OUT ON a LIMB

by Shirley Maclaine

  “That … just then was the happiest I’ve ever been,” he said, breathing hard and shouting slightly above the surf. “You know I’ve never done this before? That was the first wave I ever rode. I’ve missed a great deal, haven’t I?”

  I didn’t say anything. I just turned over in the water and thought it was the happiest I had been in a long time too—only I wished I had had the abandonment to ride that wave with him.

  We lay in the water until the sun came out. Then on our backs we inched our way out of the sea and onto the wet sand where we lay until we could feel the sun drying us off.

  “Gerry?” I asked, “when you look back at your life, when were you happiest?”

  He thought awhile and then with a kind of startled look said, “You know, now that you’ve asked me, I would have to say all my happiness has been connected with nature—sometimes with people—but never with my work. That’s astonishing to me. My happiest moments have never been connected to my work. My God, why is that?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe because you felt work was duty.”

  “But even when I win I’m depressed. For example, the last time I was elected I fell into a depression for days.” He looked up into the sky. “I must think about that, mustn’t I?”

  I got up to get dressed.

  “It seems a shame that you should feel depressed when you win. What do you feel when you lose?”

  He got up and walked to the tree where we had left our clothes. “When I lose I feel challenged. I feel a sense of struggle and that makes everything worth it. I think I need to spit against the wind.”

  We walked further around the island and soon found a small food stand by the sea that sold pineapples and papayas. We squeezed lemon over the papayas and sat on the sand. The Hawaiian who owned the place was reading a Raymond Chandler novel and intermittently looking at the sea. Gerry and I talked about Asia, the Middle East, and the time I had spent in Japan. He didn’t ask me any personal questions and I didn’t volunteer any information.

  We continued walking until we found the directions to Sea World. We went in to see the dolphins and killer whales. It was feeding time. One of the dolphins got more to eat than the others. Gerry didn’t think it was fair. He said survival of the fittest was cruel and there ought to be a way for man to restructure that basic fact of nature. He said that was what civilization was for … to make the world a kinder place. He felt sorry for those who couldn’t fend for themselves.

  At the large tank a killer whale was being fed. Seagulls circled overhead waiting for the whale to miss one of the fish that the attendant, who wore a wet suit, was dropping into the gigantic mouth. Then he missed one. A gull swooped down, scooped up the fish, and flew to the other side of the tank. The whale saw him and with a great lunge went after him. The gull sat on the rim where the whale couldn’t get at him. The gull blinked at him. And the whale interrupted his feeding to glare at the gull for a full three minutes. Gerry laughed out loud, and the whale went back to his feeding.

  We left the aquarium and walked into the hills above the sea. Birds of every color flitted and squawked through the lush tropical trees. We tried to open a dried coconut but we needed a machete. I told Gerry about the time I had gone to the big island of Hawaii once to be alone. I rented a little house on the Kona Coast and sat on the volcanic rocks for days thinking about competition, among other things.

  I had been in Hollywood for five years and the way good friends would fight each other for good parts was getting me down. I had just been nominated for another Academy Award and I didn’t like the false pressure that the nomination seemed to burden me with either. I didn’t like the feeling that winning a little brass statue should be more rewarding than doing good work. It had confused me because everyone else thought it was what Hollywood was all about. But I didn’t see why anybody should win or lose. I didn’t like how crestfallen people felt when they lost. And I hated how much money was spent trying to influence votes by giving parties and taking ads in the trade papers. Gerry seemed interested in what I was saying but couldn’t understand that I had genuinely not cared whether I won or not.

  “Why didn’t you care?” he asked.

  “I don’t know,” I said, “but I didn’t. And I don’t care now. I think I didn’t want to be embarrassed to win something that had no business being a contest in the first place. I wouldn’t be depressed the way you say you are when you win—I would be embarrassed. You need to win because that’s how democracy and majority rule work and there’s no other way to be a successful politician. But artists shouldn’t be involved with that kind of competition. I think we should only be concerned with competing against the best we have in ourselves.”

  He asked me if I really had gone there alone. I told him yes, I had; that I had done a lot of that in my life. I needed to be alone. I needed time to reflect. He said he had gathered that from my first book, Don’t Fall Off The Mountain. He said that book was one of his daughter’s favorite books.

  He asked me if I ever got lonely. I said being alone was different from being lonely but that I believed I was a basically lonely person in any case. He never asked me about my divorce, or my relationships with other men. If it was going to come up it would have come up then. I assumed he wasn’t ready to know.

  We stopped, sat, and watched sand crabs dig their holes as late afternoon began to fall. One of them fell over on its back. With a twig Gerry turned it upright and smiled gently. I told him how I had watched a colony of ants outside that little house on Kona. They diligently spent their days carrying a stale bun, crumb by crumb, from one rock to a hiding place under another rock. They were so organized and determined. There were no individuals. No way to be one. They seemed selfless. I wondered if that was a good way to be, to submit your own interests to the good of the species. Was that what Gerry thought he was doing? Gerry asked me about China. Though he had never been there he knew a lot about it. We talked about the Chinese revolution and he said he wished there had been time when we were in Hong Kong to go across the border, if only for a few days.

  We fell asleep in the afternoon sun, and when we woke a cool breeze had come up. We ran together on the edge of the surf laughing and pummeling each other. Gerry stopped to skim flat stones over the surf. Then we walked, holding hands, until we came in sight of the hotel, where we separated. Gerry walked ahead of me and disappeared into the throng at the pool area. I stood watching the sun set for a while. Then it struck me how free Gerry had seemed all day being outside and how inept he could be inside, with four walls around him. He was really a different person when he was unconstrained. I was sure that he’d be better at his work if he’d let himself go more, better at his marriage too probably, better with me.

  Entering the hotel, Gerry was waylaid in the lobby by his delegation. “Where have you been? Are you feeling better?” I heard snatches of conversation as I walked unnoticed by him and everyone else. I felt like background music.

  I got into the elevator, glad that I was alone in it, except for a porter.

  I was taking a hot shower, washing the salt from my hair when the phone rang. Gerry said, “Why have you been away from me for so long?”

  In five minutes he was in my room sitting on the floor. There was a TV special on from Las Vegas starring Sinatra, Sammy Davis, Jr., Paul Anka and Ann-Margret. He sat with his legs crossed, leaning forward, and asked me about musical comedy shows. Were the singers really singing or did they mouth to a playback? Did they have to memorize the lyrics or did they have cue cards? How much rehearsal did they have before they actually performed?

  As we talked we decided to have dinner at an out-of-the-way Japanese restaurant I knew on the other side of Waikiki. If we could successfully negotiate getting a cab there would be no problem from then on.

  I left the hotel room first. The down elevator took so long that he found himself going up just to avoid arriving in the lobby with me.

  The lobby was full of journalists and Secret Service men. I put my
head in a magazine and kept it there until I got outside. A cab was waiting in line. Photographers popped flashbulbs as famous delegates entered and left. I got in the cab and asked the driver to wait for just a moment. He said he couldn’t wait long. I looked nervously into the lobby. Gerry was there but he had been stopped by a visiting delegation. I counted the seconds.

  “My friend is coming,” I said. “Hang on just a moment.” The driver waited.

  A few minutes later Gerry extricated himself, smiled into a camera that popped a bulb in his face and saw me wave to him. Nonchalantly he walked toward the cab and got in. No one noticed anything.

  We drove to the Japanese restaurant. I knew the manager but she wasn’t interested in whom I was with. I asked her in Japanese for a private tatami room and she showed us in, brought us some hot saki and went to prepare our sushi. Gerry wasn’t sure about the raw fish but he ate it anyway.

  The candle on the table flickered under his face.

  “Oh, how I loved today,” he said.

  I smiled.

  “And oh, how I love talking to you.”

  I smiled again.

  “And, oh, how I love being with you.”

  I smiled and rolled my eyes in mock disgust. He knew what I meant.

  “And oh, how I love you.”

  I began to cry.

  He reached over and took my hand. I couldn’t talk.

  “I’m sorry that makes you unhappy,” he said.

  I pulled out a Kleenex and blew my nose.

  “Oh, Gerry,” I said finally. “Why is it so hard for you to say?”

  His face went solemn. “Because I say it in ways other than words. I say it with my hands, with my body.”

  “Why?”

  “I don’t know. I think it’s because I have to manipulate words all day long in my work and I don’t want to feel that I’m manipulating words with you.”

  “You mean that’s playing fair with me?”

  “Yes.”

  “Well, I need to manipulate words to express my feelings. Is that unfair?”

  “I don’t know how it is for you.”

  “I’m not sure that love is fair anyway.”

  “I don’t think I know anything about love,” he said. “This is all new to me. I only know I feel comfortable expressing myself physically because I’ve never done that before and I use words all the time.”

  I tried to grasp what he was saying. Did he mean he couldn’t really be trusted? Or did he mean he didn’t want to commit himself in so many words because he didn’t want the responsibility later?

  “How,” I asked, “will you express yourself when we’re apart then?”

  He shrugged. “I don’t know. It’s a contradiction, isn’t it? I’ll have to think about it.”

  We ate dinner talking about Japan and how it was sacrificing its culture for the sake of industrial development. After dinner we walked awhile before we took separate cabs back to the hotel.

  There was a convention banquet in the hotel dining room. I went to my room and waited. The dolphins leapt gently in the aquarium below and the palm trees rustled drily in the trade winds.

  Half an hour later we were in bed. Gerry said his work had piled up for the next two days and he needed to be up early in the morning. I was leaving in the late morning.

  We turned out the light and tried to sleep.

  Suddenly he got up and with that determined walk he crashed into a chair. I laughed. He went to the bathroom and came back and paced up and down at the foot of the bed.

  “What’s wrong?” I asked.

  “I don’t know what I’m thinking,” he said. “I don’t know what to do. And I’m not even ready to think about what I’m thinking.”

  I watched him quietly. He got an apple out of the fruit basket. He paced with the apple in his hand. Then he came back to bed and began to eat it. Deliberately and with great concentration he chewed each bite thoroughly without saying a word. It was as though he didn’t know I was there. He didn’t eat the apple like most people, leaving the two ends. He ate the apple from the top down and finally he devoured the whole thing, seeds, core and all.

  I laughed and it startled him.

  “I don’t eat much,” he said, “but once I do I eat it all.” He leaned over on his elbow. “Remember that.”

  I tried to sleep. I didn’t know when I’d see him again. I thought of what it would be like in the morning when he’d walk out the door and shut it behind him. I couldn’t make myself comfortable. I turned from one side to the other. Each time I turned he touched me. On and off all night I tossed and slept, tossed and slept. Each time I moved he touched me. Soon daylight filtered through the curtains. He sat up, pulled the covers around me, and lifted my face.

  “Listen,” he said, “we’ve had thirty-six hours of something too extraordinary to describe. Most people never have that. Look at the positive side. I always assume I begin at zero … so anything above that is a plus.”

  I swallowed hard. “I don’t. I assume I start wherever I want and I can go anywhere I want after that. I feel I can make anything happen if I want and I’m not grateful for our thirty-six hours. I want more. I want all I can get.”

  He laughed and threw up his hands. He got out of bed and I could feel him prepare himself for a day of work. He had had his time with me, considered himself lucky, and now had to contend with his English sense of obligation. It was simple for him. He had made a career out of denial.

  “Gerry,” I said, “wait a minute. Could you live without this now?”

  He thought for a moment and his face was grave. “Life would be bleak, gray, empty. Now give me a nice long kiss,” he said, taking my face in his hands. I reached up and held his hair, letting it fall through my fingers. Quickly he dressed, and before I knew it he was at the door.

  “I’II call you when I get back to London.”

  He didn’t say goodbye. He didn’t turn around. He walked straight to the door, opened it and left.

  The room changed. It was the moment I was so afraid of. The silence made my ears ring. I felt sick. I sat up and threw my legs over the side of the bed. I looked around for something he might have forgotten. No, I thought. This is ridiculous. I’m not going to allow myself to wallow around like this. I got up and took a cold shower, ordered breakfast, and packed. Then I sat down and wrote him a letter about how right he was that half a glass of water was half full, not half empty.

  I slept restlessly on the plane back over the Pacific.

  “What do you want from me?” I could hear him saying it again. He was right. Did I want him to shatter his personal life, risk his political work and in general give up everything he had dedicated his life to for me? Now I didn’t want to think about it.

  “I have to finish the job I started in my work a long time ago,” he had said. Did I want to risk that for this? And what, anyway, was this? Was it really love? Was it what people gave up everything for? Would he ever do that? Would I? Could I live in London? What would the English voters do if they knew? Would it really ruin him? He claimed with absolute certainty that his wife wouldn’t be able to take it, but what would the people think?

  So he had said, “I have to calm down. I need to cool myself out. I’ve been too obsessed with you. I need to be objective now. I don’t want to think about what I’m thinking about.” He had said all these things to me and when I tried to be helpful by assuming a cooler attitude myself he had said, You’re not going to get rid of me that easily.” So I too was confused—Bleak, empty, and gray, he had said. Would it be bleak, empty, and gray for me, too? Could I do without him? What was I really doing with him? What was I doing with myself?

  Chapter 6

  “It is very difficult to explain this feeling to anyone who is entirely without it, especially as there is no anthropomorphic conception of God corresponding to it. The individual feels the nothingness of human desires and aims and the sublimity and marvellous order which reveal themselves both in nature and in the world of
thought. He looks upon individual existence as a sort of prison and wants to experience the universe as a single significant whole.”

  —ALBERT EINSTEIN

  The World As I See It

  When I got home I was irritated, frustrated, upset with myself, and more bugged than ever by something I couldn’t touch. Yes, I was bothered by all the obvious problems relating to Gerry. But it was more than that.

  I called David. He was still in California. He sensed immediately that something was wrong. He asked how my weekend had gone, knowing that I wouldn’t say much but endeavoring to be my friend and lend support if he could. I asked him to meet me in Malibu.

  He came right out with a bag of fresh peaches. We took them down to the beach. The peaches were juicy and sticky and sweet.

  “What’s wrong?” asked David, knowing that he could come right to the point because I had invited him.

  I swallowed a huge bite of juicy peach sweetness and didn’t know how to begin to tell him what I was feeling. “I don’t know,” I said. “I’m hung up … well, not exactly hung up. I just feel that there’s something about why I’m alive that I’m not getting. I’m a happy person and getting plenty out of life—I don’t mean I’m hung up with all that middle-aged crisis stuff. It’s something I can’t explain. In fact age has nothing to do with it except maybe that after awhile you finally get around to asking the right questions.” I hesitated, hoping David would say something that would trigger me into more clarity. He didn’t. He just waited for me to say more. I went on. “I mean, maybe I’m not even talking about me. I mean, well … maybe it’s the world, Why doesn’t the world work? And why should that get to me? I mean, how come you never seem bugged? Do you know something I don’t know?”