Daring

by Gail Sheehy

  “We made the deal,” he said.

  “You what . . . ?” I choked. My accountant had lectured me sternly not to allow my financial future to be decided in a competitive spasm. “How could you, without talking to me?”

  “Hey, you gotta have faith in your representatives. It was eleven forty-five. I had a twelve o’clock deadline. I couldn’t reach you.”

  “But, but,” I sputtered, “what about the royalty rates and when are the payment periods—I was afraid this was going to happen!”

  “Don’t you wanna hear the deal?”

  I could tell, Janklow was feeling ten feet tall.

  “Sure.”

  “A million dollars.” He let it sink in.

  “A million dollars?”

  He moved right to self-congratulations. “You gotta believe it.” He rattled on. “So Avon was at six-fifty and I called up Dick Snyder [Simon & Schuster/Pocketbooks] this morning at ten, I tell him, ‘Look, a low editor at your place says she’s interested in this book but I don’t know how real that is. I want you to know it’s hot. The demographics alone—forty-three million American women—do the figures yourself—what can you give me for this book?’” Janklow hurried on: “Snyder gets all excited. He said he’d published Passages when he was at Bantam and he knew what he could do with this book. It’s all about you gotta believe, and with this wonderful book you wrote, these guys only needed two hours to check the demographics, and they believe. Snyder called me back with his High Noon preemptive bid—a million bucks. He said, ‘I need an answer in fifteen minutes.’ He got it. Avon had dropped out at seven-fifty.”

  It was a sweet ironic moment of triumph. Men would only take a subject like menopause seriously when it generated numbers like forty-three million potential buyers.

  I thanked Janklow profusely and went home eager to share the excitement with Clay. When we came together, we began dancing and giggling like kids who’d pulled off a great caper.

  TWO WEEKS LATER, I had my first meeting with Graydon Carter. He had taken Tina Brown’s place as the much-anticipated editor in chief of Vanity Fair, a handsome, Byronic man-about-town and Hollywood connoisseur. He took me by surprise when he said, “God, all those candidate profiles starting in ’87, then Gorbachev, then your menopause article, and a bestselling book—the last five years have probably been your best.”

  Probably so. They coincided with being happily married—and menopausal. Dr. Pat had been right about postmenopause. I felt buoyant, surging with a new kind of energy, not so start-stop but more sustainable. It’s what Margaret Mead had described as “post-menopausal zest.” My waist had returned. My memory was more reliable (but don’t expect me to remember your name the first time we’re introduced).

  I had written it. I had declared it in speeches. But living it is believing it: the most satisfying stage of our lives as women is our fifties. Not for everyone, of course. But for the majority of healthy women, as studies have documented, this is the stage of highest well-being. I could not, and did not, imagine anything of the sort when I was in my thirties and writing Passages. Back then, I had stopped parsing the stages of adult life at fifty-five. I thought then, What could happen of any interest after fifty? How quaint.

  But it wasn’t just postmenopausal zest. It was the accumulated force of the women’s movement that coalesced around that time. The show “trial” of Anita Hill in 1991 had awakened millions of women and men to the spectacle of an all-white, middle-aged male phalanx of senators shaming a prim, thirty-five-year-old attorney and academic, who calmly exposed an assault against women that then had no name—sexual harassment. It took the daring of Anita Hill and millions of boomer women who stood up and demanded a respected place at the table. We empowered one another.

  The media dubbed 1992 the Year of the Woman. Barbara Mikulski, the first woman ever to be elected to the U.S. Senate without following a husband, made me laugh when I interviewed her about it. “Calling 1992 the Year of the Woman makes it sound like the Year of the Caribou or the Year of the Asparagus,” she scoffed. “We’re not a fad, a fancy, or a year.” She knew that we had to be prepared for a long, slow, never-give-up, nonviolent war until 51 percent of the American population was fairly represented in the Senate. President George H. W. Bush was not supportive. In a debate at the University of Richmond, he voiced his contempt for women in politics. “This is supposed to be the year of the women in the Senate. Let’s see how they do. I hope a lot of them lose.”

  But they didn’t. Mikulski galvanized other women to step up and run for office. Patty Murray, an education activist from Washington State, won a Senate seat despite being ridiculed as “a mom in tennis shoes.” Carol Moseley Braun was the first and only African American woman to be elected to the U.S. Senate. Barbara Boxer and Dianne Feinstein became the all-female face of California’s representation in the Senate. By 2013, it took a woman in the Senate, Patty Murray, to start talking with her conservative male counterpart in the House, Paul Ryan, and break through the partisan gridlock, avoid another government shutdown, and revive the art of compromise to come to a friendly agreement on a budget deal.

  By now, I like to think we are living in the Century of the Woman.

  CHAPTER 34

  Lions and Toads

  WE ARE CLIMBING THE STEPS to the Parthenon of the printed word. From behind its grand pillars the New York Public Library on Fifth Avenue glows and beckons through a blur of rain. The fantastical lions, Patience and Fortitude, sit astride stone steps too high for ordinary mortals. It is the night of the Literary Lions gala, an award coveted by practitioners of fiction and nonfiction, who will be draped in red sashes and bronze medals, warriors in the battle of wits to create something that might last.

  My toes, slippered in satin, float upward step by step, my arm buoyed by the man who sculpted my career as a writer. “Clay!” people call out. It’s Tom Wolfe and Gay Talese and Vartan Gregorian, then president of the library; everybody knows Clay. He has done far more to deserve recognition than I, having given countless writers their voice. But tonight, he takes pride in the fact that I am one of the new literary lions. His throat inflates like a bullfrog who commands the pond. I am happy too, and sick with fear.

  At the top step, jaded news photographers pretend to be thrilled to see each couple. “Over here! Oh, yes, divine!” Air kisses are blown. Embraces carefully avoid dislodging hairpieces. Those who have to be asked “Your names?” suffer a crisis of fading social status, quickly assuaged by the feigned apology “Oh yes, of course.” Clay and I are recognized as a power couple.

  I lift the skirt of my long beaded gown, taking care not to let droop the swath of black satin in which I am caped. I have never dressed so grandly. The usually hushed halls are suddenly deafening with jollity. Glasses clink and silken hems are lifted when the command is sounded to descend for dinner. Among the twenty writers to be lionized tonight are William Styron, Neil and Susan Sheehan, Maya Angelou. Through this portal have walked giants of the word, carriers of the narrative of our species. I feel humbled.

  My mind lurches back to a few hours before when Clay and I waited in a cramped examining room. Clay sat with his naked limbs poking out from a paper gown. We were propped side by side, on stools, like dolls. When the imperious Indian surgeon entered, he rolled on his stool toward Clay. I was in the way. I skittered to one side. In the cut-crystal accent showcasing his posh British education, the surgeon delivered his dictum.

  “Radical neck surgery—it is your only option.”

  I wanted to say, “There is never only one option,” but I was invisible.

  “I need your full consent,” the surgeon told Clay.

  “Full consent—what does that mean?”

  “To do whatever is necessary.” The surgeon stepped out while we considered. Clay’s head lurched forward. His shoulders slumped. I pulled him to my shoulder before he fell off the stool. I had never seen him faint.

  THE GONG RINGS FOR DINNER, summoning me back to the librar
y. The swarm suspends its ritual calculus of status positioning and descends to another vast room beneath a glass-and-steel dome. We look for name cards. I am seated next to a King Kong of publishing. He has discarded the wife who helped him build his company. She is a friend of mine and the editor on my next book. Conversation will be forced, but nonetheless he loudly boasts about his new lady, a younger, sexier, more accommodating accessory.

  I catch Clay’s eyes, distant in thought. He smiles. He isn’t scared. He had told me earlier that day, “We’ll get through this, together.” But he wants me to make a promise. “Don’t tell anyone.”

  “Why not?”

  “The minute people hear the word cancer, they move away.”

  “Not everyone.”

  “Oh, yes. It’s like you’re contagious. You must promise me. Not a word.”

  “Well, I’ll tell Maura, of course.”

  “No! Not anyone.”

  How could I shut out my daughter? She would never forgive me. She is my rock. But how could I go against the wishes of a person who is looking death in the eye? Loyalty demands that I seal this knowledge. It scalds my throat.

  Clay’s booming voice suddenly summons our whole table of literary lionizers into a single scintillating conversation. No one knows that we are not what we appear to be. We are about to be turned into something else, unknowable, a powerless couple up against mortality.

  WEEKS LATER, WE SOUGHT A SECOND CONSULT, this time with Dr. John Conley, a pioneering head and neck surgeon. We sat long enough in his waiting room on Central Park West to learn that he was a violinist and a self-published poet. We liked the idea of a surgeon who was an artist. A tall, elegant gentleman appeared and summoned us into his consultation room, treating us like guests who had stopped by for tea. He poured Lapsang souchong into porcelain cups and casually offered Clay the same solution: radical neck surgery.

  “Don’t let the name scare you,” he said quickly, soothing the shock. He told us he had pioneered a procedure that spared deformity.

  I had looked up this physician in the Columbia Presbyterian Medical Center database. There was only one item of alarm: he was seventy-nine years old. How steady could his hands be in a lengthy operation? Clay did not have to verbalize his fear to another man. Instinctively, Dr. Conley moved closer to Clay, knee to knee in fact, and held out his long tapered hands.

  “I do three or four of these operations a week,” he said. “They take from three to five hours. I’m as steady as I ever was, or I wouldn’t still be doing surgery.” All the while he described the procedure, his hands remained still as gloves on a table.

  Dr. Conley’s approach was collaborative. He wanted Clay’s complete buy-in and he included me, the caregiver, in endorsing his care plan. We agreed.

  “And now, I want to ask something of you two.” We were enthusiastic. “On the morning of surgery, I want you to tell me ‘You are going to do a splendid operation.’” He was showing us that this truly was a collaboration based on acceptance and trust.

  Across the street, Central Park was beginning to awaken from the dreary winter with a splurge of cherry blossoms. Clay grabbed me around the waist and pulled me to him, giddy with the euphoria of disaster.

  “Hope. We have hope!” He led me into the park to find a tree to hide us, “while I kiss you all over.”

  We took the time to walk up and down the grassy hillocks from Eighty-Sixth Street to 110th and stop to look at the Shakespeare Garden. It was poetry in color, each bed a bright verse of English flowers from the bard’s plays or sonnets: columbine bells, primrose, quince, eglantine, and the deadly rue. I vowed then and there, one day I would create a Shakespeare garden as a paean to the aHa! moment of this day.

  The toad of cancer crouching on the back of Clay’s tongue had been caught early and would be cut out. Dr. Conley was confident that radiation would finish the job. We were buoyant with victory.

  We were not a powerless couple. We were partners in fighting for life.

  PART THREE

  THE BONUS YEARS

  AND NOW LET US BELIEVE IN A LONG YEAR THAT IS GIVEN TO US, NEW, UNTOUCHED, FULL OF THINGS THAT HAVE NEVER BEEN.

  —RAINER MARIA RILKE

  CHAPTER 35

  The Happiness Prescription

  “IT’S INDOLENT.” The oncologist broke the news slowly. “This is a low-grade non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma. The median survival rate at your age is ten years. But since you have no symptoms and early treatment with any drug won’t improve your life span,” and here his voice rose cheerily, “I’m going to leave you alone.”

  It was 1993 and the new diagnosis came out of the blue. An invisible killer had been sleeping in Clay’s blood for who knew how long? It was my friend Dr. Pat who had sent us to see Dr. Morton Coleman, director of the Lymphoma Center at New York Hospital. She had told us he was known for his humanistic approach.

  We were stunned at being “left alone”—did this mean giving up?

  “My advice is this,” Dr. Coleman said in a voice pulsing with confidence. “Go out and live your life—the two of you. Do something wonderful you wouldn’t have done before.” He smiled. “Do it together.”

  This was the secret of true power, I thought. Not external success, not the overkill of Big Pharma. Why not try to tap into the powers of the mind to mobilize the body’s astonishing capacity for self-healing? By changing the way one thinks, one could mitigate the emotions that translate into harmful chemicals in the body. We made a commitment to try. Most weekends for close to a year, we took long, meditative walks in Central Park or, when the weather was good, in the Mashomack Preserve on Shelter Island. Meandering along paths through dense oak woodlands and crossing a latticework of tidal creeks, we would suddenly emerge on the shoreline. Sitting, hushed, we would wait to be startled by the soaring of a great-winged fish hawk. Osprey were protected there. The ultimate thrill was to see the acrobatic swoop of an osprey diving for its dinner.

  When we spoke on these quiet walks, it was to wrestle with the next great existential question: Stripped of title and setting, what was it about his work that Clay most loved? What could revive the excitement and purpose he had felt in putting out his own publications ? It would take a full year before he found the answer.

  After Manhattan, Inc. folded, Fairchild Publications gave Clay another command as editor of a men’s magazine called M. For the first time in his life, Clay was locked into a contract and had to go through the motions of a corporate employee with no passion of his own. Where was the bodysurfer I knew who had an unquenchable zest for catching the next wave? The man who always dared his protégés to go beyond? The man who transmuted his cocksure smile into a Roman candle under his writers’ fearful feet with the emphatic words “You can do it!” Now he was a man stopped in his tracks. Not running, not looking for the next wave, not getting out of his sweatpants until noon. It didn’t require another doctor to tell us that he was suffering from chronic low-grade depression.

  Secretly, Clay’s network of grateful colleagues and protégés, people whose careers he had fostered, including me, had been meeting for months to share ideas for how to get him back in action. The group had approached several journalism schools. We heard from the journalism school at the University of California, Berkeley. The dean there, Tom Goldstein, a native New Yorker, was excited about luring Clay to the West Coast. I thought Clay would be thrilled, given the loss of New West and his interrupted dream of exploring California lifestyles and politics. Instead, he was phlegmatic.

  Here I was, at the peak of success in my work, while Clay was beginning a descent. Not surprising, given that he was a dozen years older. We were changing places. He had been the guide and inspiration that allowed me to become what I was meant to be. How could I, in essence, be as valuable to him—slow his descent?

  I HAD A JOURNEY OF MY OWN to make. It had been seven years since I began research on the sequel to Passages. In that earlier book I had stopped tracking the stages of adult life at the age I was now—
at fifty-five. Back then, in my thirties and midway through that brilliant decade of endless promise, I could not imagine what would be of interest about life after the midfifties. How naive!

  Now, two decades later, science and medicine were stretching our life spans by some thirty years. A Western man in 1900 had a life expectancy of about fifty-five. Nearing the year 2000, his average life span was eighty-five, and the average woman’s life span was eighty-eight. One in four baby boomers was expected to live to one hundred. These facts threw off by miles our calculations about middle and later age—nothing short of a revolution in the adult life cycle. In a single century we had created almost a different species.

  Why wait until we were old to take advantage of those extra years? Whole new stages were springing up at several points along the landscape of adult life, offering new opportunities and discontinuities that had never before appeared on the maps in our minds. To investigate how people were adapting to this startling expansion in lifetime was a thrilling prospect.

  From beneath my bed I dragged out the zippered suitcase containing all the journals and hundreds of pages of transcripts from interviews I’d conducted thus far with men and women in their late forties, fifties, sixties. I was on top of the mountain. If I stopped long enough to look around, the view was breathtaking, a 360-degree panorama of the roads taken, hills climbed, foolish detours, and crash sites. But I had survived—more than that, I had thrived. Now the specter of mortality had once again invaded our dreams.