Fear of Dying (20 page)

Don't stigmatize him! Don't let guys in the men's room know he's Jewish!
I wanted to shout, but instead I laughed hysterically at all the mohel's jokes.

“What a great audience!” he said, thinking my mad laughter was applause rather than anxiety. And then he was off to the next snip.

I'm no scholar of Judaism, but may I remind my chosen people that the bris begins with Abraham, who was willing, if not quite pleased, to sacrifice Isaac until God stopped him and substituted a spring lamb—or was it a goat? This always makes me think that the bris was a stand-in for human sacrifice. Those ancient religions were pretty bloody affairs.

Just sayin'.

But foreskin or no foreskin, I adored that perfect little Jewish boychick. Who wouldn't?

 

 

 

Again I have that strange dream where I am going backward and forward in time. But this time I wake up in hideous pain. I am in the abortionist's office on Fifty-seventh Street.

“I don't belong here—I'm a grandmother now,” I tell the nurse.

“You'll be fine,” she says. “You're just a little disoriented.”

“No, I am not—what year is it? I don't belong here!”

“Shhh,” she says. “I can give you something for the pain.”

And she goes to get me pills and water.

My head is scrambled. I wanted to go back in time to be young again—but not to feel this way. Besides, I no longer want to go back in time. Now that I'm a grandmother, I want to stay where I am!

The pills are white. The water is lukewarm. The nurse is not really listening to me.

“You'll be fine,” she says, giving me the pills.

“I don't mean the pain, I mean I'm in the wrong time!”

“Breathe deeply,” she says calmly. “The D and C went fine.” And she gives me a shot that puts me to sleep.

I dream that I am Leo's grandmother at his bris. I dream Glinda's pregnancy and labor. But when I wake up, it is still the New York of my teenage years—old Fifty-seventh Street, near the old Russian Tea Room. The window I see is dark with soot and the sky is darkening. I stumble up and gaze out the sooty window at the Steinway store, the thrift shop where they sell old furs, the shabby delis. How do I get out of here? Why did I ever wish to be young again?

I think of all the time-travel movies I've seen and the books about time travel I've read. Everyone talks about getting to the past or the future—nobody tells you how to get back! You think you'll go back to the great things about youth—the energy, the unlined face, the rampant sexuality. But what if you go back to the
worst
things about your youth—like this? “Why do you think you can choose!” comes my mother's voice, chiding me. “You always think you can choose!
Some choices are permanent, Vanessa!
”

I look carefully again, searching for a Starbucks or some shop from today, but I can't find one. And everyone is wearing hats! I must be in the past since this is a world of hats. I want to go back to sleep and wake up at Glinda's apartment, staring at my grandson, Leo. I don't want to relive my horrible adolescence!

And then I see it—down the block from the Steinway store is Bibliomania, which in the fifties and sixties was in an old, now-demolished building, on the north side of Fifty-seventh Street. I begin to weep uncontrollably.

The doctor runs in with a bottle of whiskey and a cut-crystal highball glass (remember those?).

“What's wrong? Is it the bleeding? It's completely normal to bleed and cramp a bit, and some women feel sad. Don't worry, you'll feel much better soon. This will help.” And he poured me a tumbler full of warm scotch.

“I'm sober,” I say between sobs.

“You're
what
?”

“In the program. I don't drink.”

“What program?”

Oh God, I must really be back in time, because nobody knew what “the program” was back then. I start to howl hideously. And loudly.

The doctor, of course, is terrified by all the noise I'm making. He's done something highly illegal and now he must think he's done it to a crazy girl who will report him.

“Lie down and rest,” he says sternly.

In a little while, the nurse comes in and gives me another shot. I am sure this is it—the end of my life. I've read about abortion doctors who risked their patients' lives so as not to get caught. As my consciousness fades, I focus on Leo's sleeping baby face.

*   *   *

“What were you dreaming?” Asher asks, “You were talking in your sleep. Are you okay?”

I look at Asher's face with immense relief. Since his aneurysm, Asher has become a different man: mellow, empathic, full of the joy of being alive. Some men achieve this if they live long enough. They become wise.

“Bless you!” I say. “I was back in my adolescence. I thought it was real.”

“Dreams can give you information,” Asher says, “if you read them right. Dispatches from the dark side.”

Mind still sozzled with sleep, I hug him.

“Nessy,” he murmurs, a name from our galloping courtship, which I haven't heard for a long time.

I am half in and half out of the past when he kisses me slowly and tenderly on my mouth.

“Let me brush my teeth,” I mutter.

“Forget it.” And he slips down to caress my pussy.

“I have to pee,” I say.

And I run to the bathroom, glad for the present, happy to have left the past behind, happy to be the age I am.

“Come back!” Asher calls urgently.

“Coming!”

I slip into bed, amazed that Asher is making the first move—which is unusual for him.

While I lie next to him, astounded by his presence still, he opens my silk robe and touches my cunt as if he were Adam just discovering Eve's pussy.

“Beautiful,” he says.

And then he begins to run his tongue slowly along my labia, gently inserting one finger to feel for my G-spot on the front wall of wet pussy.

For one second, I remember the cramping and pain of the abortion's office, then I remind myself to
feel
, not think, to allow the warmth, the pleasure to flood over me, to unlock myself to his tongue, to surrender completely.

When you meditate, disruptive thoughts float in and out but you make a decision to let them go. So with pleasure. You decide to let go of the interruptions, the thinking, the distraction, the chastising voices of the past.

His tongue on my clit is lazy at first, then less lazy, then insistent as he touches my G-spot with his finger and I am swept away with waves of anticipation that blank out my mind and let me focus only on pleasure, releasing the painful past, releasing the desire to return there and be young and beautiful again.
Fuck
young and beautiful—this is worth everything—and I come with fierce contractions that seem to go on and on endlessly.

Asher holds me.

“I felt a bolt of lightning go down my spine when you came,” Asher mumbles. “Incredible. Never felt anything like it before.”

“You raised the kundalini,” I say.

“What the fuck is that?”

“What you felt—like an electric snake in your spine.”

“If you say so. It was amazing.”

“It was.”

“The kundalini is life force, energy, fire, sexual power. Some yogis believe that when you harness that body power to the mind, there's nothing you can't do. When you have that fire—sexuality, creativity, knowledge—everything comes together.”

“You betcha. Kundalini, schmundalini—it's great stuff. I thought I was dying. You've brought me back.”

“I think you may have done the same for me.”

*   *   *

I remembered that when I first met Asher, he seemed to be at war with his body. We'd go to some amazingly beautiful spot in the world, stay in a gorgeous hotel suite where I immediately thought of sex, and he began by fussing with his various communication devices—CrackBerries, satellite phones, computers—keeping me away with his obsessive need to check in with his office. It made me crazy. I'd strip down to my silk underwear and dance around the suite, trying to attract him, and he would get pissed off at me. He felt controlled by my sexuality, thought I was using him as a relaxation device (and why not?) and would become ever more intent on resisting me. He made me utterly crazy and from time to time I would take off and meet an old lover just out of horniness and the feeling of rejection. Once I met a former lover of mine in the Crillon in Paris in one of those rooftop dormer suites for two days of amazing sex. There is a picture of me taken by a paparazzo who nearly, but didn't, out me, and I look more beautiful and glowing than I ever have in a tabloid picture. The reason was forty-eight hours with Franco, my old lover from Florence. Sex can do that—make your skin rosy and your eyes full of light—and nobody has to know but you and your lover. I felt I deserved to feel and look that good. No guilt at all. When you have taken off your clothes enough in the theater, no costume change seems to matter. Maybe that's why actors are so promiscuous. It feels like another part you're playing—as such part of work not play. But since your work
is
play, guilt is superfluous.

Was that why I was able to time-travel back to my past? Nothing really explained it—except my fierce wish to be young again, now gone. I was so relieved at being home, with Asher, that I wanted to atone for all my dangerous wishes to juggle time. I was terrified, in fact, that I might fall through wormholes without wanting to.

Wormholes were wishes, weren't they? And they were always there, waiting to suck you through. You never knew when the most painful part of your past might swallow you—just as you dreamed of returning to the best of your past—whatever that was. The point was that time was not in your control. Why did you believe it was? How arrogant!

I began to read everything I could find about time travel—Einsteinian relativity warps, parallel universes, the history of time-travel literature. It was a subject that never ceased to fascinate people—like raising the kundalini through sex. But the more I read about it, the less I could understand my own experience of it. Was it just that I'd always been a very vivid dreamer? Or had I somehow broken time's bonds through the power of wishing? I knew how powerful wishes could be. Whenever I wished hard enough for something, I got it. I had to be careful what I wished for then or I might outfox myself. But I was closing in on the end of the play despite my fears. I discovered the secret of writing—live in the present moment. Do not fantasize about possible response because you cannot know the future.

I knew that time travel was partly fueled by wishes. When I began my play about growing young again, I had interviewed many witches and studied many grimoires, and I knew that witchcraft without wishes—that is to say
intention
—probably would not work.
You needed intention above all.

*   *   *

Meanwhile, Asher and I were growing closer and closer. His near-death experience had opened him up somehow. And I was opened up too. I was reminded of how overwhelming real passion could be, how it could become your raison d'être, and how few people wanted to acknowledge that. The poets did and the songwriters did. But most people wanted to forget it when it was no longer in their lives. Too disturbing. Too frightening. You missed it too much if you remembered well. Some men and women searched for it endlessly in one-night stands. But women didn't always love zipless fucks without a sense of safety and caring. Men often found pure lust disappointing—it depended on the man and where he was in his life. Real tantric sex was a
sometime
joy, as the ancients knew. It had to be much more than what my late friend Anthony Burgess called “the old in-out.” It needed time, stroking, intention, eye contact, bathing together. It was inefficient—and that was part of the pleasure of it. American sexuality was too much like American work—goal oriented. The goal was the mutual orgasm. But tantric sex didn't covet
only
the goal, and that made it alien to a lot of Americans. Not that orgasm was unimportant, but it wasn't all there was. The whole body was the instrument of the sexual symphony, and most people missed it. I missed it too at this point in my life.

But I was glad that Asher and I were growing closer. That was a happy change. If only I could stay in the present and not be drawn back to the past.

Was my need for passion drawing me back into the past? In my past I'd known many varieties of passion—including some that were terrifying and devouring, some in which I thought I was being eaten alive by my need for a certain lover. I wanted to feel that again and never to feel that again. Could you feel that again at any age? Was it even possible?

My cell phone still accompanied me everywhere like an electronic genie. But I was less and less interested in its pagan pings.

If some man who could spell, who was beyond rubber suits and impersonating long-dead poets contacted me, then maybe, maybe I would get interested, but until then, my experiment with ziplessness had lost its savor. I wanted the growing closeness with my husband more than I wanted strangers. Astonishing.

 

 

 

“It takes a long time to be born and a long time to die,” my sister says, walking into our mother's room.

But this time it seems like the time might be here. She is staring vacantly into space, drooling, and seems utterly unaware we are here. Her caregiver, Ariella, is spooning diluted cereal into her mouth. She eats and drinks less and less.