Fear of Dying (15 page)

“Shall we?” he asked in a most gentlemanly fashion. But, not waiting for my ladylike answer, he began to enter me.

It seemed we made the beast with two backs for hours and hours and hours. We muttered and murmured and kissed and hugged and licked each other wherever our tongues could reach—but neither of us seemed to be getting close to a climax. Neither of us could relax. Neither of us could re-fucking-lax. We both needed to be in control.

“I seem to see my good lady wife, Vivienne, floating through the wall,” he confessed.

“Banish her,” I said, not able to banish Ash. I could never banish Asher. He was in my bones.

Nigel and I were valiant at sliding and stroking and tweaking and making loving nibbles. But nothing seemed about to happen. No wave crested, no sunrise rose, no jagged lightning pierced the place where our bodies conjoined.

“I promised Vivienne I'd never do this again,” Nigel said. “And she's arriving tomorrow.”

“Don't worry,” I whispered.

“I don't want to leave you high and dry,” he murmured.

“Don't worry,” I said again. “The timing's not right. We're both worried about other things.”

“Perhaps next time we meet?” he asked.

“Of course,” I said. “Of course.” Women of my generation lie as easily as we kiss.

Later, we sat in the living room of his suite, nibbling caviar and pâté. He drank more Amarone. I drank mineral water.

“Are we still friends?” he asked.

“Loving friends,” I said. “We'll have our time.”

But I knew we wouldn't have our time, because we just weren't bonded in that particular way. Not every couple can turn into loving lovers—no matter how much they think they ought to be. The stars have to align a certain way. Worry has to be banished. Wives cannot drift through walls and husbands cannot be home recovering from hearts that attacked them. Many conjunctions have to conjoin for a good conjunction. I had known that before, but somehow I had forgotten. Being with Nigel only made me miss Ash more and more! Strange how I had to be with Nigel to realize how bonded I was to Ash. I was so lucky not to have been caught in my various experiments.

*   *   *

Later that night, I had a dream in which I found myself thirty years younger as if by magic. I was with Nigel. We were both between marriages and we were wholly open to each other as we hadn't been when we'd met earlier that day. Our romantic lives were before us, not behind us. Because aging is not only about flesh—it's also about our great expectations when we are young.

And that was when I began writing the play. While Asher recuperated, I plunged into a fantasy born of my rage at aging. In it, a woman who is furious at the passage of years finds a way, she thinks, to reverse them. I plunged into research for my play. I read everything that included magical transformations. I saw movies. I read magical spells in
grimoires
.

My play began with two friends of a certain age—Isadora and I?— at a table on a bare stage:

“Don't you want to be young again?”

“Are you kidding? I'd sell my soul for it.”

Maybe I could even convince Isadora to work on it with me? It would be fun to collaborate with a real writer.

“I dream of being young again,” my character says.

“Me too,” the Isadora character says.

“All I want is to be thirty years younger, knowing what I know now.”

“I'm there. So how do we do it? Spells? Potions? Magical thinking?”

“Do you know any real witches who can do it?”

“No such possibility exists. I've looked.”

“I wonder about that.”

“Because when we
were
young, we didn't appreciate our youth. That's what makes me
nuts
!”

“We didn't know the power we had—or how to use it.”

“True. Too true.”

“So you used to know all these wiccans. Do you still have the phone numbers? They probably use e-mail now—wicca.com.”

“Well,
find
them. Or I will.”

*   *   *

The idea was to tell the story of a woman getting younger by means of witchcraft.

My heroine was visited by a man who claimed to be Mephistopheles. He could be played by my friend Nigel. He claimed to be able to grant her “the wish that dare not speak its name.” It was of course the wish to grow younger, the Faustian wish of all Faustian wishes.

So I invented these wiccan characters out of a Halloween pageant—two possibly gay warlocks and an ancient female witch—who came to tempt my heroine with dreams of reversing age.
And
she fell for it—even signing away her soul in blood. Miraculously, she became young again. Or did she only
believe
she had?

I'd never written a play before, but I really got into it, filling it with all my campiest fantasies of magic and time travel. My warlocks wore long capes and had elaborate body piercings. My ancient witch dressed like Lady Gaga on steroids.

I had very little idea of what I was doing. But maybe I had some beginner's luck. The dialogue began to flow.

“How much do you want it and how much are you willing to pay?” Meph asks.

“What sort of payment?” asks my heroine.

“We'll get to that later,” says Meph. “What is magic but the deep intent to change?”

“Time,” my heroine says, “was once my friend. Now it streams by faster and faster.”

“So how much do you want to stop it?” asks Meph.

And so it went. I was having fun playing on the page—something new for me. I totally let go and allowed fantasy to take over. Isadora told me that every book she had written was a complete self-analysis. I began to understand what she meant. Fantasy can lead you to reality, but you have to be open.

As I saw my heroine transformed, I worried about the dues she'd have to pay. Her soul? Her child or grandchild? I went on clattering over the keys with panic pounding in my chest.

Meanwhile, my phone kept beeping with new potential lovers on the line. I had long, flirtatious talks with some of them, phone sex with some of them, but illness, death, and my play kept interrupting. My play had got me by the scruff of the neck. It was teaching me a new kind of freedom. Besides—I didn't think I wanted the distraction of Zipless anymore. Asher's illness had thrown me because I had taken his love so for granted.

Who were my fictitious witches and what did they mean? Never ask that of yourself while writing. It may stop you cold. Just trust that if
you
believe in your characters, others will too. I learned that the hard way. Whenever I thought too critically about my work, I couldn't write. Isadora had said that too.

In most Faustian transformations, the dabbler in magic is punished. We're not supposed to play with time and the devil. Challenging the gods shows a lack of humility that often proves fatal.

I thought I was just fooling around with an old story. Why then did I feel so scared?

What I didn't know then was that for anyone who writes, a story is not just a story. It's also an amulet. As someone who had spent my life mostly speaking other people's words, I was innocent about that. Oh, I had written made-up screenplays, but never had I written a story that came from my own soul.

*   *   *

Gradually, it dawned on me that I was trifling with matters of life and death. I made copious notes on how to end this play. Beginnings are easy but endings are hard. Was it a comedy or a tragedy? Was my heroine really given another chance at youth—or was she deceived by her own fantasies? Was the tone to be satirical or sad—or a mix of the two? While I pondered these things, I planned a long trip to India with Asher. He probably wanted to go because he thought he was dying and it would be his last trip. India strikes everyone differently, but many of us associate it with Hindu ideas of reincarnation.

*   *   *

Isadora and I are on the phone again. I'm in my apartment and she's in hers. Belinda Barkawitz is sick and I don't want to leave her.

Vanessa:

I'm writing a play and you're not writing anymore. What's going on here—this is nuts!

Isadora:

Well, I have something to tell you. I haven't told anyone and I didn't want to talk to anyone about it because I was afraid to jinx it. I've been writing fantasies.

Vanessa:

What do you mean by fantasies?

Isadora:

I have no idea what I mean. My characters go to these other planets. They discover Goldilocks planets. They get away from our poisoned earth and create utopias on these virgin worlds. They get away from the Koch brothers and evil companies trying to destroy the earth and instead of Goldilocks planets being so far away, they are suddenly near enough for us to populate them with humans. But there is a fine-tuned selection process. The chosen people have to be kind, love the environment, dogs, trees, flowers,… especially dogs! Especially poodles!

Vanessa:

I think it's wonderful that you're writing, but do you really think you can screen people? And only have good people on the spaceship?

Isadora:

I said it was
fantasy
.

Vanessa:

Well, it certainly sounds like fantasy to me 'cause we know it's impossible to screen for the good people…. It sounds impossible to me.

Isadora:

It's probably impossible but I told you these were utopian fictions. I really don't know where I am going with this. I'm scared to death because it's not what I'm known for. I'm known for writing honestly about women and sex … blah, blah, blah—and I'm sick to death of it!

Vanessa:

I can certainly understand that—one does get sick of whatever one is known for. It's typecasting—who doesn't get sick of it? We all get sick of it! They kept wanting me to play Blair the bitch over and over again. It made me ill! I wanted to play King Lear as a woman and nobody would finance it. I wanted to play Macbeth as a woman with Lady Macbeth being the man and nobody would finance it. I wanted to do a female Hamlet, do you remember that?

Isadora:

(Laughs).

Vanessa:

And do you remember the time I tried to get a movie made of one of your books?

Isadora:

Which one was that?

Vanessa:

Oh, you know the one. It was set in ancient Rome. I think it was called
Livia
and was about Hadrian's wife. You remember … he had a wife named Livia who had an amazing villa with murals of birds and flowers. The frescos are in one of the municipal museums in Rome. They're unbelievably beautiful. But nobody wanted to finance a movie about Livia. They kept telling me it should be about Hadrian because he was the emperor, and who would give a shit about his wife? Although she was brilliant and beautiful and a force in Rome at the time—but nobody wanted to finance a movie about a
woman
!

Isadora:

Yeah, I vaguely remember. That was a while ago!

Vanessa:

So, I do get it…. You've been writing these fantasies and have told nobody. Who's the heroine?

Isadora:

Heroine? Hero? Who cares? We're human beings. Some of us are ruled by what happens below the belt and some of us are not, but we're ambivalent, stumbling, grumbling human beings. Far too smart for our fragile bodies. Far too clever for our mortality. So I basically wanted to imagine genderless people smart enough to know that they would eventually die and act accordingly.

Vanessa:

Would you let me see some of these pages?

Isadora:

Absolutely not. I'm just writing them for myself. They're not for publication. They're not for reading by friends.

Vanessa:

Darling, just think about it….

Isadora:

I'm thinking….

 

 

 

And then my dog, Belinda, died.

Belinda is old. Old is the problem with dogs. Love 'em and lose 'em. One morning, she refuses to get up. She lies, unable to move, panting, her nose dry and her eyes tearing big gray gloppy tears. I carry her downstairs and take her by cab to the animal clinic.

Most of the humans waiting with their boxes and leashes and doggy strollers are middle-aged women. Only a few men. Boxes chirp and mew, dogs drool and sniff. Occasionally a snake lifts its head out of a box as if we already were in India—or the Garden of Eden.

We get attached. We project our fears and wishes onto our animal companions.

“Max, sit down,” says a blonde with Band-Aids all over her face.

The kids are gone but dogs linger on. Dogs as incontinent as old ladies, dogs with moles, dogs with wheels instead of legs. As I wait for Belinda to have a chest X-ray and various blood tests, I watch the whole range of human-animal interaction. Women convinced cats are their babies, or wounded birds or lame dogs with flopping rear paws.

I wait and wait. I read every animal magazine. I drink a sweet coffee concoction out of a vending machine. Eventually a vet comes out and talks to me as if I am three.

“Belinda is not doing well for an older poodle. She is in crisis—probably because of her Addison's, but has a fever of a hundred and six and crackle on one lobe of one lung. We may need to keep her overnight. Would you be good enough to go to the cashier?”