Saturday's Child (56 page)

We found space, sub-renting from the Women's Action Alliance, which had offices on Lexington Avenue where
Ms
. had once been quartered. We could have much-needed twenty-four-hour access; eventually we'd work in shifts and, toward the end, around the clock. The Alliance women had
no
idea what they were getting into—but then neither did I—yet they were excited by the project and absurdly hospitable. We began renting one room, then gradually expanded until we swallowed virtually the entire floor and the Alliance staff was cooped up in two small offices, patiently waiting for the book's completion. By the end of our sojourn there, we had a functioning tiny kitchen, foam pallets and blankets for dozing breaks, a medicine cabinet (full of aspirins, No-Doz, vitamin C, Midol, and tampons), a periodically resident cat (with litterbox), and a frequently visiting poodle.

Hiring staff was another new role for me, an uncomfortable one I probably would have handled abominably, too guilty to turn anyone away, had it not been for Karen, who would become the de facto assistant editor of the book and day-to-day coordinator of the project. Word spread, and the staff—not counting contributors—grew at its height to eighteen salaried
women (subsistence salaries, admittedly),
plus
interns, volunteers, and translators. When Toni Fitzpatrick joined us, the quality of research bumped up impressively—as she reminds me to this day.

Karen is now an attorney, and will always be dear to me. Toni—also now an attorney (and a therapist: one of those overachiever types)—lives in California but visits at least once a year with Shira, her wee feminist daughter. Karen, Toni, and I—the hard-core of
SIG
—sometimes get out the old scrapbooks and convulse with hilarity at anecdotes evoked by certain snapshots. About those days at
SIG
I
am
nostalgic, although I'd do something drastic in order not to relive them. Blake—who was our token male and all-around helper, frequently hanging out at the
SIG
offices—now says he thinks that those years were the equivalent for me of what most people experience as part of a normal youth: summer camp or college-dorm heydays. It's a fair insight, in that our offices became home to me more and more as the book moved into its final crunch years, and I sometimes slept there. We became a family, a workaholic commune. People left but, recidivist, returned. Love relationships bloomed or withered, people fell ill, recovered, survived migraines, breakdowns, root canals, funerals, arrests, abortions, and personal crises. We were there for each other through it all.

We spent weekends and holidays poring over demographic charts, we rose at 3:00
A.M.
to place phone calls to some country where it was midday, we typed and translated and fact-checked and proofread until dawn, or straight on through the next day. I tried to forge a work system that would reflect feminist vision, a balance between anarchic self-responsibility and practical professionalism. This did
not
always succeed, and there were endless meetings, arguments, sometimes tears. But there was as much or more laughter, understanding, and teamwork. We ranged in age from adolescence to the mid-sixties, and were of an ethnic and racial composition as varied as the U.S. Women's Movement itself. Job functions sometimes blurred, as did day and night, exhaustion and elation, pride in our efforts and humility at the valor of women around the world whose lives we were discovering and describing. Every one of us who worked on the anthology emerged forever changed.

Ultimately, the buck stopped with me, named by the staff “Attila the Hon” (
sic
). The fundraising—ongoing and perpetual—was my responsibility,
as was dealing with Doubleday via my forbearing editor there, Loretta Barrett. Mine were the final decisions on assigning contributor essays and country research, on content, staff administration, format and style, translations, and scheduling. As hands-on compiler and editor, I compulsively line-edited every article and every statistical preface. This had to be done repeatedly since updates kept coming in, necessitating, as we joked wearily, going “Baaaaack to Afghanistan”
just
when we'd managed to make it all the way through to Zimbabwe. Mine, too, of course, was the responsibility of dealing with the contributors I'd chosen from almost eighty countries. Some of them had to use pseudonyms for safety, some were in forced exile, and some were temperamental divas, but most of them were cooperative and enthusiastic, taking seriously the responsibility of being a voice for their countrywomen.
⁴

Choosing, editing, and dealing in general with the contributors lent me even more perspectives regarding the multiplicity of feminisms I'd learned to affirm earlier. Choosing contributors also led me to the woman who would give me a markedly different perspective on my being “hopelessly heterosexual.”

Breaking Through

In June of 1981 I was still filling in some crucial gaps where contributors were concerned. By and large, once word got around that Simone de Beauvoir had agreed to be the contributor from France, soliciting essays had got considerably easier. Yet there was a problem we regularly faced regarding countries with varying degrees of totalitarian government. “Official women” from their National Federation of Women or their Women's Bureau were eager to contribute, but while off the record they would vent their rage openly, their written submissions parroted their political masters. This was understandable but maddening. If the dictatorship was a right-wing one, the line was that feminism was a Communist plot, that in
their culture Women Were Women and Men Were Men so they had no need for women's rights. If, on the other hand, it was a left-wing regime, the line was that the revolution had solved all such problems, so any rumors of sexism were CIA lies and capitalist slanders. Finding brave, independent voices willing to go public from such countries wasn't easy—yet with enough obstinacy usually turned out to be possible.

But one such country, with a left-wing dictatorship, had me stymied. It was in the Caribbean, and I was intent on including it, concerned that if I didn't, it might seem I automatically agreed with the United States's strong opposition to its government. Sure enough, the Federation women offered a “No Problem
Here
!” essay droned onto paper in sleep-inducing jargon. But the women I located in the exile community who
were
willing to critique their government all took a virulently right-wing line (written, I might add, in an equally insipid style). I was on the verge of admitting defeat when saved by Claire de Hedervary, a Belgian feminist working as a political adviser to the UN Security Council.
⁵
Claire mentioned she thought she knew the perfect woman: a UN colleague in exile from the country in question. This woman had fled because she felt the revolution—of which she'd been a part—hadn't gone far
enough
, that it had abandoned its ideals and had exploited and then betrayed women. She spoke and wrote fluent English (as well as Spanish, German, French, and Italian), was a published poet,
and
, although she worked at the UN Centre in Vienna, was currently in New York for a week at Secretariat headquarters. I embraced Claire and told her that
she
was as helpful as she was chic (which was very), and that I owed her a bottle of champagne if this worked out. Then I rang up Iliana de Costa and invited her to lunch.

Pause.

Iliana de Costa is not her real name. It's the name I invented for a fictional character based on this woman, in my novel
Dry Your Smile
. But it's the name I perforce return to here, at her request, since she still works with the UN—an organization not yet as free of homophobia as we would wish it to be. So she is pseudonymous in this memoir, but all other details
of our relationship are accurate, albeit subjectively related. Only the names—of the individual and of her country, since it would identify her—have been disguised. To protect the guilty.

We had a lovely lunch, our conversation ranging from the lives of Sor Juana de la Cruz and Virginia Woolf to feminist insights, poetry, and international politics. Iliana was a multicultural intellectual, possessed of a rich sense of humor, a mellifluous voice, large expressive eyes, and Latin American buoyancy. Only a little taller than me and five months younger, she nonetheless seemed the elder, very much a woman of the world, and she exuded a stubbornness that I recognized and found invigorating. She couldn't have survived going into exile, alone, at age nineteen, without being stubborn. I felt I'd made a friend, and invited her to be a contributor on the spot. She accepted, but said she'd have to write under a pseudonym. Given her critique of her country, I could understand why; she wasn't the only contributor whose identity we were protecting, via a tight security system to which only Karen and I were privy. There was definitely a buzz between Iliana and me, but I didn't think much about it. I was accustomed to the exhilaratingly high-energy exchange often generated between feminist activists in cross-cultural encounters.

Kenneth's therapy, and mine, and ours, had all been moving right along, and hope sprang eternal in my obstinate breast. In July, once Blake was at summer camp (now an annual ritual, not an emergency flight), I swept Kenneth and myself off to the Yucatán, in Mexico. It was supposed to be the honeymoon we'd never had, a week together in hopes of kindling the spark we'd either never felt or had felt so briefly and so long ago it wasn't an ember anymore. The trip had its poignant moments, but it generated more billing than cooing, thus only increasing the financial pressures. Afterward, I returned to New York and work, and Ken went on for a week's vacation in Key West by himself.

Iliana wrote and telephoned, but not perceptibly more often than other contributors, and she was incredibly helpful in obtaining statistics and reports for the research staff that would otherwise have taken us months to locate and extract from UN bureaucracies. In one phone call, she said she'd been immersed in reading everything I'd published, and asked if I'd be interested in coming to Vienna to speak on a panel with Nawal El Saadawi and Germaine Greer at the next UN observance of March 8,
International Woman's Day. I replied that I'd love to, if my schedule allowed it.

That September, Blake and I went to Quebec for a long weekend. We needed it desperately, since the marriage had taken another downward turn. (Such occasions are precisely the reason credit-card debt was invented.) Blake practiced his UN-school French and gorged on escargot, discovering that snails are the gourmet's excuse to eat quantities of garlic-butter-soaked bread. We stayed at the Château Frontenac, took carriage rides, got merrily lost wandering the narrow streets of the old city, walked along the St. Lawrence, laughed, cried, and hugged a lot. But coming home was no fun.

When, at the turn of the year, I finally accepted Iliana's invitation to speak in Vienna, I told Kenneth I'd like to bring Blake with me for his first trip to Europe—especially since Vienna was a music city. The Vienna UN Centre would pay for a business-class ticket, which I could convert into two coach seats with only a small additional payment, and my per diem expenses could stretch to cover both Blake and me. It would be spring break at UNIS, so we could eke out ten days. Ken thought it was a fine idea—but only if he could come, too. There was a flurry of calls to Iliana, who, ever resourceful, found an excuse for another ticket.

Would I be willing to give a poetry reading? Because then, more money might be—

Uh, well, could Kenneth and I give a
joint
poetry reading?

Yes! She would arrange it. Ever vivacious, she insisted she'd love showing off Vienna to my whole family, that we'd have a proper holiday. So the feminist holy family took flight in March of 1982.

Breaking Open

It was to be
eine kleine
hell. The only unalloyed delight of the trip was when, during the panel Q-and-A, Blake politely asked Germaine Greer why she had granted an interview to
Playboy
when the magazine was built on contempt for women. Insulted (and hung-over), Greer fumbled her response rather badly, and the audience wound up discreetly hissing her but applauding her twelve-year-old questioner. The other public events went well enough, and I threw a dinner in honor of those
SIG
contributors
who were present.
⁶
The “vacation” part was touching, even overwhelming. Iliana had arranged for opera and philharmonic tickets, museum trips, visits to Mozart's house, drives to the Venus of Willendorf site and to Dürnstein, the medieval castle on the Danube. She was extraordinarily generous with her time as well as with her wallet. She and Kenneth got on royally, having in common their passion for Goethe, Schiller, and Wagner, not my favorite trio. Blake liked her. We were all grateful.

I was also a nervous wreck. It was becoming evident that Iliana had, as I first regarded it, a “crush” on me. The intensity of her gaze was flattering, and the champagne and sheaf of orchids arriving addressed to me at our hotel after the poetry reading raised my temperature and Kenneth's eyebrows. I said I needed to talk with her alone. It became apparent, after that conversation, that she felt she'd fallen in love with me.

Who knows, after all the libraries filled with analyses on the subject, why anyone falls in love with anyone? Some say you really fall in love with the person you yourself become in the beloved's presence. All I knew was that no one in my life had
ever
looked at me the way Iliana did, with such a luminosity of desire. Oh, how I liked the woman I saw mirrored in her eyes, the woman I became in her presence! Added to that was the startling sense of freedom in feeling erotically drawn to someone who, being a woman, spoke the same emotional language, someone who was already a friend, a
sister
. Nevertheless, I told her the story of Yaddo, and I said flatly that nothing could ever happen between us.