A Fast Life

Joan Juliet Buck explores how her grandmother’s one regret came to shape her own history of romantic entanglements.

- Joan Juliet Buck

In the bar of Badrutt’s Palace Hotel in St. Moritz shortly before New Year’s Eve 1965, the dazzling British wife of a famous German baron turned to my grandmother and asked her, “If you had your life to live over, what would you do differently?” My grandmother, Nana to me, Esta to others, pulled herself up in a big black dress with the good diamond brooch so as to be a little less short, a little less fat, and rolled her beautiful green eyes to the ceiling the way she had when she was a model. She was nearing 70, seven years the widow of my unreliable grandfather, the only husband she’d ever had. She pursed her lips, and said at last—the suspense had silenced our side of the bar—“I’d have done everything the same, but I’d have been fast.”

In the language of her youth, “fast” meant loose. As a fast woman, Nana would have many lovers instead of years of patience rewarded by the occasional good diamond. I was 16, old enough to feel her longing for missed adventures, young enough to imagine that if I lived the life she craved, I would have no regrets. I’d dance through life with different men, and know love the way poor Nana never had.

My parents had left Hollywood for Paris when I was 3, and Paris for London when I was 9; I was slightly French and slightly British. My producer father was far too proud of how well I spoke French, and overwhelmed me with so much love and approval that I felt he owned me. I viewed husbands as dominant fathers, guards who fed and housed you, dressed you according to their taste, and expected you to obey. I didn’t want one of those, I wanted a transcendent complicity.