Manhattan

1976

Sol Schwartz, a commercial artist, called last night. He had picked me up in front of “Guernica” at the Museum of Modern Art in 1971, shortly after I had lost my virginity on a waterbed in a closed wing of Bellevue Hospital to a Jewish dental student at New York University.

I’m sure glad sex improved after that experience! What a selfish, insensitive bastard my de-virginizer was.

Sol remembered our conversations in detail…even the name of the headmistress at the school where I taught first grade.

He told me that I should be an ambassador’s wife because protocol agrees with me, then he asked about my romances.

He surmised that I was incapable of loving anyone freely—that I would always maintain control and keep a distance because I feared more emotional pain and had learned how to protect myself to an exaggerated degree. He said that my voice had changed; the hesitancy was gone. I was tougher now.

He was absolutely right.

Another friend from Frenchtown, Tennessee, called today. He lives in San Francisco now and promised to ship a case of California Chardonnay to me.

I turn to art for peace and tranquility…

At the Alliance Française:

Yesterday, saw Kleinhans’s photography exhibit: Perigord, France. Made me aware of how much I need a change of environment. To breathe fresh air in the morning, inhale the fragrance of potted red geraniums resting on some steps leading to an ancient, worn wooden door trimmed with black wrought-iron hardware. To hear no automobile or construction machinery, no piercing telephone rings. How I would enjoy slowly opening a shuttered window to gaze on a landscape uncluttered by buildings or highways—solely to appreciate nature’s greens, browns, yellows, oranges.

Maybe Tuscany would do the trick!

I have never truly envied someone’s wealth, beauty, or professional success, but when—especially a woman talking about her mother’s unconditional, nurturing love—it shatters my heart every single time.

MOM

ENCOUNTER

She is legitimate.
But appears to a
Man at dinner at eight on a Tuesday at a
Madison Avenue coffee-shop counter to be a
Demimondaine.
Her soft scrambled eggs stubbornly resist the
Paroxysms of her esophagus as the
Gray-haired, gray-eyed, gray-suited
Stranger erects himself on the stool beside her and
Comments on the darkness of her seedy toast.
Charred thoughts of the past, of being watched, always watched
Choke her movements. She
Exposes impeccable manners.
Fingers firmly grasp the fork, as she raises her eyes to
Probe his face. Quickly lowering the pronged instrument to the
Hard plate, she slowly rises to pay the bill—one
Account finished,
Another just begun.
Manhattan’s aggressors strangle her sweet pliability of temper and womb.

{From the book, Furrow, by Anne Weitzer}

Until I was in my twenties, I was a Barbara Pym prim and proper young lady. Then, after a series of emotional traumas and heartbreaking losses, I transmogrified into an Iris Murdoch renegade.

October 6, 2000

Friday

Port Lincoln, New Jersey 10:15 PM

The phone rang. I didn’t answer, but waited for the machine to record the

message.

It began: “This is Janet Emerald. I live next door to your mother. She’s in the Frenchtown jail. She was arrested for drunk driving after she drove her car into a restaurant.

She called us from jail. We’ll post her bond and take her home. Call me. 901-751-

3232.”

Immediately, I called her back. Janet sounded totally in control. She explained that my mother drove her Volvo through the side of the Trafalgar Cafeteria around 5:00 PM.

Miraculously, no one was hurt!

After she rammed through one side of the dining room, she backed up and totally demolished a lamp pole. My 81-year-old mother’s face was bruised, but she had no other injuries. Not even her glasses were broken. (Great TV ad for Volvo!)I had been waiting for THE EMERGENCY for years. I had predicted that only a crisis would make it possible for me to move her out of her home and into an assisted-living facility.

When I entered her house—with the help of her lawyer (because she refused to give me a key; I might steal something!)—I was horrified.

The walls were lined with empty half-gallon plastic jugs of cheap Scotch. The handle of each jug was precisely pointed to the right. Even in the throes of alcoholism and dementia, my mother’s obsessive-compulsive nature reigned.

Cigarette butts covered the once beautiful parquet floor in the hallway that I had frequently polished on my hands and knees when I was a child, as she glowered above me like the Colossus of Rhodes. Large black garbage bags filled every room; she never took the garbage out. But each bag was meticulously tied at the top with string. Stains in the shape of inchoate embryos covered the wooden floor and bedroom carpets upstairs. She was incontinent and had urinated everywhere. All of the toilets were stopped up and overflowing with shit. She had been using plastic buckets, which were never emptied.

The kitchen appliances were almost black with filth; the dishwasher had not been used for more than a decade. The rubber and plastic inside of it had disintegrated like the yellowed pages from an ancient library book.

My relationship with my mother had always been strained; I was terrified of her.

There had never been any kind of emotional intimacy between us: no affectionate caresses, no bedtime stories, no nicknames, no birthday parties, no Santa Claus, no tooth fairy, no hugs and kisses, no cuddling, no appearances at the camp horse show or water ballet or school spelling bee, no phone calls, no care packages…nothing—even when I was very young.

Manhattan

1977

Robert seldom mentioned his childhood, but on one rare occasion—the only time he ever visited me alone in New York, he was en route to London to meet a client—he stated matter-of-factly, “My father did everything possible to destroy my self- confidence.”

It was the only personal conversation that we ever had.

We were sitting in Mme. Romaine de Lyon’s restaurant and eating asparagus omelettes by a window with white lace curtains.

Was he aware that he and my mother flawlessly performed the same act upon me?

He also described a recurring dream that he had: He and my mother were standing in the yard of his childhood home in Cotton Fields, Arkansas.

“We’ve killed someone,” he calmly stated to my mother.

I guess he felt guilty about his treatment of me, or rather his infinite indifference. It was his way to apologize, the best that he could do, under his steely emotional armor.

My homosexual father made the decision—from the beginning—to sacrifice me, in order to save himself.

1975

Stuck in Pleasure

Men and women are different and ought to be. Successful romance depends on this polarity. Life is much more pleasant when this is accepted. I so enjoy playing with men…teasing, exciting, disarming, confusing, titillating…

(Of course, when I’m older, I’ll become a fierce feminist and will dislike most men because of their cavalier treatment of women.)

I adamantly refuse to accept Thoreau’s description of life—and my mother’s—as “quiet desperation.”

I love the sensation of a man coming inside me; I feel like Mother Earth.

Howard Lowenstein called today. We met at a party, but I didn’t give him my number. He tracked me down by asking someone else where I worked.

Darwin always wins; the man is the hunter.

In search of understanding:

From Walker Percy’s phenomenal novel,  “The Moviegoer.”

 1961.

I agree.

###

“I will also plead guilty to another charge.

We’re better because we do not shirk our obligations to ourselves or to others. We do not whine. We do not organize a minority group and blackmail the government. We do not prize mediocrity for mediocrity’s sake. Oh, I am aware that we hear a great many flattering things nowadays about your great common man—you know, it has always been revealing to me that he is perfectly content so to be called, because that is exactly what he is: the common man and when I say common I mean common as hell. Our civilization has obtained a distinction of sorts. It will be remembered not for its technology nor even its wars but for its novel ethos. Ours is the only civilization in history which has enshrined mediocrity as its national ideal. Others have been corrupt, but leave it to us to invent the most undistinguished of corruptions.

No, we’re sentimental people and we horrify easily. True, our moral fiber is rotten. Our national character stinks to high heaven. But we are kinder than ever. No prostitute ever responded with a quicker spasm of sentiment when our hearts are touched. Nor is there anything new about thievery, lewdness, lying, adultery. What is new is that in our time liars and thieves and whores and adulterers wish also to be congratulated and are congratulated by the great public, if their confession is sufficiently psychological or strikes a sufficiently heartfelt and authentic note of sincerity.”

We were hitched in a cheap, fast civil ceremony in New York’s City Hall in June 1973. My sparkling engagement ring was cubic zirconia.

His lovely mother came from Athens. The following December we were married in a more elaborate, traditional Greek Orthodox ceremony in an Athens cathedral. According to custom, both of us wore flowered crowns, as we were led in a circle on a raised platform in the center of the church, while the priest mumbled in Greek.

“The man is the sun; the woman is the moon who circles around him.”

[music: Beethoven’s “Moonlight Sonata”]

It only goes downhill from there. Trust me.

My wedding gown cost fifty dollars. I bought white lace and satin on Orchard Street on Manhattan’s Lower East Side and hired an elderly woman living in the West 90s to turn the materials into a very simple floor-length dress with long sleeves and a V-neck.

My mother’s explanation of “handicapped versus disabled”:

All women are handicapped by virtue of their sex. Those that never learn to cope/compensate are disabled.

Geez. She was smart.

She had a privileged childhood, but no love. Her two younger brothers

tormented her relentlessly. Her father was abusive, and her mother was neglectful.

Geez. Nothing changes from generation to generation!

I think my mother might have been a very expensive call girl in Manhattan for a while when she lived on Riverside Drive in the 1940s; when I cleaned out her house after her death, I found many designer clothes, satin dressing gowns, and furs disintegrating from age.

My mother never bought anything like that during my lifetime! At home, she lived in ugly flannel pajamas, and did all her shopping at the cheapest discount stores.

She probably hated men, too. There was never a whiff of an affair.