Constance Read Online Free PDF Page B

New Jersey and I was supposed to be relieved that a bad and worsening marital situation had come to an end? I wasn’t. All I saw was failure.
    Now we were divorced. I wandered from room to room and grew disconsolate at the unfamiliar silence. I’d held on to the apartment because Barb didn’t want it. She wanted to be in Atlantic City with her family. Her brother Gerry Mulcahy managed a small casino there.
    —It’s not the other side of the world, she said.
    —It’s far enough. When will I ever see my son?
    —Whenever you want.
    Barb did the accounting for the casino and I only discovered much later how ill she was. I was aware of her fatigue each time I drove out to New Jersey to take Howard for the afternoon. Iattributed it to the tedium of her job and the awfulness of living in Atlantic City among members of her own family. They weren’t an inspiring outfit but they were friendly enough to me. They called me “the professor.” I knew that if I’d been able to sustain the marriage, Barb’s life wouldn’t have been half so miserable as it turned out, and I said this to her on one of my visits. She was renting a place a block from her mother’s house. Howard was in the yard, I could see him out there on his hands and knees. He was interested in snails at the time. She’d leaned across the table and touched my cheek.
    —Sidney, she’d said, it’s not your fault, but thanks for the thought.
    What went wrong? She was a good- looking woman and we’d liked each other well enough once. Then out of the blue she decided that I wasn’t giving her what she needed, and that what I did give her she didn’t want. Resentment broke out, and once that happens the sex life goes all to hell and soon the marriage was wrecked beyond repair. It was all too depressing to contemplate. I’m with Goethe on the correct response to a failing marriage. Resignation. The preservation of order at all costs. Stoic nobility of spirit. But I wasn’t allowed to suffer with stoic nobility of spirit, instead Barb moved out, taking Howard with her, and that’s why I had the place to myself. It was on West Sixty-ninth, a few blocks from Central Park. There was no shortage of bookshelves, all of which I’d filled, and numerous rooms including an airless spare bedroom that gave off the kitchen. But it was too big for one man, and there was a problem with the boiler in the basement. The super couldn’t control it. In winter the pipes in the walls got so hot it was like living in a steam bath. If I opened a window I got a blast of frigid air.So I either baked or froze, like some kind of a reptile. A large English crocodile perhaps.
    I was too restless to read and it was too late to do any writing, and anyway I’d had a drink. So I went to bed at half past nine with a couple of scholarly journals and that day’s newspaper. The neighborhood got noisy around ten. In those days there was always shouting at night, sometimes screaming, only on rare occasions gunshots. Then I’d hear the sirens of approaching cop cars, or I wouldn’t. Often they just didn’t show. What was happening was this. The city had started to show symptoms of the sickness that would rip it apart and leave us unable to heal ourselves, or police ourselves, even
pay
for ourselves. New York was remaking itself, but into what? Barb believed no marriage could survive in a city like that. It was another bad theory of breakdown in my opinion. Nobody’s fault, contingent circumstances: all excuses. Why did nobody take responsibility?
    As for Penn Station, apparently there was no money in railroads anymore. Interstate highways and airplanes had done them in. Anyway it had been deteriorating for decades. It was neglected and begrimed, it took up two entire city blocks, and in New York it just made no economic sense, unless you believed that a railroad station possessing all the solemn grandeur of a Gothic cathedral was worth preserving for its own sake. It broke my heart to see