Winter Journal

  16. 252 Millis Road; Stanfordville, New York. A white, two-story house in northern Dutchess County. Construction date unknown, but neither new nor particularly old, which would suggest sometime between 1880 and 1910. Half an acre of land, with a vegetable garden in back, a dark, pine-shaded yard in front, and a small patch of woods between your property and the one to the south. A worn-out but not altogether decrepit place, something to be improved on over time if sufficient funds were available, with a living room, dining room, kitchen, and guest room/study on the ground floor and three bedrooms upstairs. Purchase price: $35,000. One of several houses on a rural side road with moderate traffic. Not the extreme isolation of Provence, but a life in the country for all that, and if you never ran into altruistic dentists or left-wing farmers, your neighbors on Millis Road were kind, solid citizens, many of them young couples with small children, all of whom you came to know to one degree or another, but what you remember best about your Dutchess County neighbors are the tragedies that took place in those houses, the twenty-eight-year-old woman who came down with M.S., for example, or the grieving middle-aged couple next door whose twenty-five-year-old daughter had died of cancer within the past year, the mother now reduced to skin and bone from a steady diet of gin and her tender husband doing his best to prop her up, so much suffering behind the locked doors and drawn shades of those houses, and among those houses your own house must be included as well. Age 30 to 31. A bleak time, without question the bleakest time you have ever gone through, brightened only by the birth of your son in June 1977. But that was the place where your first marriage broke apart, where you were overwhelmed by constant money problems (as described in Hand to Mouth), and you came to a dead end as a poet. You don’t believe in haunted houses, but when you look back on that time now, you feel that you were living under an evil spell, that the house itself was partly to blame for the troubles that descended on you. For many decades before you moved in, the owners had been a pair of unmarried sisters, German-Americans named Stemmerman, and by the time you bought the place from them, they were exceedingly old, in their late eighties or early nineties, one blind and the other deaf, and both had been in a nursing home for close to a year. A neighbor who lived a couple of doors down the road handled the negotiations for them—a vivacious woman who had been born in Cuba, was married to a quiet American auto mechanic, and collected glass figurines of elephants (!?)—and she told you a number of stories about the notorious Stemmerman sisters, who apparently hated each other and had been locked in mortal combat since childhood, the two of them bound together for life and yet bitter enemies to the last, who were known to engage in such loud, vicious quarrels that their voices could be heard up and down the length of Millis Road. When the neighbor started talking about how the deaf sister would punish the blind sister by locking her in the downstairs closet, you couldn’t help conjuring up scenes from Gothic novels and remembering that tacky black-and-white movie with Bette Davis and Joan Crawford from the early sixties. How amusing, you thought, a couple of grotesque and crazy characters, but that’s all in the past now, you and your pregnant wife would be bringing youth and vigor to the old house, and everything was about to change—all the while neglecting to consider that the Stemmermans had lived there for fifty or sixty years, perhaps seventy or eighty years, and that every inch of the house was impregnated with their malevolent spirits. You actually met the deaf sister one day at the Cuban woman’s house (she nearly choked to death trying to drink a cup of tepid coffee), but she seemed benign enough to you, and you didn’t give the matter another thought. Then you moved in, and in those early days of cleaning and rearranging furniture (some of which came with the house), you and your first wife pulled an armoire away from the wall in the upstairs hallway and found a dead crow on the floor behind it—a long-dead crow, utterly desiccated but intact. No, that wasn’t amusing, not amusing at all, and even though you both tried to laugh it off, you went on thinking about that dead bird for months afterward, that dead black bird, the classic omen of bad tidings. The next morning, you discovered two or three boxes of books on the back porch, and because you were curious to see if anything was worth holding on to, you opened the boxes. One by one, you pulled out pamphlets from the John Birch Society, paperback books about the Communist plot to infiltrate the United States government, several volumes about the fluoride conspiracy to brainwash American children, pro-Nazi tracts published in English before the war, and then, most disturbing of all, a copy of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, the book of books, the most repellent and influential defense of anti-Semitism ever written. You had never thrown away a book, had never been tempted to throw away a book, but these books you threw away, driving the boxes to the town dump and purposefully shoving them under a mound of rotting garbage. It wasn’t possible to live in a house with such books in it. You hoped that would be the end of the story, but even after you got rid of the books, it still wasn’t possible to live there. You tried, but it simply wasn’t possible.

  17. 6 Varick Street; Manhattan. One room on the top floor of a ten-story industrial building in what is now known as Tribeca. A sub-sublet, passed on to you by the sometime girlfriend of a childhood friend of yours. One hundred dollars a month for the privilege of camping out in a former electrical supply office, a gutted shell not meant for human habitation, which until recently had served as a storage room for the artist’s loft across the hall. A cold-water sink, but no bath, toilet, or kitchen facilities. Living conditions not unlike those in your maid’s room on the rue du Louvre in Paris, but this room was three or four times larger than that one—as well as three or four times dirtier. Age 32. Before landing there in early 1979, a whirlwind of shocks, sudden changes, and inner upheavals that turned you around and set your life on a different course. With nowhere to go and no money to finance a move even if you had known where to go, you stayed on in the Dutchess County house after the breakup of your marriage, sleeping on the sofa bed in the corner of your downstairs study, which you now realize (thirty-two years later) had been your bed as a child. A couple of weeks later, on a trip down to New York, you experienced the revelation, the scalding, epiphanic moment of clarity that pushed you through a crack in the universe and allowed you to start writing again. Three weeks after that, immersed in the prose text you had begun immediately after your resuscitation, your liberation, your new beginning, the unexpected hammer blow of your father’s death. To your first wife’s infinite credit, she stuck with you through the dismal days and weeks that followed, the ordeal of funeral arrangements and estate matters, disposing of your father’s neckties, suits, and furniture, taking care of the sale of his house (which had already been in the works), standing by you through all the wrenching, practical business that follows death, and because you were no longer married, or married in name only, the pressures of marriage had been lifted, and once again you were friends, much as you had been in your early days together. You started writing the first part of The Invention of Solitude. By the time you moved to Varick Street in early spring, you were well into it.

  18. 153 Carroll Street; Brooklyn. A railroad flat on the third floor of a four-story building near Henry Street. Age 33 to 34. Three rooms, sit-down kitchen, and bathroom. The bedroom, overlooking the street in front, was large enough to fit in a double bed for yourself and a single bed for your son (the same sofa bed you had used as a child and which you had now reclaimed after the sale of the house in Stanfordville). Two middle rooms, one without windows, which you converted into a makeshift study, the other the living room (one window overlooking the garden), followed by the kitchen (one window) and the bathroom in back—tawdry and rundown, yes, but a big step up from where you had been living before. You lost the place on Varick Street in January 1980 (the artist was giving up his loft), and when Manhattan rents proved to be too steep for an apartment that could accommodate both you and your two-and-a-half-year-old son (who spent three days a week with you), you crossed the East River and began searching in Brooklyn. Why ha
dn’t you thought of this in 1976? you wondered. Surely this was a better solution than trekking one hundred miles to the north and buying a haunted house in Dutchess County, but the fact was that Brooklyn had never even crossed your mind back then, for New York was Manhattan and Manhattan only, and the outer boroughs were as alien to you as the distant countries of Oceania or the Arctic Circle. You wound up in Carroll Gardens, a self-enclosed Italian neighborhood where most people went out of their way to make you feel unwelcome, treating you with suspicion and silent stares, as if you were an intruder in their midst, an estranger, even if you could have passed for Italian yourself, but no doubt there was something wrong with you, the way you dressed, perhaps, or the way you moved, or simply the look in your eyes. Again and again for almost two years, walking down Carroll Street on the way to your apartment with the old women sitting on the stoops of their houses, cutting off their conversations when you were within earshot of them, watching you pass without a word, and the men standing around with nothing in their eyes, or else looking under the hoods of their cars, examining the engines of those cars with such persistence and dedication that they reminded you of philosophers in search of some ultimate truth about human existence, and the only time you ever received a nod from the women was when you were walking down that street with your son, your little blond-haired son, but otherwise you were a phantom, a man who was not there because he had no business being there. Fortunately, the owners of your building, John and Jackie Caramello, a couple in their early thirties who lived in the garden apartment on the bottom floor, were affable and friendly and never displayed the slightest resentment toward you, but they were your contemporaries, and they were no longer grinding the axes of their parents’ generation. Joey Gallo’s aunt lived on your block, there were the social clubs around the corner on Henry Street where the old-timers hung out during the day, and if Carroll Gardens was known as the safest neighborhood in the city, it was because it was ruled by an undercurrent of violence, the retaliatory violence and ethics of the mob. Black people steered clear of this well-guarded enclave, knowing they would be risking danger if they set foot within its borders, an unwritten law you might not have understood if you hadn’t seen it executed with your own eyes, walking down Court Street one day in the brightness of an autumn afternoon, when a rangy black kid carrying a boom box on the other side of the street was jumped by three or four white teenagers, who pummeled him, bloodied him, and smashed his radio against the sidewalk, and before you could intervene the black kid was staggering away, stumbling forward, and then starting to run as the white kids shouted nigger at him and warned him never to come back. Another time, you did have a chance to intervene. A Sunday afternoon in late spring, walking down Carroll Street toward the subway station on Smith, when you stopped for a couple of minutes to watch a roller-skate hockey game being played on the asphalt surface of Carroll Park and saw, hanging on the chain-link fence that surrounded the park, a large red, white, and black Nazi banner. You went into the park, found the sixteen-year-old boy who had put it up (the equipment manager of one of the teams), and told him to take it down. Perplexed, not at all understanding why you would ask him to do such a thing, he listened to you explain what the banner represented, and when he heard you talk about the evils of Hitler and the slaughter of innocent millions, he looked genuinely embarrassed. “I didn’t know,” he said. “I just thought it looked cool.” Rather than ask him where he had been all his life, you waited until he had removed the banner and then continued walking to the subway. Still, Carroll Gardens was not without its advantages, the food in particular, the bakeries, the pork stores, the watermelon man riding through the neighborhood with his horse-drawn wagon in the summer, the coffee roasted on-site at D’Amico’s and the blast of sharp, beautiful smells that assaulted you whenever you walked into that shop, but Carroll Gardens was also the place where you asked the single most stupid question of your adult life. You were upstairs in your apartment one afternoon, at work on the second half of The Invention of Solitude in your windowless study, when a great clamor of voices rose up from the street outside. You went downstairs to see what was going on, and the whole block was out in force, clusters of men and women were standing in front of their houses, twenty excited conversations were going on at once, and there was your landlord, the burly John Caramello, parked on the stoop of the building where you both lived, calmly surveying the commotion. You asked him what was wrong, and he told you that a man who had just been let out of prison had been breaking into empty houses and apartments along the block and stealing things—jewelry, silverware, anything of value he could put his hands on—but he had been caught before he could get away. That was when you asked your question, uttering the famous words that proved you were an out-and-out dunce who still understood nothing about the little world in which you happened to be living. “Did you call the police?” John smiled. “Of course not,” he said. “The boys beat the shit out of him, broke his legs with baseball bats, and threw him into a taxi. He won’t be back in this neighborhood again—not if he wants to go on breathing.” So much for your early days in Brooklyn, where you have been living for thirty-one years now, and in that transitional period of your life, beginning with the breakup of your marriage and your father’s death, the nine months on Varick Street and the first eleven months in Carroll Gardens, a time marked by nightmares and inner struggle, alternating between fits of hope and no hope, tumbling into the beds of various women, women you tried to love and almost loved but couldn’t, certain you would never marry again, working on your book, on your translations of Joubert and Mallarmé, on your mammoth anthology of twentieth-century French poetry, taking care of your confused and sometimes embattled three-year-old son, and with so many things happening to you at once, which included the near-fatal cardiac arrest of your mother’s second husband just ten days after your father’s funeral, the vigils in the hospital six months later as you watched over your grandfather’s rapid decline and death, it was probably inevitable that your body should go haywire again, this time with a pounding heart, an irregular heart that would suddenly and inexplicably speed up inside your chest, the bouts of tachycardia that would take hold of you at night just as you were falling asleep, or wake you up just after you had fallen asleep, either alone in the room with your son or lying next to the sleeping bodies of Ann or Françoise or Ruby, the frantically beating heart that would echo inside your head with a percussiveness so loud and insistent you thought the noises were coming from somewhere in the room, a thyroid condition as you eventually found out, which had thrown your system entirely out of whack and for which you had to take pills for two or three years. Then, on February 23, 1981, twenty days after your thirty-fourth birthday, just four days after her twenty-sixth birthday, you met her, you found yourself being introduced to the One, the woman who has been with you ever since that night thirty years ago, your wife, the grand love that ambushed you when you were least expecting it, and in the first weeks you were together, when much of your time was spent in bed, you developed a ritual of reading fairy tales to each other, something you went on doing until your daughter was born six years later, and not long after you discovered the intimate pleasures of reading to each other in this way, your wife wrote a long prose poem entitled Reading to You, the fourteenth and last part of which evokes the erratic beating of your heart and is set in the bedroom of your third-floor apartment at 153 Carroll Street: The cruel father sends the stupid boy into the woods to be killed, but the murderer cannot do it and lets him go, bringing back a deer’s heart to the father instead, and this boy speaks to the dogs and the frogs and the birds and in the end the doves whisper into his ears, the words of the mass, the repetitions over and over into his ears, and somewhere else I whisper into your ears, messages, messages from me to you, about the back of your knees and the inside of your elbows and the impression above your upper lip, from me to you even if you are now away. I whisper like the birds in the story I read to you, repetitions in the room where
you took me. The parts are the same, but changing, always in movement, altering imperceptibly like the expression on your face from a smile to seriousness leaning over me in the thin light. So I wish you a story in the reading of it, in the writing of it. We inherit stories, too, conditions, faces, hearts, bladders, weak and stricken. His heart has water around it, drowning, the sick heart, the heart sick, the stricken part, the beat measured in you that is sometimes too fast so you take pills to make it slower, to make it right and rhythmic, not random and slipping like other things. I wish you a story in bed where they hang the moon after the old men die so it shines forever on top of you, and will not stop even if it does not have its own light, but is borrowed and cyclic. I will take the moon, the borrowing and stealing and changing from large to small. The tiniest moon, thin and weak behind a cloud in winter is the view I choose.