Fear of Dying (18 page)

“I don't do that anymore. But you can have a drink and I can have something else.”

“Great,” says Nadya, and we duck into a dark bar-cum-brasserie on Second Avenue.

“I'm sorry I blasted you that time,” Nadya says.

“Don't worry about it. I'm not holding a grudge.”

“No, you were so generous to me, and I was completely ungrateful.”

“Nothing to be grateful for. How's the new book?” I ask.

“Getting slammed by all my supposed sisters.”

“That proves you must be doing something right.”

“Do you really think so?”

“I'm sure of it,” I say. “‘No one throws stones at a barren tree' goes the Arab proverb.”

“But it hurts,” says Nadya.

“I'm sure it does. I remember critics. One famous critic once called me ‘a hyena in petticoats.' But just think—you remind people of how starved they are, and nobody likes that.”

“But I'm trying to change that starvation,” she says. “Where's the gratitude?”

“Gratitude is a word in the dictionary. If you're trying to save the female sex to receive gratitude from them, forget it. Gratitude is the rarest of emotions. You must know that.”

“But my book tries to teach them how to have sexual pleasure! I don't get it.”

“I do,” I say. “You're beautiful, famous, and have a handsome lover. That's enough. So many women are starving.”

“Vanessa—you can't say that you accept the situation.”

“I don't accept it, but I know that revolutionaries always end badly. Either they become dictators or they're killed off by their revolutionary colleagues. History shows us that. If you want to be a revolutionary, get used to the attacks. It's impossible to legislate sexuality.”

“I can't believe you'd say that.”

“Why?”

“Because you were always my inspiration. Long before I met you, I wanted to model my life on yours.”

“Oy.”

“Why oy?”

“Because I have never understood my life less. I've been through a very tough period.”

“Tell me about it.”

“I'd have to write a tome to tell you about it. And I don't write that sort of thing. Plays, screenplays. All they need is a good ear for dialogue.”

“Well, I'm sure you could do it and maybe even change the world.”

“I don't have much optimism about changing the world for the better. It's hard enough to change yourself for the better. I'm not sure that the word can save the world. The world is so fucked. And nobody listens to the word.”

“You've really become a pessimist.”

“Maybe I always was. The human race does not give me hope. We're despoiling the only planet we have, torturing and killing one another, treating women like shit in much of the world. This is insanity.”

“But I think we can change things,” Nadya says.

“By focusing on our pussies? I've always been for pussy—yes. But you'd be surprised how few women have the leisure to focus on their pussies—not to mention no partners. That's why you piss them off.”

“But I
want
them to have partners.”

“So do I, but it's more complicated than wishing. You tell them about how great their sexual potential is, how wonderful their cunts are—all of which is true—and they go home with their vibrators or their bumbling boyfriends. Naturally, they resent you. It's really sad. They would love to have the orgasms you describe, the orgasms you can have—but they're starving. It's like the starving child with nose pressed against the window of a fabulous pastry shop. How can you tempt the starving with satiety?”

“Of course I know that, Vanessa, but I want to change it.”

“Then get them all fabulous tantric lovers who can awaken them.”

“I wish I could,” I say.

“It
is
a problem—once you know your potential, you long for its fulfillment.”

I flash on my own stunted sex life. I know what I'm capable of and I know Nadya has described it—but how hard it is to find, especially with an old husband. An old, sick husband. There it is. I said it.

“I know,” Nadya says. “You worry me.” But Nadya can't know yet. Nadya doesn't know the half of it. Nobody knows until they get to that point—an ailing husband, the lack of zipless fucks, or even zipped-up fucks. Not to mention the fantasy of the “happily married woman” with sex on the side.

How can you have tantric sex “on the side”? When sex is that great, it takes up your whole life, your imagination, your dreaming. You would fly anywhere for it, sail your boat across the Mediterranean, ask your deck monkeys to tie you to the mast before you dove into it again. It's the life force, the fire that goes from loins to navel, navel to heart, heart to brain. It's everything—particularly creativity. And I miss it. I miss it all the more because I can remember having had it.

“I worry myself lately,” I say.

*   *   *

As I walked home from my meeting with Nadya, I thought about all the people who'd tried to change the lot of women through the centuries and how often things had gone back to the way they were. Were women their own worst enemies? Did we allow ourselves to be envious of other women to the detriment of our own progress? Or was it just that young females were so
fartutst
about getting their waiting eggs fertilized that they forgot about liberty? You could never forget about it. You had to keep on fighting forever.

I think Aldous Huxley was right about reproduction in
Brave New World.
Until we could “decant” sperm and egg separate from partners, we'd never have equality. Men were too territorial and violent. But detach reproduction from human relationships and you might have a chance.

We all ought to be
hatched
. Then we could choose our own preferred parents rather than being stuck with the ones we were born from. We'd create “chosen families.” Would I have chosen my particular mother? I doubt it. But I probably would have chosen my father—ah, my poor dead daddy. I missed him so. I was number one on his hit parade and my sisters never let me forget it.

Envy was what corrupted the world of women. Of course, men were envious too, but they knew they had to kill one another until they figured out a viable pecking order. Then they fell into their appointed—or anointed—places—at least until the alpha male began to fail. We women didn't really know how to do that. We pretended not to believe in hierarchies, to all be sisters under the skin—till hell broke loose. It was a very defective system for stability. Better to be hatched into a particular caste and stay there. Yes, I was becoming horribly pessimistic. Who was it who said, “Whoever is not a misanthrope by forty can never have loved mankind?” That was me—despondent, deranged, depressed.

Of all the ills we are heir to, depression is the worst. Looking down at your slippers in the morning and not believing it's worthwhile to put them on is like waking in a dungeon of doom. Not bothering to shower and dress because you've seen it all, known it all, and don't care anymore is a torture beyond nightmares. I have been to that dark place. I never want to be trapped there again. It used to be sex that got me out—sex and falling in love. What can get me out now? Zipless.com? I wish. I could hardly think about Zipless without being grateful for Asher in my life. Thank the Goddess he had never found out.

*   *   *

On the way home, I stopped into a high-end deli where the food could have been weighed out in solid gold. It was three in the afternoon and at the sparsely occupied tables were mostly ancient women—almost as old as my mother. They were all speaking different languages—Russian, Polish, Portuguese. And eating with a gusto that was almost biblical. The joy of food remains to the very old—if nothing else. And all these women looked like witches—jawbones and noses prominent, eyes sunken in orbits of bone, backs crooked and shoulders moving upward as they shoveled in the food. Often they were wearing battered hats that had gone out of fashion wars ago.

This was where we all were going—Botox or no tox, lifts or not. We would all be witches someday—maybe that was what my play was about? Most of us would be alone, some with old girl friends with whom we shared a language if not complete trust. We were all going down that twisting path that led you-know-where. We'd break our staffs and burn our books once we'd seen our daughters married off and becoming mothers. We were all Sycorax or Prospera or even Gaia. What did we have to fear? Everything. Nothing. Nothingness.

My telephone gave a little ping. There were some pages that described a flight through outer space. At first, I thought this might be a message from one of the swains—but no, these seemed to be pages from Isadora:

We journeyed through the vastness of the stars. In the black sky we saw bright lights—some blue, some yellow, some golden. We got used to this journey and after several months stopped asking, “Are we there yet?” The odyssey lasted weeks, years, eons. Children were born. Grandparents died. More children were born. We didn't ask if the children were boys or girls. It seemed irrelevant. All we cared about was the endless voyage. It was as if we had all turned into Odysseus and we were fated to travel forever while the gods above us took bets on our futures.

Athena was there and Aphrodite. Zeus was playing dice with the universe. Hermes, the messenger of the gods, flew with his winged sandals from galaxy to galaxy, bringing messages from gods to people. Time seemed to disappear. Time, anyway, is an illusion, as is death. Eventually, we landed on an asteroid. On shaky sea legs we climbed out of our ship.

What was this planet? Rusty red with huge blue stones veined with gold. The atmosphere was so rich in oxygen that we could not walk but ran. We bounced. We felt like characters out of some myth, treading on air.

Very hard to evoke something so unfamiliar, but we were elated by our new home. The air must also have been full of some substance that made us all laugh and sing simultaneously. We sang, we sang, we sang. If you can sing, you know your problems are not insurmountable.

What was Isadora writing about? A new world in which the troubles of humanity were extinguished? I read on and on and on, thinking, My old friend has flown into space! And then I shut my phone down and ordered food.

I bought a thick slice of duck pâté and a spinach salad for Asher, knowing he would love it. It gave me pleasure to have him waiting at home, knowing it might not always be the case. Feeding men and children was very satisfying, especially when we knew that someday we'd only have to feed ourselves. All the chores we'd once complained about became life-affirming now. Life-affirming. Life-enhancing. Life.

My phone pinged urgently. The man with the rubber sex suit would not give up, would not give up, would not give up. My lack of response excited him.

“R U REALLY HAPPILY MARRIED?” he demanded.

“YES,” I texted back. On some level, I knew it was true.

*   *   *

Dear Goddess, how did my generation get feminism so wrong? Yes, we needed to change both custom and law. Yes, we needed Betty and Gloria and Germaine and Andrea and Shulamith and Alix and Erica and Nora and the girl guides at Berkeley who rescued Emma Goldman from undeserved obscurity. What a great woman she was to know that a real revolution also included dancing! And did she ever give up sex with men? Never!

How much the ideologues got wrong. How were we ever going to exclude our fathers and grandfathers and brothers and sons and husbands—all of them—and mentors and pals? We didn't spring full grown from the egg of time. We had mentors and lovers and partners and pals who believed in us. Even I, stumbling behind the great girl guides in my dirty tennis shoes, had men who were loving mentors. Lep loved my acting, my writing, my wit. And my father and grandfather adored me, tried to teach me all they knew of life and love and lucre. I realized that the true secret of my confidence was being loved by my father and grandfather.

Was it their fault that it took me so long to grow up? Hardly. I was given the seeds of the pomegranate on a golden plate and refused to eat, thinking I knew better.

And now, when I am surrounded by death—yet still, somehow, dancing—I know that I was born to give life as well as art and that both are equally important.

If I were offered it now, I would eat the pomegranate and stash the golden plate in a safe-deposit box for my daughter to melt down when she was ready!

 

 

 

 

My cell phone shrieked. It was Glinda.

“Mom—I'm in labor,” my daughter said. “Meet me at the hospital.”

So once again I took off for that place where so many life passages begin and end. This time it was Mount Sinai, where the maternity ward is full of orthodox Jews in old-fashioned hats and new-fashioned wigs.

On the way, I called Isadora.

“You are a most unconvincing grandma,” she said. “You look too damned young.”