Nancy and I woke up late on the
first morning of our marriage, and in separate beds. During the night, covered
with sweat, my arms and legs tangled with my bride’s in the tiny twin bed, I
had disengaged myself and crept over to the other twin in the room. Nancy found
no symbolic meaning in my decampment; both of us accepted as a given that we
needed our sleeping space. Our bedroom on 77th Street wouldn’t accommodate
anything larger than a double bed, which we both agreed was too small for us. Nancy
also disliked the vestigial kitchen and the occasional rodent migration from
the patio, but the sleeping issue was paramount, and I had realized that when
we were married, we would at least a queen-sized bed. Years later, we discovered
that what we really wanted was a king. For the past several decades, our bed
has measured seven by seven feet – and even that isn’t as big as the California
King. Other couples, who like to snuggle
throughout the night, are amused by our mutual need for nocturnal solitude. but
we can’t sleep in each other’s arms; I toss and turn and Nancy has to make
herself a little nest, from which only the top of her head is visible,
swaddling herself in bedclothes. Even our guest room in East Hampton, which had
been our daughter’s bedroom, has a king in it these days; Danielle shared our need
for nighttime lebensraum. Our friends
Roger and Dorothy, who normally sleep in a double bed, sleep in that room when
they come to visit, and find the bed’s flight-deck proportions absurd, although
Roger pointed out one advantage: you could have an affair with another woman in
that bed, and your wife would never be aware of it.
“What now?” we asked each other
that first morning in the College Motor Inn. We pulled aside the curtains and
looked out at an Arctic landscape; more snow had fallen during the night, and
there was at least a foot on the ground. Did we want to complete our journey to
Lake Minnewaska Mountain House, assuming that the road was passable and that
they had cleared their driveway? Not really. In that pre-cell phone age, there
was no way for them to have let us know that they were closing up shop the
night before, but the sight of their padlocked entrance left an indelible
impression of inhospitableness. On the other hand, we didn’t want to simply
turn around and go back to New York.
“Let’s go to East Hampton,” said
Nancy. I had spent a couple of summers there with my parents, and Nancy and I
had visited friends who had rented on the East End of Long Island the summer
before. (For you non-New Yorkers, there is no such place as “the Hamptons”;
Southampton, Watermill, Bridgehampton, East Hampton, Amagansett and Montauk share
topography and climate, but are, within limits, culturally and economically diverse.)
East Hampton then was sometimes touted as the most beautiful village in
America, and not without reason: on either side of Main Street grew enormous
and spectacular elm trees that spanned the avenue and met in a canopy overhead.
They’re still there, but Dutch Elm Disease has left them in a sadly reduced
state, having either died or been cut back. The town itself retains some of its
charm, but not all: Town Pond, with its adjoining 17th-century cemetery, is
still there, along with Mulford Farm, Gardiner Windmill, the Huntting Inn and Guild Hall, but many of the wonderful
little mom-and-pop stores have been driven out by high rents and replaced by
real estate agencies and chi-chi places like Elie Tahari, London Jewelers,
Audemars -Piguet and Ralph Lauren – stores brag, in gold leaf on their windows,
of their other branches on Rodeo Drive and in Palm Beach.
“We can stay at the Sea Spray Inn”
(a quaint, upscale B&B right on the ocean), Nancy continued. “They have
those wonderful little cottages.” The idea appealed to me. In fact, I wish we’d
thought of it before we committed to our now aborted plan; usually, Long Island
gets much less snow than upstate New York. Sure, it would be expensive, but
this, such as it was, was our honeymoon! The lady at the College Inn’s front
desk (not our donna amica from the
previous night) told us that, according to the radio, the Thruway had been
cleared, so we checked out and pointed the car south. It was a blindingly sunny
day; I had to stop and rummage through my suitcase for sunglasses, but it was certainly
a nicer drive than last night’s, and though longer in miles, faster in time: down the Thruway, east on Bruckner Expressway,
across the Throgs Neck Bridge and then east again almost to the tip of the
South Fork of Long Island. But the big car, on dry pavement, rode and handled smoothly,
and our high spirits had returned. We found NPR on the car’s FM radio (a
luxurious option in those days) and were in front of Sea Spray at four o’clock.
But the Inn was closed for the
winter. That made two days in a row that we’d been thwarted in sight of our
destination – like K in Kafka’s “The Castle,” who for a variety of trivial
reasons is foiled every time he attempts to visit the eponymous building. But
this time it was on us; why hadn’t we called ahead? And there weren’t any Holiday
Inns out there. But wasn’t there a motelish sort of place called the Something
House on Pantigo Road? Yes, there was – the East Hampton House – and it was
open, and not too dear, and they had a room, a much nicer one than what we’d
left in New Paltz, and with a queen-size bed. The room clerk didn’t ask for
proof that we were married, though we were hoping he would. We went upstairs,
showered together, and made love, thereby establishing a tradition that we’ve
maintained throughout our marriage: we never have sex on our anniversary, only
on the night before and/or the night after.
Dinner would prove problematic. We’d
eaten a hurried breakfast at a rest area on the Thruway, and we ready for some
real chow. At present, there are dozens of restaurants in East Hampton, many of
which are open on a Monday night in March – everything from hamburger joints to
fine-dining eateries that can compete with New York’s best – in fact, some of
them are spin-offs of New York’s best. But the second day of our marriage was
before Bobby Van’s and Nick and Toni’s and Serafina had opened out east. We
drove into the center of town, parked the car on virtually empty Main Street,
and started walking. The snow (and there was plenty of it) had been plowed into
huge mounds on the street corners, and the cold was bitter. I remembered a
place called Chez Labbatt, frequented by my parents, but when we found it, it
was dark and shuttered. We checked out Sam’s, on Newtown Lane, which would have
been perfect; it’s still one of the best pizzerias in town. Same story: closed
for the winter. Right across the street from Sam’s, however, was an establishment
called Lyon’s, which was open for business. There were six or seven other
customers, widely spaced. The menu told us that, despite the name, it was a Chinese
restaurant, featuring the same Americanized dishes as New York neighborhood
Chinese restaurants -- egg rolls, chow mein, chop suey, and egg foo yong. We were
too hungry to care; we ordered wonton soup and shrimp toast. It wasn’t as good
as the steak sandwiches at the Compleat Angler, but it got us through the
night.
And a less hectic night it was than
the one before. In the morning, we hatched a plan: why not rent a house out
here, and spend the whole summer in it? A honeymoon cottage – corny, but at the
same time, not a bad idea, if we could find something not too exorbitant. Nancy
wouldn’t be able to work, and I was making next to nothing; the biggest
inducement not to move from 77th Street was its $135 rent. But various
relatives, notably my mother, had come through with checks as wedding presents,
and we were feeling flush. We had retired the Triumph the previous year, but Nancy’s
parents were buying us a new car – this was the dawn of the Japanese econobox
era, and a couple of thousand dollars would get us four doors and four cylinders.
We found a copy of The East Hampton Star and turned to the rental
ads in the real estate listings, which were mostly for mansions on the water or
on exclusive streets that we knew we wouldn’t be able to afford. But there was
one that seemed interesting: a two-bedroom cottage on a street called Northwest
Landing Road. The clerk at the desk knew it: “That’s in Northwest Woods,” he
said, “by Overton’s Landing; take Swamp Road and turn right.” He let us look at a map, and we saw that it
was in a kind of no-man’s land halfway between East Hampton, on the ocean, and
Sag Harbor, on Gardiner’s Bay. The next morning, we drove out there to take a
look. There were no gators or quicksand on Swamp Road, and the house itself was
all we could have hoped for: just a wooden shack, but in good repair, as far as
we could tell, with a screened-in porch in front and a side yard big enough for
a badminton net, which we acquired. The picket fence you see in the picture was
added later, as was a coat of paint. It was small, though twice the size of our
apartment. A couple of hundred yards away was a harbor, with a couple of
winterized boats moored in it, where we could fish and sail when the weather
got warm. And, peering through the bedroom window, we saw a queen-sized bed.
Best of all was the rent: $1100 for Memorial Day through Labor Day, inclusive.
That was where we spent the second
six months of our marriage. It was a glorious summer for a number of reasons, one
being that it started on time. June can be a chilly and/or rainy month on the
South Fork of Long Island, but our Memorial Day was warm enough to loll on the
beach, though the Atlantic was far too cold to swim in. And loll we did; every
day we’d pack ourselves a picnic lunch, drive to Indian Wells Beach in
Amagansett, and work on the tans that our dermatologist tsk-tsked about in
later years. We played tennis on the public courts behind the Springs School,
went on photographic safaris to places like the Walking Dunes and the Montauk
Light, and drank Bloody Marys on our porch before grilling a steak or a
bluefish for dinner. And now that we had a second bedroom, we invited everyone
we knew to share the wealth. Tom and Ciba came to visit, and so did Dorothy,
with whom we shared an adventure: her younger sister Marjorie happened to be
attending a nearby house party that turned rancid, and she called for help;
with some difficulty, we tracked her down on an unmarked road, rescued her and brought her home with us. Dorothy
had married Harry Wise – and divorced him – during our courtship, a
spectacularly ill-advised liaison whose imminent failure was obvious to both of
them even before their wedding, but they had to go through it to get out the
other side. Both of them, in their separate lives, were our intimate friends;
Harry eventually built a house in East Hampton and we were his perennial
weekend guests. Eventually, between them, they accumulated seven spouses, the
last, in each case, the right one.
Nancy too had a younger sister
named Marjorie, and she came to stay with us for a week. When she got home to
Grand Rapids, she told her parents that she thought we were on the verge of
separating: “All they do is fight,” she said. That wasn’t true; all we did was
argue, in a style with which she wasn’t familiar. We argued about whether to
put pepper in the Bloody Marys; about whether hard mattresses were better for
you than soft ones; about the relative merits of the University of Michigan and
Cornell (I had to give ground on athletics, but I maintained that my alma mater
was superior academically); about feminism (not the ideology but the prose
style: I found the writing of some of the second-wave exponents like Andrea
Dworkin and Betty Friedan grim and humorless. Much later, our paths intersected
Betty’s regularly, and when we’d see her at dinner parties, she never seemed to
know who we were unless she needed a ride home. Germaine Greer and Camille
Paglia were much more my style.)
We were not in situ for the whole three months we rented the house; Nancy was still
working, and we couldn’t bear to be separated for even one night, so we spent
weekends in the country and the other five days in town. It was just as well; I
had some publishing to do if I wanted tenure, and wouldn’t have gotten any work
done in East Hampton, so I stayed home and wrote, or went to the library and
researched, almost every day until mid-afternoon, when I ambled over to the
tennis courts in Central Park to promote myself a game. Of course, that
schedule meant that we’d have to brave the traffic on Fridays and Sundays, and
fearsome it was; the Long Island Expressway hadn’t yet been finished, and everybody
had a secret alternative route, which everybody else already knew about. Ours
featured the Bruckner Expressway, the Throgs Neck Bridge and the Cross Island
Parkway to the Northern State, but it was no faster than any other way: three
hours was about the minimum time you could expect to spend behind the wheel,
and, depending on the time of day, four hours wasn’t out of the question. We
have Robert Moses both to thank and to blame for the traffic mess that still
exists our there.
The big excitement of the summer of
1969 was the Apollo 11 mission to the moon. Kennedy had announced early in his
Presidency that we would put a man up there, “not because it’s easy, but
because it’s hard.” Not to mention expensive; Ralph Abernathy rightly demanded
to know why those hundreds of millions of dollars weren’t being spent on
housing and feeding poor minorities, and wasn’t mollified when someone in the
Administration explained that that would have been even harder.
But Abernathy was won over by the
glamor and excitement of the launch, to which he had a front-row seat. And so
were we. Our cynicism told us that the whole space project existed primarily to
distract the American people from Vietnam, but our child-like excitement
allowed us to be distracted. We decided that on Sunday, July 20h, the day Neil
Armstrong’s boot touched the lunar surface, we would drive from East Hampton to
Dorothy’s parents’ house in Westport because they had a color TV and we didn’t.
As it turned out, the broadcast was in black and white, but Dorothy and all her
friends were there, everyone experiencing giddiness to be living in a science
fiction world, but also some dread – what if the module crashed and burned in
front of 50 million people all over the world? But it didn’t; from NASA’s point
of view, it all went smoothly. For me, the only sour note was Armstrong’s proclamation
– “That’s one small step for a man, one giant stride for mankind.” He
pronounced it in a sonorous, oracular fashion, and it was so obviously not a
spontaneous utterance that I laughed. No wonder there are conspiracy nuts who
still think the whole thing was staged. I pictured a meeting at NASA where
various wordings were tried out and discarded – “That’s one giant step forward
toward the brotherhood of man. . . ”; “That’s a leap of faith across the void.
. . ; “That’s a step on the staircase of world peace. . .” And I pictured Armstrong trying to beg off,
and, when he couldn’t, obsessing a;; the way to the moon about mangling it. “That’s
one giant stride for a man . . . no, wait, I mean. . . .”
Half a century ago, and we haven’t
been back, probably because there’s no good reason to have gone there in the
first place. Now everyone is excited about Mars, but I don’t think I’ll live to
watch that landing. But Nancy and I are still together, so Margie was wrong. Our
honeymoon on Swamp Road was just the beginning of the idyll. When Labor Day
came, we were very sad to have to pack up and join the endless parade of cars
slowly grinding its way back to the City. Our apartment, for the first time,
seemed cramped to me.
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