Free I Stand Corrected by Eden Collinsworth Page A

name to,” I said, adding my signature to the bottom of the handwritten marriage document.
    Signing an agreement in a language I couldn’t read was a cavalier conclusion to a day that already had raised questions.
    That afternoon, we had taken a walk along the riverbank and met a man who invited us to his nearby hut. Constructed with woven reeds and resting on stilts to accommodate the river’s high tide, it consisted of a single room with a roof but no walls.
    In spite of what others might consider a privacy issue, the hut was home to the man, his wife, and his daughter, along with his mother and mother-in-law. The household also included a female guinea fowl that, at low water, patrolled the small area under the hut with the territorial aggression of a pit bull. I noticed several pigs; I gathered that they, too, shared the hut when the river rose.
    W. conversed with the man, who was obviously delighted to have the male company.
    “I think it’s safe to say that, in this part of the world, marriage is weighted in favor of the husband,” said mine-to-be as we returned to the docked boat.
    “What did you two talk about?”
    “First of all, the young girl is not his daughter—she’s another wife.”
    “You mean someone else’s wife? She looks terribly young for that.”
    “No, I mean she’s his other wife. A second wife. It seems he traded one of his pigs for her. To make matters even more amusing, the pigs were the original wife’s dowry.”
    “I don’t find that at all amusing,” I said.
    “My dear, not only is it amusing, it’s a tribute to ingenuity. And did any one of them look unhappy to you?”
    I had to admit they did not. Not only were they happy, they were the most civilized people I had ever met.

PART THREE
The Dichotomy of Personal and Public

    A fox barks not when he would steal the lamb.
—
Chinese proverb

CHAPTER NINE
    L eery of providing the corporate officer to whom I reported reason to believe my professional commitment would be diluted, I withheld the news of my marriage.
    A year later, the same executive was deliberately kept unaware of my pregnancy until it became obvious. But attitudes in business change over time and with geographical location.
    There has always been a cultural disconnect between the two biggest U.S. coastal cities, condescending New York making self-invented Los Angeles defensive. I was a devoted New Yorker who never lingered longer than a week at a time during my infrequent visits to Los Angeles. I had a respectable career in book publishing, had absolutely no experience in the magazine business, and had never before raised capital. Ignoring both the bleak statistics on the failures of new magazines and the risk-averse premise of impending motherhood, I decided to launch a magazine in Los Angeles. In other words, I made the deeply insane decision to leave a business I understood and start another from scratch in an industry about which I was completely ignorant and in a city I didn’t know.
    Why I did this, I could not tell you, but I was willing to accept the responsibility for my decision and held stubbornly to it.
    With a husband who was a walking definition of the word “freelance” and a baby on the way, I relinquished the security of employment. I would either successfully secure funding for the magazine or go through my limited savings trying.
    W. was a cartoonist for
The New Yorker
, and his cartoons became the currency that paid for consultants I couldn’t compensate in cash. I took on two partners: an editor and a publisher.
    Chance was not unkind.
    A fateful seating assignment on a flight the magazine’s publisher took to San Francisco got us to what was next. She’d been bumped up to business class. Sitting beside her was Larry Ellison, the billionaire founder of Oracle, who would become our primary investor. With two more investors, there was enough seed money to launch the magazine.
    Living as I have in so many places, I’ve come to the