Daring (24 page)

Given these manifold delights, why did my feelings of unease persist?

We were a “let's pretend” family. The '60s had spawned so many options, marriage was seen as unnecessary and definitely unhip. A lot of people we knew were experimenting with “open marriage.” I saw that as a dispensation for adultery, and those couples usually erupted in savage jealousies. Divorce was as popular as a new sitcom; it seemed everyone was trying it. Having been through the hell of divorce, Clay and I were both wary about being burned again. We were deeply attached emotionally and professionally and drawn to each other sexually as if by magnetic force. Yet marriage was too big a leap. So we just made it up as we went along.

Not by coincidence, the piece I was working on for
New York
's Valentine issue was called “Can Couples Survive?” For the story I interviewed Dr. Ray L. Birdwhistell, a communications professor at the University of Pennsylvania's famous Annenberg School. Birdwhistell was aptly named for a happily divorced pioneer in the study of nonverbal communication between men and women. He had left the nest of his conventional wife, he told me, when women's liberation made him a “free bird.” His theory was that “the closed dyad”—couples who expected all their emotional needs to be met through the spouse contract—was lethal to prolonged love and good sex. Both partners should accept the need to make valid social contracts with other people.

It made me look at Clay dispassionately. Here was a handsome, magnetic, heterosexual bachelor-about-town in his midforties. At the office he was surrounded by comely young staffers. After dark he was in demand to fill the single-man quota at uptown dinner parties given by “social x-rays,” as Tom Wolfe memorably labeled the spare-ribbed ladies of a certain age who hungered for the attentiveness no longer paid them by their bored philandering husbands.

For my part, I had three lives, which only occasionally overlapped: Maura's mother; Clay's partner and hostess; and Gail the writer and breadwinner. Every day I felt as if I were running a minimarathon, dashing past Clay's office with my story unfinished in time to pick up my daughter from school or have dinner-bath-and-books with her before I had to be dressed to the nines as Clay's partner for the evening's events. Clay often said, “I can't get enough of you.” There wasn't enough of me to go around.

And I wasn't crazy about the prospect of a closed dyad either. I felt eager to stretch. As a single woman who attracted flirtations from other smart and sexy men, what was I missing?

Maura's father and I had worked out a civilized, even cordial, relationship as coparents. We agreed not to argue about possessions or custody or holiday calendars. We realized that we had a responsibility that superseded all those issues and it would last for our lifetimes. I assumed full custody but shared our daughter with Albert every other weekend and alternate holidays and for two weeks in the summer. It didn't occur to me to ask for compensation for working as his PHT (Putting Hubby Through) partner. Only fifteen years later did courts consider restitution for PHT services through expanded alimony or a division of property rights in the wife's favor.

Pride kept me from asking for alimony, and Albert contributed only child support. I made a conscious effort to sideline the hurt and anger and to put on a happy face whenever our paths crossed. Those repressed feelings would later erupt during Maura's adolescence. But for now, we concentrated on smoothing the jolt of transitions and sharing the daily decisions that would nurture a child we both cherished.

Had Clay and I married then—and I knew it even at the time—we would most likely have turned into a variation on the marriage in Noël Coward's
Private Lives
, living on snappy dialogue with every other sentence a dagger between the ribs. When I raised the subject of children, Clay would get fidgety, like someone stuck between floors in an elevator. He knew that I was keen to have another child. He might have been persuaded to accept the idea, but he told me he couldn't see himself dragging strollers through airports or sitting up with a colicky baby when he had a cover story to close. The message was clear: I could have a baby, all right, as long as I was prepared to be alone with it in the kitten box for the first five years. But I did not want to be a single mother, again.

“Can Couples Survive?,” an excerpt from my book in progress on couples, stirred a lot of talk when it appeared in a special issue of
New York
in February 1973. Aspirational women were just beginning to recognize that early marriage usually foreclosed the possibility of a career dream. Feminists started the trend toward postponement of marriage, much to the dismay of many men who expected a wife to carry the husband's dream.

Honesty prompts me to admit a larger obstacle to marriage for both Clay and me. Neither of us had yet met the criteria of the psychoanalyst Erik Erikson, who had given a pretty good definition of intimacy as the capacity to live with another person in an emotionally attached, interdependent, and committed relationship. That task was supposed to be mastered in one's twenties! But I had already advanced to my midthirties, and Clay was twelve years older—what was wrong with us? As George Vaillant learned by following the men in the Harvard Grant study from college into their nineties, the mastery of intimacy depends on first mastering identity. In Vaillant's 2012 book,
Triumphs of Experience
, he reported that some of the study's men didn't become capable of true intimacy until after age seventy!

Clay was utterly confident about his ideas. But despite his larger-than-life persona, he did not feel confident, in private, that his identity as an editor and publisher was secure. Publishers from rich and powerful families could, at whim, buy or sell or shut down small successful publications such as his. He did not have a father's missionary zeal behind him, like Henry Luce, or a titled family like Lord Beaverbrook, or a family castle like William Randolph Hearst. As a self-made man, Clay was always dependent on the kindness of wealthy strangers.

My identity was even shakier. It was time for me to loosen the coils that kept me still dependent on my Pygmalion. I was ready to become my own woman. Time was pressing. Intimations of mortality continued to invade my thoughts after the confrontation with death in Ireland. I believed I had to prove to myself, and to the world, that I could write a book on my own terms, live on my own income, and combine raising my child with fulfilling my own dream.

SERENDIPITOUSLY, I WAS INVITED
in midsummer of 1973 to take a trip to the Soviet Union. This was the most frigid era of the Cold War, but somehow, Columbia University had arranged for a small cultural group, Citizens Exchange Corps, to take a handful of American students who wanted to meet their Russian counterparts. It was an extraordinary opportunity. Clay encouraged me to go. Maura was already scheduled to spend those same two weeks with her father.

At the end of our trip, I was detained at Moscow Airport. “Icon!” snapped the emigration officer. “
Nyet, abstrakni
,” I said. The officer had torn off the paper from a tourist-only berioska shop with which I had attempted to camouflage an abstract oil painting I had bought from an underground artist. It was a collage of a church with every window and door barricaded. But it wasn't the religious theme that upset the officer; it was his total unfamiliarity with abstract art. He was pulling off all the collage pieces in a manic attempt to find the precious gold icon he was certain lay beneath. My arguments were futile. Even after he had destroyed the painting, our whole group was detained for hours.

I had to let Clay know I would miss my plane and be delayed getting home. An offer of dollars to “compensate” the officer for having to stay so late on my account was remarkably effective in disarming him. He granted me one long-distance call. It was 8:30
P.M
. in Moscow, 4:30
A.M.
for Clay. He was in East Hampton. An odd uncertainty in his voice surprised me; I sensed someone else was there. Before I could pursue my suspicion, the line went dead.

When I returned a day late from the Soviet Union, something was different in the atmosphere of our weekend cottage. Clay wasn't there, but something feminine, a scent not my own, lingered in the bathroom. Had another woman left a cloud of dusting powder, bubble bath, a hint of roses? Then I remembered. He had asked if a new staffer he had hired could stay in Maura's vacated room for the weekends when I was away. Nancy was freshly divorced from one of Clay's oldest friends, dumped in New York from her previous life in Paris, and feeling like “a wet cat looking for a home,” she had told me. Clay had promised her a job at the magazine. Remembering the terror of dislocation after divorce, I had sympathized with her.

I said nothing when he arrived, nor did he. But the morning after my suspicions had been aroused, I awoke in our cottage bursting with righteous indignation.

“Did Nancy take my place while I was away?” Clay stammered until he gave up trying to craft an alibi. I packed up my belongings and called a taxi to go to the train station. Clay kept protesting, even begging, until my Irish temper broke. “I hope you and Nancy will be very happy together. I have a book to write. AND I DON'T NEED YOU!”

He ran outside in his boxer shorts to stop me from getting into the cab but I had the last word, a slammed door.

He returned to the apartment on Sunday night, but that night and the entire following week, I slept in Maura's room and refused to speak to him. I began making inquiries to find my own apartment. He moped around and had breakfast solo. The next weekend, facing the prospect of a long Labor Day holiday alone while Maura went to her father's, the armor of righteous indignation began to wear off. The magnetism resurfaced. Clay pleaded with me to go with him to the country. Of course I declined. He left for the four o'clock train, alone.

The therapist I had been seeing to sort out my conflicted feelings about Clay had warned me: “You go from one extreme to the other. You tell yourself to give him up altogether, but you seem incapable of cutting the cord. So you throw yourself into a full commitment to him, again, and then are disappointed when he doesn't reciprocate.”

I couldn't resist. On Saturday morning, after a sleepless night, I picked up the phone at seven and called him. His voice was stiff. “It's too early to call.”

“I miss you.”

“This is not an appropriate time to talk.”

“Why? Is Nancy there?”

“And you're not.”

“Is this an ultimatum?”

“Take it as you wish.” He hung up.

Yes, of course, his fling with Nancy was his ultimatum: live with me or I'll find other women to play with.

Consumed with the jealousy he had intended to sow, I had to find some way to distract myself. I tried to write. My fingers soon tired of hitting the stuck keys on my aging typewriter. As the day lengthened and loneliness swelled to fill the hours, I remembered a party invitation. It was a PR event for politicians and media types, and it was that night, but in Washington, D.C. An attractive senator I met on an interview had tried to persuade me to come down. I'd sent my regrets but now, defiant, I slipped into a clingy summer dress and high strappy heels and hailed a yellow cab for LaGuardia, intending to catch a shuttle.

The cabdriver warned me the Bos-Wash corridor was drenched with rain. At the airport they said freakish lightning was on its way. Nothing was going to fly. I walked back to the same yellow cab, grounded, glum.

“Tough luck,” the cabbie said.

“Yup.” Now what—home to eat sprouts and start packing?

As the cab crowned the Triborough and cut over toward the Manhattan exit, I said, “What would it cost to drive to D.C.?”

“Two hundred and dinner.”

“Really?”

It was an excuse to visit his “little lady on the side” who lived in D.C.

“Let's go.”

The drive was surreal. The sky thickened to the consistency of cooking fat. We were looking for a popular hangout on the edge of Georgetown but not much of anything was visible, not even the Naval Observatory Tower. Ridiculously late, we found the right street but we couldn't read the number or even the names of the restaurants through the curtains of rain. Zeroing in on my best guess, I urged the driver to pull up onto the curb: “Yes, point the lights at the sign over that window.”

A crowd of laughing faces suddenly filled the window. A New York City yellow cab was crashing their party! A man rushed out with an umbrella. It was he, the very senator who had flirted with me when I interviewed him.

“Hey, New York!” he shouted. “Don't drive in—I'll carry you in!”

He scooped me up and carried me to a barstool amid cheers. The cabbie was carried in, too, on a brace of two pairs of shoulders, and plied with drink. Guests raised a toast and began singing as the band broke into the Rolling Stones end-of-the-world rocker, “Gimme Shelter” . . .
I tell you love, sister, it's just a kiss away.

We all drank beer and sang our favorite Stones and Beatles songs, and the band did riffs on Eric Clapton and Cream. The senator couldn't stop laughing about my zany escapade. He got cozy and asked if he could take me to my hotel. “I don't have a hotel,” I said. “I have a milk train to catch.”

“The Capitol's so gorgeous by night, why don't we walk through and look at the art?” he proposed. “It's the best gallery in town.”

“Won't someone be waiting up for you?”

He assured me he had no time for marriage; he was a freshman senator. By 1
A.M.
the air was drying and sweet as he swept me off in his convertible. His offer, of course, was a high-powered variation on “Come up and see my etchings.” But it was magical to stroll the portrait gallery with an amorous guide. He took pains to point out the painting of an attractive woman in a blue suit sitting at a desk: “Eva McCall Hamilton, the prettiest suffragist,” he said. “She was fearless, like you. She drove a horse-drawn float through Grand Rapids with a huge banner proclaiming ‘Vote for Women,' and that was in 1910.”