(3 of 11)
Vadim had created a view of life for himself, a view shared by all his friends, which held that any show of thrift, jealousy or desire for organization and structure was a sign that you were bourgeois. God forbid! "Bourgeois" became the dreaded epithet, as horrifying as betrayal or dishonesty. There were even times when it was suggested that the French Communist Party had bourgeois tendencies ...
I had inherited $150,000 from my mother. At the time, it was a nice sum, something I could fall back on if I stewarded it carefully. Vadim could not comprehend why I hesitated to give him large portions of it so that he could hire a friend to come with us to some vacation spot and work with him on a script. At first I was horrified and said so. But over time I began to feel that I was being petty and stingy. So I gave in. Only years later did I realize that Vadim was a compulsive gambler, that the locations for his films or vacations were often chosen for their proximity to a racetrack or casino. I had no idea that gambling was an addictive disease, as difficult to overcome as alcoholism, anorexia and bulimia. Much of my mother's inheritance was simply gambled away.
Along with thriftiness, jealousy was a major no-no. Why did women make so much fuss about the physical act of intercourse? Just because a husband or wife (though it always seemed to be the husband) had sex with someone else, that didn't represent betrayal--"It's you I love." Vadim would go on and on with his friends about how the sexual revolution of the '60s showed that people were finally beginning to see what they had always known: that middle-class morality needed to be discarded for sexual freedom and open marriage. Maybe he'd smelled it on my skin when we'd first met--that I was malleable and insecure in my sexuality. In any event, I was vulnerable to him and felt that in order to keep him and be a good wife, I had to prove that I was, in fact, the queen of "nonbourgeoisness," the Oscar winner of wildness, generosity and forgiveness.
As time went on, Vadim would fail to come home in the evenings. I'd have dinner ready and he wouldn't show. Often he wouldn't even call. I would usually eat all the food I'd prepared for us, go out and buy pastries and French glace (not nearly as satisfying as our ice cream), devour all of it, throw it all up and collapse into bed exhausted and angry. Sometimes he'd come home around midnight and fall into bed drunk. Sometimes he wouldn't show up till morning. I swallowed my anger (along with the ice cream), never really confronting him about this behavior. I didn't want to seem bourgeois. I didn't think I deserved better.
Then one night he brought home a beautiful red-haired woman and took her into our bed with me. She was a high-class call girl employed by the well-known Madame Claude. It never occurred to me to object. I took my cues from him and threw myself into the threesome with the skill and enthusiasm of the actress that I am. If this was what he wanted, this was what I would give him--in spades. As feminist poet Robin Morgan wrote in [Morgan's memoir] Saturday's Child on the subject of threesomes, "If I was facing the avant-garde version of keeping up with the Joneses, by god I'd show 'em."