DIANE MERKER AT INMAN STREET
Diane Merker
At Inman Street
Lewis B. Sckolnick
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Diane Merker At Inman Street
Lewis B. Sckolnick
Copyright ? 2007-2013
130 Rattlesnake Gutter Road
Leverett, MA. 01054-9726 U.S.A.
Téléphone 1.413.367.0303
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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 papers set to his right while he
talked on about all of the money that Ted Hughes was making from the works of “that
poor woman”.
Gordon Cairnie still always had a way of whiting out Ted Hughes and all of his own
accomplishments as though he were some sort of 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
about.
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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
except what few glimpses of it I would 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 flat down and
outside to the rear basement door where the superintendent was putting them away. Diane
was the one who had taken the doors off their hinges and then unscrewed the hinges from
their three notched cutouts in the frame and on the door.
The other people in the house had already brought all of their doors down so there must
have been almost fourteen doors there with many of them still leaning up against the
outside red brick basement wall of the house when I first came down.
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The three apartments comprised what had once been a private home that had long ago
been broken up into a rooming house and now all of the new tenants were getting rid of
all of their unneeded doors as it had been converted into apartments.
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
that it defied 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 some old bottle of red
Italian or French wine around 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 the wooden frames.
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.
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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 town 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 one 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
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the New York State Thruway where I immediately turned around and hitched to JFK
where I grabbed the first KLM flight to Amsterdam.
I had traveled from Amsterdam to Moscow and back with most of my time having been
spent in my home in northern 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 free in her
own apartment without her having to think of getting dressed 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
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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
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 naked 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
part of the world likes to call propriety.
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I thought that is we comfortable for the two of us that we could both be the way we
wanted to be without having to worry what the other might be thinking for Diane and me
were long past that stage in our long 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 new 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 were.
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.
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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 Tampere.
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 and seen exactly how
she then was before me.
Diane was not that way only then, for on Saturday morning when we went out to get
some paint at the local hardware store, 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 dead at the
end of the third week of January in 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 better days.
The sidewalks were covered with deep slush from the snowstorm of the night before but I
was still looking forward toward the coming New England spring for that in a real sense
was one of the reasons that I had come back from Europe.
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Yes Diane knew exactly how she was then and I always thought that there was something
funny and rather seductive about all of her ways even if she would often like to disagree
with me as to how she was for what I saw was not what she wanted me to see and what it
was that she wanted me to see will now forever remain 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 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
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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 her living room couch that day.
There was some 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 certainly did manage to have a 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 home
there never did seem to be anything fresh to read even if one had just been out to the
bookshops that very day.
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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 open 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.
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There in the small back kitchen that looked out over the snow covered backyard 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 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 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, 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 the 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
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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 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.
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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.