaying the event in order to make it real. About the book, he called it “a detached view of Jesus’ pathetic story,” and added, “It always gets to me, disturbs me.” It clung to him for weeks. And why not? He’d had a brush with mortality. As for me, I fluttered like a novice nurse trying too hard to do the right thing. At night, we both veered off track. Clem’s phone calls were heavy with uncharacteristic fear and anger; I was filled with fear, for him and for me.

  And then he was home. The only memento was the intrusion of an oxygen compressor with long tubes to be used before bed and “as needed,” and a tall green cylinder of oxygen for emergencies. It stood like an ominous sentinel in the corner of the bedroom, a reminder that all was not as before. The first night home, instead of his usual book and a cigarette, he sat on the edge of the bed, breathing the oxygen, his hands folded. He said he just wanted “to savor feeling better.” He remarked on how “feeble” he felt, a new word that would come up often, and how he blamed the smoking and drinking. Sounding like a repentant gangster in a thirties movie, he said, “I thought I could play fast and loose with my body.” In turn, I gratefully seized those thoughts. They meant we would be on the same team. I reminded him of his favorite Bee Gees song, “Stayin’ Alive.” We could do it.

  During those posthospital weeks, we continued to do a lot of talking. He was dreaming a lot. Particularly vivid were the ones of Sol, his middle brother, whom he always referred to as the “good son,” the one who had given the most and gotten the least. He had contracted polio as a child, and it had affected the use of his right arm. Clem had always berated himself for not protecting Sol from his father’s dismissive treatment of him as the “damaged” son. Sol had died in 1987 of lung cancer, “the first to go.”

  And we were doing a lot of hugging. We had always been huggers, but these were long, clinging hugs. Another first: I felt needed by Clem. Not just as the passive “presence” he had always loved in his life, nor as the current slavey of health and hearth, but with an urgency, as a hands-on presence.

  Surprisingly soon, the familiar reasserted itself. No more medications, except for the “as needed” oxygen and the inhaler, albuterol, for episodes of shortness of breath. We both puffed away on our inhalers—I was now on two that I used daily—as we picked up our routines. For Clem, that meant smoking and drinking. I went to more Al-Anon meetings in hopes of controlling my outbursts of anger, which increasingly fractured my focus on my own life. Every day I stumbled over the Step One tenet that I was “helpless over alcoholism.” As many times as I said it, my subtext was Yes, but . . . Maybe if I . . . And I kept going back to meetings. After all, I was smart, I could learn, and I was motivated. Things had to get better, didn’t they?

  Late morning on March 29, I was at my desk, trying yet again to breathe fire into the tepid dialogue of Steve’s interrogation by the Norwich police, straining to hear the voices and let them lead me to their truth on the page. The phone rang. I picked it up, grateful for a respite. And our lives changed.

  A woman’s voice. “Janice Greenberg?” The name Janice always set off my official-business alarm. “The District Attorney’s office.” “Arrested.” “James Powers.” “Fraud.” I heard her, but I absorbed little. “No, that’s impossible. There must be some mistake.” I said all the things people say when something is unthinkable. Besides, her voic
e was too young, too innocent, to deliver such a dark message. Who is this girl who goes on and on? But my body heard. The blood boiled in my head; my skin quaked with cold. Slowly I pieced together what I didn’t want to hear: The funds we had given 555 to invest two years earlier were gone. We had been embezzled. Sarah had been victimized as well. We were to meet with the “girl,” an assistant DA, the next morning.

  Within seconds I had my folder of monthly statements from Powers, the lists of investments, so orderly: numbers, percentages, totals, and profits, not too big, not too small. Fake, all of them. A fantasy contrived to satisfy a gullible victim by a vicious con man with an oily, optimistic veneer. No, it couldn’t be. Trembling, I called one of the companies listed on the statement, then another. Dead ends. I had no proof of ownership; they had no record of my name or of Powers. Finally, one company tentatively acknowledged my name and asked for my mother’s maiden name. She said the name “Norden” was incorrect. I screamed at her; she disconnected.

  My body was still shaking, but I could feel the iciness of shock start to subside. And I could focus. It had taken such a short time, maybe half an hour, for the truth to sink in. The money was gone. The money from the last painting we had given to Emmerich to sell, the profit from my apartment sale. We had found ourselves with more money than we had ever had at one time, and I had thought it was time we invested it, tried to hold on to it. Instead, all of it was gone. I had been mugged once on a dark street in the West Village. It was like that. Quick. One minute you have something, the next minute, nothing. I turned off the computer and called Sarah. She had already heard. She was angry, so angry. Drawing resolve from her anger, I told her that I couldn’t just sit there, that I was heading down to Powers’s office. I had to see for myself.