I’M SLIGHTLY NERVOUS ABOUT TOMORROW AND SEEING MY BELOVED AGAIN FOR THE FIRST TIME IN FOUR WEEKS. IN MY EXPERIENCE IT CAN BE SLIGHTLY BUMPY PICKING UP RELATIONSHIPS AFTER A PERIOD OF SEPARATION. BOTH partners have got used to being 100 percent of their world and along comes this other person with demands and needs and expectations. So reentry can be a little rough. I’m not talking about the first ten minutes! Of course it’s really good for you to be apart for a while, to experience who you are. If you can’t live alone you can’t live with someone else.
People ask me how do you make a marriage last twenty-seven years? Well, I’ll tell you my tip: separate bedrooms. And that doesn’t mean no nookie. Far from it. (It means you now have two venues, plus the kitchen floor.) It just means that a woman of a certain age no longer has to put up with a farting, burping, snoring, demanding old bear in her bed; and, by the same token, a gentleman doesn’t have to watch ER and bad television till all hours of the night. I fall asleep easily and early. I like a little Chopin and a good book. The missus likes late-night TV, pottering around the bathroom, and sleeping late. I love to get up really early and write. This way I don’t disturb her. We found that the only time we ever bickered was over what time the light went out. So we solved it. She has a boudoir, all silks and perfume, and I have an English room, all wood and fabric.
Everyone needs their own space. See Virginia Woolf’s essay A Room of One’s Own (apart from Orlando, the only tolerable bit of writing she did).13 In a totally perfect setup I would share a bathroom, because I am terribly fond of casual female nudity. It’s an odd thing, but I have never grown tired of looking at the naked female form. I have always thought it terribly unfair that artists can have nude models and not writers. In fact, I once asked Tania to pose for me as a writer’s model to see if it would help me writing comedy. She took off all her clothes and posed naked on a sofa while I sat down at the typewriter: but, alas, I didn’t get a lot written. Artists must have much more self-control. And how did Picasso paint with his penis? Or is that just a metaphor?
She is hilarious, my wife. After we had been to see a season of Japanese movies, whenever I entered the room she would throw herself on the ground and kowtow! I’d find her facedown, prostrate, behind me, and nearly leap out of my skin. She’d get me every time. I think she became pregnant shortly after that…. She has a way of saying very little and then coming up with the best line at dinner. It’s very annoying. Once, when I said I was reading The Shorter Pepys, she asked me if there was a taller one. I remember filling in an immigration form for her and under “profession” I entered “gagster’s moll.” On the return trip she wrote “Occupation: Pillow.”
All men love breasts and all women love breasts—because they are our first meal. Breasts are God’s Big Macs.
As you can tell I’m nuts about her. And she has learned not to listen at just the right times. If I’m grumpy and foul she simply feeds me. I think the art of marriage is trying to improve the lot of the other person. It isn’t just having someone to blame. If it isn’t better than living alone then you shouldn’t do it. [All right, enough marriage guidance. Get on with the fucking diary.—Ed.]
I’m in Washington, D.C. I think Washington, B.C., might be more appropriate with the dreadful Bushites in power. This is the town where the attorney general covered up the tits on a statue of Justice. Highly appropriate when you think that this lot only came to power by mugging the Supreme Court.
It’s a rainy Monday so I hope we get a crowd as we are playing our one and only club gig; an experiment by the Greedy Bastard agent. After tonight’s show we pile into the buses and head for New York City for three whole nights and a day off. Yea. Yesterday here was sunny and lovely, the Capitol shining, the big wide streets jammed with monumental buildings. Tania and I came with Lily a few years ago at cherry blossom time and did all the tourist sights, which is just as well, as they are all closed off today for a marathon. I always hated cross-country and spent the afternoon at Union Station, a rather elegant Roman building housing trains and shops and cinemas. I saw Intolerable Cruelty, which made me laugh a lot. About ten years ago I made a movie (Splitting Heirs) with a relatively unknown Catherine Zeta-Jones, and she was lovely and clever and adorable then, and I’m thrilled she has made it big-time, because you can’t take your eyes off her. We were all very taken with her on the set, and one day for a gag had our director’s chairs remade with the names Eric Zeta-Idle and Rick Zeta-Moranis. In fact I even got to do a nude love scene with her. But sadly and disappointingly it was I who was nude.