medical care and lifestyles” in the U.S., and a statement by Görbe saying his “private life” was “private” when asked in the early 1970s about how he and Zella were adjusting to New York. But that was pretty much it. There was nothing about their home life (not even one of those lousy spreads, so common with children’s authors, where some reporter visits them at home to prove that he really is a joyous family man with kids and a wife and colourful wallpaper and a house filled with constant storytelling); nothing about his career from “her” point of view (one of those pieces where the wife comments on her husband’s zany writing process, his odd schedules, his fun-loving ways with the kids in the park); in fact nothing about Görbe having a wife or any home life at all. Zella’s public appearances, rare in any case, stopped entirely after 1975, as did any mention of her on Görbe’s part. His entire persona was public, and, as such, especially after days and days of reading about it, totally put on, or so it seemed to me, for maximum publicity.
Most amazing were the pictures. My aunt had hinted at the transformation Görbe had undergone since the 1960s, but it was beyond what I’d expected. He’d been slight, almost pixyish, at the time of his arrival in New York, and what happened to him over the years was so extreme I could only think his metabolism had been damaged. There was no way you could get that fat in that short a time all by yourself. Part of the problem early on was that he hadn’t figured out how to dress for it. He was still wearing the clothes of a skinny man—narrow pants and tucked-in shirts—through much of the 1970s and ’80s. It wasn’t until the ’90s that he adopted the black suit and overcoat whose layers smoothed his folds and bumps of flab. It was why he took up the cigar as well—his features had sunk so far into the flesh of his face he needed something sticking out like that, a flag, to remind us he was still in there. And with the physical change came increasing accounts of bad behaviour—sarcasm, insults, fist fights. I was surprised so few articles commented on how a writer of such fantastical stories, of a world mapped out with such visionary innocence, did little more than satisfy his appetite for food, booze, tobacco and outrage. There was nothing beyond that, just the immensity of his cravings, as if Görbe had become the monster excluded from his books.
That, at least, seemed to be Zella’s opinion. The one article I did find on her was a page six piece from the New York Post, a single paragraph mostly taken up with the names of celebrities who’d attended a recent “bash” for one of Görbe’s books in 1975. They gave her three sentences: “It appears the booze was flowing pretty freely. Zella Görbe, the author’s wife, was acting ‘erratic,’ according to one guest. Before being escorted home by a private nurse, she regaled the room with stories of her husband’s weight, calling him a ‘fat disgusting pig’ one minute, then swooning over her ‘little boy’ the next.” There was nothing else, and however much I scanned through the information I’d gathered, returning to paragraphs and statements, there was no more about Zella’s “behaviour,” nothing to suggest she was a drunk, certainly nothing about a “private nurse,” though I did note a number of photographs where there was a third figure present—an older woman, dressed well but very straight, always in the background near Zella. Since none of the photographs listed her among the guests, either the newspapers didn’t know her name or she wanted it kept out. She looked stern, a mother figure, and the pictures made me recall what my aunt had said about Görbe when he was twenty years old: still afraid of the dark, playing hide-and-seek, climbing into the attic as if it was the entrance to a palace.
During that last month I kept my research hidden from Görbe. I worried about how he’d react. But Görbe must have sensed something, because he paid more attention to me than before, coming over unannounced with presents for the kids, sitting by the kitchen table (as much of him as would fit, anyhow) complimenting Marcy’s cooking and listening to her talk half-jokingly about how I couldn’t enjoy New York because I was so wrapped up in making contacts here, so obsessed with publishing in the right places, so distraught at not getting on, that the kids had started jumping on my back while I sat at the computer just to get some attention. “Ah, ambition,” Görbe muttered. “Toxic as poison.”
He even showed up to two dismal readings arranged by my U.S. publisher.
“Well, that sucked,” he said, afterwards. “It’s interesting that the woman in the audience—or I guess I should just say ‘the audience,’ period—didn’t even bother to buy a book. With all our eyes on her you think she’d have the decency.”
“The only thing worse than giving a reading is having to attend one,” I replied.
“Absolutely,” said Görbe. “You note that I never read myself. I just get up there and bullshit for a while. It’s all they want to hear anyhow.”
“More of your bullshit.”
“Right. More of my bullshit.” He laughed and blew a big cloud of cigar smoke. “You should think about that some time.”
“It doesn’t matter,” I said. “I read, I don’t read, it’s all the same.”
“That’s the spirit!”
It was, I think, the only way he knew to cheer me up, though of course I didn’t need to be cheered up. My failures were something I’d accepted, or at least stopped trying to avoid or explain. And that was the problem: the more Görbe came to my readings, or said he liked my book, or tried to get me to not take it so seriously, the more tiresome it became. I had become his foil, the failure against which he could measure his success, the person he might have been had he not so successfully managed his public persona and with it his career. Time would prove me wrong, of course—that is, I was Görbe’s foil, but not in the way I thought—but during those weeks I was irritated by his condescension, and one night, at two in the morning, after we’d consumed more Brandy Sangarees than advisable, I turned to Görbe and said, “How’s your wife?”
“My wife?” Görbe turned with the cocktail lifted partway to his lips. “My wife is none of your goddamn business.”
“Oh, I see,” I said. “You’re the only one who’s allowed to get personal.” Görbe said nothing, but I could see he was ready to hit me. I felt tears come to my eyes, not because of the implied violence, but for exactly the opposite reason, for the effort Görbe had been making, in his own way, to make me see what was important, and instead of which I was trying to get to him, to bring him down to my level, which was also a way of raising myself to his. “Why are you doing this? Why are you trying so hard with me?” I pressed my face closer to his, not caring what he did. “When I called you I thought we’d meet for coffee and you’d give me the usual bullshit about writing and living in Manhattan, and I’d give you the usual bullshit about how honoured I feel to be here, and we’d never see each other again.”
He grabbed my shirt and lifted me off the bar stool and slammed me against the bar—it felt as if my spine had snapped—then hauled me out of the room so fast my feet couldn’t keep up, and dumped me on the sidewalk out front. Then he went back inside.
I don’t know how long I stayed there, blind with humiliation. The feeling was so intense it somehow rebounded on itself and made me shameless, sitting on the pavement not caring who saw me, my clothes soaking up the slush, indifferent to Görbe’s voice back in the bar telling everyone how lucky I was. I got home and Marcy asked why I was wet, and I couldn’t look at her, and I couldn’t look in on Henry and Benjamin asleep in their beds. I was so consumed by what Görbe had done I couldn’t focus on anything.
The next morning Görbe left his apartment at ten, hopping the subway into Manhattan and then the M35 bus to Ward’s Island. He was dressed as always—black suit, black tie, the overcoat, the cigar. He wasn’t reading anything, wasn’t looking around, wasn’t muttering more than a quick hello to the bus driver. He took a seat and stared straight ahead, and once in a while he’d open a big sketchbook on his lap and make a note or doodle a picture for the next installment of the Atlas.
The morning started with snow, by noon it was rain, and I got off a block after he did to avoid suspicion and got soaked running back to catch Görbe checking in with the receptionist and moving down one of the corridors of the Manhattan Psychiatric Center.