Memphis

1958

In my parents’ house, nothing was traditional.

For Christmas, sometimes, my father created a tree from small green umbrellas sprouting up like giant cattails from a New Jersey swamp. Other times, Robert sprayed enormous magnolia leaves gold and bound them together like large fans used to cool off a surly pasha.

In those politically incorrect days, there was an institution in Memphis called Home for the Incurables. Nancy briefly belonged to some women’s organization that  visited the patients, all of whom could have appeared in a Flannery O’Connor novel.   I accompanied her there once.

I had never seen so many helpless, hopeless, and deformed people, and I began to cry.

A nurse softly said to my mother, “You really shouldn’t bring a young child to a place like this.”

Nancy did not respond.

When we were inside her Chevrolet station wagon with the batlike fins over the rear lights, she screamed, “Stop it with the crocodile tears! That’s life. Get used to it!”

[Carl Orff’s Carmina Burana]  Music that should accompany the memories…

(My father always said:  Don’t settle for an ordinary life.)

 Other lovers from the 1970s…

 The married French radiologist, Pierre, with the severe features of a Christian Schad portrait, whose patients included many celebrities and Manhattan socialites.

Our first date was in the King Cole bar of the St. Regis Hotel. We hurriedly drank Kir Royales. A very attractive young woman sat alone nearby. He invited her to join us for dinner at Gino’s restaurant on Lexington. She accepted. The dinner was just dinner. She was an actress from Los Angeles and had come to New York to work on a film. Pierre wanted a ménage à trois; but it didn’t happen. (I think she was just an expensive hooker looking for customers.)

He came over to my apartment once a week with a cheap bottle of Beaujolais, some smelly French cheese, purple grapes, and Carr’s crackers. But, he was also cultured and refined; I learned a lot. He always wore underwear that came from Switzerland—softest fabric I ever touched.

We met in an elevator in the medical office building where both of us worked, when he complimented my black fedora with the wide brim. He liked to spank me, lightly and playfully, and talk dirty simultaneously.

The South African psychiatrist whose fingernails were always dirty because he rode his bicycle everywhere and kept it well oiled. He thought I desperately needed him because of my unsavory childhood. We met on the street when he almost ran over me.

The Croatian who always giggled before and after sex. He gargled his snot and rinsed his teeth at meals with coffee. That was a very short-term relationship.

The Jewish art director who airbrushed photos for multinational cosmetic companies. He liked for me to wear a black garter belt and long silk stockings. We met in front of Rousseau’s “The Sleeping Gypsy” at the Museum of Modern Art on West 53rd Street.

London, England

1972

“I’m leaving right now! No one ever ever slaps me!” I shrieked. “Get away from me, Yanni!”

Hurriedly, I packed.

Yanni apologized and begged me not to leave.

I dragged my two worn-out yellow Samsonite suitcases up the two flights of stairs and out the front door of our Earl’s Court bedsitter and waited for one of those shiny, spacious, perfect black London taxis to pick me up and drive me back to my familiar run-down hotel in the Paddington section of London.

The following morning I looked at the fifth century-B.C. Elgin Marbles in the British Museum.

Yanni was so blindly patriotic; amazingly, he had been able to deliver lengthy disquisitions in broken English about Greek history and how those marble panels belonged in Athens: The glorious Greeks and all the infidels.

It rained all that day. London seemed almost empty; the streets were deserted; most of London must have gone away on summer vacation. Everything—buildings, sidewalks, sky, trees, and a few lost souls—all looked ashen.

I had never been so lonely in my whole life.

When I got hungry, I entered a small Indian restaurant and sat at a corner table. All of the customers were Indian, and all of them stared at me with large, dark eyes as I ate my spicy lamb and creamy yogurt. It must have been the first time that they saw a young woman eating alone in a restaurant.

I was a Martian on a foreign planet.

The following morning, I telephoned Yanni. “Can I come back?” I asked quietly.

“Yes, of course. That’s wonderful news!” he responded.

When I arrived at the bedsitter, there were piles of dirty dishes in the kitchen sink and laying on the rickety dining table was a signed black-and-white photograph of a glamorous blonde woman holding a microphone.

He really had missed me!

The night before he had picked up a nightclub singer and brought her back to “our” apartment for cold ouzo and hot sex.

In the 1970s,  I was the poster girl for multiculturalism.

My curiosity was boundless; my lovers came from all the over world.

Among them:

The Jewish cosmetic dermatologist, Alan, whose bedroom and bathroom walls were completely covered in mirrors, including the ceilings. He dated mostly models, and his sister acted as his personal maid. She cleaned the kitchen and vacuumed the living room, while we fucked in the bedroom. Alan and I met at a party given by a German doctor, whose Chinese butler hit the bottle sometimes…once he put cherry tomatoes in the fruit salad!

When he served dinner, his face turned bright red and he merrily chuckled.

###

Joshua, the married Zionist, who criticized the way I dressed; he said I was always so buttoned up. Too conservative.

If you want Las Vegas, go to Las Vegas! And he was so cheap!

He was involved in all sorts of political organizations and would get discounts on rooms at the Sheraton on Seventh Avenue. We were not allowed to lie on the sheets because the rooms supposedly were used only for meetings. We had to lie on top of the bedspread.

He was impotent and insisted on masturbating above my stomach. When it was time to go home, he always told the taxi driver to drop him off first (we lived about ten blocks from each other).

He would give me a few bucks for the taxi—never enough to cover the bill and the tip.

[Men who are stingy with money are equally stingy with emotion. Stay far away from them!]

Whenever we lay on top of the hotel bedspread, I thought about my former Greek husband who insisted that bedspreads in hotels were always filthy. He also had a fetish about library books; he would never touch a library book. Dirty pages! And he wasn’t talking about pornography!

Others…

 Jesus, the Puerto Rican, who was an honors student at Columbia University and had won a full scholarship, lived in International House. His room was about seven feet by four feet.

He taught me how to carry my purse in bad neighborhoods. We spent a lot of time in a bar on West End Avenue and in his tiny single bed.

###

Gordon, the  African-American professor of African studies at Hunter College. He was from Tanzania. His perfect classic features made him look like an Indian maharajah. All he needed was a jeweled turban to complete the picture.

###

Leon, the investment banker, who stacked towels beside the bed because he sweated so much during sex.

An ex-girlfriend called him Skunk, not because of body odor, but because of his hairy chest, which was all dark hair except for a white streak exactly in the middle of his chest, as though it were a precise guideline for open-heart surgery.

At Christmas, even though he was Jewish, he recycled the holiday cards that he’d received; he crossed out the greeting and signature of others and sent them to his lovers and business associates!

In his den, he had an oil painting of a naked man chasing another on a football field; the chaser had an enormous erection.

He was 48 years old and still desperately in love with his mother. The initials for his company were M.O.M.  He was a creative and ruthless businessman. Made a fortune on Wall Street.

 

Years later, she and my father boycotted my wedding and sent a neatly typed note on engraved eggshell stationery: “Mr. and Mrs. Robert R. Smith, Jr., will not attend.”

I waited for an explanation for their absence. I waited for decades, but it never came.

My mother and I were master/slave; Hitler/Jew; shark/bloody leg; Mr. Murdstone/David Copperfield; Johan/Henrik in Ingmar Bergman’s Saraband. 

Whenever someone asked about my “Mom,” my gut reaction would have been to answer, Mom? I don’t know anyone like that. Nancy, my biological mother,  the popinjay, the vituperative termagant, was certainly no Stella Dallas.

To my mother, every aspect of life was categorized as a bargain or overpriced.

That included me: poor Return On Investment.

I had no siblings. To visit her after I left home for college, a formal invitation was required. Christmas was the only time that I was permitted to return to my parents’ house.

Thanksgiving. Memphis. 1966

My father and I went to the local Holiday Inn for our Thanksgiving dinner.

My mother was indisposed, once again, because of her drinking.

We ran into Anastasia at the restaurant; she was one of my father’s loyal,  female friends. If I had looked closely, I might have seen the Trojan condoms in her Lucite handbag; Anastasia was a wealthy divorcée who got her kicks by pimping for the secret society of artistic, homosexual men in the East Memphis neighborhood.

She threw raucous, extravagant parties where handsome young boys and older patrician men were introduced. Women were invited also, but they tended to be in their 50s and 60s and were oblivious to Anastasia’s lascivious machinations.

 

 

Writing in my diary is my therapy. Goethe said:

“The beginning and end of all literary activity is the reproduction of the world that surrounds me by means of the world that is in me, all things being grasped, related, re-created, molded and reconstructed in a personal form and an original manner.”

Often, I wish I were a ballerina so that I could sweat blood for beauty and for art. I gesticulate in front of the mirror, with my arms outstretched reaching farther and farther.

Art has helped more people recover from abuse, abandonment, and betrayal than all the psychiatrists in the world.

If not that route: War…Hitler, Stalin, Mao—all were abused children. The plus side???

Abused children have much more interesting sex lives as adults. There are roles to be played: domination/submission; fetishes to act out; neurotic kinks that find expression at some deep, dark primal level.

I must bring energy to despair. Move over Jean Rhys!

 

 

Manhattan

1971

Weeks later in New York City, I lost my virginity to Noah, a not nice Jewish boy from Brooklyn,  on a large, heated waterbed behind blood-red padded leather doors in a closed wing of Bellevue Psychiatric Hospital on First Avenue.

After fucking, he told me that he felt like he had been through a meat grinder!

Noah had an amphetamine-addicted roommate who shared his East 24th Street apartment. Both were dental students at New York University and had easy access to Bellevue.

 

 

My parents never even had medical insurance, which they considered an extravagance, until they were eligible for Medicare. They gambled…and won the health lottery.

And when my father died, Nancy gave his body to a medical school so that she wouldn’t have to pay for cremation. Afterward, she refused to accept his ashes; she told the hospital to dump them in a public veterans’ grave.

However, when Robert’s clients expressed interest in making charitable donations in his name, she made a wise decision: Their money was used to buy magnolia trees to be planted  in a large area, which was being developed into a community  park, near the Memphis city limits.

 

 

 

 

1963 

During the too brief period between the end of school and the beginning of River Run Riding camp when my trunk and I were loaded onto an airplane to Philadelphia, my mother would lock me out of the house for, at least, five hours daily.

I used the toilet in my father’s shed, which protected his gardening tools and the occasional antique Japanese lantern.

[J. S. Bach’s Concerto for Violin in A, BWV 1041]

 I found a somewhat comfortable spot on the red brick steps that led to our back door. I would sit there for hours, reading overweight Russian novels about the rich and poor, blessed and cursed, landed gentry and peasants, gambling, alcoholism, lust, and unrequited love—my kind of books.

Alcohol: the greatest nepenthe ever created. I read about it a lot, before I ever tasted it.

When the warm Tennessee sun filtered through the white magnolia and pink dogwood trees, and the pages appeared to be shrouded with Irish lace from the shadows of the leaves, momentarily, I was almost happy.

###

When I returned to Frenchtown at Christmas, during my freshman year at college, my mother called me a Fat Pig, over and over.

“You need to lose two inches off your hips, “ she commented icily. I had gained ten pounds.

Her porcelain doll had grown pudgy. Totally unacceptable.

After college/After Greek marriage/After divorce:

 

But deep down, I really relished being pursued by men. They definitely upgraded my standard of living. For the first time in my life, I felt powerful. I understood that these affairs were mutually beneficial.

I was poor; men took me to glamorous parties, to expensive dinners, to the theater, and on trips: yachts in the Caribbean, Florida, and Bermuda; luxurious resorts in the Dominican Republic, Spain, France, and England.

I went out almost every night, even though I had “early arrival duty” at the Greeley School.

A girlfriend warned me: “Be very careful. Remember the movie

Looking for Mr. Goodbar”?

 “The dull ache will not depart,” Faust says in the first part of Goethe’s epic. “I crave excitement, agonizing bliss.”

[music:            Ralph Vaughan Williams/The Lark Ascending]

 

____________________________________________________________________________________________

Through the Internet, I met a wealthy widower, a self-made Israeli businessman. He had all the qualities that Joshua lacked—infinite self-confidence, decisiveness, and a pragmatic view of the world.

He was the kind of man who would never go to a shrink or to his sister to ask permission to make a life-altering decision.

Raz had a wonderful sense of humor, and he actually listened carefully to me and remembered what I said.

Both of us had had unhappy childhoods because of our parents’ aggressive rejection of us; we completely understood each other emotionally.

Raz was dark, exotic, übermasculine, as well as exceptionally warm and affectionate. He liked music, so we went to several cabaret shows at the Alqonquin, Feinstein’s at the Regency, the Carlyle, and jazz shows at Birdland.

While in bed, he sang Broadway show tunes to me with a Hebrew accent. He knew the lyrics perfectly!

We took sybaritic boat rides around Manhattan while eating glazed Chilean sea bass and listening to a live band play Cole Porter songs, as we slouched against each other on the banquette and gazed at the sparkling Manhattan skyline.

He spoke Arabic also and told me that there are no curses in Hebrew, but an infinite number in Arabic.

For example, the Arabs say, “May your underarms be infested with all the fleas from all the camels in the desert.”

Nice.

For breakfast, I served him cornflakes with bananas and Sanka. His

favorite.

He asked, “You don’t cook, do you?”

“Nope,” was my reply. “How do you know that?”

“The banana slices are thick; you don’t have much practice with a knife.” He was correct. Clever observation.

I admired him tremendously. He came to New York with nothing at age 25 and shared a room with a prostitute in a seedy hotel on Broadway until he could afford to rent an apartment. He slowly built an international wholesale office-supplies business and made shrewd investments in New York commercial real estate. He was waiting for a ten-million dollar offer for his warehouse in Long Island City.

Childhood rage can be an incomparable gift.

It gives us energy, concentration, and indomitable drive.

He had two grown daughters and a son-in-law, plus grandchildren.

Everyone lived in the same apartment building, and they all depended on him financially. He was the all-powerful godfather.

I knew unequivocally that I could never be a member of his tribe. [music: Leonard Cohen sings “Alexandra Leaving”]

“Suddenly the night has grown colder.

The god of love preparing to depart.

Alexandra hoisted on his shoulder,

They slip between the sentries of the heart. Upheld by the simplicities of pleasure,

They gain the light, they formlessly entwine;

And radiant beyond your widest measure

They fall among the voices and the wine.

It’s not a trick, your senses all deceiving,

A fitful dream, the morning will exhaust –

Say goodbye to Alexandra leaving.

Then say goodbye to Alexandra lost. Even though she sleeps upon your satin;

Even though she wakes you with a kiss.

Do not say the moment was imagined;

Do not stoop to strategies like this.

As someone long prepared for this to happen,

Go firmly to the window. Drink it in.

Exquisite music. Alexandra laughing.

Your first commitments tangible again.

And you who had the honor of her evening,

And by that honor had your own restored –

Say goodbye to Alexandra leaving;

Alexandra leaving with her lord.

Even though she sleeps upon your satin;

Even though she wakes you with a kiss.

Do not say the moment was imagined;

Do not stoop to strategies like this.

As someone long prepared for the occasion;

In full command of every plan you wrecked –

Do not choose a coward’s explanation

That hides behind the cause and the effect. And you who were bewildered by a meaning;

Whose code was broken, crucifix uncrossed –

Say goodbye to Alexandra leaving.

Then say goodbye to Alexandra lost. Say goodbye to Alexandra leaving.

Then say goodbye to Alexandra lost.”

 

EXCERPT 40

MEMPHIS

1959

The Ku Klux Klan burned a cross in the front yard of the house across the street from us. The NAACP had purchased the house for an African-American minister. Every weekend several of our neighbors strutted up and down the street carrying loathsome signs painted black and white: “N——, Get Out.”

The one Jewish lady, Mrs. Roseborough, on our block (and the only person who had a swimming pool) had produced Tennessee Williams’s first play Cairo, Shanghai, Bombay in her backyard.

She became a target for the KKK, as did my parents, because they refused to participate in the Sunday marches. Not long afterward, a Molotov cocktail sailed through our window, and obscene and threatening phone calls were becoming a common occurrence at three in the morning.

Often Robert was out of town on business trips and sexual escapades, so my parents decided for safety’s sake that it was time to move.

 

My parents sold their house to a lovely black lady, a missionary, who traveled back and forth to Africa. Her niece, Zola,  was one of my favorite playmates. Until my father died,  Zola’s aunt was his landlady; he rented the small office building behind the house for more than thirty years. It was always a peaceful, respectful relationship.

 

 

Children’s Book [From:   Fantasy Friends on Furlough (in a Putrid Pandemic)]

Doughty Dodo Bird

Doughty dodo bird was so determined.

The ermine looked up at her and said,

“You never give up…what’s up with that?”

The dodo replied, “My dreams are big, and

I don’t give a fig about those who tell me,

No, your aspirations are silly, you will fail

Willy nilly.

Do—n’t  Do—n’t tell me what I can do.

My plan is to fool you too!

I will succeed and

Fulfill my need to

Be the best that I can be.

 

Touchy Toucan

Touchy toucan was quick to give you a peck with her beak.

“Think before you speak,” she squawked,

“Or you might dread the consequences.

The words you spout

That all come out

Can cause unnecessary harm

And will alarm those who don’t understand

And are too shy to take a stand.”

So be polite.

Avoid a fight.

Try to cultivate wisdom

Instead of a schism.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

THEN AND NOW

 

Thirty, forty, fifty? It doesn’t matter how old you are, only how old you look….” begins an eye-catching cosmetics ad.

Jane Fonda, in retrospect, said, “Turning thirty was scary as hell.” Louise in Honoré de Balzac’s Mémoires de deux jeunes mariées (The Two Young Brides) wasn’t too thrilled about her thirtieth birthday either: “I shall soon be thirty, and at that age woman embarks upon dreadful inner lamentations. If I am still beautiful, I shall perceive the limits of feminine life; afterwards, what will become of me?” In Edith Wharton’s The House of Mirth, Lily Bart found the approach of her thirtieth birthday to be more than she could bear.

            I wish I were immortal Athena living in the rent-free Parthenon. Instead, I’m thirty years old today, doubting my wisdom and inhabiting a New York City apartment that costs too much.

In work and in love, I find myself lurching forward and backward. The romantic and the realist continually joust on the playing fields of my heart and my mind. My résumé covers a lot of territory; in schools and summer camps I’ve taught children how to read E. B. White’s Charlotte’s Web and Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s The Little Prince, to perform water ballet to the music of Ferrante and Teicher, and to jump horses over post-and-rail fences. I’ve been the administrative assistant to the president of a men’s clothing company and a production planner of mattress ticking (for jailbirds’ cots and cheap-motel beds) for a Fortune 100 textile corporation—the most horrendous job! Additionally, I’m a volunteer for an organization that helps autistic children and for a nonprofit group that promotes preventive medicine.

Now I’m gainfully employed as the assistant editor at a medical magazine on Manhattan’s East 60^th Street.

On a pleasant summer day nine years ago on Bayswater Road in London, I met a swarthy Athenian—the kind you’re supposed to have a vacation romance with, but never marry. In rapid succession, Michael, the Greek, became my lover, my husband, my ex-spouse. I married Michael because he looked like a young Omar Sharif and spoke the little English he knew with a seductive accent and toss of the head. We shared zero history. I sought connubial bliss liberated from all traditional restraints. I got exactly what I wanted…for a while. That idyllic summer we communicated by drawing simple pictures, as we indolently reclined on green canvas chairs in Hyde Park. He was exotic, tempestuous, fiery, emotional. Everything I  (exceptionally reserved WASP from bucolic Germantown, Tennessee) was not.

As husband and wife we traveled through the splendiferous Greek islands. The fragrance of white jasmine permeated the air as we nibbled fresh figs for breakfast on the tranquil island of Kos. We rode docile donkeys to the top of a steep hill on Lindos, Rhodes, for a breathtaking view of the blue Mediterranean. The countless cicadas hummed on Crete as we merrily wandered through the picturesque farms dotted with whirling windmills. Michael enthusiastically guided me on an unforgettable Hellenic sojourn. I will always be grateful for having been sucked into the vortex of Greek culture.

I’m passionate about all kinds of literature. It reveals the multifarious ways there are to think, to live. Biographies and autobiographies of writers also intrigue me, especially books limning the dark side of women and men considered to be artistic giants. Some rotten people have created great art.

Discovering what I am about is the main thing—an illusion as good as any other. I’m a promiscuous reader, a dilettante, an autodidact. Creative agitation in women of thirty or thereabouts is not uncommon. Willa Cather’s The Troll Garden, a collection of short stories and novelettes, and Doris Lessing’s The Making of the Americans—their first literary achievements—were written when the authors were twenty-nine and thirty-one, respectively.

Physically, I’m in better shape than I was in at twenty. A low-sodium, low-cholesterol, high-fiber diet, and low-impact aerobics are integral parts of my ritualistic health routine.

The rapid changes in women’s roles during the past decade have left me wobbly and straddled uncomfortably on the cutting edge of a social revolution. I don’t want to be defined by a job or lack of one. Evaluate my character, not my income!

In truth, sometimes I fear I’m a latent Southern belle, an inchoate Blanche DuBois who prefers Wild Turkey to Colombian Gold, unmistakably more of a Jean Rhys woman than an Ann Beattie character.

My idiosyncrasies are growing more pronounced. As Evelyn Waugh did, I detest the telephone and even prefer confirming appointments by mail. Always walking on the shady side of the street, always wearing sunglasses to prevent (I hope) the development of cataracts, never browsing in department stores, shopping for just about everything from mail-order catalogs, are among my myriad eccentricities.

Until a year ago, keeping a diary seemed a waste of time, but now maintaining meticulous records of impressions, literature gobbled or savored, is as crucial as wearing mascara, lipstick, and perfume. Constructing chronological tables as I read is automatic. I want to know how old the women, whether real or fictional, were when they graduated, married, had children, gave birth to novels, had their first extramarital affair, divorced, murdered, committed suicide. I want to know the same about the men.

My hypochondria is as evident as H. L. Mencken’s condition was, positively due to our mutual birthday. I am star struck by worry; Virgo is culpable. By working for a magazine where I have unlimited access to medical journals and textbooks, I’m relieved of the urge to move to an apartment within whispering distance of the New York Academy of Medicine.

Between three and three-thirty in the morning, I frequently wake sweating, with heart palpitating. My milestone birthday ended one passage and began another. I agonize: This is it. No more mistakes allowed. Finality. Horror. No more living in the future. There is only now.

According to recent National Institutes of Health statistics, the average life span of a thirty-year-old Caucasian female is eighty years. As a borderline optimist, I rationalize that I still have approximately ten years to go before tripping over the halfway marker.

Please, dear Fate, now that I’m old enough to be a senator, I suggest your letting me live as long as the nonagenarian Georgia O’Keeffe.

I bid a fond farewell to my twenties.

 

 

Forty-nine! Wow! How did that happen! I am firmly entrenched in glorious prime time!

Physically, emotionally, and psychologically I’ve changed during the past nineteen years. Geographically, I moved nine miles—from midtown Manhattan to a small community just across the Hudson River in New Jersey.

Thankfully…I’ve become more adaptable, flexible, resilient; whatever life slaps me with, I have grown confident enough to handle it with equanimity.

My marital status changed, too.  At age thirty-two I married a native New Yorker, the firstborn son of Russian-Jewish immigrants. My articulate husband and I share a love of Shavian plays, Mozart sonatas, and Verdi operas.

Warm and loving, my spouse has taught me a lot about the redemptive powers of unconditional love and affection.  When I withdraw into seemingly impenetrable silence, my customary but unproductive way to deal with anger, he instinctively knows how to gently take the defensive wall down, brick by metaphorical brick.

When I changed husbands, holiday customs were also altered. Instead of feasting at Easter on roasted lamb and mageiritsa (traditional soup made of sheep’s entrails), I politely swallow matzo  and gefilte fish at Passover.

I wear the same size dress as I did a decade ago and have no new cavities. My hair—once the color of undiluted espresso—is heavily and naturally streaked with silver. I’m not going to dye it. The trichological transformation that I see in the mirror forces me to come to terms with aging. That’s meant in a positive way—acceptance of living, with more joy and more dignity, as a mature woman, never again to be called a pretty girl.

The late Alfred Charles Kinsey, founder of the Institute for Sex Research, said that a woman reaches her sexual peak around age thirty-eight. (I say between thirty-eight and forty-eight; two years ago I had to replace my All-Flex arcing spring diaphragm.)

Marrying for the second time and learning to drive a car (in effect, for the second time) coincided. Both require a lot of patience and a certain tolerance for risk. The year I left Tennessee, when I was seventeen, I had stopped driving after a near-fatal collision with a tractor-trailer on a major highway. Many years later, a girlfriend who owned a gleaming BMW persuaded me to sidle into the driver’s seat. I’ve been driving (unfortunately not BMWs) ever since.

My forties are better than my thirties. I sleep peacefully through the night. I know and accept that I’ll make lots of mistakes as long as I live; neurotic perfectionism is no longer part of the package. Living in the present is second nature to me now, like counting calories and the dollars in my mutual funds. I’ve grown more tolerant of my weaknesses and adamantly refuse to desert my most fantastic dreams. As Yogi Berra said: “It’s not over till it’s over.”

Always searching for an illusive frontier, I still don’t really feel settled.  Deep down in my heart, I’m the worldly Somerset Maugham, the peripatetic Graham Greene, the restless Paul Theroux waiting for the next train. I look forward to change, to the next destination. I want to live in motion in a continually changing landscape with a changing cast of characters. Disliking quotidian routine, I want to be able to distinguish every day from all other days. I want to live fully in a rich phantasmagoria.

Evolving and learning give me the greatest pleasure. In my imaginary perfect world, based on my criteria for adventure, next year I would become a race-car driver and five years later—a commercial airline pilot; I’d fly 747s to Hong Kong, Sydney, Cairo, and Berlin. My altruistic side would head a foundation that keeps every library in the United States open seven days a week, twelve hours a day.

The unknown with both its disappointments and surprises enriches me. Being a quiet maverick of sorts, I suspect I’ve become somewhat addicted to those adrenaline rushes that invariably accompany the excitement of the unfamiliar.

In Passages, Gail Sheehy writes, “We are becoming accustomed to the idea of serial marriages. It will be progress when we come to think of serial careers, not as signifying failure, but as a realistic way to prolong vitality.”

However, I cling to my past eccentricities like white napkin fuzz to a black wool skirt, and I’ve generously added a few more. (Although occasionally now, I will amble into a department store when the inviting newspaper ad proclaims “40 percent off all merchandise.”) I can tell whether I like someone by the way she removes a paper lid from a jar or the way she organizes bills in her wallet. I’m critical of my own behavior as well…if I have more than ten items to buy, I never sneak into the express line at the supermarket. Anachronistic, chatty letters or e-mail (I LOVE E-MAIL!!!) are always preferable to disruptive telephone calls. And the other day I took my innocuous beige cloth coat to a tailor; per my request, he lined it in blazing-red satin: the anthropomorphic me.

When standing in motionless movie lines, I inconspicuously eavesdrop. Women and men in Manhattan, it seems, habitually talk hyperbolically about money and jobs. I prefer to go to films alone, to sit on the aisle, and to be totally absorbed in the celluloid drama in front of me. As an intense observer, I don’t want anyone to break the spell immediately afterward.

Modern life is too frenetic for my taste. Abandoning raucous aerobics, I spend more time these days practicing laid-back yoga. And I need more time alone.  In Gift from the Sea, a collection of poetic essays about the conflicts and challenges facing women, Anne Morrow Lindbergh felicitously wrote about the importance of solitude to a woman’s mental and spiritual well-being. Lindbergh said, “Woman must come of age by herself. This is the essence of ‘coming of age’—to learn how to stand alone. She must learn not to depend on another, nor to feel she must prove her strength by competing with another. In the past, she has swung between these two opposite poles of dependence and competition, of Victorianism and Feminism. Both extremes throw her off balance; neither is the center, the true center of being a whole woman. She must find her true center alone. She must become whole. She must, it seems to me, as a prelude to any ‘two solitudes’ relationship, follow the advice of the poet to become ‘world to oneself for another’s sake.’ ”

I strongly identify with Binx Bolling, the protagonist of Walker Percy’s The Moviegoer. “The search,” Binx says, “is what anyone would undertake if he were not sunk in the everydayness of his own life. To become aware of the possibility of the search is to be onto something. Not to be onto something is to be in despair.”

Despair stalked me in my early years…but no more. I have what I want: not an easy life, but an interesting one.

There are infinite paths of possibility. Pulitzer Prize–winning Robert Frost said it best:

“Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—

I took the one less traveled by,

And that has made all the difference.”

 

 

 

 

 

MOM

“Do you love your mother?” I asked Alex.

“She’s dead. I had her cremated. I loved her and hated her,” Alex answered.

Alex was a 43-year-old woman. I wondered why her mother gave her a man’s name.

Alex and I met while working as freelance copy editors at an upscale women’s magazine on Madison Avenue and 60^th Street. We spent hours together under a hot Halogen lamp in a tiny, windowless room with holes in the walls. Our space was a converted storage room for art supplies.

She was a bona fide abstract expressionist artist from Chicago. Once a year she had a show of her vibrant, violent paintings at a gallery on Mercer Street. I was a poet manqué and an essayist from a bucolic town in southwestern Tennessee, just five minutes from the Mississippi line.

We had great conversations about men, mothers, sex, and literature. They were all closely related.

Recently married for the third time, Alex would cry sometimes when she talked about her fights with her husband. They regularly went to a marriage counselor, and Alex saw a psychiatrist on the side—for her emotional needs, not sexual.

She grew up on rice and beans and slaps from her Mom, who collected stray cats and food stamps. Her mental condition permitting, she worked part-time selling bras in the intimate apparel department of a fine selected store.

Alex’s older sister ran away from home to save herself when she was 16. That was the end of all contact. Dad was long gone.

Alice Miller, the Swiss psychologist, says that rotten childhoods can be somewhat redeemed if the young victim of bad parents is fortunate enough to be cherished by a sensitive, nurturing adult.

Alex was saved by  an adoring, feisty aunt who taught her about goodness, love, and hope. But she couldn’t teach Alex about jealousy.

Most of Alex’s fights with her husband were about his looking at other women. Not touching, just looking. Alex ended her second marriage immediately when she found out about her husband’s affair. They lived in a big house in Bergen County, New Jersey, but he had to spend a lot of time in California for business. When he was in the Garden State, they made love every day. That astounded me. She was so lucky. My first husband was a native Athenian (Greece, not Georgia). We made love about three times a day before we got married. That’s when we lived together in the Earl’s Court section of London. Most of the people who lived in that section were Indian. Taki liked to go out for lamb curry at midnight. He liked for me to walk ahead of him and smile at the men standing around. He liked for me to pretend that I was a whore. When a man would  approach me, Taki would rush to my side. That excited him very much. Then he couldn’t wait to go to bed with me. We were in our early 20s. Taki lost all sexual interest in me shortly after we married. I think a lot of married couples never have sex.

Anyway, When Alex found the key to her second husband’s secret post office box, she knew that he was having an affair. She had been looking for “Love” stamps when she rifled through his desk drawer. He had a good job and was generous. When he got a small inheritance, he put everything in joint names: Joint tenants with right of survivorship.

During the day she was free to paint and to bake all-natural banana-nut bread. She had had a good deal.

When she discovered her husband’s infidelity, she catapulted herself into a hysterical rage. I told her she should have kept quiet and kept on painting. “Kill him in a painting,” I suggested.

“Why didn’t you keep quiet?” I asked.

“Impossible,” she answered.

Alex was impulsive. Emotional outbursts were alien to me. They were very bad manners where I came from. “If you lose control, the other guy wins” was my motto.

But Alex’s emotions matched her clothes and artwork. She wore Keds that were hot pink, orange, or purple. Some of her paintings of people and things looked like sunsets in Santa Fe, even though she never painted landscapes.

When she divorced the second husband, she got alimony. Several lawyers told her that she wouldn’t get anything because she was healthy, childless, and thirtysomething. But she shopped and shopped until she found a pit bull for a lawyer.

After her divorce and financial settlement, she went to the Greek island of Kos, rode old bicycles without hand gears, and ate fresh figs for breakfast until her money ran out.

 

Alex and I sure were different. That’s probably why I liked her so much. She always told me how well-bred and self-contained I was. I liked her spontaneity and shocking tactless remarks. She crunched cold, hard carrots all day and never apologized for the irritating sound. Several times a day she talked on the phone with her third husband. “I love you,” she whispered over and over, except when she cried and said, “We’ll talk about this later.”

I liked our intense conversations. We dispensed with the small talk pretty quickly.

As a child, Alex slept with one leg hanging over the edge of the bed so that she could jump out when her mother started beating her.

As a child, I slept on my back with my hands on the sides of the narrow bed. My parents didn’t get along, so my mother slept in my bedroom before we moved to a bigger house. Sleep was very important to her. If I accidentally woke her up, she’d start screaming and slapping me across the face. So, even when I had chills and fever, I’d try real hard not to shake.

She made me wear pajamas with feet and plastic soles after she found me lying with my nightgown above my waist.

“The rats are going to get you,” she said.

When I slept with a man for the first time, I was almost 21. My lover was a Jewish dental student at New York University. We did it on a water bed in a closed wing of Bellevue Hospital.

Alex’s first experience was with a 30-year-old when she was 16. He became her mentor and encouraged her to go to art school.

So Alex married him, and they moved to New York. He was very sweet, but Alex didn’t love him, so after she got her degree from Cooper Union, she divorced him and went back to Chicago for a while.

Both Alex and I are childless by choice. Thank God for Mary McCarthy and diaphragms. Someone said McCarthy did for diaphragms what Melville did for whales.

When we were in our teens, we made the decision not to become mothers. Our mothers had branded us with pain.

I said, “Having children is an act of cruelty. Why bring someone into the world to suffer?”

“Yeah, I agree,” Alex replied.

“But I don’t want to die now,” I said. “I have hope for the future. But if I had to choose between exactly repeating my 39 years—with everything the same, not being able to change anything—or death, I’d take death. What would you do?”

“I don’t know. I know I don’t want to die yet. After all, we have squatters’ rights,” was Alex’s opinion.

I looked at the light-blond rectangle she had dyed on top of her dark-blond hair. Her earrings, bright purple ladders made from pipe cleaners, hung like spaghetti al dente. I never wore earrings except at parties or when I went out with small groups of people, which wasn’t very often.

“Time to work,” I said.

“Yeah, I guess so,” replied Alex.

I was reading a story titled, “The Seductive Mother.” It was about a woman who slept with her son.

Alex was working on a piece about a woman who just returned home from the hospital after a mastectomy. It described her ordeal of shopping for a nightgown and sleeping with her husband for the first time after her operation.

We studiously read the repugnant material under the Halogen heat.

Five days later in the mail, I got an invitation to a show of Alex’s paintings at a gallery in the Village.

All of her paintings were exhibited on one floor. Each painting had a number. By the entrance, the guests picked up the sheets that listed the artwork. Alex picked incredible titles. Her paintings blazed on the white walls.

The food was great. Penne primavera, pasta and broccoli, tuna salad. Her husband, who liked to read magazines about guns, had made everything. He was Jewish, cute, funny and a self-employed caterer. Alex was Irish and had married three Jews. I was a Southern Wasp, divorced from a Greek and married to a Jew, a real mensch. Even in Tennessee I had heard women say that Jewish men made the best husbands.

After my divorce from the Greek, who had a bad case of satyriasis with other women, I only went out with Jewish men. They’re so funny! They really have a unique sense of humor. Must be genetic. I went out with lots of Jewish men. It didn’t matter whether they were married or not. The Jewish stockbroker I dated said facetiously, “I think the Ku Klux Klan sent you here to fuck all the Jews to death.”

At the party I met some of the people who worked with Alex at the Metropolitan Museum, where she freelanced sometimes on their catalogs.

Slowly, I walked from painting to painting. The largest and most magnetic was a Kandinskylike composition of red and gray. A bloody-looking configuration in the shape of an enlarged uterus had been superficially dusted with her mother’s gray ashes.

The painting was titled “MOM,” and it was for sale.