Ben was an English major at Brooklyn College when he met Clara at this party. I will put their meeting at this party since all college parties are essentially the same and I am saved the trouble of describing it. But they met, conversation in the corner, coffee at Riker’s, and so on. Ben wore blue work shirts, tweed jackets with leather elbow patches, long scarves wound around his neck and thrown over the shoulder. His father did something. Whatever your father does, that’s what he did: the years shuffling by, marked by decaying Chevys and fevered vacations, the World Series and Gelusil. Ben’s minor was French, and he read Apollinaire and Cocteau. His reading of French anglicized him in a Ronald Firbank kind of way, and he affected a weariness and sensitivity that, on Flatbush and Nostrand, was something to see. He had a darting, arcane mind, of a kind that made Clara forever obscure the fact that she had once admired Salinger. Somewhere they found a place to be alone, and in two months Clara was pregnant. Ben married her, after a long, serious talk with her father and mother, during which Ben shook his foot nervously, flashed his compulsive smile at them, and made bewildering jokes about W. H. Auden. Clara’s father shook Ben’s hand and they both stood there, in wordless misery, laughing cordially. The father couldn’t understand how Clara had allowed this silly boy into her slim, straight body.
I first met Ben in a class in classical civilization at Brooklyn College. At the time, I was attending school on the Korean War GI Bill, and my school friends were other ex-soldiers like myself, a penurious and shabby bunch indeed. Ben was the first non-veteran I had come across who seemed to have something to do with what I then thought of as reality. We sat in the back of the room, composing obscene sonnets, to which we wrote alternate lines, while the rest of the class relentlessly took notes. Why I was going to school I really can’t tell you in any clear way: let’s say that I wanted to learn Latin. All right.
Ben and I failed that course, but Ben, who was being supported by Clara’s father, panicked. He was afraid that their monthly stipend would be cut off and that he might have to drop out of school or go to work. The reader must know that in the fifties, Ben was a member of a large minority of young people that thought that life was somehow nonexistent outside of the academy, that is, life within the university was real life — outside were those strange folk who spoke ungrammatical English and worshiped the hydrogen bomb. God knows what has happened to those scholars; I know only what has happened to Ben and Clara. In any event, I myself didn’t care about my F, but it was interesting to see Ben’s reaction to the failing grade: he begged, he pleaded, he took a makeup exam and wound up with a C for the course. When I say it was interesting, I mean that I saw that Ben was not that romantic Byronesque figure I had taken him to be. He somehow had a goal, a — what shall I call it? — “stake in life.” On the other hand, I am more or less still searching for myself, if you can stomach that phrase. Well, let that be; this is the Steins’ story.
I suppose it was at about this time that I met Clara, Ben’s other half — the banality of that expression is, in this case, perfection itself. The scene: a hot day in June. Ben had received permission to take his makeup exam. I was invited to their apartment to have a drink and some supper and “see the baby,” Caleb. At the time, I was going with a girl who regularly contributed to the Brooklyn College literary magazine, and whose father was a shop steward in what used to be a Communist local. She read The Worker, and pressed on me the novels of Howard Fast. If she has followed the pattern of her generation, she has married a pharmacist and lives in Kips Bay — but in those days she was my mistress: or, let me write it, My Mistress. How flagrantly serious we were! Lona carried her diaphragm in her bag and we discovered that John Ford was a great artist. We went together to see the Steins in their apartment in Marine Park.
The most exquisite tumblers, tall and paper-thin, filled with icy Medaglia d’Oro topped with whipped cream. Hennessy Five Star. Sliced avocados with lime wedges. Crisp, salty rye and Brie. In my faded khaki shirt, the shoulder ripped where I had fumbled in removing the patch that had once identified me, I ate and drank and understood why Ben had been concerned with his grade. Clara made it clear that the Hennessy was a gift from her father, who apparently was good for little else. “In his freaking air-conditioned Cadillac!” she said. “What else?” Ben said. “De gustibus.” Lona was into her harangue on the symmetrical beauties of Barbary Shore, Ben was depleting the Cognac, the baby was crying. We spoke of Charles Olson, of whom I was then scarcely aware. Clara thought he was “pure shit,” a fake Ezra Pound: she knew him from Bard or Bennington or someplace. Norman Mailer was also “shit,” as was the Communist party, Adlai Stevenson, peace, war, and Ben. Ben would twitch slightly and say Cla-ra, Claa-ra, Claa-rr-aa? Lona and I soon left. At the door, Ben showed me a split in the sole of his shoe, to demonstrate his penury. I soon came to realize that Ben was always broke — I mean that was his mask. His life, financially speaking, was remarkably stable — but he was always broke. The attainment of this attitude was a talent of Ben’s class, which attitude has persisted, and even refined itself. At the time, I was naïve enough to think that one had to be without money to be broke.
Lona and I separated soon after. I remember taking a ferry ride that afternoon and, later in the day, going to Luigi’s, a bar near the college, where I got drunk on 2-for-35 Kinsey and beer chasers. Sad, sad, I wanted to be sad. It was delicious.
Some time passed and I lost track of the Steins. Ben had graduated and he and Clara and the baby had left town, Ben gone to some assistantship in the Midwest. I had left school and was working in a factory on Pearl Street, operating a punch press that stamped out Teflon gaskets and couplings. The work exhausted me, but I took comfort in the fact that it left my mind free to write. Of course, if one’s mind is too free while working a punch press, one can part with a finger or two. But I was caught in the mythology of the struggling writer in America; in retrospect, I see that I contributed some small part to the myth myself. It is not a comfort — but then, what is? At night, I was slogging through a gigantic and unwieldy novel, From Partial Fires, which had long before got completely out of control, but which I persisted in thinking would make my name. I don’t know what else I did. I did have an affair with a girl who worked in the factory office, who regarded my manuscript with awe; we saw a lot of movies together and afterward would go to my apartment on Coney Island Avenue and make love. She would leave at midnight; I would walk her to the subway, then return to stare at the thick prose I had last composed. I don’t think I have ever been closer to despair.
Suddenly the Steins were back, just for the summer. Ben was going to work in some parks program to bring culture to somebody in the guise of demotic renderings of Restoration comedy. Almost every Saturday we all went to the beach in Ben’s car. June, my lover, could not understand the Steins, and they thought of her as an amusing yahoo. Clara delighted in asking June questions like which of “the Quartets” she preferred most. Ben drank vast quantities of vodka and orange juice, as did I. One day I was fired for having taken off three Mondays in a row, and was lucky enough to get on unemployment. June hit me with her beach bag the next Saturday when I called her my “little Polack rose,” and she walked off to the bus, crying. Clara seemed delighted and cheerful the rest of the day, and toward twilight we swam together far out into the ocean. Ben seemed to me then the luckiest of men.