Then Victor got an offer. Our fortunes lifted, as if from Fate: associate professorship, support for a lab and in New York no less. I may as well have drunk champagne the whole way down I-95, this glorious spring day. Victor clipped the car over to the Merritt Parkway, and both of us were happy and in love again, laughing, passing glances back and forth, fully knowing we were on our way.
And knowing I would, I regained my groove. Soon I was writing again, having plays produced. Small productions with meager budgets and students for personnel, but at least I was working. Plays produced, stories published. Yes, yes, yes! Though here in each citation I should note, Victor does deserve billing. For that which I know I’ll write later on, I’ll credit him now, because he did help immensely, he was involved in each stage of everything I wrote. Because Victor’s brain, analytically, even creatively, is a first-class engine, and finely tuned. He has plenty of sensitivity for detection, for seeing patterns and shapes (and yet how specifically it’s applied). And he loved me. It showed. So he deserves credit for his notes down the margins, his nights running out to fetch Chinese food, his patience for reading dialogue in bed some January midnight, and he still sees connections in a text I don’t pick up. Got to the point where on a dark day, alone at noon and not writing, I’d convince myself he was the better writer between us, if only Alzheimer’s didn’t need his gifts more than literature.
And in some cave inside, some deep heart of hearts he didn’t (doesn’t) see because it wasn’t (isn’t) on paper, he probably agreed (agrees). Oh, Victor believed in me as an artist, but to a point. He was timid. He identified my limitations privately, perhaps unconsciously, but I saw them in his edits, encouraging me to stay safe, to work inside the framework of my capabilities and to avoid regrets.
Framed by love, but no less belittling.
Sara Gardner was a late bloomer, one could say. In the spring of ’88, I was teaching theater studies part-time at Hunter, where somehow I wasn’t fired. Once, by anonymous complaint, I was brought up to peer review for presumed “malicious intent” in grading papers, and there wasn’t anything presumed about it. I loathed my students. I resented my colleagues. And of course I thought much worse of myself. I’d become a cartoon of the academic’s wife, a token artiste in silk floral scarves, a dilettante at ethnic dinners I labored to prepare from magazines for Victor’s esteemed colleagues, where here they’d won national medals—a Nobel winner one time—and I was asking who wanted more couscous.
Then I turned forty. I expected to hate turning forty, but it turned out much worse. Life was all tragedy, no comedy for a year. I thought my existence was finished, and then it wasn’t; there was still room to turn forty-one, and the humiliation became a fever collar around my neck. I couldn’t hide beneath enough black sweaters. I struggled to write anything meaningful, anything reasonably authentic to my life. All the clichés became personal. Did I lose interest in exercise? In sex? I couldn’t see why I’d ever want to use my body again. At one point I was in a salon ordering the stylist to shave off all my precious hair (she wouldn’t do it), and I started crying so intensely I had to be moved to the manager’s office. Eating and napping, however, or staying in the apartment, watching period dramas in the afternoon with a goblet of white wine, programs I’d previously recorded and already seen five times, there I excelled. Hell, I improved by the week.
And where was Victor? Where was my devoted husband? Still in the lab chipping away at his life’s work, working nine to eight, six days a week, the self-appointed superhero of public health. And when he wasn’t working, he was swimming or reading or insisting we see some chamber music quartet on tour from Budapest.
Of course there were good days, days we spent motoring up through the Hudson Valley, nights out at the movies, nights in bed with the lights off, just talking. But the bigger picture? How I saw the pattern at that point? Our marriage was a book written by authors in separate houses.
Then one weekend, six months after my birthday, Victor was away for a conference, and Saturday morning I woke up typing. I’d had an idea in a dream and I wrote a marathon through Sunday night. Like it was a question of stamina: Did I have it in me to go one more page? I kept quiet when Victor returned, I didn’t show him a thing. It felt very naughty and secret, like I was seventeen again, shielding what I’d written from Mother. For a month I got up at three in the morning, wearing my tattered bathrobe at the dining table, writing longhand. Soon, semiconscious, I had a monologue in two acts,
Woman Hits Forty.
And it was good. It was the best thing I’d ever written.
I showed it to a director friend and she loved it. Her lead actress loved it, she said I’d “stumbled into this big untouched heart” (how I loved the little note card she sent me; I still have it above my desk), the question of when women bloom and toward whose light. Maybe it was the era, but it resounded. Those first two weeks, seventy-five people down on Franklin Street were standing every night. Women were crying on the sidewalk: women my age and their teenage daughters. Then came Cheryl Cheney from
The New York Times,
stopping by unannounced one Thursday. After Friday morning’s review, investors seemed to materialize from the air itself.
“A feminist triumph written by Sara Gardner for women who didn’t know they were feminists.”
But look at Victor. Roll up the headaches and the excitement involved in trooping up Broadway, and see Victor instead, Victor who hadn’t noticed a thing those weeks in production until the review was in the newspaper, beside his cereal. Why? Because I’d left him out, and because he’d been too busy with a grant to attend the first performances. Because I didn’t want his help, I didn’t need his support. Probably because I was still furious over how easily he’d turned forty the year before, when it didn’t mean anything to him. When, worse, he hadn’t seen why it should be a big deal to me. “It’s a number, not a milestone,” he said at some dinner a few weeks after my birthday; we were out with a couple in their twenties, new employees from the lab. He added, “It’s your boomer self-regard. People last century were lucky to even make forty.”
This from he who was becoming better-looking with age. Who received daily affirmation of his brilliance, who went on ploddingly succeeding, whereas I could cry a house down. Me of the midlife crisis, sending away for BMW brochures.
The week before Broadway, I wasn’t sleeping. I was petrified into a permanent waking state. I couldn’t read the newspapers. I was convinced some other new show would exhaust the critics’ applause. Obviously Victor knew by then what I was up to (God, I write that as though I’m still guilty about it) and figured he’d been left out, but he didn’t say a word. He never would. He nursed his exclusion: the moping, the hunched shoulders, the earlier morning exits and later returns at night. In situations where normally he’d lead conversation, he went quiet. Where he’d call me on my shit or want in on whatever I was writing, he turned off, shut down, and went back to the lab.
But where I want to go here, where I foresaw myself going, sitting here staring at CVS checkout girls through the window, sitting here while Victor drives back to the lab, already forgetting we just fought, is to dinner.
Two nights before our final dress, a dinner out: me, Victor, and his best friend, Russell. An Italian restaurant on the Upper East Side. It was Russell’s idea, in fact, to celebrate my success. Because already he viewed it as a success, the fact that I’d reached Broadway.
Whereas some people saw only how it could flop.
It was a beautiful night, one of those soft May nights when Manhattan glitters.
“So where’s Victor?”
“Where do you think?”
We ordered wine and sat in the garden. Russell surprised me by asking how I was doing. Normally his self-interest rates its own ecosystem. But he pushed: “Sara, I mean it, how are you?”
And I can still feel him put his hand on top of mine, still remember thinking, God, I hate this movie. But suddenly I was tearing up. I was overwhelmingly sad, as if I’d been that way for a while but hadn’t realized it, and a cry came out as a shudder, a complete meltdown sitting on an imported Tuscan bench.
Victor was an hour and a half late. He apologized profusely, but by then I’d spilled my guts to Russell and I felt great and we were drunk and I don’t know that I noticed. Victor saw what was happening, of course, but he only said something like “Well, I see we’re drinking white” or “Don’t let me hold you guys back.” I don’t know that either of us paid much attention. Russell was openly flirting by that point: with the waitress, the hostess, and especially me. Every woman in the room recognized the situation. Certainly I encouraged him. I laughed louder at his jokes. I was forty years old, and damn if I didn’t want to feel sexy, if I didn’t like looking young in his eyes.
Then at some point Victor asked me pointedly, “So how was rehearsal?” And I remember sobering when he said it. Because all it took was the change in his voice. Between the appetizers and entrees, this quiet moment when his tone stood out for its openness, and so did his face, and I dived in, when with just that one little question he’d made us “us” again, the us I loved. Well, I took him up on it, made some dumb joke before getting to anything real, but just when I stopped joking, when Victor inquired again and pressed me and put his hand on the table near mine, this time asking something more specific, about a certain actress’s tendency to drop lines, Russell interrupted, wanting to know if Victor understood what a hot piece of ass he’d married.
Russell laughed at his own comment and started telling some story. A minute later, Victor excused himself to the restroom, and Russell took the opportunity to tell me what knockout proportions I had, like I was an apartment he wanted to rent.
“Honestly, Sara, you know if Victor wasn’t my best friend—”
Victor came back. The two of them spent the rest of dinner discussing stereo equipment.
How many cards has this taken?
Twelve cards.
I’m staring at the plastic wrapper from the cards balled up in the ashtray, threatening to uncrinkle and pop out.
I wonder if that night meant anything to Victor. If he ever thought of it again. If it was more than just another dinner out, another New York night, while for me it was an era collapsing by the time we got the check. An evening bigger than a decade.
Victor will never see these cards. I can already hear the Socratic inquiry, his careful investigations, to pry and soothe simultaneously. He’ll say I’ve got it wrong. He’ll say my remembering is incorrect, that I’m over-emphasizing, under-analyzing, the typical dramatist’s approach: emoting. Besides, he’s not coming to counseling again anyway. An hour ago, we had a fight in the parking lot about psychology, “pseudoscience.” He blew up, and one thing he didn’t see was that I loved it. Just to get him shouting, part of me was happy. A lot of me. That was psychological progress I’d pay triple for any day.
Victor listens to neurons, not people. Something he’ll find frustrating or unnerving about someone at a dinner party, he’ll label “interesting” and leave it at that. Right at the moment when anyone else would vent normal human frustration, Victor shuts down, or clasps his hands behind his back and observes and labels. As though to say, never get involved. People don’t change. You can’t bring about evolution, the point is to watch and ponder. And yes, in my exasperation there’s still part of me that likes that side in him, since it’s the opposite of my tendency to pounce or explode.
It was something I once wanted for myself: to step out of myself into the cool-blooded post.
But for all of Victor’s powers of analysis, he never turns them inward. I remember I once urged him to keep a diary. He said, “What would I write about? I don’t spend much time reflecting why I do anything.”
Woman Hits Forty
was a big success, up in lights nine months, a great run. The producers got paid, the actress got an Outer Critics Circle Award, and I found my voice and some big paychecks. Late bloomer, but I bloomed. I gave myself four hours at Saks. I called Mark, my new agent, out in Los Angeles.
First thing Mark asked me, “How come you’re not writing screenplays?”
Know what Victor said? “What do you know about writing screenplays?”
Regina’s town, Otter Creek,
where Indian campfires once attracted the sights of Mount Desert Island’s first European visitor, the French explorer Samuel de Champlain. Sara bought me an edition of his journals when we moved to Maine, so that I’d have an idea of the island’s history.
“This island is very high, and cleft into seven or eight mountains, all in a line,” Champlain wrote around 1600. “The summits of most of them are bare trees, nothing but rock. I name it l’Isle des Monts-déserts.”
In April, when I first met Regina, there was still a foot of snow on the ground. By five on a Friday, in the basin of a mountain range, her bedroom would be a glowing box, a lighthouse in the woods. I’d hang a right by the motel, go two miles on a dirt road, and turn up a gravel drive, and there at the top would be Regina’s cottage, with the sagging roof, shingles in the yard like litter. Shutters off their hooks. Her bedroom light would be on, first floor, southeast corner, and so would the porch light, and I’d walk inside without knocking, knowing the roommate was away, the curtain about to rise.
But that Friday, there’d been no invitation. No e-mail from Regina commanding me to attend. If La Loulou’s show was going up, someone else held the ticket. Russell’s plane would arrive in an hour, and I was still at the lab with my staff gathered for our weekly Friday status meeting, trying to stay focused.