Читать книгу Fear of Dying - Erica Jong - Страница 11

3

Wondermans Rampant

The only “ism” Hollywood believes in is plagiarism.

—Dorothy Parker

In their prime, the Wondermans led a glamorous life in the penthouse on Riverside Drive once owned by George Gershwin. They gave glittering parties where famous faces were glimpsed in smoke-filled rooms. “A tinkling piano in the next apartment / Those stumbling words that told you what my heart meant.” I thought those lines were written for my parents; they certainly evoked my feelings about their parties—where ladies in satin and marabou smoked cigarettes in holders, clinked champagne glasses, drank in a way nobody drinks anymore, and changed husbands as they changed platform shoes. The men had darkly mirrored hair and thin mustaches like Adolphe Menjou. Limousines circled the block, awaiting them. Chauffeurs were black and wore caps. Maids were black and pretended to be obsequious. They put on their hats when they went home for the day.

When McCarthyism ended their show-biz careers and my parents returned from Hollywood at the height of the Blacklist, they found the Gershwin duplex and filled it with three decades’ worth of memorabilia. It was a movie set as much as an apartment. Even the floor in the gallery was mirrored for exhibition dancing. The double grand pianos were lacquered white. The library had framed pictures of them from all their movies and leather-bound copies of all their scripts. The powder room off the gallery was an infinite hall of mirrors where I could stare at innumerable multiples of myself becoming greener and hazier with each reflection.

I never really knew how the Blacklist had affected them. They had plenty of friends who were also ruined by it, but my parents were too fiercely ambitious—even in the engagé thirties—to have signed the wrong petitions. The Blacklist coincided with the end of their salad days as performers. It was time to do something else anyway.

So they came back and set up Hollywood on the Hudson. They had smartly squirreled away their Hollywood money (despite what Dorothy Parker said about it melting in the palm like snow), and eventually their theatrical book and autograph shop, Bibliomania, also prospered. In a business—rare books—populated by nerds and ladies in Boston marriages, my parents were unusual. They had a flair for the dramatic and a flair for mixing people. Many couples fell in love at their parties. It was as if their love were contagious.

For three little girls in black velvet dresses and British black patent-leather Mary Janes that had to be fastened with button-hooks who watched from halfway down the stairs at their parties, it seemed that our parents were the King and Queen of Cool. It seemed we’d never live as glamorously as they. And it seemed the height of ambition to grow up and become our parents.

Now I know that many children feel that way. And that the lucky ones are the ones who outgrow it. Toni, Emmy, and I had never outgrown it. That was why our lives were so hard. We weren’t starving or drinking polluted water, but we were stuck in a kind of emotional poverty all the same.

What struck me always, sitting at my parents’ bedside, was that it was time for me to take off the black velvet dress and stop sitting in the middle of the stairs.

It was at one of my parents’ parties that I first decided I was going to be an actress. All because of Leporello Kahn. I was sixteen when I met Lep Kahn (at the time the pun was lost on me). Lep—whose father was a famous opera singer at the old Met—was originally named after Don Giovanni’s side-kick. It was a lousy thing to do to a child. Lep’s name was a joke, so he tried to turn his life into a joke. He grew up to be one of those merry, seemingly harmless plump middle-aged men who brilliantly know how to appeal to teenage girls. He was the first man to let me know I was beautiful, and he was so suave and clever that he promptly made all the sixteen-year-old boys I knew seem like louts. (Not that it was hard.)

I met Lep at one of the first parties at which I actually drank vodka (in slavish imitation of my mother). I was wearing a strapless peony-pink gown with a harem skirt (those were the days of harem skirts), and with every drink, my breasts bobbled farther out of my boned top. Lep was looking at my breasts and saying, “You must come down to the Russian Tea Room and have lunch with me.” The Russian Tea Room meant show business glamour in those days. Now it has morphed into an unrecognizable simulacrum—like everything else connected with that vanished world.

Lep was an important Broadway producer who did everything from Shakespeare to Pinter. A big macher. He promised me Juliet in a new production of Romeo and Juliet, and though the role fell through, my affair with Lep did not.

Without Lep Kahn, would I have had an abortion at sixteen, quit school at seventeen, moved to the Village, and appeared as Anne in the road show of The Diary of Anne Frank at eighteen (the part that deluded me into thinking that the theater was a viable profession)? No. No. No. No. Looking back, I should have stayed at Walden (which was loose enough to accommodate all kinds of hanky-panky), finished high school, gone to some arty college like Bennington or Bard, and never gotten involved with Lep Kahn—but who could have known that at the time? His passion for me seemed like the key to the life I wanted.

He was one of those attractive plump men. His stomach shook when he laughed in the nude. He had breasts almost as big as mine. But he also had melting brown eyes and long silky black lashes, wore wonderful tweed jackets, had a beard and mustache peppered with gray (which gave him an authoritative air), smoked a meerschaum pipe, and smelled of honeyed tobacco and Old Spice (sexy, then). He chewed cinnamon-and-clove gum—which I found harmlessly eccentric. I didn’t think he was fat. He seemed Falstaffian to me—especially since he could quote Shakespeare by the yard. He was what I did instead of my senior thesis.

“‘But, soft! What light from yonder window breaks? . . . It is the east, and Juliet is the sun. . . .’”

Imagine having that quoted to you while you are playing hooky from high school to drink vodka and eat blini with beluga at the Russian Tea Room—always thinking you will be glimpsed with Lep by one of your parents’ friends! The fear of exposure was part of the thrill.

Since Lep was the reason I quit school at seventeen, having had an abortion at sixteen, you might say he was a child molester who ruined my life. But I didn’t think so at the time. I was so excited about becoming an adult and an actress. I assumed the couch casting came with the territory. Lep arranged the abortion, in fact—back in the days when it was illegal—with one of those show business doctors who practiced right down the block from the Russian Tea Room.

However grown up I felt sneaking off to meet Lep at the RTR and then going to his pad (as he called it) on Broadway and Fiftieth Street in a big old gloomy apartment that also served as his office, imagine how scared I was going off to get an illegal abortion without my parents’ knowledge. How alone in the world I felt! Though Lep went with me and held my hand. Even paid for it. I think he got me the Anne Frank role because he felt so guilty.

Which of these tableaux should I present? The abortion doctor’s seedy office? Lep’s gloomy, cavernous apartment facing a courtyard filled with filthy pigeons nesting? Lep dancing naked with his belly shaking?

Sex with him was not amazing, but I had nothing to compare it to at the time. He knew how to eat pussy, though—perhaps to make up for the fact that his penis was not always operational in those pre-Viagra days. He compensated for the softness of his prick with the hard truth of poetry. And then with the part of Anne Frank, who in those days represented all innocence, beauty, truth—the summit of every young actress’s desire.

I see myself at sixteen, walking hand in hand with Lep into the abortion doctor’s lair, sure I would be dead by nightfall. (Everybody then had heard of a girl who died from—or was sterilized by—a botched abortion.)

No nurse was present. No receptionist. Abortions were done then without the benefit of witnesses or anesthesia. I dressed in a gown (as later for my face-lift), lay on the table with bare feet in the cold stirrups, gratefully accepted the shot of whiskey proffered, and fell into a red hole of pain so excruciating I can feel it to this day. I can still remember my womb horribly cramping, still remember retching and nearly choking on my vomit, still remember the doctor shushing me. When I asked for Lep, the doctor told me that he had “gone to a meeting”—which in those days had nothing to do with AA—but had sent a car for me.

I see myself then, pale, shaking, drained of hope, in the back of a Cadillac limousine, trying to be brave, trying not to cry for my mother, trying to feel as grown up as I had lunching with Lep at the RTR. But it was no use. I was a mess. Relieved, yes. But my head was unaccountably full of visions of pink babies, my heart a hollow nest, my rage buried in a million excuses for Lep (he had a meeting, had a deal to do, responsibilities to escape because they were too painful). I had more mercy on him than I had on myself.

Those were the good old days of either-or. Either be an actress or have children. Either succumb to fluffy, eventually soul-destroying domesticity, or be a sleek woman with kohl-rimmed eyes who was far too sophisticated to confess to wanting a baby. Either Kate Hepburn or the happy housewife—there was no in-between. Every choice available to women meant pain and renunciation. My daughter’s generation, who turned their backs on their brilliant careers to make brilliant babies, learned that by and by. A woman without a paycheck becomes a slave in a world that worships Mammon. Woo-hoo! Could have told ’em that. But would they listen? Do daughters ever listen to mothers or mother-figures? No. You can’t tell no one nothing! Remember that and shut up. Half of parenting is keep your piehole, as the Brits call it, sealed. It’s a Monty Python world—and the Sermon on the Mount is rewritten by Lloyd Blankfein and Jamie Diamond. Don’t turn the other cheek unless you want your pocket picked. And so it goes.

But maybe I am rewriting history. Now that I am sixty and my eggs and my acting career are all washed up, every child I did not have cries out to me like a ghost on a cloud seeded with shadowy infants. But what did I know then? Did I know my parents would get old and ill? I wouldn’t have believed it possible. They seemed so powerful then.

Not long ago I read in the Times that Lep Kahn had died. Good, I thought, now nobody will know. My secret is safe with him. The abortion doctor died long ago.

So we grew up in the Never-Neverland of forties Hollywood and we returned to New York in the fabulous fifties. We all remembered trick-or-treating by limousine with movie stars’ kids. We remembered Halloween costumes borrowed from the studios. We could still smell the eucalyptus trees of Westwood and hear the crashing Pacific of Malibu and Trancas. We were California kids transplanted to New York and the transplant never quite took. Sometimes I think that is why all three of us long for Mediterranean landscapes. Toni found hers and Emmy fell hopelessly in love with Italy. And I was bicoastal before the word was coined. I batted back and forth between New York and L.A. like a Ping-Pong ball for most of my professional life. The place I felt most at home was the air in between. I belonged nowhere. Often I still feel that way.

When I married Asher, my acting career had gone to that place women’s acting careers used to go when they neared fifty. There were no interesting jobs for me, so I quit. I refused to play the mother, then the grandmother, then the crazy old hag. I became Asher’s wife with a vengeance. And since Asher was seemingly rich, my job as wife was all-consuming. We entertained in Litchfield County, at the beach, in Manhattan, in the Luberon. I was the perfect hostess and event-planner—a profession in itself. Probably the oldest profession—but for that other one. The days slipped by. Once you get off the career train, it’s not so easy to get back on. I let my contacts slip.

Of course, if I were still working, I wouldn’t have to advertise for sex. When you are actively employed in the profession, men turn up routinely. They may be less than men—actors—but they know how to play men. That’s their craft. They are especially good at brief and dangerous liaisons. Permanence scares them. Which all worked very well for me as long as I was scared of permanence.

Thinking back to all the brief and dangerous liaisons I had on the job, I doubt that I’d be able to have them now—even if I were working. It takes a certain optimism to begin an affair—an optimism I may have lost. You have to believe that another man will make it better. And that gets harder and harder as you get older.

I hate getting older. I don’t see anything good about it. The downward slope of life is full of rocks. Your skis are blunt and there are these patches of black ice everywhere, ready to slip you up. They may have been there before but you never noticed them. Now they are lying in wait for you on every slope.

Vanessa Wonderman had a great career from Anne Frank on. I played Juliet, Viola, Miss Julie, Maggie the Cat, and dozens of murdered girls in movies. Those were the days when women were mostly victims. (Actually, that hasn’t changed as much as we had hoped.) But dying was a living. Until I got too old to be an attractive corpse.

No doubt about it, I was going through a bad patch. I wanted to shake myself. This was no way to live—or to die.

And then an e-mail came from the Zipless ad that piqued my interest:

I love that you describe yourself as a happily married woman. I’ve always thought that a happily married woman would make the best lover. I cannot celebrate Eros once a week because I live far from New York, but perhaps I could manage once a month. Will you meet me for a drink at my favorite restaurant in New York and check me out? No strings, just a drink. Fear not, I am happily married too.

I carried the printed e-mail around in my purse for several weeks. Just having it in my possession made me feel vaguely hopeful—as if my erotic life was not over, as if there was still hope for me. Then, impulsively, I wrote to the e-mail address given:

HMW desires your photo.

Almost instantly I received a jpeg of a rather handsome brown-haired man with a salt-and-pepper beard and big blue eyes. He looked to be about forty. “Call me,” his e-mail said. A number was proffered.

So I did. He sounded nice. We had a pleasant if somewhat awkward conversation.

“Will you meet me next time I’m in New York?” he asked.

“Why not?” I said.

“Why not yes or why not no?”

“Yes.”

It was either that or the black ice.

Asher would hardly be happy if I succumbed to suicide. Sex was better than suicide, and this wasn’t even sex—it was just a drink.

We meet at ‘21’, under the ceiling of boys’ toys. I have no idea what to expect. Naturally, I am nervous. I debate whether to use my real name and decide against it. I hold a white rose as the agreed-upon sign that I am me.

A tall, handsome man with startling blue eyes walks in, also holding a white rose. He looks around the bar room until he finds me, seated in a corner. He pulls up a chair.

“You must be HMW,” he says.

“I am.”

“I am HMM—Happily Married Man.”

“So I see.”

“I’m very glad you came,” he says. Then there is a pause. We can’t figure out what else to say.

“Will you tell me your real name?”

“Yes: David. And yours?”

“I’m not ready to tell you that.”

“So what should I call you?”

“Call me Serena. Perhaps it will have a magical effect.”

“I hope so. Tell me why you placed that ad. I’m really curious.”

“Well, I adore my husband, but he’s much older, and people seem to be dying all around me.”

“Sex is very lacking and you miss it, right?”

I feel guilty even nodding, so I say and do nothing in response.

“Tell me about you,” I propose.

“My wife is ill. I’d feel like a cad if I left her, but my life is pretty bleak. I was hoping to banish the bleakness. I don’t want to get involved with anyone who might know her or me, but I thought since I come to New York every so often. . . . So I saw the ad and thought I’d take the risk. I’m terrified actually.”

“Me too.” Was it possible we were perfect for each other?

“Can I buy you a drink?”

“Please.”

He calls the waiter and we order drinks—red wine for me, bourbon for him.

“You’re beautiful,” he says, “and I’m sure I’ve seen you before.”

“Unlikely.”

“Why is it unlikely?”

“I’ve spent my whole life being an Upper East Side housewife,” I lie. I have no intention of identifying myself.

“Why is that bad?”

“In New York it’s a crime never to have done anything with your life.”

“I’m sure you’ve done things with your life. You wouldn’t look so alive if you hadn’t.”

“Thank you. Do I really look alive? Some days I feel half dead.”

“Everyone should look so good dead.”

“What brings you to New York?”

“I’m raising money for my company, meeting with investment-fund managers, that sort of thing.”

“Men in suits?”

“Yes, and a few women in suits, but I don’t want to talk about that. I can do those pitches in my sleep.”

“What do you want to talk about?”

“What we came here for—fantasy.”

“Do you want to tell me yours?”

“I’d rather show you.”

“I’d rather get to know you first.”

“Often that ruins the fantasy.”

“I’ll take that risk.”

“Look, why don’t you come to my suite at the Palace—right down the block—and we’ll talk there. I have a car waiting.”

I think about it. It puts me in a sweat. He is a total stranger, and the idea of sex with a total stranger terrifies me.

“But you’re a total stranger.”

“Then get to know me.”

I battle with myself. At twenty, I would have been challenged, but now going to a hotel room with a strange man seems like the sheerest folly. Am I going to risk all the great things I have with Asher for a perfect stranger?

“My father is dying,” I say.

“All the more reason why you should live.”

“Look—you go to your suite and order lunch and maybe I’ll join you there if I find the courage.” Am I ready for risk-taking or not? I used to be good at putting all the risks out of my head, but now I think about how much I have to lose.

“Good. Suite 2733.”

He leaves. I run to the ladies’ room, pee, touch up my makeup, and run down the block to Madison Avenue before I can change my mind. Then I circle the block three times in a daze, debating with myself. Am I ready for adventure or not? The old dybbuk of impulsiveness comes back. I will go to his suite. What do I have to lose except everything?

When I get there, a waiter is laying out a spread of beluga caviar, smoked salmon, and Champagne. The suite is huge and sunny. David is grateful I have come. When the waiter leaves, he kisses me decorously on the cheek. His beard is scratchy.

“No strings,” he says, moving swiftly away.

We sit opposite each other at the table and toast in vintage Krug. He prepares me a toast point with caviar.

What am I doing here? I think in a panic. Nevertheless, we continue to make small talk as if we have just met at a cocktail party.

“All my life, I’ve dreamed of meeting a woman who shares my fantasies.”

“We all dream of that.”

“But some fantasies are more unusual than others.”

“I’m sure we’re all pretty much the same in the fantasy department.”

“Not necessarily,” he says. Then he stares at me and continues, “Dare I?”

“Dare you what?”

“Dare I share with you?”

“I don’t see why not.”

“Perhaps we should just have lunch and wait for my next visit.”

“Fine with me. I can’t stay very long today anyway.”

“Oh—what the hell,” he says.

He gets up and goes into the bedroom of the suite. A few seconds pass. When he returns he is holding aloft a black rubber suit with zippers over the crotch and the breasts. He looks at once sheepish and mischievous. He raises his eyebrows in question as if he is channeling Jack Nicholson. His beard makes him look Mephistophelian when he works his eyebrows that way. “What do you think?”

“Do you wear it? Or do I?”

“You. And there are certain accessories that go with it.”

“Accessories?” My mind is blank. I don’t think immediately of manacles and chains and whips, although the Marquis de Sade must have had such stuff at Lacoste—his ruined castle in the Luberon.

“You know,” he says. “Accessories.”

Then it dawns on me. He’s thinking of gothic paraphernalia. My mind flies back to a time I played Sade’s Justine, the twelve-year-old serving maid whose virtu is tested by nuns, monks, cavaliers, comtes—et cetera. Someone had adapted Sade’s Justine into a filthy French movie.

Sade was a revolutionary, of course, with a revolutionary’s detestation of the establishment. Did the monks preach virtue? Then he would preach sin. He was, we know, a member of the National Convention and hated hypocrisy as much as he hated its chief purveyor, the Catholic Church. For which he spent five years in the Bastille and thirteen years in Charenton, the insane asylum. Most of his books were written in jail—a terrific place for a libertine to write. Freedom, after all, is distracting.

In the only known portrait of him—done when he was twenty—he has such a sweet face. Jail may have saved his life in that bloody period when aristocrats were being guillotined. It certainly increased his literary output.

Oh, I had done S&M with the director of that movie—a certain Christian Fleuvier d’Anjou, who claimed to be a comte himself, descended from a distant cousin of Sade. It was a big bore to me—and dangerous to boot. Maybe the girls who’d never heard of “the Divine Marquis” or even L’Histoire d’O were turned on by it—especially if they got cash and prizes along with the stinging butt and reddened clit. But I much preferred soft lights and sweet music—tenderness, even if fake tenderness.

We all have our particular preferences. Mine is gentle sex, the kind in which a man takes forever before he touches you down there. But most people are so guilty about sex that they want the crime and the punishment built in.

“I think it’s not my cup of tea,” I say softly.

“Oh, just try it on,” David pleads. “You never know till you try.”

I don’t know whether to laugh or cry. Nothing human is alien to me, but I don’t want to wear that suit. God only knows what the matching headgear is. And I had already tried S&M—as a young actress—with a director who turned out to be a horse’s ass. And violent besides.

“I think I know,” I say, getting up to go. “Thank you so much for the drink.”

“You bitch,” he hisses. “How could you lead me on like this?”

“I thought this was just lunch.”

“I thought you were serious.”

“I thought so too, but I never made any promises.”

He grabs my arm and squeezes it painfully. “I can get younger chicks than you.”

“I’m sure you can—let me go!”

“You’re fifty if you’re a day.”

“Thanks, I’ll tell my plastic surgeon. I’m sure he’ll be pleased.”

And somehow I make it to the door without his touching me again. I run to the elevator in a sweat. He doesn’t follow. I descend to the lobby. I walk several blocks at a trot, always thinking there is a stretch limousine following me. My high heels clatter over the pavement. I am already out of breath.

How could you be so stupid? You know the world is full of crazy people who have learned how to temporarily hide their craziness. Scratch a lover and find a lunatic! And then I flag down a cab and go to see my parents.

“I’m a hundred and ninety-three and half dead!” my father raves. “Same old story.”

Veronica has made him get up and sit at the table for tea and he is pissed off.

“What is the matter with your father?” my mother asks me.

“You married him, I didn’t,” I say.

“But he is so grouchy,” she says. “He’s never been this grouchy.”

I go and kiss my father on his head. “Same old story,” he says dismissively. “I know what you’re here for.”

“What?”

“Money.”

“I am not. I don’t want your money.”

“Bullshit,” my father says, and begins fiddling to turn off his hearing aid.

“Don’t you dare turn off that hearing aid, Mr. Wonder-man,” Veronica says. “Vanessa is here to see you.”

“What for? I’m half dead. I ought to jump out the window.” He gets up and walks toward the dining room window, but Veronica restrains him.

“You ought to count your blessings,” she says. “Look down the street at the homeless people. You got it good. You got to get you some gratitude.”

“Gratitude, platitude,” my father growls.

“At least he can still rhyme,” says my mother.

“Let me go back to bed!” my father screams. “I’ve been awake long enough!” He is Dylan Thomas raging against the dying of the light, Ivan Ilyich in his black sack.

“He sleeps all the time,” my mother says. “I don’t understand it.”

In movies the dying have long, intense conversations before parting, but it’s not like that in real life—or is it? My father escaped from my mother the only way he could. He was escaping from her in sleep as he had once escaped from her in work.

“I do,” I say. I have only been there five minutes and already I’m longing to leave.

I think of the rubber suit and suddenly begin to laugh.

“What are you laughing at?” my mother asks as my father is frog-marched down the hall to his bedroom, a prisoner in striped pajamas.

“Nothing.”

“Some nothing. Tell me.”

“I’m thinking that if we have to see the world as a tragedy or a comedy, we might as well see it as a comedy. It’s more fun.”

“I agree with you,” my mother says. I long to tell her about the rubber suit. She would see the absurdity of it. Even in her present condition.

My phone vibrates then. I sneak a peek. It’s from my swain with the rubber suit—or at least I think it is.

“You bitch!” he’s texted; the creep now has my cell phone number.

“Are you happy, darling?” my mother suddenly asks. She has become as angelic as my father was demonic.

“Don’t I look happy?” I ask.

“You look worried,” my mother says. “A mother can always tell.”

I go into the other room and call my friend Isadora. “I’m visiting my parents and I need a drink,” I say over the phone.

“That’s the last thing you need. What’s happening?”

“My parents are dying and I met a man who wants me to wear a rubber suit for him.”

Isadora breaks into gales of laughter. “I must have met him too once upon a time—or his twin brother. He’ll do you as little good as a drink.”

“Come—meet me for coffee. We can compare notes.”

When Isadora bounces into the espresso place where we always meet, I’m struck again by her curly blond hair and big smile, as if she is thirty, not sixty. Seeing her makes me feel that getting older is not so terrible.

Isadora and I like to meet in a tiny coffee shop where the espresso is supposed to be the best in the city. It’s a hole in the wall on the Upper East Side but the coffee is indeed extraordinary. We both order lattes.

“Rubber suit?” asks Isadora.

“Rubber suit,” I say.

“How do you know you wouldn’t like it?”

“I know,” I say. “Have you ever worn one?”

“I refuse to answer on the grounds it might tend to incriminate me. I know that most people who have read my books think I’ve tried everything. I let them think so.”

“But it’s not true?”

“What do you think?”

“I think you’re just a nice Jewish girl pretending to be a sex fiend,” I say.

Isadora laughs. “At one point in my life I may have been a love junkie, but it taught me a lot—and I would never be fooled by a site like Zipless now—even though I named it. Sex on the Internet is much overrated.”

“Why?”

“Because most of the people drawn there are confusing fantasy with reality. They think they know what they want, but they don’t.”

“What do they really want?”

“Connection. Slow sex in a fast world. You can’t get that from a woman in a rubber suit. Or a man.”

I think about it. Isadora is right. We all want connection, and the velocity of our culture makes it harder and harder to find.

“What you really want,” my dear friend says, “is joy. Tell me when you find that—because you’re looking for it in all the wrong places!”