Free A Complicated Marriage by Janice Van Horne

blushing about how much I loved her books I made a senseless hash of titles and characters, none of which she had written. She rewarded me with a smile of ill-disguised pity for which I was abjectly grateful.
    More sustaining were the parties given by Oscar Williams, the poet and anthologist, and his poet wife, Gene Derwood. Oscar, almost leaping out of his shoes with the joy of life. I was glad he had escaped Clem’s clean sweep. Oscar lived on top of a small industrial building on Water Street near the fish market. Dark, not a soul to be seen except the poets climbing those rickety steps to the promise of spending an evening with
writers who wrote. One night, I stood on the roof next to Saul Bellow, looking at Brooklyn and its beloved bridge. We talked about the Dodgers and I told him how, as a child, my older brother, a fanatic Giants fan, had for years made me memorize all the Giant lineups in order to impress his friends. Saul smiled and said, “Not a bad thing to know.” I remember thinking, This is a moment .
    And then there was a quintessential New York moment. Rush hour, pouring rain, no umbrella, not a bus in sight. I had just come out of Macy’s, having had a lousy haircut on the cheap, when a taxi from nowhere appeared. As I reached for the handle, another hand covered mine. She smiled fiercely and growled, “Mind if we share?” Somehow, between 34th Street and Bank Street, we warmed to each other, exchanged names, and I almost fainted. My new best friend was Jean Stafford, the woman who couldn’t write a bad short story if her life depended on it and whose novels The Boston Adventure and The Catherine Wheel had opened my eyes to what it might be like to write from the inside out.
    I gushed compliments and then, overcome by sheer abandon, I blurted out that I had just moved in with Clem, who I figured she probably knew. She did, and I asked her up for a drink. She accepted, and the three of us hung out drinking for an hour or so. I was delirious—finally, a conversation I could bathe in. Then, too soon, my new best friend dashed off into the night and out of my life forever. Well, except for an occasional wave across some vast bar or restaurant. She, by then married to A. J. Liebling, I, by then married to Clem, we were evidently not destined to be a foursome. All for reasons, past and not forgotten, such as happen in a social enclave too close for comfort, and such that I could not begin to unravel.
    Yes, there were a few time-outs, but for the most part life was art, art, and more art. My days, unstructured as they were, slipped into the semblance of a routine. Usually, having been out late, we would sleep until ten o’clock or so in the sanctuary of our air-shaft bedroom, which would turn into bedlam on weekends, when the building’s weekend drunks would get it on, loud and violent, the women, to my surprise, outlasting and outcussing the men. I’d make breakfast for Clem: orange juice or half a grapefruit, one fried egg sunny side up, yolk runny but not too
runny, two strips of well-done bacon, one piece of rye toast, and one cup of coffee, half with the egg and half after. Me? I was more of a corn flakes and orange juice sort. Then Clem would go off to Commentary , just like the husband in my “picture.” Well, with a few tweaks here and there. And I would busy myself with what I thought a wife-to-be would do—I nested.
    My new nest came with a new neighborhood. Ninety Bank Street marks the spot where Hudson Street becomes Eighth Avenue as it continues to Central Park. Then, as always, it was a major truck route northward through the city. Problem was, Hudson Street was still paved with cobblestones. Day and night, starting around 4:00 AM, the trucks would ker-thump past our second-floor apartment. The bigger the trucks, the more our windows rattled.
    Across Hudson, on the corner of Bleecker, was the last public toilet and watering hole for horses in the