My Life So Far (78 page)

T
he comedy
The Seven Year Itch
was onto something, and it’s about much more than sex. According to science, all our cells change every seven years. The Bible is also full of significant sevens (“
On the seventh day . . .
”). And it seems that people go through major psychic transitions every seven or so years and therein lies the rub: What if a couple’s transitions don’t mesh? That’s when choices have to be made: We can part, we can remain together on different wavelengths and do our best, or we can try to understand each other’s transitions and work to make them compatible. Tom’s and my wavelengths had grown too distant. After sixteen years, not knowing how to make our differences compatible, we parted.

My friends told me to stay busy. I knew that was wrong for me. Busy was what I’d been—busy and inside my own head. Now for the first time I was in a situation where
who
I was and
how
I was used to functioning were no longer valid. Therefore I had to allow everything to reorganize, not on a cognitive level (since I was, quite literally, out of my mind) but somatically, on a cellular level. For this to happen, I knew unconsciously that I needed to be very still and allow myself to witness what was happening and
feel
it.

I surrounded myself with loving women friends and classical music. My home became a haven. I knew that I needed all the endorphins my body could muster, so I forced myself to keep working out and took marathon bike rides and hikes with women friends.

Through the pain I could tell that something new was happening to me. Trauma was creating an opening in my psyche. I needed to pay attention, to be ready to step through and descend into it, whatever
it
was.
It
felt archetypal. Something in me was being slain in the fires of pain so that some new thing could be born. I knew it and went with it, and in the alchemy of my pain, like flowers whose seeds open only in the presence of fire, tendrils of something new began to sprout. Pain for me was a Trojan horse, penetrating the protective walls I’d erected around my heart, bearing within it hints of a future I might never have awakened to had I tried to numb myself with busyness.

One day I heard myself say out loud, “If God wanted me to suffer like this, there must be a reason.” God? I looked around.
Did I just say God?
Never had such a thought come into my head. I’m an atheist, right? But the moment I said it, the texture of my pain changed ever so slightly. It became easier to be patient, giving myself over to . . . what? I didn’t know, but I was so weakened that it was easy to let myself go limp and just
be.

Ever so slowly, over the months, a membrane began to cover the heart wound, and I could tentatively begin to cross the abyss without falling in. In psychologist Marion Woodman’s
Leaving My Father’s House
I read: “When humans suffer they are vulnerable. Within this vulnerability lives the humility that allows flesh to soften into the sounds of the soul.” Maybe this was what was happening to me. I felt lighter, as if a space had been cleared around me allowing coincidences (
God’s way of remaining anonymous
) to manifest. Maybe these coincidences had been happening all along and I just hadn’t been open to them. Now it was as though I were being led to them.

For example, there was the way I came to find a therapist. While Tom and I were still living in Ocean Park, at the end of our little street a house was torn down and rebuilt. This was the house that Paula and her husband, Mark, moved into. Then one day about two weeks after Tom and I split up, I was bike riding along the beach with Julie Lafond, and as we passed Wadsworth she pointed to that very house and said, “The therapist who saved my marriage owns that house and has her office in the basement.”

Well,
thought I, who was holding back from going into therapy because I worried I wouldn’t find “the right one,”
This may be a sign: I’ve just been staying there with my best friend, I saw it being built, it’s on my old street, and the therapist who owns it saved my other friend’s marriage.
I called up that very afternoon and made an appointment.

It was a fortuitous coincidence that led me to a female professional I would talk to once a week over the ensuing two years. She set me on a path of self-reflection and, after retiring, referred me to the therapist who would make a life-altering difference.

Then there was the psychic (hey, therapists, psychics—why not cover all bases?) who told me I would begin writing: “Writing and writing—and what you write will be important to women.” That’s when I began the journal writing that has helped with this book.

Over the following months, awash in what felt like miracles, surrounded by the love of my children and women friends, I could feel myself growing stronger. The sense of being led remained. The dark, empty space inside was beginning to fill with Spirit. I was entering my body, and I could feel a quickening.

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

PHOENIX ON HOLD

For everything there is a season
And a time for every matter under heaven:
A time to be born, and a time to die

—E
CCLESIASTES
3:1–2

I
T WASN’T TIME YET.
The ashes were there, the Phoenix was beginning to rise, the Spirit was beginning to fill me. But my ego wasn’t strong enough yet to contain it. A large part of me still panicked at going forward without a man.

The day after my divorce was announced in the papers, the phone rang. Someone yelled, “Jane, there’s a Ted Turner on the phone for you.” Ted Turner? I’d met him once with Tom at a screening of a documentary about child abuse that his Turner Broadcasting System was going to run. He’s probably calling to offer me a job, I thought as I picked up the phone.

Suddenly a voice boomed through the phone so loudly that I had to hold the receiver away from my ear.

“Is it true?”

“Is what true?” I thought it was an odd way to start a phone conversation with a virtual stranger.

“Are you and Hayden really getting a divorce?”

“Yes.” I was still in the throes of depression and unable to speak above a whisper.

“Well then, would you like to go out with me?”

I was dumbstruck. Dating was the furthest thing from my mind. “To tell you the truth, I can’t even think about dating right now. I can hardly even speak. I think I’m having an emotional breakdown. Why don’t you call me back in three months?”

“Hey, I know just how you feel.” I could tell he was trying to modulate his voice to approximate compassion and that this was hard for him. “I just broke up with my mistress,” he went on. “I wrecked my whole family and my marriage two years ago to go and live with her, so now I’m having a hard time myself.”

It occurred to me that this was just about the most inappropriate thing a man could say to a woman who had just been dumped by her husband of sixteen years for
his
mistress. Didn’t it occur to him that it would be his
wife
I’d identify with, not
him
?
This is one strange guy,
I thought.

But what I said to him was, “Call back in three months, when I’m feeling better. Okay?” He said he would do that, and we hung up. Whatever would come of it, the call in and of itself made me feel better. So did calls from friends like Warren Beatty and Quincy Jones, who wanted to check in to see how I was doing.

“Chin up now, cuz,” Quincy said lovingly. (He’d recently had his genealogy traced by the Mormons and it showed that we were distant cousins.) “Don’t let yourself get too down now, cuz. This is your time to play, have fun.”

Ted called back almost three months to the day. I’d all but forgotten about his promise and was surprised and flattered that he had remembered. I realized I didn’t know enough about this man who would be my first date in seventeen years. I knew about CNN but had never watched it. I got my news from the papers and National Public Radio. Besides, this was pre–Tiananmen Square, pre–Gulf War days, and CNN was still referred to occasionally as “Chicken Noodle News.” Nor was I familiar with the world of sailing and the fact that he’d won the prestigious America’s Cup. So as time approached for the date, I hurried to find out everything I could.

It wasn’t encouraging. Someone gave me an article about his life that revealed he probably had a drinking problem. Not what I needed—again. A friend of one of his children whom I happened to know told me he liked only younger women and if he was interested in me, it would only be as a notch in his belt. Of course there were lots of positives as well: his environmentalism, his global vision, his work for peace. My brother, the sailor in the family, filled me in on
that
facet.

1984, with Vanessa.

(© Suzanne Tenner)

“Oh, sis, this is really exciting! He’s the
real
Captain America” (unlike the bro, I guess, who had had a different take on Captain America in
Easy Rider
). “Ted won the America’s Cup!” He couldn’t believe I didn’t know this and went on breathlessly to tell me the whole saga of the Bubba from the South who stormed into Newport, home of the blue-blazered bluebloods, wearing an old engineer’s cap; how at first nobody in the race took him seriously; and how he kicked their asses.

“You gotta understand—he’s a hero!” Peter’s voice gets high when he’s excited. It was contagious. But as I said to my kids right before the date, “Don’t worry, this is just a way to get my feet wet, practice how to do the dating thing again. This isn’t going anywhere. Trust me.”

Actually I had come down with a bad cold the day before the date but decided not to cancel on him, given how long he’d waited. When he called to get directions to my house, I told him I was sick and would have to make it an early evening. It didn’t seem to faze him. But I was nervous! I’d gathered the clan around me for support: Peter, Nathalie, Troy, Vanessa, Lulu, and my assistant, Debbie Karolewski.

I may not have been invested in this date “going anywhere,” but I wanted to be sure it wouldn’t be because
he
didn’t want it to. So I wore a very short black leather miniskirt, a tight black halter top, black hose, and spike black heels. A few studs and I could have passed for a dominatrix.

I remember being up in my room putting on last-minute touches when Ted arrived. I could hear when Peter opened the door and Ted burst through, his over-the-top voice booming out, “Hey, Montana! Gimme five!” Peter lives in Montana and, as I learned later, Ted had just bought a ranch there and was excited that they had this in common.

A few minutes later I came down the stairs and Ted swung around to watch me. “Wow,” he said in a husky voice, devouring me like so much eye candy with an unabashed lust so palpable that I could feel it on my skin. I also saw he was nervous, and I found that endearing. He shouted good-bye to my family (they seemed subdued, as in the wake of a tornado), ushered me quickly out the door, and helped me into a hired sedan with a driver he introduced by name (which impressed me).

“I have friends who are Communists,” he offered eagerly as soon as we were seated. He said it like a little boy bringing home good grades. “I’ve been to the Soviet Union several times because of the Goodwill Games. Gorbachev is my buddy and so is Castro. I’ve been to Cuba two times. We go hunting and fishing together.”

I had to laugh. I didn’t know if it was because he really thought I was a Communist and wanted to let me know that wouldn’t stand between us or if he thought it was something I’d find endearing. I did. It was the second time in a matter of minutes that the word
endearing
had come to mind—not what I had been expecting. Before we’d even gotten to the restaurant, he pulled another stunner: