The Search for Philip K. Dick (19 page)

Once, when I phoned Phil while a number of people were in the room with him, he spoke to me in a cruel, mocking manner. Then they left while we were still talking and his manner immediately changed and became pleasant and civilized. I didn’t understand why he would behave this way but was happy that at least he ended up being friendly.

Phil phoned me just before the convention and invited me to come over to Oakland and go to it with him. Ray Nelson wanted Phil and me to get back together. He believed that Phil still loved me. He was the one who suggested to Phil that he invite me. I was delighted, thinking this was all Phil’s idea and hoping that a reconciliation was in the offing. The convention turned out to be a nightmare. There wasn’t anything for me to do but sit around at tables with people I didn’t know while Phil was off talking to other people. For years Phil had conditioned me to avoid the world of fandom, and here it was in all its glory. I drank too much. I wanted to leave and go off with Phil somewhere. He finally left with me at 2 a.m. As we walked out on the streets of downtown Oakland to go to the car, he suddenly got a terrible look on his face and walked away. He left me in the middle of the night in the middle of the street in one of the most dangerous spots in the Bay Area.

I was stunned. I couldn’t believe Phil would do something like this. In my haste to get away safely I backed into a telephone pole. Back home I had hardly gone to sleep before dawn appeared. I decided to go back to Oakland and find out what had gone wrong. I took our four-year-old daughter, Laura, with me. When we knocked at Phil’s door, he came out in his pajamas, his eyes wild, waving a small revolver in the air. I stood there paralyzed for a moment. Then I grabbed Laura’s hand, backed up quickly, and left. I was terribly upset that she had been there and had been frightened by Phil’s strange and hostile behavior.

I called up Dr. J and went to her office on the way home. She told me, “You mustn’t ever go over there again.” I had to agree with her. I had to give up.

My life had reached a turning point. That night I sat at home thinking, “Phil is destroying everything that I love most in the world—himself and our family.” I couldn’t believe my own thoughts: “I’m going to buy a deer rifle at the Palace Market tomorrow and shoot Phil.” Then I thought, “No, I’ll go buy a deer rifle and shoot myself.” After a short while I decided neither of these ideas were worth anything. I couldn’t do such a thing to my children. I’d end up in jail, or they’d have a mother who was a suicide on top of the present mess. This was the only time in my life that I ever found myself seriously thinking a murderous thought, but now, when I read about a killing associated with a marriage or a love affair in the newspaper, I can empathize with the feelings of the person who did such a terrible deed.

That night I had a dream that I was in a small rowboat with the four girls. I was trying to save Phil, who was in the water beside the boat, drowning. But each time I tried to pull him into the boat he would almost pull me into the water instead. Meanwhile, we were drifting toward an immense waterfall. In the dream I had to make a terrible choice. I had to row away and leave Phil in order to save the girls.

Not more than a few days passed before Phil called, and naturally I told him all about my thoughts and their resolution—I always told him everything.

Then, one day in mid-October, he called me to ask, “Can I come back home?”

“Yes,” I said. “You can come back. The study is still set up for you.”

I was making jewelry in my workroom with my first employee, Henryetta Russell (who worked for me for forty years). I decided that I wouldn’t stop working when he came. I needed to go on with my separate life. By then I must have learned at least a little bit that I couldn’t emotionally depend on Phil. When he arrived, I greeted him and told him we would get together at dinner time; I needed to work. I probably was somber and serious.

He carried his new typewriter and his suitcase into the study. An hour later, when I came out of my workroom to get a glass of water I saw Phil walking to his car carrying his suitcase and his typewriter. I felt very sad as I watched my husband walk away from my house—I knew it was for the last time.

Grania moved out of the Lyon Street cottage just before Halloween. She tried to keep a friendly relationship with Phil, but he was angry at her for leaving. When shortly later she went to the Lyon Street house to pick up her possessions, Nancy Hackett was there sitting on Phil’s lap.

Maren Hackett, the friend we had met at church, had invited Phil over to her place because she, herself, was interested in him. She was surprised when the relationship that he formed was with Nancy, her nineteen-year-old stepdaughter.

After Grania left Phil, Jack Newcomb left his wife and moved into the cottage. Ray told me that there were a lot of illicit amphetamines around and rumors of drug dealing. Phil started taking amphetamines “recreationally” at this time. Ray Nelson said that Phil was better versed on drugs than Al Halevy, a pharmacist acquaintance.

Phil was writing me strange letters about an amphetamine salesman who ended up in jail and an Israeli gunman who was hiding out in his basement. I was shocked by these letters except that I didn’t really believe them. Years later, Ray Nelson told me that everything Phil had written was true. Phil gave Jack the original manuscript of
The Man in the High Castle
. He told Jack, “I love you. Use this as an insurance policy.” Jack told Phil, “I’ll never sell this while you’re alive.”

In 1983, Jack Newcomb called me from Los Angeles to ask me to buy the manuscript of The
Man in the High Castle
for $5,000. He said that Ray had told him I was “okay”; that’s why he was speaking to me now. When I heard his name and that he was calling from a pay phone, I called him right back so that the charges would be on my phone and we could talk for a longer time. He remembered charging gas on my Texaco credit card and told me, “Phil spent most of his time putting you down.” He thought I was rich, that I had $5,000 to give him for Phil’s manuscript. (It would have been a good investment—but who knew at that time?) I referred Jack to the Eaton Collection at UC Irvine. (Kleo always thought I was rich, too. I have to laugh. I do own a very nice house, which I bought in 1955 for nothing down and $101 a month.)

“It was a strange period,” Grania recalled. “There was the diaper scandal. Someone stole diaper-service diapers from Marion Zimmer Bradley’s front porch. Somebody resembling Phil was seen there. Phil and Jack got hold of a Klaxon horn, which they used to harass people they didn’t like. They blew it over the phone at me. They drove by Marion Zimmer Bradley’s house and blew it late at night. They were full of manic mischief.”

Phil became furious with Jack and kicked him out. Kirsten went with Jack as a go-between to help him pick up his clothes. Phil was so angry at Jack that he even became furious at Kirsten.

Later that fall, Phil came out to Point Reyes to visit me and in the course of the conversation casually mentioned that Jack Newcomb had wanted to kill me. He had dissuaded Jack, he said. But I thought, “Where had Jack gotten the idea?” But still in my denial habit, I didn’t take this information seriously. My bulldog psyche was still hanging on to the hope that eventually Phil would return and we’d all be happy again.

Recreational drugs were beginning to appear on the Bay Area scene, including the psychedelic drug LSD. Ray Nelson brought some for Phil to take. The two of them sat together in Phil’s house for eight hours while Phil had a terrible hallucination, sweating, feeling completely alone, reexperiencing a spear thrust through his body, and speaking Latin, as he relived a life as a Roman gladiator. He had such a bad trip that he never tried LSD again.

On Christmas Day 1964, I was pleased when Phil called and asked if he could come out to see us. He brought an armload of Christmas gifts, several packages for each of us, all of them nicely gift wrapped. But then he stayed only a little while and suddenly left angrily. Not knowing that he was coming, I had invited some other guests. Perhaps it was this that offended him, or was it because I asked him to mash the potatoes? It was impossible to know.

Kirsten told me, “At this time Phil thought that everyone was out to get him. He was hyper, running around doing bizarre things. At other times, he was charming and funny. I remember him gulping down pill cocktails. I couldn’t believe the conglomerations of pills that he took. He wanted to commit everybody, Grania, Francine, a friend of Nancy’s sister. He thought Nancy should take Thorazine and many of his other acquaintances should go to Langley Porter.”

In early 1965, Phil was still phoning about once a month and coming to see me and the girls. He came one beautiful spring day and told me that he was “Nancy’s consort.” My heart sank. He even looked different, as if he had dissolved into a feckless nineteen-year-old. I knew
my
Phil was in that person somewhere, but where? I had been reading Martin Buber’s
I and Thou
and wanted to discuss it with him. He was dancing, showing the girls how he could do the frug. So I gave up on Martin Buber and said, “I’ll do the frug with you.” His face changed, he looked very strange, stopped dancing, and suddenly left. I felt like an old discarded shoe.

After this, I was so miserable that I could hardly function. I could only find comfort lying in the sun at the beach or going back to bed in the morning—something I had never done in my life before. I waited anxiously for the phone to ring.

When I saw Dr. J, she told me that Phil only liked the house, not me or the girls. She said his loving side wasn’t real. I insisted that I had seen a wonderful person in Phil. She told me this person was buried so deep that for all practical purposes
my
Phil was gone, and besides, now he had a commitment to Nancy. I couldn’t believe
my
Phil was irrevocably gone.

How could he have made a commitment to Nancy when he’d made a commitment to me? Brooding at home, I had a terrible sense of evil. Not about Phil, not about any actual person, but about something I couldn’t get into mental focus.

I would try to get my mind going in a positive direction and forget about Phil, but then he would call me and say, “Why don’t you come over and see me in Oakland anymore?” He wrote more strange letters, giving me the impression of an almost depraved lifestyle. One time he called and told me that his house had been vandalized and all the literary novels that he had written had been totally destroyed. Another time he called and said in a pitiful tone of voice, “I’m in such bad shape I can’t work on my own any more. The only way I can write is to work with someone else.” He was writing
Deus Irae
with Roger Zelazny.

In the early summer of 1965, I taught jewelry making to a group of people from the Synanon drug-rehabilitation facility, which was located only a few miles north of where I lived. Six or seven people came down to my house once a week. One of the men in the group, a handsome, tall blond fellow whose family owned ranches in Nevada, became interested in me, and I dated him briefly. I thought perhaps I could make Phil jealous if I told him that someone else was interested in me. Perhaps it would make some change in the situation between us. Well it did all right, but not the way I’d hoped. After I told him, Phil became very cold in his tone of voice and didn’t speak to me for several weeks. It seemed to me that the last thread in our relationship snapped at this time.

Phil’s attorney, William Wolfson, was suing me for half of the house on Phil’s behalf. Under the new no-fault divorce law, he very likely would succeed. I worried: “Where will I raise my girls?” My attorney, Anne Diamond, called a meeting with Phil and Wolfson in her San Rafael offices. She suggested that Phil consider the money he had put into our house as rent. Both he and his attorney were insulted. “Why?” I thought. “It seems so logical.” On Phil’s behalf, Wolfson refused the offers that my attorney had made. Phil sat there without saying anything, but managed to give the impression that he didn’t like what had happened but had no power to do anything about it.

My clever attorney prepared legal papers for me to keep at my house in case Phil came out to Point Reyes again and, on September 29 he did. I asked him to sign the papers that would give the house back to me, and we went to a notary and he did. He seemed happy about this. When we returned to the house, I tried to hug him. He looked at me strangely and rushed out of the house.

The divorce was final on October 21, 1965. I went to court in the morning with my friend Inez Storer as my witness. Anne Diamond suggested that I not pick up the final papers, but I didn’t understand her idea. She saw how much I loved Phil and felt that we might still get back together, that not taking the final step in the divorce action might keep the relationship alive. But I didn’t “get it” and went ahead and finalized the legal action. Almost as soon as I had returned home, Phil called up and wanted me to tell him all about the divorce. He didn’t sound sad or depressed, just cheerfully interested in hearing what went on in court that day.

About a month after the divorce, the girls and I met Phil once again at Jack London Square on the Oakland waterfront. I gave him a beautiful handmade beaded, fringed deerskin Indian jacket that had belonged to Richard. Phil put it on. Years later, a few months before his death in 1982, as we were talking on the phone long distance, he reminded me of that day. He said it was the last time he had seen all of the girls together. He sounded as if he were almost crying.

I didn’t cry, not for eighteen more years, but I obsessively thought about my relationship with Phil sixteen hours a day, trying to understand what had happened. I worked on myself to change or remove traits that Phil had criticized. In the midst of my misery, I started seeing how beautiful ordinary people are. How almost everything we have, the thoughts in our minds, the words in our mouths, even the way we see the landscape, comes as a gift from other human beings. Sometimes a beautiful, numinous light seemed to be behind the hills and the line of eucalyptus trees at the edge of the field.