In the Flesh Read online

  In the Flesh

  A Novel

  Hilma Wolitzer

  The author thanks the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation for its generous support and the Yaddo Corporation for a fine place to work.

  Special thanks to Gordon Lish.

  for

  Ted Solotaroff

  Oh futile tenderness

  of touch in a world like this!

  how much longer, dear child,

  do you think sex will matter?

  There might have been a wedding

  that never was…

  —from “The Demon Lover” by ADRIENNE RICH

  CONTENTS

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  Chapter 43

  Chapter 44

  A Biography of Hilma Wolitzer

  Preview: Silver

  1

  WE WERE MARRIED IN 1957, in those dark ages before legalized abortion. I know that’s no excuse. There were always illegal abortions. But my social circles were narrow and unsophisticated. The doctors in my life were of the old-fashioned tongue depressor variety. Their worst crimes were probably kickbacks on unnecessary, but lawful, hysterectomies.

  I knew vaguely about worldlier women who flew down to Puerto Rico or other tropical places to have safe, painless surgery, and probably even had time to get in a little sun and dance the carioca. But I had never even been in an airplane. And the stories I knew by heart were about hapless girls in the back rooms of drugstores after hours, whose blood flowed in fountains, poor girls whose butchered parts were packaged and distributed among the trash cans of the city.

  In those days, my mother, in her innocence, spoke with longing to her cronies about being a grandmother someday. It appeared to be her goal in life. I think she wanted to wear a gold charm bracelet dangling with symbols that commemorated the births of babies. She wanted a record of bright and precocious sayings and an accordion folder of photographs—that first-class ticket to the society of grandmothers.

  I was her lone child, come late in life, “like a biblical miracle.” She might have more appropriately named me Ruth or Leah, but instead she chose Paulette, after her favorite actress and after a distant cousin on my father’s side. I believe she had a premonition that I was to be last as well as first and so had used the female version of a masculine name to cover all unfulfilled dreams. And she was right. My birth had denied passage to any future brothers and sisters. My mother claimed that one morning a few months later everything had simply fallen out of her. As a young misinformed girl, I had pictured the worst: a giblet tangle of fallopian tubes, ovaries, and the little pear-shaped uterus, all lying useless on the bathroom floor. But first I had been born, dropped in agony like an oversized egg from a disconsolate chicken. Way behind schedule, my mother was impatient for the natural order of the generations.

  When I was twenty my goal was to lie entwined with Howard forever. We had met at a school dance in my second year at N.Y.U. He was eight years older, a saxophonist with the combo that was playing that night. I didn’t want to dance at all; I just stood against a wall and watched him and listened to the music and felt that giddy sickness that would not go away. “What’s the matter with you?” my girl friends asked, but I couldn’t explain it then.

  Sex, which I had discovered in the misery of childhood (like everyone else), had finally reached the ultimate stage of partnership. And what a partner I had! Even cramped in the back seat of Howard’s car, I recognized with awe all those sensations we invented and that new voice that came from the dark pit of my throat (“Don’t … oh yes … oh God.”)

  Was it possible that my mother and father didn’t know? In their world there could be mingling without coupling, kisses without tongues. When I came home, struck with experience, I tiptoed past their bedroom, and they yoo-hooed and advised me to take some milk and cupcakes before I went to bed.

  Lying in bed, “in trouble” already, I used a wad of toilet paper and a flashlight for undercover checking. Nothing.

  There was probably still a chance that I was mistaken or that my body was just giving me some punitive suspense. As I had assured Howard, it was my safe time and our pleasure didn’t have to be deferred for the sake of caution. Of course he had hardly waited anyway, had barely missed a stroke.

  I checked again. Nothing.

  During the past week I had looked around for heavy things to lift. Nothing seemed just right. Books were ridiculously light, and the refrigerator was stationary.

  Howard and I even ran four laps around the Jamaica High School track and then collapsed panting in the tall grass behind it. There I found out that his own birth had been unplanned. It seemed like the saddest irony. “But how do you know that?” I asked.

  “My mother told me,” Howard said casually.

  I was shocked. If there was a baby, or its meager beginnings inside me, that refused to be dislodged, if I actually had it and it grew up, I would always tell it how we planned its being, nurtured it, and then rejoiced in its arrival. Everyone is entitled to that.

  But in the meantime, hot baths and strenuous exercise. Drifting into sleep, the flashlight locked between my knees, I thought about the slow passage of sperm, the mere chance of it, that rendezvous of sperm and egg like some nostalgic event.

  I adored Howard’s physical presence in a room, was willing to overlook ordinary frailties and even idiosyncratic turns in view of his special dark beauty. In my first stunned perception of him, he looked like a cross between Bugsy Siegel and Delmore Schwartz.

  But he was a moody man, given to occasional depressions and frequent existential twinges. Sometimes he complained about a feeling of sinking or drowning, and I saw myself swimming tirelessly alongside him, his own personal Gertrude Ederle, buoying him up, keeping his spirits above water.

  I was delighted to have an obsession. I dearly loved the intensity of that word, reminiscent of old Bette Davis movies, of thrilling historical passions.

  No one approved. Howard had been married briefly before to a woman named Renee, a maniac of sorts. He still heard from her from time to time. My mother said that his loyalty would certainly be divided, and besides he had bedroom eyes. My father said that he was not ambitious. Sherry, a classmate with bohemian leanings, was never going to let herself be snared this way. When I told her about Howard and me, she was another prophet of doom. “What is he? Scorpio?” she said. “Uh-oh.”

  Howard’s mother was convinced that our relationship was only a phase. She would probably say the same thing, if asked, about the human condition. His father jangled the change in his pockets and looked like he was making plans.

  As our crisis mounted, Howard became more unsure about committing himself. I t
ried to be understanding, remembering what he had been through in his life so far. We sat in his car, parked on a dark street in a neutral neighborhood. There was no question of doubt anymore. All the evidence was in.

  “What do you want to do?” he asked.

  Fear had canceled some second thoughts. Now unreasonable love wiped out the rest. “You know,” I said, trying to telegraph that love. “What about you?”

  He sighed, his eyes shifted restlessly, and I imagined my mother’s pride and joy, a slender gelatinous thread riding the sewer currents of Queens.

  “Are you afraid, Paulie?” Howard said, and I knew then that he was.

  I made him say it anyway. “Of what?” I asked, forcing his glance.

  “Of … I don’t know … of medical complications.”

  “Aren’t you?” What a mess it could be! I concentrated, flashing terrible mental pictures at him, Daily News headlines, even threw in some war atrocities for good measure.

  He shuddered, receiving my message. I couldn’t help thinking that men whose mothers have established an early pattern of guilt in them are probably the easiest. Even in those green days I had a psychological bent.

  “So that’s it, I guess,” Howard said, and we were engaged.

  I threw my arms around him, sealing the bond with an ecstasy that was almost religious. “It will be wonderful,” I promised. “We’ll have a wonderful life together. We’ll have terrific good luck. I can feel it.”

  He hugged me back, but all I could really feel were the doombeat of his heart and the collapsing walls of his will.

  2

  THROUGH SOME MINOR POLITICAL influence we were given first refusal on an apartment on the nineteenth floor of a building in a large cluster of buildings in Forest Hills. We were assured that thirty other couples on legitimate waiting lists had been bypassed in our favor.

  We went to see the apartment two weeks before the wedding. The couple who were moving out led the way through a maze of labeled cartons and crates. For some reason the man felt obliged to point out the obvious. “Well, here’s the oven,” he said, and we peered dutifully inside, as trusting as Hansel and Gretel. “And this is the refrigerator.” An orange nestled against what appeared to be a urine specimen. There was the boiled egg smell of school lunchrooms.

  Somewhere an infant cried, its wails muted and distant-sounding. Was it packed into one of the crates?

  Howard poked around. He looked into closets and he examined sink stains as if they were hieroglyphics. “You folks going into the suburbs?” he asked. I could see he was getting ready to have one of those discussions about the merits of city life against those of the country. He smiled encouragement at the man who didn’t smile back.

  “We’re splitting up,” the wife said, and she threw a couple of pot covers into a carton where they clanged together like cymbals in mid-symphony.

  My heart tilted. Premonitory signs meant a lot to Howard. I looked at him, but he didn’t say anything. What could he say anyway? Good luck? You can’t win them all? He wandered away, wordless and troubled.

  The apartment was small. Lilliputians might have lived there quite graciously. Footsteps, voices, even the resonance of thoughts, it seemed, clamored through those thin walls. It was hard to think in positive terms, of coziness and economy. But of course we took it. We pressed money and gratitude into the hands of our benefactor and certain designated middlemen. One of them was the superintendent of our building. He opened the door of his apartment slightly and then wedged himself in the opening, as if he believed we might force entry. When we introduced ourselves, he smirked, giving the impression he knew plenty about us already.

  We were married in traditional June, as it turned out, all arrangements made in a desperate frenzy. There were some last-ditch attempts by others to foil our plans. Howard’s father, who directed funerals in Rego Park, tried to convince me to call off the whole thing. Behind Howard’s back he offered two hundred dollars and a side trip to the Virgin Islands. He was such a literal man. Did he think I might be restored to my former state there? A man in his business, I thought, should have been uplifted by the promise of new life, no matter what the circumstances.

  An hour before the wedding, my mother, who had been bitterly silent all morning, said, “You had promise, Paulette. Teachers always said good things about you. With a little luck, you could have been somebody.”

  But I knew she was remembering her own dreams for me, those tap dancing classes, those elocution lessons, that futile but desperate desire to have mothered Shirley Temple instead of me. I felt sorry for her then and I stroked her arm in consolation. But she wasn’t finished. “You used to write nice poems,” she said.

  I was startled. She had hardly ever acknowledged my poems before. “Oh, Ma,” I said. “That was kid stuff. Adolescent mewling.”

  Which wasn’t entirely true. I had intended to be a poet at one time, could be one yet, for all I knew. I still kept copies of my best poems and all the rejection slips from The New Yorker, The Atlantic Monthly, and Partisan Review. They were standard rejection slips, not one with a personal note of encouragement or regret. I remember that I licked the first one to see if the signature was machine printed too, but the blue ink came off on my tongue. Sometimes I looked at the mastheads of those magazines for the names of the people who signed the slips, but they were never there.

  “Say something nice to me now,” I told my mother, fussing with the corsage that drooped tearoses on her breast. “It’s my wedding day.”

  “Well, I guess you know what you’re doing,” she said. It was the best she could come up with under the circumstances. But at least she was calmer than she and my father had been when I first offered my news. A musician! They clapped their foreheads and beat their breasts. How to explain that his music was an essential part of Howard, a second voice full of yearning and declaration; that his saxophone was a golden extension of his body? Musicians were confused in their heads with gypsies and dope peddlers, with vagabonds and thieves. But weren’t they right in a way? Didn’t he look wicked with his dark, sleepy eyes, and that mobster’s bulge in his trousers? Hadn’t he come in a caravan disguised as a ’52 Chevy, to steal me away?

  “It’s a bum’s life,” my father said. “It’s not steady.”

  My father had worked for twenty-eight years in the Post Office, and he could respect only the pension-bound promise of a government job. In the thirties, he pointed out, civil-service employees still put bread on their families’ tables and kept the nation running besides.

  “But Howard is going to have a studio,” I pointed out. “It will be a business. He’ll rent time to other musicians who want to make recordings, and he’ll give lessons on the saxophone and clarinet. And he’s part of a nice little combo. They play club dates and weddings. Strictly union scale,” I added, trying to speak my father’s language. But it was all a threat to them: Howard’s history, his handsomeness. Why hadn’t he gone in with his father? Unpleasant work maybe, but definitely steady.

  “He’s an artist,” I explained. “A sensitive man.”

  “A married man,” my mother said.

  “Divorced,” I said, correcting her. “Annulled,” I said, correcting myself. “They were hardly even married. It was only a little mistake.”

  Mistake! It was as trivial to them as my being only a little pregnant. Their X-ray eyes glanced in the direction of the real mistake, that furled fetus suspended below my heart.

  Howard’s married sister in Los Angeles sent a telegram: Every happiness, STOP. Wish we were there. STOP. Hope it’s a bed of roses. STOP.

  Howard assured me it was meant in ironic good humor, but he didn’t even sound convinced himself.

  No one cried at the ceremony. It was a small uneasy assemblage, but at least Howard’s first wife didn’t show up, as he had hinted she might.

  My oldest friend Judy Miller and her husband stood up for us. Sherry interrupted her wild life in Greenwich Village to serve as another witness. Two music
ians from Howard’s combo wore dark glasses and drummed out nervous little melodies with their fingers on their folding chairs. They called everyone “man” regardless of gender, My mother wondered if they were blind. She wondered if they took opium.

  Howard had a minor nosebleed, delaying things for a few minutes. But then it was done. Quickly, without pageantry, without epithalamiums.

  A modest luncheon followed. The maraschino cherries oozed artificial color over the fruit cup. Lenny drank too much and told ethnic jokes and jokes about wedding nights, managing to offend everyone.

  Howard and I moved into the apartment right after the wedding. On the first night, lamps without shades threw our crazy, shadows everywhere. We turned off the lamps and went to bed. The windows were curtainless and filled with moonlight and the place smelled of new paint and insecticide. Above our heads strangers shouted and ran heavily across the floors.

  This is our new life, I thought. So far, so good. The ghosts of the former tenants had left, were gone forever with their unresolved quarrels, their rumbles of discontent. I shut my eyes and tried to memorize the room and the placement of furniture. My hand and Howard’s crept toward union under the bedclothes. Everything that mattered seemed to be held in that joining. But was my grip stronger, more urgent than his?

  My eyes opened and I looked at Howard lying next to me. I imagined him a fugitive from my will and determination, even from my love. His spirit moved without shadow across the unbroken paint of the walls. Away. Away.

  And what if I could never write again after this? Fabled punishment for happiness; one pleasure in exchange for another. But what if all creative thought went into clothes-washing and cake-making and just keeping Howard there; if the baby lying mute and waiting absorbed everything, my language along with my calcium?

  I gasped, struck with a kind of terrified joy. Howard mistook it for a cry of lust, and he moved over me. And when we finally moved together, thoughts, with the powdery substance of dreams, invaded me. This was the stuff then, this was the real thing: these arms, legs, flesh, these odors, gestures, this room, bed. Here were the poems, the unwritten words waiting coiled and crouched like loyal and patient beasts.