Fear of Fifty (33 page)

When I met Margaret, she was plump from grieving: a small round woman with intense eyes and graying hair. She came to live with me and Molly for a decade. Molly was five when she arrived, fifteen when Margaret retired for good. (In between there had been one other retirement, which didn't last.)

Margaret was not a servant—unless she was a servant of God. She needed to be needed. To overcome death, she needed to make things grow. “I would not do this for anyone but you,” she always said. She was my teacher, my sponsor of self-respect, as well as Molly's nanny. She introduced me to daily meditations, to taking care of my own soul, to living one day at a time. Living with Margaret was like getting a second chance at childhood. I had had a neurotic Jewish childhood. Now I was getting the other kind.

A baby's mother also needs a mother. Molly, Margaret, and I reconstructed the primitive tribe. Our Connecticut commune might have been the caves of Lascaux. Margaret gave me the uninterrupted five hours a day I needed to write. She also helped me keep the hearth aflame.

Hers was the most precious gift I've received—after the birth of Molly and my parents' acidophilus milk. My parents gave me life. Molly gave that life meaning. Margaret helped me keep that life alive.

I hope I gave her as much as she gave me. Without her, motherhood would have swallowed my writing whole.

Molly, Margaret, and I traveled all over the world. We coddled, then bounced, numerous men. Margaret fed my swains homemade chicken soup, faithfully informed them I was “in the shower” when they called while I was in bed with another, and was there for Molly when I was not. She taught me that motherhood is a shared responsibility. She also taught me how to listen to my child. Eventually she let go and I took over. When Molly demanded me and not my stand-in, Margaret retreated into the role of executive housekeeper.

In early adolescence, Molly was lucky enough to have two live-in mothers to rebel against. She had enough wisecracks for both of us. And enough rage. Every girl needs at least two mothers to denounce.

How much our world has diminished the lives of women! The Egyptian peasant digging the alluvial mud of the Nile at least has sisters and cousins to help her. Poor and illiterate she may be, but hardly as alone as we in our fancy bathrooms. I imagine the “privileged” American woman in a palatial bathroom with a toddler peering between her legs as she sits on the throne. She has gadgets galore but never the extra pair of hands she needs most. Women in America may have the best bathrooms to clean. But they often have no one to share their children with.

Women in America read “lifestyle” pages that are really glorifications of shopping. They teach us we must veil ourselves in makeup to be loved. And we willingly take the veil, thinking ourselves
freed
by it. Makeup is no more optional for us than the veil is for Arab women: It is our Western version of the chador.

At thirty-nine, I had a three-year-old daughter, all the responsibilities of a man, and all the liabilities of a woman. I made my living by saying so—and women are supposed to do the opposite. I suddenly understood things about the discrimination against women that my earlier life had shielded me from. Without child support, I had no choice but to go on writing—it was the only way of making a living I knew—yet my writing always put me in the midst of the crossfire between the sexes. I wanted a serene life, but I had no notion of how to get one. I was living out the typical experience of my generation, and at a level of privilege most of my generation does not begin to have. Privileged or not, it was enormously stressful. I had been raised to take my place in a world that no longer existed.

If I had to live like a man, I thought I would assert my right to a man's pleasures: nubile concubines.

My fortieth birthday was imminent and I was looking for the ultimate birthday present. Didn't I deserve it for all my hard work? For keeping the fire and the baby alive?

 

Imagine, if you will, a blue-eyed twenty-five-year-old. He is six foot two, has a perfect ski jump nose, pearly teeth, dazzling smile, brawny chest, muscled arms, biceps, and calves. As if that weren't enough, he also has a love of poetry, a literary bent, and a cock that also has a literary bent. It curves upward like a burnished scimitar.

How did I meet him? Not through a newsletter advertising men with large appendages (though my fans send me those regularly), but in a health club, through a friend. He was sweating on a Nautilus machine—a very seventies-turning-eighties way of meeting.

Will Wadsworth Oates III was the verdant limb on a rotting family tree. He came for tea one wintry night and never left—except to buy new barbells and old Harleys.

“Horizontally speaking,” as Lorenz Hart wrote of Pal Joey, “he's at his very best.” But vertically, he was pretty good too. He knew how to wear a tux. He had family training in knowing which fork to use. He would never confuse the contents of a finger bowl with consommé. He also looked good in a hat, the sign of a lady's man—or an actor. He could sail, swim, sing, and strip in seconds. He was also sweet. My gay male friends adored him. My women friends sniffed the air and called him a gigolo behind my back. (But an intellectual gigolo, as the phrase goes.) He was a librophilic, a romantic, a picaresque hero. He liked hard books and soft women.

Love feeds on likeness or imagined likeness. When it is blasted, we become enraged. Why? Because we have deceived ourselves about our twin.

How could I know that Will (or Oatsie, as his old friends called him) would proposition most of my women friends, hit on my men friends for auditions, and always be “borrowing” money?

I thought I knew the rules: I got him a credit card. I didn't know them all: The limit was too high.

I bought him gorgeous clothes, gave him a car (but, being practical, neglected to put it in his name). Summers, I took him to the Cipriani in Venice as if he were a starlet. As he swam laps in the pool, he was admired by ladies and gents alike. Will was so eager to please that he could make anyone fall in love with him. All his acting went into his life.

But Jewish girls and guns don't mix, and Will kept loaded guns in my house. When I discovered this—five years too late—I threw him out. Perhaps I was ready to anyway. In the beginning, I thought the guns weren't loaded (“a likely story, ma'am”) because he swore he kept the ammo separate.

When I remember him now, he merges in my mind with Colette's Chéri. I think I see him trying on my pearls in bed. He had the playfulness of the born gigolo, and every liberated woman
needs
a gigolo from time to time. The connotation of the word betrays our disapproval of pleasure itself. But living for sensation and pleasure need not always be a bad thing. Will was my Bacchus—beautiful, androgynous, full of juice.

We object to the gigolo because he is paid for love, but we do not object to the mercenary who is paid for killing. Our statues are to condottieri, not
cavalieri serventi.
Our world would be better if it were the other way around.

Gay men do this gig far better than women. Perhaps they understand the bargain better. They sometimes adopt their lovers, recognizing this relationship as a species of parental role playing. But eventually even they get fed up. When the bargain shifts, they become enraged. Then they throw the bastards out.

Will was essentially kind—though the hustler in him sometimes got the upper hand. He loved performances, as much in daily life as on the stage. Will used to lift barbells on the lawn when Jon came to pick up Molly. He was hoping to seem dangerous enough to protect me. I was touched.

He would press me to marry him and I would procrastinate. It was not only that I liked being legally unhitched, but that I knew I could never marry Will. Any day, my life might change, without the intervention of lawyers. So I didn't say yes and I didn't say no. And he got angry.

I always thought Molly liked him. Later she told me she was afraid of him. I shudder when I remember the hidden guns. Will always swore the guns were out of reach. But how could he have known this when his normal condition was
stoned?
Bands of angels must have been watching over us. Margaret must have flown in with them.

When things began to get chronically awful in our lives, I realized how much we were drinking. A lot. I dragged Will to AA, thinking
he
needed to get sober. Another grandiose self-delusion. Like many addicts, I needed his addiction to face my own.

We started to go to meetings together. At first, they terrified me and I used to cry all through them. I did not know why. I hated the jargon and the slogans, made fun of the straitlaced way AA converts spoke the lingo of the Program: Easy Does It, One Day at a Time, Take That Off the Worry List, Let Go, Let God. Then I began to see that AA was the only place in my world where I was welcomed unjudgmentally. I fell in love with AA—a blessed alternative to the nature “red in tooth and claw” that characterizes the rest of our society. AA people are kind
on principle.
They know they have to serve others to serve themselves.

Will stayed sober for a year. I did for two. That taste of sobriety got me started, and it also broke us up. I began my still-unfinished trek down the long and winding road of surrender. I am still willful and afraid, but at least I
know
I am.

As Will was moving out, I found a lump in my left breast. While I waited for the outcome of a biopsy, Will and I were reconciled briefly by mortal fear. The day the lump proved benign, he moved out. The lump lingered for a while, then disappeared as if it had never been.

I dreamed of him endlessly. Sometimes I still do. In dreams, he can still make me come. When I am alone in a hotel room or settling into a rented house anywhere in the world, he immediately arrives.

I have heard many people say that they still love all their old loves somewhere in some synapse or other. The same is true for me. Memory clouds the love as it is meant to do, but beneath the fog of forgetting, the love remains. I still love them all—Jon, Will, Michael, Allan. I even love them
better
than I did when we were together, because now I have more empathy. They probably don't want my love, but there it is anyway. I cannot lose it. It returns in my dreams.

I seem to have skated over the divorce as over thick, unrippled ice. It was hardly like that: It was like falling through. Down through the black water, submerged in ink, but unable to write with it (no quill, no paper), unable to read, unable to breathe, unable to stand on the mucky bottom. Some incidents shimmer through the blackness, bringing back the sadness of it all.

One morning, I awake in the waterbed in Connecticut with Will. The doorbell shrills. It is a process-server out of Dickens with a rough red face and a thatch of yellow hair.

I stagger out, wrapping a damp terrycloth robe around my nakedness.

“Excuse me,” he says, with the icy politeness of the secret police in Nabokov's Zembla.

“Are you Missus
Yong?”

“I am.”

“This is for you.”

And he hands me a thick envelope, then quickly turns and runs down the icy path and drives away.

I tear open the papers at the door, shivering. I've never seen a process-server before. Nor have I seen a piece of paper like this. It seems to say that if I move away from Fairfield County, I will be prosecuted “to the full extent of the law” and lose custody of Molly (“the issue of that union”) unless I remain “domiciled” in one of the following four towns: Westport, Weston, Fairfield, or Redding.

A very confusing suit, possibly unconstitutional and unwinnable, but a needle in the heart. After all, I already feel myself to be forever a “bad mother,” because I must work to support her. I have somehow accepted the lack of child support, the random cruelties (like turning off the phone and letting the machine pick up so that I cannot check in on my two-year-old), but this is the ultimate sabotage: They will take my child in trade for my rebellious books. This betrayal cuts to the bone. (At that time I had no way of knowing that custody suits had become my generation's cruel and usual punishment for daring motherhood and a career at the same time.)

Two years and several thousands of dollars later, Jon and I are sitting in a social worker's lair in the basement of the Stamford Court House. The social workers, one male, one female, ask us in social-worker lingo: “What seems to be your area of disagreement?”

Somehow, my lawyer has kept Molly out of court, has prepared me with psychological affidavits attesting to her mental health, and has had the custody case thrown out and sent us instead for “mediation” —a therapy that relieves no one really but the judge. In mediation the fair person gives in and the crazy person gets to make the decision—usually by yelling.

We have been waiting for two hours in a basement hallway full of teenage black parents from the ghetto, battered Latina women, and others so poor they can't
afford
to get divorced.

Asked to state our problem, we find we cannot even
formulate
it. Finally, Jon blurts out, “My ex-wife wants our daughter to go to Ethical Culture—and I think she should go to Dalton.”

“Well—she would be
better
at Ethical, because she is ...” I trail off.

The two social workers are looking at us as if we have both farted.

“Surely we can resolve that,” the woman says, in a choked voice.

And a “compromise” is struck. I will send Molly to Dalton (Jon's former school) and he will drop the suit. I weigh Molly's inquietude over the lawsuit against sending her to a school I think is wrong for her, and I decide on the lesser of two evils. Jon shrugs and drops the suit. He is sick of it. So am I.