It’s August, 1963 and it’s the last night for me at Norma Place, at the cottage
where we’ve lived for seven years. By “we” I mean Alan and me. Alan is gone. He
left me in June. It will take me some time to realize he’s gone for good now. Not
just off to war because he came back, although I made a mistake and complained
about him and we ended up divorcing. Not just divorced because he came back and
we remarried. Not just separated because he came back again and we moved here.
Now he is gone for good and it is no mistake; it is merely the end we all come to.
But he beat me to it.
I’m okay with being alone. Alone means time to write and time to think and to
remember. And if I feel lonely, there’s the decanter with the brandy. Didn’t I write
somewhere that if you’re alone and you don’t have something to drink, you can get
the howling horrors? As long as I have brandy or whiskey, I think I will be okay.
That’s bad, I know. But it’s the truth.
A woman who lives here on Norma Place came around and asked me if I needed anything. I told her to get me another husband. I suppose she had heard of my reputation for biting one-liners. She said she was shocked by my remark. She was appalled! I apologized and asked her to get me a ham sandwich on rye and hold the Mayo.
It won’t help. A man is irreplaceable. Yes, as I said in one of my poems, there
was nothing more fun than a man. They’re fun in bed. I mean, they can be.
Sometimes, we have to remind them of what we regard as fun. I had a brief fling
with a college fellow when I was, oh, about 38. I took him up to my room at the
Algonquin. My, oh my, that hotel had no idea what we were up to. I heard that he
told his friends I knew how to do everything! Then he got bored with me. Men
have a tendency to get bored. When he got bored, he told everyone up and down
the isle of Manhattan that I was, as he put it, a “lousy lay.” Some things you don’t
do by laying, or more properly, lying down. Or it depends on where you are lying
or who is not lying down. Well, you get the idea.
Back to Alan. He was also a younger man. When I was young, I liked them
older; when I got to be older, they got younger. I thought he was cute. Benchley
said we should send him to military school. And Alan’s age gave me a problem in
regard to his mother. She was only about a decade older than I was. That’s no age
for a mother-in-law. Oh, she gave me a pain. She spoke with a drawl. Southern
belle who should have worn a bell around her neck, like a cow. I think she thought
I was a cradle-robber. I must have been a cradle robber. I couldn’t help it.
I knew deep down he was exactly what I needed. I was a successful writer, a
career woman. Alan did the cooking. He did the dishes, until we hired some
servants. He was my secretary. He consoled me when I needed consoling. In the
early days of our marriage, I knew I was very lucky.
I didn’t think of him as a writer. Writers were people who wrote beautiful words.
For years, I spent my time with people who called themselves writers and they
made a living stringing words together, but they were not really writers. They
wrote reviews of what other people wrote. Woolcott-bah! He wrote with a pen
dipped in acid, just like his remarks to me and many others. Insults are not poetry.
Even Benchley, and God knows I loved him, in his later years wrote trivia and
made short films that he didn’t even write. As for Alan, he wrote film scripts, so he
got himself work writing for movies, as long as I was associated with him, because
I had the name. I hated writing scripts. I called what he wrote “Hollywood trash.”
We wrote A Star is Born and people loved it because it was a tragic story about Hollywood people. I just called it trash and wanted to be free of writing it. Or having the need to write it because of money.
Now I realize it is a skill, one that I didn’t have. I did need him to guide me. And he risked a lot by hitching himself to my name. We got blacklisted together. It
forced our separation after we had reconciled and remarried. After he had rescued
me when I was stranded in Mexico, dumped by another younger man. Oh yes, that
strapping handsome gigolo with whom I wrote a play. Why did I think he was a
writer? I was divorced and lonely and whiskey didn’t help. The play was a failure
and when it came to actual sex, I waited and waited until the night, at a party when
he pushed me down on the sofa and gave me a lay in front of all the guests, who
tried not to look, and later I apologized, saying I could not stop him when this had
not happened in six months. Yes, I went to Mexico with this awful lover; he
dumped me for a shopkeeper. Alan was still there and ready to save me. And we
remarried. Always, Alan.
There were so many men. My first husband, Eddie, he of the aristocratic Anglo- Saxon heritage, whom I must have outgrown, or maybe I never really knew him, and I certainly didn’t fit his suburban world when he came back from the World War and found I was living in the Bohemia I had spoofed in a poem I wrote for him. Charlie, the ace journalist and rapid-fire playwright, the stallion with women,
whose legacy to me was what I lost on a surgical table and then wisecracked that I
should not have put all my eggs in one bastard. A lover whose name I won’t reveal,
who gave me a black eye, and when my friend Lillian Hellman asked me who and
why, I told her to leave it alone. And a few famous writers. But Hemingway, oh
dear old Dr. Hemingstein, I wanted him but I knew he never wanted me. People
must have suspected I had a crush on him, when they read my “Constant Reader”
review of his book of short stories, or the article I wrote where I said women want
to take him home and have him stuffed. That was me and I think he resented my
saying that. These were men who got away. Ironically, I, who was always trying to
do away with myself, outlived them all. There must be a message, a moral, in that.
I am more of a survivor than I realize. And for all that I want and need men in my life, I stand up for myself. I always have. I’ve said it in my poetry many times and I wonder if people see the suffragette in the stanzas. Young girls who wear glasses have often said to me: ”It’s so true. It’s unfair hat men seldom make passes at us.”
That’s why I called the poem “News Item.”
So, I am still alive, even after the pills and the razors, and the other methods I
wrote about. I am packing my things to go back to New York. I will move back
into the apartment hotel. I will have a little dog. I must always have a dog
companion. I will have my writing and my drink and my memories and maybe a
friend here and there. I will get used to being without Alan. We had our years
together. That is what matters.
I do wonder. I could have died at any time. Benchley found me when I took the dose of sedatives. What if he had not found me? He scolded me for trying to die. In the story I wrote based on that death attempt, “Big Blonde,” I did not put Benchley in it. Instead, I let Hazel’s maid, Nettie, do the scolding. I know now that Nettie was furious that Hazel thought she had the exclusive right to be down in the dumps and do away with herself. “Everybody’s got their troubles,” Nettie told her. Nettie’s people have seen more trouble than most of us, and I must make sure, when I am gone, that any money I have will go toward helping her people. In any case, I did not die. I was not supposed to die then, or even now. God must have something planned for me. Something special. Life will not let me go.
I am watching the TV now and they are showing the remake of our old script A Star is Born. But there is music in this version and Judy Garland is singing a song about a man who got away. Suddenly, it all makes sense. I don’t care that they remade our script. Our names are on the credits because it was something we did write and we must have put our difficult love into it. And the drinking. I did a great deal of the drinking but so did he. The young men he pursued when, like other men, he got bored, they couldn’t put that into the movie but my self-doubt and self- hatred must be in there somewhere. My trying to be myself is in there. His reassurance to me that I was beautiful was there. No one realizes that this was indeed the story of our love. Alan, my love, you were my Man Who Got Away. I have some things left to do, for that is why God is letting me live on for a bit but I will, I hope, see you soon. And then, forever.
© Lynne Bronstein
Bio: Lynne Bronstein is the author of Nasty Girls (Four Feathers Press) and four
other books of poetry. She has been published in magazines ranging from Playgirl
to Chiron Review, from Lummox to anthologies in England, Ireland, Israel,
Canada, and India. Her short fiction has appeared in magazines and anthologies
and has been read on National Public Radio. She also writes a column on Facebook
and Substack called Show Biz Cats.
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