David Gates: A Hand Reached Down to Guide Me

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When I came back to work after the holiday, my husband was typing in his cubicle. I found the note I’d written him my under my keyboard, with a Post-it reading You might want this for your memory book . I took it to be his pissy way of giving me his blessing.

3

It was snowing the day I moved in, and when I pulled up to his house, he was shoveling a path from the front steps to the sidewalk, wearing his red plaid barn jacket—no gloves, no hat—and blowing out clouds of breath in the cold. I had signed on to live with an old man who might be prone to giving himself a heart attack. He helped carry in my suitcases and boxes: all I owned then was my clothes, my books and papers, some CDs—I didn’t have to be told that I’d be listening to them with earphones—and my computer. I came to him with seven thousand dollars in the bank and six thousand in credit card debt.

I’d quit my regular job at the paper to kick in a column from time to time—who worried about health insurance back then?—and Andrea promised to hook me up with freelance work. A borderline kept woman, fine. But to live in a grown-up house, with a grown-up man? To be able to devote yourself to writing before it was too late? Otherwise I’d be like my mother in twenty years—a postsexual groupie going on about poets she’d “studied with” in some summer workshop. “Let’s just say it’s not your all-time most feminist move,” Andrea said. “I mean, I’d grab it, not that anybody’s offering. But you should probably think about making a splash sooner rather than later.”

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So how rich was he? It didn’t occur to me to ask—how would you? To me it was magic money, like what your parents have when you’re a child. Once in a while, early on, I’d look at a price on a menu or on an opera ticket and think I was in over my head, but you get used to not thinking. The house in Rhinebeck had been their weekend place, before what he called “the Great Awakening”; his wife had kept their loft on White Street. He’d inherited ten hilltop acres from his father, several towns to the south, on which he’d always meant to build someday, but his wife was a city girl, so they’d compromised on this place: a three-story house with a mansard roof, from which you could walk to the little shops and restaurants. Rhinebeck hadn’t been unbearable back then, he said, but you could already see where it was headed. He wanted to take me to see the hilltop in the spring, after mud season, when you could get up the dirt road. The view, he said, was heartbreaking.

Of course he professed belief in the room-of-one’s-own thing—after the seventies, what man didn’t?—and he let me have my choice of places in which, he said, the soul might select her society then shut the door. (He didn’t really say that; it’s a little wink and nod to my mother. I don’t know why I’m being so pissy.) How about the guest room on the second floor? The parlor off the living room? The finished room in the basement—more space, though not much daylight? Anywhere, really, except his daughter’s old room: I could have the run of the house, since he went out to the carriage barn every morning at six thirty. I took what was once a maid’s room, at the back of the top floor, with an arched ceiling and a dormer window looking out into the branches of a tree—which he said would eventually resume life as a maple. Together we moved the mission table from the parlor, up the broad stairs to the second floor, then, on its end, up the narrow stairs to the third. I asked if I could hang one of his paintings on my wall—he had none of them up in the house—and he told me to take my pick; that would guarantee he’d never intrude. He insisted on buying me an ergonomic desk chair in the city, and a narrow brass bed at an antique shop in town, for napping or—not to be grim, but these things will happen—in the event of a spat. I noted that he was imagining me as the one who’d have to go huffing out of the conjugal bed, but after all wasn’t it his conjugal bed?

He said this was to be my home too, so we’d put out any favorite objects I’d brought and rearrange furniture to suit my taste. But his taste was better than mine. He did buy a new mattress for the conjugal bed, which he needn’t have done: I wasn’t that imaginative. Her dishes, her kitchen stuff—it was just dishes and kitchen stuff, though one blue spatterware bowl got on my nerves, I don’t know why, and I put it out of sight on the top shelf of the cupboard. The glazed Chinese tea jars, the brass umbrella stand embossed with a comely lady in colonial costume and the pair of Staffordshire dogs might have been hers, or might just have been bric-a-brac that had come with the house. If he’d had pictures of her and their daughter on display, he must have put them away before I’d visited for the first time; how long before wasn’t my business. I kept my own pictures in a plastic storage box in my room of one’s own, along with old check registers, bank statements, tax returns and floppy disks.

I did my writing up there, or tried to, like the poor little second wife in Rebecca —the narrator with no name, which is a famous thing about Rebecca —behind the fancy desk in the morning room with no letters to write. Some days he’d bring lunch up to me: slices of sourdough bread, spread with goat cheese and tapenade. After I’d worked awhile, I’d take a book down to the window seat in the living room, where I must have made a pretty picture for him, my bare feet on the green velvet cushion, frowning away over Susan Sontag, Joan Didion, Elizabeth Hardwick—he took care to recommend what he surely thought of as women writers—and The Art of the Personal Essay . He had read my first attempt at a short story and told me my gift was for nonfiction.

In addition to whatever assignments I got from Andrea—not many, after I told her I wouldn’t do celebrity pieces—I set myself a goal of writing a thousand words a day: just whatever happened to be on my mind. Of course he encouraged me—“You’ll see what it turns into”—and I’ll be charitable and assume he had no intention of exposing what pitiful society my soul had selected. If you want to know my thoughts about how Starbucks coffee shops and Barnes & Noble stores (topics du jour back then) both favored the same snobby forest green, or about how surprise parties betrayed contempt on the part of those who gave them (an idea I’d adapted, to put it kindly, from Auden’s essay on Othello ), you can find them in the files of the paper. My editor insisted on accompanying my columns with a chip shot of my face, apparently thinking it would lure a few readers—I was still enough of a looker—though I doubt many of them made it past my first paragraphs. Most of the time I got my ideas, if you can call them that, when I read that somebody famous had died: I got lucky when Bella Abzug and Tammy Wynette kicked off within a week of each other—you can imagine what I made of that. I will still stand behind my piece about Edith Fore, the old lady who did those TV ads for Lifecall America: of course I called it “I’ve Fallen and I Can’t Get Up.” You should check that one out if it’s still around. But “Martha Gellhorn: In Papa’s Shadow,” in which I tried to compare what little I knew about her life with my own experience of having been married to a fellow writer? Oh right, who was also outdoorsy and also knew Spanish? I’ll give myself this much credit: I sat there doing a word count every couple of sentences until I hit four figures.

“Everything I think of is shit,” I said.

He patted my head. “You have to work through it, is all. Or with it. You know, ‘Nothing to paint, nothing to paint with.’ Just go as dark as you want.”