Intimate Wars (4 page)

Cynthia Colquitt-Craven, a descendant of English aristocracy whom I had met at a local pub while traveling down the Cornish coast, ran a large stable and riding academy. When she invited me to her home for a visit, we became instant friends. I lived in her small stone cottage for eight months, rising at dawn each day to help her feed the horses and muck out the stalls. She taught me to ride and I learned to share her passion for fox hunting.

I jumped five-foot banks, galloped across fields, and tried, like everyone else, to be there at the “kill.” Sometimes we'd pass antihunt demonstrators with signs bearing a quotation by Oscar Wilde, calling hunting “the unspeakable in full pursuit of the uneatable
.”
At the time I was too far into the English aristocratic fantasy to relate to the protesters. It would be years before I allowed the cruelty of what we were doing to enter my mind. In the meantime I rode to the hounds à la Tom Jones, in full regalia with a small flask in my jacket for
whiskey. At night I sat by the fire sipping brandy with Cynthia and the hunt master, his dogs at my feet after a long day of riding. I learned to play a good game of darts at the local pub and went galloping along the gorgeous beaches of the Cornish coast with Cynthia for pleasure, wild and free.

Cynthia shared my fantasy. Not only was she actually descended from the English Plantagenet kings, but she lived there in her head. We parried back and forth about the most obscure historical facts, quoted Shakespeare and recited Elizabethan poetry, and walked on the bluff where Walter Raleigh had played bowls while the Spanish Armada gathered force. We were sisters and allies in multiple realities. In the years to come, when our lives became so different—I holding the hands of my patients on the operating tables and she always with her horses in Cornwall—that wonderful sense of connection would return every time we talked. With Cynthia I experienced a true sense of trust. It was the first time I'd ever felt that with another woman.

I went to Europe again and again. I studied music in Paris for eight months, living in a room with no windows and surviving on bread and cheese. I attended a bullfight in Madrid, where I caught the ear of a bull thrown to me by a triumphant matador. I lived in Cologne for five months with Walter Kinzel, a German research psychologist whom I met in the lobby of the Americana Hotel. At twenty-two I learned to play backgammon on the QEII from Prince Alexis Obolensky, just before the first international backgammon tournament. He noticed I was traveling alone, and we began a friendship that lasted the duration of our transatlantic crossing.

 

ALL OF THESE ADVENTURES were self-selected and self-defining. I began to feel that I could make things happen, create realities from the visions in my head.

I came back to the United States when my money ran out and I received news that my father was ill in the hospital. I worked part time, practiced piano, and read constantly. But I couldn't escape the fact that I was back in Kew Gardens, Queens.

It was becoming clear to me that I would not be a great concert artist. It was far too hermetic, and the possibilities of becoming internationally known were few. It seemed to me that entering this world would in fact be like entering a nunnery, practicing five to six hours daily and giving up everything else. And I saw what had happened to my cousin Marilyn, a prodigy who had the opportunity to become a great solo artist. None of that had come together for her.

Most importantly, I had come to the point where playing music no longer filled me up emotionally. It was too loaded with my own subjective demands for excellence and a competitive edge. I could only touch the pure joy of music through listening to others.

Leaving this identity was an existential predicament. I knew it was the right thing to do, but where would I find the greatness I sought? On what set? I knew that any kind of well-travelled path would be death for me. None of the traditional female roles that surrounded me drew me in. I felt I was drowning in everyday life.

 

PARALLEL TO THE LIFE I was living, another world was coming into being: the women's liberation movement was gathering steam. I felt isolated, cast out, and groundless, and I didn't see myself as part of anything—certainly not the band of angry young women who were calling themselves feminists. I hardly noticed them.

In fact, the war I would come to call my own—the multiple battles for abortion rights—was raging all around me.
Abortion was illegal in the United States, and women were fighting across the country in creative, radical ways for reproductive freedom. The speakouts, rallies, and marches swelling in New York City were paving the way for my entrance into a conflict rich with history and full of meaning, with warriors who exhibited the qualities of courage, creativity, and integrity of purpose that I yearned to find and express in myself.

In my early twenties I knew I had the personal power to attract what I wanted, and I was unafraid to engage it. I had been preparing for battle my whole life. I had no way of knowing that a movement, a history, a war was waiting for me. But I was ready.

—
ERNEST RENAN

 

 

 

 

 

W
hile the rest of country was enmeshed in the second wave of feminism, the turmoil of the Vietnam War, the deaths of Bobby Kennedy and Dr. King, and the hedonistic chaos of Woodstock, I found I could not be admitted to college because I'd been traveling through Europe instead of taking the SAT. I was going to be a great artist, and that did not require four years of traditional schooling. Internally directed, self-involved, and apolitical, “things of this world” were far less important to me than my commitment to art.

I liked to hang out at the legendary Café Wha and Café Figaro in Greenwich Village, where one could get in touch with the 1968 bohemian ideal. There I would sit with my black capes, black eye makeup, and long, black hair parted down the middle, sipping espressos and observably reading Rimbaud or Baudelaire to attract like-minded friends. I spent my days imagining how I would make history, as I knew for certain I would. As Charlotte Corday said at her trial for
the assassination of Marat during the French Revolution, I wanted people to “know that I had lived.”

I signed up for a few courses at the Herbert Berghof (Stella Adler) studio of acting with the ambition of becoming a Shakespearean actor, thinking a career in theater could be the way to actualize my desires. But I grew frustrated and realized that I didn't want to be limited by someone else's words. I felt inhibited by my role as the messenger of another's creation; I wanted to be the creator.

Thinking that becoming a painter might give me the opportunity for undiluted self-expression, I signed up for classes at the Art Student League. While I was a student there I managed to do a self-portrait in oil and an abstract watercolor, but this iteration of my artistic self was also short lived. On my way to class one day I walked down Fifty-Seventh Street past Carnegie Hall and noticed my reflection in the glass-encased posters displayed outside. The image of myself as an artist, an introvert hurrying to class with my black portfolio, was jarringly incongruent with my internal reality, and I knew this, too, was not to be.

My search for an appropriate role, a part to play that would suit me, was beginning to oppress me. Feeling lost and alone, I tried to find myself in religion. I'd only been formally exposed to Judaism through a few summer camps and Sunday school sessions, and it hadn't held much interest for me. I later experimented with Catholicism, the Church of Truth, and Christian Science. These experiences helped foster my lifelong search for transcendence, but none of them satisfied my quest for meaning.

I spent most of my time at home, reading. I would drag the covers off my bed and park myself on the living-room couch with a couple of pillows and whatever book my head was in at the time. I was particularly fond of Greek tragedies
and existential philosophy. Not that everything I read was of that highest order: Pauline Réage's
Story of O
amazed and excited me, and there was a particular passage in Grace Metalious's
Peyton Place
in which Selena Cross moves her hips “expertly” on the beach that I'd read over and over again as I lounged.

My mother would look at me with disgust as I lay there surrounded by books, which had always been a point of contention. Finally she insisted that I get off the couch and told me to look for a part-time job. I began to leave the house with her each morning, she on her way to work, I with a marked-up newspaper listing of available jobs to go over in my favorite café.

I had no job experience, so I was open to taking what I could get. Almost on a lark I answered a listing for a bathing suit model. The garment center showroom was crowded with other applicants—young, attractive girls who appeared far more familiar with the process. After changing clothes in a small dark room I fought off feelings of vulnerability and managed to parade myself in front of the two men who were choosing. When they asked me to remove my top, I quickly excused myself.

Next I interviewed with an industrial psychologist whose company, Personell Projections, specialized in counseling men looking for a midlife career change. This time the employer's request was slightly less invasive: “Can you type?” After assuring him of my technical ability, I attempted to impress him with my knowledge of psychology. Ignoring my intellectual overtures, he told me that I would not be hired unless I removed my makeup. I decided to take the job.

The psychologist shared an office with a lapsed Jesuit priest whose parents had been killed in a car crash. The resulting emotional trauma led him to leave his order and enter the
secular world. As a result of this career change, he now felt free to express his peculiar sexual predilections. One day he called me into his dark office and begged me to open the top button of my blouse so he could just look. It excited me to play with the power he'd handed me—to see his lust, and to feel the throb of my own. I stood in front of him, enjoying his naked, obvious desire, and slowly opened the button.

I worked there for almost nine months until the office closed down. The lapsed priest and the psychologist could not manage to make a successful business venture.

My mother, fed up with waiting for me to find decent employment, began searching the papers herself for job opportunities for me. In a local Queens paper she found an ad for a part-time medical assistant.

“It looks perfect!” she said to me, excitedly showing me the ad. I shrugged, indifferent to what seemed a rather boring job description. But it was close to home, and I would only work two nights per week and Saturday mornings. At least I would have time to pursue my other dreams, whatever they turned out to be.

 

THE REGO PARK medical office was in a small two-family house with an English-style garden in the tiny front lawn. Rows and rows of identical redbrick two-story houses lined the neighborhood, reminding me of Malvina Reynolds's 1962 song “Little Boxes.” I was interviewed by a well-coiffed, perky woman in a white nurse's uniform. She questioned me about my background and showed me around the office, which consisted of a waiting room, an exam room, a consulting room, an X-ray room, and an office in the back where bills and charts were kept.

Part of my job would require taking chest X-rays of patients, and there was a small darkroom to develop the negatives.
As the woman toured me through the space she laughingly told me that if the physician, Dr. Gold, ever joined me in the darkroom, it was not to flirt, but because he sometimes needed to assist in the developing process. It was then that she confessed to being Mrs. Gold; she was just helping out until he hired a new assistant.

Next, I had an interview with Dr. Gold himself. He appeared to be impressed by the fact that I was so deeply serious and needed part-time work to help support my studies. I noticed he was extraordinarily handsome. When the interview was over, Mrs. Gold told me she would call in a couple of days to tell me whether or not I had the position.

That evening, my mother took a break from hounding me to get a job. She chattered on about how extremely pleased she was at the idea that I might be working for a doctor—not to mention his office was close to home, and he was Jewish! I was not home a few days later when Mrs. Gold called the house to give me the good news—I had gotten the position—so my mother role-played as me, accepting the offer with much pleasure and confidence.

 

DR. GOLD WAS A well-established internist who practiced as a primary-care family physician. He knew all his patients' life stories, their problems with their children, their marriage issues and money worries. From the first day we worked together his compassion for them was apparent. When I would tell him that a patient owed money or had walked out after an appointment without paying, he'd smile and say, “Let it be. It's okay. They can't afford it.”

As he specialized in internal medicine and diabetes, Dr. Gold's patient population was large and varied. Patients who were survivors of the Holocaust came to him monthly so
that he could fill out their medical reparations forms for the German government. I found this extremely disturbing; it seemed they were tacitly accepting the idea that there was a kind of restitution for the Holocaust. But Dr. Gold put pragmatism before politics. They needed the money to buy food and keep roofs over their heads.

An old woman who had suffered terribly in the camps came to the office each month. I recognized the blue tattoo on her forearm as the one shared by my Polish piano teacher and a neighbor who lived near my parents. I stared at the numbers in horrid fascination as Dr. Gold dutifully filled out and signed the woman's German forms.