How to Save Your Own Life (10 page)

“So that you wouldn't die without having experienced a Swede?”

“Well, it may sound silly to you, my dear, but you don't
have
an incurable disease. It changes everything.”

And it did. When Jeffrey made a definite pass at me, I thought and thought about it and finally said to myself,
Well, after all, he does have an incurable ...
I was making love to death, enlivening death, denying death. What a ploy! How did
I
know the guy had lupus anyway? But even more important, would I
catch
it? I never fucked Jeffrey without wondering. And I never washed so much when I came home.

Our first encounter was a farce anyway. Gretchen had a loft where she used to meet her various men (after we had both read their “F” Questionnaires
¹
and given them clearance) and from time to time she would lend it to me. Jeffrey claimed to have some cocaine and he wanted to try it with me. That was the excuse, anyway. If
I
had known anything about coke then (I know slightly more now) I would have realized that
he
knew nothing. He had scarcely enough coke to get a roach high (and there were plenty of them in that loft, too) and he had no idea of how to snort it either. But what did
I
know at that point? I hadn't yet been to Big Sur to meet the experts. I was just a psychiatrist's wife from the Upper West Side and hot for adventure. Coke it is. Clear all the patients out of a Friday afternoon in September. Lock up the co-op, tell your husband you're in Bloomingdale's for the afternoon, and head for the loft.

 

Much cloak and dagger. Jeffrey and I are both feeling so illicit that we take separate cabs to Gretchen's office, meet in the lobby, exchange conspiratorial glances, and, while I go upstairs to get the keys to the loft, he goes off to get some beer and sandwiches. Then we take separate cabs to West Nineteenth Street.

We meet on the rickety wooden stairs, both of us looking around nervously (nice Jewish kids that we are) for fire escapes. The place is a trap. SHRINK AND WRITER TRAPPED IN LOFT FIRE. But we persevere in pursuit of adventure. You
know
the loft. Creaky floors, a dozen skinny avocado plants in pots. A mattress on the sooty floor. Dirty sheets. Dirty old couch with cheap Indian throw. Windows begrimed with all the pollution of New York. And then Gretchen's special touches: a fruit bowl full of Reese's Peanut Butter Cups by the bed, a silver tray with a vast selection of condoms, vaginal jellies, diaphragms, a bottle of Youth Dew. God bless Gretchen.

Jeffrey and I pace around nervously, giggling a lot, then finally settle on the couch and begin unwrapping our sandwiches.

“Would you like to try the coke now or later?” my smooth co-conspirator asks.

“Why not now? ...”

He pulls two little foil packets out of his pocket—they look like the wrappings for salt brought on a picnic—and extracts two battered sawed-off straws from his jacket pocket. Oh god. I am terrified. Will this weird drug make me into a sex-crazed lunatic? Will I lose control totally?

“Snort,” he says expertly, not knowing what the hell he's doing; and of course I breathe out and disperse the tiny quantity of white powder over the dirty couch and dirty Indian throw.

“Here,” he says patiently, “try again,” and he also offers me the contents of the next packet.

“No, I can't. I'll ruin that one too.”

He insists.
“Please.”

“No. You try it.”

“No, really, I insist.”

“No, you try it.”

“No,
please...”

“No, really. After you.”

“No, I
insist...”

“No. You try it.”

Jeffrey tries. He snorts deeply. Then his face lights up—as if there really were enough powder to make him feel anything.

“Do you feel anything?”

“I don't know.”

“Then you don‘t, silly.”

Jeffrey leans back on the pillows. “I
think
I do. Here... You try too.”

“There's no powder left.”

“Yes there is. Here.”

He sticks it under my nose and I breathe in. It tickles. It could be the dust in the loft. Then we both sit there for a while staring at each other, waiting to become raving nymph and satyr, totally devoid of inhibitions. Nothing happens.

“What do you feel?” I ask.

“Hmm... interesting,” Jeffrey says.

“Interesting what?”

“I wonder if this is it.”

“If
what
is it?”

“This.”

“What?”

“This... this... je ne
sais quoi...”

And with that inanity, I begin to giggle. Jeffrey assumes it's the effect of the coke so he giggles too. Which makes me giggle more. Which makes him giggle more. Which makes me giggle more. Which makes him giggle more. Which makes me giggle more. Which makes him say, smoothly, “Shall we go to bed?”

Aha. The question has been popped. The long-unphrased, entirely inevitable, nude-beach-ripened, adjacent-analysts-inspired question has been popped. Poppéd. Here goes.

“I think not.”

“Why?”

“Well, for one thing, your wife's my friend, and for another, you play tennis with my husband, and for another, I'd feel too guilty.”

“What if we only give each other back rubs?”

“Which lead to front rubs, which lead to fucks ... like with your mermaid.”

“Not necessarily. Would you feel less guilty if we only went down on each other?”

I grin at him. This is what my old high school buddy, Pia, used to do while touring Europe. To keep herself pure. It does, somehow, feel less like a commitment than fucking.

“Or else we could use one of Gretchen's vast selection of condoms.”

“Why a condom? Don't you have a diaphragm?”

“I do—but how can I use the same one with my husband and with a lover?”

“You use the same cunt, don't you?”

And we both get the giggles again. Somewhere mid-giggle, Jeffrey points to the bed and says “Shall we?” and I think, What the hell, the guy has lupus, the patients have already been cancelled, and we've gone to all this trouble to get the keys to the loft. The cocaine seems to have been forgotten—if it ever existed.

To my surprise, Jeffrey is not silly in bed. He stops giggling and becomes wholly concentrated on rubbing my back, eating me till I come three times in a row, and then finally fucking me. He is slow and meditative about it, and a terrific lover. All that's missing is my
feeling
anything for him. Except that he is a dying man. But then, again, aren't they all?

 

Jeffrey and I greet with innocent cheek-kisses under the canopy of 943 Park. Midway between his shrink's office and mine—a discreet compromise.

“Shall we take separate cabs to my office?” he asks, rolling his eyes around, obviously enjoying the intrigue.

“Not necessary,” I say. “In fact, I rather hope Bennett sees us.”

“But what about Roxanne?” he asks nervously. His wife. Like all adulterous husbands he assumes she's pure. And unsuspecting.

“Oh you're right.”

“Anyway, why are you so cool about Bennett?” Jeffrey asks. “You didn't
tell
him, did you?”

My heart leaps. God—I did. And after promising Jeffrey I would never.

“Of course I didn't tell Bennett, silly, but after what Bennett told me, I don't suppose it matters much if he finds out.”

“What is it, pumpkin?” Jeffrey asks sympathetically.

“I'll tell you when we get to your office.”

 

Once there (having risked the one cab) I spill out the whole sad story of the Woodstock weekend to Jeffrey, who is immensely understanding.

“I always thought Bennett was a sadist at tennis,” he says. “What are you going to do?”

“Leave him,” I say, decisively. “I can't go on living with a hypocrite. I mean fucking around occasionally is one thing, but Bennett was immensely cruel. That time I came back from Woodstock, you know what he told me?”

“What?”

“I repeatedly asked him if he had been with another woman and you know what he said?”

Jeffrey shakes his head. “No. What?”

“He said, ‘Your fantasies are better than anything I could tell you.' Can you
imagine?
I mean if he had said, ‘Look, I fucked someone else, I'm fallible too.' Or even told a
lie
about where he was, it would have been
human
at least. But to lay it off on me and
my
fantasies... I call that sa
dis
tic. I had enough problems with my fantasies without his tormenting me about them further. He made me feel that I was crazy. Like in Gas-
light.
That seems to me the cruelest thing anyone can do—making the other person feel crazy. It's almost kinder to beat someone up.”

“Poor pumpkin,” Jeffrey says, coming over to my chair and putting his arms around me. “The guy really is a bastard, isn't he?” And he begins gently easing off my shoes, kissing the soles of my feet as he does, and unzipping my green-and-white voile dress (under which I am wearing nothing but flesh-colored bikini panties). And then his hands are cascading over my body, cooling my anger, soothing my hurt. We move down to the floor (we have always been superstitious about fucking on the analytic couch) and he gives me one of his expert back rubs, massaging each vertebra separately, concentrating for a long time on my coccyx and then on my shoulder blades. When Jeffrey makes love to me, I relax entirely—maybe because I have never felt the slightest stirrings of romantic love for him and therefore feel wholly safe. It is just sensation. Sensation and friendship. In friendship now, he buries his head between my legs and begins eating me—something he does as if he really enjoyed it, unlike the majority of men. Perhaps it is just a virtuoso performance—a species of male narcissism—but what do I care, lying back, being teased and licked and probed and licked again, being made to come and come again until I am weak in the knees and shaking all over. I try to reciprocate, take his cock in my mouth and begin teasing it with my tongue, but he won't let me. “This is your day,” he says, and begins massaging my back again.

By the time he looks at his watch and declares it time for the seven o‘clock analytic patient—the one he can't cancel—I have come five times, and still he won't let me reciprocate.

“Women's Lib,” he says, with a twinkle in his eye.

 

I leave Jeffrey's office and wander out onto Central Park West. It's still light out, with those warm breezes wafting up under my voile dress where my cunt is wet and throbbing from all that attention. Sure enough, every man I pass looks me over, and one even starts to follow me. It never fails. After making love for three hours, I must walk with a special lilt or exude some odor like a cat in heat.

 

It used to astonish me that men followed me in the streets after sex, that they grinned and winked as if they
knew.
I'd be coming from Jeffrey's office (or Gretchen's loft downtown) and before long I had a retinue, a string of chorus boys, a following of tomcats.

Usually I felt wonderful after an assignation. Before, I would be tense, obsessive, terrified. I'd call Bennett at the hospital and be exceedingly sweet to him and also set up my alibi for the afternoon. Somehow it was always shopping. “I'm going to Bloomingdale‘s, darling,” I'd say, quite unconsciously affirming the deep connection between sex and shopping, between bloom and Bloomingdale's.

Ah Bloomingdale‘s! Would it be as crowded as it is if every woman in New York had two lovers named Jeffrey? One afternoon, I had the brainstorm of strolling through Blooming-dale's main floor after walking all the way back uptown from the loft on Nineteenth Street. I looked around me like a dreamer and suddenly
understood.
All those women promiscuously spending money, stuffing shopping bags with
things,
charging, charging, charging to their husbands' accounts, were starved for sex! So many holes to fill! So much misplaced passion!

The only difference between the shoppers and me was that they failed to recognize their hunger for what it really was while at least I admitted it. They scarcely
knew
why they cared about a new gloss stick for the lips, a free sample-kit of wrinkle creams for the face. They wanted their wrinkles plumped out, their valleys filled, their pores plugged. They would pay
any
thing for that. They were excited when some vapid model on the main floor handed out cards saying FREE CUSTOMIZED PERSONALIZED MAKEUP BY MR. X
or
LEARN TO LOVE THE FARM-FRESH FACE
or
FIND A NEW YOU. Suddenly I had a vision of a whole world of women starved for sex and making do with all sorts of buyable substitutes. Making up.

A woman who spent her afternoons with a lover would never again find herself in Bloomingdale's fingering Mary Cunt or lusting after Elizabeth Ardent. She'd go barefaced as a baby and throw her charge plate in the nearest sewer. Isn't that the problem? That women have been swindled for centuries into substituting adornment for love, fashion (as it were) for passion? The main floor of Bloomingdale's by Hieronymus Bosch!

All the cosmetics names seemed obscenely obvious to me in their promises of sexual bliss. They were all firming or uplifting or invigorating. They made you
tingle.
Or
glow.
Or feel
young.
They were prepared with hormones or placentas or royal jelly. All the juice and joy missing in the lives of these women were to be supplied by the contents of jars and bottles. No wonder they would spend twenty dollars for an ounce of face makeup or thirty for a half-ounce of hormone cream. What price bliss? What price sexual ecstasy?