by Gail Sheehy
Had Clay and I married then—and I knew it even at the time—we would most likely have turned into a variation on the marriage in Noël Coward’s Private Lives, living on snappy dialogue with every other sentence a dagger between the ribs. When I raised the subject of children, Clay would get fidgety, like someone stuck between floors in an elevator. He knew that I was keen to have another child. He might have been persuaded to accept the idea, but he told me he couldn’t see himself dragging strollers through airports or sitting up with a colicky baby when he had a cover story to close. The message was clear: I could have a baby, all right, as long as I was prepared to be alone with it in the kitten box for the first five years. But I did not want to be a single mother, again.
“Can Couples Survive?,” an excerpt from my book in progress on couples, stirred a lot of talk when it appeared in a special issue of New York in February 1973. Aspirational women were just beginning to recognize that early marriage usually foreclosed the possibility of a career dream. Feminists started the trend toward postponement of marriage, much to the dismay of many men who expected a wife to carry the husband’s dream.
Honesty prompts me to admit a larger obstacle to marriage for both Clay and me. Neither of us had yet met the criteria of the psychoanalyst Erik Erikson, who had given a pretty good definition of intimacy as the capacity to live with another person in an emotionally attached, interdependent, and committed relationship. That task was supposed to be mastered in one’s twenties! But I had already advanced to my midthirties, and Clay was twelve years older—what was wrong with us? As George Vaillant learned by following the men in the Harvard Grant study from college into their nineties, the mastery of intimacy depends on first mastering identity. In Vaillant’s 2012 book, Triumphs of Experience, he reported that some of the study’s men didn’t become capable of true intimacy until after age seventy!
Clay was utterly confident about his ideas. But despite his larger-than-life persona, he did not feel confident, in private, that his identity as an editor and publisher was secure. Publishers from rich and powerful families could, at whim, buy or sell or shut down small successful publications such as his. He did not have a father’s missionary zeal behind him, like Henry Luce, or a titled family like Lord Beaverbrook, or a family castle like William Randolph Hearst. As a self-made man, Clay was always dependent on the kindness of wealthy strangers.
My identity was even shakier. It was time for me to loosen the coils that kept me still dependent on my Pygmalion. I was ready to become my own woman. Time was pressing. Intimations of mortality continued to invade my thoughts after the confrontation with death in Ireland. I believed I had to prove to myself, and to the world, that I could write a book on my own terms, live on my own income, and combine raising my child with fulfilling my own dream.
SERENDIPITOUSLY, I WAS INVITED in midsummer of 1973 to take a trip to the Soviet Union. This was the most frigid era of the Cold War, but somehow, Columbia University had arranged for a small cultural group, Citizens Exchange Corps, to take a handful of American students who wanted to meet their Russian counterparts. It was an extraordinary opportunity. Clay encouraged me to go. Maura was already scheduled to spend those same two weeks with her father.
At the end of our trip, I was detained at Moscow Airport. “Icon!” snapped the emigration officer. “Nyet, abstrakni,” I said. The officer had torn off the paper from a tourist-only berioska shop with which I had attempted to camouflage an abstract oil painting I had bought from an underground artist. It was a collage of a church with every window and door barricaded. But it wasn’t the religious theme that upset the officer; it was his total unfamiliarity with abstract art. He was pulling off all the collage pieces in a manic attempt to find the precious gold icon he was certain lay beneath. My arguments were futile. Even after he had destroyed the painting, our whole group was detained for hours.
I had to let Clay know I would miss my plane and be delayed getting home. An offer of dollars to “compensate” the officer for having to stay so late on my account was remarkably effective in disarming him. He granted me one long-distance call. It was 8:30 P.M. in Moscow, 4:30 A.M. for Clay. He was in East Hampton. An odd uncertainty in his voice surprised me; I sensed someone else was there. Before I could pursue my suspicion, the line went dead.
When I returned a day late from the Soviet Union, something was different in the atmosphere of our weekend cottage. Clay wasn’t there, but something feminine, a scent not my own, lingered in the bathroom. Had another woman left a cloud of dusting powder, bubble bath, a hint of roses? Then I remembered. He had asked if a new staffer he had hired could stay in Maura’s vacated room for the weekends when I was away. Nancy was freshly divorced from one of Clay’s oldest friends, dumped in New York from her previous life in Paris, and feeling like “a wet cat looking for a home,” she had told me. Clay had promised her a job at the magazine. Remembering the terror of dislocation after divorce, I had sympathized with her.
I said nothing when he arrived, nor did he. But the morning after my suspicions had been aroused, I awoke in our cottage bursting with righteous indignation.
“Did Nancy take my place while I was away?” Clay stammered until he gave up trying to craft an alibi. I packed up my belongings and called a taxi to go to the train station. Clay kept protesting, even begging, until my Irish temper broke. “I hope you and Nancy will be very happy together. I have a book to write. AND I DON’T NEED YOU!”
He ran outside in his boxer shorts to stop me from getting into the cab but I had the last word, a slammed door.
He returned to the apartment on Sunday night, but that night and the entire following week, I slept in Maura’s room and refused to speak to him. I began making inquiries to find my own apartment. He moped around and had breakfast solo. The next weekend, facing the prospect of a long Labor Day holiday alone while Maura went to her father’s, the armor of righteous indignation began to wear off. The magnetism resurfaced. Clay pleaded with me to go with him to the country. Of course I declined. He left for the four o’clock train, alone.
The therapist I had been seeing to sort out my conflicted feelings about Clay had warned me: “You go from one extreme to the other. You tell yourself to give him up altogether, but you seem incapable of cutting the cord. So you throw yourself into a full commitment to him, again, and then are disappointed when he doesn’t reciprocate.”
I couldn’t resist. On Saturday morning, after a sleepless night, I picked up the phone at seven and called him. His voice was stiff. “It’s too early to call.”
“I miss you.”
“This is not an appropriate time to talk.”
“Why? Is Nancy there?”
“And you’re not.”
“Is this an ultimatum?”
“Take it as you wish.” He hung up.
Yes, of course, his fling with Nancy was his ultimatum: live with me or I’ll find other women to play with.
Consumed with the jealousy he had intended to sow, I had to find some way to distract myself. I tried to write. My fingers soon tired of hitting the stuck keys on my aging typewriter. As the day lengthened and loneliness swelled to fill the hours, I remembered a party invitation. It was a PR event for politicians and media types, and it was that night, but in Washington, D.C. An attractive senator I met on an interview had tried to persuade me to come down. I’d sent my regrets but now, defiant, I slipped into a clingy summer dress and high strappy heels and hailed a yellow cab for LaGuardia, intending to catch a shuttle.
The cabdriver warned me the Bos-Wash corridor was drenched with rain. At the airport they said freakish lightning was on its way. Nothing was going to fly. I walked back to the same yellow cab, grounded, glum.
“Tough luck,” the cabbie said.
“Yup.” Now what—home to eat sprouts and start packing?
As the cab crowned the Triborough and cut over toward the Manhattan exit, I said, “What would it cost to drive to D.C.?”
“Two hundred and dinner.�
��
“Really?”
It was an excuse to visit his “little lady on the side” who lived in D.C.
“Let’s go.”
The drive was surreal. The sky thickened to the consistency of cooking fat. We were looking for a popular hangout on the edge of Georgetown but not much of anything was visible, not even the Naval Observatory Tower. Ridiculously late, we found the right street but we couldn’t read the number or even the names of the restaurants through the curtains of rain. Zeroing in on my best guess, I urged the driver to pull up onto the curb: “Yes, point the lights at the sign over that window.”
A crowd of laughing faces suddenly filled the window. A New York City yellow cab was crashing their party! A man rushed out with an umbrella. It was he, the very senator who had flirted with me when I interviewed him.
“Hey, New York!” he shouted. “Don’t drive in—I’ll carry you in!”
He scooped me up and carried me to a barstool amid cheers. The cabbie was carried in, too, on a brace of two pairs of shoulders, and plied with drink. Guests raised a toast and began singing as the band broke into the Rolling Stones end-of-the-world rocker, “Gimme Shelter” . . . I tell you love, sister, it’s just a kiss away.
We all drank beer and sang our favorite Stones and Beatles songs, and the band did riffs on Eric Clapton and Cream. The senator couldn’t stop laughing about my zany escapade. He got cozy and asked if he could take me to my hotel. “I don’t have a hotel,” I said. “I have a milk train to catch.”
“The Capitol’s so gorgeous by night, why don’t we walk through and look at the art?” he proposed. “It’s the best gallery in town.”
“Won’t someone be waiting up for you?”
He assured me he had no time for marriage; he was a freshman senator. By 1 A.M. the air was drying and sweet as he swept me off in his convertible. His offer, of course, was a high-powered variation on “Come up and see my etchings.” But it was magical to stroll the portrait gallery with an amorous guide. He took pains to point out the painting of an attractive woman in a blue suit sitting at a desk: “Eva McCall Hamilton, the prettiest suffragist,” he said. “She was fearless, like you. She drove a horse-drawn float through Grand Rapids with a huge banner proclaiming ‘Vote for Women,’ and that was in 1910.”
He kissed me under Ms. Hamilton and said he would like to continue seeing me. I was not naive enough to think this was his first time moonlighting as a docent to a single woman. After more kisses in the car, I began feeling like Birdwhistell’s “free bird.” There was magic in this night. The senator pressed me to stay over. I had to get home before Maura returned the next morning, and it would have spoiled things.
On the dreary milk train ride back to New York, my thoughts returned to Clay and I was caught in a whipsaw: You have to leave him, Gail. Yes, but I don’t want to lose him. How perverse we women are! Another scene from Woman of the Year flickered through my mind. After Hepburn pushes Tracy too far by adopting a child and expecting him to take care of the boy, he leaves her. She lures him back by letting herself into his apartment and making breakfast for him. She wakes him up. He says he doesn’t want her in the kitchen, but he falls for her all over again.
If it worked for Hepburn . . .
CLAY RETURNED FROM THE COUNTRY at about seven on Monday night. The flicker of candlelight in the living room must have caught his eye. He leaned over the balcony railing. “Who’s there?”
He must have seen the placemats set out on our favorite oval cherry table, a bottle of wine chilling in a Georgian silver bucket; he must have smelled the rosemary-stuffed lamb chops and potatoes baking.
“Gail! Thank God. I thought you’d left, I mean, for good, you didn’t answer, last night, I kept calling . . .”
“I’m here. Are you alone?”
“Of course!”
I wasn’t sure that Nancy was totally out of the picture. But this was not the time to fuss over our recent dalliances.
“Look at the lovely supper you’ve fixed for me,” he said, diving down the stairs. He wanted to give me a big hug, and I let him, but I didn’t dare allow a kiss.
“Let’s talk,” I said. He opened the wine and brushed a kiss on my neck as he poured me a glass, then began trying awkwardly to apologize. “It was a dumb fling. I was feeling like you forgot about me.”
“It’s more than that.”
Over salad, I told Clay I needed solitude to get serious about writing the book that occupied my mind. “I can’t do it with all these distractions.”
“Like what?”
“Our on-again, off-again romance,” I said. “I’ve become too dependent on you. I don’t want to stop seeing you, but—”
“You can’t leave,” he protested. “You belong here.”
“There comes a time when the apprentice has to leave the mentor.”
“But Pygmalion got the girl—she literally melted into his arms.”
It took all the gumption I had to resist falling into his arms. “You need freedom, too, Clay. You’re still a wild bird. You’re not ready to nest.”
He didn’t argue. I remembered being unhappy about the way he had treated me when we’d spent a weekend at the Virginia retreat of the Washington Post publisher.
“Where do things stand with you and Kay Graham?”
“I don’t know what you mean.” He had a goofy grin.
I was tired of his evasions. “Are you pursuing her, I mean, personally?”
“Would I have insisted you live with me if I were trying to capture Kay?”
“Maybe I’m your cover. You wouldn’t dare let her courtiers see you as a rival. But I could tell at our Kissinger dinner. She’s in love with you.”
He brushed it off by saying something about how much older she was, and besides, he would never be a kept man by a rich woman. I let it go. I realized it would be foolish, and probably futile, for me to insist that he break off his relationships with some of the most powerful women of the day. They had together what Birdwhistell called “a valid social contract.”
Why did I have to leave him to grow? he demanded. Didn’t I understand what he had told me after the dinner party from hell? He didn’t want me in the kitchen. He wanted my ideas. He wanted me at his side, at the table with his circle of writers, he wanted my insights about New York’s movers and fakers. He wanted me in his bed. Suddenly, he was desperate to claim me.
“Why now, why couldn’t you make a commitment before now?” I asked.
“You never gave me an ultimatum!”
I couldn’t help laughing. Clay being a man who could not abide being told what to do would have dug in his heels and said, “No woman dictates to me.”
He tried another approach. “With all our fights, we’ve taken a lot out of each other this past year. When I first knew you, and your life was coming apart, you were only, what?—twenty-eight or something? I thought you looked worn out. But you know what? Today you look more beautiful than ever.”
“Then I hope you can wait until I’m ready.” I stood up, an announcement that I was ready to leave. “Clay, I adore you. But it’s time for me to break away. Can you understand?”
His face reddened. In a burst of frustration he said, “I love you so much, I could KILL you!”
Whatever the outcome, I knew I had made the most daring decision of my life.
PART TWO
THE PASSAGES YEARS
PROBABLY A CRAB WOULD BE FILLED WITH A SENSE OF PERSONAL OUTRAGE IF IT COULD HEAR US CLASS IT WITHOUT ADO OR APOLOGY AS A CRUSTACEAN, AND THUS DISPOSE OF IT. “I AM NO SUCH THING,” IT WOULD SAY; “I AM MYSELF, MYSELF ALONE.”
—WILLIAM JAMES
CHAPTER 19
Lovebirds
THE DAY IS WHITE AS A BLANK SHEET. The windows are open and naked. A breeze caresses my face with the scent of fall. I can hear trees out there rustling. The bed is vast, unfamiliar, suitable for two, three, children and dogs. Where am I? Oh, yes. Not in Clay’s world.
This is one of the first
mornings in a place of my own. A friend steered me to this furnished sublet on the Upper West Side. A sprawl of a place, but sunny with polished oak floors and a full dining room, a lazy living room with deep armchairs, a marble bar in the mirrored closet, and a bedroom for Maura the size of a small kindergarten. All this for the sacrifice price of $700 a month.
Here, I feel free of the usual to-do list. I can stretch and let my mind play in the swinging door between imagination and consciousness. I am beginning to intuit the idea that will underlie my next book. When we come to a dead end, if we dare to make a major life change, we will grow from it. When one door closes, that makes room for another to open.
The doorbell rings, an unfamiliar ring. It takes a long time to roll out of this bed. Feeling like Goldilocks, I stumble to the windows and find myself looking down at the tops of trees in Central Park. I take a deep breath and count my blessings. It’s autumn 1973 and I’m in a new world. Gail’s world.
I PULLED ON A COTTON CHEMISE and padded barefoot down the long hall and peeked out the peephole. It was filled with a big handsome face, lots of brown curls, a much younger man than Clay. He was holding some kind of a cage.
“Who is it?” I called.
“Robin. I come bearing a bird.”
“Robin? Oh my God. Robin Costelloe, how did you remember about the lovebird?”
Robin was a dreamy Irish sculptor I had met in Dublin while escaping from Bloody Sunday. I had told him how shaken up I was after coming home from Ireland to find my lovebird dead—what kind of loser couldn’t even keep a bird alive? “Robin, I don’t know how you found me, but you caught me sleeping later than I ever have in my life. Can you give me a few minutes to get decent?”
In that charming Irish accent that runs sentences up a hill ending in a question mark, he said, “I’ll pop ’round to Chock Full o’ Nuts? What kind of coffee would you be liking?”
What crossed through my mind was: Do I really want to open this door? I’ve just closed the door on one life in order to find the solitude that a writer needs to do an important piece of work. Maura has more of her mother here and we have a whole park across the street as our front yard. All I wanted to do was take my daughter to the park and teach her how to ride a bike. And while she was having a playdate, I’d sit down at my brand-new board-over-file-boxes desk in the bedroom and start writing.
