Great Kisser Page 4

  He wrote me often, encouraging me, his letters frantic, surging, in his impatience filled with half-words I learned to decipher.

  He had a perfect job, his own theater, a lunchtime program for local workers, a prison program of theater workshops with kids from the reform school.

  In 1974 he wrote: “The movie people are brutal and demanding, like the garment industry. Am planning next season’s work and reading, refurbishing my soul and thinking of parenthood—very strange.”

  In December of 1976, after our wedding, Karen and I left the rains of Vancouver for the holidays and arrived in Santa Monica, where it was warm, bright and sunny, to stay with Bob and Linda for a week.

  We slept in the baby’s room, surrounded by a crib and toys for the coming baby. The house was filled with books and playscripts. Bob’s sun-dappled workroom was lined with posters for children’s, Vietnamese, mental patients’ and prisoners’ liberation, as well as theater posters of plays he had directed. He had a complete file of our correspondence and my writing.

  Bob thought he was living in the last days of Amerikan fascism, but he had a good time meanwhile. There was a book on his desk, Forming Your Own Corporation, lying alongside a pamphlet on combating American imperialism in Asia and Latin America.

  Linda showed us a closet of lavish suede clothes—jackets and suits—she had bought for Bob, which she saved for him, but which he defiantly refused to wear. He wore the clothes of the people, as did everyone in the movie colony in Los Angeles.

  They had a maid, a college student. Linda paid her a dollar an hour, but also threw in lessons in Marxist theory.

  Bob and Linda’s bicycles leaned against the trees in their backyard. Avocados fell from the trees and dropped into the yard.

  I told him I had thought of him when watching Joel Grey receive the Academy Award on television. Grey, with his elfin look and smile, reminded me of Bob. He had said, holding the Oscar, “Don’t let anybody tell you this isn’t a terrific feeling,” and I had pictured Bob.

  Bob laughed. “Oh, I never watch the Academy Awards. I made a vow never to watch that commercial bullshit.”

  Our room was next to theirs. Bob did Linda’s pregnancy exercises along with her every day. We heard them counting. We also heard a lot of laughter, and the sound of continuous munching.

  The refrigerator was filled with milk, yogurt, coconut juice, health foods. Everything reeked of health. We hid our liquor.

  In the baby’s room we awoke to their laughter.

  One morning I awoke, heard their laughter, and wept. Karen cradled me in her arms.

  “This is the town for you, Michael,” Bob said. “These laid-back, bland blonds don’t have the energy. It’s a terrific place for a New Yorker with talent and brains. You know, Mike, I’m surprised you didn’t blow your brains out in Vancouver. We’ve got to get you out of there.”

  He earnestly, arduously set about finding me a job in the movie colony. He found an apartment for me and Karen to sublet behind theirs. He came by in the morning, leaving pastry at the door and copies of Daily Variety, Billboard, Cashbox, The New York Times and the L.A. Times. During the day he phoned me with interviews he had set up. In the evening he waited for the news.

  Nothing worked. Bob looked away or directly downward as I talked to him, giving explanations, expressing my hopes.

  It was while Bob and Linda were away for a week that I saw an ad for a job at a civil rights organization called Jewish Punchers in Manhattan. It was the kind of place where I knew if I got the job, I’d want to kill myself. So of course I would get it. I left a note for Bob and flew to New York for the interview. The editor of Jewish Punchers’ Magazine spoke of the difficulty of finding a good bathroom in the city, and gave me a list of his favorites.

  And I got the job. We would be moving back to Manhattan. I called Butinsky in Boston for the first time in five years. “Please help me,” I said. “I’m still here, at the same old address,” he said. He could hardly wait to see me.

  Twenty-five years later, Karen said to me, “I would have had a child with you but I thought you’d leave me. How you cried at Robert’s. You were constantly yelling in those days. You would have been a terrible father then. I had no security. You were constantly threatening to leave me.

  “But then we were thinking of doing it four years later. But I had a hysterectomy, remember? A fibroid uterus.” No, I didn’t remember it. I remembered almost nothing. And then, as she spoke, I did.

  After Karen told me this, she said, “Life is winding down so rapidly, like a tape unspooling more and more quickly as it comes to the end.”

  IV: I’ll Take Manhattan

  It was 1978. We were back in Manhattan and had 13-year old Kevin with us. Almost every street seemed to have a resonance for me, a memory. For the next fifteen years, I walked back and forth across the city. I walked from Columbia University down to Battery Park; I took the ferry to Staten Island and back; I walked across the Brooklyn Bridge into Brooklyn Heights. I walked across the esplanade and into Cobble Hill and Carroll Gardens. And I walked back. Alfred Kazin walked the city and he crossed the bridge. I stayed where I was.

  And I walked up and down Riverside Drive and Broadway and through Central Park and visited the street fairs. Sometimes I walked to a building where I woman I had a crush on lived and I stood outside, just as I had done as a schoolboy. And always I expected to find someone that would end this silence and darkness, with whom I could begin to live.

  Karen fed and clothed me, led me piddle around the way writers did, hoping for a flash. She let me take the little freelance reviewing jobs, the crap that led nowhere. And she paid for the writing studio I avoided like the plague, even after I had published two novels and won a major literary prize.

  “What if she really loves you more than life itself?” Butinsky had said.

  When we had guests, Karen sat like a zombie, getting higher to ease her inhibitions. After a while she began to nod off. She did this in front of Holocaust scholars and Times staffers and Pulitzer and Nobel prize winners.

  I felt like a ventriloquist, speaking both for myself and for her, trying to divert their attention from her silence. I wanted to scream. I would become more and more animated so that no one would notice that Karen was dead silent, distant and high, a haunted look on her face. But of course they did. And they didn’t know how deeply she observed and how empathic she really was. They rarely came back.

  As the years passed in Manhattan, Karen began to fall a lot. Balance issues, from the booze and the pills. I would turn and she wasn’t there. She was on the ground, a trickle of blood spurting from her knees, and apologizing. For Karen always apologized. She often said to me she was trying so hard to “correct her faults,” and when she said that to me, it broke my heart.

  On the day we moved from Vancouver into our first apartment in Manhattan, Karen had fallen and banged her head against the wall. The ambulance soon arrived. She had a mild concussion.

  Karen sipped away during the days and nights, and there were stretches when I almost followed her lead. Kevin, 13 now, gave us a red wine flask. I tried to get to know Kevin better by reading his Feelings Book: “I have got a problem everybody is calling me ELF EARS and I don’t know why. I’ve checked my ears and there not really pointed.” On weekends Karen and I and Kevin weaved our way through the city, the trusty flask on my shoulder. A young Israeli woman pointed to it smiling and said to me, “Stay high all the time.” I wanted to strike her. And the bright Central Park Sunday darkened for me.

  When she was fired from her first job, Karen got up at 4 A.M. in the apartment and began to hunt for the slides of paintings she’d done many years before. “I found two sets of slides,” she said, “but they were both of other people’s work, and not even people of any importance to me. Just people I knew.”

  The next midnight, Karen sat nude in the living room except for her wedgies, and holding on to a piece of my flannel pajama top she’d found there. She was staring ahead wit
h a beer in her hand. The cat was beside her. She sat there while I wrote in another room, and that’s how I found her. Soon, I knew, she would weep and I would hold her in my arms.

  She moved around the apartment and in a slurred voice she said, “There is something I must do, but I can’t remember what it is.”

  She sat down beside me, tears falling down her cheeks. “What if something happened to you?” she said. “No one would even know me. I just want you to be my friend. Nobody knows the real me except you. What if you die? What have I done with my life? If I die, you’ll be all right. You have your work. If you die, I have nothing.”

  She knew how much I wanted children of my own. One night she was crying in her sleep after we had fought. I woke her up, and she said, “I dreamt that I brought giraffes and other animals into the house to bring more life here for you.”

  By now I had the job at Jewish Punchers. I had rented a study in the tower of an office building and went there to write after work. I would take the elevator to the 26th floor, then walk up a narrow winding staircase to the stone tower. Plaster fell from the ceiling in chunks and I had to keep moving my card table, typewriter and lamp to different corners of the cavernous room.

  Karen visited me there late one night, quite drunk. I had told her wistfully I would have liked to find a patron so I could get out of the job. She said she was sure the patron would be a sexy dark Italian woman in black stockings like the one I’d really wanted all along. Her description was so accurate I got hot hearing it. “I know what it’s like to be a patron,” she said. “You get kicked in the teeth and shat on. I don’t have enough money for you. But,” she screamed, “I’ve been giving my whole life. Everything I have.”

  When I looked around, she had lain down on the peeling radiator and was hyperventilating. She gasped for breath and pounded her fists on the steaming radiator. “Please, sweetie,” I said. I tried to get her down but she held on; she wouldn’t budge. Her screams bounced off the walls.

  I had no phone.

  I was afraid Karen would die and that I’d be blamed, just as I’d felt on the balcony in Vancouver—that I wouldn’t be able to get her to the doctor in time, down the winding staircase, into the elevator, to a cab, to a hospital.

  “Sweetie, sweetie—”

  I pleaded with her, held her, assured her. She trembled and gasped for breath.

  She knew I’d give in. I always did.

  Then we talked quietly. She was afraid of going into her office. “I feel my skin will ooze and I’ll look like a monster,” she said.

  Then came the series of operations. There was the one on her throat that came close to her brain. She fell off a horse; the hysterectomy followed soon after.

  My beautiful wife wanted me to desire her, but she physically abused herself. I was filled with pity for her, even love, as well as rage. But desire? Did I know how to desire a woman? I desired all women, but I was so afraid.

  V: The Tapes

  I’ve written this so far the way I remember it, the way I’ve told it and retold it to myself over and over again: that Karen coerced me into marriage with the threat of suicide, that I was frightened that she would kill herself or kill me. That I was locked into it by fear and shame and intimidation and extortion. In that story I am the victim.

  But then there are the tapes, little molecules of sound, vividly alive, telling a different story, the same story, many stories. They are evidence of a different reality, a life within the same life, of my collusion and cowardice, of Karen’s friendship and support and devotion. They tell a love story as well, a love story from the beginning of what I had always sworn was a misbegotten life and a bad marriage. Not the kind of love story that Karen would have wanted me to tell, but a love story nevertheless. And a tale of gratitude.

  In his World War Two memoir, My Mother’s Sabbath Days, the poet Chaim Grade writes of the wartime chaos of a Russian street. He lifts up his friend Misha, struck by a truck, onto his shoulders and carries him through the teeming crowds to the hospital. Misha’s blood drips over Grade’s face and ears, and he kisses Grade rapidly many times on his bald head.

  This is a story of many kisses.

  When I was 15, my parents were borderline lunatics, carving me up in little pieces, haranguing me and robbing me of what might have constituted a childhood. My father was a beaming cheerleader of my defeat (“You can fail, Michael, if you try! You can do it!”) Yet that same year my father, who wanted me by his side to cry to every hour of the day and night, and whose income as an insurance agent was severely limited, mustered up the funds and the balls to send me away from himself and New York to the Cherry Lawn School in Darien, Connecticut. There I was loved and pampered and encouraged to become a writer. I took up smoking, was slapped by a girl—hard, in the face—who found no other way to break through my terrorized shyness so that I could see that she had a crush on me; I was typecast as a dreamy poet who wanders across the stage reading a book and bumping into people in Arthur Koestler’s play, Twilight Bar, and sat outside in winter for morning meetings where we were given massages by Dr. Christina Stael von Holstein Bogoslovsky, the Swedish lady principal, to keep us alert. She was married to Boris Bogoslovsky, a diplomat at the United Nations. And as the snow fell, icicles hanging from the awning over our heads, Alexander Kerensky, the head of the Menshevik opposition to the Bolshevik revolution, spoke to us of Stalin’s murderous crimes and quoted from Igor Gouzenko’s novel about Gorky, The Fall of a Titan. And I heard, for the first time, Dylan Thomas, Thomas Mann, Auden, Sean O’Casey and Ecclesiastes read aloud by teachers and students. Almost no one who has heard Dylan Thomas for the first time at 15 on a snowy morning in Darien can ever be totally broken.

  Tapes have long been a part of my life, and not only Butinsky’s tapes. In the worst years of alcohol and pills locked in with Karen in the dirty Manhattan apartment in the 1980s, I carried a hidden tape recorder around with me and secretly taped conversations with friends because I was too high to hear them at the time. Later, in the sober night, I took them out and listened to them, enjoying my little ripostes and theirs, chuckling at witticisms and hearing the nuances of conversations I had missed out on, and often catching up on my own words, on entire conversations I had been part of but not heard in the first place.

  The tapes were my reconnection with reality, minutes or many hours later. And almost a quarter of a century later, Butinsky’s tapes introduce me to myself. And gradually my self-righteousness wears down. I miss it terribly.

  It was in 1980 that I gave Karen the ultimatum: send Kevin back to his real father, or give up the marriage. He was growing marijuana plants, setting fires, collecting knives, getting arrested for painting graffiti on subway cars. I wanted him out. I didn’t want him, and I felt I was hurting him terribly by not wanting him. And Karen would not send him, but gave him that option, which he took, to her lifelong regret.

  The tapes had so many different meanings for me. Using them with friends, taping conversations when I was high. Afterwards, when I was sober, listening to them and finding out what had actually happened. And in a similar way, hearing these old tapes of my shrink Butinsky, I think of how I have gone through life, with such craziness, with such turmoil, and that I’ve missed so much.

  The tapes restore what has been missed. Much of what I am writing about, I had forgotten until now. No doubt about it, I’ve missed my life. It wasn’t the one I wanted. And so I waited for the new one to begin.

  VI: The Arrest

  Kevin went back to Portland to live with his rich WASP father in 1980, but he always wanted to be with us. When Kevin was 15, he called me from his father’s house in Oregon and shouted, “I’m reading Sartre’s Anti-Semite and Jew.” Stuff like that from Kevin, that darted to my heart. What did he like about me? Images of Kevin before he left:

  Enduring my stare of hatred: cornered, his eyes trying to look straight ahead, darting about. His head rigid. Cool and frozen.

  Kevin high. Lit up, he shines like a
polished apple. Karen is delighted with his good mood, not thinking about the Heinekens he had drunk through the late afternoon, or what he has smoked.

  He is a handsome, tall and muscular boy with brown hair. When he squints his eyes in a smile, he looks as if he is crying.

  He says to me in his slurred voice, beaming: “I want to be like you: wine, women and song.”

  Ghettoization, 1978. Manhattan. Bedroom, kitchen, Kevin’s room in the back. Every time he stepped over the line, I banged the wall.

  Taboo areas in the tiny apartment: the living room because it adjoined the bedroom, the kitchen because he banged around so much, the bathroom because I spent so much time in there.

  Autumn, 1978. Kevin at 13 is falling apart at school. He makes strong resolves that last for a few days. I map out a space for him to study in the cramped apartment. I tell Karen to check his homework every day. I wrench these steps out of myself reluctantly. They take my time, and they are ineffectual anyway. For Kevin is a charming bullshitter. Soon he works his way out of the net: with a hurt look, he tells Karen he thought we respected and trusted him, yet we wanted to check up on him daily—as if he were a child. Karen is moved. She buys it. No more checking: no more homework. I feel rage. He’s back to his old schedule—staying out until midnight or all night with his friends, once sleeping on a park bench on Riverside Drive.

  We clamp down again. I supervise Kevin’s English homework. For a week things go smoothly, although in his book report he confuses Thomas Wolfe with Tom Wolfe. (He writes, “Tom, as he was known to his friends, wrote of his North Carolina childhood in his famous best-seller, Big Fire at the Vanitys.”) After he leaves the house one morning, I hear a buzzing in his room. I open the door and trace the sound to his closet. I open it and a light stuns me. I shield my eyes from the blaze. It’s poorly connected by a nest of wires hooked up haphazardly and seems set to explode. It’s shining down upon a fresh marijuana plant. I unplug it. I pound the wall: zounds! holy moly, sin and putrefaction. I am betrayed.