Cleaning out my closet

The Column: 02.09.24

My beloved and I live in a large co-op building on the Upper West Side of Manhattan that I bought in 1987 and from our terrace we can look up to the apartment where Sinclair Lewis lived in his alcoholic distress before going away to die in Italy in 1951 and farther up is Faye Dunaway’s old apartment with panoramic views of the city. She resided there when she was having an affair with the Italian heartthrob Marcello Mastroianni — Marshmallow Macaroni, we used to call him — and where she, in a fit of fury because he wouldn’t marry her, threw his clothes off the 20^th-floor balcony to sail down onto the brownstone roofs. A neighbor told me about it who’d gotten the scoop from a previous resident, since departed. Faye screamed a name at him and heaved two armloads of shirts and pants and they went fluttering down like a flock of dying butterflies. “It was a good thing he wasn’t in one of the shirts at the time or she would’ve heaved him over in person,” the neighbor said. “I went out and found a couple in the ramp going down to the garage and they are just my size, one orange, one green stripes, not exactly my style but they make me feel like a Somebody.”

So from our terrace, I look up and remind myself to stay off alcohol except for Communion and avoid the sadness of Lewis’s end. He kept cranking out novels in his old age but people had had enough of him especially as he got old and out of touch with the current scene and the work got more cartoonish.

But I put the bottle aside twenty-some years ago, not wanting my cheerful little girl to see her daddy drunk, a powerful motivator, and whiskey has lost its appeal. I walk past liquor stores and don’t slow down to have a look.

No, what troubles me now is the amiable state of my marriage. I can’t remember the last time my sweetheart slammed a door or raised her voice to me. A woman would have to be passionately in love with a man to throw armloads of his shirts off a 20^th-floor balcony. Marshmallow’s offense was refusing to divorce his wife, Bella, back in Italy and marry Faye. He ate his cake and had it too. Faye wanted him for herself, didn’t want to be a sleepover pal, a flame, a paramour or playmate. She wanted to be Mrs. Macaroni. Throwing his shirts overboard was a dramatic attempt to make him naked and therefore dependent on her but apparently he had plenty more shirts where those came from. He calmed her down by speaking Italian to her, a great language for pacifying your lover. I long ago memorized the lines Tu solo sei il mio vero amore, sei il mio sole e la mia luna, il mio pane e il mio vino, la bellezza dei miei giorni e l’estasi delle mie notti if ever she storms out of the roomscreaming and heads for my clothes closet, but it hasn’t happened.

There have been times of irritation when I let the shower overflow or I set a hot coffee on a tabletop, scarring it forever, when I’ve spoken the lines in English, “You alone are my one true love, my sun and my moon,” et cetera. But we’re a calm couple.

And now I think back and realize that no woman has ever loved me as Faye loved Marshmallow. I have disappointed a number of women, two by marrying them and two by not, but nobody has so much as thrown my hat off a balcony or a tie or pair of shoelaces.

I am told that Faye’s closet demolition did not end the Macaroni affair. I am told that soon thereafter the downstairs neighbors could hear that master bed slip-sliding back and forth across the tile floor accompanied by cries of delight. And that is why I long for a big blowup between us — the beauty of reconciliation, the heartbreak leading to rapture.

I’m not Italian but I know a good deal when I see one. My closet is open, my darling. Most of my clothes are old, out of fashion, stained, too small; I’d be happy if you cleaned it out from end to end. I need to be Dunawayed and then ­­— shirtless, shoeless, depantsed, let me be yours forever and a day.

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