My Kitchen Wars Page 6

  Once I started, I drank only to get drunk. Booze helped fill the gap between the vets, who knew everything, and us, who knew nothing. Yet try as we might to match them drink for drink, we couldn’t. They kept filling our glasses with one rotgut or another to loosen our conjugations, but there was only a hairline inflection between loosening up and throwing up. Or passing out. By doing the latter regularly, I learned what too much booze did to girls. Only later did I learn what too much booze did to men.

  As I look back now on the primacy of our drinking rituals, I think sex was a cover. What both sides wanted was a way to mask our mutual embarrassment at having nothing to say because we had no language in common, and screwing wasn’t going to change that.

  Our smoking rituals were the same. My friends had taught me to smoke, finally, when I won the role of Sabina in Thornton Wilder’s The Skin of Our Teeth and had to smoke onstage. This was the role Tallulah Bankhead had made famous on Broadway, but I’d never heard of Tallulah and had terrible trouble acting like a seductive sexpot who didn’t cough when she inhaled. I didn’t tell my parents I’d got the lead, because I didn’t want them to come to a performance and see me smoking. But the ritual went hand in hand with drinking, and I was soon up to two packs a day. Smoking was about hands the way drinking was about mouths. Unzipping the cellophane and undoing the foil, hitting the bottom of the pack on the side of your hand, shaking out a cig, placing it between your first and second fingers, waiting for a light, holding gently the extended hand that held the lighter, taking the first puffs to make sure the end was lit, inhaling deeply and breathing out slowly to watch the smoke fill the air between you and your companion smoker, tapping the glowing end lightly, watching the ash fall. For some of us, it was better than sex.

  Most of us were too ignorant to be honest about sex. Even for GIs who’d learned the rudiments abroad, wartime sex was very different from civilian sex, which seemed annoyingly to involve other things like love and commitment and endless conversation and endless cigarettes. The vets helped teach girls like me to hide our emotions behind sandbags, to shoot down silly notions about love and romance. They had returned from the Real World as if from the dead, as if to expose how tinselly, how phony was the little crepe-paper world we’d wrapped ourselves in. Even learning, which I’d exploded into as a freshman, studying Plato with the avidity I’d once applied to the Bible, seemed a waste of time. I went to fewer and fewer classes, just enough to get that Purple Heart, a Phi Beta Kappa key, because I couldn’t stop being the good student even though I no longer believed that grades meant anything. At nineteen I was beginning to worry that I had no passion in me when I first saw Paul outside Holmes Hall, dappled by the shade of a sycamore like an elongated faun in preppy clothing, and worried no more.

  I fell in love the way girls did in movies, from the way he looked, tall and lean with jutting brows, slanted pixie eyes and tilted smile, his shoulders slightly hunched in a gray-blue crew-neck sweater over a button-down shirt, white buck shoes beneath gray flannels. On that campus, he was exotic. I was used to boys in jeans and lumber-jacket shirts and Army-issue fatigues. I was used to, and mighty tired of, men being either jocks or flits. We used to complain about the macho types you loved to kiss but couldn’t talk to and the queers you loved to talk to but couldn’t kiss. To find a good looker who was also smart and talented and passionate about art, and at the same time vulnerable because he’d been wounded by the war, well, the combination was irresistible, and who was I to resist?

  Paul belonged to the literary set, a tight coterie of writers and would-be writers, whom I both envied and resented for the certainty of their opinions about the Great Works of Literature, to which they laid claim. Within that set, he belonged to the Novelist, an excitingly fun and unconventional tomboy who was destined to be, none of us doubted, America’s first female Hemingway, and who ended up writing nothing at all. When they broke up, Paul took up with me, a mere philosophy major who had no opinions about Great Works I’d scarcely heard of.

  I read fiction the way Grandma had taught me to read the Bible, piecemeal, as isolated statements taken out of context, as if whatever was printed on a page expressed God’s literal truth or the search for it, sentence by sentence, page by page. Pat read everything, like her mother, and she knew the names of books and authors and how to talk about them. She also had an ease in writing that was my despair. She could toss off in an hour an English paper that I struggled with for a day and a night. Writers are born, not made, I’d decided, although when I met Paul, I was ready to be reborn.

  I was not a Writer, but I listened and became an eager Reader as I began to finger the works themselves, falling in love simultaneously with Mann and Gide and Proust and Joyce. I was an instant convert, finding for the first time in fiction the depth of meaning I had looked for in philosophy, until I got stranded in logical abstractions. When I fell in love with Paul, I fell in love with literature, in sickness and in health, for better and for worse, and no matter what course the narrative took, I never fell out of love with either.

  Paul was an apostle of a new faith that hit me as it hit Saul on the road to Damascus. His set included a couple of teachers as well as students, teachers who were also just back from the wars, real men who were light-years away from the genteel lady high school teachers of Wordsworth and Keats. And at the center of this circle was a writer truly modern, a great European, a Nobel Prize winner, who was alive and well and living, peculiarly enough, in Hollywood—Thomas Mann. The Magic Mountain was their Bible, as taught by a charismatic professor appropriately named Angell, who actually knew Mann personally, was writing a book about him, worshipped him as the writer-seer we’d sought to explain the horrors of the Real World as it was happening, now. Mann wrote the kind of fiction even I could read, because I read it as if it were a biblical epic, and for the first time Europe became a real place and its conflicts helped explain a real war.

  Paul’s commitment to literature as an art, a sacred text, was religious. It had saved him in the war, he said. Before this altar I was a willing acolyte, with Paul as my priest. It was tremendously exciting to find a new religion after the loss of the old, and a new god. The literary disciples met in one or another professor’s house on equal terms, because what little difference there was in age between them was wiped out by the shared experience of the war and by a shared mission. To them Art was no ivory tower but a mode of moral action, an activist’s salvation from the chaos of war and the newly unleashed terrors of the atom bomb. Joe Angell had been in an intelligence unit of the Air Force and knew a lot of inside stuff about government plans for the bomb. He never divulged any secrets but he made apocalypse a felt possibility. He also made seizing the moment the only right way to go, and when we all got drunk together at his house, we got drunk on good bourbon and on wine that you had to open with a corkscrew.

  Paul was the star of this group. He was the best writer, the most intense, the most persuasive, the most talented, the most committed. Because he’d hated athletics as a fat boy, he’d specialized early, writing and printing his own neighborhood newspaper as a teenager, excelling in English classes and flunking math, scorning what he was not good at to compete keenly in what he was. He thought my philosophy courses absurd, my ignorance of literature pathetic, but he welcomed a bright and wide-eyed disciple. I gave him practice in the role of the teacher he wanted to be and would soon become. If not for the war, he would have been a journalist, but the war turned him serious and gave him a classroom mission that his father decried, because it made no money. His mother understood. “I always thought that if Paul hadn’t become a teacher he would have made a good preacher,” she said once, “although I couldn’t vouch for what he’d preach.”

  Paul had extra glamour for me because he wasn’t poor. He came from Pasadena. He had a car. He would take me out not just to Lucy’s in Ontario to eat a bargain dinner of garlic bread, red-sauced spaghetti, and cheap red wine, but to the far more costly Sagehen on Route 66 to drink
old-fashioneds or martinis and eat shrimp cocktails and thick steaks with baked potatoes. And throughout dinner he would talk, about literature and art and politics. His father was a big-time corporate lawyer who became head of Pomona’s Board of Trustees. He had an older brother who’d preceded him at Pomona and was already in Harvard graduate school getting his Ph.D. Paul came from another world, another class, and I kept wanting to give him little presents to express my gratitude. “You’re funnier than Pat,” he told me once, and I said, “That’s odd, because our humor’s very much the same.” “Not funny ha-ha,” he said, “funny peculiar.”

  Paul was funny ha-ha. Before he’d gone to war, he’d edited the college humor magazine and enacted the role, with another chubby friend, of class clown. The war slimmed him and trimmed him and sharpened his wit. He was the genial fat boy no more, and while he ridiculed others, he never laughed at himself. He could be mean as a snake, just because he felt like it. When the yearbook finally appeared that Pat and I had worked on hard and long, recruiting good writers like himself as contributors, I summoned up courage to ask him what he thought of it. “Not much,” he replied. He meant to wound and he did, and I could have taken better warning from it, but I didn’t.

  When we necked in the front seat of his car in the Wash, we smoked and got high on beer or wine, and we kissed and felt various lumps, and then Paul would invariably put his head in my lap to be comforted. All the lit guys called their women “girlies” or “sex objects” to show how tough they were about romance, but Paul wanted a sex object much less than he wanted a mother. He would cry and cry, reliving his war the way my brother had in his malarial delirium, only now that the doors were open I felt desperately helpless, like a mother with a sick child. I stroked his hair and tried to soothe his misery and made it clear I would do anything for him.

  Paul’s family had a beach cottage at Balboa, so, knowing it would be empty, we drove down there from college one afternoon and got tanked on beer. We took off our clothes and lay down on the sofa, and it was easy for me to close my eyes and pretend to have passed out because I was certainly zonked. I felt him on top of me and thought, well, let happen what will. Only nothing happened. He fell asleep and so did I, and driving back to the campus, he said, “Boy, what I almost did to you and would have if you hadn’t passed out.” It was another warning, but I didn’t want to be warned.

  Paul graduated that spring and I continued straight on into summer school to be near him. At the family beach house, he was learning French to pass the language exams required by Harvard, where he would follow his brother in the fall. I was in Claremont, gulping down chunks of American literature as big as Melville’s whale. I had already eaten Hawthorne and Emerson and Whitman and Thoreau and was finally learning, from a professor who was also a poet, how to digest modern poetry—John Crowe Ransom and Marianne Moore and Eliot and Pound. I was discovering irony, paradox, ambiguity. My writing was improving because I was beginning to understand what I read. I longed to talk about all of it with Paul.

  But the action of love is rightly described as a fall. Balboa was only an hour and a half’s drive from Claremont, but I waited by the telephone in my dorm for calls that never came. I had no car, and even if I had, women were not supposed to pursue men, at least not women like me who were trained to wait as we were trained to listen. We were like the chorus in a Greek play, responding like an echo to the actions of the protagonist. Once in Balboa, my protagonist found it more convenient to date his sister’s friends.

  One of his friends told me Paul was coming to Claremont on some errand having nothing to do with me and that he was going to have lunch in the Coop. I fixed and refixed my hair. I reshaved my armpits and polished the toenails that would show in my sandals and found a clean cotton sundress that tied in a bow on each shoulder. I rehearsed and re-rehearsed what I would say, how I would play it cool but warm, to show that I cared but didn’t care. “Hi, Paul, how’s it going?” “Hi, Paul, how’ve you been?” “Hi, Paul, good to see you again.” “Hi, Paul …” If today I had to enact the emotion “Anguish” for some theatrical improv, I’d only need to imagine the mirror above the dresser in my room at Clark Hall and a girl with freckled shoulders watching herself mouth the words “Hi, Paul …”

  I didn’t see Paul again until we met by chance a year and a half later in New York. I had piled on courses so that I could graduate early, in January, and escape from the college walls that had once seemed so liberating. I intended only to drop my boxes of books and tattered clothes in Riverside, en route to Los Angeles or San Francisco to get a job. But Dad had to go into the hospital for yet another operation on his adhesions. He was so dispirited that tears came into his eyes as he squeezed my hand and said goodbye on his way into surgery. He made it through but he would be weeks recovering at home, and the D.O. insisted that I be there to help out. I was forced back into the bottle again, with the cap screwed tight and no openers in sight.

  After a month, Dad was up and around and it was clear to me that my essential job was not cooking our feeble meals or washing the dishes or doing a once-a-week clean. I was there just to be there. They couldn’t stand to let me go. Why can’t you get a job in Riverside? they would ask. In publishing? I would reply. The truth is, I was unequipped to do anything, but publishing was a good excuse to leave. I spent my days between meals and dishes reading in my faded pink-and-blue bedroom, staying sane by reading War and Peace and Anna Karenina for starters, then on to the four volumes of Remembrance of Things Past.

  When I went out at night on a date with a local boy, I smoked and drank to make up for all those hours lost during the day, then chewed Sen-Sens and opened all the car windows and put my hair out the window to get the smoke out. On Sundays, I drove to church and parked in back in the lot where we used to roller-skate, smoking cigarettes and listening to the radio, and returning when services let out to lie about the subject of the sermon. Mine was the misery of Sartre’s No Exit, but it was partly self-imposed. I couldn’t exit without my father’s permission because I didn’t want him to feel I’d run out on him. Every week I asked if I could go. The D.O. said it was up to Dad. Dad said nothing.

  In April, I told him that some college friends had offered me a ride to San Francisco in their car, after the Pasadena wedding of a Pomona pal who happened to be from Riverside. I would stay with Pat’s parents, who had moved north to San Mateo, until I could find a job and a boardinghouse in San Francisco. My bags were packed, they’d been packed for weeks, but not until the morning of the wedding did Dad relent and let me go. He gave me his blessing in the form of a $25 war bond in my name, which I could cash in for $18.75. That was my dowry, plus a $500 debt to the college that I could pay off over time. On a scrap of paper among many such he’d scribbled on in the rest home where he spent so many years before he died, I found written in his hand—in pencil—“Bettie flew the coop and never came back.” He’d misspelled my name.

  In my brief time in San Francisco, I did indeed live in a boardinghouse on Pacific Avenue and stole enough bread and butter at breakfast to make sandwiches for lunch. By buying nothing but cable-car fare to get me to and from my job with a merchandising firm on Market Street, I saved enough money to buy a train ticket to New York, meant to be a temporary stop on my way, when I got money enough, to Europe. I spent three days and nights sitting up in the bar car of the Superchief, then changed trains and stations in Chicago. I spent the overnight trip to New York on the Twentieth Century Limited talking to a fellow I’d met in the bar car and so was awake to watch the November dawn light up the mists of the Hudson River and color its banks, past West Point, past the George Washington Bridge, before we dove underground to emerge in Pennsylvania Station. I’d burned all my bridges and smashed all my bottles. I had $20 in cash in my pocket and was on my own for good.

  When I met up with Paul the following month at a party in the Village, I was living on Bedford Street, renting a pint-sized bedroom from a pink-chemised landlady who gave me stove pri
vileges in a kitchen full of cockroaches, but no refrigerator privileges, so I kept my package of frankfurters on the fire escape and scraped off the mold before frying. Within the week I arrived, I’d nailed a job as file clerk in the production department of Alfred A. Knopf, where one of my tasks was to clean out dusty files of correspondence with writers like H. L. Mencken, Kahlil Gibran, André Gide, Thomas Mann. What an idiot I was not to take home letters that bore their signatures beneath otherwise worthless natterings about production schedules and delayed deadlines.

  I was scared to meet Paul again, but also curious about him and careful about what I wore. He was in his second year of graduate school at Harvard, having finally passed all three of his language requirements after failing Latin twice, which had put him in such Anguish that he had thought of jumping into the Charles, but it was winter and the river was solid with ice. We met in the basement kitchen of a town house on Leroy Street where artists and writers gathered to be fed by a wife who was a gifted and generous cook. One of our Pomona friends had rented a room there while he polished his short stories by day and took me to jazz joints by night.

  After that, Paul wrote. I responded. From then on we corresponded. Paul said, “Let’s.” I said, “Let me think it over.” I was very much alone. I wrote Pat in San Francisco, “What do you think? I know I love him but I’m not sure I like him.” She wrote back tactfully, “He’s got a strong personality, that’s for sure, but if you think you can stand up to him, do it.” I didn’t know if I could stand up to him, but I knew I couldn’t stand to live without him. I found that out after the apartment I’d been wanting for weeks finally became available. I took one look and my heart sank. The apartment now looked as dreary as the gray air shaft revealed through its lone window. I wrote Paul, “Yes, let’s.”