OUT ON a LIMB

by Shirley Maclaine

  “Maybe if you gave more time to feeling you deserved happiness it would not take so much.”

  “I cant. I think of what else I should be doing.”

  “Why don’t you just think of what you are doing?”

  “Because I always feel I should be doing something else.”

  “But what about yourself? What about enjoying yourself more when you can? What’s wrong with enjoying yourself? Why do you think you don’t deserve a good time?”

  “Because I’ve got better things to do with my life than having a good time. I can’t think of myself first.”

  “Maybe you should. Maybe if you figured out more of who you are you’d be able to help more people.”

  I remembered a reporter who interviewed me when I first returned from China. He was cynical about the enthusiasm I had for how the Chinese had struggled to win their new self-identity. Like most of the others, he thought I had been naive to be as moved as I was by the Chinese revolution. I explained how the Chinese had improved themselves compared to the recent past, and I said that the thing that moved me most was how they seemed to believe so deeply in themselves. That really angered the reporter.

  “What do you mean, they believe in themselves? That’s only propaganda and you bought it.”

  I asked, even if it was just propaganda, why was he so upset by the idea of believing you can do and have anything? And to my astonishment the anger turned to tears. He said nobody had the right to believe he could do or have anything—because in the end he’d be crushed. I realized he was talking about himself. He felt unworthy, couldn’t trust himself. He left my apartment in New York and five hours later he called me.

  “I’ve been driving around all night,” he said. “What you said is exactly why my marriage is falling apart. My wife tells me the same thing. She says we’ll never make a go of it unless I believe in myself more, unless I believe I can be happy. That’s why I got so upset with you. I’m afraid I can’t do it, not strong enough. In fact I’ve set up a set of eloquently cynical standards as a journalist so that I ridicule anyone who hopes or dreams or dares to be what they want. Myself included. And that’s because I don’t believe in myself. So how can I take seriously anyone else who does?”

  I said I hoped he’d write a good article anyway and wished him well.

  Suddenly I thought I understood why people had been so upset with the success of the Chinese revolution. Whatever their system was they had dared to believe in themselves alone, without the help of the rest of the world.

  Gerry fell asleep holding me. In sleep he looked so vulnerable. My thoughts worried at the inner uncertainty of this otherwise very strong man. Did he somehow hold himself responsible for the tragedy of his first brief marriage because his wife had died in childbirth? Certainly the second marriage had been expedient for him and personally convenient in providing a mother for the baby. But did he now feel guilty because he sensed he had cheated himself? I thought of a conversation I had had recently with my father. With all his forceful command he had never believed in himself either. And he was one of the most talented people I had ever known. Aside from being a superb real-life performer he was an accomplished violinist, a good teacher, and a perceptive thinker.

  Now he was reaching the end of his life—or so he thought. And he had always drunk too much. Lately my mother had been ill with a major hip operation. Dad was faced with what he would do without her, and began to drink so heavily from early in the morning that Mother called me, more deeply concerned than she had ever been that this time he was really killing himself. Dad was with her as she spoke to me openly and honestly on the phone. Neither of them minded. For years we had all been frightened of where his drinking was leading and the fear was culminating in this one phone call.

  “I’m so worried about him, Shirl,” she said, “and I can’t help him. You know what a talented good man he is but he doesn’t believe that he is.”

  I asked her to let me speak to him.

  “Hi, Monkey,” he said, calling me by my nickname. I could see him sitting in that favorite chair of his, pipe rack beside him, the telephone tucked into his shoulder. I could feel him reach for his pipe and light it with the old antique lighter I had brought him from England.

  “Daddy, let me be to the point, okay?”

  “Okay,” he said.

  “Why are you drinking so much now?”

  I had never asked him that question. I could never bring myself to ask him, I suppose because I was afraid he would tell me.

  He began to cry. This was what I had been afraid of. I had never wanted to see Dad openly crack. Then he said, “Because I’ve wasted my life. I may have acted strong but that was because I never believed I could do anything. My mother taught me too well to be afraid and whenever I think about how afraid I am I can’t stand it. So I have to drink.” I could see his hands shaking as they used to whenever he wanted to detract from any emotion he might be displaying.

  “I love you, Daddy,” I said. And I started to cry too. I felt somehow that I had never really said that to him before. “Look what you did. You raised Warren and me. Doesn’t that mean anything?”

  “No, but I know you two didn’t want to be like me. That’s why you turned out like you did. You didn’t want to be nothing. Like me.” We were both crying and trying to talk through our tears. I wondered if any ashes had fallen to the floor.

  “That’s not altogether true,” I said. “We just did more with the help you gave us than you did with the help you never got.”

  “But I feel so worthless when I realize what I haven’t done with what I’ve got.”

  “Okay,” I said. “But there’s still time, you know.”

  “How?” he said. “What do you mean?” He tried to clear his throat. I wondered if Mother was watching him.

  “Why don’t you get out a pen and paper and every time you feel worthless put those feelings down on a piece of paper? I’ll bet you could come up with some great notions on the feeling of feeling worthless.”

  He was really sobbing now. “Sometimes I think I can’t stand it and if I just drink enough I won’t have to bother waking up in the morning.”

  I swallowed. “Daddy,” I said, “I’ve never asked you to promise me anything in my life, have I?”

  “No, Monkey, you haven’t.”

  “Well, will you promise me something now?”

  “Yes, anything. What?”

  “Will you promise me that instead of drinking, that every day you’ll write at least one page of something you’re feeling?”

  “Me write? Christ, I’d be so ashamed if anybody read it.”

  “Okay, then don’t let anybody read it. Just do it for yourself.”

  “But I don’t have anything to say.”

  “How do you know if you haven’t tried?” I could see him brush the lint from his left shoulder. I heard him cough.

  “I can’t write about myself. I can’t even think about myself.”

  “Then write about me or Mother or Warren.”

  “You and Warren?”

  “Sure.”

  “Lots of people would want to read that, wouldn’t they?” he said sarcastically. I knew he was smiling.

  “Well, only because it’s from your point of view.”

  “You think so?”

  “Yes, I do,” I said. I could see him begin to rock in the chair.

  “You know old Mrs. Hannah, my sophomore teacher, once told me I should write. In fact she told me I should talk less and write more.”

  “Really?” I remembered how he spoke of Mrs. Hannah when I was little. She had a broken-down car he loved to fix.

  “Old Mrs. Hannah had the goddamdest car. She’d have been better off with a horse and buggy. That damned car was like another person to her. Do you know that one day out in the hayfield.…”

  “Hey, Daddy,” I said, “why don’t you start by writing about Mrs. Hannah’s car out in the hayfield? Don’t waste it by talking about it.”

&nbs
p; “Is that how it works?” he asked, clearing his throat and sounding funny and mischievous. “You mean all the times I’ve held court could have been a book?”

  “Sure. Didn’t Mrs. Hannah always say you talked too long and too much with nothing to show for it afterwards?”

  “Yep,” he said, “she sure did. She was a pisser. She burned down her barn to get the insurance money and then ran off with the guy who sold it to her.”

  “Well, she sounds like a good character to write about.”

  “Would you read something if I wrote it?”

  “Sure. I can’t wait. Send it to New York. It’ll get to me wherever I am.”

  “You mean you really think I have something to say?”

  “Well, I’ve been listening to you for over forty years and I think you’re funny and touching. Why don’t you write about your pipe?”

  We had both stopped crying now.

  “Will you do it? Will you try?”

  “Well, Monkey, I guess I have to, don’t I?”

  “Yep.”

  “I promise then. I promise.”

  “I love you, Daddy.”

  “I love you, Monkey.”

  We hung up. I walked around the house crying for another hour. Then I went to the phone and called a florist. I ordered a rose a day for a month with a note attached. “A rose for a page. I love you.”

  Dad has been writing on and off ever since. I’m not sure if he’s completely on the wagon. But then no writer I know is! But I do wish old Mrs. Hannah had mentioned his talent and her belief in him a little more often.

  The notes that he sends me are short and each one tells a story, a story from the life of a man who influenced me deeply, because he inadvertently taught me to love brilliant and complicated men who needed someone to help unlock them.

  Chapter 5

  “I very much doubt if anyone of us has the faintest idea of what is meant by the reality of existence of anything but our own egos.”

  —A. EDDINGTON

  The Nature of the Physical World

  Gerry and I slept. Whenever we moved we adjusted ourselves to fit, leaving no space between us. At some point he murmured something about a wake-up call so his delegation wouldn’t wonder where he was in the morning. I called the operator and waited for dawn when he would have to leave. I felt forlorn as I watched him sleep. He went away. His eyes were shut. He was lost in his own unconscious. I watched his sleep until I finally did the same. As I slept, double images of my father and Gerry tumbled over each other in my dreams.

  When the wake-up call came, Gerry sat straight up in bed as though a bugle had called him to duty. Quickly he kissed me, dressed, and said he’d be back after he got rid of his press aide and reporters.

  “I’ll probably have breakfast with them,” he said, “so why don’t you eat now? I’ll tell everyone in the delegation I have jet lag and we can spend the day together.”

  He left, gone before I noticed he had forgotten one of his socks. I ordered some papaya and toast and ate on the balcony. Below me an attendant was feeding the dolphins. I remembered how Sachi used to ride the dolphins when she was a kid and we’d meet Steve in Hawaii as a halfway point to Japan. She used to say she understood the dolphins and they were her playmates.

  Somewhere below me I could hear journalists talking about what would make good stories out of Hawaii. Interspersed in their professional kidding was speculation about Dr. Lilly’s experiments with dolphins. I wondered if dolphins really were as highly intelligent as scientists said, or if they really could have their own evolved language. I remembered someone telling me once that residing in the great brains of the dolphins were all the secrets of some immense lost civilization called Lemuria. I had heard about Atlantis, but Lemuria was unknown to me.

  I watched the Secret Service men and the journalists watching the dolphins. I wondered how Gerry and I would get through the day without being recognized.

  About an hour later he called. “Look,” he said, “meet me on the beach to the left of the hotel. Most everyone will be keeping close to these premises. I’ll be there in fifteen minutes.”

  I dressed in jeans and a shirt and underneath I wore a bathing suit. I tied a scarf around my head and put on black-rimmed sunglasses.

  Walking through the lobby and out the back entrance nobody noticed me, but I was afraid to stop and watch the dolphins because of the journalists. I walked quickly past the pool and out onto the warm sand where tourists were already lying on the beach with radios blaring rock and roll. The smell of coconut suntan oil hung in the air.

  I walked along the edge of the beach where the clear blue waves lapped the shore, heading left. No one was swimming yet. The palm trees bent in a soft trade wind. I did a few bends in the shallow waves, not having done my exercises in the morning. My show seemed half a life away.

  A few hundred yards up the empty beach I stopped, sat on the sand, lifted my head to the sun and waited for Gerry. It felt almost regular, almost human. More than anything, I hated the secrecy. I didn’t like feeling furtive, clandestine, dishonest; it hurt. I hoped that Gerry didn’t get a dangerous kick out of it like some people did.

  He was wearing khaki slacks and a white, loose shirt as I watched him amble up the beach through the edge of the surf. His arms swung out from his body and he carried a pair of sandals in his hand. He didn’t wave when he saw me. I got up and met him in the water so we could continue to walk.

  “So I see you do have another pair of shoes,” I said.

  “My vacation shoes,” he laughed and touched my face.

  “Did your delegation buy your story about jet lag?”

  “Oh sure. They will do a little of the same themselves. Having a conference in Honolulu is too tempting anyway.”

  He buckled his sandals together, slung them over his shoulder and took my hand when we were well out of range of the hotel. I leaned my head against his shoulder and we began to walk.

  We found a coral reef that led way out into the ocean and felt as though we were walking on water. Gerry teased that everyone thought that’s what he claimed to be able to do anyway. The coral was sharp. We stopped and looked out at the big surf breaking further out to sea.

  “Can you ride the waves?” he asked.

  “I used to when I was in my twenties,” I said. “Before I got old enough to be afraid of it.”

  I remembered how carefree I used to be with my body. It never occurred to me that I might break something or that anything could go wrong at all. Now I had to think ahead even when I got out of a taxicab. If I turned an ankle or banged my knee it would interfere with my dancing. When I was younger I had danced more recklessly. In fact, I guess I had done most everything without thinking very much. And I had had a wonderful time at it too. With adulthood, I had become more and more aware of the consequences of everything I did, whether it was leaping into the waves or having a love affair.

  Awareness didn’t lessen the fun or the wonder. On the contrary, now I wanted to learn to live totally in the now—in the present, with a confirmed completeness that that was all there really was anyway. If I had in fact lived other lives in the past and would possibly live other lives in the future, belief in that would only serve to intensify my commitment with all my heart and soul to the present.

  Reincarnation was a new concept to me, of course, but I found that each time I thought about it I derived great pleasure from its implications. Were time and space so overwhelmingly infinite that they served to make one realize the preciousness of each and every moment on Earth? Did my mind need to take quantum leaps of imagination into other possible realities in order to appreciate the joy of reality now? Or, were real joy and happiness the inclusion of all those other realities that in effect expanded one’s awareness of the reality of now?

  Expanded consciousness. That was the phrase so many people were using more and more. One needn’t trade in an old consciousness for a new one. One could simply expand and raise the consciousness one already had
—an expanded consciousness simply recognized the existence of previously unrecognized dimensions … dimensions of space, time, color, sound, taste, joy, and on and on. Was the conflict between Gerry and me simply a difference in movement toward expanded consciousness? Perhaps I was trying to force him to move at a pace that was mine instead of his. His pace wasn’t to be judged either. It was just different. I knew I could be demandingly insistent, a result in part of intense curiosity and in part of impatience. I was impatient with others who didn’t indulge in the same search. My life seemed to be devoted to a series of questions. Gerry’s seemed to be devoted to answers.

  We headed away from Diamond Head, Waikiki and Kahala, walking toward the thick underbrush of the deserted side of the island. The further away we got from people, the more Gerry touched me. Soon we were walking with our bodies joined together. It was too lovely to talk. The sun fell behind the clouds and the coconut palms began to bend in the wind. It started to rain. We ran from the water into a grove of trees where ripe coconuts lay strewn on the ground. We stood under a tree and watched the rain fall on the fuchsia-colored azaleas around us. A blue bird shook its wings and flew further into the underbrush. Gerry put his arms around me and looked out to sea.

  “This is so beautiful,” he said.

  He hugged me closer.

  The rain fell harder now—one of those thick tropical rains that looked like a sparkling beaded sheet.

  “Do you want to go swimming in this rain?” I asked.

  Without answering Gerry pulled off his shirt and trousers. He too had a bathing suit underneath. He rolled his clothes into a ball, placed them under his sandals beneath the tree and ran into the ocean.

  I took off my jeans and shirt and followed him.

  The waves were higher now and whitecapped. We dove under them, feeling the salt spray mingle with the fresh rain. We laughed and splashed each other. I wiped the salt from my eyes, glad I hadn’t worn mascara. Gerry swam out further, waving me to come with him. I was afraid to go, so floating in the rainy waves I watched him. He stopped and lay on his back past where the waves were breaking. Then he turned over on his stomach and waited for the right wave. It came, and he rode the crest of it until it subsided close to where I waited. He swam toward me and swept me up in his arms. I kissed his salty face and he smothered me in his big shoulder. We swam back to shore and lay together in the shallow breaking waves looking up at the rain, water soaking our faces.