I tried to remember a conversation George and I had had at dinner a few nights before. I had asked him about his parents…
“You know, I know nothing about you, really. Tell me about your past—your childhood.”
“Why do you want to know that?” he barked.
“I’m interested in people’s childhoods,” I apologized. “Aren’t you?”
“Nah. Childhood! Hah! I didn’t have a childhood! I had a pair of alcoholic parents who once in a while came out of their daze and remembered they had a kid. I was brought up by my mammy; she was a servant, but she treated me better than my real mother ever did. We lived in South Carolina and were rich as hell—not that they earned it; it was all inherited. My uncle ran the business, a liquor business; my great-granddaddy or somebody back there had started out with a still and, after a while, made it legal. It kept our family and my uncle’s afloat, but they ran it into the ground; you can’t keep taking out and not putting back in. My uncle, he put it away pretty good too, the whole family did, and when he died; the distillery was swallowed up by a conglomerate. Years ago. By that time I’d been expelled from half a dozen schools and joined the air force. The air force straightened me out. Saved my life. Came out and went to college, journalism school. Stayed straight. Pretty straight. Drank too much. Got crazy. Don’t do that anymore. I’ve been all right since then, except I have trouble with women.”
“What was your mother like?”
“My mother was nice when she remembered me, but she didn’t remember me very often.”
I wanted to ask: Did she hold you, touch you? Did she put you on her lap?
“And your father?”
He shrugged. “He was a lush.”
I knew that his brusque foreclosure of the subject had nothing to do with me, but still I felt slapped, shut out. I guess I had lived among women for too long. I was used to their ways and expected them of men as well. And a woman, if anyone shows any interest at all in her childhood, will open up and talk for hours, recalling major events, analyzing the tiny details that impinge upon a psyche, musing on the damage done, the benefits received, and the ambivalence that remains, poisoning her days. Women—all the women I know, anyway—
love
to talk about their parents, their childhoods, and their consequent psychic state.
So perhaps it didn’t mean anything—anything personal about George, that is, or me—that he didn’t want to discuss his childhood. Maybe men just weren’t interested in such things. But it was tempting to begin analyzing him, to hypothesize that he’d been severely damaged by a father who ignored him completely and a mother who remembered him occasionally and gave him a hug, then thrust him back into the icebox. He might not know how he felt. I remembered how the Andersen fairy tale of the Ice Queen haunted me when I was a child, although until I was in my fifties, and having a conversation with my friend Molly, I didn’t realize that the reason was she reminded me of my own mother. Yet I wasn’t severely damaged. Was I?
But if George could not rest in love, had not ever in his life been able to trust it, he would never love me.
I dismissed this thought.
I tried to remember whether any of my husbands had enjoyed talking about their childhood. Charles had. Of course, he was Italian. I’d known a number of Italian men who were honorary women. But none of the others had, that I could remember. So maybe George’s reluctance had no profound meaning.
But then, how to explain him?
I couldn’t think. I couldn’t feel. I held myself apart from myself. It occurred to me that I needed help.
I sat up and dialed Molly.
“You’re there!”
“I’m here. I had an auction yesterday that spilled over till today, and I couldn’t get away. I’ve been on the phone all morning. It was just settled ten minutes ago, and I’m sitting here wondering whether it’s too late to go up to the country. So I’m here. How come
you’re
here?”
“Mary Smith’s birthday party was last night. And I had a lunch date today,” I said.
“Oh. How was the birthday?”
“Fine. Stay here, okay? In New York. Don’t go to the country. Have dinner with me tonight.”
“What’s the matter?”
“I’m upset. I need to talk to you.”
“Of course I’ll stay. What is it? What’s wrong?”
“I’ll tell you later. Where shall we eat?”
“Alison on Dominick?”
“Great.”
“What time?”
“Seven-thirty.”
“I’ll make the res. See you.”
Molly Baum is my agent, but she is also one of my best friends and has been for over twenty years. I started out with a male agent, forty years ago, but in 1968, dear old Harry Horn had a coronary and died. Molly is a quick, decisive woman who nevertheless thinks about things, questions them. She doesn’t settle for surfaces. Molly claimed she knew what was good for me even when I didn’t, and there was considerable evidence that she was right. She had warned me against marrying Andrew, she said he would abandon me, and she was right. Of course, she warned me against marrying Mark on the same grounds. Well, I suppose she was right again, but even if in the end they do both abandon you, there is a difference between a man who leaves you for a younger woman, after stealing your money and your house on Twelfth Street, and one who dies of pancreatic cancer.
Like me and my friend Mary Smith, Molly is self-created. Her mother had been pregnant a dozen times and had had seven children when Molly was born. She had more children than she wanted or could feed—she worked in a sweatshop to support them—and Molly had to fend for herself from the beginning. When she was ten, her mother died, and the next year, her father did. The three younger children were tossed from married sister to married sister in the next few years. Molly was miserable. What she wanted above anything else was an education, but she didn’t see any way of getting one where she lived.
Molly was smart and determined, though. She saved up money from baby-sitting, and when she had thirty dollars, she left Gary, Indiana, and came to New York. She was fifteen, and beautiful, and she got a job modeling in a wholesale fur house. She was subjected to the harassment young women in such a situation are always subjected to, but she was already tough, and got tougher. She let no man get within a foot of her—and in time won the respect of all the guys in her industry. Earning enough to support herself and go to school at night, she managed to get through college. Then she went to work for a magazine: she’d always wanted to be a writer.
Over the years, she drifted into agenting and into marriage. She’s been married—and divorced—three times and has three kids. For twenty-five years, Molly has had her own agency; she sells mainly romance novels, even though she no longer believes in romantic love. After her last divorce, she said she was giving up love, sex, and men forever, and she’s stuck to her word for the last decade. She says that women always get shafted in their relations with men, and that once they reach the age of sense (I think she means menopause), they should avoid them. She doesn’t object to men falling in love, and she treats her married friends pleasantly, but I know she is more comfortable with women who are alone, like her.
Molly is short and blond, with a wild head of curly hair and a tinkly little voice that can give you a false impression if you don’t know her. Men who haven’t dealt with her before sometimes treat her like a flake, imagining they can bulldoze her into a deal. But she has no compunctions about putting people down, albeit diplomatically. And she has absolute integrity—something you can’t count on finding in an agent.
We embraced and made chitchat, Molly glancing carefully at my face but asking nothing. I know I looked bad, tense and shadowed. I ordered a mâche salad and, my favorite at Alison’s, a braised lamb shank with white beans, a dish I could never finish. I always took the remains home with me, to zap in the microwave some other night. We ordered wine. While we drank it, we discussed business matters. I have twenty different publishers worldwide, so there is always a lot to discuss. I waited until we’d finished our main course before I launched into George.
“I’ve met a man,” I said.
“No!” She slammed her cup into its saucer. “I don’t believe it! At your age! Don’t you know better by now?”
“Come on, Molly, I need help. I really care about him, but he’s driving me crazy.”
“I can’t believe you…” She was shaking her head from side to side, in despair.
“Well, I did, okay?”
I told her the whole story. It carried us through cappuccino and the brandies we ordered afterward. It carried us through the ice water we drank after that. The restaurant was beginning to empty before I finished. After I had recounted this morning’s events—his momentous question and his immediate precipitous departure—I stopped, just stopped, my voice dwindling off…
After a silence, Molly asked, “Is that it?”
I nodded. I could barely speak.
“I’m sorry, Hermione,” she said quietly, “but I don’t understand what you see in him. I mean, he’s
mean.
He’s thoughtless and inconsiderate, and he doesn’t care about you. He toys with you.”
“You really think so?” My eyes blurred.
“What
do
you see in him?” she asked.
“Oh…” I considered. “He’s smart,” I said. “He doesn’t speak well—he’s too busy sounding like a good ol’ guy—but in fact he has an elegant mind. One day at lunch he discoursed on Clarence Thomas’s career; not only did he know all the facts, but he had a perspective on the man, saw his strengths and weaknesses…”
She gave me a look. “Puh-leeze.”
“Look.” I was embarrassed. “When we first met, he made me feel—I can’t believe it was only last Sunday!” I gasped. “It feels as if an eon has passed since then. Anyway, he pursued me so intently…he looked at me with such excitement…he made me feel desirable. I haven’t felt desirable since Mark died.”
She gave me a look.
“Well, all right. For ten years, though.”
She nodded. “You’ve been alone a long time. As long as I have.”
“And don’t you feel…a little shrunk? A little dried up, less alive?”
“No! I’m much too busy. Besides,” she admitted, “there are always these flirtations going on…”
“Okay. So maybe there have been a few men in the past few years who’ve acted interested…”
“Lots. Remember Wally Bedell?”
“Oh, please!” I protested. “That’s what I mean. They weren’t people I could feel desire for. You know, you get to our age…well,
my
age”—Molly is five years younger than I—“and you feel desire for damn few people. Practically nobody. Who’s attractive? They’re all old, fat, sloppy, bald, and gray, they’re failures wanting to whine or successes wanting to brag! Is there a single man you know that you could feel something for?”
“Not me. And that’s fine with me. It’s a relief.”
“Well, I feel—I can feel—I do feel desire for George. In fact, I’m so hyped up with desire, I can’t sleep…”
Molly sagged, both her body and her mouth. “Well, I’m sorry. Because I can’t see—well, what do I know? Who knows. Maybe he’ll come back, maybe he’ll call, maybe you’ll live happily ever after, for god’s sake.”
“Oh, that’s the worst part! Never, never in my life…Well, you know, you were there when I married Andrew, when I married Mark…You remember how tentative I was, how unsure that I was doing the right thing. I said, I remember—I told you just before the judge arrived—that I couldn’t picture growing old with Andrew, and you said, ‘Don’t worry, you won’t!’”
We both giggled.
“But this time! I can’t sleep, I keep having these fantasies, I see the two of us together, our families together, spending holidays traveling, spending the summers in Sag Harbor together, me spending time in his house in Louisville—”
“He has a house in Louisville?”
I shrugged. “I don’t know. He lives there. I put him in a gorgeous modern glass-and-wood ranch, all jutting angles and levels, with views of the forest. I put him in a two-story colonial, white with black shutters. I put him in a grungy apartment that needs immediate redecorating. By me. I put him—”
“Okay, I get it.” Molly held up her hand to halt me.
“I put us in an apartment on Central Park West, floor over floor. I put us across town from each other, me on Fifth, him on CPW. I put us in a house on Twelfth Street, occupying all four stories. Shall I go on?”
She shook her head.
“This has never happened to me before. I never had such fantasies before.”
“That’s only because before, when you were interested in someone, he was interested in you too. You didn’t need to fantasize. You had reality.”
“You think?”
“You’ve probably always had these fantasies. Without knowing it.”
I shook my head. “No. No.”
“Hermione!” she cried. “Consider how you make your living! How can you write these romances if you don’t believe in them? Of
course
you believe in the fantasy of happiness ever after!”
I bristled. “I write them,” I said coldly. “I don’t believe in them. What do you think I am, an idiot?”
“Oh, come on.” She placed her hand over mine, resting on the table. “I’ve outlawed romantic love from my life, but I sell romances, don’t I? We all believe in that fantasy. All women.”
“I
don’t
believe it.”
“It’s the way we were raised,” she argued, trying to take the sting out. “It’s our background. Our socialization.”
“Not me.”
“What? You were different?”
“Yes. I wasn’t raised the way other girls were. I wasn’t raised to be dependent on a man. I never imagined living happily ever after; I was never allowed to entertain such a fantasy. Our lives were too hard.”
“So where do your novels come from? Nobody could write them as well as you do without believing that stuff…”
“Don’t try to butter me up,” I muttered.
She gazed at me sympathetically and sighed. “I’m tired,” she said, gathering her shawl about her shoulders. “I’ve been up since five, and it’s after midnight.”
“Molly, what should I do?”
“Forget him,” she said.
Sunday morning early, I called the garage and asked one of the doormen to fetch my Porsche. I made it out to Sag Harbor in two and a half hours, with a stop for breakfast; eastbound traffic was light on Sundays. But my body was tense and my driving jerky and distracted. I came close to having a couple of accidents.