A Complicated Marriage

by Janice Van Horne

  What a grim day. I felt abandoned. He had given up, walled himself up behind booze and cigarettes. What would the night bring? Would I have to call 911 again? Or would I not make that call? He wants to go, let him go. And on the heels of anger came the guilt.

  Waiting for sleep, I was six years old, hearing my father steal away in the night. How fearful I must have been of what would happen to me. After all, I must have done something, though I didn’t know what. And I must have clung to my mother, who, distraught with anger and grief, was not a good port in a storm. Oh, how that house must have shaken on its foundations that night. And soon my recurring nightmares began: a rhythmic circle of animals marching slowly in unison, faster and faster until they collided in a deafening chaos that awakened me, screaming unstoppable screams. My Freudian Sy said it was sexual; I called it a cry for a life jacket in a sinking house. So went my dark scenarios as I waited for Clem’s call in the night: “Jenny!”

  At the root of my foreboding was that I knew these were early days. I might not have settled into the illness drill, but it was becoming clear that the only thing I could count on was that every day would be different. In comparison, the embezzlement seemed like a breeze. It happened once—slam bam, the deed was done. The rest was mopping up the mess. This would be recurring shocks as I lived in wariness, waiting one minute at a time for the next tremor.

  Not even a month passed after Clem’s return from Roosevelt when we were back at Lenox Hill. That morning he had been very weak, unable to eat. I knew that if I was to get him there in a cab, we would have to go immediately. This time he stayed for six days as they dosed him with antibiotics, prednisone, oxygen, a nebulizer, a nicotine patch, and Haldol to keep him sedated. As before, the days were calm, but at night, after I left, the calls would come. “Where am I? Why am I here?” The nurses called it “sundowning.”

  I could imagine the panic when the safety net of the hospital’s daytime routine fell away and, abetted by disorienting drugs, one went into freefall. I thought of Friedel that long-ago summer in East Hampton, calling us in the night as he waited for kidney stones to pass, so sure he was in a prison camp and would not live to see the dawn. Finally I took Clem home with Dr. Kutnick’s prognosis as a souvenir: “Each episode will be more severe and last longer.” I didn’t need to hear that.

  Clem, thin and ashen, sat on the bed. “I don’t know what to do with myself.” This was yet another Clem. I trusted his mood would be as transitory as the deep purple blotches on his arms from the IVs and prednisone. But I would have preferred my insouciant Clem, who, instead of saying, “You,” when I asked him what he wanted, would have said, “A drink.”

  I had barely settled Clem when Merrill Lynch called. The IRS had imposed a lien for unpaid taxes on the money market account I had always kept separate from Powers to cover immediate expenses. I called Chemical Bank. No surprise—the gate had closed there, too. The accountant had said it would be only a matter of time; nonetheless, it felt like a knife in the back. I hadn’t been on the lookout; my thoughts had been elsewhere. Such an outrage, first a victim of Powers, now of the IRS. And always a one-two punch: What happened to us happened to Sarah. But it could have been worse. Early on I had removed about $3,000 from Merrill and stashed it in our new “bank,” a pale gray envelope behind the A–L volume of the OED on Clem’s bookshelf. From now on I would be paying bills with money orders and I would cash any incoming checks at a storefront on Amsterdam Avenue. It would be hard to remember that the liens would be lifted when the facts were documented by the court. Mostly, I felt that I had been raped twice.

  That evening, after lamb chops and a hit of Sein feld with Clem, I knew it was time to get down to the business of financial wherewithal. I thanked God for Social Security, Medicare, and AARP. My own insurance premiums were high, but they covered Clem’s medications. I made a list of our essential expenses, and another, woefully short list of our anticipated income from royalties and reprint fees. There would be no more lecture fees. To our “bank” I added five gold coins that my grandmother had given me over the years and my mother’s diamond bracelet, rarely worn in recent years. The last time I had hocked it, I had been twenty-four. I and the times might have changed, but the Century Pawnshop was there. I wondered if it would still support us for a month or two. So much for my treasure trove—what about my real asset, me? I would get a job. Surely someone would hire me. Another list. From audacious to hallucinatory, it ranged from Alex Liberman, head of publications at Condé Nast, to Nan Ahern Talese, the much-heralded editor with whom I had gone to grammar school.

  Alex and I had shared art-world space for decades. Knowing how much he enjoyed the flirting game, I had never taken personally the twinkle in his eye and his warm hands. But now I thought, what the hell, the worst he could do was turn off the twinkle and freeze me out. As for Nan, the possibility that she would remember me after fifty years was indeed hallucinatory. Although both married to writers, we had moved in separate orbits, as we had even as children. She had been the class “star,” I one of the “others.” Of course I remembered her—the sixth grader whose sled the boys would pull up the hill, with her on it. “I hate her,” I had written in my diary at the time, even as I adored her.

  And there was the art. As watered-down as the collection had become over time, it was our major asset. No more Newman, Hofmann, or Gottlieb; they and their kin had been turned over to dealers or Christie’s in order to house, feed, clothe, and school the family since the art-market bonanza had ignited in the sixties. But there were still a few paper works from the all-stars, a slew of predominantly second-generation pieces, and an abundance of sculpture and representational art. What to do? I called three dealers for their advice.

  Larry Rubin, now director of Knoedler, came by to talk to us. We had known him and his family for years, but that morning there was no small talk. He was grim. The outlook of the market, especially for the art that we had, was not good. His suggestion: We should borrow money and sit out the slump. And, poof, he was gone. Borrow? The word was anathema to Clem and me. The idea of owing someone money was out of the question. I had learned from Clem on day one that when a bill arrived it was to be paid immediately. Nor did Clem lend money; when approached, he would give it as a gift and forget about it.

  André Emmerich stopped by next. He was more optimistic. He thought we would do well at auction, preferably with a group of the most “desirable” pieces, offered as being “from the Greenberg collection.” It sounded risky to me to put our primo art out there all in one shot and hope for the best. It wasn’t going to happen. However, we appreciated his advice, his warmth, and his offer to be of help in any way he could. I also appreciated the reminder of how valuable the Greenberg provenance was.

  Bill Acquavella was the next to visit. We knew him, but not as well. He was genial and to the point. In effect, he said, “Whatever you do, don’t cherry-pick what you have, sell nothing, keep the collection together as the Greenberg Collection, and avoid auction. It would be better to offer it to an institution.” After he left, I knew immediately that was the way to go. Clem agreed. How it would happen, or when, I had no idea, but it was the right solution for the long term. Short term, we would simply have to get by. At least now I had a direction.

  Those were the good days, when I felt no situation was so bad it couldn’t be fixed. But sometimes my mind and body would shake and Clem would say his usual, “It’s only money.” Once, he asked, “Do we have enough to cover everything we need?” My answer was, “Yes.” And I explained that his Social Security covered the $800 rent and there was enough behind the OED for food, etc. Subject closed. Clem, my endearing, enduring socialist. He soothed me with his commonsensical ways, at least until the next time I would hurtle through the “what ifs” and “what thens.” Especially as I waited for sleep and the daylight, which would bring the palliative chores that would keep us healthy that day.

  July was a time of relative normalcy for us. Clem, though short of breath
, was able to go out when the spirit moved. Most of the time he sat at his desk, handled his endless correspondence, and read. He ate, drank, and smoked. He talked on the phone and people came by, though he never took the initiative. As for me, life had become simpler. Stripped of all the worldly busy-ness that free time and money afforded, I lived on a short leash and chose my activities carefully. I undertook what I hoped would be my last curatorial job and began the process of making a detailed inventory of the art. I would then need to label the photos and have new ones taken of the others. It was good to be back at the computer. When it was done, I would get a few appraisals and we could start thinking about a price. But that was all in the future. Meanwhile, the activity of just working on a plan gave me a more balanced perspective of our financial problems.

  Then the respite was over. On August 3, I took Clem back to the Lenox Hill ER. Weak, breathless, nothing else for it. This time there was no bed available, and I spent the rest of the afternoon shuttling between a stool by his gurney in a hallway and what had to be the smallest, dreariest waiting room in the city. Eventually, they stowed him in an alcove of the ER for the night. When I returned in the morning he was in a small room with three other patients. Sedated and on the usual regime of oxygen and IVs, he seemed all right. He would be discharged the next day.

  I went to keep a Plaza lunch date with Jennifer, a celebration of her recovery from her double mastectomy. She had come through so beautifully and was cheerfully making plans for reconstructive surgery. While with her, I checked our answering machine. Dr. Kutnick had left a message: Clem, wanting to check himself out, had tried to get dressed and had fallen. When I got there I was told that he had fractured his pelvis and that there would be no surgery. Instead, they would put a pin in his leg and he would be in traction for approximately three weeks. Yes, eventually he would be able to walk.

  Those were the facts. I had no time to absorb it all. Clem, who had the highest pain threshold known to man, was now in severe pain. I asked for medication. I screamed for medication. The nurses were stones. Evidently no orders had been left. I demanded to see a resident. At last a white coat turned up and authorized something. Still raging, I went to admissions, explained the circumstances, and demanded that Clem be moved out of the ward. Something must have clicked, because he was transferred to a palatial private room overlooking Park Avenue, replete with plush chairs, real food, china, stemware . . . at least for two days. Then it was back to the trenches.

  That first night Clem was in traction, strung up like a chicken, leg in the air. They assured me the pin didn’t hurt. How could it not? The sight of him broke me; I kept ducking into the bathroom to cry. I was afraid that if they saw me, they would clap me into the psycho ward. I finally went home.

  The next morning I arrived to find him calmer, but tied to the bed rails. I untied him. Once again I was screaming. Full-out war. A resident explained that he had tried to get out of the apparatus—well, who wouldn’t have?—and he was now on a small dose of morphine. But all day his restlessness was only a millimeter below the surface, like my hysteria. Clem desperately wanted to sit, but the weights kept pulling him down. Over and over he called for me to lift him, but all too soon he was down again. Finally, a nurse said that with the traction they should have installed a trapeze to pull himself up with. Followed by those now-familiar words “You’ll have to have an order.” The comedy continued, and it was evening before the thing was finally hooked up. Clem was too weak to use it on his own, but together we managed to keep him vaguely upright. A helpful night nurse suggested a bed pad that would keep him from sliding. No, no order necessary. I had learned that it would take a village to solve a simple problem. That was day two.

  Soon we settled into our quarters, where, I assumed, we would be for the duration of Clem’s healing. Fretter that I was, to my surprise I never doubted that there would be a healing. Perhaps I used up my fretting quotient during the day-to-day skirmishes or at night when, sleepless at 4:00 AM, I would slip into the abyss of dark thoughts and bad dreams.

  We were in a dim, approximately seven-by-eight-foot cubicle separated by a curtain from Mr. Beckman, his starched, chatty private RN, his often visiting, coiffed and buffed wife, and his window. In a matter of a few days we had been shunted from loading dock to steerage to first class to third class. I say we, but Clem noticed little. And I soon got used to it. The days were long, sometimes from ten to eight, with Sarah spelling me when she could. I put out the word, but it was August in New York, the city a desert, the friend pool in short supply.

  When people did come, I was always shaken by the initial dismay on their faces. To see Clem through their eyes distorted my reality, which was that whether I was in that cubicle or in my bed at night, I was one with Clem. I was partnered with him through erratic test results and bodily functions, with him on the uncertain ground that in an hour would shift from one step forward to two steps back: changes in his eyes, from clear to cloudy to deranged; in his skin, from chalky to yellow to pink; and in his mind, from coherent to distressed to angry to delusional to comatose. I lived in the minutiae of him, while others could see only the barbaric nature of traction—and indeed it was barbaric—and that the man they had known was lost, probably forever. Some came only once. The most stalwart came regularly and came to accept what was. They were my lifesavers, who seemed to understand that Clem was there, somewhere—he was just on a long trip.

  The ultimate nonbeliever was Dr. Kutnick’s backup. Following a crisis caused by dehydration—why had that been allowed to happen?—he said to me flat out, “He won’t last another week on that traction,” and turned on his heel. I reported the Harbinger of Doom to Kutnick and steered clear of further encounters. As much as I hated to admit it, like my stepmother guarding my father, I, too, had become a Gorgon at the Gate.

  The weeks passed. Those hours by his bedside, both of us bathed in fluorescent light that turned us into mud-green creatures of bad dreams. I read, I wrote in my journal—the dumping ground of my anguish—and I made endless lists of questions that I would hurl at any doctor who passed by: Would his “good” leg atrophy, shouldn’t he have a circulation machine, why wouldn’t the bedsores heal, couldn’t the traction be reduced from forty pounds, would his mind ever . . . ? There were few answers, and, caught in the abstruse machinery of the hospital, I continued to run in circles of ignorance. However, I did come to accept the necessity of restraints, which were used during the bad nights, when he would rip out his tubes and even his catheter. I blamed everything on the constant fiddling with drugs: up this, lower that, changing combinations of Percocet, Ativan, Haldol, Restoril . . . I tried to chart it, but gave up. No matter what, it was never right. I often prayed for the courage to trust the doctor, but failed and continued my vigil. And each time Clem would call out, “Jenny!” as if I weren’t right there, it was a stabbing reminder that, as much as I believed he would come through, for now he was lost to me.

  In fact, Clem had three states of being. Sometimes, for a moment in the morning, he was “there,” and I might even read him a bit of the Times. At the other extreme, he was “out.” Most often he was in the middle ground, suffused with the spell of whatever was dripping into him. It was then, bored with my own thoughts, that I took to chronicling my storyteller’s long narratives, which had two central themes: war and travel. He talked of being a casualty “because I am the only man and there is a war.”

  “Where?” I asked.

  “Inside.”

  He was often in an airport (he loathed airports) going to L.A. (he wasn’t so keen on L.A., either) or at Bennington (he liked Bennington). The snippets: “We weren’t told we were going abroad . . . That man has a baby pack on his back . . . We’re on the wrong airline.” Or, “Get into the kitchen. Get a weapon . . . How did they get hold of us? Do they have Sarah, too? What do they want? Do they have the picture? They should know it’s only art. We’re in the Northwest . . . this is prison.” One day it was funerals: “My grandmother Eva
, my father’s mother, I am sixteen [the age Clem was when his mother died suddenly of a mastoid infection] . . . It’ll be my funeral when the death rattle starts . . . It’s inappropriate for me to be laid out in a bed . . . It takes something away from Bill [Rubin] for me to be buried at the same time . . . At Bill’s funeral we drank ourselves cockeyed [Bill would die in 2006, at seventy-eight].” Of his “lost” son, Danny: “He’s been abducted into a cult. He can’t get out.” Or he was dying, most often on a train to Baltimore: “But I push it away.”

  August 22, Clem veered abruptly into pneumonia. Different floor, traction off. He had been coughing a bit, his white-blood-cell count went up, and within an hour, breathing was difficult, and that was that. Sarah and I were there, later joined by Annie and Jim Walsh and Sarah’s best friend, Ruthie Mayer. Clem was comatose, the bed raised, his breath labored, antibiotics pouring into him. We waited through the night. It was so sudden. I was dazed. This can’t be happening, he had a broken pelvis, he was healing, we were supposed to be going home. The hospital corridor was alive, TVs blaring, lights on, the nurses loud, alternately peremptory and boisterous, trolleys rattling like freight cars. Jarring my cold insides. An old woman, white hair down her back, her open gown floating behind her, sang tunelessly as she wandered up and down the hall, clacking her gold mules. A Times Square of infirm insomniacs. Did they sense death on the floor, or was it the norm?

  By morning, Clem rallied. And why not, we laughed. This was Clem. He was alert and for a moment even knew where he was. I wondered if the last weeks had been a dream. Dr. Kutnick dispelled any such thought. Clem had responded well to the antibiotics, but next time that might not be the case. Right out, he told us that he had thought Clem would die the night before; however, he had been “salvageable.” This time he would be “dischargeable” from the hospital. I was appalled by the jargon and all the “this times.” Hell, I had always known that, hospital or home, this was a time of no guarantees. What I now knew for sure was that Clem hadn’t stopped fighting.