Fear of Fifty (46 page)

I flew to Paris. When I went to pick up my luggage, I saw, through the glass barrier, this big bear of a man, waving madly at me, smiling. He had such an open face. When I met him outside the barrier, he couldn't stop saying how glad he was I'd come. When we got into the car he'd rented, he kept looking at me so hard that he continually drove up on the sidewalk. He never stopped saying “I'm so glad you came. I'm so glad you came.”

We checked into his favorite hotel, a little relais in a park in the center of the sixteenth arrondissement. Formerly a
maison de passe,
it had tiny rooms full of dreadful rococo furniture, but our suite looked out on a green garden.

“I need a bath,” I said. A bath tends to be my solution to everything.

Ken fussed around, running the bathwater, pouring in the piney green Vitabath, trying to help me unpack, bouncing around the tiny suite until I screamed, “Please sit still! You're driving me crazy!” He was so eager to please, it made me nervous.

Finally alone in the bath, I soaked and thought. What on earth was I doing here?

A knock at the door.

“Do you want some tea or coffee?” he asked. “Shall I order something?”

I was annoyed to be interrupted in my stew. But I yelled, “Coffee.”

When I got out of the tub, we sat down in the living room of the suite and drank the coffee.

“I love how comfortable you are with your body,” he said. “You just walk around the room dressed, half-dressed, undressed, and you're happy in your skin. I've never been with a woman like that.”

“What do you mean?”

“Usually they lock the door and put on makeup. Women are so afraid to be seen in their own faces.”

We talked. We went out for dinner at a local brasserie. We talked and talked and talked some more. I thought about how different my evening would have been if I'd gone to Venice. There would be lots of time spent phoning, arranging, canceling, arranging again. Then there'd be hot sex—and then good-bye. This was the opposite. We were at the beginning, not at the end of something. We walked and walked the streets of Paris. We talked. When we got back to the hotel, we talked some more. At some point, I thought, we're going to have to get sex out of the way, and then what? It was a Rubicon to cross, possibly a Waterloo.

“I haven't worn a condom in years,” he said, faking jollity and humor to cover his panic when the matter of sex arose. “I've been living with someone forever.” And indeed, the whole duty to apply the obligatory condom caused instant detumescence.

“So much for political correctness,” he said. I pretended to laugh. But I was in despair and so was he. When I awoke next morning with his erection pressing against me, I promptly gave myself a full-scale guilt attack about Piero to avoid even the possibility of sex.
Poor Piero,
I thought. How could I
do
this to
him?
How could I abandon him for another man?

Poor Piero?
Poor Piero must have had a succession of other women all the time I knew him, and I'd never forced
him
to wear a condom. (We have one set of rules for bad boys and another set of rules for good.)

What did I want? Did I want to go back to the gigolo gig? After all, it was heresy in my generation for first sex to be anything but magic, zipless, a marvel of chemistry. We had stopped believing in God and in her place we had substituted great instantaneous sex. When that proved problematic, we declared God dead. The Land of Fuck was our sacred country, and when it proved difficult of access, we declared ourselves marooned.

In the morning, thank heavens, Ken had a meeting. And I stayed home to write. 1 brooded a while, then called Piero in Venice. He seemed remarkably nonchalant that I hadn't come, and he muttered of projects he had to work on with his lady and how pressed he was for time. (He expected to see me that summer when I was due to rent my usual ramshackle palazzo.)

When Ken came back, I was delighted to see him. He had this sunny smile that made you glad to be alive. He handed me a smallish packet. I opened it. It was a first edition of
La Fin de Chéri
by Colette.

“I wanted you to have something to remember this weekend by,” he said, “in case it's our last.”

“How did you know that's one of my favorite books!” I exclaimed.

“I don't know. It just seemed to be calling to me from the shelf.”

How could he know that I measured all the stages of my life against Colette's progress? I had had my Willy, my Chéri—was he to be that impossible man who also becomes a
friend?
Colette saw that as the ultimate stage of a woman's life. He had bought this book, thinking of it as a parting keepsake. He knew it was salvage time.

But what salvage! Somehow he had picked the only book that would have opened my heart.

Even now it amazes me that we persevered.

Because the truth is that what I found with Ken was the one thing I did not catalogue in my sex chapter: empathy. I thought I knew everything, but I did not know this. Men are as oppressed by macho mythology as women are. They are
terrified
of having to be studs. In the name of liberation we have reduced them to studs or nothing. We have insisted on gigolos and then cried that gigolos were all we got. “Chemistry” has become the new tyranny for our supposedly sexually liberated generation. But chemistry can be blocked by closeness.

What I learned with Ken is that some of us fear love even more than we desire it and we have learned to use sex as a way to banish love.

An odd alignment of the stars led Joan Collins to be in Paris at the same time we were. She invited us to come and see her filming an interview for French TV. Afterward we were all to go to Brasserie Lipp for dinner.

The show Joan was doing required her to be interviewed wearing a fabulous pink Chanel suit, in a setting of Didier Aaron antiques. For some reason, she was speaking of antiques and how much fun it would be to buy them. I sat and watched her consummate professionalism. Here was a woman who had beaten the system, survived all her husbands, rescued her children, thumbed her nose at a world that laughed at older women (and treated actresses as disposable commodities). She had wound up with the best revenge: living well. In a sane world, she'd be a role model, not a target for other women to attack. But feminists were as hard on her as male chauvinists. Why? Because she wore makeup? Because she dared to play a sexy older woman? Because, like the actress she was, she knew how to make an entrance?

After the taping, Joan, her friend Robin, Ken, and I were walking toward the Hotel Bristol for tea. An American couple spotted us—Joan and I walking ahead of the men. The woman stopped and exclaimed, “There's Joan Collins!”

“Which one?” the husband asked.

Such is fame.

That night at Lipp, we made a merry entourage. After her ordeal by press, Joan did not want to be photographed with her boyfriend, Robin Hurlstone, so she asked Ken to be her beard. She talked to him and I talked to Robin and the paparazzi were suitably confused as we entered. Now they were massing in the street outside the restaurant. (No wonder the paparazzi hate the celebrities on whom they feed. They are always outside waiting in the cold while the prey is warm inside, eating.)

Being around celebrities of Joan's wattage always makes me grateful to be merely a writer. I may be recognized for brief periods when I am promoting a book, but the rest of the time I am invisible, making notes.

Somewhere in the middle of that very merry (though rather too public) dinner, Joan, her secretary, and I all went downstairs to the tiny bathroom.

“He's
rather
dishy,” said Joan of Ken. “And he does seem clever enough for you.” She rolled her enormous eyes.

Since I was trying to do
anything
in my power to get away from Ken at that point, it gave me pause that Joan found him “dishy.” I kept thinking of leaving Paris and flying to Venice, but then I'd remember I had nothing to fly there for.

It is hard to open yourself to someone who might really love you. I kept trying to drive Ken away and he kept passing the test by staying.

He was forever trying to do things for me—from running my bath to feeding me snacks. I remember the two of us bouncing around that tiny suite like boxers in a ring.

“Don't you believe that anyone will ever love you unless you do and do and do for them!” I screamed at him in exasperation.

That stopped him.

“No,” he said.

“Well—you are lovable,” I shouted. “The trouble is—
you
don't believe it.”

He started to cry. He lay back on the bed with tears streaming down his face. I threw my arms around him.

“You
are
lovable, you
are
,” I said. And, both of us weeping, we made love that night for the first time.

That was how our relationship began. If I were a bookie, I wouldn't have bet on it.

A few weeks later, back in the States, he took me to his house in Vermont for a weekend. It was too stormy to fly, so we drove up Route 91 to Brattleboro and then made our way into the Green Mountains. In Putney, we stopped for dinner. The conversation between us flowed as always and I grew terrified of how close we were getting.

“I've been waiting for you all my life,” he said.

“I'm terrified,” I said, finally knowing it.

“Of what?”

“If I love you, I'll try to please you all the time and then I won't be able to write,” I said. “I have to be free to be honest in my writing, and that has to come before everything. I can't be protecting a man.”

“Write whatever you need to write about me, about everything,” he said. “I'll never fault you for that. That's why I love you.”

“You say that
now
—but it will change. It always changes. Men say one thing when they pursue you and another thing when they trap you. You probably believe what you're saying now, but it will change, I promise you.”

“No, it won't,” he said. “Besides, I'm not
men
.” He grabbed a napkin.
“I release you
—
from everything,”
he wrote on it. And then:
“Write whatever you like, always.”
And he added his signature and the date.

I still have this document in a safe.

But the truth was that I was more afraid of myself than I was of him. If I loved him, would I censor my writing to please him? If I married him, would I force my writing to be married as well?

This was my dilemma at first—for we did get married, three months later, in Vermont. I had to fight my own tendency to try to please by censoring the truth.

“If you censor anything,” he said, “you'll eventually get mad and leave me. And I'd rather have you tell the truth and
stay.”

It was my particular craziness to think I always had to choose between my writing and life. Perhaps it is every writer's craziness. I was still fighting my mother's and grandmother's war.

Before we got married, our parents made a little dinner at a country inn. Ken then drove his parents back to the Sugarbush Inn and I drove Molly. Somewhere I took a wrong turn and started over the mountains toward New York. The rain was sheeting down. I drove and drove.

Molly was razzing me as usual about my rotten sense of direction.

“You know, Mom,” she said, “you don't
have
to get married unless you
want
to.”

At that moment, Ken and his father drove up behind us.

 

It was only after we got married that we discovered all the reasons our marriage was inevitable. His natural Prozac offsets my habitual gloom. He has my father's mad tenacity. He never gives up a fight. He is possessed by the Mad Joke Demon. He wakes up laughing in the middle of the night. He needs to love me more than he needs to push me away. I need to love him more than I need to feel abandoned and deprived.

Why did we get married instead of just living together? Because we needed to know that when the tough stuff came we would stay and work it out. And there have been all kinds of tough stuff. Sexual problems, money problems, the unique difficulties of stepfamilies. Sometimes we fight like hellcats and make love like lovers. Sometimes we turn our backs on each other. Even when we are screaming and throwing things, we are friends. Who is the man and who is the woman? Sometimes neither of us knows. The marriage is androgynous—like the closest friendships. It will keep.

We both accept the fact that, in trying to have a marriage of equals, we are making history (like the rest of our pioneer generation). We both accept the fact that we do not own each other. We are both able to say anything to each other—and we have had fights so black that it seemed the sun would never rise again.

But at the bottom of all the gloom, there is a sense that we are responsible for each other—if not for each other's happiness. There is empathy, admiration, respect for the other's intelligence, and honesty. I cannot imagine writing a book as naked as this if not for this marriage.

Seeing me stuck, Ken will say, “So what if they attack you or make fun of you—you've lived through
that
before. It doesn't erase your words.”

And I realize that I've lived through everything and have come out the other end, laughing and reading aloud to my best friend in bed.

Women are the cowards they are because they have been semislaves for so long. The number of women prepared to stand up for what they really think, feel, experience with a man they are in love with is still small. Most women will still run like little dogs with stones thrown at them when a man says: You are unfeminine, aggressive, you are un-manning me.