Saturday's Child (54 page)

The impasse couldn't last. Editing, speaking, and organizing kept me drained, but not writing felt like suffocation. Then, in 1979, I was awarded a National Endowment for the Arts grant in poetry. Every penny of the ten thousand dollars went to get us out of debt, but left us back at square one: I needed to hustle more journalism assignments and speaking dates so we wouldn't slide back down. The grant, which was supposed to be used for writing time, had bought me not a single hour.

Something began to crack, spidery lines webbing across my resolve like craze along a piece of pottery. Once too often I found myself mulling Yeats's line “too long a sacrifice can make a stone of the heart.” I started wondering aloud whether to apply for a stay at an arts colony, away from everything—marriage, money-earning, magazine, activism—for once in my life, have to do nothing but write, even if only for a few weeks. Ken thought it wasn't a bad idea; we both assumed it would serve as a kind of brief separation to freshen the relationship. He suggested Yaddo, in upstate New York, where he'd had a residency himself. I applied. Ned Rorem, a frequent guest there, was my recommender. I was accepted for the summer but felt I could spare the time only for a three-week stay in the spring.

I remember that my
Ms
. colleagues gave me a little going-away party in the office conference room, because I hadn't taken any vacations since starting at the magazine three years earlier, and because some of them knew about the home-front battles. Suzanne—with whom I'd invented the TGIM (Thank God It's Monday) Club, since at the time she too was enduring marital tribulations each weekend—gave me two reams of crisp typing paper. Gloria gave me five boxes of number 2 Venus Velvet pencils, our mutual favorite, sharpened just so. There were waggled eyebrows about “those art colony frolics, ya' know.” I laughed uproariously, reminding us all that I was a fuddy-duddy old married lady one year short of turning forty, and stating for the record that I was traveling with a portable typewriter, baggy jeans, and a most unfetching flannel nightgown for chilly spring nights in the country. Then I went home, obsessively finished my child's costume for the upcoming UNIS play, and made to-do lists for Kenneth about household needs in my absence. Last, as I'd promised him I'd do for some time, I organized all of Ken's papers into a coherent filing system, a goodbye present before I left.

Meanwhile, out in Washington State, some officials were ignoring seismic readings coming from Mount St. Helens, which was thought to be inactive. “Oh, she's just like one of those women's libbers, letting off steam,” said one wag, famously. “A menopausal lady threatening to throw a temper-tantrum,” chortled another. It was May of 1980.

Breaking Out

Yaddo was paradisaical. I'd published five books by then, all of them written on the run, in the corners of my existence. Now, for the first time in my adult life, meals were cooked for me, laundry done for me, phone messages taken for me, the world kept at bay so I could work uninterrupted. For a woman writer especially, this is mind-boggling (most male writers have live-in arts colonies called wives). There were days and days of silence, spring woods through which to amble, a cabin in which to work at any hour without disturbing anyone. I broke this blissful rhythm only once, dashing to Manhattan to watch Blake play the lead in his school presentation of
The Pirates of Penzance
, but then I returned to Yaddo and resubmerged in its luxurious peace.

If anyone got stir-crazy, there were other writers and artists for socializing in the evenings, but I mostly relished the solitude. Moreover, it was problematic being regarded as the Feminist Leader whom almost every male artist or writer felt compelled to interrogate, as in “What is it you people really want?” But I found friends in the novelists Mary Elsie Robertson and Jewell Parker Rhodes, and the painter Katherine Kadish. We devised a ritual of late-afternoon Bloody Mary imbibing on the Great Lawn or in the Rose Garden, where we'd sit and cackle at the pomposity of our artistic brethren, cheered by the thought that our clique was making them even more paranoid about us than they already were. There were two exceptions among the men. One was the poet Al Poulin Jr., who wasn't politically obnoxious and who became a bit of a pal. The other was a sculptor calling himself (fatuously) Vladimir Urban.

Yessss. He was tall, dark, and Gothic-novel handsome. He was stunning in other ways, too: whenever those sensual lips parted, inanities came dribbling out with awesome reliability. But he had the common sense to keep his mouth shut most of the time—certainly at first—so that
his silences and brooding gaze seemed symptomatic of depth rather than ignorance about every subject except plaster of paris and the weather. Still, this man knew how to flirt.

I had never really flirted. But it was peachy to be flirted
at
, and once I applied myself, was I ever a fast learner. Feeling miraculously freed from every stricture, I was writing poetry daily in a rush of creativity, and I convinced myself this flirtation was a symptom of that energy. Besides, it
must
be meaningless because he was a dim bulb and I naturally could be attracted only to a genius.

Then, one moon-drenched spring night—after I'd spent the day revising poems as I lounged beside a lilac bush in full fragrance—I drank a critical amount of red wine while watching shooting stars, and went to bed with him. It was May 18, 1980. Three thousand miles to the west, fuddy-duddy Mount St. Helens erupted.

It was good. It was
very
good. It was so good I did it again the next night (and the next, and the next). I rationalized that I could afford to repeat such a significant experiment because (a) he was not my intellectual peer and therefore it was inconsequential; (b) if this meant I was objectifying him, why then it was turnabout for the eons men had objectified women; (c) contrarily, when I caught myself feeling infatuated then it must mean I
wasn't
merely objectifying him; (d) I knew that Michael, Kenneth's friend and sometime lover, for whom I'd cooked almost as many breakfasts and dinners as I once had for Thatcher, was staying at our home in my absence; and (e)
surely
by now Ken and I had the Bloomsbury-equality stuff thoroughly worked out between us.

Lovemaking in our marriage had of late been rare, mechanical when it happened, and a relief when it didn't (for both of us, I suspect). In earlier years, it had been at least warm and affectionate, and I could always rely on my own internal fantasy life to contribute considerable climactic excitement (as, I'm sure, Ken's was doing for him). But
this
, in a sense, was my first experience of pure, delectable, raucous lust. I could manage to get over the embarrassment of being a late bloomer engaging in remedial living, but it was more difficult for me to stomach the fact that such a revelation could happen with a nitwit for a partner. Nevertheless, it was undeniable that so long as Vlad didn't get chatty, settled for looking like a Pre-Raphaelite angel, and did what he knew how to do, the results were
spectacular. For my remaining two weeks at Yaddo, I felt I was a poet again—and, for the first time, a beautiful woman, a free woman, a
sexy
woman.

Truth's supposed to be a good thing, although in retrospect I sometimes can't remember why. Denser in my way than Urban was in his, I
still
believed I had a single-standard marriage. So when I came home, of course I told Kenneth the truth about the affair, and of course I was shocked when of course he suffered what some might call a nervous breakdown. I saw no way not to tell Blake as well, who, at age eleven, had a considerably more mature reaction than his parents. He was naturally taken aback and upset at first; then, as we talked more, he said philosophically, “Well, I'm glad for you, Rob, because it's made you really happy. I can see it in your face. But,” he sighed, “Kenny's going to take it badly. So this is going to be damned inconvenient for me.” He was right.

We entered into a drama that was part tragedy, part farce, part surrealism. Qualities I'd so loved in Kenneth in the first place—his capacity for going to extremes, his fervor—careened into boomerang play. There was weeping, shouting, moaning, stomping about. There were public and private scenes, suicide threats, and Ken's attempted tit-for-tat affair with another woman.
¹³

I didn't know it yet, but this was the start of the beginning of the end. The drinking got worse, then better, then worse.
My
addiction was to stubbornness-abuse (and I didn't yet know beans about codependency or enabling): I
insisted
we could save the marriage. Pat Carbine lent me the money to get Blake out of the house for the summer, sending him to the same progressive arts camp his pal David Pogrebin attended; David's mother, Letty, pulled strings to arrange his last-minute acceptance; Suzanne sat up with me most of one night while Kenneth was out, labeling every item of Blake's clothing as the camp required, and somehow making me laugh, weepy-eyed, while we did it. With Blake safely off, I started therapy. Then I maneuvered us into couples therapy. Finally Ken
agreed to begin his own therapy. We were getting in touch with our feelings all over the place.

Repeatedly, we'd separate, reconcile, separate. Women friends were marvels during this period. It was as if the safety net I'd spent decades helping to weave for others was suddenly, all unasked-for, stretched for me. Kenneth sometimes seemed worse in my presence, so when things got really bad I'd stay elsewhere, all around Manhattan—what Suzanne termed “sleeping around without sleeping around”—with different friends so as not to put too much weight on any one woman's hospitality: at Gloria's, at Suz's, at Bella Abzug's, with my old chum the designer Lois Sasson, with the poet Adrienne Rich, with the short-story writer Ann Beattie, with the philosopher Dorothy Dinnerstein, with the biographer Marion Meade … at one point I held keys to the homes of more distinguished women than had attended the first Seneca Falls Convention.

Suzanne, Gloria, and Pat conspired supportively so that
Ms
. sent me to Europe on assignments twice that summer. In the fall, they packed me off on a U.S. lecture tour with Tatyana Mamonova, to publicize the cover story I'd written on her and three other exiled Soviet dissident feminists. If Robin was going to be in a diaspora from her own home, the trick was to keep her moving productively. They knew I was a workaholic and in need of cash to boot, so they mobilized, providing opportunities and deadlines that I drove myself to meet. It was the sole pleasure I had left, at least until I was booked for an autumn lecture in Alaska and brought Blake along for a much needed short vacation where we could watch salmon, spot great bald eagles, learn that the inside of a glacier, where it “calves” or splits off a section, really
is
ice blue—and where we could recall, fleetingly, how to laugh.

By the year's end, things had quieted down. I was convinced the marriage would survive, tattered but intact. My brief foray into luscious sexuality had ended—forever, I thought, mourning it silently. It just wasn't worth the ensuing punishment, the crush of grief. Kenneth, calmer now, kept saying that it wasn't the fact of my having had an affair that pained him so; it was that the affair had been with another man.

“Your whole
life
is spent with women,” he explained plaintively. “Women are your colleagues, sisters, friends—your world. I acknowledge
that. So I would've easily
understood
if only the relationship had been with a
woman
.”

We both smiled at how far-fetched
that
would be.

Breaking Away

In July of 1980, with Blake at camp, I flew to Copenhagen, Denmark, to cover the United Nations World Conference on Women and, preceding it, to a week-long smaller gathering in Oslo, Norway, sponsored by the UN International Institute for Training and Research (UNITAR). I was tireder than I'd ever been in my life, but relieved to be getting away, and I knew that both meetings would also afford networking chances for choosing contributors to
Sisterhood Is Global
, which had been steadily percolating as a project ever since
Sisterhood Is Powerful
had been published ten years earlier.

The networking was indeed fantastic, and being around vibrant women from all over the world put my personal troubles in perspective and replenished my energy. At the week-long UNITAR conference called “Creative Women in Changing Societies,”
¹⁴
I reencountered old friends: the Brazilian theater director Gilda Grillo, the Egyptian writer and physician Nawal El Saadawi, the Thai feminist Mallica Vajrathon, and my U.S. feminist colleagues E. M. (Esther) Broner and Phyllis Chesler.

I also met for the first time a number of extraordinary women who were to become friends, allies, anthology contributors, and long-term colleagues. There was Gwendoline Konie of Zambia, who movingly described the realities women faced in postcolonial Africa, and former Portuguese Prime Minister Maria de Lourdes Pintasilgo, wise, jolly, unpretentious. There was Keiko Higuchi from Japan, whose militance was masked by her genteel demeanor, and the Ghanaian novelist-playwright Ama Ata Aidoo, with whom I talked through the glimmering, midnight-sun summer night not only about our struggles as women writers but
about our same-age, precocious, chess-loving children. And there was a New Zealander with short blond curls and an air of calm authority, who gasped as we were being introduced, “Robin Morgan! You're one of my heroines!” A jeans-and-boots-clad streak of energy, she turned out to be a sitting member of Parliament, but acted like no MP any of us had ever met. This was charismatic, twenty-eight-year-old Marilyn J. Waring. Her tactical brilliance and impatience with intellectual sloth would become as evident in the daytime working-group sessions as would her emotional fragility and musical flair in the evenings when, accompanying herself on her guitar, she sang folk songs for us all in a classically trained lyric soprano.