Fierce Attachments

by Vivian Gornick

  Nettie and I exchanged a quick glance. Mama saw the camaraderie, felt the exclusion.

  “You think you’re a hot shot because you won’t go to work, don’t you?” she shouted. “Don’t you? Well, let me tell you something. You know what they say about you on the street?”

  “Ma!”

  Her face white, her lips compressed, a pulse beating in her neck, my mother struggled to gain control. Too late. Nettie herself had turned white and risen from the bench.

  “What do they say about me on the street?” she asked, a dangerous smile in her voice.

  “They say—”

  “Ma! Stop it! Stop it!”

  Nettie moved into the doorway of the kitchen. I moved with her. Mama moved toward both of us. Nettie stepped back into the foyer. So did I. Mama stepped between us. She laid conciliatory fingers on Nettie’s arm. Nettie brushed the fingers from her arm and with one hand on the doorknob she hissed, “You know he always liked me.”

  For a moment that lasted a hundred years we remained as we were, the three of us, grouped in the tiny foyer. No one moved. My mouth opened and stayed open. Nettie’s hand remained on the doorknob. Mama’s fingers touched the air. The afternoon light, filled with threat and anxiety, fell on us from the distant kitchen window.

  She slept with my father, I thought, and an immense excitement swept my body.

  “You whore,” my mother whispered. “You filthy whore. Get out of this house.”

  Nettie slammed out the door and Mama ran through the apartment. She flung herself down on the couch and wept hard, broken tears. Torn between pity and fascination, I watched her as long as she lay there. She cried for hours.

  Months later I came home from school one evening at six o’clock. As I was about to insert my key in the lock, Nettie’s door opened. “Come in,” she pleaded. I stood with the key in my hand, staring at her. I could hear my mother moving about on the other side of our door. “Please,” Nettie whispered again. “Just for a minute. She won’t know.” Her face was contorted with the effort that begging cost her. The key was half an inch from the lock. I don’t remember what I thought, but I remember what I felt: If I go in to her I’m betraying Mama, if I don’t I’m giving up sex. I went in.

  I was so young. I had no way of knowing that to betray Mama was not to ensure that I would not give up sex.

  “Why can’t you find a nice man to be happy with?” my mother is saying. “Someone simple and good. Not an intellectual or a philosopher.” We are walking down Ninth Avenue after a noon-hour concert at Lincoln Center. She places one hand palm up in the air. “Why do you pick one shlemiel after another? Tell me. Do you do this to make me miserable? What is it?”

  “For God’s sake, Ma,” I say weakly. “I don’t ‘pick’ men. I’m out there, I’m just out there. Things happen, an attraction begins, you act on it. Sometimes, way in the back of your mind, for a fraction of a second, you think: Could this be serious? Is it possible this man will become my intimate? my partner? But mainly you push the thought away, because this is our life, Ma. Affairs. Episodes. Passions that run their course. Even when they include getting married.”

  She knows I’m speaking now from a losing position, and she moves right in.

  “But an alcoholic?” she says.

  “An ex-alcoholic, Ma.”

  “Alcoholic, ex-alcoholic, what’s the difference?”

  “Ma! He hasn’t had a drink in four years.”

  “He also hasn’t called in two weeks.”

  Marilyn Kerner had said almost the same thing. Marilyn (she never did get married), now forty-six, a lawyer living on the Upper West Side, remains a corrective voice in my life. When I want not the easy reassurance of the therapeutic culture but the unsparing appraisal of the standard-bearer of the Bronx, I call Marilyn. There are no euphemisms in Marilyn’s vocabulary. Be prepared for an analysis that will strike like a body blow, or don’t call Marilyn. But I had called Marilyn over this newest rapture of mine and she, too, had said, “An ex-alcoholic? Doesn’t sound promising.”

  “But, Marilyn,” I’d protested, “it’s just the opposite. He’s been there. He’s been as powerless as a woman. He’s got wisdom. Believe me. This man is extraordinarily undefended. The friendship between us has been marvelous. With every word, every gesture, every bit of behavior, he has said to me, ‘I’m as vulnerable to this as you are, as sensitive to your fears and insecurities as I am to my own.’”

  “But he hasn’t been sensitive to his own,” said Marilyn. “He’s been pickled in alcohol for fifteen years.”

  “He’s different now,” I said. “Jesus Christ. Nobody gets a second chance in the Bronx, do they?”

  “It’s not that,” Marilyn said. “It’s that if you come from the Bronx you don’t ignore the evidence. You can’t afford to.”

  Now, of course, the evidence is weighing heavily against me. This man and I had met at a journalists’ conference. Desire had flared quickly, and then happiness had taken us both by surprise. We had spent a month together. Now we had separated, I back to New York, he to the Midwest to finish an assignment. Our plan had been to meet in New York in six weeks. Meanwhile, he was to call the day after I got home. Two weeks have now passed: no phone call. He’s on the road. I have no way of reaching him. It’s been two weeks of concentrated misery. It’s the first thing I’m aware of when I wake, the last thing before I sleep. I sleep so badly that often I’m awake in the night, whereupon I remember and the pain is dazzling. By now I’m not a character in a Doris Lessing story, I am a Doris Lessing story. The world is a framed space filled in by obsession. I move through the space grim and staring-eyed, a modern woman condemned to the knowledge that the experience of love will be played out repeatedly on an ever-diminishing scale, but always with a full complement of fever and sickness, intensity and denial.

  Meanwhile, as we walk, the city is giving us back a street version of the drama raging within. We’re in the Italian market district. All about us men are laboring to deliver cartonfuls of meat, vegetables, groceries. But in New York nothing gets separated out, so people’s lives are also being delivered up on the street. A man standing at an open phone booth kicks insanely at the side of the booth while he shouts into the receiver, “I told you I’m coming! Didn’t I tell you I’m coming? Why do you keep asking me if I’m coming?” At the corner three high-school girls, ferociously made up and dressed in polyester high fashion, are gathered in a tight knot. As we pass them one says to the other two, “I tell him, Tony, you leanin’ too hard on me, I don’ like no man to lean so hard on me.”

  My mother and I both listen carefully to the man on the phone and the girl on the corner. We walk two blocks without speaking. Then she peers sideways at me, and she says to me, “You know what the Russian says.” No, I tell her, I can’t say I do know what the Russian says. She speaks a sentence in Russian and translates, “If you want to go sleigh-riding you’ve got to be prepared to drag the sled.” We both burst out laughing, and by the time I get home I’m feeling purged.

  The phone is ringing as I walk into my apartment. It’s Marilyn.

  “Did he call?”

  “No.”

  “Well …” she begins.

  “I wrote him a letter,” I say.

  “A letter? What for?”

  “To break the passivity, for one thing. It’s awful, that helpless waiting. And also, I want him to know what I think of all this. I must say what I wrote is brilliant.”

  “Yes?” Marilyn says warily.

  “Yes,” I say. I choose not to hear the guardedness in her voice. “Want to hear some of it? I remember whole chunks.”

  “Sure.”

  “Well, I started out saying that although it was painful to me that his feelings hadn’t lasted ten minutes in the real world I could absorb that, and live with it. What I couldn’t absorb was his plunging us back into the cruelty of old-fashioned man-woman stuff, turning me into a woman who waits for a phone call that never comes and himself into the man wh
o must avoid the woman who is waiting. I said I thought we’d been friends with a mutual interest in being civilized, reliable people even if we were in love.”

  “That’s good,” Marilyn says cautiously. “Very good.”

  “Now here’s the brilliant part. I asked how it was possible that he hadn’t been able to put himself in my place, imagine the pain and apprehension I’d be feeling, not be compelled to pick up the phone if only to say, ‘Listen, I can’t go on with this.’ It was this I found offensive, even frightening. Now listen to this. I wrote: That failure of the sympathetic imagination, when it occurs between two people who have been intimate, is like natural disaster to me. It fills me with dread and amazement. The world then seems a barbaric place, without any hope of tender regard.’ Isn’t that great?”

  Silence. Long, unexpected silence. Then Marilyn sighs. “You’re still just like your mother,” she says.

  “What?” I yelp. “What do you mean?”

  “You go on picking up these marginal types, idealizing them, and then you can’t believe it when they don’t know their place. You’re amazed that they’re doing this to you. Don’t they know you’re supposed to leave them, not they leave you? And then you get on your high horse.”

  “So how is that like my mother?”

  “Your mother idealized a whole marriage, and when it left her … You can fill in the blank yourself.”

  My brother graduated and left the house, and Nettie did not cross our threshold. We were alone in the apartment, Mama and I, as I had always known we would be. She lay on the couch and stared into space. I hung out the window. Her stare was dull, silent, accusing. She would not be roused. I sat in the room, spoke the thoughts in my head, and nothing happened, absolutely nothing. It was as though I had not spoken. Her refusal was powerful. It hypnotized me, awed me into collaborative submission.

  Failing to get what she wanted from life, what she thought she needed, felt was her due, my mother disappeared under a cloud of unhappiness. Beneath this cloud she felt helpless, fragile, and deserving of sympathy. When she was told her relentless melancholy was oppressive to those forced to witness it, she was surprised. Her mouth and eyes flashed angry hurt and she said, “I can’t help it. This is how I feel. I can only act as I feel.” Secretly she considered her depressed state a mark of sensitivity, of stronger feeling, finer spirit. She would not take in the idea that her behavior affected others adversely, and the notion that a certain level of social exchange is required below which no one has the right to fall was foreign to her. She could not see that her insistent unhappiness was an accusation and a judgment. “You?” it said with each resentful sigh. “You’re not the right one. You cannot deliver up comfort, pleasure, amelioration. But you are my dearest of dears. Your appointed task is to understand, your destiny to live with the daily knowledge that you are insufficient to cure my life of its deprivation.”

  Before such superiority of will I lost myself entirely. The trick, of course, was that she couldn’t be had. She wanted nothing; I wanted everything, anything. I raged and I railed at her (“The sun is shining! It’s a sin to be indoors”), but inside I went numb and dumb, became languorous and stupid.

  Affixed to our windows were old-fashioned guards made of strips of tin with curled edges at the tops that projected roundly into the air above the street, ballooning out in a kind of mock-balcony effect. The guards had been there when we came and would be there when we left, but I had not a sufficient sense of history to see the matter in this light and puzzled over why they were not taken down now that my brother and I were no longer children, never pausing to notice that I still made excellent use of them.

  On weekend days I hung out the living-room window for hours on end, leaning deep into the inner curve of the guard, my back to the room, my mother lying on the couch behind me. It was much the same as when I sat on the window ledge at the other end of the room late at night with my legs on the fire escape, only one vital difference obtaining between the two window sittings. At night on the fire escape I fantasized grandly out into the world. During the day, leaning into the guard, I became the princess in the tower, a prisoner yearning down at the street below, my sense of remove then overpowering. I stared at people I knew (children playing, friends laughing, couples walking), as though across an immeasurable distance at a form of life foreign to me and permanently unavailable. To be one half of an ordinary human exchange taking place in the unbounded open seemed, during the hours I hung out the window, unthinkable. That is, unimaginable.

  The imaginable had always been problematic. When I was a child the feel of things went into me: deep, narrow, intense. The grittiness of the street, the chalk-white air of the drugstore, the grain of the wooden floor in the storefront library, the blocks of cheese in the grocery-store refrigerator. I took it all so seriously, so literally. I was without imagination. I paid a kind of idiot attention to the look and feel of things, leveling an intent inner stare at the prototypic face of the world. These streets were all streets, these buildings all buildings, these women and men all women and men. I could imagine no other than that which stood before me.

  That child’s literalness of the emotions continued to exert influence, as though a shock had been administered to the nervous system and the flow of imagination had stopped. I could feel strongly, but I could not imagine. The granite gray of the street, the American-cheese yellow of the grocery store, the melancholy brownish tint of the buildings were all still in place, only now it was the woman on the couch, the girl hanging out the window, the confinement that sealed us off, on which I looked with that same inner intentness that had always crowded out possibility as well as uncertainty. It would be years before I learned that extraordinary focus, that excluding insistence, is also called depression.

  I stared out the window as though at a magical tableau, the granulated vacancy in the air behind me hanging like dead weight, pulling us both down to the bottom of all the years that had ever been or could ever be. We became, my mother and I, all women conditioned by loss, unnerved by lassitude, bound together in pity and anger. After Hiroshima dead bodies were found of people who had been wearing printed kimonos when they were killed. The bomb had melted the cloth on their bodies, but the design on the kimonos remained imprinted in the flesh. It seemed to me in later years the deep nerveless passivity of that time together had become the design burned into my skin while the cloth of my own experience melted away.

  I began leaving home at nineteen and kept leaving until I was married in the living room at twenty-four in a noisy act of faith that announced the matter accomplished. My husband was small (my size); blond (“insignificant-looking,” as Mama put it); foreign (he couldn’t defend himself in English). We were drawn to each other by a common love of the arts, but he was a visionary painter and in me literature had aroused the critical faculty. He was wordless, I was all words. In him repression was demonic, in me explosive. Most of the time he brooded, twice a year he drank himself into a stupor. I remained sober and a scornful tongue was my constant companion. All the differences were negotiable except one: I talked better than he did and I used words like a weapon. That knocked us hopelessly off balance. I opened my mouth and power was mine: I could slice, cut, and pin; thrust, batter, and storm. He was helpless before the amazing siege. To the very largest degree that must have been how I wanted it, although certainly I could not then see this simple reality driving me on in all my attachments to men. The course I had followed to lead me to this man and this marriage was not difficult to trace (any child analysand could have delivered a creditable description of the psychological terrain), but I remained deep in the woods a quarter of a mile from the road.

  A woman in the movement once said, “We were all either stars or groupies.” By groupies she meant the women who had swum in the orbit of the ordinarily accomplishing men they had married and stayed married to. By stars she meant the rest of us: those who bucked and kicked against the allotted destiny, could neither make a proper marr
iage nor walk away from marriage altogether. I remember entering graduate school at Berkeley and being confronted for the first time by the two kinds of women who conformed to this model. Later I realized it was all there, in that small tight world, relations between the sexes as I would ever know them.

  The English department at Berkeley was itself a model for human relations in the world. There were those in power: the brilliant, famous, full professors, and those seeking power: the brilliant young men ready to become the disciple, the protégé, the son and intellectual companion. Together, professor and protégé formed the interlocking links in the chain of civilized cronyism that ensured the ongoingness of the enterprise being served: English literature in the university.

  Side by side with the young men were the women students. Most of them came from the Midwest, wore Peter Pan collars, were choked silent with intensity, and in the third year at school became engaged to one of the promising young men. Many of these women were also brilliant: one wrote intellectual poetry, another psychoanalyzed Henry James, a third reinterpreted The Faerie Queen. It was interesting to observe how people in the department spoke of such a woman once she became one half of the future academic couple. Before she had not really been spoken of at all. Now she was referred to in muted tones, as though the conversants were in a sickroom speaking of an invalid, and inevitably one heard one of them saying, “Poor Joan. Gifted girl, really. Of course it’s unthinkable that she not marry Mark, who is, after all, brilliant and will carry her into the only life worth having; but what she could have done.” The mixture of ritual and relief in the speaker’s voice was both peculiar and palpable.

  Then there were the other women students. Intense in an altogether different way. Brash, difficult, “gypsy-dark” (meaning Jewish from New York), the intelligence strong not subtle, the sensibility aggressive not demure, the manner startling in its overdirectness, without grace or modesty, disorienting. These women did not fall in love with Mark, who sat next to them in Medieval Lit 101. They studied with him, argued with him, sometimes slept with him, but they did not marry him. Or he them. To Mark these women were exotics, a temporary stimulation to be indulged before one got down to real life. To the women Mark was an ambitious drone, clever but cautious, wanting adoration without an argument. In short, these hungry young people feared, despised, and excited one another. Secretly, I think, most of them yearned to make connection. But the secret remained a well-kept one.