Near the term end I finally submitted a story. Everybody loved it. After class Valerie came up to me and said, “How come I’m so serious and everything I write comes out sounding so funny? And you always make jokes and act as if you’re not serious and your story makes me cry?”
She was serious. As usual. She wasn’t coming on. So I took her for coffee. Her name was Valerie O’Grady, a name she hated for its Irishness. Sometimes I think she married me just to get rid of the O’Grady. And she made me call her Value. I was surprised when it took me over two weeks to get her in bed. She was no free swinging Village girl and she wanted to be sure I knew it. We had to go through a whole charade of my getting her drunk first so that she could accuse me of taking advantage of a national or racial weakness. But in bed she surprised me.
I hadn’t been that crazy about her before. But in bed she was great. I would guess that there are some people who fit sexually, who respond to each other on a primary sexual level. With us I think we were both so shy, so withdrawn into ourselves, that we couldn’t relax with other partners sexually. And that we responded to each other fully for some mysterious reason springing out of that mutual shyness. Anyway, after that first night in bed we were inseparable. We went to all the little movie houses in the Village and saw all the foreign films. We’d eat Italian or Chinese and go back to my room and make love, and about midnight I’d walk her to the subway so that she could go home to her family in Queens. She still didn’t have the nerve to stay overnight. Until one weekend she couldn’t resist. She wanted to be there Sunday to make me breakfast and read the Sunday papers with me in the morning. So she told the usual daughterly lies to her parents and stayed over. It was a beautiful weekend. But when she got home she ran into a clan fire fight. Her family jumped all over her, and when I saw her Monday night, she was in tears.
“Hell,” I said. “Let’s get married.”
She said in surprise, “I’m not pregnant.” And was even more surprised when I burst out laughing. She really had no sense of humor, except when she wrote.
Finally I convinced her that I meant it. That I really wanted to marry her, and she blushed and then started to cry.
So on the following weekend I went out to her family’s house in Queens for Sunday dinner. It was a big family, father, mother, three brothers and the three sisters, all younger than Value. Her father was an old Tammany Hall worker and earned his living with some political job. There were some uncles there and they all got drunk. But in a cheerful happy-go-lucky way. They got drunk as other people stuff themselves at a big dinner. It was no more offensive than that. Though I didn’t usually drink, I had a few and we all had a good time.
The mother had dancing brown eyes. Value obviously got her sexuality from the mother and lack of humor from her father. I could see the father and uncles watching me with shrewd drunken eyes, trying to judge whether I was just a sharpie screwing their beloved Value, kidding her about marriage.
Mr. O’Grady finally got to the point. “When are you two planning to get hitched?” he asked. I knew if I gave the wrong answer, I could get punched in the mouth by a father and three uncles right then and there. I could see the father hated me for screwing his little girl before marrying her. But I understood him. That was easy. Also, I wasn’t hustling. I never hustled people, or so I thought. So I laughed a rid said, “Tomorrow morning.”
I laughed because I knew it was an answer that would reassure them but one they could not accept. They could not accept because all their friends would think that Value was pregnant. We finally settled on a date two months ahead, so that there would be formal announcements and a real family wedding. And that was OK with me too. I don’t know whether I was in love. I was happy and that was enough. I was no longer alone, I could begin my true history. My life would extend outward, I would have a family, wife, children, my wife’s family would be my family. I would settle in a portion of the city that would be mine. I would no longer be a single solitary unit. Holidays and birthdays could be celebrated. In short, I would be “normal” for the first time in my life. The Army really didn’t count. And for the next ten years I worked at building myself into the world.
The only people I knew to invite to the wedding were my brother, Artie, and some guys from the New School. But there was a problem. I had to explain to Vallie that my real name wasn’t Merlyn. Or rather that my original name was not Merlyn. After the war I changed my name legally. I had to explain to the judge that I was a writer and that Merlyn was the name I wanted to write under. I gave him Mark Twain as an example. The judge nodded as if he knew a hundred writers who had done the same thing.
The truth was that at that time I felt mystical about writing. I wanted it to be pure, untainted. I was afraid of being inhibited if anybody knew anything about me and who I really was. I wanted to write universal characters. (My first book was heavily symbolic.) I wanted to be two absolutely separate identities.
It was through Mr. O’Grady’s political connections that I got my job as federal Civil Service employee. I became a GS-6 clerk administrator to Army Reserve Units.
After the kids, married life was dull but still happy. Value and I never went out. On holidays we’d have dinner with her family or at my brother Artie’s house. When I worked nights, she and her friends in the apartment house would visit each other. She made a lot of friends. On weekend nights she’d visit their apartments when they had a little party and I’d stay in our apartment to watch the kids and work on my book. I’d never go. When it was her turn to entertain, I hated it, and I guess I didn’t hide that too well. And Vallie resented it. I remember one time I went into the bedroom to look at the kids and I stayed in there reading some pages of manuscript. Vallie left our guests and came looking for me. I’ll never forget the hurt look when she found me reading, so obviously reluctant to come back to her and her friends.
It was after one of these little affairs that I got sick for the first time. I woke up at two in the morning and felt an agonizing pain in my stomach and all over my back.
I couldn’t afford a doctor so the next day I went to the Veterans Administration hospital, and then they took all kinds of X-rays and made some other tests over a period of a week. They couldn’t find anything, but I had another attack and just from the symptoms they diagnosed a diseased gall bladder.
A week later I was back in the hospital with another attack, and they shot me full of morphine. I had to miss two days’ work. Then about a week before Christmas, just as I was about to finish up work on my night job, I got a hell of an attack. (I didn’t mention that I was working nights in a bank to get extra money for Christmas.) The pain was excruciating. But I figured I could make it to the VA hospital on Twenty-third Street. I took a cab that let me off about a half block from the entrance. It was now after midnight. When the cab pulled away, the pain hit me an agonizing solar plexus blow. I fell to my knees in the dark street. The pain radiated all over my back. I flattened out onto the ice-cold pavement. There wasn’t a soul around, no one that could help me. The entrance to the hospital was a hundred feet away. I was so paralyzed by pain I couldn’t move. I wasn’t even scared. In fact, I was wishing I would just die, so that the pain would go away. I didn’t give a shit for my wife or my kids or my brother. I just wanted out. I thought for a moment about the legendary Merlin. Well, I was no fucking magician. I remember rolling over once to stop the pain and rolling off the ledge of the sidewalk and into the gutter. The edge of the curb was a pillow for my head.
And now I could see the Christmas lights decorating a nearby store. The pain receded a little. I lay there thinking I was a fucking animal. Here I was an artist, a book published and one critic had called me a genius, one of the hopes of American literature, and I was dying like a dog in the gutter. And through no fault of my own. Just because I had no money in the bank. Just because I had nobody who really gave a shit about whether I lived or not. That was the truth of the whole business. The self-pity was nearly as good as morphine.