Venice Part Two

As for my daughter… Our visits continued for a while according to the old arrangement, but shortly after a dreadful article about Art appeared in Rolling Stone, I got a call from Barrett, my ex. In a rush permitting no interruption, he said, "I just want to tell you that we're moving, in two days, to New Jersey. You can say goodbye to Maggie tomorrow at Mae's house." A goodbye party had been hastily arranged. He hung up.

I called my lawyer who said I couldn't stop them. He guessed that this last minute notification and the party during which we'd be surrounded by people was to forestall any kidnap attempt on my part. That would never have occurred to me.

The Rolling Stone piece was written at her instigation by my cousin Evie's Boyfriend at that time, a schmuck named Grover Lewis. Charming and lethal, he cozied up to me and Art and then implied in what he wrote that Art was loaded on heroin during the interview. And what he said Art said had not much to with what he did say. Grover called up the night before the piece came out. He was drunk, incoherent, and crying. He apologized and said his editor had pushed him for a "darker" piece. After this, Evie told me blandly, quoting somebody or other, that "Journalists are always selling somebody out."

The piece inflamed Jeanne and Barrett's ongoing paranoia, and Barrett seized upon a job in Princeton. They sold their house for not enough money and hightailed it to the East, to a life they later said they hated in order to escape me and the monster they read about in Rolling Stone.

Evie owed me. So to this party, at my encouragement, she invited some of her flashier friends, a hot young female singer, some actors. Our guess (correct) was that Jeanne and Barrett would be so dazzled by these stars, they'd hover less, and I could get quiet a moment with my child.

It worked. While Jeanne and Barrett stood, rapt, at the piano listening to Ronee Blakeley sing, I grabbed Maggie's hand and took her upstairs where I told her I loved her and would miss her and gave her a tiny heartshaped pendant I'd bought for myself at thirteen and had been wearing ever since.

And then we heard ol' Jeanne come thumping up the stairs, screaming and hysterical, "Margaret! Margaret!" And there she was: Big, bug-eyed, out of breath and white-faced in the doorway of the room we sat in.

Oh well. I was not the demon Jeanne took me for, but I was a rotten mother. And Jeanne was not such a good one, as I was to learn, but she was there. I hadn't been. I wasn't.

After this I had no distractions from the work I'd undertaken and nothing to prevent me from being consumed by Art.

I established a routine with him. We met at my house on our lunch breaks. He drank ale, smoked and talked. I listened, questioned, prodded. I'd got him going chronologically, starting with who his parents were and how they met. As I said, his initial enthusiasm waned quickly. At the time, unperceptive me, I just thought he was lazy. Much later I realized that Art brought to each session his complicated, exhausting compulsion to perfect artistry. Art was never careless or casual in anything he did -- least of all in this matter of his immortality.

(Oh, dear. What will happen to me in this memoir now that Art is fully in the picture? Now that I feel myself, as usual, both swamped by him and lifted, like a swimmer in a big wave? I guess I'll just have to keep myself in view.)

Anyway, he drank a lot at these sessions and sometimes was clearly wrecked by more potent substances. He got loaded because he liked it and also to hush the constant self-critical voices in his head and the doubt in his heart. These cripplers were constant with him and later I saw how they operated when he performed his music. He dismissed his best work when he was sober but delighted in less exciting stuff when high.

As we worked, I got to understand what was distancing him from me as I watched him nod out in mid-sentence. It was excruciatingly angering. I wanted to kill him at those times. I found him repulsive and stupid. I'd watch his cigarette ash lengthen and drop onto my madras-draped overstuffed chair or onto his pants. From my reclining position on the floor, in the middle of my notes, notebooks, my own cigarettes and ashtray and coffee, I'd call his name or kick at his foot and marvel at his smooth, practiced surfacing. He'd continue the sentence he'd drifted off in, sometimes logically. He'd tip his cigarette automatically into the ashtray even if it was too late, glance, and brush away the fallen ash. On those tapes I hear his standard alibi, "I'm just tired, baby," and my snide, "Yeah, yeah," or my nagging, and I wince. I don't know who I disliked most at those moments, Art with his defensive whiney lying, or me, the purse-lipped, persistent shrew.

Years later, I was able to get a handle on what enraged me at those times. It was as if he had willfully taken away the man I knew and replaced him with some vaguely similar mumbly asshole, and the infuriating part was that the asshole appeared to think I was so stupid I wouldn't notice the switch. When I understood what was causing my pain, I managed to distance myself. I gave the asshole other names. Arthur, spelled backwards, was the boozy nodder, "Ruhtra." "Reppep" was, with Art's inevitable discovery of cocaine, the speedy one.

In '72, though, I just got mad, but bit my tongue. I was obsessed with the book, and Art became obsessed with me again, and no wonder. I was a sympathetic, insightful, eager listener, filled with wonder for what he told me and how he told it. It was made clear to him on a daily basis that absolutely nothing interested me as much as he did. I frequently cooked for him, worried about his health, his moods, and delighted in his lovemaking -- though, now that drugs were in the picture, sex, for him, was less compelling, and that was a disappointment, making me grumpy. And grumpier, still when I acknowledged that my occasional sexual frustration, like my jealousy, was a blemish on the supposed perfection of my intentions So I kept quiet, and demanded nothing of him, really, but that he show up, remain conscious, and tell his story.

I didn't depend on Art for my social life. My cousin, Mirandi, and I renewed our friendship. We had lunch together, went to movies and for walks and gossiped endlessly. And I still loved to be alone. Synanon hadn't knocked that out of me.

I can enjoy a meal at a restaurant with just a book for company, and I'm puzzled by people who can't. I can go for long walks, stopping for occasional exchanges with strangers. On my walks in Venice, I brought my camera, shooting color; that was new for me. But, "Junior," Art's mother told me once, "always was one to run everything into the ground." (I told Art I would put that on his tombstone). Art demanded more, always, of anything.

He wanted more of me. He was sick of living with Bob and Nikki. He wanted us to get married. He wanted to move in.

I liked things as they were. My place was mine. Over my bed on the white painted lath that was my wall, I'd carefully thumbtacked a complete collection of snapshots from my life. Me, at 7 in a New York winter, bundled in a coat and hat, grimacing toothlessly at the feet of Peter Stuyvesant. My mother -- in brightly fading overexposed color -- on our subsequent journey West. Tanned and rested in the desert in turquoise beads, a peasant blouse. My daughter. My cousins. Laid out like overlapping tiles, here was a map of me. I didn't want Art moving in, and it wasn't just because of the smoking, drinking, and drugs -- good reasons; the ones I gave him. I'd been forced to cohabit for three and a half years with crowds of certifiable crazies, and I wanted a room of my own. I wasn't to have it. Not then.