Fear of Fifty (34 page)

A year later, I am about to publish
Molly's Book of Divorce,
an illustrated children's book about a little girl who goes back and forth between Mommy's and Daddy's house. The book is ironic, but it's also a Valentine to kids and parents suffering divorce. I wrote it as a bedtime story to help Molly deal with a life in which she is always leaving socks, underpants, teddy bears at another house. I also wrote it for myself. It ends with a party in which the divorced spouses and their new partners all kiss and make up. Wishful thinking. The book is on press—when suddenly a lawyer's letter stops everything.

Jon's lawyer threatens that unless the child's name is changed, he will use every means to get an injunction against the book.

Alice in Wonderland's father never did this, nor did Christopher Robin's (of course
he
was the author), but it is useless to go to court to prove that children's books are traditionally named after real children. The publisher has already been thrown into a panic. I am summoned into his office and ordered to comply with the demand.

To avoid a lawsuit, I change the little girl's name to Megan and the presses once again roll. I am billed for the scrapped printings. Endless meetings with lawyers take place to reassure the publisher, but somehow the energy is lost. The tabloid press has picked up the story and made its usual hash of it. All the reviews of the book speak of “the scandal” and not the book. What scandal?

There was no lawsuit, no injunction, only a lawyer's letter, harsh words, and endless meetings. But the book is tainted anyway. The publisher edges away from it. And the parents who might find it comforting to their children never find it in bookstores. But, like a damaged child, I refuse to give up on it. Determined to get the book out in another form, I put the pieces for a television show together: Loretta Swit as the mommy, Keri Houlihan as the little girl, Allan Katz to do the pilot. The pilot is terrific. But it never goes to series.

“Divorce is a downer,” say the network executives.

“Loretta's too
old,”
say the network executives (who, six months before, insisted on her being cast). She gave a wonderful performance too, spookily stealing some of my mannerisms as actresses do. With her unique combination of grit and sweetness, she might have been an inspiration to mothers raising kids alone. But the series was inspired by women and nixed by men—as usual. Between “Loretta's too old” and “Divorce is a downer,” the series was dead. It aired as a busted pilot, got better reviews than most of my books. Then it vanished into video limbo.

Half the families in America are getting divorced in 1986, but not on television sitcoms. “Divorce” is still a dirty word in network TV. A few years later, there's a stampede to make such programs.

“You must have been prophetic,” television executives now tell me. “You were years ahead of your time.”

Megan
is out of print. Therapists for children discover it and buy it in out-of-print bookstores to help counsel kids in the midst of divorce. I send them whatever remaindered copies I have. But mostly the book cannot be found—another casualty of the divorce.

After that sabotage, I go slightly nuts and sue Jon for harassment, citing my loss of livelihood and the interruptions to my work. The harassment is real enough, but the law was not made for this—nor for the remedy of heartbreak. This absurd new lawsuit drags on expensively for a while, further interrupting my work.

Finally, I find that I cannot stay enraged enough at Molly's father to go on suing him. I still feel tenderness for him. I dream of our being friends someday. And I want to get on with my life.

Jon and I have pushed each other away, hurt each other, hurt our child. Now Molly is starting first grade at Dalton. It's time to learn to be parents if not yet friends. I am settled, weekdays at least, in a beautiful apartment overlooking the East River in Manhattan. A little distance has been put between us and our pain. The scar tissue has begun to form. It is constantly ripped off, but, little by little, we are learning to share. Weekends, Jon and I meet in Connecticut. I keep the house in Connecticut for Molly to be near her dad. Besides, the house is my writing haven.

My new apartment in New York proves to be located in one of those antediluvian buildings where Jews are encouraged to grow foreskins in order to pass as WASPs. They know they are there on sufferance because the building was formerly “restricted,” so they become enforcers, keeping out other Jews.

As at the Maidstone Club in the Hamptons, where the founding fathers never planned to open the neighborhood to “fags, show business types, or Jews,” the inhabitants of this stuffy building now find themselves surrounded.

They sold the apartment to me—though I was the epitome of everything they had fled all their lives. When Will moves in—with his Harley, black leather jacket, spiked wristlets, and boarding school accent—I become the Joan of Arc of Gracie Square.

It's whispered in the building that we “squeak the bed springs at night,” that Will smokes—or sells—dope in Carl Schurz Park, and that the little redheaded five-year-old and the kindly white-haired nanny are practicing pagans who worship the Horned God right there on East End Avenue.

The co-op board suddenly decides to send a committee to inspect my apartment. Do we or do we not have enough carpeting? That is the question.

A bed springs committee is formed. This august body—composed of one reconstructed-foreskin Jew (a lawyer), one unrecovered alcoholic WASP (also a lawyer), and one perfectly coiffed Chanel-yenta with a lambskin bag covered with interlocking Cs (a decorator
married
to a lawyer)—solemnly inspects my apartment. The gray-mauve carpets match the river. The walls are mirrored to reflect it. The waterbed is disguised in an Amish quilt and brass headboard to look like a cuddly
letto matrimoniale
in a New England bed and breakfast.

I hold my breath as the committee walks through the bedroom. Every inch of the house is carpeted except for the tiny mirrored foyer. The waterbed is, of course, illegal—that I know. But fortunately my inspector-generals are too prudish to
touch
the surface of the bed, which would have rippled under its antique star quilt, giving me away. Having had their kicks, they depart, not a little puzzled by my seeming adherence to the rules.

Now a harassment campaign begins in earnest. There are hang-up calls each night at three A.M. and anonymous poison pen letters left under our front door. On one occasion, Molly is yelled at in the elevator for my supposed sins.

Will and I consult lawyers. They tell us nothing and want fat retainers. They promise to negotiate with the co-op board. I have a sudden flash: This is another problem the law can't solve! And what am I doing in such a building anyway? I belong on the West Side, where I grew up. It turns out that the apartment I grew up in is on the market. An enterprising realtor calls, asking do I want to see it? I do—until I hear the price. Two million? When my parents lived there, the rent was $200 a month. Thomas Wolfe was right: You can't go home again.

Will, Molly, Margaret, and I rent an apartment in Venice for three months that summer and quietly put the Gracie Square apartment on the market. One afternoon Will and I are lying in bed, watching the canal water make its magical ripples on the ceiling, when my business manager calls with the news that someone wants to buy the New York apartment.

“Sell it!” I say. Will and I fuck our brains out, then dance around the room, giggling.

 

Fags, show business types, and Jews unite! You have nothing to lose but your real estate! Unmarried Jewish mothers with young lovers cannot live in “good” buildings in New York. My mistake was
wanting
to live in a “good” building. Better stick to my own kind.

So we sell Foreskin Towers and set about looking for a brownstone. No more East Side co-ops. We need turf of our own to call home.

We find a narrowish row house on Ninety-fourth Street between Park and Lexington, which is inhabited by a nice psychiatrist, his bouncy wife, and three very clever children. They are hoping to move to Paris. Over the shrink's bed is a sign: MENTAL HEALTH IS OUR GREATEST WEALTH. I find this an excellent omen, so I buy the house at once.

It needs
everything
—a new roof, new kitchen, laundry, boiler, baths. I do what I always do with houses—spend till the money runs out, then go back to work to finish the book.

Sooner or later I run screaming from the renovation, crying, “
Cash flow.”
Three of the four floors are inviting, even if the garden and ground floor remain unfinished. By then, the walls are covered with William Morris wallpaper of the same Victorian vintage as the house; the stairwells are purple and the chandeliers Venetian. My father tells me it looks like a whorehouse.

“How would you know?” I ask.

Good-bye, Foreskin Towers.
Nobody
can tell me who to live with in my own brownstone. But the house is never quite practical. Since it has always been owned by doctors, the basement is full of spooky old medical equipment, X-rays of rib cages, pelvises, skulls. Former patients, speaking various Spanish dialects, still arrive in the middle of the night wanting succor. Even in daylight, the house is dark, as row houses tend to be, and for security's sake, all the members of my commune—except Poochini (successor to Poochkin)—are obliged to wear panic buttons to activate the alarm system if we take out the garbage or answer the door.

The brownstone solves our housing problems for a while. It also gives Will something to do and me something to be grateful to him for. But it turns out to be haunted by my old headache. Ghosts of previous tenants and their patients are in residence. I have the wrong dreams in that house—dreams that must belong to the patients of one of the former Cloctor owners. Or else the ghosts go back to a much earlier vintage.

Was the body of the Ruppert Brewery manager (for whom the house was built) buried in the vault under the sidewalk? Had some outraged husband murdered his faithless wife? I engaged a psychic healer (who was reputed to have helped Margaret Mead in her final year) to exorcise the place. She promised she would do so, but only if I became her patient first. I used to go to her “studio” on York Avenue, lie on a table nude, and have her talk to my unreliable thyroid gland, palpate my healthy liver, and describe the astral visits she would make to my brownstone at five in the morning. (“I came in the early morning, didn't you see me?”) Then I would pay her in cash.

She always stressed how she hated exorcisms (
cleanings,
she called them), how they gave her a colossal headache. But she must have worked wonders, because I sold the place for a profit just before the real estate market crashed.

And so I moved again. When I met Ken, he was living in a building that
specialized
in “fags, show business types, and Jews.” We bought a bigger apartment in that building and stayed on. I was delighted to be on the twenty-seventh floor after years of darkness. And I was delighted to be among my own kind. The building I live in is also a major dog and cat building. Apparently fags, show business types, and Jews like animals.

Molly transferred to the Day School, where the mothers do not wear the Krupp diamond to Field Day and kids do not get picked up in limousines. (Lots of New York private school kids went to school in limousines in the eighties—before their daddies went to jail.)

I was always either flush or broke, but somehow I was able to pay the bills and raise my daughter. I even learned how to be a decent mother. Eventually Jon and I stopped suing each other and began to talk. Sometimes we even reminisce about old times and remember why we loved each other. And Molly's face lights up as if with a thousand candles.

I can't wait for her to tell
her
side of the story, even though I know it won't be soft on me. Until she makes sense of it all, the real story will go untold. It's hers to tell, not mine.

Everything about the divorce is at once so common and so unique. Two writers—facing fame, rejection, money worries, and their own pain—try to raise a child. The child they raise turns out to be like both of them, yet like herself most of all: wildly funny, cynical, a killer with words. She
has
to be to survive her parents.

My generation is strewn with divorces. Looking back, we often wonder why. What did we gain by
not
staying together for the sake of the children? Did we gain anything at all?

We were the generation that was going to live forever. And we've turned fifty like everyone else. We're not going to beat the
malach hamovis
¹⁰
after all.

Sometimes it seems both our kids and our parents were smarter than we were. We fell somewhere between our parents' thirties idealism and our kids' eighties cynicism. Somewhere deep down we
still
believe that
all we need is love, love, love.
Somewhere deep down we question how we got gray hair. How on earth did
we
get to be the grown-ups? The wonder is that our kids are growing up—despite all we did to destroy them.

If you lack Freedom, you cannot give it to others.

—Arabic proverb

Do you know, the older I grow the more sure do I become that the only man one can really love is the man one does not respect.

—Marie Dorval, quoted by André Maurois in
Lélia, The Life of George Sand

 

 

I was raised to be a good girl of the fifties, to believe that “love and marriage go together like a horse and carriage.” The first time I got married it was 1963, the second time 1966, the third time 1978, the fourth time 1989. My life, then, has proved a microcosm of love and sex for my generation. Every time I got unhitched, I felt like Margaret Mead among the Manus or the Mundugumor. Mating and dating had all “changed, changed utterly,” and a “terrible beauty” was born.