A Complicated Marriage

by Janice Van Horne

  The final convocation of the VIPs was on April 29, for the sentencing of James Powers. Two weeks earlier he had pleaded out, as Valerie Arvin had predicted when Sarah and I had first met her. It seemed that years had passed since then. I awoke, stomach clenched, fearful yet eager for my day in court. Sarah was still in Hartford, but our friend Annie Walsh offered to come with me. The group congregated, swelled by family and friends. I could feel the uneasiness in the air.

  Grim and guarded, we were impatient for the proceedings to begin. Powers was finally brought in. He looked pasty, diminished, his demeanor sullen and listless; he looked like the loser felon he was and had always been, although he had concealed it well. Only five of us took the stand to speak. The crime was the same, but each spoke from the depths of his or her experience and the gist of each differed. From trust and betrayal to “His life in jail will be more assured than my own” to “He should pay” to the invasion of our lives to “I cooked food for him.” This speaker was the only one who, when she finished, approached Powers, pinned him eye to eye, and said, “Shame on you.” I felt a chill. She might as well have put a bullet in his head.

  I told our story, Clem’s, Sarah’s, and mine. From the initial shock and my retrieval of $21.47 from the Chase account—“the only return on our investments I would ever hold in my hand”—through all the ensuing shocks of destitution, taxes, liens, and Clem’s health. My gist: “The numbers and facts are known, but I will never be able to calculate the damage Powers did to our family. This was a crime of violence.” Inwardly the emotions of a year flooded through me, and when I mentioned Clem, I cried but the flow of my words never faltered. Strasberg might have finally said, “Well done.” And I was proud; I had said what I had to say. One of our group leaned over and said, “You were earth and fire, Joan of Arc.” Annie held my hand.

  The judge had been moved by us all. He passed a sentence of eight years, the maximum under the plea agreement. He spoke of the magnitude of the crime and recommended that the defendant serve his full term. I liked to think he would have been happy to sentence Powers to fifty years. Valerie told us it was highly unusual for a judge to put such a recommendation on the record.

  The group adjourned for lunch nearby. Our spirits were light, our mood softened. Oh, there were a few grumblings about the length of the sentence. After all, eight years added up to less than a year per victim, a short term for a crime that had altered the course of our lives. And it would take almost that long for our credit ratings to be cleared of liens. But at least the bastard was in jail. We bantered, drank, and toasted the future. We had come a long way since our first meeting, when the air had been filled with panic, fear, anger, and so many questions with no answers. We still didn’t know all the answers, and never would, but we had all found strength, perspective, and purpose within the group. We were bonded, although I realized how little I knew of their personal lives. On the street when we parted, I knew that we would probably not see each other again. None of us would need or want to be reminded of the past year. And then it was over, and I headed for the subway.

  Over the next two days, Clem’s breathing became more labored. He used the nebulizer more frequently and he was back on prednisone. This time, however, it soon became clear that the miracle drug had lost its healing powers. On Monday, May 2, in the late afternoon, Clem’s breathing worsened and he complained of pain in his left leg. I called 911. The drill was the same, but this time, as we waited for the ambulance, Clem broke out in a cold sweat and started shivering. For once, the paramedics didn’t waste time with the usual arguments against going to the East Side, and in record time we were in the Lenox Hill ER. Clem was started on an IV, they eased his breathing, tests were under way. It was still unclear whether he would be admitted. Sarah joined me for the long vigil in that disheartening waiting room we knew all too well. Late that night, he was admitted.

  The next morning Clem was much improved, downright chipper. He even shaved himself. Doctor Kutnick said that his lungs were clearing, and although there was a blood clot in his thigh, it should respond to medication. If all went well, he could be released as early as Thursday. I had brought books and we settled in to Room 434.

  After lunch, Clem mentioned the morning we had gone to get married. “We were sitting in the back of that taxi, and I knew that marrying you was too good to be true.” I understood what had stirred the memory—the next day was our anniversary. It was a day we never forgot to mark; nothing fancy, just a word to say, I remember. But that he should refer to the taxi made me laugh. I told him how vividly I, too, remembered, except that I had been worried about my golf dress and if it was spiffy enough and wishing I had a corsage to make me look more like a bride. “Do you remember stopping the cab and running into a florist for an orchid? It was as if you had read my mind.” He shrugged. “Maybe I did.” But I knew he didn’t remember the flower.

  When I told him it was thirty-eight years—we never did subtract for the “divorce”—he said, as he did every year, “That long? You don’t look old enough.” Good to hear, especially since I had recently turned sixty. A little later, drowsy, eyes heavy, he said, “I never gave you enough. I’m sorry.” His words came from a place seldom unlocked. I knew he wasn’t referring to flowers and “stuff,” he meant enough of himself. I told him that his words surprised me, that I had always thought of myself as being the withholding one. He simply said, “No, not you.” But I was sure it had taken two. I thought of the many things that lay between us, said and mostly unsaid, as we had protected each other or, more often and more likely, protected ourselves.

  There was a gentleness in the room that day. It was reflected in his thoughts and his voice. I had noticed that in recent weeks his intonation had become softer, the hard edges of consonants more cushioned. It was as if his boyhood Southernness had reasserted itself.

  Late that night he was possessed once again by the drug demons. He called me. He was locked up in a hotel. They refused to give him a wake-up call . . . My helplessness, the doubts, my anxiety kicked in. He had been so fine all day. What if he fell again? I should have taken him home. They were just making him worse.

  The next day, our special May 4, was as bleak as the previous day had been sweet. Clem was still raving when I arrived. Valium, Ativan, nothing would calm him. The doctor said the clotting was worse. There was now numbness. They would operate that day to “evacuate the clot.”

  The waiting was interminable. Hours passed. We heard nothing. By late afternoon, Clem was finally calm. We sat silently on the edge of the bed, holding hands. There was something childlike in the way we sat facing the door, as if we were waiting for a grown-up to come and tell us what to do. After a while, so matter-of-factly that he might have been telling me the time of day, he said, “This must be what it feels like to be dying.” I murmured reassurances, but I knew nothing. All I could do was arm myself with questions as we waited for the surgeon.

  It was evening when the surgeon finally showed up. He was in no mood for questions. With icy precision, Dr. Ahmed spelled out that he would “evacuate or bypass.” There was a fifty-fifty chance of removal. The leg was probably gangrenous. No general anesthesia, and the operation would take about an hour. And he was gone. He had barely looked at Clem, not to mention at me or Sarah, who was now with us. Stunned, all I could think was, Gangrene? Fifty-fifty chance of what? Amputation? Death? I held on to Sarah. I held on to Clem.

  More waiting. It was dark before Clem was wheeled out. We followed and sat in an empty waiting room nearby. One hour, two, almost three, and we heard nothing. Then I saw Ahmed coming down the hall in street clothes. He seemed taken aback that we were still there and simply said, “There were more clots than anticipated.” As I sputtered with questions, he said I should speak to Dr. Kutnick and left. Thanks to Sarah, physical violence was averted.

  Early the next morning, Dr. Kutnick told me that they had removed as many clots as possible. It was now a matter of waiting to see if what remained could be dis
solved. He prescribed a pain pill, “as needed.” Compared with the emotional storms on both our parts the day before, this would be an easier day. Clem rested, deep in his thoughts, picking up a book now and then, putting it down, picking up another. I felt weepy all day. No tears, an inner weepiness. Clem summed it up when, toward evening, he said, “Dying is boring.” Humor and horror. To laugh or to cry? I laughed and told him he hadn’t lost his gift for telling it like it was in the fewest words possible. I also told him I had never known him to be bored. He said, “All things being equal, which of course is never the case, I never have been bored before.” His favorite caveat, “all things being equal,” in this case meant, “with the exception of boring people.” I went home that night reassured and convinced he would come through this.

  The following morning, everything seemed much the same. But not to Dr. Kutnick. He told me Clem’s kidneys were now impaired. He wanted to hold off on giving him anything stronger, but said if Clem experienced more pain I should call him. Impaired, pain—this was not going to be a calm day. But Clem managed well on the pills and he dozed on and off. An Upper East Side matronly supervisor of something or other stopped by to talk. Her kind words hovered in the stale air. Nothing sank in, until an hour later it did. “My God, that motherly bitch was death’s messenger!” I had stopped processing information. I needed help.

  I called Sarah, my steady center. I called Annie and Jim Walsh, who said they would come the next day. When Alexandra Truitt, our friend Anne’s daughter, called to ask how Clem was, I asked her, too, to come by. Somewhere in the course of that day I finally understood that a corner had been turned. Medical attention was no longer focused on how to restore him but had now shifted to how to “make him comfortable.” That euphemism for imminent death. As with so much in life, the clues were there long before the mind was willing to grasp their significance.

  That night when the phone rang, it wasn’t Clem; it was Dr. Kutnick. My breath caught. Through a tunnel I heard him talking about Clem’s kidneys and other organs and time to start on morphine . . . The rest was lost to me. I threw the receiver to the floor and remember nothing except the howls that must have been mine. How long I was “gone,” I don’t know, but when I returned I saw the phone and picked it up. The doctor was still there. He talked me down; no need to come to the hospital tonight, Clem was sleeping, the morning, come in the morning . . . I called Sarah and told her what I knew, by now the tears silently streaming.

  At five o’clock I was in the lobby of the hospital, fighting with a guard who wouldn’t let me through to the elevator. I reasoned, I railed, I threatened. I had found a target for my rage: that nameless man in a uniform buttoned up with rules and regulations. He didn’t stand a chance. I physically shoved my way past him. Upstairs, outside “our room,” a nurse tried to bar me from entering, but, mercifully, another nurse intervened and drew her aside.

  I had slain the dragons at the gate, and there was my prize. Clem rested peacefully. The oxygen, the tubes, the drip of IV fluids, all as usual. I took my place by his side and held his hand, his beautiful, treasured hand, surprisingly warm. I thought, This is good. Kutnick read it wrong, he underestimated Clem’s healing powers, he has come through the worst, the clots are dissolving, it may take time but we’ve done this before, we’ll do it again, and we’ll go home. Did I speak these words or think them? I know I talked to him of this and that and of going home, the words sprinkled with love. Occasionally his eyes flickered; he knew I was there. And Sarah was soon there, too. A perfect room of our own, the other bed empty, the morning light blooming in the window.

  Later, when Dr. Kutnick came in, he told us that Clem would experience more discomfort and that they would be increasing the morphine dosage throughout the day. Again that shock, the cold clench of fear. The truth hammering at the door. But this time, no howling.

  As the morning lengthened, a reassuring ordinariness settled over the room. Our small family of friends gathered. As we talked and gossiped, we tacitly included Clem in everything we said. For all the world, he might as well have been reading a book as we moved around him. But each time a doctor stepped in or a nurse adjusted the IV, I was shocked again, slip-sliding out of the ordinariness of the routine, the surety that all was as it should be, just another day in the hospital. I shut the door to the room. But that did not stop the uniforms from coming.

  And so the hours crept by. We did the Times crossword. Clem could have helped us out, but we agreed that he never would have. He loathed games, tests, puzzles of any kind. He couldn’t see the fun of it. A sad day when I, a games addict, learned I hadn’t married someone I could play with. I told them what Clem had said the day after Jackson died: “What matters most is what you mean to your nearest and dearest.” Clem’s way of cutting through all the hoopla and bullshit that had followed Jackson’s death. Poor Jackson, he hadn’t fared well in the nearest-and-dearest department. But Clem was speaking of himself, too. Even before he had gotten sick, he would say that he wanted to die at home with us at his bedside. Well, he’d gotten it half right. And in our way, we had all spent the day making the room feel like home. All our chat and movement tuned to the steady cadence of Clem’s breaths. Like music. Lulled, we shared his soporific calm. Our breath, his breath.

  At four o’clock a nurse came in and asked if we would step out while she “made him more comfortable.” A couple of us went to the cafeteria. Why, I don’t know. It was a place I had always avoided. Dismal, ill lit, filled with refugees like me passing through, seeking respite, so many alone, staring, eating they cared not what, none of us where we wanted to be. How long were we there? Ten, fifteen minutes? Enough to drain my soul. Afraid, I ran back to 424.

  Clem was there, but he was different. What had they done to him? They had stolen his Clem-ness. He looked like an old man in bed, a supplicant at death’s door. Meek and mild. Sanitized, starched, and trussed. Posed for death. Why hadn’t they let him be? Rumpled, frowsy, his head arched back, the easier to reach for breath. Make him more comfortable , my ass! They had stolen his will when I wasn’t looking. If only I had never gone to that damn cafeteria, he might have been himself for another hour, another minute, long enough to astonish us one more time, to say, “I’m glad you’re here. Be happy.”

  The spell we had cast on that room throughout the day had been swept away. We now sit hushed. We hold him. His breaths are few and fragile. I feel my sadness creep through me. Does he know, does he sense, we haven’t been there? He knows he isn’t at home, but does he know we left him alone? The thoughts jump out at me from behind the doors of my sadness. They tighten the screws of my guilt. Even as I bury my face in Clem’s hand, I wonder if I can ever appease the ferocious appetite of my guilt.

  No more intrusions. The door stays closed. Twenty minutes, forty-five . . . Then the final shock. His last breath.

  AND AFTER

  THERE WAS NOTHING soft and easy about widowhood. The process, rote and impersonal, began the moment Clem’s body was wheeled away to the elevator and someone asked if I wanted an autopsy. Startled, I cried, “No!” and fled Lenox Hill forever. In the days and months that followed, the regimen ground on, from the funeral director—there would be no funeral—to the lawyer to the endless forms and procedures. And time always seemed to be of the essence. Those things went against every inclination in my body, which wanted to sink into the utter stillness that had descended on 275, as if the winds of a terrible storm had swept through and moved on. In that vacuum I wanted to contemplate the enormity of what had just happened and absorb the impact in small doses, and at a tolerable pace. But the machinery of death’s aftermath would not be stopped.

  The obituary in the Times brought the world in with calls of condolence tinged with concern about the announcement’s many sloppy, silly errors. The callers were not amused. I was. Evidently, to die on a Saturday when no one over twelve was minding the store was not prudent. In any event, by the end of the week the Times regulars weighed in at great length with
their thoughts on Clem’s role in the history of American art.

  At Sarah’s urging, a party was organized, and before a week had passed the apartment was crowded with friends. I swam underwater and for once didn’t work the party. Well, except for an inspired moment when, after an orgy of toasts, I told the story of Clem, at twenty-four, going across the country selling neckties wholesale for his father. And how, over the years, when he would talk about developing one’s “eye,” he would say, “Bear down hard when you look at each piece of art, as hard as you look when you’re choosing a necktie.” I led them to the tie racks in his closet, where they deliberated at great length over which of his prodigious number of ties would be their memento of Clem. Two days later, I fell onto my bed one late afternoon and slept eighteen hours.

  A few days later, Sarah and I sat in Clem’s office, staring at the heavy, maroon vinyl container of his ashes. What should we do with them? Scatter them, we supposed. But where? There was no favorite mountain, or beach, and certainly no dolphins in the vicinity. The Frick and Met, though dearly loved, were unlikely venues. And Ken’s Gulley was now the aggrandized compound of Norman Lear. The more we looked at the humble vessel, the more we realized how much Clem would have approved of the honest color and practicality of the vinyl, and that his office was where he was meant to be. He would be surrounded by what he enjoyed most: his old Remington and the walls of books. Not a fancy library, but an eclectic, every-word-read and annotated library. At one time, when Town & Country had asked him to write a short piece about his favorite view, he had begun, though never finished, a piece about the view from his desk of the reservoir, the birdlife, and the mansard roofs of the Stanford White building across the way.

  Of course he should stay here, and I knew where: among the poets the young Clem had revered and whose ranks he had hoped to join someday. We cleared a niche and slid him next to Wordsworth. The box looked like a hefty tome with a curious title: “No. 33663, remains of Clement Greenberg, cremated May 10, 1994, Babylon, NY.”