Daring (48 page)

This was the secret of true power, I thought. Not external success, not the overkill of Big Pharma. Why not try to tap into the powers of the mind to mobilize the body's astonishing capacity for self-healing? By changing the way one thinks, one could mitigate the emotions that translate into harmful chemicals in the body. We made a commitment to try. Most weekends for close to a year, we took long, meditative walks in Central Park or, when the weather was good, in the Mashomack Preserve on Shelter Island. Meandering along paths through dense oak woodlands and crossing a latticework of tidal creeks, we would suddenly emerge on the shoreline. Sitting, hushed, we would wait to be startled by the soaring of a great-winged fish hawk. Osprey were protected there. The ultimate thrill was to see the acrobatic swoop of an osprey diving for its dinner.

When we spoke on these quiet walks, it was to wrestle with the next great existential question: Stripped of title and setting, what was it about his work that Clay most loved? What could revive the excitement and purpose he had felt in putting out his own publications ? It would take a full year before he found the answer.

After
Manhattan, Inc.
folded, Fairchild Publications gave Clay another command as editor of a men's magazine called
M
. For the first time in his life, Clay was locked into a contract and had to go through the motions of a corporate employee with no passion of his own. Where was the bodysurfer I knew who had an unquenchable zest for catching the next wave? The man who always dared his protégés to go beyond? The man who transmuted his cocksure smile into a Roman candle under his writers' fearful feet with the emphatic words “You can do it!” Now he was a man stopped in his tracks. Not running, not looking for the next wave, not getting out of his sweatpants until noon. It didn't require another doctor to tell us that he was suffering from chronic low-grade depression.

Secretly, Clay's network of grateful colleagues and protégés, people whose careers he had fostered, including me, had been meeting for months to share ideas for how to get him back in action. The group had approached several journalism schools. We heard from the journalism school at the University of California, Berkeley. The dean there, Tom Goldstein, a native New Yorker, was excited about luring Clay to the West Coast. I thought Clay would be thrilled, given the loss of
New West
and his interrupted dream of exploring California lifestyles and politics. Instead, he was phlegmatic.

Here I was, at the peak of success in my work, while Clay was beginning a descent. Not surprising, given that he was a dozen years older. We were changing places. He had been the guide and inspiration that allowed me to become what I was meant to be. How could I, in essence, be as valuable to him—slow his descent?

I HAD A JOURNEY OF MY OWN
to make. It had been seven years since I began research on the sequel to
Passages
. In that earlier book I had stopped tracking the stages of adult life at the age I was now—at fifty-five. Back then, in my thirties and midway through that brilliant decade of endless promise, I could not imagine what would be of interest about life after the midfifties. How naive!

Now, two decades later, science and medicine were stretching our life spans by some thirty years. A Western man in 1900 had a life expectancy of about fifty-five. Nearing the year 2000, his average life span was eighty-five, and the average woman's life span was eighty-eight. One in four baby boomers was expected to live to one hundred. These facts threw off by miles our calculations about middle and later age—nothing short of a revolution in the adult life cycle. In a single century we had created almost a different species.

Why wait until we were old to take advantage of those extra years? Whole new stages were springing up at several points along the landscape of adult life, offering new opportunities and discontinuities that had never before appeared on the maps in our minds. To investigate how people were adapting to this startling expansion in lifetime was a thrilling prospect.

From beneath my bed I dragged out the zippered suitcase containing all the journals and hundreds of pages of transcripts from interviews I'd conducted thus far with men and women in their late forties, fifties, sixties. I was on top of the mountain. If I stopped long enough to look around, the view was breathtaking, a 360-degree panorama of the roads taken, hills climbed, foolish detours, and crash sites. But I had survived—more than that, I had thrived. Now the specter of mortality had once again invaded our dreams.

My own fears were also stuffed inside that zippered suitcase. What Furies would fly out? From all my research and interviews, I expected to brace myself to accept the inevitable decline at this time of life. Would I cry a lot and come out the other side with the crisp, dispassionate composure of Older Woman?

Concentrated work on writing
New Passages
demanded discipline and solitude. I would have to walk away from my public platform and turn inward for at least a couple of years. A plan took shape when a friend offered to share her office in a resort town in Southern California. There I could drop out for a month, let fall the masks of public life, escape offers and deadlines, even ignore the rituals of grooming to get to work.

Clay promised to join me in California as soon as he closed the next issue of
M
magazine. Having found a modest condo to rent a block from the beach, I set up a Spartan routine. Rising at dawn, I stretched, inhaled coffee, spooned organic yogurt, and tried to work up the nerve to do what I had always enjoyed doing with no sense of danger: swim in the ocean.

Why not? I reminded myself that I had been comfortable in the water since I was a tadpole being tossed back and forth between my parents in the shallows of Long Island Sound. But this was the mighty Pacific. And I was no longer young.

Walking to the beach under the rattle of palm leaves, I melted from the warmth of the West Coast in winter. Abruptly, I came upon a little strip of beach. The backdrop was an outcropping of tall reddish rocks. With very little room between water and rock, I began running cautiously along the shoreline, considering the waves. These were not surfer waves, but they tumbled in with a careless energy that I began to sense as malevolent. Instead of thinking, as I had in the past,
I can't wait to dive under and come up on the other side
, my imagination was invaded by thoughts of drowning. I returned quickly to the condo.

Over the next several days I waited a little longer each morning to walk to the beach, hoping the strip of sand would expand as the tide lowered. My fear only increased. Fear of losing my footing; fear of no longer being carelessly agile; fear of Clay's body breaking down. When the thought of death is too terrifying to confront, it comes back in various disguises. Those waves represented everything that could overpower me and take away what I loved.

One night Clay called. For the first time in almost a year, his voice was booming with brio. “It hit me!” he said. “Today, while I was walking in the park—it's like you were with me—I suddenly knew.”

“What?”

“What I love to do.”

“What, what?”

“I love to identify and shape young talent.”

“Of course, yes! You can do that as a teacher!”

He grunted. “But I don't want to occupy a stuffy academic chair.”

“No, darling, Berkeley has something else in mind—actually making magazines with your students.”

Because he had pinpointed his core passion, he was suddenly open to a possible new container for it. Berkeley was about as remote from Manhattan as one could get, but its graduate school of journalism was among the most prestigious in the country. The very originality of the idea—to establish a brand-new center devoted to the hands-on creation of magazines—appealed to both of us. Clay was now eager to join me sooner in California and we would fly up to the East Bay together. He couldn't wait to meet the graduate students.

The morning after that call, I waded into the ocean beyond my waist. An aberrant wave caught me off guard and broke over me. I was startled, but not frightened. That was the surprise: it was a gentle dunking, like that of a playmate. Foam gurgled around me. I suddenly felt girlish. I looked out at the big waves, playful as white-bellied dolphins, leaping and tumbling and inviting,
C'mon in and dive through us. You'll see, you'll come out the other side.

No, this passage was not about decline! Our midlife can be a progress story, a series of little victories over little deaths. We have time for a
Second Adulthood.
This was one of those small epiphanies that Virginia Woolf called “moments of being.” It's when a shock pulls the gauzy curtain off our everyday resistance and throws a sudden floodlight on what our lives are really about. Now I knew: faith over fear is what it would take.

I dove into the cold waves and came up on the other side, laughing. There it was. The challenge—the anchor for all of us in the sea of our Second Adulthood—is a rebellious purpose. Mine would be to redefine middle life and put out the word: this is a gift.

THE GREAT UPROOTING.
The move from the East Coast to the West Coast in January 1994 fulfilled a long-held fantasy of Clay's and mine to try living in Northern California. We would gain some release from the toxicity of New York's unrelenting competitive struggle. And we'd be exposed to the wild creative energies of the new digital revolution.

But the break was also agonizing. Clay's apartment had been his home for thirty-five years. As we boxed hundreds of books and rolled up carpets, Clay groaned and turned gray. I tried to cheer him up with a brilliant insight from one of our best friends, Ciji Ware, whose book in progress redefined downsizing as
rightsizing.
But pain was literally hammering at Clay's heart. Dr. Pat dispatched us to the cardiac unit at New York Hospital. He lay all day on a gurney, nearly bored to death. Once doctors snaked a balloon into one of his vessels and began stretching open an artery, he became animated. He couldn't stop interviewing the doctors. “How close did I come?”

“Ninety percent blockage.”

In the recovery room, he was humbled. “It's about time we opened up!”

Moving into a cramped faculty apartment turned out to be the best medicine of all. Even though we were back to living like graduate students, with brick-and-board bookcases and fighting over one bathroom, we also awoke to the music of goldfinches and woodpeckers. On walks through the woods, we might spot a quail or a preening blackbird. We found a running track that overlooked San Francisco Bay. Steep steps took us down to the original Peet's Café. At first glance, I thought it must be a methadone clinic. A line of regulars would be standing outside, sleepy-eyed, clutching their own mugs and waiting for the 8
A.M.
opening. For Clay and me to sit outdoors in T-shirts in January, reading the
New York Times
, while we lazily devoured oatmeal and lattes, was sheer bliss.

Clay swapped his tailored British shirts and big lunch ties for denim and rolled-up sleeves, driving to the campus wearing a jaunty cap and shades. He was crazy about his graduate students. They all seemed to know several languages, at least one of which was Chinese or Farsi. They were as in love with making magazines as he had been at their age.

I spoke to Clay's class about what's involved in writing for
Vanity Fair
, organizing a long-form story by themes. At the end of each semester, Clay and I entertained the class with a buffet at our home and talked about their aspirations. Carla De Luca, a star student and later documentary maker, remembers, “We got a twofer with you and Clay.”

On the exciting day when their magazine came out, Clay took his budding writers and editors to dinner at the Chez Panisse Café, where Alice Waters was pioneering the slow food movement. The Berkeley campus in those days was a veritable Garden of Eden where there were enough African Americans, Asian Americans, Hispanic Americans, Arab Americans, and Native Americans along with preppie easterners and proper midwesterners to feel comfortably represented amid the swarms of supercool Californians. Clay often said he wished he had come to teaching sooner.

For me, it had to be a bicoastal life. My children, my hoped-for grandchildren, my sister, my editors, my publisher—so many of the important people in my life were on the East Coast (did I mention my hair colorist?). A week spent in New York, running to
Vanity Fair
to close a story, and on to Random House to talk about my next book, kept my adrenaline pumping. The returns to Berkeley always felt like being on vacation.

After two years, we bought a sun-filled house clinging to the hills, with a backyard garden full of exotic tropical plants. I would come back from a morning run up and down the hills and, while descending our steps, pick a clementine or a sweet Meyer lemon to suck on while I gathered an armful of camellias or pink dogwood. It was a paradisiacal environment for a writer. Except for one thing. I couldn't find an assistant with a New York work ethic. They always had to leave early for a pottery class or chanting circle or to feed a camel (honest, two people in our neighborhood kept camels as pets).

On weekends, Clay and I might drive up to the wine country or down the coastal road for an overnight in Big Sur, indulging in the sybaritic life for which we had never had time as young strivers. We were young again. We were in love again.

That lymphoma never came back.

JOIN THE FELKER FEST!

It was a happening. A pack of literary journalists at the gate! It took a ballroom to contain all the luminaries who came to support Clay's new dream—the Felker Magazine Center at the University of California, Berkeley. Nearly a thousand people turned out to pledge contributions—writers, editors and publishers, business tycoons, artists and agents, even salespeople and switchboard operators who belonged to the original
New York
magazine family—all crowded into the ballroom of the Pierre on Fifth Avenue for the “Felker Fest” on an unforgettable evening in April 1995.