Sleeping with Cats (19 page)

I am learning how to remember

little colored crayon nubs of my childhood,

the sun coming through mason jars

of peaches still scalding from the canner,

the fat chalk the brakemen would throw

when we begged, perfect

for scrawling dirty words on sidewalks.

I save the newly found pieces of memory

like bright exotic stamps carefully put in

to the scrapbooks of a collection.

Unlike butterflies, collecting them

does not kill them, but captured,

saved, they become vibrant.

Soon they grow bigger.

I am building a simulacrum of my life

as untrue as maps. I remember when

I learned those red arteries and blue

veins of roads were just cement

or asphalt, not the scarlet road

I had imagined our car roaring over,

like the first time I heard the phrase “silk road.”

So I am neglecting the vast hangars

full of nothing, the tunnels of boredom,

the days leaked out in classrooms

of despair, the banality of dusting.

Instead I build a tower of beautiful

junk, the blue sapphire glass of terror,

the winking red stars of sex, the purple

suns of transcendence, the white

light of insight flashing, the intricate

webs of belief and refusal, the homely

satisfying bricks of friendship, books

and recipes and yes, maps of places

I dreamed into being and inhabited

a season, a lifetime, a glimmering moment.

W
e found an unfurnished apartment
on Egmont in Brookline, on the edge near Boston University and Commonwealth Avenue. Immediately we brought our Siamese kitten home. We were on the top floor of a yellow brick building with a parking lot and garages behind, a six-room apartment: one bedroom we shared, one was his study and one was mine. The rooms were large, light and airy. Robert announced that he would give me five years to establish myself as a writer, because the amount of money I could bring in was negligible and not worth the bother. I was very grateful and worked harder than ever at the marriage. I wanted him to be pleased with his choice.

What he did want was a comfortably appointed apartment—but not with much expenditure—and a gourmet cook. We furnished the apartment mostly out of Sunday want ads. I had six cookbooks by now. This was my period of great bread. I was home and I enjoyed the kneading, the rising, the entire process. I made challah, rye breads, cinnamon swirls, whole wheat, raisin bread, Swedish orange rye: if the cookbook gave the rule for it, I baked it.

I was part writer and part homemaker. I even polished floors and tiles. I was grateful to be given a chance to write and did not notice how much time my efforts to be the perfect wife used up. Still, I was dedicated to
my new roles, and my writing career did not seem to be going anywhere fast. I had tried two agents without publishing more than the poetry I sent out myself and an occasional story in a literary journal. My novels were unpublished and seemed likely to remain that way. Making curtains was an escape from despair.

Our seal point Siamese kitten bonded with us quickly and from then on, she slept between us in bed, often on one of our pillows. She was delicate, quick and very bright. Robert named her Arofa—the Tahitian equivalent of the Hawaiian
aloha.
Nobody ever got it right in her seventeen years. She was a tiny kitten who grew into a small lithe cat, never gaining an extra ounce. Her frame was small, but her spirit large: she was fierce enough in her loyalties and her antagonisms to make up for her size.

I had never before had a cat truly mine, that I could treat as I chose. She received a huge amount of attention. When I walked, I took her along on a leash. She went down to the laundry room with me and up to the roof. It lacked the spectacular views offered by North Point Street, but I could see the Charles River and a good bit of Brookline and Boston. I wish my current house had a flat place on the roof so I could climb up and sit there, looking into the trees and over them to the hill and the marsh.

Arofa was attuned to us, alert and intelligent, strong willed but passionate to please. She would never do anything as stupid as jump off the roof or dash into the street. She was easy to train to walk on her leash and stay when commanded. She would taste anything and early developed a desire to have a little wine with her supper, just a lick or two, especially dry red wine.

I believe Robert was pleased with me. We were closer during the couple of years we lived there than we had been previously, or would be in the future. I found the novelty of behaving as a middle-class housewife somewhat entertaining. I worked my way through Julia Child and began to collect other cookbooks, as I still do, although my tastes these days are more for peasant than haute cuisine, and I cook mostly Mediterranean. I discovered a gift for cooking, an ability to grasp the fundamentals of a
recipe, then to vary it and make it my own. I do not do a great many things well. I've never been able to muster the energy or discipline to play seriously at cards, chess, computer games. I think basically the peasant in me wants a product to emerge if I spend my time and energy on an operation. It can be a stew or a mousse, a poem or a story, a row of hollyhocks or a cabbage patch, but I want product. I loved to go to Haymarket and the North End and shop for good meat, the freshest artichokes and the crispest greens.

Our apartment was pleasant, although never fancy. No place I have lived has ever been elegant. The furniture is old and comfortable. Rugs provide the glamour. My infatuation with carpets began with an Oriental we purchased at a Sunday house sale. I still have it, in my office. We began collecting interesting items of decor, a few of them from Robert's time in the Pacific.

Robert had been working for IBM after college and had gotten engaged to a young woman with whom he seemed to have a rather chilly relationship. At one point, he felt bored, irritated, trapped—as had happened just before I met him. He had thrown up his job and set off to journey around the world. During the next year and a half, he spent time in Tahiti, New Caledonia, Borneo, Australia, New Zealand, Indonesia, Malaysia. Not long into his wandering, he joined another young man, Scotty, who rapidly became his best friend. They traveled together for a year and a half until finally Robert was recalled home by his fiancée, who demanded that their relationship be resolved, and also by a letter telling him about a new computer company. It would be run by computer types, not business types, and there would be great freedom of hours, of lifestyle. They would take only work they agreed was interesting.

Scotty continued his journey through Indochina, spending some months in Vietnam in 1962. He wrote long letters about the American presence and why he felt the Viet Cong had the allegiance of most ordinary people, especially in the countryside. He determined for Robert and me an early and continuing opposition to that war. Scotty went on to Japan. In photos, the two men resembled each other, both small, wiry,
wearing glasses, with brown hair and a similar expression of guarded curiosity. Scotty had been the perfect companion for Robert.

Robert broke up with his fiancée and went to work for the new computer company, which he hoped would be more compatible with his creativity than IBM had been. They promised him freedom and that he could take leaves of absence between projects when he desired.

In Japan, Scotty began learning Japanese in an intensive course and studied Zen with a monk. He urged Robert to bring me and join him in Japan, which Robert planned to do the following spring. I am sure I was no more real to Scotty than he was to me, but he was very important to Robert, who viewed him as his other, better self. Scotty's letters came regularly, keeping us posted on his progress with Japanese kanji and Zen. I would never be the ideal traveling companion that Scotty had been—up for anything, ready to sleep on the deck of a junk or roll up in a sleeping bag in a doorway, ready to slog into the jungle and be sucked by leeches, ready to eat anything at any time and try to like it. Going to Japan to be with Scotty was not negotiable.

The worst aspect of that time in Brookline was being invisible as a writer. I can't forget the despair and hopelessness of those years, but I never stopped writing. My friends from college seemed to be leaping forward. Victor and Padma were hooked up with
The New Yorker;
David Newman was working for
Esquire
. Eric got his Ph.D. and went to work for IBM. Nadine, however, was locked up in a mental ward again.

I believed in myself, even if I was a minority of one. I had space and time to write, and I finished the third draft of the novel I had been working on, wrote a great deal of poetry that slowly but surely was getting published. I found the apartment luxurious—all that space only for me and Arofa during weekdays. She sat with me while I wrote, although at this stage of her life, she was too young and rambunctious to be the perfect writer's cat she would grow into. I played with her, rough and tumble games, games of skill, of leaping and climbing and chasing. We often took her with us when we went out socially. When we climbed Mount Monadnock, she climbed it with us, on her leash. No wonder she was a
bright cat: she had the equipment and constant stimulating experiences.

The apartment, full of colorful Indian cottons and oak furniture, felt warm and open. We continued the study of wines we had begun in California. In those days, this was an easy matter. It was possible to drink great Bordeaux and great Burgundies for five to seven dollars a bottle. We found hundred-year-old prephylloxera Madeiras at four to five dollars a bottle. Our social life as a couple was typical of the times. Wives made elaborate dinners, husbands mixed and poured drinks and talked shop. My interest was more in the planning and preparing of the meal than it was in what transpired after the guests arrived.

In spite of not having a job, I did not write as rapidly as I had in San Francisco. I did not work weekends, because we often went off on excursions or entertained or were entertained. Guests came to stay with us. Gourmet cooking and shopping for it took time. All of this was interesting, but I kept having the sense I was not getting done what I should. I carefully resumed the discipline I found in San Francisco, and every day I worked for several hours straight. I was sure if I knew other writers and could exchange work with them, I would write faster and better. I sent writing through the mail to friends in New York and Ann Arbor, but their feedback could take months to reach me. I was convinced I needed closer stimulation.

Early in 1963 Henry—at whose apartment we had met in Chicago—arrived to visit and then to stay indefinitely with his younger wife, Sylvia. Before they arrived, I was excited and happy. I wrote thirty letters trying futilely to find Henry a job in the Boston area. He had been working for the post office but wanted to resume teaching English. I was delighted at the prospect of dealing with another writer regularly and having someone to exchange poems with, doing mutual critiques. Whatever I had lacked in Chicago, I did belong to a group of writers. Here nobody understood what I did or took an interest.

Henry arrived coldly angry with me. If I had admitted to being unhappy with Robert, he would have accepted the marriage, but I was absorbed in my life, narrow as it was. My poetry was rapidly improving,
and so was my fiction. I was gradually learning to do more of what I wished I could. I just needed feedback.

He liked best to have long late-night sessions probing motives and rehashing Chicago. “You've sold out,” he told me. “Sold out for bourgeois comfort. You're a kept woman.” He jabbed at me, smoking cigarette after cigarette, stubbing the butts into ashtrays soon overflowing, into glasses and cups. Since he was also being “kept” by Robert at the moment, this hardly seemed fair.

“You live by the clock. You want to write us into your social calendar.”

“I can't write a novel in odd moments. I have to put in hours every day.”

He felt that my authentic self was the poor, needy and lonely woman he had been drawn to in Chicago, and this new competent and disciplined self was inauthentic. Since I pretty well liked bourgeois comfort, that accusation made me uneasy, but when I married Robert, he was deeply in debt and his prospects were wobbly and uncertain. I had little motivation to rehash Chicago. I was aware I had kept my burgeoning affair with Robert secret from Henry, that I had not been open or honest. I felt I had escaped Chicago with what I needed, the base of a good relationship, and there was little I wanted to subject to Henry's revision.

“You have shut all uncertainties out of your life.” He thundered at me like an Old Testament prophet, like Ezra. Repent Ye Whore of Babylon. “You don't care about anybody else now.”

Sylvia did not like me any more than she had in Chicago. However I spoke with her was wrong. I said the wrong words, used the wrong tone, ignored her or patronized her or pushed myself on her. She was in a difficult position—she was years younger than any of us, much less educated and experienced and dropped into a strange town where she knew no one except her brother, whom Robert had brought into the computer company as a trainee.

The situation with them grew tense. “You're fooling yourself,” Henry said. “Love? You don't feel love for
him
.” I had to be pining for Henry, and if I contradicted him, it was because I was in a state of denial. Sylvia
was sure I wanted Henry. I had been close to Henry and dependent on him in Chicago. I had never loved him as I did Robert, but there was no way to convince him of that. I was rather annoyed that I had to try, daily, nightly, endlessly. He kept saying, “You're suppressing your true feelings.”

My true feelings were that I was tired of cooking for them, cleaning up after them, having them in my space, experiencing their lack of respect for my work time and my need to concentrate. My true feelings were close to a desire for strangulation. This was the period when my zeal for housework dissolved and it has never returned. Finally I said to Robert that I was going to New York to stay with Vic and Padma Perera, and I wouldn't come back until the Chicago party had decamped. I took the next train to New York. Vic was a Guatemalan Jew and Padma was from India, but both wrote in English and were heavily involved with
The New Yorker
. I took the train to see them regularly, but this time was openended, and they were a little nonplussed. Robert called me forty-eight hours later to tell me Henry and Sylvia had cleared out. I was sorry I had lost a friend, but I was desperate for privacy, tired of being psychoanalyzed by an amateur and sick of being a target.

In July we went up to Maine for a total eclipse of the sun that we viewed from Great Moose Lake. Robert found the Maine woods boring—too much the same—but the eclipse moved both of us. I found it magical and holy. The extraordinary darkness with the effect of sunset all around, the whooshing in the trees, all lodged in my deepest imagination. That image of the sun occluded but with its mane of corona flaming out has asserted itself in my poetry several times. I can close my eyes and see it. I know a woman who pursues eclipses. She has enough money to go to as many as she pleases. I am not sure if I would do that, if I could. That experience feels so vivid and complete to me, I don't want anything to compare it to.

I am one of those people who remember exactly where they were when John Kennedy was assassinated, partly because of what followed. We were both home packing, for we were about to spend Thanksgiving with Robert's older brother, a statistician working in Schenectady in
upstate New York. Then we were to see a friend of mine from Michigan, Eric, with whom I had edited the college literary magazine. Now he was working for IBM in Poughkeepsie, so he and Robert had more in common than most of my literary friends. We were stunned by the news. We didn't own a TV, but the woman across the hall did, and we watched the news on her set.