Diane Merker At Inman Street

 

Diane Merker

At Inman Street

Lewis B. Sckolnick

Copyright ? 2007-2015

 

The first time that I walked into the small Grolier Poetry Bookshop on Plympton Street in Cambridge I saw Diane Merker seated there near the wood framed glass door on the large front room red couch set before the divided-light picture window.

Diane was listening to Gordon Cairnie the owner and founder of the shop who was sitting at the far end of the couch with its split open cushion wearing one of his worn smooth tweed sport jackets with a stack of week-old mail and assorted papers set to his right while he talked on about all of the money that Ted Hughes was making from the works of his late wife “that poor woman” the American poet Sylvia Plath. 

Gordon Cairnie still always had a way of whiting out Ted Hughes and all of his accomplishments as though he were some sort of a leach or criminal and that only showed just how very little about life and love that he had never learned after more than seven decades.

Sylvia Plath had been to the Grolier often and Gordon Cairnie knew what he was talking about to the extent that anyone might possibly have had some idea as to what she was all about.

It was the beginning of October but it still felt very much like summer as all of us tried to fool ourselves into believing for as long as was we possibly could before the coming of the first cold snap of winter.

Diane was always to be seen well dressed in public as well as in private and she easily stood out as the most cosmopolitan of women to have ever graced that bookshop.

I saw Diane there often and I really did not know very much about the rest of her life which she kept private with the exception of those few glimpses of it I would be able to glean from time to time there at the Grolier on those long fall afternoons that were stretching away out toward winter.

Time has a way of passing and sometime that winter I was at Diane’s third floor apartment on Inman Street carrying the doors of the various rooms of the apartment down and outside to the rear basement door where the superintendent was putting them away. The house had been a rooming house years earlier and the time had come to get rid of all of the reminders of that part of the house's history. Diane was the one who had taken the doors off their hinges and then unscrewed the hinges from their three notched cutouts in the frames and on the doors.

The other people in the house had already brought all of their doors down so there must have been close to fourteen doors there with many of them still leaning up in a thick row against the outside red brick basement wall of the house when I first came down.

The three apartments comprised what had once been a private home that had long ago been broken up into the rooming house and now all of the new tenants were getting rid of all of their unneeded doors as they had clearly been getting in the way of their movements from room to room.

Across narrow Inman Street on the east side of the block heading toward Massachusetts Avenue to the south was the Syrian Church which seemed so out of place and in place a the same time that it defied any sense of definition for whatever else it was it was a piece of the Umayyades Square in Damascus set down there in the heart of Central Square.

Diane’s cooking and baking both had a touch of the eclectic about them and thus I never did quite know what to expect from her and there was always an ancient bottle of red Italian or French wine hidden away on a cool low shelf to start the meal off with.

When I stopped by a few weeks later Diane showed me how she had meticulously filled in all of the doorframes where the hinges once had been attached and how she had painted over everything so that you could no longer see where the hinge settings had long ago been chiseled out of all of those wooden frames with their rather distinctive array of moldings.

Diane was clearly impressed with her work and she certainly wanted to show it off to me and to anyone else who just might happen to drop by to see her.

I was away in Europe and Asia that summer and I only again caught up with Diane once I had been back for a while. We would see one another from time to time either at the Grolier or at her place.

It was at this time that she had first begun writing free-lance for the Boston Phoenix newspaper. Diane would show me one or two of the articles about the latest goings on in the Cambridge scene but I never quite got around to reading any of them in full. My not reading any of those articles had to do with my lack of desire with regard to the subject and nothing else.

Diane may have seemed to have kept to herself yet she certainly knew everyone worth knowing in Cambridge and there were many people who knew her or of her. Diane was often able to get some of the more intimate details about many of the people in Cambridge who she followed so she often left me more than a bit surprised at some of the very fundamental basics which I would so easily miss but which she always managed to grasp.

Maybe Diane was not quite the Gertrude Stein of Cambridge but she was certainly as close as anyone could ever hope to imagine.

We made it through that winter and the next thing that I knew I was in New Paltz and then on to Detroit, Lawtons and New York followed by my Finnegan’s Wake return to New Paltz. On my way back up to Boston I only got as far as the Kingston entrance to The New York State Thruway where I immediately turned around and hitched to JFK airport at Idlewild where I grabbed the first KLM flight to Amsterdam.

I had traveled from Amsterdam to Moscow and back with much of my time having been spent in my northern home city of Tampere.

I was not to be back in Cambridge until the following January so that more than ten months were to have passed before I was to next see Diane again.

When I got back to Cambridge right there at the end of the third week of that January I went straight to Diane’s where I stayed with her for a four-day weekend.

Diane was waiting for me at the front door of her apartment when I first arrived for I had just called her from a pay phone somewhere out on Kirkland Street ten or twenty minutes earlier and she told me to hurry and come right over.

I could see that Diane was happy that I was there and glad that she could be casual and free in her own apartment without her having to think of getting dressed up just for my arrival, something I knew that she would have had it been anyone else.

It was still early in the morning and I was still sleepy as I stood there in the narrow hallway looking at Diane as I took off my leather work boots while she was quick to take my parker from me and hang it up in the small hall closet. We really did not have all that much to say to one another at first as we let our eyes speak for both of us. I knew that Diane was still sleepy and that she wanted to get back to the warmth of her bed as soon as possible.

At the end of the long modern living room couch I could see that there were two folded wool blankets with a folded yellow sheet stacked on top and a fresh pillow lying right there next to them.

I stood there in the living room by the narrow side window and started to undress as I placed my clothes on Diane’s desk chair, the fact that I was soon to be standing there almost in the nude in nothing more than white briefs and a white t-shirt before her did not seem to bother her for although it might have been the first time that she had seen me that way she like so many other Ashkenazi Jewish women whether family, friends or lovers, seeing me standing in that way had long ago become something all too natural for all of them.

I had always been like that before I went to bed and I decided not to change my ways for the moment just so as to please Diane for in a sense I was still trying to learn more about her and how she reacted to me in various settings when we were there alone together at her home so I was not about to become someone else just for the sake of something that a certain part of the world likes to refer to as propriety.

I thought that it was comfortable for the two of us that we could both be the way we wanted to be without ever having to worry what the other might be thinking for Diane and me were long past that stage in our long intertwined relationship.

While I had been undressing Diane was behind me busily bending over and making up the couch to be my bed. I was soon lying there on the couch with Diane seated up against me on the side of the newly formed bed as she tucked me in. I could tell from the fullness of her exquisite breasts with their curved cleavage and the pressing of her nipples up against her nightgown and robe as she pulled the sheet and blankets tight up over my shoulders that she was both excited and happy to have me there that day.

Diane had seen at once how sleepy I was the moment I had arrived so I was glad that I did not have to explain anything to her or apologize for being so tired. The idea that we never had to explain things to one another is one of the reasons we were the friends that we had always been.

Diane knew that even with her nightgown and her robe that I knew exactly how she was built and how she looked even if she always managed to keep herself more or less covered when she was with me. I think that that was something additional that Diane had always liked about me for it allowed her to be as she so pleased without her ever having to think to go out of her way to please me.

Diane liked being like that in front of me because she knew that she could show off to me and to herself just how comfortable she was with me being there even if I had in a very real sense come right out of the blue from distant Amsterdam, Tampere and Moscow along with so many places in between.

I knew from the first moment that I saw Diane standing there at the front door when I had arrived that all she was possibly wearing was a cotton nightgown and a rather lightly tied robe. The only thing that might have made her happier when she first saw me coming up the stairs would have been for some stranger to have passed us by in the hallway and seen exactly how she was right then before me.

Diane was not that way only then, for on Saturday morning when we went out to get some paint at the Pill hardware store on Massachusetts Avenue, it was not at all to be seen as accidental that she was wearing a light cotton pink print dress with the hem coming just to her knees and the last six inches of her green parka was left unzipped and unbuttoned right there at the end of the third week of January in the dead of a New England winter.

On her head Diane wore a pink wool beret and her boots were a pair of old brown leather laceups, which looked like they had long ago seen their much better days.

The sidewalks were covered with a deep slush from the snowstorm of the night before but I was still looking forward toward the coming the New England spring for that in a real sense was one of the reasons that I had come back from the very edge of Western Europe.

Yes Diane knew exactly how she was then and I always thought that there was something funny and rather seductive at the same time about all of her various ways even if she would often like to disagree with me as to how she was for what I saw in her was not what she wanted me to see and what it was that she wanted me to see will now forever remain a part of the unknown.

Maybe I was wrong but I felt then just as I was about to fall asleep that I had come at just the right time for Diane for she seemed to need someone around there at home with her for a while who she could talk to and not just have there as company or who she would later describe as a guest.

I think Diane knew what she had in me early that morning as she sat there on the living room couch and tucked me in for whatever else we had or did not have we never did seem to have secrets from one another as we had always been totally open before each other from the very first time that we had met.

Diane bent over and kissed me on the forehead before she got up and walked away toward the entranceway of the living room. I once again felt like a little boy as Diane kissed me like that and I knew that was how she wanted me to feel and in a sense I could not help but share that way of feeling about myself right then.

I must have fallen asleep at once for the first thing that I remembered when I awoke an hour and a half or more later was seeing the back of Diane’s robe as she walked away from me earlier that Thursday morning. I knew that she must have stood there in the entranceway of the living room for a minute or two just to watch me sleep for I had long known that she like so many other women had often liked to see me sleep. I would not be at all surprised if somewhere in this world there is a photograph of me sleeping there in bed on Diane's living room couch that day.

There was a distant friend of Diane’s who had just lost his apartment on Broadway who was now in the small front room and he was staying there with her for just a few days but he managed to be at the Plough in the Stars bar out on Massachusetts Avenue most of the time as though it were his office of sorts for he most certainly did manage to have a distinct way of keeping regular business hours there.

One of the very first things that Diane showed me was her copy of Fire in the Lake by Frances Fitzgerald. I knew by the way that she was so clearly taken by that book that that was the type of writing which she so wished to be able to do. Diane had often shown me that book and I knew that she had read it many times over. Whenever I think of her bookcase there on Inman Street Fire in the Lake is the only book that my mind’s eye remembers for it had such a prominent place there on the second shelf not far from the side window.

The houses in Cambridge were filled to bursting with books, almost as though they were some sorts of leveling devices and no matter how many books there might be at a given home there never really did seem to be anything fresh to read even if one had just been out to the bookshops earlier that very day.

While I was away in Europe, Scandinavia and Russia Diane had written a first novel, which was waiting there in typed manuscript that she had had copied and bound for her at Gnomon Copy out on Massachusetts Avenue, she told me that some selections from the novel were to be published in The Phoenix.

The novel was about those past two years in Cambridge but after opening the book by chance to a page that had a far from flattering view of myself I decided to pass on reading it for the time being. 

That Friday night Diane had a date but she was a bit unsure of her choice for the evening so she had me instantly stand in as her first cousin. When the date showed up and Diane was standing there with him at the front door I told him in a most direct manner that she had to be back home by midnight.

It was while Diane was away that I took that first quick cut at her novel but I soon put it back on the bookshelf and I never did make it into Fire in the Lake as I chose to go over my own writing and read whatever I had brought back with me from Tampere on my way up from New York.

Whatever I had said to the date must have worked for Diane was back well before midnight and the two of us then went straight into the kitchen for a late night dessert and coffee for we both knew that coffee only kept insomniacs awake.

There in the small back kitchen that looked out over the snow covered backyards we talked about some of the most mundane things imaginable as we both seemed to spend most of our time looking at one another and we both knew that we liked what we saw even if Diane was too locked up in her own set rules of love which never had a place for me.

On Saturday morning we went to the hardware store up on Massachusetts Avenue towards Boston where Diane purchased a small can of bright yellow paint, two brushes and a small container of turpentine. I could tell from the moment we walked in the door of the shop that Diane had long been one of their regulars.

On the way home we stopped at a shop near the corner of Inman Street to stock up on vanilla ice cream, not that either one of us really cared what the flavour was.

In the afternoon we painted her kitchen, with the bright yellow being a great change from the drab faded Irish blue that Diane had inherited.

On Sunday morning I went out for the New York Times and the two of us sat around on the living room couch and at the kitchen table with cups of coffee at hand as we worked our way through that enormous newspaper.

Late that afternoon we went to see a movie at the theatre on Massachusetts Avenue. Sitting there in the row directly in front of ours was a Native American Indian from Montana with his young son. Diane was soon a close friend with the both of them and she easily got down both of their stories with all of the out of the way facts and detailed information without any need for the memoria technica of paper or pen to hold her notes.

After the movie we went back to Diane’s apartment and took a nap together on her big bed in the back bedroom. We lay there with my right arm around her and me holding her close. Diane was older than me and she somehow did not consider it right for me to be her lover. I thought that she was trying to be funny but she was clearly all too serious as though she had thought through all of the details well in advance.

Later that afternoon when I was alone reading in the living room and looking at the snow still coming down I got up and walked into the kitchen and found Diane there working on an article for the Boston Phoenix. I went back into the living room and grabbed some notes that I had for a poem and went back into the kitchen to join her. Over coffee the two of us were writing up a storm but the strongest remembrance from that time were the creative airs that were wafting through the apartment right then.

I was back at Diane’s apartment four weeks later for lunch and I could see that she was not in a very happy mood. The once bright yellow walls of the kitchen had now been painted over in a light dried muddy brown with streaks of the yellow clearly discernable under the new film. All of that was clearly an attempt on her part to paint away me and that now forever lost four-day weekend out of her life.

I think that was the last time that I ever saw Diane, as writing, love and travel took me to different and unexpected places.

The years passed and my attempts to reach Diane all failed me. I assumed that she had either gotten married or had moved back up to Haverhill to be with her mother. I had this idea of her living there all by herself in a large Victorian house set on a hill with a view from a high window out toward the Atlantic Ocean while she wrote some long New England epic novel that would always be remembered.

Some years later when I was far away from Cambridge and all of the direct memories that it held for me I had a dream:

I was back on Inman Street and the door to Diane’s apartment was unlocked. I stepped in and looked into the living room with the copy of Fire in the Lake still sitting there at its appointed place on the second shelf of the bookcase. I walked down the hallway to the kitchen. Diane was standing there by the sink. I could see that she was angry but we were soon seated at the table over ice cream. Later we went to bed.

One day five years after I was to last see Diane she decided to walk out of her life forever.