Fear of Fifty (45 page)

“And which animal you are. Ken's a wolf—aren't you, Wolfie? And Molly's an elephant—the big domed forehead. And Erica's a bichon frise like Poochini.”

We all painted ourselves on eggs——even the reluctant suitor. His was a noncommittal face. Barbara's confrontational manner cowed him somewhat. I was glad.

He and I slept together that night, but we did not even touch. I dreamed of flying in a little plane with Isadora Wing and Piero and a big black bear. Piero was rattled, but the bear was not.
“Don't panic, ladies and gentlemen,”
he said. And suddenly Ken and Barbara Follett were in the plane too, and Molly, and all the Follett kids.

“Have you ever tried wing-walking?” I asked the bear.

“I'm a conservative pilot,” he said. “I don't want to die just yet. I have a lot to live for.”

On my birthday, Easter Sunday, the bear called from Toronto.

“How's your weekend?” I asked.

“Awful,” he said. “I guess you can't relive the past.”

I was puzzled. “I came up to spend my birthday with my former girlfriend.”

I swallowed, but my mouth remained dry anyway.

“Your birthday?
When
is your birthday?”

“Today—March twenty-sixth.”

“My God,” I gulped. “So is mine.”

A long silence. But he didn't seem surprised.

“Will I see you next week?” he wanted to know.

“Saturday?”

“Yes—the night you write.”

“Yes,” I said. “I'm making an exception in your case.”

 

It annoyed me that he had
my
birthday. First of all, nobody else should have my birthday. Secondly, it seemed another goddamned omen. Something was closing in on me and I didn't like it. As Anita Loos said,
Fate keeps on happening.

How dare this man have my birthday? Did he respect
nothing?
Did he want to horn in on everything I had? My birthday was mine.

That Saturday night, I picked him up in my car—with a driver hired for the occasion—and we went downtown to the Public Theater to see a musical that was half in Yiddish, half in English. His choice. From the way he kept looking at me, I knew this was a test. He wanted to know if I laughed at the appropriate moments, if I understood the Yiddish, if I was
Yidderate.
Ahh—I got it. This was some kind of ordeal: the theme of the three caskets, the glass mountain to climb, kissing the sleeping prince to see if the spell could be broken. How
dare
he be testing me? I thought. I ought to be testing
him.

“Well, did I pass?” I asked as we got into my car.

“What on earth do you mean?”

“Look—I know an audition when I see one. I'm not stupid.”

He looked at me mockingly.

“Where did you learn Yiddish?” he asked.

“The same place you learned it,” I said. “Besides, I don't know much.”

“You laughed in all the right places,” he said.

“As defined by you,” I said. “God—you're a cocky son of a bitch.”

“You love it,” he said.

After that, we started going out for dinner every night.

“I've met this really nice man,” I told my therapy group.

“Yeah, yeah,” they said. “If he was
really
nice, you wouldn't be able to like him....”

“Oh yeah?” I said.

“Yeah, yeah, yeah,” they said.

Ken and I were in the habit of closing restaurants. We would sit and eat and drink and talk and then suddenly people would be sweeping or mopping up around us.

What did we talk about? I cannot remember. But we couldn't stop. I used to gaze at him at the table and think: I'm never going to sleep with him. I was so sick of things that started with sex and then fizzled. We would be friends, I told myself—friends, not lovers. Then nothing could ever go wrong. Friendship was best, after all. Friendship had a chance of lasting.

So we had dinner together every night and didn't sleep together.

It became a game to see how long I could string this out. Sex proved nothing, I told myself. It only muddied the waters. I had been sexually enthralled by many men, and when I broke the addiction, what remained was usually not worth bothering with. This time I was going to like the man first. I was not going to marry the man today and change him subsequently.

Meanwhile, there was Piero. His love was imperishable because his life was promised to another. He had come to visit me in Connecticut not long before I met Ken, and he was somewhat less impressive taken out of the watery world of Venice. Like Ondine on land, he needed his iridescent scales to dazzle. I had seen him briefly after the wedding in St. Moritz and the magic was partly restored. But I think the truth was I was growing tired of his predictable elusiveness. If I made myself convenient, he would conveniently appear—for a while. The sex, of course, had never stopped being delirious, but even delirium has its limits. Without masochism to fuel it, it grows cold. Like the men who pursued ardently and then ran away, like the eligibles who quizzed you on your property and investments, even the great studs became boring, after a while. They had figured out a new gig—that was all: the gigolo gig. They knew how to make you come and come and come and come and come. And so what? As soon as you saw the cynicism underneath, the swooning ceased to be so important. Manipulation rather than revelation.

In Los Angeles for a few days to see my literary agent and pitch my new novel to a handpicked selection of baby moguls (who had read
Fear of Flying in grade school),
I stayed at an actress friend's apartment in West Hollywood. Every morning, up three hours before I needed to be, I found myself calling Ken even without really planning to. I found myself describing to him the scene in which I am tap-dancing the plot of my new novel to a room full of Armani-clad twentysomethings who used to shanghai my first novel from their parents' bookshelves and jerk off into it in the bathroom. I am trying to tell them why this novel about a middle-aged woman artist in thrall to a gorgeous young stud will make a great movie. But there's no way they're going to buy it. For them, I'm a curiosity, an antique from an age shrouded in the mists of history: the seventies.

“My mother loves your books,” one of them says. And it rises to a chorus of:
Mine
too,
Mine
too,
Mine
too.

They're going to go back to their offices and call their mothers with pride. “Guess who I met?” they'll say. But do they want to make movies their mothers might like? Absolutely not. Their mothers are, by definition,
old.

“I've gone from being too young for everything to too
old
for everything,” I tell Ken on the phone. “When I was in Hollywood in the seventies, I was newly famous and a fool for any con-man. All the people in charge were older. Now all the people in charge are
younger
—but they're still all guys.”

Why am I telling him all this? I wonder. Because he understands? Because he gets it? Because we can talk as if we've been talking all our lives?

Nevertheless, I mistrust it. When is he going to turn into a monster or a wimp? When is he going to flee from intimacy? When is he going to reveal the Mr. Hyde behind the Dr. Jekyll?

During my week in Los Angeles, I keep remembering Hannah Pakula's immortal line about moving back East: “Hollywood is no place for a woman over forty with a library card.” Hollywood always makes me feel that I'll never be rich enough or thin enough or young enough. Even when I was young enough, I felt too old for Hollywood. So I am all the more delighted when the very epitome of older women who have conquered Hollywood comes to my table at Morton's—where I am having dinner with my agent—full of excitement about my books. She invites me to lunch at her house the next day and I discover that the very grand, the very glamorous Joan Collins is really a cuddly Jewish earth mother under all that paint.

We sit in her white living room trading stories about younger men. She has just about survived her palimony ordeal with that very snake-hipped and slithery Peter Whatever-his-name-was.

“I never
knew
he was lying,” she says, “or fucking my friends. He was so romantic. That's what we miss—men who aren't afraid to be romantic with us.”

 

I fly back to New York, and Ken is waiting at the airport.

“I thought you needed someone to meet you,” he said, shooing away the hired driver.

Shortly after this, he took me flying for the first time. His plane was a Cessna 210 that he parked at Teterboro airport in New Jersey. He taught me to do the walk-around, checking the fuel, the landing gear, the flaps, had me read off the checklist for take-off, and then he became totally calm and concentrated when he took off. Flying was an altered state of consciousness for him. He was never so happy as when airborne. As we ascended over the gas drums and industrial wastes of New Jersey, the problems of the earth fell away. The air was full of little planes—each tethered to the ground by a constant stream of radio communication. The air was the last place left where freedom was more than a word.

We flew north up the Hudson with its purple palisades, then turned east over Long Island Sound and made a quick tour of the end of the island with its foaming surf and green potato fields. We listened to the weather as reported by other pilots and we rode thermal bumps clearing the tops of clouds. No wonder I had invented a pilot husband for Isadora! This was the freedom I had sought my whole life. But how had a fictional character managed to summon a real man? I must have written a powerful spell.

We landed.

“You weren't afraid at all,” he said.

And it was true.

 

After that first flight, we drove back to my brownstone, where Molly was waiting, having just returned from her father's house. This was the first time Ken had met her. She was diligently completing her homework at the dining room table.

“What are you going to be when you grow up?” he (uninspiredly) asked.

“A civil litigator,” she said brightly.

And he fell in love with her on the spot.

Alarm bells went off again. This guy is not kidding, I thought. What was I going to do?

Leave for Italy, as soon as possible, that's what. Fortunately I had a friend who had invited me on a junket to a cooking school in Umbria. We were all supposed to meet in Rome, journey to the Umbrian hills for a week of learning how to taste olive oil, knead pasta dough, and simmer sugo. I had committed myself to this trip long before I met Ken, but no sooner did I arrive in Rome than I felt bereft of him. I also missed Molly. It seemed there was no reason for me to be here. I had long since given up even the pretense of cooking.

We were all put up in a charming inn located in a former stable. The rooms were made of stone, were dank and damp, and had no telephones. The Umbrian countryside was a riot of wildflowers—poppies, irises, hyacinths—but the rain came down unceasingly. I put in the usual call to Piero and he was, as usual, hard to reach. Then he called back (while I was elbow deep in pasta dough) and said he couldn't come. Then he put me on the phone with his stepson—which I later learned was supposed to be a cue to me that he was coming, but didn't want it generally known by his family.

Assuming he
wasn't
coming, I made plans to go home at once. But when he called and said
“Non scappi,”
I was hooked again by his voice.

Ken, meanwhile, called from New York and asked me to meet him in Paris. I waffled. Then Piero showed up as if out of nowhere. We spent a blissful night together in the stone stable. We made love with our usual miraculous ease, and slept in each other's arms all night. The next day, we explored the wet Umbrian countryside and wound up in Todi, eating at Ristorante Umbria. As we were laughing and touching, eating and drinking, I asked him why he stayed with a woman he didn't love.

“She's my antibiotic,” he said. “Without her, I would have been married twenty times.”

I have my answer, I thought to myself. She's the antibiotic and I am the disease.

He drove me back to my cooking school and we kissed and said good-bye. When I returned to my room, there were three messages from Ken, the last one informing me that a ticket to Paris would be waiting for me at the Rome airport.

He called later to say, “Don't feel obligated to come, but it would be great if you did.”

The day finally dawned when I was supposed to go home, and I taxied to the Rome airport not sure where I would end up that afternoon.

 

If I went to Venice, I would wait and wait to be able to fit in hours with Piero. If I went to Paris, something else would happen.

At the airport, I went to the Air France counter and found my ticket. I checked the schedules. The next flight to Venice left in an hour, the next flight to Paris in an hour and a half. I wandered through the terminal in a panic, pushing my luggage in circles. My eyes glazed over. I bumped into people and walls. It seemed to me that this decision was pivotal in my life. I thought of beautiful Venice and beautiful Piero and the few magic days we'd spent after the wedding in St. Moritz. I could recapture that. Or could I? You never step twice into the same bedroom. Once you begin to see the
routine
of bliss, is it still bliss? Even voluptuaries can become chained to their clocks. Ah—time to have my nightly immersion in Chaos and Old Night. The chthonic deities won't be put on a schedule. Once you routinize them, they tend to drift away. And Pan? He gallops back into the primal wood.

And if I went to Paris? Well, something new would happen. Another door would open. Or close. I was in a sweat just thinking about it. I was afraid I was giving up my freedom, my life.