The Tall Boy: A Memoir

by Jess Gregg

  I waited in a kind of suspended cognizance until my name was called. My lawyer nodded for me to come forward. Obeying, I lifted unblinking eyes to the judge. The charge against me was probably read, and there must have been discussion between him and my lawyer, yet all I recall now is his voice asking how I pled, and the other voice, my own, answering “Guilty”. Forever after, I heard him sentence me to a year in prison, and then, in the same impersonal voice, suspend it. I was smartly fined, however, and put on probation for twelve months before the knock of the gavel closed the case.

  Some kind of reality began to return as I left the courtroom. I glimpsed Jim in the crowded corridor, and we walked along, side by side, neither looking at the other. “What will you do now?” he asked at last.

  I told him of my plan to go to New York when my probation was over, but that seemed no solution at all to him. As we reached the street, he met my eyes for the first time. “Bud, could you change?”

  I said as gently as possible, “Probably not.”

  “But would you try?” he asked. “Would you make every possible effort?”

  To satisfy him, I said I would. We shook hands, and I understood that our goodbye was likely to be forever. When he had gone, I stood there a moment longer. The downtown air was poisoned with traffic fumes, but I breathed it in gratefully—filled my lungs. Then I headed on home.

  10

  BLUE HEAVEN

  At the end of her letter, just before she signed love, Marty, she wrote, “I’m suddenly afraid of the direction I’m heading, but I don’t know how to turn back anymore.” It was the first time she had volunteered even this much information about her personal life. However, by this time, I was pretty sure the lover she was talking about was a girl.

  We had been corresponding fairly regularly in the year since we had graduated from college. That in itself was odd, since we’d never been close on campus. She had sat across the room from me in English 107, a slender girl with a cool, level glance, and long eyelashes that were repeated in shadow on her cheeks. She seldom participated in class discussion, although when she silently disagreed with someone’s opinion, a quickening pulse in her throat contradicted that appearance of cool. Once, after I’d read a paper aloud, she had slipped me a note after class. “Beautiful,” it said. Always hungry for approval, I kept it in my wallet until the word rubbed away.

  Eventually, I asked her out to a movie—asked her twice, in fact, but she was always busy. As far as I know, she never dated anyone on campus—word had gone around that she was engaged to someone in nearby Orlando. If this were true, she never brought him to the dances or the games. The one time I saw her away from class was when I happened into one of those “happy hour” bars along the highway, and she was sitting in a booth with some young woman. She seemed not to see me, and yet that sudden pulsing in her throat suggested she was uncomfortably aware of my presence.

  I was too busy answering questions about my own life to wonder much about Marty’s. I would have probably forgotten about her, except that just before graduation, she let me read some poems she had written. I was expecting regulation moon-wash, but found instead a passionate outcry, intense, original, moving. On impulse, I sent them to Edith Haggard, a New York literary agent, who had been able to sell a story of mine to Esquire. Although she eventually sent the poems back, her letter of rejection transported Marty. “Some of this is just wonderful,” Haggard wrote. “A haunting voice. But unfortunately, poetry won’t pay the rent on my office—”

  Even when graduation scattered us, me back to Los Angeles, she home to Galveston, we kept in touch, trading enthusiasms about books, authors, and each other’s work. Sometimes, I tried to coax a little personal news from her as well, but she never picked up on this. Not until this last letter. And before I could even reply, she wrote me another, still more revealing for all its ambiguity.

  “You and I have never discussed it in so many words,” she wrote, “but we have always sensed the truth about each other. Alas, I am far more comfortable with the truth about you than about me. I don’t want this kind of life for myself. I see nothing in it for me but unhappiness. Yet I am more and more drawn into it. Do you do this too? Fear, but follow?”

  A few months earlier, I would have probably dashed off a reassuring letter, telling her to come on in, the water’s fine. But since then, the water had cooled, and I myself was in it way over my head. I was serving my year’s probation now, and nothing crossed my path that I did not instantly interpret as a police set-up. Some young man had only to give me an interested glance, and an alarm went off in my head, jangling until I rushed away. On every side, an unbearable pressure was put on me to change my life; but nobody had any suggestion about how change was possible. I was in Marty’s boat, seeing nothing but disaster ahead, not knowing how to turn back, and unable even to reach out to anyone for comfort.

  And so the letter I wrote back to her simply continued to chat about books and the new plays. She didn’t answer it. She didn’t answer the next two either. It wasn’t until some months later that I learned she had taken a razor blade and slashed one of her wrists. Not that she ever told me. I had to hear of the attempt from someone who didn’t like her much, or me at all. “And the laugh is,” our mutual critic confided, “the person she wanted to die for is a real dog’s lunch. Some dreary woman who runs a secretarial service—”

  I telephoned Marty at once. Neither of us could get the words out when we heard the other’s voice. And in fact, we never did speak of my arrest or her suicide attempt. She had been ill, she told me, but was feeling fine now. “Except,” she added, hiding behind a droll voice, “I’ve got to get away from here soon, or I’ll die.”

  “Where’ll you go?”

  “New York, I suppose. That’s where people go, isn’t it?”

  “That’s where I’m going,” I told her. “Soon as I can find the money.

  “Are you poor, just now?”

  My troubles had left me in economic chaos. “Pretty poor,” I said.

  “Find someone to share expenses with,” she advised. Then she laughed. “Maybe you and I should live together.”

  It was a joke, of course. Yet we kept joking this way over the next few months, and gradually it began to seem like common sense. Each of us had come to a violent stand-still in our lives, and neither wanted to risk going back to the old way. Maybe two paralytics giving each other support could manage a few steps forward.

  Discussions of budget began to replace literary matters in our letters. Plans were made, discarded, revived. Marty would take part-time work once we got to the City. So would I, if the proceeds from selling my car evaporated before I could finish my novel. Yet as our enthusiasm grew, so did our doubts. A telegram from Marty, one Sunday night, put things succinctly: It will never work. I telegraphed back just one word and an exclamation point: Quitter! By the next letter, she was once more discussing where we would live. “In Greenwich Village, if that’s not too cliché,” she wrote. “But not a cold-water flat, let’s promise ourselves that—a hot tub every night is my one surviving pleasure in life.”

  Marty went to New York in July, and somehow found an apartment for us, plus part-time secretarial work for herself at Redbook. As my probation had another month to go, I did not join her until mid-August, arriving in the middle of a relentless heat wave. She met my train, and despite the damp cotton dress, and hair pasted in wet commas on her brow, she managed to sustain that cool look. We kissed the air in front of each other to avoid sticking together. It was almost too hot to talk, but going downtown on the subway, she said, “You’re going to kill me.”

  “Why?” I kept myself from looking at her left wrist.

  “The apartment I rented for us,” she said.

  “Is it terrible?”

  “Eye of the beholder,” she said.

  We got off at Sheridan Square, and walked west toward the river. Here the buildings had increasingly a penitent air. Marty drew out a key as we approached a narrow white
house on Greenwich Street. Our names were already written in a slot beside our doorbell, but they had a parvenu look next to the stately identification printed just above us: Squire Fairfield. “I haven’t met him yet,” Marty said glibly, to distract my attention from the crumbling plaster and cracked paint, “but we’ll have him down for tea soon.”

  Three flights of stairs led us up to our apartment. The living room doubled as a bedroom, and there was a kitchenette and booth-sized bathroom. The tub itself was in the kitchen, with something like a cellar door covering it, so it could also be used as a table. Lots of light came streaming in through the front windows, but this was promptly absorbed by the flat, horizonless blue painted on every wall, door, and ceiling. An old tune came back to me, and I sang out, “—just Molly and me/ tee da da da dee/ We’re happy in my blue heaven—”

  She thought I was making fun of the place. “You hate it, don’t you?”

  But I didn’t. Contentment began to seem possible to me for the first time in months. “It’s going to be the greatest,” I told her.

  Her smile was tentative. “You haven’t tried the beds yet.”

  There were two of them, though they were not twin. One was a double-size cot with a thin mattress on its curled wire web. Across the room from it, flush with the wall, was a single bed whose box spring said pung! when I sat on it. We tossed a coin, and I got the cot. “We can always rig some kind of screen between us, if it’ll make you feel safer,” I told her.

  “I don’t think we need worry about that,” she said, with gentle irony. “We’re not each other’s type.”

  Not all our problems were resolved that simply. Or that honestly. In our first month in the blue apartment, we were so eager to make a go of living together, we didn’t complain about anything, no matter how troublesome. I cooked the dinners on alternate nights for five weeks before she suggested that, henceforth, she do all the cooking. I never did have the heart to tell her she was no better cook than I. My concoctions may have been primitive, but at least scorch was a recognizable flavor. Her food simply confused the taste buds, an example being orange jello in which asparagus had been sunk.

  Money also kept us teetering on the brink of disaster. Every time I was our banker, she made me feel I was a miser, begrudging her even the necessities of life; and when she handled our expenses, I had the constant impression she was flinging our money to the wind. I cut a picture of Marie Antoinette out of Time Magazine, and pasted it on the bathroom mirror. It was gone by mid-morning, and expenses continued to soar, except that she never served cake again.

  Our major problem was partying. Neither of us was particularly social. We had no acquaintances in the neighborhood, and I didn’t want to re-connect with the people I knew uptown. Yet we didn’t need to know anyone to run with a group in the Village—merely to touch toe to the current was to be swept along. A couple we met in the check-out line at the market asked us to drop by for a drink at their loft, and before anyone had even gotten our names straight—they called me Marty, and her, Jess—we were rushing about with the downtown loud-crowd.

  I never learned most of their names either. One young man was known simply as “the boy who shat in Auden’s tub,” an achievement which apparently opened doors to him the length of Manhattan Island. We went to a party on Thompson Street, where a girl sitting on the sill of an open window started laughing and fell backwards onto the courtyard four stories below. She was dead when the ambulance arrived, and they couldn’t find out who she was, as someone had pinched her purse during the excitement. On the romantic side, we went to a wedding breakfast at the San Remo Restaurant, where the groom was Eugene O’Neill’s younger son. Too many toasts soon sent him stumbling into the men’s room, and when he didn’t return, the bride asked me to go see if he was all right. “I’ll be out in a minute,” he growled, when I tapped at the stall door, under which the feet of two people could be seen.

  Marty and I kept waking up with hangovers. She missed going to work twice, and neither of us was getting any writing done. A quarrel about nothing kept lurking, never actually happening, but not letting us relax either. “It’s not working out, is it?” she sighed, at last.

  “How can it work out?” I cried. “We’re both rushing right back into the same life we were so frantic to get away from.”

  She had a way of drawing herself up by merely lifting her eyebrows. “I am not rushing back.”

  “That girl in the army fatigues, who was eating you up with her eyes, last night?”

  “I can’t help what other people do with their eyes,” she said. “I didn’t even notice her.”

  Yet she knew I was telling the truth, and I could tell it made her uneasy by the way she fumbled her hand over her wrist. She said nothing more then, but after dinner that night, instead of ironing the sprigged cotton she wore for social occasions, she conspicuously curled up on her bed and began reading. “The fact is, I hate parties,” she said, abruptly. “I only put up with them because I was afraid you’d get bored staying home all the time.”

  We did stay home more often after that, though never all the time. We went to Loew’s Voluptuous (as she called it) for double-feature movies when we could afford it, and to the zoo when we couldn’t. I enjoyed being seen with Marty—she held herself beautifully, her head was well-shaped, and her nose joined her brow in a straight line, like the goddess on a silver dollar. She wore practically no make-up, except for the Vaseline she smeared on those long eyelashes. I think she was pleased with the way I looked too, tall and lean, usually wearing levis. Sometimes she called me “Tex” to tease me. For the same reason, I would call her by her real name, which she hated: Martha.

  Once again, our writing became the focus of our lives, Marty biting her pencil and frowning at a pad of yellow paper in the living room, me rattling away at my typewriter in the kitchen. A gray cat, finding the lights on and the windows open, came in to live with us, almost invisible against our blue walls. We got to know some of our neighbors. Squire Fairfield turned out to be two elderly women on the top floor, nurses from the first World War. Miss Fairfield was senile now, and seldom left her bed, but Miss Squire still churned with vitality. “The man who read the meter today asked if he could use my ‘terlet’,” she told us. “I said, ‘Hell, honey, you can pee up the chimney, if you’ll just say Myrna Loy for me!’” He did, pronouncing it Brooklyn style, Moina Ler, to Squire’s whooping delight.

  The perfect autumn merged into a less perfect winter, but the heat pipes thumped reassuringly, we had a Christmas tree trimmed with popcorn, and the first time it snowed, Marty, born and bred on the warm Gulf Coast, ran outside, wheeling round and round, her arms flung out and her head thrown back, sticking her tongue out to taste the drifting white flakes.

  Yet somehow it wasn’t enough. All our pluses kept adding up to a minus. Even with each other’s constant company, both of us were lonely. “It’s not working, is it?” Marty asked again.

  I probably thought she was blaming me for the fact, and that cut my temper short. “If it’s been such a bust, why bother to stay?”

  She lifted her chin. “Because it’s my apartment,” she pointed out. “But don’t let that bother you, I’ll go at once, if that’s what you want so badly.”

  “Good!” I shouted, and both of us began packing our suitcases.

  Except I didn’t want to go, and she didn’t either. Instead, we looked for ways to compensate for not being who or what the other was missing. I typed up her poems for her, she cut my hair for me, and both of us picked up each other’s clothes. What we never quite did was to level with each other. After six months together, I still had to guess what she was thinking. She never openly confided, even when she was in pain. The February chill seemed constantly to seek out the scar on her wrist. It was no more than a little pink line under her watchband by now, but these twinges apparently kept alive all those images she couldn’t live with. Though she never spoke of them, I would hear her whimpering in her sleep at night, and sometimes
when she sobbed aloud, I would find myself stumbling across the cold room to wake her up. “C’mon, baby, it’s just a dream!”

  It never seemed like a dream to her. Even when her eyes opened, she would cling to me, her voice still fragmented with fear or despair: “She didn’t care, she stood right there, laughing at me—”

  “Who did?”

  “Lundy! Lundy!”

  “Who’s Lundy?”

  A long pause. “No one,” she finally said.

  Sometimes when she didn’t settle down to sleep again, I would climb in beside her and we’d share a cigarette, or I’d rub her back. Our voices were low, gradually becoming drowsy and disconnected, already part dream. “—can’t find the tray—”

  I roused slightly. “What?”

  “I know I had it,” she explained sleepily. “I put it on the elephant shelf—”

  Usually, I wandered back to my own bed before morning, but sometimes I only dreamed I did. And sometimes, when we lay so close together in those hours before light, pretending sleep so we wouldn’t have to explain, we encouraged the impossible to happen. “Crossing the glass bridge,” she described it, later. It didn’t happen a lot, and was in no way to be confused with sensual curiosity, or just snuggling close to keep warm. At heart, it was the desperation of both of us to go straight. Sometimes we were successful, and sometimes we weren’t, but the darkness was on our side, and we were silent even between ourselves, except for the husky acceleration of our breathing.

  On those mornings when we woke up still together, we acted as if nothing had happened. Yet the unspoken made itself heard in other ways. We found ourselves beginning to relax, even to assume that we were a perfectly usual, normal young couple. I would hear her singing to herself with cheerful banality, “‘—just Molly and me/ tee da da da dee/ We’re happy in my blue—’”

  Many of the boundaries that separated us grew less distinct. Her bureau drawers and mine gradually became the same, we finished each other’s sentences, and shared the same tube of toothpaste. One Sunday morning, we even sat in bed, drinking sherry from teacups, and openly discussing our sexuality. She admitted she had tried to alter her direction once before, when she was fourteen, by “letting the boy next door.” In turn, she wanted to know how many girls I had slept with. Two or three was the fact, but I told her ten. “And didn’t you enjoy it with them?” she asked, defensive for all womankind.