A Complicated Marriage

by Janice Van Horne

  After I had hooked him up to the oxygen tubing that would stretch to the living room, he would make his grand entrance on his walker. However, these efforts meant an expenditure of precious air, and most days motivation went on hiatus. On one such afternoon, our painter friend Jeanne Wilkinson dropped by. Clem lolled on the bed. We drew up chairs and chatted. Jeanne asked Clem if he would mind if she did a sketch of him. As a lifelong charcoal sketcher himself, he was pleased. As she took out her pad, Clem matter-of-factly asked, “Do you want me nude?” After much mirth, not shared by Clem, he kept his nightshirt on.

  A far less pleasant visit was that of a Harvard professor and his graduate students. Seduced by his fancy titles, the polite formality of our preliminary exchanges, his solicitude in regard to Clem’s health, and of course the aegis of Harvard, we agreed to a two-hour “field trip.” Clem had no objections—after all, art talk, students, just his thing. The group arrived, a bit larger than I had anticipated, but everything seemed in order.

  Assuming all would go well, I went off for an hour or so to an Al-Anon meeting. I returned to a scene out of Animal House: all the lights on, overflowing ashtrays in every room, everyone boozing, and in the smoke-filled bedroom, Clem, bleary on Scotch, surrounded by students, sucking oxygen. Outraged, I ordered them to open every window, put the glasses, bottles, and ashtrays in the kitchen, replace the furniture where it had been, and get the hell out.

  Yes, this sort of thing was run of the mill. Yes, I behaved once again “like a wife.” But this was an indignity on a scale that was incomprehensible to me. As for the students, I was sure they had much to chortle about. And the smarmy professor? I was sure he would slither his way to the heights of academe.

  During the fall, Clem had routinely put off speaking requests, but there was one engagement that had been on the calendar for some time and that he was reluctant to cancel. The New York Public Library had a special series of appearances by “distinguished authors.” The venue was compelling; for Clem, as for all aspiring New York intellectuals, the Forty-second Street Library was where he had been nourished. Joining the ever-resilient Art and Culture, the last of Clem’s four volumes of collected essays and criticism had been published in 1993. Now his life’s work was available to all and he would be honored, not only as an art writer in an art context, but as an author. But, as with Paris—though now because of more stringent health problems—it was not to be.

  For the most part we inched forward, the waters uncharted. We had never been so encapsulated, our life together having always been such a crowded place. The only other occasions had been those dread driving trips, especially the three-month European odyssey closeted in the mini-Simca, as Clem searched for art gold and came up empty and I searched for togetherness and found loneliness.

  Now, we had taken on the coloration of an old married couple. As he had done since the day he had been fired from Commentary, Clem continued to do only what he wanted to do. In recent years, when people had asked about his writing, he would say, “I suffer from inertia.” Now, should someone ask, he would just shrug. But no one really asked. As for me, I tended to his needs, anticipated disasters, and fretted about every coughing spell and wheeze. And, like any tired, old married woman, I continued to get grumpy and nag when he forgot to take the pills I put out or he got tangled in the catheter tube. Then, like any old, long-suffering husband, he would take the high road of forbearance, leaving me to bite the dust in shame. Only once, when I had raged long and loud, did he raise his voice: “Don’t yell at me!” And I shut up, relieved to know there was a limit to what he could bear.

  At night we sat on the love seat in the TV room, watching sitcoms, and I thought about when our love was new and we would lie on the bed at night in our deplorable lingerie-puce bedroom on Bank Street and watch boxing and Sid Caesar and Jack Paar. Now I introduced Clem to the vast menu of TV, and he quickly espoused PBS and the History Channel. In fact, any documentary would do, preferably one about nature. But his favorite was Frasier. The runner-up was Seinfeld. Always the critic, he would mutter, “Too Jewish” and, “They push too hard for a laugh.” I also introduced him to the wonder of the remote control, which I came to regret. Congenitally incapable of operating anything with buttons or knobs, his plaintive “Jenny” calls notched up as he fell into TV limbo. One morning he reported that he’d found a porn site but then had been unable to find it again. Unfortunately, I couldn’t help him there. And a few minutes later he mused, “All those years, all those girls . . . I would have been better off masturbating.”

  One night, as we watched a PBS show about birds, Clem mentioned the nightingale and that he had never heard its song. As if I had heard a clarion call, I sprang into action. Surely, here was something special I could do for him. The bird of poets and fairy tales and even my mother. She who had lived in perpetual innocence and had sent me into my dreams and nightmares with her ramblings of buttercups and nightingales. I had found buttercups, but, like Clem, I never had heard a nightingale. Had she? Had Keats, Yeats, Eliot, or Matthew Arnold? Or did its mystique lie in its elusiveness, a bird that sings in the dark and never sings the same song twice, as if to tantalize and confound?

  I headed to the Colony Record store, that mecca of all things musical, where as a singer in the sixties I had combed the racks for the moony torch songs of sad ladies of the twenties and thirties, the more obscure, the better. My songs. Just as two decades later, still in their thrall, those songbirds would become the gritty core of my bittersweet comedic plays. At the Colony, the clerks were intrigued with my quest for the nightingale. They scoured their storeroom, computer records, sourcebooks. The store became an aviary as we listened to records and tapes, just to be sure the elusive diva was not hiding among the sparrows. But all in vain. Until the maturity of the Internet, its mystique would remain intact.

  Soon after, I noticed Clem, uncharacteristically without a book, without pen or paper, lying still on his bed. I asked him if he wanted anything. He said, “No, I’m reviewing my life.” I wondered if, in his reverie, he was thinking of the young intellectual who had yearned to be a poet. Was that his link with the nightingale? The poet he had never become, the song he had never heard. Yeats, the poet we both loved, and the bird that sat “ . . . upon a golden bough to sing / to lords and ladies of Byzantium / of what is past, or passing, or to come.”

  During the night I would check on Clem. Was the room too hot, too cold? I would adjust the blanket and touch him. Sometimes he would remember in the morning and be pleased. Though I liked hearing that, I preferred being unobserved. Deep down I was afraid that he would expect more and more tender care and I would either fall short or be eaten alive. I say deep down because I knew well the sad, entangled roots of that thought. And also knew that nothing of that sort would ever happen with Clem. He expected nothing of a practical nature from others, and therefore had lived a life free of disappointment and free to enjoy the gifts of the unexpected.

  My own expectations in regard to my work went through a sea change at this time. There was a flurry of interest in my plays from directors who submitted them to the McCarter Theater, the Manhattan Theater Club, and the Skirball Theater; they were all rejected. I watched myself open the letters and trash them with indifference. In only a year, my joy of writing had evaporated. The reason was only too clear: The cold hand of reality had left no room in me for the “let’s pretend” world of theater.

  One afternoon, when two women painter friends of Clem’s asked to come by, I once again grabbed the opportunity and joined an out-of-town friend on a jaunt to the Cloisters. Believing as I always had in the gentleness of women, I felt that Clem would be in good hands. I readied him in the living room and, tethered to his tubes, I left him to a few hours of art chat. At the Cloisters I was drawn to a small wood-paneled painting of Jesus, The Man of Sorrows. The tears of blood, the suffering. And the Woman of Sorrows, where was she? Who stood for the widows, the mothers of dead children? The Madonna, of course, but she was on
ly in evidence serenely suckling her babe. Alas, the Cloisters may have given me a change of scene, but it was hardly the best feel-good choice at that time.

  When I came home, it was a replay of Harvard—the place reeking of cigarettes, all three woozy on Scotch—and I lost it. I threw the Harpies out, opened the windows, and got Clem back to bed. I despised the women, who purportedly loved and esteemed Clem, for their stupidity, and Clem for his complicity, and myself for fighting battles that drained me and bored me and that I knew I could never win. I wouldn’t make that mistake again. But those were the moments when another part of me wanted to throw in the towel and move on to the sorrowing widow scenario.

  December was a good month for us. Clem’s condition remained steady, enough so, that several times his friends suggested a wheelchair tour of the Met on a day when the museum was closed to the public. Clem would always say yes and then, at the last moment, say no. Even for art, Clem would not be lured from home.

  And then it was celebration time. As we always did, Sarah and I staged a bang-up Christmas: a huge tree, proclaimed, as always, “the most magnificent ever,” mounds of presents, and a gathering of friends for Chinese food, Clem’s favorite. Clem tottered around on his cane, pleased with the glitz of it all. And after months of interim jobs, Sarah was celebrating her directorship of the new gallery Black+Greenberg on Grand Street. She would be living in an apartment in the back. And more good news: Our tax liens were finally lifted. No more money orders, no more fear of marshals at the door. We could have a bank account and I could trash the worn gray envelope. The OED could rest in peace.

  The only sadness was Jennifer’s death. She had fought her breast cancer with every fiber in her, but no amount of courage would save her. She had been housebound the last months, seen to by a series of live-in aides who never lasted long, given that they received the brunt of her fierce rage against what was happening to her. I could understand that rage, and would listen and nod. But she barely knew I was there, so completely had she crusted over and moved inside herself. It wasn’t long before she was rushed to the hospital. When I arrived there later that morning, there was only an empty bed. I was told she was in the morgue. The word made me shiver, as did the knowledge that she had died alone.

  The next day I met her brother and a sister, a nun, whom she had never mentioned. Sister Violet was as short and stout and round-faced as Jennifer was tall and lean, with her fine-boned blondness. I watched Violet put on Jennifer’s white Givenchy winter coat with a white fur collar and gracefully scalloped hem. She preened at the mirror, thinking herself very fine. “Perfect for Nebraska,” she said.

  I had understood Jennifer’s rage, but I was disconcerted by Clem’s listless acceptance of what was happening to him. No anger, no highs, no lows. His emotional spirals had flattened out since he had been weaned from the hospital medications. At home he was the Clem he had always been, except more subdued. His even disposition that I had always treasured now oppressed me. When he would say he wanted “to talk,” he really just wanted my presence. He had reached a plateau in his recovery and evinced no interest in furthering his progress or talking about it. While I, as I tended to his daily care, needed to believe that his condition was improving. I was incapable of joining him on his high road of acceptance. A lonely time of things not said. He never spoke of death. Only once did I ask him whether he thought about it. He said he did, but seldom, and when he did, he “numbed at the thought of it.” I envied him.

  On January 16, Sarah and I threw an eighty-fifth birthday party for Clem. Since his seventieth, we had arranged a big celebration every five years, always in friends’ lofts, always a dancing party. This year, the gathering would be smaller, and I filled the apartment with close friends and family: his brother Marty, so long estranged, and his wife, Paula Fox; their half-sister, Natalie, whom I had met only once; and Leatrice Rose, his brother Sol’s ex-wife. Reconnecting with Clem’s family meant more to me than to Clem, who appeared to be unmoved by their presence. The Greenbergs, who cared so little for maintaining family ties, would have been surprised to know that they had become my virtual family after I had been stripped of my own forty years before. Now I felt the lack of family more strongly, and, though I knew they cared little about Clem and certainly not at all about me, I wanted to see them and touch them. The party was a success. I kept everyone moving and talking to people they didn’t know, as I had learned to do years before. Clem sat where he sat. After the group winnowed down, we put on the Bee Gees, and when “Stayin’ Alive” came on, Clem couldn’t resist. With his cane and a steadying hand, he stood and danced.

  As if to keep the celebratory mood going, a few nights later, leaving Clem with Sarah, I went to a party at my artist friend Yvonne Thomas’s. There I ran into my “starter affair” and felt the flutter of being young and in love. Later, on the Fourteenth Street subway platform, three beautiful African American women were singing in a cappella harmony, “I believe in yesterday . . . ” When, at Columbus Circle, I switched to the C train, it was to the strains of an aging hippie on a sax playing, “Smile though your heart is breaking . . . ” I cracked up. How many nostalgic messages did I need to tell me that my flirtiness had just been my own half-baked way of “feelin’ alive”? And the coda? It told me that my world was Clem, and though we were dancing on thin ice, we were alive. I smiled all the way home.

  And then winter closed in. It started off on a frightening note. During the past months there had been occasional alarms with the catheter when the urine had turned cloudy or bloody. Each time I was advised to wait and see, and each time it had cleared. But in late January the flow stopped and Clem was in pain. It was 3:00 AM. I wrapped him up, stowed him in the lobby, scoured the deserted streets for a taxi, and once again took him to the ER. They cleared the blockage, gave him antibiotics, steadied his breathing, and discharged him the next afternoon. Clem, as usual, was unfazed, while I found it an unsettling reminder of how fragile our status quo was.

  I scrubbed and vacuumed, emptied closets and drawers, and then began again. My way of numbing. I would sleep heavily, as if it were a burden, only to awaken suddenly when I would hear Clem call. But often they were phantom calls. No matter—I would go and check and then check again, and then be unable to sleep. I had a strong need to talk to friends, but I was unable to listen. I felt that my sadness was contagious and that people were keeping their distance. As Clem suffocated, I suffocated. “Sympathetic dying,” I quipped to my friend Carol. She understood my panic and simply said, “Clem is alive.”

  I endured all the caretaker clichés: I had no appetite, cried at odd times, couldn’t concentrate on a book, was struck suddenly by physical pains that then disappeared. Even as I recognized these things as clichés, they were no less real for that. On the emptiest of days I watched myself watch television. Shadows of Bank Street in my twenties: I watched myself losing my self. I slipped into a monotone. More shadows remembering when, after our baby’s death, my analyst Sy had said I was choking on inexpressible emotions: rage and guilt and fear. I felt them all. I was submerged in a tank of water, navigating by fear, dodging electric currents. Rage itched under my skin to get out. And it leached out, mainly at Clem over the trivial frustrations of caretaking. My anger had always been part of me, but never before had I met it head-on and been forced to acknowledge it and admit my helplessness in the face of it. Then, suffused with guilt, I would beg forgiveness, even as I knew I didn’t deserve it. And the price of a good hour, a good day, a party? More guilt, piggybacking on my anger about having to pay a toll for feeling good. Oh, the long tentacles of guilt.

  These feelings had been cumulative, and eventually I had the sense to know that I needed help. Marge Iseman, Helen Frankenthaler’s sister and always a cornucopia of advice, recommended the Jewish Board of Family and Children’s Services. There, at a cost adjusted to what one could afford, I was folded into a therapy group that met one evening a week under the guidance of Ruth Kreitzman, a skilled and compassionate t
herapist. I found, in the occasional confrontations and bickering of the group, a chance to vent some of my emotional steam in a safe place. It provided a good counterbalance to the gentleness of Al-Anon’s dynamic. I hadn’t known I needed both until I experienced them.

  As winter drew to a close, so did the one-year anniversary of the day we had heard of the embezzlement. My fellow VIPs were indifferent to my reminder, and I felt let down. Not that I wanted to celebrate or have a weep-fest, but I wanted a simple affirmation: “Yes, a terrible thing happened to us.” And: “Yes, we remember.” I was sure no one had forgotten, but the hand-holding days had passed.

  The IRS had certainly not forgotten. As tax time approached, we faced a final reckoning regarding the taxes that Powers had never filed. The liens had been lifted, but the amount the IRS had deducted for unpaid taxes, plus interest, left us with much less available cash than I had expected. The IRS was holding out for penalties as well, which the accountant hoped to negotiate. Two weeks later, we received the final IRS sign-off letter, so important in case credit problems cropped up down the line. We were no longer criminals in the government’s eyes.

  Fortuitously, that very week, on April 28, as if to show that what goes out can also come in, there was an opening at the Wadsworth Atheneum in Hartford of a group show honoring the work of Noland, Olitski, and Caro, a show that also honored Clem. The three artists, family to us for so many years, attended the opening and dinner that followed, as did Sarah, who represented her father. She called late that night to tell us of their extraordinary generosity: The artists had gifted their honoraria to Clem.