by Tad Friend
After my first — and, as it turned out, only — night with Francesca, I called Melanie in Mississippi to break up. It was a painfully murky conversation, particularly as I omitted the Francesca part to spare myself. The next day she called back, sounding bravely optimistic, to remind me that I always overreacted when she went away. I should just tell her the real trouble. “Don’t spare me,” she said.
Finally, stumblingly, I said that I was very happy with her at home but always anxious about how she was going to behave in public.
“You’re not proud of me?” Melanie said in a small voice.
______
THE SUMMER before college, when I worked at the Jersey Shore, I was seventeen and the drinking age was eighteen. A friend gave me an old fake ID that set me up as “Mike Epstein,” a nineteen year old whose photo looked vaguely like a brown-eyed, curly-haired, chubbier me. I memorized his address and date of birth for the bouncers, then realized the new identity gave me running room. In a crowd of strangers, that summer and in summers following, I sometimes introduced myself as Mike. Mike went to the University of Pennsylvania, wasn’t as worried about what people thought of him, and cared deeply about your orgasm. It felt great to be Mike to the extent that it was a trying on of the person I might have been, or might possibly still become. It felt shaming and miserable to the extent that I was lying to every Sharon I met, and I finally gave Mike up.
By the time I graduated from college, I realized that almost everyone I’d hung out with was Jewish: Rich Appel, Dave Stein, Paul Sax, Julie Glucksman, Deb Copaken, Jonathan Sapers, Jean Castelli. Bruce Monrad had known precisely where he and I would end up: as vice presidents somewhere. Rich and Dave seemed to think any of us could be almost anything. They seemed not to see me as a Wasp, and thereby to open up possibilities my background had threatened to foreclose.
Largely similar but just different enough, upper-middle-class Jews and Wasps are magnets with flickering polarities: attraction, retraction, compulsion, repulsion. When my colleagues at The American Lawyer gathered to watch the Mets in the playoffs, I cringed when a Jewish coworker I was quietly sleeping with announced, “Gary Carter has the nicest tush in the National League!” Why “tush”? Why compare them? Why say anything whatsoever on the topic aloud? Later, I had a running Scrabble game with, and crush on, a Jewish friend named Lisa. She said she had her heart set on a $20,000 platinum engagement ring with an emerald and a two-carat sapphire, surrounded by diamond stars. That sounds kind of busy — and expensive. Crush over.
MELANIE AND I got back together two or three months later, depending on how you count. The interim was messy: Melanie found out about Francesca because she started dating Francesca’s boyfriend. And there was a Giovanna night in there, too. My mother gave me a little talk about the difference between love and infatuation, and I could see that she might have a point. But I hadn’t gotten over my infatuation with infatuation.
That Christmas, Melanie stayed in New York, saying she wasn’t ready to see my family yet. At home, I began to view my parents through Melanie’s newly skeptical eyes, noticing how Mom sought praise for every meal, and how Day, annoyed with her, downed three rum-based Red Lions before dinner. Mom drew me aside one morning to say, “Don’t you think Day is drinking too much?”
“Yes,” I said, bracing myself. She often asked one of us to carry her water.
“I don’t know how he can do it, after Grandpa Ted,” she said worriedly. Then, switching tacks, she asked, “Where does male rage come from?”
“Women, probably,” I said.
She thought about it and shook her head, “No. No, I don’t think so.”
She later brought up the drinking with Day. He went to the family doctor and asked how much alcohol would be too much, then told Mom he was only two-thirds of the way to the red zone. She felt he was making the problem mathematical and abstract — but, having made his point, Day cut back, and the threat receded.
By the following summer, trust had provisionally reestablished itself, and Melanie and I were living together on the top floor of an old tenement above the Holland Tunnel, a railroad apartment with two fireplaces and a surprising amount of light. I liked her constant nearby bustlings, just as I liked folding laundry for two. When Melanie visited William Faulkner’s home, Rowan Oak, she remembered that he and I shared a birthday and picked a gardenia blossom to press into her note to me: “I love sharing my treasures, my collections, small as they may be, with you. And it fills me with such joy to be around yours. I look forward to going home as I never have before.”
Georgica celebrated its one hundredth anniversary that July Fourth weekend. The night before the party, Day had a dream in which Melanie told him, “Slovenly hats are best for heads with many memories.” I wanted to tell her this — she believed in dreams and psychics, in the I Ching — but it would have meant calling her in New York, and the medium would have been the message: I’m here, and you’re not. Melanie loved Georgica. She loved sitting in the kitchen with Norah and getting the skinny on the rest of us, or trying to anticipate the silent summons that told us all when to go to the beach. But she wasn’t there, because the celebration was for families only.
I had been fighting with my parents about whether Melanie and I could sleep in the same bed in Villanova and Wainscott — a battle I eventually won by declaring, “Okay, we just won’t visit.” I didn’t have the stomach for another dispute, especially when I was uncertain: was she family? So Melanie and I fought instead, because she sensed that if I wouldn’t fight for her now, I wouldn’t fight for her later. As I was heading out the door, she ran up in a puff of jasmine and said, “I hate feeling like this shrew who drives you away — but you drive me to it!”
“You think it’s all because I don’t love you enough,” I said. “But it’s a full-time job staving off your insecurities.”
“So get a Wasp girlfriend who doesn’t have any emotions!”
That was the weekend that Mom told us about Grandpa John’s vanishing act.
As the celebration began, in a white tent on the softball field, I wandered to the windmill, where lovely old photos revealed the continuity of ritual across the generations: softball, tennis, beach picnics, children doing headstands by the lifeguard chair. My heart misgave me to see a young, blazingly pretty Muriel Rogers, Dickie’s mother, arrested in impatient motion by the bathhouse as she hurried toward her throat cancer, her larynx surgery, her ravaged old face. No one could infer such youth from such age.
Back at the tent, Elliot Ogden made a speech of welcome, and then Wilson stood, a little unsteadily, to address us. Prostate cancer now riddled his bones, though he never spoke of the pain. “One of the reasons for the success of Georgica has been the absence of speeches,” he began, drawing a laugh. He fiddled with his bow tie, waiting for quiet, then went on to make a plea for preserving those properties that did open up for “desirable candidates” who would perpetuate the Association’s “character and congeniality,” for keeping up a certain standard that could be met by the money of the old and the energy of the young. Though lightly delivered, his remarks seemed like a coded plea for informal restrictions. (In the surrounding Hamptons, a number of properties still carried covenants prohibiting their sale to “Jews, Negroes, and entertainers.”)
Georgica’s founding documents contain no racial or ethnic qualifications, but its members maintained themselves as an all-Wasp group until the 1950s, self-selecting for “our kind of person.” The first Jews got in, as one longtime Georgica resident puts it, “because one was so Waspy he’s not really Jewish, and one was Yale and played beautiful tennis.” But there was still anxiety a few years later when Estée Lauder’s son Ron became an associate member (a membership status accorded renters and those whose houses lie outside the Association). A resident says, “What you heard was ‘The Lauders are lovely people, but we’re afraid of their friends.’ That was the way it was couched — that their friends would come and see the place and buy in, and we’ll turn aro
und and it’ll be all Jews.”
In the 1980s, Conrad and Peggy Cooper Cafritz were admitted as associate members: Peggy is black, and Conrad is Jewish. (Conrad’s real-estate-development business ran up more than a billion dollars in debts in the early nineties, which is something of an accomplishment.) My parents liked them, and I got on well with Conrad, enjoying the way he’d purse his wine-taster’s lips and twirl his reading glasses like a lariat as he tartly recounted the local gossip. But we were in the minority. The feeling against them and their splashy parties wasn’t bruited about so much as passed invisibly, the way the signal to break into a trot flashes through a herd of caribou at the sight of a wolf. After a few years, the Cafritzes’ membership was not renewed.
The following summer I invited Conrad over for tennis. Later that week, I was approached by an affable older member, who said, “I understand that you had Conrad Cafritz playing with you the other day.”
“Yes.”
“Ah.”
I felt my neck begin to tighten. “I wasn’t aware that that was against the rules.”
“Oh, it’s not,” he said. “You can bring any guest you like. It’s simply that he was a divisive figure, and his reappearance was felt not to be … auspicious.” I invited Conrad back the following week, but he suggested we play at his place.
Wilson’s centennial speech made me glad Melanie wasn’t there, after all. She was always particularly demure around him, fearing to put a foot wrong, even as I was particularly voluble, trying to forefend the kind of remarks he’d occasionally made to me about how “Jews are spoiling the character at Yale, sophisticating the collegial atmosphere.” He was a textbook anti-Semite of his era: opposed to Jews as a group but willing to make exceptions for outstanding individuals of his acquaintance. Maybe he liked Melanie, or maybe he didn’t know she was Jewish — he was often surprised that people he liked were. I never knew if his silence on the topic around her was owing to courtesy, or conscience, or simple luck.
______
MELANIE AND I had lived together for a year when she quit producing documentaries to focus on her poetry. Soon she was down to her last two thousand dollars, and I was grumpily paying the rent for both of us — grumpily because it put the question of joint property in sharp relief. When we went away together for my travel stories, to Egypt, Morocco, and Greece, the holiday mood would darken as Melanie realized that I wasn’t, just yet, going to propose. When I traveled alone, I’d come home to find her at the top of the stairs, studying my face as I mounted. Her questions grew more pressing: would we raise the kids Christian or Jewish? Have a bris or a christening? My suggestion of a “brisening” bought me a little more time. I had no desire to raise our potential children as Christians — I didn’t believe in God — but I didn’t particularly want them raised as Jews, either. I had in mind some kind of traditional yet nonreligious household that treasured Christmas. She began talking about having a baby without me, if necessary. “Are you still taking the pill?” I asked. There was a mutinous silence.
Walking near Macy’s, I saw a small woman in her seventies eagerly selling blue and pink baby bonnets from a grocery bag at her feet. “I knit them myself,” she kept saying to the indifferent throngs: “I made them all myself!” The caps weren’t particularly attractive, but I was moved to buy one to ease her increasingly crestfallen look and reward her for hoping. I began to pull out my wallet, then put it away — what would I do with a baby bonnet? I didn’t tell Melanie about the incident, because it had brought her so to mind.
Late that summer, while tidying up for a poker game, I was carrying one of Melanie’s notebooks back to her office when a poem fell out. “Maplewood Farm, 1993 (for Tad)” was about sifting through Grandma Tim’s paintings after her death, the year before, about memory and loss. It ended:
In the hayloft’s yeasty nave
We lay listening to pigeons
In the rafters, pigs mucking below, alive
In all that dark.
Replacing it, smiling, I saw my name in the notebook in a journal entry, and the words “he has many problems, very deep.” Startled, I read on, my face growing hot. Then I settled in to proceed chronologically from our breakup in 1991 — when there was a lot of abuse of me, most of it deserved — and learned that I was self-centered, cold, uncaring, and emotionally immature. I had developed my defiant solitude to cope with my mother, while modeling my inexpressiveness on my father. She’d canvassed some of my close friends, and they agreed with her.
I felt a little better about reading her journal when one entry revealed that she’d begun reading my journals a few months earlier, but also much worse, because my journals were the repository of all my doubts about our relationship. Privy to them now, she had written: “DO NOT HAVE CHILDREN WITH THIS MAN.” And yet here she still was. During our next fight, when she kept asking about Giovanna — actually not a threat, just then — I shouted, “Goddammit, I do love you,” and hurled my glass of iced tea onto the kitchen floor. After I sheepishly mopped the linoleum and swept up the broken glass, I found her sitting pensively on the edge of the bathtub. “So there’s my lack of self-worth and my fear of abandonment,” she said. “I’m more frightened than you are, as you once told me,” I said. We rested our foreheads together.
She was seeing a psychotherapist, and at her increasingly determined suggestion, I began therapy myself that September. I acquiesced in part to buy more time. But I’d been thinking about talking to someone for two years, ever since Grandpa John’s wife, Sherleigh, tumbled down the stairs and sustained a skull fracture that would, within weeks, carry her off. After her fall, I called Grandpa John but couldn’t get him to understand who I was. I repeatedly identified myself — “It’s your grandson Tad!” — but he said, “I think you have the wrong number,” in polite, going-away tones.
After hanging up in bewilderment, I waited ten minutes and called back. “It’s Tad!” I yelled, and he said, “Oh, hello.”
After saying how sorry I was about Sherleigh, I asked how he was.
“Bearing up,” he said briskly. “Still traveling?” With a sense of unreality, I mentioned that Melanie and I were about to go to Egypt, where I’d be writing a travel piece. “When I had the bad taste to climb on the dome of the Taj Mahal seventy years ago, the novelty of foreign places had not yet worn off,” he observed. “Now it has, and travel per se is no longer enough to write about.” Yes, I said, that’s right. Dismayed by the thickness of his shield, yet unable to think of a single consoling thing to say to pierce it, I worried, after we concluded the call, that I’d end up just like him.
Still, I went into therapy with the idea that my shrink should be able, within six weeks or so, to tell me whether the problem in my relationship with Melanie was me, or her, or us. I ended up on the couch for thirteen years.
Just before Christmas, Melanie and I saw A Perfect World, in which Kevin Costner plays Butch, a convict in Texas in 1963 who escapes and, more or less by accident, kidnaps an eight-year-old boy named Phillip. I had just begun, haltingly, to talk about my childhood with my therapist, Sylvia, after she’d observed, “I’m beginning to wonder why you feel it’s so important to seem chipper, in here. I mean, you came to me for a reason, no?” Now, as I watched the growing bond between Kevin Costner and an uncertain boy, the exchange of confidences and physical affection, I felt my chest tighten. Butch carries a postcard his father sent from Alaska after he took off when Butch was young, and near the end of the film, as the Texas Rangers are closing in for a showdown we sense won’t end well, he reads it to Phillip:
Just wanted to tell you that me leaving has nothing to do with you. Alaska is a very beautiful place, colder than hell most all the time. Someday you can come and visit and we’ll maybe get to know each other better.
By the time the lights went up, I was sobbing. Melanie put her hand on mine. I flung it off, then reached for it again. “Just — I love you, but just don’t,” I said. “I can’t talk about it right now.”
That last spring, Melanie kept calling from a puppy store, saying she’d fallen for a Cavalier King Charles spaniel that wriggled with joy whenever she tapped on the window. “She won’t bark, I promise,” Melanie said. “She never barks.” Our landlord, who worked downstairs, had a phobia about dogs and our lease forbade them. But after a week of Melanie sobbing herself to sleep, we brought Lulu home. Cavaliers are a quirky, overbred group — former hunting dogs with a lousy sense of direction — but they are wonderfully affectionate. Lulu was fond of scooting toward us on her butt (which turned out to mean she had worms) and prodigal with face licks. Soon Melanie was paying more attention to Lulu than to me, and relishing the instant reciprocation. It both vexed and surprised me that though I was doing a considerable share of the kibble pouring and let’s-go-for-a-walk-now-ing, Lulu responded more to Melanie’s rapturous embraces.
In May, after a happy ten days in Ireland, Melanie and I fought on our last night. It was a strange fight, a fight in reverse. She said she’d be willing to postpone having kids. Feeling stricken by this desperate sacrifice — feeling unworthy of it — I told her she should find someone better than me to have children with. I suppressed the gamy knowledge that I was relieved, as I could now leave seeming noble, rather than just slinking off. As we were falling asleep, exhausted, in our small white room near Shannon Airport, she whispered, “Stay with me.” I began crying, and it took me a while to say, “I just don’t feel your love the way I should.” “I’m sorry you don’t feel you were loved enough,” she said, still very quietly. “I had high hopes for you.”