Fear of Dying

Ah, make the most of what we yet may spend,

Before we too into the Dust descend;

Dust into Dust, and under Dust to lie,

Sans Wine, sans Song, sans Singer, and—sans End!

—The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam

When I met Asher Freilich I was forty-five and living with an actor young enough to be my son. My daughter was thirteen and more grown up than my twenty-six-year-old lover. I liked to think of Nikos as a Greek American reincarnation of Colette’s Chéri, but actually he was far more comfortable in the diner in Astoria where he’d grown up than he’d ever be wearing my pearls in a drawing room near the Bois de Boulogne. I had taken up with him purely for his James Dean looks and the indefatigability of his cock. Somehow, he drifted from staying overnight into never going home. But I was busy with my soap and never really had the time to properly kick him out and retrieve my spare key.

I met Asher at a theatrical AIDS benefit. Thousands of young and beautiful gay actors, and there was Asher—the silver-haired father figure. Handsome and tall with golden brown eyes, he won my heart by remembering all my movies—even some I would rather forget! He was the sort of man I never would have considered in my younger days—solidly responsible, owner of stocks and bonds and companies that did arcane things like build pipes and purify water. For someone who loved theater and movies, he had an inborn knack for business. He was a bereaved widower (before that married and divorced almost as much as me), loaded, but that was hardly what I liked about him—I who had always supported artistic losers. What I liked about him was that he reminded me of my father. They even shared the same Leo birthday—August 10—and they both had the same ferocious energy and Catskill Mountains humor. Asher was so unlike my type that I told my analyst-of-the-moment—a mountainous gray-haired woman named Bobo Bressler (née Barbara Neuwirth, who wrote sexual self-help books; How to Be Your Own Sex Therapist was the most famous)—that I could never be with him. She didn’t buy my bullshit.

“You can love a man who adores you!” she said. “Just turn your head around.” (I have often stolen her line when counseling friends who have met the man of their dreams and cannot see it. “Turn your head around,” I say.)

Isadora felt the same way. “If you don’t grab him, I will.” She immediately saw that I was trying to talk myself out of a great guy.

Her advice and my analyst’s proved right: Asher was funny, tender, sweet, and a compulsive gift-giver. He bought jewels as if they were chocolate truffles. He also bought chocolate truffles. These were mostly for Glinda, who adored him on sight, despised him right after I married him, and then bonded with him for life. Asher loved Glinda too. Sometimes I thought he loved her more than me.

Nikos at first tried to make a fuss about palimony, but Asher sent me to his white-shoe lawyer, Thomas Breedwell, Esq. (I swear), who said nothing like that ever flew in New York courts. So I retrieved my key. And, astonishing myself more than anyone, I gave up my cheating out-of-work actor for a kindly billionaire. This was so out of character for me that my friends were too amused to be jealous. At least at first.

Hadn’t our mothers always said, “It’s as easy to marry a rich man as a poor man”? Well, it wasn’t for me. Unless I was paying the bills, I felt out of control. Besides, mine was the generation that thought wearing the pants financially would give us equal rights. Hah! When I met Asher I really had to change the way I thought about men. And about myself.

But where was the worm in the apple? For a while the worm was hiding in the core. Glinda and I moved into Asher’s museum-like fourteen-room duplex on Fifth Avenue. I had imagined myself transforming it from dark to light, flying back and forth to Milan with Asher and filling the place with futuristic furniture, which we would highlight with contemporary art. But Asher couldn’t stand to have anything changed. His last wife—the sanctified dead one—had decorated the apartment over the years. Any change would kill her all over again.

I hated her decor. Fine French furniture from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, Aubusson rugs, Gobelins tapestries, vermeil cachepots and chandeliers, third-rate eighteenth-century paintings from the school of this or the school of that. Asher’s late lamented wife had had more money than taste. But what could I say? Rejecting her decor was like rejecting her. She had died lingeringly of breast cancer. How could I strike another blow?

Asher was generous and loving. What he lacked in sexual technique he made up for in enthusiasm. He reveled in the daily intimacy of marriage. But was it really intimacy? After a while, living with Asher made me understand why Freud had said that not even he could analyze a beauty or a billionaire. Asher’s money caused people to kiss his ass all the time, which made him both insecure and arrogant. Still, I was determined to make the marriage work. I had had enough relationships that tanked. This one was going to last.

Dickie (Richard in public) was forty and worked with his father. He didn’t mistrust me nearly as much as his wife, Anita, a grasping, greedy little yenta who was sure I had married Asher only for his money. And then there was Lindsay, the lesbian daughter who could do no wrong in her father’s eyes. He was always praying for a miracle and trying to marry her off. He never uttered the word gay. Did he think her partner, Lulu, was merely her roommate? Apparently. Lindsay was tolerable but her partner was counting on a big inheritance. Despite the fact that both kids already had generous trust funds, my appearance on the scene seemed likely to diminish everyone’s patrimony.

Not that I needed Asher’s money when I married him. I was writing screenplays by then and doing well. It was only when I declined into wifehood, stopped writing, and became the producer and director of our social life that the money seemed necessary. Naturally, my needs expanded to fill my husband’s income. Instead of shopping at Loehmann’s, I shopped at Valentino. Instead of buying caviar at Zabar’s, I bought it at Petrossian. Instead of cooking for my own parties, I hired a private chef. The only thing I didn’t do was hire a private secretary slash party planner. I did that myself. I had to do something besides shop.

None of this made me happier. Conspicuous consumption in New York is an ever-escalating stairway. No matter how extravagant you are, someone is more.

I understood all this from my childhood in Hollywood. None of it was real. None of it really mattered when you had three-in-the-morning insomnia and devils came up from the depths to haunt you. But for Asher it was part of the cock-measuring contest that was his life. A beautiful wife, a private jet, a duplex on Fifth, a farm in Connecticut, a house on the beach on the “East End” of Long Island, a villa in Cap Ferrat, a chef who used to work for George Soros. All this mattered because it intimidated other men and attracted women. These were symbols of dominance, which made other primates kiss your nether parts. Of course when they did, you felt both cynical and suspicious.

At the charity balls we had to go to, I would sometimes amuse myself by imagining all the participants as baboons or gibbons grooming one another, displaying reddened hindquarters, kneeling before the most charitable billionaires and picking off (and eating) their fleas. The grooming rituals were so obvious. You couldn’t really have a decent conversation anyway because you could barely hear anyone speak. But just by observing the dance of the primates you could tell who was important and who was not. The fund-raising supernumeraries and executive directors of charities were willing to grovel for even comparatively small change. Born on their knees, they couldn’t wait to fall on their faces, and their billionaire marks knew it.

“Here comes that phony Frenchman from the museum,” Asher would say. “Let’s give him a run for his money.” And then I would watch while Simon di Sinalunga groveled while pretending not to grovel, inviting us both for lunch, trying to set a time to come to our apartment and assess the pictures, all the while pretending to be interested only in art.

Asher loved making a monkey out of Simon, loved watching him scrutinize my cleavage in my red Valentino gown, loved watching him try to count the diamonds in my necklace. We were never more united as a couple than in public with the cameras flashing. It was our best gig. I suspected that the same was true for many of the couples at the party who flirted connubially in public, then went home and never spoke to each other—like two-year-olds in the sandbox engaged in parallel play.

Goateed Simon, marvelously turned out in a hand-tailored tux, speaking with an accent known only to museum directors and classical music announcers, went on about the new wing he was building in Central Park. Asher pretended to be fascinated.

We were hardly out of earshot when Asher said, “That monkey says it’s not about money.”

“Vanessa, he would kiss my ass even if I insulted him to his face. Those guys have no sensitivity. They’re about as sensitive as goddamned toilet seats. A human abacus with an Italian name—that’s all these guys are. You can’t insult ’em. Believe me, I’ve tried.”

Asher was a shit-disturber. Actually, that was one of my favorite things about him. He had no sacred cows. Except perhaps his late wife, who could do no wrong. Amazing how saintly spouses become after they die.

As Dickie Freilich gradually took over the everyday workings of the business, Asher decided to become an artist. Surely he had known enough artists who sought his patronage. Why couldn’t he become one? Not for him the Sunday painting of his idol Winston Churchill nor the steel constructions of his friend Arthur Carter, he wanted to make gigantic earthworks like Robert Smithson or wrappings of man-made monuments like the Christos. What appealed to him about earthworks was how big they were, how much land had to be purchased, how many people employed in building them. It seemed that pipelines and reservoirs were not so very different from earthworks except that the earthworks had no practical use. This appealed to the cynic in Asher.

“As long as I was only building water systems I could be dismissed as a rich grubber yung—but when I make these things, I’m an artist! I love it! Art is defined as something useless.” Asher had gotten rich in a variety of businesses from finance to real estate to water.

Asher admired more than any contemporary work Smithson’s Spiral Jetty, built into the Great Salt Lake in Utah. We had to fly there in our plane and inspect it from all sides. We brought all the catalogs and noted the way it had changed colors over the years. Knowing of his interest in Smithson, the Dia Foundation tried to get Asher to fund the restoration of the jetty, but Asher wanted to build something as grand as Spiral Jetty and sign his own name to it. He was sick of being a patron. He wanted to be an artist. This led him to suggest hiring Smithson as his teacher.

That was when he decided to take me on a tour of the stone circles of England and Ireland.

He looked at me critically, almost disapprovingly—like the satrap about to have the concubine killed. Then he burst into peals of laughter.

“That’s why I love you, Nes, ’cause I can’t put anything over on you. You know me, baby.” He squeezed my hand, almost amputating a finger with the huge canary diamond I wore.

I did know him. But did he know me? Did he know that I loved him with my whole heart? I wanted to make that clear.

The truth is we all want to be known. And we’re simultaneously afraid of it. We want to be unmasked, and the person who can unmask us wins our respect. That was the real reason Asher fell in love with me. My knowledge of him broke through his loneliness. Maybe his sainted late wife hadn’t really known him—though he’d never admit that even to himself.

Money is like sex. Sometimes the more you have the less you have. As the Chinese sages knew, no amount of money can make people speak well of you behind your back. But Asher stockpiled money mainly to impress the other men who were stockpiling money. They were his peers, the ones he needed to impress. I’ll never forget the day he learned that some contemporary of his was buying an out-of-service Concorde and planned to use it as his personal transport. It made him nearly insane.

“I know it’s idiotically impractical, but it burns my ass. That bastard will get to Paris in three hours while we take six!”

“The Sultan of Brunei has plenty of things no one else has—including a harem.”

“Maybe for me it is. Besides—everything about money is childish. So what? It still buys what I need most.”

“Everybody gets duplicity from their fellow man. I’d rather have it in comfort. My dad never learned that.”

In their own way, my parents were just as crazy about money—on a smaller scale. They had grown up during the Depression and for them the Depression was still a reality. They had transmitted that reality to their daughters. All three of us were marked by their money anxiety. All three of us felt poor despite the fact that we would probably inherit from them and had never known want or hunger or the blacking factory. In our hearts we were all Oliver Twist crying “More, please.”