I had a vague, unformed, yet undeniable realization that having a job was where it was at. If you had well-paid work, you had some power in a relationship. You could be independent. And if you had a well-paid job that was interesting and satisfying? That almost took the place of a relationship. But how the hell did you get a gig like that?
By now, I’d realized I would never make it as an actor or a dancer. I had some talent, but not the insane drive you need to make it to the top. I had enough sense at the time to realize that I needed a profession. But I didn’t have any clear idea what that was. I was so clueless that I actually applied to United Airlines for a position as a flight attendant. (In those days we were still calling them stewardesses.) The airline called me back for a second interview. I’ll never forget it-about ten of us sitting around the table. They started asking us our political views. Everybody’s sitting there simpering, “I don’t know, I mean, I don’t really care.” Then I weighed in with a few strong opinions. I never heard from United again.
I fell back to reconsider. I could be a diplomat. Sure. Why not? This was admittedly an odd choice for someone as impulsive and confrontational as I am, but I already had a couple of languages under my belt. I could speak French and Hebrew. I applied to work in the Foreign Office in the State Department. During my first interview some functionary informed me that I would have to take an entry-level post as a secretary. I thought, I don’t see how that works. Secretary to diplomat? No. I don’t think so.
In the spring of 1973, after graduating from UCLA, I took a job with a law firm that specialized in estate planning. My God, was that dense. I did accounts receivable and reception work. Basically, I was a girl Friday. At the outset, I approached the job rather too casually for my employers’ taste. I came in late, showed up when I felt like it. Before long, my supervisor called me in and warned me that I was about to be fired.
That brought me up short. “Man,” I thought, “I don’t mind getting fired from a good job, but I can’t get fired from a job this tacky.” So I cleaned up my act, became prompt, innovative, a real dynamo. They came to love me. I started thinking, Maybe there’s some future for me in the law.
It was not such a leap. An actor seeks validation from his audience. An attorney gets his validation from judge and jury. (Many trial lawyers, I’ve concluded in the years since, are frustrated actors.) I took stock of my abilities. I had a good memory. I could write well. I could think on my feet. So I got a book from UCLA Law School that was supposed to help you prepare for the LSATs. On the night before the test I looked through it. Then I went out and got drunk. Maybe I wanted to sabotage myself, or perhaps I wanted to give myself an excuse if I failed. Anyway, they give that test early in the morning. I stumbled in, three sheets to the wind, barely able to pencil in a blurred succession of circles. Somehow I did well enough to be accepted by Loyola and Southwestern in Los Angeles and Hastings in San Francisco.
Gaby was threatened by the whole idea of my going into law. He refused even to consider the prospect of my moving, or our moving, to San Francisco, so Hastings was out of the question. His objections were just enough to undermine my confidence. I put off sending in my applications until it was too late for Loyola. Southwestern accepted me for the fall of 1973.
I grabbed onto law school like a drowning woman clings to flotsam. It was to become my salvation. Law school took more effort than undergraduate work. I had to study. I had to memorize. I actually had to attend classes. I found that I was well suited to analytical thinking. Briefing cases came easily to me. You take a case decision of fifty pages written in the densest legalese and have to figure out: What’s the issue? What’s the rule? What’s the conclusion? I enjoyed the intellectual exercise of taking something very complicated and reducing it to its essence.
I cannot say that the law loomed before me as some mystical, meaningful vocation. A sense of principle did not kick in until a few years down the line, when I realized my real calling lay in the D.A.‘s office. But from the start, studying law served as an absorbing and invigorating counterpoint to my life with Gaby.
The deeper I got into law, the more I withdrew from him. We continued living together-we were going on five years. But the screaming matches and the physical skirmishes ended. The reason was simple. I was no longer really there.
Sensing that I was distracted for long periods, Gaby’d ask me, “Where’s your mind? Where are you?”
I’d always had the ability to distance myself at will from reality. During our first year together, I recall, I had an unwholesome penchant for romance novels, real bodice-rippers like Lust in the Weeds. I read them voraciously. And I lived in a dream world.
But now, my emotional disengagement from Gaby took on a different quality. It was convenient, in a way. He liked me best when I was docile and submissive. I’d made that discovery the first year of our relationship, when I’d gotten a terrible cold. I was weak and exhausted and Gaby couldn’t have been sweeter to me. He was at my side almost constantly. He tended to my every need and even carried me to the bathroom. My dependence galvanized him into chivalry. Subconsciously, I dragged out my illness to extend that peaceful interlude as long as I could. The problem was, I couldn’t stay sick forever.
I remember so many nights I’d come home from a study session or the library and peek into the bedroom to see if he was there. If he wasn’t, I’d hop into bed as fast as I could in hopes that I’d be asleep before he got home.
As I look back on it all now, I realize that I was suffering from a true depression. I was unhappy with Gaby, but my perspective was so distorted that I couldn’t imagine being happy with anyone else. I repeated to myself all those bromides that I’m sure a lot of couples repeat to convince themselves that they should stay together rather than get out and look for something better. Like: “There’s no such thing as the perfect mate.” “You can’t find it all in one person.” “You always have to compromise.” What I didn’t understand at the time was that in order for compromise to work, both parties have to be essentially compatible. They shouldn’t be spending 90 percent of their time together brawling. There should be something in each that enhances the other. Still, whatever it was that Gaby and I had, I thought it was the best I deserved, the best I could hope to get from life.
Even now, I’m hard put to explain why I married him. I’ll be the first to admit that a lot of what I’ve done in my personal life has been impulsive, has seemed to run counter to the dictates of common sense. But in its own weird way, getting married made sense at the time. If we were having trouble, the thing to do was to bind ourselves closer to each other so we’d have to get along. Right?
Well, no, actually.
Still, Gaby was a pragmatist. He needed a green card and he’d get one if he married me. Since we were obviously going to stay together, didn’t it make sense to do it in a way that would give him citizenship? I saw the logic of that, though Gaby knew how down I was on marriage in general. I agreed on one condition-that no one but the government would know about it. We’d run out to Las Vegas and get a piece of paper and keep our lips buttoned. He agreed. And that’s how we got married the first time. It was just a formality.
Gaby kept his end of the bargain. Our secret never leaked. I never told anyone, and no one ever knew-not even my brother, who was my closest confidant.
A year or so passed this way and Gaby started to talk about doing it properly. The idea of a wedding seemed to make him happy, so I gave in. On November 6, 1976, we were married again. My father’s father, a very devout Jew, came over from Israel, and for his benefit we had an Orthodox wedding in my parents’ home. I remember standing at the altar, nearly delirious with a 102-degree fever, telling myself, “This is not happening.” The rabbi’s words washed over me. I was barely conscious.