I got another job as a clerk/typist in a small printing house, and settled into a new place on Avenue B, near the Charles movie theater. At a party one night, a drunk told me that Ben and Clara and some art student had set up housekeeping together. Ben was working toward his doctorate, a study of the relation between the songs in Shakespeare’s plays and the choruses of Greek drama, and they were in Cambridge. Their son, Caleb, was at boarding school — too late to matter, of course — Ben studied and wrote and drank, the art student painted and drank, and Clara — I couldn’t imagine anything that Clara did. My only picture of it all was of Clara and the art student, arms around each other’s waists, stumbling into the bedroom while Ben groaned Claa-ra, Claa-rr-aaa? his nose in the sauce.
Soon after, I met a girl who had known Clara from high school, and she said that Clara often spoke of me in her letters; I was touched. We went, later that week, to the New Yorker, and saw La Grande Illusion for the seventh time, then took a cab to my place. The following Friday, she called and asked me if I’d like her to come over for the weekend, and I said it was fine with me. When she came in, she had a Jon Vie cake and a teal-blue candle that had been “handcrafted.” I kept still. Making love that night, she began to cry, and I thought of the foreman and his fantastic wife. Perhaps he had been telling the truth, after all.
The next few years are a blur of the most disparate things, all of them, however, very much the same in essence. My Jon Vie girl left me one night in a bar when I began to insult her because she had been talking incessantly about Saul Bellow. “Fuck you and your mockie writers,” I said, or words to that effect. “Them Jew writers don’t speak for us proletariats and blue-collar woikers.” I don’t know why I said this: I have nothing against Saul Bellow; I’ve never even read him.
At about the time of this unpleasantness, I began to write again, but found it unsatisfying, both as act and product. I thought that I might write a detective story and get enough money to leave my job and go somewhere, but I couldn’t get past the first chapter. What made me quit the whole thing was coming across a magazine one day in the 8th St. Bookshop; in it, there was a poem by Benjamin Stein. I can’t remember all of the poem, but it was cast in a curious and affected language, a kind of modernist cant then abounding. The first few lines ran:
I touch ya, ya touch
me, yer bellie an mine.
ole catullus wuz rite
1,000,000 kisses …
On the contributors’ page, it said that Mr. Stein was an “ex-professor of English now living in the Bay Area with his wife and son.” I can’t express the feeling of defeat that this little poem carried into my very spirit. I did understand, however, that my own aborted “return to writing” had the closest affinities to this ridiculous trash of Ben’s.
I didn’t go back to work the next day, nor the next, and then I went in to collect my pay and tell the boss that I had to leave for Chicago because of a family emergency. I lived frugally on some money I had saved, supplemented by occasional freelance proofreading jobs, looked out the window, and mentally composed hundreds of letters to Ben and Clara. But they were impossible to write, filled, as they would have to be, with no facts at all. I suppose I was vaguely ashamed of myself.
About six weeks before the last of my savings ran out, I got into a silly conversation with some idiot I had known for years. He was buying the drinks and I, in a sponger’s honesty, kept telling him, as we got drunk, that I could not buy back. Somehow, we made plans to collaborate on a play that would exploit the ludicrous side of the flower children. “A winner, man, a winner! Maybe we could get a goddamn grant and do it in the parks even!” So we became collaborators, and I moved in with him after explaining my wretched financial status. Oh, well, not to go into it, but I began to carry on with his girl, who was always conveniently at home when he was not. She was a true Miss Post Toasties, white teeth, blue eyes, sunny California hair — ah, dear God. She, of course, told him of our indiscretions after we had had a bitter argument one night over the ultimate artistic value of the Beatles. The Beatles! You can see that I had gone beyond foolishness.
He threw me out, and I took a room by the week in the Hotel Albert until I could get up the nerve to write Ben and ask him for enough money to put down as security and the first month’s rent on a shotgun flat on Avenue c. It struck me as I wrote him that I had no one else to write to. I didn’t expect him to send me the money, but two weeks later he did, a money order for a hundred and fifty dollars, and a note: Peace. The letter was postmarked from Venice, California, another outpost of the lost battalion. I moved into the new place, started working temporary office jobs, and recovered some of my solvency. I even managed to send Ben ten or fifteen dollars a week to pay off the debt. Some months passed, during which time I heard no more from Ben, nor from Clara, either. My experience had got me another truck-dispatching job with a direct-mail company on Fourth Avenue, a few blocks north of Klein’s. I handled the trucks that made the daily post-office runs, and acted as a kind of foreman over the constantly changing personnel. Since I despised the management as much as the laborers despised me, the job was a nightmare, and I began to drink my lunches in a Fourteenth Street bar. My afternoons were passed in a boozy haze of sweat, curses, and shouts. For this, I got eighty-five dollars a week.
One afternoon, Clara called me on the job. She wanted to know if I’d like to have a drink with her after work — someone had told her where I was working and she thought … Her voice was gentle, almost gentle, and, I thought, resigned. Ben was doing what he wanted to do, write. He was happy. Did it matter to him or to Clara that he wrote badly? Did it matter to anyone? We made a date to meet in a little bar on University Place at five-thirty.
When I got there, Clara was already at the bar, working on what seemed to be, from her manner, her third Gibson. She was cool and brown in a yellow dress and yellow sandals, her hair drawn back from her face. I ordered a bourbon and soda and sat on the barstool next to her, giving her wrist what I hoped she would take to be a friendly squeeze. How I despised myself. What could I possibly have said? It is amazing that I am utterly unable to recall our conversation. Well, you must remember that I was half-drunk when I got there, and the bourbons that I subsequently drank did nothing to make me less drunk. It is odd that this should be, that I can’t remember anything of what was said, since this was surely one of the most important conversations of my life — that is, if you are willing to accept that my life is of any importance at all. On the way to the bar, I had determined to ask Clara if she would consider “being” with me during her stay in the city. Then we would see — we would see what would happen. God knows, I was no worse than Ben; in some ways, I was better. I had stayed in the city, I had stuck it out, I hadn’t fooled myself that I was a writer. I had, in short, faced the music. I don’t think that I thought of myself as a failure; not that I do now, of course. But I have come to realize that there are certain options, let us say, that are closed to me. The fashionably grubby artistic circles in New York are filled with people like me, people who are kind enough to lie about one’s chances in the unmentioned certitude that one will lie to them about theirs. Indeed, if everyone told the truth, for just one day, in all these bars and lofts, at all these parties and openings, almost all of downtown Manhattan would disappear in a terrifying flash of hatred, revulsion, and self-loathing.
Well, we spoke of Ben, that’s for certain. Ah, how marvelously drunk we were getting, gazing at each other through those rose-colored glasses all drinkers wear. Ben had left Clara again and gone to a commune in Colorado with some young girl he had met at a rock concert in Los Angeles. I must have subtly inquired as to Clara’s feelings on the matter; I mean, I wanted to know if she cared, I wanted to know if she wanted him back. I clearly remember her facing me, her legs crossed, one of them brushing my calf as she swung it back and forth, the fragile glass to her mouth. Oh, I don’t know. I don’t know how I said it, said anything. Probably something like, “Why don’t we just give it a try for a while? For a few days?” What I wanted to say was: “Your yellow dress. Your yellow sandals. Your dark and sweet skin. Your legs. I don’t care about Ben or anything else but you.” But I do remember her saying, “Let’s go to my hotel. That’s what you want, isn’t it? Isn’t that what you want?” And I said something like — oh, I was determined to force her to spoil our chances, if chances they were—“Is it all right? I mean, with Ben?”