by Blake Bailey
Yates was twice her age but seemed older, wheezing and frail, and the fact that he was able to hang on to her, if only for a while, attests to a powerful lingering charm. At his best he was nothing if not “understanding and knowing and kind” (as Mary Robison pointed out), all the more so in the presence of pretty young women. But in the case of Laura—the last significant romance of Yates’s life—perhaps the best explanation is a basic human tendency to idealize artists because of their work. As Peggy Rambach observed, “Dick’s writing was so sensitive, so tender toward children, that Laura figured he’d be that person.” He was and he wasn’t, but in any case she pursued the man who was. As a courting gesture—lest she get a “sweet send-off” at the outset—she mailed him the complete lyrics to one of his favorite old tunes, “Mountain Greenery”: “Whatever happens,” she wrote, “it’s a great song and I’d love to hear you sing it and, non sequiturally speaking, I love you.” And he seemed to love her too, though as Monica Yates remarked, “The physical aspect was hard to fathom.”
For a while, though, he seemed rejuvenated—relative, that is, to the morose disheveled old man who smoked and muttered at the Crossroads. While in Arkansas for a reading that February, he was the life of several parties—not only the drunkest but the most ebullient guest. “Dick was bombed, but he was on,” remembered a married woman with the improbable name of Booghie, with whom he shamelessly flirted. “Do you remember me—Booghie?” she wrote him afterward. “We sat on the couch and you promised to love me forever, and give me big bucks, and kisses all over and we sang songs, and I fell in love.… It was the high point of my winter.”
Yates even found pretexts for introducing Laura to his daughters—without, however, quite violating his old taboo against exposing them to girlfriends as such. Monica was in her last year of college and considering a career in publishing, so it simply made sense for Yates to invite her to Boston in order to meet a nice, smart “friend” of his who could advise her about the profession. Also, Monica had recently published a story in the Boston Globe, whereupon Dubus wrote her a kind letter to the effect that she should “stick to her guns” and keep working on her stories rather than be pressured into writing a novel (“I got the impression,” said Monica, “that he was justifying his own career mostly”). As Yates assumed she’d want to meet Dubus too, he proposed that the five of them—Andre and Peggy, he and Laura, and Monica who was about the same age as the other two women—get together for dinner. Monica agreed, but reluctantly: She’d read between the lines re Laura’s true status and found the prospect of being in the midst of older men and their daughterly girlfriends “creepy”; besides, she was a “mess” at the time—unhappy, high-strung—and didn’t relish having to deal with her father in person, knowing he’d be drunk. And so he was, though his well-spoken young “friend” made a good impression; as for Dubus, he was almost as drunk as Yates. Monica was appalled: “Both he and Dad were very boisterous. Andre kept telling these tedious anecdotes about going into bars and charming the locals: ‘So I walked in and pretty soon the whole place was eating out my hands!’ etcetera. Again and again the waiter warned him and Dad to lower their voices. An awful night.” Laura herself seemed to enjoy such outings and contribute to the general hilarity, though they soon palled in Peggy Rambach’s case: “I was very bored during Andre’s meetings with Dick. I was the woman and hence ignored. My mind would wander, I’d daydream, concentrate on the length of Dick’s cigarette ash and so on. It reminds me of how Dick once inscribed a book to us: ‘To Andre with all my respect…’—and this and that, on and on, then finally—‘and to Peggy, who is a lovely girl.’”
Though arguably there was no connection, Monica Yates had a psychotic episode shortly after that meeting with Dubus et al. Like her sister a decade before, she’d taken an hallucinogenic drug (mushrooms) and hadn’t come down; like her father she thought she was Christ; like both she had a history of depression. “I was anorexic early in college—five foot nine, 107 pounds—then during my last year I got fat,” she said. “I was very upset about this, and I was messing up in a lot of other ways, too—losing close friends, my boyfriend, that sort of thing.” After a week in the Northampton mental hospital, her mother arranged for her to be transferred to Grasslands in Westchester, where she stayed for six weeks. At the time she was diagnosed as schizophrenic and given the drug Haldol, though an outpatient psychiatrist decided it was an isolated incident and took her off medication. When it was all over, Monica went to Durango, Colorado, where Martha and Gina had recently moved; she found work in a nursing home, though mostly she “holed up” and wondered what had happened to her and worried about the future. Her father worried too—“Join the club,” he’d told her—though his main advice was just to get on with her life and try not to think about it. She thought about it anyway (“Dad didn’t do enough of that,” she said; “the crazier he got, the more he’d deny it”), and perhaps as a further reaction against fate, she became deeply religious. This, however, worked no better than being a chemistry major. During a lonely solo bicycle trip that took her through the Bible Belt, she called her father: “Dad, I don’t want to go to heaven if these people are the ones who’ll be there!” “Well of course, baby,” he replied. “Everyone knows that.”
Meanwhile Sharon Yates’s life had grown increasingly tranquil in her father’s absence. Two years before, she’d met her future husband Richard Levine, a shy man who’d felt daunted in the presence of his girlfriend’s rather celebrated, saturnine father. “Every time Jimmy Carter tells another lie,” Yates dourly quipped on meeting Levine, “he grows another tooth.” That night at dinner, Levine grew uneasy as the silence expanded at their table; he’d expected Yates to be a lively raconteur, but the man sat leaning to one side with his face set. As it happened, he and Sharon were eavesdropping on a nearby table—a mutual habit when together—and every so often they’d remark caustically on what they overheard. That was in 1977, and on July 21, 1979, Sharon and Levine eloped. Yates was disgusted at first—he’d wanted to walk his daughter down the aisle and give her away—but he soon got over it. A little later they visited him in Boston, and after dinner he took them back to his crepuscular apartment and opened a bottle of champagne.
* * *
Yates’s story collection proceeded apace, though he’d had to change the title Five Kinds of Dismay because he now planned six stories rather than five, and one of them hadn’t struck him as particularly dismaying. He’d suggested Aspects of Home to Sam Lawrence, who found it “too academic”; Yates altered it to the less Forsterian Broken Homes. “Nobody’s eyes light up much on hearing my tentative title,” he wrote. “The idea, see, is that all the stories will touch in some way on fucked-up families.” A somewhat younger author who also favored such themes—indeed was indebted to Yates in a number of ways and modest enough to admit it—visited Boston that summer. “I wanted to tell you again how pleased I was to meet you and to be able to spend a few hours with you,” Raymond Carver wrote. “You’ve been one of my heroes since I first read Revolutionary Road and was just stopped dead in my tracks with admiration.” Carver had presented Yates with a copy of his first collection, Will You Please Be Quiet, Please?, and now enclosed a second, Furious Seasons, with the diffident caveat that Yates read only four of the stories therein (he listed them). “Don’t take any of this, please, as an obligation of any sort,” he added. It’s unknown whether the two ever met again.
Meanwhile Yates was in financial trouble. In the fall he accepted a one-semester appointment at Harvard Extension teaching two classes—fiction and expository writing (the latter a subject he hadn’t taught since his New School days)—but was still unable to pay nine hundred dollars in back taxes to the state of Massachusetts. When they threatened to seize his property (one pauses to wonder what Yates had to fear from such a threat), he called his friend Joe Mohbat in Brooklyn. Usually when he called to talk to the Mohbats, the lonely Yates would immediately apologize for taking up their time (“I know you
have better things to do”), but this was different. As Mohbat remembered, “He took a while getting around to it, but he sounded pretty desperate. He insisted I draft a note and charge interest and so on. I wouldn’t be surprised if he went without meals to pay me back; it ate him up to ask for money.” Yates’s first installment on the loan was somewhat delayed when the check became buried amid the chaos of his desk—“where, as you’ll see,” he wrote Mohbat, “it picked up a few traces of roach shit”—but Yates was nonetheless grateful for what he considered the rather ambiguous favor of “[saving his] ramshackle life.”
At that point poverty was a lesser sorrow. Though Yates and Laura were still somewhat together after several months, the end was near. The usual problems applied, though in certain ways the two remained compatible despite Yates’s lapses; by then, however, he needed more than just an “emotional nurse” (the function he ascribed to past girlfriends and wives), he needed someone to care for him physically—a lot to ask of anybody, much less a charming young woman with her life ahead of her. Such was his infirmity that Geoff Clark was “horrified” when he saw Yates that fall in Rhode Island, noting how Laura was obliged to “guide him about”: “[A]fter a quick beer in the union before his reading, Dick, requiring assistance, took minutes—hours, it seemed—to climb the union stairs, stopping periodically on a step, clinging to the railing as he breathed heavily, agonizingly, gathering himself for the next step.” During his readings, too, Yates was often derailed by coughing and what Clark described as “lip-smacking pauses that broke the rhythm.”* As for what it was like sharing a bedroom with Yates—the couple spent a night at Clark’s house during the visit, and through the wall he heard Yates “hacking, coughing, muttering, groaning, pacing” all night long.
“I think this may be my last foray into the magic world of young girls,” he wrote Mohbat that same month. “Got to face facts, and I’ll soon be 54, which everybody knows is the time for carpet slippers and companionship with some pleasant lady whose brains have been utterly scrambled since her third husband walked out in 1965. That’s what’s great about young girls, apart from their vastly superior flesh: their brains haven’t yet had time to be scrambled by the world.” Yates tried to be philosophical about things, but he was heartbroken and dreaded the loneliness that lay ahead. When the young woman calmly declined a belated proposal of marriage, Yates tried to win her back—or simply forestall the inevitable—with his prose. Probably he spent at least a week polishing the seven typed pages of comic pensées and vignettes that make up “Notes Toward an Understanding of Laura M—,”* an effort reminiscent of those strenuously witty letters he had written Barbara Beury twenty years earlier, though even more wistful and funny and sad. “Talk of marriage brings on an intellectual power-failure in most contemporary girls,” he wrote.
Their circuits go out one after another, and they must fill silence and darkness with commitment and relationship and identity and sharing and coping and space and meaningful … and this-level and that-level and feelings and feelings and feelings and feelings—this spastic paralysis can go on for hours until somebody manages to change the fuse; only then do things come back to life and allow a girl to say “love” again.
So I am forever grateful that Laura M— is an extraordinary girl. Her circuits never go out. Her “no” and her “too old” may hurt like whips, but they are words a man can trust.
One can fill in a lot of blanks based on these pages; suffice to say, the basic trajectory of the romance seems to have been pretty much the same as all the others in Yates’s life, if perhaps mitigated by a bit more humor and mutual appreciation than usual. “When Laura said she didn’t like my story I shouted ugly stuff for about two hours and made her cry,” he wrote. “Since that night, I have been unable to discuss my work with Laura at all except in postures of arrogance or apology.” That Yates would have found other reasons to shout at her (and surely did) is beyond doubt, but once she saw fit to criticize his work, however innocently, the die was cast. Indeed, most of Yates’s “Notes” seem the product of his creative brooding on that subject, as when he imagined Laura considering one of his stories for the Atlantic:
She reads it through with an open mind, blinking now and then at the soft-edged and idealized parts; then she prepares an inter-office memo to Richard Todd [an editor at the magazine].
Dick: (And Laura, bless her heart, hasn’t yet gotten over a sweet, secret thrill at calling Mr. Todd by his first name) This new R. Yates story leaves much, I think, to be desired.…
A few days later she receives Todd’s reply:
Laura: I couldn’t agree more. Soft-edged, idealized and boring, boring, boring.… Reject this piece. Trash it. Wipe it out. We will, I think, be doing the wretched man a favor.…
The diamond-bright precision of Todd’s intelligence is just the tonic Laura needs to help her compose her letter to me, which reads like this:
Dear Richard Yates: Like most of your previous thirty-four submissions, this one came close.…
I’m afraid I can’t meet you for a drink on Friday, as promised; something has come up. Try me later in the month, okay?
Kisses, L.…
* * *
Whenever I say ugly stuff in restaurants, Laura goes into the ladies’ room and cries. This helps her to put me in perspective.… I make frequent use of mens’ rooms, too, in various bleak and melancholy ways, but Laura doesn’t known anything about that.…
* * *
This is a multiple-choice question. If Laura is the nicest girl I have ever known … then how come I shout ugly stuff at her all the time?
A. Because I want to disappoint her and drive her away like the harsh and terrible old man I am afraid of becoming.
B. Because I am like Doctor Jack-O’-Lantern in having to show I don’t need anybody’s kindness while dying for it.
C. Because I drink too much beer.
The best answer wavers somewhere between B and C, though the ramifications of C are everywhere in evidence, and help to explain another item:
I am pretty sure Laura thought pushing me over the hedge was funny, but she didn’t laugh at the time because that would have spoiled her sense of outrage. In much the same way, she seldom allows outrage to spoil her sense of what’s funny, even on being teased about such matters as vegetarianism and cultivated body hair.
Fair to assume that Laura pushed (and Yates fell) because he was exasperatingly drunk again, and then the fact that she cultivated body hair and vegetarianism would seem to push the whole opposites-attract principle beyond the generational pale. Other problems apparently included her admiration for the brilliance of David Milch (who’d taught her at Yale), her frequent fraternizing with friends her own age (“this madcap shuttling between Somerville and Harvard and Jamaica Plain”), and the fact that, finally, she’d begun to avoid Yates entirely except for the odd weekday lunch. “I love Laura M—,” the “Notes” sadly conclude. “I will love Laura M—until the day I push aside my Jello and scratch at the window of my oxygen tent for the last time.”
A month or so later, Laura took a job with Random House and moved to New York. “She’s offered ample assurance that we’ll still be ‘friends,’ but I’ve never really believed in stuff like that,” Yates wrote the Arkansas woman named Booghie that December. “Still, I’ve been familiar with loneliness before, many times, and know I’ll survive it. If I can’t exactly welcome it like an old comrade, at least it’s no worse than putting up with some tiresome old acquaintance of mine.” In the meantime he wondered if he might address his present correspondent as Margaret: “Because while ‘Booge’ is certainly a cute and kicky name—Don’t get me wrong—I think I’d prefer the idea of a lovely, forever unattainable girl named Margaret, down there in Arkansas, to whom I can write letters once in a while—on the hopeful assumption that she might once in a while write back.” But he must have decided that Arkansas was too far away, or that a married woman named Booghie really was too unattainable, or that confessing his lo
neliness to a relative stranger was unseemly, or perhaps the letter got lost amid the roach droppings and other refuse. In any case it was never sent.
* * *
Yates had a horror of being pitied (at least by non-intimates), and as his health declined and the sadness of his life became obvious, he took more frequent refuge in a gruff, though by no means humorless, persona. “Ahh, mind your own goddamn business!” he’d snap, coughing, when solicitous strangers would advise him to quit smoking. “You guys ever going to start wearing grownup clothes?” he said to Dubus and Jim Crumley, indicating their cowboy boots and jeans. In such a mood he particularly relished the chance to squelch anything smacking of pretension or phoniness. “I just love your work, Mr. Yates,” said a critic from the Boston Globe. “And I can see why Flaubert is such an influence. Really, there’s no great novel that isn’t about adultery.” Yates looked the man up and down, then laughed in his face: “You’re out of your mind!” At the same time Yates became all the more sympathetic toward what he perceived as real suffering. The writer John Casey had gotten on Yates’s bad side some fifteen years before in Iowa (by seeming overprivileged and picking on Bob Lehrman), but when the two met in 1980 at their mutual friend Bill Keough’s house, Yates was strikingly kind. “Yates really likes you,” Keough told Casey afterward, and it occurred to the latter that he’d endeared himself by having had the “worst year of [his] life”: “My dog and father had died, my wife had left me, and my best friend had just killed himself. I’d been kicked to shit, and now I was a real human being in Dick’s eyes.” When Casey went on to win the National Book Award, Yates wrote him a warm letter of congratulation.