How to Save Your Own Life (13 page)

 

Michael Cosman was a general practitioner from Great Neck for whom the army had found no medical use whatsoever. He was assigned to spraying mess halls for roaches and interviewing the contacts of VD victims (who, in truly democratic spirit, often offered to infect him). The army was driving him about as crazy as it was driving me. But his response to it all was to grow a handlebar mustache and plant marijuana outside the hospital (where, along with marigolds and pansies, it helped to spell out
USAREUR)
—while my response was to break my leg. (Is there a psychological difference between men and women? A rhetorical question.)

 

Sometimes I think I could tell the story of my life through the scars that mark my body. I could write a whole novel in which the heroine, standing naked before the mirror of her memory, enumerated the scars up and down the length of her body, and for each scar told the story of how it came to mark her flesh, the pain she suffered, whom she shared that pain with, what healing was attempted and by whom. Each chapter heading would name the scar, and each chapter would begin with a recounting of the accident that “caused” the scar. Except that the reader would instantly become aware that the “cause” was much deeper than mere accident.

I would tell of the opalescent, crescent-moon-shaped scar on my right knee, made by an equally opalescent shell fragment on the beach at Fire Island the summer I was eight. I would tell how I sank to my eager knees in the sand, not feeling the shell pierce through to the moony white bone until I stood and bright-red arterial blood spurted out onto the white sand. I would tell of the six pale stitches on my left palm, made by a huge bread knife the summer I was fifteen, miserably unhappy with my job as kitchen maid and waitress at Camp Merryhill, and wanting a reason to stop slicing sandwiches so I could languish in the infirmary, read Dickens and feel like an orphan along with Pip and Oliver Twist. I would tell of the twelve-slice-high stack of uncut peanut butter and jelly sandwiches and how I suddenly brought my palm down on the blade I had unwittingly pointed toward the ceiling, slicing open my own white flesh instead of the spongy white flesh of the bread. I would tell of the strange fibrous lump in my backside, made by the quarts of blood released into the tissue of my back and thighs when I was deliberately given a too-spirited horse at the Ft. Sam Houston Riding Club and was later thrown spine first onto an outcropping of rock. I would tell how I was lucky enough to lose only blood rather than the use of my legs, how I landed on my ass rather than my spine, how my guardian angel spared me paralysis, how I was taken to the army hospital, and suddenly, in the middle of 1966, realized that a whole secret war was being fought in Vietnam as I passed my three weeks in the hospital among baby-faced quadruple amputees and napalmed children from Vietnam.

Then I would go back in time more than thirty years and tell of the tiny hole in my neck, created in my mother's womb, the disturbing remains of some mysterious prenatal event whose traces remain to this day. I would tell of the three stitches above my left eye, made when I catapulted over the cord of my electric typewriter in one of those fits of despair about writing which are as much a part of the writer's trade as the typewriter itself. I would save for last that almost imperceptible swelling in my left shin, the remains of my fractured tibia, snapped on the icy slopes in Zürs in 1967, when Bennett was so deeply involved with Penny that he hated having to go on vacation with me and consequently bullied me into skiing on slopes which he knew were icy and anyway too difficult for me to handle.

Oh I could tell the story of my marriage to Bennett through the accidents we had together. Interestingly enough,
I
was always the one who got hurt. And he—who felt like a perpetual victim of the world's injustices and therefore justified in committing any cruelty—was always angry at me for getting hurt. But one accident will have to do, will have to serve for all the rest.

 

I rewind the film backward seven years and my life flashes past in reverse: The sunny room in which I am writing this changes to humid overcast New York during that summer of jealous madness, then changes to rainy Heidelberg the winter of 1967-68. We are driving south on the autobahn and the wiper blades are smearing the windshield with arcs of mud. It is two and a half weeks before Christmas and Bennett has gallantly insisted that I drive to the Austrian Alps with friends and get in two weeks of skiing before his leave schedule permits him to join us. His “leave schedule”—unbeknownst to me—is actually Penny. And once again Bennett has made me feel guilty about going away—when in fact he has chosen to stay in Heidelberg so that he can have a full two weeks to fuck Penny in my study without fear of any witnesses but my manuscripts.

Our parting has been grim. Bennett has duly reminded me about what a “spoiled brat” I am—because (at his suggestion) I am getting extra vacation time and he is not. All the guilt he feels about getting rid of a wife to fuck a mistress has been reversed and projected onto me. And I, who am so very good at feeling guilty, feel terrible. Poor Bennett, I think, as we speed south on the autobahn, and me the lucky one, going skiing.

Not that I ever wanted to go skiing in the first place. Just as a glittery blue ocean puts me immediately in mind of sharks, sugary alps piercing a bright blue sky make me think immediately of broken limbs, falling chair lifts, and hapless skiers impaled on their own poles. The first time Bennett took me skiing (in the Black Forest, that spring), I'd never even had the damn things on before, and he left me to struggle with the laces and bindings while he took off over the hills and wasn't seen again for six hours. That was pretty much the course of our outdoor-sports relationship. He was the athlete; I was not—and whenever he prevailed upon me to do anything athletic with him, it was usually a prelude to his leaving me stranded on a mountain or a beach or a baseball field or a muddy track.

But there I am going skiing and trying for the life of me to feel lucky about it. The skis are on the roof of the Volkswagen Squareback, the boots are in the trunk, the mud is on the windshield, I am in the back seat with the dog, and my friends Chuck and Ricey Higgins are telling me not to feel bad about Bennett, for whom my heart is breaking.

“Oh, he'll be okay,” Ricey is saying—probably knowing full well that he's stayed home to screw Penny.

“He'll get in plenty of skiing
after
Christmas,” says Chuck. “Don't
you
feel guilty.” In retrospect, they probably
both
knew about Penny.

Two weeks of skiing in the idyllic Austrian town of Kössen, in the foothills of the Alps. Though it is early in the season, there is plenty of snow, and with my two supportive friends beside me, my skiing is progressing beautifully. All day in ski school I perfect my stem turns, hoping Bennett will be proud of me when he arrives. At night, we three wander through the snowy, blue streets of the village, past the cemetery with candles marking the headstones (“So they can read?” Ricey asks), past the war memorial where all the names of the dead who were buried under other snowdrifts are incised in cold black granite. The blue snow blows up in little gusts like the smoke of risen souls. It covers the names, uncovers them, covers them again—making the dead seem like sons and fathers to each other.

Alone in my room later, I am sad and frightened. I never would have seriously entertained the idea of sleeping with anyone else during the first years of my marriage, but I wonder about Bennett. Is he really alone? Why hasn't he called me in ten days? Is he mad at me for going away without him?

After eleven days, I call him, wanting reassurance. Bennett sounds pained. The strangeness of his voice panics me.

“Oh, Bennett
always
sounds strange,” Ricey says later.

“He isn't the warmest guy,” says Chuck, philosophically. I try to reassure myself. He's always strange, I tell myself—which is true. But then the other question inevitably comes up: what am I doing married to a guy who is always strange?

Bennett arrives three days before Christmas, bringing the rain.

 

The rain begins pissing down over the slopes, washing away the snow, revealing boulders, tree stumps, haystacks, the black obelisk of the war memorial, now unsoftened by snow. The four of us languish indoors, praying for the rain to stop.

“If it stops today, the snow will still be good,” we say hopefully, every day. And every day it goes on raining.

Somehow, the rain is my fault. The rain is the result of my having been comfortably off in childhood while Bennett was poor, the rain is the result of my having skied so well during the two weeks Bennett and I were apart, the rain is the result of my suppressed anger and suspicion.

And I am duly apologetic. I apologize to Bennett for the rain. And he rages at me. And I apologize again—which only makes him madder. One thing I have only lately learned is that apologizing to people sometimes produces the reverse effect that one intends. If you apologize for something that isn't your fault in the first place, you, in effect, confirm their belief that it is your fault. Thus the weather is my fault. I believe it. Bennett believes it. Ricey and Chuck don't believe it—but who are Ricey and Chuck, after all? Just friends. Bennett and I are the weather gods.

With the fanatical zeal of the frustrated athlete, Bennett insists that we all pack up and head still higher into the Alps. Surely, higher up there will be snow. So we take off for Kitzbühel.

Now, Kitzbühel is usually one of the more bustling ski resorts. Cafés, people strolling down the main streets, discotheques, tanned ski instructors in their red sweaters and red caps, their hip pockets filled with flasks of brandy—but today even Kitzbühel is deserted. The main street is blustery, slick with sleet, desolate. Ricey and Chuck have stayed in their room playing cards. Bennett marches resolutely up the Hauptstrasse, determined to ski no matter what the weather. I trudge resolutely behind him.

The cable car swings up the mountain in a strong wind. A few red-faced stalwarts—veterans of an Arctic expedition, perhaps—join us in the cable car, laughing and slapping each other on their well-padded backs, taking light snorts of some Teutonic firewater as the car creaks on its icy cable. I am, of course, sure it's going to break—and actually, that alternative seems not much more unattractive to me than what awaits us at the top of the mountain. One of our compatriots in the cable car is a hearty one-legged skier—one of those indomitable veterans of Germany's imperialist past. He may have lost a leg in battle—but he skis twice as well with the other. This is the sort of counterphobic madman who tackles the slopes on such a day. Normal people don't. Except my beloved husband—whose mouth is now set in absolute determination. Our car swings into the upper dock of the cable landing. Bennett shoves me with his pole to get a move on, as one might prod a cow.

Outside the cable landing, there is such a blizzard that one literally cannot see the path ahead. We stop and put on our skis here, even though the wind already threatens to knock us over. I press my boots into my ski bindings with a satisfying snap. Once I
have
the skis on, it's another story what to do with them. My knees are buckling. I have maneuvered on skis perfectly adequately with Bennett away, but now that he's
here,
I am suddenly incompetent. It feels like coming to the top of a staircase, looking down, and forgetting how to walk.

We form a single-file procession (Bennett behind the hearty one-legged skier, me behind Bennett, some idiot behind me, treading on the backs of my skis). We trudge blindly along in the blizzard, stabbing the ice with our poles, sliding one quaking leg in front of another. To the left of me is a whitish blur which I assume is a mountain. To the right of me is a bluish blur which, my ski pole tells me, is sheer drop. How did I get myself into this predicament—me, a simple Diaspora type from the Upper West Side? The skating rink in Central Park was my winter Olympics. The Great Snow of ‘47 nearly buried the Museum of Natural History and the cars on both sides of the street looked like giant loaves of snowy bread—but what in god's name am I doing on an icy ledge in the Austrian Alps with a crazed Chinaman and a one-legged Kraut? And who is that idiot who keeps stomping on the backs of my skis? I say a little prayer to God, my mother, and my beloved analyst, Dr. Happe:
Please let me live long enough to publish one book; I swear I won't ask for anything at all after that.

Eventually, the narrow icy ledge gave onto what seemed like a mountainside: another white blur, descending. As we left the ledge and came out into the open, a gust of wind hit us with such ferocity that I was nearly knocked over backward and managed to keep my hold only by digging my poles into the frozen ground.

“For god's sake, Bennett, let's go back,” I shouted in the direction of his red parka.

“I didn't come all this way to turn back. I've already missed nearly a week of skiing!” he snarled.

Missed a week. Already.
That was the essence of Bennett's personality: feeling cheated. I couldn't see his face and yet I knew how it must look—scowling, self-righteous, twisted with determination not to let the weather cheat him. And so the reddish blur took off down the mountain while I stood at the top, paralyzed with fear, digging my poles into the ground to keep from being blown over. Bennett was blown over a few minutes later, in fact, but I couldn't see how it happened, nor could I have helped him even if I'd wanted to. And at that point, I didn't much want to.

After several struggles with the wind (which the wind invariably won) Bennett relented and deigned to descend by cable car. On the way down he made sure to call me chicken and accuse me of having ruined his day of skiing. Oh, there is no sense in blaming him for that. The world is full of petty tyrants, stingy souls, woman-haters. There is no end to the supply of them. They are themselves, as the snake bites and the scorpion stings. But those of us who get involved with them and stick with them are the fools.
We
deserve the blame for not picking ourselves up and walking away. We think we are buying security with our slavery—and then, a decade later, we leave and let them keep the furniture, realizing that it is a blessing to be rid of their tyranny at any material cost and that there is no such thing as security anyway.