Fear of Fifty (4 page)

Mortality is the question here, not face-lifts. Can we embrace our mortality, even learn to love it? Can we pass along our knowledge to our children and then pass along, knowing our passing is the proper order of things?

That is the problem I and all my contemporaries are facing at fifty. We have come smack up against the spiritual hollowness in our lives. Without spirit, it is impossible to face aging and death. And how can women find spirit in a society in which their most enduring identity is as consumers above all, where every struggle for autonomy and identity is countered by the relentless dicta of the marketplace—a marketplace that still sees us as consumers of everything from hormones to hats, from cosmetics to cosmetic surgery?

I wander around the spa with my daughter, knowing that my body is not the issue. It's whether or not I have the right to my immortal soul.

Even the phrase sounds suspect. Women? Immortal? Soul? You can just hear the cries of derision. Yet whether or not women have the right to their own souls is the whole question. It is not a matter of fad and fashion. It is not a matter of new-age or twelve-step hype. It is the essence of whether we are allowed to be fully human or not.

If you own your soul, you don't have to be afraid at fifty.

I flash back to a time exactly three years before my fiftieth birthday, when the age clock inside me was inexorably ticking.

I am on a plane, flying to Switzerland to attend the wedding of a former beau, now a friend. He's a beautiful Roman ten years younger than I, and he is about to marry a German princess ten years younger than that. I'm happy for them and, at the same time, desolate. It's not that the bridegroom and I are still in love, but just that we have talked endlessly about how we'd wind up together (because neither of us would ever marry), and now he is marrying and I am not.

I don't want to marry again, I think (at not quite forty-seven). I'm free. My freedom is such that I'm involved in a long-distance triangle with another delicious Italian, a domestic triangle with a man who can't decide to leave his wife, and I'm also seeing a variety of men who are as terrified of commitment as I've become. My life is a social circus, but I can never relax and curl up in bed with a book. Though I may deny it, I am off to this wedding, as usual, in search of the perfect man. Of course, I don't believe in the perfect man. Of course, I nevertheless hope to meet him.

The wedding takes place in the little town hall in a Swiss mountain village that looks as if it belongs on a cuckoo clock. The beautiful bride and groom sign the register, pronounce their vows—the groom saying “Sì,” the bride saying “Ja”—whereupon the judge who has married them falls to the floor with a thump, his skin turning the slate blue-gray color of sudden cardiac arrest. It is absolutely clear to me that the judge is dead,
gestorben,
morto. The relatives scurry to call the EMS and frantically reassure each other. (At least the Germans are reassuring each other that the judge will be fine; the Italians, on the other hand, are muttering darkly,
“Maledizione,
maledizione.”)

Pretty soon an ambulance races uselessly to the hospital with the irretrievably dead judge, and the silent, chastened wedding party wends its way up the streets of the snow-frosted town to a reception in the elegant chalet of the bride's mother. Toasts are made, champagne glasses clink. The German relatives deny that anything bad has happened, and the Italian ones keep wringing their hands and clutching their groins to ward off the evil eye.

The wedding is darkened by this event—despite everyone's denials. But the baby who emerges the requisite months later is beautiful and blond, perfect in every way. And the bride and groom are as happy as Candide and Cunégonde in this best of all possible worlds. Death has darkened life, but life goes on.

At the wedding supper, held in the very grand but sufficiently rustic hunting chateau of another of the bride's relatives, I am seated next to a handsome young playboy from Monaco, Milan, Paris, and London, who, seeing a placecard with my name, attempts this witty proposition: “You write naughty books. Will you be naughty with me?”

My heart plummets. Gloom claims me in the midst of the festivities. My reputation is a kind of dirty joke, and my best friend has just gotten married. I drink too much, dance too frantically, kiss the bride and groom, and depart into the snow on the arm of a gay friend (whose houseguest I am). I will awaken at three A.M. in his attic guest room, wringing my hands and weeping.

In the morning, the vapors are gone, banished by the sun on the snow. I drive down through the Alps with my friend, stopping in a trout restaurant to eat and talk, eventually passing Lake Como and Milan and winding up in Venice, where my lover awaits.

As always, the sex between us is a magical abolition of time, and for three days I am happy. We sit in his boat rocking on the lagoon, watching the mirages of Venice float over the waters. We make love at odd times, in odd places, avoiding his relatives. We part, promising to be together “someday.” (I will buy the palazzo adjacent to his wife's, and he will visit me morning and evening—via underground tunnel, presumably.)

But my old boyfriend's new domestic bliss has changed the equation. Of course I need my own soul to face fifty, but don't I also need a partner and a friend?

Surely I could go on for another few years borrowing husbands. There are always plenty of them on loan. But that isn't the point. I may have my own houses, my own bank accounts, a wonderful daughter, and some degree of control over my future, but the truth is I feel I am adrift in the world. I can't control aging, nor the fate of my books. And I am lonely. I may not need a husband, but I sure do need a friend.

For the first time in my adult life I find myself thinking of my parents' marriage. I feel nostalgic for it as if for a marriage I once knew. My parents were friends at the end of the day—they giggled in bed and read aloud to each other from The New Yorker. They never seemed to tire of each other's laughter. I remember their bed covered with books and their animated arguments punctuated by S. J. Perelman riffs read aloud.

I am almost fifty and I have no one to read aloud to in bed. I have lovers and I have friends. But the friend who was also a lover has just gotten married. And that shines a spotlight on my loneliness.

Why are all the independent women I know alone? And why are all my men friends marrying younger women? I return to New York with some chink in my armor suddenly open. And when a friend wants to introduce me to a friend, I surprise myself by saying yes.

 

My parents' marriage, of course, is where it all begins. She was seventeen and he nineteen when they met in the Catskill Mountains. He was from Brownsville and she was from Washington Heights. His father and mother were Polish Jews with a German name: Weisman. Her father and mother were Russian Jews from England with a Russian name: Mirsky.

They fell in love over a drum. He, seeing she could paint (and thinking her foxy and hot), invited her to “paint his drum.” She, seeing he was handsome and blue-eyed and a good drummer, agreed. She painted his drum and flirted with him. He ingratiated himself into her bed. By summer's end, Eda Mirsky and Samuel Nathaniel (Seymour) Weisman decided to get married. They were very young and it was the Great Depression.

Her father said: “What? Marry a
barabanchik?”
(a drummer, in Russian).

His mother said: “I think she's using you.”

But pheromones are stronger than parental warnings. They got married in City Hall on March 3, 1933.

Their early years were tough. He worked all night in little boîtes—Bal Musette, Bal Tabarin—and she stayed home. Too many girl singers and too much reefer tempted him. Left alone till the wee small hours, she wondered if she had made a mistake. Her father was by now a prosperous portrait painter and commercial artist with a sprinkling of famous clients. There were Oriental rugs and bone china and a life very far from the Russian shtetl where my grandfather Mirsky was born.

Even during the Depression, my mother's parents were prosperous—though my grandfather had fled a boyhood of dire poverty in Odessa and my grandmother had, like so many grandmothers, married beneath her. She had been the daughter of a Russian forester and timber merchant, wooed and wed in Russian, in London, before the Great War. Her parents ran a grocery store in the East End of London until the wealth of their eldest son rescued them and they retired to his gentleman's farm in the country. So my mother's family had already begun their climb in the world when she married an impecunious musician and had to start all over again.

Plunged into the reality of being a poor troubadour's wife, my mother woke up—as my grandmother had before her. Marriage is never easy for the young. (It's even harder for the middle-aged.) My mother painted, worked in Bloomingdale's demonstrating art supplies, designed clothes and fabrics, while my father got his first job in a Broadway show—Cole Porter's
Jubilee—
where he played “Begin the Beguine” in the band on stage.

“I introduced that song,” he still brags.

Success was hovering just on the horizon. But when my mother was pregnant with her first child in 1937, she gave my father an ultimatum: show business or us.

“Did I ever tell you about the time,” she asks, “when Daddy brought home twenty showgirls and I was hugely pregnant with your older sister? Well, the girls were so beautiful and I was so pregnant that the next morning I got on my bicycle and rode all the way up Riverside Drive, vowing to ride and ride until I lost that baby.” She laughs. “I was eight months pregnant!”

But the baby wouldn't be lost. It hung on like a barnacle, as babies do. And my father did eventually quit show business.

How can anyone choose between love and work? (Women have been forced to do that for centuries, and finally we recognize the impossibility of the choice.) I know my father would have made a success of anything he set his mind to: He has that tenacity. But my mother resented his being a traveling troubadour when she had set aside being a famous artist for motherhood, and she was to win this war.

When my older sister was born, my mother, exhausted by the unrelenting toil of raising a baby, moved back to her parents' comfortable home. My father still worked nights and my mother still had plenty of admirers.

“How did I—a married woman with an infant—have all those admirers?” she asks rhetorically. “But I did.”

One was a doctor—someone with a real job. My mother contemplated divorce.

My father's brother came to take his clothes back to Brooklyn.

“Don't stay with him if you're not happy,” my grandmother (who had done just that in her marriage) told my mother. “I'll help you all I can.”

I was almost not to be.

But pheromones prevailed and my parents reunited. Seymour became a traveling salesman of tchotchkes. Eda got pregnant again. I was born in 1942.

“We are born and what happened before that is myth” V. S. Pritchett says in his autobiography, A
Cab at
the Door. In Speak, Memory, Vladimir Nabokov talks about an empty carriage on a porch, awaiting his birth. We marvel at the days before our coming to consciousness because, in truth, they predict our mortality (which it takes our whole lives to make peace with—if we ever do).

What if I were never born? What if that egg and that sperm had never met? Would it be worse than death? Or better? (I am heading toward that final annihilation of self—so I'd better decide this question soon. More time is behind me than ahead.)

I think of that hiatus in my parents' marriage as the time when I hovered, wondering whether I would be embodied at all. Called forth by their love—ambivalent like all loves—I came into the world a sickly child, with dehydrating diarrhea, a red, raised angioma on my neck, and an allergy to milk.

What time was I born? I always ask my mother, wanting to have my astrological chart done. (My birth certificate is lost. The hospital in which I was born has closed, and the records are not to be found in the city's archives.)

“Who knows?” she says. “It was the war. There were too few doctors. The nurse put an ether mask over my face to hide the fact that I had given birth before the doctor came. I bit the nurse's hand! I yelled, ‘The baby's already born! Don't you dare drug me!' ”

So I was born in the midst of feminist rage: My feisty mother bit the nurse's hand, refusing anesthesia.

I must have looked awful.

“Do we have to take it home?” my father is reported to have said on first seeing me. (I had either fallen out of the crib and been given that famous angioma—or else I was born with it. In any case, everyone agrees I was a mess.)

“All the babies on that ward died of infectious diarrhea,” my mother says.

“All?”

“I think so. You were the only survivor—so I was determined to keep you alive.”

Whether this epidemic was fatal to each and every baby or not, I am unable to verify. But the important thing is that my mother was—and is—convinced that I was the sole survivor of a baby plague.

Clearly disappointed I was not a boy, my father tried to make me into one, teaching me drums, how to shoot baskets, and contempt for all womanly limitations. For the longest time, I thought I was a boy in girl's clothing. When later various analysts hinted at something called “penis envy,” I shouted them down. I thought I had a penis. Why be envious?

“I loved you more because I had such a struggle to keep you alive,” my mother says. And then she tells again the old family tale of lactose-free milk reconnoitered on midnight runs and how I nearly “starved to death” and how she loved me despite the ugly crimson angioma—which miraculously shrank to nothing in the first two months, leaving a pink, towheaded baby girl.