What I Want

Slept nine hours and feel a lot better.

Off to the 45th reunion today of Hunter College High School’s Class of ’69 today – Terri’s coming in from Chicago; Jeannie died of breast cancer in 2003 – then bunking with Clark and the Ladies tonight, before picking RTT up at JFK tomorrow at the unconscionably early hour of 6am and arranging to transport him back to Ithaca. (My preference would be to put him on a bus. Does that mean I’m a bad mother?)

Part of the panic attack, I suppose, was related to my anxiety about Ben. Part of it reflected my uncertainty over What Comes Next.

Thursday, Ben had another reoccurrence of one of the symptoms that hospitalized him a month ago. As it turns out, the symptom was transitory, and he never slipped into the Zone, but the episode scared me. He’s pretty sick. He doesn’t have a car. And he’s all alone – lip service has been paid to the girlfriend coming back from wherever she’s gone at the end of the summer but given the fact that she cleared everything she owned out of the Tburg apartment, and that she apparently was deeply depressed throughout last winter because the winter was so hard, that seems unlikely to me. Though what do I know?

I care about Ben on a deep level despite all the bullshit that came down. It’s horrifying to think of him being ill and alone without anyone to take care of him.

More importantly, though, he’s RTT’s father. Since I was the wage-earner throughout our domestic life together, he was RTT’s primary caretake. They’re very tight.

Oddly enough, after we broke up, our conversations became more intimate than they had been in the decade before. “I’ve never actually seen myself as the star of my own life,” Ben told me one day. “I’ve always seen myself in a supporting role.”

Ben dotes on Robin. Robin is the light of his life. He grumbles about Robin constantly, but it’s the kvetching of a Jewish mother.

And Robin understands that Ben dotes on him. He depends upon Ben’s doting.

I don’t dote. I’m way too self-involved. RTT’s happiness is very important to me; indeed, I would put it before my own – the Robert Heinlein definition of love (thank you, Clark!) But having been raised by wolves, love is one of the many currencies whose underlying economy is completely alien to me. I love RTT. But unless some crisis is occurring, it would never occur to me to worry about him obsessively.

If anything happened to Ben, though, I think it would break Robin

That alone is enough to make Ben a priority for me.

If Ben’s health continues to deteriorate – as seems likely unless Medicaid is willing to kick in $84,000 for the drugs; if the girlfriend doesn’t come back; if he’s all alone and helpless…

Well.

Hopefully, it won’t come to that.

###

In terms of What Comes Next, it dawns on me that I’m so convinced that I’ll never get a damn thing I really want, that I never even think about what I really want.

So.

I don’t actually want to deal with another dysfunctional nonprofit, and as far as I’m concerned, all nonprofits are dysfunctional – that’s the way they’re incentivized. That’s why I haven’t been aggressive and methodical about tracking down another VISTA gig. For some reason, I think I should want to. But I don't.

What I want to do is write commercially successful novels that skitter on the edge between Great Literature and something you might read while your plane is being hijacked.

I have approximately 20 more years to do this. Way back when I was a hippie and supporting myself as an astrologer, I figured out the date that I’m gonna die: It’s in 2034 and I will have full possession of my mental faculties until just about the moment I drop dead.

(Right. The sun does not go round the earth and astrology is a bunch of bunk. I get that. )

I want to continue growing my little coterie of pals and have a pleasant living situation with one or two of them. For the next couple of years, on the East Coast because I like the proximity to New York City. Eventually, though, I’ll want to live near Max and Liza because I’m pretty sure they’ll be the parents of my grandchildren within the next five years.

I’d like to get married again. I have what I suppose you could call crushes on three men. They’re all more-or-less inappropriate: the first because he’s a hopeless alcoholic and way too young; the second because he’s a consummate narcissist, self-aware enough to know he’s a narcissist, but not at all interested in being any other way; and the third because he lives 800 miles away from me.

So it’s unlikely I’ll marry any of those three.

In fact, it’s unlikely I’ll marry anyone since I have no dowry: The sum of my worldly goods consists mostly of art objects, photographs, old diaries and books in an Oakland, CA storage unit. I have nothing in a material sense, and though I’m attractive for my age and in excellent health, it seems unlikely that anyone would want to make that kind of binding legal contract with someone who doesn’t bring wealth of her own to the table.

I’ve been in and out of romantic relationships all this year – currently out – but I haven’t really found any of them fulfilling.

Anyway, these are vagaries, but they may be some kind of starting point.

Back to removing cat hair from my little black dress so I can look glam for the reunion.