After all, there is a point to all the mistakes, to crying on the bathroom floor searching for the last traces of cocaine. Now that I am thirty, I know for certain that there were things I did in my twenties that I needed to do. Perhaps I might have done them as a teenager or a college student, but I believe that I needed to do them as an adult, a free person, without a tour bus or a counselor or a parent or a roommate or some other guardian there to chaperone me through: There just were things I needed to do absolutely alone.
I needed to spend a week in Florence by myself, to check into the Excelsior Hotel and eat breakfast and dinner in bed with a view of the Arno, watching soccer on Italian television and be amazingly bored, I needed to walk the streets of this most romantic and recherché of cities all alone, I needed to have Italian men who could tell I was American as if I were carrying the Star-Spangled Banner harass me when I got lost in cul-de-sacs and say the only English words they knew, “aw, baby, you so pretty,” I needed to find a kitten in a pretty little street and then find out his owner was a painter in an atelier just behind him, and I needed to talk to that man though somehow he spoke no English and I spoke no Italian; I needed to visit the Tower of Pisa alone and buy a cheesy souvenir replica of it alone; I needed to spend a month in Miami Beach by myself, to walk into a tattoo parlor off the main drag, get some touch-ups on a hand-done India-ink engraving some guy gave me with a needle and thread one drunken college night, and then I needed to fuck the tattoo artist—who had been working on my naked back for four hours—on the floor of the shop afterward just to make sure that the Penthouse “Forum” isn’t all lies; I needed to walk the streets of downtown New York for hours a day, afternoons roaming by, shopping in SoHo, stopping for iced tea at the T Salon, having a manicure once a week at a Korean place in the Village, spending hours going through the sale racks at Barneys, buying lipstick I didn’t need at the MAC store, basically throwing away a load of money on a lot of nothing; I suppose, in some strange way, that I needed to have the IRS seize my assets; I needed to cop heroin all by myself on Avenue C or Stanton Street, where it is always midnight, and I needed to nearly get arrested trying to score some dope in Madrid; I needed, I guess, to spend a night in a city jail in Florida; I needed to sleep with the junkie lead singer of a bad heavy metal band and then sleep with his nineteen-year-old brother the next week; I needed to write my first book with no one looking over my shoulder, and I needed to go on tour to promote it with no one special to come home to; I needed to have the best girlfriends you can possibly have on earth, to have relationships with them that have spanned through college, through moves to Ukraine and London and San Francisco and back again; I needed to believe that I would one day go to law school, that I would be the rightful heir to Clarence Darrow if I ever got into a courtroom; I needed to live, for five years, in a huge and beautifully appointed loft—that I unfortunately had to share with the psychologist who owned it, occasionally with her boyfriend, eventually with her baby and nanny, occasionally with a high colonics administrator, and sporadically with her patients, with many of my own friends who saw it as a crash pad as they passed through town, and ultimately with my roommate Jason, and most unfortunately with an inept flautist who gave flute lessons on Thursday afternoons; I needed, at age twenty-four, to be fucking a ridiculously charming man of forty-eight, so I could know I’d done it with someone twice my age; I needed to drop acid at Walden Pond and do all the ridiculous things people do on that kind of trip, which is, as far as I can tell, the only reason anyone ever goes there, and seemingly the only reason Don Henley wants to preserve it; I needed every meal I’ve ever eaten alone in every restaurant, I needed every waiter who insisted I read Atlas Shrugged, every waitress who told me what it was like to be twenty-five and a single mother going to college part-time; I needed every conversation on every airplane or Amtrak ride, every born-again Christian, every just-engaged couple who said I was the first to know about their betrothal, every vitamin salesman who gave me free samples; I needed to live alone in several different apartments, a fleabag motel, a luxe hotel and at my mother’s house in Fort Lauderdale for a year and talk to almost no one I know almost never because I was so tired from all the other things I needed to do.
And still, I know I needed to do them.
I know that I would jealously hear of a vacation a friend took with her boyfriend to the Loire Valley or with her husband to Montserrat and I would think: If only. I would think: I want to share these adventures I have with someone. But I have had excursions with boyfriends now and then, and I have always found that I preferred the possibility and uncertainty and rank risk of being alone. I needed that, those things.
I did not want the life I have had until now, but I know I needed it.
There are other things that other women need to do: they need to have lesbian affairs; they need to drop out of medical school and become investment bankers; they need to fly with the Air Force in Iraq or work for the Peace Corps in Papua New Guinea; they need to sleep with their brothers-in-law; they need to—heaven help us—sleep with their brothers; they need to live in New Orleans for five months, in Kraków for three months and in Bangkok for two years. They need these things, all these things—for if they didn’t, they surely would not bother, for it is so much easier to just get married. It is so much easier to stick with Plan A. But these are necessary tangents, and we honor the peripatetic spirit in men, we extol the wayfarer and the rickety line that his compass traces, we celebrate Odysseus on his homecoming—his noös—while his wife, Penelope, is praised by the Muse for her faithful looming, for her persevering and patient watchful waiting. Surely we don’t want these antiquated notions of women’s roles to reign on today. Women need to take their chances and be single for a while (that Odysseus could do his wandering once married is another matter to take up). No one can be sure what will happen, but everyone can know what they need right now. Men tend to respond to those calls from within with much greater certainty than women do.
A recent New York magazine article described a sudden spate of young brides, in which one line from one twenty-two-year-old newly-wed particularly stood out: she said that she doesn’t want to be thirty-five and single (which I find funny because chances are she may well be thirty-five and divorced). The whole notion of calculating the chances of ending up alone as a way to plan a marriage: it’s like playing the odds at the track, which usually do not predict with any kind of certainty how a horse will perform, so surely this is no way to plan a partnership for life. These young marriers are trying to follow a Big Plan, as if Robert Graves had never existed. When these girls sound so sure and so organized, as if you really could plan your whole life in a Filofax, it frightens me. Disorder and mishaps are useful—or at any rate, they are inevitable. I’ve started to believe that the thing to do is plan for everyone else’s disarray. After all, there are all these men who have told me that I am their second wife, including several who do not yet have a first wife, which makes me wonder: Maybe that will be my future. On the other hand, my best friend Christine thinks by now we should both be on our second husbands. Clearly, marriage has come to mean something other than what it’s supposed to, the lifetime partnership principle seems to be preempted by some idea that this might be a fun thing to try.
Now, I will say that there is a lot of the last several years I did not need, that I would trash for just a few moments of time without them. Mostly I did not need all the heartbreaks, I did not need to learn over and over again that it is better to have loved and lost than to never have loved at all. I did not need to learn that I would have preferred the never-loved part. I did not need to devote hours to writing letters that were too short or too long to men who cared too little or too much, I did not need to obsess over will he call and will I ever see him again to the point of forgetting to eat, forgetting to wake up, forgetting to sleep. I did not need to take more than one drug overdose—accidental, deliberate, who knew after a while—to combat the hugeness of these horrible feelings,
the horror of knowing for sure that I would never love or be loved again. I did not need all the time I devoted to a romantic life that I am certain now was mostly wasted and wasteful when I could have been writing, could have been reading, could have been feeding the homeless, could have been visiting with my now-dead grandfather, could have been doing almost anything else. I cannot say I see the point to any of this now, I doubt that I really saw the point of any of it then, I only know that I was driven by compulsion that seemed outside of me, like the murderer in Jim Thompson’s The Killer Inside Me, I only know that I had a rage for this terrible pursuit and horrible disappointment that I could not stop.
And I could have lived without it. And I will do anything in my power to never have to feel it again.
And girls who marry young may either be spared that feeling or be running from it, but I just couldn’t. And I hate that about myself. All the other reasons for staying single I am proud of, as proud as I am of anything else about my life; but for the freedom to throw myself at one heart failure after another, I am an idiot.
This is why, in the end, it still feels like men have all the power. They still seem to obey their impulses to run away while women are enslaved to their impulses to run toward. As long as men continually get messages about avoiding commitment while women are taught to desperately seek it out, the sexes will always be at odds with each other and nothing will work. It does not matter that men are more at the mercy of their physical and sexual temptations, that they are fools for any woman who leads them down the path to hell. “For she is the dangerous hills and many a climber will be lost on such a passage,” Anne Sexton warns in “O Ye Tongues,” though surely she must know that she is playing into both the fantasies and fears of men, and not much more. Because that temptation for them is akin to the need to scale Mount Everest or bungee jump or take a more calculable risk like driving over 75 on 1-95: it is a risk that lives in its moment, is as real and palpable as childbirth and baking bread in its moment—but then it is gone. There is no baby or warm loaf left as a souvenir that you must suffer or savor. It does not have the constancy that my need for some man—any man—can often have.
And this is why I root for the bitch who derails the whole applecart, who throws the system off guard and makes a mess of some poor fellow’s life. I cheer for her because she has broken the chain. She has taken a taste of what he has completely consumed, what has consumed him. And I would like, so much, to be the dainty sampler of the world’s delights instead of the person who has need that is only satisfied with more need.
Fleetwood Mac really is the rock-and-roll band that defined being married and being single and being messed up in love both within the songs and among the group’s personnel more than any other. Also, it is the band that tells the story of the prices you pay for both: Stevie Nicks is yet another tragedy of beauty aging in the wrong way. “Silver Springs,” a Nicks composition from the late seventies that became a hit for the band when it reunited for a tour in 1997, celebrates the power of young attachments and the way they never quite die. But a less noticeable aspect of the song is the way Stevie understands herself to be a woman who haunts many a man. “Time casts a spell on you, but you won’t forget me.” Many of the best will remember her intensity and lunacy and platform shoes and witchy clothes and allusions to velvet. They will recall the blonde girl with sadsack eyes, spinning and dancing and singing with that nasal voice, veiled and revealed. “I’ll follow you down till the sound of my voice will haunt you / You’ll never get away from the sound of the woman that loves you.” Stevie will always be the most remarkable, strange and unforgettable woman any of them was ever involved with.
But they are all married to other people now and she is not. Stevie Nicks was the girl on fire, will probably be frozen at age twenty-five forever, like publicity shots of Greta Garbo and Bette Davis that have so indelibly sealed their image at twenty-five in our minds. The world has elder statesmen and veteran actors, it has Richard Nixon and Bob Hope, but it has no use for aging starlets. All of them seem to be gone before it even becomes an issue—whether that is cause or effect, I don’t know. But after playing a sex goddess, it is probably hard to play a grandmother. Male actors have less extreme transitions: rarely were they sex gods in the first place—it was not until Richard Gere in American Gigolo that we properly figured out how to objectify masculine beauty—and everyone knows they age more gracefully anyway. Jane Fonda has chosen to get out, so has Debra Winger, and many more have just kind of gotten lost outside the scenery, ravishing beauties who were also solid and somber actresses-actors who were still able to be pretty, often fresh-faced and freckled: Carrie Snodgress, Susan Anspach, Karen Black, Katherine Ross, Cristina Raines, Genevieve Bujold, Ronee Blakley—where are they?
Many left to raise families and never came back. But Stevie Nicks didn’t do that. She has been addicted to cocaine and Klonopin, she has had silicone breast implants installed and extracted, she ballooned to 175 pounds, she was the object of derision in Sid and Nancy when a muumuu-clad Chloe Webb catches her reflection in a London shop window and screams aghast about looking “like fucking Stevie Nicks,” she had a critic describe her as “twirling toward oblivion.” She has since recovered, or at least rehabilitated, but Fleetwood Mac took the best years of Nicks’ life and she can never get them back. But whatever the price, the intensity of what went on between the couples in that band, like the very public, very impassioned and, frankly, very seventies marriage of Carly Simon and James Taylor, is something I envy greatly: at least they had that experience of really going for it. At least they dared to have a big wild love. It seems like half of my age group, grown up under the sign of divorce, are so scared of commitment that they avoid relationships altogether, and the other half is so frightened of being alone that they cling with white-knuckle grips to high school sweethearts and college romances that have long since ceased to be useful. They hang on to these lifeless, listless attachments, unwilling to go through the elementary steps, the trial and error of relating that it takes to learn to be in a real relationship, to be in the right one. They hide, but they don’t seek. What scares me now is that fear and defensiveness guide everything, nobody meets anyone halfway anymore. In the fifties, a bad relationship meant people killing each other; now it means people avoiding each other. Stories of Edmund Wilson smacking Mary McCarthy in a drunken rage, and then telling her, as she burst into tears, to stop it or he would give her something to really cry about—awful as this sounds, the deep engagement of this sick love sounds comparatively appealing to me. For all the talk of communication these days, what that mostly amounts to is talking about a relationship rather than having one. We talk around it, above it and below it, but rarely do we just fall in and let it happen.
The world is profoundly scared of single women, they are loose cannons, the uncontrollable variable, hormones and pheromones afloat and adrift; much more frightening than the extra man at a dinner party, they are the piece that can change the status quo, upset the balance, break up families. The term “home wrecker” has somehow never been applied to a man. Today there is also the “office wrecker,” the destructive female force ruining the workplace, as in the book and movie versions of Michael Crichton’s Disclosure, whose female lead is a Silicon Valley executive who is said to think that software is just another word for her angora sweaters. But despite her putative ignorance, this rapacious bitch is crafty enough to be a menace both to family stability and to job security. Much as I wish to denigrate Crichton for inventing this misogynist’s wet dream, unfortunately the hateful attitude assumed toward his character is not prescriptive so much as it is descriptive of postfeminist office politics. The genuine dread of the young ballbuster, brash and presumed to be hell-bent on bringing ruin on all of the men—and most of the women, who tend to divide against themselves as men never do—on her way to the top, is a genuine contemporary phenomenon, not the historical anachronism one would hope it would be.
Elaine Garzarelli, the
Wall Street economist whose formulas for combining market indicators enabled her to predict the stock market crash of 1987, is maligned by her male peers regularly and with ridiculous delirium. Ms. Garzarelli is fortyish and single, and like most men who have made it big—real big—in the field of high finance, she has been known to be cocky and rash. Since 1987, she has made some bad calls and foolhardy predictions in a loud voice that has been duly amplified by the boys on the trading floor who wish her gone. (Of course, this is not even the usual felonious act that gets most men fired from their jobs while they do soft time, and allows them to make a gradual, respectable return to the financial world, even if, like Michael Milken, their havoc can be blamed in the main for bankrupting an entire company—in his case, Drexel Burnham Lambert.) Elaine Garzarelli now lives in a safe retreat in Florida, where she is an owner of a financial concern, and she proudly tells the press that “I can’t be fired because it’s my company.”
Jamie Tarses, the young woman who became president of ABC Entertainment in 1996 on the strength of developing youthful, urban shows like Friends and Caroline in the City at NBC, was so beset by slander and libel from the moment her appointment was announced that it almost seemed as if she were deliberately and diabolically hired to be the straw woman if the ABC lineup did not work out. A cover story in The New York Times Magazine in August 1997—written by Lynn Hirschberg, who seems to specialize in nasty stories about women in complicated public positions—seemed only too happy to play into the animosity, actually describing Ms. Tarses’ manner as “feline,” repeatedly describing her vulnerability and male agents’ belief that she takes everything personally and cries a lot, accusing her of flirting with her boss via fax to win over his favor, and just generally saying all kinds of things you would not dare say about a man.
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