Theo ended up in Cambridge after getting tossed out of the Anthology Film Archives for failing to maintain budgetary control over his programs and running up an annual deficit of over $200,000. One of his old ‘film geek’ buddies (his term), Ronnie Black, had landed a job running the Harvard Archive and Cinema and was looking for a second-in-command. ‘You’re the best programmer this side of Paris,’ Ronnie told him, ‘but you like to be deliberately profligate. So here’s the deal: you get the job on the proviso that you cannot spend a penny of our money without me signing off on it. You try to play games with me on this front, you’re out on your ass and that will be the end of your career. But if you play by the rules, together we’ll be able to run the show in Cambridge and do exactly what we want to do at Harvard . . . within reason.’
I met Theo at a dinner organized by an old Harvard friend named Sara Crowe. She was the very model of a New England Brahman, with one of those lean angular faces that put me in mind of the sort of Massachusetts grandes dames painted on commission by Whistler. She combined a certain ascetic noblesse oblige with a horror at the tawdriness of most human endeavor. She was considered perhaps the most important colonial historian since Perry Miller. Her book, American Theocrats: New Journeys into the Puritan Mind, won her considerable critical attention, not to mention a tenured professorship at Wellesley. Just to augment the manifold accomplishments of her life she had also married disgustingly well. He was a mutual fund star named Frederick Cowett: Princeton, Wharton, a big family compound in Wells, Maine and their very own townhouse on Beacon Hill, where they lived in upholstered elegance with their two young sons.
Sara was a marvel. The woman never put a foot wrong, never seemed to juggernaut down the wrong street, moving steadily from achievement to achievement. When I got the call at New England State to come over for dinner, she was completely warm and upbeat, telling me she’d heard from her spies all about the way I had stood up to Ted Stevens over the jock issue, and how proud she was of me for ‘being moral at a time when careerism takes precedent over everything else’.
‘Anyway, it’s clear that New England State is nothing more than a way-station for you before you find your way to grander things.’
Translation: What’s a Harvard smarty like you doing teaching at a third-tier university like that one?
Then she changed the subject by mentioning the dinner party to which she wanted to invite me two weeks from Friday.
Yes, her house was magnificent and decorated in subdued but immaculate good taste. Damn her, Frederick didn’t even turn out to be a bore. Instead he came across as charming in a well-bred preppy way, reasonably literate, and not averse to the eclectic group that Sara had assembled for the evening.
That was the other intriguing thing about Sara Crowe – for all her apparent Brahmanism, she did cultivate eccentrics and people who did not dress in Brooks Brothers shirts and bermuda shorts. Which is why, during our Harvard years, she got chummy with Christy – even if ‘La Poète’ (as Sara always referred to her) was the antithesis of Sara’s button-down style and had this habit of shocking her friends by drinking far too robustly and then launching into a scatalogical stream of consciousness.
I often thought that Sara needed such extreme friends as a way of informing the straightlaced world in which she dwelled that she was not totally one of them; that her circle would include artists and writers and even a mad film archivist like Theo Morgan.
Sara knew Theo because she sat on the board of the Harvard Film Archive, and because she also spotted him early on as a premier cru oddball.
‘Don’t think I’m trying to fix you up by seating him next to you,’ Sara told me in a fast whisper in a corner of her living room, before we all entered the very formal dining room to be served by two liveried waiters. ‘But I promise you that you’ll have a far more entertaining evening with Theo at your side than if I sat you next to Clifford Clayton – who will trace back his lineage to the Mayflower for you and also talk at great length about the derivatives market.’
Sara was right. Though I had to readjust my thought processes to tune into his mile-a-minute delivery, Theo Morgan proved to be excellent value.
‘Know what this place reminds me of?’ he said loudly as he sat down next to me. ‘The Magnificent Ambersons.’
‘Didn’t know anyone read Booth Tarkington these days,’ I said.
‘The movie is better than the book – which is upmarket soap opera.’
‘It’s rare that a movie betters a novel,’ I said.
‘You mean Mario Puzo’s The Godfather is a masterpiece and the movie is pulp?’
‘Ooops.’
‘And how about The Treasure of the Sierra Madre? I mean, the B. Traven novel isn’t the worst, but Huston’s film . . .’
‘Remind me never to challenge you on a film question again.’
He shot me a mischievous smile.
‘But I like being challenged,’ he said.
As I quickly came to discover, I too liked the challenge of being with Theo. At the end of the dinner – by which time I’d barely spoken to the man on my other side – he asked me to write down my number in a small black notebook that he pulled out of his jacket pocket. I really didn’t expect him to call after this evening. But he surprised me and phoned the following Monday.
‘Now I do hope that you approve of Howard Hawks.’
And he invited me to a screening of Only Angels Have Wings the next evening at the Brattle in Cambridge. We went out for a pizza afterwards – and started that first-date ritual of telling each other about ourselves. So I learned about his less-than-happy childhood in Indianapolis and he heard about my less-than-happy childhood in Connecticut. When I dropped the fact that my father was currently on the run from the law, his eyes actually widened.
‘Now that’s what I call classy,’ he said.
‘I never thought of it that way,’ I said, sounding just a little defensive.
‘Oh, come on,’ he said. ‘A dad who is a fugitive. You should be writing this story, not telling it. I mean, it’s irresistible stuff – especially since he can’t have left you feeling all warm and cuddly about him.’
‘You know, my mom always used that expression, “warm and cuddly”.’
‘But not with the emphasis on heavy irony that I bring to it.’
We saw each other again that weekend – a Bogart double-bill, The Maltese Falcon and High Sierra – and dinner at some cheap hamburger joint. On the third date – two Rohmer talkathons and a cheap Chinese place that was rather good all the same – he invited me back to his apartment. I accepted without hesitation.
Naturally I was nervous. So too was Theo. But when he finally made the move, we both responded with a fervor that was surprising.
Afterwards he put on a Miles Davis album – ‘Great post-coital stuff.’ Fetching us a decent bottle of wine he let it be known that he was seriously falling for me.
‘Now I know that, strategically, this is a dumb thing to say – because I’m supposed to play diffident and stand-offish and “don’t crowd my space”. But I’m not going to assume some role I don’t want to assume. I’m going to give it to you straight, Jane: you’re wonderful – and I’m a tough critic.’
When we have a need, we generally try to fill it. Theo Morgan did just that for me – and his declaration of intention didn’t push me away. On the contrary I was ready to be in love again, ready to give up the isolation and solitude that had been so much a part of my life since David’s death. For years I couldn’t even imagine the embrace of another man. I had shut down in that department (not that there were men flinging themselves in my path). But here was a guy who was singular and different and so comfortable in his own quirky skin. I loved his wit, his mental gymnastics and the fact that he could riff wildly on any subject – from George Bush’s ineptness in the English language, to an avant-garde jazzman of the 1950s named Jimmy Giuffre, to Joseph Strick’s film versions of Joyce (of which he was a big fan), to a forgotten Miami c
rime writer named Charles Willeford, whom Theo considered on a par with Chandler.
The range of his interests was dazzling. I sensed he so loved and needed these private passions because they masked a terrible loneliness. A few weeks after we became lovers he admitted to me that he hadn’t had a proper girlfriend for years, and that the one big love in his life – a performance artist named Constance van der Plante – had unceremoniously dumped him after he lost his job in New York.
‘You know, I almost didn’t go to that Sara Crowe dinner,’ he said. ‘Lucky me that I did.’
Sara was more than surprised when I told her that Theo and I were now an item.
‘Well, this was certainly not what I had planned when I put the two of you together.’
‘Don’t sound so shocked. He’s wonderful.’
‘Of course he is,’ she said, not sounding as though she meant it. ‘The thing is, Jane . . . well, I just wouldn’t have guessed that the two of you would have hit it off like that.’
‘Life is always brimming with surprises.’
‘You do sound happy.’
‘And you do sound genuinely unsettled by this news,’ I said.
‘It’s just taken me unawares.’
That reaction was pure Sara. She ‘loved’ her eccentric friends, but had this rather Victorian view of love: you can sleep with a mad artist when you’re of a certain age . . . but you must settle down with the sort of sober, reasonable man who is going to keep up his end of the conjugal bargain and provide you with an upscale life. So the idea that I was now Theo Morgan’s lover . . .
‘I really do like Theo,’ she said. ‘And, of course, he has every opportunity of becoming a rather important writer on film. But – and this is not a heavily emphasized “but” – he really is not the sturdy foundation upon which . . .’
‘I get your point,’ I said.
‘I didn’t mean to cause any offense.’
‘None taken,’ I said.
Christy met Theo a few weeks later when she was back in Boston to give a reading at Eliot House, and thoroughly approved of him. We went out to dinner after the reading which, in that great tradition of most poetry readings, was only attended by around thirty interested people. It didn’t matter that Christy had been another Pulitzer finalist the previous year for her second collection of poems. Poetry in our culture didn’t have much in the way of commercial legs.
But Theo – much to my amazement – knew his stuff when it came to modern American poetry. Over dinner, he was exchanging critical comments with Christy on everyone from Hart Crane to Howard Nemerov to Auden. When he disappeared off to use the toilet, Christy flashed me a knowing smile and said: ‘Well, I’d jump him if I was living here. But I like obsessive compulsives.’
‘He’s not that obsessive,’ I said.
‘Oh, yes, he is. But there’s nothing wrong with being a brilliant case of arrested development. Like me, you teach writers. In some way or another, all writers are damaged – and believe me, I can spot damage in a nanosecond. But there’s “bad damaged”, psycho-boy stuff. Then there’s “good damaged”, out there but interesting. Your fella falls into the second category.’
‘So you approve . . . with reservations.’
‘I think he’s super-smart and super-complicated. If you can handle that, marry the guy. But just know one thing: if you are thinking in any way of changing him, forget about it. He’s got his own way of doing things, and he’s not going to ever shift away from that.’
Christy was certainly right about Theo’s rigidity. He refused to ever get up before midday. He started the day with a pot of extra-strong espresso. He would only use one specific brand of espresso coffee – Lavazza – and would only make it in one of those small old-fashioned stove-top espresso makers. While the coffee was brewing, he’d eat a bowl of a particularly sweet and unhealthy cereal called Captain Crunch – but he refused to do so with milk, as he completely abhorred it. Then he’d install himself at his desk and begin the two hours he passed every day working on his magnum opus, a comprehensive history of American cinema – ‘about the most opinionated and idiosyncratic book ever written on the movies in this country’ and one which (he was sure) would instantly make him the most renowned critic in the country . . . if he ever got around to finishing the damn thing. It wasn’t that Theo lacked discipline or diligence. Rather the problem was that it was so insanely long: 2,130 pages of manuscript and he hadn’t yet reached the 1960s. I’d read the section on Orson Welles – he did allow me that privilege, after I’d promised I wouldn’t be overly critical – and I was amazed at how lucid and well-written and intelligent it was. Just as I was also dazzled by the scope of his ambition.
But when I asked to read more, he demurred, saying that he really shouldn’t have shown me anything in the first place, that I might be opening myself up for disappointment with the rest of the book, and that he could have possibly ‘tainted’ the writing process by letting me have a glimpse. He got so agitated and downright stressed out as he told me this that I had to mask my shock at the way he talked himself into an obsessive-compulsive corner.
‘I can never, never let you even touch the manuscript again,’ he said, pacing up and down his studio room at a manic pace.
‘Theo, there’s really no need to get so upset about—’
‘No need to get upset! No need to get upset! What do you know about upset? For four years, no one – no one – has touched this manuscript.’
‘But you gave it to me, Theo. You asked me to read it. So I don’t understand—’
‘That’s right, you don’t understand what it means to—’
But before finishing the sentence he had grabbed his leather jacket and was out the door. I thought about following him, but decided it was best simply to let him be – especially as I was so damn thrown by this out-of-body scene that had just been perpetrated. I decided there and then that, if he didn’t come back with some sort of explanation for this deeply disturbing act, I’d leave that night.
When he didn’t show up after an hour I scribbled him a note:
I waited for you. I hope you are in a better place.
And I went home.
At this point in time we’d been going out together for around six weeks and though we had spent a few evenings at my apartment in Somerville we’d generally stayed at his place in Cambridge, as it was far more convenient for all the cinemas we attended around Harvard Square. Though we were seeing each other two to three nights a week we had an unspoken rule to never show up uninvited at the other person’s residence. Until that night . . . when, around midnight, the doorbell rang. I hesitated before answering it, thinking: Say this evening was the moment when the veneer of normality and romantic bliss finally cracked and from this moment on, I’ll be seeing all the spooky, strange stuff he’s so far kept from view?
But another voice said: And if you push him away now because of one small outburst, you’ll be alone. And you don’t want to be alone again.
So I opened the door. He stood there, looking spent, his eyes brimming with fear and shame.
‘That was . . . awful,’ he said in a low whisper. ‘And I’ll understand if you slam the door on me. But . . .’
‘Is this a little secret habit you’ve been holding back on me – insane rages over nothing?’
‘I’m sorry. You don’t know how sorry I am. Can I come inside, please?’
I hesitated. He said: ‘Please, Jane . . .’
I nodded for him to follow me upstairs. Once in my living room he put his arms around me and told me that I was the best thing that had ever happened to him, that the last time he got one of these ‘rages’ was around two years ago. If it ever happened again he’d understand if I dropped him on the spot, and he’d do anything to make it up to me, and . . .
Though I did appreciate his contriteness, neediness is always a bit unnerving – even though I simultaneously found it reassuring. Perhaps because, at this point in time, I also needed him, and the way he ma
de me feel wanted and central to his life. It’s that old endless tug-of-war between wanting to feel essential to someone else and concurrently fearing this dependence because of the responsibility it imposes on you.
So I put my arms around him and told him there was nothing more to say about it, except: Let’s go to bed.
Which we did. When I woke up the next morning at eight Theo had broken his ‘never up before noon’ rule and had cooked a huge breakfast for us. When he started singing his contriteness aria I silenced it with a kiss.
‘There will never be a repeat performance,’ he promised me.
‘I’ll hold you to that,’ I said.
I went off to work, determined to try and put the entire incident behind me.
And Theo kept his word. There was no repeat performance in the months after this one-off incident. It wasn’t as if he became ultra-cautious around me, always on his best behavior and never showing me his complexities. On the contrary he reverted to his vampire hours shortly thereafter – continuing to watch movies all night and never rising before noon, and steadfastly refusing my attempts to change his junk-food habits. But I wasn’t complaining. If I’d had a particularly bad day at the university – or suddenly got hit with one of those black moods that occasionally overtook me – he instinctually understood how to manage the situation: attentive, but never oppressive. Knowing when not to crowd someone is never the simplest of learned lessons, but we both seemed adept at it. Whenever he was not around I genuinely missed him, just as I also liked the fact that we were never with each other day in, day out.
Eight months passed. One afternoon I arrived home to find a delivery van from Sony outside my door. The driver approached me as I climbed the steps to my front door, asked if I was Jane Howard, and said that he was delivering a 42-inch plasma television to me. When I said: ‘There must be some mistake,’ he showed me the dispatch order – and there, in fine print, was Theo’s name.
Leaving the World Page 19