by Wendy Lesser
At this, I blew up. “Okay, now I'm mad,” I yelled into the telephone. I told him about all my calls to the New York Times on his behalf. I argued that I had not refused to run the ad but had simply advised against it. I did everything I could to make my case, but I did so in a tone that suggested he was the perpetrator and I was the aggrieved victim. Two could play at this game, I thought, and when the phone conversation was over, that's how we left it. We were both not speaking to each other.
About six or nine months later, Katharine came through town on her own. We had one of our usual long, satisfying lunches in which the conversation ranged over everything but the quarrel between me and Lenny. Finally I brought it up—obliquely, hesitantly—and she answered by telling me a dream she had had the night before. “I dreamed you and Lenny were speaking to each other again,” she said. “And when I woke up and realized it wasn't true, I burst into tears.”
I don't know if she told this dream to Lenny as well. I never understood their marriage sufficiently to know whether words like this could pass between them, or whether she just needed to leave him alone in his wounded state. But a few days later I received an email in which Lenny said (and though I am quoting from memory, I am pretty sure the words are close to exact): “I am sitting here alone in the Umbrian countryside, surrounded by natural beauty, and the effect of this solitude and quiet is to make me feel that I am no longer angry at you for what I thought you did.” The message was very carefully worded so as to evade either apology or confession of error—it left open, for instance, the question of whether I actually did what he thought I did—but I was ready by this time for a declaration of peace, and I even admired and was amused by the delicacy of the phrasing. Lenny was completely himself still; that was the bad news but also the good news. I instantly responded that I was delighted to hear from him, and we went on from there.
It is only now, thinking about this quarrel years after it took place, that I begin to see that Lenny's view was not completely crazy. Why didn't I agree to run that ad? I say I was trying to protect Lenny's interests, but how does that fit in with my much-vaunted principle of allowing adults to make their own mistakes? Perhaps he was right on some level, and I was afraid to be seen taking his side so openly against the New York Times. It sounds too naked and craven when I put it that way, but I suspect that what Lenny saw in me, that grain of betrayal that he magnified into a whole loaf, may in fact have been there. We had, after all, a very complicated relationship by this time, and yet I never even thought to look twice at my motives in regard to him. Quite possibly they were less innocent than I imagined, if less vicious than he imagined.
8.
“He lets himself get away with nothing, not even
his desire to be touched, and where another mind
would stop, blind to its feeling, Brodkey's persists
toward that place, the weird planet on which we
really do live, feeling meaning.”
—“To Mean to Feel”
Lenny is not the only difficult friend I ever had. There were others with whom I had quarrels and reconciliations. I do not know whether I, as a difficult friend myself, have had more or less than the average number of such people in my life; it is not the sort of thing one compares notes on. In fact, the notion of a difficult friendship never even struck me as a distinct category until I began to reflect on it after Lenny's death. Only then did I realize that there were a number of people in my adult life who fit into it. (I am not counting childhood because we are all difficult friends in childhood, but the pattern of vicious spats and wounded silences is something most of us seem to grow out of after adolescence.)
The difference was that I sooner or later dispensed with all my other difficult friends. The cost of keeping them was just too high. I was aware of having to swallow my pain or my anger or my sense of impatience whenever we overcame our differences and got together again. The thing is, we never really overcame our differences: there was always a slight coolness, something kept in reserve, at least on my part and I think on theirs. Whereas with Lenny all was forgiven every time, though “forgiven” seems precisely the wrong word for the kind of instantaneous forgetting he and I were able to practice.
“But you haven't forgotten,” I can hear you saying. “If you had truly forgotten, you would not be able to trot out this list of quarrels at such length. On the contrary, every detail of every disagreement seems to have burnt itself into your memory.”
Well, yes. I do, on a rational level, recall the fights, in all their gory detail, and at any point in the past twenty years I could probably have summoned up the mental record and read aloud from the transcript. And I believe that Lenny, though he was a much less detail-minded person than I, also remembered everything. If I had, for instance, ever said the words “movie producer” or “New York Times” in his hearing, he would have rolled his eyes in exactly that way I pictured when I thought of his possible response to Louisa's question about burial or cremation. That eye roll of Lenny's, which was less like a human expression than that of a terrified horse, meant Pain is in the offing—I can feel it coming—Please avert the thought. It was Lenny's way of saying, “The horror! The horror!” and “Ahfuhgeddaboudit,” all at once.
So on a conscious, superficial level, we could both recall the history. But on a deeper level, that level where Lenny operated best (and perhaps, if I am honest with myself, where I did too), the slate had been wiped clean. There was no lingering impediment to the friendship; it was as strong after each quarrel as it had been before.
I think this was because Lenny was an essentially lovable person and my other difficult friends were not. In their case, after the last slammed-down phone or unanswered letter or parting grimace of rage (and in every case there was a last one, for they are all gone from me now), I was not sorry to see them go. I could live without them. Whereas Lenny always left a noticeable gap, an empty place in my life that needed to be filled. Difficult as he was, he was also a terrific friend. After his death, I was talking with another longtime friend of his about the various writers we knew who had died recently, leaving holes in our small literary and personal world. “So-and-so was a real jerk,” she said about one of them. “Well,” I said hesitantly, “Lenny could be a jerk at times too,” and she immediately responded, “Oh, but Lenny was wonderful.” She did not say, “No, Lenny was wonderful”— she was not, in that sense, contradicting me. She meant (and I understood her exactly) that even if he behaved badly at times, he was still wonderful. I think many of his friends felt that way.
I have had other friends who died and who, in dying, took away a sizable part of my Berkeley life. Berkeley is like that; it's a small enough town, and a static enough town, that individuals make a big difference to it. When we lose people, we tend to feel the loss permanently, and no newcomer can ever quite fill the space. In the last decade or so, in particular, we—by which I mean we middle-aged longtime settlers—have been losing people with increasing frequency: Bill Nestrick, Henry Mayer, Mike Rogin… Each was struck down far too early (they all died younger than Lenny, in fact), and each left a gaping hole in part of my social world. But I was not as close to any of these people as I was to Lenny, so their deaths, even though they shocked and saddened me, did not leave me feeling as bereft as I do now.
It is a peculiar kind of bereavement, though, more lasting than it is intense. There are other people—and not just my husband and my son—whose deaths would murder life for me. I would not, for instance, particularly care to survive my friend Arthur, with whom I speak on the telephone just about every day, sometimes more than once. And there are other friends whom I miss viscerally whenever they leave town, and whose presence, in some form or other, is crucial to what I think of as my daily life.
Lenny was not like this. I did not especially miss him when he was in Italy. I did not even miss him, in any very tangible way, when we were enduring one of our silent periods. That's the oddest thing about those quarrels: in my memory
, there is very little pain associated with them. Embarrassment, yes; annoyance, yes; but not pain. I was accustomed to Lenny's absence and could live with it, because on some level I felt that he was always out there, even if temporarily inaccessible to me. I am not sure how well I can live with the thought that he is never coming back.
9.
“The sight of him was mysterious news, like
myself surprised in a mirror, at once strange and
familiar.”
—“Sticks and Stones”
It's true that Lenny was more difficult for me than he was for some of his other friends. I don't mean he was more difficult to me, in the sense of being ruder, more angry, more vengeful. Lenny was a bit of an equal-opportunity maniac, in that way. He carried his cloud of obsessiveness around him like Pigpen's cloud of dust in the old Peanuts comic strips, and if you happened to come within range, that was just your tough luck. It was nothing personal (except insofar as everything with Lenny was personal—but the person, in that case, was him and not you). I know perfectly well that the quarrels I had with him were not the only ones or even the worst ones he had. But they required something of me that was not easy for me, in particular, to supply. I hesitate to call it forgiveness, because I do not really believe in forgiveness (not, at least, the Christian variety we are always being recommended to practice). I wouldn't call it tolerance, either, because both Lenny and I were notoriously intolerant, of each other and everything else; it was one of the qualities we consciously shared. Perhaps the word I am searching for is flexibility
I have always been remarkably inflexible. Even as a child, I had fixed ideas and fixed preferences. I take a position and I cling to it like death; nothing can budge me, neither argument nor evidence, until enough time passes and I am ready to budge by myself. As a critic, I have found this to be both my strongest asset and my greatest weakness. I know right away what I think about something, and I can hold that opinion in the face of enormous opposition. I can also explain why I hold it, which is where the critical faculty kicks in. But this speed of decision comes with a certain impatience (impatience being an almost inevitable corollary of inflexibility), which prevents me from allowing extremely difficult artworks the necessary time to sink in. If something doesn't work on me right away, chances are it will not work at all. There are exceptions to this—more and more of them, as I grow older—but the number of cases that follow the rule are still in the vast majority.
Recently I learned that I had a tiny birth-defect, a shallow hip socket that had remained silent and invisible for fifty years. (I learned about it when it at long last decided to speak up and make itself felt.) Suddenly I had a key that unlocked years of self-questioning about my physical inflexibility—my inability to do the stretches, lifts, or turns as well as the best students in my ballet and modern classes could do them, my frustrating incapacities and weaknesses in the world of dance. As I lay in the hospital bed recovering from the operation that fixed the hip socket, I began to wonder if there were some similar defect, tiny but ever-present, that accounted for my psychological inflexibility. Would it, too, wear out eventually? Could it be replaced by something else? And did I want it to be?
Lenny was like a stretching exercise for my psychological inflexibility. Repeatedly, over the years, he demanded of me a spontaneity, an ability to retract, an improvisatory suppleness that I did not natively possess. I have just now happened upon this dance-like metaphor, but perhaps it is more than a metaphor, because Lenny and I both cared a great deal about dance. He was one of the rare Berkeley men in my circle—my husband may well be the only other one—who felt that the ability to dance was an important masculine trait. And feminine trait as well: Lenny noticed that I danced well (it was one of the few personal characteristics of mine he ever commented on), and this made me feel that, like my husband, he saw something in me which most of my literary or scholarly or otherwise articulate friends did not. I have said that Lenny did not view me as a sexual being, and I still stand by that, but he did, I now realize, see me as a physical being in the world, someone whose quality of movement was central to her identity. And since this is very much how I view myself, it was comforting to get this image reflected back from him.
I am not sure how I felt, or feel, about Lenny himself as a dancer, since by the time I got much of a chance to see him dance, he was so impeded by gout (or whatever it was) that he could barely lift his feet off the ground. But even his shuffling was rhythmic and snazzy, so that he always seemed as if he were dancing up a storm, even when he was barely moving. And now that I picture him progressing across the dance floor in this way, I realize how good a title Shuffle was for one of his books. It signified not just the random ordering of a pack of cards, and not just the shuffling off of this mortal coil (though Lenny was certainly aware of both those meanings), but also the actual way in which he moved through the world.
Anyway, for whatever reason, whether it had something to do with dance or not, I found that with Lenny— perhaps with Lenny alone—I was able to exercise my nearly non-existent capacity for flexibility. This may well account for the fact that my husband, over the years, found my reconciliations with Lenny increasingly annoying. That is, he was annoyed by the quarrels (he thought they were all ridiculous), but he was even more annoyed by the speed with which, when the quarrel was over, I would forget all about it. I now think—and I am realizing this for the first time—that my husband resented the way this rare flexibility was being directed at Lenny when it could so much more usefully have been directed at him. But that, of course, was the point. It would have been much harder for me to be flexible within the marriage. I too, like Lenny but in reverse, had figured out a calculus that would enable me to use my difficult friend as a substitute-spouse: to deflect onto him the reactions, the extremes of quarreling and reconciliation, that would not fit comfortably into the domestic setting.
And perhaps I imagined (but here I am speaking of subconscious motives only: I do not view this, even retroactively, as a conscious intention) that my dealings with Lenny gave me some kind of moral credit I would not otherwise have had. I have never before asked myself why I forgave Lenny, or allowed him to forgive me, so easily and so effortlessly. I have not thought that it required investigation, it felt so natural. But if I examine my own calculus as relentlessly as I have his, I can see that putting up with Lenny gave me a public setting in which to display my ability to deal with a temperamental man. I am not saying my husband is temperamental in the way Lenny was. On the contrary, to the entire outside world he appears to be the soul of kindness and compromise, the conciliating figure in the relationship, the flexible one. Only I know (and perhaps Katharine: I think she has a suspicion) how tough and stubborn my husband can be. His is the toughness of passive resistance, where mine is the toughness of active effort. This equal and opposite tug-of-war works—that is, the marriage survives and flourishes—but it can be hard on the participants. One of the ways I had of dealing with that, I now think, was to relent toward Lenny. If my husband was the obviously nice one in the public version of our marriage, I at least could be the nice one in the difficult friendship with Lenny. Not that anyone else was noticing. Not that even I was noticing, until now. But I think something like this was operating, all the same.
I0.
“Walking down Monroe Street, I approached the
wavering light of Friday night prayer candles in
our kitchen window. The shadow of my mother,
against the window shade, moved from refrigerator
to stove. Everything as it should be. Italian
ladies with shopping bags and baby carriages.
Italian kids sitting on the stoops of their tenements.
This was real.”
—“The Zipper”
I am glad that when Lenny died we were not quarreling. And I am glad that before he died I had the chance to see him in Italy, which was in a way his natural environment, or rather, the environment to which he was
best suited, possibly because it was not natural to him. Some Jewish writer or other—perhaps it was even Lenny, though I am pretty sure it was not—used to tell a story about the old Lower East Side neighborhood of his youth, in which Jewish and Italian families had mingled freely. “For years,” this writer said, “I didn't know there were two separate groups, the Jews and the Italians. I just thought there were the Jews and the happy Jews.”
Actually, this could not have been Lenny, because for him things were never that simple. He could see the dark side of the Italians as easily as he could see the dark side of everything else. But it is also true that he was happy in Italy, and in his life there with Katharine, in a way that I had never seen him happy before. Or so it seemed to me when we visited—my husband, our son, and I—a year or two after Lenny and Katharine had married. We spent our first meal with them at an outdoor restaurant they loved, a place where the chef-owner picked the herbs and vegetables for our meal from the garden surrounding our table, and where we were the only patrons for the duration of a very long lunch. Lenny was expansive and funny and as nutty as ever. Even though we tried to steer clear of the touchy subjects, like Israel, the publishing industry, and English department politics, it was impossible to stay off them entirely, and that's when the nuttiness would come out most forcefully. But Katharine, unlike most of the previous wives, was very good at mildly squelching Lenny's more objectionable opinions, and the lunch was a complete pleasure. Afterwards our son, who, at the age of twelve, had just been given his first grownup glass of wine, commented to me and my husband that Lenny would have made a perfect subject for a recent school assignment. Asked to describe a family member, our son had despaired of having anything interesting to say about any real family member and had therefore made up a weird, wildly eccentric grandfather to write about. “But Lenny is crazy and lovable, so he would have been just right,” he said, obviously regretting the lost opportunity. I did not need nor did I wish to point out that Lenny wasn't actually a member of our family: it was enough for my son, as it had always been for me, that he at any rate felt like one.
