Fear of Fifty (17 page)

Michael was short, had flashing brown eyes, close-cropped brown hair, and a brilliant gift for words. All my life, I have fallen for the same qualities in men: bravado, blarney, verbal brilliance, and musical virtuosity. Also, bookishness. Michael recited Shakespeare by the folio and knew more about classical literature, medieval history, and modern poetry than any boy I'd ever met. He was funny; he was smart; he was full of wild energy. He had the touch of the poet I have always found irresistible.

“Great wits are sure to madness near allied,/And thin partitions do their bounds divide,” Dryden wrote. This is the story of my life—or at least my love life.

How could I know that a year after we married, Michael would be hospitalized at Mount Sinai for a schizophrenic episode and sedated with thousands of milligrams of Thorazine?

I have told the story of Michael's breakdown—or a fictionalized version of it—in Fear
of Flying,
so, like most writers, I can no longer remember what really happened. My memories have vanished into the fictional narrative. I remember only bits and pieces: his disappearance (he was rowing on Central Park Lake); his reappearance (he tried to lead me out the window to prove to me we both could fly); his hospitalization (he called me Judas and quoted Dante in Italian to prove it).

Michael had quit law school and had been working for a mad market research genius who was computerizing America's buying habits and selling the results to advertising agencies. Michael's boss became rich but Michael went crazy. And who wouldn't have gone crazy spending night after night watching those huge computers of the sixties spew out news of Tide, Clorox, and Ivory Snow and how soap-suds correlated with educational status and TV watching? Michael hated himself for the work he was doing. But he was captured by the promise of lucre beyond his wildest dreams. Alas, he cracked up before the gold rolled in.

I became a daily visitor to the psycho ward at Mount Sinai during the long, hot summer of 1964, when Harlem burned. The city was teetering on the edge of apocalypse, and so were we. Dazed, enraged, Michael berated me and tried to get me to help him escape. I was torn between my loyalty to him and my desire to go on with my studies, my writing, my life.

His parents—his mother a tiny brunette with a wife-of-Bathish gap between her front teeth, a penchant for wearing three-inch open-toed mules, and a three-pack-a-day cigarette habit, his father a tall, bewildered, yet belligerent bald man—appeared from California and promptly decided
I
had driven their son crazy.
It
was all my
fault.
After all, I was the wife. Michael's mother, a Jewish princess from West Hartford, Connecticut, had married beneath her (like all Jewish princesses) and wound up a navy wife in San Francisco. She took out all the disappointments of her marriage on my parents' seeming wealth. Michael's parents had struggled to put a lanai on the house and pizza on the table. My parents found them hopelessly déclassé. Michael's parents, in turn, found my parents hopelessly snobbish. (All four of them were right, of course.) All four of them could agree on nothing but the necessity of breaking up our marriage.

They succeeded. When Michael's health insurance expired, his parents and my parents made a deal: Take him back to California. I was enlisted as the nurse. My father and I flew out to San Francisco with Michael and a psychiatrist in tow. Michael was heavily sedated in order to be allowed on the plane at all.

What a flight! The blind leading the drugged! Later, living in Germany with Allan, I tried to evoke that time in a poem: The chilling details of being in love with someone who suddenly opts out of the assumptions that constitute what the world calls “sanity” are evoked in “Flying You Home.” Michael's brilliance had ratcheted up several notches and turned into madness. The world we walked through was painted by a surrealist. We thought we could climb down into rain puddles and talk to apples. At first, I was more attracted than repelled by all of this. There turned out to be more than a touch of madness in me, too.

Almost immediately upon arrival in California, the shrink, my father, and I enrolled Michael in a Southern California clinic that looked a lot like a health spa but was a funny farm. This was to be Michael's postgraduate training: Thorazine 101. (“Exit husband number one,” as my daughter says—given any opportunity.)

Michael, of course, accused me of being Judas and selling him out for twenty pieces of silver. I wept. My father led me away like Eurydice out of the underworld. Unlike Orpheus, my dad did not look back. I escaped. A handy family lawyer annulled our marriage as if it had never been. I never saw Michael again. He did call me once or twice hinting at money after Fear of Flying was published. I remember being disappointed. For one brief summer, after all, we'd both thought he was Christ.

We should have lived together for a while and never gotten married at all. But it was 1963, and in 1963, you married the first guy you slept with. (My daughter finds this funny.) Sex was permitted only as long as you were in love. Love led, inexorably, to marriage.

Back in New York the following fall, I taught English at City College and “made Ph.D. noises” at Columbia Graduate School. My best friend that year was a greengrocer's son from Blackburn, in Lancashire, England, named Russell Harty. Fresh from the Giggleswick School in Yorkshire and, before that, Oxford, Russell was vamping until ready for prime time. He was later to become one of Britain's most famous chat-show hosts.

Thrilled to be in New York and out of Giggleswick, Russell fell in love with me and my West Side bohemian Jewish family, who were everything his family was not.

“You taught where?” I asked.

“Giggleswick.

“You made that up,” I said.

“I wish I
had,”
he told me.

I had a crush on Russell, but he would never kiss me. He adored me, of course, and we had worlds of wit in common, but eventually, I realized he liked boys.

We were destined to be lifelong friends, even, at times, lusting after the same men. (“If you bring dishy guys like that to London with you,” he said once at a dinner for four at Langan's, “I refuse to be responsible for my behavior.”) Russell later became not only famous but notorious. His North Country accent deepened. He became the London celebrity the tabloids loved to hate. Inevitably, he interviewed me on the telly.

By then his days of marking blue books in a City College cubicle were far behind him, as were mine. We were also destined to have the same kind of fame: famous for being famous, famous for sex, drugs, and rock and roll, famous for our nasty reviews. The irony of it was we had both started out rather donnishly. Russell had studied at Oxford with Nevill Coghili, when I was studying at Columbia with James Clifford. Defrocked dons was what we both became.

He died of AIDS, of course—one of the bumper deathcrop of the early eighties. In those days, people simply disappeared and months later you'd learn they were dead. I lost many friends that silent way: Russell Harty; Tom Victor, the photographer; David Kalstone, the literary scholar and writer; Paul Woerner, the theatrical lawyer. One day we were laughing in New York or London or Venice, and the next day they seemed to vanish. After a deadly pause, a mysterious obit would run in the newspaper: “After a long illness,” it would say—with no mention of AIDS in the early days, or of the partner left behind to mourn. These friends seemed to crawl off into holes to die, long before AIDS or HIV was an acceptable diagnosis.

Recently I told my daughter Molly about these deaths at the unacknowledged beginning of the plague years.

“They simply disappeared,” I said, “ashamed to be ill, afraid no one would understand. Some of them went home to their families, and you never heard from them again. Some had companions to nurse them, but unless you were part of their community, they didn't keep you informed. There was so much
shame
—”

“Write about it, Mommy,” said Molly, “so my friends will know. We were all just little kids then.”

If I close my eyes, I can still see Russell's buckteeth, the part in his reddish-brown hair, and his big brown eyes. I can still hear him saying: “Me muther wunders why I never married you—and the bluddy thing is—it's too bluddy late to tell 'er.”

I imagine Russell chatting everyone up in that great bathhouse in the sky that is gay heaven. I hope he's having fun with Oscar Wilde, Marcel Proust, William Shakespeare, Michelangelo Buonarotti, and the rest of the chorus line. It must be crowded there.

 

So I taught at CCNY, where my students use to threaten that I was sending them to 'Nam if I flunked them, and I wrote my unreadable master's thesis: “Women in the Poems of Alexander Pope”—a proto-feminist document if ever there was one. (In those days, women scholars used to write about male poets in “the canon,” but we usually tried to prove that they were really women under their periwigs!)

I dated. It was 1965 and I had long blonde hair and lots of pheromones. There were always men. I didn't like any of them as well as Russell, but I assumed unthinkingly—good girl of the fifties that I was—that you had to have a man whether you liked him or not.

I went through a series of male chauvinist piggy graduate students who thought women should be their research assistants. Then I fell in love with a very well hung but otherwise remote and chilly musician, with whom I went to Europe as a camp-follower at music festivals. When it became clear that he wanted to split to see an old girlfriend in London, I took off for Italy, land of my dreams, where I vengefully fucked a married Italian (the first in a long line of those).

“Eat it like gelato, baby!” Paolo or Gino or Franco or Sandro raved in bed. I laughed so hard, I thought I'd swallow his
pisello.

Being single was always tricky for me because I was the girl who couldn't say no. I liked men a lot, and I liked a lot of different men. When I wasn't near the guy I loved, I loved the guy I was near—to paraphrase Yip Harburg. Marriage was therefore refuge, a way of concentrating on work.