4:00 PM Sun 21 Nov 71
Sitting in the big window all packed, waiting for Bruce to come home so we can drive to Florida and I can meet his mother. Spent 3 hrs cleaning the apt which is a lot for me. Hoping coffee and ghost stories will keep us awake. Reading another AEW Mason – it is just like a Spiegel catalog. Is this man a novelist or a dress designer? I refuse to EVER AGAIN be subjected to one of his pale ethereal heroines, wearing green chiffon with silver starbursts on the shoulders, satin buckle shoes and a diamond belt, writhing and roped throughout the denouement. The man has a problem. St. Petersburg Fla – Wd 24 Nov 71 Bruce pulled a Bertie Wooster – ran into an old friend at his gig he wanted to party with so we left a day late. Fortunately it was all right with the dog & cat people. We are going crazy in this place so Bruce had Buster call to say they had an Important gig. Sorry! No Thanksgiving! We leave at 3 this afternoon if we can stand another 3 hrs of this torture. Not sleeping together is bad enough, B’s mother is an angry, vengeful old sourpuss. Mrs. Vill never goes anyplace, never sees anyone, never thinks of anything interesting, never does anything but take care of the old lady (her Mom) who is gaga. (B’s father staged a final heart attack just to escape.) I’m tired of being lectured on bra-less-ness, long hair, the Ungrateful Young and the duties of a wife. The most interesting part was the scrapbooks. Bruce was a Baby Genius – learned to read and write music at age 3 – it was in the paper. He cried over discords on the piano. He was cute. Also Mrs. V’s wedding pix – she claimed everyone thought she looked like Dolores del Rio. She certainly went overboard with the satin, lace and veiling – very disappointed to hear I won’t be wearing a veil and that I’ve yet to buy my dress. She looked up my father in Who’s Who and not only is he in there, so am I (all of us by name.) This makes her angry that she lives in St. Petersburg in a little house with an old lady, but I think Old Mrs. E keeps her daughter young – she gets to be the “can do” one. (Old lady can’t walk and has no idea who we are.) The furniture is pretty awful Louis Quatorze and the food is sparse (she has put me on a diet.) When I suggested we go out to eat I got a long lecture against restaurants. Restaurants! She is repelled by the idea that you don’t know exactly what you’re eating or who it’s made by and she is not comforted by my embrace of the “what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger” philosophy. So horrified that I ate lamb lung & eyeball in Algeria she may never recover. We spend a lot of time washing dishes (by hand) while B sleeps. Bruce doesn’t even try to talk to his mother and his brother, who lives all the way up in St Augustine, refuses to come down to say hi (we will see him at the wedding where he’s B’s best man.) She goes on an on about how Bruce should be a lawyer because she’s read they make the most money of any profession. 10:20 PM After a fabulous dinner at The Kingfish we are looking up all B’s friends who all appear to be musical. They are playing right this minute. Reading Eleanor & Franklin. Penn Station Baltimore Fri 3 Dec 71 – 5:18 PM Sitting at the train station with red suitcase, wearing long green coat & muff, missing B already. Going home to spend my birthday shopping for my wedding dress! Striving towards perfection – wrote a poem. GOTHIC NOVEL A woman alone is open, gaping a button hole without a button hook. She carries her muff before her like an offering Flic, flic! Stranger’s eyes will slit the pause like razors. The railway carriage stinks of creosote, wet fur. I prefer the window up, thank you I prefer it down. She lights a Sobranie to remind her of Devon in the haying; the gentlemen lean forward, reading the faded gold initials on her morocco case. Reading and enjoying Sayers’ Mind of the Maker.
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Wed 20 Oct 71
Honey Plage is dead. Car accident. It might have been suicide. Dr. Plage says no memorial: funerals are arcane and disgusting and life belongs to the living. I made Bruce promise to give me a funeral – told him to read Millay’s Wild Swans to my assembled ex-boyfriends. He wants zydeco. We decide to collaborate on a murder mystery in which Dr. Page somehow killed his wife so he can partake of all this young flesh eager to exchange itself for a passing grade. Messed with brakes? But how could you guarantee that she drives fast enough? I say strand her at the train tracks, wacked out on sedatives. It’s the only way. Chloe told me in playwriting class that my play Our Father’s Restaurant is the best student play she’s read in 5 years. It was a great class because Gomo wasn’t there (the speed freak who makes pig noises at me.) On a new BC pill but not getting my period. Still, pregnancy is impossible. I never forget to take it and they say if you never forget to take it you are 100% protected. Bruce says no fatherhood in his future no-how. Sat 30 Oct 71 My shoulders rise around my ears with tension at the close of another Bad Heart gig. For the Marlys Democrats, who are a decidedly unlively crowd. Band was terrible – worst I’ve ever seen them, and Avril came all the way down from Phila too. I apologized. A says Mom is better since coming back from China and that her best friend Carlee’s parents’ put her in a mental institution and won’t let A see her. They blame A (who has never even tried marijuana) for C’s “bad road”. I am reading about W. H. Ireland’s Shakespeare forgeries. Fascinating. His father died refusing to believe he was capable of such good work!!! Pretending it was Shakespeare’s was his only hope of getting Vortigern published, much less produced. Everyone wants to turn “genius” into a bronzed baby shoe. Tamsin says good writing is always published. Why would law of the jungle suddenly become suspended? I bet if Balzac brought in his stuff now, the editor would look up from the MSS and say, “Now go home and write me a story.” To me, this continual flux of talent and death and change and applause reveals no work is complete in itself, like a tree or a rock – it’s an interaction. Only interesting thing in EJ Oliver’s Balzac is that artists are criminals. They want to steal society’s values. 4-5 Nov 71 Lying in bed after finishing Shirley Jackson’s Bird’s Nest with Beau the cat sleeping on my chest. From this angle I can see where I wrote Bruce’s name on the window the first night we spent together. It hasn’t been washed since. I won’t wake him – he can enjoy it in the morning. Checked a wedding etiquette book out of the library. The ancient brides of Israel wore blue ribbons on their left shoulders to signify fidelity. No comment on what grooms wore. Bruce and I bought gold rings for our little fingers because that’s the finger Elizabethans reserved for True Love – forget who you were married to. Even my high school roommate Kristi says her Navy husband doesn’t expect her to remain faithful while he is away. But I expect it, and Bruce, also, does not feel like sharing. We had a fight tonight – Took Dixie out for a walk hoping he would come after me. He didn’t. He probably wouldn’t have come after me even if I were naked. I found out later he thought I drove the car to Philadelphia and he didn’t make a move to stop me. How can you fight with a person like this? We made up very nicely, cried and kissed. Belvedere Hotel, Baltimore – Fri 12 Nov - 71 Waiting for Bad Heart gig at 9, wearing long red paisley skirt unbuttoned to matching hot pants. Very fetching. Place filling up with video & sound people. I wanted to write about my disappointment over EB White’s Trumpet of the Swan. Awful stuff. The females do nothing but lay eggs, which gets on my nerves. Overhear Bruce telling someone I proposed to him. Stung, I correct him with the truth and he acts like he really does not remember. You can’t get away with this around a diarist – we write everything down. I recall the occasion exactly – sitting over coffee in Ellicott City. But thinking about it I decide not to haul out the relevant book and chastise him with it. The most common question people ask when they see these notebooks – are you writing about me? I’ve learned to say No. There have been times in the past when someone – sisters-roommates-mothers-boyfriends - realizes these diaries are spies from the future and then they become a focus of rage. Bruce is jealous of my friendships – God forbid he should ever realize who – or what – his competition really is. Wed. 22 Sept 71
Depressing weekend at Pewter Hill. Dad – already irate because Chevenix has decided grades are inherently fascistic, now wants me to give him a budget. I gave him the basics – rent, car, food – that ought to be enough. (The band is all on food stamps and I’m too proud. As a result, I get identified as “the rich one” when its really my fathers cash, not mine.) Bruce is perfectly willing to oblige with any figure Dad wants to see (he wants Dad to buy the band a van) and I don’t know how to tell my father he shouldn’t trust my fiancé. Don’t encourage him. Dad definitely wouldn’t understand marrying someone you don’t want to encourage, but it’s all about shaping behaviors that you want (says psychology.) But my father doesn’t even want to imagine a marriage where the man isn’t in total control or he would lose his erection permanently. At the moment he’s acting a lot more excited about giving money to Bruce rather than to me, because Bruce gives him (seems to give him) what he “wants”. Much behind the scenes hissing that I should not queer this pitch. I try to explain to Bruce that in the long run it’s more trouble than it’s worth. He does not know how to play my family’s game and I am too dispirited to instruct. It’s hard accepting money from people who don’t respect you. But maybe Dad respects Bruce since he turned refusenik in Vietnam and was brought home in handcuffs. Still, at our blood test Bruce fainted, so I wonder it got as far as Vietnam… Sun. 26 Sept. 71 Depressing rainy day. Struggling with my gothic novel – will I ever write a good one? Tamsin says “don’t do it” and the rest of the class says “don’t sell out.” But I love gothics and feel there is a place for “my special one.” It has to be English because America is not gothic enough - this creates all sorts of problems and I have hared off in a Dickensian direction with notes of Trollope and Bronte. Now I am afraid to show any of it to the class so brought in instead my story about St. Julian. You’d think we shouldn’t have to all write the same thing but they are all telling me it’s time to “get my gothic ass in gear.” Tamsin goes on and on offensively about what a genius Bruce is, the best poet, the best artist, the best writer, the best musician, the best composer – so clever of him to make a poem in the shape of a gun! In the shape of a tree! And he’s so good looking. (Incontestable.) I roll my eyes and it is hard not to take this the wrong way, i.e I am Dullsville. (Bruce thinks Tamsin is a Butterball turkey.) Worse – lost my Theatre Downstairs job after just a few weeks in the 20% budget cuts! Dr. Plage says he may be able to find me some “slush” fund money but the way he looks at me when he says it tells me to run in the opposite direction. He all but smacks his lips. Rather write full time anyhow. Reading E. Nesbit’s The Wouldbegoods – I like her supernatural stories better. This one just a tad too cute. Think I ought not to use the supernatural myself – but I may not be able to help myself. In this treacherous hour after dinner I should be making a survey of current gothics instead of falling asleep. Trying to read D. Eden’s Brooding Lake – cast it aside when the “cruel beaks of the keas” remind me of Gerald Durrell. (He called keas nature’s clowns.) Margaret Erskine’s Graveyard Plot has no plot – or the publisher gives away what plot it has in the blurb! So I cast them aside and make a wedding invitation list instead (85 people.) Dad has amazed me by giving Bruce $10,000 – this will end in tears (he expects to be paid back.) Bruce is elated – rushes out to buy a dobro and cowboy boots, reserving a pair for me. I don’t want them – not my thing. I’m bribeable however. Engraved stationary; that’s my meat. Aaahhh…red and gold with entwined names & initials. Bruce has agreed to combine last names – Bruce and Alysse Vill-Aallyn sounds especially pretty. The engraver gives me the heavy silver die in a plush bag. Would make a perfect murder weapon. The band resents our prosperity. Bruce wants to go to the Senators game but the rest of the band votes it down – must rehearse for their Fri. job. Fine by me. Almost midnight – Sun 3 Oct 71 Tell me to stop reading these gothics. You know they enrage me. Finished Eyre’s Monk’s Court tonight – if they take that, they’ll take anything. Tamsin says I can’t turn my novel into a detective story since gothics rely on “mental confusion”. I think she’s making up rules to slow me down. What it should be about is ordinary relationships turning extraordinary. Isolation and paradox. 2:15 AM – Sun 10 Oct - 71 Brain churning from Deborah Kerr’s Turn of the Screw. She was insane from the beginning, which damps the excitement somewhat. Played Miles’ death flawlessly however. Enjoying classes though graduation seems farther away, if anything. Bruce has dropped out – if the government won’t pay (they keep sending him threatening letters) he doesn’t want to “waste” his money. Tamsin says I love Bruce too much and it’s going to ruin my artistic life. All feel free to lecture me on my romantic fallibility. Went to a party at Dr. Plage’s – his wife Honey, who in spite of her stripper name has long dark hair, glasses and is a French scholar, took me aside and told me never to get married. Says it’s a complete disaster and I’ll be sorry. Much talk of Sylvia Plath, heads, and ovens. I backed away saying Bruce and I only want to pledge our lives to each other. She snorted in a disbelief not very complimentary to Dr. Plage. But he is pretty handsy. I’d feel cheated married to him, too. |
Alysse Aallyn
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