Neither of our parents and almost none of our friends knew: she was pregnant.
1.2. We’d rented the four small rooms on the second floor in July of ’61. Diagonally across the tiled hallway from what turned out to be a local “shooting gallery”—an apartment where neighborhood addicts dropped in to shoot up — our flat was filthy when we moved in: the gray floorboards were littered with newspapers, orange rinds, an apple core, tuna fish cans, torn paper bags; the sink counter was strewn with matches, candle stubs, twisted spoons; and a hypodermic lay on the splintered flooring by the sink — detritus of the junkies who’d had the place before us and who, according to the other tenants, had spent their three-month stay without ever having the lights turned on. Primitive drawings sprawled the dirty, lead-white walls, and in the front room foot-high green-, blue-, and red-crayoned letters proclaimed:
HEY, HEY! WE FOUND SOMETHING THAT PLEASES THE CAT!
Over several visits we cleaned it out and got the electricity working.
1.3. One sweltering afternoon, leaving the place, as we were crossing Fourth Street, we ran into an old high school friend, Sharon, just married herself to a restauranteur named Mickey Ruskin. When she heard our story, she was quite sympathetic. “You know,” she said, shaking back her dark hair in the hot city sun, “I could lend you fifty dollars right now. Why don’t you call me this evening?”
So Marilyn did.
And she did.
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2. A young friend named Paul, close to me and devoted to Marilyn, a bright adolescent with hair paler than cooked yolk, soap-white hands, and pink-framed glasses, a kid who wrote sonnets on classical subjects and who’d been helping us out in every way he could, ascertained, by searching through the Columbia University Law Library, that, because of different age-of-consent laws for men and women, not to mention miscegenation laws, there were only two states in the union where we could legally wed.
The closest one was Michigan.
2.1. The August night before we were to take off to Detroit, I spent in bed with an older, sensitive man and my mentor since my seventeenth year. “You may consider this your wedding present,” he told me. “Roll over.” Between bouts of sex, we talked of some of my reservations over the whole thing. As the lights from West End Avenue’s traffic moved under the bedroom’s ceiling, he said: “Marriage isn’t so bad. She’s a very smart girl. It may, in fact, be exactly what you need. I never regretted doing it — it’s been quite wonderful for me. How children will be for you, of course, I’m not so certain. …”
But, like many adolescents, while I felt parenthood would be the fun, the challenging, the meaningful part, the rest I wasn’t so sure of.
2.2. The next day I went down to New York’s old Greyhound bus station, where I met Marilyn. Among those dingy blue and yellow walls, she was excited and pleased and stuttered a lot. Probably we both did. And talked very loudly.
On the bus, our notebooks in our laps, we discussed poetry and Jane Austen and what the most compressed language we could possibly think of would be like.
What about one where every word was only a syllable?
No, what about one where each word was no more than a phoneme, with vowels for verbs and consonants for the other parts of speech, so that single syllables — rup or fnim — would stand for entire simple sentences: “Dorothy likes avocados” or “Iguanas will often gossip incessantly.”
To be, or not to be, that is the question:
Whether ’tis nobler in the mind to suffer
The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune …
When we got finished with it, it came out something like: “Hyrnyroiyop. …”
Then we got to work on: “It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want. …”
While leaves flickered outside the bus window, pulling from the jungle gyms of power stations or backyards strewn with broken swings, car tires, and refrigerator doors, we went on like this for hours.
Finally Marilyn dozed against my shoulder, while evening grew all indigo behind the drifting broadcast antennas, blipping their red beacons.
2.3. In Detroit, while waiting out the three-day period of “residency,” we sat in coffee shop booths at formica tables, writing the opening chapters of a novel about a dead horse, a little girl called Messalina Schmidlap, and a lady taxidermist named Octavia Declivity. It began: “One day, on the outskirts of Detroit, in a field of blowing grain, a horse died. ….” Holding hands, we took six-hour walks through the city or crossed into Windsor; and slept the night in separate Ys — Marilyn becoming sad and nervous when we had to part for even that long, while I became confused and resentful — before, next morning, we would meet for coffee, eggs, danishes. …
“I’m trying,” Marilyn would explain, “to picture what it would be like, on the top floor of the YWCA, to have a horse barbecue. …”
2.4. We were married in Detroit’s City Hall, a bit past eleven o’clock in the morning, August 24, 1961.
In the small, bare, judge’s office beside the empty court, while the pedestrian ceremony took place, with the judge’s secretary and a policeman as witnesses, Marilyn broke out in barely suppressed giggles. As we were leaving through the beige-paneled courtroom, I asked, “What on earth was that about?”
With one hand she held mine tightly, while with the other she still carried a small bag of breakfast doughnuts. “I kept imagining,” she whispered in the echoing hall, “that, when we came out, we’d find a dead horse in front of the judge’s bench!”
Returning by bus to New York at August’s end, the first thing we did, after walking from Thirty-eighth Street, up past the Port Authority Bus Station, was to go see Gone with the Wind, which had just been revived at Forty-second Street’s Harris Theater: in part two, where Vivien Leigh, Butterfly McQueen, and Olivia de Havilland make their way by wagon from the flames of Atlanta, suddenly their horse keels over, clearly defunct, and Butterfly McQueen cries out in her childish soprano, “Miss Scarlett! Miss Scarlett! The horse is dead …!”
We howled for ten minutes while, around us in the audience, black women and Puerto Rican men tried now and again to quiet us.
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3. The obligatory rapprochement visits to our families?
On my first trip home, while Mom dithered a bit, wondering why on earth we’d done it, my grandmother asked to see the marriage license and, after reading it over with her glasses held away from her nose, announced: “Well, then, you’re married. And you have an apartment. All right, what kind of things do you need?” Both were, basically, very glad to see us. Various relatives got called and informed. Congratulations warmed the afternoon.
Marilyn phoned her mother. Then we took the subway up to the Bronx. In the apartment house hall, we took a breath and rang the bell. My new mother-in-law, Hilda, answered the door; and, though I followed Marilyn into the apartment where all the slipcovers were clear plastic, after the perfunctory greeting, Hilda didn’t speak to me at all. She didn’t say much to Marilyn either. Basically she seemed stunned: but after a strained, mostly silent twenty minutes, when we were getting ready to leave, she managed to blurt: “You’ll come up to dinner — on Friday?”
Although the invitation had been directed only at her daughter, Marilyn said: “All right. Chip and I will be here.”