Daring (57 page)

Robert invited me to lunch at the American Hotel, the grand old duchess of Sag Harbor. Once he was sated by oysters and an ice-cold Beefeater martini, he told me that since his wife died he had lived alone in his old house in New Hampshire, and he had just sold it. His pipe dream was that in his later years, he'd creep off to Ireland and read himself to sleep on the porch of an old-age pensioner's home.

“I can live without love and sex,” he said.

I smiled and said, “But why would you want to?”

I FOUND THE NERVE
to call him and ask what he was doing for New Year's Eve. He mumbled that he was just getting settled in Sag Harbor and preparing to teach creative writing in a graduate M.F.A. program at Stony Brook Southampton. Moments later, he called back, “Why sure, I can come into Manhattan. What would you think of dinner and music at Michael Feinstein's?” He arrived formally attired in a pin-striped navy-blue suit, black hat, and cane and swept us off with a flourish to enjoy an evening of Christine Ebersole singing love songs. After we rang in 2011, I asked if he'd like to come up to my apartment for a nightcap. He sat in the chair normally occupied by my new dog, Chollie. I sat on the sofa. Robert didn't know he was trespassing on the dog's chair, but he must have noticed his rival sulking and prowling around our feet.

He didn't kiss me.

Later that night, he sent an e-mail:

We began to enjoy sharing our passions for books, theater, art exhibits. Later in spring, when I rented a little house in Sag Harbor, Robert would drop in at dinnertime with a freshly caught flounder and insist upon making dinner for me. It was delightful to take on the role of sous chef to an inspired cook. Over his martini and my ginger ale, he captivated me with stories of the movies he'd made, the fascinating characters he had known, from seminal physicists to his literary heroes, Sean O'Casey and James Salter. He had caroused with actor Peter O'Toole and squired a twenty-two-year-old ingenue fresh off the boat from England, Audrey Hepburn, when he was
Life
's theater reporter. He knew just about everybody and everything. I was enthralled.

In May 2011, a workshop of my play,
Chasing the Tiger
, began rehearsals at the Bay Street Theater in Sag Harbor. Robert asked if I'd like to share a reprise of our New Year's Eve date.

Christine Ebersole was singing at Bay Street. The place was full, so we climbed to the top row and perched on the steps. I was one step beneath him. We hummed and sighed to a repertoire of Noël Coward's love songs. It was the closing song that melted me: “Falling in Love Again.” Without looking, I felt my hand move behind to find his. At the same moment I felt his fingertips. His hand closed over mine like a warm glove in winter. We didn't look at each other. We didn't have to.

Afterward, on the uncomfortable sofa in my rental, we pretended to be interested in TV news. He moved closer. Nibbled my ear. He brushed a shy kiss across my lips. I had forgotten how proper he was. “I'd like to try that again,” he said. Embracing, we began sliding into the gulley between seat cushions on the damn sofa.

I stood up and took his hand and led him into the guest bedroom. In the dim light I turned to face him. I lifted my halter top over my head and watched the flush of astonishment come up in his face. We fell into each other's arms.

“I've been asleep for seven years,” he whispered to me, “Rip van Winkle on a mountaintop in New Hampshire, living alone ever since Margaret died.” Again and again, he marveled, “I can't believe it, you've turned the lights back on in my life.”

I was stunned to feel myself falling in love again. We both began giggling. The more I laughed, the harder he laughed. Embarrassment dissolved into real intimacy.

A SURGE OF VITALITY SEEMED
to alert the universe that I was still alive and kicking. Suddenly the curtain began going up on a new act in my life.
USA Today
asked me to write a biweekly column about new passages. Great! I enjoyed firing off pieces for Tina Brown's digital magazine, the
Daily Beast
. The people I met and conversations I had at the Aspen Ideas Festival set my mind spinning like a top. Requests came in for me to speak about
Sex and the Seasoned Woman
, a book I had had fun researching several years earlier about women fifty plus who are marinated in life experience and still passionate about life, including sex. I found out that seasoned women rock. Seven hundred of them had responded to my online questionnaire. It had been a lark to drive across the country and meet with groups of such women to hear their stories of Internet romances, pilot-light lovers, start-up businesses, audacious travels—no one had ever asked about their passions before—I couldn't shut them up!

It was always a pleasure to return to the quiet of Sag Harbor and see Robert. What I didn't know for over a year was that he endured constant pain. This was a man who had walked the length of Ireland at seventy-five bearing a thirty-eight-pound rucksack. Despite two surgeries, the severe bend in his back could not be set right. But I would not have guessed at his pain when he accompanied me on my nightly dog walkings. These were the shortest walks of my life, but some of the sweetest. We both knew he wouldn't be in my life forever, but we would make the most of the moments.

Over numerous dinners in colorful Irish joints and his choice of French cafés, Robert goaded me to write about my life. When I demurred, he said, “C'mon, you've been fearless in exposing yourself to new experiences and challenges. You've taken LSD, you've jumped out of airplanes, you dressed up in hot pants to walk the streets with hookers; for heaven's sake, you embedded yourself in the Irish civil war before anybody ever heard of embedded reporters and got caught in cross fire! You even scared presidential candidates—I mean, my God, didn't the first President Bush shudder and say, ‘Is this going to be a full psychiatric layout?' You're so alive to the people and happenings around you, you can't help yourself. You live life in the interrogative!” He sipped his martini. “It's about time you wrote a memoir.”

How could I craft a story with so many disparate experiences into one coherent narrative—the fearing and daring, the writing and mothering, the succeeding and failing, the loving and caregiving and dying and starting over? They were all pieces of my puzzle, and they could not be separated, because that is how women live, always struggling to find the right balance to create harmony.

“Gail!” Robert's deep voice shook me out of my reverie. “You've had an extraordinary life.” He was speaking now like a true editor. “Just start with when you sneaked down the stairs from the estrogen zone to pitch a story to Clay.”

AS I NOW REFLECT ON
what daring means in my life, I realize it is how I survive. When I feel fear, what I do is dare. Fear immobilizes. Daring is action. It changes the conditions. It startles people into different reactions. It's a crap shoot, but it can be the catalyst to empowering oneself.

Happily, I began daring early. I thought back to when I was twelve and began sneaking into New York on the train to watch a million private lives crisscrossing Grand Central Terminal. That gave me the confidence to write about anybody. When I worried that J. C. Penney would not hire a girl in the pre-feminist '60s, I dared to ask if I could see Mr. Penney himself. At the risk of being fired by my boss on the women's page, I crashed the all-male city room of the
Herald Tribune
to pitch my best story to the hottest editor there.

When Clay insisted that I follow Senator Robert Kennedy's presidential campaign, I almost froze. But I took the dare. It thrust me into one of the major historic events of the century.

On reflection, I can see the pattern. Try as I did, I could not figure out how to balance being a mother and ambitious author while acting as hostess and consort of a powerful man. I dared to leave him. If I had stayed with Clay and failed, we would have lost each other forever. He was the love of my life and I risked losing him in order to prove that I could stand on my own two feet. When I later found the courage to marry him, I was secure enough to feel complete. And together we dared to adopt a child of trauma. By then in my late forties, I was better able to strike a healthy balance.

To find the perfect balance between the forces in our lives is impossible. When we are going through a passage, we lose equilibrium. But once we are able to let go and adapt to the change, we can grow and find a new balance. The tai chi I practice in Central Park with a friend and teacher is leading me to a deeper understanding of the Chinese philosophy of yin and yang. It is all about balance. I love the symbol—two swirls wrapped around each other within a closed circle. The white crescent, yang, represents daylight, associated with fire, sun, and masculine traits: fast, hard, aggressive, but it encompasses a dollop of black. The black swirl, yin, designates the darkness of night, and feminine qualities of nurturance, structure, and rest. Yet it also incorporates a small circle of light. The two opposites cannot exist without each other. They are symbiotic. So it is in life.

Whenever my dark side threatens to overtake my light, I remember the mantra that has guided my life: Lean forward, shoot off the edge of the pool, and keep on swimming.

Gail pitching Clay, ca. 1986.
©2014 The Estate of Cosmos Andrew Sarchiapone

Clay at
New York
, ca. 1970: “I'll make you a star.”
©Burton Berinsky/Landov Media

Gail at
New York
, 1969. Author shot for “The Amphetamine Explosion.”
Photograph by Dan Wynn/Courtesy Demont Photo Management