The Search for Philip K. Dick (5 page)
Read The Search for Philip K. Dick Online
Authors: Anne R. Dick
I had no idea that he had such a problem about climbing down that cliff.
The girls were a little confused by Phil’s presence but they couldn’t help but like him and soon got used to his being around. They knew something was going on though not quite what. Kleo seemed to have disappeared. Phil adored the children and often went with us to the beach. I was shocked that Phil had never learned to swim and was afraid of the water. I wanted him to take swimming lessons so he could get over this fear, but he wouldn’t. He said he only wanted to stand on the shore and watch. Phil took the children to dance class, cooked breakfast for them, and organized excursions to the zoo, a redwood forest, and an amusement park. The four of them invented a game, monster. The girls ran away shrieking with joy, while Monster Phil, dragging one stiff leg after him, a ghastly expression on his face, claws instead of hands poised in front of him, chased them around the house. All the neighborhood children came to play monster. After Phil got tired of being a monster, we’d play baseball, soccer, or volleyball out in the field. Sometimes Phil would hold one of the children on his knee while the others clustered around, and he would tell them a story he made up for the occasion.
Evenings, Phil built a fire in the welded-steel fireplace in the middle of the living room. After dinner we got out the card table and played Scrabble, Kimbo, or the Game of Life. Phil never took the path that went to college. I tried to teach Phil how to play charades, but he didn’t like it at all. I hated Monopoly. I kept landing on Phil’s hotel on Boardwalk, but Phil and the girls loved it. For his token Phil always chose the old shoe.
The whole town was shocked by our affair. Normally sensitive to what the neighbors thought, I hardly noticed. June Kresy was stunned. “I’ve never seen people behave like that,” she said.
But finally in early December, in spite of my strong feelings for Phil, I tried to break off the relationship. Regardless of what Dr. A had said, I felt it was wrong. Phil and I had gone on an excursion, without the girls this time, and were walking on a rocky beach in Sausalito. I remember how the round stones of the beach felt under my feet. I had trouble keeping my balance and put one hand on Phil’s shoulder as I faced him.
“Phil,” I said, “I can’t continue with our relationship. It isn’t serious enough for me and I feel very guilty about Kleo. I love you but our affair is a mistake. You’re a married man and that’s that.”
Phil took both my hands in his. He said in a tone of desperation, “Anne, please don’t abandon me.”
I realized in that moment that he needed me. After a pause I said, “All right—but we’ll have to get married,” and Phil agreed.
Dr. A was angry with me. He said harshly, “A nice Greek girl like Kleo may never marry again.”
I didn’t say anything. After all, Dr. A was a psychiatrist. But I thought it was strange that earlier he’d told me not to take any responsibility for Kleo and now he was telling me that I was seriously at fault. Well, it was too late now. I wasn’t going to give up Phil for anything.
Dr. A wanted to see Phil again. When Phil came back he was chuckling. “Dr. A said, ‘If Anne wants a husband she’ll go out and find the best one available, just like she buys a box of soap at the grocery store.’” I didn’t know how to respond to this, so I didn’t say anything. Phil would say things that were completely out of my range of experience or bring up matters involving his past—cans of worms that seemed better left unopened.
Phil asked Kleo for a divorce. She agreed and moved back to Berkeley. Avis Hall, who lived across the street, remembered Kleo driving away at “a hundred miles an hour.” Phil tells about her departure in
Confessions of a Crap Artist
.
Phil applied for a Mexican divorce as well as a California divorce so we could be married in Mexico that spring while waiting a year for the California divorce to be final, the divorce law at that time. However, the Mexican divorce would not be legal since Phil would not be legally divorced yet in California. I ignored these aspects of our legal or illegal relationship—foolishly—for although I was practical about everyday things, I wasn’t practical about major life decisions.
Before I’d met Phil, the girls and I had planned to go back to St. Louis at Christmas to visit Richard’s family. Phil encouraged me to make this trip. He wanted me to work out a financial arrangement with the Handelsmans for an income to supplement the $575 monthly amount I was getting from Richard’s Social Security and from rent from a building back east that the girls and I had inherited from Richard. But any effort to do this couldn’t possibly succeed. The Handelsmans had kept Richard on an allowance of $570 a month and wondered why we didn’t drive a Cadillac and why we didn’t outfit the three girls with new clothes every month. Meanwhile huge dress boxes of Mrs. Handelsman’s “old clothes,” thousands of dollars’ worth of European designer clothes, some never worn, would be sent to me periodically. I don’t think any of us had a realistic focus on money matters.
While my daughters and I were in St. Louis, Phil wrote me:
Dear Anne, That strange old lady who cleans up your house evidently descended on it as soon as you were out of the driveway—when I got back there to turn off lights and lock doors I found the front door locked and that big outdoor light off and the various small messes indoors cleaned up. Right in the middle of the dining table, in its paper bag, terribly visible in the cleaned-up ascetic room, was my pair of blue pajamas. A sort of chanting reminder that they who sin will be found out by the Others. However, that old woman has her own defects, since I found water running in the bathroom bowl and a spoon on the floor.
[On the way home from taking us to the airport he stopped by his mother’s house.]
I went upstairs to my family’s place and bummed a meal from them and told them why I was in town (i.e., that I had driven you and the children to the airport or spaceport, whatever it was). Thereupon my mother and I had a long discussion about breaking up a bad marriage (mine, and the one she had with my father)…. I wiped off the windshield carefully and set off. Actually the trip was easy. The rain had almost stopped, and the … Christmas shoppers had gone home to eat. But about halfway along the route, about at the intersection with U.S. 101, I really started getting the shakes. I know damn well that it had nothing to do with the drive as such, it was simply that I was beginning to get back onto the part of the route that we five had taken coming in, and I was subconsciously contrasting the driving in with this driving back…. Marin County seemed shut down. Deserted. As if nobody lived there, like those half-ruined wartime housing developments that are now crumbling away and covered with weeds. By the time I got near Woodacre I was beginning to wonder if I could go back to Point Reyes Station and spend the 13 days. Anyhow, I did get back and I intend to live through the 13 days, which proves that an ordinary human being can do almost anything if he puts his mind to it—which is your theory…. Here’s how you can represent me to your rustic but well-placed family and friends. “He’s well known in Russia and England … in fact, in Germany & Italy and France—also in South Africa and in Argentina (in translation of course) … and he’s just beginning to become known here in the U.S. Lippincott is bringing out a novel of his next spring.”
In a second letter he wrote:
You have no idea how much your phone call affected me. For an hour (more like two) afterward I was in a state of what I would in all honesty call bliss—unlike anything I’ve ever felt before. Actually the walls of the house seemed to melt away, and I felt as if I were seeing out into time and space for an unlimited distance. It was a physical sense, not a mere intellectual thought. A genuine state of existence new to me. Evidently my not having heard from you for a couple of days had had the effect of starting into motion a sense of separation from you—quite natural, but all I was conscious of was that I felt gloomy and lonely and at loose ends. As a reality you had begun to recede—not that my feelings toward you had changed, but that as an actual fact in my life you had in an obvious physical sense receded quite a distance. Then when you called, this distance was abolished, and the return of you as a physical reality caused a genuine transformation in me, as if I had stepped from one world to another…. There is a direct relationship between my hearing you, and the religious person, who, after the traditional isolation and fasting and meditation, “hears” the voice of “God.” The difference is that you exist, and I have some deep doubts about that fellow God.
As soon as the girls and I returned to Point Reyes, Phil moved in with us, bringing his possessions with him. All his clothes, cheap to begin with, were old and shapeless. Phil didn’t care about visual appearances or household objects at all. The only things he treasured were his Royal Electric typewriter, his Magnavox record player, his books and records, and his set of the
Encyclopedia Britannica
.
Among his favorite books were
A Crock of Gold
, by James Stevens, and
Miss Lonely hearts
, by Nathanael West. His library included complete files of
Astounding Science Fiction, Amazing Science Fiction
, and
The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction
magazines. He had a large collection of H. P. Lovecraft stories and novels, and other horror tales. He also had a collection of literary works, and at the time was especially interested in Camus, Kafka, Beckett, and Ionesco.
Hatte loved Phil’s collection of old comic books, especially
Mandrake the Magician
and his complete file of
Mad Magazine
. She went from reading fairy tales to reading Phil’s
Cosmic Puppets
and the other science fiction stories and novels in his collection.
Phil brought his two-drawer file cabinet, stuffed with papers. He’d kept a carbon copy of every letter he’d ever written.
“I suppose you’re saving all those letters for your future biographers,” I kidded him. He smiled his pleasant smile but didn’t reply.
I gathered all of Phil’s own novels and stories together, and in the evenings after the girls had been tucked in their beds, I sat in our bed reading them while eating an artichoke, dipping the leaves in hollandaise sauce and turning the pages. Phil kept coming in the bedroom to watch me read his books.
He said, “You remind me of Samuel Johnson; you drip hollandaise on your nightgown like Johnson spilled egg on his vest, and you have an acerbic wit like Johnson’s.” Then he added, “If you’re Johnson, I guess I’m Boswell.”
I smiled at him and went back to my book, thinking, “Everyone knows science fiction writers don’t write biographies.” As I read all his novels and stories during the next few days, I commented delightedly on each story and novel. I especially loved “Human Is” and told him, “‘Human Is’ is your best story.”
Our reading tastes were eclectic. Phil and I both owned copies of
Winnie the Pooh
and
When We Were Young
. Both of us knew the texts well enough to quote whole sections and poems, to the children’s delight. I tried to get Phil to read
Murder in the Cathedral
, but instead he dived into Richard’s three volumes of Sandburg’s
Lincoln
.
“I’m a Civil War buff,” he said. “The Centennial’s coming up and there’s going to be a lot of interest in the Civil War.” He thought he might write a novel based on that war. He also began reading intently the many volumes of Freudian psychology I had collected, as well as my
Treasury of Jewish Folklore
.
After he unpacked and shelved his books, he set up his personal apothecary in a closet next to the study. He had a large collection of pills and medicines and loved to prescribe for the girls’ runny noses or bandage their skinned knees. He showed Jayne all his medicines, told her what each one was for, and said, “Adults are sick almost all the time.” Phil couldn’t believe that my medicine cabinet didn’t even have aspirin in it. “It’s beyond belief,” he said, “that you can have a medicine cabinet with nothing in it.”
I had been brought up by my Christian Science mother, didn’t take any pills of any kind and seldom went to a doctor. “I never get sick so why should I?” I told him.
Phil took two Semoxydrine pills a day. “These were prescribed for me years ago,” he said. He didn’t tell me what for and I wasn’t interested enough to ask. He got an attack of tachycardia not long after he had moved in. He told me, “My heart can beat rapidly for days and I run the risk of dropping dead unless I take quinidine.” Then he added, “Quinidine is dangerous. I might drop dead from taking quinidine.” I felt he was overly nervous about these sorts of things. He looked fine to me.
Phil’s cat came with him, an ear-torn, dingy grey-and-white tom from some Berkeley alley. He adored cats and had always had one or two. He doted on “Tumpey.” If this cat didn’t show up for a meal, Phil would say mournfully, “Tumpey’s dead again.” I preferred beautiful pedigreed animals but Tumpey reminded me of the stray cats I had brought home as a child, and I tolerated him. Besides, Phil loved him.
We had hardly unpacked all of Phil’s belongings when it was time to celebrate the first birthday of the year, mine. Phil bought me a fossil hammer. I was enchanted. How could he have known that was exactly what I wanted? We drove to Drakes Beach and collected fossil whale bones embedded in the cliffs there.
Phil was just finishing
Time Out of Joint
, his first book to be published in hardcover. He gave my name to a minor character in the last part of the book. Sometimes he worked in the study at my house, sometimes he went over to his old house to write. He wrote until all hours, but finally I protested that his schedule didn’t fit in with family life. He immediately put himself on a nine-to-five schedule and came home every day for lunch. At lunchtime, we became so involved with our conversations that I usually burnt the first two melted cheese sandwiches that I was toasting in the broiler. We talked about Schopenhauer, Leibnitz, monads, and the nature of reality. Or Kant’s theories as applied by Durkheim to the culture of the Australian aborigines. Or Phil would hold forth on the Thirty Years’ War and Wallenstein—light topics like those.