Daring (16 page)

One night about a year later, Clay appeared at my apartment house in the wee hours, a little tipsy, judging by the gruff dismissal he received from the Ukrainian seamstress. She didn't want to let him up. Her frantic ringing of the intercom failed to arouse me. Suddenly, I was awakened by a loud banging on my door. I grabbed a robe and opened the peephole. There was the hulk of Clay, chesterfield blown open, black tie hanging askew, looking like big Lab who had lost his way home. I could barely get the locks undone before he uttered a loud lament:

“Come home with me!”

“What? It's the middle of the night.”

“I can't stand it anymore.”

“Can't stand what?”

“Going home without you.”

“Are you crazy? I have a child.”

“I want to see more of Maura, too.”

“And the dog?”

“You don't have a dog.”

“I know, but we were thinking—”

“Gail, I want you with me at dinner parties.” He was dead serious now. “I want your softness beside me when I go to sleep. I want to show you my favorite jazz clubs. I want to go through the papers with you over breakfast—you have so many ideas—I can't stand this anymore—you have to move in with me!”

Of course it was absurd. I laughed, but even now, writing this, I feel a faint surge of the magnetic pull that defied all reason. The romantic obsession that had been building between Clay and me for the previous two years had elements of the Pygmalion myth. The original narrative from Ovid's
Metamorphisis
depicts a sculptor who created an ivory statue of a woman so pure and realistic, he fell in love with it. Venus granted his wish to turn her into a real woman. With a kiss, the sculptor found her lips warm, and touching her breasts, he found the ivory had turned soft. They fell in love.

I liked the erotic imagery. But I wasn't an inert piece of marble that required a man to bring me to life. I was an ambitious woman who needed to write. I think I gave Clay a brownie and milk and sent him home like a truant schoolchild. The next day I climbed his stairs, all four flights to the funky
New York
office. It was crammed with freelancers waiting to pitch Clay stories.

“Look who's here!” he shouted from one end of the long hall to his office. I didn't deserve his enthusiasm; my story wasn't finished. I was writing a piece about the suburban dads, like my father, who commuted to New York and the “Belles of the Bar Car” who waited for them to fall out of their marriages. Clay escorted me down one flight to a boardroom used only occasionally by Milton's Pushpin staff. He made sure I had a working typewriter, copy paper, carbons.

“You'll have it finished to give to fact-checking by five?”

“I'll do my best.”

It was all very businesslike.

Sometime around four, Clay slipped into the boardroom. Not a word from him. Nor from me. As if in a stupor, we stepped through the world into another, smaller room and I was on my back on an Oriental carpet and I saw him far above me. My nipples hardened. I ached with desire. He was touching my breasts. My hands clutched at his shoulders. The innocence was gone. It was on every count utterly, shockingly, rapturously wrong.

I DIDN
'
T THINK ANYONE
at the magazine knew that we were involved personally. And I knew for sure that he did not favor me over other writers. Whenever there was an assignment that I really wanted, he would say astringently, “Gail, when the assignment's right for you, I'll give it to you.” But so-and-so is better for this one, he would say. Nonetheless, moving in with him would at least keep our uncontrollable attraction aboveboard, and out of the boardroom. But here was the problem: I couldn't picture myself living on the Upper East Side. Foreign country. I didn't even own a proper suitcase.

The next day, a Friday, I dropped Maura off to spend the weekend with her dad. I stuffed a tote bag with a few things and shopped for a weekend's worth of groceries. (Tom Wolfe later told me about the day he stopped by to see Clay at his Xanadu on Fifty-Seventh Street and found him putting together some income-tax data. “Look at this,” Clay exclaimed with pride as he riffled through his date book, “I only ate dinner at home eight times last year!”)

Sitting on an uptown subway with the three flimsy bags under my feet, I felt like a runaway.
I must be totally mad
. And I was—I was mad about this man. The uniformed elevator man looked at me dubiously but silently rode me up to the seventh floor. Clay's door was wide open. Right away, entering the ruby-carpeted balcony, I looked over the wrought-iron railing into the sunken living room, and again, my knees went weak. Clay sat filling a big club chair by the fireplace. Buttons on the phones were blinking. The intercom was buzzing. He was talking to a guest perched on the fireplace fender while a big white phone receiver was tucked under his ear. There was no seam between the fabric of this man's life and his work. He announced me like a headline.

“Gail is here! C'mon down!” His voice filled the vast room. “Where's Maura?”

“With her father for the weekend.”

“I'll be up shortly. We've been invited to a cocktail party for Pamela Harriman.”

The situation was ludicrous. Here I was, hot off the subway in my jeans and boots with two bags full of groceries, imagining I'd cook us a cozy little supper. Instead, I was expected to be suited up in a chic little cocktail number for a party to celebrate the marriage of one of the most famous courtesans of the twentieth century. Pamela Digby Churchill Hayward Harriman, once described as “a world expert on rich men's bedroom ceilings,” was the daughter-in-law of Sir Winston Churchill. The very day after her second husband died, she had gone back to her old lover, Averell Harriman. A month later, she had walked the venerated seventy-nine-year-old ambassador down the aisle.

“Tonight?” I gasped.

“Friends are giving them a little party,” Clay said casually. “Drinks at six.”

I set my humble bags down in the bedroom. The room smelled of roses; he had put a vase of yellow ones on the night table. A nice touch. But I couldn't help feeling like a letter slipped under the door marked Addressee Unknown.

NOT A MOMENT TO CATCH
my breath from the day we moved in. Mornings were a rush to get Maura off to school. During the day, I was always on deadline for Clay's magazine. He'd dash past the desk while I was desperately trying to close a story by six o'clock—

“Why aren't you home? Dinner's at eight.”

He just assumed I'd also be home and dressed in time for a command performance as his companion at a plated dinner party where most of the other women would have had their nails lacquered like Chinese empresses, their pores glazed like English porcelain, and their lashes thickened like privet hedges, the better to make eyes at the richest men. I would usually be the youngest female at the party, but an ink-stained working waif by comparison, with waves of unmanageable red hair and wearing a then-twenty-nine-dollar Diane von Furstenberg wraparound dress.

WITH ALL THE FRENETIC ACTIVITY
of sharing life with Clay, I was worried about the impact on Maura. She had started kindergarten at Grace Church School, a wonderfully nurturing primary school where the children began the day with organ music and the Lord's Prayer in the chapel of the imposing Gothic-style Episcopal church. But for Maura, then five, Clay's apartment was a castle beyond imagining. She slept like a princess in the four-poster. Carved on the headboard were fantastical wooden animals. Her tiny school uniforms hung in a closet that she could reach only by standing on a footstool. Her own recollections, which she gave me permission to include, are more vivid than any I can render, since she knew Clay's world from the point of view of a young child:

It was going to take a long time to get to know this man in all his contradictory guises. He wanted me in his life yet he warned me more than once not to become emotionally dependent on him. “My emotions move with glacial slowness.” On the other side of our most tender moments, I felt those icy crevices open and swallow him. I brought the adulation of a young disciple, the sutured heart of a betrayed wife, and the insecurities of a child-woman who didn't know how to play the part of hostess to the great man. But when it was good, it was very, very good.

CLAY STAGED AN EARLY FIRST SKIRMISH
between the sexes at an unforgettable dinner party in February 1969. The setting was the Park Avenue apartment of Armand Erpf, Clay's most faithful benefactor. His living room was a billion-dollar art gallery with Impressionist paintings casually interspersed with priceless Renaissance art. An elfin man over seventy, Armand's most recent acquisition was a bewitching wife. Almost twice his girth and roughly forty years younger, Sue Erpf sat opposite him at the end of a stately dining table, black eyes blazing, black hair curling over her shoulders, breasts proudly displayed in an empire gown. Armand had found the perfect complement to his aging Giacometti ascetic, a flesh-and-blood incarnation of a nineteenth-century Courbet nude.

To provide the evening's entertainment for Armand's rich donor friends, Clay had invited two of his most formidable women writers, Gloria Steinem and Barbara Goldsmith, along with me. We were meant to be bait for the star guest, a biological anthropologist named Lionel Tiger. He had written his first book,
Men in Groups
, expounding a deterministic thesis meant to prove men's biological superiority as hunters and women's subservient purpose as breeders. His own biological superiority was not immediately obvious, although his unusually short stature and chimp-shaped ears did clearly link him to a primate past. Mr. Tiger's book had not been published yet; Clay was eager to hear our reactions. And we wanted to perform for Clay.

“We are entering a period of intense personal acrimony between the sexes,” Tiger began pontificating. Stony silence. “The seriously competing woman between the ages of thirty and forty must forget about having children.”

Goldsmith and I squirmed. We both had children already, and we certainly had not dropped out of the competition. But we said nothing.

“The prerequisite is to forgo offspring,” Tiger repeated. “Or drop out and lose her place in the pecking order.”

Gloria was single and childless, by choice. I waited for her to pin his ears back, expecting her to say something like,
To
“
forgo offspring” is a choice women can now make. The Pill gives us control over reproduction. You must know, Mr. Tiger, this is the bedrock of the feminist revolution.
But Gloria, too, said nothing. She remembered later that Armand and his wife both sounded off when I spoke approvingly about seeing male graduate students with baby carriers strapped to their chests. “How pathetic,” Sue Erpf said. “So unmasculine.”

I had just published a cover story in
New York
titled “The Men of Women's Liberation Have Learned Not to Laugh.” I was still a graduate student at Columbia University and in a prime position to observe a fierce and often funny lashing out at men by the brightest of young, outspoken women. I had written about Polly, who went nowhere without her latest copy of
Aphra
, the first feminist literary pamphlet. Her boyfriend, Jerry, was used to treading on eggshells for fear of unconsciously dropping a male chauvinist remark just as they were cuddling into precoital mode on some sunken couch in the common area of his dorm.

“The way I look at it,” Jerry told Polly, “about the worst goddamn thing to be these days is a white, middle-class, Anglo-Saxon American male.” Polly gave him her byzantine stare. “What I mean is,” he tried to explain, “you haven't got a damn thing to be oppressed about so everyone treats you like a crumb.” Polly fixed him with her blinkless stare.