David Gates: A Hand Reached Down to Guide Me

1

On the morning I was to be married for the second time, I found myself going to my knees in the shower and praying: that my ex-husband would find love again, that I would always love my new husband and that whatever pain I had caused in my life would be forgiven. Just one of those maudlin premenstrual moments; I suppose the wedding could have been better timed.

I washed and conditioned my hair, toweled off, blow-dried the fog from the mirror and laid out makeup on the ridge of the sink. The pictures from that afternoon show a bride who might still have passed for thirty.

—

In fact, I was thirty when I’d married my first husband, whom I’d met when we were both working for a Gannett paper in the Hudson Valley—not much of a job for a gal with a degree from Yale, but we can’t all be Naomi Wolf. (She was in my year, and I suppose I have to admit to some envy.) He was twenty-seven and looked younger; they’d hired him mostly because he could speak Spanish, having spent two years with the Peace Corps in Peru. This was back in 1990, when somebody had finally noticed that Hispanics had come to Peekskill, Beacon and Poughkeepsie. I’d been at the paper for three years. When the editor brought him by my cubicle, with his flat stomach and male-model stubble, I thought: Maybe one time with him just because I can, if I can.

I stole him from a nice girl, a senior at SUNY New Paltz, fit enough to go rock-climbing and kayaking with him, fool enough to think her fetching round cheeks and her strong thighs and her blond hair entitled her to a happy life. Oh, I don’t really know what she thought: there must have been something to her, because her favorite book was The Bell Jar , though I imagine she’s moved on by now—haven’t we all? We used to go out for beers, the three of us, and I enjoyed playing the treacherous older sister: confiding to her in the bathroom about the man I was seeing, then coming back to the table and running a bare toe down her boyfriend’s shin. He told me, after she’d moved back to California, too heartbroken to go to her graduation, that she sometimes liked to slap his ass when he was on top of her—being a nice girl, she always asked first—and did I think that was weird. Poor babies: so scared of themselves and each other.

—

The man I’d been seeing was a writer at Newsweek , where I was a fact-checker—researchers, we were called, I suppose for the think-tankiness of it—hired straight out of college for twenty thousand a year. But of course with the prospect of moving up. The writer had graduated from some sweaty school like Penn State and had worked for the Daily News , so the Yale thing must have been part of my appeal, along with the prettiness and youngerness and wantonness things. He was married—shockeroo, right?—and years later, when he ended up in a wheelchair, the wife stayed with him. It’s possible she loved him—I never met the lady.

I didn’t start up with him, strictly speaking, until after I’d left Newsweek , where after four years I’d been getting nothing but the occasional shared byline: some writer, out of charity or laziness, would delegate me to do a phoner. And I’d had a seminar with Harold Bloom, for God’s sake. So my writer got me a job at that loser paper—people knew his name back then—where I could write and report, review the occasional movie or concert, accumulate some clips while looking for something worthy of me. Because I still wanted to consider myself a New Yorker, I kept my walk-up on Eighty-Eighth off Amsterdam, reverse-commuting to Westchester an hour each way.

It turned out that my writer was mentoring another female researcher too; no wonder he’d been so willing to put in a word for me. A couple of evenings a week he’d come to my apartment straight from his office and give me a good mentoring, with a scarf tied around my ankles. He always had to leave by eight o’clock, which left me free to go out. I’d offer him my shower, but he was afraid to go home with wet hair.

—

I stayed faithful to my first husband for five years, which doesn’t make much of a story, so I’m not going to string this out. The writer and his wife, though: Wouldn’t that be a story? I asked my mother once, “Would you have stayed with Daddy if you hadn’t had me?”

“That’s like saying if you’d been born with flippers would I have aborted you.”

“Yeah but if I’d been already been born…” I was twelve, with a steel-trap mind, though I picked up only the illogic, not the flippiness of saying this to a daughter about to get her first period.

“That’s my point,” she said.

Actually, she did leave my father, though not until I was out of the house. Whereas the writer’s wife—I don’t know, somebody goes, somebody stays, somebody latches on to somebody else, the thing with somebody else does or doesn’t go on for a while: Am I missing something here? Sad old Harold Bloom—who never put a hand on my thigh, though he did call me “my dear,” which is what he called everyone, male or female—made us read the Paradiso , where it turns out to be Love that’s moving the sun and the other stars. That’s the big kicker. I have to say, I’m not seeing it.

—

“So it looks like I’m moving up to Westchester,” I told the writer. Now that we were no longer fucking, he’d begun taking me to P. J. Clarke’s again; while the mentoring was intense, we’d met at a bar for alcoholics on Tenth Avenue, with fluorescent lights and signs all over the walls displaying the prices of drinks. I assume now that this was less about caution than about wickedness.

“At your age?” he said. “An extra five hundred square feet isn’t worth a human life.”

“Actually,” I said, “I think I’m getting married.”

“Oh,” he said. “Huh. Well, I guess this was bound to happen, wasn’t it?” He raised his snifter of Rémy. “Mazel tov. It’s done wonders for me .”

—

I grew up in Saddle River, New Jersey. Richard Nixon moved there a couple of years after I went off to Yale, and my mother claims she spotted him once, through the tinted glass in a black car, and gave him the finger, all of which I doubt. She’d gone to Smith, where she majored in English and made obsessive visits to Emily Dickinson’s house. When I was in high school and college she was always going into the city for readings and off to Vermont or Provincetown to take classes with poets who picked up a living by humoring middle-aged ladies. I don’t mean to make her sound silly; at least, as I found out, she became a bit of a pothead. I was sixteen when I caught her out behind the shed where my father kept the riding mower. “We won’t tell your dad,” she said—as if doing so had been thinkable—and passed the joint to me. My father was the executive vice president, whatever that is, of a company that manufactured speaker systems for movie theaters, which I suppose made both of them artistic people. He’d voted for Nixon the first time but not the second, or maybe it was second time but not the first—I know he didn’t like McGovern, whichever one that was. When their marriage broke up, he took a lesser job in Philadelphia, while she stayed in Saddle River—all her friends were there—in a shabby one-bedroom condo.