I wrote a couple of quickies after that. The first was An Intelligent Woman’s Guide to Pro Football, which furnished our third-floor walk-up on Perry. Then I wrote Crystal Death, about the health hazards posed by table salt, and that helped pay for Michael’s birth and layette.
I often think about the ejaculation that started all of this. I am certain which one it was. We had been at a party, downstairs in our building, in the apartment of Ira Schuster, who had been such a sweet friend to us and who looked so virtuous in his gray suits and blue shirts, with his prematurely graying beard and dark eyes that registered the regular setbacks he suffered as a lawyer in the public defender’s office. Ira not only drank to frightening excess but caused others to drink as well. They’re called “enablers” nowadays, but back then we just thought of Ira as a good host; everybody got hammered and danced sweatily to old Edwin Starr records. Afterwards, Olivia and I stumbled up to our apartment, kissing and pawing at each other as we ascended, and by the time we let ourselves in Olivia had unbuttoned my shirt and her kisses were so warm and enormous, I could feel myself tumbling through them and into her: I felt she could swallow me body and soul, and I wanted her to. We undressed, we tore the blankets off the bed, because even though it was winter we were sweltering. The foreplay was over. We both wanted me inside of her; it seemed like an emergency. There was nothing fancy about it. I knew even as that ribbon of protein was pumping out of me that Olivia would get pregnant.
Often, I would rehearse suggesting to Olivia that we, as the phrase goes, terminate the pregnancy. We could not afford a child. I wanted her to myself. I despised fathers and I dreaded becoming one. But I said nothing of the kind. We took the infant Michael home from the hospital and sex and sleep were never the same. Michael howled like a pack of wolves in the wilds of his own colic. Olivia and I began quarreling: in those days, acrimony was the only exercise we gave our hearts; bickering took us through the paces that had once been led by love.
And then our families descended upon us. Olivia’s parents, Sy and Lillian Wexler, flew in from Chicago, and brought so many baby presents they had to take separate cabs from Kennedy. Olivia’s sister, Elizabeth, who had been interested in me for a moment and through whom I had first met Olivia, had moved out of New York shortly after Olivia and I were married but came in from Ohio, where she worked in the admissions office of an experimental college and where her job was to make people admit things, or so Olivia used to joke, in those prebaby days when a sense of humor was as free as the air. Next to arrive was Olivia’s brother, Stuart, from whom she hadn’t heard in two years, since he had moved to Houston to manage a hotel and had gotten involved with a Messianic Jewish cult. He deemed our union a mongrel marriage, but nevertheless news of Michael’s birth sent him hightailing to Manhattan—all those Old Testament tales of who begat whom had made him a soft touch for procreation.
Our apartment was bursting with learned, argumentative Wexlers. Sy and Lillian were still tenured at the University of Chicago; they hung out with a lot of brilliant ex-socialist intellectuals, and their analyses of everything from Allende to the politics of nineteenth-century utopian Zionism were delivered with bite and sarcasm. Even the La Leche League was subjected to the rigors of the Wexlerian intellectual style—a style built on the assumption that the world was full of vanity, stupidity, and darkness, and that even those who would want to do good were lured into destructiveness by their own incomplete thinking.
When the Wexlers were exhausted, the Hollands came to relieve them of their adoration duties. My brother, Allen, came in from Massachusetts, looking as sleek and prosperous as a big, happy otter. Making a fortune filling teeth, he brought Michael a gag present of two pounds of white chocolate. He had already fathered a child, and he was pompous with his sense of having survived numerous domestic trials. When he held Michael, he slipped on a surgeon’s mask, and when he gave me an (unasked-for) lesson in diaper changing, he quickly put on a pair of rubber gloves. Connie, for her part, was tearful, leaning over Michael’s bassinet, weeping freely, the way people do when they are completely alone. She was between marriages, infertile, in her own mind doomed. At thirty, she looked fifty. She wore tight clothes despite getting heavy; she had puppet lines around her mouth; her eyes looked wounded, offended; her hair was colored the yellow of an old man’s teeth. “Hello, mister,” she said to Michael, through a vibrato of melancholy, like some poor old broad in a piano bar, “welcome to the good times.”
There was a brief interval of time—a half-day, or it may have been just an hour—when Connie, Allen, and I felt pleased to be with each other, enjoyed the camaraderie of veterans from a distant war. But then Gil arrived, unfresh from a fact-finding mission in Panama City—he had by now been promoted to a rather responsible position in the UN Office of Economic Development, though he knew nothing of economics, cared little about industrialization or demographics, and, in fact, more or less despised Third World peoples. He was haggard, hollow-eyed, unshaven, gassy from the Panamanian cuisine. He came to us straight from the airport, blew in right past Connie, whom he hadn’t seen in at least two years, nodded at Allen, whom he had seen a few months before at a conference at MIT, slapped me on the back, kissed Olivia, and then rubbed his hands together and said, “Bring me my grandson.”
Having a child might not have been so unsettling if only other people in our circle of friends had children, too. But this was before my generation’s procreative panic, and every writer, editor, sculptor, lawyer, tennis instructor, architect, music teacher, reporter, computer programmer, and Buddhist we knew was childless. I wrote, and made enough to keep at it full-time. Olivia at that time was putting together a folk art catalog for the Manhattan Museum. She wore beautiful dresses; we ate out whenever we chose to. Life was dinner parties, gossip, worries about careers and money, plans for holidays, sneering remarks about the President. It had all seemed (if not perfect, then at least) fine. It was what I had wanted all along: an apartment in the Village, a wife who loved me and believed in me and who, in those early days, was avid for me, mad. I had art, I had love, I had the name of an importer who sold wines from the petits châteaux for half of what they fetched at Sherry- Lehmann.
But now all I had was a child. He loomed over everything, casting his shadow. Life, at least our life, was too fragile to survive the onslaught of Michael’s needs—his cries, his rashes, his sleeplessness, his abhorrence of having his diapers changed, his little stuffed nose, the narrow nostrils plugged with green, his eyes glittering with panic as he tried to howl and breathe through his mouth at the same time.
Our apartment looked like a dive within weeks. We were too tired to clean, too annoyed to even pick up after ourselves. And now we were dominated by his things. The mobile of rubber rabbits vaporized our books, the aqua-and- yellow rattle disintegrated our KLH stereo components, the Snoopy pacifier turned our wine to vinegar, and the bassinet curled the Brassaï prints right off the wall. And then came the diaper pail, white and plastic. For all its environmental awareness, it obliterated our Pakistani prayer rug, rusted my Olivetti, canceled my subscription to The New York Review of Books, it opened the window and scattered Olivia’s folk art notes, and then extinguished every candle, candelabrum, candlestick, and, of course, every candlelight dinner.
Now, fifteen years later, the evening lay before us, unsettling in its emptiness, challenging us to turn all this free time into a romantic renaissance. I poured another Scotch and, as I made my way back into my study, I listened for any signs of movement, like a thief in my own house.
The coast was clear, and I slowly closed the door, actually (and utterly) fearful that Olivia might hear the click of the lock’s mechanism fitting into the housing of the frame and, like some creature in a horror story, come whooshing down the stairs.
I opened the bottom drawer of my desk and carefully lifted out the manila folders in which I stored the various reviews my books had received. The folders holding the reviews for the books written under my own name
were plumped up by other reviews and articles that held even passing references to me, such as: “Steadfastly refusing to discuss the reprint, movie, or foreign rights deals that have surrounded his latest book like so much plush velvet,— chose to steer the conversation back to his favorite writers, a crew that includes writers as wildly divergent as Cervantes, Charlotte Brontë, and Sam Holland,” and (one of Olivia’s favorites) “Not since Sam Holland’s A Natural and Unnatural History of My Wife has a writer so passionately misunderstood what makes his spouse tick.”
Beneath the folders of my real reviews was another, this one holding notices garnered by the various books I wrote under pseudonyms. (To call these the products of my “false self” would be, I think, merely fanciful, a little sprinkle of existential pixie dust on the rather plain business of staying alive.) These for the most part came from magazines that catered to the specific market to which the book itself was pitched. And the reviews were, as a group, glowing—yet what an eerie glow: the luminescence of swamp gas spreading its methane blush against a hot black sky.
At the bottom of that drawer was an old oversized envelope, in which Graham had, more than a year ago, sent back a proposal I had worked up to do a book called Patricide. “As your agent,” the note had said, “I must concentrate on such a book’s lack of commercial appeal. But as someone who would like you to think of him as a friend, I must also say that the half-joking, half-hellfire tone of the whole thing made me rather uneasy.” The old proposal and Graham’s note were still in the envelope, but now there were several other sheets of paper as well, and these were the few letters that Nadia Tannenbaum had sent to me during the course of our affair and in its immediate aftermath, letters that constituted her reviews of Sam Holland as Lover, letters that I was too sentimental, too vain, and, it now seemed, too fucking stupid to have thrown away.
I hadn’t thrown them away because, in some sad, weakened way, I wasn’t finished with them. I read them when I missed her. I read them when Olivia sneaked off to bed and turned off the light without even saying good night to me. I read them when I thought about friends with whom I had started off as a young man and how they had gone on to write books that were reasonable, respectable, friends who had secured teaching positions or quirky little jobs at foundations, or were writing scripts and chasing after actresses on that aptly named Sunset Strip, where the change from day to night becomes something lewd and commercial. I read them when I felt life was a race I was losing— losing to others, to time, gravity. I read them often.
Dear Sam,
I feel like Lazarus, raised from the dead. What an idiot I’ve become! I’m already an hour late for work and here I am in my apartment, twirling around, singing with the radio. I never expected to feel happy, not ever again. And now you’ve given me a happiness that so far exceeds any happiness I have ever felt—I mean it blows every laugh, sigh, and orgasm right out of the water….
I did not know how to throw something like that out. And the others were of the same genre—the once-lonely woman catapulted into the sensory tumult of life by some tomcatting husband, lured by passion deeper and deeper into a hopeless love.
I quickly looked through the letters because I knew it was time to rid myself of the mimetic device through which I could dependably plunge myself into those days, those weeks, those shuddering, sweaty beds, those long dinners and silent walks—all of it impossible, wrong, finished.
Nadia, though young, was a widow—a fact that I very much wanted to believe saved our liaison from the stereotypical older man-younger woman scenario. She had married her college sweetheart, a rich boy from Napa Valley, but he had drowned while hang-gliding on their honeymoon in Bali. Nadia carried her tragedy like a single perfect rose. She was willowy, dark, with straight black hair as thick as a broom, and deep, secretive eyes. She was full-breasted, narrow-waisted; there was something a little too perfect in her beauty—it was a beauty that, had it not been for her wound, might have become merely pretty, like those doodles schoolgirls make on their notebooks while they daydream in class. (Actually, I made those doodles, too, which may explain all of my subsequent difficulties in life.)
As a young widow, Nadia lived in a group apartment in San Francisco. She had an affair with a Chinese baker; she tried to become a nature photographer, spending long, eucalyptus-scented days in Muir Woods, waiting to be moved. But the waiting saddened her, as did the technology of making a photograph—the chemicals, even the click of the shutter were depressing. Everything saddened her. She missed Leo. He had died perfect in her mind.
Then she had an accident. She was in a cab that lost its brakes on a downhill plunge on Geary Street and banged demolition-derby-style into a dozen parked cars before coming to a stop. Her back was viciously wrenched. Her old Chinese boyfriend introduced her to an acupuncturist, but it did no good. From there she made the rounds from chiropractors to physical therapists, massage gurus, aroma therapists, faith healers—this was San Francisco, after all— and finally gave in and sought some conventional Occidental treatment in the person of an elderly German doctor named Frieda Manheim, who gave her massive doses of muscle relaxants that made poor Nadia so rapturously depressed she tried to kill herself. Pills.
News of Nadia’s condition reached Leo’s family and they were decent about it. Recalling Nadia’s ambition to become a photographer, they put her together with Leo’s Aunt Lorraine, who owned a stock-photo service in New York, one of those places with a library of a million or more images, which they leased out to advertising agencies, chambers of commerce, magazines, textbook publishers, and the like.
Nadia was put to work cataloging a recent acquisition of European photos from the twenties and thirties, bought from a Connecticut collector who had stored the old photos with shocking carelessness. The name of Aunt Lorraine’s company was International Image, Inc., known in the trade as III, or Triple I. Their offices were on East Twentieth Street, just eight blocks from my publisher’s office, and after I wrote Visitors from Above, my editor sent me to Triple I to find suitable and affordable pictures for an eight- page photo insert.
Their offices were well lit, immaculate, but the walls of fireproof metal files lining the walls made the place seem like a morgue—open a drawer and find where the waterfalls are buried, open another for six hundred and ten renditions of the Eiffel Tower. My publishers often produced topical books on the cheap, and they had a long-standing (that is, wholesale) relationship with III.
When I went over to begin searching out pictures of flying saucers, I was helped by Aunt Lorraine, Lorraine Wasserman, stout and smartly dressed, with a frank, calculating air, a small mouth, stylish shoes, a whiff of Dentyne in her smile. I sat in her office and explained to her the sort of pictures I was looking for. I was particularly interested in finding some illustration of a MIB—that is, a Man in Black, one of those supposed intergalactic disinformation specialists who are said to pay ominous, unannounced visits to those who have spotted extraterrestrials and to threaten them with…I don’t know…evaporation, atomization, some kind of spacey punishment. Of course, there were no actual photos of the MIBs, just crude drawings that made police composite drawings look like portraits by Sargent. But I thought we might fake up a MIB, perhaps by using some other picture of a moody figure wearing a dark suit.
“Men in black, men in black,” mused Lorraine, twiddling her Mont Blanc pen and then, suddenly, staring at her fingernails, as if someone had mischievously painted them red while she slept. “You want priests? We got thousands of priests, but mostly they’re either praying or playing with children, and the feeling I’m getting is something a little spookier. Maybe an exorcist kind of thing?”
Just then, Nadia came into Lorraine’s office. I noticed her, utterly. There was no intention behind it, just a fierce and total attentiveness.
“I found something,” she said, her natural reticence for the moment overcome by the tremendous excitement of just having found a little-known Brassaï photograph, of considerable artis
tic and monetary value. When Olivia found a little treasure in her antiques-rustling gig, she usually got a high color in her face, as if she had just raced up several flights of stairs and then quickly downed a cup of scalding tea. But Nadia’s Mediterranean skin remained opaque, as cool as terra cotta. The tone of her voice wasn’t one of celebration but self-justification, as if she had proved her own value, or at least her lack of complete valuelessness, to Lorraine.
Lorraine frowned, indelicately. The charitable impulse that had motivated her hiring Nadia had by now run its course. “Not now, Nadia,” she said.
“Sounds like a musical—a little twenties revival,” I said, feeling obligated to cover Lorraine’s bad behavior. “Not Now, Nadia!” I said again, moving my hands in some lax approximation of a chorus girl’s gestures.
Nadia smiled. It was the smile of someone who appreciated my effort to smooth over the situation with a little humor, someone who would be able to forgive me—for being less charming than I appeared, for being selfish, for lacking some essential energy I needed to catapult me out of the deep glassy groove into which my life had settled, and to forgive me as well, and most importantly, for the large sin that lay at the center of me, a sin that dominated me and which I could not, nor would ever be able to, name.
The next morning I awoke, wild with yearning and guilt, after spending the night in a dingy, beige midtown hotel, thinking of Nadia. (This is, I confess, an inexact use of the word “think”: I pictured her, speculated upon her, imagined, and ravished her.) I read for an hour and then showered with fanatical care. The telephone on my night table rang, and I answered it with my hair slicked back, a skimpy towel wrapped around my middle.
Men in Black Page 4
