With that, I left Manhattan.
* * *
* * *
Unlike millions of other women who would get sectionorced that year, I was lucky to have made enough money on my own to save for the proverbial rainy day—of which, in middle age, there will be many. As a sort of fuck you to the bank, I paid off the mortgage, rented my apartment, hung up my high heels, and hightailed it to my teacup house in the hills of Litchfield County. And because there was plenty of room to run, I bought two standard poodles, Pepper and Prancer, and did what I’d always wanted to do ever since I was a little kid: I wrote whatever I wanted and I rode dressage horses.
Being what my father called a cocky son of a bitch, right away I got bucked off and broke a bone—after which I hobbled around with a walker and felt like an old person. I wasn’t 100 percent sure that I should get back on the horse, but my father encouraged me. He reminded me of how I’d always “gotten back on the horse” as a child. Three months later, I entered a competition and won a couple of ribbons.
I woke up in the morning and inhaled the sound of silence.
I was happy.
I didn’t think about my old life. I didn’t think about New York. And most of all, I didn’t think about men.
Nevertheless, six months into my retreat, I got a call from Tina Brown. She had a story idea for me. Now that the appropriate time had passed since my sectionorce, she suggested that I throw myself back into the dating world and write about what it was like to be dating over fifty. I could do internet dating. I could hire a matchmaker.
I cut her off.
I don’t think so.
I wasn’t ready to start dating. But most of all, I didn’t want to. I’d been in relationships for nearly thirty-five years. I’d even experienced the full relationship cycle—fall in love, get married, and get sectionorced.
And now I was supposed to do it all over again? Was engaging in the relationship cycle the only thing I could do with my life? I thought about the time-honored definition of crazy: doing the same thing over and over again and hoping for a different result.
It was time to put an end to the cycle. And so I decided for the first time in thirty-four years to be man-free.
This also meant being sex-free. At this point in my life, I’m not a casual sex person.
I didn’t talk about it, of course. The topic of sex—once the source of so much amusement, embarrassment, fear, and joy—rarely came up. My single friends had been single forever and not dating and therefore not getting any, while my married friends were married and dealing with kids and also—I imagined—not getting any. But every now and then, when I’d explain to some man that I wasn’t interested in going on a date and frankly I might never be interested in going on a date ever again, he would gasp, “But what about sex?” as if I had just killed a kitten.
“What about it?”
“What do you do?”
“I don’t do anything.”
“But don’t you need sex?”
“Do you? I’ve found that people who need sex tend to make bad decisions to get it. I’ve seen people blow up an entire world-class career just because they needed to get a little.”
Besides, I had so much else to do that felt much more interesting. Like cooking elaborate meals. Learning Instagram. Making a pop song on GarageBand. My best friend was a girl called Angie. She lived up the road and she had just survived cancer and worked at a psychiatric institution teaching teenage kids Shakespeare. We would hike up and down the country roads, passing Calder’s sculptures and Frank McCourt’s house. There was no cell service up there, so we talked. About feminism and the meaning of life and the fever dream novels I was writing. We’d often stop by Arthur Miller’s writing studio, the one he made himself with
his own hands and where he wrote The Crucible. It was a small space, maybe eight by ten, with a smoothed piece of long wood attached to the wall as a desk. I’d go to the window and stare at the view of the woods and the dirt road and think: This is the very same view Arthur Miller must have looked at a million times. And how did he feel? Did he, too, despair of ever getting this writing thing right? And then I’d pray: Please, please let some of Arthur Miller’s genius rub off on me.
Pleeeeasssse.
Well, it didn’t.
During the time I spent in Connecticut, I wrote three books—every one of which my publishers hated, so much so that they refused to publish them. When I finally managed to get out a whole manuscript I thought they’d like, they sent it back with a black slash across every page.
Welcome to middle-age madness, where your career might possibly be over.
I called Marilyn. Help.
“Sweetie,” she said. “I think you’re going crazy up there all by yourself. Which is why the stuff you’re writing is crazy, too.”
And then my accountant called.