Lexington Avenue local, 77th Street stop

My great grandmother and great aunts at Wild Acres in Charlottesville in 1935

Summers always brought out the restlessness in me.  I can’t remember which summer it was, probably 1971, I was living on an old Pennsylvania railroad barge on the Hudson, and the heat and humidity had settled over the river like a soggy blanket.  It was so hot that I spent a couple of nights sleeping in the air conditioning on the floor of my cubicle at the Village Voice using a chair cushion for a pillow.  The heat just refused to lift, and I was starting to fray around the edges, so I called Helen at her place on 83^rd Street.  There was no answer.  I waited a couple of hours and called again, thinking she had gone out doing errands, but she still didn’t answer, so I took the Lexington Avenue subway uptown and talked to Joe, her doorman, who told me she was down for the month at her summer house in Morehead City, North Carolina. 

I talked her address out of him and asked to use the phone in the lobby and called information and got her number and called collect.  She said she didn’t want to see me.  She said I was too unpredictable and uneven and un-a-few-other-things, that what a woman needed more than anything else was someone she could depend on, someone who was regular.  With me, her expectations were always getting dashed.

I told her that I needed to get out of the city.  I think I even told her I was sleeping on the floor at the Voice to get out of the heat.  I said that I really wanted to see her.  I missed her.  I was running my mouth, saying anything that popped into my head, when she abruptly said, okay.  She said there was a Piedmont flight to an airport nearby.  I told her I’d call her from the airport when I got in.  She said okay, and she hung up.  Once she made up her mind, she didn’t like to waste time or words for fear she’d change it, and she didn’t like change.  I was 25 that summer, and change for me was simple and quick, like flipping the pages of a desk calendar.  I knew the whole thing of going down there to North Carolina to see her was liable to blow up, but I didn’t care.

I called her house just before I got on the Piedmont flight, and she met me at the airport in a driving rain and set out for a steep-roofed shingled two-story summer place with a wrap-around screen porch on a beautiful narrow bay between the mainland and the outer banks.  Take away the location on the ocean, and it reminded me of Wild Acres, the place owned by my Randolph great grandmother and great aunts in Charlottesville in the 1950’s – old Persian rugs on polished hardwood floors, overstuffed furniture with fluffy pastel print cushions, upstairs bedrooms with four-posters standing right in the middle of the room, mahogany dressers topped with gently curved mirrors.  That night when I walked in, I could close my eyes and imagine myself as a boy at Wild Acres so easily it was eerie.  Suddenly, I got it about her resistance to uncertainty and change — she had a longing for something that had once been, that didn’t have much time left, and it made her sad.

I stayed a week.  We loafed on the screen porch in the heat, went swimming, ate hot beaten-biscuits for breakfast made by her housekeeper.  She had practically grown up with her housekeeper, who actually worked for her mother over in Raleigh and was on loan to Helen for the month.  Her housekeeper was another reminder of Wild Acres, and being waited on made me feel odd, and I said a few things to Helen about the South and having a housekeeper that were awkward and stupid.

Still, the week went by without a major fight, which was pretty amazing, but the time passed without magic either, and the weird thing was, down there on the Outer Banks, magic was in the thick humid air like supercharged oxygen.  One day we took her brother-in-law’s outboard runabout to a deserted island on the banks, carried a picnic lunch, ran around and swam naked on a gorgeous beach that ran for two miles in either direction without a soul on it.  We got lost as night fell trying to find our way by map through the shoals back to her little piece of bay, but finally we made it, dehydrated, sun-burned, giggling with exhaustion.  But the next morning I woke up in a bad mood, we had a fight that lasted most of the day, and I stalked off to find a bar in town, couldn’t find one, and went back to the house and straight to bed. 

We didn’t sleep together that week; she said she didn’t want to offend the housekeeper’s sensibilities, but I thought it probably had more to do with her not wanting the housekeeper to report back to her mother in Raleigh that she was running wild with some hippie from New York.  All of which masked the fact that when it came right down to it, neither of us wanted to sleep together that week, and that shocked both of us.

Shock was not something I coped with very well, and neither did she.  When the week was over, I took a bus to Virginia to visit my brother.  She stayed on at the house awaiting the arrival of her sister, whom she barely tolerated, a brother-in-law whom she tolerated even less, and her nephew, whom she loved. 

We didn’t talk again until the end of the summer, after I wrote a story for the Voice about that week we spent together down on the Outer Banks.  The story was like a balloon inflated way too full that was ready to pop, not a flattering portrait of either of us.  She called me after the story was published and was very kind, said she thought that it was the best writing I had ever done.  By that time, she was living in Charlottesville taking writing classes at UVA, and she had become close to one of my Randolph great aunts, Aggie.  She gave Aunt Aggie my story to read, and Aunt Aggie told her it was a boy talking in that story who was not yet a man.  When she told me this on the phone, I hung up on her.  She was right.  Aunt Aggie was right.  I was still growing up, and I wasn’t doing a very good job of it.

That fall at a party, someone dosed me with some really bad acid, and I had a very disturbing run-in with a side of myself I didn’t like at all.  It was the bad-trip of all bad-trips…I remember passing through a waterfall of blood.  On the other side was an unfamiliar world filled with false people, people who were pretending, and I was one of them.

It took weeks to recover from the acid trip, which consisted mainly of forgetting what had happened, because who wanted to deal with seeing yourself in that way?  Just before Christmas Helen called me from Charlottesville with some fantastic story Aunt Aggie had told her about my Randolph ancestors from my father’s side of the family.  I asked her how she was, and in reply she said there had been a change in my voice.  She was always noticing these changes…in fact she had taught me to notice them…and now she said that she trusted what she heard in my voice.  She invited me down to Charlottesville for Christmas, and without really thinking, I said yes.

I met her at my great aunt Aggie’s apartment.  There I was with these two elegant Southern ladies sitting around this gracious living room having cocktails and I felt shabby and strange and out of place, even though Aggie was my aunt, not hers. 

Aunt Aggie smoked Fatima cigarettes with a shiny black cigarette holder, and she regaled us with stories – little stories – brief tiny glimpses of her life, all of which seemed to leave her with the short straw, ignorant in the presence of brilliance, a fool among the majestic.  Helen and I sat there listening, knowing that Aunt Aggie was dying of pancreatic cancer, yet she could turn her grim circumstance into the funniest one act play.  She had the marvelous ability to poke fun at herself while Rome burned and make you want to fiddle along with her.

Late that night we left Aunt Aggie’s and drove to a cottage Helen had rented on a Thoroughbred horse farm not far outside Charlottesville.  It was a tiny place with only three rooms – a living room, bedroom/bath, and kitchen.  At one time it had been the out-building kitchen for a manor house owned by an early Virginia legislator.  But now it mirrored the clutter that was both of our lives.  We spent our first few hours stacking books and letters and old New Yorkers and newspapers, the accumulated effluvia of a woman far gone on the graduate writing courses she was taking at UVA, hard at work looking for anything to do other than study.  When we climbed into bed, I made a joking remark about the little pillow she always slept with, but by that time she was already asleep with a beautiful, contented smile on her face.

We awoke around noon, and she bustled.  A woman not bustling once her feet hit the floor was a woman to be scorned, seemed to be Helen’s creed.  I was still in bed, practicing the opposite creed.  What do you want for breakfast, she called.  I have orange juice, oranges, grapefruit, English muffins, some biscuits from home, but they’re frozen, eggs, bacon, coffee, tea, toast, jam.  What do you want for breakfast, Lucian?  Come on, answer me!

You know what I want.  A Coke.   Toast.  Butter.  No jam.

You’re sure you don’t want anything else, she insisted.  You’ve got to eat something.  Breakfast is the most important meal of the day.  Maybe some grapefruit?  Juice?

Okay.  Grapefruit and juice, I said, giving in.  Want me to cut the grapefruit?

Just come and sit down.

I never wanted to come and sit down for breakfast and confront all that preparation for starting the day.  For me, days started in mid-stride.  I usually had a hamburger at a diner on University Place just down from the Voice. Rather than coffee, I drank Cokes.  Several.  She knew my tastes at breakfast, but never kept Cokes in her fridge.  I figured she had stopped in quite a few country road gas stations back in North Carolina when she was young and had seen men standing around drinking cokes and those men were farmers, and she didn’t want to see someone pulling on a green six and a half ounce Coke bottle at her breakfast table. 

I couldn’t blame her.  Something inside me winced at the idea of drinking a Coke for breakfast, but my taste buds didn’t wince, so it became a habit, one more in a long list of immediate gratifications I pursued throughout my days back then.  We spent the day doodling around Charlottesville and that night we took my great aunt Aggie out for dinner and drinks.  Nothing can describe what someone like Aunt Aggie can do to you over dinner.  It’s like an education, but you don’t feel smarter, you feel better about yourself and the world in some ineffable way. 

Too soon, I started to feel restless.  I would walk down to the store at the crossroads and get the Washington Post and New York Times, then I’d walk back and sit there reading the papers while she worked on her UVA studies which made me feel even more restless.  I would walk out to the wood line across the field and gather firewood for the huge fireplace in the kitchen that still had cast iron pot hangers cemented into its sides.  I’d sweep out the fireplace, straighten up the living room, borrow Aunt Aggie’s Buick and drive around the country roads, and it wasn’t long before I started thinking of leaving. 

It always happened that way.  I looked wildly about for diversions.  I tried to read a book but couldn’t get through three pages.  Tried to write a postcard home to my folks but gave up after the greeting.  She noticed.  She always noticed.

The last two days I was there, I tried to help her with a paper she was writing on Ford Maddox Ford.  I could tell by reading through the first draft that it was a good paper, but her insights into Ford were buried in that stilted academic writing of graduate programs.  Her writing was a little looser, but reading it made me feel like I was wading through mud.  I kept saying to her, look, you’re really onto something good here, but can’t you just write it and not worry about the academic crap?  And she would reply, no, no, you don’t get it.  All I want to do is get this thing finished so I can complete the course.  It was due before Christmas, and I put in a late-letter, so I got a reprieve, but now I just want it out of the way. 

I wanted her to take chances with her observations of Ford Maddox Ford, to force the professor to keep up with her, but she couldn’t bring herself to do it. We ended up spending the last day haggling over stuff like single words and the placement of commas and inane stuff that didn’t add anything to her paper.

That night while she busied herself in the bathroom, I lay in bed with a restlessness I couldn’t let go of.  I picked up the phone and called Greyhound to ask for the next day’s schedule north to Washington connecting to New York.  She came out of the bathroom and found me on the phone and accused me of setting up my next liaison before I’d even left her house.  I tried to explain that all I was doing getting the Greyhound schedule.  She grabbed the phone out of my hand expecting to hear a woman’s voice, I guess, but I was on hold, waiting for a customer service rep.  She took the silence for some girl holding her breath, not saying a word.  She hung up.  We went to bed angry with each other over nothing.  Both of us were way too accustomed to exactly that.

I split the next morning, and she left Charlottesville not long afterwards, her semester of writing classes having ended.  We kept seeing each other, awkwardly, standoffishly.  I would call her from the Lion’s Head, usually after having had a few martinis, or she would call my office and leave a message inviting me over for dinner, always a welcome invitation to a single guy living on a barge floating next to an old warehouse dock on the Hudson River in New Jersey.  When she called me at the Voice, it meant I didn’t have to find my way home that night, taking a bus from Port Authority and hitching a ride down to River Road. What a luxury! 

But it was all testy for both of us.  I’d call, and she’d say, what is it this time?  Horny?  It’s not as easy as it seems, sweetheart.  Try me again some other time when you’ve got something else in mind.  Click.  But the lines could be easily reversed, depending on who needed whom and for what reason.  I would get invited to some fete up at Plimpton’s on East 72^nd, the equivalent of a White House State dinner for her, and I’d call and ask if she wanted to go, and she couldn’t say no.  It was a sadistic little trick I was playing on her, dangling Plimpton’s like it was Tiffany’s, and she knew it, and I knew it.  It was like we were in a private club neither of us wanted to belong to.

Back on East 83^rd Street, in the morning, I would walk into the kitchen and slump onto a chair, fiddling with my grapefruit, taking half-hearted sips of coffee, no Cokes, as usual.  She’d say, let’s go for a walk in the park.  No, I’ve got to get down to the Voice, got a story I’m working on.  No, you don’t, that’s the excuse you always give when you don’t want to spend time with me.  I had no answer for that.  She’d say, why don’t you just try staying here for a few days with me?  You won’t have to go back over to that…that barge where you live on the river.  Isn’t your friend still there living on the other end of the barge?  Can’t he take care of the cats and feed them?  All you have to do is call him and tell him you’re going to be gone for a few days.  He’ll take care of your cats.

What she said made perfect sense, but in my mind’s eye, all I could see was the downtown side of the 77^th Street subway station, the headlight of the train coming in the distance, doors opening, closing, train accelerating away from uptown, let me off at 14^th Street where there’s a diner I can get myself a Coke and a grilled cheese sandwich and walk over to the office on University Place. 

I don’t…I don’t know, I would stammer.

What do you take me for, a damn fool?  I know what you’d really like to do is be gone before I get up in the morning, sneak out of here and leave a cute little note on the coffee table telling me not to take this wrong, it’s just that I’ve got to be in Washington on a story by noon.  What a bunch of crap!  Do you treat all your women like fools?  Do you?  I shrugged.  Do you remember that night you came up here whimpering that someone had just ripped off your apartment on Avenue B, remember?

I remembered.

Do you remember what you said to me that night?   Well, do you?  You told me you want to live with me.  Remember that?  You were sick, you had the flu, you were running an insane temperature, your nose was running all down that buckskin jacket of yours, you were crying.  I held you that night, and you soaked my nightgown!  The next morning, I fixed you orange juice and I wanted you to stay in bed all day and get better, but you were up and out of here within an hour.  Don’t you realize that other people have feelings, too?  Damn you!  You’re just sitting there staring out my window.  Why don’t you say something.  Here, have some of my bacon.  Eat some breakfast, it will be good for you.

That was the problem.  Not only were her breakfasts good for me, she was good for me.  I suppose somewhere inside of me I did want to try living with her, even if it was just for a while.  But I knew it wouldn’t work, and she knew it, too.  Most of what I said to her, usually late at night, came out wrong.  Her face would get all screwed up, and she would go into the kitchen to fix herself a cup of Ovaltine and a sliced apple.  She called Ovaltine and a sliced apple her mother’s tranquilizer from watching her mother when she was a child.  She said once that she had told her shrink about her mother’s tranquilizer, but he didn’t understand.  And then she ranted and raved against doctors, who were third on her hate-list, behind lawyers and bankers, who were either first or second depending on what week it was.  Ovaltine and a sliced apple.  She was always trying to give it to me, but I drank her Scotch instead. 

She told me once that I was worse than her maid, who stole sips of Scotch when she came to clean a couple of days a week.  She complained to me about her maid all the time.  I’d get tired of listening and suggest that she should sit the maid down and tell her if she touched another drop of booze she’d be fired.  That would solve the Scotch sipping problem.  But you just can’t do that with a maid, she said, as if this were something anyone should understand.  Who said you can’t, I asked.  Mother said you can’t, she explained.

Sure enough, within a couple of weeks her mother had sent her an antique liquor storage cabinet, a mahogany box that sat on four carved legs with a locking top that held 12 one -quart bottles of liquor.  In went the bottles, down went the top locked up tight, and then she hid the key!  She wasn’t satisfied that she had succeeded in keeping the booze away from the maid, she had to start a new game with the hidden key.  Before, she would hide her best bottles of liquor, and now she hid the key.  So, one night, I asked her about it.  It is the way it has to be, she told me, holding her head straight up so I would be certain to see that she was making a statement.

Why don’t you just stick the key in your purse and walk out of the apartment and forget it?  You got the booze locked up.  Isn’t that what you wanted?

The drinking has nothing to do with it, she said, even more sure of herself now. Drinking is not the point.

What point?

Didn’t your Aunt Aggie teach you anything?  Mother always said that you have to establish yourself with the help.  You’ve got to let them know who is boss.

So, with your locked liquor cabinet and the hidden key, you’re establishing the rule that she doesn’t drink on the job.  What if she finds the key you have so carefully hidden?  What if she beats you at your own game?

She stood up, so angry she was shaking.  Oh, damn you!  I need you!  Can’t you understand that?  She paused, looking out the window down at 83rd Street. You’re probably right, I’ll get beaten at my own game.  Oh, damnit, you horrible creature!  I hate you!

Wait a minute, I said.  I’m not the one you should be mad at.  It’s your maid who’s sneaking your Scotch, not me.  I knew I was baiting her.  It’s what we did to each other, or what I did to her most of the time. 

She moved closer to me and took my hand and looked straight at me.  I’m not mad at you, Lucian.  Her voice was cracking, hoarse.  Can’t you see I’m angry with myself?