Back in the States, I began to pursue a different line of work. I’d done some research on the life of the silent screen comedienne Mabel Normand, but it was proceeding slowly. In the meantime, I was starting to write articles about food. The New York Times had just transformed the “Woman’s Page” into “The Living Section,” in an attempt to embrace both sexes and a swelling interest in food and the kitchen. My first piece for them was on the history of Jell-O.
I’d been trained in the pompous jargon of the academy, and I had a tough time retraining myself to write the way people actually spoke. I tackled each project as if I were composing a 750-page book, not a 750-word article. I would acquire far too much information and then agonize over what to select and how to shape it. It began to dawn on me that the reason I had so much trouble writing essays was that I had no faith in my own judgment as to what was important and what was not. And thanks to my live-in critic, I was never going to develop any. I knew I had to find a space away from Paul, some kind of room of my own, if I were to be anything more than a handmaid to his writing, his career, his fame.
Naturally, this made me the Enemy. I had read and reread his book in manuscript and had made comments his editor later echoed. I had assured him it was the best thing he’d ever written, but none of that seemed to penetrate. En route to Mexico to spend New Year’s with friends who had retired to Chiapas, Paul developed an abscessed tooth. It was so agonizingly painful that while we waited for our friends to arrive back from the airport where we’d somehow missed each other, Paul drank the entire bottle of Wild Turkey we’d brought for our hosts. It did not ease his pain, but it uncorked emotion, as did the dose of Seconal our host, a retired doctor, gave him to knock him out. “Not once did she say, ‘Good work, Paul, job well done,’” he railed. “She didn’t even read the fucking book once it was out.” By now it was long past midnight, and when Paul finally stood up, he fell straight over, in mid-sentence, like an axed tree. We dragged him into bed, where he slept the night away, but I couldn’t sleep. I was dumbstruck at the anger he’d been harboring toward me, at the monster he saw in me.
I got a job teaching Comedy at the New School in New York one day a week. A friend who’d be away for a semester was willing to sublet her railroad apartment on Ninety-first and Lexington, so that I’d have a place to prepare my class and continue my research on Mabel. Paul couldn’t understand why I didn’t rent an office in Princeton. Then I could write during the day and come home each night. And of course pick up groceries on the way home and cook them up and have a few friends over for drinks and get into knockdown fights disguised as intellectual discussions and stay up late complaining about everybody after they’d gone—the usual routine. He couldn’t understand that if I didn’t break the routine, the routine would break me. I yearned to create something permanent, something concrete, to have something to show at the end of a few decades’ hard work. Instead of making a loaf of bread that might keep for a week, I wanted to make a book that would last for years. I wanted a longer shelf life.
To write I would have to remove myself from the very air that surrounded Paul and me, echoing with our eternal duet. “You can’t write,” he’d say. “Why don’t you do something you’re good at?” “Like what?” she’d say. “Cooking,” he’d say. And she heard but didn’t heed and struggled to put words and sentences together on a piece of paper for the same reason she put artichokes and lamb together on a plate. And she continued to show him her work because he had skills she lacked, and if he hacked the writing to pieces, she deserved what she got: confirmation that writing was his job, and all she was good for was to cook. She saw what had compelled a generation of daughters to slam the kitchen door and proudly announce that they knew how to be doctors and lawyers and bankers but they did not know and did not want to know how to cook.
I was unraveling fast. Paul had begun to exercise what he called “selective deafness.” The moment I opened my mouth I could feel him turn off his mental hearing aid and tune me out. It made me so jittery that I found myself stuttering, or saying “heartfelt” when I meant to say “handmade,” or “Freud” when I meant “Einstein.”
I went manic. I would wake in the middle of the night, my head bursting with ideas, and run down to the library, where I pulled books from the shelves at random—Erasmus’s In Praise of Folly or Powdermaker’s Hollywood, the Dream Factory—and read avidly for two or three hours and felt lightbulbs exploding all over the place, and then I went back to bed and didn’t remember anything I’d read when I woke up.
I began to cry again, the way I’d cried in my childhood. The tears would come out of nowhere, and I couldn’t stop them. Crying was just one of the things I did, like sneezing from permanent hay fever. I would look in the bathroom mirror and see an image as distant and remote as Paul’s.
I found I could no longer stomach academic gamesmanship, in which anger was disguised as argument. The underlying aggression was too palpable, the need to dominate too naked to ignore. Was Samuel Beckett a serious artist or a put-on? Was or was not folk art a contradiction in terms? Help, said a still small voice inside me. “Discourse” had become a favorite cant term of the deconstructionists, but to me all conversations were imploding, all words seemed empty and pompous. In the heat of a debate, I who was as smilingly polite as a Japanese wife heard myself say to a longtime friend, “You’re full of shit.” He didn’t speak to me for a year and I was glad, because words were superfluous. One day during a lengthy argument with Paul over the relative aesthetic value of film versus literature, Sam asked me quietly, “When are you and Dad going to get a divorce?” The question shocked me. “It’s all talk, my dear,” I told him. “We just argue to exercise our jaws.”
Still, even I could see that I was not in good shape. Desperate to find out what was wrong, why I was crying, why I was manic, why I felt I was losing my mind, and—good Presbyterian that I was—to do something about it, I had asked Paul’s permission to find a shrink in New York, because he was the one who would have to foot the bill. Presbyterians didn’t go to shrinks, they had God to talk to. But God wasn’t taking my calls these days, and I had nowhere else to go. By great luck I found the woman I called the Shrinkess, a young mother half my age. I gave her a piece I was writing for the Times on fake food, like the plastic sushi models you saw in the windows of Japanese restaurants. “Your mind and body are on separate tracks,” she said. “Just tell me how you feel about it. Just tell me what you see.” I had to be told that what I felt, what I saw, mattered. I had to clear my throat and find a voice at last.
By this time I’d been given a regular column of restaurant reviews for the New Jersey section of the Sunday New York Times. My editor thought she was doing me a favor. She had never lived in New Jersey. The Manhattan reviewer, who had never lived in New Jersey either, had insisted that Manhattan standards be applied to the suburbs in order not to dilute the value of the rating. According to the rules, you had to visit each place twice, retain total anonymity, and sample as much of the menu as possible. Paul had said at the beginning, “Count me out,” which meant I had to rely on the kindness of friends to get mouths for hundreds of meals all over the state. But while I hated the threatening letters and telephone calls from outraged diners and chefs to whom anything less than a three-star puff was an insult, I liked seeing my name in print. I also liked the instant feedback from friends who’d been entertained by my prose, even if Paul’s highest praise was “cute.”
Not until I found a restaurant that I thought a potential four-star did I ask Paul to go with me on the second visit. As usual, the restaurant was hell to get to and Paul was not in good humor by the time we did. His mood did not improve with the first course. His objections grew louder and nastier as the meal went on and finally became so vehement that the couple next to us, who were actually enjoying their meal, turned and asked what we had ordered that was so awful. On the drive back I was angry, not because Paul hadn’t enjoyed his meal but because he was determined that I k
nock the place down to one or two stars at the most. When I objected, he said, “What did you want me along for if you didn’t value my opinion?” He could not accept that in this one insignificant arena, it was my opinion, and only mine, that mattered.
When Paul announced that he was going to take a trip to visit war sites in Hawaii, Japan, and major islands of the South Pacific, he couldn’t believe that I didn’t want to go with him. Travel had always brought us together, just as living at home had always pulled us apart. But I knew that if I quit this job to fit myself into his agenda, I’d never have a job.
It was around this time that Paul became obsessed with his body. He took to wearing nylon bikini briefs in Day-Glo colors that he ordered from catalogues. He became fanatic about his Canadian Army isometric exercises, this man for whom croquet was heavy exercise. I knew he was terrified of regressing to the Fat Boy of his youth, but there was something more. When I stayed up talking with friends late into the night it wasn’t unusual for Paul to descend the stairs nude and parade about the room until someone said, “Oh, Paul, go back to bed.” But now I would find, when I came to bed, that he’d shaved off all his pubic hair. “I was drunk,” he’d say next morning when I asked why. I could feel fantasies thick as bedcovers over us, but he would not talk about them or even admit he had any. Sex was not something you talked about. It was something you did, alone or with somebody else.
He took a trip to Russia with a handful of prominent scholars, as part of an official cultural exchange. When he came back, he couldn’t stop talking about a student he’d met, a boy to whom he’d promised to send a pair of expensive leather cowboy boots. Some days I returned from New York to find him stretched on the library couch listening to records of Russian music. Did it matter, I wondered, if he had a crush on a young Russian boy? When a friend who knew one of the professors on the trip told him she was a pal of Paul’s wife, the man was incredulous. “You mean to tell me that guy’s married?” Paul took to singing the praises of a student whom he’d had to dinner more than once when I was in New York and mentioned that they’d exchanged jackets. Exchanged jackets? Sure enough, there in his closet instead of his expensive Harris tweed was tattered denim.
Even our entertaining life took an odd turn. On our honeymoon, Paul had fantasized blowing up the bridge that connected Cape Cod to the mainland, and declaring himself King of the Cape. When we were in India, he’d bought a sackful of colorful zircons and topazes, which we jokingly called his Crown Jewels. A friend who was a jeweler fashioned a crown out of scrap metal, inserting the jewels between “rubies” of bicycle reflector buttons. I dug out a Charles II black wig with black curls and stitched up a cape with fake ermine. On our terrace, we staged the formal investiture of the Duke of Raritan, and his Duchess served an enormous banquet to honor his court—the Royal Jeweler, the Royal Archivist, the Keeper of the Keys, everyone got into the act. But were we playing Jarry’s Ubu Roi or Pirandello’s Henry IV? And was I the Duchess of Raritan or the Fool?
If home life was weirdly like a pantomime, New York was scary because it was too real. The bedroom in the apartment I’d rented had a window that opened onto the back fire escape. Just before my sublet began, there’d been a break-in, and my friend had installed an iron gate with a big padlock on it. If I wanted air, I had to unlock the gate, heave the window up, prop it open with a stick, close the gate, and lock it. But I was unused to city sounds and sights. The window looked across the court into a brightly lit apartment where a man with black sideburns hit his blond companion across the chops with the back of his hand. Or was I only imagining it, making a Hitchcock movie out of an ordinary domestic spat? I watched them in the dark, like Jimmy Stewart, fascinated by domestic violence that was so open.
I undressed in the dark, so that no one would know I was in the apartment. As I lay in bed and listened to the sirens wail, I wondered what I was doing there when I could have been lying safe in my bed in Princeton. But for the first time, I was learning to think for myself, without fear of contempt or contumely. I could think any way I wanted, say anything I wanted. It was as if I’d picked up my life where I’d left it when I’d first come to New York. I was on my own.
When the sublet was up I found another one, this one in the Village, in a building owned by the neighboring Episcopal Church. The apartment belonged to an Anglo-American woman, a writer, who was going to spend a few months in London deciding whether or not to marry the Englishman she’d taken up with. The problem was, she was not just eccentric but disturbed. When I opened the door to her apartment for the first time, a Siamese cat sprang at me howling. The woman had left it there for four days without food. It turned out I’d inherited not only the starving cat but a history of hostility between her and the church and between her and her downstairs neighbor. He would telephone me in the middle of the night when I was sleeping and shout that my noise was keeping him awake. He finally took his paranoia and his grievances to the rector, accusing my subletter and me of being professional prostitutes who were blaspheming the church. The rector forthwith kicked me out. It was an odd moment for a suburban matron trying to start a new life. Later I learned that my landlady had killed herself in England.
I tried to carry on as usual in Princeton, but my old life no longer had much life in it. Entertaining had become a burden, and I did it less and less. Paul was always dieting, so our daily fare was sparse and dull. When he decided to entertain the entire English Department and their spouses to honor a retiring secretary, I sank to a new low: I ordered fried chicken and potato salad from a local deli. One spouse was overheard to say, “She’s supposed to be such a great cook and this is the crap she serves?”
By this time I was sleeping with the cleaver under my pillow. It was a crude Chinese cleaver, about a foot long, with a wooden handle and a blade so thick no amount of sharpening would give it an edge, but fine chopping was not what it was about. It was about heft, and it could halve a chicken in a single blow. A friend had given it to me because she said she never used it. She liked to serve a roast chicken whole, and she used her chef’s knife for chopping vegetables. Besides hacking through bones, her cleaver could also smash garlic or anything else that got in your way, but during the period it did time under my pillow, I didn’t miss it in the kitchen at all.
Paul was often away on some lecture tour or other, and I lay awake and alone in the dark, cut by a slice of moonlight through the window by my bed as I waited for sleep that was long in coming. When I heard a creak upon the stairs, an odd thump in the dark as one or another of our cats leaped and landed, the scenario would begin to play. The intruder had come in through the French windows of the dining room and perhaps paused for a handful of peanuts from a kitchen counter before he made for the staircase. At the top, he could turn right into Tucky’s bedroom, but he would soon see that it was empty of anything more valuable than a Chagall print and a Who poster.
Or he could turn left and move down the narrow corridor to the master bedroom, attracted by a glint of mirror on the vanity, in the drawer of which lay a dazzling assortment of costume jewelry that even in the dark he would not mistake for real. A small Persian rug was the only thing of value, but that he would not know even in the light. There was never any money in the house, but he would not know that either.
The intruder would enter my bedroom through the door on my right and pass by the head of my bed, which faced the fireplace beyond. At an earlier time, when my fears were less definite, I had imagined using the poker to defend myself, but now I recognized that it would be difficult to get to and awkward to wield. No, a cleaver was simpler, cleaner, easier to grab, and packed more of a wallop. Not that the intruder had entered with rape on his mind but, having found nothing more than a drawerful of silver and a handful of cheap beads for his trouble, he might feel that a warm female body offered some redemption of an otherwise lost night.
Unfortunately, the very ordinariness of the farmhouse in Capote’s In Cold Blood had made a strong impression on my middl
e years, confirming every True Detective story I had read as a child by flashlight under the covers, reveling in the forbidden, hair-raising pages of black-and-white photos showing bloodied bodies and smashed heads. For me, the house had never been a sure Place, the body never inviolable, innocence never the first defense.
Even now I had my escape route mapped out in the same detail with which I’d elaborated my flight from the house on Walnut Street in the event the Japs landed. Forty years had not changed the basic plan. Once I heard the footsteps of the intruder approaching the bedroom, I would slip silently from the bed and exit through the bathroom and on through the study to another hallway beyond, then down a back stairway and out through the garage to the front yard, or out the back door and across the backyard into my neighbor’s yard, and finally into the street, which would of course be empty, as would all the adjoining streets, and in the wee hours no one would be mad enough to respond to a crazy woman in a nightie banging on a door.
Unless he got to you first. Let’s say he was in the room before you were aware, and all you could do was pretend to be asleep. Let’s say you hadn’t heard him at all until he was on top of you, as had happened to the daughter of a friend of ours, who woke to feel a man’s hairy balls dangling in her face. She was a smart, cool girl who later became a psychiatrist in the U.S. Army and revealed at this moment her future capacities by talking the guy into telling his story instead of doing anything further with his balls. But let’s say he didn’t feel like talking. That’s where a cleaver would come in handy, provided you could get one hand free to grasp the handle and aim for the neck.
The Shrinkess laughed at my cleaver. We had taken to exchanging recipes and we talked a lot about food. She liked recipes to be exact and followed them exactly. She was a scientist, I was an improviser, but we found common emotional ground in kitchen talk. In the course of our conversations, she changed my diagnosis from “depressive with tendency to martyrdom” to “exacerbated environment.” I rolled the syllables of “exacerbated environment” on my tongue with the delight of Holofernes in Love’s Labour’s Lost, relishing the labials of “remuneration.”
My Kitchen Wars Page 19