Fear of Fifty (43 page)

“I'll wash them,” I say.

“For God's sake,
don't
,” she says.

“It's only blood,” I say. “How can we be afraid of blood after all these years of menstruation and motherhood?”

She shuts her weary eyes.

“Just try to sleep,” I say.

And she passes out.

Later the moon rises—a bit fuller this night. I sit watching it while the five other women of the house are fast asleep.

What do I want of this old moon? I want her to release me. I no longer want this picaresque life dictated by the blood of women, by the pull of the tides, by the pull of the moon. I want sex to let me go. And I want to let go of that place inside myself that hooks onto men and makes them the center of every adventure.

I'm ready to impersonate Erica Orlando now (and I don't mean Disney World). I'm ready to become an androgynous creature, flipping from century to century, in a wardrobe full of petticoats and riding britches, redingotes and shawls, tricorns and bonnets, fichus and cravats, periwigs and perukes. I'm ready to walk along the road unrecognized as a sexual being, singing my songs from under a veil, a mask, a hood—like those ambiguous statues in my friend's Venetian garden. It would be liberating to be as genderless as death—taking on the properties of man or woman as suits my immediate seduction.

It is not that I no longer love men, but that I want to experience being untouched by sex so that I can
really
know love—the love that gathers everything up into its arms at journey's end.

In the last few days I have been rereading a book I loved in my twenties—
Henderson the Rain King
by Saul Bellow. Again, a picaresque adventure. And one in which the hero, because his heart forever pounds
I want! I want!,
goes off to Africa for reasons even he knows not of. There he meets various tribesmen, who take him on a spiritual journey through which he redeems his own soul. At the end of his story, he credits love with having given him every spiritual advance he ever made in his life. And by love he seems to mean the love of women and of children. He has not had any men friends before he came to Africa. It is the African men who teach him to trust other men. His life with men—from his father onward—has mostly been a battleground. And women have been
love.
Women have supplied the missing half.

Perhaps Henderson the Rain King can attribute the grace of his life to love, but for women, sexual love is a more perilous matter. Centuries of death in childbed, deaths of children, the myriad broken promises of men, have taught us that we cannot trust carnal love above our own survival.

For women, sexual love may be a luxury to come home to at journey's end. For men, however, it is a necessity on their picaresque path. Henderson comes home for love; Ulysses and Tom Jones do the same. But for women this sort of love is the great La Brea Tar Pit—a gummy pool that may eat everything except our bones.

At this time in history, perhaps we cannot afford such surrendering love. Perhaps it takes too much away from us. As women of the whiplash generation, our dilemma has always been how to love yet love ourselves at the same time.

Part of us wants to love like the goddesses—coldly and capriciously. Part of us owes allegiance to Kali, eating her lover and attaching his skull to her waist. Part of us wants to love like Juno, scooping up mortal men, toying with them, then letting them go, turning them, in parting, into caves for the sea to crash through, great phallic stones, or even, if we are merciful, swine. Part of us wants to be Athena and Diana—who need no lovers, who have intellect and marksmanship instead.

The moon herself, with her big hollow head, counsels coldness.
The end of the picaresque is reason,
says she.
And reason always rules out love.

But is she right? Eventually, we may come to another sort of love. Primed for it by sexual love, motherly love, attachment love, we may come to the love that connects us to eternity. In order to come to it, we must first begin to believe in it. This happens grudgingly at first, then tentatively, then passionately. We must come to believe that carnal love is not enough. And then the ocean of spirit in which we swim will become manifest.

It takes certain disciplines to break through our habitual blindness to all but matter. Abstinence from alcohol or drugs may be necessary for some; abstinence from food or material things may be necessary for others. Renunciation helps us see the path more clearly, but the issue is neither drink nor food. These abstentions merely reveal the path that was always there.

A week later Gerri is wholly recovered. She and I walk down the rocky path from our house and up the country road toward (I swear it) Dante's Restaurant. The path has become less rocky and precipitous with each day and the Tuscan countryside is ripening as August approaches. There are hanging plum tomatoes, bunches of purple grapes, single yellow tree roses with heavy fragrant heads.

We are talking about love, as usual, and surrender.

“It's not the not-drinking,” says Gerri, “but the giving up of the struggle—seeing yourself not as a rock in nature's path, but as the path itself.”

Struck by the beauty of her phrase, I remember the clarity I had when I was sober: a calm clarity that inspired everyone around me, but my best friend in particular.

Why had I lost my sobriety? It was not that I drank a lot, or uncontrollably. Drink is not my
only
addictive substance. Work can be. Or food. Or worry. Or prescription drugs. Or spending money. Or never saying no. Or men. My addictions shapeshift to deceive me. They sneak up on me—cunning, powerful, bearing their own denials.

But I had had real serenity once and had passed it along to my best friend when she was grieving for her beautiful husband, senselessly dead in an avalanche. I was the rock for her to cling to as the snow flowed around her with its terrible secret. Now she was passing that steadiness back to me. If we are all made of God, it is our friends who remind us. We pass the gift of God to them. They pass it back to us when we need it most.

The picaresque path can probably also be a metaphor for the passage of the soul back to its creator. The thieves along the way—the thieves of money, of love, of magic, of time—are merely human obstacles to keep the traveler from perceiving that she herself is the path.

The path is as steep and as precipitous as we make it, as level and rolling as we can grade it, as steady as we are steady, as passable or impassable as our own will to pass.

In a true picaresque, the hero stops struggling and becomes the path.

At fifty, we need this knowledge most of all.

 

In Tuscany Gerri and I slept late and shared our dreams when we awakened. There were dreams of old lives, old loves, and fields of bluish snow. Dismembered bodies and dismembered cars littered the slopes. At times our dreams infected each other's sleep. We read to each other from books of poetry and meditation. We analyzed each other's troubles, as we always do. We laughed about everything.

We also fought about everything—like real sisters. We fought about money, bedrooms, whose car to take. Every one of these fights was actually about something else—usually abandonment. I wanted to be first on her list and she wanted to be first on mine. I wanted all her attention, all her love, all her care. I wanted her to be my mommy, my daddy, my sister. She wanted the same from me. She wanted to be fed, cared for, nurtured without limit. She wanted backrubs, poems, pastas, and to be left alone when she needed to be left alone. She wanted to come before my writing, my child, my man. And I wanted no less from her.

She was sick at first, so I took care of her. Then I was jealous of the attention, and she took care of me. We had gone down into the primal cave of our friendship. We had felt loved enough to rage and fight, to show the inside of our naked throats and our bared fangs, and the friendship took another leap toward intimacy. Without rage, intimacy can't be. I had learned this from my marriage—the fourth one—the one that just might last.

 

The rental is over today. Everyone left at dawn but me and Ken. Molly is fifteen and two days. Early this morning, she thanked me for “the greatest summer of my life!” Then she flew home to her father with Margaret and her friends. Gerri has flown home too. I am alone on the Tuscan hill at seven o'clock in the morning, watching the morning star fade into the pink of the rising sun.

The cock crows. The cicadas warm up for a hot day.

The cypresses are still black, the olive trees still dull silver, the chestnuts still green.

The black cat we have been feeding all month prowls the stone terrace, hissing at the brown and white cat who has come around to share the bounty. They live on this hill, are fed by the fireman and his wife, our landlords, and another English family, but they belong to no one. This is their hill, not ours. Territoriality rules the animal kingdom to which we so reluctantly belong.

Our bags are packed. We are leaving wine and olive oil and stacks of books for the next transients to inhabit this little shelf before heaven. The road is still impassable, but not for us.

None of this is ours. We rented it for a month and are moving on. The olive trees, the cypresses, the walnut trees (with their still-green fruit), are not ours, nor will we be here for the harvest. I will take my poems and photographs, the chapters I wrote here, and go on to the next destination.

All the things that maddened me—the maid who would not wash dishes, but only towels for the next renters, the owner who lurked, pretending to be fixing the pool filter, but really spying on my daughter and her friends sunbathing, the oven that would not light, the wasps that swarmed whenever we cut a peach or a melon, or opened a Coke, the fighting semiferal cats—all these finally delighted Molly and have filled her memory bank with shiny coins.

“We always spent summers in Italy,” she will say, “so my mom could write.”

And all the push-pull of mother and daughter will be forgotten as the memories pile up.

Of course we have screamed at each other in cars over road maps, in the kitchen over dirty dishes, in stores over the prices of things. Of course she has pushed me to the limit with her endless needs, and I have maddened her with mine—particularly my need for the silence that teenagers find so utterly incomprehensible.

Sometimes I feel too old to keep up with a fifteen-year-old. Sometimes I feel so young that only her existence makes me pretend to be a grown-up.

How did I get to be a grown-up? At times I find myself still sitting on the hillside, plotting revenge against the adult world. I still say “Mom” when I am scared—though I never called my mother that and “Mom” is anyway too unsteady to help me now. In truth, she was always shaky—though she loved me. And Molly really needs to know things I have forgotten I know. Like when it's okay to call a boy or how to memorize dumb stuff for SATs, like when to try scary new things and when to pass them up for the sake of self-preservation. I wake up and remember to be an adult for her. She summons me to shed my baby ways.

I have plans and plans. Finish with my
Fear of Fifty
and jump back into my novel of the future, give myself the gift of writing poems again, write some short stories, finish my musical, complete my book of meditations, affirm my life every morning and let myself have a good day, free myself each night to dream the necessary dreams, find pleasure in serving those I love, give up guilt at refusing when they demand my self-annihilation, find joy in teaching, joy in talking to loving readers (who think I have answers when all I have are a few pointed questions), give myself time every day to walk or go to a museum, be generous because it reminds me how much abundance I have been given, be loving because it reminds me not to feel jealous of those who only
seem
to have more, seize my life, release my anger, bless the known and the unknown world, bless the hill of olives, bless the pinecones falling from the umbrella pines, bless the still-green walnuts, bless the rosy glow of the sun, which I may not get to see another summer, or even another day.

If, every day, I dare to remember that I am here on loan, that this house, this hillside, these minutes are all leased to me, not given, I will never despair. Despair is for those who expect to live forever.

I no longer do.

The real marriage of true minds is for any two people to possess a sense of humour or irony pitched in exactly the same key, so that their joint glances at any subject cross like interarching searchlights.

—Edith Wharton, A Backward Glance

But I had been in love pretty often and I didn't think it stood the wear and tear.