How to Save Your Own Life (14 page)

The next day we continued driving higher and higher into the Alps. If there was no good snow in Kitzbühel, perhaps we should try Innsbruck or St. Anton or Lech or Zürs. Chuck and Ricey went along. They were happy enough wherever they were, playing cards in front of the fire and drinking
Glühwein
and eating Austrian pastries.

The rain was still pissing down when, on the third day of our wanderings, we drove into Zürs am Arlberg—a bleak, treeless ski resort whose barren peaks were shrouded in rain clouds.

The resorts highest in the Alps, above the timberline, all have a similar naked aspect to them: a group of elegant chalet-style hotels on the lower slopes of severe jagged peaks and, on sunny days, an intense blue sky—blindingly blue, because of the thinness of the atmosphere. When the mountains are covered with snow and the sun is out and the lifts are all running, these “serious” ski resorts are not entirely without cheer, but when the butterscotch-candy sun slides down between the peaks and the shardlike purple shadows cut into the snow, the whole landscape becomes dismally lunar and cold.

On rainy days, it is even worse. You are there to ski, but you cannot ski because there is no snow. Neither is there anything else to do—but play cards and eat. Or else read—preferably some long, inscrutable tome. We spent four days at the Sport-Hotel Edelweiss, watching the rain come down, playing hearts, overeating dumplings and schnitzel and roast pork with apples. Feasting on pastries
mit Schlag.
And
Kaffee mit Schlag.
And drinking ourselves insensible on
Glühwein
every afternoon by the fire.

I was perfectly happy with this routine. I was reading Ulysses at the rate of about five pages a day, gaining weight at the rate of about five pounds a day, and feeling content never to put on skis again as long as I lived.

The slopes were dangerously icy. I had heard terrible stories about what happened to even expert skiers on icy slopes. There was nothing preventing me from staying in the hotel with Ricey and Chuck the morning Bennett decided to tackle the slopes—nothing except Bennett's challenging glare. Or was there more? Bennett's affair with Penny had begun (I now realize) the previous fall and he had become more and more rejecting toward me. Even though I didn't “know” about Penny, I
knew.
My antennae were too good for me not to know. In fact—this flashes back to me with a shock—I'd been thinking seriously of leaving Bennett. A broken leg was the perfect punishment for thoughts of running away.

 

It has rained all night, the rain has frozen and the slopes are glassy as the slopes of some fairy-tale mountain. Toward morning, light flurries of snow begin and settle on the slopes just enough to resemble two days' cover of fresh powder. Sheer ice camouflaged in fluffy snow. After a breakfast of croissants and coffee, I trudge along after Bennett toward the nursery slope T-bar.

“We'll start on the easy slopes, okay?” he says, appeasing me. And I nod, thinking,
There are no easy slopes.
But already, Bennett is on the T-bar, heading upward, and I follow. I remember the words of my first ski teacher, an American college dropout: “All you have to worry about is gravity.” All. At the top of the T-bar, gravity strikes and I fall, ass first, on the icy ground. A brisk German girl snaps at me as if my falling were a rude gaffe, an antisocial gesture like a fart or a belch. I scramble to my feet, look for Bennett, and realize that there's a terrible cramp in my leg. The days of sitting around the Sport-Hotel Edelweiss have left me out of shape. Meanwhile Bennett is already whizzing down the slope.

I follow. My leg is cramped, I can't bend my knees, I am doing the sort of straight-legged panicked snowplow they show in ski manuals as an example of what never to do.

Bennett does two graceful parallel turns and I mimic him, looking like something out of Chaplin's
Gold Rush.
The poles are lethal weapons in my hands, my knees are absolutely rigid, my eyes closed in panic. Just then, I must have hit a patch of ice because I got going so fast that I suddenly understood the expression greased
lightning.
I fell—deliberately, I think, in order to stop myself—and lay in the snow, twisted into a pretzel of arms and legs, wondering what in hell I had done to deserve so much pain.

“Are you all right?” Bennett yelled. I answered in groans. I was looking melodramatically up at the blazing blue sky and thinking of
The Snows of Kilamanjaro—the
part where the hero says something about how you are supposed to black out from the pain, but, alas, you never do.

“Don't move,” Bennett admonished, but I was stuck in such a painful position that I had to try to move. One ski stuck in the snow, my foot wedged in the boot, the special quick-release bindings not releasing and all the pressure on my own nonreleasing leg.

Bennett came over and pronounced it “just a sprain.” Then he tried to extricate my foot from the boot. The pain was excruciating, but the humiliation was even worse.

Help came in the form of two young men on skis who arrived at the top of the T-bar with a cunning aluminum gondola contraption between them. One was wearing bright yellow sun goggles, and the other had a gap between his teeth. My whole being was focused on that gap. They got me out of my ski boot somehow (the leg was already swelling up) and slipped a long plastic balloon over my leg, zipped it up, and inflated it. I was lifted onto the gondola, covered in blankets (like a corpse), and my skis were strapped alongside me. My rescuers clicked into their skis and we were off down the mountain, the neon-blue sky above and the blinding snow below, and my presence evoking looks of curiosity, relief, and, fear from the skiers we passed. We zigzagged down the mountain with incredible speed and lightness, then we trudged along the slushy Hauptstrasse (where I was jostled considerably). More vulture-like looks from my fellow humans, to whom I smile and wave, trying to be brave. Cars passing. People staring down at me. Pain. That intense physical pain which cannot be remembered except as a kind of blinding whiteness. White sound.

I am taken to the office of an unforgettable shark named Dr. med. Holger Kapp (an avaricious Austrian who'd learned all the latest medical shenanigans in Boston), and there I am X-rayed. Bennett appears, assuring me once again that it's “just a sprain.” The X-rays appear, assuring us that it's an impressive break, a spiral fracture above the ankle and the tibia shattered into bits the shape of sharks' teeth. In German the diagnosis sounds even more menacing:
Schienbeindrehbruch am distalen Ende (Aufsplitterung in mehrere Bruchstücke)!
This is what happens to a woman who even
thinks
of leaving her husband!

Then I remember Dr. med. Kapp, waltzing in, trying to sell us bone-hardware, special crutches, and a week (at least) of chicken soup at steak prices. Anything might happen on the way home, he warned. Severe skids on icy roads, fogged-in autobahns, drunk drivers. But Bennett insisted on getting me back to the good old army hospital, where the doctors did not have funny accents and believed in “conservative treatment” of fractures. And so we hit the road that very night.

Deserted, rainy autobahns all the way back to Heidelberg. The grimmest Christmas Eve I've ever spent in my life—and, believe me, I've spent some grim ones. Ricey and Chuck drove our VW bug and Bennett and I took the Squareback so that I could stretch out on an inflatable mattress in the back. I was by then delirious with pain, and alternated between weepy remorse for having ruined Bennett's vacation and deep embarrassment for having to pee into wadded-up Kleenexes and then toss them out the window.

The next thing I knew I was in the army hospital, flying high on Demerol. Nothing much seemed to bother me then. I skied in and out of sleep, weaving, looping, sailing over icy slopes, rocks, and boulders. Each time I awakened from my Demerol dreams, there was some new diversion. Chaplain Glascock, for example, came bearing mimeographed copies of the latest Character Guidance Briefing, blessed me, and then hastily departed—as if afraid of opening some theological dispute he couldn't resolve. Pete Hatch, the well-named head of ob-gyn hung around telling gynecologist jokes which all dealt with vaginal odor. Phyllis Stein, the president of the Jewish Officers' Wives Club (or JOWC) wished me the obligatory mazel and assured me that she had the clout to get me kosher meals if I desired them. Even the hospital CO appeared to tell the stories of his two broken legs (Davos and Kitzbühel) and to admonish me to get right back on skis the following year. Only my husband made himself scarce. Guilt and anger kept him away, but as long as I was on Demerol, it didn't much matter.

A week later, though, trapped at home, a prisoner of my cast and Bennett's wrath, the full horror of my disability struck. I couldn't drive with the cast on or walk up stairs or bathe. Bennett refused to let me sleep with him at night because he said the cast “disturbed” him. He refused to come home for lunch because he claimed I was so hysterical and weepy that I depressed him. I was in constant pain, and without the drugs I'd had in the hospital I was a wreck. Dreams of mutilation replaced the dreams of flying. I hopped glumly from one room to the next, trying to clean up the house, trying to work, trying to block out my nagging, constant feeling of betrayal. I'd drink coffee. I'd read the junk mail. The entire army seemed afflicted with the doggerel-writing bug, and in the morning mail there was always something diverting. The Medical Wives' Club Newsletter (MWCN) reminded me: “As you go through life/Never forget: /Strangers are friends/You've just never met!”

But where were these friends? And where was my husband? Missing in action. Off with another officer's wife. And I was home with bound feet, like a good Chinese wife.

Somehow, just when the day seemed most unbearable, Michael Cosman would arrive. He arrived with hand-rolled joints or little bottles of champagne, with handfuls of flowers, with books, with strawberries, with brandy. My neighbors probably thought we were having a torrid affair when they saw his car parked outside my house for hours and hours. But we were talking. And laughing. Telling each other stories. Remembering New York together. Telling
Polish
jokes. Drinking. Getting stoned. Making fun of Germans and the army. And giving each other marital therapy.

On the days when Michael couldn't come, he'd call. I'd hop madly to the phone on my good leg, plop down on the couch, rest my cast on the ugly army coffee table, and we'd settle down to two hours of mutual therapy at government expense.

He'd call ostensibly to ask me how I was doing and to let me cry on his shoulder about my problems with Bennett. But it wasn't long before he'd start talking about
his
problems, telling me his reaction to DeeDee's much-vaunted affair with a local hippie, what he blamed it on, how he rationalized it, and so on. Then he'd reminisce about his youth, treat me to long Jean Shepherdesque monologues about his violin teacher Mrs. Traumstein; his third-grade teacher Mrs. Gletscher; his sexual explorations in the bathrooms of P.S. 103; his fraternity days at Cornell; how he once put barbecue sauce on his penis and asked this girl to lick it off; how Harriet Finklestein had the biggest clitoris he'd ever felt; how Mr. Weinburger (of Weinburger Window and Shade) once caught him in bed with Sally Weinburger; what different girls said (moaned, yelled) when they came; how he had this recurrent dream that he was involved in an orgy with the characters in Archie comics; how one day he would forgive DeeDee for her affair and then the next day start imagining it in vivid detail and haul off and slug her. Et cetera.

I was more grateful to Michael than I've ever been to anyone. He called out of his need; I listened out of my own, and, while perhaps this wasn't the best possible basis for a friendship, a real friendship grew. Even after my leg had mended, Michael remained my best friend and confidant. In seven months the bone had healed, leaving a slight thickening in an otherwise slender shin—and Michael and I were still just talking.

 

Six years later. Summer. Michael and DeeDee have been divorced for almost four years, Bennett and I have “lasted” through much gritting of molars (mine) and the fact that we've arranged our lives so that we practically never see each other. Ever the rebel without a cause, Michael has still refused to do a residency and has a thriving clap- and birth-control-pills practice for young singles in a brownstone in the West Seventies.

“What can I do for you?” Michael asked, offering me a seat in his sooty back garden, where not even marijuana would grow. The place was littered with bottle glass and cinders, but one cheery, yellow umbrellaed table stood in the center of the soot garden. We drank vodka and ate Greek olives. Michael looked me over.

“What's up? You enjoying being a famous lady? I haven't seen you in ages.”

“You really want to know?”

Michael looked at me over his bushy yellow mustache and beard and amber aviator glasses. He seemed to know exactly why I'd come.

“If Bennett was having an affair in Heidelberg, who would it have been with?”

Michael stared hard at me, hesitated, realized I knew, and then said firmly: “Penny. I thought you knew years ago.”

“Bennett just told me last weekend.”

“What made last weekend different from all other weekends?”

“I don't know. Maybe he resents all the attention I'm getting and doesn't know how else to express it. Maybe he wants to destroy me. Certainly it's working. I've never felt more hysterical in my life. I walk through the streets absolutely seething with rage. I want to kill every Oriental I see.”

“Christ—I'm astonished. I thought you knew ages ago.”

“Why?”

“When you came back from Vienna, got back together, you told me you'd discussed everything ...