To his somewhat curious frown I recounted the incident as I recalled it.
When I was finished, he chuckled quietly: “That’s probably one of the reasons Bobbi and I aren’t together today. I had a tendency to lay down the law on what we would and wouldn’t do a little too hard and fast.”
We sat smiling at each other across the sun-filled living room (had we ever been together in a room that large before? Certainly not in either his Lower East Side flat or mine), revising our images of each other across the decades.
Incidents turn, in time, to reveal a previously hidden facet. Up in Harlem the old St. Philips Parish House where I went to Sunday school has long since been pulled down and replaced by a glass and brick building a block north. Down on the East Side, James Street and St. James Street were now alleys through twenty-story pink brick housing projects. And all that’s left of Louis’s Shoeshine Parlor is half a chipped slab of marble, an inch or two high, extending from the building wall some feet out on the sidewalk, and a few stains and discolorations on the old brick that only suggest the shingled wooden shelter to someone who already knows what was there. Now and again, if rarely, we’re given opportunity to look back and judge if what we thought was so characteristic of a place, a person, eternal unto judgment, was after all, so telling.
13
13. Some days on in winter, work on The Jewels of Aptor halted again, as the heat in our apartment gave out entirely. At the same time, I developed an ingrown hair on my jaw which became infected. After a week spent sitting about all day, huddled with Marilyn under blankets, I’d developed a swelling on the left of my face the size of an emperor grape. A trip to Bellevue’s emergency ward one cold gray afternoon only got me seen by a rather nervous intern, who suggested that it might be an abscessed tooth and, before they did anything, I should come back to their dental clinic — just to make sure.
That was on Friday.
The dental clinic was not open till the following Wednesday.
13.1. Sunday, I was stricken with chills and fever. The swelling had gone from the size of a grape to the size of a plum. Monday night, in my old army jacket, with a towel around my neck for a scarf, I walked, fevered and shivering, to the drugstore on the corner of East Fourth Street and Avenue B: an impossibly crowded counter, a small tiled floor, and three wooden phone booths along one side, where we’d often gone to make calls when we’d first moved in. The druggist was a large, round-faced, balding man who ran the store with his small, white-haired father. In such an impoverished neighborhood, he served as a kind of first-level doctor, within the limits of the law. That night he talked to me for a minute, heard my chattering teeth, saw my hunched shoulders and ballooning cheek, and phoned a small clinic just below Houston Street. Yes, I should go there right away. There was a doctor on duty till nine.
The clinic was on the second floor above a storefront. I remember fluorescent lights, blue walls, white-enameled pots on a table, a glass-faced cabinet, and a very tall, white-haired doctor in shirtsleeves, who, when I said something about the Bellevue intern’s suggestion of a possible impacted tooth, muttered, “… idiots!” then anesthetized and lanced the swelling, to drain a good half cup of bloody pus from my jaw. Then he packed the wound with gauze and bandaged it.
My fever broke in the office.
Soaked and cold, I walked back through the blowy February night, my teeth chattering, the streetlights incredibly sharp in the black, now and again doubled in reflection on my glasses. I climbed upstairs in the dark (the hall light had been smashed again) and crawled into bed with Marilyn.
14
14. And Auden? Two years after our dinner, Marilyn and I attended a reading with our friends Dick and Alice that Auden gave at the New School for Social Research. Though he could occasionally do inspired readings of his poems, Auden was sometimes a worse reader of his own verse than Delmore Schwartz was of his. (Schwartz was a large and disheveled man, whom a few times, when we were wandering through Washington Square Park with Dick — one of Schwartz’s chess friends — we met. He was pathologically shy and had some small speech defect you immediately overlooked in person, but which became glaring from the podium of the Columbia University Auditorium where Marilyn and I went one evening to hear him.) At that night’s New School reading, Auden was not inspired.
Afterward, however, Marilyn went up among the others who’d gathered around him at the front of the auditorium to offer her good wishes and congratulations.
When she returned to us through the crush, Dick asked: “Did he remember you?”
Marilyn laughed. “Of course not!”
The four of us walked back across Fourteenth Street toward the Lower East Side.
15
15. The Jewels of Aptor required several poems. When I’d begun the novel, I’d told Marilyn that the plot would require some magic spells. It also needed variant versions of a hymn, the identity of the authentic version of which the whole plot more or less turned on.
Would she write them?
Enthusiastically, the first day I suggested it, she created the spell for calming an angry bear: “Calmly brother bear.…” I thought it lilting and lovely.
But nothing else came. The book was close to its end. As late as March when the first draft was done, I still cherished a notion of Marilyn working along with me.
Off the living room was a little cubicle that had been built out into the room. Our first plan was to fix it up as an office space. A table, a typewriter, a chair was moved in. Yes, it could be Marilyn’s office. (I didn’t really need one. I seemed to be able to write in an easy chair or sprawled on any bed.) For about a week, I recall, Marilyn did not even go into it.
Once I asked her if the space was all right for her, and only got a snarl and a shrug to leave her alone.
I went on writing in the living room, sitting in the bathroom, in a corner of the bedroom. One afternoon, I decided I might as well go in just to use the typewriter for a while. I was typing there that evening when she came home.
I heard her come in, finished the sentence, and got up to greet her. As I stepped out the door into the living room, I saw she was upset.
“Hi …” I said.
“Why are you using my office?” she demanded, and then went into the back.
“I was just typing something up — ” I began to explain.
But, I also realized, all chance of the wanted poems for the novel had vanished. The next day I wrote my own paltry versions, without mentioning them to her. I would only insert them at the last minute — which, a couple of weeks later, is what I did. And until Marilyn read over the whole manuscript, decided that she liked it and wanted to submit it to Ace, and I began a final retyping, both of us stayed out of the little office room, with its typewriter, pad of paper, and glass full of unused pencils and pens.