by Jeanne Darst
I thought that was probably it. There would be no halfway point where we’d meet between our two houses. After that day we’d never see each other again. But shortly after she was canned from the gym, I ran into her at the library where she was now working, and she needed a roommate desperately. I saw an opportunity to get away from the littlest Believer and I took it. A few weeks after living together I convinced Carmen to write a show of skits and stand-up comedy and improvisation.
Carmen was mad at me all the time. This was our schtick: passionate Latina and bumbling white lady, and like a lot of schticks it was our real life, too. She was mad at me because I drank too much, was impossibly white and suburban and rich (which I was, relative to her), fancy and carefree, which she saw as inane. I was messy, didn’t clean a whole lot, prompting lots of “Just ’cause I’m dark don’t mean I’m gonna scrub the bathroom!” routines. She didn’t understand extreme drunkenness and blacking out. I tried to explain that this is what civilized people do, but she couldn’t make the cultural leap. What I ate drove her crazy. “You just put a little tomato and mayonnaise and salt and pepper on a couple pieces of bread—it’s delicious.”
“No. No, you can’t! That’s insane! You need some meat on there or it’s not a sandwich!”
“Yes it is. It’s called a tomato sandwich. I’m going to make you one.”
“I’m not gonna eat it.”
One night I got drunk and she was a little drunk and I suggested we go down on each other. She went berserk and told me to fuck off, but I kept pestering her. “It’ll be fun! Come on! Let’s just try it.” A “Take one big bite” kind of argument, like you’d have with a three-year-old about spinach.
Finally she got on board and we went in the bedroom. She went first, and I thought she did a good job, it wasn’t really my thing but it was an experience. For someone who had to be convinced she certainly gave it a thorough go. Then it was my turn to do her. Well, the booze was starting to wear off and frankly the idea was losing its luster. Then I was confronted with the actual female anatomy, and man, I was not feeling good about this. I did my best and came up with some creative ways to get through it, when Carmen stopped me and said, “What are you doing?”
“I’m, um, you know, eating you out.”
“No you’re not. What is that, is that the blanket? Are you using the blanket on my pussy instead of your mouth?”
“No! No. I just had to—”
“You’re not even doing it. You’re pretending. You’re pretending to eat me out. I did you! I swear to God, Jeanne!”
“I’m sorry. It’s just, it’s really gross and I can’t do it. I was doing it, though. I was.”
Carmen threw me out of our room for the next few nights. I guess it was a classic case of unrequited cunnilingus, and we never talked about it again. I felt the same way about writing our show together. She would pretend to be writing but I was doing most of it, I was the one doing all the work. And most of the time I was perfectly happy doing all the work. Writing our show, writing, seemed like something I might want to do with myself.
After living with Dad for twenty-three years, my mother certainly wasn’t going to jump for joy that I wanted to write; my sisters didn’t care, as long as I didn’t TALK about writing.
I had always had my heart set on doing nothing, but playwriting came along and I thought, Why not? I’d like to take a few precautions not to go insane and die broke, chatting with wallpaper like my grandmother did and whatnot, but other than that, could it be so bad? When Dad found out that I was doing some playwriting and poetry and short stories he called me at my mother’s apartment one weekend and said he was driving to Rye to a dinner party and “why don’t I give you a ride back to Purchase and we’ll talk about whether you should try and get a job at a small paper somewhere, à la Hemingway, it’s the best way to get used to writing every day.”
I accepted the ride back to school. I spotted his little red Dodge Omni coming toward me up York Avenue and saw there were other people in the car. I hopped in and was introduced to some (“very interesting gal, hell of a nice guy, used to write for The Nation . . . ”) people. I don’t know why I thought there wouldn’t be a couple of “terrific-looking” Austrian novelists in the car with my dad. It started to rain right around the curve of the Willis Avenue Bridge but Dad remained focused on something he was saying rather than something he was driving. I barely noticed but the Austrian in the backseat with me was clearly terrified. It was a stormy, curvy, windows-up, oxygen-deprived, harrowing monologue of a ride with no say whatsoever in your own safety or wellbeing or the topic of conversation so yeah, I was utterly at home. They dropped me off and drove off in the storm.
The next day my mother called. “I suppose you’ve heard what happened with your father.”
“No.”
“Apparently after he dropped you off he drove down some stairs and couldn’t get back up the stairs. I’m not sure. There were some Austrian writers who were coming out of the library. Sounds like the blind leading the blind, if you ask me.”
“The Austrians were in the car. What steps?” I realized the only steps my mother could be talking about were the library steps. My father had driven down this long set of stairs that is not wide, really, just a regular person staircase, not like the steps up the Jefferson Memorial or anything, and he would have had to have driven from my apartment onto the mall, a brick esplanade kind of thing meant, again, for pedestrians to get around, not cars. I had never seen a car on the mall ever. So he drove onto the mall like someone in a Jerry Bruckheimer movie, and then went down this narrow staircase where he landed in front of the library. Again, a place where cars didn’t go because there was no way for them to get there. I called him up.
“God damn it, Jean-Joe, I know it’s a state school and all, but do you think they might have a little something in the budget for a few signs here and there?”
“Signs? Dad, there’s a road and then the road ends. What kind of sign do you want?”
“Well, I’ll tell ya, some damn nice kids helped me push my car back up those stairs but it must’ve made the Austrians a little nervous. They took the train back to the city, which I thought was a little unnecessary.”
I wasn’t looking forward to hearing around campus about the lunatic who had driven down the library steps, but at the same time I was glad to have avoided a conversation with him about writing. The last time we’d talked I’d told him I might major in African-American literature, and his reaction was calm, measured, as if trying to get me to move a knife away from my own throat.
“Now, Jeanne, hold on a minute, hold on here. I can see your attraction, particularly to James Baldwin and so forth, there’s no doubt Maya Angelou is terrific, God, and Zora Neale Hurston, really terrific. But at some point the black experience is just one experience, while majoring in, let’s say, European literature, opens up so many other experiences, the big ones, ones you can tackle right now, with the benefit of good professors and your peers. You may never get that chance again. That’s all I’m saying. Think it over. Give it a day or two and we’ll talk.” His reaction to my wanting to write could turn into a real box set. It would start with what books I should read on writing (“Gardner’s terrific, of course, but no one can top Frank O’Connor’s The Lonely Voice on the short story, now let’s see, I assume you’ve read Cather’s book on writing already? Updike’s essays are in themselves lessons in writing, have you ever tried John Middleton Murry on style? You can’t forget F. R. Leavis on the novel. I’m going to photocopy some Keats for ya, because you just can’t get better lessons than from just reading Keats. You’ll learn more from the poets simply because there’s more critical writing on poetry. Prose has only been taken seriously since about 1850 . . .”) and go on and on and on from there.
A LITERATURE PROFESSOR at SUNY Purchase named Bell Chevigny was the advisor on our senior project, the two-woman show that Carmen and I wrote and performed. Bell had just written a novel and she invited us to he
r apartment around Riverside and 110th for a book party. She gave us an inscribed copy of her new novel. Was there anything cooler? I was friends with someone whose book was published, a woman, someone who was happily married and had two daughters. Carmen liked Bell quite a bit, we both did, but Bell was an important symbol for me, a happy, successful writer with a family and many friends who was not living in poverty. Bell wasn’t a drunk, either. A mother. A writer. A normal person.
Our two-woman show, This Side of Virginity, a play on the title of Fitzgerald’s first novel, This Side of Paradise, was a big hit, got a great review in that journalistic knockout of a student newspaper, The Load. We were on our way, like the acting students, the dancers everybody wanted to fuck, the painters who rode around on vintage bikes in jeans splattered in multicolored oils, the ultra-focused film majors, to artistic superiority. I thought we’d hit Saturday Night Live to start off with and then I would bust out a humor piece in The New Yorker, establishing me as an incredibly hilarious serious writer. The movies and plays I would do would insure I could travel as much as I wanted and not have to work jobs to support the precarious writing life. Unlike my father, I had a backup plan, a plan B as they say. Acting. I’d like to reiterate in case you missed that: Acting was my backup career, my safety net so that I wouldn’t have to be broke.
Dad came to our show and loved it and called every other day with ideas for Carmen and me and our next show. He thought it’d be great if we did a parody of William F. Buckley’s TV show, Firing Line. Carmen didn’t even know what that was, and I tried to explain to Dad the utter lunacy of a twentyyear-old Dominican woman playing William F. Buckley while I took on the role of John Kenneth Galbraith. Meet the Press was another show he thought we’d be terrific at parodying.
He’d leave messages on our answering machine. “Jean, it’s Dad. I got an idea for you. I got an idea for you, I got an idea for Carmen . . .”
A FAILED DIVORCE
AT FIRST THEY ACTED like normal divorced people. They were angry and they spoke badly of one another and dated other people and not each other. Mom could actually smell our father on us when we came in the door on Sunday night after a weekend at his place.
“Have you been at your father’s? You reek of franks and beans.” He was renting his friend Quig’s house in Springs, Long Island, and the wood-burning stove there, the “black cat” as his neighbor the artist Saul Steinberg called it, did leave you smelling as if you had been camping. That first Thanksgiving they were divorced she forbade him to enter her apartment, so Dad took us to a sushi place on Third Avenue, not a “Calvin Trillin Chinatown dumpling house on Thanksgiving” kind of place, but rather a last-minute “Dad didn’t make a reservation anywhere” kind of place. The place was empty, aka totally depressing and potentially gastro-disastrous. My dad was not a big sushi person but the man would eat anything; he had a tendency to finish everything on his plate and then reach toward yours.
“Are you going to eat that piece of mackerel there, Jean-Joe?” my dad said, hand poised above the piece of fish on my plate, suspended like a giant white-man hand puppet, awaiting my answer.
“Umm, no.”
“I didn’t think you had plans for that one,” he said, popping it into his mouth. “Now, tell me, Jean, reading any of the English poets? I mean the greats. Keats? Blake? Who’ve you tried?” and before I could answer, my dad had spread wasabi on the green plastic separator things that act as some kind of plate decoration and lobbed it into his mouth and began chomping on it.
“Dad! Jesus Christ!” Katharine yelled. “That’s a garnis!”
“A what?” my dad said with wide eyes, as if he had eaten a blowfish.
“A garnis! It’s plastic. Decoration. You’re not supposed to eat it!” Eleanor said, looking around to see if the waitstaff was watching. My dad pulled the green plastic matter from his mouth and laid it on his empty plate.
That Thanksgiving was the last time he ever took us out to dinner. He’d run out of his house money. That piece of mackerel was the official start of destitute divorced dad.
He was early to pick us up for Christmas. Ever since I can remember, my father never had anywhere else he had to be.
He was sitting on one of the couches in the lobby with a bag of presents on either side of his knees. He wore a hat; he still bought and wore hats, mostly from this prehistoric preppy store on Madison and Forty-sixth, F. R. Tripler. Tripler’s was his only charge account, so you could count on some things from there at Christmas. The men’s section may have been passable, but the women’s clothes were the most outdated, buttoned-up, queer shit imaginable. What old money wear in menopause.
He got up and gave his usual huge greeting. “Jean-Joe! Eleanora! Julita! Katarina! Mer-ry Christmas! Sit. Sit. Have I got some great things for you all.” My dad, hat and gray overcoat still on, began taking presents out of the bags, all unwrapped. My father had never wrapped a present ever. It totally threw off your timing as the person getting the gift because you could plainly see what you were being given as he reached across people to hand it to you and out of politeness you had to maintain a façade of suspense as he passed the unclothed gift your way. There were biographies he got half-price at the Strand, a button-down shirt with a silk tie at the collar from Tripler’s that Pat Buckley might wear to jury duty, and then the worst kind of present my dad gave—an expensive item, like a fancy camera that you knew meant he wasn’t going to eat for a week.
We sat in the lobby opening presents, thankful that because Mom was new to the building we didn’t know any of the people coming and going to their holiday festivities, passing us and giving the raised eyebrow to the doorman, Mario. Katharine and Eleanor, the two people in our family who had incomes, entry-level though they were, made a couple overtures to actually going somewhere for brunch, but Dad cheerfully dismissed these wacky notions.
“Oh, I think we’re good right here. What do you think about that OED, Jean-Joe? There’s a manual that comes with it on how to use it and also a magnifying glass, which, even at your age, you’re going to need, believe me. Oh, it’s wonderful. Your life as you know it? Gone, I’m telling ya. You’ll thank me later.”
“Thanks, Dad.”
“You’re very welcome.”
My father then reached into one of his bags and pulled out a large hunk of Parmesan cheese.
“I thought my bio of Rebecca West smelled a little funny.” Katharine giggled.
“Murray’s cheese shop on Bleecker.” He pulled a knife out of his herringbone overcoat and chiseled off a flaky hunk. “Eleanor? Can I interest you in some of the finest of Parma?”
Eleanor, on the verge of tears, uttered, “No thank you.”
“All right, then, terrible decision but you are free to make it. Katarina?”
“Sure. Yummy.” He handed Katharine the crumbly cheese.
“Help yourself to some of that good bread. Now, who else would like a bit? Julia, what’s the name of the doorman again?”
“Mario, but he doesn’t want any cheese, Dad,” Julia said.
“Nonsense. It’s Christmas and he’s working. Where’s your spirit?”
“Please don’t offer him any cheese, Dad,” Eleanor pleaded.
“What is wrong with you girls?” My dad stood up and then yelled across the lobby, “Mario! Mario!”
Mario put his Daily News down.
“Can I interest you in some of the finest Parmesan this side of the Mediterranean?”
“Oh no, thank you, sir.”
“You’re not being polite, are you, Mario?”
“Dad, he doesn’t want any cheese,” I said.
“Okay, I will have some. Thank you.”
“Terr-ific. Okay, let’s see here . . .” And my dad began jabbing at the Parmesan with his knife again. “Where are you from, Mario?”
“Italy.”
“What part?” My dad placed a chunk of cheese in Mario’s palm.
“Umbria.”
“Umbria, my God, that’s gorge
ous land! Your family farmers or winemakers or what?” My dad nibbled on a bit of cheese as if he were at a cocktail party in Southampton.
Just then the doors of one of the two elevators opened and Mom and Phil Sully got out. Mom’s eyes went to the cheese on the lobby table, the presents everywhere, the crumbly baguette on the table, Dad, Mario and us girls. While it didn’t reflect favorably on Dad, it wasn’t what you’d call a moment of glory for Mom or Phil Sully, either. Mr. Sully probably wouldn’t want the New York Bar Association knowing he was dating a client. Mom simply walked through it like a rain shower.
“Steve. Girls.” Mario trotted to the door and held it for them as they walked out of the lobby into the sharp December chill and Eighty-seventh Street.
My father didn’t miss a beat. “Katarina, I am about two weeks away from all my Fitzgerald research being done. Did I tell you that? I wish to hell that I could find that he once ran into a blaze and pulled out an orphan. Jesus, the more you know, the more difficult it is to like the guy.”
Dad’s divorced-dad game was strong: impromptu passes made at cashiers at the IGA in Amagansett with whom we had gone to grade school, amorous lunges at Julia’s college friend’s older sister out on his little Sunfish sailboat followed by friend needing to be driven to the train to get back to the city immediately, condoms falling out of his pocket when he stuck out his hand to meet your friend’s elderly mother at the gas station.
A few months later Mom decided to ditch the Upper East Side for Florida, which seemed like a gutsy divorced-ladystarting-over kind of move. My parents were physically farther apart than they had ever been. But there was some backpedaling after Mom was “asked” to leave the complex where she lived in the Sunshine State after only a few months, at which point she opted to crash in the West Village at my father’s studio while she looked for her own place. My father had moved back to Manhattan from Amagansett after his relationship with a local woman named Pity ended, as one can imagine, badly. Reconvening in the West Village my parents now ate together, went to movies and checked each other in and out of the hospital. Some people might call this dating.