Saturday's Child (64 page)

Life was more peaceful than it had been in my adult memory, which doesn't mean it wasn't punctuated by convulsive periods. In the preceding paragraph I've skipped over the element of Marilyn Joy Waring.

A particular challenge in memoir writing is to convey a past state of mind now so altered by hindsight that it's difficult to access the original topography for oneself, let alone describe it to others. This is especially true about the state of being deeply, wholly, lethally in love. The present self keeps muttering How in god's name could I
ever
have done that/put up with that/felt that? (This is a variant on Whatever did I see in
him/her?
) Nevertheless, the past self
did
. And it's no good simply announcing that the whole thing ended badly but took ten years to do so. One must reenter that past terrain so as to convey at least part of the reason why in hell one was there to begin with. This is imperative for at least three reasons.

First, cardboard villains may be permissible in real life, where in fact we meet them all the time, but they're not acceptable on the page: too simplistic and, frankly, boring. Second, if Our Heroine (in this case, laughably, me) loved and stuck with a demonstrably not-so-good-for-her person for such a long time, what does that say about Our Heroine? Third, it takes two to tangle, so it's just as well to accept responsibility for one's actions. Granted, it's easier to exercise restraint when a relationship rusts twenty years in the past. Furthermore, if a union has produced offspring,
one is more motivated to strive for generosity, if only for the offspring's sake. But when the situation is both more recent and less generative … you see the problem. So bear with me. And do realize that if at times I descend into exasperation, that's
after
six layers of revision.

The poetry I wrote to Marilyn helps me remember the absolute beauty I perceived in this woman, beauty of which she was sadly unaware—”greensilver sapling, her body,” I named it in one poem; “silk breasts and brain erotic,” in another; “voice indigo as a violin's,” “antic grin that struck and blazed me glad / to be alive,” her “particular face, lit with love to see [me] enter the room.” As always, the poems, like amber, preserve distilled memory: how she was capable of a sudden, disarming sweetness, how adroit her perceptions could be, how my ribs would hurt from laughing, how girlishly happy I felt…

Marilyn had not, after all, gone quietly into the antipodean night. On the contrary, she began what would be a veritable commute to the United States.

This was largely my own fault. Some feminist leaders hide their contacts close to their chest, but others take real pleasure in matchmaking, seeing it as one aspect of activism. I fall into this latter category. For years I'd made it a practice to suggest others—my countrywomen as well as internationals—for jobs, funding opportunities, speaking engagements, and so forth, delighting when a match worked. Long before we'd become lovers, Marilyn's name was one of a number I'd raised on occasion, since I thought her a dynamic speaker with important things to say about women, labor, and economics.

I admit that once we fell in love, I intensified this effort—especially since I knew she was in financial difficulty, having sacrificed her seat in Parliament as well as the pension that would have accompanied it had she completed her third term and not brought down the government. I also empathized with her being in her own diaspora—the staying-with-friends, books-in-storage nightmare—since she'd sold her house before their shared farm plans were postponed by the Australian lover, who was having second thoughts, obviously sensing something, despite Marilyn's still not having told her about us. It did occur to me that my promotion of Marilyn was not necessarily in my self-interest, once I realized that what she needed the money
for
was to buy her share of the farm with her
other
lover.
But carrying off noble self-sacrifice was something I now had down to a fine art. I got off on it the way an anchorite thrills to nestling in a hairshirt. Besides, it did seem tacky to withdraw needed support from a sister whose work I still respected. Or so I told myself.

Consequently, when Genevieve Vaughan was planning a spring strategy retreat in Texas and asked me whether she should invite Waring as the economics person, I said yes. Meanwhile, international feminism was catching on in the United States, in part thanks to the warm reception
Sisterhood Is Global
had received from press and readers. This created a climate where I was asked all the more for referrals, and Marilyn's name was one I suggested.

It took a while for me to realize fully that she wasn't about to break it off with me
or
her other lover, that each of us was a standby in case the other didn't work out, and that I was in an all-woman version of a cliché situation: being involved with the married man who's always on the verge of a divorce. Then it took more time to make myself grasp that her presence in the United States was just too tempting for me to ignore, and was therefore personally destructive. Once I understood both unhappy truths, I stopped promoting her so energetically. By then it was too late. She'd begun to be known a little, and was being invited independent of my prompting.

In late March of 1985, less than a month after I'd moved to Perry Street, she came to New York for a few days before Gen's Texas meeting, to which we both were going. She was to sleep on the sofa because we were in the This Can No Longer Continue We're Just Friends mode. Which lasted twenty-four hours. I wonder now why we bothered to go through such ornate motions of denial at all, as if we were exotic birds hoooing at one another in a bizarre mating dance on the Discovery Channel. By the time we left for Texas we could barely keep our hands off one another, even in public, and by the time she departed for New Zealand we were distraught with goodbyes all over again. Worse, I now
loved
her, as well as being besottedly
in
love. That summer, passionate letters and phone calls burned back and forth, with me repeatedly saying goodbye forever, confident she would ignore that. I should have bought stock in AT&T, but I hadn't the foresight, stomach, or extra cash.

In October she was back. She had speeches in California and Indiana. I had organizing lectures in Iowa and Utah, so we met in Arizona—yes, I know, never mind the geography; it was all west of the Hudson River—and we spent her thirty-third birthday together at the North Rim of the Grand Canyon, where she'd never been, with side trips through the Painted Desert, Zion, and the sculptural glory called Bryce Canyon. (It was satisfying to show off
our
natural grandeur, so I indulged in a burst of eco-patriotism.) She returned to New York with me and remained in the United States until early December, based at Perry Street but flying in and out on overnights for speeches in New England. We spent a weekend at Kate Millett's farm in Poughkeepsie, where Kate enjoyed playing the maternal figure to us. We weathered a rare, tiny earthquake in Manhattan, where earthquakes aren't supposed to happen. I cooked an excessive Thanksgiving dinner at which Lois, Lesley, Marilyn, Blake, and I gorged ourselves to stupefaction. Life almost seemed normal.

It was a bittersweet two months, though. Marilyn was torn, still trying to have it both ways, which would periodically make me feel like the girl in this particular port. Ultimatums, to her or to myself, did me no good; after a lifetime of feeling I had to be in control and had to feed the emotions of everyone near me, I was now in a state of emotion that could not be controlled—and conscious of my own hunger. So my longing undercut my resolve, and Marilyn knew that, relying on it. I assumed her fierce intelligence would surely come to grips with what she was doing. What I should have grasped at the time, even given my limited experience with husbands and lovers, was obvious. Yet I wouldn't understand until it got branded onto my soul years later: intellectual brilliance is not necessarily a reflection of emotional maturity.

Many of the poems in
Upstairs in the Garden
, love poems shadowed with ambivalence, were written during this period. Marilyn's somewhat schizoid rationale was “I can't help it if I'm in love with two people at the same time.” Mine was “I know that this is bad for me, and that I'll pay for it later. But I'm so happy—and don't I deserve to be reckless for once?” Self-delusion is a potent justifier, particularly when mutually reinforced. In fairness, her resolve was undercut, too, by
her
longing. We were always poised on the brink of final farewells, which intensified the poignancy and
urgency of every moment. At the same time, as if living in parallel dimensions, we were making our own chipper plans for future encounters. Every time I thought it
was
over and felt reconciled to that, she'd unsettle me. She ultimately flew off with tearful adieux to lectures in Montana and Washington State, then to proceed westward home to New Zealand—but suddenly decided to fly back across the entire United States to see me again, even though only for two more days. At such moments she was as helpless in the clutches of this obsession as I was. Finally, exhausted by trying to figure out who in hell was driving, I decided to sit back and ride. At least having my own place gave me stability; Blake's presence helped keep me going; and I continued, no matter what, to write. Marilyn left for home on December 3. I delivered the manuscript of
Dry Your Smile
two weeks later.

A Doubleday contretemps ensued. Loretta, loyal to her authors, backed me solidly, but the firm had just been bought by the German multinational conglomerate Bertelsmann A.G., and the new management was interested in cash-cow biographies of celebrities or the sort of nonbooks that have titles like
1000 Exciting New Ways to Cook Yams
or
The 7-Step Zen Diet to Success, Orgasm, and a Perfect Golf Swing
. They were unimpressed by the few Doubleday authors producing “litrachur.” I was told, furthermore, that my quasi-autobiographical roman à clef was too unrealistic;
no
body lived that way. Their special concern was that no couple could exist in which the husband was gay/bisexual and the wife later had a woman lover. Citing Vita Sackville-West and Harold Nicolson, Jane and Paul Bowles, or the facts of my own life elicited blinks of nonrecognition. Their bottom line was that I had to straighten
some
body out—preferably
both
but at least
one
, the husband or the wife—or no publication. This is how they get you: not so much with fire hoses or jail, but by pestering you to death.

After months of such hassle, rather than cut the protagonist's relationship with “Iliana de Costa,” I went into extensive rewrites and de-gayed her husband. (It's comforting to know the First Amendment is of use to someone in this country, though unfortunately it's to an abuser like Larry Flynt.) We got the book past the censors in this manner, and it came out in 1987, the year Blake graduated from UNIS.
Dry Your Smile
did well abroad, but was barely visible in the United States, because Doubleday/
Bertelsmann's revenge (for my not having straightened
everyone
) was to publish it nearly in secret. They placed not a single ad.

That was the last work I would publish with Doubleday, departing at the same time as did Kurt Vonnegut and their few other remaining literary or political authors. The best way to recover from postpartum book-delivery depression is to start another one as soon as possible, which I did. For some years, I'd wanted to explore what had
really
drawn me (and others) to the tactics of violence during the late Sixties and early Seventies—and I mean the emotional, sexual sub-agendas, not the rhetoric about smashing imperialism. That's how
The Demon Lover
began. But something had changed in me during the
Sisterhood Is Global
years. My brain couldn't think in a solely national context anymore. Too many dots were connecting themselves: the high rate of spousal battery found in the homes of policemen in both Chicago and New Delhi, for example. So my initial research about other women militants in the U.S. New Left grew to encompass more countries, then stretched backward in history, until the book emerged as a cross-cultural study of how violence has been eroticized in patriarchal society, and how and why women and men have colluded with that or resisted it. It required considerable research, the kind of reading that makes for troubled dreams. But I was so glad to be writing almost full-time that I had no complaints.

At the end of December 1985, I fell ill with a bad flu and bronchial infection that lingered through January, compounded by the anxiety provoked by Doubleday's first reactions to the novel. Marilyn, on holiday in Australia with you-know-who, was aware of my being sick and beleaguered, but didn't phone or write for weeks, and she knew that I would never phone her when she was with her Australian lover. Later I learned that she'd finally been forced to admit my existence and then had agreed, after a huge fight, to reconcile permanently and faithfully with the lover. Meanwhile, I could do nothing but feel wounded and insulted by her silence. Nor could I do anything on the book front except wait passively for Loretta to try to change Doubleday's decision. So I spent most of that January wheezing, popping antibiotics, sitting before the fire wrapped in flannels, and filling hundreds of handwritten pages with what I called “The Fever Zone Journal,” meditations on what writing was, what love was, what silence and betrayal—including mine of Iliana and of Marilyn's
other lover—was. By the end, I'd reached the decision that the person I loved more than anyone in the world other than Blake wasn't acting even as a friend, much less as a lover, and that this affair
had
to
stop
.
¹

A banana peel lay waiting for my instep. Ever since I'd met her, Marilyn had talked about her dream of spending time at the United Nations doing in-depth research on the UN System of National Accounts, which basically defines what's of value in world economics (women's labor does
not
count, a GDP invisibility). I'd told her I thought there was a book wanting to be written on the subject, one that could demystify economics and would be especially crucial for women, and I encouraged her to pursue the idea, promising help with writing it, with a literary agent, and with publishing contacts. During 1985—in one of the On periods in the On and Off relationship seesaw—I'd generated an invitation from Rutgers University for Marilyn to be a visiting scholar with support for this research, and also had recommended her to funding sources regarding the project. The irony was that now, in early 1986—just when I really
did
want to begin getting over her—all these chickens were coming home to roost. And lay egg on my face. Next door in New Jersey at Rutgers. And in Manhattan, at the UN. Close proximity. For three months.