Fear of Fifty (30 page)

Blithe as I was about my first day of pregnancy, I later panicked.

I had so accepted the bluestocking either-or (the baby or the book) that I flew into paroxysms of doubt about how I could ever do this amazing balancing act.

Luckily the baby had no doubts, nor did Jon, nor did Buffy and Poochkin. They slept on me at night as in a love pile, and in the morning, I went up to the attic to continue the further adventures of Fanny, who, astonishingly, had also discovered she was pregnant.

All the feelings of pregnancy—terror, confidence, bliss—went into Fanny and were translated into eighteenth-century terms.

I contemplated undoing the pregnancy and did nothing. Fanny went to an outlaw apothecary, Mrs. Skynner, with thoughts of aborting the babe, but she could not muster the courage. I wondered how I would ever make a living if I didn't finish this book. Fanny, on the other hand, schemed to have herself set up as a kept woman, masked from her patron, who turned out to be her own stepfather, Lord Bellars, and the father of the babe. My own child slept safe from harm in her white wicker bassinet. Fanny's child, on the other hand, was kidnapped by a wicked wet nurse and she had to run away to sea to save her. Each tumultuous surge of early motherhood was translated into another plot twist in the book. Thus do writers make books out of flesh.

“Shall we go to the health food store?” your mate asks. And you are drawn out of a bustling London street (bordered by canals full of sewage, fishheads, rotting fruit, and dead animals). “Coming in a minute!” you call downstairs. And you scribble in a few extra fishheads and dead cats in the eighteenth century before you rush out to buy bean curd in the twentieth.

“A sort of life,” Graham Greene called it—and no one has yet improved on the phrase. But it is also richer than most lives, because it is always lived in two places, two centuries, two time-continua at once.

Imagine straddling the cosmos, clinging to the tails of comets, knowing that time does not exist. That is the writer's life. It is the purest connection to the universe a mortal can have. It is also a kind of prayer.

A novel in which those two levels of life become one, in which the emerging book turns out to
determine
the emerging life, would be thrilling if it were to be written on the deepest level. But most writers use the dream-reality conceit cheaply. Many books
start
in “reality” and venture into the mirror world of fantasy, only to return to “reality” at the end. Usually the “real world” is used as a frame or a launching pad. Sometimes the characters bring ordinary objects back from the dream world to prove where they have been: the worn shoe leather of the Twelve Dancing Princesses; the child's scarf left in the Royal Doulton plate in
Mary Poppins Comes Back.
Because it is our daily experience of life to be dreaming half the time and waking half the time, it is natural for us to invent stories that embody our confusion about which world is the actual one. Perhaps we only
seem
to sleep here while we are awake elsewhere? Is it possible that we meld opposing lives in one seemingly whole personality? These questions fascinate us because our lives are forever split between fantasy and reality. A writer is merely one who makes use of that fissure as the compost heap of stories.

Pregnant with Molly, I was happier than I have ever been at any other time in my life. I was one becoming two, or two becoming one. My moods were smooth. I felt radiant, purposeful, full of life. And I wrote without any of the doubts that had paralyzed me in the past. I had the perfect integration of mind and body. My muse was inside me; centering me. My mind could roam. My body knew what it had to do without my interference.

That was the most curious thing about pregnancy. I didn't
have
to be in control. I could let go. A higher power was running this. What a blessed state for someone who always thought she had to control everything.

When I was three months pregnant, Jon and I were secretly married in our house in Connecticut. We kept it from our parents, our friends, and the media because I had written an article for
Vogue
stating that I didn't believe in marriage. How could I recant? Also, I felt my life had been too public. I wanted to take back the power secrecy imparts.

Howard and Bette nudged us for months about getting hitched. My parents pretended indifference. Just before Molly was born we relented and told both sets of parents that the baby was legal.

I, who had dreaded pregnancy, was astonished to find myself loving it. I, who had denounced marriage, was astonished to find myself happy. I possessed a calm I scarcely recognized as mine. Perhaps it belonged to the baby. Pregnancy was such a magical transformation that I understood why my older sister had six children, my mother three, and my younger sister two. Earth mothering abounds in my family. I am the aberration.

The pregnancy seemed so easy that everyone from my obstetrician to my Lamaze coach agreed: “That baby's going to pop right out.”

Yoga headstands in the sixth month and forward bends in the seventh had convinced the world (Jon and our mutual yoga teacher) that the delivery would be easy. A book tour in my sixth month convinced
me.
Only one interviewer dared ask whether I was pregnant under my smock.

“You're the first to ask,” I said. “The others probably just thought I was fat.”

My energy remained abundant almost till the eighth month—and even then, dragging a belly like a dinosaur egg,
I
thought I looked gorgeous. The narcissism of pregnancy made me pose for photographs romancing my own belly. Demi Moore was probably in grade school, and nobody would have printed them on magazine covers in 1978, but surely I would have posed for them if I could have. Whenever possible, I wore transparent dresses that showed my belly.

I remember Jerzy Kosinski stroking it at a cocktail party. “I would give anything to experience childbirth once,” he said.

But the baby did not “pop right out.” Due on the first of August, she hung in there, pressing on my bladder until the end of the month. It was August 18 before she decided to budge. I was reading an eighteenth-century book on “masques and ridottos” in the Pequot Library when suddenly I was soaked. Calmly I returned the books to the librarian and drove home.

Jon and I phoned the doctor and waited for contractions to begin.

Nothing happened.

I went into the kitchen and made an immense steak sandwich with homegrown beefsteak tomatoes. As soon as I had wolfed the whole thing down, the contractions began.

Calls from prospective grandparents every five minutes were more annoying than the contractions. Howard was
insisting
we go to the hospital. It was
his
grandchild after all! Rather than argue, we went. I had called my Lamaze instructor, packed my copies of
Immaculate Deception
and
Leaves of Grass.
I was determined to have this baby naturally—whatever
that
meant.

As with every other passage of my life, I was about to give birth in a hotly politicized time. Anesthesia was then considered uncool and antifeminist. Only sissies got spinal blocks. No Amazon-mother-woman would succumb to knock-out drops! So I labored in hideous pain nine whole hours, until my strength was gone.

And when my doctor suggested a cesarean, I fought him, citing feminist texts. Only the slowing of the baby's heartbeat changed my mind.

Fanny would have died. The babe would have been scarred by forceps, dismembered, or stillborn. Off in a Demerol dream of the eighteenth century, how could I know that a gnarl in a broken coccyx (from an old riding accident) had blocked my daughter's way into the world and that a cesarean was the
only
option.

“Don't kill me, I'm halfway through the best book of my career!” I shouted to David Weinstein, my beloved obstetrician, as we got stuck in the elevator on the way to the operating room. Rescued by an angelic maintenance man in a grasshopper green suit (and invisible wings), we raced out of the elevator—the doctor pushing the litter and me raving—down the hall to the OR.

Jonathan was not allowed into the OR. I barely was myself. This was a sacred circle of medical men. A spinal block was administered and my legs grew numb. I could feel cutting but no pain.

A bloody lump was lifted high for me to see.

“Is that the placenta?” I asked.

“It's your daughter,” said David, putting a little creature covered in iron-ore-colored blood into my arms. She was wearing a hastily wrapped pink blanket and fluttering her blood-caked lids. Her eyes of undersea blue met mine.

“Welcome, little stranger,” I said, weeping and washing her face with my tears.

Born of a sudden notion mooted between two fated lovers on a smog-filled cloud above a California canyon, she had come all this way to us, patiently traveling on feet that never touched the ground (as Colette said of
her
daughter). She was mine and not-mine all at once. She was the most beautiful thing I had ever seen and the most terrifying. God had dropped into my life wearing Molly's face. Or else God's hostage. My life henceforth would not belong to me alone.

Exhausted, elated, I waited for her to be brought to my room. A hosed-down baby, with the same inky eyes, and a tuft of reddish hair done into a shiny pink bow, arrived in a clear lucite box like a Valentine's gift. I took her to my breast, wondering if this was how to do it. It worked. She suckled. And I couldn't stop staring at her as if she were an apparition that would vanish as quickly as it had come.

Then I collapsed. A day or night of drugged dreams and then I awakened to the pink face and inky eyes and auburn tuft again. What was our fate—hers and mine? What miracle had made her? How could such a miracle be both so ordinary and so extraordinary? Molly's birth made a believer of this agnostic.

Those were the lines I wrote for Fanny when the experience was new and fresh in my mind.

I kept every scrap of paper from the hospital (the woozy list of names), every photograph (including the sonogram at ten weeks), both identification bracelets—hers and mine. With these mementos I made books for her—books for baby days, books for every little-girl birthday, and a special book for her passage into adolescence at thirteen. I was a writer before I was a mother, and it was the writer who was more formed. Motherhood is an acquired taste. You learn it humbled on your knees. Becoming a writer
about
motherhood is the easy part.

So we took her home, but at first my canine babies were not so delighted to have a sibling. Buffy howled when I breast-fed her, and Poochkin left turds of outrage in the corners of every room.

A horrid baby nurse came from an agency in Greenwich and proceeded to do what baby nurses do best: make the parents feel like idiots. She ate for two as if she were a wet nurse. She secreted the baby in her room and brought her to me every few hours, only to deliver that classic baby-nurse line: “Missus Fast, your milk's not rich enough.” On the nurse's day off, I wheeled the carriage next to my bed and greedily cooed over my baby all day and night—when I wasn't madly breastfeeding or madly photographing. She held my attention like a fiery constellation. Her eyes bewitched me. Her first smile caused me and Jon to waltz around the room with the baby between us. We were besotted with her, the first parents in history.

But I was also determined to finish my novel on time. Every morning I'd march up to my study on the third floor, intent on making my deadline. The publishers had given me the sort of money women didn't usually make. If I missed the deadline, they'd take it all back. It never occurred to me to take a day off. I simply tripled my workload and pressed on. The baby was fed all night and the book all day. I produced more pages, not fewer. Perhaps I was afraid my talent would evaporate into motherhood. I tested this hypothesis daily.

Like other members of the whiplash generation, I had too much to prove—to myself, to my mother, to all the men who said it couldn't be done. I needed to prove my mother wrong. Women could do it all. “We have won the right to be eternally exhausted,” I used to joke.