Daring (25 page)

He kissed me under Ms. Hamilton and said he would like to continue seeing me. I was not naive enough to think this was his first time moonlighting as a docent to a single woman. After more kisses in the car, I began feeling like Birdwhistell's “free bird.” There was magic in this night. The senator pressed me to stay over. I had to get home before Maura returned the next morning, and it would have spoiled things.

On the dreary milk train ride back to New York, my thoughts returned to Clay and I was caught in a whipsaw:
You have to leave him, Gail. Yes, but I don't want to lose him.
How perverse we women are! Another scene from
Woman of the Year
flickered through my mind. After Hepburn pushes Tracy too far by adopting a child and expecting him to take care of the boy, he leaves her. She lures him back by letting herself into his apartment and making breakfast for him. She wakes him up. He says he doesn't want her in the kitchen, but he falls for her all over again.

If it worked for Hepburn . . .

CLAY RETURNED FROM THE COUNTRY
at about seven on Monday night. The flicker of candlelight in the living room must have caught his eye. He leaned over the balcony railing. “Who's there?”

He must have seen the placemats set out on our favorite oval cherry table, a bottle of wine chilling in a Georgian silver bucket; he must have smelled the rosemary-stuffed lamb chops and potatoes baking.

“Gail! Thank God. I thought you'd left, I mean, for good, you didn't answer, last night, I kept calling . . .”

“I'm here. Are you alone?”

“Of course!”

I wasn't sure that Nancy was totally out of the picture. But this was not the time to fuss over our recent dalliances.

“Look at the lovely supper you've fixed for me,” he said, diving down the stairs. He wanted to give me a big hug, and I let him, but I didn't dare allow a kiss.

“Let's talk,” I said. He opened the wine and brushed a kiss on my neck as he poured me a glass, then began trying awkwardly to apologize. “It was a dumb fling. I was feeling like you forgot about me.”

“It's more than that.”

Over salad, I told Clay I needed solitude to get serious about writing the book that occupied my mind. “I can't do it with all these distractions.”

“Like what?”

“Our on-again, off-again romance,” I said. “I've become too dependent on you. I don't want to stop seeing you, but—”

“You can't leave,” he protested. “You belong here.”

“There comes a time when the apprentice has to leave the mentor.”

“But Pygmalion got the girl—she literally melted into his arms.”

It took all the gumption I had to resist falling into his arms. “You need freedom, too, Clay. You're still a wild bird. You're not ready to nest.”

He didn't argue. I remembered being unhappy about the way he had treated me when we'd spent a weekend at the Virginia retreat of the
Washington Post
publisher.

“Where do things stand with you and Kay Graham?”

“I don't know what you mean.” He had a goofy grin.

I was tired of his evasions. “Are you pursuing her, I mean, personally?”

“Would I have insisted you live with me if I were trying to capture Kay?”

“Maybe I'm your cover. You wouldn't dare let her courtiers see you as a rival. But I could tell at our Kissinger dinner. She's in love with you.”

He brushed it off by saying something about how much older she was, and besides, he would never be a kept man by a rich woman. I let it go. I realized it would be foolish, and probably futile, for me to insist that he break off his relationships with some of the most powerful women of the day. They had together what Birdwhistell called “a valid social contract.”

Why did I have to leave him to grow? he demanded. Didn't I understand what he had told me after the dinner party from hell? He didn't want me in the kitchen. He wanted my ideas. He wanted me at his side, at the table with his circle of writers, he wanted my insights about New York's movers and fakers. He wanted me in his bed. Suddenly, he was desperate to claim me.

“Why now, why couldn't you make a commitment before now?” I asked.

“You never gave me an ultimatum!”

I couldn't help laughing. Clay being a man who could not abide being told what to do would have dug in his heels and said, “No woman dictates to me.”

He tried another approach. “With all our fights, we've taken a lot out of each other this past year. When I first knew you, and your life was coming apart, you were only, what?—twenty-eight or something? I thought you looked worn out. But you know what? Today you look more beautiful than ever.”

“Then I hope you can wait until I'm ready.” I stood up, an announcement that I was ready to leave. “Clay, I adore you. But it's time for me to break away. Can you understand?”

His face reddened. In a burst of frustration he said, “I love you so much, I could KILL you!”

Whatever the outcome, I knew I had made the most daring decision of my life.

PROBABLY A CRAB WOULD BE FILLED WITH A SENSE OF PERSONAL OUTRAGE IF IT COULD HEAR US CLASS IT WITHOUT ADO OR APOLOGY AS A CRUSTACEAN, AND THUS DISPOSE OF IT. “I AM NO SUCH THING,” IT WOULD SAY; “I AM
MYSELF, MYSELF
ALONE.”

—
WILLIAM JAMES

THE DAY IS WHITE AS A BLANK SHEET.
The windows are open and naked. A breeze caresses my face with the scent of fall. I can hear trees out there rustling. The bed is vast, unfamiliar, suitable for two, three, children and dogs. Where am I? Oh, yes. Not in Clay's world.

This is one of the first mornings in a place of my own. A friend steered me to this furnished sublet on the Upper West Side. A sprawl of a place, but sunny with polished oak floors and a full dining room, a lazy living room with deep armchairs, a marble bar in the mirrored closet, and a bedroom for Maura the size of a small kindergarten. All this for the sacrifice price of $700 a month.

Here, I feel free of the usual to-do list. I can stretch and let my mind play in the swinging door between imagination and consciousness. I am beginning to intuit the idea that will underlie my next book. When we come to a dead end, if we dare to make a major life change, we will grow from it. When one door closes, that makes room for another to open.

The doorbell rings, an unfamiliar ring. It takes a long time to roll out of this bed. Feeling like Goldilocks, I stumble to the windows and find myself looking down at the tops of trees in Central Park. I take a deep breath and count my blessings. It's autumn 1973 and I'm in a new world. Gail's world.

I PULLED ON A COTTON CHEMISE
and padded barefoot down the long hall and peeked out the peephole. It was filled with a big handsome face, lots of brown curls, a much younger man than Clay. He was holding some kind of a cage.

“Who is it?” I called.

“Robin. I come bearing a bird.”

“Robin? Oh my God. Robin Costelloe, how did you remember about the lovebird?”

Robin was a dreamy Irish sculptor I had met in Dublin while escaping from Bloody Sunday. I had told him how shaken up I was after coming home from Ireland to find my lovebird dead—what kind of loser couldn't even keep a bird alive? “Robin, I don't know how you found me, but you caught me sleeping later than I ever have in my life. Can you give me a few minutes to get decent?”

In that charming Irish accent that runs sentences up a hill ending in a question mark, he said, “I'll pop 'round to Chock Full o' Nuts? What kind of coffee would you be liking?”

What crossed through my mind was:
Do I really want to open this door? I've just closed the door on one life in order to find the solitude that a writer needs to do an important piece of work. Maura has more of her mother here and we have a whole park across the street as our front yard.
All I wanted to do was take my daughter to the park and teach her how to ride a bike. And while she was having a playdate, I'd sit down at my brand-new board-over-file-boxes desk in the bedroom and start writing.

I went into Maura's room to wake her. “Quick, get dressed, honey! I want you to see the surprise on our new doorstep!” I pulled on jeans and a shirt. Maura squealed over the bird.

“How did it get here?”

“It's from Robin, my Irish sculptor friend. He remembered about our lovebird.”

Robin returned with jelly doughnuts and coffee and a bunch of jolly yellow mums. Maura fixed the flowers while I made us eggs. Robin was in the United States as a visiting writer at a North Carolina university. He wanted to invite me to come down for a weekend book festival that fall.

Maura asked if the bird would sit on her finger. “Oh, yes, they're very tame,” Robin said. “Try it.”

The baby parrot was peach faced with a green body and looked like he was blushing. We were all captivated. Who knows what false move spooked him? Suddenly he was flapping around the dining room and then disappeared. We found him in my bedroom where the windows were wide open. Maura shrieked, “He's going to fly into the park and get eaten by crows!”

“No he's not!” I said. I slammed down the windows, one after the other.

Robin, the only one with the composure to find towels, led us in the chase. It turned into a great scramble with the poor bird squawking and flapping. Each of us failed by inches until Maura delicately dropped a blanket over the bird. The noise stopped. I lifted him back into his cage and covered it to calm him down. Up until this point, I had sworn to be guided by the Chinese proverb about cultivating creativity, “Before spontaneity comes discipline.” I was pretty good at discipline. Robin was all spontaneity. His presence reminded me that we need a healthy dose of both.

OVER THE NEXT YEARS,
I enjoyed an emancipated bachelor woman's life.

Traveling for research and speaking engagements brought me in contact with intriguing new men. Like most women in their mid- to late thirties, I was probably at the peak of my physical attractiveness. And being single, I was shamelessly flirtatious. The senator often came up to New York, and our romance blossomed, but like a day lily, not a perennial. I enjoyed dates with a dashing foreign correspondent, and dinners prepared by a documentary TV producer, curly headed and concupiscent, who once danced me through a rainstorm on the beach. My friend Chota at Air India introduced me to his eclectic clan of diplomats, filmmakers, and foodie friends. And how could I forget the painter with the body of a ballet dancer?

As I sit here collecting these memories into a list, I realize that it may sound as though they were superficial flings. On the contrary. They all evolved from infatuations into relationships and grew into lifelong friendships that I cherish. And then there was Jack and the spell of Sligo in the Celtic twilight.

Jack Deacy, a red-bearded Irishman with a perpetual laugh, was a writer I met while we were both contributing to the Irish issue of
New York
. When I was offered the loan of a house in Dublin by an Irish government official, it seemed curative to go back to Ireland under more promising circumstances. Once ensconced in an elegant Georgian town house with a lovely garden and mild weather, I yearned to throw a party. I discovered that Deacy was in Dublin and invited him. He brought along the actors and playwrights and newspaper people he knew. It turned into a long, lugubrious night at the end of which Clay called from London to ask me to join him for the weekend at David Frost's. Deacy answered the phone. Clay was not pleased. Assuming that I was having a flaming affair—and worse, with another Irishman—he accused me of betrayal.

“But I can't have an affair—we're not married!”

As the English say, I might as well be hung for a sheep as a lamb. Deacy wanted to show me the west of Ireland. We drove up to Yeats country, reading to each other from
The Collected Poems of W. B. Yeats.
After driving around the shivering deep blue of Lough Gill, we found a beautiful old hotel, the Abbey Inn, in Dromahair. We had just finished reading a Yeats poem about Dromahair, “The Man Who Dreamed of Faeryland.” Deacy had an uncle, a musician-farmer, who lived nearby. He brought his traditional Celtic band to the hotel to play for us. The frenetic tin whistling and reel after reel of furious thumping on goatskin drums got us up and dancing until we ran out of breath. When we walked outside for air, astonished at the green of the fields lit by the full moon of a late Celtic twilight, we noticed a two-story stucco house next door. A For Rent sign hung on it.

I dreamed that night of living in this magical land.

The next day we met the genial owner of the hotel, Jack McGoldrick. He showed us the house with its six bedrooms and kitchen and commodious common room. If we knew any Americans who wanted an inexpensive getaway, with a bar and restaurant right next door . . . the owner had read my mind. When something sounds too good to be true, it probably is. But by then, I was hopelessly beguiled by the poetic Irish soul and the mellow beauty of Yeats country.