At the Strangers' Gate Read online

  What puzzles me now is that I did not see the sheer cumbersomeness of this life plan: going to graduate school while trying to write pieces for magazines while hoping to become a composer—basically, doing one thing full-time and another part-time in order eventually to do something else entirely. (But, then, I realize I still do more or less the same thing now; I just do it in an environment where it’s declared useful rather than wasteful.) If there is one thing I’ve learned, it’s that ambition shouldn’t be pursued circuitously at all, but in a straight line: see that thing out there and then chase it. Straight lines are worthy of their good publicity: they really are the shortest routes between two points. But circuitous ambitions at least lead you around in their own wide circles. It does take you longer to get where you’re going, but you take a wide route while you do. I wasted years of time being ambitious about things that were not my ambition, but I met a lot of entrancing people doing it. And meanwhile all the ambitions really came together, as a single task, around the only thing I have ever been any good at: putting the right set of words in their one possible order. I was pursuing that in a straight line at least.

  Straight lines or curved, one might almost say that ours was the last ambitious generation—but that would be too typically ambitious a statement. In the mid-eighties, our friends were young novelists and artists, and their books were published and their pictures hanged and their prices advanced, and their advances grew, and though the intelligent among them knew that we were clinging, by the very edge of our fingernails, to the half-inch ledge on the crumbling façade of a building already condemned and under demolition—still, the view from up there looked fine for the moment. The old equations of ambition and energy and success still held, or seemed to.

  So we arrived in New York and, staying for a time at a discount hotel in midtown, carefully spending fellowship money, we went to an apartment broker on East Eighty-sixth Street, and for a week looked at tiny one-bedrooms in Yorkville. (I was going to go to school at Seventy-eighth and Fifth; Martha was beginning at Columbia.) Martha liked none of them, and the exasperated broker at last sent us to go look at a studio on Eighty-seventh Street near First Avenue. I think now perhaps he was hoping that, seeing something like this one, we would also see sense, and stop hoping for too much, settle for one of the others we’d already seen. This one, you see, was a nine-by-eleven room in a basement. It defined impossibility.

  But he didn’t know how crazy we were. Or how entrapped in our particular folie à deux, in which impossibility became a form of idealization. This tiny studio looked out on the back of a church with a stained-glass window on leaded backgrounds. From it, we could walk to the Metropolitan Museum. It was just a shoebox, but we felt it was a romantic shoebox. (The rent was about the same as it was in all the tiny apartments we looked at. Three hundred and seventy-nine dollars a month. Four hundred was our top.) We were so enraptured with the idea of our escaping and intertwining that everything unappealing about the place was transposed into the key of irresistible. “We’ll have a blue room, / A new room, / For two room, / Where ev’ry day’s a holiday / Because you’re married to me….”

  Like all romantic illusions, this one got debunked pretty quickly: by mice and cockroaches and other, less mobile kinds of squalor. But the point of a romantic illusion is not that it is an illusion but that it is romantic. The romance renews the illusion. I reinhabit it as I write. No one really surrenders an illusion in the face of a fact. We prefer the illusion to the fact. The more facts you invoke, in fact, the stronger the illusion becomes. All faith is immune to all facts to the contrary, or else we would not have such hearty faiths and such oft-resisted facts. If your faith is in life’s poetry, as ours was, a tiny room inadequate by any human standard and designed to make life borderline impossible looks appealing. The less possible it becomes, the more beautiful the illusion looks. Such illusions—call them delusions; I won’t argue now—grow under the pressure of absurdity as champagne grapes sweeten under the stress of cold ground. We learn in life through the process of replacing one illusion with a slightly roomier one. We don’t learn about rooms by learning that you can’t live in a room. You just make the room your life. Then you find another. You hope it’s bigger. You hope it’s rooms.

  We are on a subway, going to City Hall, together, as we were on the bus before. Who were we, the boy and girl on the bus and then the train? My inadequacy as hero of the city or even the story is the subject of these pages. Heroes declare their inadequacy to be heroes by the act of writing: to explain is to excuse. Every story is an apology for something. But the heroine, or anyway distaff-side talker, Alice to my Ralph, is another story, and deserves—or anyway demands—a page or two of her own.

  Martha was already who she would become, and to say that is to begin to describe her. To write about someone who has been your companion, lover, partner, and cosigner—ending as the CEO and CFO of a tiny money-losing venture with two extremely well-paid employees with great educational benefits—for almost forty years is difficult, while to write lovingly, not to say amorously, of your wife is considered very bad form. Uxoriousness may be admirable in life, but it’s dubious in prose. I have tried to understand why this is, and the simple reason is that it seems at once oddly boastful and untrue. The lounge singer who winks at his wife and says, “That beautiful lady has been with me for forty years,” is, we feel sure, actually winking at the coat check girl. Too much wife wooing is dubious because the subject is listening, hovering around the margin of the page. Sigh for a lost love and the world sighs with you; sigh for a current spouse and the world doesn’t know which way to look. But what can I do?

  At eighteen, she was the prettiest girl I had ever seen, and that she should have found me appealing remains the great event, and mystery, of my life. Her prettiness, however old-fashioned the word, is uncontroversial, I’m told. She was and would become many other things as well, a feminist and a filmmaker, but it would be a lie to say that the prettiness was not the first thing I noticed about her, as it would be the steadiest thing I would keep about her.

  We met before college. I was five years out of high school—I had graduated, God help me, at fourteen—and she was still in it. She had grown up with her Icelandic mother and her sister, Julia, who was the one who gave the party where we met, in a gracious stone house with a garden on the outskirts of Montreal—a “suburb,” I should say, but in winter especially it felt more like a frontier outpost than a subdivision. It was like entering a three-woman convent. They shared a mannered, melodious way of speaking. Oddly, though I assume she still speaks that way now, I can hear it only in memory. They liked mock clichés, or clichés used in a mocking way—“She’s a woman truly at the crossroads” or “It was quite the soirée”—which they repeated with mischievous smiles. The accent was part drawl unique to Montreal English-speakers, and part lilt by way of Iceland. A simple sentence I heard her say on the night we met—“We all went to the lecture, but it was a bit of a catastrophe!”—became a study in melodic extension: “We all went to the lec-shure—but it was a bit of a cat-aaaas-trophe.” They loved old-fashioned expressions, which they used with ironic delight. “We were truly ensconced at the hotel” or “By then, the hurly-burly was a thing of the past…” or “Let us do this deed while the fit is upon us….” They loved planning elaborate social occasions—teas and brunches and “at homes”—but were equally wary of guests who would not leave. “If we invite Caroline, she’ll stay talking all afternoon,” Julia would say to Martha conspiratorially. “So you say that you have to finish a paper and I’ll say that I’ll call her a taxi—if we let her walk to the bus, she’ll stand by the door for hours.” They planned their escape from the social occasions they were planning with even more delight than they planned the occasions themselves.

  Beautiful and passionate, she had made love to a series of suitors in the basement of that same house—the mother was Nordic, after all, and pleased at least to know where her daughter was—with an ent
husiasm (and resourcefulness) that belied her china doll aspect. That aspect, her mother knew, was an illusion maintained by sleep and energy and maternal care, and there was at most a three-hour window before the girl’s stamina collapsed. Her mother was sure she was even more fragile than she was. And so she encouraged her in the habit of being a marathon sleeper.

  She certainly slept more than anyone I have ever known. I would call at eleven in the morning on a Saturday and she would be sleeping. Twelve noon…still asleep. To this day, her normal serving of sleep is ten solid hours, and eleven is not unknown. But later, when children arrived, and for twenty years it meant getting up in the middle of the night and then early in the morning, she would do it uncomplainingly. She was as fragile as her mother feared, but more resilient than her mother knew. The gracility and the resilience both became my companions.

  The resilience had come, I learned soon enough, from having her soul pulled so taut with longing. She longed for London streets. She longed for Paris parks. (Later, she would find out that the London streets were mostly imaginary, though the Paris parks were real.) She longed for a life bigger and brighter and more engaged than the one she knew in the pretty, reliable winter world of Montreal.

  We had both grown up in Montreal, going to school and then college in its still-thriving—what would once have been called its “bustling”—centre-ville, its center city. Montreal seemed dreamlike then, even to those who were awake in it. Thirty years behind American cities, it was still a sweet place to live. There was a thriving downtown, unscarred by social change. To shop mooningly at Ogilvy’s department store, still Scottish in feel, with the same Christmas windows for a quarter-century, was to feel oneself in touch with the old Empire. To have lunch—as she loved to do—at Eaton’s, in its ninth-floor re-creation of the dining room of the SS Île de France, was to inhabit the kind of happy, bourgeois civilization that had already been atomized in “safe” cities elsewhere. It was more like Fitzgerald’s St. Paul at the turn of the century than like the now despoiled Philadelphia where I had been born. You could spend a night on rue Saint-Denis, which, though not Parisian, was French, or go to any of the thriving Hungarian cafés and enjoy something more than a tourist’s taste of an older, Middle European culture. It was sweet to spend a summer night at La Ronde, the amusement park, or a winter morning skiing on Mount Royal. There was a gentleness to Montreal then, which was, I suppose, largely inseparable from its provincialism. (This was true provincialism, the kind born of a language group secluded from a larger world; later, the Québécois provincialism was extended, as much by indifference as benevolence, to the sub-provincialisms, Jewish and Hungarian and Haitian, that it superintended.) Montreal was what I can only call a naïve city—it had a naïveté of tone, an earnestness of spirit, which I still recognize in things that began there, like the Cirque du Soleil. What they share is not having soured on the simpler kinds of pleasure. Even those of us who dreamed of a larger horizon and more varied flavors sensed how sweet it was to live there. But it was also a small place, and we wanted out. Now sweetness seems to me so much rarer than spaciousness as to be relished above all things. But I didn’t know that then.

  That I became her flock of birds to get out is odd and lucky. Someone once called her in print the most innately polite person she had ever met, and the truth is that in each of us natural sociability had been overlaid with Canadian politeness, and hers with a further coat of Icelandic courtesy, producing a veneer of politeness so extreme that many took it for disingenuousness—which of course, in another way, it was.

  Ambitious and erotically alive, startlingly experienced for an eighteen-year-old, she loved expressing her capacity for passion. There’s a photograph from our wedding day—our second ceremonial wedding day, the following summer in Montreal—in which she is reaching right over the Mies chair in my parents’ living room to kiss me, her face buried in mine, with the contortion of my body registering a surprise I felt then and still feel, on occasion. I don’t deserve her, I thought. You don’t deserve her, her mother thought. No one deserves me, I think she thought—and, thinking that, decided that she might as well make herself a gift to one of the undeserving, if he came with a destination.

  She was above all stylish, a prodigy of fashion, really. She had a clothes philosophy and an unerring eye for what looked right—to wear the right thing was to become another kind of person. She loved clothes as no one I have ever known. This was not frivolous, and even less was it superficial. Someone who took such trouble to pull herself together—the one right T-shirt could take days of shopping—had decided to face the world with joy. Had decided to outface the world. (Years later, when Richard Avedon became our adoptive father, they could talk for hours about angles and hems, sharing a faith in fashion that sounded silly if made too articulate, but was sublime if lived as laughter.)

  “You’re making me sound like an airheaded clothes horse,” she said a moment ago. It wasn’t just clothes, she urges me to point out, right now, hovering above my keyboard: she loved “beautiful things” of all kinds. Okay. But what was astonishing to my teenage mind was that each beautiful thing was for her nestled in a kind of web of invisible wires, each tugging on scenes from old musicals and chapters from old books, from Mary Poppins to novels by Virginia Woolf, so that a Wedgwood plate or a tartan robe pulled with it, toward it, entire worlds of feeling that she longed for. My own family had a taste for beauty, God knows, but it tended toward things whose beauty was self-contained—my parents collected minimal art, planks and slabs of heavily lacquered wood—or else was a function of the thing’s newness, my family being true believers in the myth of the avant-garde. If it was strange and new it was beautiful.

  For her, it was by being not strange and not new that things earned their beauty. They were familiar, but familiar not from a middle-class life in Canada; rather, from an imaginary life glimpsed in books and movie theaters, which she was determined to get to. Ever since she was small, she had been following the invisible wires that tugged on things from their point of origin, the places she longed for. The things also longed for their original homes, and if one simply followed them religiously enough, one might get there, too. The invisible wires all led away from Montreal, sweet though it was, away from family, loving though they might be, away from home. The invisible wires all led elsewhere.

  We decided that we believed in what we called “poetry,” which meant anything except rhymed or metered verse. It meant an attitude toward life that didn’t take practicalities too seriously. It was materialistic without being at all realistic—though now I know that materialism without realism is a ticket to the poor house, or a life of debt. We would walk through the department stores of Montreal, and choose suits and plates and chairs. The moment we became a couple (all the other coupling stuff aside) came when, looking in a store window on Sherbrooke Street, she said, “What’s the most beautiful thing in the window?” (“That girl,” I would answer, peering at her reflection, her bitter-almond eyes smiling in a queenly way at the compliment, not unwelcome for being entirely expected.) We always agreed on the most beautiful thing in the window: it was Georg Jensen china—or lavender cotton socks, or red-tattersall shirts, or a subtle plaid.

  She had a proprietary vocabulary for clothes and objects, whether her own or not: something might fall short by being too “costumey,” or too clownish—too much “like a minor operation in Buffalo,” or “like a birthday in a kibbutz.” My clothes were all of the above. I was still effectively dressed by my mother, whose tastes ran toward the avant-garde delight in garish colors. Once, on a bus, when we were first dating, Martha couldn’t help herself, and with her jaw uncharacteristically clenched, she tore off a harlequin bow tie that I was innocently wearing with a red velvet bolero jacket. Clothes figured that prominently in her emotional life.

  Not that she was superficial. She loved literature and poetry, instructing me on the greatness of Alice Munro (at a time when I was still pretending that my favorite writer
was Julio Cortázar, an obscure South American postmodernist—Borges must have seemed too common) long before most people recognized it; Canada’s future Nobel laureate was known then as a short-story writer for girls and women. But material things were her immediate daily means of poetic expression; to wear the wrong one, or cherish the wrong object, meant to follow the wrong thread to the wrong place. Every outfit suggested a scene: a walk on the beach, a rainy morning in London, an afternoon in Paris, where she had never yet been, making the chance of eventually taking her there the closest thing I held to a trump card in my measly hand.

  So, New York. For most of the first half of the decade, we would live in that basement room, and see other basement dwellers and tenementarians come out, like cockroaches, in the evenings to look for pizza and walk the streets in shorts and sneakers, a new uniform. For the second half, we lived in a bigger room, a small loft, filled with rats and mice, the walls unaccountably bleeding treacle and our neighbors full of strange aspirations. They were mostly artists, who in those years believed in SoHo as an avant-garde quarter as thoroughly and as unreflectively as their predecessors had in Montparnasse. That they were all on a lease that was shorter, and more narrowly ruled by the brutalities of the real-estate market, was not a vision available to any of us, except as an abstraction that ultimately governed life, though not, we thought, our lives. (Back then, a Saturday morning in SoHo had rules and rituals as fixed as any potlatch of the First Nations. Now no one remembers their absurdities, except a few lone survivors who, like me, remember their beauties.)