Fear of Dying (4 page)

I never really knew how the Blacklist had affected them. They had plenty of friends who were also ruined by it, but my parents were too fiercely ambitious—even in the engagé thirties—to have signed the wrong petitions. The Blacklist coincided with the end of their salad days as performers. It was time to do something else anyway.

So they came back and set up Hollywood on the Hudson. They had smartly squirreled away their Hollywood money (despite what Dorothy Parker said about it melting in the palm like snow), and eventually their theatrical book and autograph shop, Bibliomania, also prospered. In a business—rare books—populated by nerds and ladies in Boston marriages, my parents were unusual. They had a flair for the dramatic and a flair for mixing people. Many couples fell in love at their parties. It was as if their love were contagious.

For three little girls in black velvet dresses and British black patent-leather Mary Janes that had to be fastened with buttonhooks who watched from halfway down the stairs at their parties, it seemed that our parents were the King and Queen of Cool. It seemed we'd never live as glamorously as they. And it seemed the height of ambition to grow up and
become
our parents.

Now I know that many children feel that way. And that the lucky ones are the ones who outgrow it. Toni, Emmy, and I had never outgrown it. That was why our lives were so hard. We weren't starving or drinking polluted water, but we were stuck in a kind of emotional poverty all the same.

What struck me always, sitting at my parents' bedside, was that it was time for me to take off the black velvet dress and stop sitting in the middle of the stairs.

It was at one of my parents' parties that I first decided I was going to be an actress. All because of Leporello Kahn. I was sixteen when I met Lep Kahn (at the time the pun was lost on me). Lep—whose father was a famous opera singer at the old Met—was originally named after Don Giovanni's sidekick. It was a lousy thing to do to a child. Lep's name was a joke, so he tried to turn his life into a joke. He grew up to be one of those merry, seemingly harmless plump middle-aged men who brilliantly know how to appeal to teenage girls. He was the first man to let me know I was beautiful, and he was so suave and clever that he promptly made all the sixteen-year-old boys I knew seem like louts. (Not that it was hard.)

I met Lep at one of the first parties at which I actually drank vodka (in slavish imitation of my mother). I was wearing a strapless peony-pink gown with a harem skirt (those were the days of harem skirts), and with every drink, my breasts bobbled farther out of my boned top. Lep was looking at my breasts and saying, “You must come down to the Russian Tea Room and have lunch with me.” The Russian Tea Room meant show business glamour in those days. Now it has morphed into an unrecognizable simulacrum—like everything else connected with that vanished world.

Lep was an important Broadway producer who did everything from Shakespeare to Pinter. A big
macher
. He promised me Juliet in a new production of
Romeo and Juliet
, and though the role fell through, my affair with Lep did not.

Without Lep Kahn, would I have had an abortion at sixteen, quit school at seventeen, moved to the Village, and appeared as Anne in the road show of
The Diary of Anne Frank
at eighteen (the part that deluded me into thinking that the theater was a viable profession)? No. No. No. No. Looking back, I should have stayed at Walden (which was loose enough to accommodate all kinds of hanky-panky), finished high school, gone to some arty college like Bennington or Bard, and never gotten involved with Lep Kahn—but who could have known that at the time? His passion for me seemed like the key to the life I wanted.

He was one of those attractive plump men. His stomach shook when he laughed in the nude. He had breasts almost as big as mine. But he also had melting brown eyes and long silky black lashes, wore wonderful tweed jackets, had a beard and mustache peppered with gray (which gave him an authoritative air), smoked a meerschaum pipe, and smelled of honeyed tobacco and Old Spice (sexy, then). He chewed cinnamon-and-clove gum—which I found harmlessly eccentric. I didn't think he was fat. He seemed Falstaffian to me—especially since he could quote Shakespeare by the yard. He was what I did instead of my senior thesis.

“‘But, soft! What light from yonder window breaks?… It is the east, and Juliet is the sun.…'”

Imagine having that quoted to you while you are playing hooky from high school to drink vodka and eat blini with beluga at the Russian Tea Room—always thinking you will be glimpsed with Lep by one of your parents' friends! The fear of exposure was part of the thrill.

Since Lep was the reason I quit school at seventeen, having had an abortion at sixteen, you might say he was a child molester who ruined my life. But I didn't think so at the time. I was so excited about becoming an adult and an actress. I assumed the couch casting came with the territory. Lep
arranged
the abortion, in fact—back in the days when it was illegal—with one of those show business doctors who practiced right down the block from the Russian Tea Room.

However grown up I felt sneaking off to meet Lep at the RTR and then going to his pad (as he called it) on Broadway and Fiftieth Street in a big old gloomy apartment that also served as his office, imagine how scared I was going off to get an illegal abortion without my parents' knowledge. How alone in the world I felt! Though Lep went with me and held my hand. Even paid for it. I think he got me the Anne Frank role because he felt so guilty.

Which of these tableaux should I present? The abortion doctor's seedy office? Lep's gloomy, cavernous apartment facing a courtyard filled with filthy pigeons nesting? Lep dancing naked with his belly shaking?

Sex with him was not amazing, but I had nothing to compare it to at the time. He knew how to eat pussy, though—perhaps to make up for the fact that his penis was not always operational in those pre-Viagra days. He compensated for the softness of his prick with the hard truth of poetry. And then with the part of Anne Frank, who in those days represented all innocence, beauty, truth—the summit of every young actress's desire.

I see myself at sixteen, walking hand in hand with Lep into the abortion doctor's lair, sure I would be dead by nightfall. (Everybody then had heard of a girl who died from—or was sterilized by—a botched abortion.)

No nurse was present. No receptionist. Abortions were done then without the benefit of witnesses or anesthesia. I dressed in a gown (as later for my face-lift), lay on the table with bare feet in the cold stirrups, gratefully accepted the shot of whiskey proffered, and fell into a red hole of pain so excruciating I can feel it to this day. I can still remember my womb horribly cramping, still remember retching and nearly choking on my vomit, still remember the doctor shushing me. When I asked for Lep, the doctor told me that he had “gone to a meeting”—which in those days had nothing to do with AA—but had sent a car for me.

I see myself then, pale, shaking, drained of hope, in the back of a Cadillac limousine, trying to be brave, trying not to cry for my mother, trying to feel as grown up as I had lunching with Lep at the RTR. But it was no use. I was a mess. Relieved, yes. But my head was unaccountably full of visions of pink babies, my heart a hollow nest, my rage buried in a million excuses for Lep (he had a meeting, had a deal to do, responsibilities to escape because they were too painful). I had more mercy on him than I had on myself.

Those were the good old days of either-or. Either be an actress or have children. Either succumb to fluffy, eventually soul-destroying domesticity, or be a sleek woman with kohl-rimmed eyes who was far too sophisticated to
confess
to wanting a baby. Either Kate Hepburn or the happy housewife—there was no in-between. Every choice available to women meant pain and renunciation. My daughter's generation, who turned their backs on their brilliant careers to make brilliant babies, learned that by and by. A woman without a paycheck becomes a slave in a world that worships Mammon. Woo-hoo! Could have told 'em that. But would they listen? Do daughters ever listen to mothers or mother-figures? No. You can't tell no one nothing! Remember that and shut up. Half of parenting is keep your piehole, as the Brits call it,
sealed
. It's a Monty Python world—and the Sermon on the Mount is rewritten by Lloyd Blankfein and Jamie Diamond. Don't turn the other cheek unless you want your pocket picked. And so it goes.

*   *   *

But maybe
I
am rewriting history. Now that I am sixty and my eggs and my acting career are all washed up, every child I did not have cries out to me like a ghost on a cloud seeded with shadowy infants. But what did I know then? Did I know my parents would get old and ill? I wouldn't have believed it possible. They seemed so powerful then.

Not long ago I read in the
Times
that Lep Kahn had died. Good, I thought, now nobody will know. My secret is safe with him. The abortion doctor died long ago.

So we grew up in the Never-Neverland of forties Hollywood and we returned to New York in the fabulous fifties. We all remembered trick-or-treating by limousine with movie stars' kids. We remembered Halloween costumes borrowed from the studios. We could still smell the eucalyptus trees of Westwood and hear the crashing Pacific of Malibu and Trancas. We were California kids transplanted to New York and the transplant never quite took. Sometimes I think that is why all three of us long for Mediterranean landscapes. Toni found hers and Emmy fell hopelessly in love with Italy. And I was bicoastal before the word was coined. I batted back and forth between New York and L.A. like a Ping-Pong ball for most of my professional life. The place I felt most at home was the air in between. I belonged nowhere. Often I still feel that way.

*   *   *

When I married Asher, my acting career had gone to that place women's acting careers used to go when they neared fifty. There were no interesting jobs for me, so I quit. I refused to play the mother, then the grandmother, then the crazy old hag. I became Asher's wife with a vengeance. And since Asher was seemingly rich, my job as wife was all-consuming. We entertained in Litchfield County, at the beach, in Manhattan, in the Luberon. I was the perfect hostess and event-planner—a profession in itself. Probably the oldest profession—but for that other one. The days slipped by. Once you get off the career train, it's not so easy to get back on. I let my contacts slip.

Of course, if I were still working, I wouldn't have to advertise for sex. When you are actively employed in the profession, men turn up routinely. They may be less than men—actors—but they know how to
play
men. That's their craft. They are especially good at brief and dangerous liaisons. Permanence scares them. Which all worked very well for me as long as
I
was scared of permanence.

Thinking back to all the brief and dangerous liaisons I had on the job, I doubt that I'd be able to have them now—even if I were working. It takes a certain optimism to begin an affair—an optimism I may have lost. You have to believe that another man will make it better. And that gets harder and harder as you get older.

I hate getting older. I don't see anything good about it. The downward slope of life is full of rocks. Your skis are blunt and there are these patches of black ice everywhere, ready to slip you up. They may have been there before but you never noticed them. Now they are lying in wait for you on every slope.

Vanessa Wonderman had a great career from Anne Frank on. I played Juliet, Viola, Miss Julie, Maggie the Cat, and dozens of murdered girls in movies. Those were the days when women were mostly victims. (Actually, that hasn't changed as much as we had hoped.) But dying was a living. Until I got too old to be an attractive corpse.

No doubt about it, I was going through a bad patch. I wanted to shake myself. This was no way to live—or to die.

And then an e-mail came from the Zipless ad that piqued my interest:

I love that you describe yourself as a happily married woman. I've always thought that a happily married woman would make the best lover. I cannot celebrate Eros once a week because I live far from New York, but perhaps I could manage once a month. Will you meet me for a drink at my favorite restaurant in New York and check me out? No strings, just a drink. Fear not, I am happily married too.

I carried the printed e-mail around in my purse for several weeks. Just having it in my possession made me feel vaguely hopeful—as if my erotic life was not over, as if there was still hope for me. Then, impulsively, I wrote to the e-mail address given:

HMW desires your photo.

Almost instantly I received a jpeg of a rather handsome brown-haired man with a salt-and-pepper beard and big blue eyes. He looked to be about forty. “Call me,” his e-mail said. A number was proffered.

So I did. He sounded nice. We had a pleasant if somewhat awkward conversation.

“Will you meet me next time I'm in New York?” he asked.

“Why not?” I said.

“Why not
yes
or why not
no
?”

“Yes.”

It was either that or the black ice.

*   *   *

Asher would hardly be happy if I succumbed to suicide. Sex was better than suicide, and this wasn't even sex—it was just a drink.

We meet at ‘21', under the ceiling of boys' toys. I have no idea what to expect. Naturally, I am nervous. I debate whether to use my real name and decide against it. I hold a white rose as the agreed-upon sign that I am me.

A tall, handsome man with startling blue eyes walks in, also holding a white rose. He looks around the bar room until he finds me, seated in a corner. He pulls up a chair.

“You must be HMW,” he says.

“I am.”

“I am HMM—Happily Married Man.”