Fear of Dying. Erica Jong
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