Free Fear of Dying by Erica Jong Page A

him. She didn’t buy my bullshit.
    â€œYou 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.
    Then there was the problem of his children.
    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