Blue Eyes

by Leslie Armstrong

Part 1 appears in this issue.

conclusion

New York, Spring 1979

Michael and I ran into Martha Stewart at an opening at the Cooper Hewitt Design Museum. She had just started her catering business and had made tray upon tray of unusually beautiful and delicious hors d'oeuvres for the Cooper Hewitt party. Martha and I hadn't seen each other since we first met when she was still a stockbroker, and I was in graduate school.

Martha, whom I had previously considered to be as cold as dry ice, was surprisingly friendly, so I told her about The Little House. She offered to make a scale model of the Little House itself in gingerbread for the book party which was to be held at Books & Co., a two-story bookstore at 74th Street and Madison Avenue, where luminaries from Bill Cosby to Susan Sontag were known to hang out.

Early on the day of the book party, Michael announced that maybe he would pass on the party. I should go on my own. I was incredulous. Was Michael Lax, the super-handsome and successful industrial designer, unable to share the limelight with someone else for just one evening? Apparently not.

“What do you mean, go alone? This is my big moment!” I wailed. In the end, at the very last moment, he graced me with his decision to come.

The party was well underway when we arrived, and Martha's enormous gingerbread model of the little twenty-foot square dwelling, with its contiguous shed, single sloped roof, and its immediate surroundings, all in full multicolored, sugar-coated detail, was rightfully the center of attention.

True to form, Michael began drinking too much, talking too loudly, and flirting with anything in a skirt. Throughout the evening, I trailed him, fawned over him, and otherwise stroked his needy ego. When Books & Co. closed its doors and we were waiting for a cab to go home, I was overcome with nausea. Pent-up anxiety and fear that he would act up, and relief that he had not, at least not excessively, sent me retching to the curb.

* * *

As spring turned to summer, I again broached the subject to Michael's excessive drinking and his having to face quitting. Predictably, he took it badly. In late August, after a difficult, booze-saturated vacation in a dark, mildew-filled shingle house on one of the freshwater ponds on Cape Cod, Michael announced that we were done. When we returned to the city, he would drop me and my kids off at my house and we would be seeing one another no more.

The depression and despair that followed were familiar but no less painful than previous experiences under comparable circumstances. That winter was especially grim as my comfortable and comradely partnership with Russell and Kirsten Childs also went south.

Kirsten and I had turned Russell loose right after work on The Little House was finished because he had become infatuated by and committed to working for EST. EST stood for (Werner) Erhard Seminars Training, a cultlike, grueling, self-help program of two weekend-long workshops plus weekday evening sessions which became very fashionable in the mid-to-late 1970s and on into the 1980s.

The workshops, conducted by trainers who were confrontational and often sadistic, were for as many as two hundred people at a time. The program claimed to use the general processes of life itself to flesh out then solve the personal, individual problems in one's own life. Whatever that may have meant, it was God's truth to Russell and he became an EST volunteer and evangelist. It is no wonder that soon thereafter he and Kirsten also divorced.

Kirsten and I pressed on but, as two women flying solo, we were unable to attract sufficient work to keep our firm going. Kirsten found a well-paying job with a well-established larger firm and went on to a distinguished career in environmentally sustainable design. I teamed up with a very talented but deeply neurotic architect, Alan Buchsbaum, with whom we had shared space when we all started out at 170 Fifth.

Alan, who had moved downtown to Greene Street in Soho, liked my work and thought my abilities complemented his, which they did. He thought I was well-connected, which I was, more or less. And he liked having me around because he was almost always depressed and liked that I was as well.

During that winter, Michael would call every so often. Big of him, given that his younger daughter, of whom I was very fond, was still staying at my house when she came home from boarding school for weekends. Michael would take me to dinner and we would often spend the night together. He would fix me with those blue eyes and wonder — rhetorically — why we weren't together as though that might still be a possibility. He seemed to be addressing his drinking, so I thought there might be some hope, although my psychiatrist at the time — and I definitely needed one — said he would fire me if I took up with Michael again.

* * *

I was to turn forty in May, and Michael invited me to Paris for my birthday. However beautiful and seductive Paris can be in the spring, it did little for me; I couldn't get beyond silently monitoring Michael's alcohol consumption — he had made little improvement, if any at all — and wondering how often and when he had slept with the woman who had lent us her apartment.

My psychiatrist was right. It was over, really over. My depression lifted. There was more to life than those blue eyes.

* * *

I met the man who was to be my third husband that same spring and remarried in 1983. He also had blue eyes, but they were pale and failed to pierce. I would occasionally run into Michael in and around New York, and we would have lunch. While he continued his pattern of sleeping with anyone he could seduce, Michael also went to Hazelden — now the Hazelden Betty Ford Foundation — outside of Minneapolis to deal with his drinking and, on return, he regularly went to AA meetings in New York.

He had four sequential serious relationships during this period: first with a distinguished German pathologist, then with an aristocratic Florentine princess-type whom he almost married but abandoned two days before the ceremony. The third was with an American who had a thriving business in fine Oriental carpets. The fourth and most intense relationship was with an interior designer named Saskia.

All I knew of Saskia was that she was the ex-wife of the architect who had been my fourth-year design critic at Columbia Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation and had been all over the attractive girl who had the drafting table next to mine but never gave me the time of day.

* * *

Although Kirsten Childs and I no longer worked together, we remained close friends. In the late 80s, she and I went together to Michael's 60th birthday party. His brownstone on East 91st Street was packed with women, all women whom he had “known” and some whom he had loved. There was nary a husband in sight. Certainly, my new husband refused to attend. Kirsten was likely the only woman present, other than his daughters, with whom he hadn't slept. It was a perfect party for an aging Don Juan.

A few months later, Kirsten called me. She was at first hesitant, then sheepish. Then it came out. The blue eyes had gotten to her as well. “Do you mind? Will you be upset?” she asked me.

“How could I be upset? It's been twelve years since Michael and I were together!”

She was as embarrassed as I had been admitting to Michael's first wife, Rosemary, that I had taken up with him only five years after the two had split. “It's fine,” I said. “Just be careful. But you know Michael and his drinking and his need to sleep around as well as any of us. Just don't get your heart broken.” For some reason, maybe because his time at Hazelden seemed to have had some effect, I thought it just might work. And it did.

Kirsten was tall, elegant and, being half-Icelandic and half-Scottish, she was also somewhat exotic. Michael adored and admired her, as well he should have. For him she was an upscale, accomplished, star environmental interior designer, an ice princess on the outside and a cozy partner in all other ways when they were alone.

Kirsten managed both to tame his need to screw everything that walked, an effort aided partly by Michael's non-aggressive prostate cancer, and to keep his alcohol intake under control. They lived together for eight years but never married. Michael was not into marrying again, but he promised she'd be well looked after if something happened to him.

In the late 90s, he fell off a ladder at their shared house in Bridgehampton and had a heart attack. I am not sure which came first: the heart attack or the fall. At any rate, he unexpectedly and almost immediately died. The light from those piercing blue eyes was finally extinguished.

Kirsten was devastated and mourned him for the rest of her life. I am embarrassed to say, fifty years later, those piercing blue eyes still invade my dreams.