My heroines were Simone de Beauvoir, Virginia Woolf, Elizabeth I of Englandâchildless queens of literature and power. It was clear to me that the renunciation of weak female indulgence in the muck of maternity was the price of intellectual excellence. My diaphragm was the keeper of my flame, of my brain, my independence.
If the choices I had were Betty Crocker or Elizabeth I, I wasted no time whatever about which to choose. Maternity was a trap, had been for my mother, my grandmother, women throughout history. Even before Mary McCarthy's
The Group
came out, I had been to the Margaret Sanger Clinic for my diaphragm. It was a freshman year initiation ritual at Barnard. The only uncertainty seemed to be about whether or not you first had to go to Woolworth's for a wedding ring. I selected the option of wearing white kid giovesâas if I were being confirmed.
When my first husband proved schizophrenic, I congratulated myself for my prescience in not getting pregnant. But the pregnancy terror rarely let me rest. Every month was the pit and the pendulum. I noted my periods in my Week-at-a-Glance and went crazy if I was one day late. Control, control, control. It was a woman's only way to stay in charge.
Allan and I had never discussed babies before we were married. And after we married we never discussed
anything.
But soon after we arrived in Germany, I began to believe he was an alien creature. I could never breach the wall that separated usâso I could never imagine making a baby with him. I failed to
conceive
it, thus failed to conceiveâa thing some women can do with only certain men, not others. I don't think we even tried until the end, when I knew I was leaving and, in a spasm of guilt, wanted to entrap myself. By then, I was already out the door.
But Jon always felt like flesh of my flesh. We were destined to have Molly. I saw her hovering over the L.A. smog the night we met at his parents' house and talked all night on Mulholland Drive.
“Do it, Mom,” she said. “Here I come!”
“Wait a bitâwhoever you are,” we said.
Three years later, we welcomed her.
How did someone with such a fear of losing control manage to get pregnant?
The way was paved with stray dogs.
By then, we had moved to Connecticut, bought a house with five bedrooms, and moved in with our New York ficus tree and our store-bought bichon frise, acquired on Lexington Avenue, near Blooming-dale's, before we became animal welfare converts. Or before I did.
I got animal welfarism by osmosis (or brainwashing) from our friendship with June Havoc. Yesâshe's still
alive,
darling Baby June, Gypsy Rose Lee's sister, she of the perfect Norwegian nose (modified by forties Hollywood), living in the perfect Miss Havisham Connecticut house with a menagerie of one-eyed, lame, and crippled dogs, three-legged cats, arthritic donkeys, pigs with diabetes, and swans with broken wings.
She calls them “the kids,” calls her lair for them the Old Actors' Homeâand takes care of them with such devotion that they may indeed stand up on their hind legs and start reciting
Hamlet
at any moment. June, whom we had met on one of those “free” cruises (which turns out not to be so free since fans chase you around B Deck with nephews' manuscripts, and elderly parties who are translating Omar Khayyám into Urdu or redoing the Oz books in end-stopped couplets and consequently need “a good New York agent” accost you in the neon discotheque at 3:00 A.M. to discuss “the New York publishing scene”).
June was aboardâalong with a host of other new or slightly used celebrities.
Jon and I confided in her that we had been househunting all over the United States this bicentennial yearâfrom Lake Tahoe to Wyoming to Santa Fe to Islamorada to Key West to the Berkshiresâand we were so fed up that we were about to move back to California, to Big Sur this time, or Napa, or even Berkeley.
June's eyes lit up!
“Come to Weston,” she said. “I'll find you a house.”
And she did. And helped to populate it. Because of June, I was forever running off to nearby animal shelters when the call came that euthanasia day was drawing near. June and I would do local TV (when local TV showed up) to advertise the adorable doomed animals, and when local TV did not show up, we'd usually go home with abandoned animals ourselves.
On one such jaunt, Jon and I fell in love with Buffyâor rather, Buffy fell in love with Jon. The big red muttâwho looked like Little Orphan Annie's dog, Sandyâfollowed him everywhere around that doggie Auschwitz, and when he refused to take her, began howling like a coyote at the full moon.
“Darling,” said June, “I promise you'll never regret it. If she doesn't work out for you, I'll take her to the Old Actors' Home, I promise.” And so we took Buffy home.
She even
looked
like an Auschwitz dogâskin and bones draped in mangy red fur, huge brown eyes that seemed to have all human misery from the beginning of time reflected in their doggy depths, a tendency to knock over garbage cans and eat the contents, not to mention worms of incredible length living in her intestines and the resultant uncontrollable diarrhea.
After she bit his hand when he inspected her teeth, the first vet we took her to said: “This will never be a pet. She ought to be put down.”
This only made us more determined. We took Buffy back home, wormed and fumigated her, flea-bathed her, did her hair with chamomile shampoo and cream rinse, and began feeding her steaks, vitamin E capsules, rice, and carrots. She still growled at us, shat in the corners of the house, and tried to chase the garbage truck up the driveway. But little by little, she calmed down.
In a couple of months, she looked like Annie's Sandyâafter she was adopted by Daddy Warbucks and had a long-running hit show on Broadwayâa big red mutt with spindly legs and a tuft of reddish brush on her lovely long narrow head. We renamed her Virginia Woof (to go with Poochkin, aka Aleksandr Pushkin, the bichon), but her pound name still somehow stuck. Buffy, Buffoon, Scruffoon, Ms. Woof were her aliases. She became a model petâbeautifully trained by someone more stalwart than I, to heel, to bark at strangers, and to never “make mistakes” indoorsâwhich was more than we could say for Poochkin, who would mark his territory outdoors or in and masturbate the couch pillows until they were stiff.
The two of them had been uneasy housemates at first, but now they mirrored each other's positions at the hearth or sat like bookends on either side of the front door. Buffy was in love with Jon and Poochkin with me. Each of us had a canine sidekick in our his-and-hers studies. But Buffy was the dog of deeper soul. She had been abandoned, after all, and saved from death row. Both dogs and people are nicer after hitting bottom.
If
I can turn this dog around,
I thought,
there's nothing I can't do.
Even have a babyâeven though I
am
a writer?
But I hesitated, still fearing the eternal Waterloo of women. By the summer I was thirty-five, I was romancing stray dogs in supermarket parking lots, crying over dogs killed by cars, writing poems about the intelligence and intuitiveness of dogs.
Looking at Buffoon one day, I thought, A baby could
never
be as much trouble. And look at her nowâthe perfect pet. What I didn't know was that the analogy between dogs and babies only lasts a year or so. After that they are cussed little creatures of their own will, until about the age of twelve, when they become dybbuks or incubidepending on your religious persuasion.
But it really
was
Buffoon, Scruffoon, Spittoon, the very distinguished Ms. Woof, who got me ready to have a baby. It was another kind of surrender. Once a dog inhabits your heart, it's not hard to open it to a baby.
Poochkin had been my walker, my muse, my protection on the New York streets, my son, my lover. But Poochkin came to me as a healthy, perfect, baby bichon. Buffy was meant to be loved for all her trouble. I guess I knew that trouble was part of motherhood and that if you can be a woman who loves a dog too much, you can do the same with a baby or a man. (This could be a bestseller:
Women Who Run with the Dogs and Love Them Too Much.)
A baby! A baby! We started playing musical diaphragms. We started thinking about names. We started a vegetable garden and bought a jeep (not quite the perfect car for pregnancy but domestic nonetheless).
Molly was as much Buffy's daughter as she was mine. Buffy's devotion and Jon's were fixed. Mine wavered. That was why I needed both the canine and the man. I know that women are supposed to be able to commit parthenogenesis and never look back. But I needed the security of a man and a dog. Could I train Buffy to be like Nana in
Peter Pan?
That was crucial. In my mind I was roving around Wiltshire, London, the Ivory Coast, and the Caribbean; in my body, I was getting ready to make a baby.
I have always wanted to write a book that captures the quintessential oddness of a writer's life: living one extravagant imaginary life in your study, in your notebooks, in the library stacks, while another quotidian, domestic life revolves around it. How these lives interweave each other is part of the story. How can you be writing
this
one morning ...
There were but five Rogues, led by a Boy of Ten, who slobber'd and shook like a Half-Wit, and who continually scream'd, “Vile Witch! She cast a Spell on me!” pointing a crooked Finger at each of my Sister Witches.
In the Centre of the circle two Men held the beauteous Maiden of the Coven to the cold Ground, whilst the others ravishâ d her in turn, with as great Brutality as they could muster; and less, it seem'd, for whateâer Pleasure an unreasoning Beast might find in so forced an Act of Passion than for showing off their Brutality to their Brute Brothers. She was violated perhaps ten, perhaps twelve Times; and whereas at first she whimper'd and fought, after a while she seem'd to lye still, her glaz'd Eyes staring Heavenward, her mouth mutt'ring, “Gracious Goddess, have Mercy.” Whereupon the Brute who then was tormenting her with his swollen red Organ, grew inflam'd by her piety and, pulling his ugly Truncheon out of her poor abus'd Cunnikin (which now spill'd o'er with dark Blood), he thrust it violently into her Mouth, saying, “This'll teach thee to pray to Devils” and he ramm'd his Organ so far back in her Throat that she turn'd red and chok'd and seem'd on the very Point of Death. Whereupon he withdrew it, and each of the Men ravish'd her Mouth in turn, until it bled as horribly as her poor Nether Lips. When I thought I had seen the worst and could bear to look no more, one of the ugliest of the Lot, a Rogue with a Strawberry nose and the slitty Eyes of a Pig, extracted his Scimitar from its Scabbard, and, ignoring her most piteous Screams and the Pleadings of the other Members of the Coven, carv'd a Cross into the Flesh of her Forehead, and carv'd it so deep that her whole Face ran red with Blood, and soon she swoon'd in his Arms and expir'd ...
And then sit down to lunch with your family? You can.
And the exoticism of the writing is somehow fueled by the domesticity of daily life.
But what about those moments when your daily life seems to bleed into the book, when you don't know whether you are Erica or Fanny, when you don't know whether Fanny is pregnant or you are?
This book, this pregnancy, were destined to feed each other, each fattened and transformed by the other's fate.
I had taken Fanny from being the Cinderella of a great family in Wiltshire, to being raped by her stepfather, to running away “to seek her fortune,” to falling in with a coven of mother-goddess-worshipping witches, to joining a band of Robin Hood-like thieves called, after his, “the Merry Men,” to being cast adrift in London to earn her living as a whore in Mother Coxstart's notorious brothel, when suddenly the book was interrupted by a trip to Paris to promote my second novel,
How to Save Your Own Life,
or, as it was called in French, La
planche de salut.
Jon and I were staying in a small hotel near St. Sulpice. We fell into bed one night exhausted, jet-lagged, and full of good wine, both wanting to sleep, but instead we reached for each other, and made love endlessly as if in a trance.
After, I lay awake as he slept. My womb felt full of light. It seemed a huge red planet glowed inside me. I felt that throbbing two inches below the navel which makes you experience yourself as a Möbius strip bringing the cosmos within.
In the morning, I was having my picture taken for some glossy magazine against the rampant lions in a fountainâwhen my French translator asked me why I had such mischief in my eyes.
“We made a baby last night,” I said flippantlyânot even sure it was true.
“And what about the next book?” she asked, believing me.
“What about it?” I said blithely, with that utter euphoria that in fact presages pregnancy.
Hortense Chabrier was a small chain-smoking redhead who took it upon herself to be my literary protector. She had two children of her own and was involved in a very civilized menage à trois with my other French translator, Georges Belmont. I had met Georges and Hortense through Henry Miller. Henry and Georges were great old friends from the thirties and Hortense was a brilliant young editor who worked for Robert Laffont. Henry had discovered
Fear of Flying
and sent it to them, only to discover that it had been turned down by Laffont with the excuse: “French women don't need psychoanalysts.” (Probably because they have French
men.
)
Georges and Hortense reopened the question of
Fear of Flying,
translated the book as Le
complexe d'Icare,
and discovered that French women liked it as well as American womenâand for the same reasons. In the process, we all became great friends.