The Men in My Life

by Patricia Bosworth

  I STAYED AWAY from Jason for close to six weeks, refusing to see him or talk to him. In the meantime Bessie organized a dance workshop at Reisinger’s, the big new theatre on campus. I was performing a solo set to a poem by e. e. cummings, “Your Little Voice (Over the Wires),” which I recited as I danced. As I recited the words in a tremulous voice, I felt that I was growing larger and more important to myself.

  Marcia had invited Jason and he showed up in the audience, along with my father. I could hear Daddy coughing and laughing. I thought I could hear sparse applause as I took my curtain call, dripping with perspiration. Both men came backstage to congratulate me. I took one look at Jason and felt weak in the knees. I still loved him in spite of everything. He stared at me very hard.

  Then there was an uncomfortable silence. Daddy didn’t speak to Jason, but he hugged me and said, “You were wonderful, my darling!” Then he quickly made his excuses. “Late meeting back in New York City, kiddies.” He ran off to his hired Carey Cadillac limousine outside the theatre.

  As soon as he’d gone, Jason grabbed me and kissed my cheeks, my nose, my lips. His strong arms felt good as his kisses rained down on me. He wouldn’t let me go.

  “You coming home, baby? Please, you coming home? I have a job . . . I am making some money.” He held me close. “Oh, God, I have missed you, missed you.” There were tears in his eyes. “I love you, I really do love you.”

  With some trepidation I agreed to go back with him to Alger Court that night. Once in the bedroom we began to kiss frantically, moaning, gripping each other, tearing off our clothes. The fish tanks were still gurgling in the background and I could hear the birds chirping on the sun porch. We ended up making love on the floor.

  Jason was working for Wally delivering trays of Thomas’ English muffins to supermarkets and diners all over Westchester. He complained about it, but he knew that if he didn’t earn some money, I might leave him for good, and so our life went on for a while longer. It was not the same. I stopped cooking elaborate meals for the family; we existed on takeout and frozen foods. I was more intent on my college classes and I’d started auditioning for TV shows and commercials.

  On weekends we’d hop in the Jag and zoom over to Bear Mountain State Park, lie on the grass, drink cheap wine, and try to plan our future. Jason wanted to go to Europe; I wanted to move from Alger Court before we did anything else. “We have no privacy,” I told Jason. I wanted to create a home.

  Jason hedged. He agreed we should move, but not quite yet. I knew he didn’t want to lose access to Grandma and her estate.

  In the meantime we would talk until it got dark and then we’d drive back to Bronxville, fall into bed, make love. Jason consumed me all over again with his tawny hairy body, fucking me deep and hard, rocking me back and forth in his arms, holding me down while he tickled my nipples with his fingers until I moaned. I hated myself for feeling so consumed by him. I disliked the man, and yet I stayed with him. Something bound us together. Years later a tough old movie star, Shelley Winters, told me, “When the sex gets better and hotter so you can’t get enough of it, you deceive yourself into thinking your marriage is getting better, when in reality the rest of your marriage is full of shit.”

  BY THIS TIME I was starting to view our marriage as a kind of bizarre adventure. I never knew what to expect. I certainly never expected to meet Jason’s mother, who had been incarcerated in a loony bin for decades. But not long after Jason and I reconciled, Mrs. Bean suddenly appeared at our door. She looked almost the same as she did in the photograph on our dresser—same twisted little smile.

  It was midafternoon. Jason had returned from his job driving the Thomas’ English muffin truck. He had just grabbed a beer from the fridge and the bell rang.

  There she was, Judith Bean, standing in the doorway in a thin cloth coat carrying what looked like a cardboard suitcase.

  “Mom?” Jason stood and stared.

  “I’m back.” She smiled sweetly and put her suitcase down. “I’m back just for a little while . . .”

  Jason pulled me next to him. “Mom, I want you to meet my wife, Patti . . .”

  Judith Bean shook my hand very solemnly. “I’m glad my son has married such a pretty little girl.”

  “Mom . . . Mom . . .” I could tell Jason didn’t know how to handle the situation. “Listen,” he said, “Mom, did you just leave . . . the hospital, I mean.”

  Judith Bean stood up very straight. “I walked out. I wanted to see you before I die,” she said. “I wish you’d visited me. Why didn’t you visit me?”

  Jason hung his head. “Dunno, Mom. I guess . . . we may have been told not to.”

  Judith Bean surveyed the room. “Where’s Grandma?”

  “She’s probably sleeping,” I said. “I can wake her.”

  Jason held my arm. “Don’t do that, baby.”

  “I’m hungry,” Judith Bean announced.

  “I’ll fix you something,” I said.

  “That would be nice.”

  I hurried into the kitchen and made my mother-in-law a peanut butter sandwich. There was coffee in the pot.

  I brought everything out on a tray. Judith Bean was perched on the sofa staring into space. She wolfed down the sandwich and gulped the coffee, and then after wiping her mouth, she looked at us with burning eyes.

  “Don’t you want to know why I came to see you, Jason?” she asked.

  “Yeah, Mom, sure I do.”

  With that, Judith Bean jumped from her perch and declared, “Because I am going to kill myself right now, and I want you to watch me.” Before we could do anything, she had zipped through the door and onto the street and was jogging toward the train station.

  We ran after her, but she was an amazing little runner for a sixty-five-year-old crazy lady. Lying down on the train tracks, she gripped the rails. It took all Jason’s strength and mine to pull her off. By this time she was yelling like a banshee. “No, let me go, I want to die! I want to die, please!” A crowd gathered. Wally appeared, still in his Thomas’ English muffin overalls.

  “Oh my Gawd . . . Mom!” He knelt beside her writhing body. Jason was continuing to hold her down. “Call an ambulance, call the police!” he ordered to me.

  In another hour Judith Bean was taken to a hospital in a straitjacket and eventually was driven back to the state hospital.

  She escaped one more time. Once more we raced with her to the train station, and once more she lay down on the tracks and pleaded with us to let her die in peace. “I long to be crushed and obliterated—nothing left of me,” she cried.

  Jason let out a great sob and folded his mother into his arms. “Oh, Mom, oh, Mom,” he moaned. He loved his mother. He seemed to relate to her torment. He was very shaken by the experience.

  I momentarily felt sympathy for my husband. He’d never had a childhood. But even after this shared experience, our life together didn’t change.

  Chapter Eight

  ONE EARLY EVENING, Jason returned from work cradling a dying bird in his hand. Was it a starling, a blue jay, a baby hawk? Even Grandma didn’t know, but Jason was determined to nurse the bird back to health. I remember how carefully he fed it with an eyedropper, murmuring sweet nothings to it as the bird lay inertly on the living room couch that first night. Television was forgotten, supper left unprepared—until Grandma started complaining and I heated up a can of soup for her—but Jason was utterly absorbed with this bird.

  Grandma didn’t approve. All at once she spoke, in a hoarse, croaking voice, more than she’d spoken during our entire marriage. She told Jason he could not keep the bird uncaged; she was worried the bird might be carrying a disease. She ordered him to put it in the aviary with the other birds or get rid of it. Wally backed her up and so did Faith. I said nothing. Thus ensued a raucous argument. It ended with Jason storming out of the living room, shouting, “The bird is gonna be with us!”

  HE CALLED THE bird “Lucky,” and from then on Lucky remained in our cramped bedroom as Jason nursed h
im back to health. He did keep his job, but he stopped painting.

  I’d come home from class or a modeling assignment and find our room in a mess, pillows on the floor, shades drawn, the dusty bureau heaped with racing forms and an amber beer mug filled with pennies.

  Jason would be lying on our bed wearing only his underpants, with Lucky on his stomach. He’d be feeding the bird, petting it.

  “He knows me, the little bugger.” He’d grin. Jason had always preferred birds to humans because, as he put it, “They don’t talk back.”

  AS SOON AS the bird got well, Jason allowed it to flap around our room uncaged. I began suffering from insomnia, afraid that Lucky might peck my eyes out as I slept. I took to snitching some of Daddy’s Nembutals whenever I went home for a visit.

  Weeks went by. Finally I had to know. “How long are you going to keep Lucky?” I asked Jason one night.

  “What do you mean? He’s gonna stay here,” Jason answered belligerently. “He likes it here, don’t you, boy?” and he’d kiss the bird’s beak and urge me to do the same.

  I would draw back whenever Lucky’s claws gripped my flesh, whenever his wings beat against my skin. I couldn’t communicate with him the way Jason did, chirping and twittering at him tenderly. Lucky actually would peep back.

  “Birds are amazing creatures, free and beautiful and brave. They fly all over the world. Birds are nicer than people.”

  “I guess they’re nicer than your fish,” I’d answer. “You don’t pay any attention to your fish anymore.”

  We would both stare at the fish, swimming rather disconsolately around in their murky tank. “Tank needs cleaning,” I’d say.

  “So? That’s your job,” Jason would reply coldly. “Clean it, baby.” And he’d go back to allowing Lucky to chew on his finger.

  NONE OF MY classmates except Marcia knew about the strange realities of my marriage: the bird that flapped around our sagging bed; my ninety-six-year-old grandmother-in-law who ranted about my “commie poppa”; my sadistic, narcissistic, self-involved husband whom I couldn’t break away from. For a while a rumor circulated on campus that my parents had disinherited me because I’d married someone they disapproved of. Hence my need to earn a living. I angrily denied the rumor.

  I did keep up a frantic pace running up the hill to campus in an effort to get to class promptly, sometimes stumbling, almost falling as I slipped into a seat. I was invariably late or rushing off to another modeling assignment or audition. Being a model did have some compensations. Like going off on a Caribbean weekend for a location shoot for bathing suits. Or lunches al fresco at photographer Milton Greene’s penthouse studio high above Lexington Avenue overlooking Grand Central. The debonair, skinny Fred Astaire and the equally dashing Cary Grant were being photographed by Milton for some Life magazine spread. I was there for a less impressive booking, but I was able to watch them pose and then nibble at some delicious repast.

  ONE NIGHT I escaped for dinner and the theatre with my mother. Once we were together it was as if we’d never been apart. I forgot about being Mrs. Jason Bean. I was Patricia Bosworth Crum, college student/aspiring actress/model. We talked about subjects that interested Mama, such as her job at “Bloomie’s.” She was reading “everything by Rebecca West”—Black Lamb and Grey Falcon and her account of the Nuremberg trials; Mama had bought a new hat at Lilly Daché; she’d just invented a marvelous new soup, cold tomato with a topping of curried mayonnaise.

  Then we went to see William Inge’s new play Picnic, directed by Joshua Logan. The show really affected me. It was set in a small Kansas town on Labor Day weekend in the communal backyard of two middle-aged widows, Flo and Helen, who live in adjoining houses along with one of their boarders, a spinster schoolteacher desperate for marriage. Nothing ever happens to them until Hal, a sexy, mysterious drifter, appears in their midst. His animal vitality upsets everybody, especially Flo’s young daughters—Madge, who’s bored by her beauty, and Millie, a bookish tomboy played with agitated intensity by twenty-five-year-old Kim Stanley. Her performance was so close to the bone I found myself almost hyperventilating. I liked the young, skinny Paul Newman too, and Janice Rule as Madge, especially in the scene where she and the drifter (played by Ralph Meeker) dance seductively in the yard and you know she will sacrifice a wealthy marriage (to Newman) for the excitement the drifter promises. She does run away with him, and all the other women want to run away with him too.

  By the end of the show I panicked, realizing that Jason would wonder where I was. As soon as I put Mama in a cab I called him from a pay phone in Times Square and said I was on my way home. When I reached Alger Court, my heart was thudding. I knew that as soon as I admitted I’d been to the theatre with my mother Jason would be angry. But I had to keep seeing my mother and my father too. They were both reminders that I wasn’t Jason’s prisoner. Until I married, I’d taken the intense, complicated world I’d exiled myself from for granted. I needed to be reminded that this other world of privilege and beauty and opportunity was still available to me. Yes, there was pain and darkness in it too, but I could take the good parts and create a beautiful world for myself. It was part of the reason I could go on living.

  I did not want to share my parents’ world with Jason, but then they had never invited us as a couple to the brownstone on East Sixty-Eighth Street anyway. That was their way of rejecting him. As far as they were concerned, he didn’t exist. That must have hurt him.

  I was in the midst of describing how Picnic had moved me when Jason hit me square in the face. While I began crying, he watched me coldly. “Your mother isn’t good for you,” he said. “She’s feeding you lies about me.”

  “No, she isn’t,” I sobbed. “She doesn’t like you because she doesn’t know you.”

  “She doesn’t want to know me.”

  It was true, but I couldn’t admit that to him.

  We undressed in silence and crawled into bed. Lying next to him was excruciating. I felt so helpless. I’d learned too late that I was married to a bully. And to make matters worse, I’d returned to our relationship of my own free will. By staying with this man I was helping sustain and excuse the abuse.

  I SAW MY brother now and then, but it was always an effort. He didn’t want to see anyone. His spirits and psyche had not improved in the last year. He had graduated with honors at Stockbridge and gone on to MIT. But he had lasted there only a couple of months. It had been a painful experience for him. He could do the work, that was no problem, but he could not make any friends. He felt totally isolated and alone. He came home and explained quietly to my parents that he no longer wanted to be at his dream school. My father suggested he take the year off to just relax, figure out what the next step might be. He got him a part-time job at the Daily News as a copyboy. Bart didn’t last there more than six weeks.

  Now he was home again, “rattling around in the brownstone,” as he called it. He was going to movies and seeing his best friend Tobias. He was thinking of going to Reed College in Oregon in the fall.

  “It’s smaller, it’s supposed to be very good . . .” Tobias had enrolled there. I disliked Tobias. He had a sallow face and shifty eyes; he lisped. I thought he was like a character out of a horror movie. I told my brother that.

  Bart was indignant. “Tobias has had a hard life, harder than you will ever have. He knows a lot of stuff about people that I don’t know.”

  “Like what?”

  “Stuff that you wouldn’t understand.”

  “Try me.”

  My brother gazed at me pityingly. “If you leave Jason, maybe I’ll tell you why Tobias and I are friends.”

  Bart and I would usually end up at the Bronxville Drugstore sipping lemon cokes. I noticed he was still speaking in dull, flat tones; his face was expressionless. He had acne dotting his cheeks. We would sit in silence, and then I would ask him what was the matter, using our private language. He wouldn’t react, and when I’d repeat the sentence he’d scoff, “Stop talking like that. We are too old
for that now.”

  He would admit he was enjoying driving the station wagon to the Cloisters or to Garrison by himself. It was quiet up there. He’d catch me up on what was going on at home. Mama was planning events in Bloomie’s Gourmet Shop. Daddy was still working on the Rita Hayworth case.

  Overall, our parents were leading pretty separate lives. “But that’s par for the course, isn’t it?” my brother said quietly. We finished our lemon cokes and I walked him over to the train station.

  And then out of the blue he asked me, “Was it worth it? Is sex that great?”

  I FELT SO foolish and helpless; I had gone past the phase of thinking my life with Jason would ever get any better. So I simply withdrew from the experience of being a wife and began to devise a method that allowed me to live with myself and with him, despite all the confusion and pain.

  We were both busy with various jobs. Jason had started to paint again with his sporadic gusto, and then there was his obsession above all with his damn bird.

  “Ships passing in the night,” he used to say to me as I’d follow him to the bathroom for my nightly shower. We weren’t communicating much, except in bed, and that was passionate but wordless. I was still frightened of his temper, but I’d lost all respect for him. “The thrill was gone,” as Wally would say.

  I kept everything bottled up and never told Jason what I thought of him. But after—was it now sixteen months?—I stopped being committed to the relationship. From then on I felt like a hypocrite for pretending I cared when I didn’t. Instead I began trying to figure out a way of getting out of the marriage gracefully.

  During those last months I saw my father more often for lunch. He was insisting on it. And I was grateful. I’d missed our long heart-to-heart talks (mostly dream talk about my future; Daddy was a fantasist who painted a rosy picture: “You will be on Broadway and in the movies . . . You will be very, very successful. I feel it in my bones.”). How could I live up to such expectations? I would tell my father to please tone down his hopes for me, that I was bound to disappoint him. I wanted to do everything I dreamed of doing, but I was worried I wouldn’t be good enough.