Manhattan

1981

Another day for hibernating. The past weeks there have been too many dates with new men, too few hours of sleep, too much Pomerol and Metaxa, too much strenuous sex. I’m getting too old for living this way while working full-time/overtime at the medical magazine.

My body is flashing red lights; my last period was 44 days ago. No, not pregnant.

[Amenorrhea hasn’t plagued me since I was a tormented adolescent. The relentless stress inflicted by my mother caused my period to stop for several years.]

Self-preservation must overrule the pleasure principle.

Must learn to be more patient and tolerant. Must be able to forgive others more easily. Must not take myself so seriously. Must not be so hypersensitive.

I am seriously defective; my hypersensitivity will overwhelm me and alienate me from learning experiences.

As T. H. White wrote in The Once and Future King:

“The best thing for being sad,” replied Merlin … “is to learn something. That’s the only thing that never fails. You may grow old and trembling in your anatomies, you may lie awake at night listening to the disorder of your veins, you may miss your only love, you may see the world about you devastated by evil lunatics, or know your honour trampled in the sewers of baser minds. There is only one thing for it then — to learn. Learn why the world wags and what wags it. That is the only thing which the mind can never exhaust, never alienate, never be tortured by, never fear or distrust, and never dream of regretting. Learning is the only thing for you. Look what a lot of things there are to learn.”

As Anna Dostoevsky, wife of “Fedya,” wrote in her diary:

“From a timid, shy girl I had become a woman of resolute character, who could no longer be frightened by the struggle with troubles.”

1972

Manhattan

In retrospect, I very much regret returning one of my mother’s very rare letters to my father. Nancy had informed me that she was filing for divorce.

I asked him to return it. He didn’t.

It was a Xerox copy of a letter that she had written to her father about why she was getting a divorce. (She never got one.)

She said, among other unusual and hateful things, that she spent her wedding night with my father and his blond boyfriend, Joe, an Episcopal priest, who had been a longtime lover, and, according to Nancy, the love of his life.

Joe married them! She wrote about the times she got Robert out of jail or the psychiatric hospital.

His offense: picking up men for sex.

Memphians in the 1950s were not tolerant of homosexuality. The only thing worse than being black was being gay.

My egregious mistake was sending the letter to Robert. It was an awful thing for me to do. I had enclosed it with an epistle from me explaining, lovingly, I thought, that I loved him very much anyway and that homosexuality was neither a crime nor a sin. Men were just born that way. I loved him as much as ever.

I got the usual response from my unreachable father:

NO RESPONSE AT ALL.

1975

Look Back in Anger

Walker Percy’s The Moviegoer resonates within me. I am Binx Bolling crossed with François Truffaut’s quixotic dreams and amorous restlessness.

Throughout my adult life, I’ve tried to understand what experiences and influences Nancy endured to warp her into the woman she became.

One incident is heartbreaking: Shortly after my birth in Tennessee, she took me to visit my grandparents in Pennsylvania.

While we were gone, my father had wild homosexual orgies in our Memphis house.

When she returned, there were broken whiskey bottles and cracked eggshells everywhere; the eggs had been thrown at the walls.

The silverware from her great-grandparents had been stolen.

Years later, Robert painted a geometric Matisse-like watercolor that included several dramatic elements of that night—broken whiskey bottle, cracked egg, his childhood home in Arkansas, hers in Pennsylvania, criss-crossed like angry swords…broom (her not-in-this-lifetime career ), paintbrush (his fantasy career), leafless tree with gnarled, exposed unattached roots (his marital life).

The gestalt is eerie and disturbing.

My parents were a lifelong mystery to me. Whenever I was alone in the house, I would go through their chests of drawers in hopes of finding clues to their behavior, which seemed so alien compared with the love and warmth I witnessed among my friends’ parents.

In my father’s bureau, I found pills for treating venereal disease. In his bookcase, he kept several novels by Gore Vidal and a copy of Great Cases in Psychoanalysis, which I found fascinating because of the kinky sexual case histories.

I believe that my father was trying to understand himself, and he selected Nancy as his wife because he tragically believed that he must be punished for his perceived sexual deviations. Our WASP culture, at that time, harshly frowned on the psychiatric profession. Our culture said: Fix yourself. Self-reliance above all.