Black Eye: Escaping a Marriage, Writing a Life

Intimate Strangers

Last night, I worked in my writing shed later than I’d intended. It grew dark, and I didn’t have a flashlight to show me the path back to the Norcroft lodge. The sky was cloudy; there were no stars, the moon had already set. I stepped outside my shed, turned off the lights, and waited for my eyes to adjust to the dark. But it remained pitch black, with only an occasional flash of headlights off to my left, where the highway was, and to the right, in the distance, the lighted windows of the lodge. My shed is thirty or forty yards off the driveway , down a narrow path through the woods. I stepped onto the path and moved very cautiously, shuffling my feet a few inches at a time, guided only by the feel of the leaf-covered gravel underfoot. More than once, when I thought the path must have met the driveway , I veered to the right and was gently nudged back on track by a hillock of grass, a slight dip underfoot, once by the long stem of something brushing my cheek. n Thursday, January 9, 1986, late night Went to Helen’s for a quick dinner before the University of Wisconsin basketball game. As we were walking to the Field House, she slipped on the ice and gave her head a good crack, so we went back to her house. I stayed there for a while to be sure she was OK, began to leave, and then started telling her about seeing B and sat back down again. We had a 39 Intimate Strangers n good talk, and I gathered some history for B, who says next session we will talk about Stu’s family. Some of Helen’s points: Her husband, Richard, was never a “bully,” but he let you know how he wanted things to be. He permitted no squabbling or “nit-picky” arguments. Richard never interfered in Helen’s “province.” He respected what she did (volunteer work, homemaking) and her right to make her own decisions and have her own opinions. In the early ’50s, they settled this issue when he supported Joseph McCarthy and she did not. Richard was quite unlike his own father, whom Helen described as “an autocrat and a bully of the old school.” Most interesting: Helen has no memory of the only anecdote that Stu has ever told me about his father. According to Stu,when he was in grade school,Richard punished him for lying. As Stu tells it,he had permission to go to a movie with a friend and the friend’s older sister. But Richard saw Stu and friend—and no sister—at a bus stop. Stu says that for the next year, he had to get Richard’s permission whenever he wanted to go to a movie. Even on Saturdays, Helen would not allow him to go to a movie until he had called Richard at the office, interrupting whatever he was doing, to ask permission. Helen said she wished Stu would also get some help from a therapist. n The first time I met Stu’s parents, they had come to California to visit. Stu and I had been living together for a couple of years. Stu’s younger brother, Hal, also lived with us, more or less camping out in the bedroom Stu used as a study. Richard and Helen stayed in a motel, but one night they came for dinner to our house in Redwood City. I made chicken paprikash, one of my specialties. I suppose I was trying to assert my identity. My father’s parents were both born in Hungary. But they were poor, observant Orthodox Jews. If they could have afforded a chicken, they would never have cooked it in sour cream. Another evening, Stu’s parents took us out for dinner at L’Auberge, a fancy French restaurant. We all had cocktails with Intimate Strangers 40 appetizers; some of us had two. The maitre d’ served wine with our entrees. The conversation grew loud. I fingered the starched edge of the linen tablecloth while Richard, Hal, and Stu argued about Vietnam. Richard supported Nixon; he believed in bombing the enemy. Hal said that the country might never recover from the napalm , the defoliation of the jungle. Stu condemned the war as genocide committed in the interests of a ruling...