CHAPTER 1
IN SEARCH OF FAME
Wife No. 1
The critic asked me if I would say something about Bob. My first reaction was no. It has been years since we parted company—years since we saw each other last. But I do know things about Bob. The critic insisted, hoping I might shed some light on Robert's disappearance and his past. (I almost forgot that he had turned his identity into that of Robert A. Michael.)
Robert had always been called Bob. But on his applications to graduate schools, of course he used Robert as his first name. Since he had no middle name, where the graduate application forms asked for one he simply put the letter A. His initials, quite by accident and without forethought, came to be RAM. These initials would hold ever-greater meaning for Robert as his career unfolded. Robert applied to graduate schools that were all located on the East Coast and protected by ivy. Once enrolled in graduate school, he thought Bob gave away his Midwest origins, and he began to use his given name Robert, the name everyone now knows him by.
I didn't know what an architect was. There were none in my family and none among my family's friends and acquaintances. When Robert said on one of our first dates that he wanted to become an architect, I registered no feeling at all. I had no knowledge of what his profession would mean to our lives. None whatsoever. As it turns out, Robert didn't have much of an idea either.
Robert and I were sweethearts. The classic Eisenhower era kind where it didn't make much difference what you wished for because everyone was wishing for the same thing, a spouse, a house, a car, and kids. I wished for Bob senior year in high school, and I followed him to college. Well before we were married, he became wedded to his studies. He wanted to be an architect. We dated. We made plans. We talked about marriage. Bob was going to go off to graduate school to continue his architectural studies. But what about me, Bob? There was no reason for him to take me with him to Harvard and its Graduate School of Design, the GSD. Unless, unless I got pregnant. Slam bang thank you, ma'am. I wore no diaphragm that one night and I knew. Yes, I knew. Remember that this was before the pill. The marriage was a hurried affair, just like the night I got pregnant. Nobody had planned this except me.
When Bob was in his teens, he expressed an interest in becoming an artist and began taking classes at the Art Institute. His parents decided that this was a big mistake, especially as his instructors kept encouraging him to do more with his obvious talent for drawing. It was Bob's father who encouraged him to use his artistic talent to become an architect, "a profession," he said, presuming that this "profession" could assure him a living income, frightened that Bob's talent would turn him into a starving artist. To seal the deal, Robert's father gave Robert the book The Fountainhead as a birthday present. The Fountainhead had been on the best-seller list getting mixed reviews, but Robert's father, even though he had not read the book himself, understood that it portrayed the architect in heroic fashion, just like the artists Robert most admired.
Mother was surprised when I announced the July wedding. It was already April. Father suspected something but didn't say anything. For Dad it was one fewer daughter to deal with, as he would announce inappropriately at the rehearsal dinner. Luckily I had two sisters who were married prior to me. The routine was down pat; Mom took over from there. Robert didn't care. His sight was focused on graduate school. He accepted that marriage was going to be an inconvenient interlude in his quest for fame. This was the first time I saw him get depressed. It seemed that this big move to graduate school with a wife in tow was something he hadn't bargained for.
"Let's get it over with and start our life," Robert declared. By now I was calling him Robert at his insistence. He thought first I had to get a job. "You've got a degree in library science, and Boston is full of libraries. No problem."
Nobody in my family did the math, counting the foreshortened period between marriage and the birth of Robert Jr. Free love was late coming to the Midwest, but it got there fortunately just in time for me, a nice middle-class white girl, to be forgiven for having developed an out-of-wedlock pregnancy. I thought Bob and I were in love; the classic "boy meets girl, boy and girl fall in love" kind of love, just as we were taught. It was pretty uncomplicated, except for Bob's quest for fame. That I believed would be a passing fancy once we had a family.
It wasn't our brains that attracted us to each other. Bob had hung out with an artsy crowd as an undergraduate before applying to graduate school. My best friends would be called nerds today. Opposites attract; maybe that was it. We had read some of the same books, including that damned book by Ayn Rand, The Fountainhead. He knew that I was not the Dominique Wyland that Rand created to be Howard Roark's lover and mistress. Bob loved that book, and I hated it. Bob imagined that he could emulate Howard Roark once he had his graduate degree.
Some people don't really get to know each other until after they are married. We developed our sexuality at the cusp of the sexual revolution. I was a little bit ahead of Bob in that regard, reading Simone de Beauvoir, Friedan, Steinman, and the whole feminist chorus. Men didn't have anything close to those dynamic publicists as references except Hugh Hefner, who warped men's expectations regarding the female body.
Opposites attract? But for how long? Eventually it gets old. It got old for us as careers, work, school, finances, kids, and Bob's ego and ambition all collided inside our marriage. Kids change everything, you know. And to have a kid just wiped out like Robert Jr. was ... that kind of thing just changes your life. Bang. Life isn't the same anymore. And it never can be. There is the guilt. There is just too much of that to go around to be evenly distributed. It changed Bob's life. Mine too, of course. I guess I should say Robert now, because Robert Jr. was a product of Robert Sr. There was never a question of what a male son would be named. It was Robert's way of laying claim to this child conceived out of wedlock. Wedlock. What a strange word.
Robert was really astraight arrow. He felt very guilty that I got pregnant. I never told him that it was a plot on my part. And there was never a question that we would get married. That was just the way it was done. Even if we wanted an abortion, we would have no idea about how to proceed.
Graduate school was difficult for Robert. It seemed that the only way he could get through some days was to focus on an imaginary professional future. Robert Jr. and the way he learned fascinated him. He was convinced that he saw architectural talent in that little body. Perhaps he saw himself and was disappointed that he had taken so long to find his calling, even though the professors at the GSD made him question his own abilities day and night. It seemed sick when he started talking about Michael and Michael Architects. He was just putting too much stock in this kid, and the pressure would just grow to be something impossible, I thought. I couldn't imagine where this fantasizing of Robert's was going to go or how I could divert it. Robert was devastated when Robert Jr. was killed. His imaginary world shattered. I was afraid that he was going to drop out of school. He became morose. I can't say he became suicidal, but looking back that seems like a reasonable assumption.
I guess it was then that we made this silent pact. We'd get Robert through school, we'd conceive again and go about raising kids, and then ... we were never able to talk about and then. Robert did graduate, not with honors as he had expected when he entered the GSD. Of course it was the professors' fault who didn't recognize his talents. To Robert he was at the top of the class. A genius.
Before graduation we did conceive again. Robert had a hard time accepting Amy, a petite little girl who held no resemblance to Robert Jr. and of course could never become an architect and her father's partner.
Robert wanted to stay on the East Coast after graduation. New York offered the best employment opportunities. He really wanted to work for Skidmore, Owings & Merrill. He had no trouble getting a job there with his Harvard degree in hand. Portfolios were what firms looked at, not grades. His portfolio clearly showed his reverence for Mies van der Rohe in his student designs. SOM had been founded in Chicago, and they too had been strongly influenced by Mies's minimalist aesthetic.
Life in New York became another kind of hell. No job for me. We lived in a hovel in the Village. All that life outside, but we had no money, one kid, Amy, and now another on the way. The breaking point for Robert came when a colleague, a fellow GSD grad, stole his drawings for a presentation. Robert nearly went berserk. If we owned a gun, I think there would have been some bodies lying around SOM. Robert's team had been working on a tight schedule and was getting ready for a client pin-up. They had worked late the night before but decided to all go home and get some sleep before the presentation. Robert was so beat, having stayed up until early morning for nearly a week, that he forgot to set the alarm clock when he got home, and he overslept. Of course he thought it was my fault that he had overslept, but I had no way of knowing that he was scheduled to participate in a presentation that morning. We talked little about his work. He took a cab uptown but was still fifteen minutes late for the meeting. All the drawings were pinned up, and here was his supposed colleague talking about Robert's drawings as though they were his own.
Robert never recovered from that. He learned something, I guess. But it launched a kind of paranoia toward his profession and others who practiced it. That was when he started putting his initials and date on every drawing he produced: RAM 00/00/0000. But his career at SOM was over as far as he was concerned. He said he'd never work for anyone else ever again. He vowed to start his own firm. His father, a realtor, offered him the opportunity to design some spec houses in his Chicago suburb. That offer also meant a ticket out of New York. No disappointment for me, but Robert's dream of making it in the east was finished. Robert was not sure about working so closely with his father. I told him that I thought it was worth a try. Our lives were miserable. He agreed. We packed.
Robert eventually found some space and started his office in downtown Chicago. To be honest, our life gets kind of fuzzy after that. I started working for an alternative bookstore, and those people became my "alternative family." The rest of the time I spent raising the kids, now two, Amy and Chip. Robert worked. I mean he worked. He was at his office (which he liked to call his studio) at least ten hours, most often twelve hours, a day. And when he wasn't there, he was out trying to make professional contacts and trying to get work. He joined the Young Founders Club at the museum and joined an avant-garde film society and was chosen for its board. He even joined the Chamber of Commerce so he could be part of their group insurance plan. He wanted me to participate in all this stuff, but I hated cocktail party chatter with people pretending to be who they weren't.
The place I was working had really neat people who held potluck suppers every other Friday night where everyone would bring their kids and pitch in and we'd talk about what we were reading, smoke some pot, and drink cheap wine. I got Robert to attend one night. That was an absolute low point in our marriage. We both went home stoned and started yelling at each other and cursing and throwing stuff. The house was a mess the next morning with the kids screaming in our ears. Without the help of New York, we had been able to create another little hell. We pretty much led separate lives after that. We still lived together. We would even have sex on occasion, but the love had gone out of our marriage. It was the sexual revolution. We could find uncomplicated sex outside of marriage. I think that's an oxymoron. We liked to think it was uncomplicated, but it never was. I don't know about now. At least by then we finally had the pill and didn't have AIDS to worry about yet.
Our marriage just fell apart. We were like two people on an ice floe that just imperceptibly breaks up as the water around it warms. Except that there were these two other little bodies on our breaking-up ice floe. Without discussing it, we had agreed to stay together until they were through school.
Another turning point in our relationship, and there were many, occurred when Robert's father gave us a piece of land. Abercrombie Heights had become a destination for many affluent upwardly mobiles who could afford property with fantastic views of Lake Michigan and the city. Robert had designed several spec houses for his father on property in the Heights. There was a property Robert's father thought was unbuildable, so he gave it to his son to see what he could do. Robert saw this as an opportunity, a huge opportunity, to build a house that could demonstrate his talents. He would be the client, the architect, and the builder. The problem was that we had no capital, only the property in our name. Robert imagined this to be an opportunity like the Case Study Houses were in California, which launched the careers of many West Coast architects. He begged me to approach my father for a loan. Robert's father had deeded title to the land to us, so we had some equity in the property. Dad, hoping to save our marriage, which was obviously on the rocks by this point, gave us a land contract. After persuading Dad to give us the loan, my task was over. Robert never consulted me on the design of the house. I don't think the idea ever crossed his mind. Robert's dream was built.
The house was really Robert's. I moved out when I couldn't take living in a Robert A. Michael and Associates, Architects, showcase any longer. It was never my home. It was like living in a furniture showroom, full of all this modern crap you couldn't sit on. I'd spend as much time as possible either at the bookstore or at friends' houses. If the kids and I weren't there, the house wouldn't get dirty or mussed up, and Robert wouldn't get annoyed that the house wasn't perfect when he'd unexpectedly bring a potential client home for a drink. We had this exercise down so well that we didn't even have to talk about it. Somehow I would know when I should be out of the house, and somehow he would know when I was. I guess in this sense we were closer together than ever in this kind of extrasensory kind of way—but further apart.
For Robert's graduation from Harvard I bought him a signed lithograph by Le Corbusier. He was Corb to everyone at the GSD, some of whom had worked for him in his Paris atelier, or so they said. The lithograph was signed "L-C 55. 1955 Le Corbusier Poeme de L'angle Droit Mourlot." Even then I had to borrow money from Dad for the purchase. After a little research Dad decided that the print might grow in value, so there was little back-and-forth over the nature of the bargain. But since it was purchased with his money, he felt that it was as much his as it was Robert's, even though he cared little about its provenance.
The print shows an open hand, fingers apart and pointing upward. The hand might also be taken as the profile of a bird. It was an image that Corb painted frequently—the Monument of the Open Hand. From the prints I could have chosen there were also many of women, buxom women, bare-breasted women. Corb seemed to share Picasso's fascination with the female torso. That generation of artists pandered too much to Robert's taste, which still had a ways to grow, to mature. I settled on the open hand.
When it was presented at his low-key graduation brunch with his parents, Robert took the print from its tube and looked at it. He noted that Corb had signed the print L-C 55. I wouldn't appreciate that comment until after the SOM incident when Robert began to sign his own drawings RAM with a date. The print had meant something to him? I wasn't sure.
