It was around this time that the so-called nosebleed incident occurred. One morning Nancy rose later than usual, went into
Ben’ room to make his bed, and found the sheets and walls spattered with blood. In a panic she threw a coat over her nightgown
and rushed over to the high school, where she tracked Ben down in his gym class, one of two dozen boys waiting to throw a
basketball at a hoop. And there she pounced on him, at once relieved that he was alive and furious that he had given her such
a scare. It turned out that during the night he had had a nosebleed (he was prone to them), woken, sneezed blood all over
the wall and bedclothes, and fallen back asleep. Then in the morning he had dressed in the dark and left without even realizing
what had happened. And now here was his mother, a harridan in pink slippers and a raincoat, a scarf tied over her hair, hurling
herself at him in front of a group of boys who would never forget what they had witnessed, or let him forget it.
Years later, when he was famous and people cared about his life, he described the incident. In a memoir titled
The
Eucalyptus,
he wrote: “My mother’ intrusive arrival at the school that morning merely confirmed what I already suspected: that she was
a meddler and an hysteric. At the same time, it opened my eyes to a certain ferocity in her character of which I had so far
only caught glimpses. Later she told me that it was my brother as much as me of whom she was thinking, when she switched on
the light in my bedroom and saw all that blood: Mark, his body bullet-riddled, or dismembered, in some remote theater of war.
And so, as she put on her coat that morning, she made a vow to God that if I were to be spared, she would devote the rest
of her life to the protection of her children. And I was spared. And yet it was a fatal pact, because by making it, she was
effectively telling us that our safety mattered more to her than our loving her, or feeling that she loved us; that she would
rather have us safe at a great remove than at danger near her.
“I now see that the reason I myself decided never to have children is because I knew I could never be as selfless as my mother.”
I
T WAS A Saturday morning near the end of October 1969.1 was sitting next to Nancy at the piano when the telephone rang. As
was her habit, she jumped up to answer it, in case it was Mark, calling collect from Vancouver. But it was not Mark. It was
Anne Boyd. I could tell, because after the initial “Hello,” Nancy’ voice rose into a girlish squeal that meant pleasure greater
than anything I could induce. “Annie, Annie!” she cried—and pulled the phone, which had a long cord, into the study.
I got up from the piano. The realization that for the moment, at least, my services would not be needed filled me with a giddy
sense of freedom, as if school had been canceled for the day. So I puttered around the living room, flicking dust off the
nesting tables and repositioning the cushion that covered Dora’ pee stain on the leather chair, all the while listening in
on Nancy’ half of the conversation. “Oh, but that’ wonderful! What do you mean? Don’t be ridiculous, of course you can stay
with us. Now, Anne, I don’t want to hear another word about it. You’ll stay here and that’ final. No, I don’t even want to
hear the word ‘hotel’. . . Good. When will you get in? We’ll pick you up at the airport. Okay, if you’d rather . . . But how
will you know how to find the house? I’m hopeless with directions, you’d better have Clifford—I mean Jonah—call back when
Ernest’ here. Oh, Annie, I’m sorry about that. Will you ever forgive me? I’m just so used to your husband being Clifford!
Tell Jonah I’m dying to meet him. We all are. Annie, I can’t wait to see you, it’ been so long . . . Yes, have him call tonight.
Ernest should be back by seven. Right. We’ll be waiting. Bye.”
She hung up. “Denny, you’ll never believe it,” she said, sweeping back into the living room. “That was Anne Armstrong. I mean,
Anne Boyd. I haven’t head from her in a year. And now guess what? She and her husband—her new husband—are coming for Thanksgiving.”
“Really? How wonderful.”
“Yes, isn’t it?” Nancy’ hands flew to her face. “Oh, but there’ so much to do! I mean, this man she’ married—this Jonah Boyd—he’
a published writer. We’ve got to put him up in the style to which he’ accustomed.”
I was tempted to ask why she thought that published writers would be accustomed to any particular kind of style, then thought
better of it, and followed her into Daphne’ room. It was the first time I’d ever been in there. With a queenly gesture, Nancy
flung open the curtains, letting through a slant of late morning light that exposed the moss green carpeting, a double bed
with a rumpled floral coverlet. Along one wall were bracketed bookshelves on one of which Ayn Rand’
Atlas Shrugged
elbowed an assortment of high school textbooks. On another was Daphne’ collection of frog figurines. Two posters—a psychedelic
peace sign and the cover of Bob Dylan’
Blonde on Blonde
album—had been thumbtacked to the wall. Below them lay a heap of stuffed animals and dirty clothes. “Oh, well, I suppose it
will have to do,” Nancy said, putting her hands on her hips and surveying the wreckage. “Of course, Daph will have to clear
away all of her crap.” She tossed a pink elephant onto the pile, then sat down on the bed. “Oh, but this mattress! Feel it!”
I sat down next to her. I felt.
“The springs are shot. And these sheets! I’ll have to buy a new bed, that’ all there is to it. And new bed linens. You know
the reason they’re coming—he’ supposed to give a lecture up in San Francisco. Someone else was supposed to give it, some very
famous poet, but the poet went into a drunk tank, and they asked the husband—Jonah Boyd—to take his place. Now why do you
think she wants to visit? Does she miss me? I hope nothing’ wrong. They’ll fly into LAX Thanksgiving morning, drive over,
stay two nights, and then on Saturday head up north, stopping for a few days at Big Sur on the way. And the best part is,
Anne and I will have plenty of time to play. Finally we can take another crack at the Grand Duo.”
I pretended both surprise and pleasure. It was obvious that Nancy needed a sounding board for her fretfulness and planning
impulses; also an assistant in what was clearly going to be a redecoration project of considerable scope. And so that very
afternoon, along with Daphne—whose outrage at being thrown out of her room Nancy had managed to quell, somewhat, by promising
to let her to pick out the sheets—I was taken to Macy’, first to the furniture department, where Nancy arranged for immediate
delivery of a new Serta Perfect Sleeper, and then to the whites department, where Daphne, after much debate, settled on a
set of “Vera” sheets decorated with bright orange sunsets and blue rainbows in the style of Peter Max. Here the trouble began.
Nancy didn’t like the sheets. She worried that Boyd—a novelist, after all—would mock them in one of his books, follow a description
of their psychedelic gaudiness with some insulting witticism, something like, “I had to wear sunglasses to bed.” For Nancy,
in addition to biographies of crowned heads, was an avid consumer of novels in which adulterous men and women parried rude
remarks over martinis, and though she had not yet read any of Jonah Boyd’ novels, she took it for granted that they would
fit into this category. “Really, honey, couldn’t we get something more subdued?” she asked Daphne, who had inherited her mother’
stubbornness, if not her taste.
“But you said
I
could choose!” Daphne said. “You promised. After all, these people are only going to sleep on them two nights. But I have
to sleep on them practically the rest of my life!”
In the end, to avoid a public scene, Nancy gave in on the sheets. Bags in tow, we hastened back to Florizona Avenue, where
we found Ernest and Glenn in the study, smoking cigars and listening to Mahler’ Fifth Symphony on the HarmonKardon stereo.
Glenn and Daphne greeted each other with the studied casualness of people who don’t want anyone to guess they’ve recently
been in bed together; I could tell, because that was just how Ernest and I greeted each other.
As no dinner invitation appeared to be in the offing, I said my good-byes and went home. Back then I still lived in a one-bedroom
apartment on Orechusetts Drive. My complex—essentially a stucco rectangle with views of the 420 freeway—was called Eaton Manor.
Nearby were Cavendish Hall, Hampton Estates, and Chatsworth Court. Most of my neighbors were fellow secretaries, some of whom
were also having affairs with their bosses. On Sunday afternoons, Ford LTDs and Oldsmobile Cutlasses filled the parking lot,
taking up the empty spaces between the Chevy Novas and Dodge Darts. At this point, my relationship with Ernest had not yet
settled into the durable bond that would later prove so sustaining for us both; it was still an off-and-on thing, fretful
and fitful. Some Sunday afternoons he would arrive unannounced at my door, pinion me to the wall or push me onto the bed,
where we would make rough love. Afterward I would give him tea or Coca-Cola, and we’d look at the television until dusk fell,
when he’d leave with as few words as he had come, and I’d move to the window, to watch his car pull out of the parking lot
and imagine what, back on Florizona Avenue, Nancy was up to: feeding the cat, or baking a ham, or knitting. I admit that at
those moments I envied Ernest, with Dame Carcas to have to hurry home to.
Much has changed in the field of psychoanalysis during the years since Ernest practiced it in the office above his garage.
Freud is no longer totemic, and today, if a therapist were to say to his patient, “Well, it’ obvious: Even though it was the
husband you were having the affair with, the one you were in love with was the wife,” the patient, though she might agree
or disagree, would hardly be shocked. And yet at the time, such an idea wouldn’t even have occurred to Ernest, not because
he rejected lesbianism as a category, but because he had yet to conceive of a universe in which men didn’t always stand at
the very center. Thus he would never have guessed that as I had sat next to Nancy on Daphne’ bed that afternoon, a longing
had swept through me which I could hardly articulate but which I now recognize to have been something akin to desire. Of course,
it never would have occurred to me to try to kiss Nancy, or even embrace her. Nor, I suspect, would she have tolerated such
advances. Still, the feeling was there, mixed up strangely with my daughterly adoration. This was what drove me back to that
house every Saturday, despite the abuse I had to endure. Since then, of course, I have known my own fair share of amorous
adventure, I have been loved by several good men (Ernest among them) and in at least one case experienced a love far deeper
than anything I ever felt for Nancy. So why is it that today I keep dreaming about that afternoon on Daphne’ bed? What is
it that I wanted to happen? Why is her voice—of which I have only a memory—so sharp and distinct in my head, and why, when
I wake up in the middle of the night, am I tormented by her particular and peculiar smell of cigarettes and cooking and the
perfume she wore only on special occasions, such as Thanksgiving, with notes of cassia and anise and bearing a name that would
forever after connote, for me, that remote and lacquered world of womanhood in which she and Anne had spent such easy days,
and which I could never penetrate—
Apres I’Ondee?
The day before Thanksgiving Nancy called and asked if I could stop by after work to help her get the house ready for the Boyds.
I readily agreed. The pleasure of holidays, it has often seemed to me, is mostly anticipatory, which is perhaps why, today,
I recall those hours that I spent cleaning and cooking with Nancy, scrubbing the bathtub while she ironed the “Vera” sheets
and made the bed, with a far greater fondness than I do the dinner itself. She was in a euphoria of planning. Already she
had hounded Daphne into putting away everything that gave her room a sense of identity. Gone were the books, the frog figurines,
the posters. Two drawers had been emptied and part of the closet cleared. Her mother’ orders Daphne obeyed flatly and without
protest, since they fed a resentment the cultivation of which, at this stage in her life, was one of her principal occupations.
With the pitiless dispassion of adolescence, of the child who believes that
she
will never make the mistakes that dog her elders, Daphne observed her mother as she went about the onerous routine of constructing
a Active guest room, a stage set to last only two nights. Ben watched too, though with greater empathy: Although he would
not be leaving home for two years, already he had begun composing a poem of farewell, in which the protagonist, from the vantage
point of his Wellspring dorm room, regards with smug compassion the spectacle of his mother at the supermarket, buying his
favorite treats and then bursting into tears upon the realization that he will no longer be home to eat them. I know this
because, several weeks later, he read the poem aloud to us. “Isn’t he gifted?” Nancy asked, her eyes on the music desk.
As the afternoon wore away, Nancy grew more nervous. What would Anne look like? she wondered. Would she have quit smoking,
gained weight, lost weight? “I wonder why she decided to come,” Nancy said at the piano. “I mean, why she
really
decided to come. What do you think, Denny?”
“To see you, of course.”
“Is that it, though? Is that all?”
We retreated to the kitchen, where we washed vegetables and tore up bread for the stuffing. It was now becoming clear that
as much as it excited her, the prospect of Anne’ visit also filled Nancy with dread. She confided that every time the phone
rang, part of her hoped that it would be Anne, calling to cancel—"because then, at the very least, I wouldn’t have to deal
with any of it. The awkwardness, and having to explain about Mark, and the new husband.” What if the old connection no longer
surged? What if, on reuniting, she and Anne felt nothing, or worse
(was
it worse?) felt
too
much—a tug of longing so intense it could engender only sorrow, given how rarely they were now able to see each other? In
the first case, she would greet Anne’ departure with relief, in the second with regret, in both with an inconsolable ache
of loss.
She did not sleep well that night (or so she told me the next morning). I came over early, and together we stuffed the turkey,
taking care to adjust the thermometer before arranging it in its pan. Into the oven the bird went. Nancy took off her apron;
lit a cigarette. She was harrowed by anxiety, while I, on the contrary, felt rising in me the richest flush of pleasure. That
morning was the apogee of my love for Nancy, a love the name of which I dared not speak, and which I had tried, ironically,
to consummate through my affair with her husband. Later I grew to love Ernest for himself; that Thanksgiving, he was an irrelevance.
It was Nancy with whom I was besotted, and the passionate suitor, as all passionate suitors know, is profoundly selfish. How
I longed for her to weep, just so that I could kiss away her tears! No matter that what preoccupied her was another love,
no matter that I was as irrelevant to her, at that moment, as Ernest was to me! This was my chance to prove myself. So I bustled
about, chopping carrots, setting the table, as effervescent as Daphne was sullen. I even took care, for once, to load the
dishwasher to Nancy’ exact specifications, and was disappointed when, rather than peering inside to make sure I’d misarranged
the plates, she slammed the door shut and switched the thing on without a word—when for once I had done a perfect job!
It was close to one o’clock. Nancy was basting the turkey for the umpteenth time. Dinner was scheduled for four, with the
other guests invited for three. The Boyds’ flight had landed, on time, at ten-thirty (Nancy had checked with TWA), which meant
that they should have arrived in Wellspring at twelve-fifteen. Ernest was sequestered in his office above the garage. Ben
and Daphne were playing Scrabble at the tulip table. Already Mark had made his mournful holiday call; tears had been shed
at his description of Vancouver going about its regular business, an ordinary weekday in Canada, which he and some of his
fellow draft dodgers were going to try to make more cheerful by preparing a little feast of their own, with a soy loaf in
the shape of a turkey. The memory of that call must have touched some nerve of maternal affection in Nancy, for now she stole
up behind Ben and rubbed his shoulders.