1983
October 7: Sometime around 6:00 this morning there was an earthquake. I slept through it. You were supposed to be able to feel it from Canada to (yes) Baltimore. Well, Tommy, my rumble [in Poughkeepsie] is your rumble; at [least] we’re tremored together. But a phone call would be too much. Rachel came into my office in the morning (while I was reading more of the Donaldson biography [of F. Scott Fitzgerald]). She tells me that another part of Tom’s conversation last Sunday involved his horror of AIDS. I thought this might have abated by now, but it hasn’t. So he will be hiding in his house. In an awful perverse way does this make me think: ok, at least he isn’t with anyone else? Maybe he’ll come back to me?
. . .
A nice breezy Friday night. Fall is here. It seemed criminal, walking around in the twilight, not to have someone to share it with. O mysterious reader, if 3 months from tonight I am not gone from this town, read no more. There would be no point to it. For nothing will happen between that page and the grave.
October 9: The October 10 issue of New York magazine reports that the vacancy rate below 96th St. is less than 1% and that the whole housing situation is likely to get even worse. I will not let this deter me. I am getting out of this place over Christmas.
October 11: I taught Heaney in the morning; they really don’t know Northern Ireland from northern New Jersey, but they were attentive enough. (They all showed up, all 19, but since that effort is sufficiently heroic some of them reserved the right to shamble in 10 minutes late.)
October 12: Drinks at Ann’s . . . My plans to move to New York came up—and Barbara responded with stony silence. Suspected disloyalty to the old plantation?
October 13: Matthew Bruccoli—the Fitzgerald biographical industry—lectured to a sparse crowd in Rocky 300 at 7:00 . . . He says the real tools of the biographer are jet planes and widows and Xerox machines. If it ain’t published, it ain’t scholarship, he said—responding to charges that he bursts into print too often.
October 17: The October break—which lasts until Wednesday—has begun. The students go off to places like California & London; the faculty may get as far as Vermont. How lonely I feel this time. The sense of emptiness in this apartment is fairly splitting me in two—as if that’s the only way to get somebody else into it. Me and me.
October 17: There was an ad on Friday & Sat. in the NYT for a place on E. 43rd St. (151, #4A) for the absurdly low price of $508 a month. [Went to] the office on 2nd Ave., between 52nd & 53rd. The broker (a very cute boy named Jamie Niblock, whom I’m thinking of asking out for a drink) said I should get down there right away, since other brokers in the firm would be free to send people down too. “I strongly suggest you take a taxi,” he said.
I raced to the street, found a cab, cursed the traffic and arrived at the place just as 2 girls from Barnard did. An agent brought all 3 of us in together. I took a very fast look. It’s small, but it’s livable—and only a block from Grand Central. (It’s between Lexington & 3rd. You look right coming out of it & you see the station. You look left & you see the U.N.) I knew I had to get back to the broker before the girls did, so putting self-interest ahead of gallantry I raced to the street and got a cab back to 2nd & 53rd. I beat them by about a minute and a half.
And now it’s mine . . . My heart raced. Will I be able to manage it? . . . My instincts keep telling me I will. I’ll review books like crazy on the train to help pay the bills. In fact, one of the first things I did was call Newsday and sign on for two more.
October 18: Number 151 is framed by two small yellow door lights—very inviting & O. Henryish. It’s above a Xerox store & there’s a super named Pat McCormack who lives on the premises. It occurs to me that my generation is desperately trying to pay large sums of money to live in the same apartments their parents fled for the suburbs . . .
October 21: I’ve done one of the stupidest things I’ve ever done. My only consolation is that he’s done one of the stupidest things he’s ever done. That may be the only thing that saves me from reaping the whirlwind.
Barbara gave a great boozy bash to celebrate Dixie’s 40th birthday. Among the many present was [HPS ], who was looking handsome and more than relaxed. He was flying a bit. Well, he was drunk and I was drunk & when we sat on the couch he started pouring out his troubles to me. I made the mistake of listening, and before I knew it we were upstairs & sort of groping one another. It didn’t get very far; I was too drunk to worry about it, and I thought it was over. But it was still very much on his mind. He rode me home & I invited him in for a cup of tea because I could see he was still feeling nervous & agitated. He was talking a mile a minute—his position, his past loves, his lover, etc. It didn’t make much sense, but neither did I. In any case, I wound up turning the water off before it boiled . . . It wasn’t much more than a drunken fumble, but when he left he seemed to be alternating between overwhelming regret & apprehension—& the feeling that this might be the start of something big. How he has been interested in me for years, how he could do this a thousand times, etc. I was already deep into oh-my-God-what-have-I-done thoughts, & wondering if I was going to be sick.
October 22: Ann tells me this will all blow over & that if there’s any impropriety it’s more his than mine. But I somehow keep thinking there’s going to be trouble out of it. At least in my head.
October 24: I’m infinitely relieved. I saw [HPS] at about 5:30 in his office. He was so nervous he appeared stricken by some sorcerer for a moment. But we quickly saw it was going to be fine. We tripped over ourselves to say that we’d both been drunk, that there was nothing to be ashamed of, that we weren’t always like this, and that it would of course be wrong to go on with it. We both seemed to exhale at once. And then we wound up wanting to talk college business—to get away from it.
Until he came back to it in a delicate way. He said—all these things almost as asides—that he had “enjoyed it” (not just that there was nothing to be embarrassed about); that I was sweet; that he found me easy to talk to (not that we were both just drunk). He said that there was a quality of innocence on both sides that he liked about it. He lamented how he had no one to talk to here because of his position, and how he wished he could see someone away from here: as it is, whenever he travels it’s always on some sort of college business. (I’d mentioned the New York apartment to him.)
October 25: [Paul Fussell] is a Californian, but you wouldn’t know it. He looks a lot like Russell Baker and even sounds a little like him. His lecture (about a bogus WW2 diary) was clever & well delivered. (Beth sat next to me & drove me creepy-crazy; she was all set to emote over the discovery of another Anne Frank before P.F. got to the kicker.)
. . . At last I settled down to write my letter to Tom. To make it friendly, almost detached, funny. I have no idea whether he’ll respond to it. Enfeebled as he is, he doesn’t need me. And I still need him. I told him that Byron said friendship was love without wings & that that wasn’t such a bad idea.
But there are still better ones.
October 27: I watched Reagan’s speech on Grenada & Lebanon (he had more to talk about than he had time for). More and more the mission is beginning to look as if it was not such an outrageous idea after all. And then there was Jeane Kirkpatrick’s speech to watch—much tougher & more entertaining than Hill Street Blues.
October 29: I’ve started to pack. Some of the picture frames have four years of dust on top. Specks accumulating through . . . the thousands of papers graded; the nearly two thousand risings and sleepings; all the words thought and written in this same place. I’m ready to go.
November 1: Tommy called. And we talked for an hour. Everything so different, so peculiar, in many ways so fine.
He is better. Several weeks ago things were so bad that he was telling his chairman he wasn’t sure he could finish out the semester. Since then he’s been given a pill—some sort of antidepressant he takes 3 times a day while seeing the shrink. The result: he is looking for jobs, writing his book, waking up in the morning amazed he’s not feeling awful . . . All through the talk I had the strangest feeling that he wants me to be happy—not because he wants to share in my life, but also not because he wants me settled so he can forget about me and I won’t bother him. No, because he feels tender towards me . . . But what comes now? Do I go on being in love with him?
November 2: [A department meeting about developing a more rigorous version of English 105] Bill Gifford sits there looking wounded—as Lynn Bartlett says, he sees his whole life being undone. He wants to keep the touchie-feely version of the course he’s taught for 20 years, the one in which the students talk about how literature relates to their deepest feelings. . . .
November 5: I’m gradually bringing a lot of stuff that I won’t have room for in the apartment over [to my office]. And it makes me wonder if some of the “senior members,” as we always call them, won’t be thinking that he’s making himself at home a bit prematurely.
November 7: . . . Lunch with Barbara and Bob in the Retreat. Charlie Beye will, on the basis of a story Bob tells, forever be known as The Man Who Came to Dinner at the Maces’. It seems he was there last night . . . The predictable unbearability of such a gathering was heightened by Dean’s wispy moans about the decline of standards here and there, and a few choice anti-Semitic remarks just to spice things up. Charlie was so disgusted and disbelieving that when Dean at one point lamented how awful all the young people in the English department are, Charlie turned to him and said, “Well, with an old queen like you in the department they must be pretty miserable.” Dean—who is more than a queen; he’s more like Empress of India—responded in a little whisper: “You’re very sophisticated.”
November 8: The students continue to be crazy about Updike. I told one of them in office hours I was surprised they were so enthusiastic about [Rabbit Redux], and explained to me: “It’s all the sex.” . . . Today was Election Day. Nothing much on the ballot except the transportation bond issue, which, with the self-interest of a new commuter, I voted for.
November 9: The composition class went very well. We did the sonnet, & as I was mentally comparing Walker Gaffney to a summer’s day, the students were catching on nicely.
November 11: I’m writing this sitting on my sleeping bag on the floor of #4A, 151 E. 43rd St. I got here late this afternoon and got the keys next door.
As soon as I put the suitcases on the floor I went out for a walk. The lights were coming on up and down Fifth Ave.
I live here now.
November 12: A boy in a fish store was pouring clams over ice in the window; near it was another fish store—hobby fish. After Poughkeepsie one’s eyes suffer a sort of mercantile overload. One can’t quite believe all of these stores are just outside one’s door. All at once I feel very much at home and very much a rube.
November 13: [Moving my things from Poughkeepsie] What should have been an ordeal turned into an idyll. Oliver [my Irish brother-in-law] arrived with his two Salvadoran helpers (one of them escaped on the floor of a truck and has been here only a month) and we loaded up in about an hour . . . [Once in Manhattan] We double-parked the truck and made dozens of trips up the stairs—and finally got the couch up four flights . . . I don’t think I’ll ever forget the twilit moment when I waved good-bye to them. We were all laughing and our eyes kept darting from the Chrysler Building to Grand Central to “Naciones Unitas!”
And there we were—three different kinds of immigrants, each dreaming the different phases of the same dream. . . .
Copyright © 2025 by Thomas Mallon. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
