Fierce Attachments: A Memoir (FSG Classics)

by Vivian Gornick

The larger truth is that the “otherness” of the Italians or the Irish or the Jews among us lent spice and interest, a sense of definition, an exciting edge to things that was openly feared but secretly welcomed.

They never spoke first to anyone. That’s the main thing, I guess, about being a few among the many: it silences you.

Life seemed fuller, richer, more interesting when she was making sense of the human activity in the alley. I felt a live connection, then, between us and the world outside the window.

So this was her condition: here in the kitchen she knew who she was, here in the kitchen she was restless and bored, here in the kitchen she functioned admirably, here in the kitchen she despised what she did. She would become angry over the “emptiness of a woman’s life” as she called it, then laugh with a delight I can still hear when she analyzed some complicated bit of business going on in the alley. Passive in the morning, rebellious in the afternoon, she was made and unmade daily. She fastened hungrily on the only substance available to her, became affectionate toward her own animation, then felt like a collaborator. How could she not be devoted to a life of such intense division? And how could I not be devoted to her devotion?

My heart would beat faster as she spoke, my attention press itself against the unexpectedness of her details. Mrs. Kerner was a spellbinder. Hers was the power of the born storyteller—that is, the one for whom every scrap of experience is only waiting to be given shape and meaning through the miracle of narrative speech.

Ah, she’s got it. Triumphant, accusing, she says, “The unhappiness is so alive today.” Her words startle and gratify me. I feel pleasure when she says a true or a clever thing. I come close to loving her. “That’s the first step, Ma,” I say softly. “The unhappiness has to be made alive before anything can happen.”

The air is sweeter than before, warmer, fuller, with a hint of rain now at its bright gray edge. Delicious! A surge of expectation rises without warning in me but, as usual, does not get very far. Instead of coming up straight and clear it twists about, turns inward, and quickly stifles itself to death; a progress with which I am depressingly familiar.

I never daydreamed about love or money, I always daydreamed I was making eloquent speeches that stirred ten thousand people to feel their lives, and to act.

A hungry fantasizing went instantly to work as soon as I was seated with my back to the apartment, my eyes trained on the street. This fantasizing was only one step removed from Nettie’s “Wouldn’t it be wonderful,” but it was an important step. Mine began “Just suppose,” and was followed not by tales of immediate rescue but by imaginings of “large meaning.” That is: things always ended badly but there was grandeur in the disaster. The point of my romances was precisely that life is tragic. To be “in tragedy” was to be saved from what I took to be the pedestrian pains of my own life. These seemed meaningless. To be saved from meaninglessness, I knew, was everything. Largeness of meaning was redemption. It was an adolescent writer’s beginning: I had started to mythicize.

I imagined myself draping her in some lovely material that was both warming and magically possessed of the power to increase the healing process. I couldn’t see the material clearly for the longest time. Was it thin or thick, solid or print, light or dark? Then one night I looked closely at it and saw that it was lace. A series of flash images confused me. I saw Nettie’s face cradled on a piece of her own lace. I saw myself and the prostitute and Nettie, all of us with our faces laid sadly against small pieces of lace. Not a mantle of lace for any one of us, only these bits and pieces, and all of us sorrowing against the bits and pieces.

A new calendar had begun marking time in the apartment: the first time it snowed on Papa’s grave, the first time it rained, the first green of summer, the first gold of fall. Each first was announced in a high thin wail that to begin with acted like a needle on my heart, to end with a needle in my brain.

I let Mama crush me against her hot chest. I did not resist. Mama was where I belonged. With Mama the issue was clear: I had trouble breathing but I was safe.

Widowhood provided Mama with a higher form of being. In refusing to recover from my father’s death she had discovered that her life was endowed with a seriousness her years in the kitchen had denied her. She remained devoted to this seriousness for thirty years. She never tired of it, never grew bored or restless in its company, found new ways to keep alive the interest it deserved and had so undeniably earned.

It elevated her in her own eyes, made of her a spiritually significant person, lent richness to her gloom and rhetoric to her speech. Papa’s death became a religion that provided ceremony and doctrine. A woman-who-has-lost-the-love-of-her-life was now her orthodoxy: she paid it Talmudic attention.

The air I breathed was soaked in her desperation, made thick and heady by it, exciting and dangerous. Her pain became my element, the country in which I lived, the rule beneath which I bowed. It commanded me, made me respond against my will. I longed endlessly to get away from her,

My skin crawled with her. She was everywhere, all over me, inside and out. Her influence clung, membrane-like, to my nostrils, my eyelids, my open mouth. I drew her into me with every breath I took. I drowsed in her etherizing atmosphere, could not escape the rich and claustrophobic character of her presence, her being, her suffocating suffering femaleness.

Dorothy’s memories were richly detailed, my own sketchy. It wasn’t just that she was eight years older. She was a Levinson. She had lived it more fully than I had.

“You’re growing old together,” she said to me. “You and what frightens you.”

I see the burning quality of Nolde’s intention, the serious patience with which the flowers absorb him, the clear, stubborn concentration of the artist on his subject. I see it. And I think, It’s the concentration that gives the work its power. The space inside me enlarges. That rectangle of light and air inside, where thought clarifies and language grows and response is made intelligent, that famous space surrounded by loneliness, anxiety, self-pity, it opens wide as I look at Nolde’s flowers.

That space. It begins in the middle of my forehead and ends in the middle of my groin. It is, variously, as wide as my body, as narrow as a slit in a fortress wall. On days when thought flows freely or better yet clarifies with effort, it expands gloriously. On days when anxiety and self-pity crowd in, it shrinks, how fast it shrinks! When the space is wide and I occupy it fully, I taste the air, feel the light. I breathe evenly and slowly. I am peaceful and excited, beyond influence or threat. Nothing can touch me. I’m safe. I’m free. I’m thinking. When I lose the battle to think, the boundaries narrow, the air is polluted, the light clouds over. All is vapor and fog, and I have trouble breathing.

She doesn’t know I take her anxiety personally, feel annihilated by her depression. How can she know this? She doesn’t even know I’m there. Were I to tell her that it’s death to me, her not knowing I’m there, she would stare at me out of her eyes crowding up with puzzled desolation, this young girl of seventy-seven, and she would cry angrily, “You don’t understand! You have never understood!”

Benign in intent, only a passport to the promised land, City of course was the real invader. It did more violence to the emotions than either Mama or Nettie could have dreamed possible, divided me from them both, provoked and nourished an unshared life inside the head that became a piece of treason. I lived among my people, but I was no longer one of them.

It was a given that the more uncertain we were, the more self-righteous we would become. It was necessary for each of us to feel special, different, destined for a superior end. Divided against ourselves, we withheld sympathy from one another. Secretly, each of us identified a collection of undesirable character traits in the others from which she separated herself, as though dissociation equaled deliverance.

“You go on picking up these marginal types, idealizing them, and then you can’t believe it when they don’t know their place. You’re amazed that they’re doing this to you. Don’t they know you’re supposed to leave them, not they leave you? And then you get on your high horse.”

She could not see that her insistent unhappiness was an accusation and a judgment. “You?” it said with each resentful sigh. “You’re not the right one. You cannot deliver up comfort, pleasure, amelioration. But you are my dearest of dears. Your appointed task is to understand, your destiny to live with the daily knowledge that you are insufficient to cure my life of its deprivation.”

What I could not register was this: In each of these affairs a necessary element of control devolved on me. If a man was short or stupid or uneducated or foreign, I felt sufficiently superior to risk tenderness. I might be socially uncomfortable but I was freed up. Love was a swamp of overwhelming proportion. It covered the ground once I stepped off the solid territory of miserable, blessed loneliness. To sleep with a man was to start drowning in need. An equalizer was an absolute, not a relative an absolute necessity. Stefan was

We did not want each other, chemically or romantically. The misery that had to be lived out before that simple knowledge was ours.

Each day brought long moments of unhappiness it took hours to recover from. Each night we took to bed our confusion, our longing, our paralyzing intensity. Only rarely did our bodies give us relief, and then but for an hour. It was my first experience of sexual love as catharsis, wherein one is left as lonely in the morning as one had been the evening before.

For a long time, a few years in fact, Stefan and I described the tension between us as intensity. (Tension we knew was in the negative, but intensity—ah, intensity!) Our lovemaking was almost invariably tight and explosive, a pent-up release from the gloom that marked so many of our days. The atmosphere of our early quarrels had never actually dissipated; bit by bit we had accustomed ourselves to it, as one does to a weight on the heart that constricts freedom of movement but does not preclude mobility: soon enough walking about in the cramped position seems natural. An absence of lightheartedness between us became the daily condition. We could live with it, and unfortunately we did. Not only did we live with it, we fell into the habit of describing our difficulty as a matter of intensity.

It was always “I can’t work! I can’t think!” That was the holy invocation between us, the litany, the chant, the ceremonial admission that eroticized and restored. Either he would rage, “I can’t work!” or I would, and that phrase punctured the compression chamber into which we had sealed ourselves. The inability to work was the only unembarrassed, unafraid admission we could make to one another. In the act of announcing this frailty we reminded ourselves of the superior nature of our common sensitivity and felt safe from the judgment we each feared in the other. To be wretched in the name of work was ultimately to armor ourselves against each other.

I realized suddenly that an image had taken control of me: I saw its shape and its outline clearly. The sentences were trying to fill in the shape. The image was the wholeness of my thought. In that instant I felt myself open wide. My insides cleared out into a rectangle, all clean air and uncluttered space, that began in my forehead and ended in my groin. In the middle of the rectangle only my image, waiting patiently to clarify itself. I experienced a joy then I knew nothing else would ever equal. Not an “I love you” in the world could touch it. Inside that joy I was safe and erotic, excited and at peace, beyond threat or influence. I understood everything I needed to understand in order that I might act, live, be.

“Love me!” he whispered. I pressed myself against him, held him close. “I do, I do,” I whispered back. And it was true: as true as I could make it. I did love him, I did. But only down to a certain point. Beyond that point, something opaque in me, there was no give. I could see the opacity. I could taste it and touch it. Between me and my feeling for Stefan, perhaps for any man, I wasn’t sure, there fell a kind of transparent membrane through which I could whisper “I do” and make the whisper heard but not felt. Nettie hovered in the air. Her image was quick to the touch, warm and alive. I was right up against it, no obstructions, no interference. The thing was, I could imagine her. She was real to me, he was not.

“I would say that I’ve had an unhappy life,” he said. “Not only because of what my life has actually been, but because of what life is. I’m disappointed. Not only because I don’t have the creative powers I want. I’m disappointed because the trees don’t talk to me, or the grass or the flowers. I’m disappointed because the flies mistake me for a piece of horseshit.”

In his late twenties, after he had left his wife and son, he discovered therapy, and psychoanalysis became the great drama of his life. He absorbed its language and its insights in much the same way that he read great literature: he grew wise in a vacuum.

These delights of the mind never seemed to go anywhere, or to be seriously related in a way that mattered. His intelligence was like a piece of railroad track severed at either end from the main connection, with a single train car riding it back and forth between stations, imitating motion and journey.

Davey was a recapitulation of my history with men—when I considered him powerful I’d been a clumsy belligerent; when I saw he was weak I became a desirous woman—except that with Davey, for the first time, I saw the configuration whole. I saw my bondage, and I was shamed by my release. How angry and scared I became when I had clear sight! And how pained that it was through Davey I had achieved it. Because I knew Davey. I could imagine him right through to the center. I loved his appetite and I recognized his fears: they were my own. I knew how Davey had gotten to be the way he was, and in his presence I knew better how I had gotten to be the way I was. For a time this openly shared knowledge made us friends. There was between us a mute tenderness for our common beginning. The way we slept was emblematic of our relationship: we lay curled around ourselves facing each other.

In the face of silence I talked rapidly and at overwhelming length to fill what I experienced as the void, exhausting myself and those who had brought down on me the punishing need to speak words, words, words.

“Listen to me,” I pleaded, “just listen to me.” He nodded at me, not taking his eyes from mine. “You don’t know me at all,” I said. “You think I’m this hot-shot loudmouthed liberated woman, as brash and self-confident as you, ready to walk across the world just like you, and that’s not who I am at all. It’s making me lonely now to make love with you, and you not know what my life is about.” He nodded again. I told him then how I had hungered for a life like his but that I hadn’t ever had it, that I’d always felt marginal, buried alive in obscurity, and that all the talk I manufactured couldn’t dissolve out the isolation. I told him how sometimes I wake spontaneously in the night and I sit up in bed and I’m alone in the middle of the world. “Where is everybody?” I say out loud, and I have to calm myself with “Mama’s in Chelsea, Marilyn’s on Seventy-third Street, my brother’s in Baltimore.” The list, I told him, is pathetic. I talked and talked. On and on I went, without pause or interruption. When I stopped I felt relieved (alone now but not lonely) and, very quickly, embarrassed. He was so silent. Oh, I thought, what a fool you are to have said these things. He doesn’t like any of this, not a bit of it, he doesn’t even know what you’re talking about. Then Joe said, “Darling, what a rich inner life you have.” My eyes widened. I took in the words. I laughed with delight. That he had such a sentence in him! That he had spoken the sentence he had in him. I loved him then. For ...

Why, I thought, would I want him to leave his wife? What would I do then? Take him into my apartment? It’s too small. Besides, I may not like sleeping alone, but I like waking up alone. Yes, it’s painful when he leaves, but it’s not that painful. The situation suits me. And then again, it’s interesting.

When he was there he was so thoroughly and unreservedly there I felt neither deprived nor possessive when he wasn’t. For the first time, what a lover did when he was not with me was of no real concern; in fact, it was none of my business. This was an experience.

Then a day came when I also saw that learning to live without a future is a sterile exercise: what looks like life within a walled garden is really life inside a renovated prison yard.

I got up and wrote in my journal: “Love is a function of the passive feeling life, dependent on an ideal other for satisfactory resolution: the primitive position into which we are born. Work is a function of the active expressive life, and if it comes to nothing, one is still left with the strengthening knowledge of the acting self. Only when access to the imaginative life is denied does one go in for love in a big way.”

It was always in the morning I would struggle on. Never right now. Not with work, not with Joe. I could not see that each was a means of escape from the other. With Joe I blissed out, avoided the pure pain of sustained labor. With work I hardened myself against the “intrusion” of love: a married man was just fine. For years I said: In the morning. Which, of course, never came.

Our emotional life was an absorbing subject for me, and became one for him as well. He delighted in the extensive nature of the discussion, entered into it without fear or defensiveness, and soon had me hooked on the regular feeding such talk provided me with.

Joe chattered on while Mama and I made appropriate female noises [How wonderfull You didn’t really! That’s fantastic!],

We who talked so passionately together for hours, days, months, and years were sure to lose interest the moment one of us ceased to be aroused in bed. I knew this was the deeper truth between us, I said it out loud—often—and still it was as if I didn’t know what the words actually meant. Between the flash of insight and the imperative to act lay miles of anxiety to negotiate. “Our connection is erotic,” I announced periodically. “Yes?” Joe replied with interest in his voice. “Neither of us responds to the specific shape or content of the other’s mind or spirit. We engage only through sexual arousal.”

Desire ensured tenderness. Tenderness precluded danger. Once out of danger, I was free to retreat into the absorbing secret life of my own abandon. In bed I didn’t have to be myself. I could lose myself, and still I was safe. I’d come out of that lostness and there was Joe, holding on to me, never more trustworthy than when receiving proof anew of his own vital powers.

All my life I had suspected I wasn’t interesting enough, special enough, talented enough to hold the attention of those who came toward me in friendship or in love. I could attract people, yes, but could I hold them? I was never sure. Now, it seemed, I didn’t have to be sure. The erotic connection brought reprieve. I wasn’t under the gun to earn interest or respect daily. The deal was set: I could relax into it.

It was almost as though I chose men who would ensure I’d arrive back at this moment, depressed and paralyzed by the failure of love.

“I had an abortion with my legs up against the wall in an apartment on West Eighty-eighth Street, with Demerol injected into my veins by a doctor whose consulting room was the corner of Fifty-eighth Street and Tenth Avenue.” She nods at me as I speak, as though these details are familiar, even expected. Then she says, “I had mine in the basement of a Greenwich Village nightclub, for ten dollars, with a doctor who half the time when you woke up you were holding his penis in your hand.” I look at her in admiration. She has matched me clause for clause, and raised the ante with each one. We both burst out laughing at the same moment. Surprise.