Saturday's Child (62 page)

The remaining week of my stay in New Zealand was a haze of nonstop lovemaking, passionate conversation, public appearances, and hilarious attempts at discretion. Through it all, by ourselves or around others, politics functioned as an ongoing, ever-intensifying erotic foreplay between us. And all this was taking place amid the natural beauty for which the country is justly known—a beauty that served to intensify the sensuality. Black-sand volcanic beaches. Fields of scarlet heather. Rolling green hills dotted by puffs of frisking newborn lambs. Snow-capped mountains, crystalline pools, ancient
kauri
forests, glowworm caves, hot-spring baths, bubbling mud pools, white-plumed geysers, boiling lakes. The whole damned landscape was steaming, over-the-top, orgasmic.

By the time I left New Zealand, I was a woman in love, in the grip of a passion that would sustain a level of white-hot ferocity for ten years.

Back then, however, we both said it was an affair from which we were returning to our respective lovers. Marilyn was not going to tell her lover, which disturbed me, and she thought I was wrong to tell Iliana, but it had never occurred to me not to. We both were red-eyed with weeping on the day of my departure, and Marilyn, who'd driven the roads of her small country so often she could've done so blindfolded, managed to get lost on the way to the airport, almost making me miss the plane. I remember striving for a sophistication that might redeem us, saying at the flight gate, “Come on now, no more tears. Surely we know how to do this.”

We didn't. When I landed in Hawaii for my planned overnight stopover, I was wretched, already missing her so much the ache felt physical. I also seriously questioned my mental and moral health. I walked the beach outside my hotel for hours, flagellating myself, wondering if after decades of marriage, I was now turning into some kind of omnivore, a selfish maniac, a sex fiend—and a recidivist crisis addict to boot. I dreaded telling Iliana. But I knew I couldn't not tell her, partly because she'd sense it, mostly because I couldn't lie to her.

I've thought about this fetish with honesty a great deal. God knows I understand that truth is subjective and plural—and that it can be used as a bludgeon. But the private ways in which lies are excused and the political ways in which truth is manipulated have always repelled me. In close relationships, especially, it seems to me that by not hazarding honesty—which is really simply the longing to know and to be known, the longing I believe is synonymous with loving—we doom intimacy. Even when you make up your mind to tell the truth, it still is an onion, and you peel skin after skin. But if you aren't even trying to do
that
, what's the point of the masquerade? I'm sure that my fixation on honesty has its roots in my childhood, in the swamp of lies about my identity. My name was not what I was told it was. My parentage was not what I was told it was. My age was not what I was told it was. This, combined with the too early imprint of being a working actor, would give anyone a skewed sense of what's real. As a young adult, I tried to discover what reality was—or, if it didn't exist, to invent it. Even now, no matter how odious the truth may be, I'd always rather know it. Writing, for me, is a process of discovering and recording truths—about myself, other people, consciousness itself. Politics, for me, is about communicating and protecting those truths.

But in my mulishness I've at least learned that honesty takes two—the teller
and
the hearer—and ultimately I've come to trust only two partners in that exchange: my son, and you, my reader. Still, Iliana was the kind of hearer who wanted the truth, went through its sorrow, and survived—which is why, though we were lovers for less than three years, we'll likely be “family” for the rest of our lives. I rang her from Hawaii. As I thought she would, she heard something in my voice. She asked me the direct question. I gave her the direct answer.

She was hurt and furious, her heartache centering around having been cast, as she put it, “as the annunciating angel.” I certainly couldn't blame her, since I was busy blaming myself: I'd used her, relied on her support in my time of need, and now betrayed her. This was only part of the story, of course, but everything gets oversimplified in an atmosphere of reproach, and I was more comfortable with self-accusation than with counter-accusation. My return to New York was followed by days of misery, tears, and attempts to repair the relationship.

Meanwhile, those artifactual datebooks display the shorthand of how life swept mercilessly on. Catching up with Blake. Seeing Margaritta Papandreou, in New York for a visit. Drawing up the invitation list for the big Donna Shalala dinner. Writing a magazine piece on New Zealand so gushingly prurient about its natural glories that I might as well have invented a new genre: landscape pornography. Phoning Riyadh repeatedly to ensure that the Saudi contributor, Aisha Almana, would be attending the Strategy Meeting. Dealing with the Israeli embassy, consulate, and mission to the United Nations, all three of which were blustering about the presence of Palestine as well as Israel in
Sisterhood Is Global
(the Israeli contributor, Shulamit Aloni, a member of the Knesset, feminist, and peace leader, knew this all along and understood perfectly). Delivering promised campaign speeches at fundraisers for Gerry Ferraro. And working with Karen on all the yet-to-be-resolved crises looming around the imminent Strategy Meeting, to which, by the way, both Iliana and Marilyn had already been invited—the thought of which gave me cramps.

October was filled with pain and recriminations, guilt and rebellion, false reconciliations. No longer sure I could heal the relationship with Iliana, I also saw no future with Marilyn. The latter wrote ardent love letters and phoned daily, yet was schizophrenically proceeding with plans to
buy a farm, raise Angora goats, and live happily ever after with a lied-to lover who was moving to New Zealand from Australia to share this bucolic future. All lovers aside, I more than ever wanted space of my own, and
soon
. I'd begun to suspect that Iliana and I would not be walking hand in hand into the sunset.

Off the Page and into Action

On November 10, Karen, Toni, the Strategy Meeting staff (what remained of the book staff), and I drove out in rented cars to Long Island. The plan was to have one quiet day to ourselves when we could settle in, make sure all was in order, and get the meeting rooms ready. The plan was also to give the staff a well-deserved day and night of being peacefully pampered before They arrived. This was naturally shot to hell by the appearance of the Nigerian contributor a day ahead of schedule, with no notice and many imperious needs. But we carried it off nonetheless.

We
really
carried it off. For decades, feminist activists had been meeting in storefronts and basements, while men had been assembling in luxury hotels to talk policy. For once, I wanted women to be treated
well
, and I'd raised the money to do it. So we'd arranged with the airports and with feminist moles in the State Department for VIP treatment, streamlined passport procedures, priority baggage handling.
⁷
Each contributor was met by a Sisterhood Is Global volunteer (we had identifying sweatshirts made up for the occasion), presented with flowers, ushered to the VIP lounge and thence to a limousine for the drive to the Three Village Inn. Special care was taken over dietary details. There were flowers and fresh fruit in every room, a complimentary bottle of Ouzo in Margaritta's, a borrowed guitar in Marilyn's. We even had arranged and paid for a twice weekly dialysis treatment for Slavenka Draculic, the Yugoslav contributor, who at the last minute had informed us she had kidney disease.

On November 11, they arrived: a regionally representative cross section of the anthology contributors—from Barbardos, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Cuba, Finland, Fiji, Greece, Italy, India, Kuwait, Libya, Mexico, Nepal, New Zealand, Nigeria, Norway, Palestine/Israel, Poland, Saudi Arabia, Spain, Sri Lanka, Thailand, and Zambia.

It was a memorable six days, and it was moving to see how touched the women were at being treated with such respect. The inn proved an ideal setting, surrounded by autumnal golden woods through which people could take walks during meeting breaks. Berit Ås (Norway) and Hilkka Pietilä (Finland) actually took morning swims in the nearby lake—their Nordic heartiness impressing everyone but inspiring no imitators. Simone de Beauvoir, ill with flu in Paris, had to cancel but sent support by phone and telex. Devaki Jain landed a day late from India, barely having got out at all in the wake of turmoil following Indira Gandhi's assassination. Marilyn arrived just out of the hospital with pneumonia, whispering, to my distraction, that her relationship with her lover might be over. Iliana came for two days, found it too painful, and pled off with job obligations. Nourah Al-Falah could get permission to leave Kuwait for only three days—so spent two of them flying in order to have one precious day with us. Luz Helena Sánchez (Colombia), who was a medical doctor, brought me around when I passed out from control-freak exhaustion on the fourth day.

But everything went off without a hitch. No press were allowed, so the talks could be honest, and I knew we were home free when the first woman felt safe enough to cry. We talked for hours—in full meetings, in regional caucuses, in the dining room, in the individual cabins—about our personal lives, political priorities, differences, similarities, hopes. Issues now taken for granted as basics in the international Women's Movement first surfaced into codification at that meeting, including globalization, women's unpaid labor, the threat of religious fundamentalisms, the increase in sex trafficking, and the impact of national debt on women. At one point, I remember Karen, Toni, and I hugging each other, sobbing with accomplishment. The meeting had magic.

In the meantime—despite our both having solemnly declared This Cannot Happen Again—Marilyn had been creeping from her cabin into mine each night like a character in an operetta. Since Karen was
ensconced in the cabin next door, she knew, but no one else did. Iliana had spent only one night at the inn before returning to New York.

As the six days came to a close, everyone was a bit tense about the transfer into Manhattan for the public events. On the penultimate day, the regional caucuses came back to the full meeting with a proposal that made my heart sing and sink at the same moment. The women didn't want it to end. They wanted something permanent, an ongoing institution that would function as the first international feminist think tank but also have an activist component. They wanted to “lift the book off the page and into action.” They wanted the Sisterhood Is Global Institute. They wanted Robin to make it happen.

I was flattered, honored, and appalled. I'd been waiting for the day when the anthology would be published and the Strategy Meeting done, so that I could turn my attention to getting an apartment and writing again. I already had the next book planned:
fiction
, by god, no research necessary. There was also the little matter of finding myself madly in love with someone who lived on the other side of the planet,
and
being in the middle of a breakup with Iliana.

Consequently, I tried to foist the Institute back on those who wanted it. No fools they. One by one, they declined, citing clever reasons for why and how I should be the hapless soul to found it. The only dissenters were Marilyn and Iliana—who'd returned for the last half-day—who supported my plea for release in two distinct appeals. (I wondered darkly to Karen if it was necessary to sleep with everybody around the table to get unanimous permission to be left alone and write.) It was finally Margaritta, the senior stateswoman as it were, who lovingly entrapped me, building a case that I was a victim of the anthology's success, and that if the Institute were not at least begun with my participation, contacts, and funder networking, it wouldn't happen at all. One good entrapment deserves another. So I persuaded valiant Karen Berry to be the first executive director, promising my help behind the scenes. I trusted her politics, ethics, cross-cultural sensitivity—and workaholism. The assembly agreed, and we spent the last day at Three Village Inn drafting a press release about the Institute's founding, with de Beauvoir signing on to it by phone.

The next four days were high pressure. We drove into the city and
rebased at the Tudor Hotel, near the UN. I didn't return to Iliana's in Greenwich Village, but stayed at the hotel, near where the events were. That night, Doubleday threw a lavish book-publication party for contributors, press, and guests—so large it was held in the ballroom of the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts, at Lincoln Center. Champagne flowed, as did major press coverage. In addition to the twenty-five women who'd been on Long Island, other contributors were in attendance, including some based at the United Nations and some living in exile in North America, so it made for a hearty representation. Many came in national dress. A representative pantheon of the U.S. Women's Movement attended or sent messages as well, and my old
Ms
. officemate Alice Walker issued a statement calling the book “one of the most important human-rights documents in history.” Of course both Iliana and Marilyn were in attendance—the former breathing deeply, the latter drinking champagne deeply. I'd slept an average of four hours a night for weeks, so by now my eyes were glittering and my teeth grinding from stress, manic excitement, and double espressos.

Afterward, Lois threw a smaller party for the
SIG
staff, Iliana, and myself at her apartment. We somehow got through it, though the staff was wiped out too, Karen was zomboid, and Iliana was in a state of controlled anguish. As a surprise, she'd reserved a suite at another hotel, more lavish than the one where we all were staying, and she shanghaied me to it, where more champagne was chilling, along with her fragile hopes. I fell asleep, half dressed, after one glass.