Saturday's Child (61 page)

“Just doing my job,” Marilyn replied, with Kiwi understatement. I could almost see her characteristic shrug over the long-distance line. It was now four years since we'd met in Oslo, and we considered ourselves friends. We'd kept in touch by mail, and Marilyn had been through New York on business three or four times in the interim. She always called to say hello or stopped by the magazine or the
SIG
office to visit. Sometimes we'd have lunch or dinner. At every encounter there was personal warmth and political collegiality, but never
ease
. On the contrary, there was always that sense of danger, an intellectual sparring, an almost tactile purr of electricity. At one point, Marilyn was in the United States for three months as a visiting fellow (
sic
) at the Institute of Politics, Kennedy School of Government, at Harvard. She arranged for the school to invite me up for three days to speak, give a political workshop, and read poetry at a women's event she was organizing there. We'd combine the visit with an interview
Ms
. wanted me to do with her. It's indicative of the edginess I felt when around Marilyn that I brought a de facto chaperon to Boston in the person of Jane Ordway, who was interning with me at the time. The interview went well, albeit tensely. At the women's event, I read poetry and talked politics as requested, but declined to dance, although I watched Marilyn dancing—and noticed that she moved like smoke. This was in April of 1981, two months before Claire de Hedervary would suggest I meet someone named Iliana de Costa.

In conversations during the interim years, Marilyn had mentioned the end of one relationship with a lover and the beginning of a new one; I'd told her about the death of my mother and demise of my marriage, and the
unexpected element—a woman lover—in my own life. Ever since Oslo, there'd been a refrain: she wanted to bring me to New Zealand for a lecture tour. She felt it would be a tonic for the isolated feminist movement there, and admitted she'd like to show off her country, of which she was so proud. I'd been invited there once before, during the 1970s. Back then I'd regretfully but firmly declined because I wanted to show solidarity with Gloria, who had just been disinvited because the NZ women had foolishly fallen for the smear that Gloria was a CIA agent. But I'd heard about the famed natural beauty of this small country, and had always wanted to visit. Annually, Marilyn inquired about my schedule. By early 1984, with the anthology winding down—and feeling myself safely shielded from any interpersonal electricity by the protective mantle of my relationship with Iliana—I agreed to go.

I wrote Marilyn that the following September would be the best time, after final page proofs and before last preparations for the book launch and Strategy Meeting in November. She wrote back on her parliamentary stationery that the timing would be perfect—enough advance notice to organize the lecture tour, and besides, September would be springtime Down Under. What neither of us knew was that in June, while Iliana and I were in Greece, Marilyn would not only bring down the NZ government and her party but put herself out of a job. That didn't change anything, she said the day I rang with congratulations; in fact, now she'd have time to tour the country with me, to show me its wonders.

Iliana was not pleased at my going, yet resigned to it. She even teased me, with a decided edge to the humor, that she was jealous of this Marilyn person who'd first become an MP at age twenty-two, had cut a rock 'n' roll record in New Zealand, was taking flying lessons, and exuded such notorious charisma. But by then I was used to Iliana's feeling jealous of most women with whom I worked—the accusations all baseless—so her statement just seemed familiar and mildly annoying.

Throughout July and August of 1984, Karen, Toni, and I, together with interns and volunteers, scouted locations for the Strategy Meeting. We finally found a beautiful old inn with an excellent restaurant on Long Island. I booked the entire place, main house and cabins, for six days in November, with my heart in my mouth about funding. It was a fair risk. By the end of August we had the funding commitments. Gen Vaughan had
again flown to the rescue like a good witch on her broom, to match another Ford Foundation grant. Karen and I flew into action with preparations: airline bookings, reserving hotel rooms for the five additional days in Manhattan after the Long Island meeting, and lots of liaising—with Doubleday about the book party and the media, with Ford about the reception/seminar they would host, and with Donna Shalala about public panel presentations and a formal dinner she, as president of Hunter College, wished to sponsor. As September rolled around I was reluctant to leave. But I'd given my word, the New Zealand lecture dates were set, and Karen would be in New York to handle things in my absence. So I flew off, myself, for the place called by the Maori “Aotearoa”—“land of the low-lying white cloud”—where the seasons were reversed and the water swirled down the drain counterclockwise and the very stars in the heavens were alien, and where my life, too, would turn upside down.

Little Match girls

The journey from New York to New Zealand takes more than twenty hours of flying. Over the next decade, I would do it so many times I would get it down to a science. But that first time, seasoned flier though I was, I found it an unsettling experience, compounded by walking out of my Northern Hemisphere autumn into a verdant spring, plus losing an entire day as we crossed the dateline (you do reclaim it—flying into yesterday—as you return, but this merely heightens the feeling of irreality).

On that first visit, New Zealand struck me as being quaintly poised in a 1950s time warp; in terms of the Women's Movement,
may
be the 1960s. In the not always friendly rivalry between Kiwis and their cousins across the Tasman Sea, the Australians growl that the New Zealanders are “pommier than the poms,” meaning more British than the Brits—which isn't an exaggeration (on the other hand, the Aussies sometimes try too hard to imitate the worst of what they think of as American). Aotearoa's Maori communities are their own world: complicated, artistic, insurgent, passionate, and oppressed. But
pakehas
—the Maori word for New Zealanders of European ancestry—tend to be veddy English, exemplifying that syndrome in which colonials, feeling inferior, try to imitate or outdo the original, fail pathetically, then feel inferior all over again.

The people were affable, though, even puckish, and you couldn't not like them. In public appearances and private encounters, I tried to hold up a metaphorical mirror to the women, who were laboring under a double (national and female) inferiority complex, so that they might see their own strengths. I kept reminding them that theirs was the first country where women won suffrage, the first to establish a form of social security, the place that shelters more endangered species than any other nation in the world. I kept saying that the country's small size and population (three million people, less than the New York City borough of Brooklyn) made possible a laboratory effect regarding progressive social change, so that as activists they could afford to take greater risks, be leaders, set more examples for the rest of us. They were as thirsty for affirmation as for news of global feminism. So many women attended the lecture in Christchurch that we wound up doing an entire second presentation later that evening for those who'd been turned away at the earlier one. In Wellington, in addition to other appearances, I spoke at the farewell party thrown for Marilyn by other women parliamentarians, announcing, to a roar of applause, that I brought regards from Geraldine Ferraro, who was then running for vice president of the United States. In Auckland, Hamilton, Palmerston North, at universities and public venues, I guest-taught classes and ovulars, delivered lectures, read poetry, held workshops and Q-and-A sessions. In between there were meetings with women's groups, Maori and
pakeha
both, focusing on health, media, violence against women, connections between sexism and racism, reproductive rights, funding—the usual. That was the foreground.

The background was the joltingly strong erotic energy that vibrated between myself and Marilyn Waring. It hit me in the face, not quite at the moment of arrival, because the flight left me walking into walls, but within the first twenty-four hours. I realized then that far from providing a protective mantle, my relationship with Iliana had intensified the possibilities, in that I now knew I could be drawn to a woman. But this was one relationship I started
out
trying to stop.

It had everything going against it. I had a lover. Marilyn had a lover. The idea that I'd be betraying not one but two women made me literally sick, and I kept disappearing into bathrooms before speeches, losing my previous meal. I dropped nine pounds in the first five days. For her part, Marilyn
seemed to enjoy the power of the allure between us; her sexual history was markedly different from mine, and her friendships seemed casually peopled with former women lovers from previous affairs. Except for the one with Vladimir, I'd never really had an affair, and I considered my relationship with Iliana, however rocky at the time, a
relationship
, one I'd assumed would continue.

Yet it was undeniable that seeing Marilyn in her own element heightened her attraction, as perhaps she'd known it would. For one thing, only recently out of Parliament, she was at the apex of her popularity; people would stop her on the street to thank her for having kept New Zealand nuclear free. But it was nothing so simple as the aphrodisiac of power, because hers had substance. It had been earned and exercised for principled reasons, at considerable cost, and with little personal ambition. There was, too, the sheer delight of the way her brain worked: a lightning-swift intelligence that had a fatal allure for me, particularly since it was combined with her own gift for audacity. She had a flair for the dramatic (which the old professional in me recognized and appreciated—but coolly appraised as that of an amateur). Unlike Iliana, she wasn't possessive and didn't question my actions or intentions. That was pleasant. It felt as if I'd regained a sense of my own agency. More: she
understood
my passion for work, even shared it—and that in itself was magnetic. The cultural differences were apparent: where Iliana had a hot, effusive manner, Marilyn projected understatement; after the previous months this felt like a soothing hand on my fevered brow. I remember thinking Iliana was like a great adoring Labrador puppy, and Marilyn like an aloof, patient cat. (Since I considered myself a cat person, I didn't take my own simile lightly.) Most important, Marilyn was the only adult I'd ever met, male or female, whose peculiar energy equaled mine. She could work incredibly hard and play just as hard. Whatever she chose to do
mattered
to her, and she focused like a five-foot-four-inch human laser beam of intensity on whatever that was.

After six days of flirting that wasn't flirting (but
was
), of double entendre that twittered awkwardly at itself, of self-disclosures and exchanged confidences interspersed with ponderous silences that were then followed by raves about how perfect our respective lovers were, I couldn't bear the
hypocrisy. I needed to name it, expose it, kill it. At dinner that night I said as much.

“Look, Marilyn, I don't know what's going on. But I can't play these games. I mean … Marilyn, what are we
doing?
”

She paused for a moment before answering, with a mournful grin.

“Our very best.”

Neither of us could breathe for the next ten minutes, from laughter released in recognition and admission. At least the tension was broken. We then entered into three more days of Seriously Discussing It. All this was interwoven, you understand, with television appearances, radio interviews, more guest teaching of classes—in American studies, women authors, feminist theory—and side trips to meet flightless birds at the Auckland Zoo and wander through the splendid public gardens in each city visited. Seriously Discussing It meant we could now spend every spare moment assuring each other This Cannot Happen.

Certainly any relationship was out of the question, considering my lover, her lover, and our locations. All Asia yawned between us. Even if it were only a brief affair, the fallout would be severe (she didn't see that, but then she also was aghast at my propensity for telling the truth to people I loved). We found scores of reasons why Absolutely Nothing Could Possibly Take Place—all the while talking about It and thinking about It, thus magnifying the desire.

That desire was unlike any I'd felt in my scant history of erotic experience. With Kenneth, my mind had been drawn to his literary brilliance and my heart to his bull-in-the-china-shop dependence; there hadn't been that overwhelming a physical attraction—which I didn't much notice at the time, being so young and knowing myself so little. At Yaddo, it was moon and art colony and breakout and the safety of what's temporary, mindless, and pretty. With Iliana, it was she who'd initiated the attraction and pursued it, doing so with such headstrong elegance that I responded; I'd been as much in love with the idea that
she
was in love with
me
, and with the idea of
being
in love, as I'd been in love with her. But here, everything locked into place: brain, heart, body. Despite her greater experience, Marilyn was equally thrown by the intense pull between us. She confessed she'd been haunted by it for four years, since Oslo, but had been
afraid to make that clearer for fear of losing our friendship. Now, she said, it was as if we'd each finally met our match.

Discussions of political strategies felt like a dance of twin intellects indulging in a singular pleasure. We shared the addiction of longtime politicos who arrogantly believe themselves capable of saving the world, plus the private, bitter fatigue of idealists for whom only the failures feel real. We shared a passion for art, although not the way I had with Kenneth or Iliana, both poets. Not an artist herself, Marilyn was nonetheless extremely well-read, and her former training as a musician, which she'd abandoned for Parliament, gave her insights into the aesthetic process that she expressed knowledgeably, longingly. A bit of a rake, she carried herself with the rapscallion grace of someone who'd been an athlete when younger, and this chronic roguishness lent to her moments of tenderness an acute poignancy. The body was slender, angular, wiry; the voice was rich and mellow—and she knew how to use it. Her large dark eyes, high forehead, prominent cheekbones, and sharp chin gave her face the features of a wild falcon.
⁶
For the first time in my life, I not only desired to
be
desired in my old narcissistic fashion;
I
desired. If we had indeed each met our match, we certainly were tinder. Ultimately, the energy was stronger than the resolve. We struck flame.