Room for Doubt Read online

  Once again, I got the whole cold-shoulder treatment. This time, feeling less at fault, I felt more irked. Why was I receiving the brunt of Lenny's anger? Did he really expect I should have run to him with the news that his wife was confiding in me? Did he imagine that I might somehow have influenced her behavior? Or did he simply hold it against me that I knew something about him, something I should not have known? And yet how could I have avoided knowing it? When the wife began her confession, should I have held up my hand like a traffic cop and said nobly, “No, I can't listen to this”? Can a reasonable person, that courtroom fiction, be expected to behave so commendably in the face of everyday gossip?

  This is pointless. I am arguing with Lenny over an issue that, even if he were not dead, he would long ago have forgotten—or, if not forgotten, would have buried beneath that ever-rising carpet under which we habitually sweep all our irresolvable difficulties. And if he had not buried the disagreement in this way, no amount of supposedly rational argument (I say “supposedly” because even while I pose as the disinterested lawyer, I recognize that I had and still have the kind of mixed motives in this situation that Lenny would instantly have sensed, if not consciously perceived), no amount of argument of any kind, rational or irrational, would have budged Lenny from his conviction that I had done him wrong.

  He stayed with that wife for another three or four years, and then they were divorced. The minute they were apart, he began speaking to me again. Even at the time, even to me, the calculus was evident. As long as he stayed married to her, the anger that might have been directed at his wife had to be diverted safely onto me. I was, in this sense, expendable. It was only when she became the expendable one (by her own choice—the divorce was her idea) that she was able to become the vessel for his previously diverted anger, and I no longer had to carry it. If x minus one, then y plus one: it was as simple and as powerful as that.

  3.

  “I smacked my little boy. My anger was powerful.

  Like justice. Then I discovered no feeling in the

  hand. I said, ‘Listen, I want to explain the complexities

  to you.’ I spoke with seriousness and

  care, particularly of fathers. He asked, when I finished,

  if I wanted him to forgive me. I said yes. He

  said no. Like trumps.”

  —I Would Have Saved Them If I Could

  Let me say a word about anger, since it is something I know a great deal about. If I were asked to say which of the seven deadly sins most afflicts me, I would certainly choose anger. Most of the others do not, in fact, strike me as sins at all. Gluttony and sloth, for instance, may be bad for the sinner's health or welfare, but they do little harm to other people, and pride is a positively good thing in many cases. But anger, whose ravages I experience on a near-daily basis, seems to me an inherently dangerous emotion. It is dangerous to the one who feels it (during a routine fit of wrath, I can practically measure my blood pressure rising, sense the veins throbbing in my temples, hear my heart pounding extra-hard in my chest), and it is also dangerous, or at the very least unpleasant, to those who bear the brunt of it. My tendency to anger quickly, a tendency both physiological and psychological in origin, has made all my relations with other people more difficult than they need have been. It has unfitted me for certain tasks—serving on committees, say, or rectifying billing errors over the telephone—that other people seem to accomplish with little or no trouble. It has also caused deep pain within the bosom of my own family. If I could opt for the removal of the organ of wrath, I would no doubt benefit from the operation.

  But I would not choose to have it. For anger, in addition to being my enemy, has been my friend—a Mephistophelian friend, to be sure, but one that is responsible for many of my most intense experiences. I am fueled by anger just as much as I am fueled by pleasure, or desire, or willingness to do good. Anger is not always a vengeful, narcissistic emotion. Sometimes it is even a generous one. But it is a dynamo that is impossible to control. My old friend, the same one who warns me off the word “merely,” has also said that indignation is a poor master and a good servant. Well, yes, but is it really indignation if you can put a yoke on it? In my case anger is almost always an overpowering emotion, brief but intense, like lightning, and it fuels me only if I give myself over to it. If I allow it to simmer inside, it declines into pallid resentment or wan depression, neither of which is of any use to me.

  Lenny's anger was of a different sort. It burned like a stoked fire, keeping its coals red-hot long after mine would have turned to gray dust. It combined the fireworks of live anger with the warmed-over bitter herb of resentment and the dark abysses of depression. Lenny's anger was a many-splendored thing. But different as it was from mine, it was something I understood. I am not saying I considered it rational or commendable— especially when it was directed against me—but I understood how it might have arisen, and what it might feel like, and why it was so powerful. The sources of anger in me sensed their counterpart in Lenny and embraced the alliance, even if it was an alliance that kept him and me, the possessors or possessed of the anger, split apart much of the time.

  And I think that on some very deep level Lenny understood this. (All of Lenny's understanding of human nature was on a very deep level: at the surface, he tended to be either nuts or indifferent.) I am not saying he could have voiced it explicitly, any more than I was able to until just this moment, when his death has led me to scrutinize the past in a way I never did before. But Lenny must have guessed that I had an anger like his, a fueling anger that could be turned outward on the world to help me survive. And this meant that I, unlike most other people, could be counted on to survive his anger.

  Lenny and I were both big admirers of D. W. Winnicott, though I didn't learn this about him until after his death; our joint but separate admiration never found its way into our conversation. One of the things Winnicott says is that babies learn to separate themselves from their mothers by learning that hate, or anger, does not kill. As an infant, you can allow yourself to feel independent of your mother—to be angry with her, to hate her, to wish she would go away—and she will still be there when you need her. (This is if you have a “good enough” mother, the kind Winnicott defined and believed in.) I am not saying that Lenny mistook me for his mother; as far as I know, he never stopped speaking to her, not even for a week. But I do think that in some way Lenny knew his anger would not make me disappear. Whenever he was ready to stop being angry, I was still there. This is not something I consciously knew about myself, or something I would necessarily have predicted in advance. But it did turn out on each occasion to be true. And I think Lenny sensed it. Which may go some way toward answering the question I asked earlier—that is, why did I bear the brunt of Lenny's anger? Why me and not someone else?

  It also explains why I now feel he has violated our compact. The deal was, you could feel anger without destroying. The victim of your anger, sooner or later, would pop back up, like one of those bottom-weighted clowns I had as a punching bag during childhood. Lenny, though, is not going to pop back up. Could it have been my anger that killed him, or possibly his own? Can anger destroy, after all? It is a chastening thought, and very late in the day for me to be coming to it.

  4.

  “The private life of a friend is to be dreamed about,

  never known.”

  —Going Places

  When Lenny used me as the scapegoat in his marital disagreement, it was not only my involvement in the immediate situation or his unconscious recognition of my durability or even my generally brash, annoying, anger-provoking behavior that caused him to select me as the appropriate placeholder. I represented other values, both positive and negative, that were useful in the equation. I was almost the same age as the wife. (He tended, for most of the time I knew him, to have wives or girlfriends that were roughly eighteen to twenty years younger than he.) Other than that, I was in many ways her opposite. I was Jewish and she was not. I was short
and she was tall. I was direct and earthy, she was elusive and mysterious. In all these respects I much more resembled Lenny's mother (who was, perhaps not insignificantly, eighteen or twenty years older than he; she had lost her birth records in the move from Poland to New York, so the exact age difference was uncertain, but it was pretty much the same gap reversed). I do not make this comparison idly. Winnicott aside, I always felt there was something slightly maternal in my relationship to Lenny. My friend of the merely ban and the indignation principle also says: All women are always older than all men— and Lenny would have agreed with him. But that alone would not have made my connection with him maternal. There was also some kind of incest taboo going on between us. Lenny was a very attractive man, but I did not experience his appeal as sexual, and he certainly never had any sexual interest in me.

  Perhaps that should have offended me, but I don't think it did—though, now that I am examining my motives and his under the strong light of retrospect, I wonder if this can be entirely true. Did resentment at having been tacitly rejected fuel our quarrels? Or were they instead a sign of repressed attraction, like the spats in screwball comedies? I know that both these interpretations seem to hold water, in the abstract, but I cannot feel the truth in either of them. I believe in the unconscious, but I am convinced it always makes itself felt in some way. I have always rejected the idea of false consciousness, which strikes me as condescending and authoritarian. (That is, who are you to tell me my consciousness is false? Or, for that matter, who am I to tell you that yours is?) So I think I will go on insisting on my own version of events here. We were just friends.

  If your only access to Lenny was through the fiction, you might have imagined him as some kind of sexual adventurer who viewed all women as potential conquests, all men as potential rivals. I gather he did have a side like that, but I never saw it, except in certain of his stories—the stories about prostitutes in Cuba or starlets in Los Angeles, for example, which always drove me crazy with their strange combination of naive romanticism and wide-eyed titillation. Sometimes he would give me one of these stories to read, and I would always have to say, “Oy Lenny, not one of these! You know how I hate the ones with women like this,” and he would laugh sheepishly and say, “But why? Why do you hate them?” and I would once again try to explain. He could never tell in advance which stories would provoke this reaction in me, or perhaps he just enjoyed provoking the reaction again and again and so he pretended, to me and to himself, that it was unexpected. He always seemed surprised when I didn't like one of his stories—not angry, not hurt, just bemused and slightly acquiescent. We never quarreled about things like that.

  But, as I said, the side of Lenny that came out in the stories and possibly in his sexual relationships with women, a persona or personality that was dominated by sexual jealousy, was almost invisible to me in daily life. Among his close friends were many women, one or two of whom had been girlfriends but most of whom had not. So it was clear that he did not always need to be sexually conquering. He also had a tremendous capacity for admiring other men. Of one friend, a handsome scientist with piercing blue eyes and prematurely white hair, he used to say, “He looks like God.” Lenny's admiration for other men extended even, or especially, to the men who had subsequently or previously taken up with one of his girlfriends or wives. A friend of mine calls this the “husband-in-law” relationship, and it was this particular friendship that Lenny truly had a gift for. You could see a bit of this in his oft-expressed pride in the Baron, the Swedish husband of his longtime girlfriend; but you could see it even more clearly in the way he dealt with Bob, the second husband of his third wife. Lenny liked and trusted Bob, relying on him to an unusual degree in questions involving his much-loved daughter, who was Bob's stepdaughter, and in other matters pertaining to domestic arrangements with his former wife. He and Bob were also, for a time, members of the same English department, and Lenny considered him one of his few firm allies in that potentially treacherous realm. Another important ally was the husband of Lenny's first Berkeley girlfriend; in fact, I venture to say that husbands-in-law of one stamp or another made up most of Lenny's closest departmental friends. I don't know how to explain this, and on some level I don't wish to. The obvious theories about “triangulated homosexual desire,” so popular in Berkeley's literature departments, seem irrelevant to this particular case. Sex was precisely what seemed not to be present here. By some act of willed oblivion or involuntary good will, Lenny managed to ditch any remnant of jealousy or preening that might have interfered with these lasting male friendships. And this was equally true, though in a different way, of his friendships with women. Or so it seemed to me, from the partial vantage point I occupied.

  One thing that made me partial, and still does, is my own gift, or need, or whatever you want to call it, for friendships with men. When I was younger I had many women friends, but most of them have dropped away by now, or have become dear old friends that I rarely see. The important friendships of my life at this point are almost all with men. Anyone who knows me could think up lots of possible reasons for this: my parents’ early divorce, my having been raised in an all-female family, my rather brusque and aggressive and distinctly unfeminine approach to the world, my excessive tolerance for the foibles of men, my corresponding harshness toward the foibles of women… it begins to be difficult to distinguish cause from effect here. I cannot explain the habit myself. All I can say is that I have increasingly found friendships with men to be easier than friendships with other women. So I may have sympathized with and even encouraged Lenny's inclination to ignore the sexually loaded element. In some way it must have been my character, and not just his, that was dictating the comradely form our friendship took.

  5.

  “My father never owned a car or flew in an airplane.

  He imagined no alternatives to being

  himself.”

  —“My Father”

  The one night I did spend with Lenny was spent entirely in driving, he in the driver's seat and I as the passenger. Lenny was a good driver, and he liked to drive long distances. Driving put Lenny in a good mood. I guess it gave him the sense he was getting somewhere, and it also made him think he was connecting with America—that mythical America of the roadside diner and the smalltown gas station which New York Jews always feel so cut off from.

  Our road trip started at the Los Angeles Times Building in Times Mirror Square, where we ran into each other unexpectedly. I don't even remember what I was doing in L.A. that weekend, much less what Lenny was. Each of us had been in the city all weekend long, pursuing our respective activities, whatever they were, and then by total chance we converged on the Times Building—and not just the building, but the same floor, nearly the same office—at the exact same moment. (I suppose it won't make the coincidence seem any more remarkable if I add that I rarely go to L.A., and never to the Times Building. That may well have been my only time there.) I remember the expression of delighted surprise on Lenny's face when he first saw me. My own must have looked the same.

  “Hey!” he said when we had finished commenting on the amazing coincidence. “How are you getting home?”

  “From LAX to Oakland,” I said. “I have a flight in two and a half hours.”

  “Listen, cash in your ticket and we'll drive home. C'mon, it'll be fun. I have my car right here. We'll be home by three or four in the morning.”

  To get the full import of this story, you have to understand how rare it is for me to change my plans. I am not a great improviser. That seriously understates the case: I am probably the worst improviser of my acquaintance or anyone else's. (I even hate the improvisation part of modern dance classes, which made my life hell in the late Sixties and early Seventies, when the normal embarrassment of adolescence, compounded by the culturally imposed embarrassment of “self-expression,” yielded a near-complete paralysis on my part.) I like to have a plan, and then I like to have a backup plan; I rarely meet a disaster for which I do not alread
y have a Plan B in place. The idea of doing something on the spur of the moment is very un-me. But it is, or was, very Lenny. And in this case Lenny's enthusiasm for the last-minute scheme, his willingness to grab coincidence by the neck and wring it for all it was worth, won me over.

  The process involved calling not just the airline but also the man I lived with (the man who has now been my husband for eighteen or twenty years, but who was then just my boyfriend) to say that I had run into Lenny by chance and was driving up the coast with him and would be back later than expected. My boyfriend thought there was something fishy about the whole thing, but he didn't know who or what to suspect. So he just let it go. From Lenny's point of view, nothing could have been more innocent. We were just traveling buddies, like Bing Crosby and Bob Hope on the Road to Somewhere, only not quite as comic and with less singing; I do remember there was definitely some singing, though.

  I don't know what we talked about for nine hours. (It was at least nine hours, because we took 101 and maybe even Highway 1 for part of the time. Even if the ramrod-straight Highway 5 had been finished by then, and I don't think it was, Lenny would never have opted for such a streamlined, unpicturesque route.) Sometimes we listened to the radio, but no station lasted long. Once or twice we stopped for a bite to eat. But mostly we just drove into the darkness and chatted. I remember feeling then for the first time what I often thought since: that though Lenny couldn't be bothered to retain any of the details most other people would have used to describe or characterize me—though he probably couldn't even have told you what color my hair was or how many siblings I had or where I went to college—he understood who I was at a very profound level. He knew a version of me that I knew; or (and perhaps this comes to the same thing) he made me feel that I was known.