having parents he could say that to and then have them make a fuss over him.
And I remembered one day when we had gone out for a family Sunday-afternoon walk on Fifth Avenue, Valerie window-shopping for dresses she could never afford. Coming towards us was a woman about three feet tall but dressed elegantly in suede jerkin and white frilly blouse and dark tweed skirt. My daughter tugged at Valerie’s coat and pointed to the dwarf lady and said, “Mommy, what’s that?”
Valerie was horrified with embarrassment. She was always terrified about hurting anyone’s feelings. She shushed my daughter until the woman was safely past. Then she explained to our daughter that the woman was one of those people who had never grown taller. My daughter didn’t really grasp the idea. Finally she asked, “You mean she didn’t grow up. You mean she’s an old lady like you?”
Valerie smiled at me. “Yes, dear,” she said. “Now don’t think about it anymore. It only happens to very few people.”
At home that night, when I told my kids a story before sending them to bed, my daughter seemed to be lost in thought and not listening. I asked her what was wrong. Then, her eyes very wide, she said, “Daddy, am I really a little girl or am I just an old lady who didn’t grow up?”
I knew that there were millions of people who had stories like this to tell about their kids. That it was all terribly commonplace. And yet I couldn’t help the feeling that sharing a part of my children’s lives made me richer. That the fabric of my life was made up of these little things that seemed to have no importance.
Again my daughter. One evening at dinner she had infuriated Valerie by continuingly misbehaving. She threw food at her brother, deliberately spilled a drink and then knocked over a gravy boat. Finally Valerie screamed at her, “You do one more thing and I’ll kill you.”
It was, of course, a figure of speech. But my daughter stared at her very intently and asked, “Do you have a gun?”
It was funny because she so obviously believed that her mother couldn’t kill her unless she had a gun. She knew nothing yet of wars and pestilence, of rapists and molesters, of automobile accidents and plane crashes, clubbings, cancer, poison, getting thrown out of a window. Valerie and I both laughed, and Valerie said, “Of course I haven’t got a gun, don’t be silly.” And the knot of worried concentration disappeared from my daughter’s face. I noticed that Valerie never made that kind of irritated remark again.
And Valerie astonished me too sometimes. She had become more and more Catholic and conservative with the years. She was no longer the bohemian Greenwich Village girl who had wanted to become a writer. In the city housing project pets had been forbidden, and Value never told me she loved animals. Now that we owned a house Valerie bought a puppy and a kitten. Which didn’t make me too happy, even though my son and daughter made a pretty picture playing with their pets on the lawn. The truth is that I had never liked house dogs and cats; they were caricatures of orphans.
I was
But for some reason she had nightmares, maybe because of her Catholic upbringing. During the night I would have to wake her up because she gave little cries of despair and wept even while sound asleep. One night she was terribly frightened and I held her close in my arms and asked her what was wrong, what she’d dreamed about and she whispered to me, “Never tell me that I’m dying.”
Which scared the hell out of me. I had visions of her having gone to the doctor and receiving bad news. But the next morning, when I questioned her about it, she didn’t remember anything. And when I asked her if she had been to see the doctor, she laughed at me. She said, “It’s my religious upbringing. I guess I just worry about going to hell.”
For two years I wrote free-lance articles for the magazines, watched my kids grow up, so happily married that it almost disgusted me. Valerie did a lot of visiting with her family, and I spent a lot of time in my basement writing den, so we really didn’t see that much of each other. I had at least three assignments from the magazines every month, while working on a novel I hoped would make me rich and famous. The kidnapping and murder novel was my plaything; the magazines were my bread and butter. I figured I had another three years to go before I finished the book, but I didn’t care. I read through the growing pile of manuscript whenever I became lonely. And it was lovely watching the kids grow older and Valerie happier and more content and less afraid of dying. But nothing lasts. It doesn’t last because you don’t want it to last, I think. If everything is perfect, you go looking for trouble.
After two years of living in my suburban house, writing ten hours every day, going to a movie once a month, reading everything in sight, I welcomed a call from Eddie Lancer asking me to have dinner with him in the city. For the first time in two years I would see New York at night. I had gone in during the day to talk over my magazine assignments with the editors, but I always drove home for dinner. Valerie had become a great cook, and I didn’t want to miss the evening with my kids and my final nightcap of work in my den.
But Eddie Lancer was just back from Hollywood, and he promised me some great stories and some great food. And as usual he asked me how my novel was coming. He always treated me as if he knew I was going to be a great writer, and I loved that. He was one of the few people I knew who seemed to have a genuine kindness untouched by self-interest. And he could be very funny in a way I envied. He reminded me of Valerie when she had been writing stories at the New School. She had it in her writing and sometimes in everyday life. It flashed out every once in a while even now. And so I told Eddie I had to go into the magazines the next day to get an assignment and we could have dinner afterward.
He took me to a place called Pearl ’s that I had never heard of. I was so dumb that I didn’t know it was New York ’s “in” Chinese restaurant. It was the first time I had ever eaten Chinese food, and when I told Eddie that, he was amazed. He did a whole routine introducing me to different Chinese dishes while pointing out the celebrities and even opening up my fortune cookie and reading it for me. He also stopped me from eating the fortune cookie. “No, no, you never eat them,” he said. “That’s terribly unsophisticated. If there’s one valuable thing you’ll get out of this night, it’s learning never to eat your fortune cookie in a Chinese restaurant.”
It was a whole routine that was only funny between two friends in the context of their relationship with each other. But months later I read a story of his in Esquire in which he used that incident. It was a touching story, making fun of himself making fun of me. I knew him better after that story, how his good humor masked his essential loneliness and estrangement from the world and the people around him. And I got a hint of what he really thought about me. He painted a picture of me as a man in control of life and knowing where he was going. Which amused the hell out of me.
But he was wrong about the fortune cookie business being the only valuable thing I would get out of that night. Because after dinner he talked me into going to one of those New York literary parties, where again I met the great Osano.
We were having our dessert and coffee. Eddie made me order chocolate ice cream. He told me that it was the only dessert that went with Chinese food. “Remember that,” he said. “Never eat your fortune cookie and always order chocolate ice cream for dessert.” Then offhandedly he asked me to come to the party with him. I was a little reluctant. I had an hour and a half drive out to Long Island, and I was anxious to get home and maybe get in an hour’s work before I went to bed.
“Come on,” Eddie said. “You can’t always be an uxurious hermit. Make a night out of it. There’ll be some great booze, good talk and some nice-looking broads. And you might make some valuable contacts. It’s harder for a critic to knock the shit out of you if he knows you personally. And your stuff may read better to some publisher if he’s met you at a party and he thinks you’re a nice guy.” Eddie knew that I had no publisher for my new book. The publisher of my first book never wanted to see me again because it had sold only two thousand copies and never got a paperback.
So I went to the party and met Osano. He never let on that he remembered that interview, and neither did I. But a week later I got a letter from him asking me if I would come in to see him and have lunch about a job he had to offer me.
