Fear of Dying (8 page)

Even after her first hip surgery, she was trying to get Antonia to bring her vodka in the hospital. I had no reason to doubt that Glinda was born with the predisposition to cure her troubles with mood-altering substances. I was like that myself. What would my life be like if I stopped drinking? That day in the woods, I decide to try it. I don't tell this to Glinda when I meet her before flying home. I have signed up for the family program three weeks later and I have met again with Glinda's counselor.

“I didn't mean to imply that you were an alcoholic,” Rae-Lynn says. “I just thought that you should see how all this looks to you if you don't drink. Sometimes people find it helpful. Sometimes their perspective shifts. It's your decision, of course.”

“The people here are so calm,” I say. “It makes you think they have something special to offer. I'd like to be calm too.”

“It's yours if you want it,” says Rae-Lynn.

If only it were that easy. Flying home, I realize that the whole outside world is in a conspiracy to make me drink, but I don't. It's hard not to. The pine trees and silence at the rehab make it easier. On the plane I keep thinking that just one drink will return me to that calm even though I know it isn't so. I manage to resist—God only knows how. My resistance lasts several years while Glinda solidifies her sobriety. And then I drift back into the occasional glass of wine—especially when Glinda isn't there.

*   *   *

“Where the hell are you, Mommo?” Glinda asks across the table.

“In the woods of Minnesota, years ago.”

“Wasn't it beautiful? I hated Detox but then I fell in love with the place. I almost didn't want to leave when they said I could.”

“I know. You were terrified to go there and terrified to leave.”

“I wish we could go there now—for a retreat weekend—but there's this to think about.” She taps her belly with a swollen hand.

“I love you with all my heart, Glinda.”

“Me you too, Mommo.”

“Let's pay the check and go buy baby clothes.”

“Yesssssssssssss!” says Glinda.

We leave the restaurant and plunge into retail therapy.

Even at the worst moments between mothers and daughters, shopping is the cure-all. I love seeing Glinda looking beautiful in a new dress. There's almost nothing a new dress can't solve. Until the bill comes.

But retail therapy is hardly easy with a daughter who's already five months pregnant and getting bigger. Nothing fits as you go into the baby-growing stage of pregnancy. We all end up wearing the same tattered sacks or jeans with the fronts cut out and replaced with elastic—or leggings made for a giantess. Or various elasticized
schmattas.
Who was it who said if pregnancy was a play, you'd cut the last act? Maybe we all have. You can't sleep, can't wear anything elegant, can't fit behind the wheel of a car, and you waddle like a duck rather than glide like a princess. It seems like it will never end. Only amnesia would make any woman do it again. Though we love our children beyond all imagining, beyond all expectation. Nature is a very clever mother.

So we slide into a pricey boutique and buy baby clothes made by impoverished ladies to feed their own babies and emblazoned with labels in French and Italian, mostly bearing the names of men who would never bear babies themselves.

 

 

 

 

When I met Asher Freilich I was forty-five and living with an actor young enough to be my son. My daughter was thirteen and more grown up than my twenty-six-year-old lover. I liked to think of Nikos as a Greek American reincarnation of Colette's Chéri, but actually he was far more comfortable in the diner in Astoria where he'd grown up than he'd ever be wearing my pearls in a drawing room near the Bois de Boulogne. I had taken up with him purely for his James Dean looks and the indefatigability of his cock. Somehow, he drifted from staying overnight into never going home. But I was busy with my soap and never really had the time to properly kick him out and retrieve my spare key.

I met Asher at a theatrical AIDS benefit. Thousands of young and beautiful gay actors, and there was Asher—the silver-haired father figure. Handsome and tall with golden brown eyes, he won my heart by remembering all my movies—even some I would rather forget! He was the sort of man I never would have considered in my younger days—solidly responsible, owner of stocks and bonds and companies that did arcane things like build pipes and purify water. For someone who loved theater and movies, he had an inborn knack for business. He was a bereaved widower (before that married and divorced almost as much as me), loaded, but that was hardly what I liked about him—I who had always supported artistic losers. What I liked about him was that he reminded me of my father. They even shared the same Leo birthday—August 10—and they both had the same ferocious energy and Catskill Mountains humor. Asher was so unlike my type that I told my analyst-of-the-moment—a mountainous gray-haired woman named Bobo Bressler (née Barbara Neuwirth, who wrote sexual self-help books;
How to Be Your Own Sex Therapist
was the most famous)—that I could never be with him. She didn't buy my bullshit.

“You
can
love a man who adores you!” she said. “Just turn your head around.” (I have often stolen her line when counseling friends who have met the man of their dreams and cannot see it. “Turn your head around,” I say.)

Isadora felt the same way. “If you don't grab him, I will.” She immediately saw that I was trying to talk myself out of a great guy.

Her advice and my analyst's proved right: Asher was funny, tender, sweet, and a compulsive gift-giver. He bought jewels as if they were chocolate truffles. He also bought chocolate truffles. These were mostly for Glinda, who adored him on sight, despised him right after I married him, and then bonded with him for life. Asher loved Glinda too. Sometimes I thought he loved her more than me.

Nikos at first tried to make a fuss about palimony, but Asher sent me to his white-shoe lawyer, Thomas Breedwell, Esq. (I swear), who said nothing like that ever flew in New York courts. So I retrieved my key. And, astonishing myself more than anyone, I gave up my cheating out-of-work actor for a kindly billionaire. This was so out of character for me that my friends were too amused to be jealous. At least at first.

Hadn't our mothers always said, “It's as easy to marry a rich man as a poor man”? Well, it wasn't for me. Unless I was paying the bills, I felt out of control. Besides, mine was the generation that thought wearing the pants financially would give us equal rights. Hah! When I met Asher I really had to change the way I thought about men. And about myself.

But where was the worm in the apple? For a while the worm was hiding in the core. Glinda and I moved into Asher's museum-like fourteen-room duplex on Fifth Avenue. I had imagined myself transforming it from dark to light, flying back and forth to Milan with Asher and filling the place with futuristic furniture, which we would highlight with contemporary art. But Asher couldn't stand to have anything changed. His last wife—the sanctified dead one—had decorated the apartment over the years. Any change would kill her all over again.

I hated her decor. Fine French furniture from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, Aubusson rugs, Gobelins tapestries, vermeil cachepots and chandeliers, third-rate eighteenth-century paintings from the school of this or the school of that. Asher's late lamented wife had had more money than taste. But what could I say? Rejecting her decor was like rejecting her. She had died lingeringly of breast cancer. How could I strike another blow?

Asher was generous and loving. What he lacked in sexual technique he made up for in enthusiasm. He reveled in the daily intimacy of marriage. But was it really intimacy? After a while, living with Asher made me understand why Freud had said that not even he could analyze a beauty or a billionaire. Asher's money caused people to kiss his ass all the time, which made him both insecure and arrogant. Still, I was determined to make the marriage work. I had had enough relationships that tanked. This one was going to last.

Then there was the problem of his children.

Dickie (Richard in public) was forty and worked with his father. He didn't mistrust me nearly as much as his wife, Anita, a grasping, greedy little yenta who was sure I had married Asher only for his money. And then there was Lindsay, the lesbian daughter who could do no wrong in her father's eyes. He was always praying for a miracle and trying to marry her off. He never uttered the word
gay
. Did he think her partner, Lulu, was merely her roommate? Apparently. Lindsay was tolerable but her partner was counting on a big inheritance. Despite the fact that both kids already had generous trust funds, my appearance on the scene seemed likely to diminish everyone's patrimony.

Not that I needed Asher's money when I married him. I was writing screenplays by then and doing well. It was only when I declined into wifehood, stopped writing, and became the producer and director of our social life that the money seemed necessary. Naturally, my needs expanded to fill my husband's income. Instead of shopping at Loehmann's, I shopped at Valentino. Instead of buying caviar at Zabar's, I bought it at Petrossian. Instead of cooking for my own parties, I hired a private chef. The only thing I didn't do was hire a private secretary slash party planner. I did that myself. I had to do something besides shop.

None of this made me happier. Conspicuous consumption in New York is an ever-escalating stairway. No matter how extravagant you are, someone is more.

I understood all this from my childhood in Hollywood. None of it was real. None of it really mattered when you had three-in-the-morning insomnia and devils came up from the depths to haunt you. But for Asher it was part of the cock-measuring contest that was his life. A beautiful wife, a private jet, a duplex on Fifth, a farm in Connecticut, a house on the beach on the “East End” of Long Island, a villa in Cap Ferrat, a chef who used to work for George Soros. All this mattered because it intimidated other men and attracted women. These were symbols of dominance, which made other primates kiss your nether parts. Of course when they did, you felt both cynical and suspicious.

At the charity balls we had to go to, I would sometimes amuse myself by imagining all the participants as baboons or gibbons grooming one another, displaying reddened hindquarters, kneeling before the most charitable billionaires and picking off (and eating) their fleas. The grooming rituals were so obvious. You couldn't really have a decent conversation anyway because you could barely hear anyone speak. But just by observing the dance of the primates you could tell who was important and who was not. The fund-raising supernumeraries and executive directors of charities were willing to grovel for even comparatively small change. Born on their knees, they couldn't wait to fall on their faces, and their billionaire marks knew it.

“Here comes that phony Frenchman from the museum,” Asher would say. “Let's give him a run for his money.” And then I would watch while Simon di Sinalunga groveled while pretending not to grovel, inviting us both for lunch, trying to set a time to come to our apartment and assess the pictures, all the while pretending to be interested only in art.

Asher loved making a monkey out of Simon, loved watching him scrutinize my cleavage in my red Valentino gown, loved watching him try to count the diamonds in my necklace. We were never more united as a couple than in public with the cameras flashing. It was our best gig. I suspected that the same was true for many of the couples at the party who flirted connubially in public, then went home and never spoke to each other—like two-year-olds in the sandbox engaged in parallel play.

Goateed Simon, marvelously turned out in a hand-tailored tux, speaking with an accent known only to museum directors and classical music announcers, went on about the new wing he was building in Central Park. Asher pretended to be fascinated.

“Are you prepared to call it the Freilich Wing?” he twitted.

“It depends,” said Simon.

“How much?” asked Asher.

“It's not only a question of money.”

“Then what is it a question of?”

“Can I take you to lunch in the Trustees Room?”

“Call me,” said Asher, and turned away.

We were hardly out of earshot when Asher said, “That monkey says it's not about money.”

“Shhh, he'll hear you.”

“Vanessa, he would kiss my ass even if I insulted him to his face. Those guys have no sensitivity. They're about as sensitive as goddamned toilet seats. A human abacus with an Italian name—that's all these guys are. You can't insult 'em. Believe me, I've tried.”

Asher was a shit-disturber. Actually, that was one of my favorite things about him. He had no sacred cows. Except perhaps his late wife, who could do no wrong. Amazing how saintly spouses become after they die.

As Dickie Freilich gradually took over the everyday workings of the business, Asher decided to become an artist. Surely he had known enough artists who sought his patronage. Why couldn't he
become
one? Not for him the Sunday painting of his idol Winston Churchill nor the steel constructions of his friend Arthur Carter, he wanted to make gigantic earthworks like Robert Smithson or wrappings of man-made monuments like the Christos. What appealed to him about earthworks was how big they were, how much land had to be purchased, how many people employed in building them. It seemed that pipelines and reservoirs were not so very different from earthworks except that the earthworks had no practical use. This appealed to the cynic in Asher.