Wallflower at the Orgy (19 page)

But otherwise, during the week, I see only women and their children and their mother’s helpers and their styrofoam containers holding sandwiches and Vienna wafers and plums and soft drinks. Thus far, I have sat with the Mommies, the Huntresses, and the Climbers. The Mommies all wear wretched, wrinkled one-piece bathing suits and express concern over violence in fairy tales, the price of chuck at the Bohack, and the difficulty of boycotting grapes during months when it is necessary to pack lunches daily. Much talk of Sally and Portia and what horrid children they are. Or what horrid mothers they are. I forget which. The Huntresses are three psychoanalysts’ wives who drink Bloody Marys and discuss divorce all day long. One of them—who is aptly named Diana—has already broken off with her husband. She bought a new bathing suit at Jax in Southampton and wanders up and down the beach with scarves trailing, searching for a new man. Last week she and a girl friend went to L’Oursin, the discothèque-barge, but all they emerged with were headaches from the strobe lights and a joint of marijuana a pitying eighteen-year-old boy
slipped them. Diana is undaunted and has her eye on an apparently single creature who looks like a Czech film maker and smokes Gauloises. No one knows who he is.

The Climbers are all married to Wall Street types, wear matching bathing-suit-and-jacket ensembles, and spend the day discussing how they can meet all the celebrities in the area. Their usual ploy is to introduce their children to the children of celebrities in hopes of meeting their parents. “Do you know who that is?” one of them said to me, pointing to a three-year-old child who was busy eating sand. “No,” I said. “That is Sean McCourt,” she explained, “the Broadway playwright’s wife’s son by her second marriage.” “Oh,” I said. The Climbers spend two days a week in Southampton—one having their hair done at Lupe’s, the other exercising at a private club. All of them have calluses on their hands from working out on trapezes—a brutal fact that Ellie and I discovered and thereupon canceled plans for Kounovsky’s.

Adam and Amanda love the beach, partly because they are allowed to go to the bathroom in the ocean owing to the lack of facilities. Amanda, who managed to build a twig house out of poison ivy, has made friends with Julie Henry, the daughter of Harry Henry, the Broadway producer. “
HARRY HENRY BUYS N.Y. MATRON’S NOVEL FOR MUSICAL
: ‘All I Have to Do Now Is Write the Book,’ Says Housewife.”

Sherman Rogin on the beach again. This time I’m positive he winked at me. And I could swear he deliberately walked
his dog past me several times just to sneak extra looks at my Rudi Gernreich black bikini with plastic inserts. Ellie says he is having an affair with Rustine Pepper, the wife of the
Village Voice
columnist, in whose driveway his dog was seen recently tethered. What’s more, she says that the dog, a German shepherd, is definitely the prototype of the Doberman pinscher which developed such fascinating fetishistic tastes in his last novel. “
JEWISH NOVELIST BREAKS UP LAWYER’S MARRIAGE
. Guard Dog Keeps Angry Husband Away from East Hampton Lovenest.”

Our first rainy weekend. Frank arrived Thursday for his first three-day weekend since the Fourth, expecting to find cheerful babies and a tanned and terrific me. We sat in the house with wet sheets and mildewed air. Kids screamed all day. We stared Ingmar Bergman–like at each other all night. There was a movie playing in town but we had seen it in the city in April. There was a movie at the Bridgehampton Drive-In, but it starred Doris Day. Sunday, in desperation, we went relentlessly antiquing. Ended up at Ballasses in Amagansett and bought three thoroughly mysterious objects good only for trailing plants over. Frank left this morning, cursing me, the Long Island Rail Road, and his brand-new bathing suit, and blaming all of us for the weather. It makes sense. He’s a rational man. He knows there’s no use blaming God.

A party at Hank Henry’s. I met his wife—on the Coast Guard beach, where else?—and she invited us. Unbelievable house—eight thousand dollars for the summer, one second from the beach, and four in help, including a waiter who served drinks with a toothpick in his mouth. Everyone who was anyone was there, my dear. Fags. Lesbians, Lyricists. Composers. Actresses. Playwrights. Authors. What we were doing on the list I don’t know—I think we were being used in about the same way a florist uses green leaves to fill out a vase of roses. I was so nervous about going that I spent a fortune on a long chiffon culotte outfit that was absolutely transparent and made me look as if I had nothing on underneath. Frank thought it was obscene, but Sherman Rogin loved it. I told him how much I admired his work. He told me how much he admired my ensemble. A wonderful evening. Though, now that I think of it, there wasn’t really much reason to have been worried about it: the conversation dwelled mainly on the price of real estate in the area. Today is the mother’s helper’s day off. I’m taking the kids to the game preserve. Afterward, I think we’ll go to the bakery in Southampton—which just happens to be next door to the bookstore where I can buy the collected works of S. Rogin.

A night with the ladies. Incredible. For one thing, lots of drinking. I felt so old—I always associated drinking-with-the-girls
with the ladies tippling martinis at Schrafft’s. For another thing, the conversation: they talked of nothing but which beach wives were being unfaithful, with whom, and how. It seems that the Czech film maker has turned out to be an advertising illustrator and has taken up with a blonde surgeon’s wife from Passaic who is out for the summer while her unsuspecting husband does open-heart surgery all week at Downstate Medical. Meanwhile, the word from Bridgehampton is that a television newscaster and his wife have switched mates with a couple of anthropologists across the street and are living happily ever after. Everyone searched her mind for more stories of infidelity that led to happy endings. No one could think of any. All that I could think of were the tales of indiscretion I used to hear during my summers in the city—like the one about the Random House editor seen necking on the grass in Central Park with a copy reader—but no one seemed to want to hear tales about what might be going on in town. I suppose no one wants to think about it. I know I don’t. The ladies insist there is as much hanky-panky out here as there is in the city. Ellie says it isn’t so. Not that she would have any idea: the high point of her summer was the night a peacock escaped from a private game collection and spent the night honking and defecating on her patio. I was so depressed by the evening and all the girl talk that I called Frank when I got home. He was out. “
LAWYER ARRESTED IN EAST SIDE ORGY
: Claims He Was Driven to It After Five Weeks as Summer Bachelor.” All the ladies agree that if their husbands were unfaithful to them, they would know. I wonder.

It rained again all weekend. Frank has taken to muttering something about how he is paying $100-a-minute for a vacation in the rain. Adam and Amanda both have summer colds, with little red noses on their little red faces. Worms have struck the tomatoes and a rabbit ate the dill. I am fighting back with chicken wire and insecticide.

This is not my week. Today the doorbell rang, and standing there was a fresh-faced seventeen-year-old girl. “I hear there’s somebody young living here,” she said. I went to get the mother’s helper. And all my illusions about how I still manage to look seventeen vanished.

Sherman Rogin called this morning and asked if I’d like to have dinner with him. Tonight. I know I shouldn’t have accepted, but I couldn’t help it. Frank has been postponing the two weeks he was supposed to spend out here—to the point that I’ll be lucky if he gets out for a four-day Labor Day weekend. And in the meantime, it’s hard not to feel that my weekdays are spent in a world of ladies and little people. It’s the Indian reservation, with all the men off making war and wampum and all the ladies sitting home drying ears of corn.
Of course, after Sherman called, I felt so dreadful about accepting I decided to call him back and tell him I couldn’t possibly go through with it. I couldn’t reach him. I thought of Frank, calling me every night, not going to see the new Steve McQueen movie because he knew I would want to see it when I got back to town, making last weekend so nice by deigning to play tennis with me and taking me to Gordon’s for crispy duck and chocolate cake. I called him in town, all weepy and ready to make some muddled confession. When I got through to him, he was so annoyed at being interrupted in the middle of a meeting that I determined to go through with the date after all. “
LAWYER’S WIFE ARRESTED FOR BITING AUTHOR ON HEAD
: ‘I Couldn’t Help It,’ She Said Later. It Looked Like Black Grapes.’ ” Actually, I doubt that anything will happen. We’re just having dinner. You can have dinner with a man if you’re married and have it not mean anything at all. He’s probably just blocked on his new novel and wants to talk to a sympathetic soul. And if, in the course of the evening, he happens to attack and rape me—well, we’re civilized people. I could hardly yell for the police. I’d just have to submit.

Well. He picked me up at 7:30. I had spent two hours figuring out what to wear. I couldn’t very well appear in my diaphanous culottes. So I wore a little white skirt and a little red shirt and I looked just like the Peck & Peck girl I am. We drove to Montauk, to a fish place overlooking the water. And there I was, sitting with a glamorous, sensual,
potentially violent novelist, who spent most of the evening talking about his mother and whether he should trade in his car for a Fiat and where you can buy the best clams in the area. Then we went for a drink at a bar in East Hampton and talked some more. About my mother’s helper and her prospects for higher education. About Adam’s day camp. About the prices at the Farmer’s Market in Amagansett. And nothing happened. That’s right. I didn’t know whether to be elated or disappointed. I think he expected me to be whatever he thought a lady in a transparent dress would be, and I thought he would be some kind of romantic madcap. I don’t know. In any case, he dropped me off at 11:30 and
chucked me under the chin
. Like I was his kid sister. There I was, home before midnight, feeling completely foolish and horribly guilty. As well I might have. Under the right circumstances—whatever the right circumstances might have been—I might have let that man have his way with me. I might have become pregnant by him. And produced a child that was clearly not my husband’s. “
PATERNITY SUIT INTRODUCES GENETIC LAW
: Blue-Eyed Lawyer Accuses Blue-Eyed Wife of Going Elsewhere for Brown-Eyed Child.” Frank is coming out today on the 5:34, and I’m probably overdoing things, but I’m planning to bring martinis to the train. If he smoked a pipe or wore slippers, I’d bring them too. And I’ve promised myself to ask him all about his cases. And cook lobsters, even though I hate dropping the poor things into boiling water. Monday I begin Jane Austen.

We’re back in New York. I almost cried as we drove across the Triborough Bridge. I’m so happy to be back. If I never have to clean another grain of sand out of a car, or remove tar from my kids’ feet with turpentine, or set foot in the town of East Hampton again, I’ll be absolutely overjoyed. Last week I told Frank I’d like to go to Europe next summer. He nodded. “What are we going to do with the kids?” he said. “Leave them with your mother,” I said. He said he would think about it. And then, before my eyes, he picked up the real-estate section and began scanning Houses for Sale—Long Island. Hmmmmm. “
LAWYER’S WIFE BECOMES L.I. HOSTESS WITH MOSTEST
: East Hampton Home Becomes Salon for Summering Artists and Writers.” Hmmmmm. Well, I suppose there are worse fates.

Q
:
First of all, I understand you’ve been in New York for three straight weeks, and I wondered how it happened that you were in one place for that long a time.

NICHOLS
:
Well, I didn’t go anywhere. We start shooting
Catch-22
next month, and the producer and Buck Henry (the screenwriter) and some of the people on the picture came here, because I didn’t want to go to California, and they indulged me.

Q
:
When I interviewed you about Buck Henry, you told me someone once asked you about California and you said you had found peace in Hollywood.

NICHOLS
:
That was a joke. Buck asked me that—that’s how we met. He said, “Do you like it here?” And I said, “Yes. Here under the shadow of this great big tree, I have found peace.” It was at a party at Jane Fonda’s house and was, in fact, in the shadow of a great tree.

Q
:
Do you find Hollywood not conducive to working?

NICHOLS
:
Living, I would say.

Q
:
Most people say it’s easier to live there.

NICHOLS
:
Well, yes it is. But who says that’s good?

Q
:
I wanted to ask about
Catch-22
, because I just saw Joseph Heller’s
We Bombed in New Haven
, which has more or less the same theme, and it seemed a little old-fashioned and World War Twoish. I wondered if you thought
Catch-22
was still timely?