Marilyn sat in the easy chair, reading a novel by Disraeli.
Every once in a while I would get up to wander into the kitchen to stir the skillet full of spaghetti sauce I’d done up from a recipe on the back of the small white-and-green cardboard box of oregano leaves, the counter still flaked with bits of onion and three fugitive pieces of tomato. Or I’d wander into the front bedroom — just as another arc from the hydrant below broke between the black fire escape slats to sing across the glass, and five hundred purple crescents would gem and drool the pane, while I stood watching the motion of light in water.
“Marilyn, come in and take a look at this. …”
Then we’d go back into the living room — and I’d kneel down on the bed and write some more.
7.21. My play dealt with the shooting of Rimbaud by a Verlaine, egged on — in my version — by his wife, Mathilde, from her frustration over having been kept a Victorian prisoner, first by her parents, then by her twenty-eight-year-old husband, when Mathilde herself was only a few months older than the eighteen-year-old vagabond poet.
7.3. Of that tight trio of friends — Gail, Judy, and Marilyn — Marilyn had not been the first to marry. Nearly six months before we’d eloped to Detroit, Gail had married a thirty-five-year-old Italian native of the Village, named Mike. Mike was an affable, if excitable, character, something of a ne’er-do-well, and whose involvement with drugs went well beyond the acceptable bounds of marijuana into heroin and speed. He was rather dazzled, I suspect, when his somewhat joking marriage proposal got him an enthusiastic yes from the attractive, lively, and intelligent twenty-year-old New Jersey-born undergraduate.
Their relationship developed some fairly serious problems fairly quickly, however. I remember a pleasant dinner with them, which Marilyn invited me along to, at their downtown flat a few weeks before we went to Detroit. But other friends were soon reporting arguments and a generally uneasy atmosphere around the two of them.
Between my sexual adventures and my writing pursuits, I’d always considered myself a pretty sophisticated young man. But before the warm weather turned, an incident happened that brought home to me just how naïve about the real world I was.
One evening, minutes after Marilyn and I had finished eating, there was a loud knock on the door. The key in the bell was twisted hard, three times. Then the knock came again.
Marilyn and I frowned at each other; then I got up and went to the door.
“Yes?” I said, looking through the peephole. The unshaven face of a man in his mid-thirties at first I didn’t recognize. “Who is it?”
“Chip?” the man called from outside. “Marilyn —?”
I opened the door as I realized it was an angry Mike, who was stepping from one foot to another. “Where’s Gail?” he demanded. “Is she in there?”
“No,” I told him, surprised. “Why should —?”
“’Cause if you’re hiding her from me — ”
“Mike?” Marilyn said, stepping up behind me.
“Where’s Gail?” he demanded over my shoulder.
“She’s not here,” Marilyn said.
“Come on in,” I said. “Why don’t you come in and sit down for a — ”
“Well, if she’s not here,” Mike said, “you tell her when you see her I’m gonna — ” He made a fist, lifted it in front of me, but, as if another idea took him, turned abruptly from our doorway and galloped down the stairs.
I closed the door, turned back to Marilyn, who was frowning again, and shook my head.
“What do you think that was all about?” she asked.
“God only knows,” I said. We went back into the living room to speculate on Mike’s and Gail’s vagaries while from the street now and again a shout echoed in the cul-de-sac that, the third time it came, Marilyn realized was probably Mike, howling imprecations at, or about, his temporarily vanished spouse.
Five minutes later — certainly no more than ten — there was another knock. Again very loud.
I sighed, got up, and went back to the door, assuming Mike had returned.
When I opened it, though, two policemen stood there, Mike between them, hands cuffed before him, demeanor wholly changed from the irate husband of minutes ago.
His blue work shirt was darkly sweat-blotched. Between the open buttons, his chest and its hair gleamed with perspiration. His stubbly face was covered with bright drops. He sagged against one of the cops — at first I wondered if, with the billy club one had obviously just knocked against my door, he’d been beaten. Mike’s eyes were wide.
The policeman on the right hefted up his stick and said to me, “Do you know this guy?”
The seconds I stood there watching the policemen while Mike panted under the hall light, remain lucid as an image. What went on in my mind, in that same time, will be forever opaque. I must have been thinking of how many cops-and-robbers movies. I must have been thinking of Mike’s often bragged-about criminal career. I know I wondered what he’d want me to say. Finally, I made a choice and said, with a kind of questioning look, “No, I don’t …?”
Mike sagged back even farther, clasped his hands in prayer, and lunged forward. “Aw, Jesus Christ, Chip! Come on …!”
Flagrantly, I’d said the wrong thing. “Yes,” I said, now. “I know him.” I told them Mike’s name. “He was just here to see us a few minutes ago.” I was frightened at that point; but I probably sounded ridiculously blasé.
“Okay,” the cop said.
They turned away from the door — taking Mike. When I went inside, back to Marilyn, I knew that, for the most naïve reasons, I’d come close to getting Mike into even more serious trouble than he already was. And for all my much self-vaunted nineteen-year-old sophistication in the ways of the marginal world, I hadn’t even known what to do when faced with an ordinary identification check.
7.4. Then there was another party, this one a wedding celebration for my tall cousin Nanny who, a scant month after us, married an intense musician/karate instructor/black radical with a gentle smile and a sense of humor that could smart like finest emery cloth. It was a quiet Buddhist ceremony at a small midtown temple. My elderly maiden aunts, whom everyone feared would be shocked, sat primly on the floor with everyone else. Those two slim black ladies, the older, Sadie, a domestic science teacher (I remember a photograph of her as a girl in a college schoolroom at a blackboard, while Professor Boyer with his pointer indicated the declension of λελυχα, λελυχας, λελυχε…), the younger, Dr. Bessie, a dentist (who, as she got older and older, became more and more like Sadie’s fiestier twin), who, together, thirty-five years before, at the rerelease of Birth of a Nation, when the pickets and protests outside seemed to be accomplishing little, bought tickets on line (they were light enough to be mistaken for white), went into the theater, to run down the aisle, leap onto the stage, tear down the screen, and start a riot. Many years later, both would take up the serious study of yoga.
Then the younger guests repaired to our apartment on East Fifth, where Marilyn and I had cooked pounds and pounds of yellow rice and paella (toward which my mother had contributed thirty dollars), me vaguely perturbed as to whether anyone would think to ask if the lobster tails had been imported from South Africa, as indeed they had — a fact I’d only discovered on the bottom of one label after I’d gotten the two dozen of them home from the supermarket and out of the red, white, and clear plastic wrappers.
7.5. There was no lock on the front door of our building. The door itself was usually left standing open. Day and night, especially in cold weather, from the hall we would hear the claws of two, three — some times half a dozen — ownerless dogs, running on our stairs. Daily we found their turds on the tile landings.