Days later I woke to an email from my father saying he’d put Medley down. We had been given the move-out date, and I’d spent recent weeks scrolling through rental listings looking for an apartment for him that would fit his budget. He emailed to tell Alexis and me about Medley after the fact, claiming that she was getting old and wouldn’t survive the move. I went white with rage when I read the email, furious with myself for not considering this possibility and whisking the dog away to my sister’s or to my apartment for safekeeping along with the dishes and the books and the wine goblets.
I couldn’t stay angry for long, though. I didn’t have room for it. Things had settled down, my mother had a home, the babies had arrived safely, but my mind still felt like the bar on my phone that let me know how much storage space was left; there was only a sliver. I didn’t know when the time would come when I could empty myself enough to recharge, but I knew until it did I simply needed to press on, until our family had been entirely dismantled and then rebuilt into whatever form it was about to take.
It was at this point that Jo intervened and insisted on sending me on a river cruise through the south of France. An only child, she had spent much of her life shouldering the responsibility of caring for a chronically ill, immobilized father and an alcoholic mother; I never needed to find the words to explain realities to her. Her offer—a week on a boat, with little internet connection, six time zones away—was the reset I needed.
18. The Other Woman
My friend Lesley was the only person I knew who shared my habit of pilgrimaging to places she’d long loved in books. Lesley was a journalist and a writer, and the difference between how we pursued our various obsessions was that Lesley turned her trips into feature stories for glossy magazines, whereas I merely aimed to satisfy my inner eight-year-old’s desire to set actual foot in places I’d marked off on maps. When her stories involved travel, I’d often gone along with her.
One year, after attending the annual South by Southwest festival in Austin, I’d rented a car and driven to Kansas City (stopping briefly at Laura Ingalls Wilder’s Mansfield, Missouri, house on the way), where I’d picked Lesley up at the airport. The next day we drove across the state, marveling at the straight roads and undulating landscape, all the way to the tiny town of Holcomb to research a story she was writing on the fiftieth anniversary of Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood. Lesley was six months pregnant at the time, something she was not afraid to emphasize, theorizing it might make tight-lipped residents open up more easily. She was right. We soon found ourselves in quiet country kitchens, being fed sandwich meat on sliced white bread, listening to tales about the time Capote and his childhood friend and then–research assistant Harper Lee (To Kill a Mockingbird was complete but wouldn’t be published until the following year) had come to town. I was standing in front of the sink during one such visit, rinsing lunch plates under a framed needlepoint stitched saying, which read: I AM WOMAN, HEAR ME ROAR, when the woman who owned the house remarked that Lee was the more impressive of the two. “I wouldn’t be surprised if she’d actually written the book.”
The next afternoon I snapped a photo of Lesley in her chic black dress, sporting large black sunglasses, standing in front of the long driveway leading to the house where the murders had taken place. We sent it to her husband by way of a Wish You Were Here postcard.
Not long after that, Lesley convinced the journalist Sally Quinn to let us stay for a weekend at the Grey Gardens house in East Hampton, Long Island. Quinn and her husband, Washington Post executive editor Ben Bradlee, had purchased the home in the late seventies from Big and Little Edie Beale—the aunt and first cousin, respectively, of Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis—under the agreement they could not tear the house down. They’d then spent years carefully renovating it. The house and its former occupants, the eccentric Beale duo, had been made famous after the release of the Maysles brothers’ documentary Grey Gardens, which captured the mother and daughter, once members of high society, living in squalor with numerous cats and raccoons, though seemingly quite content with this reclusive world they’d created for themselves. The Edies, the house, and the film had long reached cult status, and when Lesley heard Grey Gardens would be empty for a weekend between renters, she went to work on getting permission to stay there. And so, one weekend in March the two of us drove out to East Hampton with Lesley’s French pug, as well as her assistant, Alison, and took up residence in the twenty-eight-room estate a block from the beach. In the evening, before dinner we played records on the player while we each took baths in our own huge porcelain tubs with taloned feet. There was a full moon that weekend, and before bed I would walk down to the ocean by myself in the silver light and stand silently as the waves crashed. “My future self is so jealous of us right now,” I said to Lesley when I got back to the house.
We’d been warned beforehand that the house was haunted, and Little Edie’s room in particular was reported to be filled with ghosts; Ben Bradlee had once referred to Little Edie as a witch. In the movie she is seen performing an elaborate flag dance. Her presence was still very much apparent: there were framed pictures of her around the house wearing the turban and fur she was famous for. Her children’s books were still in the library. In her youth she’d been a great beauty and dazzling debutante and liked to boast that famous, powerful men such as Howard Hughes and J. Paul Getty had proposed to her, which is easy to believe when you see pictures of her from that time. However, in her mid-thirties she’d returned to the estate to care for her mother, who’d slipped into financial ruin following a divorce from her father. She never left.
On our first night, Lesley and Alison insisted on sleeping with their doors open, worried about the spirits that might arrive in the dark. I was in the middle of extricating myself from the married man for the first time and offered to sleep in Little Edie’s room, thinking if Little Edie did show up in the middle of the night, perhaps she could provide me with some guidance and if not, at least the distraction from my own problems would be welcome. I turned off all the lights, shut the door, and felt my way into the bed in the pitch-black. And then, after weeks of troubled insomnia, I collapsed immediately into the longest, deepest sleep I’d had in months. “Little Edie must have been looking out for you,” Lesley said the next morning. “We’re simpatico,” I responded. Just two weirdos, I thought, adjusting the turban I’d plucked out of my suitcase and put on for breakfast.
•
Lesley was already set to be in Paris in late April for a magazine story connected to a book she was writing on Hemingway, when Jo swooped in and offered to send me on a river cruise in France for the same week. The cruise departed from Avignon and finished seven days later, up the Rhone in Lyon. It seemed improbable that Lesley and I would cross paths, but it pleased me nonetheless that we’d both be on French soil at the same time.
A few days later I was once again catapulted out of my life and across the ocean, and within hours of exiting the plane in Marseille, I found myself on the balcony of my gilded stateroom, overlooking the flowing Rhone River. When I leaned out the window to take a selfie against the scenery, it looked like I’d photoshopped myself into a van Gogh painting. Everything was decadent, from the light, to the trees lining the water’s edge, to the cheese that oozed out on the china plates in the dining room.
Before coming on this trip I’d made jokes about the senior citizens’ cruise I was embarking on. As it turned out, I was the youngest on board by about twenty years. But sitting here, rolling French vineyards visible through the windows, I was deeply struck by how these privileged men and women had seemingly excelled at later life. This was the lifestyle we were all encouraged to save up for: the reward. With my mother, I had seen the worst-case version of what we imagine growing old to be; here I was observing the best case. The difference was striking, especially coming back to back.
In the mornings, I watched as the women served careful portions of soft-boiled eggs and buttered toast to their husbands, while both sat in
habitual silence. Perhaps that’s what marriage became eventually: one long ritual of performed habits.
Over dinner one night I was invited to join a table of two couples. My solitariness stood out nearly as much as my age in this group, and since arriving I’d been on the receiving end of many curious stares, as if my being alone made them uncomfortable.
I picked up my plate and plunked down in the chair they’d pulled up for me. It soon became clear they didn’t know each other, either. And as the first course arrived (dinner was at least four courses), they began well-honed introductory stories about themselves. The couple on my left had met as children in Afghanistan more than forty years ago. They’d had a clandestine (young people of the opposite sex were not allowed to even converse) relationship that continued into their teens. Afterward they managed to stay in touch when he was temporarily jailed during college for participating in protests.
“He wrote me notes on toilet paper,” the wife said, placing her hand over his and smiling at me, “and then stuffed them into his pockets where his mother would retrieve them when she came to pick up his laundry.”
After her family immigrated to Germany in the late seventies, they lost touch. A few years later, shortly after he was released from jail, he traveled to visit family in Germany. The very first person he ran into at the airport was her cousin. Inquiring after her whereabouts, he quickly traveled to meet her. Two years later they were married and immigrated to California.
“Thirty years and still we go strong,” the husband said, smiling proudly.
The couple on the other side of me were two women, Judy and Joan, celebrating their sixth wedding anniversary and their sixty-fifth birthdays. At first glance I’d pegged them for a pair that had been together for decades, but I couldn’t have been more wrong.
“We met on Match.com,” Judy told me. Judy reminded me of Bea Arthur, tall and stooping, with a deep, commanding voice that suggested she was not in the habit of suffering the opinions of others. “My husband had died in a fire a few years before”—her breath caught with emotion—“and the second I met her I knew Joan was the one.”
Joan looked like an older, heavier, taller version of Blanche Devereaux. I’d seen her being helped on board earlier, navigating the walkway with two canes.
“Same for me,” said Joan. “I’d been divorced for five years, but I knew. My husband walked me down the aisle.”
So much for thinking I had these people, or anything else, pegged. I could practically hear Katharine Hepburn’s sharp voice ring out from The Philadelphia Story: “The time to make up your mind about people is never!” Here, I thought, were the stories that made marriage seem like a good idea. Something to be pursued, and something that could be sustained, but not moribund. Advertisements for marriage. Eventually talk turned to me, and I explained I was on board to write a story for a travel site.
“Do you ever come to California?” asked the man. “I’d like you to meet my son. He is very smart, and very handsome, but he needs to meet a good woman.”
I laughed. “I’m sure he’s too young for me,” I said.
The man shook his head emphatically. “Oh no, he’s twenty-eight.”
I paused, but only briefly—I was learning to get a kick out of the response some people had to my actual age. “I’m forty,” I said, and waited. The round of gasps and raised eyebrows I’d anticipated did not disappoint. After demanding I reveal what year I’d been born—much as I had done on my date with Dan the stunt guy—the man leaned back in his chair and looked at me with raised eyebrows. “And you are not married?”
“I’m not,” I said, only realizing afterward the question had been entirely drained of its sting. Then again, perhaps it’s hard to be stung when you have just stuffed yourself with a pound of stinky, gooey cheese and followed it up with a bowl of chocolate mousse.
His wife leaned forward. She’d been pleasant and smiling throughout the meal but now sounded a bit alarmed. “Oh, but I hope you’re not ruling out marriage entirely?”
I looked around at all the wealth, and security, and pleasantness, and then back at this couple who had survived so much, and to the two women who’d found each other so late in life, and wondered at the idea that anyone could rule out anything other than death. I assured her I wasn’t ruling anything out and then grinned. “But at this point it would take a lot of convincing.” One of the reasons I was on this boat, after all, was because I never had to check in with anyone when I wanted to do something.
When I got back to my room, there was a message waiting for me from Lesley. Back in New York, I ate every Sunday night dinner with her and her husband, biking over the bridge to their West Village apartment, to feast on whatever recipe Lesley had plucked out of her cookbook that week. She would often text in the morning to inquire whether I was okay with her making beef bourguignon or ask how I felt about lobster pie. (I always felt just fine.) Now she was emailing to see if I could manage to meet her for dinner Thursday in Paris. Was there really no chance of making it work? She wanted to know. It had seemed unlikely to me when we’d discussed it in New York, but being on the road, or water, had pushed me back into that frame of mind where most things felt possible, and so I asked. It was absolutely fine, I was quickly informed. I arrive at Gare de Lyon at 6PM! I promptly wrote Lesley. DARLING!!!!!!!!! she wrote back.
The next day when we docked at a small town, one of the attendants on the boat walked me to the local train station and helped me buy a ticket to Paris. The boat would dock in Lyon the following afternoon; the plan was for me to meet them there. It was raining when I reached Paris later that day, a fine Parisian spring rain, but I decided to walk from the train station to Lesley’s hotel in Montparnasse anyway. On the boulevards, the sycamores were in bloom, and the Luxembourg Gardens exploded in color. I stopped and stood in front of the Medici Fountain. The very first time I’d come to Paris, I’d been nineteen, and deeply unimpressed. I hadn’t yet learned to like wine, or cheese (that didn’t come presliced, anyway), and at the hostel I was staying in it was impossible to sleep thanks to all the American backpackers crowded around the television screaming at O. J. Simpson racing his white Bronco across the L.A. freeways. One morning on my walk to find a “normal” coffee, I’d stumbled on the Medici Fountain and thought I’d discovered a secret. It seemed otherworldly to me then, representing all the magic of the world I had been unable to touch growing up. It was still that for me now, more so even, cloaked in the mist of the afternoon. And standing there I thought about the girl I’d been the last time I was here and the woman I was now, and was pretty pleased with myself. But also pleased for the girl who had stood here all those years before not knowing but hoping for what her life might be about—namely adventure—and pleased, too, for the future I couldn’t yet fully imagine that might bring me back here at some point yet again.
Later before dinner Lesley and I sat at Le Select, one of the hot spots of the Lost Generation, eating thick slices of brie and sipping champagne. “I’m jealous of us again,” I said, looking at the picture the waiter had just snapped of us. Afterward we ate with Lesley’s magazine team at Prunier, a famous seafood restaurant around the corner from the Arc de Triomphe that had been a favorite of Hemingway’s. It was the last day for oysters until September, and they came out stacked on enormous trays, nestled in mounds of salt and ice. The oysters themselves were huge, “practically pornographic,” said Lesley before we all dropped one in our mouths. We were joined at the table by Valerie Hemingway. She had been Hemingway’s research assistant when he wrote A Moveable Feast, his memoir about his early years in Paris. She later married one of his sons. She and Lesley were retracing Hemingway’s steps through Paris for the story Lesley was writing.
As we ate Valerie told me about working for Hemingway. She’d been nineteen at the time. She said she thought that for Hemingway, returning to Paris to retrace his own youthful steps there had made him regretful that he’d left his first wife, Hadley. She told me how he’d signed
over all the rights to The Sun Also Rises to Hadley before it was published. And that even afterward, when it was a huge hit, “he never went back on it.”
Back in Lesley’s hotel room that night we lay in the double bed as the rain continued its constant patter on the roof. Before we went to sleep Lesley called her husband and almost-two-year-old daughter to say good night. “You were with us at Grey Gardens, and Kansas, darling,” Lesley said to her daughter. “And soon you’ll get to come on adventures with us again.”
I thought of Hemingway and all his wives. The series of women he’d married who, with the exception of Martha Gellhorn, another journalist heroine of both Lesley’s and mine, had spent most of their lives making his life easier. He was the writer, whose adventurous lifestyle was so coveted as a definition of virility and masculinity. I had coveted it, too. Why else were we here, but to walk in similar footsteps? And yet the older I got, the more I thought about how his home life had been facilitated by his wives: reservations looked after, bags packed, meals cooked. No kidding he was adventurous; he didn’t have to think about anything else. And yet here I was. In a hotel made possible by the friend who cooked extravagant meals for me on Sundays. On a trip organized by the friend who was intent on my benefiting from her job. Able to leave because I ran a business with another friend with whom I shared much of my career and finances. I had hurled myself into this year feeling alone, and prepared for more of it, but as I lay there under the Parisian eaves of our hotel room it occurred to me I’d managed to split many of the so-called duties of a partner between a circle of friends. I was the other woman in their lives, and together they combined to make the perfect husband in mine. They loved and supported me and understood me. For better or worse. Always.
When I returned to the boat the next day, Judy stopped me in the lobby. “We all heard you left and went to Paris for one night,” she boomed. “Train to Paris, for the night. How chic!”
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