Sleeping with Cats (16 page)

After a disastrous affair with a professor, Nadine broke down and her mother put her in a mental institution. When she managed to get out, Henry and I finagled a job at Gary for her. It wasn't much of a job, but I was living on the same thing. We called ourselves the kibbutz. We were a kind of eating club, reading group, writers' support group. Henry ran a little zine we both worked on. He had more money than we did, from his
well-to-do family, and often treated one or both of us to supper. Certainly his apartment was far more luxurious than either of ours. He was a moody broody sort of guy, obsessed with a girlfriend he had lost years before, a stocky bearlike man deeply into psychoanalysis and Roethke. He longed to be a lay analyst and lived and dreamed in Freudian. He had a terrific ability to hold a grudge.

Nadine was seductive, sexy, opinionated and apt to take on superior airs. Her father had been a charismatic intellectual; she despised her mother as ignorant, but they were close. Her father had walked out and hadn't helped financially or related to her in years. She had a lot of class attitudes that meshed poorly with her economic situation. She was just as poor as I was but was convinced this was a temporary state. She fell in love as often as I did, but with even more disastrous results, for every relationship filled her with desperate hopes of marriage and security. She was talented and driven, so we understood that aspect of each other very well indeed. She strongly identified with male authority and tended to dismiss other women. I was one exception, and the other was her younger sister, a painter. The sisters had a complicated love/hate relationship, which they transferred to me. Nadine once wrote a story in which I ended up killing myself because I could find neither love nor success in writing. I was shocked and wounded by the story, but after a month or so, I had to recognize it was her best story, because, alas, I was an interesting character and emerged as such, whereas she often had trouble with characterization. No one in her fiction seemed real except the protagonist, who was always Nadine.

I was trying to move to New York. A friend, David Newman, who was working at
Esquire,
offered me a job as a slush editor, but I declined. I repeat that all my friends thought I was out of my mind. But I was afraid if I moved into that world, I would need to succeed in media and that would consume me instead of allowing me to learn to write the kind of fiction and poetry I was struggling to produce. I brought my file of letters of recommendation up-to-date, did the Modern Language Association interviews that December, wrote letters and sent my résumé to every college in and around New York City. I had some interviews that led to two
prospects. I was lining up my New York friends to look for anything else that could support me and an affordable apartment. I imagined I would live with a college friend, as I had that summer between my junior and senior years. These plans were about to tear to confetti pieces.

My second fall of teaching at Gary, I met Robert at a party at Henry's house that Nadine, Henry and I were throwing. I forget the occasion, but the crowd was far too large for his apartment. Robert was there on impulse, having run away from his job as a systems analyst with a small computer company in Massachusetts and turned up at Henry's apartment—where floaters often came to rest. Our first contact at that party came when he was lying on the floor. I stepped over him, he grabbed my leg, and I kicked him. Not a promising beginning. I resented him, because he had moved in with Henry and now Henry had less time for me. Henry was another one who found my poetry too female, too direct, too emotional, but at least he was willing to read it. Gradually over the next three months, I came to know Robert and like him. He had a curly Toulouse-Lautrec beard much too big for his face. When he shaved it off, he looked more attractive and vulnerable. At first he was loudly discontent and surly, but shortly he calmed down and began to be himself.

He had grown up in Sheepshead Bay in Brooklyn, in a lower-middle-class family. At fifteen, he had gone off to the University of Chicago as part of their misbegotten Children's Crusade: the program that offered entrance at fifteen to gifted high school students. Small, bookish, bright but completely inexperienced, he got into a great deal of trouble. He received his bachelor's, although he spent more time shooting pool and playing poker for money than in classes. Since he looked about twelve and was only seventeen when he graduated, he didn't develop relationships with women. He thought he would take his Ph.D. in physics (as Michel had), but instead was seduced by Leo Szilard's work in biophysics and became his assistant. When he discovered the UNIVAC computer, which filled an enormous room at the university, he was hooked and became an early computer nerd. He worked first at an air weapons facility; then for IBM, where he developed a language for big machines called EXTRAN—this was the era of FORTRAN. He worked
well at IBM but found the corporate culture stifling. He ran off on an Asian trip.

When we got involved, Henry was not pleased and managed to manipulate us into a breakup with the aid of a tape recorder and the pressure and opinions of his other friends, who backed him. He interviewed each of us about the other, edited the tapes and played them for us. He persuaded guys who had known Robert in the past to talk about him in unflattering terms and then gave me those tapes. We both were shocked and mistrustful. Everyone seemed to be jealous of everyone else. Robert resented how much time Henry gave me; I resented how much time Henry gave Robert. Henry was determined Robert and I not become involved. When we started seeing each other again, it was clandestine. We did not let anyone except my roommate know we were intimate. Henry eventually figured it out, but by then, Robert and I knew each other much better and Henry had the crisis of a pregnant girlfriend on his hands.

Robert was a small neat man. He was the smallest person in his family of large men, as he was born with osteogenesis imperfecta and had undergone a series of endless broken bones all through his childhood into adolescence, when the disease finally abated. Most babies with osteogenesis are crushed to death during birth. He was stoical and had trouble believing in other people's pain, perhaps because he had undergone so much himself. He was prone to depression but enjoyed food and wine immensely, and he liked sex. He was bright, not much in touch with his emotions, but curious, open. His features were sharp, his nose prominent. His eyes were a warm hazel. He wore glasses and at that time had his hair cropped close to his scalp. He was slight but not weak, in spite of his bones. He liked to laugh, and he could be reduced almost to tears if something was funny enough.

I liked making love with him, and he liked it with me. He was the first person I had been with since I left Ann Arbor who was into oral sex as well as intercourse, and that was a great pleasure. He was open to trying new experiences in all areas, which again was a thing new to me since college. Most of the men I had been with were fairly rigid in their expectations and their behavior. Robert struck me as not at all that way, and I
respected him for that openness. He seemed in a great many ways a good match. He was avidly curious about ideas and experiences and sensations. He was fond of music from classical to jazz. In Chicago, I used to go and hear jazz in a hotel lounge in the ghetto often, and we did that together. At this time, he was fascinated by sports car races. Since I had grown up on stock car racing, sports cars were exotic to me. He had been learning to fly a plane the previous year, but he was in debt now and dropped it. He drove a silver Porsche. I had no idea how expensive that was or what it meant. It was just a little car that both Henry and Robert tended to drive very fast. I never thought about the danger. I remember that Robert's hands on the steering wheel were the first time I noticed them: he had strong and shapely hands I found attractive. He was deft with them, good at putting things together, minor carpentry, whatever was called for—when he felt like it. In his interests and his experiences, he was not like anyone I had known.

As for Henry's situation, it seemed ambiguous and sticky, although I had helped women get illegal abortions while I lived in Chicago. I had, since I had aborted myself at eighteen, kept a record of abortionists with prices, how you contacted them, and other relevant information. Since I almost killed myself and came near bleeding to death, I have been an impassioned supporter of a woman's right to control her own body. It is one of those bedrock issues that determines which candidates I support and for whom I vote. It's still one of the issues I work on fiercely and frequently. That and civil rights were my political involvements in Chicago, although nobody thought of abortion as a political issue then: it was considered a personal shame.

Robert had gotten a research job with someone he had known in college, although we understood that with the usual bureaucratic paperwork at the U. of Chicago, he would not be paid until the end of November. November came and went and so did December, and no paycheck arrived. When it turned out that the job was a figment of his boss's cracked imagination and that the project he had been working on for three months did not exist, he was in financial trouble. He got in touch with his former company and they welcomed him back. However, they
would only pay for me to move to the Boston area if we were married. Robert wanted very much to marry. I was less enthusiastic, but I have discovered, once you have been married to someone else, it becomes to a man a litmus test of your commitment to him whether or not you are willing to marry him. I think it was not so much that he was crazy for me as that he had been desperately lonely in Boston. After having fled the small—in fact rather intimate—computer mini–think tank, coming home with a wife provided some justification or rationale for disappearing and reappearing. My presence made it all plausible.

The first time we had a serious conversation about marriage, I found myself saying, “If we marry, I don't want children.” As soon as I said it, I was simultaneously startled and illuminated. I had assumed earlier that I would have children, as “everyone” did. But by this time, enough of my friends had had babies for the prospect to be far more real to me than it had been a year or two before. I had watched woman after woman abandon her ambitions and become devoted and absorbed by her offspring. As soon as I had spoken to him, I could think of nothing else for the next several days. I realized I was convinced I would be a terrible mother, as I felt my own parenting should not be replicated. I would either neglect a baby in order to write, or make the baby my “novel” and be an overcontrolling mother, secretly resentful of what I would feel I had sacrificed.

Just before the new semester, Gary suddenly cut me back to two classes, not enough to live on. They had promised me solemnly I would always have three classes, but they were hiring Ph.D.'s and needed me less. I had managed to live and in fact even to save money on my ridiculous stipend, but I couldn't exist on two classes and it was too late to try for a part-time appointment at one of the other schools. It was crisis time. Robert suggested that getting married would solve all problems; I was not convinced, but I was willing to try, because I seemed to have come to a dead end and I loved him. I did not consider that preeminent, for—as I've remarked—I have an affectionate disposition and I found it easy to love most people who cast themselves in the way of my attention. I thought him a good person. I thought I would be good for him.

So a local rabbi at a temple I went to (I didn't have enough money to
join, although a friend paid my way for High Holiday services) married us. We packed Robert's Porsche and drove to Boston, stopping for a brief awkward visit with my parents, who were stunned, since I had told them little about Robert. Then we visited his. I was not reluctant to leave Chicago, where I had been poor, miserable, unsuccessful as a writer and altogether down-and-out. No one around me believed I would accomplish anything interesting. I was as invisible as I had been when I moved down from Wilson Avenue to Hyde Park with Michel. We were being thrown out of our apartment building on Fifty-fifth Street, which was finally being torn down. All signs seemed to point to departure. My life was vanishing around me, even as the buildings were reduced to rubble.

The first cocks begin clearing the throat of morning—

Who's that walking up on Pettijean mountain?—

rasping their brass cries from outflung necks

as they dig their spurs in the clammy cellar air.

Windows upon the mountain trap the first light.

Their bronze and copper plumage is emerging

from the pool of dusk. Lustily they drill the ear

with a falsetto clangor strident as mustard

raising alarm: I I I live I live!

I stand with a damp wind licking my face

outside this shabby motel where a man snores

who is tiring of me so fast my throat parches

and I twist the hem of my coat thinking of it.

“The rooster, or cock, is a symbol of male sexuality,”

the instructor said, elucidating Herrick.

You stuck me with spiky elbow and matchspurt glance.

We were eighteen: we both were dancers in the woods,

you a white doe leaping with your Brooklyn satyr.

Bones and sap, I rode in the mothering earth

tasting the tough grass and my dear's salty mouth,

open and swept, in a gale of dark feathers.

We owned the poems they taught us, Leda and Europa.

We struck the earth with our heels and it pivoted,

sacred wood of blossoming crab and hanging snake,

wet smoke close to the grass and a rearing sun.

That fruit has fallen. You were burned like a Greek

just before the last solstice, but without games.

I was not there. For a long while I hadn't been.

Now you are my literary ghost.

I with broken suitcase and plump hips, about

to be expelled from this man to whom I'm bound

by the moist cord of want and the skeins of habit,

a hitchhiker in the hinterland of Ozarks.

You hardened to an edge that slashed yourself

while I have eased into flesh and accommodation.

The cry of the mouse shrill and covetous in my fingers,

I cannot keep my hands from anything.

My curiosity has been a long disaster.

I fear myself as once I feared my mother.

Still I know no more inexorable fact

than that thin red leap of bone: I live, I live.

I and my worn symbols see up the sun.