August 21, Sionnet, Long Island
Maybe seven months since I last took up this journal. In New York, days were much the same. No useful work, but not unhappy, exactly. Out a couple of times a week, with friends, or with W.’s friends: theater people, literary types, artists (see pages of the New York Review of Books for subjects, authors). At parties, always one sidling up to me, asking what he was really like, or maybe an opinion, how wonderful he was, I must be so proud. Well, I am proud.
My days blur together, but here for the anthropological record:
Residence?loft on Thomas Street in Tribeca, expensive, all the latest stuff, not ours, we are subletting from a friend of W.’s, who is off somewhere doing a film. W. does not like to be tied down to places and furnishings, and he likes that I am the same way. Birds of passage, us, nomad artists, although only he is an actual artist. Children would just tie us down. I lie abed late, stay up late, read mainly trash, or I watch TV with the sound on low. Often need a pill to put me under. I never dream.
Arising, prep. breakfast for me and W., words of greeting, some pleasantries. I do not ask him how it is going, and I make myself scarce. Unpleasant to be in the loft while he is working. Nervous vibration. I’m not his muse at all; in fact, his muse seems to dislike me.
A cab up to 62nd Street off Park, Doe Trust offices, someplace to go. Various tasks, mainly reading begging letters and reports and commenting on them for the trustees and my father; also help to run W.’s business affairs. Not a Lady Who Lunches, me. Try to keep up with the anthropological literature, I use the library at the American Museum of Natural History, and demonstrate to myself that I still have a profession. I don’t go there very much, as it makes me feel sad, or, if I think about it too hard, frightened. In the late p.m., I go back downtown and find W. He is usually at the Odeon, at the same table, and there are the usual downtown types hanging out with him, being brilliant and witty, and he makes a place for me and I slide in there, and the women look little darts at me when they think I am not looking, because they would like to be married to him but are not, and I am. Chattering we all drift over to some excellent and fashionable place to eat, Bouley or Chanterelle, for example, and we always get a table because places like that always have tables for people like us, and then we go to clubs and listen to music and people press tickets and invitations on us. Jesus, I am bored even writing this. Contrast and background to the more engaging now.
But sometimes I miss the long meaningless, leisurely afternoons. Sometimes W., for example, would not be at the Odeon, but up in his room, lounging on the daybed, with some dope or an open bottle, his work finished for the day, and I would join him for whatever substance and afterward a long lazy fuck before returning again to the lush life. Now, busy busy, studying Yoruba language and culture, organizing the logistics of the expedition for Greer. W. is enormously supportive, which I confess I worried a little about, as he has never seen me in high gear before, says it is like having an affair with a different woman.
Later, 8/21
Omitted the real reason I stopped writing here, which is that I discovered that W. was peeking. I never confronted him on it, cowardice I know, and what did it matter anyway, when you get down to it, one flesh and all, and I could have made a game of it, something to amuse us. If I were another woman. Or I could have become angry but I don’t like what my anger does to him, and after all, with all we have together, it’s a small thing. I just include it here, for the record. You can lie all you want in the published papers, but keep the journals honest. M. taught me that, and I took it seriously, although it might have been merely one more of his ironic comments. He said I had an underdeveloped sense of irony.
This journal is a new one, given to me by my father for our trip, God knows where he got it, but I love it. Several hundred unlined pages of the kind of thin all-rag paper they used to use for Bibles, bound in boards and protected with thick aluminum covers. These can be closed with a hasp that has a serious barrel lock on it. It will be my African field journal.
8/24 New York
Got our visas today, Nigeria, Mali, Benin, Gambia. Others pending. W. like a kid, showing his stamped passport off to waiters, people on the street. I’m also assembling gear for expedition, things people need in 3rd world. Tampons. Vitamins. Ciprofloxin. Imodium. A pound of Xanax. Lots of passport photos. Greer very helpful, been there lots of times. I want to call M., but can’t. Why? Who am I afraid of hurting? Him? W.? Myself?
W. unhelpful as ever, this time not his fault, he’s sick from shots. I am, as usual, not, which he seems to resent. People like to do things for him, however, and he has grown used to good service. I cosset him and give him materials on the Yoruba, which both of us find fascinating. He is reading the big Abrams art book, I am going through Bascom on Yoruba divination. I love them already: the artistic sensibility of quattrocento Italy melded with the religious passion of ancient Israel. Or maybe they are the closest survival into modern times of what the ancient Greeks must have been: artists in their blood and bone, warriors, close to the gods. Like the Greeks, too, they fought one another, the little kingdoms often at war, and subject to the depredations of the empires to the west and north, Fon and Hausa, and in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries their chief polities collapsed and hundreds of thousands of Yoruba became prisoners in local wars and were shipped to the plantations of Cuba, Haiti, America, and Brazil, in one last and remarkably homogeneous consignment of slaves. The survivals of African magical and religious practices in the New World?voudoun, candomble, Santeria?are all descended from the Yoruba, or secondarily from African nations influenced by the Yoruba.
This prep is very pleasant. No, more than pleasant. I am conscious of a deep happiness, something I have not felt for a long time, not, in fact, since I was a girl in the company of my father, not since our shipwreck, when everything went sour. And, I can confess now, I was not happy being Wife-Of. I find I need work, serious work that I’m good at. And also, while I’m confessing, it gives me a kick to be for once the senior member of the dyad. (I guess I was happy with M., but that was sort of a delirium I see now, a Gemisch of hot sex and hero worship, and which I understood at some level could not last.) Although I have to say that in our city life W. never made much of being the main guy. I fear that, his particular little tics aside, he is a more decent and generous person than I am.
9/2 Sionnet Labor Day
We drove out, a miserable trip on the expressway, instead of taking the Chris-Craft from City Island with Dad and Mary and her boyfriend. The misery of crawling traffic I have rationally estimated as being not as great as having W. puking his guts over the stern, so I drove the rental with reasonable grace, what I get for marrying a lubber. For his part, W. felt guilty, which he is not really very good at, he tends to get smarmy solicitous, which I can’t stand. We were a little tense therefore, but this got blown away when we passed the Walt Whitman Mall on the road to Huntington, and he did his usual parody, I Hear America Shopping, line after line, biting and hilarious, and this, I think, makes up for a lot of lost time on the water. W. loves Whitman, and he joked once that what tipped the scales for him asking me to marry him was when he found out that Walt had grown up just down the road from Sionnet, and apparently was in and out of the house all the time with my great-great-great-great-grandfather Matthew, who was his contemporary, and who remained a close friend all his life. Matthew Doe backed Walt’s newspaper and received in return signed copies of all his published work and a bunch of manuscripts. The manuscripts are in the Library of Congress, but we kept the books, and my dad gave W. for a wedding present an 1860 Blue Copy of Leaves of Grass, with Walt’s annotations in it, which knocked him out.
It was late afternoon before we arrived, and everyone was already out on the back terrace with drinks. My mother was there because Mary was there, because I doubt she would have changed her plans just to see me off for a year or two in Africa. Mary was her usual self, there is never anything new to say about Mary, she was fully formed at five years old. The boyfriend is new, however, and an improvement on the usual run. He is Dieter Von Schley, the photographer, very proper, blond and bony, lovely manners, a Prussian type, although he is actually from Cologne. A Catholic, too, remarkably, and not apparently a heroin addict like the last one. He and my dad are in love already, Dad has shown him the cars, amid much rolling of eyes by Mom and Mary. Dad looked unchanged, like the house. Mom unveiled the new face-lift, a Brazilian job, and I think she got taken, or maybe it is that her personality has been etched into her features so deeply that even a Brazilian surgeon can’t quite re-create the lovely Lily of yore. She must be pushing sixty now, although she has forbidden birthdays for decades. She has not piled up much treasure in heaven, I’m afraid, and little flashes of fear are starting to show.
W. did his part, having turned the charm up a couple of notches, retailing New York theater and celebrity gossip, and I was doing mine, which was keeping in the background. No one asked me anything about the Yoruba. Except, I must record, that W. was talking about the new production of O’Neill’s Moon for the Misbegotten and about the movie star, R.T., who’s in it, and who everyone knows is a total queen, and Mom said, “Ooh, I love him, he’s so sexy. What part does he play?” and I, with no thought at all, said, “He plays Miss Begotten.” Not exactly Wilde, I know, but W. cracked up anyway, and we had to explain it to Mary, and Mom frowned and gave me a stern little lecture on homophobia. W. thought that was funny, too, and made a joke out of it, another act of mercy added to his score.
Our Labor Day dinner was what it always was, the first oysters of the season and barbecued game hens; we are very traditional at Sionnet, and our big occasions invariably include oysters, upon which the family fortunes were originally founded. I do still have moments of bliss there, and this was one of them, sitting out on the north terrace, stuffed with good food and lounging in our soft and ratty wicker (the interval having arrived when Mom was drunk enough to be sentimentally nice to me and not drunk enough to start in on how I had ruined her life), and I was just reflecting that the only thing lacking was my brother’s presence, when Josey walked in. I leaped up and gave him a big slightly drunken barbecue-sauce kiss and fixed him a plate. He had flown in to MacArthur-Long Island on his Learjet, and come up in a limo, a very new-money thing to do. I know he loves me, but I think he pulls stunts like that to piss off Dad.
He had going-away presents for us, too: a GPS locator for me, of spectacular complexity, and for W. a pith helmet. Which I must say, W. accepted with good enough grace. Mary gave me an Hermcs scarf, something she no doubt got from a fashion shoot, but pretty all the same. Mom gave me a check, which is what she always gives me, and gave me from the age of about seven. Buy yourself something, honey. Dad gave me one of those universal tools, in a wash-leather bag. He was in heaven, of course, he lives for the moments when everyone is all together and reasonably content, and he got out the 1898 cognac and poured every one a thimbleful and made a very nice speech wishing us bon voyage, and noting that the date we were scheduled to leave, the fifth of September, was the anniversary of the first landfall of the Doe family in North America, and how proud he was of me and W. and how he hoped our journey would be as prosperous. It was a typical Dad speech, sentimental, a little embarrassing, but lovable.
After which Mary, with her unerring instinct for seizing at any moment the center of attention, spoke up and said that she and Dieter had decided to get married. Which meant Dad would get his St. Patrick’s wedding after all, and Mom would be able to throw the party of the year, and I would, of course, miss it, which I guess made it perfect from her point of view and Mary’s.
Later, in our room, I let myself fall apart. W. comforted me, now that I think about it, rather in the way Josey used to do. And I am not comforted, although profoundly grateful as I nevertheless sink into my usual slough of self-contempt. So Mommy doesn’t love me, get over it, Jane, you’re a grown-up now, and so on, what a wretch you are, you have everything, everything! As my brother says, dial 1-800-BOOHOO. We are in my old room, my girlhood room, with the worn provincial furniture, my girlhood bed, too, which is a little narrow for the two of us, and when I have stopped the disgusting weepies he gives me a good one, and I make a lot of noise, more than necessary, to tell the truth, to alert the house that despite them I am happy.
I am counting the days, I am so glad to be leaving this scene, the arty city, the family drama. That’s the truth, M.