I’m rather good at concealing anger. Had to be in my old profession. But recently it’s begun to show through. What I’m mad at nowadays is, for instance, mortality. I’ve passed seventy-eight and have only recently found how to enjoy life. For one thing, I’ve stopped worrying about what people think of me—or so I like to believe. I used to spend most of my time straining to be a nice guy so people would like me. Now I’m out of show business and I’ve become my true grumpy self.

On the day after our arrival, I received a cable from New York City, informing me, by a prearranged code, that I had a new son by a woman not my wife. I can’t remember that I was flustered. I went to a press conference and did my best to “push” my film.

Molly enjoyed the hotel, the excellent food, the service, our being alone together. She spent her afternoons playing solitaire and planning for the new apartment we’d bought, which was being prepared to her specifications. Since our children, all except the youngest, had gone their ways, Molly thought of this apartment as our last home and final resting place.

Molly, of course, knew nothing about the recent event in the city where our apartment was being prepared and what had led up to it. An expert dissembler, with a lifetime of practice, I’d covered my tracks perfectly. What had been most effective in the deception was that I no longer gave a damn if I was caught. The singular aspect of the situation was that I took it in stride. I’d become so accustomed to a life in layers that nothing could penetrate my indifference to personal danger and possible disruption. I’d anesthetized myself.

A writer, perhaps more than a filmmaker or a theatre director, lives off what he has stored up in the way of impressions and experiences. One thing we all learn is not to deny our violent feelings but to respect them. They are our material, as well as our bond with humanity. People generally try to forget the pain of the past, to lift themselves above it. They’re protecting themselves where it hurt most. Artists know that they have to live differently than their neighbors, and that hurt is part of the game they’ve chosen to play. Our weaknesses, our faults, our sins, are what make us understand other living creatures. We don’t look away when we look back.

I’d drink too much and long for the taste of the streets again, of the gutter, the dark hotels, the cities where I was not known. Oh, to start over and live a totally different life! Some nights I’d break out of our home, looking for I never knew what, or where I might find it. More often than not, I’d end by calling my “girlfriend” (who was later to be my second wife), summon her out of her home. We’d walk the streets, sing and dance on the sidewalks, end by fucking in alleys, in the back rows of movie theatre balconies, and on park benches, in the summer on the roof of my apartment house, in the winter up against the radiator in the entrance of the building where she lived.

Was I hoping to be caught? I didn’t care. Something had to happen, something dramatic. And soon! I was trapped in my “success.” I hated the sound of cultured voices, heard them against the cries of anguished unrest within me.

I knew I needed help. I’d had the attention of one psychoanalyst a few years before, gone to him only because Molly said she’d leave me if I didn’t. He was cultured and cuddly, and his wife drank too much. When she had to be assisted up the stairs and to bed halfway through dinner at his apartment, it caused me to wonder how a man who hadn’t been able to help his wife could help me. I dropped out.

BUT MY misery those years was deeper. I was in revolt against my way of life, my respectability and that of the wife I loved. Against our orderly and proper way of living. I longed for what I can only call chaos. I kept feeling I was in the wrong place, doing the wrong things with the wrong people. I had to strain to sit still across from the good friends Molly would invite to dinner, and would chafe at the conversation on culture, politics, and the arts that followed the meal. By the end of the evening, my smile had frozen. I felt that all the conversation we’d taken part in was the same as all the other conversations we’d taken part in, that all our friends were in constant and inevitable agreement on any and all subjects. I could always anticipate what they were going to say. They were, each of them, “on the side of the angels,” and their views were fixed. No doubts were ever raised.

I, on the other hand, was on the side of the devil.

But now I knew I had to have help; my life was a mess. My second analyst was tall, grave, and austere and, as far as I knew, had no woman. At my urging, he was ruthless with me—that is, truthful. His observations sometimes reached the level of contempt. But I swallowed my resentment: I’d asked for it. “How the hell did I get into this mess?” I demanded. “And why don’t I like whom I’ve become? Tell me.”

He did. He exposed my dissembling, small and large, pulled off my masks and kicked over my poses. He said I lied to myself, constantly, even as I told others the truth. He said I was constantly betraying my true feelings to please others, that most frequently I didn’t say what I felt, only what was useful to say.

But he didn’t condemn me. That wasn’t his technique. He only did, and did thoroughly, what I’d begged him to do. He told me the truth as he knew it, and I accepted it.

WHEN Father had first come to America, he must have felt that he was still in a hostile and threatening environment—after all, he could not speak the language—so he continued to behave in New York as he had among the Turks, guarding himself to be circumspect, always beyond criticism on the streets and in the marketplace, always ready with his smile of compliance. He’d learned to get by on his cleverness and never say anything that might be misinterpreted. He learned to survive by cunning, by guile, and by restraining his real reactions. He couldn’t afford to behave truly on the streets or in his store. He had to please and flatter his customers. A salesman has to sell himself before he can sell his goods. He preserved his life by pretending respect for what he feared and even despised. In Turkey, he’d learned what Anatolian Greeks learn: how it was necessary to be in order to survive.

I spent afternoons after school in the stacks of the New Rochelle Public Library, reading books that might explain the intimate problems of my life. Or in the movie houses. Movies became my passion. They were dreams, like my dreams. I didn’t have money, so I found a way to sneak into Loews New Rochelle. When the exit doors were opened and everyone was crowding out of the theatre, I would slip in against the current of the crowd. I was quick and I was slippery.

What did I want of life? Nothing noble. But, passionately, to be an American, to have what American kids had, a daily life like theirs, to be accepted by them, to enjoy what they were enjoying—each other’s company, cars, bell-bottom trousers, summer places, a pocketful of pocket money, a varsity letter on my sweater, to dance with a girl, to dance well, to neck with her later—nothing very noble, you see. Just the most ordinary, the most common, and the most precious things.

I generalized from this disaster that the most precious things in life were forbidden by authority (my father) and that everything I wanted most I would have to obtain secretly. I learned to conceal my longings and to work to fulfill them surreptitiously. I stopped feeling guilty about the beautiful brown eyes conspiracy. It was necessary. From that philosophical conclusion it was only a short step to this one: What I wanted most I’d have to take—quietly and quickly—from others. Not a logical step, but I made it at a leap. I learned to mask my desires, hide my truest feelings; I trained myself to live in deprivation, in silence, never complaining, never begging, in isolation, without expecting kindness or favors or even good luck. To do without good luck! What a fate! To never expect an improvement! To consider rejection inevitable!

But I learned to keep coming back, to persist. I hardened.

And since what I wanted most I didn’t get, not nearly, I learned to live as an artist lives, empathically, observing, imagining, dreaming, all behind the mask.

Remember that for years, when I was a very young man, every time I entered a bed where a girl was waiting for me I’d be entering a courtroom where I’d lost many decisions. Doesn’t every culprit wish to turn the tables on his judge, deflate his eminence, show him up, kill him? Wasn’t it natural, since women had once held so much power over me, that when the tables were turned and it was I who had the heft, I’d want to gouge the situation for all it was worth?

Well, I did. I specialized in taking women away from men, particularly those handsome young fellows who played leading roles in films, tall and well muscled, every way confident or seeming so—war heroes, horseback riders, fast-car drivers, publicity gods. I wanted to prove that Vin Draddy wasn’t able to please a woman or hold her, not when I wanted her.