How to Save Your Own Life (12 page)

The door opens and I am hugged. Holly has only recently learned, after a lifetime of WASP boarding school
coolth
—as she calls it—to hug people, so she hugs a lot. Especially me. I like it.

The fluorescent lights over the violets are on, but otherwise the loft is dark. A soft tangle of ferns grows up toward a gray skylight.

“Come on in, love,” says Holly, who is wearing a caftan she made herself and no shoes. She smells of sleep, warmth, somewhat stale Jungle Gardenia perfume. I sit down in the bentwood rocker, dispossessing the cat, Seymour, and several patchwork pillows.

“Where the hell are you coming from?” she asks.

“I just had dinner with Jeffrey Roberts, actually.”

“Oh? The Pillsbury Dough Boy.”

“He's really very nice—and very lost.”

“I would be too, if I were living in a haunted house in Greenwich with Aimee Semple McPherson. Boy—she sure ain't playin' with a full deck...”

“He wants out too.”

“And you're planning to save him? Let me take my Valium right now and go back to sleep.”

“No, Holly, I'm not planning to. I don't love him that way —though sometimes I wish to god I did. But I don't think I can stomach Bennett anymore.”

“Well, that doesn't mean you have to instantly move in with someone else. There
are
those of us who live alone and like it. It's
not
a fate worse than death.”

I look around at Holly's nest, which even with the lights out is cheery and warm. Better to have spent the day here, working, as she did, than to pound the pavements of New York, seeking salvation. What on earth did I do with a whole day? Gretchen, Hope, Dr. Schwartz, Jeffrey Rudner, Jeffrey Roberts, here. And all to avoid having to go home to Bennett. When a marriage reaches
that
point, surely it is not worth keeping.

“The thing is, Holly, I don't even know why I'm so angry at him. I mean—I've had affairs myself. At times I've even
wished
he would have affairs—to prove he was human.”

Holly is fogged. “What the hell are you talking about?”

“You know, the stuff I told you on the phone this morning.”

“You mean the dame he had in Europe?”

“And also here, when we got back.”

“I
would
say that it was pretty sadistic of him to tell you about it
now.”

“But
why
does it make me so furious and ready to leave? It doesn't add up somehow. I've done it myself. I'm not exactly Miss Fidelity. So
what?
So he had a couple of affairs... He's forgiven me
my
affairs...”

“Forgiveness isn't the issue.”

“What is?”

“Love.”

“Oh god. I'd be happy never to hear
that
word again.”

“If you loved Bennett, if he gave you something besides lectures, guilt, and grief, I don't think the affairs would really matter at all. So he put his penis in someone's hole. Big deal.
Who cares?”

“Boy—
your
analysis must really be progressing. I've
never
heard you say
hole
before. When do you think you'll come up to
cunt?”

“Fuck you.”

“Bravo. Very good.”

Holly often says that she spent the first three years of her analysis learning to say
fuck,
and the next three years learning not to feel
guilty
about saying it, and the next three years getting up the courage to do it occasionally. She still doesn't do it much. But then, neither do ferns.

“Do you want me to level with you, love, really level with you?”

“I guess that's why I'm here.”

“Okay. Truth time. Here it comes. I have
never
heard you say anything positive about Bennett except that he was a good fuck.”

“Cross my heart and hope to die. In the three years we've really spent time together—
never.”

“You know what? He isn't even such a good fuck...”

Holly lowers her eyes. “You can spare me the erotica. Save it for your new book. I just wonder why you don't ask yourself why you're so bloody afraid of being alone. It ain't half bad compared to living with the walking dead.”

“I thought you
liked
Bennett.”

“What's to like or dislike? He's completely inaccessible to me. Of course he was very riveting one time about the re-analysis of the ten-year-old, but other than that, I don't remember ever having a conversation with him that had any emotional content whatsoever. I haven't the faintest idea
what
he's about. Is he happy? Is he sad? Only his analyst knows for sure.”

This gives me a pang. “I feel sorry for him. I think I represent life to him—how can I up and leave?”

“And what does he represent to you? Death? Look, lovey, you don't stay with a person out of pity. Not at thirty-two, you don't. Life just ain't long enough for that. Sorry.”

“But he'll fall apart without me ...”

“Bullshit,
he will. That's the biggest piece of narcissism I've ever heard. He'll do just
fine.”

“How do
you
know?”

“I just
know.
Besides, will
you
do just fine if you stay? For years now, you've been anguishing over leaving. It's bad for your work, bad for your head, and fattening. It's obvious you two are never going to get it together to have a child together. You really don't
like
each other well enough for that—so what the hell? Why don't you take off and find someone you really love?”

“Maybe I'm incapable of that. Bennett really has me convinced I can never love anyone because I'm so neurotic. He says the only way I'll ever straighten out is to stay in analysis.”

Holly looks exasperated. “Boy—is
that
ever a self-serving theory.
If you don't love me you
must
be sick.
How can you
believe
such crap?”

“Well, maybe I'm just too committed to writing to ever love anyone. Maybe I couldn't
live
with anyone but the walking dead. He
has
been good for my work. You've
got
to admit that.”

“I'm not so sure.”

“What do you mean?”

“All your poems are about unfulfillment, emptiness, bitterness. Who knows what you could write if you really loved someone? How can you box yourself in that way? How can you lock yourself in that kind of self-fulfilling prophecy?”

“You're a fine one to talk—you and your plants.”

“Look—cutie pie—you and I are not alike. I don't
want
to live with anyone. I don't
want
children. I'm not even very into sex. But you
are.
You're not a fern; you're a goddamned mammal...”

“God. For a moment, I thought you were going to say something devastating.”

“Didn't I?”

“I've been called worse things than a mammal,” I said.

Holly lit a cigarette and did not laugh. She was intent on getting her message across. “What's the point of hanging on like this?
Any
thing would be better than this god-awful cliff-hanging.”

“I suppose.”

“Look, what do you think
my
life is like? Not really so different from yours. I work, see my friends, go to parties. You do that anyway. Bennett is merely an appendage to your life, an inconvenience as often as not. Tonight, you don't even want to go home. It's obvious you don't. Where is he, by the way?”

“Who cares?”

“Does he know where you are?”

“Probably not.”

“Then the whole marriage is a farce, a sham, a security blanket.
I
think so anyway.” She emphatically exhaled a mouthful of smoke.

I thought about it. Holly was right. Our lives really
were
much the same. Bennett and I practically never saw each other. And by design. Or at least by my design. Then what did I need him for? So I could say “my husband” and have a figurehead monarch—like England has its Queen? So I could disguise my rebellion with token conventionality? So I could have the illusion of being protected by a man?

Suddenly, I panicked and decided I had to go home. Suddenly, I had to be with Bennett.

“I'm going,” I said.

“Thanks a whole lot. You wake me up, get me going, and then walk out. I thought you were going to stay the night, sleep on the couch.”

“I can‘t,” I said, shaking. “I really have to go.”

“You keep yourself on a very short leash, don't you?”

“Please understand if I go. Will you?”

Holly looked pissed off, but she understood. “I was going to make something terrific for breakfast,” she said. “Now I have no excuse.” Holly was, in addition to her many other talents, a
cordon bleu
chef who never had anyone to cook for.

“Some other time,” I said.

 

Back on Seventy-seventh Street the light was on in the foyer, Bennett's briefcase was stowed neatly on a chair, and the man himself was stowed neatly in bed, sleeping without rumpling the blankets. Just being back calmed me considerably. I looked in briefly at Bennett, then went to my study, sank down in my leather chair, and tried to make sense of my feelings. Why was I suddenly so calmed by seeing him sleeping there? And was that a reason to stay married? It was really odd how, especially if I had fucked someone else during the course of the day, I was utterly panicked until I'd come home and touched base with my husband.

My
husband.
What security was in that phrase! It was almost like “In God We Trust” or “Guaranteed by Good Housekeeping.”

What magic did the phrase
my husband
have? It was a seal, an imprimatur, an endorsement that I was a
bona fide
woman. It was like saying, “Look, I have a man, therefore I am a woman.”

Why did I need this? Why did we all need this? All my life I had known women who supported their families, did their own work, did most of the housework—yet needed to be married, often to men they clearly did not enjoy. I knew rich women who had husbands as baubles, career women who treated their husbands as sort of extra children in the family, frenetic housewives who raised kids and cooked and also kept their husbands' stores, businesses, or medical practices from sinking into total confusion. There was no doubt about the strength of these women. Except perhaps in their own eyes. Did every one of them need that phrase
my husband
as badly as I did? Did every one of them need that sleeping man whose presence scarcely ruffled the bedclothes?

I had tried to leave Bennett so many times, and each time I had come back. Each time I'd come back, things changed for the better. The marriage had become freer, more open, less restraining. It was so free by now that if I didn't come home at night, he simply went to sleep. Yet that wasn't what I wanted either. It was as if we were two strangers living in the same house. We really weren't free—just indifferent. Loving someone is a loss of freedom—but one doesn't think of it as loss because one gains so much else.

But I could scarcely even remember why I had married Bennett in the first place—as if that had been in another life, and I had been a different person. We all go through various transformations in the course of growing older, and become several different people even in our own brief lives. The soul is a process, not a thing; therefore you cannot put it in a box (or a book) and close the lid. It will crawl out and keep changing. The woman who married Bennett in 1966 was as different from the woman sitting in that leather chair, as the woman who endured that crazy summer of fame and jealousy is different from the woman writing this book. I keep trying to recapture myself at different periods of my life and it is impossible because even as I write, I change. Both the passage of time and the process of writing change me. And though I try to skewer bits of pieces of reality with the point of my pen, inevitably memory fails me, words fail me, and the picture is fragmentary and false. Worse still, this falsehood will be seen by the reader as literal truth and only I will realize how many discrepancies and holes there are, how many sins of omission I have committed, how many tattered fragments masquerade as the tapestry entire.

There is a rhythm to the ending ...

Many people today believe that cynicism requires courage. Actually, cynicism is the height of cowardice. It is innocence and open-heartedness that requires the true courage
—
however often we are hurt as a result of it.

There is a rhythm to the ending of a marriage just like the rhythm of a courtship—only backward. You try to start again but get into blaming over and over. Finally you are both worn out, exhausted, hopeless. Then lawyers are called in to pick clean the corpses. The death has occurred much earlier.

Everything I did that summer was part of the unraveling of the marriage, though I didn't know it until later. The first symptom of distress—just as it is the first symptom of falling in love—was that I was unable to work. I went frenetically from one friend to another, one activity to another, avoiding my home, avoiding my writing desk, unable to eat or sleep.

It wasn't odd, really, that I was drawn back to Michael Cosman that summer. Michael was the friend of my broken leg, the friend who had cheered me through the grim three years in Heidelberg, the friend who had given and given of himself without ever trying to take me to bed. He was also the only person in the world who could tell me about Bennett and Penny—and I was hungry for such information, ravenous for every detail. With Bennett's Woodstock revelations, I had slipped back into the past and I was once again remembering Heidelberg, turning the pages of my life as if it were a book, flipping back and forth between past and present. The one event that symbolized the fracture in my marriage to Bennett more than any other was my broken leg, and what Bennett had helped to break, Michael had come to heal.