An Abbreviated Life

by Ariel Leve

  21

  In the New York of the 1960s, my mother moved in a circle of acclaimed artistic achievers. Poets and painters and authors and artists who to varying degrees were out for themselves. Their absence of humility was an asset. The advertising of oneself wasn’t considered crude, but venerated. In that febrile scene, works of art excused misconduct. Narcissism flourished. Bad behavior was indulged. Poets were dramatic and vivacious and histrionic. Being an exhibitionist was encouraged. It was an exciting time. That’s what I was told.

  But for me, those days were a disruption. I didn’t see exceptional artists, I saw grown-ups who behaved childishly. Boisterous, inconsiderate people who never left the party. I would come out of my bedroom, exasperated. “When is everyone leaving?” Indifferent faces would stare back at me. Who is this demanding seven-year-old interrupting our good time? My mother apologized for my churlish behavior. “I’m sorry my daughter is so rude.”

  These people weren’t my allies. And their accomplishments did not exonerate them. They were my mother’s guests who made too much noise on a school night.

  WHERE MY MOTHER fit in the pantheon is hard to determine. She wasn’t at the epicenter, but she wasn’t on the margins either. She was highly regarded and befriended the literary heavyweights. There were the artifacts. The signed Lichtenstein that was presented as a wedding gift. The watercolor by Henry Miller for when I was born. Robert Lowell’s notes on her poems. Philip Roth and Saul Bellow were guests at the house and praised her work.

  These associations were validations. I was too young to know why this acceptance mattered or to care. And then when I was old enough to care, I didn’t.

  “I want a mommy-mommy.” I would say. “Someone who cuts the crusts of my bread.” She would laugh at the banality of this. And remind me how fortunate I was to have her, an artist, as my mother.

  WHEN NORMAN MAILER ran for mayor of New York in 1969, my mother hosted a fund-raiser for him at the apartment. I was a baby and my father, recalling this evening, said, “It probably raised fifty dollars. But that wasn’t the point.”

  Growing up, my mother frequently encouraged me to tell people Norman Mailer was my “godfather.” I was reluctant to reveal this because it didn’t feel real. I had met Mailer once or twice, and he was cordial to me. We didn’t have an intimate connection, and telling people that he was my godfather felt unnatural and weird. Later, when I was working at the Sunday Times, Mailer had written a piece for the magazine, and when my editor mentioned to him that I worked there and asked about his being my godfather, he confessed that he had been “dragooned” into it. When my editor told me this, I felt I had been implicated in a version of my life that didn’t belong to me.

  ONLY IT DID. Because my mother would use her connections to help me, whether I wanted this help or not. She persuaded Mailer to write a college recommendation letter. I have no memory of the letter, no copy of it, and how much influence it wielded is unknown. “If it weren’t for me asking Norman Mailer to write your recommendation letter, you would never had gotten into college,” she said. I owed her. Although if I had said, “I want to go to college in Spain and be on my own,” I knew she would not have solicited a recommendation for that.

  I OFTEN WENT to Elaine’s with my mother and witnessed her in action. One night she approached a table in the front of the restaurant where a Famous Writer with White Hair (was it Joseph Heller?) was sitting and interrupted his dinner with friends. He did not invite her to sit down, but she took a seat anyway. I continued on to a table in the back with Donald and waited for her to join us. Elaine had to usher her away. There was an uncomfortable feeling of knowing my mother had no idea she was being a nuisance.

  ANDY WARHOL SHOWED up at the wedding reception when she and my father got married on New Year’s Day, 1966. Several members of the Velvet Underground were there as well. She drew people in with her mesmeric appeal, then drove them away with magnificent need.

  For me, the message was clear. Instability was a natural state of being. An artist was allowed to bend the rules. It was a mandate. And she was surrounded by others who, like her, nested in the turbulence of living.

  Masters of emotional jujitsu.

  I WOULD SEE some of these people in the living room at 180 at my mother’s parties. I didn’t know who they were. Warhol was a spooky figure with white hair and a black turtleneck who didn’t smile.

  “Ariel, come out and say hello to Andy,” my mother said, opening the door to my bedroom. He looked stricken.

  WHEN I GOT older, my mother would get upset that I didn’t promote myself enough.

  “You’re shooting yourself in the foot,” she would say in response to my refusal to follow her directions. “You’re making a huge mistake.”

  “Okay, I’m making a mistake.”

  “Why don’t you listen to me?” This would be followed with a list of people to contact. “Call him and tell him you’re my daughter.”

  I knew it was coming from a well-meaning desire to see me succeed. She was trying to help.

  “I’m not comfortable doing that.”

  “You have to sell yourself. Haven’t you learned anything? That’s the way it works. How did you get so genteel?”

  She was a dedicated and electric self-promoter and didn’t see it as an unattractive quality. Unless it appeared in others. “She’s nothing but a self-promoter,” she’d say with disgust.

  The fraught destiny for poets was one she alternately accepted and rejected depending on the day. The fragility and torture were worth the anguish. It was a gift. The fragility and torture were something she wouldn’t wish on her worst enemy. It was a curse.

  ON WEEKNIGHTS I lie in bed, alone in my room, listening to my mother’s dinner parties and hoping the guests will leave at midnight. As she has promised. I have school the next day, and this was the agreement. She would have buffets. Sometimes she would have sit-down dinners that turned into buffets because she’d lose track of how many people she had invited and guests would end up eating paella out of silver-plated ashtrays using wooden salad spoons. One time she handed someone a trowel in place of a fork. He didn’t seem that alarmed. He remarked that he had never used a gardening tool as a dining utensil, but she told him there was a first time for everything and not to be so middle class.

  IF THERE WEREN’T enough seats at the table, she’d improvise. The piano bench, the step stool—sometimes she’d turn a garbage pail upside down or send someone into my bedroom to borrow my desk chair. “There’s plenty of room over there!” she’d shout and point to the windowsill. Twenty people around a table for twelve. Scrambled eggs when she ran out of veal. Even when she’d emerge from her bedroom wrapped in a towel and covered in bubbles, nearly two hours after her guests had arrived, her apology would be so whimsical and flamboyant it would overshadow her lateness. People were entertained.

  FROM THE OTHER side of the door, I hear the unruly guests laughing. My mother’s laughter was always the loudest. She was a sublime storyteller. Weaving her crafty antics into a self-deprecating tale that lampooned her inappropriate behavior.

  I get up and open my door, which is right off the living room. I stand in my nightgown and angrily announce, “It’s midnight. Can everyone go home now?” They ignore me and she clinks her wineglass with a knife, “Everyone! Everyone! We have to be quiet! Ariel has to get up for school tomorrow.”

  She reassures me. “Fifteen more minutes. Then everyone will go home.”

  “You promised everyone would go home at midnight.”

  “They’re leaving soon.”

  No one leaves. I shut the door and return to my bed, place the pillow over my head, and hope that it stays quiet. For a while it does, and in this pause, I try to make myself fall asleep. Then a piercing shriek of “Ahhhh” from my mother’s uninhibited enjoyment breaks the silence. I get up again, and open my door.

  “You said fifteen minutes!” I shout. There are half a dozen lingering guests, lounging on the sofa and sitting on the
floor. Those who have no motivation to depart.

  “You’re too loud. I can’t sleep.”

  “Shhhhhh,” my mother coaxes her guests. Time passes. I repeat. And repeat. And repeat.

  SYLVIA MILES HAS come into my bedroom unannounced to smoke and complain. “Your mother isn’t even dressed yet,” she says in a brassy nasal voice. I am eight years old. She has an elaborate hat on her head with a shiny brooch pinned to the side and a black fishnet veil that goes to the bridge of her nose. Her lipstick is shrill and red, and there is a smudge of it on her shiny white teeth. She clutches at her feathered boa over her leopard-print blouse.

  “She told me to be here at eight sharp, and she’s still not even ready! I need to use the john.”

  I am doing my homework. It’s a school night and my mother’s party is under way. It’s a special occasion, another one, and the rule of No Parties on Weeknights has been amended. The music is playing—Fred Astaire singing “Puttin’ On the Ritz”—and there is a scratch on the record. A line in the song repeats on a loop until someone walks over to the turntable, lifts up the needle, and moves it along.

  SYLVIA DIDN’T LIKE children and made that clear. She would tell me that, and I’m not sure if she noticed I was a child. “Ariel,” she whined, “can you please go check on your mother and tell her I’m waiting?”

  “I’m doing my homework.”

  “Who are these people?” She was wasting her time.

  My mother’s friendship with Sylvia seemed built on an intense dislike for each other. They’d been friends a long time. They had too much in common.

  “SYLVIA!” I’D HEAR my mother shout into the phone. “Just make an appearance. It’s my birthday and I want you to be there. It’s not going to kill you.” She would entice Sylvia with the promise of someone important who would be at the party, knowing this would make her think that if she didn’t show up, she might be missing out. Once Sylvia got to the party, she would express her dissatisfaction with the crowd. The famous director my mother had promised would be there had come and gone.

  “Who is this ‘Sandman’ person?” she’d ask me.

  My mother had lifted up the rug in the living room and Howard “Sandman” Sims was sprinkling Uncle Ben’s rice on the hardwood floor. He was an old black tap dancer from vaudeville, and my mother was writing a play based on his life.

  What I knew about Sandman Sims is that the rice he spread on the floor amplified the sound of his sliding across it. The tap dancing took place directly in front of my bedroom.

  “Fabulous!” my mother shouted. Then, just as he would stop: “ENCORE!”

  Fed up, I opened my door and nearly knocked him down. “You have to see this!” my mother cried gleefully, beckoning for me to join her. “Ariel! Come watch—you can’t miss this!”

  NOTHING COULD BE missed. Mel the Magician was a criminal defense lawyer named Mel Sachs, who always wore a bow tie with his suit. He would store his leather briefcase, which resembled a doctor’s valise, in my bedroom and often came to my mother’s parties after a day in court. My mother would plead with him to perform. “Mel, do some magic!” He would refuse politely, but she would beg, “Pleeeeaase?” and it didn’t take long for his spirited showmanship to emerge. “Yippee!” she’d exclaim, and then she would silence her guests. They had to stop talking immediately. “Everyone be quiet! Mel is going to do his magic!”

  Mel entered my room, without knocking, to prepare. From his bag, alongside legal briefs and files, he took out a deck of cards, coins, colorful balloons, and various other magician’s accessories.

  “Now I need an assistant,” he’d say.

  I would decline. Instead, I remain in bed, overhearing the guests’ oohs and ahhs and the high-pitched squeaking that comes from twisting a rubber balloon into a dachshund.

  THE PIANO WAS on the other side of the wall from my room. Composers would play the score for one of my mother’s musicals and someone would sing the lyrics from the songs that she wrote. Performances happened late at night—ten or eleven—and my mother relished the entertainment. I waited it out.

  Until I couldn’t stand it anymore and then had to confront the ruckus.

  “QUIET!” I would shout, bolting up in the dark. “QUIET!”

  I was desperate. Exasperated. I needed to sleep. “BE QUIET!” I yelled as loudly as I could, but it wasn’t heard.

  There was an opera singer in the middle of an aria. There was a violinist playing Mozart. An actor doing a monologue.

  “Everybody,” I heard my mother cry out, “it’s time for the belly dancing!”

  I threw off my covers and got out of bed, protesting the disturbance. My mother swore to me that after the belly dancer, the guests would go home. Suddenly Middle Eastern music blasted, and a “famous” belly dancer from Cairo, in a two-piece costume with jangling bells on her bra and chains on her torso, emerged shimmying from out of my mother’s bedroom. With finger cymbals striking together to punctuate the dramatic moves, a percussive whirlwind of undulating hips moved around the living room and culminated in a backbend.

  I would return to my bed, press my hands over my ears to block out the noise, and plot my escape.

  Now I want a quiet life. A home where I am not faced with circumstances that are out of my control. And conflict is not routine. When I need peace, I don’t want to have to explain why or bargain for it. I did that throughout my childhood. The need is not trivial. The roots are deep. I am compensating for what was absent. Seeking at the Lost and Found a missing childhood.

  22

  One of the girls is standing with me in the kitchen as I am making my coffee. I use a French press. Every weekend they help me to plunge. It is a ritual. I marvel at how unremarkable tasks have quietly become significant.

  I CALL OUT, “Time to plunge!” and they stop what they are doing to help. One of their little hands goes on top of the knob, then my hand, then another hand, then mine again—until we have a tower of hands resting on top of the plunger. Sometimes they will argue over whose hand will be the one on top, and when that happens, I rearrange the hands so that everyone is satisfied. I count to three and say, “Ready?” They nod. “Plunge!” The coffee grounds are compressed and I declare, “Ta-dah!” All of us remove our hands in unison and hug.

  THE OTHER ONE is still asleep. Suddenly she appears in the kitchen with crumpled hair, rubbing the sleep from her eyes. She looks anxious. “What’s wrong?” I ask. She says in an injured voice that her sister got out of bed early, and I can see that she feels left out. I reassure her that she hasn’t missed anything.

  “You were going to plunge without me,” she says—as though it has already happened and she is too late.

  I don’t want her first thoughts of the day to be burdened with worry.

  “No, we waited for you,” I say with assurance. I point to the French press filled with coffee, the plunger still sticking up in the air. “See?” She nods her head, relieved. She says she has to go to the toilet, and I tell her we’ll wait for her to get back. I can tell that she is unsure if this is true and she is torn about what to do. In a voice still unfamiliar to me, a dependable voice that conveys security, I say, “Go to the toilet, we’ll wait for you.”

  She pauses. “You promise?”

  I promise, I say. I promise.

  EVERY MORNING I hoped that my mother would make an appearance at the breakfast table.

  “I want to be woken up for breakfast,” she says.

  “You promise you’ll make it?” I ask.

  “I promise.”

  It was my job to wake her up. I was to knock gently on her door before I opened it and say sweetly, “Good morning, Mommy. I love you.”

  Instead I say flatly, “Breakfast is ready.”

  I eat breakfast with Josie and wait.

  Just before I am finished, I get up from the table and return to my mother’s room. I open the door without knocking and snap, “Breakfast!”

  It is, she says, inconsiderate of me to start h
er day off with such hostility.

  EXISTING AS A child was an irritant. I made noise. Shrieks from laughing. Or talking too loud. Toys gave off obnoxious sounds. The game Operation was a torture device. It featured bells, burps, barks, and buzzers. I would sit on the floor of my bedroom with a friend, excited to operate on the bald man with slits in his body that held his plastic organs. The concentration it took to remove his wishbone filled me with pride. I had a steady hand. I’d take a card from the pile—“For $100, take out his spare ribs”—lean in and with exacting precision, try not to touch the sides of the opening with the magnetic tweezers. Because if that happened, it set off the buzzer.

  “Josie!!” my mother howled from behind her door. “I am working!”

  The thickness of the concrete walls between us in the prewar apartment couldn’t dull the sound. Josie would appear in the doorway and I would urgently be instructed to play with something else. Something quiet. Reading and drawing were more suitable. Any board game with a noise was an assault on my mother’s senses. Operation was retired.

  But other games were tricky as well. Trouble had a plastic bubble. A pop-o-matic that rolls the dice with each pop. I would press down on it with the palm of my hand and when I released my hand, the pop! noise it generated was unacceptable. Electronics were out of the question. And dolls that emitted a sound. If a toy or a doll or a game came with batteries, they were removed. Mouse Trap screeched when the plastic cats scooped up the plastic mice on the board. Dice shaken in a cup from Yahtzee were unbearable.

  “Are you purposely trying to get on my nerves?” she would remonstrate dramatically, standing in the doorway in a diaphanous dressing gown, exposing her body to my nine-year-old playmate.

  I was embarrassed at her nakedness and confused about how I had misbehaved. Most of the time I apologized. But on occasion, I fought back.

  “We’re just playing,” I’d say, with attitude.