Saturday's Child (70 page)

There were weeks on end at the farm where we'd joke that nothing happened, meaning nothing dramatic or earthshaking. I would ritually strip off my wristwatch when I arrived, rarely putting it on again until the day I left. My pace altered profoundly. The little datebooks for those months of my farm sojourns—year after year—go blank, except for the occasional notation of a jaunt into Auckland to hear a Kiri Te Kanawa concert or have dinner with friends or catch up on some movies at a film festival. Perhaps happy lovers, like Tolstoy's happy families, are all alike and have no history. Or perhaps, as Tom Stoppard wrote in
The Real Thing
, “Loving and being loved is unliterary. It's happiness expressed in banality and lust.” The banality, or blank time, was spent in what I came to call “transparent
days”: morning tea or coffee in bed, collecting the eggs and making breakfast while hearing the radio news, weeding or planting, shearing or baling or making hay, treading the morning and afternoon rounds to check on the animals; maybe driving into the one-block town, Wellsford, for a few groceries; picking up the mail, starting dinner, pouring a glass of wine and sitting on the stoop to watch the sun set over the hills while murmuring about the day; then going inside to eat and bathe, read a bit, drift softly toward love and then into sleep.

One thing the relationship with Marilyn did was help me play. Playing was not something I'd done much in my childhood. I still don't play well or easily. I tend to watch others—Blake when he was little, or adult lovers who seem adept at having fun—to figure out how they
do
it. The years with Kenneth weren't what you could call playful, partly because of my own somberness and partly because of the tenor of the times. Iliana tried to help me play, and we did have great frolics together; we went ballooning, for instance, and I learned how to dance Latin style—though she tried in vain to teach me how to ride a bicycle. But the timing went against her, given
Sisterhood Is Global
and the other crises of that period, and when she tried to
force
me to play, it backfired. But Marilyn had two elements on her side: the timing (I was ready for it) and the fact that she herself was a workaholic, so she understood when and how one could
not
stop and when and how one could. During the semester I taught at the University of Canterbury, I'd fly up to the farm most weekends, unless Marilyn was flying down to Christchurch, in which case we'd drive off to visit the writer Keri Hulme or explore the South Island's rainforests, to Queens-town to spy on penguins and seals, to Dunedin to view the nesting royal albatrosses, to Kaikoura to sail out and gasp reverently at the sperm whales, blowing and breaching fifty feet away.

Not that I shared all of Marilyn's definitions of fun. New Zealanders are excessively hearty, athletic types. These are the people who invented bungee jumping and extreme sports; they probably devised throwing someone into the water and walking away as a method to teach swimming. I didn't mind the milder activities, though Marilyn too was unable to teach me how to ride a bicycle. (Karen had also tried. Apparently this is one of those things that, once you've not learned it, you never forget how not to
learn it again.) But Marilyn was forever putting me into strenuous physical situations with little or no preparation: skiing, white-water rafting, black-water cave spelunking, hiking up steep mountains, climbing glaciers. I trundled along gamely and sometimes foolishly—despite falling down, spraining, cutting, and fracturing parts of myself, and in general hurting quite a lot. Why not politely decline? Well, the scenery
was
glorious, I was in love, and as usual I confused stopping with acknowledging defeat. It must also be confessed that I was hooked on playing the wide-eyed ingenue, even in my forties.

But the physical danger did frighten me: un-surefooted, I lacked confidence in my balance. I willed myself onward, yet those childhood warnings still commanded my reflexes:
stand back, duck, be careful, watch out; if you get hurt you could be fired and your family will starve!
With less than charitable derision, Marilyn began to consider me a physical coward, a judgment with which I readily concurred. That is, I concurred until Blake, Lois, Karen, and other friends reminded me that going into the refugee camps around Beirut at the height of Lebanon's civil war is not the act of a physical coward. But that had a purpose. Deliberately seeking out physical danger for the so-called thrill of it has always seemed to me at best a mystery and at worst a psychosis. Or perhaps it's the recourse of people who know no other way to experience life intensely—which, for good or ill, has certainly not been my problem.

Oh, the things we do for love. I would perpetuate this commute (twenty-three hours one-way, door to door, New York to Atlantis) through 1994, usually staying at the farm for a three-month period once a year. Marilyn would come to New York for four to six weeks annually, and we'd also meet in some third country where she'd had her way paid to do political consulting or I'd had mine paid for a journalism assignment or a book tour or lecture. Conferences helped, as did frequent-flier mileage. We managed to average half of each year together this way, meeting all over the world: Brazil, the Philippines, Australia, England, Indonesia, Canada, at least fifteen different U.S. cities, and all across New Zealand. I cherished her stays in New York, where my life felt of one piece, since I could be with both Blake
and
my lover in my own Greenwich Village rooftop bower. But I prized the days at Atlantis, felt affectionately adopted by
Marilyn's parents and her brother's family, made friends, picked up a few words of Maori as well as the Kiwi lingo that passes for English, learned the local roads (including how to drive on the left), and sleuthed out where to find decent olive oil and balsamic vinegar in a rural area—no small feat.

I wrote poetry in New Zealand. “Relativity,” “The Found Season,” and “Arbitrary Bread” (written 1987—88, all in
Upstairs in the Garden
, which I finished while at Christchurch) resonate with contentment. But early drafts of what would become “Country Matters”
⁴
revealed a darker underside to Eden, and my own paper trail reminds me that “The Politics of Silence” was written at the farm in July of 1989, reflecting already familiar fault lines in the relationship. That essay, in
The Word of a Woman
, is about silence used as
power
, the power of emotional withholding, the power to make the other partner scurry and pursue, second-guess, offer multiple-choice answers, wheedle, cosset, and, in sum, do 90 percent of the work of communication—
except
when the quiet one is angry and then becomes
highly
articulate. You won't be aghast to learn that I—the apostate Jewish New Yorker with a romantic temperament and a theatrical past—was the usually communicative one, Marilyn the silent partner. Yet this went deeper than cultural differences. Then again, hadn't I been drawn to her partly for the understatement, her pastel shades so soothing after Iliana's neon colors? Hadn't I been electrified by her rage, righteously expressed against world injustices? Be careful what you wish for? Maybe don't wish at all.

We'd had our share of quarrels and some flat-out fights: a screamer in Manila, a storming-out in Jakarta, shouters in London and Montreal, a sulk in Bali, and a whole repertory racked up in Auckland, at Atlantis, and at Perry Street. But we always made up, and I thought it reassuring that we had lovers' quarrels like average couples who lived together, preferring to ignore the fact that we had the
same
quarrel every time. Whatever its topic, its subject was power. “The Politics of Silence”—the essay about which more women have written to me in recognition than perhaps any
other I've published—is actually about silence as a conscious or unconscious tactic of control in intimate relationships, in this case same-sex lovers, but not necessarily so.
⁵
This dynamic has little to do with simplistic butch-femme roles, which didn't apply to us sexually, though certain of my friends (both heterosexual and lesbian) who were critical of Marilyn sometimes wrongly hypothesized the problem that way. This was about extremes of emotional parsimony and emotional extravagance. Now, when I read that essay or early drafts of poems I later unwisely revised into happy endings, I can trace an SOS code being sent to this later me, just as I can read the Mayday messages in poems written early in my marriage. (These days I pay closer attention to what I write at the time I write it.)

But with Marilyn the good times outweighed the bad, in frequency and in intensity. After a while, the bad came to equal, and then outweigh, the good in frequency. But when it
was
there, the good was
so
good that intensity won the day, especially given my romanticism. Marilyn herself confessed she was “clumsy in loving” (by which she decidedly did not mean l
ovemaking
), and admitted that she'd never been in a real relationship of any duration before. But I, hubristically, felt as surefooted in knowing how to communicate love as she did in knowing which stone to step on when crossing a brook, so I celebrated the prospect of an exchange. “Here's my hand,” I said in effect, “see, put your foot there, now shift your weight here. You can risk it. There's no danger, my darling.” I thought, said, and tried to demonstrate how we could work at the relationship, perhaps of necessity harder than most people, given the distance. It was unthinkable we wouldn't be lovers and partners for the rest of our lives, as we'd discussed, many times. Surely we were each arrogant enough to rise to that challenge. But in 1989 the challenges were about to escalate.

Top of the Masthead

The Demon Lover
had come out that spring, as had Marilyn's book, titled, in the United States,
If Women Counted: A New Feminist Economics
(Harper & Row). We were on separate North American book tours at the same time, sometimes merrily overlapping in the same city, which felt glamorous and sexy: “Well, sweetheart, your hotel room or mine?” After the tours were finished, I went to the farm for several months, then Marilyn and I managed a September London rendezvous, since both books came out in the United Kingdom at the same time, too, and we could finesse the timing so our respective promotional appearances were in tandem. Afterward, I returned to the States for an autumn full of talks at colleges and women's centers.

The Demon Lover
had helped generate discussion about violence against women, and I seemed in demand as a speaker. Fortunately, it was also a way to promote the Institute, which was engaging that subject constantly via its international Action Alerts. Care and feeding of the Institute, by the way, continued all along, for which read: fundraising. Furthermore, it was now time for the headquarters to move. According to its founding mandate, the Institute would shift locale every five years, so that it would never be under the hegemony of any one country and thus free to criticize all. (This is one of those grandiose feminist notions that in practice constitutes a logistical nightmare. Each subsequent shift has become more cumbersome, as the library and files expand. Recently, the Steering Committee has begun studying the possibility of adopting a different approach, with a permanent headquarters and branches around the world instead of a wandering HQ. At least with the Internet, the Institute can now always be found, wherever its physical location, at its Web site:
www.sigi.org
.)

In 1989, I'd persuaded Marilyn to host the Institute in New Zealand—such are the vagaries of political pillow talk—so Karen and I packed it up and shipped it there. During the next five years, under Marilyn's guidance, it would pioneer work on women's unpaid labor, among other issues. Still, much of the fundraising of necessity had to be followed up from the New York end. (Work from “the New York end” never quite relents. Following Marilyn's tenure, during the late 1990s the Institute was held metaphorical hostage to a single-issue, single-constituency favoritism approach by
its executive director at the time, Mahnaz Afkhami, based in Baltimore, Maryland. This naturally upset many members, who thought “sisterhood” and “global” were words with meaning. I'd been keeping a low profile for fear of falling into what I call “founder's syndrome”—where the founder persists in looming over an institution, trying to control it—but in this case the membership pressure became too strong, forcing me to intervene.
⁶
)

Periodic Institute crises aside, in the fall of 1989 I was in negotiations with the BBC for a never-to-materialize series on terrorism based on
The Demon Lover
. Meanwhile, the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) and World Health Organization (WHO) had approached me with a proposal for a book they wanted me to compile and edit on women and HIV/AIDS. Sliding toward another financial downswing at the time, I was seriously considering the UNDP/WHO project—but in dread, since working with bureaucracies gives me migraines. Then Gloria and I met for a bite at the Empire Diner on Tenth Avenue, and it turned out to be such a momentous meeting we closed it by throwing discretion out the window and sharing an indecently large piece of Mississippi mud cake.

When Gloria had called, I thought she wanted to meet for another pep talk about the new book she was wrestling with, which would eventually become
Revolution from Within
(Little, Brown, 1992), but which was giving her a hard time in its birthing. Instead, we discussed the magazine, whose perils continued. The sale of
Ms
. two years earlier to the Australian
firm Fairfax had devolved into another sale, to Matilda Productions (two women formerly with Fairfax), but their glitzy approach, including recipes, fashion, and movie-star coverage, had driven the loyal readers up a tree and the magazine down a hole. Now it had been sold again, this time to Lang Communications. Dale Lang, the president and CEO, had a stable of
Ms
. imitators (
Working Woman
and
Working Mother
), but now he'd acquired the prototype—which he wanted mostly in order to use its mailing list and subscribers for his
Ms
. clones. Dale had frozen publication but put the staff on hold, saying he might reconstitute
Ms
. as a newsletter, since it probably no longer had a sufficient audience to survive as a magazine. (This was during another of those intervals when the press is reannouncing that feminism surely
is
dead
now;
“post-feminist era” pronouncements were being babbled widely.) Gloria was fighting for the life of her child again. She'd been struggling for the magazine's preservation in one way or another since its founding (at that point for seventeen years)—always insisting to herself and the rest of us that
this
new development would make
all
the difference: surely
this
advertiser,
this
sponsor,
this
investor. It's a lovably irksome tendency of hers, the exuding of deafeningly sentimental optimism—probably a residual survival syndrome from East Toledo. I respect it as her version of refusing to quit. But this time she was tired. Maybe
Ms
. had reached the point of no return? Should she drive a stake in its heart as so many of our mutual friends were counseling? Should she finally just let it go?