During the weeks in Manhattan, we lived in the full-flash intensity of the media arena, vibrating with a succession of salons and book parties at our apartment on East 57th Street. (Harry called his dinner jacket his “working clothes.”) But alone on winter weekends at our house in Quogue, we pulled up the drawbridge and vanished into our cocoon. As I ran through my magazine editorships and wrote my books, while Harry served as ringmaster of Random House and penned best-selling histories, the sounds of industry that emanated from our back-to-back studies—the whir of fax machines, the tap-tap of keyboards, the phone calls wrangling writers—were the music of our marriage.
Now that I’m solo, I wonder what other people do in their free time. After so long holed up in the word factory with Harry, I don’t have a clue who the neighbors are in Quogue. Harry never cared that I can’t cook. Nor could he. We were always too engrossed in discussing the day’s headlines to notice that we were dining, yet again, on a stuffed baked potato. Returning home after Park Avenue parties, he would crash around the kitchen, making himself sardines on toast and regaling me with the best gossip or the most preposterous highlights from his own circuit of the revelers. I have come to realize that our blissful, singular focus on writing and editing has made me eccentric. What, for instance, is a hobby?
Forays to dinner parties in the Hamptons this summer yielded age-appropriate geezers who bang on about their golf swings and congregate together with booming, bald-headed laughter. Couples talk about their elaborate travel plans, doing inconceivable things like motoring through Loire Valley vineyards or taking extended treks to see a pile of ruins in Tibet. Holidays with Harry were usually helter-skelter, last-minute trips to overpriced Caribbean resorts with an inconvenient layover somewhere that neither of us had noticed on the travel agenda.
I realize I have forgotten—and can't really be bothered to relearn—how to feign the eye-batting fascination that is the sine qua non of romantic appeal to late-stage widowers.
I am also a realist. I can’t help but note there’s a pileup around me of surgically enhanced, widowed blondes. The Times obituary page unleashes a new one every day: power wives who once swirled through Manhattan drawing rooms on the arm of some titan and now prowl affluent, Viagra-circuit cocktail receptions at the Council on Foreign Relations. They are battle-tested and battle-ready with one senses, unlike me, an infinite capacity and willingness to adapt. Captious, hostessy, and primed for action, they seem undaunted at the prospect of being jumped on for one last inning.
by Tina Brown, Fresh Hell | Read more:
Images: uncredited
[ed. How the other half lives (or, more precisely, the upper half of the upper 10 percent). I guess Tina Brown, former editor-in- chief at Vanity Fair and the New Yorker has a substack now, which I just stumbled upon. Wish her good luck, I'm sure she'll be fine.]
