No Woman is an Island

(heard in a North Beach restaurant, San Francisco, 1976)

“When he began to court me, my first husband was quite a bit older than I, but his car was brand new and very expensive, a Jaguar sedan, British racing green. Riding in that car was like sitting in a Rolex. Really, it was such a plush ride that you could literally hear the analog clock running in the teakwood dash at sixty miles an hour.
“We were both West Coast advertising people. He had his own agency, a big firm with very big accounts, and he was very good at what he did, which was manipulating the national consciousness and making money. I cast commercials. Remember Bartels and James, two duffers on the porch selling wine coolers? That was my work..
“Harold and I kept bumping into each other professionally until he finally convinced me that I was in love with him. It took us almost a year to divest our relationship of his wife. His kids were grown. Meanwhile we met secretly in airport hotels. We would work our twelve hour days then fly separately a thousand miles to sleep together. I was living on champagne and smoked almonds.
“It cost him eight hundred thousand dollars and a house in Monterey to divorce Helen, who was wanting out for her own reasons. Two days later we flew to New York and were married in the lantern of the Statue of Liberty by Mayor Ed Koch. In return for the favor, Harold agented Koch for the job he now holds on television as a fake civil court judge. We spent our wedding night in the Ritz, watching television, and running up a three thousand dollar room service bill, just the two of us. It was one of the loneliest nights of my life. I just wanted something normal to happen, you know, like my mother to share in my happiness and a real lawn and friends next door. Instead I got beluga caviar.
“The next morning we had a ten o’clock with the people from investment. Sold them on the “We make money the old-fashioned way” campaign. Late that afternoon, Harold ordered a limo to take us to Newark airport. When I asked where we were headed, he said that the honeymoon had just begun, to be patient, that I had a surprise coming.
“There is something about me that does not like surprises. Call me Ms. Predictable, but I would much rather know what to expect and what to wear than have a big hole in my agenda. We had a little spat in the car about just that fact. I said that I thought I had a right, as a full partner in our marriage, to know where we were going. Harold said that he felt that it was his right to surprise me if he damn well pleased.
“But, down deep, the guy was a just a guy, right? No guy can keep a secret. Ask the CIA. So, when we were over Iowa, I pulled out of Harold that he bought an island for me for a wedding present, and that was where we were headed, to an island off the coast of Honduras, in the Islas de la Bahia, where he has had a “little getaway” built on a three acre island of my very, very own. I must admit to being flattered right out of my foul mood and any desire whatsoever to blend back into suburbia. He even had pictures.
“We were the only first class passengers from L.A. to Mexico City. Then we squeezed into a flying culvert, a prop plane headed to Tegucigalpa. Out of thirty people on that flight, only two others were female, two German nuns trying to get to Nicaragua, and only six other than Harold and I were Americans, and they were all military. The rest were Latin men.
“I speak Spanish. Fifteen minutes after take-off, three young guys in the front of the plane stood up and informed us that we were now in the official custody of the Front for a Democratic Honduras, that when we landed in Tegucigalpa the women were to deboard the plane and the men stay. Very polite, very matter of fact. No screaming. I had to wake up Harold to inform him that we were prisoners. The soldiers got a little perturbed at first, but when they were shown the automatic weapons, they calmed down. I don’t think the nuns understood a word.
“So, an hour later I was spending my honeymoon in a cinderblock building next to a runway in the middle of a country smaller than Connecticut. A hundred yards away my husband was on the airplane, being held hostage until certain political prisoners were released and the airplane was allowed to fly to Cuba. The scariest part was when our Army intelligence guys showed up and turned the little terminal into a command center. The nuns booked a flight to Managua and left on the first evening.
“It went on for three days. Finally some sort of compromise was made and ten Honduran men were released. One by one they walked across the steamy pavement and into the terminal. Then, a couple of hours later, the door opened and down the metal stairs came Harold, wpbb;y but fast. I remember thinking that he looked very sweaty. He had his Armani briefcase, and he was running.
“When he reached the plate glass entrance to the building, he pushed it once, twice, then used the briefcase as a sledgehammer and blew it into a billion pieces and stepped through the opening into the lights of the CNN cameras. Harold was like that. Nothing got in his way. He was still standing just inside the door, looking just a bit like Kirk Douglas as a victorious gladiator, when a U.S. Army officer, on camera, informed Harold that perhaps he had acted a bit hastily, that the door actually opened outward.
“I never saw my island. Harold never regained face enough to take me there. He could not recover from the door incident. Got mopey and mean and very reclusive. Dropped out of his agency and took to writing a memoir. After six months I filed for divorce. He got the island, insisted on it, although I know he has never gone back. I got the Jaguar.”