The Bachelor

by Andrew Palmer

  Sadie and I agreed that comment almost made up for the odd furtive behavior he uncharacteristically displayed during the rest of the date. “Shawntel is right,” Sadie wrote from the other coast. “We do live in a death-denying society. I knew she wouldn’t get a rose; she’s too real for the Bachelor to handle”: words I could hear Sadie speaking, see her writing, before I read them in her letter—one of our first—since by this point when I watched The Bachelor I experienced Sadie’s reactions at least as fully as my own, whether she was sitting next to me or thousands of miles away.

  Our progression from G-chat to letters had been swift, bridged by a single postcard, hers, a reproduction of the cover of Rock Me Baby!, a 1962 pulp fiction by Greg Randolph (“Bop king Dickie Wild was the idol of millions of screaming teen-agers…but his private love life would have made even Casanova blush!”). “One thing we’ve sacrificed in our age of electronic immediacy,” she wrote near the end of her second letter, in the elegiac mode that I was coming to realize characterized so much of her writing and thinking, “is the ability to just settle with one’s thoughts, to think both broadly and deeply. I’ve noticed it lately because in our G-chat habit I push myself away, somewhat, from really thinking about you. It’s a paradox.” Mail wasn’t delivered to House Above the Morning Clouds, so every few days I’d make the hour-and-a-half-long drive to Fairfield’s nearest post office, where I’d drop off a letter and, more often than not, find one waiting for me. Sadie wrote on soft, thick, cream-colored stationery in small, distinguished cursive. Later I’d learn she used a $500 fountain pen her stepfather had given her when she was ten. “So I write this letter,” she wrote, “to allow my thoughts to settle on you, your hand, your neck, your mouth against mine, my lips moving slowly up the edge of your ear, my tongue tracing its way back down….”

  From the start, we were almost reckless in our intimacy. We recounted our last day together in as much detail as we could muster, letting fantasy and projection take over whenever memory failed. And yet while I was interested in all aspects of her life, which seemed so far away from mine, I can’t deny I was particularly interested in the details of her open marriage. Making sure to get across that I approved of the arrangement, and not for selfish reasons alone—“It must take a lot of courage,” I wrote, “to opt out of the prescribed ways of ordering your life”—I prodded her, gently I hoped, with questions. How were things with Ryan? Did he know about me? Did he have a girlfriend? How did the whole thing work? It worked by communicating about it every day and meeting its difficulties and awkwardnesses head-on. Ryan knew about me but didn’t have a girlfriend, though he’d had a few since they’d opened the marriage. He had rheumatoid arthritis and often lacked the energy for anything outside of work and family, both of which he was passionately devoted to and together seemed to provide what pleasures he needed. He loved exploring New York with Ethan, visiting galleries and museums and parks. “They like it here more than I do,” Sadie wrote. “For them it’s a vacation, for me—I was going to say a nightmare, but that’s probably a little too strong.”

  Only a little, though. Committed to a six-month vacation from work (after working for two decades without more than a three-week break, even when Ethan was born), she spent her days wandering the streets and buildings so familiar to her from her childhood. It seemed impossible that so many places—and not only places but views, smells, sounds, architectural details—could have been holding for all these years scraps of Sadie’s life. It was overwhelming. The world seemed alien in the sheer intensity of its familiarity. One day she found her feet had carried her without her permission to Gramercy Park, and she didn’t even make it to the iron gate before nausea overtook her. She tried to seek out new experiences, but even in places she’d never been she found herself thinking about the ruin of her family, how cut off from each other they’d always been, even before they cut each other off in the biggest, most final ways. “How little experience I have of gathering,” she wrote, “and trusting in the ways such an activity might nourish one.” All the walking made it easy to fall asleep at night, but once asleep she was visited nightly by dreams unsettling and worse. In one, she dreamt that two of her teeth fell out into her hand, “a classically horrible dream, of course,” and then, on the street, people kept asking for her ID, and she could never find it. “My therapist suggested that my chronic jaw clenching, which I’ve always taken to be related to anger, might also be interpreted as a kind of subconscious effort to hold myself together.”

  Beyond Ethan, who was a “constant delight,” bird-watching in Central Park, “and, it goes without saying, you,” her only reliable source of solace—one completely new to her and that took her by surprise—was (could I believe it?) karaoke. She loved watching other people, especially, that volatile mix of embarrassment and exhilaration, aloneness and togetherness, irony and sincerity. She liked the most nervous ones the best, she wrote. It was as though all the hardest parts of their lives showed up on the features of their straining faces, either to be muddled through for the length of the song or transformed into a sort of redemptive joy, and because you never knew which direction the performance would take, there was this wonderful, awful tension. “Our own hang-ups get to be so boring,” she wrote; “other people’s: endlessly interesting.”

  “You should have seen me when I got your letter today,” she wrote in another letter. “I shrieked like a little girl. It would’ve embarrassed you if you’d been there. Then I took it to my bed and read and reread it, then put it aside and started touching myself, all the way aroused, when Ethan got home from school and ran down the hallway and into my room and jumped into bed and lay down on my chest and wrapped his arms around me, then started kissing me up and down my legs and telling me he loved me. Being a parent can make a person’s head explode sometimes.” Most of the time, though, it was a consolation. She tried so hard to be a mother for Ethan in all the ways her mother never was for her. “I pulled him next to me against my pillow and read to him for a long time from the sci-fi talking-cat series he’s obsessed with, even though I hate, hate, hate reading those books—the language sticks so badly in the mouth—and when I stopped he looked up at me, his face just totally glowing, and said, in a voice so serious and hushed, ‘Mom, I love this book.’ And in that moment I was so, so happy. I remembered being his age and getting lost in books, that overwhelming feeling. And then I thought, Damn, that’s exactly how this whatever-we-have—you and I, I mean—is going to go, isn’t it: we can’t be together even in my imagination. Which I guess is my way of saying, again, maybe we should stop corresponding?”

  “Again”: the written record is full of other instances of what I took to be Sadie’s fatalistic attitude toward us. But this attitude proved to be just the spark we needed: if she hadn’t insisted on our imminent decline, I doubt I would’ve fought so hard against it; if she hadn’t deemed a long-term relationship with me impossible, I never would’ve thought to imagine a future for us.

  Sadie accepted my invitation to return to California; she’d arrive one month exactly after she’d left, and we’d have three nights and two full days to celebrate our anniversary. A few days before she was due to arrive, I picked up from the post office a small padded envelope that turned out to contain a mix CD from her. I listened to it on the way back to my mountain: sad pretty songs about heartbreak and loss that sounded like they came from another era, an era when men rambled and women pined and everyone was on closer terms with death. Scaffolds littered the countryside. Ghosts were real. There was a tremendous and general yearning for home, which was synonymous with Heaven and sometimes Mother, sometimes also Kentucky or Virginia. People were weary, unspeakably weary. The living slept on straw-covered pallets and the departed slept on our Savior’s breast. Murderers drew daggers that flashed in the moonlight, then fled for California or Chicago, leaving brides behind. The wildflowers their children saw in dreams were windows onto eternity.

  When
I got home I read the note Sadie had enclosed. “I’ve been thinking about you,” she wrote, “and the sadness you carry without acknowledging it, perhaps even without realizing it’s there, and I’ve been wondering how much of it has to do with your having abandoned the activity that once held such a central place in your life.” The letter went on in this vein for a while. “Forgive me,” she wrote three times. She suggested I direct my “energy and talent” into some sort of long-term project. Had I ever tried my hand at nonfiction? Memoir? “I know you don’t think your life is interesting enough to write about, but maybe there’s some other subject out there calling for your sustained attention.”

  That night, in the enormous bed in the enormous bedroom that was nonetheless smaller than the enormous rooms surrounding it, I lay awake thinking about Sadie’s note. That she clearly knew I would find it annoying (“Forgive me”) didn’t make it any less so. I resented what I shuddered to (but couldn’t help but) think of as her motherly concern. She was projecting her sadness onto me. I wasn’t sad. I was fine. I was. The CD full of sad songs was a trap; I wouldn’t allow myself to fall into it. How dare she try to lure me into the suffering that constituted her life. It had been a mistake to invite her back, we were incompatible. Suddenly the difference in our ages represented an insurmountable gulf.

  And yet, the more I considered her suggestion, the less repellent it became. Laura had made a similar suggestion earlier in the winter, I remembered, and a few days earlier my agent had emailed, asking when I thought I might have some pages to send. It would be nice if I could truthfully report that I was at work on something. I still had enough money to live on for a while, but I’d been spending more on gas here than I’d expected (the drive up and down the mountain burnt so much), and it was becoming more dispiriting by the day to watch my so-called savings drain away. More than that, even if I wasn’t as sad as Sadie presumed, I was growing, I had to admit, a little restless. What are you doing with your life?

  I got out of bed and wandered around the house, trying to think of a subject to write about. I brainstormed in my pocket notebook:

  —panoramas

  —clouds

  —the Bulls

  —The Bachelor

  —documentaries

  —the pine beetle epidemic

  —pineapples

  —music playing from other rooms

  —the pleasures of reading aloud

  —the history of flight

  —reading after watching TV

  —mass extinction

  —owls

  —apocalypticism

  I had wandered into Dave’s wife’s library. Built-in bookshelves lined the walls, which with the entrance formed a massive hexagon covered from floor to ceiling with books. Entering it was like being swallowed by a monster whose stomach was lined with all of literature. I made my way slowly along the shelves, vaguely searching for potential topics, when my gaze caught on a series of books whose author called out to me like a long lost friend: Henry’s Fate; Recovery; 77 Dream Songs; His Toy, His Dream, His Rest. Next to these was a copy of the biography I’d stolen from Maria, and I could almost taste the blueberry-banana smoothie, almost hear Maria in the shower, almost see the books and bottles of wine that lined her room, and it was in that moment that I decided my destiny would be to write a new biography of John Berryman.

  I went upstairs and Googled “Berryman archives,” and discovered that the bulk of his papers were kept at the University of Minnesota: I would go there the first chance I got. Maybe I could combine it with visits to my parents, whom I hadn’t seen in ages, and to Laura. Meanwhile, I would finish reading his published work, and reread what I’d read already with renewed purpose. Rather than telling “John Berryman’s story” I would tell a story about John Berryman. Taking my lead from Berryman himself, I would be transparent about my limitations. I would make clear, through subtle tactics, that I was writing from a particular point of view. But I would also—how, I wasn’t sure—transcend this point of view. I would enter into Berryman’s life as though it were my own, and maybe in the course of inhabiting it I would discover something about myself, and in making that process of self-discovery visible on the page, the book would also be an invitation for readers to discover things about themselves. That I didn’t know how to write a biography was hardly a reason not to try: I hadn’t known how to write a novel before I wrote one of those.

  It took me a long time to fall asleep that night, and I woke up the next morning full of purpose. A new beginning.

  * * *

  —

  In February 1937, John Berryman attended a Cambridge performance of The Revenger’s Tragedy, a Jacobean play full of sex and violence probably written by Thomas Middleton, though for many years it was attributed to Middleton’s contemporary Cyril Tourneur. Its opening scene features a young brooding man holding the skull of his murdered lover, almost certainly an allusion to Hamlet, in whose plot Berryman recognized parallels to his own life. But his attention was soon diverted from his sad past toward an actress with large, dark, passionate eyes. She was playing the role of the brooding young man’s mother. Berryman couldn’t stop thinking about her long after the play had ended.

  A few weeks later he attended a lunch party thrown by an American friend. There she was. I couldn’t drink my sherry, he’d recall or invent or half-invent in a poem more than thirty years later, I couldn’t eat. Her name was Beryl Eeman and she was a student of modern languages who was also interested, she told Berryman, in theater and ballet. He couldn’t bring himself to talk with her much, and then the party was over. He doubted he’d ever see her again but promised himself that if he did, he’d ask for time alone with her.

  He ran into her a few days later on a Cambridge quad. They chatted until he worked up the courage to invite her to his apartment, where he made tea and they sat on his bed sipping it and talking about themselves and literature. She claimed to prefer Racine to Shakespeare. Berryman, incredulous, tried to change her mind by reading to her from All’s Well That Ends Well. The Shakespeare seems to have had its effect: By six-fifteen, Berryman would write, she had promised to stop seeing “the other man.” / I may have heard better news but I don’t know when. / Then—I think—then I stood up, & we kissed.

  He forgot about the girl he’d left behind in New York, the Jean or Jane to whom he may have been engaged, and began writing a play about Cleopatra, a vehicle for Beryl. That spring, they spent most of their free time together. By June, she’d put down in writing that she loved him. Shortly thereafter, he reciprocated, with the difference that his letter was addressed to his mother.

  He was making his case for not returning to New York to be with his mother for the summer. Knowing from experience—he’d had a few serious girlfriends—his mother would be suspicious at best of his love for any woman other than herself, he enumerated Beryl’s best qualities for her with swift and cunning precision. She was “physically beautiful and vigorous and graceful,” he wrote,

  with a strong, direct, skeptical intelligence, no sentimentality, but a powerful emotional nature held rigidly by will and self-examination. She came slowly and profoundly to love me—she is tender and lovely beyond telling, Mum. Neither of us is primarily interested in how long it will last—for each, the present is rich and valuable when we are together and would be intolerable if we were not—that is the point. But we do, in fact, feel married now—without any adventitious strain on “forever.”

  For their summer vacation, Berryman and Beryl decided to go to Germany. She would learn German and he would study for the Charles Oldham Shakespeare examinations: the top performer would win a scholarship of seventy pounds, which, if he had it, would not only ease his living expenses but prove to his mother, after all these years, his worthiness as a son. The couple spent most of their time in Heidelberg, from where Berryman sent his mother a series of letters an
d postcards. He saw everything through the gauze of new love. “You cannot believe a place can be so lovely,” he wrote, “with its heavenly hills & woods & river & shops & people & food & coffee & beer & the Schloss & plays & Beryl & Shakespeare.” Berryman and Beryl read Romeo and Juliet together in three stretches, in preparation for seeing a production that was part of the Reichsfestspiele organized by Goebbels, himself a poet and playwright in the Romantic vein. “Magnificent production,” Berryman reported to his mother, “several hundred actors storming in from four angles, brilliant lighting, fireworks at the banquet…drums & swords & dances & a 20-minute wordless procession to lay Juliet in the tomb.” A few days later, he and Beryl happened to come across the actor who’d played Capulet, and Berryman saw in him a manifestation of Aryan perfection—“possibly the most satisfying human being I’ve seen ever, large, powerful, open, brilliantly alive, laughing, magnificent.” His shoulders were broad, his jaw square, his eyes an intriguing silver-blue….

  The Germany vacation affirmed what Berryman already knew about Beryl. She was his “one chance for a full and rich and permanent (if, necessarily, desperately partial) human happiness,” he wrote his mother. “I find capacities I had not dreamed of, never admitted the existence of, and derided even in art.”

  * * *