by Gail Sheehy
But once we returned to the hotel after a day’s shooting, I would fight restlessness and boredom and eat too many Snickers bars. I tried to write in my journal. Too raw to bleed on paper. Not ready yet. Losing someone to whom you could pour out your soul leaves you alone with the silent screaming self-consciousness that is too much to bear. No tinsely party or sumptuous meal or self-indulgent shopping spree would blot up the seeping fear of being solitary forever. So much of grief, I decided, is raw fear.
Would there ever be happy times again? A tearless night? A rising from bed that was not a heroic act? Careless laughter? I would not join a grief group. I’d rather join a cheerful group. Dr. Bolletino, the cancer family specialist, was correct. I had to feel it to heal it, and the best way was to write out the feelings. I joined a playwriting workshop given by my friend Milan Stitt, a veteran playwright and teacher who ran the graduate playwriting program at Carnegie Mellon University. Theater has always been the church where I go to heal. Playwriting was a long-postponed passion. I wrote a play, Chasing the Tiger, about love and death, based on Clay and me. Many late nights I sat in the pillowed window seat of a coffee shop and let flow my feelings on paper, from icy to scalding. Writing absorbed them.
The first staged reading, in Lakeville, Connecticut, starred Jill Clayburgh and Ed Herrmann. Jill, a friend and superb actress who had starred in Hustling, portraying me. I didn’t know at the time, nor did anyone outside of her family, that Jill herself was suffering from cancer. She gave a noble performance, her last stage appearance. Five months later, in November 2010, under the care of Dr. Sean Morrison, she died peacefully at home.
WHEN PASSAGES IN CAREGIVING was published, in May 2010, I gave my maiden speech on the subject at a party thrown by my publisher.
“You must be a saint!” exploded a woman whose husband had been faltering for some years after a stroke. “Didn’t you ever feel angry or resentful or even secretly wish he’d die sooner rather than later?”
Of course I had. The widow was alerting me to be less preachy. I was no saint. I hate making this confession. After two years in the program, I had “slipped.” I’d like to blame my drinking problem on the book tour. After performing all day, I would wind up with a major speech at a town-hall meeting or a hospital fund-raiser. Audience response was a high. So was the intimacy of listening to people’s stories while signing books. Then, suddenly, I was deposited at another strange hotel, hungry, tired, and lonely, greeted by a big gift basket of wine and cheese. So I would pour a glass to keep me company while I emptied my melancholy into a journal. Wine only made me more maudlin, so, of course, I needed another glass, and then another to put me to sleep. Four hours later, when the alcohol wore off, I would suddenly awake with a racing heart and fears stripped bare. Some model caregiver!
Gratefully, I rejoined my spiritual fellowship. My top priority every day would be to resist taking a drink. My sponsor met me for my confession and recommitment to the program. She admitted that, like me, she didn’t believe that one drink, one step over the line, and you were lost. But the pattern was there. The behavior was recognizable. I was one of the lucky ones who found recovery before hitting bottom.
After the first month, the physical craving subsided. Gradually, my attitude toward alcohol changed. After six months, I didn’t have to fight it. I felt almost giddy in ordering my new drink of choice, ginger ale. Once my drinking problem was removed, I found something even more wonderful about the program. It gave me a new outlook on life. I found so much more enjoyment in simple things, precious moments, lesser expectations. Going to meetings became essential to maintaining my well-being and learning humility. I thanked my Higher Power each morning for doing for me what I couldn’t do for myself. And I got an answer! I printed it out and hung it over my morning mirror:
dear gail,
i won’t need your help today.
love,
god
THE GREAT HEROISM OF A SOBER LIFE is getting up in the morning and facing the day, greeting others, going out into the world with something to give. When we are in the grave of our own thoughts, feeling like we will never be able to crawl back out, our fingernails packed with dirt, how is it that sometime later we can be laughing, and laughing hard?
One morning in the fall of 2010, an early phone call shook me out of ruminating. The voice was blithe as a clash of cymbals. “Gail, dear Gail, lovely to hear your voice! Will you be having your Thanksgiving party this year?” It was our dear friend David Frost. The memory of our traditional party gave me a flush of pleasure, though I had planned no such thing. “David, leave it to you to push my button.”
Frostie must have sensed even across an ocean that I needed a kick in the pants. I promised to think about getting up a party in the country. But once I did, I was stung to remember that I no longer had a country house. I no longer had a country life. A fellow Vanity Fair writer, Michael Shnayerson, was a well-known host in Sag Harbor. It took only one phone call to set a plan in motion. Michael and I decided we would each call twenty people. I would try to summon the spirit to invite our old friends to another Saturday-night Thanksgiving soirée.
Boeuf Bourguignon sounded easy. Michael and I split the tasks. Shopping was my job, a delightfully tactile experience. Beef, butchered into exactly two-inch chunks, needed to be squeezed to judge its plumpness. Were the mushrooms firm enough to slice clean? Was the bacon smoked in applewood? The baby carrots fresh from the earth? Sniffing fresh rosemary, parsley, and thyme made me swoon. I bought the cognac and pinot noir to tart up the stew, planning to make my sober beef in a separate pot.
Michael was late returning from New England where he had to pick up his daughter from boarding school. The beef quivered in my hands as if eager for the pot. Only three hours until party time! I started heating the oil. When Michael arrived, we took turns tossing the meat into the deep fryer, squealing at the sizzle of fat. A fountain of fat sprayed to the floor. We kept at our task, twelve pounds of beef to be seared in hot oil, in single layers, slowly turned to brown on all sides. After an hour or so, the floor was becoming a puddle, cooling to the thickness of collagen.
I slid. Landing gently, I flailed around but couldn’t get up. I coasted into Michael’s shins. It brought him down, too. Not one of our feet could find a grip. Slipsliding on our bums like kids who shouldn’t be left alone, we laughed, ridiculously, infectiously, unstoppably, but so good.
Friends arrived, faces I was famished to see after too long. Their precious idiosyncrasies endeared them to me more than ever. Tom Wolfe in his deliberately mismatched socks; Bina Bernard, who had shepherded me through the maze of Clay’s rehabs and returns, on a health kick again; Steve Byers, a Montana writer proud of his Tom McGuane sensibility and wearing a cowboy hat.
To my surprise, Robert Emmett Ginna, my onetime editor at Life, appeared. I had invited him, but we hadn’t seen each other since Clay’s memorial. His red hair was whitened, but his crooked Irish smile was still ravishing. Showing up was a sign that he might be moving back into life himself after his wife’s death seven years earlier.
Hours later after most guests had said their good-byes, I found Robert alone in the sitting room. We sat close. “How was the dinner?”
“Jolly,” he said.
“And the food?”
“You were the most delicious dish of the evening.”
This could easily be dismissed as a pickup line by a practiced party drunk. But coming from Robert, an entertaining storyteller but otherwise an impeccably correct and buttoned-up character, it was astonishing. He and Clay were old friends, having shared a cramped office at Life when they were both what Robert called “young cubs” breaking into print. Robert was a polymath, an art historian who became editor in chief of Little, Brown, who wrote and produced Hollywood films, and was a founding editor of three magazines, Scientific American, Horizon, and People. For the past twenty years he had been teaching creative writing, mostly at Harvard.
Robert invited me to lunch at the
American Hotel, the grand old duchess of Sag Harbor. Once he was sated by oysters and an ice-cold Beefeater martini, he told me that since his wife died he had lived alone in his old house in New Hampshire, and he had just sold it. His pipe dream was that in his later years, he’d creep off to Ireland and read himself to sleep on the porch of an old-age pensioner’s home.
“I can live without love and sex,” he said.
I smiled and said, “But why would you want to?”
I FOUND THE NERVE to call him and ask what he was doing for New Year’s Eve. He mumbled that he was just getting settled in Sag Harbor and preparing to teach creative writing in a graduate M.F.A. program at Stony Brook Southampton. Moments later, he called back, “Why sure, I can come into Manhattan. What would you think of dinner and music at Michael Feinstein’s?” He arrived formally attired in a pin-striped navy-blue suit, black hat, and cane and swept us off with a flourish to enjoy an evening of Christine Ebersole singing love songs. After we rang in 2011, I asked if he’d like to come up to my apartment for a nightcap. He sat in the chair normally occupied by my new dog, Chollie. I sat on the sofa. Robert didn’t know he was trespassing on the dog’s chair, but he must have noticed his rival sulking and prowling around our feet.
He didn’t kiss me.
Later that night, he sent an e-mail:
Sorry! Flustered. I fear that I get intimidated—shy?—in your company. Maybe I feared Chollie would disapprove if I were too forward. Anyway, you were beautiful this evening. To quote a favorite lyric: “You’re the top / You’re the Mona Lisa.”
We began to enjoy sharing our passions for books, theater, art exhibits. Later in spring, when I rented a little house in Sag Harbor, Robert would drop in at dinnertime with a freshly caught flounder and insist upon making dinner for me. It was delightful to take on the role of sous chef to an inspired cook. Over his martini and my ginger ale, he captivated me with stories of the movies he’d made, the fascinating characters he had known, from seminal physicists to his literary heroes, Sean O’Casey and James Salter. He had caroused with actor Peter O’Toole and squired a twenty-two-year-old ingenue fresh off the boat from England, Audrey Hepburn, when he was Life’s theater reporter. He knew just about everybody and everything. I was enthralled.
In May 2011, a workshop of my play, Chasing the Tiger, began rehearsals at the Bay Street Theater in Sag Harbor. Robert asked if I’d like to share a reprise of our New Year’s Eve date.
Christine Ebersole was singing at Bay Street. The place was full, so we climbed to the top row and perched on the steps. I was one step beneath him. We hummed and sighed to a repertoire of Noël Coward’s love songs. It was the closing song that melted me: “Falling in Love Again.” Without looking, I felt my hand move behind to find his. At the same moment I felt his fingertips. His hand closed over mine like a warm glove in winter. We didn’t look at each other. We didn’t have to.
Afterward, on the uncomfortable sofa in my rental, we pretended to be interested in TV news. He moved closer. Nibbled my ear. He brushed a shy kiss across my lips. I had forgotten how proper he was. “I’d like to try that again,” he said. Embracing, we began sliding into the gulley between seat cushions on the damn sofa.
I stood up and took his hand and led him into the guest bedroom. In the dim light I turned to face him. I lifted my halter top over my head and watched the flush of astonishment come up in his face. We fell into each other’s arms.
“I’ve been asleep for seven years,” he whispered to me, “Rip van Winkle on a mountaintop in New Hampshire, living alone ever since Margaret died.” Again and again, he marveled, “I can’t believe it, you’ve turned the lights back on in my life.”
I was stunned to feel myself falling in love again. We both began giggling. The more I laughed, the harder he laughed. Embarrassment dissolved into real intimacy.
A SURGE OF VITALITY SEEMED to alert the universe that I was still alive and kicking. Suddenly the curtain began going up on a new act in my life. USA Today asked me to write a biweekly column about new passages. Great! I enjoyed firing off pieces for Tina Brown’s digital magazine, the Daily Beast. The people I met and conversations I had at the Aspen Ideas Festival set my mind spinning like a top. Requests came in for me to speak about Sex and the Seasoned Woman, a book I had had fun researching several years earlier about women fifty plus who are marinated in life experience and still passionate about life, including sex. I found out that seasoned women rock. Seven hundred of them had responded to my online questionnaire. It had been a lark to drive across the country and meet with groups of such women to hear their stories of Internet romances, pilot-light lovers, start-up businesses, audacious travels—no one had ever asked about their passions before—I couldn’t shut them up!
It was always a pleasure to return to the quiet of Sag Harbor and see Robert. What I didn’t know for over a year was that he endured constant pain. This was a man who had walked the length of Ireland at seventy-five bearing a thirty-eight-pound rucksack. Despite two surgeries, the severe bend in his back could not be set right. But I would not have guessed at his pain when he accompanied me on my nightly dog walkings. These were the shortest walks of my life, but some of the sweetest. We both knew he wouldn’t be in my life forever, but we would make the most of the moments.
Over numerous dinners in colorful Irish joints and his choice of French cafés, Robert goaded me to write about my life. When I demurred, he said, “C’mon, you’ve been fearless in exposing yourself to new experiences and challenges. You’ve taken LSD, you’ve jumped out of airplanes, you dressed up in hot pants to walk the streets with hookers; for heaven’s sake, you embedded yourself in the Irish civil war before anybody ever heard of embedded reporters and got caught in cross fire! You even scared presidential candidates—I mean, my God, didn’t the first President Bush shudder and say, ‘Is this going to be a full psychiatric layout?’ You’re so alive to the people and happenings around you, you can’t help yourself. You live life in the interrogative!” He sipped his martini. “It’s about time you wrote a memoir.”
How could I craft a story with so many disparate experiences into one coherent narrative—the fearing and daring, the writing and mothering, the succeeding and failing, the loving and caregiving and dying and starting over? They were all pieces of my puzzle, and they could not be separated, because that is how women live, always struggling to find the right balance to create harmony.
“Gail!” Robert’s deep voice shook me out of my reverie. “You’ve had an extraordinary life.” He was speaking now like a true editor. “Just start with when you sneaked down the stairs from the estrogen zone to pitch a story to Clay.”
AS I NOW REFLECT ON what daring means in my life, I realize it is how I survive. When I feel fear, what I do is dare. Fear immobilizes. Daring is action. It changes the conditions. It startles people into different reactions. It’s a crap shoot, but it can be the catalyst to empowering oneself.
Happily, I began daring early. I thought back to when I was twelve and began sneaking into New York on the train to watch a million private lives crisscrossing Grand Central Terminal. That gave me the confidence to write about anybody. When I worried that J. C. Penney would not hire a girl in the pre-feminist ’60s, I dared to ask if I could see Mr. Penney himself. At the risk of being fired by my boss on the women’s page, I crashed the all-male city room of the Herald Tribune to pitch my best story to the hottest editor there.
When Clay insisted that I follow Senator Robert Kennedy’s presidential campaign, I almost froze. But I took the dare. It thrust me into one of the major historic events of the century.
On reflection, I can see the pattern. Try as I did, I could not figure out how to balance being a mother and ambitious author while acting as hostess and consort of a powerful man. I dared to leave him. If I had stayed with Clay and failed, we would have lost each other forever. He was the love of my life and I risked losing him in order to prove that I could stand on my own two feet. When I later found the c
ourage to marry him, I was secure enough to feel complete. And together we dared to adopt a child of trauma. By then in my late forties, I was better able to strike a healthy balance.
To find the perfect balance between the forces in our lives is impossible. When we are going through a passage, we lose equilibrium. But once we are able to let go and adapt to the change, we can grow and find a new balance. The tai chi I practice in Central Park with a friend and teacher is leading me to a deeper understanding of the Chinese philosophy of yin and yang. It is all about balance. I love the symbol—two swirls wrapped around each other within a closed circle. The white crescent, yang, represents daylight, associated with fire, sun, and masculine traits: fast, hard, aggressive, but it encompasses a dollop of black. The black swirl, yin, designates the darkness of night, and feminine qualities of nurturance, structure, and rest. Yet it also incorporates a small circle of light. The two opposites cannot exist without each other. They are symbiotic. So it is in life.
Whenever my dark side threatens to overtake my light, I remember the mantra that has guided my life: Lean forward, shoot off the edge of the pool, and keep on swimming.
PHOTO SECTION
Gail pitching Clay, ca. 1986.
©2014 The Estate of Cosmos Andrew Sarchiapone
Clay at New York, ca. 1970: “I’ll make you a star.”
©Burton Berinsky/Landov Media