WHAT WAS NEEDED—to be vulgarly materialist about it—was a job. The seed money her father had placed in her account was dwindling, and would sustain at most another few months of loosies and ramen and rent. But in fall of 1974 there were no jobs, at least not for a philosophy major with a rap sheet. She spent a couple days canvassing for Greenpeace, but found it hard to knock on doors knowing they’d be slammed in her face. Then she temped for a while through an agency. The work involved reading fine print at the bottoms of newspaper ads, hundreds of thousands of them it seemed, that were implicated in a class-action lawsuit against an evil real-estate developer. Jenny’s first paycheck was signed by the evil real-estate developer. As a kind of penance, she blew half of it at a bookstore near Union Square, amassing a pile of volumes by Frankfurt School theoreticians, but it failed to make her feel better, so she just didn’t go to work the next day, staying home instead and getting super-duper high. A good thing, too, because that’s the day the phone rang about a position she hardly remembered applying for, at a small art gallery in SoHo.
The owner was Austrian, with tortoiseshell eyeglasses and a shaved head. If it was possible to look like a less jolly Michel Foucault, then he did. He was obviously homosexual, and preferred, he told her at the interview (watching carefully for her reaction), the company of young people. He was also, she was guessing, filthy rich. But they shared a taste for the conceptual, and he agreed to advance her the first month’s pay and give her meaningful responsibilities right away. She was to be his sole employee, after all.
He showed her to her desk—actually a long dining table he’d placed near the front door, so that anyone looking to steal the art off the walls or floor would have to pass beneath Jenny’s watchful eye. The notion was comical in at least two ways. One: Assuming these were your average thieves—male, burly, whacked on angel dust—how was Jenny, a buck ten in heavy boots, supposed to stop them? And two: Who besides Jenny would really want to steal this art—sculptures fashioned from cigarette butts; homoerotic jello molds; a pile of rags in one corner you might mistake for trash? Bruno had one of the world’s great poker faces, but he liked her cheekiness; she could tell by the way his eyes flashed behind the glasses. “Deterrence, Liebchen. Deterrence.” He knocked on the tabletop once.
She sat down, to get a feel for where she’d be spending her days. There was a phone, of course, and a mimeographed price guide to the work on display, and a small electric typewriter for correspondence, but, given that its surface area must have been twenty square feet, the desk looked positively austere. In this way, it was of a piece with the rest of the gallery, which in a previous life had been an auto body shop. A single panel of reinforced glass had been installed where the garage door had been. Exposed girders framed a skylight. The floors were buffed concrete. Every Austrian, she thought, was a minimalist. (Later, on a fact-finding mission to the Metropolitan Museum, she would be shocked to discover a reproduced Viennese dining room of the nineteenth century, all floral porcelain and elaborate engravery. But of course, the scale of the trauma that had taken place between Bruno’s grandparents’ generation and Bruno’s was incalculable.)
To her surprise, he would say nothing about the mess that came to cover her desk. For one thing, she was practically living at the gallery. Thirty-two hours a week! For another, no one ever entered it, save for a few far-sighted investors who bought only by appointment. Even the openings were dismal affairs, with Bruno and the artists and Jenny standing around drinking boxed wine with the occasional drifter drawn in off the street by the wino’s free-booze ESP. Jenny always insisted on serving them.
The largest part of her job turned out to be ghost-writing grant applications for Bruno’s artists, none of whom, he freely admitted, were ever likely to support themselves on the open market. So how do you expect to make money? she wanted to ask. Bruno’s indifference to the fiscal was part of why she was able to work for him with a cleanish conscience, but now that their fortunes were yoked together, she would have liked to have seen a little more entrepreneurial vim. She herself had, at his urging, begun dressing what he called more professionally. When she checked herself in the mirror in the morning (in a blouse, for God’s sake) she felt like a sellout, but at least now there was some purpose to getting out of bed.
COMPROMISES SNOWBALLED. By her second February, she had joined a dating service. You filled out a questionnaire, you mailed in a Polaroid, and for $12.99 you received a dossier of questionnaires and Polaroids from men whose interests had been matched to yours via punch-card. It was embarrassing—assuming something worked out, how did you explain to friends how you’d met?—but the fact that Jenny didn’t have any friends was why she’d signed up for the service in the first place. The punch-cards, however, proved unreliable. The bachelors in her dossier were Leos and Geminis; turn-ons included theater, dancing, and fondue. She held out for beverage-based meetings, easy to escape. If they went moderately well, she’d invite the men back to her place. She interpreted as an auspicious sign the ability to cross Bowery without bolting for safety.
There weren’t many places to sit in her apartment, if you considered two to be not many, which she did. She’d tried sitting on the bed once, with a Taurus named Frank who’d seemed like a bit of a swinger, but perhaps the ululations of pleasure leaking through from her Ukrainian neighbor put too much pressure on them, because Frank had excused himself after one glass of Cold Duck, never to be heard from again. Then she’d tried drinking too much, in order to facilitate the transition into sex, but that backfired, too. It was as if, in her post-McGillicuddy renunciation of bourgeois courtship and monogamy, she’d forgotten how the game was played. One night, she heard herself explaining to a date, out on Broome Street with the busboys carrying out the night’s first trash and the players at the mah-jongg club raking their tiles together like scrimshanders sorting whalebone, about the seating arrangements at her place, and the possible awkwardness, and how they should probably just move straight to fucking. “Jesus, I sound neurotic, don’t I?” Ben, was the name of that one. Nice guy, really. A Ph.D. candidate in primatology at Columbia, who might have been able to clarify certain enduring puzzles of assortative mating, had he stuck around. But he left a message with her service the following morning saying he couldn’t see her anymore.
She hung up the phone and slumped at her desk, where she’d been editing a Guggenheim application. Chinks in her fortress of papers and books let through the cool morning light of the street. She stared down at the color slides she’d been studying, digging for antecedents for this artist’s punctilious replicas of hotel paintings from the Midwest. It was supposed to be the shift in context, the little jolt of misprision, that made it art. She had just put her head down on her arms when the top half of a stack of catalogues raisonnés levitated in front of her to reveal Bruno’s shaved head, which never changed so much as a whisker from day to day. “Morgen,” he said, before dropping the books again. He steamed across the gallery toward his own tiny office in back, where as far as she knew he sat all day sipping espresso and reading week-old news in the German-language paper he special-ordered through a newsstand on Sixth Avenue. Directly beneath the skylight, though, he stopped. “Something is wrong.”
“No.”
“Come now. I refuse to be lied to. Some young man has wronged you, hasn’t he?” From a person who renounced on principle the possibility of a transcendental morality, she thought, it was an interesting choice of words.
“None of them’s stuck around long enough to wrong me, Bruno.”
He waved a hand dismissively. “Romance is a fiction anyway. A myth to sell greeting cards.” Still, he seemed ready, given a name and address, to go challenge the malefactor, like some feudal-era father defending his daughter’s chastity. This was all in the eyes, of course. The rest of the face stayed perfectly composed. “If you want to know what the problem is, it’s that apartment of yours. They see it and judge you unfairly.”
“Who says they ever see it
? You’ve never seen it.”
“Please, darling. I mail your checks. Rivington Street?” He shuddered.
“Look around us, Bruno. It’s not like this neighborhood’s much better.”
“With a public concern, an address downtown sends a certain message, projects a certain vous savez quoi. But I don’t have to carry that into private life. Do you think your beloved Herr Adorno never watched television? I have it on good authority he never missed an episode of Gilligan’s Island. The problem with you Americans is your mania for consistency.” Bruno’s little lectures, she’d decided, were 85 percent ironic. The conceit that she would be under his tutelage provided an almost rueful amusement. “Even now, even in New York, you haven’t learned that consistency won’t protect you. I live uptown, shamelessly. And you should, too. Young men will flock to a woman who appears not to need them.” He seemed to have convinced himself of something. “In fact, I will give you a raise to cover it.”
“Bruno, this is ridiculous. Let’s start over. Good morning.”
“No. I insist.” He held up a hand. His checkbook was out.
“You’re making me feel guilty, like I’ve maneuvered you into something, when I’m just having a crappy morning, is all.”
He thought for a second. “An experiment then. You will come with me this Sunday to dine with an old friend of mine. He has never taken my advice. He lives, that is, in a fantasy world, believing in the same kind of bohemia you cling to. You look in his eyes and decide if this is what you want. If not, we move you uptown.”
“Sunday? Isn’t that the Bicentennial?”
“Do you have plans? Will you be out waving empire’s proud flag? No? I thought not.”
THAT DINNER WAS MISERABLE. She’d assumed Bruno was trying to make a match, and so hadn’t realized, until the artist showed up towing a boyfriend, that he was gay. Instead of hitting it off, she had to watch the three men push and pull with each other for upwards of two hours. It was only as a kind of punishment that she said afterward to her employer, “Fine, I’ll let you move me, but I’m not going north of Twenty-Third. And you can pay for the truck.”
She told herself she wasn’t abandoning the Lower East Side, wasn’t forsaking its proletarian freedoms for the trappings of the middle class. After all, the new building, for all its perks, was hardly a fount of civility. The people in the elevator treated her exactly as the tenants of the old place had. And there wasn’t any less noise to keep her awake at night.
The difference was that it was now all outside: the irascible all-night traffic, the cabs in front of the Ethiopian takeaways, the grinding, saurian garbage trucks. When she awakened in the a.m. into blind-slit shrinking nowhereness, it had all gone disorientingly quiet, and she would imagine for a few seconds she was back there in that mausoleum of a ranch house in the San Fernando Valley. She readied herself for the sound of her father’s wire whisk against the sides of a stainless steel bowl, the brush of his knuckles against her bedroom door. And as the black got light, she wondered what this all meant. Had she left some unfinished business back in California? Or was it simply the way a place lived in long enough imprints itself on the still-soft tissues of the brain? Or, simpler yet, did she miss it, that mouse-quiet house where they’d called her by another name? There’d been a time when she’d believed herself capable of living without the conventional comforts—career, possessions, significant other—but her self-imposed exile was revealing her to be frustratingly human. This didn’t mean she’d given up on the dream that the larger situation might be changed, or at least analyzed. But, by the time she met Richard, she’d begun to accept Bruno’s proposition that if the revolution ever happened, it would be without, or prior to, any alteration to the contours of her own individual existence. Here she was after two years in New York, only just learning to scale her expectations down to the size of her actual life. It was like trying to squeeze toothpaste back into the tube.
64
REGAN WAS TO SPEND HER EARLY THIRTIES puzzling over the central conviction of her twenties. Where had she gotten the idea that there was no problem so big love couldn’t fix it? But this was probably just another way of being hard on herself; a better question might have been, Where hadn’t she gotten it? Wherever you turned in those years, there were love beads and love-ins, “Love Me Do” and “When a Man Loves a Woman.” You couldn’t be a citizen of your own time and not believe on some level that love was, as another song put it, all you needed. She’d held fast to her love through the joys and sorrows of the ’60s. Through the showdown between Daddy and William, through Daddy’s wedding and her own, through Keith’s career change, Will’s birth, Cate’s … Perhaps this was why she was so slow to see the unhappiness creeping back in after they moved to the Upper East Side. Or to acknowledge, to herself or to her husband, that she saw it. She’d been so much unhappier in the pre-Keith past; she was still grateful to him for all he’d saved her from. In fact, she would come to wonder if it wasn’t that unhappiness she’d never told him about, the child who hadn’t been born, that lay between them now.
But whatever the cause, Keith gradually began to pull away. At six o’clock, she used to hear his briefcase hitting the ground, used to hear him steal toward the living room to catch the kids up in his arms before they could register he was home. Now he seemed to tiptoe for another reason: to buy himself as much time as possible before having to talk to anyone. He would go straight to the kitchen to mix himself a drink, which he drained with a pinched expression. He wasn’t the kind of man to complain about the mess the kids had made, but his mouth at rest was a frown, and she could feel him dwelling on something.
He’d lost interest in sex, too. This might have been a welcome development, as her own interest was waning again. Or maybe interest wasn’t quite the right word, but she often felt exhausted by the time they went to bed: bloated, unsexy, disembodied. Once or twice a week, she would get him off under the covers. He would rub her through her nightgown and she would pretend to come just before she knew he was going to, and he wouldn’t question it. But the condition for her not wanting him, it seemed, had been him wanting her. As soon as he stopped seeking her hand out, she discovered she needed his touch.
One night they were out at some professional function, a fundraiser for a children’s something-or-other, a drinks-and-tasting-menu kind of affair where you ate off little plates and mingled with clients and potential clients. Regan hated these things, not because the thought of abandoned children didn’t hit her where she lived, but because she was no good at eating standing up. To balance heavy food on a tiny plate, to manage fork and napkin and the drink there was nowhere to set down, and then to have to talk to men who invariably knew your father, or worse, your uncle … You ought to be able to pay money not to come to these things. And suddenly, Keith was talking to, laughing with, a woman who couldn’t have been older than twenty-four. She looked like a mythological creature, a silkie or dryad, long blond hair and a low-cut dress in which her breasts, without any apparent means of support, were offered like alluring canapés. This was more or less the universal ideal of female beauty, from which Regan was drifting further and further, sucked toward the Mommy Zone. Meanwhile, Keith just got better-looking. How could his love, which she’d put so much stock in, stand up to her early grays, her thickening ass, her stretch-marks and wrinkles?
She started walking everywhere: to PTA meetings, to drop Cate off at preschool, to the salon with its supersonic hairdryers. She walked one afternoon all the way down to Union Square and bought an exercise book from the four-story bookstore there, which had suddenly sprouted a fitness section. At home, she played Carly Simon on Keith’s high-end stereo and practiced isometric stretches, rolling a rolling-pin over her abdomen. Then, when that didn’t make her feel any better, she stuck a finger down her throat and, for the first time since Vassar, made herself throw up.
SHE COULDN’T HAVE SAID when this became a daily thing. It was as if there were two worlds, sealed off from each
other by the bathroom door. When she wasn’t doing it, she didn’t think about it. Or she did, but only somewhere in the back of her brain, while up front she didn’t even acknowledge that she was looking forward to doing it again, already rehearsing the steps. First she would turn on the faucet in the bathroom, and the radio they kept on the sill by the clothes hamper, because there was no fan to cover the sound. Then she would crack the window enough to let street noise in, but not enough that what she was about to do would be visible to the great world. She would keep the door to the kitchen open, so that the smaller, nuclear world—Will, Cate—would see she had nothing to hide. And when it was all in place, this tongue-and-groove construction of sound, running water plus talk radio plus the broken-glass noise of a backhoe four stories below—she would pull the door and secure it with a metal hook a decade’s worth of warping and settling had been unable to dislodge from the doorframe.
She admired the medieval pragmatism of that hook. And she admired the scale, with its nubbed rubber mat. It presented itself as the one solid place to stand in the world. But the spin of the intricately hatched dial, the blur of numbers and the almost idiographic line segments, the yaw from side to side through the positive and negative values, made her feel less that she was on solid ground than that she was at sea, up on a tiny crow’s nest, so severely many degrees out of plumb that if she fell there would be nothing to catch her but blue. She would feel in an overwhelming way how everything around her, radio, hook, scale, had been prepared for just this—an unfreedom at once exhilarating and queasy-making.
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