Fear of Fifty (44 page)

—Enid Bagnold, Autobiography

 

 

I met my husband on a street corner, nearly running him down with my car. I was picking him up for a blind date (arranged by a mutual friend who is a humorist) and I certainly knew I didn't want to be trapped in a blind date's car.

At dinner, he inhaled his food in less than two minutes flat, and talked at the same time. I was trying to remember the Heimlich maneuver—though perhaps he would have preferred another maneuver. I must have liked him because I let him monologue all night. Usually
I
monologue.

At that point I still had various snake-hipped studs on various continents, and I didn't think I
needed
a husband, though I certainly needed a friend. I'm embarrassed to admit this, but I married him five months later. We sailed the Mediterranean for our honeymoon. Then we got to know each other. I now recommend longer courtships.

Even now, we have laryngitis from screaming at each other: the dirty little secret of a durable marriage.

I'll never divorce him—how can I, he's a divorce lawyer—but I may just shoot him. This is the way two people know they're mated.

He seems to want the best for me (and I for him). His prison record cannot be found in any computer. He has—gasp—“good character,” as my mother might have said if she'd ever said such things. I hate to write anything good about this marriage, because it's a known rule of life that just as a “happy couples” piece in any magazine causes immediate divorce, writing good things about your mate in a book causes marital problems. (So does writing bad things.)

Somehow, after our first date, Ken and I found ourselves talking to each other wherever in the world we were. I went to California to see my agent, who was living there briefly, and without really meaning to, I called Ken. I went to Italy, supposedly to attend an Umbrian cooking school, but really to see an unavailable lover who moved heaven and earth not to see me for more than one night—and I called Ken. I waited for the unreliable Umbrian phone to ring and it was always Ken. I debated about going to Venice to see the other one and instead made a date in Paris with Ken. My clever husband-to-be had actually wired me a ticket to Paris, whereupon I amazed myself by flying to meet an available man when I had an unavailable man waiting in Italy. Something must have changed in my tiny masochistic mind, or else I was—horrors!—in
love.

But I didn't want to be in love. I only wanted to be in
like.
Love had never proved anything but trouble. As Enid Bagnold said, it didn't stand the wear and tear. So when I met Ken, I decided I was through with love. In the past, I had usually gotten married with my fingers crossed.

The first night I met Ken, I was just back from that wedding in St. Moritz where my best (male) friend, the beautiful Roman, had married a clever, beautiful blonde princess—with the
von
and
zu
to prove it. She was twentysomething. I was fortysomething. He was thirty-something. Somehow that made me happy to meet a man my own age. And I liked the way Ken looked: like a bear stumbling into a campsite in Yellowstone.

A big, tall, disheveled-looking man with a black mustache and beard, a full head of black hair (going silver at the edges), and a three-piece suit with a red bow-tie, Ken had the feel of a friendly animal sniffing the air. His eyes were brown and warm. He seemed to have to collapse his legs (like folding umbrella spines) in order to get into my car. He turned and smiled at me like a cat staring at a saucer of cream.

“Helllllo,” he said, clearly relieved. Was he expecting Vampira or Boadicea or a spear-carrying Amazon queen with one breast?

My friend the humorist, Lewis Frumkes, had told me he was about my age. And smart. And nice. “A rare combination,” Lewis said. “Usually they're smart or nice, but not both.”

“He's not, I hope, an eligible single man?”

Lewis was baffled by this phrase—as well he might be. How could he know I hated “eligible single men”—who usually proved to be work-addicted and sexophobic and wanted you to settle the prenup on the first date? I'd long ago decided that faithless Italians, unemployed actors, underaged WASP heirs, and married men were sexier.

My analyst analyzed this as an allergy to marriage—which was really an Oedipal crush on my adoring father. She was big on advice though she always protested she gave none. It was clear whom she approved of and whom she did not.

“Where is he
now?
” she always said when you made a reference to a man who was rich or famous, or both, whom you'd dated, even briefly, in the past. Her ears perked up like those of an Edith Wharton matron.

She looked at me as if my itinerant actors and straying husbands were
trayfe.

She wanted me married, and getting credit cards rather than dispensing them. She thought I flung myself like pearls before pigs. She thought I valued myself too little. Maybe I did. But I liked sex, and most of the so-called eligible men were scared to death of it.

“If I were single, would
I
be eligible?” Lewis asked.

“Definitely
not
,” I said, laughing.

He looked perplexed, not knowing whether this was an insult or a compliment.

 

“I told Lewis I didn't
want
to meet a celebrity,” Ken said. “But then
he
said: ‘She's not like that.”'

“You mean you were
judging
me before you met me?”

“Everyone's always judging everyone,” he said, pushing the car seat back and extending his legs. “Every time I negotiate with other lawyers, it's a cock-measuring contest. You know that. Your books are all
about
that.”

“So why were you reluctant to meet me?”

“Probably fear. I thought you'd be a man-eater. It's clear you're not.”

Was this an insult or a compliment? Who could say? I knew at once he was honest and extremely nervous. He couldn't sit still. Like Tigger, he seemed bigger because of the bounces.

I parked the car in a garage off lower Fifth Avenue and we walked to a horrendously overpriced downtown restaurant—about to be a casualty of the late-eighties bust.

He refused the first table, and the second. We sat down at the third. A native New Yorker, I figured.

“No—Great Neck,” he said, “but Central Park West when I was a baby. I remember throwing ration coupons—red points—out the window, or they remember it. I was a wartime baby.”

So was I, I thought. Should I say it? Or was I expected to lie about my age? In my forties I still hadn't made up my mind. My analyst believed in not telling. I disagreed. Who am I if not a person born in the middle of World War II? My age is part of who I am. But women, even desirable women, are always afraid of seeming undesirable. Honesty takes a long time. Undecided about how honest to be, I let him talk. I didn't do my usual rambunctious audition piece, nor did I sing for my supper. Our first date had no trace of the New York verbal duel of
Can you
top
this?

Ken told me the story of his life, from the ration coupons on. He sketched in his parents, his schools, his first jobs—journalism, film—becoming a lawyer. He told me of two ex-wives, an adored stepdaughter, a long relationship that had just ended, a love for airplanes and rare-book collecting. It all tumbled out of his mouth with much selfdeprecation. And much bravado. Not unlike my own.

He was not hiding from me. A lot of the men I knew were hiding and didn't even know it.

I was bemused by his being a pilot. The novel I'd delivered to a publisher that very afternoon (and had spent the last three years struggling with) ended with Isadora Wing marrying an amateur pilot, her fourth husband. It was a total invention. I had never even
dated
an amateur pilot. Isadora simply
needed
to marry a pilot and take flying lessons to overcome her fear of flying forever.

Any Woman's Blues
opened with her death. She had left a last manuscript to be published posthumously. This tome fell into the hands of an utterly humorless feminist hackademic who took all Isadora's jokes literally and objected to them politically. But Isadora was really not dead. She had merely disappeared into the South Pacific like Amelia Earhart. But unlike Amelia, she was able to save herself. She returned to Connecticut to become a poet again—disappeared to the world, that is, but not to herself.

My unconscious had devised this automyth of aerial-poetic rebirth because I tend to make metaphors of the conflicts I am living. When I began
Any Woman's Blues
I felt dead. Disgusted with my public persona, I never wanted to write another Isadora book, so I wantonly killed off my most famous heroine. But as I wrote, she came back to life, thus so did I. We are saved by our own creations.

And here I was, meeting an amateur pilot on the same day I delivered the book. All authors know that any book is a casting of runes, a reading of cards, a map of the palm and heart. We make up the ocean—then fall in. But we also write the life raft. And we can blow healing breath into our creatures' mouths.

For all my attempts to kill my alter ego, Isadora, she remained stubbornly unkillable. So was I. Now all I had to do was learn to fly.

I could be friends with this man,
I thought, as he talked about why he loved flying.

“It's freedom,” he said, “a defiance of limits.”

“How did you get to be so honest?” I asked.

“What's the alternative?” he asked. “It's now or never.”

 

The first date was on a Wednesday night. I dropped him off at his apartment in the East Sixties and sped home to Connecticut—where Molly and Margaret and Poochini were ensconced for spring vacation.

He called the next morning at ten. He was not playing games.

“I had a great time with you.”

“So did I,” I said.

Then, panicked at having given away
that
much, I shut up. I had learned from my various noncommittal swains not to gush. It was dangerously uncool.

“How about next Saturday?” he asked.

“How about it?”

“Will you go out with me?”

“I don't go out Saturday nights,” I said matter-of-factly. “I'm in the country on the weekends.... I write—”

“So I'll come to the country—”

“No you
won't,
I said.

“Why not?”

“I don't invite new men to my house.... It's against my religion.”

“So—convert.”

“Not so fast,” I said.

There was an awkward pause while we both contemplated our first power struggle.

“I'll meet you in New York,” I finally said.

“Great! Take the train in and I'll pick you up at Grand Central. Then I can drive you home.”

“No,” I said fiercely (I never wanted to be without a car with a new man). “I'll drive in and meet you.”

“Don't do that. Where will you
park?
”

“I'll park at my garage—or I'll get a driver. That's it-I'll get a driver so I can zoom back and see my kid in the morning.”

“I'll drive you back—I love to drive.”

“No you won't,” I said.

“Okay—however you like. Just as long as you show up.”

“Why shouldn't I show up?”

“You might panic,” he said. “People do.”

 

Did I think about him much after that call? No. I knew better than to start thinking about any man at that point.

My days were consumed with figuring out when to call Venice, which weekends my current married boyfriend's wife was away, and endlessly revising
Any Woman's Blues—
even though I'd handed it in. (I am one of those writers whose editors have to snatch the manuscript out of their hands.) I was also working on the musical of Fanny
Hackabout-Jones,
researching a book on Henry Miller, and making notes for a new novel. In the middle of all this, one of my more reticent suitors showed up, after an absence of four months.

He sent me a birthday present—an Indian miniature of a dancing goddess—and he followed with a call. What was I doing for my birthday ? he wanted to know. It was as if he had intuited I was unavailable. Otherwise he wouldn't have asked.

I told him that Ken and Barbara Follett were coming to Connecticut for my birthday (which fell on Easter Sunday that year). He asked if he could join us. I said I'd call them and see how they felt.

“Which guy is
this?”
Follett wanted to know, having seen me six months before in Venice with Piero. And then he laughed. “Of course, invite him too. I'd like to see how he compares with the other.”

“Do we know this one?” Barbara asked. For the past few years, I had been schlepping through London with all manner of escorts—married and single. My friends were always intrigued but also fiercely protective of me. Barbara once asked one of my swains point-blank: “Are you
married?
” He was a handsome Portuguese historian I'd met at a conference in Rome. He had no
idea
what to say to such a query.

“I suppose I am,” he said sheepishly.

Barbara gave him a withering look.

“Let's have a look at this one,” said Barbara on the phone. “Let's see how he paints Easter eggs anyway.”

That weekend, we really
were
painting Easter eggs in Connecticut. We sat at the big round dining room table with Molly, doing self-portraits in oils on boiled eggs.

“How you see yourself says something about who you are,” said Barbara, who is an expert palm-reader, face-reader, people-reader.