“Can I come into that terrible, smelly room?”
“When the red light is not on, it means you can come in.”
“It does not. It merely means that I won’t ruin your film if I come in. It doesn’t mean that you want me to come in.”
I opened the door for her. “You’re irritable enough to be pregnant.”
“No such luck,” she said forlornly.
“Really?”
She nodded. “A couple of days ago. I didn’t want to disappoint you. And I hoped that this time would be it.”
She was wearing the same white robe she’d worn the night I was entrapped in her apartment on Kenwood.
“I’m not disappointed. We’ve been married how long?”
“Six weeks.”
I had learned much about my wife in six weeks. Her favorite musician was Bach, though she “adored” Coltrane.
She “had” to exercise, in some way every day if only to run off her filly energy. She set up an exercise room in the basement near my darkroom where she jumped rope and rode an exercycle, with the Brandenburg Concertos playing over and over again on a phonograph.
Her favorite color was maroon; hence our bedroom was decorated in maroon and white, colors that I would not have thought erotic but that somehow became very tempting when I entered the room. She luxuriated in maroon lingerie, but would wear white to please me. “I absolutely hate black. I won’t wear it even if you like it. And the maroon has nothing to do with your university, either.”
In vain did I tell her that a) I liked her in maroon too, b) she never had to don black lace as far as I was concerned, and c) it was her university before it was mine.
She had not tried to preserve the Victorian arrangements of our house. “I hate small rooms.” So walls had been torn down with ruthless vigor. But the bright and airy results of her destructiveness were not decorated in airy colors, because “I hate pastels.”
The house was stylish but in an elegant and formal way—royal blues and deep grays and rich mahoganies and maroons, as though Rosemarie was nodding politely at the house’s refined shape and history.
It was a dramatic change from the cramped apartment on Menard. Recently I visited a young married couple in a similar apartment in a gentrified yuppie neighborhood. I was astonished at how small it was. So quickly do you forget what you have left behind.
It was expected and demanded that I approve of all arrangements in “our” house, but heaven help poor old Chucky if he ventured a dissent, much less a suggestion of his own.
“Chuck” was my usual name. “Chucky” was affectionately maternal. “Chucky Ducky” was an erotic invitation. “Charles” meant I was in trouble. “Charles Cronin O’Malley” meant I was in deep, deep trouble.
Her swings of mood were sudden, erratic, and often profound, but I could usually bring her out of the bad ones simply by touching her hand. I understood neither the moods nor my influence over them.—
“When I’m glum”—she pointed a book at me—“I read history. It’s better than fighting, right?”
“Right.” Who was I to disagree?
She had spent a lot of money on the house, but ordinarily she spent little on her clothes. Her dresses were the imitations of fashion you could buy at Marshall Field, or even more likely, at Wieboldt’s.
She did volunteer work every week at Marillac House and did not want to talk about it. “I just do it, that’s all. Any objections?”
“I’m impressed.”
“Don’t be.”
She was also careful with food, warning me, in Mom’s words, “Waste not, want not,” and adding as Irishwomen do a reference to the group that was currently supposed to make us feel guilty—“the poor starving people in Pakistan.”
“It has never been clear to me,” I remonstrated in a fashion I would have never dared with Mom, “what impact my eating has on people in other countries. Arguably, if I ate less, there would be—”
“EAT!” Grinning, she pointed a carving knife at me. “Don’t argue.”
I was threatened by her anger even when she was joking. So I twisted more spaghetti around my fork and ate—as I had been told.
She loved me passionately the way I was, but had nonetheless determined to improve me around the edges.
And had fiercely, furiously determined to be a mother.
“And because you’re not pregnant yet,” I said that night in the darkroom, “you are afraid you’re not going to have babies.”
“We’ve done a lot of screwing, Chuck.”
“I hadn’t noticed.”
“Beast.” She poked at my arm. “I suppose I’m being silly. Probably when I am pregnant I’ll hate it . … Can I come into your secret room and see what it’s like?”
“See what it’s like? You outfitted the whole thing—brilliantly, I might add.”
Somewhere in a magazine she had found a design for a perfect darkroom, all the equipment, every possible convenience, an ingeniously contrived layout, flawless electrical connections—everything the amateur would need so that he could mess around to his heart’s content.
“But you must have found something in here to distract you from your fair bride. I thought I’d check out the competition.”
“Just the night to do that. I’m working on the fair bride.”
“Really?”
“Really.”
“Then I can come in?”
I bowed reverently. “Please do, your Majesty.”
“Thank you, Sir Charles. Hey, it’s hot in here!”
“It has to be seventy-two degrees to keep the chemicals from spoiling.” I returned to the prints that I was soaking and then drying on the big dryer she had provided, the first one I had ever owned, if I could be said to own this one.
“So hot that I have to take off this robe.”
“I figured we were going in that direction. It looks like my art suffers again tonight.”
She flicked the robe away. It fell to the floor. I picked it up and hung it on a hook behind the door. Beneath the robe she was wearing a short white lace gown that was better than nothing, but not much.
“You said you liked white,” she explained.
The casual little seduction was an attempt at reconciliation. We had not quarreled. I did not know to quarrel constructively with a woman, having had no experience of such activity in my family. Hence my only response to trouble with Rosemarie was to sulk. Such conduct was no help: it hurt me, it hurt my wife, and it did not help me face the problem between us.
You do what you can do. So I sulked. And felt like a fool, and like a small, pouting child.
The conflict started with her father.
We came down from the clouds of our honeymoon with an uncomfortable thud. The city was paralyzed by a January thaw that had frozen overnight and made all the side streets as slippery as skating rinks. Then, just as we landed, yet another winter storm roared out of Canada and covered the ice with deceptively innocent snow. The rhythm of storm and subzero weather had frayed the nerves of Chicagoans, who in such winters come to believe that they are under attack by a mean-spirited lunatic and the only recourse is to act like mean-spirited lunatics themselves.
The drive back and forth between Hyde Park and home was a long, wearing struggle with ice, snow, and dangerous ill-tempered traffic. The sidewalks at the University were slippery, faculty members sullen, students suspicious of one another, and the staff prickly and dour.
Catching up on the first ten days of graduate school classes, an easy-seeming task when we planned it, now was absurdly difficult, especially since no one wanted to share notes.
To aggravate my own depression, Montezuma’s revenge, having held off until I returned home, smote me the second day of class.
“You ought to have been more careful of the water” was the only consolation available from Rosemarie, who was having reentry problems of her own. About which I didn’t want to hear. She definitely was not returning to school this quarter. We were not yet properly settled in our new home. She didn’t feel like sitting in a dull old classroom. She was not obsessed by the need for a degree the way I had been, anyway. And besides, she had to prepare for Peg’s wedding, didn’t she?
Peg and Vince were to be married the first week in March, after which he was going overseas, presumably to Korea. The Chinese had recaptured Seoul (the third time it had changed hands) but had been stopped cold by American artillery when the Eighth Army, now commanded by the brilliant Matthew Ridgeway, had fallen behind its prepared defenses—the talk about “prepared defenses” for once in military history had been true. There were rumors of an American counteroffensive.
It also seemed that everyone was fighting with his woman.
“Jane hasn’t spoken to Ted for three days,” Rosemarie announced to me one night. “I suppose”—she laughed—“you’d find it a blessing if your wife shut up for that long.”
“Is it serious?”
“The fight? Sure, all fights between lovers are serious. They’ll get over it.”
“What’s it about?”
“Who knows? Something dumb. Doctor again. He wants to give Ted office space in his own medical office building. The man never quits . … Most fights between lovers are dumb. Even between April and Vangie.”
“They don’t fight.”
“Sure they do, husband mine, but so subtly that only an outsider can notice it. They do it constructively.”
Aha.
Peg blew up at Vince, home for a weekend leave, the next night at supper at their house.
“Look, lover,” Peg said coolly, “I don’t expect to lose you. But if I do, I’ll never forget you and you’ll watch over me from heaven. But I absolutely refuse to permit you to ruin this happy time in our life. No morose stuff, understand?”
“You’re not the one who will be going into combat,” he snapped back at her.
“And you’re not the one who will be home alone, worrying every day. It’ll be hard for both of us. Let’s not have a contest to see who suffers more.”
“You want to call it all off?” His eyes flashed with anger at this outspoken lover of his.
“Just try it.”
“You don’t talk respectfully to me.” He frowned.
“Wrong nationality if you want a dutiful wife.”
“I’m sorry.” Vince looked sheepish. “I’ve been an ass.”
“I love you.” She embraced him.
The quarrel melted away.
“She was tough, wasn’t she?” I said to my wife in bed later.
“That’s Peg. She was right too.”
“Far be it for me to disagree.”
Why did men and women who loved one another have to fight that way? Wouldn’t it be better if they could work out their problems calmly and rationally?
Like archangels.
I was deeply troubled by all the conflicts, but there was nothing I could do about them.
So with unstable stomach and leaden spirits and anxious heart, I fought the maniac drivers alone every morning and evening without the consolation of my wife in the front seat next to me, offering irritable advice about how I “ought to” cope with the traffic.
“You’d probably murder me by the time we arrived at Chicago Avenue.”
“I might at that.”
By the beginning of February we had hit rock bottom and, as young lovers do, begun our slow rebound. We were very much in love, she eager still to please me and I penitent (in my own mind) for not recognizing that I had always loved her.
“Well”—her fingernails ran down my back—“it’s about time we did something like that. I was afraid we’d forgotten how.”
“My fault.” I wanted to collapse into sleep, already dreading the morning ride.
“Let’s have a fight over whose fault it is.”
“Why?”
“Then we can make love again.”
“Tonight?”
“Why not?”
“Why bother with the fight?” I turned the light back on, pushed the covers off her, and enfolded her passionately. “I love you, Rosemarie. I’ll never be able to love you enough.”
“Oh, Chuck …” She was especially sweet that night, subtle, numinous.
The next morning, my eyes barely open enough to peer through the thick snow flurries, I regretted our indulgences. We ought not to do those kinds of things when I had an early-morning class.
I did not regret it so much that I was innocent of lust when I arrived home late that afternoon. Rosemarie was in her “study,” dressed in an Aran Islands sweater and matching slacks.
“Whatcha doing?”
Her “study” (as opposed to my “office”—the names were hers and both nonnegotiable), like the rest of the house, displayed little evidence of what one might think of as typical femininity. It rather reminded one of the “study” of an English rural aristocrat—oak and mahogany (more of the latter), thick carpet and drapes (maroons and beiges), leather chairs (including the massive judge’s chair behind her desk), prints of horses on the walls, large bookcases. There were also Early American antiques, placed in strategic positions. The rather frail Sheraton table that served as her desk looked a little overwhelmed by the maroon leather chair, but somehow it all fit together—elegant, tasteful, and strong. Dear God, how strong!
The sumptuous leather easy chair facing the desk had obviously been placed there for use by the consort. I would not have dared not to use it
“Going over checklists for the wedding.” She looked up at me, frowned, and then smiled. “It looks like you have rape on your mind.”
“Me?”
“You … my God, Chuck, you’re crazy. Let me go. We do have a bedroom you know. Hey, stop that—”
“Who needs a bedroom?”
“Are you trying to set a record”—she twisted in a pretended attempt at escape—“for stripping me?”
“Twenty-five seconds,” I exaggerated as I yanked off her panties and pushed her back on her big, luxurious chair. “Have you ever been ravished on this chair?”
“Chuck … don’t! I have work to do.”
“Indeed you do, now start working.”
“All right, since you put it that way.” Her voice diminished to a satisfied moan. “A woman isn’t safe anywhere in her own house.”
Later, the sweater tied provocatively at her waist, she made us both hot chocolate and cuddled with me on the chair. “I should keep a blanket here for these events.”
“I may not strike here the next time.”
“Anytime.” She stroked my chest. “Any place.”
I had promised to start to work at The Exchange (called that in the same way that the University of Chicago was The University). I did my best not to think of the confusion and chaos of the wheat pit. My fear was not helped when Jim Clancy called me to offer me some advice. He was quite drunk.
“Who was that, dear?” Rosemarie asked.
“Your father.”
She turned pale. “What did he want?”
“He offered to show me the ropes.”
“Listen to him, Chuck, but don’t trust him. Ever.”
Rosemarie did not try to defend her father on those rare occasions when we discussed him. He was a poor, sad little man, she would say, but such pity did not blind her to his evil.
The next night, when I came home from the University, she was drunk. I heard the key turn in the lock of her study when I came in the house. She spent the night there, leaving me alone in our marriage bed.
Which, without her, was appallingly empty. Privacy I had again and I didn’t want it.
The next night was a repeat performance. I was wakened about three by a stirring besides me. The nuptial bed was no longer empty. I went back to sleep.
And left the next morning without waking her.
That night she was prepared to pretend that nothing happened.
So I punished her by sulking.
We slept as far apart as we could and still be in the same king-size bed. By day, her dull, dejected, guilty eyes tore at my heart. Finally I resolved that whatever I did the next time she went on one of her binges, I would not sulk. It didn’t help her and it made me feel terrible.
So now in her diaphanous frills she had invaded my darkroom.
As she was poking around in my inner sanctum, I figured out the immediate causes of the latest tailspin. My conversation with her father, followed almost immediately by her period, had devastated her. If she didn’t produce a child, she must have thought, she was worthless.
How could a callow twenty-three-year-old boy cope with that sort of mentality?
“What are you working on?”
“My wife, like I said.”
“No, I mean in your pictures.”
“I mean my wife in pictures. The honeymoon shots you complained that I hadn’t developed.”
“You’re the model.”
The darkroom was the inner corner of my soul into which no one had ever penetrated, a part of myself I had shared with no one.
I wanted to share it with her and I wanted to keep it private. If she had not been draped in alluring wisps of lace, I might have sent her away. My life was about to be changed forever because of her blatant womanly appeal. The same womanly appeal was patent on the Kodak photographic paper. I was ripe to be changed.
“Oh, Chuck!”
“You don’t like?”
“How utterly beautiful! You’re a genius, really you are!”
“Good model.”
“You took this the first afternoon, when I was brushing my hair?” She held the print against her breasts.
“When you practically demanded that I take it.”
“What I said was that if you were going to look at me that way, you might as well take pictures.” She peeked at the print. “Dear God, it’s perfect.”
“So are you.”
“I don’t mean that. I mean the light and the composition and the expression. You really ought to take lessons. I have some folders from the Art Institute—”
“Look at the other prints.”
She went through them, slowly and carefully, with the solemnity of a child in her First Holy Communion procession. When she was finished she put them back on the worktable where I had stacked them, facedown. She stood by the table, as if frozen in time, one hand still on the pictures, another clutched at her breast. She was breathing rapidly and deeply, but not crying.
I dried my hands and encircled her waist. I pressed the firm muscles of her stomach.
“What do you think?”
“I wish I was that beautiful.”
“The camera only records reality. It does not interpret.” I kissed the back of her neck.
“That’s not true, Chuck, and you know it. The photographer catches a single second of the passing parade on a woman’s face and explains who she is with that instant of illumination.”
“Fine.” I kissed her again. My fingers touched a fresh young breast. “If you want to explain it that way. I see the real Rosemarie and capture her in that instant when she is most who she is.”
She slipped away from me and donned her robe again. “Can I sit and watch?”
“I suspect that you installed that comfortable couch for sitting and watching.”
“Minimally. Will you teach me how to develop pictures?”
“No.”
“Please!”
“No.”
“Why not?”
“You’ll be better than I am.”
“If I promise not to be better than you?”
“Well …”
“Goody!”
My Rosemarie in those days was not very good at sitting and doing nothing. Give her a book to read and she would wait patiently till Judgment Day and indeed protest when called upon to put it down. But without a distraction she would shortly pop up and bound around a room, sniffing and snooping like a high-spirited Irish wolfhound.
“What do you have here in your secret cabinet, Chucky? Can I look? Are there any pictures of other naked women?”
There weren’t. My picture of Trudi and the roll of shots that had produced it were locked in a bank vault.
“Hey, that’s private!”
“We’re married!”
“Stay out of there!” I charged across the room.
She slipped away from my rush and opened the neat brown folder on top of my secret portfolios.
“Give it back.”
She retreated across the room, folder in both hands.
“No.”
“You have no right to look at those pictures.”
“Maybe you’re right.” She considered my claim carefully. “But I don’t think so. And, Chucky, you look just like you did when I started to take off your swim trunks at the pool in Mexico.”
“I feel the same way.” Should I tear the folder—it was one about Germany I had titled “The Conquered”—out of her hands, surely the only way I would recover it?
While I was deciding, she opened the folder, glanced at the first few prints, and then collapsed into the couch.
“I’m sorry, Chuck. I really am.” She closed the folder. “I apologize. I had no idea. I really didn’t. I don’t know what I expected, but I didn’t expect anything like …”
I was disappointed. I had wanted her to see them and hoped desperately that she would be impressed.
“You’re apologizing for looking at my pictures?”
“Certainly not.” She dismissed that possibility with her brisk hand gesture. “I’m apologizing for being dumb.”
“Dumb?”
“Suggesting that you go to the silly old Art Institute.” She opened the folder again and examined the prints with respectful caution. “Busybody little housewife trying to make her husband into a good picture taker when he’s already a genius.”
“I’m not a genius, Rosemarie.” I was enormously pleased with myself.
“I mean, these poor people, so much suffering, so much hope, and a lot of arrogance too.”
“And you feel so ambivalent about them.”
“Right. Is this the girl who gave you the Leica?” She turned the picture of Trudi, in front of the food store, in my direction.
“Yes.”
“Poor little kid. Did she make it?”
“I think so. She disappeared, but I believe she’s all right.”
“I’m glad.”
“She’s not a trollop, Rosemarie.”
“Only an idiot would think she was.”
So she didn’t remember what she had said the night she was drunk in Mexico. Or maybe she did and was apologizing.
I still dreamed that she and Mom and Peg would meet Trudi somewhere and disown me as a coward and a liar. But in my realistic moments I knew they would never meet. And if they did, Trudi would never tell. And, finally, so what? I wasn’t perfect Who was?
Those rationalizations did not assuage my guilt or my fears.
“Definitely a genius.” She continued to page through my prints.
“I’m not a genius,” I said irritably.
“Yes, you are.” She examined me shrewdly. “And I think you suspect it too.”
“I just take pictures.”
“I say you’re gifted.” She closed the folder abruptly and pointed a sharp index finger at me. “And I am a woman of enormous taste. In men too.” She grinned impishly. “You know, you want a man, and he never does propose. So one night you show him the house in which the two of you will live after you’re married and you’ve got him. Good taste.”
“Good political skills.”
“Regardless.” She waved her hand again. “Grant that I have good taste? I mean seriously.”
Her invasion of my darkroom and my secrets was an experience very like the wedding night when she reveled in undressing me. I had to yield my modesty again and make a gift of myself. I was delighted with the experience but also embarrassed and disconcerted.
The image of the wedding night repeated sent torrents of hormones rushing into my bloodstream.
“All right”—desire for her, imperious, violent desire, surged in my body—“seriously, I do grant that you have good taste.”
“Then you agree that you are a great artist because I say so?”
“I don’t know, but if you say so—”
“Oh, Chuck, this poor old woman at the railroad station—”
“She’s not old, Rosemarie. She’s in her early thirties. I call it ‘Fidelity.’ She waited at that station every afternoon for the train from Leipzig. Her husband was a Panzer commander who was captured at the battle of Krusk, the biggest tank battle in history. Occasionally Stalin sent a few of his prisoners home. They always came down on the Leipzig train.”
“And he never came?”
“Oddly enough he did. Here, let me find a picture of the two of them.”
I pulled out the shot of Kurt and Brigitta and their two children, Henry and Cunnegunda.
“It’s not the same woman!”
“It is. She’s expecting their third child.”
Thank goodness she didn’t ask me the child’s name. It was Karl, out of gratitude for the job I had found for Brigitta at our headquarters at the Residence. Nor was there any point in telling Rosemarie that I had met Kurt at the train because Brig was translating for Herr Oberburgermeister Konrad Adenauer and General Lucius Clay, and the future Herr Reichkanzler and I had it off well.
Rosemarie closed the portfolio.
“Fine … what other portfolios do you have for me to see?”
“I’ll show them all to you, Rosemarie. Every one of them.”
“Great! Let’s start right now.”
“Later.”
“Why later?”
“Take off that robe, woman,” I demanded.
“Don’t look at me that way, Chuck.” She meant it. “You frighten me.”
“I intend to. Take it off, I said.”
“But—”
“Damn it, woman, you come in here and stir me up and then hesitate. Do what I say and do it now!”
“All right” Timidly she let the robe fall to the floor. “Please don’t look at me that way. You never have … acted that way before.”
“And the … whatever you call it.”
“Chemise. Chuck, you’re going to hurt me.”
“I thought that was impossible. Take it off before I rip it off.”
“All right … I’m afraid of you.” She pulled the tasty bit of lingerie over her head and, holding it protectively against her breasts, backed up against the wall.
What a wonderful picture it would have made. Threatened woman? Ah, no. Wife egging on her husband, challenging him, testing him to see how he could improvise this role in their commedia dell’arte all’improvviso.
Very effective challenge at that.
“Drop it.”
“You’re trying to prove you’re a man after I invaded your privacy and found out about your pictures.”
“Right.” I gripped her wrist. “And I propose to prove it spectacularly. Now drop it.”
The chemise joined the robe on the floor. She cowered against the wall. “You’re … scary. Can’t we go upstairs? All these terrible smells.”
She was a little scared, and delighted in herself being a little scared. Being assaulted by her funny little husband was like riding the Bobs at Riverview.
“They’re an aphrodisiac.” I pinned her against the wall.
“Chuck … don’t … oh my God … what are you trying to do … ? Stop it … don’t drop me … PLEASE . …”
Do I have to say that it was a game, that she knew it was a game, and that I didn’t hurt her? We were improvising around our roles. We romped in the most abandoned coupling thus far in our marriage. Then we looked at all my prints and romped again.
Whatever problems we would later have in our marriage, we could never argue that they were caused by sexual maladjustment during our early days. We improvised spectacularly in our first months together.
Many turning points were reached that night, not enough maybe but still a lot. Among other things, as improbable as it may seem given the calendar of Rosemarie’s physiology, we conceived our daughter that night.