Chapter Three
CHAPTER THREE





Thoughts came too fast.
I was losing my ideas, I — Briefcase.
The bench by the front door.
I retrieved two yellow pads and hurried back to bed, flanking the typewriter with them, topping each pad with pens. The machine recorded continuity, the right pad and the left stored ancillary thoughts, facts from the past, dreams for the future. I grabbed my pen and wrote:
July 1981: All I need is a little more energy and the artist in me will again take me in the back-to-back days ahead. Anticipation fills me with excitement about once again knowing the thrill of creation. Making something out of nothing when no one else is near is the safest place for my passion — except for Jake and —
Something —
I turned off the typewriter. Something was buzzing.
The doorbell.
I hurried to my front door, pressed the intercom's talk lever and said, "Who's there?"
"Jake."
What? I released the gate, the front door, the door to the stairwell. I opened my second floor door for him, yelled down the stairs that I'd just been thinking about him, get a drink and I'll be out in minutes. I raced to the bathroom, fearing what I'd find in the mirror. That fear was justified. As I washed up, I felt the excitement that Jake always aroused in me, once I realized how perfect for me he was. He was my height, sixty-nine inches, and I loved wearing my highest heels whenever we went out. He was stocky, his shoulders broad above the curve of his paunch. His eyebrows were thick and curling black and grey over dark eyes usually dancing with fun and passion. His hair twisted into wiry curls of graying black shades; his nose was blunt and added character to his rosy, round baby cheeks, usually glowing from strokes of the sun in Las Vegas, Florida, Wisconsin or Chicago, depending on the sun. He had an adorable sweet way about him and yet he also was smart, kind, and practical. I had plenty of occasions to be glad that I'd allowed him to woo me, operating as I usually did on instinct and impulse. I loved it that he was positive, quick to grasp ideas and to seize humor.
Makeup from the medicine chest tumbled out and smashed in the sink.
I scooped up some of the beige liquid and rubbed out the shadows beneath my eyes. I brushed color on my cheeks and stroked lipstick on my mouth.
Better already.
I couldn't force a brush through my hair. In the bedroom, I grabbed something from the closet, happy to see my red velour jumpsuit. At last I found a hat under which to hide my tangled locks.
"I'm coming in if you don't hurry up," Jake said, his topsiders slapping my dark walnut stained floor, heralding his imminent appearance.
We collided in the narrow short hall between the bedrooms. The drinks in his hands splashed his shirt, the floor, me. Our eyes met and we laughed while he set our drinks on the dining table and said, "Let's try that again."
I staggered against him, draped my arms around his neck, returned his kiss. I felt slaphappy silly, like a kid who was up too late.
Jake hugged me and let his hands wander. "Your ribs are naked bone!"
"Da neck bone's connected to da rib bone and da rib bone's connected . . . "
"You can't afford to lose another ounce. Let's go," he said. He grabbed my hand and led me out.
Our usual stroll down the block quickened; we raced across Wells Street to Sir Loin, the restaurant with walls the evergreen of my living room, a perfect place to be in with the man who fed all my desires.
"Want your shrimp cocktail and steak?" That happy lilt in his voice was missing, but he waved to the waiter and ordered our usuals.
He turned again to me and frowned. His almost pretty lips were thinned by disapproval.
"Your face'll freeze that way," I said, hopefully in a bantering tone.
He must have heard me, yet he didn't respond. His thick neck and shoulders never moved beneath his blue and white checked button-down shirt.
"Hey, Jake-y I'm sorry. Free time makes me — I have to call my mother! I have to call her right now!"
"Why?"
"I can't remember my first five years."
"I can't remember my first ten."
"Ten?"
"Everyone forgets that stuff sooner or later."
"How can you be so calm about losing your first ten years?"
"What I want to know is how you could forget our date tonight."
He looked earnest when he said that. I wanted to hug him right there and then, but as I rose from my chair, I caught the eye of a stranger. I dropped back into my seat, leaned toward Jake and said, "I'm painting again, my first self-portrait in years! Think about how you feel when you love what you're doing!"
"Watch that kind of talk or we'll miss dinner — you're painting again?"
I felt guilty, though I wasn't sure why. Then I remembered his question "Yes! Only with words! Life's perfect! Absolutely perfect!"
He muttered something, then said, "What are you writing?"
"History!"
"Aren't you making history?"
"Every minute with you is historical, hysterical, heart-warming — "
"Writing history is more important than making it?"
My foot slid out of its shoe and found his leg, rubbing it slowly, up and down. "You pun more than you know but, oh Jake, there's so much to think about, so much to say."
"A man I could fight, but a typewriter?" He threw up his hands, the boy in him grinning again.
I grinned back and blew him a kiss. "Do you see a typewriter here?"
He shook his head and stared at me. Fun fled as he said, "You've changed, and I don't just mean your weight. You're all hyped up or something. Last time I saw you, you could barely hold your eyes open."
"Last time I was still under the influence of — Jake! Had it not been for peritonitis, I'd be back at work by now."
"It's only the first week of August . . . " He peered at me over his drink, then set it down carefully, continuing to stare. His mouth was tight, his eyes critical.
I grew uneasy. "You're the one who's changed." He was critical. It was over. Life would lose a vital link.
His grin returned. He wasn't against me. We were all right. The burst of my joy into laughter seemed to surprise him.
He pushed his drink in small circles, darkening the white linen cloth. He didn't raise his eyes to mine.
Again came that sense of loss when the kid in him disappeared. I put my hand over his, the one beside his martini. "You are right. I am different. I've never, ever been this happy! It's almost too marvelous to put into words! But ask me, ask me Jake, and I'll find all of the most beautiful, exquisite words in the world to tell you exactly how I feel!" My toes curled; my other sandal fell off. My naked foot continued to caress his calf. "I'm obsessed with writing, possessed by it! I've got everything I could ever desire: a perfect lover and all the words I could ever, ever need."
"You're possessed, all right. By what, is the question."
I yanked my foot away. "I won't take that, even from you."
"But I'm just — "
"Not just," I hissed at a decibel audible to neighboring diners. I was swept up in the speed of my amazingly hot blood. Seconds later I was laughing at his exaggerated bemusement.
"Shush. Calm down. Hush." He looked around the room and stroked my arm. His hand drew me into his warmth. "I'm not judging you."
"You're dear, wonderful, special — If only . . . "
"What?"
"If I could sleep, I wouldn't be so jumpy."
"You're not sleeping?"
"Not much. Creative passion has the most incredible intensity, the greatest power!"
"Our passion's the greatest!" He looked pleased with himself, then wagged a finger at me. "But not sleeping isn't so good."
I grinned and shifted in the chair. "I don't have to sleep! I'm on vacation! Right Cakes, Baby Cakes . . . Jake?" I seemed to be drunk, and on only one glass of wine. Silly drunk and having a wonderful time.
Suddenly I heard myself sobbing. "Oh Jake. I can't go back to work and dance the dance with fraternity boys in suits. I've got to get out of there! I keep forgetting to get the Sunday Trib . . . " My tears were uncontrollable and unexpected, like the despair that suddenly welled inside me.
"But you don't have to go back to work for four more weeks."
"Really? Oh thank you, Jake. Everything's Jake, Jake. A-O-K!"
"Eat fast, but eat," he said when dinner arrived.
Leaving the restaurant, he gripped my hand, I gripped leftovers. We reached my door, breathless, laughing, excited.
In the bedroom I turned on the air conditioner and threw my comforter to the floor. He undressed and lit the candles, their light wild in the rush of cool air, white wax hot and spurting on the bureau.
Faster, faster the flames bowed, stretched, their shadows huge tongues on the walls.
Merging sensations peaked, a momentary collapsing, the building beginning again.
Coming together, holding on but letting go, letting go. Letting go.
We lay side by side holding hands, adrift in thrilling bliss.
He covered our cooling bodies. We touched lips, we drew apart, still silent.
Thoughts pressed for expression but my body was too limp to move.
My thoughts rang with truth. I had to record them. But I just couldn't move. Jake murmured and snugged me to him, and then I was watching him sleep from the lassitude of satiation, until the arm that braced my chin trembled and collapsed and I fell tumbled onto his chest.
In the curve of his neck, I was inundated by the rise of sensual not sexual passion. I was so blessed to feel so much, to be so safe, to be with Jake, man, not boy, a steady supply of my favorite fudge, a safe for my passion, my exercise.
Heartbreak was worse than eczema, allergies and asthma; it was worse than major surgery made critical by complications.
RECORD THAT.
The words reverberated, urging me to pick up paper and pen. Jake stirred beneath me. His arm tightened around me. He'd be leaving soon, I could wait.
The firing surge of my thoughts slowed, my muscles relaxed, tamed by an act of love, by the warmth of Jake, the steady beat of his heart, the slow ebb and flow of his breathing. My eyes closed. They flew open as theI forced them open. It was the lighting and the deep shadows that I had to remember. Because of course I would paint before my sick leave ended, and this chiaroscuro, this tableau of skin on skin in the cast of flaming candles conjured the dense richness of Rembrandt.
PAINT NOW.
What — I did hear something a while ago. But Jake was sound asleep.
The impression of "PAINT NOW" made my ears burn. Classical music suddenly drenched me in sound, as if someone had turned up the radio's volume, sending my body into a startled spasm. Jake didn't twitch even an eyelash. "Paint now." I wanted to paint, I would paint.
Sometime later, my knee jerked and woke me up. I glanced at the clock and dropped down to nibble the line of Jake's cheek, his lips, dart my tongue into his mouth. "Thought that would rouse you," I cried when he opened one eye and squinted it at me.
When he left, I showered. Exhilaration belted out my underwater songs. I slid into a lover's old shirt, filled the ceramic white pitcher with water and ice and pulled the bed together. I placed the yellow pads and pens on the comforter — typing was beyond me at the moment.
Jake's view of my sleeplessness sent me back to Valium. Fifty milligrams this time. I made notes on a yellow pad in the dark.
It was 4:37 a.m. when I made coffee and went to the dining room. I switched on the chandelier, then the typewriter. FIRST ORDERS OF IMPORTANCE emerged top center on a fresh sheet of white paper. Impressive, making my breath catch.
IGNORANCE IS A DIRTY DIAPER. I was stunned by the brilliance of this analogy.
I reread those lines. I hugged myself and patted my back, still wrapped up in myself while I danced my way to the bay windows in the living room, and back to my road of amazement.
I bent over the machine, fingers flying, words racing across and down the page.
It's hard to be objective about subjective causes: you may not see how your right might wrong someone else.
I felt twenty-five again, advising Seventeen readers, amazed to discover that helping them helped to heal the wound that my true love Jimmy had opened. He'd been daydreaming out loud, he said, and never could honor his word in a marriage vow. He couldn't be faithful to one woman, he said. He now and then appeared on the phone, the romance of our love for each other preserved by the honor he paid his words and deeds.
Positive attitudes are crucial, a fine art to master. Just don't assume everyone else has one. My assumptions led me to heartbreak twice.
I cannot allow myself to think about, much less assume anything, about death's cancerous invasions of my parents. Life without them is unimaginable, fountain of unconditional love and the power to live by what's best for the majority, within reason and maturity, practicing The Golden Rule.
Humor is a bridge to positive thinking.
It wasn't humor that helped a classmate at Parsons School of Design forget about her abusive, drunk father, it was painting life on paper and canvas, she said. We were kindred spirits who connected in the depths of sensitivity. Most of my strongest ties to individuals were with those who also had faced death, self-inflicted or imposed. Ignorance accounted for my hard times with men, that and my incredibly thick rose-colored glasses as well as the passionate, thrusting thrill of our unions, and fun.
I cannot define the kind of quality I want my time to have until I learn what the choices are, and what it is that I need to know, this knowledge still eluding me.
I learn more from sharing viewpoints, feel more secure when sharing the caring.
No man is an island, entire unto himself — school's most important lesson.
Mistakes are the fastest, most expensive way to learn the validity of judgement. Pay attention.
"Slow down. Stop thinking so much. Too sensitive, too literal, too gullible — the last was a fault built by my assumption that people in my life also lived by The Golden Rule. I was easily fooled by those who appeared to have my parents' hearts and spirits — linked by career choice, interests, sense of humor, even their build. My first heartbreak taught me to ask the right questions, I thought, until I made my second mistake. I'd needed to find out if he were an alcoholic like the one I at last disconnected from not long before meeting Gary Murphy.
I now knew too much about failure and overwhelming emotions that took forever to leave me alone. But I was set: life was safe in the shallows of superficialities.
How rare if not impossible it must be for anyone to live without ever knowing fear. Dear Abigails had ways of reducing fear for people. That's what had felt so good about my work at Seventeen.
Advertising boosted profits for the few. Advertising had me by the proverbial. I'd have to sell my home and otherwise gear down expenses in order to return to publishing. I couldn't bear the thought of having white walls again. Why did the marketeers act as if the creative department wanted to sabotage their Christmas bonus? If the products didn't sell, we were all in trouble:
Examine the tissue of face values. Ask questions. Ignorance can be bliss, but what you don't know can hurt you.
Don't slap strangers with stereotype labels. Prejudgment promotes misjudgment and lost opportunity.
Communication paves relationships. Relationships are keys to love. Love buffers misfortune. Love is the ultimate comfort.
The last sentence brought me to my feet.
My journal was a book. It was a book! A book! Breaking Through to Happiness. A bestseller, an international bestseller!

****************************************************
Journal Entry August l981

THE COMIC IS
A COSMIC FORCE
VITAL
TO THE LIFE OF LOVE.


Critically Aclaimed Expressionist Art by Patricia Obletz (414) 444-4579