“Why don’t you go get your things?” she said.
*
Trina and I had talked about getting a place together in the “forgotten” neighborhood of Williamsburg. It was then the land of struggling Dominican and Puerto Rican families, old-school Gs, Southside crack houses, Satmar Hasidim, suspicious Poles, and a handful of mostly white artists and hip spots such as the art collectives Brand Name Damages and Minor Injury, bars like the Ship’s Mast, Brooklyn Nights, Teddy’s, and the old-man Greenpoint Tavern, warehouse clubs that would pop up and then be abruptly gone, and the old reliable thrift shop Domsey’s, where you could find a black eyelet dress preserved intact from 1954 for a cool five bucks. In fact the plan was for Trina, me, and a friend of Trina’s from D.C., Starr, who had just finished at NYU, to get a place together. I thought Starr was bullshit because she had combat-“style” boots made by Joan & David, was something of a cokehead, and was the first person I knew who ran together Oh my God as one word. Actually, the woman could’ve been Hannah Arendt and I still would’ve been critical of her—because my level of insecurity, I realize only now, was such that any friend outside our circle carried the risk of pulling Trina away from me. But. Trina thought the Clarice gig sketchy at best and tried to talk me out of taking it. Most of all, she was skeptical about the living situation.
“I don’t know, Chess, but the words ‘house slave’ come to mind,” she said.
I was, however, adamant. And I told her that anyway, it would be easier to find a two-bedroom than a three-bedroom, so she and Starr would have better luck without me. The more Trina argued against it—Trina, whose nickname was the Philadelphia Lawyer—the more I knew the job was supposed to be mine. It felt to me almost like the course of my life depended on it.
Trina’s parents had come up for graduation, along with her brother Matthew, and that night they took us to dinner at the Yale Club. Her family was the coolest family in the world to me. Trina’s mother, Jannicke, was beautiful, blond to the max but with a severe, Kierkegaardian turn of mind, and she had a lot of amazing, atypical, and to me decidedly unmomlike pursuits such as smoking a clay pipe and collecting daguerreotypes of dead Victorian people. The Judge was a creature of myth. On the surface, and certainly in photographs, he had the militarily serene eyes of a pitiless son of a biscuit. A massive Irish American guy, a bomb defuser in Vietnam and an airborne Ranger, he was without fear and seemingly immune to pain—you could well picture him calmly cutting off his gangrenous toe with a tactical knife—but he was a lover of life, thrilled to laugh and be silly and, mostly, see his people happy. He loved his family like nothing I’d ever seen before, and no matter the incendiary things a person like me might have said about the GOP over the years while eating at his table, he never took offense. Once you were in, you were in, and I thought of this as very Irish in the best way: you never peach on a fellow. Trina’s brother, Matthew, was terribly handsome but shy about it and always told stories about things like going down the side of an Alp on his face, his snowboard a plow behind him.
I remember that night at the Yale Club so well, even now. To quote Ben Gazzara for a moment here, The booze we consumed. The champagne flowed and we all told funny stories and our table was just roaring. The Moriarty family all had crazy infectious laughs. Everyone was looking at us, but not because we were arguing or being awful, not because we were weird or embarrassing—which would be the reason that people always chose to stare at my family—but because we were beautiful. Happy and laughing, but beautiful. I wondered later if the people looking at us, smiling at us, thought that I was part of this family, the odd dark-haired daughter among the blondes and redheads. The thought was thrilling to me. Thrilling in the way that some half-remembered Shirley Temple movie, where she’s whisked away from a life of drudgery by the appearance of her real father, had been to me as a child.
That evening really was a kind of farewell, I realize now. To the life of college, to the 1980s, to being a kid. And I wonder if I admitted to myself then that if Trina’s was the family I wish I had, my hope was that maybe Kendra’s would be the one I would be taken in by—the family that would make manifest some version of my dream life.
Part II
11
When Trina saw I was dead set on working for Kendra’s mother she gave in, and she and Fang helped me cart all my stuff down to the house on Eleventh Street.
It was only June but already freakishly hot, and we were all crazy sweat machines schlepping my trunk and boxes down on the 1 train, through the long alligator alley to the L, and then over to Eleventh Street. Once in front of the house, the whole thing seemed newly unreal. How could I be moving into Kendra’s house without her? I was glad it was the weekend and Cornelia the one there to greet us.
“Francesca!” she yelled out when she opened the door, smashing herself into me. Puberty had hit in the years since I’d last seen her, and overlaid on her stony little Austrian-businessman self something bubbly, gushy, extravagant. I introduced her to Trina and Fang-Hua and she was immediately captivated and touching them all over.
“Oh my God, I love that you’re so pretty! I like your hair, isn’t it just so pretty and so nice? Asian hair is just the best hair ever. I like your Docs, they’re the coolest, can I try them on? Oh, I love that you’re all so totally sloppy but you’re all like so totally pretty too!”
We were up the stairs and down the hall and she was beckoning us into Kendra’s room. I felt a shyness come on.
“Cornelia, I think I’d rather stay in Bertrand’s old room,” I said.
“Mum wants you here,” she announced.
Fang and Trina had gone into the room and were gently picking up Kendra’s things, studying them. The room looked a lot like it had the first time I’d been there, almost four years before. There was the metallic wallpaper with its psychedelic print, the preteen-dream bed set with its dainty vanity mirror covered in band stickers—Kraut, Bad Brains, False Prophets, Undead—and the piles of pillows and stacks of books and stuff of Kendra, her feather boas and European unguents and glitter makeup. The same light came through the French doors that led to the terrace. And yet the animating spirit was gone.
“I’d feel like a ghost,” Fang said. She picked up a hat—the toque with its broken aigrette—popped it on her head, and turned to us, framing her face with blossomlike hands.
“Mr. DeMille,” Trina said to her, “I’m ready for my Thorazine.”
Fang took off the hat and hung it back up.
“We already took anything valuable,” Cornelia announced. “So Mum said to throw out whatever you don’t want.”
Trina gave me a look. WTF? When she was home in D.C. and cutting her hair in the earlier punk-rock-dreadlocked days of her existence, her mother would take knotty bits out of the wastepaper basket, tie them in ribbons, and place them in Trina’s baby book.
“No foolish sentimentalism in these parts,” she said flatly.
I looked around at the wallpaper, the book piles, the big strawberry-shaped pillow.
“I don’t think I’ll touch a thing,” I said.
*
Because, as they’d later say in television commercials, that’s just not the way I roll. I mean, I may have been given to eating other people’s food out of their refrigerators, rummaging through their bathroom cabinets, and distractedly leaving balled-up tissues on most available flat surfaces of their apartments, but in many ways I conduct myself like a person who leaves no footprints. I remember I felt a huge amount of gratitude in being allowed to be in that house at all. I felt as if I’d been chosen for something, and because of this I had a debt to repay. I was there to serve.
Time moves slowly at that age, and I remember the texture of those summer workdays very clearly. I’ve always been a terrible riser, but I’d be up early, dressed, and down in the kitchen drinking coffee with Cornelia by eight. We were both mad coffeeheads and mostly didn’t eat breakfast unless there was a bread product about, like some special cakey thing from Balducci’s, and then w
e’d stuff our faces with it. Cornelia was addicted to the worst sort of news radio, like 1010 WINS, where reporters were always shouting at you live from a tragic house fire in Queens, and this we’d listen to over our coffee, trading back and forth our versions of the more amazing outer-borough accents. We especially loved the financial guy who sounded like deepest Brooklyn circa 1942 and who’d sign off with words paraphrased, bizarrely enough, from “To the Virgins, to Make Much of Time”:
Gather those rosebuds!
Then Cornelia would be out the door to one of her pursuits: piano lessons, a volunteer gig at the Episcopal church, or a “play date” (the first time I’d hear the silly phrase) with solitary girls of similarly specific enthusiasms—an oboe recital, ikebana class, or unicycle-riding jaunt around Washington Square. Cornelia was one fascinating little weirdo. I liked her fine, but she could go from nice to brat in seconds, and she liked to direct her frustration at me. One morning when we were doing our 1010 WINS voices, she suddenly turned to me and said, “You have an accent.”
“I do?” I asked. No one had ever told me this.
“Yes, you have a hint of a kind of bizarre maybe like Philadelphia accent? Or I suppose it would be like a mid-Atlantic accent. Some Catholic-ethnic thing.”
“I don’t know that I do,” I said.
“Sure you do—say the word ‘O-R-A-N-G-E.’ ”
I swallowed, never expecting to be called out on something like my language skills.
“Orange,” I said.
“See, you said ‘ar-ange.’ ”
“Okay, well, Cornelia, how do you say it?”
“Or-ange. How one should.”
Times like this I would feel an insane anger flash up in me, instantaneous and worse than poison. But just as quickly I’d swallow it, make light of it.
“Ah…let’s call the whole thing off,” I said.
Once Cornelia was gone, I’d go upstairs to Clarice’s office and make sure things were just the way she liked them. Every item on her desk, I have to say, is burned into my memory as if each were actually enormous and standing with its companions on a wide, flat, Stonehenge-like plain. There was her blue Wedgwood table lighter; her fountain pen in its majolica cup; her Indian silver ashtray; her black rotary telephone with ALGONQUIN 4-8629 on its sepia label; her Lalique crystal bowl full of parrot tulips or peonies; her twin French lamps with their garlanded bucrania; her leather blotter with its butcher-paper inserts that I had to measure, cut, and lay in fresh each morning. Similarly, every morning I had to take care of the flowers: trim them on the bias, change the water in the big crystal bowl, crush an aspirin on a section of the previous week’s New York Observer, then fold it and pour the crushed bits into the water, all the while holding my mouth in a tight clamp of concentration lest I nick, chip, or, God forbid, drop the Lalique.
When everything was ready I’d sit on the little low lady-in-waiting tabouret with a book (I was reading, and loving, a succession of Mary McCarthy books all that summer) and wait for Clarice to show herself. I might wait twenty minutes or an hour, but whenever Clarice finally did appear—always impeccably dressed and with a full face of makeup—her entrance had the practiced fervor of a diva taking the stage: “I am overjoyed at this beautiful morning.”
She would beam, and, thrilled that she seemed to be beaming at me, sitting there in my absurd pretend-grown-up clothes—a ’60s-era polyester minidress with matching hairband, a reclaimed men’s suit in metallic sharkskin, the odd plaid faille midi worn with a “romantic” jabot-collared blouse—I would beam back at her.
The mornings were dedicated to her correspondence. She would walk around the room, smoking and dictating letters while I sat bolt upright on my toadstool and scribbled in a little steno pad. In those early days I didn’t understand Clarice’s completely irony-free ways, her allergy to the unserious, and sometimes the timbres of her voice would sound so plummy that I was sure she was making a joke, knocking someone else’s pretensions. I’d raise a goofy eyebrow and try to catch her eye, but any look she gave me acknowledged nothing at all. It was as if she were looking through me at some elegant, far shore. I quickly learned to drop my hint-making ways and tried to cultivate a thorough and complementary seriousness.
I couldn’t get enough of looking at her, and she must have known this about me. Sometimes she’d break off in midsentence and stand at one of the tall, north-facing windows to show me her profile while she peered out at the trees on Eleventh Street. Surrounded by her things, all so fine and French, and with her dramatic, artificial looks, she seemed to be posing for Cecil Beaton.
Lunch with Clarice was an exercise in what it was to be a WASP. Oddly, it seemed to grow in complexity over the course of the week, like the New York Times crossword puzzle. Straight on through Thursdays it was some retro thing prepared by Cornelia. Mondays we’d have a version of the Chock Full o’Nuts “Classic,” that is, date-nut bread with cream cheese, which was laid out on Spode plates in the enormous refrigerator with a side of thinly sliced celery. Despite the Spode, this always felt like punishment. Tuesdays’ club sandwiches on white bread (which I hadn’t grown up eating and which, because of this, fascinated me) were slightly better, while Wednesday was usually potage parmentier or some other soup of complex preparation yet bland result. Thursday would be some horrible “salad” dolloped into parfait cups, one of which involved grapes, canned mandarin oranges, shredded carrot, miniature marshmallows, and—I wish I were kidding—mayonnaise. Disgusting! This was pretty much the only thing I couldn’t make myself choke down, try as I did. This was, however, noticed by Clarice, and we saw a moratorium on creamy salads by the end of June.
In contrast to the rest of the week, the Friday luncheon was like a gift. It consisted of a complicated three-course meal, cooked and served by a long-suffering, 98-percent-silent lady from Puebla named Dolores (whom Clarice called, almost to her face, “the little catering woman”), using Clarice’s hardback Julia Child with the little fleurs-de-lis on its cover. Dolores was absolutely top-notch as a chef, and as gloomy as a mile-wide storm cloud. I’ve never liked being served, so I was constantly hopping up in the course of our luncheon, diving for the water pitcher or an extra plate, so much so that once, in my enthusiasm, I knocked Dolores down and almost gave her a skull fracture. (Bizarrely, after that she was much friendlier to me.) Better than the food even was that guests usually came on Fridays. These guests might be Clarice’s editor, her agent Hat Lady, or sometimes, most thrilling of all, other writers. When Clarice let slip that a writer was coming, what with me being so into fiction and knowing by then who all was rumored to live in the neighborhood, I held my breath for the appearance of Grace Paley, Donald Barthelme, or maybe even Thomas Pynchon, whom I somehow pictured stealing down the street in batwing cape and Freddy Krueger mask.
Instead, the writers who did come to lunch were never novelists. They were belletrists: essayists, journalists. And for whatever reason, they were almost exclusively elderly. Their books seemed mostly to have come out during a small window of opportunity from 1952 to 1957, to respectable acclaim and thin sales. I’d never heard of a single one of them, but I loved meeting any kind of writer and I was nothing if not enthusiastic. One in particular wasn’t elderly at all but a preening young man with the made-up-sounding name of Broyer Weatherhill, who was so naked in his ambition that he was like some joke figure out of Evelyn Waugh. But more about him later.
To get back to the daily routine, after lunch I usually typed up all the morning correspondence, as well as any “pages” Clarice may have worked on the evening before. The first time such pages were entrusted to me, I couldn’t wait to race up the stairs to the typing study to be the first person to see this precious Claricean output. And can I tell you? The pages were nothing. They were as bland as morning oatmeal. It was a shocking thing to see, like your first-grade teacher naked in high heels. Years later I would meet a writer who described his fledgling work as so blank that it was uncritiqueable short of saying that
it consisted of marks on a page—and Clarice’s early pages were like this, a seemingly unfertile humus seeded with the skimpiest of letters.
But I didn’t understand her methods. I’d type up those pages—and she instructed me to format my typing in a narrow column down the center of each page, with two-inch margins on either side—and the pages would come back the next day festooned with all sorts of emendations and additions written very neatly in the wide margins. I’d type these up, give them over, and the next day, same thing: more additions, more emendations. Thus the work was tended and nurtured and cultivated day by day until it grew into shapely, many-leaved maturity. I admired Clarice’s diligence, and I could recognize the worth of her writing, even as I realized (with no little letdown) that what she chose to write about—always overspecific but from a too-distant standpoint, as if she didn’t want to dirty her hands—was of no real interest to me. Try as I might to get with the house brand, her concerns weren’t mine: how globalism has destroyed regional poetry; why modern classical music has failed us; could Peter Martins even be considered a choreographer? Many of the essays in fact shared the same subtext, which, simply put, was this: standards were really slipping. She used the old Noted with Pleasure “we” a lot: While we may go to the woods to find peace…She was resolutely apolitical. Worst of all, I found her writing style dowdy. It was an odd match for the sharpness of her person, the chicness of her eye—her lavish charisma.
Which might have been exactly the point.
She was amazingly prolific, and lots of important people clearly liked her work, however, because these essays would get published in journals, reprinted in anthologies, and subsequently collected into her own books. Like Edmund Wilson, her approach to writing was “no waste.”
And so each day, after typing everything up, I’d run back downstairs and give Clarice her ever-evolving pages. By that point she’d be making her phone calls, sitting in her chair half turned to the window, a cigarette burning in her silver ashtray, her formidable manicured fingers drumming the desktop in an impatient tattoo—those fingers telling me to get in and out but quick. And so I’d wordlessly lay the papers on her desk and steal away.
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